Tag Archives: polyamory

More Than Two blog: Ethical relationship agreements

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I’ve just posted a new essay over on the More Than Two book blog. This essay literally came to me in a dream; I had a dream that I was working on this blog post with Eve while we were working in a nuclear power plant, and for some reason I had long hair. There were also inspectors and other things to contend with in the dream, as there always are.

Anyway, when I woke up I raced to the computer and started writing it down, and it came out pretty close to what it was in my dream. The essay is about ethical agreements in poly relationships; it’s an attempt at answering the question “Well, aren’t any poly arrangements OK as long as all the people involved agree?” Here’s the teaser:

Communication, honesty and consent are values the poly community promotes heavily, and these ideas do seem to be intrinsic to strong, ethical relationships. But the more I think about these ideas, the deeper the rabbit hole goes.

Communication and honesty are complex topics that can easily fill a book. Consent seems more straightforward; either we agree to something or we don’t, right? I’ve often heard people say, “As long as everyone agrees to a structure or a set of rules, everything’s good.”

On the surface, that seems reasonable. And yet, I think it’s easy to lose track of how slippery the idea of “consent” can be.

There are a lot of ways to run off the rails on the way to a seemingly consensual agreement. I woke up this morning thinking about this, and somewhere in my foggy pre-caffeinated state I tracked down three ways that an agreement might appear consensual without quiiiiite rising to the level that would be ideal for ethical relationships…

You can read the entire blog post here. As usual, feel free to comment here or over there.

Blog post: What if my polyamorous partners don’t get along?

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On the More Than Two blog, we’ve written about a question asked by one of our backers: “What do I do if two of my partners don’t get along with each other?” We’re certainly getting a workout with our backer questions!

This blog post is a dialog between Eve and me. Here’s the teaser:

Franklin: I’ve been in this situation from every angle: having a partner who doesn’t get along with one of my other partners, being the person a partner’s other partner doesn’t cotton to, and having a partner who’s involved with someone I don’t particularly like. […] When you’re the one who’s in the middle, caught between two partners who aren’t getting along…well, it kinda sucks. It can be easy to end up feeling pulled in two directions. I don’t have a magic solution, though I certainly admire the problem.

Eve: In my experience, it can be hard to hold multiple relationships together without the active support of all your partners for the other relationships, especially if you live with one of them. Situations where partners are just tolerating each other may have a steady undercurrent of stress that can be damaging and hard to manage. But it can be done, and whether you can or want to do it depends a lot on your own coping, communication and boundary-setting skills; your emotional health; and how important both partners are to you.

I don’t have a solution, either, but I think we can offer some management strategies.

The whole post is here. I’d love to hear from folks who’ve been in this position! Experiences? Thoughts? Strategies? Feel free to reply here or over there.

Greta Christina: Guest blog post: Poly ethics

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I’ve written a guest post on Greta Christina’s blog about ethics in a poly community. Here’s the teaser:

It’s difficult to talk about polyamory without hearing the expression “ethical non-monogamy.” There’s a bit of a sticky wicket, though, in that we rarely talk about the definition of “ethical,” beyond the obvious “don’t lie to your partners.” That’s a good start, sure, but it’s not enough to construct an entire foundation of relationship ethics on. When we’re living in a society that proscribes everything except heterosexual marriage between exactly two cisgendered people of opposite sexes, how do we even start talking about what makes an ethical non-monogamous relationship? Where do we turn for ethics? What distinguishes an ethical relationship from a non-ethical one? Are ethical relationships egalitarian, and if so, how does that align with BDSM relationships that are deliberately constructed along the lines of power exchange? If two people make an agreement and then present that agreement unilaterally to a third person, who is given few options other than accept the agreement as-is or walk away, is that ethical? What happens when people make relationship agreements, and then their needs change? What are ethical ways of revisiting and renegotiating previous agreements? How do we even define “ethics” in the first place, without resorting to religious or social conventions? What does it take for a person to make ethical relationship choices that aren’t aligned with a religious tradition or a cultural norm?

