From an email I just made on a polyamory-related list:

I’ve found that a lot of my relationship fears vanish and my relationships become a lot stronger and more healthy when I start with certain assumptions: namely, that my partners want to be with me, that they see value in me, that when given the opportunity they will seek to make choices that honor our commitments and cherish the relationship we’re in, that they are honest and can be counted on to behave with integrity, and that when they say they love me, it’s because they do.

Often it seems to me that people base relationship rules on the assumption that their partners can not be trusted, that if given free action their partners will not choose to honor and nurture their relationships, and that their partners are harboring secret agendas involving dumping them when someone ‘better’ (whatever that means) comes along. I can’t quite fathom building a relationship on those assumptions, nor why someone would want to remain in a relationship where they were true.

Ahh, the mysteries of life.

“It’s not fair!”

Below a certain age, we hear people say this all the time. Past a certain age, people rarely say it any more. It’s not just because it gets beaten out with the litany of “life’s not fair” that almost always follows “it’s not fair!” (and in truth, I’ve always thought “life’s not fair” is a pretty lame way to follow up a complaint of unfairness anyway); rather, as we get older, and our vision gets longer, we learn that fairness operates best on a global, not a local, scale. Sure, if you did the dishes last night and it’s your sister’s turn to do the dishes tonight, but she isn’t doing the dishes because she just got back from the dentist, it may seem unfair to you from a purely selfish perspective…but really, would you want to trade places with her? And if you were the one who’d just been through the root canal, wouldn’t you appreciate it if you could give the dishes a miss tonight yourself? These things tend to even out in the end; sometimes, compassion dictates that the rigid schedule of dishwashing responsibility should change.

By the time we’re adults, we’ve all pretty much figured this out. That, or we’ve just given in to exhaustion and stopped worrying quite so much about what’s “fair” on such a granular level.

Yet in relationships, and especially in polyamorous relationships, the little whisperings of our five-year-old selves sometimes poke through our consciousness and say “It’s not fair!” when things don’t go the way we expect them to go.

Even when we don’t talk about our expectations. Even when we know our expectations are silly. Hell, sometimes even when what’s happening is not only fair, but most excellent as well.

When you’re dealing with human beings, issues of ‘fairness’ sometimes go right out the window. People change, needs change, but often our notions about what is ‘fair’ remain static. Sometimes, our notions of what’s ‘fair’ become so deeply buried that we’re not always even aware of them, or aware of the expectations we carry around with is in regards to what’s fair and what’s not fair.

It pays to remember this, especially when your inner five-year-old starts saying “It’s not fair!” in your ear. Most especially when you’re polyamorous.

I’m not even talking about the obvious situations that make people say “It’s not fair!”, such as situations where one person is an extrovert who finds it easy to meet new people and one person’s an introvert who finds it difficult to meet new people, though I’ve certainly heard many folks cry “It’s not fair!” in situations like that. (“It’s not fair that he seems to have prospective partners lining up around the block and I can’t meet anyone!”) It’s certainly true that some folks find it easier to go out and interact with people than other folks do, but that’s something we all have a measure of control over, after all. At the end of te day, wht would be more fair? Forbidding one’s extroverted partner from being an extrovert?

Nor am I talking about situations where a person who is perhaps of a more monogamous bent says of a polyamorous partner, “It’s not fair that she gets to have two lovers and I only have one!” If you want more than one lover, that’s up to you; if you don’t want more than one lover, then it’s hard to cry “unfair” when you’re involved with someone who does; and in the end, it pays to start relationships with people whose goal in relationship is similar to your own.

I’m talking about the “It’s not fair!” monster that’s far more subtle, and wriggles its way deep into the murk of your default, unexamined assumptions and unvoiced expectations.

This sense of fairness can sneak up on you when you don’t really expect it, during times when you feel that you’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty for a relationship partner and you think that either your own efforts aren’t being rewarded the way you expect (even if you might think you don’t have any expectation of reward at all!) or that someone else is somehow benefitting from your work in ways you didn’t expect.

By way of one real-world example, many years ago I met a lovely young woman with whom I became close friends…eventually.

I say “eventually” because when I first met her, she was extremely introverted, had difficulty opening up to others, and had a lot of trouble communicating or trusting folks around her. She was unpartnered at the time, largely because of this. There were a lot of things about her I liked and admired, so I spent a considerable amount of time and effort in getting to know her and encouraging her to open up to me–a nontrivial investment in a relationship with a person who was never even a lover.

Some time later, at least partly because of the experiences she had with me, she found it much easier to talk to people and to extend herself to others, and she ended up finding a boyfriend. Would it have been reasonable for me to be upset, and to say “Hey, look, I put in all the work here, and now someone else gets the benefit?” No, but I do know people who seemed to feel that I should have responded that way.

Another real-world example: Some people I’ve spoken to online were part of a polyamorous triad that included a woman who was facing major upheaval in her life. She’d just come out of a bitter divorce, and was feeling emotionally and financially vulnerable. She needed, and asked for, a great deal of support from her partners, which they offered without question. Later, when she found herself on more solid footing and felt emotionally ready to engage the world again, she began exploring a new relationship, which made her partners feel put out; they felt that since they had supported her through her divorce, they should have some more input in how quickly and to what extent any new partnerships formed.

The common thread in these examples is the idea “I have done something for someone, and I should be the person who benefits from that work.” Or, perhaps more simply, “It’s not fair! Look at what I had to go through to get what I got; why should other people get it more easily? How come I had to do all this work and the next person to come down the pike didn’t?”

And the answer, of course, is “nobody owes you for the experiences that you have had. In fact, you have done something wonderful; you have helped to bring down barriers in someone’s heart, and helped that person find a place where they can now experience the world more fully and engage others in a way that they couldn’t before. Go you!”

