"I couldn't manage it all."

So, I’m seeing the word “polyamory” and “non monogamy” a lot more in mainstream articles (The New Yorker, SEVEN PAGES OF ARTICLES in Vox, even f*cking Time) lately.  It’s not new, although I feel like the sheer amount of discussions are increasing.  I don’t have a lot of hot-takes, but the number of hot-takes I have is not zero. 

First off, I’m grateful as fuck that ENM seems to be received leagues better (indifference and vague judgment) than other experiences of queer-breaking-into-mainstream.  I may have gotten some looks with my tribe in the wild, but no one’s kicked us out of a bar, threatened our jobs, or come after our families.  And I know that’s not true of everyone’s ENM experience.  I have some midwestern friends who, during divorce and custody litigation, had to discuss a humiliating amount of detail about their ENM love lives, and lost a significant amount of custody time because of it.  People are still vicious, and they’ll still bite where there’s a free space.

But I’m "out" to just about everybody right now, except my job, and I sleep quite soundly at night.  I don’t have a lot of room to complain.  My opinions aren’t important, and I am not trying to throw shade on monogamy.  But I’m a writer, and I have thoughts, and I’m a terrible procrastinator on my more important projects.  So here it is.  

The nicest, most open-minded commenters in these mainstream “look at people doing poly” articles love to say things like:  “All the best to them; I could never keep track of all that!  It’s hard enough keeping track of one!”  And these commenters are giving their kindest and most open-minded contributions, so I need to assert right now that I’m a shithead for clapping back at it.  In truth, I’m grateful for their open-mindedness, and they have a solid point.

…but what does “keeping track” mean?  Keeping track of feelings (like we do in therapy)?  Of the schedule (like when you make plans with friends)?  Of the people themselves?  I don’t really “keep track” of my partners…I schedule them, and then we hang out.  Like you do with a partner you’re not living with.

It’s hard to find representative content to discuss relationships that isn’t dramatized, hyperbolized, or over-produced.  The poly yang to every mono yin is just as toxic.  Love is Blind on one side, Big Love on the other.  /R/relationships on one side, /r/polyamory on the other.  Predatory behavior on Tinder, predatory behavior on Feeld.  There’s no shortage of people fucking up and taking others down with them in their most representative way.

But when I think about “managing” or “keeping track” of people, I’m reminded of the enmeshment that necessarily happens in monogamy.  The relationship escalator, the pressure of marriage that is built into the culture of monogamy.  Hell, it’s in the very word.  We don’t call it “monoamory.”  We put the idea of marriage into the whole description of one-at-a-time love.  In fact, if you’re a one-at-a-time lover and not interested in matrimony, you might be dubbed a practitioner of “serial dating.”  Like…Jesus.

When marriage is the goal, the amount of checking in to make sure your partner is on the same emotional plane, on the same emotional page, with the same financial and locational goals, is sometimes overwhelming.  The resentment that happens in a monogamous relationship when one partner was planning for one outcome, and the other partner was planning for a different one?  The careful wordplay that gets used to keep things general enough for a loophole, but specific enough to quell a partner’s fears?  Nothing sounds more like management to me.

Marriage is wonderful with the right person.  But so is plain-old cohabitation.  Sex is wonderful with someone that you desire, but desire shifts constantly, and sex isn’t wonderful with someone that you do not desire.  Sometimes the best sex of your life is with someone who wouldn’t get along with your friends or family.  Comfort and excitement don’t come from the same place, but we’re always craving both of them.  

These are not polyamorous truths.  These are universal truths.  Life is hard to manage, and polyamory is a possible framework that can potentially help someone manage.

I think about monogamous people who, upon the fear that their partner is interested or excited by another person (also a universal phenomenon, not exclusive to polyamory), start to become anxiously aware of their partner’s phone usage.  The unavoidable calculations that start adding up when it’s clear that one partner needs distance.  The scorekeeping, the “after everything I’ve done for them,” the do-I-stay-or-do-I-go.

Yes, distance and breakups happen in polyamory too, and they hurt just as bad (no, the availability of other partners does not lighten the grief).  But I suppose the biggest reason I’m polyamorous is to avoid some of the management of the monogamous “lifestyle” (How’s it feel?  Just because you’re the majority doesn’t make you not-a-lifestyle).  Another person is not a threat to me.  I don’t get terrified when my partners go on dates.  I encourage the growth of my partners, because trying to stifle that growth is bad for everyone.  What do I manage?  Primarily, I manage myself.

In our throuple, my husband’s relationship with his girlfriend is theirs to manage.  My relationship with my girlfriend (even though she’s the same person) is hers and mine to manage.  There’s more circles in our venn diagram of relationships than there are in a monogamous couple’s, but none of us are responsible for intersections that we are not involved in.

You know what monogamous people manage?  Trying to fit all their needs into one person, making some inevitable compromises, and dealing with the resentment.  

What do we have in common?  The work.

