More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (59 page)

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RELATIONSHIP TRANSITIONS

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.

MAYA
ANGELOU

People are living, dynamic organisms; you grow or you die. (Actually you die, period; growth is optional.) You will change. Your partner will change. Your relationship will change. This is a fact, something we must accept gracefully. If you fear change, if you cling too tightly to what your relationship is now and insist that this is the way it must always be, you risk breaking it. Yes, sometimes relationships change in ways we do not want, and people grow in ways that take them apart rather than bring them together. That's the risk you accept when you get involved in this messy, complicated business of romantic relationships.

The things you value in your relationship now may not exist in the future. The things you want now, you may not want in the future. The things you see in your partner now may not be there in the future. And that's okay. Adopt a fluid idea about the way your life will look, keep in touch with your changing needs and those of your partners, talk to your partners about these things openly and without fear, and you can build relationships that grow as you grow. If you do not, your relationships can become brittle and shatter.

For example, when your partner starts a new relationship, you will probably have less of her time and attention. Even in the most inclusive group relationships, this can happen. Any relationship is likely to need alone time; no matter how much overlap there is, you're still likely to lose some time and attention. Is that something you can accept? Is your relationship resilient enough? Do you have things in your life other than your partners that enrich it and bring you joy, or is all of your joy dependent on your partners' attention?

Allowing change with grace, without expecting to control how the change happens, is a key skill we have seen in people who create strong, resilient poly relationships. Be clear on what your relationship needs are, be willing to advocate for them, and accept that things are going to change. That way you'll be ready.

RE-EVALUATING RELATIONSHIPS

In long-term relationships, usually a time arrives when the two new people you've become over the years stand there looking at each other and ask, "Whatever we believed or wanted a few years ago, do the people we are now belong in a relationship?" Sometimes the answer is yes: these two new people still want to be together. And then you move forward, perhaps stronger than before.

But sometimes the answer is no, it doesn't make sense anymore. This is normal and okay, and yet somehow we always seem blindsided by this realization. We become angry, and we treat a breakup almost universally in our society as though it shouldn't happen. In fact, people see this realization as a betrayal. Think of the accusation "I don't even know you anymore!" We act as though the ones we love should not be allowed to grow and change or, if they do, it means they love us less.

Since people change all the time, we can debate whether it even makes sense to make lifelong commitments, at least in the way society encourages us to. We're taught that marriage should mean our relationship never changes, rather than meaning we can be family for life but the shape the family takes can change. Instead of the idea of "breaking up," where the presumption is that you'll stay in a relationship until something makes you leave it, perhaps we should sit down every year or few and say, "Okay, who are we now? How is this relationship working? Do we like the way it's going? Should we change something? Do we even still like each other that much? Does it make sense to continue?" If we think of this as renewing the relationship every now and again, then even if the answer to the last question is no, the result does not necessarily have to be a "breaking." To use the widespread poly term, it's a "transition."

Expectations are brittle things. Not only do people change, but every relationship has a natural ebb and flow. Relationships can come and go and come again with the same person. When we acknowledge that, and allow space for changes to happen, we create relationships that can weather almost any storm.

The best way to evaluate whether a relationship is a good one, regardless of what form it takes, is to think about the things you need and want in the relationship, and evaluate whether it gives you those things. It's not the shape of the relationship that's important; it's whether it meets your needs. Another good technique is to interrogate your feelings. When you think about the relationship ending, what is your first response? If it's a sense of relief, maybe it's time for the relationship to end.

Of course, part of the fairy tale that's deeply ingrained in most of us is the idea that relationships only succeed if they last until someone dies. This is, if you think about it, a strange metric for success. If we manage to find one another's company pleasant enough for long enough, someone dies, and then we can claim success. Relationships are often measured in terms of longevity; if they end prior to the death of one of the people, we call them "failures."

In his book
The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family,
columnist Dan Savage described his
grandmother's unhappy marriage
, which ended in her suicide. He commented:

The instant my grandmother died, her marriage became a success.

Death parted my grandparents, not divorce, and death is the sole measure of a successful marriage. When a marriage ends in divorce, we say that it's failed. The marriage was a failure. Why? Because both parties got out alive. It doesn't matter if the parting is amicable, it doesn't matter if the exes are happier apart, it doesn't matter if two happy marriages take the place of one unhappy marriage. A marriage that ends in divorce
failed
. Only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney's is a success.

Longevity is a seductive idea, because it can feel like even a joyless, loveless partnership is preferable to being alone. The two of us do not believe that just any relationship, no matter how unhappy, is preferable to no relationship. Rather, one of the core beliefs that underlies this book is the idea that only relationships that enrich our lives are worth striving for.

Think about all the measures we use to tell whether or not a relationship is successful. How long it lasts? How often they have sex? How many children and grandchildren they have? Perhaps how much money they make? It seems like whenever we try to figure out whether someone else's relationship is successful or not, it rarely occurs to us to ask the people involved if
they
believe it's successful.

