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.

Nettles, by Vernon Scannell

My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
'Bed' seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears
The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my billhook, honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. And then I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead,
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.

from http://gu.com/p/xz2a4/tw

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.

Choosing to miss out

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 "loss" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

I don't like making decisions. I'm haunted by the choices I could have made and the options I've closed off, so often stall making them. I find some comfort in the freedom before choosing, as if by postponing the decision I am also avoiding the loss of the option I'll reject. Silly, I know, but every decision, no matter how positive, carries with it some loss. No matter what you choose, you'll miss out on something.

I miss out on a lot since becoming a parent. I have less sleep, less time and less freedom. These aren't trivial losses to me. I expect the fear of missing out is a large part of what causes people to pause when deciding whether or not to start a family, and may be enough to put them off altogether. I agonised over the decision to have a child for years, worrying that the price would be too high.

I wonder if this fear of missing out is what prevents some people from shifting from monogamy to non-monogamy. Monogamy provides a way to protect us from jealousy, an expectation of focus and time from our partner, and acceptance and support from society at large. Losing these benefits could be undesirable or even frightening to many.

Just as becoming a parent isn't a good choice for everyone, giving up the benefits of monogamy might be too high a price for many. Change means loss, even when that change is embracing the possibility of loving more than one partner, or deciding to expand your family by giving your love to a child.

Although I think about what I've lost quite often, I have no regrets. I'm on the right path, despite what I've had to leave behind. My daughter has started calling me 'mummy' and just that makes everything seem worthwhile, let alone the rest of the fun she has added into my life. The decision to give up monogamy was far easier. I've lost very little that I valued, and gained the love of a wonderful man that has enriched not only my life, but my marriage and family.

Whatever you decide, you miss out. That sounds terribly negative, but I'm starting to find it reassuring. Embrace your loss. Missing out is the price you pay for getting what you want.

(If you want a more eloquent take on the difficulty of accepting loss, try this.)