These are some of the issues we intend to address in our polyamory book, More Than Two, which is going into its last week of crowdfunding now.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can read the entire blog post on Greta Christina’s blog here.

Polyamory: Ending Relationships

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I’ve scarcely had time to blog these days, what with running the crowdfunding campaign for the polyamory book and having kidney stones and all.

One of the perks we have available to backers is the ability to have us write a poly blog post on the topic of their choosing over on the More Than Two blog. Our first backer to ask for a blog post came up with a topic that’s a oozey: how do we end or transition out of poly relationships? Here’s the teaser:

There’s a trope in some parts of the poly community that being poly means staying friends with all of your exes. I’m going to buck poly convention and say that’s not always the best approach, or even possible.

It’s the ideal I strive for personally, but it isn’t always going to happen, and sometimes that’s okay. What happens after a relationship ends depends a great deal about what kind of relationship it was, what course it took, how it developed, and how and why it ended. (I will say “ended” to mean that it’s no longer a romantic relationship. I’ve heard some folks say no relationship ever really ends, they simply change, though if two people who were once romantic partners aren’t anymore, I think it’s reasonable to say the romantic relationship has ended.)

I’ve had relationships end in just about every way you can imagine. I’ve broken up with partners, I’ve had partners break up with me, I’ve had breakups go smoothly and transition into awesome friendships, I have former partners I will probably never see or talk to again, I’ve had breakups that went really badly… you name it.

The most basic lesson I’ve learned from it all is there is no “breakup roadmap.” I no longer try to carry a set of expectations with me about what might happen if and when a relationship should end. Instead, what I try (not always perfectly) to do is to approach relationship endings with the same tools I use to approach relationships themselves: compassion, integrity and kindness.

It’s a tall order. When a relationship ends, especially if it’s the other person ending it, it’s really tough to reach for compassion and kindness through pain and loss. In some cases, it might be appropriate to take enough space to be able to mourn the loss of the relationship and work through the emotions attached to that before trying to go ahead with a friendship; it’s perfectly reasonable to say it might take some time to get there.

You can read the whole thing here. I’s a complicated topic, and will probably be an entire chapter in the book. I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can reply here or over there.

More Than Two: Moving toward and moving away

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I’ve just written a blog post in the More Than Two book blog about building polyamorous relationships where we move toward something rather than moving away from something. Here’s the teaser:

I was recently asked to do a media interview about polyamory. This happens from time to time, and most of the questions I’m asked tend to be fairly predictable: How do you deal with jealousy? What do you tell your parents or your kids? Do you think polyamory is the next cultural revolution?

This interview was quite different, and one of the questions I was asked helped crystallize for me some of the guiding ideals about the relationships I choose.

The question concerned dealing with fears, and while I was answering it, it suddenly occurred to me: throughout my life, the relationships I have found most rewarding have been those that are guided toward something rather than away from something.

You can read the whole thing; feel free to respond there or here.

It’s finally happening!

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For years, I’ve been on-again, off-again working on a book on polyamory.

It’s been discouraging, in that all the publishers I’ve talked to want me to make it a personal memoir, and that’s not what I want to write. The project has been languishing for a while, by which I mean for several years, lost beneath the shuffle of More Important Matters.

It has finally, at long last, been resurrected. My sweetie Eve and I have started working on a new book, one that combines her ideas about polyamory and mine. It’s going to be a monster–it’s looking to shape up as a 500-page hands-on guide for folks who want to explore polyamory, chock full of problem-solving ideas, hints and tips.

We’ve launched a new blog which will contain progress notes, ideas and essays that don’t fit into the Web site More Than Two but also don’t make it into the book, and more.

We’re going to crowdfund this project; to get around the small but nevertheless still niggling issue that publishers want a different book from the one we want to write, we’re launching a full-fledged publishing imprint to go along with it.

If you’d like to know more, check out the blog and keep watching this space!

