The Polyamorous Misanthrope » The Polyamory Community

On Being Out

Goddess of Java — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:37 +0000

I’m out when it comes to poly. People who know me well know I am. I put my poly writing and stuff on my CV. Plenty of people who read this know my “real name”.

Given the US political climate these days, I’m occasionally concerned about it. But since one cannot stuff the genie back in the bottle, I’ve decided that since I’m out anyway, it’d be nearly impossible to change that.

Has it hurt me? I genuinely don’t know. I’ve never been confronted about it, but it’s possible a client has done a search on my name¹, and decided not to hire me. If so, I never heard about it. I’m even teaching a class in social networking, and I can’t imagine that none of my students have done a search on me. Nope, no confrontations.

There was a time when my version of “out” involved explaining to all and sundry. It’s a not too unusual pattern when one has a Big Life Change and it’s something that one is personally obsessed about. These days, I’m more obsessed about other things in my life and my relationships are my relationships rather than a project – which suits my tastes better.

Thing is, right now, it’s pretty easy for me to “pass”. I’m married and have been for a couple of decades. Never mind that the closest the relationship ever was to closed was when we were part of a group marriage! The fact that we’re poly doesn’t show unless one looks pretty carefully. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like I’m about as out as I could be without wearing a sign, but my household isn’t in a position where we’re being too closely examined by anyone. We live in a very mind-your-own-business type of area, and we don’t have relatives that are controlling enough to cause trouble, so we’re extraordinarily lucky.

Which brings me to the real point of this. How out are you? What drives that choice? What consequences have you faced? What consequences are you scared of? I think this is an important discussion. Most poly activists are out, out, out. I don’t hear them talking about being in any real trouble because of it. Is it because we who are a bit more public are lucky in our life situations? What do you think?

________________

¹I have an unusual name. Though the very first results seem to be more about my various (rather conventional and homemakerish) hobbies than anything salacious.

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The Anti-Polyamory Press is at it Again

Goddess of Java — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 12:49:33 +0000

Why “Open” Marriages Don’t Work. This article is a bit insidious and I find it disturbing. The basic allusion is that anyone who wants to be poly is damaged somehow and might actually have Schizoid Personality Disorder. I deeply disagree with many points in her article. Where there’s not an armchair diagnosis, she seems to find open relationships male-driven and female tolerated. As you can imagine, I find really weird. In fact, I’d say that she’s not interacted much with the polyamory community to have this point of view!

I would like to encourage the polyamory community to respond to this by going to Psychology Today and giving some feedback. However, a caveat: I don’t think the author knows many poly people. The letters she gets are going to be the face of polyamory to her. You will be the face of polyamory to her. Keep that in mind and be a credit to your kink in your responses.

Update: Well, it seems the aforementioned article has been taken down. Interesting. I hope that she’s reconsidering her opinion due to thoughtful, intelligent feedback and a desire to do some research.

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Hobbiton

Goddess of Java — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:30:11 +0000

“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a good deal of telling anyway.” — J.R.R. Tolkein

Apparently someone referred to the advice on this blog as awesome on Twitter about an hour ago.

That’s really cool, and heavens yes, I’m flattered. Though my first response was, “Awesome? Maybe. But this blog? Dead.”

Thing is, it’s dead for good reasons, even if they’re not good for the poly community. After all, you guys are just pantingly eager for my next post, right?

You see, nothing in my life is inspiring a column! I could talk about how I went down to visit FWB, Button and the Baby, but that’s hardly exciting to you, since nothing happened that needed to be talked out or solved. (Though those of you on Netflix have got to check out “Breaking the Maya Code” documentary. It’s fascinating).

See? Babies? Linguistics documentaries? I’m a nerd and that’s what my life and relationships are about.

Or I could talk about my husband and his girlfriend, except? What? I like her? We get along? We’re both happy my husband makes a fantastic dirty martini? I enjoy that stuff, but it’s not exactly cranky misanthrope blog material.

Though, when you think about it, that’s when poly is really good — when you’re not focused on form and function, but are enjoying living. The relationship stuff that comes up isn’t poly-specific, usually.

Like last night. I got severely pissed at The Prince for what I’d thought of as a lack of communication about a non-relationship matter. Now, I’ve learned that when I’m pissed to back off and think, so it’s not that poly and relationships have taught me nothing. Rather the opposite. Rather than freak, I took care of a situation and kept my damned mouth shut until a calm time when we could talk. In the end, it turned out that he’d been quite fully communicative, but for some reason, the text he sent didn’t show up on my phone. So, it was a communication thing and a relationship thing, but not a poly thing. And not material for a poly-specific column.

