My Polyamory Reading List: By Me & Others

Someone recently asked me for readings on polyamory. I am by no means an expert, and this list is nothing like comprehensive; it's more like a collection of what I have on hand, and/or read before I decided I'd reached the point of diminishing returns and could just live my life instead of reading and thinking about my life. I welcome suggestions for things to add to the list.

Books

There are two books that are sort of de rigueur. Neither is perfect, but they both have their uses.

The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy is the one I most often hear recommended. I've read it, and thought it was fine without being mind-blowing. I'm sure I had more to say about it when I first read it, but I don't seem to have written it down at the time. This surprises me.

In any case, if you're poly these days, or curious about it, this is the book to read.

Another recent book is Opening Up by Tristan Taormino. I read this awhile ago and had very mixed feelings about it; my blog post about it is I Have Read a Book About Open Relationships. 

Blogs

I really like the blog Solo Polyamory. The author has chosen not to have a primary partner, and her discussions of navigating relationships, working out challenges, negotiating boundaries and expectations, and more, are insightful, and have been useful to me even though my relationships are quite different from hers. I particularly like the concept of the relationship escalator, which I'm pretty sure I learned at this blog.

And look! She recently favorably reviewed a new book: More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory. I will read it. Perhaps you should, too.

I also very much like The Pervocracy. This blog also covers kink and BDSM, so I have very helpfully searched for all the posts about polyamory for you. This blog is a bit of a mixed bag; I find the recent read-through of 50 Shades of Grey pretty tedious, for instance. But it contains some brilliant thinking and writing as well, and is worth exploring.

I thought I'd have more in blogs, but it turns out I don't follow many poly blogs. I'll update this post if I come across something worthwhile.

By Me

I was looking for my review of Opening Up, and discovered that I have also blogged about polyamory! Imagine that. I also observe that I suck at writing SEO-optimizing titles.

Loving Your Slutty Friend: A Guide For the Vanilla and Monogamous

I should consider picking this series up again. I like these three posts and never wrote some of the ones I thought I would.

1: Loving Your Slutty Friend: New Anything Energy

It takes courage to be open to the new things coming into your life, whether that's a new love or a new religion or a new hobby that takes you away from home every Saturday, because the changes that come with these things are unpredictable. It takes courage, too, to turn away from the new for a time because the relationship matters more.

2: Loving Your Slutty Friend: The Heart is the Strongest Muscle in the Body

Every relationship incorporates change over its lifetime. Sometimes the changes are challenging, the process of adapting to them requires a tremendous amound of hard work, and a successful outcome--if by "successful" we mean "the relationship continues"--is by no means assured. Other times, they're relatively easy to accommodate.

3. Loving Your Slutty Friend: What I Like About Non-Monogamy

Thirdly, I like sex. I like it with Raider. I love it with Raider. Whenever I have reason to honor a new relationship, say at a wedding, I write in the card, "I wish you every happiness." And one of the things I mean by this is, "I wish you good sex." And what I really mean by that is, "I hope your sex is as good as mine and Raider's." I wish this sincerely for the whole world. 

But I like sex, once in awhile--not really that often, in the grand scheme of things, but once in awhile--with someone else, too. Because sex is one of the ways I relate to people. I enjoy the kind of connection you have with someone when you are physically intimate. Back when I was a young free agent, sex was one of the ways I got to know people.

Standalone Posts 

What's Hecuba To Him, or He to Hecuba?

What is Toots to us? What are we to Toots? The kids call him Uncle, but we could just as easily have decided to call him Papa Toots; he is the closest thing they have to a third parent. I sometimes tell people that they might think of Toots as the third adult in our nuclear family, even though he lives with the Crafty Elf these days. Toots sometimes tries to convey his relationship with the children by telling people he is their godfather; that works pretty well. Sometimes he takes flack from his family for spending more time with our kids than with his biological nephew; would it help people understand the relationship and accept it if we had decided to call him their stepfather?

The Things You  Find Out About Yourself

I was surprised by how much meeting with these folks meant to me, because I hadn't thought of polyamory as a central part of who I am.

You Put Your Whole Self In

I am a moral person. I am a deeply ethical person. I am religious in a non-trivial way. I think and ponder and reflect and think some more about everything. The decisions I make about my life are shaped by these things. I don't think I've ever made a decision lightly. So, you know, at least, that if I make a decision that seems dangerous, reckless, immoral, wrong-headed, deeply mistaken, risky, or even just head-scratchingly incomprehensible to you, well, it's probably the best-thought-out, most-thoroughly-processed bone-headed move in history.  

Won't Someone Think of the Children?

We make decisions ourselves about who to trust with our hearts. Sometimes we get it right; sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it right and it still goes wrong. Sometimes somebody you thought would be there forever, isn't, and there's nothing you can do about it.

A Crusade, but Without the Oppression and Death

I say it's love, particularly love in the form of sexual desire, that wants the walls down. And I will make the claim that is not been a lack of morality or an unhealthy promiscuity or a recklessness toward my own feelings or my partners' that has led me to squeeze through the narrow gaps in so many walls in search of the light I can see shining through from the other side. 

It has been love, which in all its forms is ultimately the same form. And this is one of the ways I have been called to be in service to love in my life. 

Epistle from the Poly and/or Kinky Friends Retreat 

We long to have our relationships recognized and respected, but we also hope to share our gifts, talents, and ministry. We are abundantly blessed with gifts for open-hearted loving, and experienced with the radical honesty that our relationships call us to. 

Long-Distance Relationships: What I Think I Know About Them

A few months ago, Serious Girlfriend Who Lives 600 Miles Away and I exited the initial honeymoon phase of our relationship. When we were first together, staying up half the night to chat by IM trumped our sleep schedules, and writing epic emails was more important than food, hygiene, or bathroom breaks. Eventually, of course, our initial all-encompassing fascination with each other began to fade. Our partners, our cats, our hobbies, our unread books, our friends, and our neglected work all began to demand attention. My children thought I ought to return to providing them with food on a regular basis; her new job went better, she found, if she was well-rested. We soberly noted that we had been spending money we didn't have in order to see each other.