Some thoughts on poly identity

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As I write this, I’m in Olympia, Washington. Alas, thanks to a signficant user interface misfeature in the program (Caron Copy Cloner) I use to sync my laptop with my desktop, I don’t have my laptop with me. I’m posting from an iPad. Which has a keyboard quite poorly suited to typing long bits of text (anyone who has a BlueTooth keyboard you’re willing to donate to the cause, see me after class). And I suspect this might get long. In other words, buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

A short time ago, I discovered an essay over on the Boldly Go blog called Why I’m No Longer Poly. It’s about seven or eight months old as I type this, but if you haven’t read it yet, it’s worth the read. It’s a critique of the poly community, and there’s quite a bit in it I want to respond to. (This blog post started as a comment over there but quickly overran what can reasonaly go into a comment.)

The critique as I read it breaks down into four main points:

  • Poly is a form of privilege. The time, resources, and attention necessary to find and maintain multiple romantic relationships are most available to middle and upper class people; hence, the poly community tends (unsurprisingly) to be very middle-class and very white.
  • The poly community, possibly because of point 1 above, is guilty of a great deal of appropriation. Some poly folks consider themselves ‘queer’ just based on having non-traditional relationships, which does a disservice to LGBT folks. Gay, bi, and trans* people have been murdered for who they are; to date, that hasn’t happened to anyone for being poly (at least not as far as I know; if you’ve heard of this happening, I’d love to hear about it in the comments). This appropriation is cultural, too, with some poly folk integrating a wishy-washy, Westernized, wildly inaccurate understanding of things like Tantra into the fold of polyamory.
  • The poly community shelters abusers. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the poly community has failed to create a robust culture of compassion and consent. Serial abusers operate with impunity within the organized poly community.
  • People in the poly commmunity tend to see polyamory as a superior alternatve to monogamy, and therefore (accordng to the Transitive Property of Smugness1) polyamorous people as superior to monogamous people.

The author is talking primarily about the UK poly scene, which I do have some familiarity with, though I’m more grounded in the US poly community.

I think this critique of the poly community has some important points, so I’d like to examine it more closely. Ready? Here we go!

Part 1: Poly Is Privileged

This is an easy claim to make. Look around the poly community in a lot of cities and you’ll see a whole lot of folks who are econmically and racially homogenous. The essay also makes the point:

I’m wondering if non-monogamy is seriously possible for people who are economically disenfranchised or people who blatantly don’t have the time to devote away from work, children, and other social responsibilities to give to other partners. And I wonder now, as I try and create a balance between work, blogging, writing fiction, working out, and all of the other things I have to do if, when I do decide to adopt children, I’ll have the time to devote to more romantic partners.

For a certain model of polyamory, this is true. Maintaining multiple dating-type relationships requires financial and time resources that a lot of folks don’t have. It’s also true that polyamory, as much as it may not be mainstream, is still a hell of a lot more accepted than LGB relationships or relationships with or between trans* people. I know poly folks who have lost custody of their children for being poly, but like I said, I’ve never heard of anyone being killed over it.

But these points, while they are valid, don’t tell the whole story.

One thing it’s important to remember is the poly community is not the same thing as polyamory. The poly ommunity is largely made up of racially and economically privileged folks, but it’s dangerous to infer that polyamory is mostly practiced by that demographic. I’ve met people who are polyamorous who don’t belong to or identify with the organized poly community (particularly when I was living in Florida and Georgia), and there’s quite a lot more variety in socioeconomic class than a look ’round the poly community might suggest.

Likewise, the notion that poly requires a certain level of disposable income and time is true for some models of poly, particularly the I’m-dating-a-bunch-of-people flavor of poly, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that polyamory is therefore limited to the economically privileged. I’ve known–and been involved with!–poly folks who are financially quite poorly off, and who discover in a more communal model of polyamory a way to increase their standard of living.

Indeed, many of the folks in my own poly network have a level of income that’s perilously close to, or in some cases below, the Federal poverty line. Poly people have discovered something that roommates have known for a long time: two can live almost as cheaply as one, and three can live almost as cheaply as two.

