More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (11 page)

I drove the next day to see Ray, and that afternoon, we made love, and then I lay there sobbing in his arms, torn apart by conflicting emotions: fear and grief at the thought of losing Peter, joy at the new connection with Ray. And then, suddenly, I accepted the situation. I imagined myself without Peter, was able to picture my life without him, and I realized that even without him or Ray, even alone, I would be okay. I would mourn, but my life would go on, and I would rebuild. I wrote in my journal that day, "After a few days of feeling in free-fall, it's like I suddenly looked behind me and realized…Oh. I have wings."

A couple of days later, Peter called and said it was okay for me to come home. The ground beneath our relationship had shifted dramatically—as it would continue to over the next few years, as we found our new normal. But coming face-to-face with the reality of losing Peter inoculated me against some of the fear that accompanies the biggest changes and greatest uncertainties. Having looked the worst-case scenario in the eye, I found it no longer so scary.

Eve has called this kind of time the "dark night of the soul" moment. Unless you are truly exceptional, you will experience it at some point, usually early on. Maybe your partners are struggling. Maybe you're tired of fighting your inner demons. And
this
is when it really matters whether you've committed, with all your heart and soul, to being poly. If you don't commit, if you aren't ready for that dark night of the soul, and you back away in fear when it comes, then you and people you love are going to get very hurt.

So be ready. Because if you step into it and keep walking, you will get through it. It ends. Know that you're not alone: thousands of people before you have walked this path—not exactly yours, of course, but just as dark and scary.
It ends.
And it's better on the other side. Getting through that dark night removes its power over you, and that's what it takes to get you (and your partners, and their partners) onto a solid footing that will lead you to happiness, a place where you can make clear-headed decisions focused on the good of everyone.

The longer people avoid confronting that dark night of the soul, the more power it has over them and their relationships. Some people elaborately construct their entire lives to avoid confronting fear. Many people use the hearts of their lovers or their metamours as sacrifices to the unknown beasts they think live within the darkness they're not willing to explore.

We urge you, if you are going to explore polyamory, don't just dip a toe in. One, that's not going to give you the strength and tools to succeed. Two, you'll be treating people as things.

Of the people who do decide to make that commitment, to live polyamorously and treat their partners ethically even when it means confronting those heart-shaking fears, no one makes quite the same trip. Everyone charts a different path through that dark night. But it begins with commitment: knowing you are going to do this, and that you can.

COURAGE

When many of us think of courage, we think of heroics, of facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square. But everyday, ordinary courage is the courage it takes to confess a crush. The courage it takes to say, "Yes, I am going to open my heart to this person, even though I don't know what the outcome will be." The courage to love a partner who loves another person even though you do not have the trappings of security that monogamy promises. The courage to sleep alone. The courage to begin a relationship with someone who's already partnered, trusting that person to carve out the space for you that you're going to need.

This kind of moral courage comes from a willingness to be vulnerable, and to accept that you will be okay even though you don't know what will happen. And you know what? Courage is required because sometimes what we're trying doesn't work. The tank rolls over us. Our vulnerability is rejected, or worse, mocked.

That's the whole thing about courage. It can't promise a happy outcome. We can't say, "Just be brave and vulnerable and you will obtain love and master happy poly relationships ever after." It wouldn't be courage if there were any guarantees.

You may feel like saying, "Well, I'm just not that brave." But we're not talking about something you are or are not. We all have times when we act with courage and times when we don't. In fact, it's something that we and our partners struggle with all the time. Like everything else we talk about, courage is not a destination. Courage is a verb, grammarians be damned: it's not something you
have
, it's something you do. You practice a bit every day. And if you fall down, if your courage fails you, you always get another chance. Always. Courage happens in increments.

You'll need courage because polyamorous relationships can be scary. Loving other people without a script is scary. Allowing the people you love to make their own choices without controlling them is scary. The kind of courage we're talking about involves being willing to let go of guarantees—and love and trust your partners anyway.

So how do you learn to have courage, to develop this practice? Imagine you want to learn how to swim. You sign up for swim lessons, you get yourself a swimsuit and goggles, and on the day your lessons are to begin, you show up at the pool, nervous and eager. Imagine if, to your surprise, the swim coach takes you out onto a boat. What, maybe you'll learn to swim off the side of the boat? But instead, he spends the entire day teaching the basics of sailing—how to tie knots, how to tack against the wind, how to work the sails. "When you have mastered the art of sailing," the swim coach intones, "you will know how to swim."

You would know that that's daft. Yet often, that's exactly how we try to learn skills like trust and courage. We try to build the skills that can help us face our fears by doing things that are completely unrelated to courage—things like avoiding the triggers for our fears, or creating structures that shelter us from the things we're afraid of, waiting until we feel brave. If we fear that a partner might want to leave us, we lay down regulations telling her not to. If we fear being replaced by someone sexier than we are, we are tempted to create prohibitions that restrict certain kinds of sex.

We do not learn courage, or trust, by avoiding the things that trigger our fears any more than we learn to swim by trimming the sails on a boat. In fact, the time and effort we spend doing this is time and effort we are not spending learning to swim.

