More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (33 page)

But what if we have reason to be concerned that the new person is disruptive, manipulative, a bad influence, emotionally unstable or dangerous to our partner? We've heard all these and more as reasons why someone "had to" use veto. After all, our beloved is all caught up in twitterpation, aglow with hormones, and can't think clearly. It's true, we all gloss over flaws in the flush of a new crush. Isn't it our partner's job to see with eyes unclouded when we are blinded? To see warning signs and tell us?

Well, yes, but there's no reason to imagine that the veto-wielding partner is any more objective than the twitterpated partner. After all, it's scary to watch your partner get distracted by the new shiny. And when you're scared, you don't make wise decisions either. Which isn't to say that the veto-wielding partner is always wrong and the infatuated partner is always right. There's just no particular reason to assume one is necessarily more "right" than the other. The only way through the swamp is to communicate openly about whatever concerns or misgivings you have, and then to let the person
in
the relationship be the one to make the decision. Because even if his choice of partner is a mistake, it is his mistake to make.

"Screening veto" agreements deprive us of our ability to make our own mistakes, and learn and grow from them. Early in Eve's relationship with Peter, they talked about using a veto as part of their transition from monogamy to polyamory. But after they discussed it for a while, they both agreed that a veto might reduce their opportunities to learn.

EVE'S STORY
Peter has been in a relationship with Gwen for over five years. He started seeing her just a couple of months after he began his relationship with Clio, and while he was still traveling frequently to look after his mom. I was still adjusting to all the change and was completely unprepared for him to begin another new relationship. Moreover, I didn't like Gwen. When I met her, I had difficulty understanding her. I just had a gut feeling I didn't really like her, and I didn't feel like I was going to enjoy having her around. I told Peter so, but he continued to see Gwen.

If Peter and I had had a screening veto, I might have vetoed Gwen. And that would have been a huge mistake. Because in this case, Peter has proven to be a much better judge than I was of what will make him happy and what sort of person Gwen is. She has been an overwhelmingly positive addition to both our lives, and a stable, secure and supportive partner for Peter. I am immensely grateful not only for her presence in Peter's life, but for the agreement Peter and I made early on that we would not have the right to choose whom the other could become involved with.

ETHICAL PROBLEMS WITH VETO

There's nothing wrong with trying to manage risk—we do it every time we put on a seatbelt. Managing risk through veto, though, raises serious ethical concerns. It violates both of our core ethical principles:
The people in the relationship are more important than the relationship,
and
Don't treat people as things.

How does a veto treat people as things? A veto of an existing relationship makes a person expendable. It does not give her input into whether or not her own relationship is ended. While it's true that even in monogamous relationships the person being broken up with often doesn't get a say in the matter, the poly veto situation is unique. Here a third party
who is not actually in the relationship
is ending something that both of the people in it still want.

A veto arrangement also makes the relationship more important than the people in it, because it requires that a relationship be ended without consideration for whether it is healthy or beneficial to the people in it. Nor does it consider the harm that may be done to them by the veto.

It's true that when we have several relationships, some may cause pain in others. Despite raising the issues, despite ongoing negotiation, the pivot partner may choose to remain in a relationship that one of her partners thinks is harmful. If you are the partner who might want to issue a veto, consider
stating boundaries for yourself instead.
You could say, "This situation is degrading my happiness to the point where I can no longer imagine being happy if it continues. If you keep going down this course, I won't be able to remain in this relationship." Indeed, it's an important part of consent: you always have the right to withdraw consent, for any reason. You
never
have to remain in a situation that hurts you.

Issues of power and risk come up. If you have veto power and you say "I cannot stay with you if you remain in this relationship," you know ahead of time that you will "win" this particular play. Your partner has promised you in advance—probably when his other partner was still hypothetical and not yet a real person—that if this scenario ever arose, he would "choose" you.

Because you're pretty sure what the outcome will be, the risk for you in enacting a veto is lowered. You can deliver an ultimatum and still
not lose the relationship.
You do not have to shoulder the risk and vulnerability of saying you are prepared to leave and
really mean it.
In other words, the consequences of your actions—and thus the bar you need to reach before you issue an ultimatum—are lowered for you, giving you more power and less incentive to act in good faith.

At the same time,
all
of that risk is unloaded onto the other partner. This shifting of risk—telling another person to bear both the normal risk that comes with any relationship plus extra risk shifted from the other relationship—is one of the things that makes vetoes unethical.

If, on the other hand, you do
not
have veto power, the outcome is not predetermined. There is a chance that your partner will not break up with his other partner. So you have to accept the vulnerability of telling your partner, "I can't take this anymore. I will have to leave if you continue that relationship." You have to be
sure
. It seems to us that if you're ready to take a step as serious as ending another person's intimate relationship, it's fair to ask that you put as much on the line as they have.

And then, without a veto, your partner has the opportunity to do what he believes will be best for him in the long run, what will bring him the most happiness—rather than having to make a choice he may not want to make because it was agreed to long before a third real human being was involved.
The people in the relationship remain more important than the relationship.
Including that third person. When the outcome is predetermined through a veto arrangement, she has no room to negotiate or to defend herself or her relationship. Maybe she even has a case for why she is a better partner for him than you are—and she should have the right to make that case.

