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I’m thinking about bridging the inferential gap between mono people and poly people, and one of the things I’m thinking about is the concept of secondary partners.
I want to make it clear that this post is based mostly on my own experiences and observations; there are as many different ways of doing poly as there are poly people. However, I hope it can provide insight into one way polyamory can tend to work.
In American culture, commitment is supposed to steadily escalate over the course of a sexual-romantic relationship. Solopoly calls this the relationship escalator:
Relationship escalator: The default set of societal expectations for the proper conduct of intimate relationships. Progressive steps with clearly visible markers and a presumed structural goal of permanently monogamous (sexually and romantically exclusive), cohabitating marriage — legally sanctioned if possible. The social standard by which most people gauge whether a developing intimate relationship is significant, “serious,” good, healthy, committed or worth pursuing or continuing.
Now, the relationship escalator is a perfectly valid way to do relationships. Something a lot like the relationship escalator is more-or-less how everyone finds life partnerships, love at first sight and arranged marriages aside.
However, I think this is where a lot of monogamous people get confused about polyamory. They don’t necessarily have a model of how to have romantic-sexual relationships outside of steadily escalating commitment, and so they model polyamory as having a whole bunch of different relationships on the relationship escalator at the same time. While that’s not an impossible relationship configuration, that is not how polyamory usually works in my experience.
This confusion is only natural. It is possible for monogamous people to have secondary romantic relationships (unlike metamourship, which you can basically only experience as a poly person). But they tend to be fairly uncommon, because most people would prefer a primary relationship to a secondary romantic relationship, and in a monogamous structure you can only have one. So no wonder most monogamous people are generalizing from their own experiences.
So here’s the reframe: don’t think about secondary relationships like romantic relationships you’ve experienced. Think of them like friendships.
Many friendships settle naturally into a particular level of commitment. For a fairly extreme example, consider two people who, for the past ten years, have gotten dinner every six months. Similarly, a lot of friendships might naturally become a “hang out once a week and play video games” relationship, a “spend hours a day cowriting porn when we’re in the same fandom and barely interact when we’re not” relationship, a “we never see each other because of the Atlantic Ocean but chatting is fun” relationship. Even if your friendship has a lower level of commitment, you can still care a lot about each other, want each other to be happy, and value the relationship as it is.
You might also find that your friendships change in level of commitment over time. Sometimes you talk every day; sometimes you go months without talking, because you’re just in different places in your life. That doesn’t necessarily mean you care about each other any less. Sometimes you can pick up your friendship exactly where you left off; other times, you have to rebuild your friendship; still other times, you’re left with nothing but fond feelings.
Your romantic relationship, if you have one, is probably more important than your friendships. But that doesn’t mean your friendships are unimportant. Your friendships can be just as deep, just as intimate, as your romantic relationship; you are not going to build a life together in the same way, but you still care about them. There’s a certain sense in which your partner is more important than your friends, but that doesn’t mean you always sacrifice your friends’ needs for your partner’s– at least not if you’re a caring friend. If your friend is in the hospital, you might cancel a date with your romantic partner to go visit them; if you’ve made plans with your friend but your partner wants to hang out, you might tell them you already have plans.
If someone asked you if your friendships were unsuccessful because they didn’t end in getting married, you would be confused. It’s true they’re not romantic relationships, but they’re not supposed to be! They’re not half-assed imitations of romantic relationships, they’re successful friendships.
Secondary relationships are like that, but with more fucking.
I think the lack of understanding of secondary relationships explains a lot of otherwise puzzling monogamous beliefs. “Polyamory is all about sex” often has its root in people having no concept of off-the-escalator relationships other than casual sex. The emphasis on triads, quads, and vees is because those are the relationships that fit most closely to the relationship escalator.
Similarly, a lot of people criticize poly relationships for being unstable. It is true that my extended polycule rarely goes a week without someone breaking up or adding a new partner. (There are forty or fifty people in it, so no wonder.) But not all of the relationships are at the same level of commitment. My relationship with Andrew, which began with the utterly romantic statement “so, I want to date you, but I’m worried about running out of emotional energy; if I’m spread too thin, I’m probably going to break up with you” is, uh, pretty likely to end in a breakup. (Although you never know.) But that doesn’t mean that Mike and Alicorn are any more likely to divorce than any other married couple.
A lot of people have asked “what if you have to choose between your partners?” The standard polyamorous answer is that polyamory means I don’t have to. In a monogamous relationship, I would have to choose one partner, but in a polyamorous relationship, I can live in a house with all three people I’m dating and there are no problems.
But I think that fails to answer the main point of the critique.