It was rough there for a bit. We liked the "You, You, It's All About You!" stage. We worried that without that energy driving us, we couldn't give each other the reassuring attention we both need. We thought that if we decided to live scrupulously within our means, we'd hardly ever see each other. My family considered a move that would have put us much closer to her; when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, we wondered whether a relationship across such a long distance had a future at all.

When we got over our individual and mutual fits of hysteria and despair, we were clear that although our relationship had changed, we didn't want it to end. We set out to make an intentional transition to the new form our relationship would take, post-honeymoon. In the course of this intentional transition, I wrote up what I called my Three-Point Model of Long-Distance Relationships, and I would like to share it with you now.

Su's Three Point Model of Long-Distance Relationships.
The long-distance relationship, or LDR, is maintained through three forms of contact. The importance of each of these forms of contact can vary from relationship to relationship, even to the extent that one may be absent or near-absent, but it behooves the thoughtful person to consider their role and importance.

Type A: Low-impact daily or near-daily contact.
Type A contact is accomplished through things like texting good morning or good night, asking questions like, "how was your day?" or "what are you up to?" or reporting on minor life issues like, "my cold is much better," or "I finally got the washing machine fixed." Sending phone pictures of your tasty glass of beer or the cute thing your cat is doing would also fall into this category. 

This type of contact often takes place in between or during other activities, and is prone to interruption. For instance, it might take the form of a couple of quick texts from work that end abruptly when a meeting begins or someone comes up to you with a question.

Some relationships will have a lot of this, and some will have very little. I was talking to Live-In Sweetie about this, and he pointed out that he and his long-distance best friend do almost none of this kind of thing. For a year, I was in a long-distance relationship with Lovely Girlfriend. She had spotty internet access, a very busy life as a single mom, and two jobs, neither of which allowed for much texting or IMing. It was a rare treat if we managed to have a real chat rather than exchanging a text or two during the day. But we always texted goodnight at 10 p.m. You wouldn't think that would be a big deal, but it meant a lot to both of us. It was just a couple of lines but was a way to remind us we were thinking of each other, our little moment out of every day.

Serious Girlfriend and I text and IM multiple times most days; sometimes these turn into actual chats, but we can't count on that. We also follow each other very closely on Facebook. 

Type B: Short-duration focused one-on-one contact 

In a local or live-in relationship, this is things like Live-in Sweetie's and my habit of going out to breakfast two mornings a week, where we have an undistracted hour or so just with each other, with no chores on our minds and no kids, work e-mail, or appointments to interrupt us. Whereas Type A contact is prone to being interrupted at any time by other demands, in Type B, you've hopefully got the other person's full attention. 

In LDRs, Type B contact could be phone calls, chatty e-mails if you're the reading and writing type, Skyping, or even a long on-line chat by text or IM.

Live-in Sweetie and his long-distance best friend do some Type B. They get on the phone every so often and the conversation is never less than an hour. It's their major way of keeping in touch between visits.

Type B contact requires mindfulness and effort. Unless you live some kind of charmed life, you have to make it happen. A place in your calendar has to be cleared during which you can focus. Live-in Sweetie and his friend make dates to get on the phone so they can both protect that time commitment.

Serious Girlfriend and I have very little of this right now, and the loss of it was the hardest adjustment for me. We hope to have more, and have experimented a bit with phone calls, or with setting aside specific times for on-line chatting, but mostly this problem has been solved by a couple of visits in which it became clear that we didn't need a lot of Type B to maintain our connection and ease with each other.

Type C: Visits

Visits! Glorious, glorious visits.

There are two aspects to visits:

C1: how good they are. Do you feel the connection when you're together? Do you enjoy your visits?

C2: how often they happen. Do your lives allow for the time and expense?

Lovely Girlfriend and I felt that we could feel our connection slipping if the gap between visits stretched out to two months or more. We thought every six weeks would be ideal, though we never achieved that and didn't think it was an option. Of course, she and I had very weak Type A and Type B contact. More of that might have made longer gaps between visits more OK.

Serious Girlfriend and I also think two months between visits is pushing it. We sometimes visit each other's homes, because this is less costly than meeting in the middle for a weekend tryst. These visits give us a chance to see each other's partners and friends, visit favorite haunts, and lounge around. But they can be challenging because one of us is in Type C mode, away from home and more or less on vacation, while the other is still surrounded by their home and its demands. Time alone during home visits tends to come in chunks of a few hours at a time, because we both live with long-term partners, and I have kids. Sometimes the kids and I visit her. That's a special kind of happy chaos, but a little lacking in intimacy. I'm sure this could be quite different for people who live alone.

We have found that visits where we both are away from our homes for a weekend are essential for feeling our connection to each other, and we recently learned the hard way that no number of home visits can alleviate the anxiety we both start to feel if it's been too long since a weekend tryst.

It also really helps keep the anxiety at bay if we know when our next visit is going to be. Right now, other obligations in our lives are making it impossible for us to have a firm date. "Sometimes in August," we think, or "maybe over Labor Day weekend." We would much prefer something we could put on the calendar and count down to.

There are a lot of variables that are going to make other people's experiences and needs different than ours. Just how long-distance the relationship is, for instance. Serious Girlfriend and I find ourselves envying people who live within 3 or 4 hours of each other. That's a distance you can do for an ordinary weekend: leave on Friday after work, come home late on Sunday. With 11 hours between us, we pretty much need a three-day weekend plus at least half a day off work to make the travel worthwhile. (On the other hand, I have an east-coast friend whose sweeties are a couple on the west coast, and he puts in a full day's work on the plane on Friday, spends the weekend with them, catches a red-eye home on Sunday night, and reports to the office on Monday morning. I am in awe.)

The thing about the 3-point model is that it's useful to know which of these things best top up your tank. I, for instance, love Type A contact. I want to know how that meeting went, or what that itchy rash turned out to be, or how everybody liked the new recipe. I like knowing what's up in the daily life of my sweetie. That doesn't matter so much to some folks, and sometimes it's flat-out impossible to do long-distance, but if I can have it, I want it. That's important for me to know, and it's important for Serious Girlfriend to know, too. We don't have the luxury of all the A, B, and C we can handle and more; we need to put our efforts where they'll do the most good.

Update: a friend of mine made the following comment after she read this, and I liked what she had to say. She gave me permission to include it:

This seems like an excellent summary for a newish LDR. My experience is that there are additional challenges that start to kick in at about the 5-7 year mark.  

