"Should We Go Polyamorous?"
One of the emails I get over and over again is a variant on this one:
“My partner has just told me they’d like to see other people. Should we go polyamorous?”
And that question always carries the assumption that there’s one answer.
Look: polyamory is not for everybody. For a lot of people – and maybe even most people – monogamy is what’s going to maximize their happiness. There’s no “HEY YEAH GO POLY,” and anyone who tells you that everyone should be polyamorous is selling you something, Princess. (NOTE: they are most likely attempting to sell you on the vast benefits of their genitals.)
Should you guys go poly? I dunno. How are you at dealing with jealousy? Can you own your own insecurities? Can you communicate properly? Will you self-destruct if you have to spend a night alone, knowing they’re in someone else’s arms? Are you guys stable enough that it’s a good time to start experimenting?
(Don’t start poly as a last-ditch resort, man. I hear couples going, “Well, we fight so often that I almost stabbed him with a steak knife at the Sizzler last night – but having a baby will bring us together!” Maybe, but probably not, and if it doesn’t you’ve just made things a lot more complex. So it goes with polyamory.)
So the question is, “Was your relationship good enough that you should be staying regardless?” is the looming question that too few people ask when trying to fix their love life.
What’s your partner looking to get out of this polyamory? Are they hard-wired for the polyamory lifestyle – and if so, why hasn’t this been addressed before? Have you been walking around this massive elephant in your living room for months now, and only now are having to address it? (If so, “blithely ignoring the potential dealbreakers until they threaten to crush us” usually isn’t a great dynamic for a flexible, healthy relationships.) Is your partner wanting to sleep with one particular person? Do they want sex, or emotional relationships? Do they want to experiment for a time, or is this a hard-core surety that this is the way it must be? The question of “What is someone getting out of polyamory?” is one that a lot of people overlook, thinking that polyamory all stems from some universal and easily-parsed desire, and you can do great harm with the wrong assumptions.
Do you trust your partner? Do they love you, or are they just hoping to do the bare minimum of placation while they run out and get their rocks off? Do you trust them to care for you, even in the throes of NRE? Do they respect you, or are you making too many excuses for their bad behavior because you fear losing them? The question of “Is your partner someone worth handing the keys to your heart?” is one that every couple faces, and polyamory only exacerbates that.
And are you willing to watch this relationship crash and burn? Any time you make a major adjustment to a relationship – moving to a different state, moving in together, moving in with your family – you risk changing a comfortable dynamic. Is it worth losing everything you have now for something that might be nice but not vital? The question of “How much comfortable stability are we willing to gamble in the hopes of positive change?” is a muddy, ever-shifting question.
And what if this is a dealbreaker for them? Then the answer isn’t “Should I go polyamorous,” but rather “Should I stay with them, or try to see whether I can live with this thing they need?” That’s another separate question – and again, one that gets asked by lovers who’ve discovered their partners need more of a life outside of the house, have discovered their partners need more kink in their lives, their partners need to have less sex. The question of “How much suck is worth tolerating in this relationship?” is something that again, there’s no singular clear answer to that fits everyone.
Thing is, when this is all said and done, “Should we go poly?” is not just one question, but a hundred of them, and there’s no possible way I could give you an answer from a two-line email. Monogamy isn’t bad. Desiring polyamory isn’t bad.
What you gotta do is ask the right questions, and that starts with realizing that “Should we go poly?” is in fact the starter topic to a large discussion that’s only gonna be solved by you two, working together, honestly.
I wish you luck.
Meet A Weasel In Portland!
Seriously. How have you not heard that I have a book coming out? I promise, I’ll settle down once the last of the tour dates are up.
But for now, I’ll be in Portland on Saturday March 21st!
My entire impression of Portland is from a) my wife rhapsodizing about her youth in Eugene, which isn’t quite Portland but she made stops there, and b) Portlandia. Which is, depending on who I talk to, either complete balderdash or entirely accurate.
Regardless, I’ll be signing/speaking at In Other Words, a feminist bookstore, and I am totally psyched to be there. (There’s even a discussion group on the book’s feminist topics, which I confess fills me with a twinge of worry as to how well I executed the inverse tropes, but no matter. This is what it’s like to have a book. First world problems indeed.)
In any case, if you wanna stop by, it’s:
Saturday, March 21st: In Other Words, in Portland, Oregon
14 NE Killingsworth Street, Portland, OR 97211
4p.m. – 6p.m.
