More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (10 page)

As Eve's story illustrates, none of us are perfect. Our lives are filled with struggles and mistakes. The effort to be perfect only drives us away from one another and damages our self-worth.

The reason you need to understand where you are right now is so that you can understand your limitations. Your relationships will benefit if you can examine what your triggers are—not so that you can instruct everyone to tiptoe around them, but so you can be aware, when you're triggered, of what is going on. Knowing where you stand now will help you remember that there's not something wrong with you when you feel jealous, when the ground drops out from beneath your feet when you see your husband holding hands with his girlfriend for the first time.

You can't control how your partners' other relationships develop, but you can control how you allow them to intersect with and affect your life. You are allowed to set boundaries on your personal space and time. You don't have to make the first time you hang out with your husband and his girlfriend be a public appearance at a crowded party. You don't have to be okay with hearing them have sex, now or ever. Take care of yourself so you can take care of those around you.

When you make mistakes, think in terms of "I am a person who values integrity" rather than "I am a super-together person." Think of compassion and free will as values you strive for, not attributes you have. That way, you can more easily realign your actions with your values if things go wrong. For example, if you think of yourself as a person who values free will, you can respond constructively when someone points out that you appear to be trying to control someone. Minding the gap is about being able to see these things.

Very few of us make it to adulthood without getting a little broken on the way. None of us can see each other's wounds; none of us can really know what other people's struggles look like from the inside. But one thing's for sure: we all have them. Polyamory can push on our broken bits in ways few other things do. We may be able to build walls around deep-rooted fears, insecurities and triggers in monogamous relationships—walls that poly relationships will often raze to the ground. And because so many more people are involved, more people stand to suffer. We
all
have things we need to work on. Expect it.

WORTHINESS

Polyamory will challenge your emotional resiliency. Instead of building walls around painful feelings like fear and jealousy, you'll need to find a way through them. You may experience more loss: more relationships means more possibilities for heartbreak. And you may encounter judgment: slut-shaming, trivialization of your relationships, and claims that you're treating your partners badly or neglecting your kids are some of the most common forms. We discuss these more in chapter 25, but what's important here is developing a sense of self-worth that protects you from
internalizing
these corrosive messages.

You'll sometimes hear poly people say things like "Don't give other people power to hurt you." But that ignores the very healthy impulse to seek feedback on our perceptions of the world. Even the healthiest person, when persistently rejected, will be hurt. Rejection may erode your mental boundaries or your ability to engage in intimacy. The only way to maintain good mental boundaries, to counteract social rejection and to assess when to disengage is to have self-knowledge and self-confidence and to engage in self-compassion and self-care. In other words, to commit to behaviors that will help you develop a strong sense of worthiness. And yes, feeling worthy is a practice too.

EVE'S STORY
The first time in my adult life I remember feeling worthy was when I was thirty-six years old. I was with my poly women's group. We were talking about worthiness and how it connects to our sense of belonging, which we get when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and are accepted as we are. But being able to allow that vulnerability requires—gotcha!—a sense of worthiness. To connect with others, we must take a leap of faith and believe we are worthy of connection.

Inside I was growing more and more distraught.
I don't know how to feel worthy.
Finally I asked, "How do we begin to believe we are worthy?" My group members said, "Well, maybe
imagine
what it feels like to feel worthy, and focus on that. Over time, it will begin to feel real." I took a deep breath and made a very scary and vulnerable admission: "I don't know what it feels like to feel worthy." I was surprised at how much it hurt to say those words—to admit that the concept of "worthiness" was so far outside my realm of personal experience that I couldn't even
imagine
it.

Unfortunately, because I'm not entirely sure
how
I learned how to imagine worthiness, I find it difficult to advise others. I know that I worked at it. I read, I blogged, I took risks with my friends by sharing more with them. I started keeping a daily journal of things I was grateful for. I had recently completed several months of intense therapy, and the work I had done there seemed to finally start to take hold. But the truth is, I don't know what the pivot was. One day I just…felt worthy.

Since feeling worthy does
not
come naturally to me, if I do not work at reminding myself the feeling fades, and then I slip back into a miasma of fear and self-doubt. Then I remember to start practicing again, and I work my way back out.

The good news is that once you know what worthiness feels like, only once, you know that you
can
experience it—even if you aren't experiencing it right now. A sense of worth is critical to counteracting the
scarcity model
of love and life. If we do not believe in our worth, we become disempowered, unable to advocate for our needs. We do not see or embrace the love that is actually around us in our lives. It becomes harder to treat our partners well, because we do not see what we bring to their lives. And if we don't understand our value to them, we are more likely to feed our jealousy and fear of loss. Notice that institutions built on the scarcity model—too many workplaces, too many families—
always
inculcate a sense of low self-worth.

Worthiness is not the same as validation. A sense of self-worth comes from within, not from someone else. It can be tempting to look to the outside for validation—to look to your partner and say, "She loves me, therefore I am worthy." That creates fear rather than reducing fear, because when we rely on outside things in order to feel worthy, we fear losing them all the more. In the end, we can't wait until we see evidence that we are worthy before we allow ourselves to believe it. We start by taking that leap of faith and believing we are worthy.