1) That kind of commute (when it begins to feel more like a commute than interesting travel) is a very long and sometime frustrating commute. I think being mindful of parity in terms of who makes this effort would be a very good idea. Speaking here from the experience of not being mindful enough about that.

2) There is a kind of nebulous quality to a long-term LDR that I think may just be inevitable. You have a home and your sweetie has a home but your relationship together does not have a physical home. I don't know what the answer is for that one. There may be none.

Erika Moen at ohjoysextoy has a comic about being in a long-distance relationship. She and her husband were intercontinental for several years. They would envy us our paltry eleven hour drives and our shared time zone. This comic is NSFW, as you might expect from a website called ohjoysextoy. Her points are not all the same as mine, so I offer her to you as another point of view.

Remember, if you like something I write, you're free to share it. I enjoy attention in the form of readers.

Won't Someone Think of the Children?

In October, CNN published this pretty good article about a family made up of three adults and their nine-year old daughter. Of course, the responses across the internet ranged from supportive to appalled, and many on toward the "appalled" side of the spectrum purported to be about the writers' concerns over a child being raised in such a family. Some folks assumed that the situation was de facto unhealthy; others saw it as unstable, and wondered what it would do to the girl when her family broke up and the third partner, who is not one of her biological or legal parents, disappeared from her life.

Whenever an unconventional relationship comes up, onlookers always express concern about the children. Whether it's the mixed-race child of a biracial couple, or the black child adopted into a predominantly white family, single women or men becoming parents by choice, lesbians and gay men parenting, or non-monogamous people practicing non-monogamy while raising kids, the same questions come up: Is this good for the child? Won't it be harmful to them? What about the social stigma they'll face? Is this family--whether of gay men or of three people in a partnership or a couple that dates outside the relationship--too inherently unstable to raise children?

This concern is so common that I have even had a polyamorous friend tell me he thought it was wrong for parents to practice polyarmory while raising their children.

I, of course, have several thoughts about this.

Gosh, I Never Thought of That Before

I can't tell you how many people have told me that the Tiny Tornado might change his mind about his gender expression. People somehow believe that the first thought that pops into their heads when they hear about him is something that hasn't occurred to us in all the years we've been living in the situation.

The "what about the kids" questions about polyamory feels similar. Whether people pay due attention to the needs of their kids is independent of whether they're monogamous. Surely you can think of plenty of examples of monogamously married people who think only of their own wants and needs and not of their children's; I was raised by such people, and I'm pretty sure my brother is another such parent. Whether people take good care of their kids' physical and emotional needs is about whether they take good care of their kids' physical and emotional needs, not about whether they do that as a single parent, part of a married couple, as part of a trio, as someone who's been celibate for decades or someone who has a new sexual partner every time the moon is full.

This is why I'm such a fan of the good-faith question. Because I'm perfectly happy to answer those. "How have you dealt with being a parent and being polyamorous," for instance, is a good-faith question, and I can tell you a story to help answer it. "Don't you worry about your kids?" is not a good faith question, because it tells me that you think the answer is "No, I don't. I think only of my own gratification." But that's not how it is.

Last year, I dated a person I'll call Lovely Girlfriend. It was a long-distance relationship that started at a Quaker gathering, and the first time I visited her, we were sitting in her kitchen drinking tea and she said to me, "So, I'd like to talk about breaking up."

"So soon?" I said. "I didn't think we were there yet."

She wasn't dumping me. But she wanted to talk to me about how to be with each other so that if we stopped dating (and we did, about a year later), we could do it well. We both have kids; we like each other's kids, and our kids are friends. At Gatherings, we've done a lot of shared kid-activities and reciprocal child care. We have a lot of friends in common, and a relatively small, tight-knit community of people is an important part of both our lives. Lovely Girlfriend wanted to talk about how we would be with each other so that, whether dating turned out to be a long-term thing or not, we could still care for each other's kids, and we could continue to share our community.

It boiled down to being decent, and honest. And I think we were. Next time we see Lovely Girlfriend and her kids, the children might or might not sense that the relationship between us is different than it was. But her younger kid will still hug me hello (I hope), I'll still be happy to take the whole passel somewhere fun while Lovely Girlfriend fulfills a work commitment, she'll still sit with my younger kids in the cafeteria while I have a committee meeting, and the two of us will still be glad of the moments we can steal to be together in the busyness of a gathering. She'll still be one of my kids' grown-up friends, and mine, too.

Things aren't always that smooth, because people aren't always decent and honest, especially if strong emotions get involved. But that leads me directly to my next point:

My Kids Have Lost Precious Grownups. But It Hasn't Been Anybody I Was Dating

I think people who worry about relationship instability in polyamorous relationships imagine that we're doing something like telling the kids, "Hey, kids, here's Lovely Girlfriend. She's your new Other Mommy. Give Other Mommy a great big kiss!" And then a year later, Other Mommy is gone and the children are bereft.

We haven't done it that way, though. Lovely Girlfriend and I, for instance, were friends before we started dating, and we didn't announce the change to the kids, though they did notice we were visiting each other a lot more. Once when I hung up the phone, Word Boy said, "Was that Lovely Girlfriend?" and I said, "No, it was my doctor. Why?" He said, "Because usually you only answer if it's Lovely Girlfriend." So, you know, they do notice things. But they don't get real-time updates every time a relationship shifts a bit in one direction or another.

I always want to tell people, too, that being monogamous doesn't necessarily protect your kids from these kinds of losses. It hasn't protected mine. Raider used to have a friend, one of his best friends since college, who was very involved with us and our kids for years. She was so close that the kids called her "Aunt Cowrie," and my photo albums are full of pictures of her giving Baby Lego Savant bottles, playing with him, reading books to him, helping him plant flowers. She was the one who saw Word Boy's first steps, hanging out in our living room with him while I cooked dinner, and the turtle-shaped sandbox we recently got rid of was a gift from her.

And then she disappeared. She told Raider that she disapproved of our parenting so strongly that she couldn't bear to stay around and watch us ruin the children. And, just like that, one of the most important people in my kids' lives was gone.

