Metamours and family

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 "relationships with metamours"

I've written on this topic before. Since writing that post nearly two years ago about my fear of extending our nuclear family with the meta connections of polyamory, most of those connections have collapsed. Back then, I was concerned about the effect on Small, but she is fine. This time, I'm more selfishly thinking of myself. (I can do that sometimes, right?)

Although that post was about 'chosen family', I didn't choose any of my metamours - my partners did. With only trivial exceptions, I've always been delighted by their choices. Despite some bad past experiences, metamours, semi-metamours (metafuckbuddies?) and potential metamours are still one of my favourite things about poly. I want my partners to keep dating, because I want to meet their dates! If they find someone they want to be around, the chances are that I'll want their company too. Everyone wins!

But I'm not a part of their relationships, and I don't get a vote in how they are conducted, or how long they last. They are relationships of choice, but not mine.

That's not to say that metamours can't become friends or even family in their own right, but I suspect it happens less often than we hope. When the supporting meta-ness of the relationship has gone, there will at least be change, and what comes out the other side won't be like the metamour relationship you started with. If there are sides to be taken, the chances are you won't be on theirs any more. People that I once felt intimately close to have ended up feeling like near strangers, and none of it was in my control.

The relationship between metamours and the way that this builds poly networks or 'polycules', is seductive. It is so tempting to call these connections family far far earlier than the connections deserve. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one to fall into this trap. Most of the time, these connections feel stronger than they are. One crucial difference between biological family and chosen family is, I think, that one is opt-out, and the other is opt-in. To put it another way, you don't need a reason to include your parents or siblings in your family, but if you cut one or more of them out, you probably had a damn good reason for doing so. Relationships that started for a reason, on the other hand, are more vulnerable to change. These relationships of choice can be stronger, but the former is more plastic. The bonds between metamours can appear deceptively like family relationships (because you didn't choose them), but like your sister's partner or your uncle's new spouse, they are as brittle as romantic relationships themselves.

This is not to say that we don't believe in the 'poly tribe' any more, or that we don't think that metamours can become family. We do. We're just more cautious about whom we include. Marge Piercy's vicious poem A Snarl For Loose Friends ends with the lines 'Don't count your friends by their buttons until you have seen them pushed a few times' and I think that's good advice for anyone you want to rely on. My relationships with my partners and their meta-relationship with each other have all seen multiple buttons pushed, and we're still standing. Our relationships have been proven strong, and so we feel safe to call each other family.

Poly people talk about communication a lot. But we've learned from past experiences, and now we trust the results of this button-pushing more than what is said. That's not just because they may be unreliable, but because sadly, relationships don't succeed just because we want them to.

Small is old enough now to talk about her long term memories. She talks about my boyfriend when he isn't here, as she does with the rest of her family. When she was with my husband's girlfriend this weekend, she asked about a trip they took last Autumn, several visits ago. If someone has stuck around, through thick and thin, even when things got hard, then they'll be around long enough for her to develop a real connection with them.

Me? I'm cautious, but still hopeful. I've seen it fail, but I've seen it work, and I'm trying to learn from that. The two men in my life have loved each other as well as me for years now. No matter what else we might have got wrong, this bit we've got spectacularly right.

The relevance of significance

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 "relationship significance"

"I can't date another married woman*. I just can't," he said to me when we'd been, well, dating for a few weeks**.

This wasn't him breaking it off. He just didn't want to be my "boyfriend", he told me and I understood.

I really didn't mind. I was enjoying our whateveritwas, and had no complaints about the actual relationship, so to quibble over the terms he used to describe it, or to demand a greater demonstration of our relationship's significance through vocabulary, seemed pointless. We carried on "not dating", and I carried on being happy.

A month, or maybe two, later, he broke a brief moment of silence in the car. "Are you my girlfriend?" he asked me, with a smile that could almost have been shy. "Yes," I told him, but really, I meant "duh!" And that was the end of that.

I'm pretty sure that had I not been happy, and had our time together been less than wonderful, that lack of declared significance would have gnawed at me. Had he not been doing everything I wanted from a boyfriend, I expect I would have been stung by not not feeling able to use the word.

So I think there is a distinction between how we mark our relationships' significance and how significant they actually are, and I know which one is more important to my happiness. I won't deny that I get real pleasure from acknowledging the significance of my two relationships. I remember the first time I said "my husband" after the wedding, and realised that with that one word, people I didn't know would automatically consider him my family, my next of kin and my partner for life. It's a powerful shorthand. Similarly, when I say "my boyfriend" people know that I'm not just a married woman with a disposable bit on the side; he's valued and significant to me.

But if the words don't get used, those things are still true. It's a bit like saying "I love you" - I like to tell them, but I don't only love them when I'm saying it. My boyfriend and I recently celebrated four years of loving each other, and my husband and I will soon celebrate ten, but it isn't the celebrations that give these relationships their significance to me. It's just a delightful bonus.

In fact, a relationship that is marked with more significance than it deserves can be profoundly unsettling. Someone telling you that they love you, but not demonstrating it. Someone calling you their partner to other people, but not returning your calls. Someone who declares a level of commitment that they just aren't upholding.

Actions speak loader than words, but the right words are still sweet.

 

*He got over it.
**Whether we knew it or not.

Stars, planets and people I love

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 "What being poly has taught me"

I was driving home from a weekend away with my husband next to me and our daughter in the back of the car. Unusually, we'd spent most of the weekend apart - she with family, and the two of us with various respective friends. At two and a half, her independence surprises and impresses me; we both missed her far more than she missed us.

I drove north along the motorway, back home to the house we share, and we listened to Poetry Please on the car radio. The last poem was Stars and Planets, by Norman Maccaig, and I listened to the line describing our Earth as 'This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters' and was struck even harder by how precious these two people are to me. How precious and unlikely this family, bundled up together in my little car, is. I love them so much that sometimes I can barely think of anything else.

Polyamory has taught me that as precious and surprising as this love is, there is room for more. I may live with my daughter and my husband, but my boyfriend, no matter what, will always have a seat at our table. My three great loves, and me, 'Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters'. Maybe one day there will be five, or more of us. I like thinking about that.

I would not pretend that polyamory has always made our lives better. People are not always what they seem, and the world is unpredictable. Those who say they love you can do hurtful things because you let them get so close. All of us have been burned in one way or another by opening ourselves up.

We let people in more carefully these days, but we still let people in.

Stars and Planets, by Norman MacCaig

Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.

They seem so twinkle-still, but they never cease
Inventing new spaces and huge explosions
And migrating in mathematical tribes over
The steppes of space at their outrageous ease.

It's hard to think that the earth is one –
This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters
Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters,
Attended only by the loveless moon.

