I’ve known many people in polyamorous relationships who have a need to feel special, and try to meet this need by reserving certain activities to specific partners, or by placing limits on activities which their partners are permitted to engage in with others. The feeling is that by reserving certain special activities to one relationship, that relationship has something about it which is special.

I think that’s a dangerous idea, and I think that if you’re not careful, that idea can bite you in the ass.

The fact is, every relationship is special simply by virtue of the fact that every relationship is unique. It is not possible for a relationship not to be unique; every person is unique, and the interactions between any set of two people is also unique. Even if I were to date a pair of identical twins, and do exactly the same thing with both of them, and take them both to the same restaurants, and have sex the same number of times in the same position with each, those relationships would be unique. There’s no way for them not to be! Even identical twins aren’t the same person, and the quality of my relationships arises from who my partners are, not from what we do.

Preserving some kind of unique action as a symbol of that specialness is not necessary; the relationships are special, and no two relationships are interchangeable or replaceable. The value I get from my partners has nothing to do with those things we do together; person B can not rob person A of value by doing the same things that person A does.

The danger of relying on some kind of special activity in order to make a relationship feel special comes from the fact that any sense of specialness that arises from an activity or from a symbol must always be a specialness that is fragile and unstable. If my partner feels special only because I do thus-and-such with her and her alone, then she must always know, somewhere deep down inside, that that specialness can be taken away from her; if I do that same thing with another person, then her sense of specialness is gone.

On the other hand, specialness that comes from who she is rather than from what she does can never be taken away. It’s a sense of specialness that is cast in iron; it can never be destroyed and can never be dispelled; it’s rock-solid, because it does not depend on anything outside of her. Nothng I do with her or with anyone else can shake that sense of specialness, because it does not rest on anything which depends on me.

Symbols are tricky things. People often confuse the symbol with the thing the symbol represents; look at all the people who want to pass an anti-flag-desecration amendment to the Constitution, for example. These people do not realize that a flag is only a symbol; destroying a flag does not damage or in any way harm the thing that the flag represents.

It’s the same thing with relying on unique activities and other symbols of a relationship’s specialness in order to feel that the relationship is special. If that feeling of specialness relies on some tokenor symbol of that specialness, then that feeling of specialness is vulnerable, and easily damaged; it’s not a feeling of specialness that you can ever really be secure in. On the other hand, a sense of specialness that relies on no external factor is a sense of specialness far more secure.

Now, I think this is not obvious to many people, particularly to people already struggling with security to begin with. If you have invested some specific activity with your sense of specialness, and your security relies on feeling special, then giving up that specific action seems terrifying, because you may feel that if you lose this special action, you may also lose your specialness, and with it your sense of security. It’s not intuitively obvious at all that you’ll actually be more secure, both in your sense of specialness and your relationship, if you do not rely on some external factor to make you feel special.

But there it is. Relationships aren’t always intuitively obvious.

A few days ago, I had a visit from a friend I haven’t seen in quite some time. We spent a bit of time catching up on what the two of us have been up to in the past couple of years–her move, my move, my divorce, and so on. She’d heard some of the more lurid and wildly inaccurate details of the divorce, of course–not surprising, really, as it seems like everyone within a three hundred mile radius or so has heard at least something about the situation.

At one point, she said, “Well, it must have been easier on you than on her, because, after all, you’ve got Shelly.”

Now, this is an attitude I’ve encountered before, and it seems based on a conception of relationships that’s quite foreign to me. It’s difficult to know where to begin in taking that idea apart, as it’s founded on so many tacit assumptions and unspoken ideas about the way relationships work and the way love works that it’s hard to know how to start addressing them.

The first and most obvious problem with that idea is that it assumes human beings are interchangeable commodities, like toasters or DVD players. These things provide a service; a person who has two toasters can still make bread if one of them stops working, and a person with two lovers still has sex and companionship if one of the relationships ends, right?

Now, let’s step back for a moment and think about that. Suppose a family had two young children, and one of them was killed in a car accident. Would anyone say “Well, it must be easier for you; after all, you still have another child?” I suspect anyone who displayed that level of insensitivity to their loss could expect to get smacked. We somehow know instinctively that children aren’t replaceable; a parent who has lost a child is devastated regardless of whether he or she has another child or not. We know this; yet, somehow, it’s different if it’s a romantic relationship, right?

So why is it that romantic relationships are different? Why does everyone understand that children are not interchangeable, but still assume that lovers are?

