Poly Chicago

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of bandwidth, by which I mean how much total space we have to devote to our partners. It’s such a common thing in the Poly world for us to want to take on a new partner – without realizing that we don’t actually have space to give them in a way that’s fair to them or to our existing partners. It’s something I’ve been guilty of myself.

At any rate, I’m again in the category of ‘things I wish I’d written but didn’t,’ because I was linked today to this article that touches on a lot of these ideas. It was actually posted almost a year ago, so perhaps you’ve seen it, but it’s new to me so I thought I’d share. 🙂

‘8 Things to Consider in Polyamorous Dating Before Committing to Another Partner’

Today, above all else, I’m thankful for family.

Family means something different to me than it did a few years ago. But I think it’s the same basic premise we all strive for: the people who have been through life with you, who know you all the way down to your flaws, and who will never stop loving you anyway. Blood relatives could be family (they certainly get a head start), but for me it’s not automatic. Most of my blood relatives don’t really know me, either because they haven’t really tried or they’ve refused to see and accept who I am.

So I’m spending today with my real family. And it’s as full and deep as I could ever want family to be. Caroline and Adam and our kids, of course, and also seven other roommates and dear friends. These are the people who go through life with me, and who love me and who I love no matter what. It’s not quite my whole family – my girlfriend and her husband can’t be here today, and I’ll miss them. But we’ll have a full, spirited house, every bit in the spirit of this holiday. I’m so, so thankful for that.

I hope you’re celebrating this holiday with your family too, whatever that means to you. And if for you that means it’s hard, I hope you can find the strength and love to get yourself through, however you need that to happen.

Happy Thanksgiving. ❤

Today I was reading back through some of our old posts on this website and came across this one that Caroline wrote a few years back: “A simple, boring, Halloween story.” It made me smile.

I haven’t written a full post here since February of 2014, and that’s not a coincidence. In March of 2014 two things dramatically changed our family: first, we made an offer on a house that would eventually be home to an eight-bedroom intentional community. And second, I began contemplating, and then in short order planning, a gender transition. Within four more months I would be on hormones, Caroline would be pregnant, we would be beginning to build out our basement (three bedrooms and a bathroom, done ourselves), and we would frankly be diving into a two-and-a-half year utter whirlwind.

But today I was lying on my couch reading, and Caroline’s story made me smile. Here was my favorite part:

It’s such a simple story: a family having a night together in preparation for Halloween…. But I wanted to write it because I remember when we first became poly not ever seeing stories like this and I was thirsty for them. I needed to know that we weren’t crazy and that this could be Normal. Simple. Boring.

The fact is that it wouldn’t have been all that different if we weren’t poly. Maybe it would have been a close friend instead of a boyfriend. Maybe it would have just been us and been slightly more harried. Maybe there just wouldn’t have been any spooky noises when the lights went out. But – hey – for me, I hope more and more of my family holidays look like this in the future. Fuller, more complete, closer to my own personal ideal of a home.

It’s been three years since that story, and Caroline’s boyfriend is still here. He’s also become our roommate and a third full-fledged parent to our now two children. He walks the older one to school, knows his teacher, knows the parents of his friends, and often cares for both kids single-handedly during the day. Our one-and-a-half year old said ‘Adam’ months before he said ‘Mama’ – and he’s got two of those.

Meanwhile our family has grown in other ways, too. We have five other roommates besides Adam, who have varying depths of relationships with us and with our children. I have a girlfriend of two years who doesn’t live with us, but when I talk about my family I mean her and her husband and her dogs, too. Our boring nights often now involve seven or eight people at the dinner table, our boring mornings catching up with an overflowing family over coffee in the kitchen. A family trip to the zoo might require two cars, or three, and when my son gets a school assignment to write about his family he writes pages. And while our Google calendar might have been a bit overwhelming at first, it’s become a mundane part of the fabric of our lives.

These past few years our lives have been liberally seasoned with changes very far from common experience. But I smiled when I read Caroline’s post because, as we’ve begun to settle down into our new normal, it looks a lot like what she described all that time ago. People may not be able to identify our relationships when our family walks down the street (as Adam once pointed out, “I bet nobody gets it right”). But we’re still getting the kids to school, getting dinner on the table, taking casual date nights with settled partners, and doing everything else that’s part of a normal, simple, boring family life. We’re just doing it our way, a way that for us is “fuller, more complete,” and very much our ideal of a home.

We’re not perfect. We struggle, and sometimes we struggle hard to make this work. But we’re also doing it. We’re living proof that Poly really can look this way. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

This time just me, at the queer women’s website Autostraddle.com. They’re doing a series about polyamory (which is really cool btw – I’m part three and parts one and two were also geat). But we chatted about relationship anarchy, intentional living, family, and all kinds of stuff. Check it out!

Well, it’s been a long time since posting, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing anything!  Our monthly Poly Cocktails event is growing steadily in popularity, and my loved ones and I started going on (gasp!) publicized interviews!

I’m sure I will quickly become overdue on writing the blog article I should one day write about how intimidating a prospect it is to lay yourself out there publicly, not to mention the total vulnerability of publicly outing yourself to the mercy of internet commentaries.  But that said, we did it!  And, so far, I am pretty fucking proud of us (if I do say so myself).

The original intention was for this to be a one-off five minute blurb, but I think (as we ALL come to realize eventually) polyamory became way to big, deep, and juicy of a topic for an interviewer to encapsulate in just five minutes, and so our (amazing and respectful) interviewer decided to break it up into a series of multiple segments.