From The Poems of Norman McCaig

Other people's decisions

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 "Decisions"

The more people you date, and the more people they date, and the more complicated your wider relationship network gets, the more likely it is that a decision you make will resonate somewhere down the line and affect someone who had no input into it at all.

You could take a new shift pattern at work, which means you can no longer keep a scheduled date night with a partner, which means you need to reschedule, which could mean that your metamour has to alter plans to fit in with the new status quo. Or you could get a totally new job, so you and your partner decide to move to another city, which could mean that their partners find themselves living closer or further away. Or you could decide to have a child with one of your partners, which will totally change the structure of all your other relationships, and radically alter the time and space you have available.

And this gets more complicated when you're factoring in caring for children. It is almost impossible for my husband or me to make a decision about how we spend our time without it affecting the other. I can't go away for the weekend without either taking my daughter, taking my husband and my daughter, or leaving her with him, none of which can be done without his agreement, and none of which can be done without affecting how he spends his weekend. And how the two of us resolve this might then affect the time and space left for his other relationships. Complicated.

Two important things make this easier:

The first is kindness. I am grateful for the reassuring confidence I have that none of us will make any of these decisions without at least trying to be kind to each other, and to those other people in our network who could end up affected by our decisions. The secondary nature of my relationship with my boyfriend does mean that sometimes we make unilateral decisions about our lives that affect the other (I got pregnant, he's spent a few big chunks of time abroad) but being kind and understanding from both directions has made this as gentle as possible. If my husband wants to invite a girlfriend over for the weekend, he doesn't do this without being sure that I'm happy to spend that time with her too, which means that she will know that she is welcome, and I will feel more comfortable asking for him to agree to some of my plans another time. And, because he is kind, he's often offering to put himself out before I've even asked.

But equally important to kindness is the ability to stand up for ourselves if something is happening that we don't like. We check in with each other often, but this would be no good if we couldn't rely on each other to be honest about unhappiness or discomfort. This might mean asking for more or less time alone, or more or less time with a metamour. It might even mean ending a relationship (or even asking your partner to end a relationship) because decisions have been made that you just can't be happy with. Being kind and generous to your partners and metamours is no good if you aren't being kind and generous to yourself.

What I'm really arguing for is a balance between the two: thinking of your own needs, and thinking of other people's. Don't make decisions without considering the consequences for other people, but don't go along with anything that hurts you just to avoid conflict or keep other people happy. Everyone is important. When making decisions that affect other people's lives, think of how it will affect you, think of how it will affect other people. Check-in often to make sure that everyone is happy, and answer honestly and kindly when people check-in with you. Be kind to each other, and kind to yourself.

Flexible festivities

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 "Happy Holidays!"

I think Christmas is a bit like monogamy - it feels non-optional, fixed and traditional, but it's ubiquitousness is really just a result of social conventions that can be taken to pieces and reconstructed any way you like. For some, the day has religious significance, and for some it's more about raucous drinking and indulgent eating. And for some it is both, of course. You don't have to set a Christmas pudding on fire, spend hundreds of pounds on presents or festoon your house in tinsel any more than you have to stick to one partner at a time. These things are all negotiable, even though society does its best to convince us that they are not.

But good God does society do its best to make you feel that you are missing out when you do. I've been told that I can't really love my husband if I want to see my boyfriend as well. I've been told that my daughter will grow up resentful and confused by the lack of a monogamous bond between her parents. People who don't have big, happy families are made to feel lonely because they are constantly being told how much they are missing out on. And people I know who've decided to break with their families' traditions and do something different over the holiday period have been made to feel that they've let people down. One of my siblings suggested off-handedly to our mum that her partner and children might like to go abroad for Christmas, but the resulting wave of guilt soon persuaded her to stick to the status quo. (And to be honest, I was glad, because I didn't want them to go either.) And, of course, polyamory creates yet further complications that can make doing what you want even harder. The more entangled we are in other people's lives and other people's wishes, the more complicated and fraught it can be to do our own thing.

If you've run into, or are likely to run into any of this, I obviously can't tell you how to fix it. The only general advice I have is to stay flexible. Remember that the whole holiday season is arbitrary, and so find places where you can bend to make things easier. Perhaps getting everyone you want together for December 25th is impossible, but you can treat it as a movable feast, and organise it for another day. Perhaps you could go for something close to our solution, which is to use Christmas Day as a biological family get together, and New Year's Eve for the other important people in our lives.

Things can be complicated. In previous years, our Christmas/New Year's plans have become very complicated indeed. But as this is traditionally the season for giving thanks, I do try to be thankful for these complications. Without them, I wouldn't be spending this season surrounded by people I love.

Your future needs.

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 "meeting your needs".

I've always been pretty certain that I wanted to have children, and luckily for me, so has my husband. It was one of the things we checked out about each other in the very early days, when we were giddy with the possibility of love.

What if he'd told me he never wanted to have children? If he didn't even like children? I'm pretty sure I would have walked away. Even if I'd managed to find another partner with whom I could co-parent whilst still being involved with him, the idea of having a passionate relationship with someone who doesn't want to be a part of my family life sounds painful, let alone unsustainable. And I don't think that I could have coped with keeping the distance between us necessary for me to be able to find that co-parent. Back then, I didn't love him, but I could see that I would fall for him, hard, if we kept seeing each other. Far better to break it off straight away, to prevent serious heartbreak.

I asked my husband what he'd have done had I told him that I never wanted to be a parent. He said he'd have kept our relationship going anyway, hoping that either he could change my mind or become satisfied without children, and it would have ended badly.

Which is honest.

In situations like this, it isn't one partner's needs vs. another's, it's your needs vs. your needs. It's about what you want *now* vs. what you will want later. Which is probably harder than my needs vs. your needs, because you can't have a conversation with your future self, and any compromises you make will only hurt you later on.

But now, I think that the stability of my marriage gives us an enormous privilege in making these kinds of decisions. We wouldn't pursue a relationship with anyone who didn't like children (and our child in particular), for example, but the fact that we both have our needs met by each other gives us the strength to say "no" to things that won't work for our family. If you're lonely, or in need of support, or just going through some tough times, I can see that it isn't so easy to turn down someone who can give you what you need right now because they will get in the way of what you need at some point in the future.

And sometimes the situation is reversed - when Small was tiny, my relationship with my boyfriend changed dramatically, and he had to cope with not getting some of the things he wanted from me for quite a while. I'm pretty sure I wasn't meeting his needs, or giving him anything like the attention he wanted from me (unless that attention was to talk about my baby and how tired I was, and to ask for food - he got plenty of that). His choice was to walk away because I wasn't meeting his needs, or to put his own needs aside for a while because he wanted our relationship to exist in the long term. And luckily for me, my boyfriend was in a position where he was happy and strong enough (not to mention happy to be a part of my daughter's life, and delighted to see me so happy) to wait for his needs to be met.