The same calculus works for time. A person who’s working two part-time jobs may not have the time to go out on several dates a week, but that’s not the only way to do poly! Both long-distance relationships and communal relationships require much less investment in free time to maintain.

Why is the organized polycommunity so homogenous? That question has a complicated answer. Even the simple version is probably outside the scope of this particular blog post. (That’s not an attempt to handwave away the question; it’s just a really, really complicated subject.) Is the organized poly community a showcase of privilege? You bet. Does that mean polyamory is only for privileged people? Well, that’s a tougher argument to make. The organized poly community does not necessarily reflect the diversity of people who practice polyamory, and identifying as polyamorous does not necessarily mean identifying as part of the poly community.

Part 2: Poly as Cultural Appropriation

This critique breaks down into a couple of broad categories: poly appropriation of the spiritual beliefs of other cultures, usually in a highly adulterated (and somewhat confused) form; and poly appropriation of LGBT identity. As to the first part, from the essay:

I get sick to death of seeing white people in polyamory communities reference a tribe or a culture outside their own, putting white names to their practices, and using them to validate their relationship style or choice. I get sick and tired of the “Ooh”ing and “Aah”ing over appropriated concepts of tantra, chakras, chi, and whatever I’ve seen white people mix together in a fruit salad of whatever cultures they want to build their ignorant burrito out of to try and make their polyamory practice more “exotic” and “sacred”. You shouldn’t have to justify your relationship choice via bigotry. When you act like your polyamory is valid because it’s made of “tiny bubbles of imperfections as proof that it was crafted by the simple, hard-working, indigenous peoples of wherever” you’re being a colonialist jerk.

This gets no disagreement from me. In fact, the urge to validate having multiple romantic partners by mashing together assorted bits of poorly-understood religious traditions from a number of different cultures and wrapping the whole thing up in a ribbon of chakra-expanding tantric sex is one of the more annoying facets of (part of) the poly community.

Does this happen? You bet. I don’t think blame for this rests on the doorstep of polyamory, though. First, most of the offenders I’ve personally seen did it before they became polyamory; they started out involved in alternative New Age spirituality and then, when they started exploring polyamory in the mid to late 90s, they brought their garbled mishmash of other cultures’ spiritual ideas with them.

At least here in the US. I can’t speak for the Tantric/New Age part of the poly community in the UK, because it’s not the bit I interacted with, which brings up a second point:

Not all of the poly community does this. In fact, the poly community is quite diverse in this regard. Most of the community I was part of in Florida, for instance, is made up of rationalists and skeptics with about as much interest in New Age tantric appropriation as they have in six-day-old potato salad.

There’s a polyamory meetup group in Portland for fundamentalist Christians. There’s a group in Vancouver that’s essentially entirely secular. The poly community is not monolithic; to accuse it of cultural appropriation is to miss big chunks that aren’t spiritual at all. Do some poly people do this? You bet. Do most? Not in my experience.

Which brings up the second kind of appropriation. Again from the essay:

I’m sick to death of “allies” telling me that they have a right to call themselves queer just because they date more than one person, especially when they have lipstick parties in middle class suburbia while queer kids are forced into homelessness, nonconsensual sex work, and death. I’ll feel more sympathy for Poly Patriarch not being able to marry all of his concubines when trans* people can get married without having to worry about going to jail for fraud.

I can definitely understand being pretty fed up with this sort of behavior. I personally am not sick to death of it, because so far I personally have not seen it. I certainly would never consider calling myself “queer” because I’m poly; as a cisgendered straight white guy, that would be profoundly nonsensical of me2.

This might be something that’s more common in the UK than the US; I don’t know. I do know that the poly communities I’ve been ppart of have had members who are gay, members who are bi, and members who are trans…all of whm have a reasonable claim to “queerness,” but no because they’re poly.

Part 3: Abusers In the Poly Community

This is the most head-scratching part of the essay to me.

