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.

The main post office for the Tampa Bay area is near my office; I tend to have to go there fairly often. Attached to the post office is a United States Passport Office as well. Might not seem like that has anything to do with relationships, but I’m getting there, I promise…

The Passport Office is a single tiny room, about eight feet by twelve feet, and there’s a desk and about four or five chairs in it. Whenever I go to the post office, on any given day there are about 25 or 30 people waiting to get passports.

Now, I’ve never had to get a passport, but even assuming the people who work in the passport office are phenomenally efficient for bureaucrats (which I doubt) and can process each person in about two minutes (which I doubt), that means those 30 people are waiting there for an hour or so.

There’s no room in the passport office for thirty people, so every time I go to the post office I see a lot of people waiting in the tiny concrete courtyard just outside the passport office. The courtyard is ringed by a low concrete wall, about three feet high.

The wall is plastered with signs that say “Do Not Sit on Wall.” It seems clear what’s happened here–people go to the passport office, they end up waiting for an hour (or, likely, a lot longer), there’s no room in the office for them, and there’s no place to sit. So, they sit on the wall, somebody somewhere didn’t like people sitting on the wall, a rule was made, signs were printed and stuck to the wall.

What’s interesting is that it seems the bureaucrats did not think about why people were sitting on the wall. People were sitting on the wall because there’s no place else to sit, and because standing on concrete for an hour or more is no picnic. Had the bureaucrats actually wanted to solve the problem, there was no need to pass a “no sitting on the wall” rule; all they really needed to do was put some benches out in the courtyard, and let people sit on those.

I’ve been in relationships with similar rules. It seems like a very human impulse to say “I don’t like people doing X, so the way to address people doing X is to tell them not to do X;” it’s much more difficult to say “I don’t like people doing X. Why are these people doing X? Why don’t I like people doing X? Is there some change i can make in my environment such that people won’t do X any more, or some change i can make in myself such that when someone does X, it doesn’t bother me?”

In the past several years, I’ve tried to make a conscious effort, whenever I’m thinking about or talking about relationship rules, to identify the “whys” behind my behavior, the behaviors of my partners, and the things about those behaviors that are significant to me or to them, and then put chairs in the courtyard rather than putting signs on the wall. The results, both in terms of the way my relationship structures look and in terms of my own personal happiness, have been nothing short of amazing.

Sometimes, a little change in worldview makes all the difference.

Recently, someone on one of the poly mailing lists posted a quote and asked for opinions on it. The quote itself, which condemns polyamory, looks like this:

People who claim to enjoy being `poly’ must steel themselves
against jealousy, an emotion that should, by rights, be a warning sign
that they are doing something wrong. The fact that they feel it, or
have to try desperately not to feel it when they have to share someone
they care about with someone else, is probably the clearest indication
there is that this lifestyle is not at all natural for human beings.
The proof of this lies in the fact that if it came down to it, if they
absolutely had to choose one person from their threesome or group to
be with – just one – every single one of them would be able to make
that choice. Everyone has a preference, even among people they care
about. Everyone knows the one person they want to be with more than
anyone else.

I did a quick Google search ad discovered that this quote is an excerpt from a much longer article on monogamy at http://andtheylivedhappilyeverafter.com/48.htm.

The article has a lot of problems–so many, in fact, that it’s difficult to know where to begin. The biggest problems with the article (and the quote) are sloppy reasoning, logical fallacies, prejudice, bigotry, factual untruths, and sweeping misgeneralizations.

My response to the article got a little long.

To begin at the beginning:

The article’s first mention of “polyamory” reads “The only argument that’s left, then, is that promiscuity is just more fun. It’s too boring, opponents of monogamy say. It just isn’t exciting enough, being with one person all the time. Some groups have even christened this lifestyle with an official sounding name – “polyamory” – referring to themselves as simply “poly” and maintaining, quite honestly, that they do not see the value in exclusive relationships and would rather carry on several meaningful, if transient, relationships at once.”