And in case you’re going “Aw, man, I wanted to hang out Ferrett!” and you live in New York, Boston, Seattle or – strangely – Cleveland – then remember these dates:
Friday, March 6th: Loganberry Books, in Cleveland
13015 Larchmere Blvd., Shaker Heights, Ohio 44120
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Friday, March 13th: WORD Bookstore Brooklyn
126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 14th: Annie’s Book Stop Of Worcester
65 James Street, Worcester MA 01603
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Friday, March 20th: University Book Store, in Seattle
4326 University Way NE Seattle WA 981105
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
The One True Scotsman Is Polyamorous, Apparently
I was told the other day that unless all people in a poly relationship loved each other, and were happy, and not manipulating each other, that it wasn’t *really* polyamory.
And look, I get the need to distinguish polyamory from swinging, or even just really bad polyamory. I myself have written essays like Polyfuckery vs. Polyamory, where I’ve referred to certain types of terribly poly as “quote-unquote polyamory.”
Yet I think it’s too goddamned easy to define polyamory by its perfection, as opposed to looking at it as the sum of all its flaws. I think that handwaving off the “bad” poly as “not really being polyamory” marginalizes the many people who have terrible experiences with it, and covertly shuns the people who haven’t managed to make it work properly as being insufficient to the cause, and quietly attempts to erase all the dysfunctionality that often festers in polyamorous networks.
Most educated people would get furious if I said that polyamory consisted exclusively of two primaries and a secondary relationship. And I think they should get equally furious if I said that polyamory consisted exclusively of well-tuned loving relationships.
Because if someone’s in an abusive monogamous relationship, that doesn’t remove the monogamy. If someone’s in a monogamous relationship for petty and shallow reasons, that doesn’t make it not-monogamous. Hell, even if someone’s in a relationship where someone cheats, again, the monogamy is present – it’s a broken form of monogamy, certainly, but common enough that we need to look at cheating as a failure state that can happen within monogamous relationships.
(Even if, yes, polyamory includes the word “love” and monogamy doesn’t. Yet that borked definition, if you’ve ever referred to two people casually dating as monogamous, you left off the gamos for “marriage” and as such you’ve committed word-fuckery. Get over y’self. Every word eventually evolves beyond its word-roots.)
I get the urge. Polyamory is often crapped upon by monogamous society, viewed as strange and off-putting and “I had this friend who was in a poly relationship and she hated it, so it can’t possibly work.” The temptation to snip out all those uncomfortable parts of poly that lurk at the fringes and leave only the shiniest happy bits makes it a lot easier to talk about poly with your friends.
Yet saying to a divorcee, “It didn’t work out for you guys? Guess you weren’t really monogamous” is dismissive, hurtful, and sneering. And it’s no less so for those people who have smashed face-first into a beehive of awful polyamorous behaviors, and had a bad experience, and are now being told on some level that they were too stupid to know the “false” polyamory when they saw it.
Because the truth is, that bad polyamory isn’t on the fringe – that selfishness and manipulation is often at the heart of polyamory as it exists in the real world. What looks like love at first often turns out to be sociopathic marketing. And as such, the word polyamory is large, sprawling, a loose net tossed over a mountain range. Relationships are complicated, and usually when you try to boil them down to simplicity you wind up omitting vital steps.
And maybe you’re trying to define polyamory not as it exists, as some sort of glowing ideal, a beacon to guide people to the One True Way. But the big problem with the One True Way is that it often encourages people to cover up their un-true parts so they can get the credit for doing things the right way. And then you have all of these hidden bits that fester, because we want to believe *so hard* that our heroes walk a righteous path that we’ll quietly overlook mountains of evidence to the contrary.
No. For me, polyamory is defined with its flaws. Polyamory has both grand loves and breathtaking betrayals. Polyamory has both brotherly intensity and shallow fuckery. Polyamory encompasses all these experiences, and to say otherwise is to erase the bad in some misguided attempt to leave only the good.
But like any relationship, I think you can only truly appreciate someone when you adore both the good and the bad within them. Polyamory has done me a lot of good. It’s also done me a fair share of harm.
I love it regardless.
What Sticking Chocolate Chips To My Forehead Taught Me About My Life
So this was pretty much the standard reaction I got last night:
I told many of my friends about my odd adventures, and they didn’t even blink. My Dad didn’t even ask why; I guess after the beekeeping and the fireplay and the Rocky Horror, he’s just used to his son doing weird things.
Apparently, my life is sufficiently odd that “Hey, Ferrett’s sticking chocolate to his forehead” is literally just Wednesday to most people.
