Mono/Poly

I’ve had bits and pieces of this one swirling around in my head for a long time, trying to work out some avenues of approach. Relationship structure is a very broad topic, and there’s a number of things I can delve into around it, and around how I do it myself. I’m going to jump in here, start to parse through the topic and provide some insight into how it plays out in my life, but I expect this will end up being a topic I revisit again and again to examine in different ways. So, let’s talk about non-monogamy.

First off, the title of this post is what it is basically because making the monopoly reference is funny to me. I am, unequivocally, polyamorous. Ethical non-monogamy as a concept has become an important piece of my life, and polyam is the way it plays out. My journey to get here has been meandering, so I think giving some of the history of my relationship style may help when I talk about where I am now, both on a level of my personal ideal and the practical logistics of current circumstances.

I was, pretty much by default, monogamous up until a couple of years ago. I really hadn’t ever approached the option, I accepted the type of relationship systems I had been guided to throughout growing up without much question, and I just assumed the way I experienced it was the way a lot of others experienced it. What I mean by this is that there were several aspects of monogamy that presented me with severe anxiety. Knowing that effectively I would either do things my partner wanted that I didn’t or they wouldn’t be able to do them at all, or do them with someone they were as close to and wanted to share with, was a major source of self-doubt, anxiety, and stress. A very mild example of this: T really likes a lot of horror movies. She likes going to see them in theaters, and she has attachments to some horror series. On the whole, I *hate* horror movies. I hate the specific type of tension, I hate jump scares as a whole, I just don’t enjoy the genre. This meant that, if she wanted to go to a horror movie and share that with a partner, it meant sharing it with me. Either I would have to do something I very deeply didn’t want to, or she wouldn’t get that opportunity. This particular example could be fulfilled by friendships(as defined by mainstream monogamous culture), but I believe it’s relatively easy to relate to enjoying something different from someone you’re close to, and see how it can be a relief to be able to spread those needs around with people who do enjoy it. This concept was one of the biggest reasons the idea ever even came up in the first place.

I do want to highlight that both T and I have uncovered a lot more about things which led us down this path we did not initially understand, at least not very well. For me, I was used to challenging the concepts of social norms by this point, as I’d already transitioned socially and dealt with the spectre of how adherence to those norms was Vital to Society™. What I started to realize was that I didn’t really separate relationships on a hard line of “platonic” and “romantic” like had been presented to me all my life. While those categories certainly tried to assert themselves with the social programming, I regularly had feelings for other people that just ebbed and flowed and existed. I never saw anything wrong with that. Once I started wrapping my head around that, it was pretty easy to take some steps further and understand that I didn’t love T any less just because I ended up feeling something for someone else. And the only reason I didn’t talk about it was societal expectations.

Thankfully, T and I have pretty much never had anything that was a taboo topic. We’ve never really seen the point. Some things get more gravity than others, but we still talk about anything that either of us think about and want to figure out. So I knew, even though my concepts and thoughts weren’t fully formed at the time, I could talk to her about it and we’d sort of work some things out. One night, I was cooking dinner, I asked her to come talk with me while I did, and while we were talking, at one point I just looked over and said “so, like, what if I kissed other girls sometimes?”. Yes, this is pretty par for the course with our style of communication. I started relating some of the feelings that I really never saw eye to eye with the way physical touch and intimacy was ranked in our society, and I liked the thought of being able to express how much I care about friends that way. It was a bit of a stumbling, meandering first entry, but T was always open and agreed pretty readily, saying she was totally fine with it. As those feelings evolved, we continued talking a lot, and figuring out thing as we went. It took T a little longer to fully process the concept of breaking with monogamy more generally, as she hadn’t experienced that process of challenging cultural norms on that level(not yet anyway), whereas I had the tools in place already. But the further we stepped into this world, and the more we understood about ourselves and our capacity to love, and also how to continue engaging each other as well as other relationships, our perspectives have vastly shifted and evolved from what they were back then. T’s particular journey is not mine to tell, but this aspect of it is so heavily intertwined with mine that I couldn’t omit it.