Already, the author is succumbing to sloppiness and flawed rhetoric, assuming that “polyamory” and “promiscuity” are one and the same, and that polyamorous people engage in “transient” relationships. This betrays a profound ignorance, one born out of the author’s desperate desire to characterize anyone who’s not monogamous as being an irrepressible horndog desperate to fuck the next hot babe.

In fact, many people who claim monogamy are quite promiscuous; serial monogamy is little more than a non-overlapping promiscuity. On the other hand, many polyamorous people form long-term, stable romantic relationships; I’ve been in simultaneous relationships which have lasted eighteen and ten years, longer than a significant number of marriages in this country. And there is a form of polyamory called “polyfidelity” in which the people involved do not have any ‘outside’ lovers at all; a polyfidelitous family looks a lot like a monogamous family, except that there happen to be more than two people involved.

But the author is not going to let facts stand in her way, oh my no. The essay goes on to say “It’s more fulfilling, they claim, sharing your life with several partners, never being truly intimate with anyone.”–which makes the absurd and rather facile argument that it is not possible to be truly intimate with someone if you have another relationship as well.

And it gets better! The author then goes on to judge all of the polyamorous community with profound and quite startling ignorance; “I might actually believe them, I might actually defer to them and acknowledge that while it doesn’t work for me, it obviously does for them. I might…if it wasn’t so painfully obvious that these people are having anything but fun, are anything but excited, and are exactly what they claim to be avoiding: bored out of their minds.”

Bored? Is she for real?

Now I don’t doubt that there are poly folk who are bored; and, for that matter, I don’t doubt that there are monogamous people who are bored. For any class of people, you can find individuals who are bored; there are lawyers who are bored, Italian Americans who are bored, redheads who are bored, you name it. Hell, *I* was bored halfway through reading that article!

But to say that poly folk in general are bored with their relationships? The author wants it to be true, no doubt–but no matter which way you slice it, it’s not. Of course, there is a word for those who say “All members of class A are B”–that word is ‘prejudice,’ and prejudice always smells bad.

Taking a bit of a side jaunt for a moment: I’m not quite sure why it is that the self-appointed guardians of social convention almost always see some need to tear down anyone not like themselves in order to build themselves up. It’s possible to write an essay on the virtues of monogamy without trying to say “all people who are not monogamous are yadda, yadda, yadda;” and in fact, for some people, monogamy is a happy, reasonable, healthy, positive choice. But there seems to be something deeply threatening about polyamory for those people who defend monogamy–it’s not enough for them to say “Monogamy is right for me;” they must also carpet-bomb others with irrational prejudice and judgment.

Monogamy, for those who practice it, has some pretty compelling advantages over polyamory. It’s a whole lot simpler, for one. For another, monogamy is an institution carefully designed and constructed to protect people from their own fears and insecurities; it creates a comfortable, safe space where they need not fear having those insecurities and fears triggered, at least for the 30% of monogamous couples whose members never cheat. And, while we’re on the subject of safety, monogamy is safer than polyamory, both physically and emotionally; physically, because monogamous couples who do not cheat will be less likely to be exposed to sexually transmitted disease; and emotionally, because the more people you open your heart to, the more likely you are to have your heart broken.

Now, those advantages are not compelling enough for me to be monogamous; nor are they compelling enough for many polyamorous folk to be monogamous. Polyamory has its advantages, too; and the safety offered by monogamy comes at a price, one that some people are willing to pay, and others are not.

Monogamy is a perfectly reasonable choice–but it is not the ONLY reasonable choice, something that those who attempt to paint everyone else with deprecating (and factually incorrect) slander don’t want anyone to believe. I wonder sometimes at their motivations for tarring everyone who makes a different choice; I suspect that, at least for some monogamists, it comes from envy, and for other monogamists, it comes from a need to keep telling themselves that polyamory is wrong lest they walk down that path themselves. (You see the same thing, from time to time, amongst the anti-gay crowd–the outspoken, rabidly homophobic gay-basher who loudly and stridently denounces homosexuality because, deep within, he’s conflicted about his own sexual identity.)

