More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (43 page)

If you have children, or are thinking of having them, here are some additional questions worth considering:

• When I think about family structures that are healthy for children, what features do they all have in common?
  
• How can I and the other adults in my life contribute to an environment that is safe and nurturing for children?
  
• Do I trust my partners and their partners to be supportive of my responsibilities to my children, and do I have confidence in my ability to select supportive partners?
  

16

IN THE MIDDLE

When I dwell less on the conflicts and compromises, and more on being fully engaged with the task at hand, the center holds and I feel content.

SHERYL
SANDBERG

When you have more than one partner, at some point you may face the unique challenges that come with being the pivot: the person in the middle, between two partners. The waters here can be turbulent. Your partners may have contradictory needs, or want the same thing from you at the same time, or end up in conflict with each other. You may find it difficult, when this happens, not to feel pulled in two directions.

Even when your partners are romantically involved with each other in an intimate relationship of their own, there will be times when you're in the middle. Maybe they'll both want your attention, but in different ways or for different reasons. Maybe each has different plans for the day and wants you to participate. This will happen, sure as night follows day. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it helps to be prepared.

Of course, this situation isn't unique to polyamory, as anyone with more than one child can tell you. When you're asked to care for, support and cherish two (or more) people who have different ideas and needs, life can be a balancing act. The difference in polyamory is that you're not the boss. You're dealing with self-determining adults, which means "Because I said so!" is not a workable fallback argument. You'll be asked to make decisions that are ethical and responsible while still respecting the autonomy of each of your partners.

BOUNDARIES FOR THE PIVOT

Successfully navigating your role as the pivot starts with good boundaries. When your partners have competing needs or desires, if you don't have good boundaries you can become a prize to be fought over, rather than an autonomous person with decision-making capability and needs of your own. This can happen even when everyone is acting in good faith.

When faced with tension between your partners, the first thing to do is to ask yourself, "Does it involve me directly?" If not, you're well advised to leave the conflict to them to work out themselves. If it does, the next question is, what do
I
want? When people you love have different ideas or opinions, the question of what
you
want can easily get lost in the struggle to please others. Moreover, if you're focused on trying to please your partners rather than taking responsibility for your choices, it becomes easy for your partners to focus on
each other
as the reason you're not doing what each of them wants. Advocating for what
you
want when you're being pulled in different directions is a powerful tool to help resolve conflict, contrary to what you might imagine.

Boundaries around communication are another important part of balancing your role as a pivot. We discussed
triangular communication
in chapter 6. Short version: It's a trap to stay out of. As a pivot, triangular communication can be tempting in two ways:

• If your partners are unhappy with
  your
  choices, or feel their needs aren't being met, it is very easy for you to shift the blame onto another partner. "I can't see you tonight because Sophie won't let me." "I want to go to that event with you, but Owen is insisting I go out with him." Don't blame others for your choices; it's your choice to accept Sophie's demand or to go with Owen. We will talk about this more under "Who owns your choices?"
  
• If your partners are in conflict, it's also easy to slip into the role of trying to play the mediator, or of "translating" them to each other. This is dangerous ground, because if they don't resolve the conflict themselves, it's not resolved at all. Attempting to mediate can end up estranging them from each other and eroding their trust in you.
  

Part of setting good boundaries as the pivot is to speak only for yourself, not your partners. If a partner asks you what another is thinking or feeling, what he wants or why he did something,
resist the urge to answer.
The best response is, "I think you should ask him yourself."

WHO OWNS YOUR CHOICES?

We talk so much about communication and negotiation in poly that it can be easy to forget that the pivot actually holds a great deal of responsibility for
making decisions.
And make them you must. Negotiation is important, but it's also important not to lose sight of the
purpose
of a negotiation, which is ultimately to make a choice. A choice, hopefully, that upholds your commitments and honors the needs of everyone affected, but a choice nonetheless. Gather data, certainly. Discuss, negotiate, listen and empathize. But then make a decision.

EVE'S STORY
In the early months of Peter's relationship with Clio, she and I did a lot of planning for him, to make sure they were able to visit each other. In fact, he would sometimes joke about how we could just figure things out for him. But that changed about six months in, and that change altered not just our relationship with Peter, but my approach to poly relationships since then.

Peter and I had each been to visit Clio separately, but this was our first visit together to her house. The first night, we were trying to decide who was going to sleep where. Peter wanted Clio and me to make the decision, but neither of us wanted to make it for him. Peter asked each of us—we were in separate rooms—what we wanted to do about sleeping arrangements, and ended up running back and forth relaying messages between the two of us. He also wouldn't tell us what
he
wanted. He became frustrated—and finally slept on the couch, while Clio and I slept in Clio's bed.

It hadn't occurred to us that there was a flaw in our decision-making process; we were all pretty happy with the results up to then. But we realized that weekend that Peter wasn't taking an active role. He was letting Clio and me figure things out for him. The couch incident was the first time the three of us had been confronted with a situation where we had to make a spur-of-the-moment decision all together.