Yes, the poly community has abusers. I don’t see it as a poly problem; I see it as a problem of minority sexual subcultures in general. Ironically, the essay’s author still identifies as kinky, whereas I’ve seen abuse happen a lot more in the BDSM community, as I’ve written about here (trigger warning: rape), here, and here. But saying it isn’t a “poly problem” doesn’t mean it’s not a problem in the poly community. It absolutely is.

And it pisses me off.

A couple of months ago, my partner zaiah and I hosted the first of what’s likely to be a bimonthly poly get-together, whose purpose is to create white papers–papers that an be used by other poly organizers. The very first one? Creating poly communities that are safe and do not shelter abusers. Last month, we hosted the Portland West Side Poy Discussion Group. The topic? Preventing abuse in the poly community.

When I say this is the most head-scratching part of the essay, it’s not because I believe the poly community is a beautific assemblage of saints. It’s because the claims of abuse sound a bit…strange to me. The essay contains this bit…

If I’m dating Tom and Tom is treating his boyfriend Phil like dirt, I can’t possibly tell Tom that I’ll break up with him or I can’t sit by and watch him treating Phil like dirt. Because then I’m being controlling, jealous, and manipulative. I’m stuck in a trap where I have to put up with abusive shit all for the sake of not exercising the dreaded veto. […] Until poly people stop demonising things like “veto power” and start talking and taking seriously how polyamory can work well for abusers, I have a hard time taking on the label…

…which I find a little odd. I’m not sure I get the connection between “opposing veto” and “sheltering abusers.” I am an outspoken opponent of veto3 in poly relationships, because in my experience vetoes are often used as tools of abuse. I almost always see them wielded with indifference of–even contempt for–the needs of the people against whom they are used (people who, most often, are on the short end of a significant power imbalance to begin with).

What I also tend to see in conversations aout veto is a strange sort of either/or, all-or-nothing mentality: if you don’t have veto, that means you have no say at all, and you just have to lie down and take whatever your partner does. You can’t express an opinion or an objection of any sort; to do so is the same as veto.

And don’t psychologists tell us that one of the defining characteristics of many abusers is the fact that they seek to control their partners and particularly control their partners’ interactions with others, cutting their victims off from other sources of love and support?

Frankly, I find the discussion of veto with regards to abuse bizarre. If I were dating Sally and I saw her mistreating Bob, telling Sally I’ll break up with her if her behavior doesn’t improve isn’t veto. Telling Sally “I demand that you break up with Bob”–that is veto.

I don’t do veto, nor get involveed with those who have it. Yet if I’m dating someone who is treating another partner like dirt, or who is being treated like dirt, I’m going to say so. And if someone says that’s “controlling, jealous, and manipulatiive,” that says more about that person than it does about me, I reckon.

Conflating “doesn’t do veto” with “supports abuse” seems…well, I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but in my experience if someone is being abused and won’t leave the abusive relationship if you say “hey, this is abuse,” they aren’t too likely to leave if you say “hey, veto” either.

Just sayin’.

Part 4: Smug

From the essay:

While many poly people acknowledge that “Relationship broke, add people” probably isn’t the best solution, just as many people act like polyamory is the solution for anyone’s relationship problems, or they look down on silly monogamous people who feel things like jealousy and fear (because, you know, non-monogamous people never feel that).

I’ve met this guy. Once. On a Facebook forum. He was roundly (and loudly) ridiculed.

This may be a regional thing. I totally get that there are folks who act this way, but in my expeience there aren’t “just as many” folks who say this as who say exactly the opposite. In fact, the poly groups I’ve belonged to in Florida, Georgia, and Portland, and the poly folks I’ve met in Boston and Chicago, actively frown on the notion that polyamory is more evolved, more enlightened, and/or good for what ails those poor Neanderthal mono folks.

If I were to meet a lot of people proclaiming how backward monogamy iis, I suspect it’d get right up my noose, too. So I’m willing to give this critique a pass; it’s not my experience, but different poly communities, as I mentioned in art 2 up there, have very different attitudes. Perhaps there’s a poly community over across the pond where this idea is prevalent; if so, I can certainly understand opting out of it.

