More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (58 page)

The bar-raiser is the worst fear of people in established relationships, because it shows us what's possible. It shows us we don't have to live with compromises we once thought were unavoidable. When your partner lands in a relationship that's at a whole new level of awesome, it can be difficult not to internalize feelings of shame, inadequacy or failure. But doing that can make the problem worse, because when we feel ashamed or inadequate, we're more likely to lash out or be controlling. Feelings of inadequacy create a climate hostile to compassion and understanding.

This is one of those times when compassion begins at home. None of us are perfect. Nobody is so good at relationships that we have nothing new to learn. Good relationships are a journey, not a destination. If someone shows us better ways to do things,
that's okay.
In fact, it's better than okay; it's marvelous! It can truly make our lives better.

Bar-raising relationships aren't exclusive to polyamory. When a person in a monogamous relationship meets someone who raises the bar, the results tend to be catastrophic. People in monogamous relationships are sometimes so fearful of bar-raisers that they don't permit their partners even to have opposite-sex friends. But preventing a poly partner from meeting someone who raises the bar is difficult or impossible. When bar-raisers do happen, they alter the landscape. Scary as it is, we think that's a good thing. Ideally, something great happening to us spurs us to improve all of our existing relationships, revisiting the parts that don't work and building something better in their place.

If you're in a relationship and meet someone who raises the bar for you, be graceful and compassionate. Don't compare your partners to each other. "Why can't you be more like Jordan?" is corrosive to a relationship. Don't rank. Don't blame. Instead, say "We had negotiated this particular arrangement, and it doesn't work for me now. Let's renegotiate. Let's build something stronger. Here are my ideas about how we can do this."

If your partner starts a relationship with someone who raises the bar, you are challenged to rise above your limitations and move with courage toward the best version of yourself. A relationship that raises the bar can, sometimes, be a blessing in disguise: it can show you how to make all your relationships that much better. But not always. Sometimes a new relationship reveals flaws in an existing relationship that can't be fixed. When that happens, there may be no easy way to handle it. The flawed relationship may end.

ABUSE

Some relationships are actively destructive to the people in them, emotionally or physically. Contrary to stereotype, an abusive relationship is often complicated and not always obvious, especially to those inside it. When we think of problematic poly relationships, we tend to focus on the fear that a new partner will be destructive, but often, it's an existing partner that's the problem. After all, longer-lasting relationships have had more time for dysfunctional or toxic patterns to emerge and solidify.

When you're partnered with someone who's in a harmful relationship with someone else, it can be difficult to know what to do. Both of us have found ourselves connected through a partner to an abusive relationship. In Franklin's case, one of his partners started a new relationship that turned abusive. In Eve's case, she became involved with someone who was already in an abusive relationship. In both cases we felt helpless to protect our partners or intervene in the abusive dynamic.

Abuse often develops slowly, insidiously. It's dangerous to pin your hopes on your partner waking up one day and seeing how bad the situation is. It's more dangerous still to rely on your partner leaving the abusive relationship. Abuse is usually much more obvious to people outside the relationship than those who are in it. And people who do know they are in abusive situations often feel powerless to leave.

If you know or suspect that a partner is in an abusive situation, you may find there is little you can do directly—other than tell him your observations, express your concern, and let him know you're there to support him if and when he decides to try to leave. You cannot rescue your partner, and it can be dangerous to your own mental health to try. In the end, only your partner can rescue himself. Abuse hotlines can offer you more detailed advice—they get many calls from concerned friends and family.

Being in an intimate relationship with someone who is suffering abuse—especially if you fear for their physical safety—can cause you trauma. It's important to set good boundaries for yourself, care for yourself and avoid getting drawn into the abuse dynamic, either as a victim or as a rescuer. Consider talking to a qualified mental health practitioner—not to help you figure out how to save your partner, but for your own sake. In some cases, you may need to protect yourself by limiting your involvement in the relationship or withdrawing from it entirely.

One area where the waters can become very muddy is in hierarchical relationships. We talked more about these relationships in chapter 11. It can be extremely difficult to tease out the warning signs of abuse in hierarchies, because hierarchical relationships can mimic some of the structures of abusive monogamous relationships.

Many primers on abusive relationships list "cuts a person off from other sources of support" as a prime warning sign. Other classic markers include someone making decisions for a partner and expecting her to obey without question, requiring her to check in frequently and report what she is doing, sharing her private information without consent, dismissing or disregarding her feelings, or restricting her access to other people in general. These are ways an abuser creates control, helplessness and isolation.

Each of these red flags sometimes exists in hierarchical poly relationships. In polyamory, limiting a partner's sources of support can play out through restrictions on other relationships, especially rules that prevent a partner from seeing others unless the primary partner is present. Someone who tries to limit a partner's contact with others is not necessarily abusive, but this sure makes abuse easier.

One common element of many hierarchical relationships is that "secondary" partners are not expected—or permitted—to provide certain kinds of support to the "primary" partners. For instance, if a person is sick, there may be a rule that only that person's primary partner is allowed to be a caregiver; secondary partners are not. Other hierarchical relationships may place restrictions on the type of emotional support a secondary partner is permitted to offer, or ask of, a primary partner. Such restrictions too are signs of an unhealthy dynamic.

Many hierarchical structures require that a partner have sex with both members of a couple in order to continue in a relationship with one of them. We believe that requiring that someone have sex with you, and threatening to withhold access to support (such as an intimate relationship with another) if sex is refused, is always coercive and always abusive.