We have both had relationships end. Almost everyone does. Neither of us would call these relationships "failures," because they contributed to making us who we are today. We have taken things from those relationships—joy, personal growth, learning, love, laughter—that have enriched our lives. We are better for having had them.

We propose a different metric for the success of a relationship. Relationships that make us the best versions of ourselves are successes. Those that don't are not, regardless of how long they last. A ten-year happy relationship that ends in friendship is more successful than a lifetime relationship of misery. That doesn't mean we think good relationships are always happy, 100 percent of the time, or that we should bail at the first conflict or trouble. All relationships have their ups and downs; it is not reasonable to expect otherwise. On the whole, good relationships promote the long-term happiness and well-being of the people involved; when that no longer becomes possible, and there's no clear path to making it possible, then it might be time for the relationship to end.

RELATIONSHIPS END

A fundamental premise of ethical relationships is that all relationships are consensual. That means people are free to enter relationships without coercion, and free to end relationships that are not meeting their needs. An ethical relationship is one where nobody feels compelled to stay against their will.

Coercion can be subtle. Most of us would say, "I would never coerce someone to stay with me against their will," but not all forms of coercion involve fists. Coercion takes a thousand forms. One particularly insidious form is the idea that everyone in a poly relationship should be on great terms with, or even be romantic or sexual partners with, everyone else in the relationship. This is an idea that's often given wonderful-sounding names (like "family" or "inclusion"), but there's an ethical trap built into the foundation. Say, for example, that you have a full triad—a relationship with three people who are all sexually and romantically involved with one another. What happens if one of those relationships starts to crumble, or if one of the people no longer wishes to be involved with one of the others? Often an implicit, or even explicit, understanding exists that if that happens, the other relationship will end too.

CHERISE'S STORY
Cherise started her exploration of polyamory when she was invited to join a relationship with a married couple, Pam and David. They were new to polyamory themselves, and after many discussions had decided they wanted to find a single bisexual woman who would agree to be with both of them in an exclusive relationship. This, they reasoned, would be a good way to avoid problems with jealousy, and to explore the world of polyamory without going too far outside their comfort zone.

The relationship went well for about six months. After that, things between Cherise and Pam continued to grow, but the relationship between Cherise and David became strained. Eventually, Cherise decided she no longer wanted to be sexually intimate with David.

When that happened, Pam and David became very upset. This wasn't the way they had envisioned things. The idea that one of them might date someone the other was not involved with seemed very threatening. So Pam gave Cherise an ultimatum: "If you end your relationship with David, I will break up with you." Since Cherise was exclusive to them, this meant losing not one but both of her relationships, with all the heartbreak that went along with it.

She reluctantly remained sexually involved with both of them for another few months. Even though she really didn't want to be intimate with David, the discomfort of his unwanted sexual attention seemed smaller than the pain of being dumped by Pam. Eventually the relationship deteriorated to the point where she could no longer stay. Things ended as badly as you might expect. When they did, David and Pam blamed Cherise for the failure; after all, if she had only stuck to the original agreement, nothing bad would have happened!

Attempts to engineer an outcome are almost always thickly sown with the seeds of coercion. If there is only one form a relationship can take, the foundation is laid: play your assigned role or lose my affection. Any situation which dictates in advance how the relationship will develop disempowers the people in it, and disempowerment tends to turn coercive.

Expectations of sexual or emotional intimacy with one person as a price for intimacy with another are an example of this kind of coercion, but it can take other forms. If there is an expectation, for example, that metamours must get along, that implies that if they can't, one or more relationships will end.

And there doesn't even need to be any sort of threat for a relationship to be coercive. Sometimes internal feelings of guilt are sufficient. If you go into a relationship knowing the terms of engagement, and then those terms become hard for you to accept, it's easy to blame yourself:
I knew what I was getting into! I agreed to this! I have nobody to blame but myself! Am I being a home-wrecker by not being able to make this work? Maybe I just need to force myself to be okay with how things are. I went into this with my eyes open, right?

It has to be okay to end relationships. It has to be okay to end relationships without feeling that our support will be kicked out from under us, or that our other lovers will withdraw their love from us. When it's not okay to end a relationship, consent has left the building.

POLY BREAKUPS

There's a saying among many poly people: "Relationships don't end, they just change." It's a noble idea, and one that society in general could probably benefit from. In monogamous relationships, it's quite common to see ex-partners as potential threats, and many people don't want to maintain friendships with exes (or, more to the point, don't want their partners to maintain friendships with exes). In the poly community, where it's harder to avoid socializing with former partners, there's a greater emphasis on amicable breakups that preserve friendly, or at least civil, interactions.

But relationships do end. Even when friendship continues, the end of a romantic relationship is hard. It's normal to feel hurt. It's also normal to mourn the loss of a partner, and the loss of the shared goals and dreams.