Though maybe that’s what the poly community needs. Maybe we who have our live and matter-of-fact relationships, we who aren’t surrounded by whirling chaos, but are just living and enjoying our lives that happen to be poly need to talk about it more. So often the forums are dominated by the newly or wanting-to-be poly unhappy and needing advice, or the newly poly delirous with the wonder of it all. Certainly these states are as valid as any other and I’m not trying to denigrate where you might be in life. I am just thinking that those of us busy living could take a few moments, tell our stories, and show that at some point, it’s not all high drama.

But maybe that would be too dull.

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Secondary Clarity

Goddess of Java — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:47:00 +0000

What with lots of couples going poly and thinking that they can experiment with other people’s hearts as an appropriate safeguard to their own marriage, I’d like to present the following for anyone considering being a secondary in a relationship.

The idea and most of the text is Edward Martin, III’s; and Franklin Veaux made it all purty for you guys. Big round of applause, ’cause this is a true service to the polyamory community!

You can download a pdf of it, too.

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Off-Topic, but Important

Goddess of Java — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 23:40:13 +0000

I recognize many of my readers have their pet charities and causes. For that, thank you. Anything you do to make the world a better place is a good thing, and I’m always happy to hear stories about it if you want to tell them to me.

For those of you who don’t and are turning your minds to making a positive difference, I have an easy suggestion: Anytime you get a windfall, earmark part of that money for a trip to a warehouse store to buy a few cases of food to donate to your local food pantry.

No, it’s not something huge, but food pantries often run on tiny budgets and can run short of necessities. So, here’s things that will be very helpful to most of them:

Canned meats and stews or spaghetti sauce
Canned Vegetables
Canned Fruit
Boxes of pasta or rice
Baby supplies (wipes, diapers that sort of thing. Those things are NOT covered by food stamps).
Female sanitary supplies
Boxes of juice or milk (dried or fluid)
Infant formula

The foods you choose should mostly be as “one-box” or “one-can” as you can make them. Boxed maccaroni and cheese, for instance, really should have milk added. The fewer steps to a functional meal, the better.

I know that this is really off-topic for polyamory and polyamorous relationships, but c’mon, polyamory is about love at its core. Having enough love to help out where you can is good. It sets a good example for your kids, shows the world that yeah, we’re part of it, too and that we want to do our part to help make it better where and when we can.

I hope whatever you do for the Holiday season is done with joy, love and gay abandon.

Love,

Mama Java

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The Goddess of Java asks YOU!

Goddess of Java — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:20 +0000

I got so many thoughtful and interesting answers to last week’s question, I just had to roll with it again. Thanks for everyone who answered.

For those of you who are poly and have had children born into your poly circles, I’m wondering how it affected you? What changes did you see in your poly lives? Were they the same changes as the ones you anticipated or were you blindsided?

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Universal Principles

Goddess of Java — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:50:15 +0000

The Polyamorous Misanthrope was supposed to be a weekly column.

It was for awhile and then I started drying up for topics. Why? Well, as I study polyamory, I see more and more that the advice I give, the lessons I’ve learned and the observations I make are less about having good multiple relationships and more about having good relationships in general. Believe it or not, how people interact has less to do with the slippery bits and considerably more to do with what goes on between the ears.

I’ve said for years that there’s very little about being polyamorous that’s truly poly-specific. The website about poly families was a lot more about household management, and my advice here is a lot more about maintaining good relationship boundaries than almost anything else.

I think the reason for this is because we often give sex and romance an inappropriate focus. Please note I’m not calling sex and romance unimportant. It’s not. But we do give it a weird place in our lives and I think it causes a lot of trouble. We might use romantic relationships as a ranking system. We often use sex or romance as a proxy for something else — usually actual intimacy. And again when I look at this to analyze it, I can’t say that it’s polyamory-specific.

It makes being topic-specific difficult. The same communication principles that make my romantic life joyful interaction rather than unpleasant drama are principles that help my parenting, for goodness sake! They’re the same principles that let me have a decent relationship with my own parents.

That being the case, yes, I can write about a topic and hook it onto a romantic situation, but it’s just as likely to float through my mind because of the way my son responded to a request to empty the dishwasher, or how I’m encouraging him to speak up when he feels uncomfortable with something.

I want the columns I write to be useful in relationships, but useful relationship examples are hardly ever unique to polyamory.

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How Do I Meet People?

Goddess of Java — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:00:01 +0000

Okay, either you’re single or you’ve got your primary relationship solid. You’re centered in loving each other, you’re communicating great. Now, you’d like to meet poly people and form some more fantastic relationships.

SCREECH!

How?

That’s going to depend on a lot of things. Where you do you live? Off the top of my head, if you live in Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, or Tampa, you’re in luck. All of these places have well-established polyamory communities, and I can vouch at least one or two of the people in each city are moderately sane and have been poly long enough to have grown a grain of sense ¹.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in any of those cities. In fact, I live in a little town that has considerably fewer than 15,000 people. Believe it or not, one can still meet poly people in such circumstances. I can, do and have.

