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POLYAMORY:

[theory] My Top Questions About Dealing With Multiple Lovers

I wrote this in early 2011. The comments on the online version are especially good -- lots of viewpoints and resources shared. Sometimes my commenters just blow me away.

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My Top Questions About Dealing With Multiple Lovers

I have a lot more theoretical exposure to polyamory than personal experience, but I've been gaining more personal experience over the last year. It's often interesting, sometimes painful.

Some recent experiences are making me think I am not nearly as smart or as on top of my emotions as I like to believe I am. I remind myself that I have to be willing to acknowledge when I don't know what I'm thinking, but that's harder than it looks... I don't always take enough time to understand my feelings before speaking or acting.

Still. Through the stupid mistakes and the understandable ones, though my own failures to be sensitive and the little heartbreaks I've sustained, I've been learning.

One thing I think I've figured out is what I want: I want a number of different relationships that are ongoing, and one or two relationships that are primary, or especially committed. Ideally, in fact, I'd love to eventually have a permanent relationship with a primary polyamorous partner in which we have kids with each other, live together most of the time, etc, but are still polyamorous. That would be a while in the future, though -- for now, it's important to me to not feel as though my partners expect me to settle down or stay in one place or anything like that. It seems like any relationship I develop, even during this relatively early time in my life, could become a child-rearing relationship eventually -- like, years from now -- but if it does, I doubt I'd want to make it monogamous.

I recognize that we don't always get our ideal world. In fact, we usually don't. Although polyamory is a high priority for me, it may be something I eventually compromise on, given that the majority of people in this world identify as monogamous.

Keeping all that in mind, my preference for polyamory presents some challenges, and questions that I worry about. Such as:

1. What are my responsibilities towards my partners' other partners? A lot of poly people will tell you that if you get into a relationship with, say, a married polyamorous man, then you must also expect to interact with his spouse. In other words, don't assume that your relationship means you only interact with one half of a couple. I'm totally fine with this, but on occasion I've felt like I was getting sucked into the couple's problems, or like I was expected to have no individual relationship with my partner -- that I always had to go through his primary partner.

Yes, it is certainly my responsibility to communicate with my partners' other partners and to be friendly with them. But I need to set boundaries on that too -- just dating a poly guy

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