Opting out of a community, though, isn’t the same thing as opting out of an identity. I’ve disassociated myself with the BDSM community, because it has a lot of behaviors and practices I find toxic. I still do BDSM. Distancing myself from others who do some of the same things I do doesn’t, at least for me, change my identity. If it did, the way I see it, I’d be letting folks I don’t like dictate my identity, and that seems an odd choice to me.

1 The Transitive Property of Smugness is what I call the propensity of some folks to talk about how doing some thing like having multiple partners) or being part of some group (like people who practice BDSM) requires skill at a particular thing, and then to assume that because they do that thing, they have that skill. For example: “It takes good communication to be polyamorous. I am polyamorous. Ergo, I have good communication skills. Yay! Go me!” There are variants of this in almost every subculture I’ve ever belonged to; its kink equivalent is “Consent is an important part of BDSM. I am part of BDSM culture. Therefore, I am awesome about consent! Woohoo!”

2 Not to mention insensitive. Rude, too. And kinda stupid.

3 Defined here as a right or agreement by which one person can tell another person “I require you to end your relationship with so-and-so” and have an expectation that the other person will break up with so-and-so. I’ve spoken to some folks who use the term “veto” to mean “I have the right to give you my opinion about whether I like so-and-so.” I don’t think that’s the most common usage of the word “veto,” and it’s not the one I use here.

Polyamory: So What Is Couple Privilege, Anyway?

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I’ve been chewing on this post for more than two years now.

Part of the problem is that it’s a daunting subject; one could easily write a book on the subject of couple privilege and how it plays out in relationships. Another is that a lot of otherwise well-meaning folks tend to get freaky-deaky about the P word; it’s perceived as an accusation or an attempt at guilt-tripping, because we all like to think of ourselves as basically fair and decent people, and the notion that we benefit from advantages that we haven’t earned is an uncomfortable one.

Part 0: Privilege: What is it?

Put simply, when you talk about people or societies, a ‘privilege’ is any advantage that one person or group has over another that hasn’t been specifically earned.

It’s a simple idea that’s complicated and fraught with land mines in practice. Part of the reason for that is that privilege is invisible to those who have it. If you are in a privileged position, it doesn’t seem like you have advantages over other people; it just seems like the Way Things Are. People don’t consciously assert privilege. People don’t get up in the morning and think “Wow, as a heterosexual white guy, I think I’ll go out and oppress some women and minorities today!” Privilege is insidious because it is structural; privileged people get advantages without having to consciously think about them.

Click for an introduction to privilege; if you’re familiar with the concept, you can probably skip this.

Fuck Comcast right in their stupid EAR. And also, polyamory!

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I am on TV right now. Or, at least, I think I am. I don’t know, because Comcast is the most miserable tech company I’ve ever had to deal with.

Err, actually the second most miserable, but only by a nose.

Some time ago, i got contacted by producers from the Oprah Winfrey network. They were shooting a segment of “Our America” about polyamory. I pointed them to some friends of mine, who they liked so much they set up a camera crew in their house for weeks. They also filmed a smigeon of zaiah and I, and… Anyway, I was curious to see how it all turned out.

The show was set to air today, something I didn’t realize ’til this afternoon. So zaiah went down to the Comcast Worker’s Dormitory, Public Relations Orifice, and Meat Processing Plant to pick up a cable box. We plugged it in. Went through a lengthy process on Comcast’s miserable Net-site to “activate” the box, whatever that means. Web site said “OK, now activating your cable box, please wait 45 minutes.”

Which is a little weird; in 45 minutes, Russian organized crime can infect 250,000 American PCs with malware, so taking 45 minutes to program a cable box seems inefficient. But whatever.

Then the Web site said “Success! Your cable box has been activated.”

It lied.

Connect the box to the TV, nothing. Okay, bad cable maybe? Go outside the house, in the rain, diddle with the cable connection. Nothing. Replace the cable. Nothing. Run a known-good cable through the window into the house. Still nada.