So I'm not saying that my answer to the hypothetical question above is the "right" one, because the position I was in at the time was pretty strong: I had a stable job, good health, and the emotional strength to take the a longer-term view. Plus, it's only a hypothetical, so I can't be sure that the real me would have been quite so pragmatic. Saying "no" to something that will hurt you down the line is hard, as is saying "yes" to something that is hurting you now. But whoever you are, you deserve to be happy, so if you can, don't give up on what you want. You future self will thank you.

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.

Quality time

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 can be found at www.polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "time".

I've written before about how precious my time with my boyfriend is. Things are different with my husband. We don't lack for time together, but having a child really doesn't leave much space for the sort of "couple time" we used to be able to have almost any time we wanted - the sort of quality time my boyfriend and I have scheduled into our calendar every week. It's fairly easy for my husband and I to get alone time with other people (he stays in, I go out for a date with my boyfriend; another night, and I'm the one at home) but together is not so easy.

Once we've all had dinner, and Small is asleep, there isn't much time left before one or both of us is ready for bed ourselves, and sometimes one of us has to use that time to work. Sitting down for a relaxed meal, just the two of us, is rare. Watching a film means staying up late and losing out on precious sleep. Going out alone together to find requires planning, and use of our extra-nuclear family as babysitters.

I notice similar differences in my daughter's relationships. She and I spend so much time together, most of it is pretty mundane: shopping, cooking, her playing beside me as I get housework or work emails done, bath-time. When she gets the chance to spend time with other adults, or her older cousins, she revels in the intensity of these short bursts of dedicated attention, and the novelty of the connection. After spending the whole day with her, I couldn't keep that up.

My boyfriend and I always have huge amounts to catch up on when we see each other. We keep making plans to watch a film, or even just an episode of something, but we usually have too much to talk about. We sit, eat a meal, hold hands over the table. It's quality time, and as we don't share a home or a domestic life, we're able to make that pretty much all we have.

But I sort of resist the idea that this more intense, focused time is somehow of better quality than the drip drip of domesticity. Just as I can't keep up the energy to play at full-intensity with my daughter all the time, as my boyfriend or other family does with her, they don't get to walk to the shops each time with a fun little girl who joins in when I sing a familiar song, who wants to point out the colours of the cars and who thinks that seeing a passing dog is as exciting as a trip to the zoo. They might miss the particular moment when she experiments with new words and sentences, and her language suddenly takes a leap forward. They don't get naptime snuggles, or rushing out to look for snails after the rain. These lovely, mundane moments are paid for by the weight of time we spend together. The quantity creates this particular quality.

My husband and I spend so much time together that there is rarely much build up of things we want to say. Although we talk all the time, our conversation is more relaxed, less urgent, maybe even optional. Sometimes, once Small is asleep, we find ourselves hitting a familiar rhythm without much negotiation: putting away the toys, loading up the washing machine, pyjamas, takeaway, slumping against each other on the sofa, watching another episode of something. It takes a lot of time together to create quality time like that.

But what about the children?

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 can be found at www.polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "assumptions".

I've been subjected to more insults because I am non-monogamous than because I am bisexual. I even found more acceptance and understanding when I was a woman exclusively dating other women. This is clearly not because the UK is somehow more polyphobic than it is homophobic, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that I'm now a parent, and becoming a parent unlocks a whole new level of public scrutiny. The belief that children need one mother and one father was, after all, key to recent debates surrounding marriage equality, and a study of attitudes towards consensually non-monogamous romantic relationships unsurprisingly found that most people associate monogamy with better parenting and a more stable family life.

The assumption is that although it may be one thing to be non-monogamous without children, if you decide to start a family, it's really time to put all that aside and just be normal, for the sake of the children.

With that in mind, my theory about the spectrum of acceptance of alternative lifestyles runs broadly along these lines:

1. Your way of life is immoral and you disgust me (no acceptance).
2. What consenting adults do behind closed doors is okay, but don't rub my nose in it in public.
3. I have no problem with you or your way of life, but I think that all children need one mother and one father, so you shouldn't ever have children.
4. How you live, who you are or what you have chosen may or may not be for me, but it shouldn't prevent you from the same range of possible participation in society that everyone else has (full acceptance).

So when I was more visibly not heterosexual, the people around me might have only been at "level 3" acceptance, but I wouldn't have noticed. But it's harder to avoid now, because everyone has an opinion about how to parent children.

This all means that damaging assumptions about any lifestyle outside of the heteromonoganormative mould becomes much more obvious when parenting is thrown into the mix. People who will have found you simply misguided, or maybe even fascinatingly non-conformist, will flip into judging you as immoral, cruel or negligent.

Elizabeth Sheff has conducted some of the most extensive research into polyamorous parenting so far, and one of her interesting findings is that far from being confused or by their non-traditional families, children aged 5-8 with three or more parents barely seem to even notice. Children are pretty self-centred, and so how the adults in their life relate to each other isn't particularly important to them. "A 6-year-old may not think of someone as mommy's girlfriend, but think of that person as 'the one who brings Legos' or 'the one who takes me out to ice cream," Sheff explains. To think about it another way, if you had close relationships as a child with non-parental members of your biological family, how much thought did you give to the fact that your uncle was your mother's brother, or your grandmother was your father's mother? I'm willing to bet that that was far less important and interesting than the time the two of you spent together, and the bond that was personal to you. It doesn't matter if the significant adults in my daughter's life are my blood relatives, my close friends, or my romantic partners, it's going to be a while before she cares about anything other than what those people have to offer her.

The older children Sheff spoke to who were aware that their families were "different", were grateful for "having multiple adults from which to draw upon for help with math homework or to provide transportation". Again, nothing to do with how those multiple adults related to each other. You can imagine a child with a live-in grandparent, or a close family friend living next door saying the same thing. Whether or not we are monogamous is pretty unimportant to our children - it's just a flashpoint that reveals the depth of prejudice against us.

This matters whether or not you have children and whether or not you ever intend to. If people are only accepting of you and your lifestyle because you're not a parent, that basically means that they think you should be denied access to certain types of family life. They think you're a lost cause, but they want to protect the next generation from making your mistake. They want to cut you off from full participation in society. That should bother you, whether you want to access that part of family life or not, because you're not fully accepted - you're just being shielded from their bigotry. Which is why, if you'll forgive me, we should be thinking about what they think about the children.

The ethics of peanut butter sandwiches

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 can be found at www.polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "relationship ethics".

"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same"
George - Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

Reading articles (mostly from a pretty conservative, Christian perspective) about why polyamory is not an ethical choice, the assumption seems to be that ethical rules about sex and relationships are absolute. Albert Mohler fears that accepting polyamory as normal will lead to 'moral confusion' and Matt Slick believes that ethical nonmonogamy is no more possible than 'ethical bank robbing, or ethical embezzling'.