So, ultimately, we went through a progression of steps around the concept of polyam which continued to provide insights into how we each felt about things. This started with casual encounters with friends who were open and willing, to starting to interact with dating apps, and meeting people. A couple of years ago, from the time of this post, we both started feeling like we could engage with the deeper idea of polyam and start to process what relationship structures looked like, and the impact of them on each of us compared to other partners we might develop and so on. We both reached a point where, on the one hand, neither of us liked the idea of any kind of veto power or the kind of hierarchy that established one partner as a fundamentally more important person than the other. On the other hand, we’re married. We are financially intertwined, we have legal connection, things like power of attorney default to each other. We don’t have any children, but there’s a significant amount of interconnection there which does make our relationship more logistically significant than it would be possible for us to have elsewhere, since a person can only be in one legal marriage. This effectively just settled in as a practical exception to the philosophical rule. The financial benefits of remaining married are too significant. The difficulties of sorting things out if we were to dissolve it wouldn’t provide all that much benefit beyond some level of ideological purity. And realistically, at least in terms of where we’ve gotten to right now, the parameters of our relationship wouldn’t really be any different. We’ve both gotten to the point where we have been and are shifting to even referring to each other as partners most of the time, instead of wife, because we’re both more comfortable in that term being able to encompass all of our relationships rather than giving any appearance of hierarchy.

This is where I’m going to diverge once again into focusing on specifically my story, and how I relate to polyam. While there are, I’m pretty sure, differences in the specifics of how T and I related to polyam and exactly what we each want out of it, my actual motivation in focusing in on talking about myself is that her story is hers, and this story is mine. For a number of reasons, my views on polyam and what I want out of it have…taken sharper form over the last several months. I knew for a long while that I enjoyed and frankly needed polyam in my life to feel like I had a relationship structure that fulfilled my needs. What I didn’t fully recognize at the time was that there were a lot more possible details that I hadn’t really examined.

Back in November, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I first met C. They have been involved in polyam overall throughout their life for a much longer timeframe than I have, so they had a lot of exposure and experience that I had yet to encounter. This meant they engaged with concepts I either only had a surface understanding of, or hadn’t really heard of before. We don’t often make a point of discussing polyam specifically, in the sense it’s not really the sort of thing where one of us would enter a conversation saying “and now we will talk about how to do relationships”, it’s the sort of thing where in the course of discussing things, other partners will come up, or other relationship dynamics will end up playing a role in how schedules work, or something along those lines, and we might end up spending a few minutes just talking about whatever that particular detail is and how it works. A major catalyst for this was that, a little while after we started dating, C had some major breakthroughs on important things in other aspects of their life which allowed them time to refocus on relationships and what they wanted out of them. Through their exploration of that, I was exposed to concepts and possibilities I hadn’t really considered before. This gave me my own avenues of exploration, my own pieces to evaluate and analyze.

Arguably the most impactful of these pieces was my relation to having my own space. Given T and I are married, we’ve, by default, shared a living space up to and including a bed for the last few years. I hadn’t really ever considered this dynamic and the way it plays into my feelings and things I feel I need. Exploring this has been very complex, and has involved a lot of disentangling expectations and feelings of what I owe to partners from what I would like in my *ideal* situation. The ultimate end of this is that I highly value having my own space. I want to be able to have somewhere I can go when I need to recharge, or time to think, or simply some quiet time, and know that, within reasonable expectation, that establishment of boundaries delineating my space is inviolate. Anyone else entering is doing so under my consent, and mine alone, and me asserting a need for a little time to myself does not deprive them of a space that is also theirs. This also fulfills a need I have where I would like to have space that I know will be mine without any need for discussion when it comes to having a partner over. Now, like I said, part of what I was aiming to do with all this consideration and these exercises was to look at it from the perspective of my *ideal*, not just necessarily what I thought was logistically possible in the nearish future. So I explored this idea of my own space a little further. I worked on sorting out just what I meant by “space”, what kind of scope I was talking about and considering in this instance. It really opened my eyes to some important aspects of myself.

