My next relationship was with a woman who is now my best friend, and lover, and when we started dating she was very clear about the fact that she didn’t think that monogamy worked for her and that I wasn’t the only the only person she was interested in. I went along with it, because my head was so turned by this woman, but I was rampantly insecure and unable to communicate at that time in our relationship. We stopped dating about four months after we started and began the journey to becoming friends.

About nine months after that relationship ended, I started dating a fantastic woman, who coincidentally had very breifly dated my ex (now, best friend). She had recently ended a long-term monogamous relationship and wasn’t interested in anything exclusive. By this point, I’d done a lot of my own work and was far more able to communicate with my current lover than I was when I had attempted polyamory in the past. I could identify my own boundaries and when I was getting triggered or jealous, I could identify what that was about and what I needed, and my current lover is very good about reassuring (but not coddling) me. We’ve worked through a lot of sticky situations, including the evolution of my relationship with my best friend, which, if I’m being honest, was never strictly platonic. We decided to reconnect as lovers.

What I didn’t understand on a viscreal, emotional level up until this point was that my feelings for my sweetie would be in no way changed by reconnecting with my best friend, that I could love them both very much and that I didn’t necessarily have to choose one or the other. It’s complicated, especially when you throw in the element that my two lovers were once intimately involved with each other, though they have no romantic interest in one another now. It’s been tricky to navigate the hurt feelings on both sides about how they ended things with each other, and my feelings of being something of a prize to each of them. What I’ve found though, is that as tough as it may be, sitting down and having an honest, emotional, connected conversation helps tremendously. You can’t protect anyone; sometimes people are going to get hurt. When I told my sweetie that my best friend and I had actually slept together, though she knew it was something that was a possibility, even a probability, and had supported, and encouraged me to explore this ressurgance of romantic energy in my relationship with my friend, she had some strong reactions of jealously and of feeling insecure, and I hated that. Even though, logically, I knew I’d done nothing wrong. It was a great lesson on being able to just hang out with that, not have to fix it or appologize for it, getting to reassure her that I loved her in a way that is so specific and real.

I don’t know what exactly this means for my identity and I don’t think that I necessarily have to label it. I do know that I really value the emphasis that this kind of relationship puts on communication and honesty. I love that I’m learning in practice, as opposed to understanding in theory, that it’s entirely possible to just be with your emotions and the emotions of your beloved without having to “fix” anything, that if everyone is abiding by the boundaries of the relationship, there is no blame, but that doesn’t remove the emotion from the situation.

Long story short? In my experience, poly is MUCH HARDER than mono. But it’s so very worth the work.

for me, an insular world is a safe and comforting one. i like one-on-one time with people, and generally feel pretty unnoticeable at parties. sometimes i’m gregarious, but day-to-day banal small talk bores and tires me. i have a hard time meeting new people, and generally feel pretty relieved to be out of the dating pool. it helps that my partner is so awesome, and fun, and pretty much understands me in ways i’ve never found from other people.

A lot of people mention that they can’t imagine how poly relationship members can cope with the scheduling. In my situation that is not really an issue. There are three of us.

ah, i’d love it if that were the case. only three people. *grin*

in my case, there are the schedules of five adults and three children (all under age 10) that need to coordinate. the only two i am involved with are my husband and bf, but bf has wife/kids/her bf. throw in some chronic medical issues, three non-standard schedules, one workaholic, and summer vacation, and you have a Severe Need for a dayplanner or, my preference, google calendars.

The whole point of marriage-type relationships is the householding, is being willing to deal with the litter box and that goddamn way you leave the kitchen sink and the problem of snoring and… I think you get the picture.

i think that’s the best description of why love != marriage (or vice-versa) i’ve come across yet. householding with my bf and his family would be a total nightmare. otoh, i wouldn’t mind living in closer proximity – a neighbor/shared back yard sort of thing would be nice.