It is moral and good to be sexually faithful to your partner, and therefore having more than one concurrent sexual relationship is immoral, the logic goes. This is literally begging the question, because the immorality of nonmonogamy comes purely from the assumption that monogamy is moral.

I doubt many of us who are happy without monogamy give much time to this line of thinking. Personally, I believe what is ethical within a relationship depends more on the people within it, than assumptions from the world outside it. Making someone a peanut butter sandwich could be a kind and generous act, or an attempt at murder depending on who you're giving it to. Avoiding other sexual or romantic encounters could mean you are making good, moral decisions based on a sound ethical framework, or it could be pointless denial, depending on your partner.

If you and your partner have agreed to a 'don't ask, don't tell' approach to non-monogamy, then telling them about your other sexual partners could be an unfair and intrusive. Whereas if you have a policy of full disclosure and withhold the information, this could be an unethical breach of their trust. And if you agree to keep what happens in the bedroom with one partner private, but agree to tell another partner every detail of every one of your sexual exploits, then you have made at least one promise that you cannot keep, and so are no longer practicing ethical nonmonogamy at all. Some behaviour that a few of my previous partners would have considered unfaithful and hurtful is now happily within the ethical framework of both of my relationships. And, even more trickily, what is and isn't ethical differs even between my two partners. The assumption that non-monogamy is immoral, and therefore relationships that permit it are necessarily unethical is nice and simple, but may or may not be true for your relationship.

The difficulty with accepting a set of ethical rules for relationships wholesale, as the two articles above are asking us to, is that you might be sticking to a rule that doesn't benefit you or your partner, and so is wasted effort. The difficulty with throwing up society's accepted rules is that you've got to figure out what's ethical for each relationship from the beginning, every time.

What Polyamory can learn from Polygamy

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 can be found at www.polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "types of non-monogamy".

(For this post, I will be discussing polygamy, even though it would be more semantically accurate to say 'polygyny'. I know that etymology is against me, but I'm going to stick with cultural usage.)

It would be very easy for me to write about why I think polyamory is a better model for relationships than polygamy. I find the 'one penis policy' to be on shaky moral ground even when the women subjected to it are allowed to be involved with other women. Polygamy generally brings along with it judgemental attitude to sex outside of marriage, and regressive, restrictive gender roles. But there is a lot of criticism fired at polygamists that the polyamorists are attacked with too. And when you come down to it, we have a lot in common.

Yes, I know that polygamy has been used to oppress women, but so has monogamy, and I don't have a problem with people choosing that. In a patriarchal world where the men hold much of the power, just about anything can be used to oppress women (including polyandry, from what little I know of it). When it comes down to it, a polygamous marriage is just a relationship between one man and several women, and there are many polyamorists in that position.

Christine Brown, whose polygamous marriage was the centre of the reality TV show Sister Wives desired a husband with multiple wives so much that she actively sought the role of third wife. She wanted, what polyamorists can probably understand pretty well, to fall in love with a family, not just one person. Vicki Darger, when suffering from debilitating postnatal depression, found that being in a polygamous marriage meant that she had not just her husband, but her 'sister wives' to support her, and help with her other children. Speaking as a woman with two male partners, I'm obviously not going to want a relationship structure like Brown's or Darger's, but I can relate to the reasoning behind their choices.

Have you watched Big Love? I'm surprised at how many polyamorists haven't, and who assume that what polygamists do is very different to us. One scene in the first episode involves the three wives sitting down to organise their calendars, planning which night their shared husband will be spending with which wife and reorganising for birthdays. If you're polyamorous, you might be surprised at how much of their lives you recognise.

I was surprised at how much of it I actually envied. More than two parents for the children, regular family meals around an enormous dining table, shared finances, a communal back garden, and the ability to plan face to face, rather than just through Google Calendar. My husband and I talked about how although we were basically happy as a twosome, maybe someone or some people might come along that changed that. Maybe we'll have the chance to live more communally with secondary partner(s), or maybe one or both of us will find someone who wants to commit to our family as we have committed to each other. And despite being vocal about how my husband and I do practice hierarchical polyamory, it's been watching and reading about polygamy that's given me a less hierarchical model that I think would work for us.

Karaite Jews (for whom polygamy is rare, but permitted), some fundamentalist Mormons and Pakistani law all allow men to take a second wife, but only with the consent of the first wife. This effectively gives the first wife veto power, but not indiscriminately: you can demand that your husband breaks off his courtship of a potential new wife, but you can't demand that he break up with her once they are married. The characters in Big Love vote on whether or not to include a new wife. Although my husband and I have never felt the need to officially grant the other veto power, I would need him to consent if I wanted to bring anyone else into our family as a permanent spouse. A clear difference between our views and polygamous views on relationships is that we don't need marriage or co-primacy with our other relationships to consider them sucecssful, and we're not going to end them just because they aren't heading that way. But if our one of our other relationships did head that way, then that would be the end of hierarchy between the three of us. As Darger says about Val, the third wife in her family, once she was married to their husband, 'she instantly became a full and equal partner.' Equality between the wives is a common requirement in polygamous doctrines.

Perhaps this post doesn't make it sound this way, but I really am blissfully happy with one husband and one boyfriend, and so I'm not looking for either my husband or I to marry again, as much as I am attracted to larger family models. Even if I actively wanted it, it seems unlikely, considering how little space we have left for anyone new. But putting aside my feminist disapproval of polygamy to find out about those who actively chose it has been enlightening for me. I may be happy in my own form of non-monogamy, but other people's choices have a lot to teach me too.

The space that's left

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 can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "the bad stuff".

I was pregnant only a few months after meeting my boyfriend. And if you know me, or have read any of this blog before, you'll know he is not the father. I'd been living with the father, my husband, for 5 years at that point, and we owned property together, not to mention cats and a lifetime of plans for our future.

When I met my husband, I was single, living alone in a rented flat, starting my first professional job, and had no fixed plans beyond the next 12 months. Neither of us had put down roots. The only things restricting our relationship were our desires, and once we were clear that they aligned, we headed pretty quickly towards the things we both wanted out of life and love: cohabitation, marriage, mortgage, cats and children. There was very little in our way.

When I think about the "bad stuff" in polyamory, it's hard for me to pin it down, because I'm really very happy with my lot. I have all the important things that I ever wanted, and plenty that I didn't think I could have. But I think that the more entangled we become, through living our lives, falling in love, putting down roots, making commitments and plans, the less space there is for these new connections that we've opened our hearts to.

Love isn't enough to sustain a relationship. We all know relationships that ended despite the love, not because of the lack of it. To grow, develop and thrive, a relationship needs space.

