Is it always hard?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts will be found at www.polymeansmany.com from tomorrow. This month, our topic is "negotiation".

Here are how some recent negotiations with my partners have gone:

• My husband wanted to travel to stay with his girlfriend overnight, but I didn't want to look after our daughter on my own during the weekend. Before they fixed their date, I checked with my boyfriend, and he was happy to shift our weekly date to keep me company and give me another set of hands with the childcare.
• My boyfriend and I have had a date roughly every week for more than three years now. Recently, he's been extremely stressed and busy with work, and it's left him with less time to see his primary partner, so he's asked if he could cancel a couple of them. He's been incredibly flexible with me in the past, so I'm only too happy to show him the same understanding.

It seems to be a truth, universally acknowledged, that polyamorous relationships require a lot of negotiating, and this will be hard work. But I've found that the negotiating has been so easy, I've hardly noticed it happening. My current relationships haven't needed any more communication or negotiation than the monogamous relationships I used to have, and they're certainly less work.

I suspect this is partly because we're all getting what we want from the respective relationships, so our negotiating is always tweaking, rather than pushing against the foundations. If I wanted more than a weekly date with my boyfriend, for example, and wanted to negotiate for more, then I expect I'd be less willing to lose one of them. If I wanted my husband to spend more time at home, then we'd have bigger issues than me wanting to find some company.

But mostly, what makes these negotiations so painless for me is that they've both been such excellent caretakers of my heart that I don't question their motivations. By now, they've given me years of being kind, flexible and understanding, so if I ask something of them, I know that they want to say "yes", even if they don't.

Which is another way of saying that the hard work was finished a long time ago.