More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (41 page)

And be realistic about what commitments you can make. This means not just being realistic about your other commitments now, but about the flexibility you may require in the future when a new person enters your life. One challenge with polyamorous relationships is they require a willingness to leave space for other people who have their own needs and desires. This means that some types of commitments are especially problematic in poly relationships, and the need for flexibility on everybody's part is much greater.

For example, longer-term commitments are trickier than short-term ones. I can easily commit to a date with you next week, but to commit to a date with you the same night every week forever? That overlooks the fact that I may someday have someone new in my life, and that's the only night she can see me. Or maybe I'll someday want to go to Mexico for a week with her, which will mean canceling our date night. Commitments to always put one person "first" in certain things, or to always restrict certain activities to one person, can become problematic if someone enters the picture for whom one of the restricted activities is important. And everyone needs to be put first sometimes.

And then there are commitments that specify
how
other commitments are to be met. "I commit to sharing equally in our parenting responsibilities" is very different from "I commit to never spending the night away so that I will always be there for the kids' breakfast." Similarly, "I commit to living with you, remaining your ally throughout your life, and looking after you in your old age" is different from "I commit to never living with anyone else, never being a lifelong ally to someone else, and never taking time away from our relationship to care for another partner who needs help."

Another type of commitment that can trip you up is commitment to
future intimacy. Many of the commitments we make in relationships—things like legal and financial responsibilities, a shared home or children—are actually commitments to life-building, not to feelings. And not to never changing your boundaries. When we're head over heels in love (or feeling NRE), we may want to promise to love our partner forever. We may even want to promise to desire them forever—as much as we do now. But as much as you may want to build a life with someone, consent to intimacy exists only right now, right here, in this moment. Consent means that you will be able to choose at all times the intimacy you participate in.

Being in a consensual romantic relationship means you are never obligated to any future intimacy, meaning anything that enters your personal boundaries. It can be sleeping together, having sex, hugging and kissing, sharing emotions, living together, having certain shared experiences or making shared choices. You can state future
intentions
, but you cannot pre-consent, and both people must recognize and respect personal boundaries in the present time, regardless of intentions stated in the past. This is important to understand, or else the relationship can easily become coercive.

Many people build structures against free exercise of consent in the future to protect themselves from their fears: "Never leave me." "Love me forever." Such statements are you or your partner asking for future control of the other's feelings and choices. But even if you have already made such promises, you can always withdraw consent, always draw new boundaries, or it's not consent at all. The moment you begin
expecting
any form of intimacy from a partner because of a commitment he has made to you, or ignore boundaries because you feel your partner has no right to set them because of prior commitments, your relationship has become coercive.

Financial commitments in polyamory need special attention. It's common for people in a relationship to combine their finances. In poly, we believe it's important to have access to some money that's just yours, even if you have joint finances with another person. This helps avoid one source of resentment and conflict. We have seen many people get upset when they feel that a partner is spending joint money on dates with someone else. This opens an avenue for control; a person who doesn't want his partner to have other relationships can simply forbid using "their" money to do so. When each person has some amount of money that is theirs to use as they wish, this helps eliminate the feeling that one person is subsidizing another's romantic life.

COMMITMENTS AND SOLO POLY

Advocating for needs and navigating commitments can be a special challenge for solo poly folks, whose relationships don't follow the usual script. We're accustomed to judging a relationship's significance by how far it's gone up the escalator. So when we don't see the conventional markers of a "serious" relationship, we may underestimate its depth and how much investment has gone into it. People who take a free-agent approach often look for partners who value them and their needs even when the relationship doesn't follow a traditional trajectory. So it's often not their partners who misunderstand the importance of their relationships, but their metamours. A partner's other partner can easily trivialize a relationship that doesn't appear "committed" because it doesn't have the normal markers (such as moving in together) that society associates with commitment.

FRANKLIN'S STORY
Amy and I started dating in 2004. Amy is solo poly, and our relationship has never been on course for the two of us to share finances or live together. During the time we've been partners, she has always maintained a high degree of autonomy, living by herself and making her own decisions. We didn't have a plan for our relationship; we let it take its own path.

In the years since, we have always been there for each other, through good times and bad. We have celebrated joy together, held each other through heartbreak, supported each other through the occasional bumps that any partnership faces. Despite that, we've never felt a need to develop a more traditional relationship.

It has sometimes been difficult for other people to recognize how committed Amy and I are to one another. This has been true with partners of mine who don't understand how we can "really" be committed to one another if we aren't planning an entwined future, and to partners of hers who don't consider ours a "real" relationship because, despite all the years we've been with each other, we haven't made any move toward living together. At times I've felt it necessary to stand up for our relationship against assumptions that it can't really be serious, and she has had to set boundaries when new or potential partners consider her entirely single because our relationship is almost invisible to them.

Many solo poly people, when considering a relationship with a person who is already partnered, find it essential to talk about their expectations and ideas about commitment early on.

LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS

When you look around at poly people, you'll see a disproportionate number of long-distance relationships. Often you'll see deeply committed, long-term LDRs—something that's fairly rare among monogamous people.