RELATIONSHIP IMPLOSIONS

At some point, you are likely to find yourself involved with someone who has another relationship that's falling apart. This can put you in an extraordinarily difficult position. When your partner's other relationship is disintegrating, you have the difficult balancing act of being supportive without being sucked into the blast radius. It's easy to get emotionally involved when you see your partner hurting. That makes it easy to take sides, seeing the third party only through the lens of your partner's pain. At the same time, you may also become an easy scapegoat for the other relationship's problems.

There's no easy path through this swamp, at least not that we've found. As hard as it is to see someone you love in pain, often you can do little other than be a shoulder to cry on and a place of refuge if needed. This is one of the downsides to polyamory; the odds are good that, sooner or later, someone else will hurt somebody you love, and there's not a lot you can do about it.

One bit of advice we can give is: Do not underestimate how people will hold on to hope for a relationship long after it seems obvious to others that it's over. No matter how much a relationship is hurting your partner, don't assume that eventually he will see this and let go. Don't assume that if your partner is talking about ending it, he actually will. Human hearts have a phenomenal ability to hang on. Sometimes this serves us, but sometimes it doesn't. We often cling to things long after they have stopped bringing us joy.

So for your part, if your partner's harmful or imploding relationship is hurting
you,
don't hang on yourself in the hope that your partner will end it. Until it's over—and sometimes until long after—you're better off assuming that it will continue.
Even if your partner says it won't.
We've seen people go back to unhealthy relationships far too many times, even after leaving or promising to leave. If you know you cannot be in a relationship with your partner if he stays in his damaging relationship, then the best decision might be to leave
now—
before you, too, become too invested in (or damaged by) the situation to be able to leave.

Often you find that in your partner's story, and the story they spread to their social circle,
you
are cast as the villain—particularly if you are relatively new. When a relationship is in crisis, it's easy to blame an "outsider." Again, there's no easy way through this, but we can give you this important truth to help you get through it: It's not you. Even if you're advocating for your needs and that's upsetting your metamour, even if part of the strife in the other relationship is jealousy or fear related to you—it's not you. As long as you act with integrity and recognize your partner's right to make choices, without controlling or manipulating him, you are not responsible for your partner's relationship with his other partners. You are not to blame simply because you have added value to another person's life.

MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES AND POLYAMORY

Mental health issues complicate all relationships. When you add things like anxiety disorders, depression or bipolar disorder to the mix, poly relationship challenges become a lot harder—and in some cases, intractable. A person with a serious psychiatric disorder may also lack the emotional, and in some cases the financial, means to support himself, which can cause him or his partner to feel trapped.

Fully disclosing your known mental health issues is an important part of ethical relationships, because withholding information from anyone about things that affect them erodes informed consent. If you have a mental health issue that is likely to affect those close to you, or if you are partnered with someone whose mental health issues affect your ability to interact with others (for example, if you are a caretaker for someone, or if a partner has a history of violence against herself or others), you are ethically obligated to disclose this information. Unfortunately, the stigma attached to mental health problems can discourage full disclosure. It's our responsibility to treat these disclosures with understanding and compassion, and to make it safe for our partners or potential partners to talk to us.

If you're partnered with someone who has a mental health issue, it can become difficult to treat new people ethically and responsibly. New relationships can be especially triggering to people with some kinds of psychiatric disorders. For example,
bipolar disorder
is associated with higher rates of divorce and increased substance abuse, and high rates of anxiety can make coping with jealousy or a partner's absences much more challenging. People who have suffered abuse or abandonment may experience uncontrolled anxiety or fear of loss when their partners become involved with other people. This is particularly true if the mental health issues are untreated.

If you're involved with someone who has a partner with mental health issues, and a dysfunctional dynamic exists between your partner and her partner, it can sometimes be difficult to keep yourself from being drawn into that dynamic. It's important to keep a clear distinction between being a partner and being a therapist. Few people are qualified to act as therapists. Even if we are trained for it, therapy usually requires emotional distance—the exact opposite of what we need to nurture romantic relationships.

If you have a mental health issue that affects your ability to engage in ethical relationships, it's also important to take whatever steps you can to mitigate these effects. This might mean therapy, treatment, and making sure you get enough exercise and sleep.

One problem that can arise with some mental health issues is unwillingness to seek treatment, because the issue has become a way to avoid dealing with other problems in a relationship. For example, if you're afraid of your partner spending time with another partner, and you know you can use your mental health issue to require your partner's attention, it can be easy to fall into a pattern where you find you need your partner's support whenever she is about to go on a date.

Similarly, the standard poly advice to "Only add new partners that enhance existing relationships" can, in practice, end up being used to tiptoe around mental health issues. If this policy results in only adding new partners who are okay with a dysfunctional relationship dynamic, or who help enable a person with mental health issues to avoid treatment, we would argue that the policy is not helping anyone.

There are no hard and fast guidelines for relationships involving mental health problems, though setting and communicating clear boundaries is a vital tool. The best advice we can offer is to make choices about what level of involvement is or isn't appropriate for you, and to set your boundaries accordingly.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

Not all problems have solutions. When troubles come up that defy answers, you may find no path out that doesn't involve pain. When that happens, the best you can do is try to reach for the best, kindest, most courageous version of yourself. These questions may help when you're faced with the inevitable poly puzzles:

• Do the choices I make take me closer to, or further from, the best version of me?
  
• When I am faced with conflict, how do I seek to act with courage?
  
• Are there things I absolutely require in a relationship, and do I communicate those things?
  
• In what ways do I care for myself? How do I care for the people around me?
  
• Can I respond to changes in my relationship with grace?
  
• Do I have problems that make it difficult for my partners to be with me? How do I seek to mitigate those?
  
• Do I let problems in the relationships around me affect me? How do I assert boundaries around problems that aren't mine?