greenstorm (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greenstorm) wrote2021-03-24 08:09 am
greenstorm) wrote2021-03-24 08:09 am
Entry tags:
Say what you mean
I've been poly for a really long time.
I've been actively poly (dating folks in a context where dating other folks was explicitly part of the deal) for 25 years. If you string my partners end-to-end rather than concurrent, that time period covers more than twice my life. I have had many, most, relationship beginnings and endings while in other relationships.
The concept of poly is even more wide-open than the concept of monogamy. It doesn't mean much on its own, without a bunch of additional information. The socially acceptable way of doing poly changes from year to year; the dogma and language and should-dos change from year to year. All are influenced by the way poly is marginalized, the way it's a departure from the state-and-society-sanctioned relationship structure. Pop poly is reactive to monogamous ideas, it wants to depart from monogamy here and retain structures and privilege there.
And you don't depart from that privilege by joining a community, by taking out your genitals in a room with someone else, by falling in love with someone else. You depart from that privilege and that thought-structure by interrogating everything.
It's taken a really long time to get clear on what I want and need from poly because so little of what I want or need overlaps with our society's ideal relationship. I internalized those messages -- you will be happy if you relate in certain ways -- and I wasn't happy. I had to learn that there were alternatives that could make me happy.
Whatever departs from normative structures will be stigmatized. Whatever worships at the alter of normative structures while having a little exotic window dressing-- well, it could still be stigmatized, but there's also a chance it'll be celebrated for a little while. Long enough for the illusion of diversity and choice, until the next one comes around.
The people who work in relationship with me are fundamentally incompatible with mainstream relationship structures. It's not possible to keep one foot in the way I relationship and the other foot in a relationship with normative structures because it's not a set of prescriptive behaviours that drives me. Rather, it's a set of philosophical underpinnings. Some of them are still aspirational and may always be. Even aspirationally, they still drive me in the other direction.
When I started all this it was fashionable -- and socially required -- to have a primary/secondary poly structure. Nowadays it's fashionable to eschew any difference in priority between partners -- called hierarchy in pop poly parlance -- and even any difference in any measurable factor. Instead of folks complaining that bad poly is insufficiently catering to a primary partner, they now complain that folks spend more time or money or enmeshment on one or another. Both of these environments are equally poisonous to frank discussion about wants and needs in a relationship. When folks are trying to avoid believing or saying they ascribe to stigmatized relationship type, they can't consider the full range of possibilities and then communicate what actually works for them; what they're willing or able to do is obscured by what they think they should do. There's not a ton of difference between this state and going along with monogamy because it's what's supposed to happen: even if your chosen relationship structure actually is the prescribed one, it's hard to believe it fully from the outside because so many folks are just going along.
I've been actively poly (dating folks in a context where dating other folks was explicitly part of the deal) for 25 years. If you string my partners end-to-end rather than concurrent, that time period covers more than twice my life. I have had many, most, relationship beginnings and endings while in other relationships.
The concept of poly is even more wide-open than the concept of monogamy. It doesn't mean much on its own, without a bunch of additional information. The socially acceptable way of doing poly changes from year to year; the dogma and language and should-dos change from year to year. All are influenced by the way poly is marginalized, the way it's a departure from the state-and-society-sanctioned relationship structure. Pop poly is reactive to monogamous ideas, it wants to depart from monogamy here and retain structures and privilege there.
And you don't depart from that privilege by joining a community, by taking out your genitals in a room with someone else, by falling in love with someone else. You depart from that privilege and that thought-structure by interrogating everything.
It's taken a really long time to get clear on what I want and need from poly because so little of what I want or need overlaps with our society's ideal relationship. I internalized those messages -- you will be happy if you relate in certain ways -- and I wasn't happy. I had to learn that there were alternatives that could make me happy.
Whatever departs from normative structures will be stigmatized. Whatever worships at the alter of normative structures while having a little exotic window dressing-- well, it could still be stigmatized, but there's also a chance it'll be celebrated for a little while. Long enough for the illusion of diversity and choice, until the next one comes around.
The people who work in relationship with me are fundamentally incompatible with mainstream relationship structures. It's not possible to keep one foot in the way I relationship and the other foot in a relationship with normative structures because it's not a set of prescriptive behaviours that drives me. Rather, it's a set of philosophical underpinnings. Some of them are still aspirational and may always be. Even aspirationally, they still drive me in the other direction.
When I started all this it was fashionable -- and socially required -- to have a primary/secondary poly structure. Nowadays it's fashionable to eschew any difference in priority between partners -- called hierarchy in pop poly parlance -- and even any difference in any measurable factor. Instead of folks complaining that bad poly is insufficiently catering to a primary partner, they now complain that folks spend more time or money or enmeshment on one or another. Both of these environments are equally poisonous to frank discussion about wants and needs in a relationship. When folks are trying to avoid believing or saying they ascribe to stigmatized relationship type, they can't consider the full range of possibilities and then communicate what actually works for them; what they're willing or able to do is obscured by what they think they should do. There's not a ton of difference between this state and going along with monogamy because it's what's supposed to happen: even if your chosen relationship structure actually is the prescribed one, it's hard to believe it fully from the outside because so many folks are just going along.