More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (14 page)

Compassion is—again—not something you
are
, not something you
feel
, but something you
practice
. Compassion is putting ourselves in another's shoes. We can sit with a person in whatever they are feeling, bear witness to their pain while still loving who they are. Sometimes that person is ourselves.

Compassion is not politeness, and isn't even the same as kindness. It's not doing good deeds for someone while quietly judging them! Compassion engages your whole person, and it requires vulnerability, which is part of what makes it so hard. We have to be able to allow ourselves to be present as an equal with another person, recognize the darkness in them and accept it—and that forces us to embrace, as well, the darkness within ourselves.

A lack of boundaries is not the same thing as compassion, nor is letting someone walk all over us, or overlooking poor behavior or mistreatment of others. Real compassion requires strong boundaries, because if we are letting someone take advantage of us, it becomes very hard to be authentically vulnerable to them. Compassion requires a willingness to hold other people accountable for the things they
do
, while accepting them for who they
are
.

How do we practice compassion? The cornerstone of compassion is simple, but emotionally difficult to achieve. It means, first and foremost, assuming good intent from others. In other words, looking for the most charitable interpretation of someone else's deepest motives.

Until we all have magic mind-reading rubies in our foreheads, assuming another person's motives is always going to be dangerous. That's why we need compassion. When someone has done something we don't like, or that hurts us, or has failed to do what we want them to do, it's too easy to assume the worst motivations from them: "He doesn't care about my needs." "She completely disregards my feelings."

Compassion means coming from a place of understanding that others have needs of their own, which might be different than ours, and extending to them the same understanding, the same willingness to appreciate their own struggles, that we would want them to extend to us. We practice it every time we feel that surge of annoyance when someone does something we don't like, and then check ourselves and try to see the reason for their behavior from their perspective. We practice it every time we are gentle with others instead of being angry with them. And we practice it when we apply that same gentleness to ourselves: every time we accept that we are flawed and imperfect but are good despite that. We practice it in every recognition of each other's frailty and error.

As polyamorous people, we face particularly pressing needs to cultivate compassion for our partners, their partners and members of our community. But perhaps most important of all is compassion for ourselves. We are learning a new way of doing things. We're developing new skills that no one's taught us before and challenging ourselves in ways that many people never do. We're trying to learn how to treat not just one partner well, but an entire network of people whose well-being depends on what we do. And that's hard.

It's easy to beat yourself up for not being a perfect poly person, especially with the poly community putting its best face forward publicly in order to gain mainstream acceptance. Whether you're feeling jealous and insecure, or you're having trouble with anger management, or you can't figure out how to clearly communicate your needs…it's normal. You don't need to be a poly perfectionist. You're not the first person to have felt these things, not by a long shot. We've all been there. Try to treat yourself the same way you would treat someone you cared about who is having the same problem: with compassion and acceptance.

CHECK YOUR EXPECTATIONS

The dictionary defines
expectation
as "a belief centered on the future; a belief that something will or should happen in the future." That doesn't suggest the mischief our expectations can cause. Expectations lead to disappointment when they aren't met, and fear of that disappointment can cause us to hide our expectations—sometimes even from ourselves.

Expectations differ from related feelings like hopes, fantasies, wishes or desires. If you have the latter and they don't come true, you may feel disappointment or even grief, but we don't think that means it's bad to have them.
Expectations
, on the other hand, can fuck with you. The difference is that an expectation implies a responsibility on the part of another person (or at least an entity, like God or Fate or "the universe"). Perhaps even a sense of entitlement. So when it's not fulfilled, in addition to whatever disappointment you might otherwise feel, you also feel anger or blame.

We all have expectations. Most of the time, our expectations are reasonable and normal. We expect that when we turn on the tap, water will come out. On a more basic level, we expect that the laws that govern our interactions with the world are stable and immutable. We expect water to be wet, fire to be hot, gravity to make things fall. Our expectations form part of the basis for our perception of the world. They provide a sense of stability and predictability; if we had no expectations at all, living would become nearly impossible.

Things get more slippery when we talk about expectations regarding other people. People are self-determining, with their own motivations and priorities. We can expect some things of other people—we expect that our friends won't set fire to the house or steal the cat when they come to visit—but our expectations are always going to be hampered by the fact that we can't really tell what's happening inside another person's head. Sometimes people do set fire to houses or steal cats.

Let's talk about "reasonable" and "unreasonable" expectations. The difference is subjective, and there's a lot of fuzzy gray overlap. Some expectations are clearly reasonable. We expect our friends not to punch us in the nose without provocation. We expect our romantic partners not to drain our bank account and run off to Cancun with the grocer. Other expectations are just as clearly unreasonable. We would not expect a new date who's just shown up in a fancy formal dress to be enthusiastic if we say, "You need to go clean the cat box for me."

Between the two clear extremes lie the waters where reefs lurk, ready to shipwreck the unwary. Our expectations can run aground at just about any point in a relationship.

