Mulling something over

[treeskin]

sidhe612 made an interesting comment last time we talked on the phone; it's been floating in my head since, trying to crystallize. Let's see if this gets anywhere close.

A lot of our friends are poly, in one form or another. A certain group of our friends were beginning to explore poly, and it developed into a very long, messy crisis. sidhe612 suggested that perhaps part of the crisis came from the examples of poly practices he had noticed within our community. This made me think about choices By & I had made, and how they might look from outside our head space.

For instance, at Laid-Back Labor Day, 2002, I had a fling with one of the guys in our camp, and By took advantage of the time to enjoy one of our female friends. We both knew about the arrangements ahead of time, no big deal to us, much fun was had by all. And again, at the same event this year, By spent some quality time with friends of ours who'd made a long trip to see us, and I'd picked up a new "pet".

Now, of these four connections, only the one with Pet was a spur-of-the-moment, he's-cute-why-not sort of thing; and I've made an effort to build more of a connection with Pet since (hence my head cold this week). But I can see where the others, if you didn't pay attention to time we spent with the various people beforehand, could look like sport-fucking. (Yes, for the record, the first night with Pet was sport. )

So now, I'm wondering if we should change our behavior so our intent is more clear. Not just because of our friend who's having the crisis, but I wonder if others in our community are seeing the same things in our behaviors.


Something else our friend in the crisis hasn't seemed to catch is the concept of boundaries and permission. He's looked at both as control issues, and seems to me to be very defensive about them. He didn't notice, before my sport with Pet took place, that first I talked to Byron, then Pet talked to Byron--in public, in front of the whole camp. I've been told others in camp noticed, and applauded Pet's manners. But our friend doesn't seem to have caught the lesson that a few simple questions, and honest answers, can keep feelings from being hurt.

Guess I need to think some more.

Comments

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Probably the best way I'd have of describing us would be emotionally monogamous but sexually non-monogamous

Do you have boundaries in place against falling in love with other people, or is that allowed as well as long as the pair-bond remains paramount?

Frankly, I classify relationships by level of committment (which you guys seem to be doing just fine on), and amount of work the people in the relationships are prepared to do (ditto), and even if your relationship doesn't fall within the strictest parameters of poly by many people's definition, you are still using the same set of skills that By and Jera or Ranj and I use to keep our relationships healthy and intimate, and by those lights, I believe that you can provide valuable insight.

[draco-kc.livejournal.com]

Do you have boundaries in place against falling in love with other people, or is that allowed as well as long as the pair-bond remains paramount?

It's something we've not addressed in quite those terms, but it's an issue we've touched on. It's a dangerous issue, given the current long-distance nature of our relationship -- I think that emotionally opening the relationship to others might make it too difficult to sustain things long-distance. I'm pretty sure that he'd agree with me on that one, but certainly I think it's something that we should probably talk about and confirm that that's still our understanding. All-round, our communication isn't always the most thorough on these issues, but it's something we work on.

I know that when it comes to the way I'm presently wired, I don't know if I'm well suited for emotional non-monogamy. There was a while when soxnboxrs was regularly hanging out with a guy we had met up at the Chicago Eagle. I knew that they were playing on occasion, and I didn't have a problem with that. What tripped my [patented scorp-o-matic] jealousy response was (in addition to the fact that we were working on keeping things going long-distance) that he was getting to see this guy so frequently, and that I knew that this other guy was on the rebound from a failed relationship. I was concerned that they were getting emotionally entangled, and wasn't sure where that would take us.

Fortunately, I did the intelligent thing and talked to him about it. He put my concerns to rest about the other guy and that's not where things were going. We also made sure it was clear to the other guy where he stood.

I've also run into the issue from the other perspective. The first few months after soxnboxrs moved to Chicago, I was not in a good space. While being as supportive as possible to him, inside I felt upset and abandoned. I did a number of really stupid things during that time. Among those things was allowing an interaction with this guy, S, to go beyond a mere casual flirtation. He knew how unhappy I was with the situation and courted me in return.

Though we never played (oddly enough) I fell for him pretty hard for a while. At the same time, it was very painful for me, because it felt like a betrayal of soxnboxrs. The situation resolved itself when S started exclusively dating another friend, but it put me into another emotional tailspin for a while (leading me to do other stupid things to try to avoid dealing with how I was feeling).

Once I had some distance pulled myself out of that mess, I realized that I didn't want to put myself through that again. So I resolved that I wasn't going to permit myself anything other than casual involvements outside of my primary relationship. While I've told soxnboxrs as much, I haven't yet shared the full story of the S episode, mainly because I needed time and distance and because he had enough things on his plate at the time.