As we poly people say, “love is infinite, time is not.” I’m dating three people and have platonic relationships of equal importance with two more, but there are many more people who are attractive and who might be willing to be persuaded to date my crazy ass. It is very difficult to seriously date more than five or six people. As a monogamous person, in a committed relationship, there are protections to prevent me from finding another partner: I’m not allowed to flirt, I’m not allowed to hook up with people at parties, other people are discouraged from confessing crushes on me, and in some relationships I’m not allowed to interact with people I have a crush on or even have orientation-compatible friends. These don’t work perfectly– witness how many people cheat or break up with their partners for someone else. But allowing people to flirt, confess crushes, and casually hook up is hardly going to make them less likely to find new partners.
So what happens if I meet a Shiny New Lover?
Well, I’m probably going to break up with one of my current partners.
And “too many partners” is hardly the only time this comes up. If I have two girlfriends, and one of my girlfriends gets an exciting new job in Hong Kong and one of my girlfriends gets an exciting new job in Mountain View, I can live with at most one girlfriend. Even though I can keep dating both of them, in some sense I’m still choosing one over the other.
But again we return to the friends metaphor. If you have a bustling social life and you suddenly meet THE COOLEST PERSON EVER, probably you’re going to stop spending so much time with Joe, who was pretty neat but really hard to get ahold of. If your partner gets an exciting new job in Hong Kong, you might have to move with her, even though it means moving away from your friends. Your friendships matter a lot, but they are less committed than your romantic relationship.
A lot of people feel sad about the idea of a low-commitment romantic relationship: for them, romantic feelings are closely tied to wanting to spend a life together. That means polyamory might be a bad fit for them (although you never know). But I think sometimes it’s because they think the lower-commitment relationships are less real or like the lower-commitment partner is being betrayed or mistreated somehow, and that’s not true. There’s a lot of reasons you might have romantic feelings for someone and still not be committed to them. One or both of you might already have a life partnership or primary relationship. You or they might be an independent person who prefers their own space and doesn’t want someone else making their decisions for them. You might be incompatible as life partners: they want kids and you don’t; their dream job is working in Antartica; that clicking thing they do with their tongue would drive you mad if you had to wake up to it every day. Just like you aren’t mistreating your friends if you’re not as committed to them as you are to your monogamous partner, you aren’t mistreating your secondaries in the same situation.
Thing of Things 
Funny thing, I’m kinda easing out of poly space and drifting more into “basically monogamous, but we sometimes fool around” space, which I think is pretty different. Note that I’m *not* talking about cheating. Fuck that shit. Cheaters suck. Liars suck. No way. But still, my g/f knows that I want to have sexual adventures, and while she’s maybe kinda past that part of her life, I think she loves me enough and knows I need this enough that she’ll play along. (And golly does she play along.) Plus, you know, from time to time she’s gonna have an opportunity too good to pass up. So yay us.
I don’t know if this will work, but right now it feels pretty right. It’s sorta like poly, in that we have the openness and the “real hard work” on communication. But it’s more like “totally one primary” and “secondaries that are really non-committed short-term things.”
Anyway, that’s where I’m at in this little game we call love, sex, and romance.
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You ever hear of the term “monogamish”? That word fits your situation well IMO.
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@LTP — Yeah, it really does.
So I guess I’m a homoflexible monogamish kinda gal.
Which, I am nothing if not vague.
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Great post. But I think that what the “poly is unstable” people are getting at isn’t just that poly people have some relationships that don’t end in marriage, it’s that poly primary relationships are less likely to result in marriage. It’s not “you started dating Bob and John a month ago and now you’ve broken up”, it’s “you were dating Bob for years and then started dating John and now you broke up with Bob”. (Whether that’s an accurate criticism is a separate question, but I think this is what they’re getting at.)
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Really tho, how many monogamous (so called) relationships end up at the alter? Which, calling it “serial monogamy” really does fit how most people I know play the game.
Which okay, selection bias and all. But there is *no way* I’m doing the traditional “marry your high school sweetheart” thing. That was never in the cards. For folks like me, it’s a choice between serial monogamy and something more like poly. Those are the boundaries of the discourse.
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Speaking only for myself (and maybe others who lean SoCon on this), I don’t think I had any misconceptions about what poly entailed for primary vs. secondary relationships (although I always appreciate explanations).
The way I look at it: relationship structures are part of the operating system of culture & society, and monogamy is well-tested and stable but old. Poly is flashy and has a bunch of new and attractive features but is still in beta. “Compersion”, for example, is a new function call to get around an old bug in monogamy.
At the risk of torturing the metaphor to death: will it run on the old hardware?
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Wikipedia suggests that in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample extramarital sex by men is universal or moderate in 70% of cultures. My reading of old books suggests that it’s routine for men to have mistresses and go to sex workers as recently as the twenties or thirties. The expectation of male sexual monogamy is relatively new. (And, of course, it occurs to me how uncommon love matches are historically…)
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Thank you for the counter!