So not only was the space in my life pretty inflexible when I met my boyfriend, but it was about to become a lot more rigid, as I began to devote my energies to my daughter, even before she was born. The space available for our relationship to grow into was shrinking, and if that hadn't been enough for either of us, that would have been it. And once she was born, he found me retreating from him even further, as my time, energy and focus went into parenting.

These big life decisions - starting a family, moving house, settling down or shaking up your life-plans completely - are more of a risk and a limitation to polyamorous relationships than they are to the monogamous. What happens if one of your partners doesn't want to have children with you, but another one does? What happens if you and your partner plan to move across the country (or the world), but then you fall in love with someone new? What if you want to live with your partner, but the house they own with their other partner isn't big enough? What if you fall in love, but the person you fall in love with really doesn't have the time, or emotional energy, to make the connection with you that you're yearning for? If you have more than one relationship, these life decisions, both past and future, are more likely to come up, and love isn't going to be enough to fix them.

Luckily for me, he waited, and I came back to him and found our bond stronger than ever. Eventually, the space that my boyfriend and I had for each other turned out to be just right for the relationship that suits us. But I can imagine that if he hadn't seen the long-term view of wanting to be a part of my family, or hadn't loved children as much as he does, or hadn't enjoyed seeing how my life was developing, or hadn't been willing to support me when I had nothing to give back, or hadn't generally been as patient and understanding as he is, I might not be writing this blog from such a happy position.

So if I fall in love again, good luck to whomever that is. If they don't fit into my family, my two existing relationships, and aren't happy for our relationship to grow into the left over gaps and spaces that the rest of my life hasn't eaten up, it's probably not going to work out. But at the moment, problems caused by me having everything that I want don't seem too bad. I'll take the bad stuff when it leads to all this happiness.

Three years

Three years ago, to my complete surprise, I started developing feelings for the warm, sharp-witted man who is now my boyfriend. That makes it not only three years of a happy relationship, but three years since I considered my marriage not just non-monogamous, but polyamorous. It is a measure of how much I love and admire him that our relationship has changed me so fundamentally.

And not just me, but as the title of this blog suggests, my whole family. My husband and I don't want to be just a nuclear family any more. We don't want our connections to be just about love, sex or romance, but about drawing these connections into our family. We can now see how much our daughter thrives from these connections, and the attention of so many wonderful, loving people. This is a big change from how this blog started, when I just didn't know how having a child would affect my relationships, or quite what role our friends and lovers would play in her life. And as I wrote there, in the first entry in this blog, even that was a change from how my husband and I began, where we were (quite frankly) non-monogamous purely for the sex. I was so settled with my husband that I couldn't imagine falling in love with anyone else. I not only didn't desire it, I didn't think I was capable of it.

So I have grown in many ways that I am grateful for, and I am full of appreciation to the two most important men in my life for their role in this. To my boyfriend for giving me the love that proved me wrong, and my husband for being nothing but supportive and encouraging when he saw me falling for someone else. Thank you to them both for the best three years I've had so far.

"Trust your instincts"

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 can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "finding what works for you".

Trust yourself.

You know more than you think you do.... what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

- Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1946

When it comes to natural human behaviours, like parenting, sex and relationships, we're often told to trust our gut. We are animals, after all, and animal instincts have been honed by evolution over millions of years. Other animals don't worry about how to raise their young, they just do it. They don't worry about what form their relationship should take, or write blogs about it, or read advice columns. They follow their instincts.

Parenting, as one of the most basic and essential behaviours in any species, should be instinctive, as Dr Spock wrote, but what I think he is missing is that we are not an instinctive species. Like other primates (more so than other primates) whilst evolving our capacity to learn, our basic instincts have been eroded and overwritten.

Harriet J. Smith is a clinical psychologist who adopted several tamarind monkeys when they were no longer needed for research. When they started to breed, she realised that the monkeys that she had raised herself had no idea what to do next. The parents didn't understand why they had these tiny, baby monkeys clinging to their backs and would try to bite them, or flick them away. The only adult monkey who showed an interest in caring for the babies was one that had been captured from the wild, and who wasn't even a parent. In other words, it wasn't enough for these monkeys to trust their innate instincts. Successful parenting has to be taught.

This explains why something as natural as breastfeeding feels so unnatural to most mothers when they try it, and also why at 6 months, only 1 in 4 babies are breastfed at all, only 1% are breastfed exclusively. Of all things, lactation should come easily to mammals, but we're not the only species that can struggle. Maki, a chimpanzee born in captivity, was unable to breastfeed her baby, despite the baby being able to latch on and feed when her mother was unconscious. A gorilla in a zoo, who hadn't managed to breastfeed her first child cracked it with her second, after the local La Lache league fed their babies in her sight during her pregnancy. When you consider how rare (and stigmatised) breastfeeding is, and how much rarer it is that we actually see it, it shouldn't be a surprise that human women struggle as well.

If something as natural and necessary to the survival of our species as caring and feeding our young doesn't actually come naturally, how can we expect our relationships to work if we just "follow our gut"?

Like these other primates, we don't know instinctively what is going to work and what isn't. What feels like trusting our instincts is really trusting what we've learnt from our environment and upbringing, and this can lead us into relationship models that just don't suit us. This is why monogamy is our romantic ideal - it isn't because monogamy is natural or best for us as a species, it's just because that's the model we see around us. It's the same reason why we feel that feeding a baby with a bottle is more natural than with a breast, or why transporting our babies in prams and buggies, rather than carrying them (like every other primate), feels like the right thing to do.

Smith turned her research into a book called Primate Parenting, where she attempts to take the parenting techniques of our closest relatives in the wild and use them to guide "civilised" humans. I don't believe that natural is always best, but I do think it's often a good starting place. As Smith explains in her book, there are good reasons why keeping in physical contact with our babies, breastfeeding them on demand, and sleeping with them close by, as other primates do, are both natural and desirable behaviours, and working from that point is a good way to figure out what works best for your individual relationship with your unique child. Unfortunately, what comes most naturally to human relationships is less easy to piece together, and anthropologists are far from a consensus. And while there are many similarities between the ways that primates parent, there are wild differences in how they organise their sex lives, making it far harder to extrapolate from them to us. (Our two closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are almost polar opposites when it comes to sex and relationships.)

Finding what works for me has been a long process of picking this learning apart. When making predictions about what is going to work well for me, how much of my thinking comes from what I've inadvertently learnt from society, and how much of it comes from my own, rational thinking?

The only way for me to work it out has been to give it a go. I wouldn't have thought that I had the capacity to love more than one person at a time before meeting my boyfriend, and I would have assumed that I'd be tormented with jealousy if my husband had sex with someone else before he actually did it. These beliefs were so ingrained they needed to be demonstrated to be untrue for me to discard them. Similarly, I hated the idea of co-sleeping when I was pregnant, and insisted on having a moses basket by my bed. It became a laundry basket three days after Small was born, and she is still sleeping next to me nearly two years later. I'm not suggesting that polyamory and co-sleeping are going to work for you, but I do think some of these decisions have to be tested in the field before locking down your options. Especially if you're making plans for relationships before you've met the people you'll be having these relationships with (before they even exist if you're talking about parenting.)