But we still had Farina, one of my best friends, and her family. Now that was a close, stable relationship--a few years ago, Raider commented that our families had become to intertwined he didn't think we could get rid of each other if we tried. We lived about an hour apart, but visited back and forth regularly. For most of a school year, I kept their oldest son two days a week while they were experimenting with homeschooling, but that was OK because he was one of the Lego Savant's best friends. Farina repaired my front door and put new screens in the breezeway windows. I lent her money to buy her first rowing shell, and she lent me money when we were having trouble paying our mortgage during the custody fight with TT's birthfather. We took vacations together. Farina's wife became a good friend in her own right.

And then some problems Farina had with PTSD and depression got worse, and she began to lie to me, and to be verbally abusive. When I tried to talk to her about the situation, she became more entrenched, describing herself as my victim and redoubling her attacks on my character. I ended the relationship, and one more time the kids--and I--lost someone important.

You all probably know, as well, that last Christmas my dad, the kids' only surviving grandparent, disowned me for letting the Tiny Tornado live as a boy. I don't expect to see him again.

My point is, my kids have already suffered the kinds of losses that people worry about when polyamory comes up. But not because I was dating someone. We could have avoided these losses by not having best friends and a dad, but that hardly seems reasonable. (And I don't go around asking people with friends and parents whether they've really thought about the risks.)

Let Me Sum Up

My point, and it seems like such an obvious one that I can't believe I've taken so many words to make it, is that, in some ways, there is nothing special about the relationships you have when you're polyamorous, and the path they take is as varied as the paths taken by monogamous marriages, close friendships, relationships with biological family, dating relationships you have when you're single. As parents, we're making decisions all the time about who is part of our children's lives: whether to take them back to Miserable Small Town for another crappy tension-filled Penn family Thanksgiving, for instance (thank you, Dad, for solving that one for me); whether to introduce them to a certain friend; whether to trust them with that coach or that teacher. We make decisions ourselves about who to trust with our own hearts. Sometimes we get it right; sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it right and it still goes wrong. Sometimes somebody you thought would be there forever, isn't, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I still trust people. I trust Raider to the ends of the earth. I think we'll be together forever, but I believe that even if we're not, he will always be a great dad and a decent person. I have a girlfriend now that my kids adore, and I trust her with them. I trust her with their hearts. She might break mine, but she'll always take care of theirs.

But what I trust most is myself. I trust me to take good care of my children. I trust me to stand by them. I trust me to get into good relationships, and to get out of bad ones without drama. I trust me to explain things to my kids, as clearly and compassionately as I can, and I trust me to stand by them as they work out any confusion or sadness they feel. I trust me to do these things because I have done these things. I trust them to be smart, loving, emotionally whole, and resiliant, because they have always been these things.

There will always be losses. That is the cost of loving. I hope my kids come to feel, as I do, that the loving is worth it.

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A Crusade. But Without the Oppression and Death

I hate when I have something to write and keep starting dead-end drafts. So screw that. I'm on the internet now. I can do a listicle.

Things I like about polyamory:

1. My girlfriends' girlfriends, boyfriends, and significant others.

Sometimes when you're dating someone, they come with a sweetheart as a kind of bonus. If the person you're dating is awesome, odds are that their sweetheart will be at least that awesome if not moreso. And you can get a kind of privileged access to the sweetheart by virtue of dating their girlfriend. I know that everyone you get involved with, whether monogamously or not, might come with friends, family members, children, and pets that get to be part of your life, too, but there's a special kind of intimacy that comes from being lovers with the same person. There's even a jargon-y name for it, metamours. I like being metamours with cool people. I like having someone else who knows exacly what I mean when I say that my girlfriend is amazing in a certain way, or annoying in a certain other way. I have had the experience of sitting next to a metamour, seeing our mutual sweetie across the room, saying, "Isn't she lovely?" and sighing contentedly in shared understanding.
I remember the first time, more than 20 years ago, that I sat down to a meal with a girlfriend, her long-term partner, and her partner's other partner. I was nervous but I liked it. I liked the cross-currents of love and affection. I liked the teasing looks my girlfriend's partner was sending my way, and I liked listening to the mattter-of-fact way the three of them worked out their schedule for the coming week.

I like the feeling of a web of affection and desire. It's that simple.

2. I like my girlfriends, past and present, and my partner, and don't want to be without them.
Love and sexual desire are notoriously bad at following rules or bending themselves to practicality. Interracial couples have always loved one another whether it was legal or not. Princesses love stableboys, and so do princes from time to time.

I have loved many people in my life, some briefly and tragically, some briefly and brilliantly, some--well, one so far--forever. I have broken many rules to have these loves. I broke the rule about not being in same-sex relationships, and I broke the popular 1990s lesbian rule about not loving trans men. Eventually I broke my own rule that I was a lesbian, and settled down with Raider. I have broken many times the rules about age differences in sexual relationships.

And every time, I'm glad I didn't let a rule stop me. "But she's a girl!" would have kept me from my first real love. "She's 25 years older than you!" would have kept me from a relationship I learned a great deal from and remember very fondly. "He's a man" would have kept me from Raider.
I'm a big fan of standards, and maybe I'll talk about what that means another time. But rules? Not so much. A rule is Robert Frost's wall, about which he says:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.

Frost says, "I could say elves...but it's not elves exactly." I say it's love, particularly love in the form of sexual desire, that wants the walls down. And I will make the claim that is not been a lack of morality or an unhealthy promiscuity or a recklessness toward my own feelings or my partners' that has led me to squeeze through the narrow gaps in so many walls in search of the light I can see shining through from the other side.

It has been love, which in all its forms is ultimately the same form. And this is one of the ways I have been called to be in service to love in my life.

What I don't like about polyamory:

This is the world's shortest list. There is only one item on it. I don't like having to mold my behavior to standards that make no sense to me. I've never been good at it. I have no notion of "too much information." I am comfortable disclosing almost anything, and comfortable hearing almost anything. I have never been good at being in the closet, and once I came out never spent much time there. As a lesbian in my 20s, I accepted both the restrictions and the freedoms that being out brought with it.
But I can't be fully out right now. I can't talk in specifics. I can tell you I'm poly, but I can't tell you about anyone I might be seeing who isn't Raider, at least not on my blog or on Facebook. And there are good reasons for this. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I hate that I know people who've lost friendships because they came out as poly; I lost friendships when I came out a lesbian, and one of the costs of being in the closet is not knowing who would stand by you if they knew. I hate that someone with a vindictive ex could lose child custody over this, or that parents could withdraw from their adult children, or that employment could be jeopardized, or church or Meeting membership, or a community lost. I dislike being discreet, I'm bad at it even when I try, and I fear harming someone else by a failure to be as discreet as I should be.