We do not, by and large, have the right to expect things of people without their consent. We cannot be angry at someone for failing to do something she did not agree to do in the first place. The skill of expectation management means more than trying to navigate between reasonable and unreasonable expectations. It means recognizing that a desire on my part does not constitute an obligation on your part. And we can never reasonably be upset at someone for failing to live up to our expectations if we haven't talked about our expectations in the first place.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

When you're thinking about what you want from your relationship life and how you'd like your relationships to be structured, here are some questions it might be useful to ask yourself (and talk over with your partner or partners, if you're in a relationship):

• Why do I have relationships with other people?
  
• What needs do I have from my partners, in terms of time, emotional availability, commitment, communication and intimacy?
  
• What does "commitment" mean to me, and why?
  
• When I think about the future, what does it look like? Is there room for change and growth?
  
• How much do I value personal autonomy, transparency, cohabitation, having and raising children, shared finances, community, tradition, the opinions of my friends and family, adhering to social norms?
  
• What values are the most important to me in myself and in others?
  
• Are the choices I make in alignment with these values?
  
• Who are my mirrors? Whom do I rely on to call me on my mistakes?
  
• How do I respond to criticism from people close to me?
  
• How do I evaluate my choices when the effects of my actions are impossible to predict?
  
• What do I expect of others, and why?
  

6

COMMUNICATION PITFALLS

All words have not a single meaning

but a swarm of them, like bees around a hive.

MAUREEN
O
'
BRIEN

If you've heard anything about polyamory, you've likely heard this: "The first rule of polyamory is communicate, communicate, communicate." But what does that mean, exactly? Communication is trickier than it sounds. It covers a lot more than saying what's on your mind, and even saying what's on your mind can be surprisingly tough. Then there's the listening part. There are a thousand ways communication can fail and only a few ways for it to succeed. Yet good communication is a process, and it's essential to building trust, demonstrating respect and understanding the needs of the people you're close to.

When we talk about communication in polyamory, we're actually talking about a very specific
type
of communication: speaking the truth about ourselves, our needs and our boundaries with honesty and precision, and listening with grace when our partners speak of themselves, their needs and their boundaries. This kind of communication isn't really about words. It's about vulnerability, self-knowledge, integrity, empathy, compassion and a whole lot of other things.

Communication is such a complex subject that we've divided it into two chapters. This chapter addresses ways communication can run off a cliff, including being imprecise, dishonest, passive and coercive. The next chapter discusses strategies to help you succeed.

FUZZY LANGUAGE

In poly circles, people often complain that conversations about poly always seem to come back to semantics. This is actually a good thing. The poly community tends to focus on communication, and communication relies on words having shared meanings. Arriving at that mutual understanding is what semantics is all about.

On the one hand, language is a marvelously flexible and resilient tool. If you read a sentence containing non-English flutzpahs, even if you've never heard of flutzpahs before you can often glork their meaning from context. On the other hand, the simplest way for communication to go wrong is when one person uses a familiar word in a way that another person misinterprets. For example, Franklin once had a conversation with Celeste that went something like this:

CELESTE: Can you do me a favor and pass the sweeper?

FRANKLIN: What's a sweeper?

CELESTE: The thing that vacuums the rug. You know, the vacuum cleaner.

FRANKLIN: Oh! Right. Okay, here you go.

CELESTE: You never help me out around the house! You expect me to do everything! I ask you to do one thing and you won't do it!

FRANKLIN: Wait. You asked me to pass the sweeper, and I gave you the vacuum cleaner! It's what you wanted, right?

CELESTE: No, I asked you to vacuum for me. "Pass the sweeper" means "Pass it over the rug."

Small words can hide big misunderstandings. What is
sex?
What is a
relationship?
What do we mean by words such as
permission, consent
or
commitment?
A disagreement about the meaning of that last word popped up during a panel on polyamory Franklin once participated in at a convention:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's obvious that people with multiple romantic relationships can't be committed, because
commitment
means you're dedicated to only one person. Someone who is not committed can't be trusted, because they have no commitment to you.

FRANKLIN: But what if someone is committed to more than one person?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Impossible. That's a logical contradiction.
Commitment
means "dedication to only one person." You can't be dedicated to two people any more than you can divide a circle into three halves. A person who has more than one partner has no commitment, and therefore can't be trusted.

What's obvious to one person may not be obvious to another. As we discuss in chapter 19, on sex, even defining the word
sex
can create a thorny tangle.

SLIPPERY WORDS

When the two of us communicate about relationships, we try to steer clear of certain words. Some words come preloaded with expectations and emotional baggage, which makes them prone to misuse. These words easily become tools of manipulation, because they sound reasonable on the surface but have meanings that are difficult to pin down.

Respect.
Many people are fond of saying things like "New partners must respect my existing relationships." And it sounds reasonable: after all, who would go into a relationship saying, "I plan to disrespect all the other folks involved"?

But what does it mean to "respect" a relationship? Does it mean to yield to the people in that relationship all the time? Does it mean to always do what they say? Respect is reciprocal; what respect are the people in a relationship prepared to offer a new relationship?

Rather than use vague words like
respect
, you will benefit from spelling out what your expectations are. If you believe that older relationships have priority in terms of time and scheduling, for example, say so. Using vague words like
respect
creates an easy way to accuse others of breaking agreements any time they do something you don't like, without actually having to make explicit agreements.