All love is work.  It should be joyous work, it should be easy work.  But yes, love is labor.  You keep the person all but tangibly in your heart and mind, and you hurt when they hurt.  How does any mother love and care for more than one child?  How do people have more than one friend?  How does a doctor care for more than one patient?  (I’m cringing at my patent repetition of this poly mantra as if it’s my original thought, and not a song that’s been past down, word-for-word, among poly generations)

You know what comrades?  Labor can also be shared.  My partners don’t just have me to be vulnerable or passionate with.  Can you imagine the responsibility?  That’d be a fascist-ass relationship, which is what I feel like a lot of monogamous contributors believe when they leave comments about “management” of people.

Romance can be found in different frameworks.  It’s okay if some of them are not for you, and for the love of Christ, we don’t need any proselytizers.  Personally, I’m hoping that the continued conversation about polyamory will enable people to realize that they don’t need to stick to the factory-set relationship.  There are tons of negotiable aspects of relationships that we should be talking about that will enable us to live freer lives, without making our partners feel bad that they’re not always the perfect answer to every problem all the time.

3 Microposts from the Holidays

Happy Mondayest of Mondays (Gretchen Wieners whispers "It's Thursday").  Tits out to new beginnings.

I come to my laptop with renewed joy about my own writing process.  The writing I want to do, verses the writing that I think is important or entertaining or successful or enduring.

While I was away with family, I thought of so many things to write about.  I’m on a bit of a backlog.  So here are a few micro-posts.

–Cultural Validation:  Our society’s refusal to let go of the idea of “the one” is a little like religion’s refusal to stop selling the idea of an afterlife.  We don’t know how to live in the moment, how to sit through disappointment, how to move through grief, or how to stop worrying, so we create fantasies that only serve to make us more miserable.

Some of us move beyond the idea of “the one,” but then we meet someone who unintentionally fucks us all the way up.  Life with them breaks a certain limit of pre-programmed happiness, and life after them leaves us questioning what the fuck that was.  It’s easy to make ourselves the center of gravity in the universe of relationships (and to a certain point, we should), but we have to resist the urge to build a negative worldview around it.  The hot-people-are-objectively-terrible and the men-will-always-leave-you bits.  It’s not men or hot people.  It’s people in general.  It’s the difficulty of relationships.  Remember that you also unintentionally fucked someone all the way up.  And I know this makes me an asshole, but I find that comforting.

Those of us who do not believe in “the one” try our damnedest to warn others when we see them start to fall.  Don’t have any preconceived notions.  Don’t get carried away before you really get to know them.  There are plenty of fish in the sea.  But I still see every female high school student I teach fall into a stupor when a boy shows them a minimal amount of attention.  And it reminds me of all the ways I twisted myself, happily, to participate in a relationship that depleted me.  All the times I drove an hour to his place, low on sleep and energy, because simply the feeling of being near him exhilarated me.

I didn’t believe in soul-mates, and I sure-as-fuck wasn’t monogamous.  What fulfilled me?  I’ve been throwing around a theory that it was a kind of cultural validation.  That when I walked around with this guy who gave me orgasms but wasn’t respectful, other people would see me and know my experiences. The songs by Brand New, Say Anything, and Death Cab for Cutie were about me. Rihanna's pain in her music is my pain. High Fidelity is about me. Love Actually is about me. Everything is about me. The world sees me and I'm real.

Of course, cultural validation goes hand in hand with a strong lack-of-self worth, which is a deeper and more fundamental piece to the story. But the idea stays with me like a wall painting I never noticed before.  Especially when I think about every person who says they don’t believe in soul-mates, but still longs to get married.

– “Place-Holder” Dating:  This is strong in both monogamous and polyamorous people, and it comes from a monogamous mindset.  We date someone that we’re not crazy about because we want sex and comradery, and they’re available.  But we’ve got one eye open for a different person to “fill the spot” when we meet them.

This makes psychological sense if you’re a narcissist, but it’s quite a roundabout way of saying that the person is ungrateful.

When we fall in love and approach a vulnerability with each other that includes eroticism, desire, and consummation, sometimes we forget that this other person is still a person, with a schedule and goals and limited energy.  We don’t really forget this when it comes to friendship.  We assume friends will vacillate between layers of availability and closeness.  We assume we’re allowed to see other friends outside of them; that nothing is stopping us from hanging out with other people for entertainment and connection.  We don’t have “placeholder friends” that we hold onto while looking for a “perfect friend.”

While I truly don’t want to take the magic out of love and relationships (I’m a witch; I sort of thrive on magic), it is important to me as a relationship anarchist that I treat my partners as whole people.  Perhaps it’s also a part of being my own primary.  I don’t want to fall into an identity-crises-depression when a partner needs to shift their role or amount of time in my life, especially because when you increase the amount of partners, you also inevitably increase the amount of breakups.

–The Smart Asshole That You Miss, But Are Much Better Without:  There is a genre of person that we all left after therapy, and this is the person who projects as much intelligence as they do judgment.  They were so clever and funny, had a stimulating vocabulary, and made us feel smarter to talk to them.

…but they also made us feel stupider about some things.  Maybe about the differences in how much we read, or consume the news, or remember events from AP History.  At least once they’ve made us feel incompetent at our careers by pointing out a mistake that sounded fundamental, but was actually far more nuanced than they had the energy to comprehend.

Cheers, you fun and clever asshole.  Thanks for the fun, no thanks for the complexes.  I truly hope your self-image and personal relationships are better than when I last saw you.