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

National Poetry Day

A Wish for My Children, by Evangeline Paterson

On this doorstep I stand,
year after year
and watch you going

and think: May you not
skin your knees; May you
not catch your fingers
in car doors. May
your hearts not break.

May tide and weather
wait for your coming.

and may you grow strong
to break
all webs of my weaving.

From New Life, edited by Sally Emerson

More about National Poetry Day.

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.

Scaffolding, by Seamus Heaney

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

from Death of a Naturalist.

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.

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.

Reflected love

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Love" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

My husband and I thought that having a baby would mean that some of our friends would drift away. Babies aren't everyone's cup of tea, and so we thought that some people might lose interest in us now that our lives revolved around one.

In fact, the opposite happened. It turns out, some of our friends were so interested in Small that they wanted to spend more time with us. Both of us have made new connections since Small was born, and those people seem to enjoy spending time with her as well as well. So we were wrong: having a baby seems to have made spending time with us more desirable, not less. We're surprised and lucky to have such an amazing, loving, child-friendly community around us.

And I love that people love her. I love nothing more than seeing people enjoying her company, not to mention investing time and effort into connecting with her. I love her so much that any kindness shown to her warms me as much as kindnesses offered to me directly.

Other parents will recognise how it feels to bask in this reflected love, but so will the polyamorous, I think.

I love my husband so much, that I warm to those that love him. When someone is enchanted by him, as I am, and wants to be in his company, that makes me happy. Monogamous people are sometimes baffled by this. They don't understand how my husband and I can not only put up with the fact that we love other people, but be delighted by it.

I don't know if I can explain it, because I find it hard to imagine being any other way. For me, love is, I think, fuel for more love.

Where do you find the time?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Daily Life" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

"Where do you find the time?" This is the question I'm most often asked when I tell other mothers about my relationships. I don't always manage, I tell them, but this is why it is worth it

There are several different ways and places that we spend time together. Tonight, it works something like this.

My boyfriend and I have a date. Before I became a parent, this would mean I would go to his place, he would cook dinner, we'd have sex, plan to watch a film, talk too much, realise it was too late, cuddle up, and go to sleep. We rarely went out together. Now, it works differently. I check with my husband, (as me going out means he must stay in), and I put the date into our calendar.

Before my husband and I were married, when we lived more than 50 miles apart, I would plan our time together carefully in advance. I would think about food, drink, clothes, hair and makeup, daydreaming about that first touch, that first kiss. We took care to show each other our best faces, and tried to make our limited time perfect. After many years of living together, we still plan our time together in this way, but only rarely. We see each other every day, and so our days are filled with little, unplanned moments of intimacy that make planning ahead less of a necessity. In some ways, my relationship with Jemmy is locked into the old model: even though we have been together longer than any of my other relationships barring my marriage, the structure doesn't change much. Our time together is always precious, rarely casual. The terminology the polyamorous use to pin down these differences rarely seems satisfactory, but whether you call it primary and secondary, domestic and non-domestic, live-in and not, the two are just different. With my husband, there is always tomorrow, but with Jemmy, there rarely is.

And like I used to when my husband lived far away, I daydream about our time together. I imagine how he will smile when I open his front door, how it will feel when I touch him and take him into my arms. My husband and I rarely embrace the way he and I do any more, which might sound sad, but it's not. It's bittersweet to see your lover after a separation, even if it's just a few days, and so this fervency makes up for lost time that I don't lose with my husband. With him, there is no bitterness to make up for.

If Jemmy and I are going to have dinner together, this means my husband has to handle both dinner time and bed time for our daughter. There's a strange pull of freedom and guilt to that. In any case, the last thing I do before leaving the house is feed Small, and I do so, praying that she will go to sleep easily without me. She's usually had her dinner by this point, and might even be in her pyjamas ready for bed, depending on when I leave. I say goodbye to them both, and my husband sends Jemmy his love.

I still don't leave my daughter often, or for long. Evenings at home are not the same; even without considering the knife-edge of awareness that she is asleep upstairs and could wake up at any time, there are always things I need to do. At his house, I'm off duty, but still at home. He cooks me dinner, he fetches me a drink, and I can't spend the time with the housework of parenting, preparing for the next day. There is no baby upstairs. We would like to spend more time all four of us together, as a family, but sometimes, I need this. It's worth making the time for.

The evening probably passes much as you imagine it would, with the subtle differences that make all relationships unique. At some point, I start to become more aware of the time. There are consequences to staying out late. My daughter might need help to sleep; my husband has work in the morning, and I don't want him to be tired, or to feel that my time with Jemmy creates a burden on him; and I rarely get more than a couple of hours sleep at a time, so feel an urgent pull to bed as the evening wears on. And I won't be sleeping at this house.

As we say goodnight, he tells me he wishes that I could stay, and we talk about the indeterminate future, when the demands of parenting will have lessened enough for this to be possible. We remember waking up together, lazing around his house over breakfast before getting dressed. But not tonight. It's a wrench to leave him after so few hours, but I'm running out of time.

Back at home, my husband is waiting up for me, and I think how incredibly lucky I am to be loved by these two men. Our daughter is asleep beside him, and I climb into bed between them, taking care not to wake her. Without any conscious thought we find ourselves in each other's arms, the high-pitched sounds of her breathing behind me. It's strange and beautiful to leave them both and come back with fresh eyes. Although just a moment ago I was wishing to be elsewhere, now, I wouldn't be anywhere else.

"You just haven't met the right one yet."

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Explaining polyamory to the monogamous" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

When explaining polyamory to the disbelieving or curious, it's common to use the analogy of a parent's love for their children: nobody doubts that you can love more than one child , so why is it hard to believe you can love more than one partner?