Getting back to the essay, though, the author keeps piling on the prejudice, compounding her sloppy reasoning with this tidbit: “Promiscuous people are not happy. They are always looking for fulfillment around the corner, for excitement in the next encounter, for the bigger, the better, the more outrageous. They are never satisfied with what they have, but continue to strive toward something that is always out of reach. These people attempt to replace quantity with quality, growing tired with each new adventure and moving on, unsatisfied, to the next. Soon even the briefest of relationships aren’t enough, then it must be a stranger. After strangers become boring, they decide two strangers, now that would be really exciting. But when that doesn’t work, they have to reach lower and lower, degrade themselves even more, to find that next sexual thrill. When they aren’t seeking newer and more outrageous adventures, they’re busy running away from something – emotional problems, troubled pasts, flawed ideas about the validity of love… a happy and value-driven life. The inability to find and commit to someone wonderful is a serious character flaw, not a lifestyle that should be held up as a model of human behaviour.”

Whew! You got that, people? Everyone who is polyamorous is promiscuous; everyone who is promiscuous is unhappy; everyone who is promiscuous and unhappy eventually ends up in three-ways with total strangers. There, just so you know.

Now, at this point, it would be easy, and very tempting, to say “Monogamous people are not happy” and follow it up with outrageous nonsense about how the incredible dreariness of life with one partner drives them to cheat, to seek out a thrill by tasting the forbidden fruit, until finally their desperation for something–anything–other than the same old same old tears apart their relationship, leaving their children in broken homes and their spouses emotionally devastated, and to back it up with the statistics about the rate of divorce (50%), the rate of cheating (70% of all marriages in the US will have at least one partner cheat at least once), and so on, and so on.

But you know what? It’s all bullshit. Not all monogamous people are unhappy, and not all polyamorous people are unhappy. Not all monogamous people cheat, and not all polyamorous people have three-ways with strangers. (The snarky side of me wants to say “More monogamous people will cheat than polyamorous people will have those three-ways,” but I’ll let that one go.)

And then we get to it, the quote:

“People who claim to enjoy being ‘poly’ must steel themselves against jealousy, an emotion that should, by rights, be a warning sign that they are doing something wrong. The fact that they feel it, or have to try desperately not to feel it when they have to share someone they care about with someone else, is probably the clearest indication there is that this lifestyle is not at all natural for human beings. The proof of this lies in the fact that if it came down to it, if they absolutely had to choose one person from their threesome or group to be with – just one – every single one of them would be able to make that choice. Everyone has a preference, even among people they care about. Everyone knows the one person they want to be with more than anyone else.”

What is there to say about this quote?

Well, let’s start with: it’s factually wrong, and it can be proven to be wrong. Not every poly person can choose between his or her partners; in fact, it’s offensive and insulting to suggest that it’s true, and it’s akin to saying “Every mother who has two children loves one of them best. Every mother who has two children knows, deep down inside, that she had to, she would be able to make that choice.”

Some mothers can, I’m sure; and some poly people–particularly those in primary/secondary relationships–can too. But a poly person who loses a partner can certainly be just as devastated and just as heartbroken as a monogamous person who loses a partner; contrary to the author’s limited and mistaken understanding, it is indeed possible to be emotionally intimate with more than one person at a time, and guess what? A person who has two partners just might be equally devastated at losing *either* of them! You see, what the author completely misses is the whole foundation of this entire “romantic relationship” business: PEOPLE ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE COMMODITIES.

And, of course, there’s the not inconsiderable fact that not all poly people feel jealousy.

But let’s overlook the factual misstatements. Let’s assume, just hypothetically, that all the author’s little tacit assumptions and all the little unspoken assertions are 100% true. Even then, this passage STILL doesn’t hold water, because it rests on flawed logic and fallacy.

Let’s consider. “People who claim to enjoy being ‘poly’ must steel themselves against jealousy, an emotion that should, by rights, be a warning sign that they are doing something wrong.” That ‘something wrong’ is ‘non-monogamy.’ For some people, no doubt, this is the case. Yet people feel jealous even in monogamous relationships–not all poly people feel jealousy, and not all monogamous people are free from jealousy. So it’s possible–just possible–that jealousy is not *necessarily* rooted in issues of sexual fidelity at all! Assuming for the sake of argument that a poly person feels jealous–does that show that all non-monogamy is the problem? Or does it show that something in that person’s specific situation is the problem? Or does it show that–watch out, this is going to get rough–something *within that person* is the problem?