I am a pretty introverted person. I tend to be fairly happy staying in and reading, or watching tv, or playing video games, or something of that sort. I rarely have much of a need to go out of my own accord. More often than not, it’s more important to me *who* I am going to something with than *what* I am going to. Because of these traits, I also place a high priority on carving out my alone time. It doesn’t always need to be a lot of it, but I absolutely need to set time aside for myself, for some level of introspection, or just reading or doing something individual, or even something like writing these posts. This is augmented by some sensory input issues I have, in that prolonged or intense exposure to most any kind of stimuli usually drains me very quickly, if it doesn’t just flat out cause me to shut down and enter a sort of survival state. Time on my own, in a space that is either quiet or has noises and sights of my choosing, helps maintain the equilibrium in my brain to work through scenarios that overstimulate me. Because of all these needs, having a space to call my own is *very* important to me. In terms of my absolute ideal, this would likely mean something I can consider my own entire living space. Somewhere I can set the boundary when I need to and have my own room to move around and shake loose tensions and things like that, and at other times bring partners into, to occupy my space with me and share time together. It may not even be somewhere I claim as my living space *all* the time. I like spending nights with partners, I like having time where we just kinda go and do whatever until it feels like we’re ready for our attentions to turn to other things in our life for a little bit, and for that to be ok. It’d be great if all my partners were close enough that we could see each other regularly (same city/metro area, discounting LA because that’s not a metro area that’s its own reality) and just kinda weave time around however many relationships end up being my equilibrium point. Right now, for example, I have bandwidth. The attention and time I have available outstrips that of my current partners, due to a myriad of circumstances, and it would not be a bad thing for me to have other avenues to weave into that dynamic in my life. Being able to do that within my own guidelines, and knowing and relying on my own space, is pretty much my pinnacle relationship style. There’s mitigating factors around accomplishing that, as I acclimate to living in a city proper for the first time(as an introvert that is a *massive* adjustment), and continue to find my bearings as things like distance have adjusted dynamics of my relationships, and also process all these other things that have become apparent as part of who I am over the last several months. But I believe I’ll find my niche in that.

Now, I mentioned earlier in this post that I would also talk about practical logistics and how they impact the way I process that ideal. There’s a couple of things that I can speak to, at least as far as how things are right now. For one, if I were to ever actually end up in my own space like that outright, it’s going to be a little while. There’s a high chance that most/any future plans are going to center right here, around San Francisco. This is not exactly a low-cost area. It’d be quite ambitious to work out the financial logistics on their own. But there’s also relationship dynamics to consider. My ideal effectively spells out how I’d approach the entire concept of relationships if I were starting fresh *right now*. I’m not. I have a marriage that has a history. We’ve been together for years at this point. I cannot unilaterally make that decision, not if I wish to be a good partner. Because my nesting partner has needs too, and I agreed, both on our wedding day and continuing through to today and moving forward, that those needs would intertwine with mine and be important to me. So regardless of whether or not she’s on board with it, it would take a lot of time and discussion and planning before I was comfortable allowing that to be an option. And there are compromises that can be made. Once we’re in the right place, I am putting a priority on our next place having enough space for everyone in our household to have their own room. We can share other aspects of living spaces, and share rooms whenever we feel, but it’s a means of having *some* space carved out as mine to assert my needs over. Somewhere I can go and have as mine, or take partners and know that it is *my* space we are occupying and does not interfere with anyone else, nor will anyone else have to interfere with my space with another partner.

There’s one last piece here that I want to address that can come up. It may be apparent, or it may not, that I have only referenced the term “partners” in this post, aside from 3 very specific examples that were particular to the time periods I was portraying. There’s a reason for this. I have been asked this question, in fact, in the past. What is the difference between a partner and a friend? The answer, quite honestly, is not much. At least as far as how I approach relationships. Intensity varies relationship to relationship, for sure, but that’s true no matter what. I have people who would fall closer to the mainstream definition of “partner” who I’ve never slept with. I have “friends” who I have. The level of emotional, psychological, and physical intimacy I exchange is, with little exception, pretty much irrelevant to those considerations, and all about my connection to the specific person. That’s really the essence of it. I utilize those terms socially because it does make it a little easier to navigate conversations on a more general scale when I use them to indicate the level of time and effort I devote to a given relationship, for lack of a better description, but it’s pretty much just a practical concession and nothing more. This has become all the more true as I’ve been sorting through things like my sex-aversion and changes that occurred around that disappearing. With a lot of those hang-ups gone, I just want to spend time with and enjoy whoever I click with, and in whatever way we click. If we sleep together great, if we fall asleep watching something we’re both super into, also great. And that’s the way I prefer it.

I had originally been thinking about making a separate post about the friends or partners thing, but I don’t know that I feel the need at this point. I may revisit it, we’ll see. But this post has laid out a large swath of how I’ve come to relate to and function within the concept of relationship structures. This is a complex topic, with lots of moving parts that evolve both along the lines of how my understanding of my own needs evolves, and how my relation to my partners’ needs evolves, and the intersections I find in those things. I have no doubt that some aspect of this will show up again. For now, this is who I am, and this is how I do polyam.