The Polyamorous Misanthrope

This time, I’d like to hear from anyone that wants to sound off on the subject.

I see the phrase “Love has no boundaries” frequently.  Frankly, I do have a reaction to that (which if you read this much, you’d probably guess).  But I want anyone who wants to tell me to let me know what they think of the expression and why.

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There’s a popular situation in sitcoms and romantic comedies.  There’ll be this couple — one of them[1] being presented as having their life a bit out of order.  The couple sleeps together, and then the more together partner starts getting the other person’s life in order for them.

I’ve never been too happy with this one.  The implication is that sleeping with someone means you’ve rights over them.  I don’t care if you’re monogamous or polyamorous, this one is obnoxious!

Just because you’re sleeping with someone doesn’t mean you can:

1. Try to become their band manager.

When I speak of trying to become their band manager, I mean that as a kind of blanket euphemism for trying to manage any point in their professional lives.  It’s just that the classic example of this is the girl starting to date a musician and then wanting to manage the guy’s band.

Yes, when you get into relationships, you do want to entwine your lives.  I get that.  But wait to be asked.

2. Manage old, long-term relationships for them.

This part may seem poly-specific, but it’s not.  For monogamous examples, think of dating someone and then trying to help them manage their relationships with their parents – either trying to reconcile or defending the person against them.

In polyamorous situations, for goodness sakes, don’t try to help someone with his problems with long-term relationships!  I’m not encouraging you to be heartless, but if you haven’t known someone for more than five years, chances are slim that you have the whole picture.  If you’re dealing with new and shiny, you can’t possibly have all the facts to give good enough advice.

3. Get them to make a Life Change.

It’s one thing to want someone you love to Be All That They Can Be.  It’s quite another to immediately start encouraging them to go back to school, make a career change, blah, blah, blah.  This is especially true when you start offering to help with applications, business forms or whatever.  Don’t.  Just don’t.  It’s fine to listen and find out what the other person wants, but sleeping with them doesn’t give you a right to manage that sort of thing for them.

I get that you might think they’re in a Relationship That’s Bad for Them.  Might even be true.  Even so, wait to be asked.  Seriously.

When you are in a relationship, you have these rights:

1. You may ask for what you want.

No, you don’t get rights over another person’s time.  You do get to ask for what you want, and in fact if you want a good relationship, you’ll do exactly that.

2. You may set boundaries.

I’m not going to go into a big lecture about boundaries.  A lot of my columns talk about them.  Click here for a series.  The basic takeaway is that a boundary is about what behavior you’ll accept to be in a relationship.  But, it doesn’t tell the other person how to behave.  Yes, that’s subtle, and I spend thousands of words analyzing the difference in other columns.

The point here is that I think that translating some very, very wrong monogamous norms into polyamorous situations really has the potential for a lot of wacky hijinks that might be fun to watch on a comedy of errors.

But, dear oh Lord, you wouldn’t wanna live ‘em.

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This column is written by guest author Holly Bernabe.  She wrote it to try to help people posting sex or relationship ads to polyamorous discussion list why the list reaction tended to be less than stellar, and to help them be successful in finding the relationships they wanted.

I received your email/ad on my group list/social networking site, etc. And I’ve got some advice for you:

1. When looking for an addition, look locally. I’m likely in a state you aren’t in. You’re in BFE, wherever.  Why are you looking out of state? LDRs are possible, but pretty hard to accomplish.  Are you expecting the new person to move to your state?
2. Write intelligently. I don’t generally bother writing back to people who can’t write a full sentence with proper use of punctuation and spelling. I know in this day and age of IM-ing and cell phone text messaging, everything is getting dumbed down for sake of brevity. But in an email where you are introducing yourself, brevity is a MISTAKE. Brevity sounds like someone who has no education and is an idiot! For crying out loud, make an effort. First impressions are important. Is the first impression you want to leave your potential new spice with one of idiocy or laziness?
3. If you are going to bother to create a blanket email ad to post on a group list to try and find an addition to your family, add some detail to your email so you don’t look like a spambot. Blather on about your details and add some interesting quotes and so on so that we have some way of judging who the heck you are, so that we can figure out whether or not we even want to give you the time of day, let alone get to know you. As it is, I have no idea what kind of music you like, what you like to do for fun, what movies you like, or anything else about you.  Your email is a meaningless blank slate.
4. Sign up for okCupid and let us know how to find you on that site.  That way, if people want to check you out some more, they can.  OkCupid is poly friendly and has some fun features.  Lots of poly people are signed up there, already.
5. If you have joined a poly list, ask the list some questions.  Join in on some discussions before you post your ad. Then we will know that you’ve even bothered to READ our list and that you really are interested and you aren’t just spamming thousands of people out there with generic messages in hopes by playing the numbers someone will bother to write back to you. If you had bothered to read our list, you would know we allow most any type of post–however, we PREFER discussion and don’t like personals ads very much that have no personal information.  If you had read our list at all, you likely wouldn’t have spammed our inboxes in the first place with your ad.
6. Read the discussions on our list and make friends.  Then privately, if you all really dig someone, and you think they might like you, too, you can pursue them off list, if you feel that is an appropriate course of action.

Follow those tips, and maybe you’ll have some luck on our list.

Tips To Couples Looking to Add an Additional Person Into Their Relationship

© 2010, Holly Bernabe, used by permission

Holly Bernabe is a film student and mom of two (five counting the fuzzbucket dog, the spastic cat and the hubby).  Her biggest wish in life is to figure out how to stop time, so that she can cram into the day everything (and everyone) that she wants to do.

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