There, I said it.

Not all jealousy is rational; not all jealousy is warranted; not all jealousy is justified. Sometimes, it is; sometimes, jealousy is a clear and valid signal that something is wrong. But every so often, jealousy is actually a symptom of something else–some problem within a person’s self-esteem, or with a person’s self-image or security–and maybe, just maybe, that person might benefit by examining his fears, and challenging his self-image.

Funny thing about that kind of jealousy–it doesn’t even have to be prompted by anything related to sexual fidelity at all. People can be jealous of their partners’ family, hobbies, jobs, even pets. Monogamy provides cushions against fear and insecurity, but they aren’t perfect, and if a person is insecure, that insecurity will find a way to manifest, believe me.

As for this lifestyle “being not at all natural for humans”–all I can say at this point is the author is smoking crack. If we look throughout human history, we see that the only lifestyle which appears not to be natural for human beings is monogamy. Throughout all of history, in every culture and at every point in time, the predominant and most common of all sexual arrangements has been one man with many women; sexual relationships have historically been about power, possession, inheritance, property, and politics, not about love or romance. The notion of the nuclear family is very new, and indeed is virtually nonexistent before the nineteenth century.

If we look at the record, it’s polygon, not monogamy, that’s the natural order of human beings. Frankly, I think polyamory’s application of a bit of gender equality to the equation is a benefit.

But wait, there’s more! Having mischaracterized polyamory as being the same thing as promiscuity, having issued sweeping and ludicrous generalizations about promiscuity that would have all polyamorous people fucking strangers in the alleyways, and having buttressed this argument with a dose of good old-fashioned logical fallacy, the author then goes on to crawl behind the eyes of every single polyamorous person in the entire world, and (surprise!) finds that all of them, every single one, from every walk of life, feels exactly the same thing:

“There’s a loneliness that pervades those who simply flit from one person to the next, a sense that they are missing out on something profound and real.”

The only thing I can possibly imagine that would lead to this conclusion is the real tendency of people to re-create the world in their own image. Who knows? Perhaps the author was promiscuous at one point, felt something was missing, and found what she was searching for in monogamy. If so, hey! That’s cool; she discovered a path that’s right for her, and the net sum total of human happiness went up.

But to assume that the same is true of everyone–to assume that every polyamorous person is lonely and “flits from one person to the next” (because poly people are promiscuous, even the polyfidelitous ones, remember?) is just asinine. It’s about like saying “all Asians are good at math” or “all women want to be raped”–it makes assumptions about an entire class of people when reality shows us that the truth about human beings is our startling variation. There is more to the human experience, more breadth and depth in the human condition, than is dreamed of in her philosophy, much as she might try to put us all in the same box.

It’s kind of annoying, really; you can’t even say “All people have two legs,’ so to say that all people have some emotional experience or all people live in the same emotional reality is inane beyond words.

But even a stopped watch is right twice a day. As uninformed and preposterous as this fatuous essay is, there is some truth in it. She says, “If you understand, as I mentioned before, that sex for humans is as much about the mind as it is the body, then it makes perfect sense that the most fulfilling sex occurs within a mutually, loving, trusting relationship”–and in that regard, at least in my experience, she’s spot-on. The only part she gets wrong is assuming that that intimacy is denied anyone with two partners.

It doesn’t last, though. The very next statement–“Being with one person you love allows you a level of freedom and creativity that you can’t possible enjoy with strangers”–commits one of my favorite of all logical fallacies, the Fallacy of False Dichotomy.