Even if you have a strictly hierarchical, primary/secondary relationship, the ethical considerations of veto deserve some attention. Any relationship can end, for any number of reasons. Not all relationships last; that's a fact of life (see chapter 22). But even when the primary partner in a hierarchical relationship decides he needs his partner's secondary relationship to end, the ethical thing to do is to involve the secondary partner in the discussion and allow her to respond to concerns.

PRACTICAL PROBLEMS WITH VETO

Aside from ethical concerns, and aside from the pain and bitterness a veto may cause, veto arrangements present other practical problems you may not have thought of. For example, a veto arrangement that's justified by a bad past experience holds a bad actor's actions against a new person who never even knew him. Say your partner became involved with Bob last year, and Bob rained drama and chaos all over. If that makes you ask for veto, then when Charles comes along, you're making him pay for the sins of Bob. You are perpetuating Bob's drama.

Another problem is escalation. We can't, short of use of force, actually make a partner break up with someone else. When we use a veto, even a mutually agreed-upon veto, we are giving our partner a choice: break up with your other partner, or else. The "or else" part is often left unspecified; few veto negotiations include provisions for what might happen if the veto is ignored. But a veto can, in fact, be ignored. Then what?

Veto creates a trust imbalance. The new person is often told, "Trust us. We won't use this veto inappropriately." But what does this say to the new person? "I want you to trust that I won't veto you inappropriately, but we have a veto arrangement because
we
don't trust
you
." Is it reasonable to ask someone we don't trust to trust us?

On an even more pragmatic note, we observe that people who make the best partners in poly relationships—people who have experience with polyamory, have demonstrated good communication skills, are compassionate problem-solvers with good conflict-resolution skills, and have a high reputation in the community for these abilities—usually avoid anyone who has veto. So by having a veto in place, you stack the deck
toward
relationship problems, because so many experienced poly people with good skills will avoid you. Both of us use "Do you have a veto agreement?" as a screening question with potential partners. If the answer is yes, it's a deal-breaker.

ALTERNATIVES TO VETO

People can become confused when talking about relationships without veto because they may have a mistaken notion that "no veto" means "no input." Some new partners can indeed be damaging or even dangerous, and it's important to be able to speak up when you see problems. Think about "right of consultation" as an alternative to "right of veto." You want conversation to open up, whereas a veto ends conversation. You need to be able to say, "I got a bad feeling from the way he treated you there at the bus stop," or "I went online and found he has a restraining order against him"—and have that not be perceived as a threat, but as useful information. Your partner needs to know you will go on to say, "So please be extra careful, and I'd like it if you could phone home often."

The most common justification we hear for veto power is that it's necessary to prevent a new partner from trying to break up the existing relationship. There certainly are people who will try to do this. They're common enough that the poly community has a name for them: "cowboys" (or "cowgirls"), because they ride up hoping to rope one out of the poly herd.

Unfortunately, veto treats all new partners as bad actors simply because some might be. And your partner isn't a delicate Grecian urn, an object to be stolen away by an enterprising burglar. Your partner is a person, and people can't be stolen. If some new shiny tries to "steal" him, he has to consent to being stolen. Veto or no veto, if he wants to stay with you, he will.

So the real question is not "How can I protect myself from cowboys?" The real question is, do you trust your partner to want to be with you, even if some cute young thing asks her to leave you? If someone says "run away with me," what do you think your partner will say?

Trust isn't something most of us are taught when growing up. The conventional fairy tale tells us to find true love and we'll be happy ever after. It doesn't mention trusting our partners even when we're afraid. It doesn't tell us how to assert good boundaries when faced with potentially disrupting relationships. Committing yourself to trusting that your partner wants to be with you, and will choose to be with you even if someone else tries to tug him away, takes courage. Asserting good boundaries around your partner's other partners takes work. But in the end, your partner is going to make the choices he makes whatever rules you put in place, so what other options do you really have?

Solid boundary-setting is another important tool in managing veto-free relationships (see chapter 9). Your partner may choose a partner you don't particularly like to be around. She may choose a partner who encourages her to make choices that hurt you. At these times, you need to be able to set clear guidelines about what you will and won't accept
within your own relationship.
You do not need to spend time with someone you don't like. If you feel uncomfortable or unsafe with a certain person in your home or your bed (or around your children), you have a right to (and should) set limits about who you will permit in your space.

Of course, your partner also has the right to choose a different living arrangement if your boundaries become unworkable for her.

If you expect certain standards of behavior—to be told the truth, for example, or to have plans reliably kept—that the other relationship is interfering with, you can express these expectations to your partner without managing the other relationship. And of course, if you are in a relationship without veto, it is especially important to respect the boundaries your partner sets around her body, her mind, her choices and her space with regard to your other partners, even when they inconvenience you.

Chapter 4 talked about the idea of self-efficacy—your belief in your own ability to make yourself heard and to positively affect your own situation. Veto can seem like a form of self-efficacy, but we believe self-efficacy lies in believing that if your partner's new relationship starts to go horribly wrong, you can talk about it and make yourself heard. Veto is an indicator of low self-efficacy; it is a way of saying "I don't believe I can get my partner to listen to my concerns unless I have a kill switch."