That’s not to say that we don’t have other boundary issues or jealousies, but most of the time they’re simple and practical: look, you’ve been spending all your time with xir lately, can you spend some with me please before I go insane? — not that spending time with me and with xir are in any way exclusive except that they can’t be accomplished at the same time and need to be balanced. That, and the nail-biting thing Deborah mentions. :-)

A lot of the time we wind up effectively polyfi by principle #1 in ellefromtheeast’s comment: there’s simply not enough time to live and work and be good to each other AND go around dating seriously, that and two of us are introverts and one of us is extroverted but a total homebody. (The cooperation between me and him is lots of fun: I’m introverted but outgoing — when I’m in a social situation, I tend to take charge, but I tend to want to leave pretty quickly; he’s shy but extroverted — he loves spending time with people but hates introducing himself, getting the ball rolling. So we tag-team.)

I’ve been antsy for friends-with-benefits type stuff lately, I think because I feel like I need some outside point of reference for my sexual ways-of-being. But there were a couple of times last year that I tried dating and in each case me and the person I was dating mutually realized that our chemistry required a serious relationship and I just didn’t have the emotional energy to create that relationship in the right way.

In my terminology, the difference between primary and secondary — or marriage and dating — is not one of love. I tend to love people equally, if in different ways. But I’ve dated people I loved madly but would never household with. The whole point of marriage-type relationships is the householding, is being willing to deal with the litter box and that goddamn way you leave the kitchen sink and the problem of snoring and… I think you get the picture. I wouldn’t marry someone I didn’t love, but I’ve seen it work; and I love many people I wouldn’t marry.

I have seen friends ask SOs for an open relationship because they weren’t in love anymore but didn’t want to admit it, which always ended up incredibly badly, but I doubt that’s the usual. Also, both of my friends who have done this now swear up and down they think open relationship can’t work, so it seems they are naturally mono and their desire for openness had more to do with those particular relationships (with each other as it turns out. Oh, small high schools).

I used to think they could never work, but reading Bitch PhD sort of changed my mind. I do think it’s a rare person that they’re right for, but hey so what.

Personally, I think I could handle open because I’m not sexually jealous–I’ve talked with boyfriends about various people we found attractive (usually celebrities–doing it with people you know seems more uncomfortable somehow)–I figure, if someone is sleeping with me he is attracted to me and if he meets a girl who’s better at sex well maybe he can pass on the skills!

But, I am somewhat emotionally needy in relationships, and having to share someone’s romantic love would probably freak me out. (With my last boyfriend, I never got jealous over girls he thought were hot, but I did sometimes get jealous of his close friends of both genders. Weird, I know).

The only open relationship I’ve seen work in real life is pair who decied to open up for college. They talk about it a lot, and one of their “rules” is that they’re monogamous when they’re on vacation (i.e., now, when they’re living at home in the same town, they’re exclusive, but when they pack up for college in three weeks they’ll be sleeping around again). When they started out, they decided to share information, but after trying that, they both found it uncomfortable and decided not to. I find them pretty impressive as I don’t think most 19-year-olds have the emotional maturity to talk about something like why they’re mad at each other, much less why although they’re okay with each other having sex with other people they don’t want to hear about it.

I’m sort of curious, honestly, and if I got into a relationship now I’d want to wait a while, at least, to go exclusive. But it’s incredibly rare for me to find a guy I find attractive (I don’t even have especial standards–I’ve been attracted to all sorts of different looking guys, most of whom did not look like models, but it still comes up to just a handful) so I doubt I’d ever really act on it.

You can have rules about what you’ll do IF you fall in love, but you can’t say “don’t fall in love” anymore than you can say “don’t have rain on Saturday.”

Cheating is something else altogether. I don’t like it when poly is confused with that sort of poor behaviour and lack of respect.

The same goes for my lack of truly grasping why so many people are upset in their own personal ways by same sex relationships or people (like me) who date both genders with equal joy. it simply makes no real sense when you remember that there are billions of us on this orb so why not have billions of solutions to life’s stresses?