Still, many times in my life I have been the one to blurt out something "inappropriate," and it has been my experience over and over again that when somebody like me opens her big mouth and says something wildly inappropriate, there is nearly always someone listening who needed to hear it. I've had a woman tell me that a story I read helped her be brave enough to admit to some of her own sexual desires, with great results. I've had many people say "I thought I was the only one." When word got out in the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival worker camp, back in the 90s, that I had a lover who was a trans man, there was controversy--I had one crewmate who couldn't resist bringing me the negative gossip she'd overheard, of which there was apparently plenty. But I was also sought out by multiple women who identified as lesbians but had a partner who wanted to transition; or were beginning a relationship with a trans man; or had had a relationship with a cis-gendered man that they'd felt they had to keep secret for fear of being judged or ostracized in their lesbian community.
They wanted to talk to me because they knew they could tell me about these things. When I tell you how many people I've slept with or how recently I experienced sexual gratification or what I like to do in bed, I'm not just being Su Who Has Never Been Able to Keep Her Mouth Shut. At least, I'm not only being that. I am fighting a crusade against shame.

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Loving Your Slutty Friend: New Anything Energy

Yesterday, I joked that I was going to write a pamphlet that would focus on reassuring the vanilla and monogamous by focusing on what we have in common. Today I find myself thinking about one of those things.

A quick note about terminology: I do not want to get bogged down trying to either describe every option or find the perfect word that covers everything. I'm going to keep it simple and sloppy. I'm going to use "monogamy" to mean people who choose to be only in exclusive coupled relationships. I'm going to use "non-monogamy" as an umbrella term for all the wide variety of ways that people have non-exclusive relationships. And I'm going to use "dating" as an umbrella term for all the wide variety of ways that people relate to each other sexually and romantically, whether as one-night partners on a first-name-only basis, or as people in a long-term relationship who don't live together, or whatever. I'm going to use "they" as a generic singular pronoun. I'm going to start a lot of sentences with "for me," because my experience is just one example, not a rule book.

If you are a monogamous person thinking about non-monogamy--either as an option for yourself, or as a theoretical exercise--you might find yourself concerned that a new relationship could destabilize an older one. An older relationship can feel secure, and imagining one or both partners dating someone else can feel like it will threaten that security.

The first thing we have in common: Non-monogamous people worry about this, too! There is such a thing as New Relationship Energy, that mix of excitement and limerence and sexiness and unlimited potential that you can get swept up in with a new person In fact, the book on open relationships I read recently, Opening Up, devotes a section to talking about it.

One way to deal with NRE is to know it can happen, and be smart enough not to make any big decisions during this time. Wait until you've found out your new sweetie's flaws and annoying habits--wait until you've found out that they have flaws and annoying habits, just like your old sweetie--before you consider changing living arrangments or adding them to the checking account or breaking up with that dear old sweetie who's stood by you for so long.

Another way to deal with it is to not have New Relationship Energy when your current relationship is vulnerable. This has been my strategy, and is one of the reasons that my own non-monogamous nature has been so little acted on during my relationship with Raider. Preserving my good relationship with him has always been my highest priority, and as a result I have been extremely conservative for a person who is basically promiscuous.

Sometimes our relationship is being hard work because we have something to figure out. Sometimes, life is just stressful in general--nobody's getting any sleep because a Child Who Will Remain Nameless didn't sleep through the night until he was almost three; or we're so busy with the kids and our jobs that we're struggling to find the time and energy for a private conversation (let alone sex); or my chronic headache is acting up. During these times, I don't date.

From the time I got pregnant with the Lego Savant, in September 2000, until about two years ago, I didn't think about dating at all. It wasn't just on the back burner. The back burner wasn't even lit. We were busy: having babies, caring for babies, learning to nurture our own relationship as a couple while having all those children. (If I were doing a "myths about nonmonogamy" post instead of a "what we have in common" one, I'd say that my experience counters a kind of prevalant assumption that nonmonogamous people are always having multiple relationships, or are indiscriminate in their relationships. But we'll set that to one side for now.)

But we have something even more important than that in common, which is that even monogamous relationships can be destabilized by the Energy of the New. Certainly, one form that takes is infidelity. But any time one person changes, it can also change the relationship. Two of the women I dated when I was in grad school in the late 80s had left homes they shared with long-term partners to attend grad school hundreds or thousands of miles away. Both of those relationships ended during the first year apart. (My lover went with me to grad school, and our relationship as lovers ended during that year, too.)

You can agree not to have other sexual or romantic partners, but you can't ever be sure that your postal-worker girlfriend won't decide to go to med school, or your office-worker boyfriend won't decide he wants to study gender theory at the graduate level, or your artist wife won't realize that if she doesn't move to Europe soon she never will. When I decided I wanted a baby, that could well have been a deal-breaker for me and Raider, had he not somehow found a way to access the very very buried, hitherto completely unknown part of him that wanted to be a dad. We have friends right now whose loving, long-term relationship is threatened because of one's dream to live in particular place--and the other one's strong desire to live somewhere else.

Needing something the other can't give you; finding that there is something you want more than your relationship; someone changing, for good or ill, in ways that make you incompatible: these can happen in any relationship. It takes courage to be open to the new things coming into your life, whether that's a new love or a new religion or a new hobby that takes you away from home every Saturday, because the changes that come with these things are unpredictable. It takes courage, too, to turn away from the new for a time because the relationship matters more.

We all have to find this ever-shifting balance. This is one of the things we have in common. It's not the only one. I may tell you about some of the others sometimes.

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I Have Read a Book About Open Relationships

I am reading a book called Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. Not that I felt I needed any advice; my relationship with Raider was created almost 20 years ago and is sustaining itself pretty well (Year 20: The best so far, in every way). But I was curious to see what the book said, and curious to see what's up in the world. For many years, busy with child-rearing and whatnot, I not only cleaved only unto Raider, but I paid no attention to what was going on in the, I dunno what you'd call it, non-monogamy community. I was familiar with the word "polyamory," and aware that some folks seemed to prefer it to "non-monogamy," but I didn't know why, or what that word necessarily meant to the people who were using it. If I used it to describe myself, what would I be saying about myself? If I said I was non-monogamous, what connotations would that carry these days? It's not that I'm especially concerned about labels, only that I recently found myself curious about the thinking that folks were doing about these things.