At this point, it’s probably fair to pause for a minute and explain what that means. “Fallacy” is based on the Latin for “deceitful,” and in modern English means “an erroneous idea.” “Dichotomy” is from the Greek word for “division,” and means “of or pertaining to two mutually exclusive groups.” The Fallacy of False Dichotomy is a logical error in which the argument wrongly assumes that only two possibilities are present, and if a thing does not fit one of those possibilities, it therefore must fit on the other. “You are either a Christian or an atheist” is one example of the Fallacy of False Dichotomy; there are people who are neither.

Our author, who hasn’t been one to let a few factual or logical errors stop her before, continues the trend here, assuming that the only two possibilities are that you’re monogamous or you’re fucking strangers. There are other possibilities; naming them will be left as an exercise to the reader.

Of course, a little political correctness doesn’t stop her, either; in the very next sentences, she says, “The intimate bond you form with the person whose character you love as much as their body allows you to explore the dominant and submissive aspects of your natures, without worrying about political correctness or misunderstandings”–which seems, somewhat bizarrely, to be advocating BDSM within the context of monogamy.

Allllllllllllllrighty, then.

Moving RIGHT along, as I don’t really want to touch THAT one with a ten-foot dildo strapped to a reciprocating saw, we are solemnly informed “With most casual relationships, sex is a special occasion. It is the ultimate goal of the relationship, yet the one thing that always eludes the players, who chase after it and connive ways to get it and who ultimately only get to enjoy it with relative infrequency. Monogamy provides you with an opportunity to enjoy sex every day of your life, in every way, infusing even your non-sexual moments with a tinge of excitement and expectation. Spontaneity is much easier when you’re married to your lover.”

An astute reader would likely argue that what we’re actually talking about here is proximity–spontaneity is much easier if you’re LIVING WITH your lover, regardless of whether there’s a state certificate hanging on the kitchen wall. And that’s true, which is why many poly folk like the notion of living with their lovers; you think spontaneity is easy when you’re living with one partner, try living with two!

The essay kind of muddles off at that point, talking about how enriching it is to stroke your lover’s penis while watching TV (presumably this is better if you’re watching Lexx than Monday Night Football, not that I’d know as I never watch football but have watched Lexx while snuggled between two absolutely delightful people). I know some families with young children who might disagree about the spontaneity, but we’ll leave that for another day.

And now that I think about it, perhaps penis-stroking during “Lexx” is a bit too creepy after all.

So. A few months ago, i was talking to datan0de about his family, and he said something that in one moment really solidified some ideas Shelly and I have been exploring for quite some time, and which illustrated what has always been a fundamental flaw in my relationship with my ex-wife. I’ve been poking at what he said, and its implications, ever since, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that it represents what is arguably one of the most important axioms of an ethical non-monogamous relationship.

We were talking about relationship rules,and specifically about veto power–a relationship rule which gives one partner the right to “veto” another partner’s relationship. datan0de‘s relationships are based on rules, which explicitly include veto power; superficially, some of the rules between he and his partner resemble many of the rules that existed between me and my ex-wife. My relationship with Shelly is not rules-based; neither of us has any explicit veto power, nor any rules which explicityly govern who we may become romantically involved with or under what circumstances. Instead, our relationship understandings center around the idea that each of us has a responsibility to do what’s right for the other, and if either of us fails to take care of our relationship with the other properly, then it will result in consequences that hurt the relationship.

These seem like two different approaches; and as a result of my experiences with my ex-wife, during which she on many occasions would veto relationships that I and my partner had invested a great deal of emotional energy in, sometimes many years after the relationship started, and often for little or no reason she could articulate, I became inherently suspicious of rules-based relationship structures and most especially of veto power.

datan0de‘s relationship with his partner explicitly permits him to veto her relationship, but something he said during the cours eof our conversation really made it clear just how different in conception, if not in superficial form, his relationship structures are from the ones between my ex-wife and I. He said, “I could veto femetal‘s relationship with zensidhe, but if I did, there would be serious consequences for the relationship between femetal and I.”

That, in a nutshell, is the most crucial dfference between his relationship with his partners and my relationship with my ex-wife, and i think it’s an attitude that is crucial and fundamental for any ethical relationship at all. Just in that one sentence, i believe datan0de hit upon a key for any reasonable system of ethical relationships.