Take the cable connector out of the wall. Looks good. Replace the cable that came with the cable box, the one that goes from the wall to the box. Still nada.

Call tech support. “No problem, we’ll reset your cable box. Should take ten minutes.”

10 minutes later, I’m 10 minutes older but no closer to working cable.

Move the cable box around the house in a bizarre game of whack-a-cable-outlet. Nothing works anywhere. (Seriously, who uses cable any more, anyway?)

OWN is not available streaming over the Internet; presumably, Oprah, who is, like, the richest woman in he world or something, isn’t getting enough fees to allow Net streaming.

Okay, back on the phone with tech support. “We can’t see your cable box.”

Uh…

Okay, fine. Move it to a different cable outlet. “We still can’t see it. You’re on a TV show, you say? About polyamory? What’s that?”

The inevitable “what is polyamory?” conversation over, we start playing this whack-a-cable-outlet game again. No matter where we go, the tech says “I sill can’t ping your cable box.”

Go back online to Comcast’s miserable activation page on Comcast’s miserable Web site. “You have 1 cable device (1 not activated).”

Apparently, it will tell you “activation successful” even if the device in question is disconnected, turned off, shot repeatedly with a 12-gauge, and buried in a lead-lined box outside of Roswell, New Mexico beneath a crumpled up ball of aluminum foil and two empty cans of baked beans. When the Web site says “activation successful,” that doesn’t mean that the activation was successful, you see…it simply means that enough time has passed that the Comcast Central Babbage Engine should have been able to align the gears and pulleys to the right configuration to activate the box.

zaiah is still on the phone with the tech this whole time, while our dinner slowly turns to charcoal and then catches fire on the stove. The tech is being really patient (and curious), but nothing works.

Finally, I yank the cable out of the cable modem, which we know works on account of I was able to communicate through the web-net on the Internet-tubes to the Babbage engine that runs Comcast’s Net-site, and plug it straight into the cable box.

“Oh,” chirps the tech, “your cable box is defective. Please bring it to your nearest Comcast cable Box Redemption Center and place it on the redemption line.”

Which might have explained why when zaiah picked it up from the Comcast Worker’s Dormitory, Public Relations Orifice, and Meat Processing Plant the person-unit behind the counter mentioned casually as if in passing that she’d plug the box in and make sure the blinkenlights came on because “we’ve had a bunch of bad boxes lately.”

So after four plus hours of work, we were unable to see the show. We had several friends over who were also on the program, because, like, who the fuck has cable nowadays anyway?

If you could even begin to feel one one-hundredth of the depth of my frustration and rage at Comcast right now, your monitor would catch fire.

The Cucumbers of Wrath: “Fairness” in Poly Relationships

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This video, which was presented in a TED talk about moral reasoning in animals, shows two monkeys who have each been trained to perform a simple task (handing a researcher a rock) in exchange for a reward (a bit of food).

In the experiment, the researcher could give the monkey a bit of cucumber or a grape as a reward. Monkeys given cucumber rewards were quite happy…unless they saw another monkey being given a grape for the same task. When that happens…well, see below.

The things these monkeys are feeling translate directly into the things that can trip us up as human beings when we’re involved in non-monogamous relationships of all sorts.

OF GRAPES AND CUCUMBERS

The notion that relationships have “cucumbers” (things that help feed the relationship, but aren’t necessarily fun or thrilling) and “grapes” (exciting things that are fun to do) seems straightforward.

The problem, naturally, is that what constitutes a “cucumber” and what constitutes a “grape” can be highly subjective, and can change depending on where you happen to be in the relationship configuration.

For instance, to me some of the most delicious grapes of life are also some of life’s most mundane things: the day-in, day-out living with a partner, doing all the tasks and chores that add up to shared intimacy and a shared life together. I’ve had relationships where I live with my partner and we spend our time doing dishes, watching Netflix, and snuggling on lazy Saturday mornings, and relationships where I see a partner perhaps once a year for a wild frenzy of hot kinky group sex in a French castle.