Hence, the book.

It's a great big book, and it has some strengths. I'm not sure, though, that it's one I would recommend to someone just starting to think about whether they might not be purely monogamous, or considering a relationship with someone who is polyamorous or non-monogamous. There are several reasons for that.

For one, the book has a real bias toward non-monogamy. Monogamous people, you will learn from this book, buy into a number of myths, such as the idea that you should get all your needs met by one single person. Not only the author, but a number of her interviewees, mention this. But I have never met a person who believed this. If they did, we'd see a lot more people who formed up into couples and then moved into little hermitages together; weddings would be going-away parties, people weeping into their handkerchiefs because they were never going to see the happy couple again. This is a straw man that people who are non-monogamous like to knock down--and have for as long as I can remember, which is getting to be a long time now--because it makes them feel smarter and more enlightened than exclusive couples.

You will also learn from this book that non-monogamous people are more courageous than monogamous people. There's some truth in this, in that being non-monogamous, especially openly, does take the same kind of moral courage that any kind of unconventional choice does. But monogamy takes courage, too. I think that successful relationships of all kinds require the same kinds of qualities: bravery, honesty, respect for boundaries, acceptance of the beloved.

This book isn't written for monogamous people, and so it's a bit unfair to criticize it by saying that it would be off-putting for a monogamous reader for these reasons. But it bothered me because it's sloppy thinking, and because I believe it is possible to affirm one's own choices without denigrating the authentic choices of others.

Speaking of words: the author likes to say that terminology doesn't really matter, but the book is devoted to parsing words into their narrowest possible divisions. "Non-monogamy," by her definition, means that you have a primary relationship, and other relationships just for sex. "Polyamory" means that you seek out other relationships to meet emotional needs as well. From there, you get "hierarchical" and "non-hierarchical" polyamory, "polyfidelity," "solo polyamory," and so on. You get every possible combination of partners and lovers discussed as its own special case. Labels, labels, labels. I found it tiresome. I began to feel like the hardest part of being poly-non-mono-whatever was going to be figuring out which box I might fit in. But I don't want to be in a box. So, no thank you.

Two other small things: I appreciate the diversity of the people who were interviewed for the book, though, oddly, they are often presented as couples even if there are other people involved. For instance: "Diane and Mike live with their triad partner, Derek." I do think that a lot of people experience their relationships this way--Raider and I, for instance, are probably always going to be a couple, no matter what else happens. I think. But often it seemed like a strange default option on the part of the author as she wrote about people's stories. And I would have liked to hear a bit more from people in long-term relationships. People who've been together for 2 years, or 4, certainly have much to say that is worth listening to. But where are my peers? I'd have liked to hear more from people whose relationships were a little longer in the tooth.

All in all, I'd say The Ethical Slut is a better book. It's more concise, and doesn't spend so much time parsing words to within an inch of their lives. Neither book had much to say that was new to me; of course, I learned what I know in my twenties, and I learned it all the hard way. Maybe reading a book would have been a better idea.

Both of these books make me want to write my own little pamphlet. I would call it, "Loving Your Slutty Friend: A Field Guide to Kink, Casual Sex, and Multiple Relationships For the Vanilla and Monogamous." I would start by talking about what I think we, and our relationships, have in common. It's all just variations on a theme, I would say. It's nothing to be afraid of.

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What's Hecuba to Him, or He to Hecuba?

Raider and I have an especially beloved friend; the kids call him Uncle Toots. We have a long history with Toots. Raider and Toots can remember the night they met as college students; they quickly became best friends and, sometimes, lovers. They have so much in common and have been through so much together that we joke that they are the same person; indeed, once when they were young, someone seeing them together at an event did a double-take: this person, knowing them separately, had thought they were one person. (First aside: sometime even I confuse them. One time I said to Raider, "I made a stir-fry for dinner, but I didn't put in any ginger because I know you don't like it." Raider said, "I like ginger. Toots doesn't like ginger.")

I moved to town a few years later and met Toots on our first day working at the same place. We fell in love. I didn't get to know Raider well over the next couple of years, because he was back and forth to North Dakota caring for his parents, but I remember the night I met Raider: he and Toots lived together, and I met Raider when I picked Toots up for our first date. Until Toots and I got an apartment together, there was a room across the hall from his that belonged to Raider; I saw his stuff, I even slept in his bed a time or two, before I got to know him.

Toots and I stopped being lover-lovers after awhile. Two years? I can't remember exactly. But we had this weird inertia--we knew that one of us should move out of the apartment, but somehow we never could bring ourselves to do it. And, after awhile, we found that we had transitioned to a new relationship, something more than friends and other than lovers, although we were still occaionally "lovers" in the technical sense, as were Toots and Raider, once in a blue moon. This was the beginning of our having a relationship there is no name for. (Second aside: I've been re-thinking the expression "break up," because I have had so many relationships with lovers that didn't end, but rather turned into something else. Sometimes that transition is painful; sometimes it's not. But in the long run, it often turns out that nothing was broken.)

Raider's parents died within a few months of each other when he was 25. (Third aside: now that many of my friends and I are beginning to deal with parents who are aging, I have a new sympathy for what it must have been like for him, as an only child, to go through that so young.)

A few months after his mother died, Raider came back to Michigan, to continue work on a library science degree at Michigan. He had a tiny single on North Campus, but during this time of intense grieving, what he needed was to be with his other half, and day after day he would finish classes and drive the hour to our house so he could be with Toots. This is when Raider and I began to know each other; and we got even closer when we decided that it made more sense for him to live with us and commute to school the next semester.

In the years since then, Toots and Raider and I have lived together and apart in a variety of configurations. We all lived together for awhile, then Raider got his own house and Toots lit out for San Francisco. Then Raider and I moved in together. Then some malignant idiot ran a red light and nearly killed Toots, and he came back to Michigan to recuperate while his multiple broken limbs healed. He ended up staying, and we lived together after that for, what, four or five years? Until the Lego Savant was about 18 months old anyway. If Toots comes back to Michigan someday--as he may, to be near his own aging parents, and us--we will most likely live together again.