I'm pretty sure, based on the available evidence, that monogamy isn't natural, but it's unlikely that the pair-bonding-based polyamory that I've settled myself into is natural either. So if we don't know what is natural or what is a "best-fit" for our species to use as a starting place, we have a lot more work to do in making these decisions. But also, I expect, a lot more freedom.

(N.B. I don't mean to come down quite so hard on Dr Spock. Despite my criticism of his basic argument, he really did challenge the rigid norms of parenting at the time, empowered parents, and was the catalyst for a lot of positive change.)

Why you should lie to your partners

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 can be found at polymeansmany.com

Captain Bluntschli: You said youd told only two lies in your whole life. Dear young lady: isnt that rather a short allowance? I'm quite a straightforward man myself; but it wouldnt last me a whole morning. - Act III, Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw

If you're reading any "how to" guide to polyamory, you're going to be told (in a variety of words and ways) time and time again that you should talk honestly about everything. I broadly agree, but I think this zeal for being honest and communicating about everything can be taken too far. In fact, one of the key skills in communication is knowing when not to communicate and when not to be honest.

All good parents lie to their children sometimes. Unless there are people out there who are genuinely never bored by reading the same, sodding five page cardboard book a dozen times in succession, or who really enjoy standing around in the cold to push their child on swing for twenty minutes, we all do it. We all want our children to feel that their parents love spending time with them, and that their feelings and interests are important to us. So we read the book again (doing the voices, of course), and we laugh and smile and sing and play, even when we'd rather not. Even when we're bored, frustrated or even on the edge of losing our tempers.

Usually, these lies are really just moments when we push aside misleading or counter-productive thoughts and feelings, and choose to act out of love instead. Losing my temper, or denying my daughter my company might feel satisfying in the moment, but once that moment has passed, I'd not only feel guilty, but I'd have hurt someone I love. When I'm able (and I'm not always able) to push aside these destructive thoughts and force myself to act out of love, even when I don't feel it, I feel better about myself than if I'd succumbed to cheap honesty.

Dr Laura Markham, who writes the amazing Aha! Parenting describes this process as mindfulness. She says that "Being mindful means that you pay attention to what you're feeling, rather than just acting on it," and so taking a pause, allowing the emotion to pass through you, and not acting until you are more in control. It's a key skill in parenting, she believes, not least because it's a skill we should all want our children to have. It's a myth that you should express your anger expressing anger actually makes you more angry. So if you express your anger to someone you love, whether that is a child or a partner, not only might you have thought of a better way of dealing with it if you'd just waited a moment, but you've made yourself more angry, and probably upset or riled the other person up as well. Honesty - not always useful.

On rare occasions, the best way to communicate is to lie. Or at least, to keep the truth to yourself for now. Suppose your partner is about to go out on a date, which you have had plenty of notice for and have happily agreed to, but just before they go, you have a pang of jealousy. You're not okay. You don't want your partner to fall for this new person. You don't want them to kiss or hold hands. Do you call them up to say this? Or perhaps you hear your partner and their other lover's sex noises, and although you said it was fine for them to stay over, you feel left out and lonely, and just want them to stop. Do you interrupt?

If you pause and allow the emotion to pass through you, you might find that dealing with the feeling yourself is the best way of handling it. Do you really want your partner to go on their date thinking that you are unhappy? Will you be glad tomorrow if they've cancelled the date on your behalf? Do you want your metamour to feel awkward and unwanted in your house? How would you want them to behave if the situation was reversed? It might be better to generously lie and say that you hope they have a lovely night, or to distract yourself with a hobby and play music loudly. You might find that once the emotion has passed, you really do want them to have a good time, and you're glad you didn't spoil it for them. Or maybe you talk about it later, when your emotions have cooled, and you are better placed to rationally consider what you want them to do differently next time, if anything. You don't need to bury your feelings, just find a better time and way to deal with them.

Analysing your own thoughts and feelings in this way is hard. That's why toddlers can't do it: they are relentlessly honest with their emotions, screaming with rage, hitting people who annoy them, throwing things they don't want and weeping at temporary separations from the people they love. I don't expect my daughter to be able to manage these difficult feelings based on how they might make me feel yet, but I do think it's fair to expect adults to be at least try to do this for each other. So when I find myself tempted to say something hurtful or selfish, my goal is to push that aside and to think, instead of being honest, can I act out of love instead?

New Relationship Energy

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 can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "NRE"

"New Relationship Energy" is a term that polyamorous people use to define a feeling that is familiar to most people - the rush of desire and excitement that kick starts a new romantic relationship. When you become infatuated with someone, neuro-transmitters such as dopamine and serotonin can result in the other person being almost an addiction - with all the pleasures and torments that suggests. Sometimes, once all this has burned away, there isn't anything left, but sometimes it ignites a long and loving relationship.

For monogamous people, feeling this way about someone other than their partner is a problem - it either means that the new feelings must be ignored or suppressed, or it means the end of the existing relationship. One or the other must go. But for those of us in non-monogamous relationships, these complicated, often delicious feelings are an unavoidable complication of starting new relationships when others are also on the go.

The excellent blogger The Goddess of Java, who blogs at The Polyamorous Misanthrope wrote about how having a baby might affect a poly relationship , describing the feeling of becoming a parent as that "like being in NRE up to eleven". It's a great article, but I think that the analogy leaves a lot to be desired. Although the new feelings of parenthood are also hormonally driven, I don't think the feelings are at all similar. Unlike the mellowing of infatuation into love, nothing about that early passion I had for my daughter has diminished. The biggest difference between my feelings now and then is that I'm no longer in shock. (I'm sure it was prolactin and oxytocin that caused me to fixate on caring for her, because my brain definitely wasn't working that well.) The analogy suggests that there will come a time when the parent will stop placing their child at the centre of their universe and stop thinking that their child is something supernaturally precious. They won't. The only thing that will change is the practical demands the child places on them.

And the key difference between the new relationship between parent and child and the thrill of a new romantic contact is the uncertainty of it all. Let alone from her birth, from the moment of taking that pregnancy test, I knew how our relationship would turn out - I was going to love her for the rest of my life. And those feelings of love (more crucially, unconditional love) were there within a few days of her birth, and have neither grown or abated.

NRE isn't like that. When I started falling for my husband, I didn't know what our relationship would become. I could see that we were likely to fall in love, and I hoped that marriage and children were in our future, but I couldn't know for sure. To be honest, I didn't like it. I hated the uncertainty. The possibility of not only heartbreak but having the future with him that I wanted taken away made enjoying our NRE difficult for me. I wanted him too much.