For many people, I think the answer is the same as the answer to questions like “Why would you assume that if your partner has sex with someone else, he won’t need you any more?” and “Why would you assume that if your lover finds someone who’s prettier than you, or better than you in bed (for whatever value of ‘better in bed’), it will threaten our relationship.” And that answer is related to the reason that peopl are willing to risk losing their jobs to fly out to California and picket in support of Michael Jackson.

These people are utterly convinced of Michael’s innocence because they actually feel, weird as it may seem, intimacy with Michael Jackson, even though he’s a complete stranger to them and they’ve never met him.

This sense of intimacy is as false as it is shallow; and it’s not limited to Jacko. People feel a sort of wishful, warm fuzzy sensation often–about celebrities, about their partners, about that girl in the next cubicle that they have a secret crush on. This “intimacy” is not really intimacy at all; real intimacy lets you see right through a person and down deep into what Shelly calls their “superhero soul,” past appearance and mpast superficial details and into what makes them who they are.

There’s a Simpson’s episode in where one of the children asks Mrs. Rrabapple, the schoolteacher, “How will we know when we’re in love?” The teacher laughs and says “”Don’t be silly, most of you will never know love and will marry out of fear of dying alone.” Sadly, I do believe that for many people, it’s the truth. It seems to me that the world is filled with people who don’t want intimacy, who don’t like it and don’t trust it, who don’t take the time to really see their partners’ “superhero soul” and don’t want anyone seeing theirs. Remove intimacy from a relationship, though, and suddenly people do become interchangeable. Suddenly people do become vehicles for services. Suddenly there’s nothing particularly compelling about them; “Well, Betty was a redhead who liked tennis, and Lauren is a blond who likes golf, but basically I get the same thing from both of them. Lauren is prettier than Betty, so I think I’ll replace Betty with Lauren.” And I think that somewhere, deep down inside, some people realize that they don’t have any deep intimacy with their partners; many petty jealousies and insecurities reflect this. “I don’t want my partner looking at anyone prettier than me…” (…because, really, there’s nothing particularly compelling about my relationship with my partner; my partner doesn’t really see me, and yes, my partner would replace me with someone prettier if I let him).

Once you’ve seen down into someone’s superhero soul, once you’ve cut past all the clutter and really seen someone for all they are and all they can be, then that person becomes absolutely unique and absolutely irreplaceable in your eyes. At that point, nobody can replace that person; at that point, if you lose your relationship with that person, it leaves a hole in your life nobody else can fill.

Of course, there’s a cloud around every silver lining. The downside is vulnerability; if you let someone really see you, that person knows you for who you are–good and bad. You’re vulnerable like nothing before; your relationship shines a light on all your faults and personal failings and quirks and little neuroses, and to someone not accustomed to real intimacy, I’d imagine that’s pretty scary.

Now, you might ask why someone would want a relationship without intimacy, and I’d say “for the reason Mrs. Crabapple said. Fear of dying alone.” Even a shallow relationship is better than being alone, no? So people engage in relationships that are more or less interchangeable, with partners who are more or less interchangeable, and they invest a great deal of emotional energy into making sure that their partners don’t replace them with someone else–because, hey, then they’d be alone.

Personally, I think that fear of being alone is a lousy reason to be in a relationship. If I had a partner who was willing to replace me because she found someone better looking or better in bed or (god forbid) a better cook than I am, I’d want to find out sooner rather than later. To my way of thinking, preventing your partner from talking to or spending time with other people through fear of being replaced is exactly backwards; if I’m that easily replaced, I want to know, because that’s not a relationship I want to invest in. But that pesky fear of being alone is hard to short-circuit, isn’t it? “If I lose my partner, I’ll be alone, and nothing is worse than that.”

Funny thing, though. If you can look at someone and really see them, if you have developed the skills to see another person’s superhero soul, you will never be alone–it’s not going to happen. Doesn’t matter what you look like, or how good you are in bed, or even (thankfully) how good you are in the kitchen.

There is another cloud around the silver lining, though. A person who’s unique to you can’t be replaced–and that means it does not matter how many partners you have, once that person is no longer in your life, it’s going to hurt. Nobody else will make it better. It’s not about getting the things you need from your other partners; it’s not about having another toaster, so you can still make toast. A partner who is unique is irreplaceable. We know this about children; it’s time, I think, we understood this about lovers as well.