A lot of people mention that they can’t imagine how poly relationship members can cope with the scheduling. In my situation that is not really an issue. There are three of us. I am dating two men, they are friends, but they do not date each other…in a sense we are a “V”. They both work a lot and I work very little in comparison (I have a 40 hour work week). So, usually one of them is busy when the other has time. When their off-time coincides we frequently have “family-time” when we all spend an evening or afternoon together. If I want to stay over with the one who does not live in this apartment, I simply tell my live-in my plan and he respects that. I take into consideration plans they both have and do my best to be sensitive to their needs and desires. We come to a good compromise without pulling out schedules or having set “date-nights” like so many poly families I know. The free-form system we have is probably partly to blame for things working for so long.

I have been in a commited relationship with my live-in for nearly 4 years. I have been commited to my other partner for nearly 3 years. We are all quite happy with things.

That’s more than most would care to know, but I figure it might be nice to see that not all poly families require set-in-stone planning and organization. We just relax and let life happen.

Okay, last comment. I had a guy that didn’t get along with my then-husband. They just didn’t click. It made me feel crazy, like handling two kids with sibling rivalry issues. I hated it.

hear, hear.

my husband and my boyfriend aren’t close (more out of wariness of each other than anything else), and that can be a bitch. some days are worse than others, and i’m hopeful that one day we can all have a beer together without anyone feeling awkward or weird about it. one day…

i’m poly (and constitutionally incapable of handling more than 2 sexual-emotional relationships at a time, it seems). have been since, oh, end of highschool, when my then-bf went off to college on the west coast and i went east two years later. we were an LDR and i was also usually in a relationship with someone geographically proximate.

my husband, otoh, is something of a manslut. more into the sex than the relationships (the age-old contrast between poly and swing). we met when we were both in relationships with other people, so we both knew from the beginning each other’s proclivities. at least to general non-monogamy, if not the particulars.

how do you negotiate boundaries between and amongst your partners?

boundaries – not necessarily amongst my partners, but my own personal boundaries – have been a huge issue for me & my husband. i don’t have many, often don’t understand them, and generally disregarded them. which has been a Very Bad Thing. when we first “officially” decided to open our marriage, the Big Boundary was No Emotional Entanglements. (this is where the poly-swing dichotomy can be a problem in a relationship). it didn’t work so well for me, and i fell in love with one of my lovers. i have to give my husband huge props here for being willing to work through it with me, as it was a pretty severe violation of an agreed-upon boundary. it’s also the reason my husband and boyfriend aren’t close.

in the time since i fell in love with my bf, i’ve tried to work on my issues with boundaries. i’ve learned they are necessary for some relationships (my marriage, for example, which is extremely important to me), if not all. and i think (my husband may disagree) i’ve become better at respecting them, even if i don’t fully understand why they’re so important to the other person. a body could spend a lifetime in therapy to answer that question.

and you’ll see this in any poly discussion group: communication. in our case, communication about boundaries. constant, repetitive, communication. it maintains and strengthens trust, at least in our case.

How do you define terms like “primary” and “secondary,” for instance?

husband is primary, ‘cuz, well, he’s my husband. and since my boyfriend is also married, his wife is his primary (and they have kids, and the wife has a kid with her boyfriend). i don’t use the terms “primary” or “secondary,” though. there’s my husband and then there’s my boyfriend. and for my husband, in his words, “there’s my wife and then there’s every other person in the world.”

How do you handle jealousy, or lack of jealousy?

i’m not a jealous person, at least when it comes to sex or love. i’ve never been bothered if my partner had other relationships (and in some cases, i welcomed the other relationship, as it took some pressure off me). for me, i think it comes down to security in the relationship: if i know where i stand with the other person, jealousy isn’t an issue.

the one longish-term relationship i had where i wasn’t sure where i stood drove me batshit. and that’s 20-20 hindsight. at the time i was too young and inexperienced to know why i felt confused and yanked around and threatened by his other girlfriend.

…and that’s enough for one comment, which most people probably won’t bother to read all the way through anyway. muah.