When the Lego Savant was a toddler, Toots moved to Boston to be with his sweetie, the Crafty Elf. We can tolerate this separation only because we love the Crafty Elf so very much. And we spent some time seriously considering whether we should move to Boston, too.

My point is: What is Toots to us? What are we to Toots? The kids call him Uncle, but we could just as easily have decided to call him Papa Toots; he is the closest thing they have to a third parent. I sometimes tell people that they might think of Toots as the third adult in our nuclear family, even though he lives with the Crafty Elf these days. Toots sometimes tries to convey his relationship with the children by telling people he is their godfather; that works pretty well. Sometimes he takes flack from his family for spending more time with our kids than with his biological nephew; would it help people understand the relationship and accept it if we had decided to call him their stepfather?

I remember one night when I was pregnant with the Lego Savant. I was very sick, as usual. Raider had tucked me into bed early, and he and Toots were next door in Toots' bedroom watching ST:TNG. I lay there listening to them talk and laugh, and I could feel their intimacy and love for one another, and I felt so warmed by it. Their connection gave me tremendous pleasure. It still does.

Recently, Toots was visiting, and we were hanging out in the living room after the kids had gone to bed. I was crocheting in my big chair, and drifted out of the conversation a little bit, listening to them talk, and it occurred to me: in some ways, Raider is closer to Toots than he is to me. In important ways. I am non-optional for Raider. But so is Toots. I miss Toots when we don't see him often enough; Raider feels his absence profoundly much of the time.

This gets me thinking: are we polyamorous with Toots? Neither of us has had a sexual relationship with Toots in a very long time, but why do we so often use sex to define relationships? Heck, you don't need intimate details of my relationship with Raider to guess that, between two terrible pregnancies, a lifetime of chronic pain, extended illness, and the normal pressures of having young children, we have had some long stretches when sex was a happy memory and a longed-for future. If our relationship had to be redefined every time we went a certain number of weeks or months without sex, we'd have been married, unmarried, married, unmarried, married, and unmarried many times over the past 19 years. (Fourth aside: a new euphemism. "Hey, Raider: Will you marry met? Marry me hard!")

The only thing I know for sure is: this is one of the ways that family looks in our lives.

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You Put Your Whole Self In

The other day, I talked some about polyamory. I honestly forget sometimes that things like that might surprise some people, or make them uncomfortable. I know that a couple of my readers were uncomfortable with that post, and based on my blog stats, I'm guessing I lost some readers (though that could be a coincidence). I was like, "Oh, yeah, right."

I am lucky to have a diverse group of friends, including, through homeschooling and elsewhere, committed Christians of various stripes. It should be no surprise that there are things we don't share easily with each other. I do forget sometimes that when I write on my blog, I am writing both to some faceless audience of people I haven't met, and also to specific friends and loved ones, and that some posts may be very welcome to some friends, and uncomfortable for others.

I've actually been thinking about this kind of a lot since I posted about polyamory. Right now, my own sexuality and sexual history are things I'm interested in, and if I'm interested in something, I usually write about it, to someone, in some venue. Right now, this blog is my venue most of the time.

I write about a lot of things on my blog. Even before my renewed interest in reflection on sexuality and polyamory, I wondered if my blog was too scattered. I write about adoption; parenting; anxiety; race and class; books; Quakerism and faith; my life; people I love. Perhaps I should have several blogs--one about adoption, one about books, one about Quakerism, one for profiles of my beloveds, one about parenting...

The problem is that I don't have enough to say about any one of those things to sustain a blog. Long-time readers may recall that this blog started as a place to think about transracial adoption. Eventually, though, I found that I had said most of what I have to say on that topic, and the blog was quiet for awhile until I started using it as The Blog of All Things. I seem to be a Blog of All Things kind of person, because I don't have one thing I'm interested in. I'm deeply interested in transracial adoption for awhile; then I'm reading up on economics and globalization; then I'm reading a whole bunch of classic sci-fi, or re-watching Firefly. Lately I've been studying up on homebirth and midwifery, because I realized I didn't have an informed opinion on those things, and I was curious. Sometimes I'm interested in several things at once: right now, I'm very interested in reading and talking about gifted kids; kittens; amigurumi; common birds of Michigan; young adult fiction; marriage; flirting; service; homeschooling; gender-nonconforming kids; and religion. Off the top of my head. And that might mean a blog post on one of those things one day, and on another the next day. Or one post that touches on a couple of those things.

They're not neatly compartmentalized for me. Parenting, gender-nonconformance, anxiety, religion, and kittens, for instance, have some obvious connections in my life right now. I can't see it working for me to have a blog that was supposed to be only about one of those things.

Something I thought about yesterday, during my middle-of-the-night drive home from Ann Arbor, was whether, if I want to write about polyamory and sexuality, I should have a special space for that. A separate blog, or a section of this blog that people could choose to go to, or not. But part of what I'm thinking about is my desire to be wholly known, by which I mean to be in places and with people where I can bring my whole self. One of the things I love about FLGBTQC is that it comes so close to that for me--I've said many times, and here I am saying it again, FLGBTQC is the place in my life where people can best honor and hold both my relationship with Raider and my queer identity. I like that. I want and need more places like that in my life.

As Ragen Chastain says, I am the boss of my underpants. I am also the boss of my blog. And I need and want this to be a place where I can write honestly about what matters to me.

It's not my wish to make anyone uncomfortable; it is, indeed, my regret if I do. But at the same time, it's OK with me if people are uncomfortable. It's OK if some people only read my posts on books, or my posts on parenting. It's OK if some people decide not to read my blog at all. Even people I love. Even people who are my friends and want to stay my friends. It's OK, if you're uncomfortable, to say so. I welcome both "I" statements and Good-Faith Questions on any topic. Tell me what you think and feel; that's fine with me. Ask me more; that's fine with me. Choose to spend your time elsewhere; I'm sorry to see you go, but that's fine with me, too, and when I see you at park day or in the grocery store or at a friend's house, I'll still be glad to see you and I hope you'll be glad to see me.

