More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (4 page)

Polyamory means giving things up.
When your lover has another lover, there will be times when you will lose something, even if it's just time and attention. Any relationship needs attention in order to thrive, and no matter how close you may be to your partner's other lover—indeed, even if you and a partner share a lover—there will be times when the relationship requires one-on-one focus. It is not always possible to schedule that time so it never takes anything away from you.

Polyamory changes things.
We talk more about this throughout the book, but especially in chapters 14 and 17. The short version is you cannot open your heart to other people and expect your life to be unchanged. There will be disruptions, and you will not always be able to anticipate or control them. All relationships are subject to change. Even seemingly idyllic polyamorous relationships don't necessarily last forever, any more than perfect-seeming traditional marriages do.

People don't always get along.
Just because someone loves your partner doesn't necessarily mean she will mesh well with you. It's easy to say "I will only date people who like my current partners" (or in extreme cases, "I will only date people who are romantically involved with my current partners"), but in the real world that's not always practical. You can't coerce people to like one another, and we argue that in consensual relationships, it may not even be ethical to make your love contingent on how the person you love interacts with someone else. Sometimes, the best we can do is to agree to be civil toward one another. Biological families on occasion have members who don't particularly like one another, but still have to be reasonable at family dinners. Polyamory is no different.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

We find it's not very useful to tell you what you should do. It's far more effective to pose questions when you're contemplating a course of action. We will do this throughout the book. To start with, here are some questions that can help you determine whether polyamory might be a good match for you:

• Have I ever felt romantic love for more than one person at the same time?
  
• Do I feel there can be only one "true" love or one "real" soulmate?
  
• How important is my desire for multiple romantic relationships?
  
• What do I want from my romantic life? Am I open to multiple sexual relationships, romantic relationships, or both? If I want more than one lover, what degree of closeness and intimacy do I expect, and what do I offer?
  
• How important is transparency to me? If I have more than one lover, am I happy with them knowing about each other? If they have other lovers, am I happy knowing them?
  
• How do I define commitment? Is it possible for me to commit to more than one person at a time, and if so, what would those commitments look like?
  
• If I am already in a relationship, does my desire for others come from dissatisfaction or unhappiness with my current relationship? If I were in a relationship that met my needs, would I still want multiple partners?
  

2

THE MANY FORMS OF LOVE

Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.

ELIZABETH
CADY
STANTON

Imagine yourself as a tree. Your roots go deep into the soil; it nourishes and supports you. They're fed by the rain, which keeps your sap flowing. Your leaves are bathed in sunlight, which provides energy. The wind brings pollen from other trees, so you can produce seeds and fruit. Maybe there's even a bird that builds a nest in your branches, raises a brood and is gone by fall. Each one of these things—soil, rain, sun, wind—does something different for you. None are interchangeable. Lacking one, you might wither and die, or at least fail to flourish. With too much of one, you might suffocate.

This is a metaphor for your relationships. Some people—the people we might call anchor partners, but also perhaps our parents or siblings or best friends—ground us, stabilize us, support us. They are the ones we know we can always turn to. They're the soil. Others may be more variable, but no less crucial: the energizing, joy-bringing sunlight. The cooling, cleansing rain. The winds that bring you new ideas and draw forth your creative force.

How do you meet your own needs? Growing up in a monogamous society, we're shown only a handful of paths that love, particularly romantic love, can take. Relationships are expected to follow a specific trajectory, what we call the "relationship escalator." If a relationship doesn't follow that path, it's not "real." This cookie-cutter way of looking at relationships is so ingrained that we often try to hang onto it even when we discover polyamory. Sometimes we limit the shapes of our relationships: "My boyfriend can only ever be my boyfriend because I already have a husband." Sometimes we try to follow the standard relationship trajectory with multiple people: We start by searching for two or three live-in fidelitous partners before we even know what they want.

Polyamory allows us to let go of monogamy's predefined structures. One of the amazing things polyamory offers is the freedom to negotiate relationships that work for you and your partners. The possibilities are not always obvious, even for people who have lived polyamorously for years. For example, there's often no need to "break up" a relationship if something (or someone) changes. Maybe we can keep a connection and reshape it in another way. We can build relationships that are free to develop however they naturally want to flow.

It helps to recognize that love itself is malleable and ever-changing. Its intensity and nature varies, and this influences its flow, its mutable forms. Monogamy tells us that successful, "real" relationships all look about the same. Relationships that last a long time are called successes, without regard to misery, and those that end are called failures, without regard to happiness. Anything that is not sexually exclusive, we are told, invites chaos, anarchy, the breakdown of the family.

Monogamy tells us what to expect. Polyamory does not. There are no rigid templates, only nuance and shades of gray. This is both a blessing and a curse. Polyamory embraces the idea that relationships are, first and foremost, individual affairs, closely tailored to the specific needs of all the people involved. At the same time, it doesn't give us a clear path to follow, no royal road to "a good relationship." Abandoning the benchmarks of monogamy can be scary. Without them, how will we know what to do?

THE DNA OF RELATIONSHIPS

The moment we move from cookie-cutter relationships to custom-built ones, we have to start thinking about what is and is not possible. The vast potential in polyamorous relationships can be misleading. A relationship can be many things, but it also has built-in constraints. It's constrained by what you want—but also by what each of your partners wants, and what their partners want, and the inherent range of potential intimacy between you and your partner. Each relationship contains a range of possibilities. These possibilities are what you get to choose from.

