More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (8 page)

A RELATIONSHIP BILL OF RIGHTS

In 2003 Franklin posted a "Secondary's Bill of Rights" on his growing polyamory website. It rapidly became both the most popular and most controversial page on the site. Many people at the time objected to the idea that secondary partners should have rights at all. Here we expand the Secondary's Bill of Rights to a Relationship Bill of Rights. To develop this list, we examined other documents that defined "rights," from United Nations documents to rules from domestic abuse organizations. We think a pretty high bar needs to be met before something can be called a right. Here's what passed the test. You have the right, without shame, blame or guilt:

In all intimate relationships:

• to be free from coercion, violence and intimidation
  
• to choose the level of involvement and intimacy you want
  
• to revoke consent to any form of intimacy at any time
  
• to be told the truth
  
• to say no to requests
  
• to hold and express differing points of view
  
• to feel all your emotions
  
• to feel and communicate your emotions and needs
  
• to set boundaries concerning your privacy needs
  
• to set clear limits on the obligations you will make
  
• to seek balance between what you give to the relationship and what is given back to you
  
• to know that your partner will work with you to resolve problems that arise
  
• to choose whether you want a monogamous or polyamorous relationship
  
• to grow and change
  
• to make mistakes
  
• to end a relationship
  

In poly relationships:

• to decide how many partners you want
  
• to choose your own partners
  
• to have an equal say with each of your partners in deciding the form your relationship with that partner will take
  
• to choose the level of time and investment you will offer to each partner
  
• to understand clearly any rules that will apply to your relationship before entering into it
  
• to discuss with your partners decisions that affect you
  
• to have time alone with each of your partners
  
• to enjoy passion and special moments with each of your partners
  

In a poly network:

• to choose the level of involvement and intimacy you want with your partners' other partners
  
• to be treated with courtesy
  
• to seek compromise
  
• to have relationships with
  people
  , not with relationships
  
• to have plans made with your partner be respected; for instance, not changed at the last minute for trivial reasons
  
• to be treated as a peer of every other person, not as a subordinate, even when differing levels of commitment or responsibility exist
  

CONSENT, HONESTY AND AGENCY

This Relationship Bill of Rights contains three important, intertwined ideas that need a bit more elaboration, because they are fundamental to the kind of ethical polyamory we are espousing:
consent, honesty
and
agency
.

Consent
is about
you
: your body, your mind and your choices. Your consent is required to access what is yours. The people around you have
agency
: they do not need your consent to act, because you do not own their bodies, minds or choices. But if their behavior crosses into your personal space, then they need your consent.

Most of us will, over the course of our lives, encounter situations—perhaps at work, in our families of origin or on the streets—where we have to put up emotional walls and accept a loss of control over our lives, our minds or even our bodies. But we should never have to do that in our loving relationships. This may seem obvious, but make no mistake: it's a radical idea.

Honesty
is an indispensable part of consent. Being able to share, to the best of your ability, who you are in a relationship is critical for that relationship to be consensual. You must give your partner the opportunity to make an informed decision to be in a relationship with you. If you lie or withhold critical information, you remove your partner's ability to consent to be in the relationship. If a partner of yours has sex with a dozen casual hookups, he may be breaking an agreement, but he has not (yet) violated your
consent
. If he then has sex with you—or engages in other forms of intimacy, including emotional intimacy—without telling you about his actions, he has violated your consent, because he has deprived you of the ability to make an informed choice.

It's especially important to communicate things that might be deal-breakers, or might be threatening to your partner's emotional or physical health. Your partner deserves to have a choice about how they want to participate in a relationship with you given the new information. Examples might be sexual activity with others, drug use, acquisition or use of weapons, and violent impulses or behavior. Anything you know or suspect might be a deal-breaker should be disclosed. You cannot force someone to make the choice you want them to make, and if you lie or withhold information, you deny them the ability to know there was a choice to be made.

When people talk about dishonesty, often it's in the context of uttering falsehoods. By the simplest definition, a lie is a statement that is factually untrue. But there are other kinds of lies. For example, Franklin has spoken to a married woman cheating on her husband who said, "I'm not lying to him, because I'm not telling him that I'm being faithful!" In truth, she was lying: she was concealing information that, if he knew about it, would have changed his assessment of their relationship. When we talk about honesty in this book, we will do so from the position that a lie of omission is still a lie.

Sometimes, when confronted with the notion of a lie of omission, people say, "Not mentioning something isn't a lie. I don't tell my partner every time I use the bathroom, and that's not lying!" That brings us to the idea of relevance. An omission is a lie when it is calculated to conceal information that, were it known to the other party, would be materially relevant to her. Failing to tell your partner how long it took to brush your teeth isn't a lie of omission. Failing to tell your partner you're having sex with the pool man is.

Agency
is also intertwined with consent. Many people have been taught that if we are empowered to make our own choices—to have agency—we will become monsters, so we must surrender some of our decision-making power to external authority (which is somehow magically proof against becoming monstrous). This idea permeates society, but also seems to inform how we build our own intimate relationships. Without engaging in a debate about whether people are fundamentally good or bad (or option C), we ask you to look at your partners and ask yourself if you respect their ability to choose—even if a choice hurts you, even if it's not what you would choose—because we cannot consent if we do not have a choice.