In my relationship with my ex-wife, there was never that sense of consequence–never an idea that “I am ethically responsible for the consequences of my decisions even if the rules we agreed to permit me to make those decisions.” In hindsight, it should have been obvious; when you make a decision that hurts your partner or that breaks your partner’s heart, you can reasonably expect that to have consequences regardless of whether or not your partner agreed to those rules or agreed to give you that power. All the things you do have consequences.

To some outside observers, it seems like the breaking point in my relationship with my ex-wife came about when i started dating Shelly. Some of the people who’ve known me well for a long time recognize that the seeds for the end of my our relationship were planted much earlier, when she arbitrarily vetoed a relationship between me and another partner, Lori, I’d been seeing for abou two or three years. Not only did she end that relationship, she also explicitly forbade me ever to speak to Lori again–not something that was originally a part of our negotiated framework, but something that it’s actually quite easy for one partner to enforce on another. Lori and I were both devastated by the loss of that relationship; the fact that I had agreed to give my ex-wife the authority to make that decision does not change the reality that if you break your lover’s heart, particularly if you break your lover’s heart on multiple occasions over an extended period of time, you’re going to damage your relationship with your lover, no matter what reason you have for doing it or what your relationship agreements say.

datan0de understands this on an intuitive level. My ex-wife does not; she maintains to this day that she did nothing wrong and bears no responsibility of any kind whatsoever for any part of our breakup, as everything she did was within the rules. Because of this, the relationship structures that exist in datan0de‘s family are, in operation, much closer to the structures within my relationship with Shelly than with my relationship with my ex-wife, even though they look similar to the rules between my ex-wife and I, because the behavior of the people in datan0de‘s family is governed by a sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.

The difference between a rules-based relationship and a relationship not based on rules is, I think, far less significant than the difference between a relationship based on responsibility for the consequences of indifvidual decisions and a relationship based on a sense that anything permitted by the rules is okay. It is possible to buld a rules-based relationship in which the people involved take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and I think datan0de and his family have done that. In fact, there are a lot of things about their relationship that both Shelly and I admire, and as we develop our relationship with phyrra and nihilus, thee are aspects of datan0de‘s relationship structures we are deliberately and consciously emulating. My own skepticism about veto power aside, datan0de and his family have built something quite remarkable, and a person could do far worse than hope to construct a relationship as well as they have built theirs.

This stuff has been rattling around in my head for months, but it took this post in the Polyamory community to really demonstrate to me how universally applicable the idea of responsibility is. The post concerns the question about whether or not it is socially acceptable to invite one or two members of a poly family to a function without inviting all the members of the family.

Many of the answers focus on manners and etiquette, and quite honestly, i think that misses the point. It doesn’t really matter what the rules of etiquette say. What matters is that a person who invites part of a poly family but not the entire family to a function is asking the people he’s invited to choose between him and their partners. By extending the invitation, he’s saying “I want you to make a choice: you may spend this time with me, or you may spend this time with your sweeties, but not both.”

Does he have the right to do that? Sure. A host may choose to invite or not invite anyone to a function as he pleases. But the law of unintended consequence is as universal and insecapable as the law of gravity; and in this case, the unintended consequence of inviting only some members of a family to an event is that if you make a person choose between you and someone he cares about enough times, eventually he’s going to stop choosing you.

Etiquette permits you to invite who you please, just as our negotiated rules permitted my ex-wife to veto who she pleased. In both cases, though, the decisions carry a price tag, and the person making those decisions is responsible for those consequences regardless of what the rules say. Invite only part of a family often enough, and you will eventually hurt your friendship with those people–people don’t like being put in a position where they have to choose between friends and partners. Veto enough people and sooner or later you’re going to break your lover’s heart, and you will eventually hurt your relationship–people don’t like having their hearts broken. In each case, it’s not the rules that are the most relevant; it’s whether or not you accept reponsibility for the consequences of the decisions you make.

Consequence is what shapes relationships. Responsibility for those consequences, not adherance to the rules, is what defines an ethical person.