I am a moral person. I am a deeply ethical person. I am religious in a non-trivial way. I think and ponder and reflect and think some more about everything. The decisions I make about my life are shaped by these things. I don't think I've ever made a decision lightly. So, you know, at least, that if I make a decision that seems dangerous, reckless, immoral, wrong-headed, deeply mistaken, risky, or even just head-scratchingly incomprehensible to you, well, it's probably the best-thought-out, most-thoroughly-processed bone-headed move in history. Perhaps that is a consolation.

I might write some more about sexuality and polyamory sometime soon; I have a couple of things percolating in the Grab-Bag. But I won't write explicity about sex here. Just so you know.

In other news, my notebook went missing yesterday just after I wrote about it. It went missing in circumstances that make me hope it will yet turn up--I remember putting it, and my shopping list, into my bag, but when the Tiny Tornado and I got to the store, I opened my bag and they weren't there. Somewhere in the house, we think. Or maybe the car.

I hope it turns up. This is not just a notebook; it's the notebook my friend Janis gave me a pen quiver for. I love perfect, unexpected gifts (like the time my friend Weaver mailed me a fancy tape-flag dispenser! Clearly office supplies are a theme) and I treasure my pen quiver.

In the meantime, Raider gave me a little notebook he picked up at a conference in May, small enough to carry in my bag. And I have a beautiful journal my friend Uncle Toots bought for me at Walden Pond, really too nice for the kind of disposable note-taking I do. And I remind myself that my brain is always generating more thoughts and ideas than I know what to do with, so anything that stays lost is probably not that important; meanwhile, worthwhile things (and some that aren't) find their way to the surface again. I'm already on the second page of notes in the lovely journal.

And so on.

 

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The Things You Find Out About Yourself

I had a couple of surprises at last week's FGC Gathering of Friends. One was that one of the highlights of my week was being invited to meet with a group of polyamorous and kinky Friends. A small group of us met early in the week, and enjoyed it so much that we met again a few days later. That second meeting was one of the deepest, most worshipful parts of my week.

I was surprised by how much meeting with these folks meant to me, because I hadn't thought of polyamory as a central part of who I am. If anything, I see myself as something of a poser--Raider and I claim to be in an open relationship, but it's only been actively opened up a couple of times, and that before we had kids.

Indeed, we've spent most of our 19 years together too busy with other things to have relationships on the side. For the first few years, we were so busy enjoying each other we actually thought we were monogamous. Then, one day in the car, we engaged in one of those "what if" conversations--what if you were at a conference and it was someone you'd never see again? what if it was an ongoing relationship with someone out of town? what if it was someone in town and you wanted to date them in a clearly secondary-to-our-relationship way? what if it was someone in town and you got very serious with them?

And we discovered that none of these scenarios was a deal-breaker for either of us. "Huh," we said. "I guess we're not monogamous. Who knew?"

It was another four or five years before either of us acted on it, though. We got busy with figuring out how to stay in a relationship past the first couple of years, and then in dealing with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder I'd had since childhood, and with one thing and another, there was never a good time. For one thing, we were too darn busy to have time to date. For another, it's never a good idea to start a second relationship when your first one is vulnerable. It's too easy to use the new lover as an excuse to opt out of the work you need to do with the old one.

I'm sure some people do it and make it work. It's not a risk I'm willing to take.

And then, after awhile, all the drama and hard work was behind us. We were stable, settled, happy. And over several months in the summer of 2000, we both had some outside adventures, and it was fine. It was fun, and it was fine.

And then, a few weeks later, I got pregnant with the Lego Savant, and there followed another decade of being just too darn busy. Most parents can attest that nurturing your own relationship during the years you're raising young children is hard enough; I couldn't imagine having the energy or patience for a girlfriend.

In general, for the last decade, I've seen myself settling into life as a very conventional middle-class stay-at-home mom. I felt like I clung to my theoretical polyamory the way I clung to my nose piercing--something that signalled that I wasn't boring and middle American. Or, at least, not just boring and middle American.

I need to digress to say that I don't mean to suggest that heterosexual, monogamously married moms are dull or unworthy. I know many women who are, so far as I know, HMMMs, and they are all awesome. They make mothering into a loving art, they like their husbands, they all have something that isn't their children that they are passionate about, whether that's gardening, art, religion, political and social activism, bread-baking. There's no shame in being one of them, and to the extent that I am one of them, I'm proud to be. This is just a holdover from some anxiety from my youth; it's about me, not about them.

It never occurred to me that I clung to my "theoretical" polyamory because polyarmory is actually part of who I am. That I might not be a poseur trying to be more interesting than I am, but a polyamorous person who just hasn't had the inclination or opportunity to practice much these last two decades.

But I had a lot of time to reflect on the long car ride home, and realized that nearly all of my relationships have been non-monogamous. I've done it well, and I've done it badly. I've done it with women whose care and respect for their lovers were a model to emulate, and I've done it with women whose behavior was a red flag I should have let myself see sooner. I've gotten it so badly wrong that I've hurt someone I care about very much (long since forgiven!), and I've gotten it so right that my girlfriend and I could double-date with her lover and her lover's other lover.

But I've always done it. My first woman lover and I broke up in 1988, and I don't think I have committed to be exclusive with anyone since then (that first few years with Raider, when we mistakenly believed ourselves to be monogamous, are a special case).

Anyway, I wanted to say that until I walked into that room for that meeting last week, I hadn't realized how isolated I have felt among Quakers as a polyamorous person. (And as a person with some unconventional sexual preferences, but I'm not going to talk about that in any detail.) It felt good to be in a circle of folks where I knew I wouldn't be judged, though it actually took us some work to get to that point, because you never know. Unconventional people can be just as prone as anybody else to think that everything on their side of some self-defined line is OK, and anything on the other side is just plain wrong. Nobody wants to face that moment when you make yourself vulnerable only to find out that you were not safe from judgment in that space. But we got there. And it was a good, deep, and worshipful place to be.

I might have another post on this topic in me--thinking about this brought up so many memories: good, bad, funny, sexy. I might write about what, in my experience, works and what doesn't. What are some of the common blunders? What are the red flags you should look for in a new relationship? How do people of good will take care of each other in multiple relationships? I'm no expert, but I spent a few intense years in my 20s learning by trial and error, and I might have a few words to say.

I usually do.