That inherent set of possibilities is the DNA of a relationship. High-school science textbooks refer to DNA as a "blueprint," but this is inaccurate. You use a blueprint to build a house. It maps what the house will look like: every dimension, every detail. Sure, you get control over superficial things like paint and curtains, but basically you know what you're going to get. And once the house is built, it pretty much stays the same.

On the other hand, the DNA of every different creature
looks
pretty much the same. It's long chains of millions or billions of repeating elements, the "letters" that make the "words" that are our genes. A blueprint is a map, but DNA is more like a recipe: a set of instructions that tells cells step-by-step how to grow an organism. Under a microscope, a creature's DNA looks nothing like what the creature will, just as a written recipe doesn't look like a cake.

So imagine, then, that you pick up a new seed. It contains the DNA for a whole plant, but it's not obvious what it will grow to be: big or small? annual or perennial? weedy and tenacious, or delicate and high-maintenance? You have a lot of influence over how that seed grows, or whether it sprouts at all, based on the care you give it. But you're never going to get a watermelon from an onion seed. At best, you'll just get a bigger onion. And some plants seem downright determined to live: you can plant them in shade and forget to water them, and they'll keep right on growing.

Relationships—like living things, but unlike buildings—grow, change, and go through cycles. Some offer fruit and others flowers, and there might even be times when it seems like they're providing nothing at all. They have seasons, and they can die.

So when we say relationships have DNA, not blueprints, what we mean is that relationships, unlike houses, are alive. Society gives us a
blueprint
for what relationships are supposed to look like—one man, one woman, 2.4 kids, a yard, PTA meetings, apple pie. We propose relationships that don't fit a blueprint, relationships that are as individual as the people in them. Relationships don't need to be mass-produced to factory specifications; we can grow them to meet our needs.

That's why we like to compare the work that goes into growing your relationships to the work of tending a garden. Your garden will thrive, or not, based on the time and skill that goes into watering, weeding, fertilizing, and selecting and placing your plants (your relationship efforts), as well as on the health of the soil and exposure to the sun (your own self-work). But the things in your garden have lives of their own—things they can and cannot become, things they can and cannot give, things they need and things that don't affect them at all.

And sometimes they may not turn out the way you expect. Relationships will seek their own true expressions, no matter how much you try to contain or control them. Just as you can't look at a strange seed and tell what it will be, you can't start a new relationship and tell how it will grow. If you insist on planting the next seed you find in the shade no matter what, or if you insist on forcing a new relationship to fit a certain mold, and this approach works…coincidence has entered the picture.

Remain mindful of the needs of the things you choose to grow in your garden. Make sure there's space for the things you want to add to it, and that you have the time and energy to care for them. Remember, too, that the purpose of the garden is ultimately to nourish the gardener. If you've filled your garden with potatoes and you want some vitamins, it's okay to make room for some kale and carrots. If the big shady oak tree that you've loved for decades is shading your entire garden so that nothing else can take root, you might need to gently prune some of the tree's branches to let in light. And if something you're growing is no longer nurturing you, if it's taking up time and resources from you and the other things in your garden and not giving anything back, then it does not have an inherent right to be in your garden. And if it turns out to be toxic to you or those you care about, it's okay to pull it out.

BEING FLEXIBLE

A core value that we promote in this book is the idea of flexibility. Polyamorous relationships come in an enormous variety of flavors, so they encourage flexibility in ways that most other relationship structures don't. Flexibility does not come naturally; it can be difficult to cast off a lifetime of ideas about how relationships "should" look. Because we're steeped in a limited number of relationship models, it's sometimes overwhelming to try to understand just how many ways relationships
can
work.

We mentioned several different personal approaches to polyamory in chapter 1. These different approaches result, as you might imagine, in very different kinds of relationships. Since polyamory invites us to build relationships tailored to the needs of everyone involved, it demands that we think carefully about our relationships and craft them accordingly.

Poly relationships span the gamut from structured, living-together families to loose networks of people who don't cohabit, with all sorts of configurations in between. These relationship forms reflect their members' varying needs for structure or flexibility, for cohesion or independence, for touch and contact or private space.

If you're making a garden, you can buy the seeds that will grow into the plants you want. With poly relationships, it's tempting to plan out how you want your life to look and then search for people who fit the plan. But unlike seeds, people don't come from a store neatly labeled. You can't look at a person and predict what a relationship will grow into; relationships have a tricky way of zigging when you expect them to zag. Sure, it's important to communicate what you want in your relationships up front—but it's also important to remember you're not ordering a relationship from a catalog. Leave space for them to grow, and don't freak out if they grow in ways you didn't expect.

APPROACHES TO RELATIONSHIPS

Hidden within different types of polyamorous relationship structures are some very different ideas about relationships in general: about autonomy, community, entwinement, romance, sex and partnership. Poly people tend to speak of these different approaches as existing on two axes. One axis runs from "free agent" to "community-oriented." The other runs from "solo" to "entwined." They sound alike, but they are not.

Some poly people consider themselves free agents. That is, they value personal autonomy highly, place importance on the ability to make their own decisions, and present to the world as able to act without requiring permission from others. The model of free-agent poly can be difficult at first to understand. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that free agents don't commit, or don't consider the needs of their lovers (a.k.a. metamours), or don't care about community. This isn't true. In reality, the free-agent model places responsibility for decision-making, and for bearing the consequences, on each person individually.