Still, most demanded photographic evidence, so I provided it:
“Why were you doing this, Ferrett?” you may ask. Well, it’s a long story. But fortunately, it’s not so long that I can’t link to it.
Things Nobody Told Me About Selling A Novel (Part 3): The Clarion Critique-Wait
The Clarion Workshop was a lonely place, and a busy one. We had lost all of our friends and family for six weeks as we flew off to San Diego, and replaced them with summer friends that we’d just met. And writing was a lonely business; sitting in your rented bedroom, reading the day’s stories, felt isolating.
So you’d creep down to the commons area, and there would always be people there. The teachers, in particular, went out of their way to be in the commons; poor souls, they would be gone after a week, and they wanted to make the most of their time with us.
The only noise in the commons would be the rustling of paper, the clattering of keyboards. There were times talks would break out, of course, but the evenings were for work: critiquing tomorrow’s stories, writing your own. We warmed ourselves at each other’s presence, not communicating, but having that pleasure of knowing we were all on the same page. Sometimes quite literally.
It was comforting, being in a room full of writers…
…unless it was my story on the block.
The rule at Clarion – well, more what you’d call “guidelines” – was that nobody was to talk to you or anyone else about your story until it was critique time. This was to avoid tainting other people’s perceptions, or to hurt the critiquee – if Bobbi told you she thought your story was the best ever, and the other seventeen people disagreed, you could set yourself up for a brutal round of crits when you expected praise and got slammed. (Or vice versa – approaching praise when you’re cringing for a beating ensures you won’t appreciate it in the way you might need to.)
So when I knew they were reading my story, I got paranoid.
They went hmm, I said, trying not to crane my neck to see what page they were on. Was that a good hmm or a confused hmm? Oh, they just frowned. What’s that mean? They’re reading awfully fast – oh, wait, they just made a note. What’s the note say?
Do they like it? Did I do a good job?
After a week or two, I figured out that I just couldn’t be in the room with them when they were reading my stuff. To this day, when I hand a manuscript to Gini for reading, I go to the kitchen and clean the dishes so I won’t be tempted to read over her shoulder. This has the benefit for Gini that whenever she does me the favor of critiquing my story, she emerges with a scrubbed kitchen.
And what no one told me about my first novel is that I am currently trapped in a room with hundreds of people rustling pages, making hmm noises, waiting for the hammer to fall.
Because there is a lull-time between the time the manuscript is turned in and the Advance Reader Copies go out – a time when the reviewers get their hands on your writing. They haven’t finished reading yet, nor written the review. But in these days of social media, you see them Tweeting that they got your book, they make comments that it’s On Their Agenda, and you feel this impending iceberg of Review approaching.
Will it be a good review? Will it be a bad one?
God, you have no idea. Me? I read my blurbs. Obsessively. I was lucky enough to get some nice blurbs, so authors I respect at least liked Flex enough to say something complimentary in the hopes of driving sales, so the blurbs are like mini-reviews that prove that Flex can’t be bottom-feeder terrible.
But what if Kirkus hates it? What if Kirkus gives it a starred review? What if Kirkus doesn’t even bother to discuss it? You could be universally beloved, maybe the novel is brilliant! How would you deal with that? But then again…
And oh God, just publishing this book has made you excruciatingly aware of just how vibrant and active the sci-fi community is, hundreds of excellent blogs just waiting to dissect your book.
But they haven’t done it yet.
Weeks pass. They’re still reading. Some of them even have auto-posts on their Twitter, so you get notifications: $REVIEWER is 46% done with Flex. They were at 16% yesterday. Are they a slow reader? Is that good? Lord, you’ve never paid attention to how someone reads a book before, and seriously, how vain is it to analyze someone’s percentages?
Go for a walk, you raging egomaniac.
The thing is, you don’t necessarily want to be told how brilliant your book is. (Though that’d be nice.) What you want is the judgment, to collapse the wave quantum-physics style – because this oscillating limbo where you shuffle back and forth between grand dreams and terrible nightmares is worse than any single bad review.
The reviews will arrive soon. And when that’s done, maybe you’ll have people saying they enjoyed cat vomit more than your book. Maybe you’ll be unmasked as a fraud, where everyone you know sneers and wonders how you got published. But to my mind, that’s far better than this month of suspense.
Right now, I am in the Clarion room. I’m watching the papers ruffle. Everyone is going hmmm.
And I am doing so many metaphorical dishes.