Our sense of self—what psychologists might term self-differentiation—has a huge impact on relationships. If we make mistakes that hurt people, we can say, "I did something bad" rather than "I am bad." And if something is our fault, that means it is within our power to change the outcome.

Low self-worth will try to protect itself, sometimes in sneaky ways. It can tell us that if we have a high sense of self-worth we might not get our partner's time and attention, because we're not in crisis. Emotional crisis can become a way to get our partners to give us what we need. The solution to this problem is tricky, but one place to start is to look at people who do have a strong sense of self-worth, and see if their needs are being met.

If you are struggling with worthiness, you'll find resources at the back of this book. If you are seriously struggling, professional help can be of huge benefit—not just in your intimate relationships but in all parts of your life.

SELF-EFFICACY

Let's say you, as our intrepid mushroom hunter, get lost in the woods. Do you know a few wild plants you can collect to feed yourself? Do you know how to find water? How to make a shelter and stay warm? If not, how confident are you in your ability to figure these things out? Will you begin to panic? Will you think,
Oh, my God, I'm going to die—I don't know how to survive in the forest!
Or will you take a deep breath and say, "Well, I've never done this before, but here I am and I'd better get on with it. Let's see, it's getting dark. I guess the first thing is to look for some shelter and figure out if there's something I can eat."

There's a kind of calm that comes from believing you can handle a situation, even one you haven't faced before, and that calm increases your competence. This effect is called
self-efficacy
. Trying new things—like writing a book, or exploring polyamory—involves learning new skills, and research shows that key to learning new skills is simply believing you can learn them. Self-efficacy in poly relationships is the feeling that you can make it through your wife's first date. That you'll figure out a way to manage your jealousy, even if you don't know how yet. That if you have to sleep alone some night, even if it's been years and you don't remember what it feels like, you'll get through it and be okay.

All this may seem to have a flavor of New Age power-of-intention pop psychology, but the study of self-efficacy goes back four decades, and there's solid evidence supporting it. Whether or not someone believes they can do something has important effects on whether they can. This has proven true for everything from learning new skills to quitting smoking.

As to developing this calming competence, research has identified strategies for improving self-efficacy. Here are two simple ones.

Small successes.
Step outside your comfort zone. Find something you can succeed at: something that seems hard to you, but not so hard that it will land you quivering under the covers in tears. Stay home while your wife is on a date. Talk to your partner about your insecurity or jealousy. Each small step will build on the last, giving you a stronger sense of your ability to tackle the next challenge. They won't necessarily become easier. But the key is to develop your belief that
I can do this
.

The flip side of that is to address how you cope with "failure," if it turns out you weren't quite as strong (yet) as you'd hoped. People with high self-efficacy tend to be resilient in the face of failure; they know that often you have to fail many times before you succeed.

Role models.
An important factor contributing to a person's idea of whether they can do something is whether they see other people doing it. We can't stress enough the usefulness of having polyamorous role models, ideally people in your social network who you can talk to and get feedback from. Find your local poly discussion and support group, or start one. As polyamorous people we are surrounded by a culture that tells us, "You can't do this," "That's not possible," or even "That's morally wrong." It can be hard to maintain a belief in yourself and your abilities in the face of this social censure, especially when things get hard. That's why it's critical to establish a poly-friendly support system and find people you consider to be good examples. We discuss this more in chapter 25, on social and community support.

Building self-efficacy in other areas of your life also builds success in poly relationships. It takes the bite out of two scary monsters: "failure" and being alone. For many of us, for example, our first breakup is the scariest, because it's our first taste of romantic "failure." Will we find love again? What if the person we just broke up with was The One? Believing that you can be alone and thrive, that you can survive the end of something and rebuild, are important elements of self-efficacy.

A SPECIAL KIND OF COMMITMENT

An essential aspect of successful poly relationships, in our experience, is a commitment to
being poly
. Sometimes learning the skills is hard. We have to practice and muddle through painful situations when they befall us. At some point, poly may just feel too damn hard.

EVE'S STORY
Despite all our preparation, Peter and I didn't really know what to expect when Ray and I became lovers. I got caught up in a full-on flood of new relationship energy, and Peter, with whom I had settled into a low-key, eight-year-relationship groove, struggled with the intensity of it all. One day, when Ray and I had been lovers for about a month, Peter sat me down and said, "You're falling in love with Ray." He was right. Surprisingly, perhaps, we had never talked before about the possibility of falling in love. And there we were, and we weren't ready.

My growing relationship with Ray forced me and Peter to confront a long-buried structural problem in our relationship, one we had been able to sweep under the rug for years. One day, the day before I was scheduled to go visit Ray, Peter told me he wasn't sure he wanted to be with me anymore. I panicked. I said I wanted to cancel my trip so I could stay home and work on things with Peter, but Peter said no, he wanted me to go. And he wanted me to stay with Ray until he had decided he was ready for me to come back.