I’ll leave the links here as they come online.

Enjoy!!

Asking for a Friend: So you have a wife and a boyfriend…

Asking for a Friend: Is polyamory just about having more sex?

Asking for a Friend: How do friends and family react to polyamory?

Asking for a Friend: Do your kids know you’re polyamorous?

If you are reading this, then you are no doubt a fellow breakup warrior. A person who has fought, loved, and lost like the many souls who have given their vulnerable hearts to another person only to have them smashed, crushed, or ___________(insert other past tense verb of devastating character).

As the Neil Sedaka song says, “Breaking up is hard to do”. There is little about ending a particularly meaningful relationship with someone that isn’t. From dividing up friends, to separating your stuff; even deciding who gets which hangout spots or trying to keep distance between one another while the dust settles.

While I grant that the initiator’s job is difficult, I would like to fall in line with my fellow dump-ees for this particular post, but not in the way you would suspect.

No, if I wanted to bloviate about heartache, I could do it on my Xanga. Rather, I want to discuss what happens after that.

The truth is that once the breakup happens, it’s over. One or both parties have decided that the relationship is broken and want to move on. Words are exchanged, feelings are felt, and the die is cast. But inevitably, however long the conversation lasts, one person closes out their tab, the other leaves cash to dash out, and it’s done.

Dump-ees will recognize this period as the time when disbelief and delusion set in.

“I can get them back,” you say.

“There is still a chance,” you agree.

So begins in your mind the creation of a Rube Goldberg-ian contraption of mechanisms and methods to alter the mind of your former partner, to shift opinion, to make time reverse, to get back together. Trust me when I say this,

“It’s over honey.”

The best medicine at this point in time is to realize that whatever you had with this other person is done. Accept it because you have bigger problems.

“WHAT?” You ask.

Yep, there is a truth to breakups that I have only found through experience. You are broken up, separated from your partner, but that still implies 50% of that relationship goes on. That other part is you.

It is a terrible truth, but an inevitable one. Not only do you have to contend with the trouble of losing someone you love, but you also have to let go of the person you were when you were with them.There are no more mid-day chat sessions, no more 10pm pillow juggling acts, no more drunken escapades to parts unknown. Not as a couple, not as an item.

Humans are, by nature’s design, social creatures. We rely on each other for our survival in matters both practical and emotional. In forming those bonds, we alter ourselves to fit more harmoniously to the people we associate with. It is a natural tendency for our species to gravitate towards the people we like and emulate or blatantly copy the things we admire in others.

Goyte – Now Your Just Somebody that I Used to Know

I absolutely love Goyte’s Official Video of ‘Somebody that I used to know’ when illustrating this point. Like make-up that we cover ourselves with to fit in the frame, we alter what we are to become something new. If you have ever heard the phrase, “You guys look like a couple.” you know exactly what I am referring to.

Adversely, when a break-up happens, that same make-up starts to shed off our skin, and we slough off our past persona to become another person. At the final frame of the video, the girl no longer belongs. She has officially broken up with not only our friend Goyte, but also the image of the two of them as a couple.

They no longer fit.

For my part, these are the hardest things to let go of. While I may grasp the concept that the relationship is finished in my head, my heart will not relinquish the feeling of being together.

There is a lyric in the song that I LOVE to read.

But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember

“So! Mr.Perceptive.” You might ask, “I am definitely in it right now. I feel like I am going to die without this other person in my life because I can’t let go of what is in the past. What the hell do I do with me to get rid of this damn make-up?!?”

First, there is an awesome, definitive work on this subject by Greg Behrendt and Amiira Ruotola‑Behrendt called,“It’s Called a Break-up Because it’s Broken.”

Get this book.

Get this book. Like now, go. I’m not even joking.

Second, and I want to lead by example in this case; Start working out who you are without them. Imagine yourself as a blank canvas, an empty screen, a new sheet of freshly milled paper.

At this point in time, there are no wrong answers. AND, since you have extra time (and money!) to experiment with, there is no shame in getting it wrong or taking a long time to work things out as to who you want to be moving forward.

If there is one thing that I have learned, it’s that almost everyone has a story to share about breakups. With the exception of my parents, every other person I have sobbed to has had a reciprocal experience to share. Luckily, I was able to lean into those confessions and plead my own grievances. I vented, got a week off from work, and spent the next 7 days on ME.

I have taken up music again, lost weight, started playing sports again, grown a beard, let go of my glasses, changed my diet, lost hobbies, gained hobbies, picked up too many books, read too many books, and re-discovered how wonderful all the people in my life are.

So far, here is what I have concluded:

1. I am stronger than I realized.
2. I am sexier than I realized.
3. I am smarter than I realized.
4. I am worthy of the love, care, and attention that other’s bestow on me.

Admittedly, the idea of finding yourself is a process, and every day is a struggle to move forward while you also fight the urge to slide backwards into the familiar. ESPECIALLY when that person you were was SO right and it just worked in the kind of effortless, jovial, personal way that artists describe in movies and music.

Ultimately, your goal is to let your old self become somebody that you used to know. No doubt, breaking up is hard to do. And it is even more so when you have to do it twice. But believe me when I say this; the choices you make to change yourself FOR YOURSELF will have a lasting effect on not only others’ perceptions of you, but your perception of you.

As Samara O’Shea says in ‘Loves me…Not’, the only person you can ever be sure to wake up next to is you, so you had better make sure you like that person. Breakups give you the opportunity and space to seek and find clarity of self. Take advantage of this and the kindness of others as you determine who that person is.

You won’t regret it.