The Internet is a big boon here. Sure, there are dating sites. I’m not even going to discourage them. OkCupid and PolyMatchmaker are both poly friendly and in the interests of disclosure, I’ve met someone on a dating site before. It worked out nicely.

Even so, don’t be so damn goal-oriented all the bloody time! I understand being goal oriented. You want to try this new and wonderful lifestyle, and let’s be frank, some hot sex would be just awfully cool. Not running it down. Sex is great. New partners are all kinds of shiny and relationships are fun, goodness knows.

But, mostly you’re not going to find good relationships playing the numbers game on poly online boards with a relationship scattershot. You’ll probably get laid with this strategy, but if that’s mostly what you’re looking for, a sex club might be better. Again, not running that down! I’m not of the “Swinger is superior to poly” school of thought by any means. I am concerned with making sure you know what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for sex, yeah, a sex club is a dandy idea. Go for it, enjoy.

If you’re looking for relationships, then you’re looking for things in addition to the sex. That means you’re looking, I hope, for people to do stuff with. I think what really works better in the long run is the most banal and obvious advice you’ll ever hear. Go outside and make friends. Oh sure, use the Internet as a tool to meet people of similar interests! But after that, go out to lunch with people, host parties, go to parties, organize discussions groups, get involved with stuff you like to do. Yeah, you’ll have to take some initiative and get your butt away from the computer and facing the scawwy outside, but trust me, it can be fun!

Yahoogroups has many local polyamory discussion groups where people meet up in real life. Meetup is another option. If no local poly group exists in your area, you might want to consider starting one. There are a lot of groups and resources that exist today because someone was looking for one, but didn’t find anything.

In addition to this, if you’re going to go to online discussion groups to look for partners, be careful. Many of them are communities where people know each other, share expereinces and hang out (virtually and otherwise). Going in and announcing who you are and what sort of partner(s) you’re looking for would be about as well-received and effective as going to a neighborhood party and doing the same thing in meatspace. You’ll look uncouth and probably are not going to find what you’re looking for. A good way to find out the timbre of a group is to read through the archieve for awhile if the group has them or to lurk for a week or two to see what you’re dealing with.

But, when it comes down to it, the way to find partners is to meet people. So, quit reading this and go meet people!

Be good until next week,

Mama Java

¹ And in most cases, saner than me, too.

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Closets

Goddess of Java — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 04:00:10 +0000

I mentioned in last week’s column that there are legitimate reasons why one might want to keep one’s romantic life quite private. A poly person in the military or any other profession where witchhunts for sexual deviance are likely is probably either gonna want to change careers and be out or keep her mouth shut about it.

I have stated before that I think it’s safer for the poly family to make sure they live somewhere where nothing they’re doing is illegal and to be “out”¹. I stand by that. Notice, I say that I think it’s safer. Not more moral. Not more noble. Not “better”. I personally think that transparency is safer in the long run.

But, ya know, that’s easy for me to say. It really is. My financial status is enhanced by being a weirdo and being quirky. I have no exes who would care to try to draw me into a lawsuit or custody battle. I’m not important enough to “go after”. I’ve made some very specific and solid choices in my life to ensure that this is so. Now, if we have A Handmaid’s Tale style government takeover, I will be considerably less safe and I know it. But given our present circumstances, I’ve made choices that make it pretty safe for me to be a weirdo publicly.

Those choices aren’t noble. I think that’s really what I want to get across. They’re just choices with a price just like any other choice people make. Other people might choose not to be out about poly. Those choices are just as valid and no less noble that one’s choice to be out.

I remember many years ago there was a big discussion on one of the larger internet polyamory discussion groups where people who found being “out” valuable were commenting with some self-pride that they could never date someone who wasn’t “out”. Know what? I’d be unlikely to, as well. That doesn’t make me a better person. It was the undercurrent of virtue that got to me at the time, the idea that one might have compelling reasons not to be out was an inferior way to live. That it was somehow hypocritical. I don’t think it’s necessarily hypocritical to keep quiet about one’s love life.

Now, if you make a career out of chasing down and punishing alternative lifestylers, but you, yourself are a practitioner, I’ve neither sympathy nor mercy towards you. If you’re participating in punishing people for being poly and you’re poly yourself, and if I find out about it, I won’t keep my mouth shut.

But that’s not what I’m talking about when I say that choosing not to be out can be a very valid choice.

I’m talking about the elementary school teacher, the people that don’t want to sacrifice other parts of their lives that they value to be poly. I’m talking about people who don’t want to be activists. You don’t owe the world activism. I don’t flatter myself that I’m sticking my neck out for you. ‘Cause frankly, my neck is in no damn danger and I lack the necessary arrogance to give myself airs that it is. You people who are activists, don’t be trying to put the claim on the people you’re ostensibly trying to serve, either!