The next morning, we each talked with each other in our three separate dyads, and then the three of us all talked together. The outcome of all this talking was that Peter needed to take a more proactive role in making our group decisions. Peter initially resisted, though today, neither he nor I remembers why. Clio explained the role we wanted him to take as being like a central data processor: collecting information from both of us, interpreting it in the context of his own needs and wants, and making his decisions in line with his priorities of nurturing our relationships.

Our process changed after that. Peter became much more independent in making plans with Clio. Rather than asking me to make decisions concerning visits or sleeping arrangements, he would ask me about my feelings or plans, then make proposals for me to respond to. Quite quickly, he became fully independent in managing his relationships.

Writer Ferret Steinmetz has called this "
ping-pong poly
":
a pattern of running back and forth between your partners, trying to please everyone but rarely making a choice (or worse, making decisions that only last until you see your other partner). Nearly everyone who's been a pivot has probably committed ping-pong poly at least once; it's an easy pattern to fall into. But if it becomes chronic, it will wear you and your partners down and damage trust among all of you.

Shifting responsibility for your choices onto your other partners ("Sophie made me do it!") is cowardly. If your partners buy into this—and many will—you will be able to deflect their unhappiness onto each other instead of you. However, this ploy serves you poorly, for a couple of reasons. One, taking responsibility for your choices is a sign of integrity, which helps build trust. Shifting that responsibility will, over time, undermine not just your partners' trust in each other, but their trust in you. Two, even if your partners never become close, it's in your interest for them to trust each other and feel safe communicating with one another. Deflecting tensions from their relationship with you onto whatever friction they may have with each other can easily create confusion and conflict.

Your choices are always yours, regardless of whether they make you or your partners happy or unhappy. Own up to them. If you use phrases such as "Jill won't let me," or "Karen made me," or even "The rules say I have to," you are shifting responsibility.

TIME MANAGEMENT

Discussed a lot in poly support groups, time management is one of the toughest parts of having multiple relationships—for some folks, it's harder than issues like jealousy. It also doesn't come naturally to many people.

As with many other poly skills, effective time management really comes down to communication. Good communication about time includes being clear about what time commitments you are available for, how much time you need in each relationship (including how much needs to be dyad time as opposed to group time), how much you need for yourself (especially important if you're introverted), and what time commitments you already have. It also includes being very clear about what you are committing to and with whom—which can be harder than it sounds.

For example, on two occasions Eve scheduled vacation days off work for plans she'd made with a partner. In both cases, at the beginning (and once in the middle!) of her time with them, the partner informed her they had made plans with others for part of the time scheduled. In both cases, the partner was self-employed or in school and didn't understand that "I'm scheduling vacation time" represents a serious commitment for someone in a salaried job. Her partners had considered the plans to be tentative. For his part, Franklin has more than once invited partners to participate in his plans with other partners without asking the latter, only to find out, too late, that the partners he had made plans with expected to be alone with him.

Many poly people set up regular "date nights" with specific partners. For people who are into scheduling, this is a good tool to help let everyone know what to expect—though, as with everything else, you need to be somewhat flexible. Life isn't always tidy, and should a conflict come up, or a partner become ill or injured, it's reasonable to be able to rearrange the schedule without causing undue grief. As with anything, use judgment: if a long-distance partner comes into town for a week every six months, it's reasonable to expect date night to get rescheduled. Be aware, too, that schedules may need to change permanently to accommodate a new relationship.

Regular date nights are a great way to help nurture any relationship. They create a setting where the people involved can get back in touch with the romantic part of the relationship, free of distractions like chores, housework and kids. Sometimes polyamory makes this easier; when you have more than two people involved, it becomes easier to trade off one person taking care of the little things that always need taking care of while the two others spend time alone together. As long as the same opportunities are available to everyone, and everyone treats one another compassionately and without resentment, scheduled, focused time with each partner helps all the relationships thrive. (It's important that this not become a "service secondary" issue, as discussed in chapter 11.)

Google Calendar has become tremendously popular among poly people for time management. There's a standing joke that poly couldn't take off until Google Calendar was invented. It's so popular because, unlike a paper day planner or similar tools, it's also a
communication
tool: calendars can be shared among multiple people, with different levels of access, and several people's calendars can be viewed simultaneously. You can pull up six or seven calendars at once to look for opportunities for dates, shared time, and so on.

Google Calendar is so powerful that it requires careful negotiation before you start to use it. Failure to set explicit expectations about the purpose and use of the calendar can lead to serious misunderstandings and hurt feelings. In
chapter 6, Eve told one story
about how a lack of communication around calendar expectations helped sink a relationship.

What are your boundaries about what you are willing to share, and how you want your partners to interact with your calendar? Do you want them to see only free or busy times, have read-only access or have write access? You can schedule private events, which can only be viewed by those with owner-level permissions on your calendar—so even if someone has read or write access, you can keep some of your life private. When scheduling shared events, do you prefer to have the event added directly to your calendar or sent to you as an invitation that you can accept or decline?