So it's possible that the NRE I had with my boyfriend is the first time I've felt free to really enjoy it. I was already married, and already planning a family. I didn't have a preconceived role that I was hoping he'd take up, or a schema I wanted our relationship to grow into. I hadn't expected to ever fall in love again, and so it was nothing more than a delight to find out that there was more happiness to be had. Perhaps the lack of danger made it less exciting, but I was far more free to enjoy it, and let it be whatever it wanted to be.

It's possible that I'll never feel that thrill again. Maybe that's a shame, as I've only recently learned how to enjoy it, but I'd be okay with that. I know from how I feel about all three of them that love is far more valuable.

There's no way out...

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, Delightfully Queer, More Than Nuclear, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "commitment"

One criticism of my open marriage that I've come up against time and time again is that a relationship without monogamy is a relationship without commitment. Just as we're often told that your partner can't really love you if they've fallen in love with someone else, if you claim to be committed to more than one person, you are, de facto, committed to neither, and if you claim to be committed but not exclusive, you are kidding yourself. I've even been asked (several times) why my husband and I even bothered to get married if we didn't want to commit to each other. Exclusivity is seen as synonymous with commitment, rather than being one possible commitment out of many.

I can accept that if my marriage was exactly the same as it is now but with the addition of us being sexually and romantically exclusive, we would be more committed than we are now. But that means very little to me, because that commitment is not something that we value. Similarly, I consider cohabitation a significant and important commitment, but if other people see living with their partner as something undesirable, or maybe just a trivial as matter as having a housemate, then this won't be a commitment that benefits their relationship.

Commitments aren't about what we want or how we feel, though that might be why we make them. If monogamy was easy, and it was unlikely that your partner would ever be tempted to stray, then committing to exclusivity wouldn't be considered so significant. Monogamy is a commitment because it involves resisting temptation if it arises, and talking openly about your girl/boyfriend, partner or spouse is one of the ways that monogamous people make this commitment clear to other people. When we make a commitment to someone, we don't mean we'll do it because we want to, we mean we'll do it whether we want to or not. It's more than just a promise, it's an obligation. A commitment is a promise we make that would be hard to break.

This is one of the reasons why, even without exclusivity, marriage is still a significant commitment to me. My husband and I didn't just promise to be together for the rest of our lives, we did so publicly, in front of our friends and family, and we continue to do so when we make our relationship status clear to people. Even without the legal and financial entanglements that were the result of our ceremony, the open, public nature of the promise we made makes it very difficult to back out. There are others, but marriage is a pretty effective commitment device.

Living together, owning property, paying bills together, integrating our social and familial lives, and raising a child would make separating our lives from one another difficult and traumatic. By voluntarily putting ourselves in that position, we have committed to the survival of our relationship, even if it becomes hard, and even if we change our minds.

In some ways, my relationship with my boyfriend is more romantic, as it lacks the prosaic, legal structure of my marriage. Our relationship does have its promises, but we have made few of the commitments that either of us would require from a primary, "marriage-type" relationship. We are able to choose to be together every day, and are confident that the reason we still have a significant and cherished place in each other's lives is because it is what we both want. My prediction is that this will continue indefinitely, but there is very little that would force us together should one of us change our minds.

Commitments don't have much to do with emotion. You can stay committed to an unhappy relationship, or, like my boyfriend and I, be happily in love without obligations holding you together. The latter is wonderful, but would not be enough for me to plan my life around. The fixed, secure nature of my husband's commitment to me was necessary for me to even consider him as the potential father of my child.

And then, despite the value I place on my marriage, all the commitments I have ever made shrink to nothing compared to the commitment I made by purposefully becoming a parent. A human being exists because of the decision my husband and I made together, and we are totally responsible for every aspect of her life so far.

Unlike my husband, our daughter had no part in negotiating our commitment to her. She is completely dependent on us honouring this commitment, through no choice or action of her own. Thinking about it in this way, I am struck with what a precarious position children are in when they are forced to trust their parents, despite having no control over that relationship. And aside from the very basics, little of what a parent should do for their child is explicit or public enough to make it a significant commitment.

So, as an effort to correct that, here is my attempt to draft my own, public commitment to her (beyond my legal requirement not to neglect her), with you as its first witnesses:

• As long as she is dependent on me, I will make her interests and happiness my primary concern. I will always consider carefully how my actions will affect her. I will be mindful of my control over her life, and her dependency on me.
• I will always treat her with kindness. If I ever need to deny her something that she wants, restrict her actions, or correct her mistakes, I will always do so kindly, respectfully and without shaming or intimidating her.
• I will try to make her childhood fun, and I will prioritise playfulness every day.
• Most importantly, I will make sure that she knows that my love for her is unconditional and constant. Nothing she does, neither her successes nor her failures, will alter how much I love her. She will never need to earn my affection or my attention.
• If I ever fail at any of these points (which I'm sure I will), I will apologise to her, and try to do better next time.

There is more, of course, but this is what I'm working on now. And fulfilling all this, whether I want to or not, is not easy. There are days when I enjoy parenting more than others, and some days when I would really like to ditch the responsibility entirely, but the commitment I made to her means that I can't back out. She needs this stability, just as I, to a lesser degree, need the commitments that my husband made to me. None of us want a way out of this.

Who we are and what we choose

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, Delightfully Queer, More Than Nuclear, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "orientation or choice?"

Cynthia Nixon, in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, controversially said that being gay was, for her, "a choice".

After being accused of doing "real damage to [the] fight for civil rights", and basically being told that she is wrong in all over the place, Nixon clarified her statement. She isn't gay, she is bisexual, and she didn't choose to be gay, she chose to be in a gay relationship.

Which, I think, gets to the crux of the difference between an orientation and a choice: we can't choose what we want, but we can choose whether or not we act on it. I didn't choose to want children, but I did choose to become a parent. We don't choose to be gay, bisexual or straight, but we do choose our relationships.

I'm bisexual and I am polyamorous. At one point in my life, I exclusively dated other women, and that was, like for Cynthia Nixon, my choice. I didn't choose to be bisexual, but I do choose whether or not to pursue someone I'm attracted to. If I wanted, I could completely ignore my attraction to women, and focus entirely on heterosexual men (which is something I expect a lot of bisexual women have done) but I would still be bi. I suppose I could also have chosen not to have children, if my primary partner was resolutely child-free, for example, but that wouldn't have stopped me from desperately wanting to become a parent.

And similarly, I've chosen to be in both monogamous and non-monogamous relationships, but I didn't choose to find monogamy restrictive and pointless. I can do it, but the monogamous aspect of the relationship will always feel unsatisfying and unnecessary to me, even if everything else is great. No matter what I choose to do, it won't change who I am.