70% of *pre-industrial* cultures, sayeth Wikipedia by your link. (Perhaps this was a response to my calling monogamy “old” – I perhaps should have said “outdated”)
Yes, there is a gulf between the *ideal* of monogamy and the *practice* of monogamy, just I would expect there will be a gulf between the whatever the *ideal* of polyamory ends up being if it ever gains widespread cultural acceptance, and it’s practice.
In terms of post-industrial cultural constructs wrt sex & relationships, I see two (please correct me if I’m wrong): monogamy and polygamy.
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I think that’s an important distinction: whether male non-monogamy was common is a different question than whether it was accepted. I’d bet that in most times and places, men’s tendency to stray was seen as a vice — albeit perhaps a minor one, or the sort that people bemoan without any expectation of preventing, like gossip.
The flip side is that if husbands’ infidelity is expected, it’s concomitantly less hurtful to their wives; as usual, moral relativism and social-constructivist thinking are hoist on their own petard. One simply cannot approach this argument without some notion of baseline, universal values. (And I say that as an error theorist.)
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I don’t actually think poly is new and flashy. I think human culture is going long enough that we’ve tried a lot of stuff and that while poly theory now thinks it is doing something genuinely new and different, eventually it will either:
(a) settle down into something like “man with wife/wives and concubines” model (only this will be all genders-applicable, so that “primary with secondary relationships” is the new jargon for an old situation)
or
(b) become its own sub-culture like swinging or BDSM with its own lingo, etiquette, dos and don’ts and so on, and go along happily like that but never become a mainstream or even anything close to a substantial majority thing.
I think there are some people who are naturally low-jealousy or not jealous at all, and poly would work fine for them. I think those are the people who are serious about poly in theory, poly structure, etc.
But I also think that for a lot of people, poly is another option on the sexual menu. We’re no longer in the past of “your only access to sex is via marriage”, so people obtain sexual experience in not-leading-to-marriage relationships, cohabiting, and casual sex. As well, it’s no longer “the only sex on offer is traditional vanilla missionary style”, everyone expects to have some selection of sexual acts for variety. So to keep things refreshed in the name of having a vibrant sex life, novelty is necessary – like the “Fifty Shades of Grey” inspired dabbling in BDSM-lite.
Poly offers the opportunity to have affairs without the stigma of cheating (what people who get off on the secrecy and excitement of cheating do, I have no idea, but poly would be a bad idea for them). I think there is room for poly to become something mainstream couples dabble in, but ultimately (as they get older, maybe have kids, etc) settle down into some form of monogamy.
Only the hardcore for whom poly really is their best option will stick with it as a philosophy and lifestyle.
The standard (offensive?) question here to ask the poly people is “So what’s the difference between this and swinging?” (Genuine ignoramus would like to know).
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Emotional involvement. Swinging is, at most, monogamish. Relationships beyond the primary are almost purely sexual and generally short term – even if you swing with the same person more than once, that’s just two sexual encounters that happen to be with the same person, not an ongoing thing.
Polyamory generally means having multiple *romantic* relationships, with squishy feelings and doing non-sex things together. These are generally longer term and may involve varying levels of commitment up to and including a spouse-style relationship with more than one person, sharing a life and a home and maybe kids.
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Wait, so outside of primary relationships:
friends: friendship
FWB: friendship + sex
1 night stands: sex
secondaries: frienship + sex + romance
ace secondaries: friendship + romance
Is this a useful/accurate taxonomy?
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Reasonable first approximation, but you can have different levels of commitment in secondary relationships– for instance, your partner might expect that you’ll date them for the rest of your lives, even if you are never going to live together. (This isn’t very different from friendship– “best friend” vs. “acquaintance” vs. “friend” is getting at different levels of commitment in friendship.)
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“‘Polyamory is all about sex’ often has its root in people having no concept of off-the-escalator relationships other than casual sex. The emphasis on triads, quads, and vees is because those are the relationships that fit most closely to the relationship escalator.”
Very true. I think the concept of the relationship escalator affects the poly-community, too. The converse statement, “polyamory *isn’t* about the sex” is very common for this reason. I really dislike that statement (as a theoretical poly-person but current virgin) because for me, the sex is a big part of the attraction.There seems to be a vocal segment of the poly community (online, anyway) that is very vocal about only wanting “serious” relationships and that is somewhat judgmental their views towards casual sex and is also super negative about NRE. If that makes them happy, great! But many seem to be judgmental of others often.
To shift gears a bit, though still on topic, Ozy, how do you feel about the anti-hierarchical segments of the poly community? There are some poly thinkers who seem to be against the whole concept of having a primary and seem to think that a True and Enlightened Poly Person would just let relationships come and go without fretting about long-term commitments.
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“If that makes them happy, great!”