Monogamy makes assumptions that are poorly suited to distance, and it's difficult to maintain sexual exclusivity for long periods when your partner is far away. But because polyamory doesn't necessarily include expectations that partners will live together, and because it doesn't restrict sex and intimacy to one person, long-distance poly relationships are more feasible. Another reason you see so many is that many poly folks meet online, and because poly people represent a relatively small portion of the population, the selection of local poly partners can be limited. Our relationship with each other is long-distance, and Eve has one other LDR and Franklin, three.

Long-distance relationships exist in a constrained space. Time with a long-distance partner is scarce, meaning it's at a premium whenever the opportunity comes up. But there are many ways to nourish an LDR when the partners are apart; the two of us, for example, spend a lot of time on Skype, and we're both avid texters.

The time when long-distance partners are physically together, surprisingly, can create the most stress. When you have both local and long-distance partners (as both of us do, and all our long-distance partners do), it can be easy to get so caught up in the normal, day-to-day relationship with a local partner that you forget to make space for the distant one. Sometimes literally. A long-distance partner can be a sort of "invisible" person: someone whose needs aren't necessarily obvious. For example, do you leave a place in your home for your long-distance partner to stay on visits? If you have a regular schedule with local partners—every Friday is date night, say—are you flexible enough for a long-distance visitor to interrupt that routine?

Local partners may resent visits that disrupt regular schedules. When your long-distance partner is in town, naturally you want to maximize the time you spend with him. From the perspective of a local partner, the visits can look like all grapes and no cucumbers (a distinction we explain in the next chapter). You may go out to eat more often, take trips, spend more time playing tourist, and do other "fun" things to make the most of the limited time. Your local partner might end up saying, "Hey! When do I get to have that fun?" If your long-distance partner visits for a week and you want to spend every night with him, your local partner might say, "That's not fair! When do I get to spend the night with you?" (The answer, of course, might be "During all the other fifty-one weeks in the year.")

Long-distance relationships concentrate the fun, flashy parts of a relationship, but at the cost of all the small things that build intimacy every day. We know few local partners who would be willing to trade places with a long-distance partner! LDRs also create special concerns around relations
between
metamours, because visits may not allow much time to build metamour friendships. The partners in the long-distance relationship may need to sacrifice some dyad time to allow for metamours to get to know each other. Metamours, for their part, need to be able to recognize the scarcity of time the long-distance partners have with each other, and realize that it's probably not personal if they don't get as much time as they'd like to get to know the long-distance partner. Because distance makes time such a valuable commodity, flexibility from everyone is vital.

POLYAMORY WITH CHILDREN

Polyamory can be a tremendously positive thing for children. We have both seen or been involved in polyamorous relationships with people who have thriving, happy children. Polyamory potentially means there are more loving adults in the family. It allows children to see more examples of healthy, positive, loving relationships. It exposes children to the idea that love is abundant and can take many forms.

Evidence-based research on
long-term outcomes for kids
raised in poly families is still scarce. But a fifteen-year longitudinal study by the sociologist Elisabeth Sheff, summarized in her 2013 book,
The Polyamorists Next Door
(highly recommended reading if you are poly with children), found that the kids from poly homes are often strikingly robust and emotionally healthy—though she admits that her sample has a self-selection bias. Her generally positive conclusions about kids in poly families match observations that are common throughout the self-identified poly community.

Children of poly parents grow up with adults in all kinds of configurations. Many poly parents end up living with a non-parental partner, some of whom have kids of their own. It's quite common to see live-in vees consisting of a couple with children plus another adult partner who often participates in child care and may have a close, stepparent-like relationship with the children. Quads and quints, bigger networks living in a great big house with six or seven kids—it's all been done. Some non-parental partners are more like aunts or uncles, some more like friends of the family who don't have much involvement with their partners' kids. Some (but not many) poly people hide their poly relationships from their children, seeing partners outside the home or treating them as "friends" (we talk more about coming out to children—and coming out
with
children—in chapter 25).

There is no magic formula for poly parenting, no configuration that will work best for every family. The strongest, healthiest homes for children are those with happy, emotionally healthy adults who model integrity and good communication. The child's needs must be cared for, and the parents absolutely need to be
present
for and
committed
to their children, but that does not mean sacrificing their own needs, happiness or interests to every want of the child. Most people seem ready to accept parents' complexities and trade-offs for other things, such as careers—not just when both parents work, but when a parent needs to uproot the family to move cross-country for a career or educational opportunity. It's really not so different for relationships.

If you have children or plan to have them, and you want to open up to polyamory, it's worth taking some time to unpack your ideas about what it means to be a good parent. Our society has long idealized nuclear families, but there are all kinds of families, including plenty of children who grow up without "traditional" nuclear families. A lifelong, live-in romantic dyad is
not
the only healthy or acceptable way to raise children, and in fact the isolated nuclear family is a historically recent aberration. As a polyamorous person, you might end up creating a beautiful live-in quad or triad with dedicated co-parents, not unlike the way your great-grandparents grew up, surrounded by aunts and uncles. Or you might lose your romantic relationship with your co-parent. You might end up as a single parent or in a platonic co-parenting arrangement with your former partner, or in something that resembles a monogamous blended family (separated parents living with stepparents).