Empowering people to make their own choices is actually the best way to have our own needs met. People who feel disempowered can become dangerous. Communicating our needs, and equipping others to meet them, succeeds more often than attempting to restrict or coerce another into meeting them. (We talk more in chapter 13 about what we mean by "empowerment.")

WHEN IT'S HARD TO ACT ETHICALLY

Embracing polyamory may well expose you to a great deal more uncertainty and change than people in monogamous relationships experience. Every new relationship is a potential
game changer
. Every new relationship might change your life. And that's a good thing, right? Picture your best relationships. Can you think of any truly awesome relationship that didn't change your life in some important way? The first time you had a long-term partner, did it change things for you? The first time you fell in love, and had that love reciprocated, did it change things for you? Every person you become involved with stands a good chance of changing your life in a big or small way. If that weren't the case, well, what would be the point? The same goes for your partners and the new people they become involved with—and when their lives change, so will yours.

Change is scary for a lot of people, and so preparing for poly relationships in many ways is about assessing and improving your ability to handle change. Even just
thinking
about it, taking a deep breath and saying, "Yep, I know my life is about to change" is a huge step toward preparing yourself to live polyamorously.

In some cases, for some people, circumstances may make change even harder than usual. For example, if you've just had another big change—a new job, say, or a big move, or a marriage or divorce, or a new baby—additional changes might cause you a lot more stress than they otherwise would. In these situations, it's common for people to look at polyamory and how it could change their lives, and then try to limit the amount of change that can happen. In our experience, this tactic doesn't work very well and has a host of negative consequences, which we discuss in chapters 10 and 11.

A very common example is couples with young children. One real example we know of involved a couple with two very small children, one just a few months old. The mom was under intense stress, as often happens in such situations, and was emotionally volatile. As a result, the couple had a lot of restrictions in place to control each other's relationships. These restrictions were causing a lot of pain for the father's girlfriend, who was deeply in love with him but found her relationship with him unable to grow, while she was obliged to perform services such as babysitting for the couple in order to continue to have access to him.

In situations like this, it's easy to fall back on the idea of "putting the children first." Clearly, parents need to be able to live their lives in a way that allows them to care for their children's needs and provide loving, stable homes. (More on this later.) But too often, this need is used as an all-purpose shield to deflect any analysis of how a couple's behavior might be affecting other partners, or how it might be damaging their other relationships. Anything that looks like criticism can be framed as attacking the couple's right to care for their children.

Make no mistake, kids change things. They did not choose to come into the world, or choose the people who care for and make decisions for them. Only slowly and painfully, over many years, are children nurtured into agency and personal capability: with the ability to think and plan, to learn and make rational choices, to develop judgment and individual responsibility, and to consent or withhold consent.

When children come into a home, for the first time there are truly immature people present, making childish and selfish demands that have real moral legitimacy and must be dealt with. You have a choice how to deal with the issues, but you can't ignore them. Children add a categorically different new dynamic to the mix and, especially when they are very young, significantly subtract time and attention from adult matters. But that still doesn't mean you can use their needs as emotional blackmail or to excuse unethical behavior in the adults around them.

Being an ethical person means being ethical to everyone—partners and children. Children are not an ethical Get Out of Jail Free card: it's possible to be both a responsible parent and an ethical partner. We discuss ethical approaches to polyamory with children, with real-life poly parenting stories, in chapters 13, 15, 17 and 24.

Remember that not every time in your life will be a good time to add new partners. If you have young children and you simply can't stand the idea of your partner having other partners without, say, instituting a hierarchy, you might wait until your children are a little older before you start new relationships. If you (or a partner) are struggling with anxiety, insecurity, depression or other issues that leave you (or them) sobbing under the covers when the partner is with someone else, you could get into therapy and learn some coping strategies, or avoid polyamory altogether, instead of bringing someone into your life but surrounding them with metaphorical barbed-wire fences to keep them from getting too close. If you are dealing with a recent betrayal, you might want to work with your partners on building trust before testing that trust by investing in someone new.

If a particular relationship decision, such as placing a partner under a
veto
is unethical, don't make excuses for it by saying, "But I have to because…" Try reframing the situation. Instead of looking for partners who will let you treat them unethically, who will let you compromise their agency or keep them at arm's length, ask yourself if you are in a position to seek new partners at all. Put another way: It is not ethical to hurt one person to protect another. It's better to look at yourself and the relationships you have and ask what you need to do, individually and collectively, to enable you to have relationships that will let you treat everyone well.

MAKING ETHICAL CHOICES

Ethical decision-making is not always easy. That's fitting, because the measure of a person's ethics lies in what she does when things are difficult. We believe every decision that affects other people should be examined from an ethical perspective. Ethical relationships are something we
do
, not something we
have
. Being an ethical person means looking at the consequences of our choices on others. To make ethical choices and treat others with compassion, you need to have a strong internal foundation. Building this foundation is the subject of the next chapter, which begins Part 2: A Poly Toolkit.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

Here are some questions we can ask when making decisions that affect other people, to help guide us toward ethical relationships:

• Have I disclosed all relevant information to everyone affected by my decision?
  
• Have I sought input from everyone affected? Have I obtained their consent where my decision overlaps their personal boundaries?
  
• Does my decision impose obligations or expectations on others without their input or consent?
  
• Am I seeking to have my needs met at the expense of the well-being of others?
  
• Am I imposing consequences that will make others feel unsafe saying no to me?
  
• Am I offering others the same consideration that I expect from them?