Don’t get me wrong, the hot kinky sex in a French castle is a grape, no doubt about it. But for me, relationships where I spend time just quietly sharing a life with a partner are incredibly rewarding, and it’s far easier to build intimacy with that kind of shared life than with one week a year spent together. No matter how much fun that week happens to be. With a partner I see seldom, the time spent with that partner can look like an intense whirlwind of nonstop fun, because we have to pack all our relationship time into a very small space. It doesn’t account for the long periods of time spent apart, when the relationship is barely fed at all, with grapes or cucumbers. (I am a person whose love language is touch; it is harder to meet that need long distance.)

To a person who has that day-in, day-out living together, the weekend trips to a faraway land can look like grapes, and the doing of dishes and moving of furniture looks like a dull and unappetizing cucumber. On the other hand, to the partner who only gets my time in small dribs and drabs, the shared experiences of a life spent together looks like a plump, sweet, delicious grape. And so each person sees nothing but cucumbers in front of them, while the other person has an entire plateful of grapes.

GRAPES AND HIERARCHY

When you look at your own plate and see nothing but cucumbers, while it seems like someone else gets entirely 100% grape,it’s reasonable to feel like the monkey in the video up there. And when we feel like that, often our first impulse is to want all the grapes for ourselves.

It gets worse if we feel that we’re entitled to all the grapes, or that someone else might steal our stash of grapes.

Since I’ve been thinking about polyamory in terms of grapes and cucumbers, it has occurred to me that often, the rules and hierarchies imposed in prescriptive relationships, particularly prescriptive primary/secondary relationships, seem calculated to make sure that all the grapes belong to one partner and other partners are metered out nothing but cucumbers.

This can sometimes even go so far as “grape hoarding”–fencing off particularly tasty grapes to make sure nobody else comes near them. (Examples of grape hoarding might be forbidding a partner to go to a certain restaurant with another partner, say, or forbidding a partner to spend any holiday or vacation time with another partner.) Even sharing a grape with someone else can make us feel like that poor monkey on the left, if we feel that grape belongs to us by right. When our monkey emotions get monkey going, someone’s likely to get things flung at them.

The impulse to want to keep our grapes and make sure nobody else takes them isn’t just a human thing, or even a primate thing. Dogs do the same thing; a dog trained to do a trick to get a reward who sees the other dog get that reward for nothing may stop doing the trick.

SEPARATING THE GRAPES FROM THE CHAFF

What are the grapes in a relationship? I’ve been thinking about that ever since my sweetie showed me this video.

Kinky group sex in a Medieval castle is definitely a grape, don’t get me wrong. Intense experiences that form lifelong memories are very tasty indeed.

But focusing on those kinds of grapes, I think, makes me lose sight of the grapes I get every day–the grapes that it’s easy to disregard because I have so many of them. I’ve resolved to be more conscientious about valuing the grapes that I have, the ones I might otherwise take for granted.

If I were to make a list of the grapes I’m blessed with, it would include kinky sex in castles and trips to exotic places, no doubt. But it would also include:

  • Being able to wake up nearly every morning with my partner.
  • Having my partner close enough to touch, almost all the time.
  • Curling up on a rainy afternoon with my partner, snuggling beneath warm covers.
  • Building a private language from a shared history of experience.
  • Having someone next to me while I deal with all the various ways I have to hold back entropy.
  • Being able to plan with someone
  • Working on projects with a partner.
  • Creating with a partner.
  • Having a partner who sees me, who really get me and understands me.

So I do very much like the trips to see my distant sweeties, but I wish they were closer. I enjoy vacation time spent with far-flung lovers, but I would not trade those experiences for living with a partner. At the end of the day, if I had to choose, I would give up the vacations for having the people I love close to me all the time.

And that might be the real test of what’s a grape and what’s a cucumber: Would you choose to trade places with the person you see getting all the grapes? If the vacation experiences seem like such tasty grapes,would you trade a life spent together for a distant, vacation relationship?

How about you, O readers? What are your grapes and what are your cucumbers?