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!

This might be my favorite article I’ve ever seen about polyamory. It probably won’t be everyone’s flavor (it ranges toward relationship anarchy) but it almost perfectly describes how I approach my relationships.

I promise I have a real blog post in the works; in the meantime here’s another one I WISH I’d thought to write. 🙂

No, You Don’t Need Rules For Polyamory

Thanks to Sex For Smart People for the link!

Today I had one of those moments when I saw a post that I wish I’d written myself – but I didn’t. So I’m popping on here just to share it. 🙂 Enjoy!

Why Are You Poly People Always Yammering About Polyamory?

Lots of the Poly blogs I follow are written by people who are reasonably “settled” into their Poly lives – living in a triad, say, or otherwise in relationships that, while technically open, seem to satisfy everyone involved.

That doesn’t really describe me. Not that I’m not happy where I am. I’m certainly happy enough that I’m not interested in another partner coming in and changing my life around unless they meet incredibly high standards. But I don’t feel settled in quite the same way.

From time to time someone will ask me what I want my Poly life to eventually look like, or what I’m looking for in a prospective partner. When I was new to this I thought I had answers to these questions, but the longer I consider myself Poly, the more I realize the true answer to this question is that I don’t know. Of course I have interests. But in many cases I can see many different ways they could play out:

–I do know I’m interested in living communally. But what does it look like? Maybe with lovers, maybe with friends, maybe in one big house, maybe in a larger community, maybe revolving around work, maybe not.

–I’m interested in partners who eventually consider their family and mine to be the same thing, and I’m interested in partners who want a fun fling on the side and with whom we never integrate into each others’ lives.

–I’m interested in relationships that are sexual but not romantic, in relationships that are romantic but not sexual, and in relationships that are both.

–I’m interested in relationships that involve exploring any number of different areas sexually, but no one is a must-have.

–I’m interested in being part of a triad or quad and I also think that sounds too exhausting and I’d rather keep things more fluid.

The reason I say I don’t know what I want isn’t because I don’t know things that I want. It’s because there are so many ways I can see myself being happy. And what I really want is to allow people to come into my life, to love them for who they are, and to build a relationship and a life around what makes sense for all of us.

I don’t know when I’ll feel “settled,” though I suspect I will one day. But I’m pretty sure that when I do feel that way, it will be in a situation that I’m not capable of predicting here in 2013.

If you hang out with a group of Polys long enough, one topic that will come up is the idea of dating people who don’t self-identify as Poly (but who, presumably, are okay with it if their partner does). There are some Poly people who have had success with this, just as there are some Poly people who have had success with just about everything, ha. But most of us will agree it’s a precarious proposition.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because it’s come up with three separate friends of mine just in the past couple of weeks. The script all three have followed has been roughly this: they start dating a monogamous person, being very open about being Poly; the Mono feels okay about this and the relationship progresses; then, once things have deepened, the Mono realizes that they actually aren’t as okay with this as they once thought and it turns into a mess.

It’s hard to blame anybody involved. There was honesty at every stage – the Poly person was open about who they were, and the Mono (presumably) genuinely thought they were okay with the idea at first. And this sort of experience is why a lot of more experienced Polys swear they won’t date other people unless they self-define as polyamorous as well. I’ve made statements to that effect myself.

The place this becomes challenging for me is that, when I became polyamorous, I didn’t want to open myself up to new relationship possibilities just within the confines of a monthly Meetup. And indeed, I’ve had success opening myself up in general; I’ve built much closer friendships with co-workers, for example, and two of my amazing non-sexual Poly partners are self-defined monogamists. Of course, neither has yet initiated a serious monogamous relationship with someone else, and yes, I’m nervous about what will happen to our relationships when they eventually do.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that all three of the friends I described are fairly new to the Poly realm themselves. I suspect that a more experienced Poly would be better positioned for this situation, first because they would be more likely to try and sniff out a situation that could later turn ugly, and second because they would have better communication tools to help prevent it from turning this direction once they’ve dived in. But of course, nobody is immune.

What’s a Poly to do, except play each situation by ear, use our best judgment, and hope for the best? That’s all we can do in any relationship anyway, right?

A related thought: there’s a close cousin to Non-Poly Dating (TM), which is of course New-Poly Dating (TM). This one’s been on my mind too, for a much more personal reason. I’ve had a couple of relationships now with people who were new to Poly – one of which was pretty intense – which ended with my getting burned largely due to the partner’s inexperience. In one case she and her husband decided that our relationship needed to be vetoed for the sake of theirs; in another, a partner decided she had gotten into Poly relationships too hastily and needed to retreat. In both cases it felt like the other person was so caught up in the experience of Poly and its effect on them that they didn’t stop to consider that these sorts of decisions would have an effect on me as well. Unsurprisingly, these days I’m a bit wary of dating new Polys.

But of course, we also shouldn’t necessarily eliminate an entire category of people from our consideration just because of a past bad experience. We’d quickly run out of potential partners altogether. After all, I’ve had bad experiences with legitimately Poly people, too (And if I’m not dating Polys, non-Polys, or borderline Polys, that doesn’t leave much). But it is something to be aware of. Polyamory being what it is, the experience our partners have had with it – and perhaps more importantly, their attitude towards it – is going to have a pretty big effect on our lives.