In other words, you’ve made a positive difference in someone’s life…and you’re now upset because you feel it’s not fair that other folks get to benefit from that? Well, that’s what happens when you make someone’s life better; the whole world gets just a little bit brighter. Why would anyone want to be stingy about that?

I think, when feelings like this arise (and they do in lots of little ways, all the time), the key thing to keep in mind is this: “Have I done what I did because I expected something in return? Would I go back in time and tell the other person, ‘I will only help you if you give me something I want’?” If the answer is “no,” then let it go.

It’s sneaky, sometimes, how the things we do can come attached to expectations we might not even realize that we have until they’re not met. And it’s important to guard carefully against these unspoken, unacknowledged expectations.

I’m not saying that issues of fairness have no place in relationships, mind you. The fairness that is important in relationships isn’t the tit-for-tat “I did the dishes last night, and we’re supposed to take turns, so it isn’t fair that I have to do them tonight too!” or the “I worked hard to carry Sally through a difficult emotional time, so it should be hard for anyone else to get close to her too!” variety.

In fact, sometimes a tit-for-tat approach to fairness creates a situation that’s decidedly unfair. Another real-world example, which I’ve used before: Many years ago, I knew a married couple that was exploring polyamory. The wife had a girlfriend for many years, but when he finally found a girlfriend, the wife became overwhelmingly, irrationally jealous. After dealing with this jealousy in the typical fashion for a while (you know, passive-aggressive acting out, that sort of thing), she finally went to him and told him, look, I want you to dump your girlfriend. I’ll dump my other partner too, so it’ll be fair.

Three broken hearts for the price of one is a peculiar definition of the word “fair” in my book; which illustrates yet another important point: symmetry is not the same thing as fairness.

Personally, the kind of fairness that really counts is the kind that begins with compassion. Doing the dishes two days in a row because your sister has just had a root canal is compassionate (I’ve had a root canal, and believe me, the last thing you want to be doing when the anaesthetic starts to wear off is standing upright). On the other hand, saying “I’ll dump my partner of many years just to get you to dump yours” is hardly compassionate.

Fairness matters. Symmetry is not the same thing as fairness; fairness means saying things like “I realize that my own insecurity belongs to me, so I will not use it as a blunt instrument on you, nor expect you to plot your life around it. I may, however, ask you to talk to me while I’m dealing with it.”

This isn’t the kind of fairness our mental five-year-old understands. Our inner five-year-old is far more likely to be worried about someone else getting something that we don’t have, or getting something for a lower “price” than we paid for it. At the end of the day, though, our mental five-year-old isn’t really likely to make our lives better, no matter how much of a fuss he puts up.

On another forum I read, a person had asked for help with a poly situation he was confronting.

Seems that his wife of many years had just started exploring the notion of having a partner outside their marriage (with his knowledge and blessing), and her new lover had managed to do some things with her sexually that totally blew her out of the water and circumvented some barriers that had always been present in their marriage.

The person posting about this was very distressed and upset about it, to the point where he was considering asking his wife to cut things off with her new lover.

And I think that’s really interesting. Because upon reading his post, my first thought was “Dude! ROCK! You just hit the poly lotto jackpot! This is exactly one of the best things that can happen in a poly relationship!”

See, here’s the deal. If one of my partners has an amazing, mind-blowing, life-altering sexual experience with some other guy, particularly an mind-blowing, life-altering sexual experience that brings down some barrier or opens some new door (and yes, this has happened), I’m all like, awesome!

For me, one of the many (many!) benefits to polyamory is that it improves my sex life.

And I don’t mean “improves my sex life” in the sense of “lets me sleep with a bunch of women,” but rather “improves my sex life” in the sense of “offers new avenues of exploration and new ways to find intimacy with my lover.”

See, no matter how many things you can think of to do sexually (and as a seasoned, veteran pervert, I can think of quite a few), and no matter what you explore with your lover, the fact is that there will always be things that didn’t occur to you and there will always be things that you don’t explore. That’s the way it goes; as human beings, we can not possibly ever do it all–not even if we live to be a thousand years old.

Because of that, there will always be doorways that we don’t see.

This is especially true in relationships where some kind of barrier exists between the people involved. These barriers might take many forms–perhaps issues with relaxing and letting go during sex, perhaps problems with sexual communication or expectations, whatever.

When some new lover arrives on the scene, and explores something new or finds some way to bypass those boundaries, everyone wins. If one of my partners has a lover who gives her this awesome experience, then she has something she can take back into her relationship with me–“Hey Franklin! Check this out! If you do this, and then this and then this over here, then my body does this amazing thing! Isn’t that cool?”

But more importantly, if someone is able to communicate with one of my lovers on a level that I never have, or finds a way around some kind of barrier that’s always existed between us, then that person has just offered a gift of incalculable value. He’s just created a roadmap to greater intimacy with my partner, by showing both of us that this barrier can be circumvented, and showing us how.

Now, it’s true that some issues between people might be specific and unique to them. Even so, sometimes all it takes to begin to work on them anew is the feeling that it is possible to have a sexual relationship in which this whatever-it-is problem doesn’t exist; funny thing about people is that when you show them something’s possible, often that’s all it takes for them to find a way to do it.

Plus, y’know, I really dig my partners, and I like when they’re happy.

So to me, when a lover has some amazing, mind-blowing experience with someone else, that’s a cause for celebration, rather than fear and angst. That seems to be a minority opinion, though–and that’s a damn shame. Seems to me life is just a whole lot better when you’re not all like “I have to be the best lover my partner has ever had or OMFG FAIL and I’m now worthless as a human being and she doesn’t need me any more and brain weasel brain weasel brain weasel.”