As you well know, you learn to swim by getting in the water. Maybe you start with kicks at the shallow end of the pool, but you need to get wet. We learn courage by taking a deep breath, steadying ourselves, and then choosing the difficult, scary path over the easy way out. As the theologian Mary Daly said, we "learn courage by couraging." The path of greatest courage also seems like the hardest: it takes us right past the places where our fears live. But just as we cannot put off learning to swim until the day we magically know the butterfly stroke, we cannot put off learning courage until the day we magically become courageous. This is work we must do, now, to create fertile ground within our relationships that allows us to move with integrity and compassion.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

To become more self-aware and identify your personal strengths, weaknesses and fears—especially as they relate to relationships—here are some questions to consider:

• Why do I have romantic relationships? What do I get out of them?
  
• What do I consider essential, indispensable elements of a relationship?
  
• Are there specific kinds of relationships that I know I am looking for? Kinds that I know I don't want?
  
• What do I bring to the table for others?
  
• What makes me feel cherished, loved and secure?
  
• What makes me afraid in relationships? Why?
  
• In what ways do I protect myself from being hurt? Do those strategies help or hinder my search for connection?
  

5

NURTURING YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

Everyone who tries to create love with an emotionally unaware partner suffers.

BELL
HOOKS

When you start down the path of polyamory, your relationships may grow in all kinds of different directions. Shaking off the template of monogamy means you're free to build your life to your specifications, consistent with compassionate treatment of the people close to you. We can't tell you what your life will look like. We can tell you one thing, though, particularly if there are two of you starting from an existing relationship: it will change.

Quite likely, it will change in ways you don't expect. If there are weaknesses in your existing relationship, polyamory has a way of finding them. Trying to buffer these changes with rules probably won't work very well, for reasons we talk about in chapter 10. The things you think will be important might not be, and things you don't think about at all might be the ones that challenge you. We've spoken to countless couples who have come to polyamory, and the one thing we've heard over and over is, "When we talked about this, the things we thought would be the most important weren't, and things we hadn't thought about were."

The first part of laying the groundwork for polyamory concerns yourself—things like developing security, self-confidence and flexibility. The second involves creating fertile soil for growth in your existing relationship, if you have one. The tools for doing these two different things will be very similar. Those of you who are currently single or solo poly don't necessarily get to skip over this chapter, because past relationship experience, and the assumptions we carry with us, can still surprise us in unexpected and unpleasant ways.

THE ISSUE OF SECURITY

Why do we seek romantic relationships? For many of us, relationships are a way to feel loved and treasured and to share some part of our life with people who support and nurture us. When we've found a relationship, or two, we want to feel safe there: to feel like we can relax into the security of our partners' love.

In poly relationships, the need for security tends to play out in two ways. First, we can be tempted to seek security by placing controls on our partners. Whether it's limiting a partner's access to other people to build our sense of security against being replaced, or restricting our partner's range of action with others to make ourselves feel safe, we can be lured by a feeling that if we can just get our partners to do what we want, we will feel secure.

Conversely, if we are at all compassionate, we want to help our partners feel safe. So we might be tempted to accept their restrictions, in the hopes that we can make our partners feel more secure. Security is a tricky thing. On the one hand, our choices do affect our partners' security a lot. On the other, genuine security has to be built from within. Security that rests on another person's actions is fragile, and easily lost.

Four principles about personal security seem to be true:

• It's impossible to "make" another person be secure. We can provide a compassionate and supportive environment by providing reassurance, by listening, by acting in thoughtful ways, but these actions cannot
  make
  someone else secure. Internal work is required for a sense of security and confidence.
  
• It's almost impossible to build a strong relationship of any kind amid insecurity. This seems especially true in polyamory.
  
• Insecurity invents its own evidence and supports its own premises. No amount of someone else's time and effort is enough to make an insecure person see the light and realize that the insecurity is unfounded. He or she must intentionally and deliberately challenge, understand and then choose to move past the insecurity.
  
• Intentionally and deliberately challenging, understanding, and choosing to move past insecurity is frightening, uncomfortable work. Staring our inner demons in the face is so uncomfortable that it can make crawling through broken glass dipped in alcohol and rattlesnake venom seem like a cakewalk. It is the rare person who's willing to do this without being prodded into it. And this principle has a corollary.
  
• Trying to avoid upsetting a partner by giving in to their insecurity, or steering around their sensitivities and triggers, can become enabling: reinforcing rather than alleviating the problem. The very things we do to try to make a partner feel more secure can make the insecurity worse.
  

Another point we've learned: As counterintuitive as it may seem, sometimes a lasting sense of security comes more from knowing a partner is free to go but chooses to stay than from attempting to obligate that partner to stay.

PRACTICING SECURITY

Insecurity is toxic. You can't trust what you're always afraid of losing. You can never become a full partner in a relationship you do not believe you "deserve." You can never embrace happiness if you do not believe you are good enough for it. When we feel insecure, it can blind us to the love our partners offer, which can make us feel alienated, which makes us more insecure, which further blinds us to the love we're offered.