Ahh, the disbelieving monogamists will say, but parental love is different. You just haven't met the right one yet. When the right person comes along, that love will be so strong that you won't want any others, and you'll want to be monogamous, too. You can't love two people the way you can love two of your children.

And of course it is different, but it's not as different as people think.

In some of the early research into the links between our relationship with our parents and our romantic relationships as adults, Hazan and Shaver noted that both lovers and parent-child pairs "play with one another's facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with one another". This tender gazing into each other's eyes and stroking their hair or cheek, an act so linked to romantic love it is little more than a cliche, is something very familiar to parents. Sally Read, in her poem Latching On, describes the look on a newborn's face as 'like a lover's eyes'. The last poem I posted on my blog is a love poem, but it's there because I am often reminded of it when I look at my daughter's face. It looks right, as Muir puts it, as if hers is the perfect human face and all others lack for something. I have had that feeling when looking at a lover, but never this strongly.

Sylvia Plath's poem You're is about her unborn child, but was published in The Nation's Favourite Love Poems. Just as the polyamorous will sometimes use a parent's love for their children to explain how you can love more than one romantic partner, it would be difficult to explain how I feel about my daughter without making it sound like a grand passion, and many poets have done exactly that.

Other similarities that Hazan and Shaver noted (summarised here) are that both lovers and parent-child pairs 'feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive', 'engage in close, intimate, bodily contact', 'feel insecure when the other is inaccessible, 'share discoveries with one another' and of course 'engage in "baby talk"'. Of course there are differences (sex being the most obvious) but so many of the key features are the same, that many psychologists now think that our relationship with our parents can work as a sort of test run for our adult love affairs. We learn how to form loving relationships of all kinds from our parents, and children who are securely attached to their parents, find romantically attaching themselves to others easier as adults.

When I am separated from her, I feel her physical absence keenly, and can easily fixate on how much I want to hug her. My husband sometimes holds her hand while she is asleep. The comfort and joy we share when we hold her, kiss her, nuzzle our faces into her neck, blow raspberries on her belly and pretend to eat her toes is not at all unlike a romantic passion, and, as Kate Saunders puts it, it is definitely the stormiest love affair of my life so far.

And quite honestly, I struggle to imagine loving another baby quite this strongly. Wouldn't this powerful love stunt the growth of any love I would feel for a second child? How could I possibly love any other in quite this way?

But of course, I know that I could. I see, all around me, parents in multiple loving relationships with their children, so although I sometimes struggle to conceptualise it as possible, I know that it can be done

Perhaps the difficulty people face in comparing multiple loving relationships between parents and their children and between the polyamorous is simply this lack of good models. Conducting relationships openly this way is not the norm, so when people feel that they couldn't love another, the way that new parents often do, where do they see polyamorous relationships modelled the way I see parents loving more than one child? Our society's prevailing narrative of love comes down as strongly on the side of the "one true love" story of romance as it does on the multiple love story of parenthood.

It would be offensive in the extreme to suggest to a mother or father of multiple children that they just "hadn't had the right child yet", and when "the one" arrived, they would naturally lose interest in the children they had before. It would be unconscionably rude to doubt a parent when they say that they love all of their children, and that they have no desire to have a one child family.

And if you can imagine how it might feel if someone said that about you and your children, you can probably imagine how I feel when I'm told I just "haven't met the right one yet".

'Motherbaby'

Rachel Cusk, in her unflinching book about motherhood, A Life's Work, describes the new mother and her infant as 'a composite creature, best referred to as mother-and-baby or perhaps motherbaby.' 'I feel like a house,' she writes, 'to which an extension has been added.'

In the nine months she spent in my womb, my baby grew from a single celled life-form into a human being. Until birth, she did even need to breathe or eat, as my body did everything or her. She emerged still attached to me, needing to be physically severed by her father with repeated attempts using a pair of medical scissors. It was as she resisted our separation. And although the cord was cut, this did not mark her separation from me, just the beginning of it.

After birth, my womb felt huge and empty, leaving me with a hollow sensation that made me all the more aware that the symbiosis of pregnancy was over. Now, when she sucked at me, my stomach cramped around her absence, shrinking back to what it was before, when I was a single person. But I wasn't that single person then, and I'm still not.

I sometimes imagined that separated existence pained her, and periodically, she needed to be brought to back to me and plugged in, not just for food, but to recharge our connection. We never knew how long a gap was acceptable between these dockings: sometimes enough for a bath or shower, sometimes (thrillingly) enough for me attempt something as risky as leaving the house without her. Because although her father had an enormous arsenal of tricks that calmed and delighted her, there was one thing only I could do, and it never seemed far from her mind. Gradually, she accepted longer and longer periods of time without me, and then finally, started to shift from parasitically relying on me for nutrition to eating solid food.

Now, at more than half a year since her birth, the separation of motherbaby into just parent and child feels like a plausible future. This separation is something that I both long for and dread. I still ache for her when we are apart, though the ache takes longer and longer each time before it bothers me.

Our relationship is like a love affair in reverse. We began with our lives impossibly tangled together, and now we are gradually growing apart. She spends less and less time in my arms, and one day, she'll leave me.

For Jemmy, the more that Small and I grow apart, the more of me he can have back. Parenting is not something we share as it is with my husband, and so this early intensity has pushed us apart, despite his importance to my family. But for her father, this story is very different. When he cut the cord, that was the beginning of his ability to parent without me. During pregnancy and early infancy, taking care of his child often meant taking care of me. Just as I am feeling her ripping away from me, I am also needed less and less as an intermediary in their relationship.

And ultimately, this was the plan all along - not an extension to myself, but a child that we can raise as a family.