But fundamentally, it doesn't matter whether the way I am is a result of genetics, upbringing or my environment. I can't change it, and more pertinently, I don't want to change. We want what we want. What you do with that is up to you.

Hierarchy

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month seven bloggers - ALBJ, Delightfully Queer, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, Post Modern Sleaze, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "labels and hierarchy" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

A long time ago, I read something macabre that stuck with me: a new mother held her new baby and realised that although her child's father was the love of her life, she would gladly stand on his head to keep her baby from drowning. I love my husband, but yes. I can relate.

We fit the model of primary partners (shared finances, future plans, lifelong commitment etc) but for both of us, she comes first. Her needs are greater, her demands more vociferous and urgent, and our responsibility to her trumps everything else. It isn't that I love her more than him - I don't think I could assess which of them I loved more, when loving one of them just feeds straight back into loving the other.

I know that some polyamorous people are uncomfortable with the term 'secondary' and the concept of hierarchy in relationships. They feel that labelling their relationship as secondary to another makes them feel less important and maybe even disposable. I understand why someone might feel this way. I just hope these people never date anyone with young children.

We can't can't give everyone equal time, energy or affection. Hierarchy is present in nearly all human relationship, whether we give it labels or not. You know which of your friends are your best friends, and which are just casual acquaintances, even if you don't say so. There is a hierarchy implied by family relationships as well, so much so that when this hierarchy diverges from the norm, we point it out by saying something like "my grandmother was like a mother to me" or "she's my favourite aunt". Even monogamous people do it to some extent, by using terms to make the significance of their relationship clear, whether that is "just friends", "dating", "boyfriend/girlfriend", "partner" or "husband/wife".

It's understandable, however, that people are uncomfortable with this hierarchy being overt in their romantic relationships. Not only do we grow up expecting just one 'significant other' but we don't have a model for having more than one when we do. In our other relationships, a hierarchy is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it's there, but in love, its existence glares at us.

The fact that I prioritise my child over my husband, or my husband over my boyfriend, doesn't make either of them unimportant or disposable to me. My daughter needs me just to survive, and my husband's life is so intertwined with mine that all of my decisions affect him. What makes me prioritise others over my boyfriend (and therefore makes our relationship a secondary one) isn't a lack of affection; it's just that as much as I love him, his life is conducted largely separately from mine. My secondary status in his life (and his in mine) isn't a restrictive cage we've imposed on ourselves, it's just a fact. "Secondary" still marks our relationship as one of the most valued and important in both of our lives.

But I think it's also important to remember that some of these things can change. Previously only children might have to share their parents' attention with an even needier newborn. Long distance relationships can relocate. "Just good friends" can become lovers, and more. Secondary partners might stay that way because of circumstance or design, or they might develop into co-primary relationships.

And even my daughter's dominance over my life will change. My husband and I have made a commitment to stay together for a lifetime, but my daughter will rely on us less and less, and one day she'll grow up and leave home. Having been woken up by her kisses, I'm conflicted about that, but I know I'll let her go. The shape and structure of our relationships isn't always within our control.

The risks of "chosen family"

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month seven bloggers - ALBJ, Delightfully Queer, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, Post Modern Sleaze, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Non-lovers" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

From Stalin Ate My Homework, by Alexei Sayle:

'One year one of the members [of the Communist party] told me he would make me a toy fort for Christmas... It took a long time to arrive but finally, wearily, right on Christmas Eve he deposited it at our house - and it was magnificent. It had all the things I had specified: a drawbridge you could wind up and a working portcullis and a little light bulb that worked off a battery. Then he stopped coming to the meetings and I never saw him again. That was one problem with having a family that wasn't based on blood ties - people often inexplicably vanished and you weren't supposed to miss them.'.

I'm expecting to read a few posts about how polyamory can build a "chosen family" and about close emotional ties with metamours this month. I'll enjoy reading them, but that's not what I'm going to write about. Partly because I think the other bloggers will pretty much say what I’d say anyway, partly because I've written it already but mostly because there is something else on my mind, which is how all this will affect my daughter. Because although I am sold on the benefits of chosen family, the polyamorous tribe and the added love that she will experience because of our extra lovers and metamours, the above passage from Alexei Sayle’s autobiography gives me pause. So too, does the onetime blogger PolyMom who believes strongly that polyamorous parents should stop dating when they have children because those children “deserve to grow up with minimal changes to their family configurations.” I don’t agree that the only way to provide stability is to stick to a rigid set up, but she does have a point.

Friends and lovers have drifted in and out of our lives. Some good friends moved overseas, some just stopped calling, and since having a baby, we’ve built a new social circle of other parents who understand and share our experiences. I expect that as time goes on, we’ll see some friends more often, others less. Not all of these people will be considered part of our tribe or family, but of those that do, not all will remain so. When you choose your tribe, it isn’t stable. And, as Alexei Sayle found out, when your parents choose it, the people who you might consider family aren’t there because of you. Chosen family is risky.

Despite the title of my previous blogpost on the topic, real tribes aren’t chosen. A tribe is based on kinship, not friendship. Teresa Pitman wrote a guide for those interested in building a tribe in the style of the Continuum Concept and advises people not to be too picky: “People who actually live in tribes are born into them”, she says. “And I suspect that if we lived in tribes there would be people who we would get along with easily and those with whom we wouldn't mesh quite as well.” When we choose our family, the reasons that caused us to choose them might change. The success of tribal living is perhaps the lack of that choice.

I don’t want to sound defeatist, because I really am sure that Small will benefit hugely from the love that both my boyfriend and my husband’s girlfriend have shown and will continue to show her. Not to mention my boyfriend’s girlfriend, my husband’s other long-term lover and several other wonderful metamours, friends and lovers. These people who enjoy her company as well as ours will bring nothing but good things into her life. I don’t think that cutting any of them out would benefit her or improve the stability of our family. But these people, no matter how much they love her, are there primarily because of us, not her. Her grandparents, on the other hand, would still be her grandparents no matter what. If we fall out with our parents, they would still want a relationship with her. If we lose touch with one of our lovers and Small is especially close to them, what then?

While I think PolyMom does have a point, I don’t think that polyfiedilty or monogamy solves the problem or necessarily creates any more stability. After all, Alexei Sayle’s parents were monogamous. But it is still something I think about, and I haven’t decided what, if anything, we should do about it.

She is still very young, of course, and the only adults she shows clear signs of bonding with are those she sees at least once a week. So even our biological family aren't really family to her yet, no matter how much they love her. So at the moment, this isn't something I worry about. But it won't be long before she'll start asking about people she's met, learning to recognise names and faces, and enjoying the company of some of the people we love. Maybe by then, I'll know what to do.

Until then, if anyone has an answer, I'm all ears.