You own you, each of you, and you own your choices. Don’t let anyone try to guilt you into doing something different.

If you’re on the fence, though, about whether or not to be out, examine it. Why do you want to? What do you hope to gain? What might you lose? Face up to it and make your own choice. Then you can feel good about what you’ve done because you’ve made the choice with your eyes wide open. I made the choice to be out mostly ’cause I’m chicken. I felt like being transparent was safer for me. But you might not feel that’s the best way for you and your relationships to go.

My father used to tell me “There’s a price for everything.” It’s true. In or out, there is a price attached. The important thing is to think clearly, don’t evade the fact that no matter what you choose, you’re gonna have that price attached and do it with a clear understanding. When you do that, you will face up to the ups and downs of being poly a lot better.

¹Being “out” and “waving the poly flag” are two entirely different things. If you’re out there freakin’ the ‘danes, stop being a show-off and a jerk. You look like an idiot. Says the woman who has been an idiot before.

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High School Musical Chairs

Goddess of Java — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:00:36 +0000

What is the right action of the larger community when relationship dramas can destabilize and threaten an entire social network? — a very wise friend

Pepper Spray.

Well, okay, no you can’t do that. But hold that thought a minute.

If you’re polyamorous and are lucky enough to have a social network in your city, chances are it’s pretty small. Even in the largest city, people who openly identify as poly are relatively rare. Being poly, there’s probably going to be interlocking relationships, dating and what have you. People, being people, are gonna fall in love, stay together and have great relationships, break up, be loyal, backstab, gossip, refuse to misbehave — all of it. The one thing you can count on people to do is to behave like people.

This means sometimes there will be Relationship Drama that might splash on your local community.

How do you handle it?

This is gonna be how you handle it, ’cause I doubt like hell many people would choose my method. I go away until it blows over because, well, I’m a recluse. Being at home alone with my knitting or writing is fun. Going to a party that makes me feel like I am back in high school isn’t fun at all. To me, it’s an easy choice. It’s prying my ass out of the house that’s difficult, even to see people I like.

But, allow the person who sits in the corner watching everyone play Telephone to make a few observations.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

Okay, I am going to have to break it to you: Relationships are not always forever and sometimes breakups hurt a whole bunch. If you’re not up for that, for heaven’s sake learn how to be before you start getting heavily involved in a poly community. Emotions can run high. Can you behave yourself when emotions run high? Relationships aren’t politics and they aren’t a war. You don’t need soldiers, minions or yes-men agreeing how wonderful you are when you’re in the throes of an emotional crisis. What you need is to steady and stabilize yourself.

It’s the stabilizing part that’s the important thing. Keep in mind that it’s never a war. People broke up and emotions are running high. Don’t try to be a hero, and keep any righteous indignation out of it.

This isn’t actually unique to polyamory.

Families, churches and whatnot all have their own versions of interlocking loyalties and relationships blowing up a social structure. It happens. The question is: What do you want to contribute to? Do you want to contribute to growth, or do you want to contribute to drawmuh.

Even though it’s not unique to polyamory, wouldn’t it be cool if polyamory could set the example for Community in general. Imagine how much it would rock if you were a contributing factor to the polyamorous setting the example for how to handle the pain of relationships within breakups!

Even if it isn’t unique to polyamory, polyamory is only for grown-ups. So grow up.

If you don’t wanna see an ex, don’t go to parties where that ex is gonna be. Throw your own parties. You’re not obligated to hang out with a former love if it’s painful. Really. I know, you want your old social circle as well as not seeing your ex. Friend, it sucks, you might have to make a choice.

On the other hand, if what you want is vindication about how right you are and how horrible your ex is, get a grip and grow the hell up. We all have exes that we think are a waste of good protein. You don’t need outside confirmation here. You know the truth. Get on with your life and your Evil Ex dig his own hole. If he’s not being ostracized as your sense of justice prefers, get the hell over it and move on.

You’re not responsible for making other people behave.

If you fancy yourself a “community leader”, it’s still not your job to make sure that your widdle flock wipes their noses properly. Don’t go running from feuding party to feuding party trying to make every one behave. It only makes things worse. You’re participating in and feeding some nonsense. Step back, disengage and encourage other people not to be personally involved in things that are Not Their Problem. You can’t make it all better. You can set a good example.

On a not-polyamory, not-misanthropic note: Gifts to food pantries around the nation are down as people are being hard-hit. If you have some spare cash, try to make sure that you keep up with your donations. For those of us lucky enough that the box of pasta or can of green beans is still a relatively trivial expense, remember that it’s not for everyone. Thing is, don’t stop a the holidays. People get just as hungry in January. Be a credit to your kink and give if you can.

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