This should read: “If only valuing committed relationships and eschewing casual sex makes them happy, great!”
(I wish there was an edit button…)
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Polyamory isn’t about the sex in the same way that relationships aren’t about the sex. Sex can be a desirable part of a relationship, but you wouldn’t say that a relationship is about the sex – the same applies to polyamory. If you want something like polyamory but about the sex (except perhaps for your primary relationship), you may be looking for swinging.
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Perhaps I wasn’t clear, I think both “Polyamory isn’t about the sex” and “Polyamory is about the sex” are both wrong. Sex is a huge part of it, perhaps the primary part for some, but also not the only part of it. Honestly, if I didn’t care about having sex with multiple people, I’d just be monogamous and have a bunch of close friends. I don’t see any added benefits to a non-primary romantic relationship besides the sexual stuff that I could’t get from a close friend.
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Also, my understanding of swinging is that it is about hooking up at parties with mostly married people with you barely knowing the person. Oh, and single guys like myself are excluded.
I want to know, like, and have some ongoing relationship with people I have sex with, but the sex is still one of the primary motivators.
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Then perhaps the more generic term “open relationship” is more applicable to what you’re looking for. Secondary relationships in polyamory are qualitatively similar to primary relationships and monogamous relationships, they just involve less time and/or commitment, which seems to be different from what you’re looking for. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
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@LTP — Well, there is *something* in a romantic relationship that makes it different from friendship. And there is a difference between how my (soon to be ex) wife does this stuff and how I do this stuff. She never could do the casual hookup thing, at least not sexy hookups. She’d have casuals at BDSM play parties, but that wasn’t full-on sex. For her to have sex (which in this context means genitals and orgasms) she really seems to need some kind of romantic connection. I do not.
So she’s really happy in poly space, where that value is widely shared. I’m better in trashy-party-hookup culture, which suits my approach better. (’Cept I’m super shy, which doesn’t work well at trashy-hookup-parties — I’m the girl who fails to get laid at an actual sex party. But it turns out my current g/f is the opposite of shy, so yay.)
I know ace-poly people who regard their poly partners as something different from their friends. There’s an *extra* piece, a kind of intimacy that they don’t have with friends.
Romance is a thing on it’s own, which is different from friendship and is not *essentially* about sex.
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That said, *for me* romance essentially involves sex, but sex does to require romance. For my wife, they are both required together. For my ace friends, romance is great and sex is whatevs. I assume there are not-ace people who feel similarly, but who like sex on its own terms. (Plus evidently there are a-romantic people, but I don’t know much about their gig.)
Anyway, many combinations are possible. Don’t “typical mind” this.
My current relationship with my wife is non-sexual/non-romantic, but we still have deep love. That’s complicated, cuz it’s more than a friend but less than a partner. It’s its own thing. Which, that’s fine too. Not everything needs a name.
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I’m not sure I buy it. I care quite a bit about the few friends I have, but I’m sure as hell not polyamorous. If it’s not about the sex, then why does the concept exist?
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Many people experience romantic feelings that are separable from their sexual feelings: that’s why “friend with benefits” is a different concept from “boyfriend.”
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As in all cases of True and Enlightened Polyamorous People, I think it’s fine if that’s their style but they shouldn’t generalize it for everyone.
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To me, the distinction between romantic and platonic love has become completely arbitrary. Romantic love is usually used to denote a more serious relationship, but that’s hardly an absolute. Many people have had friendships that are at least on the level of dedication that a romantic relationships is. There are various routines and behaviors that are attributed to romantic love, but those too are mere suggestions, not rules.
So when you say to model polyamorous relationships basically as friendships, I gotta say that I’m already with you there.
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Is it true that it’s easy for a dominant woman to get a “harem” of several submissive men? Someone on Yrff Jebat (rot13). said so. I think it would be pretty hot to have several partners who have no partners but me. I like to imagine living with four boys who have to share me and follow me rules. Can that realistically happen, or is it an inherently unhealthy dynamic?
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This seems like a pretty non-central example of a poly relationship, especially the part where they have no partners but you. That said, if you enjoy it and they enjoy it, and all of you are free to bring up relationship issues and to leave the relationship entirely, it should probably be okay.
I am not an expert on either poly relationships or harems, though.
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There’s a thing called the “domme deficit”, which means that in a lot of kinky spaces there are way more male subs than female doms, which means female doms often get more bargaining power. Also, some male subs are specifically interested in you having other partners and themselves not having other partners: you’ll want to look for “cuckolding.”
24/7 relationships do exist, but they’re something that requires a lot of trust. It might be easier to find egalitarian relationships where the cuckolding aspect only exists inside the bedroom, and then move to 24/7 if that’s something of interest to both of you.
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“A lot of people feel sad about the idea of a low-commitment romantic relationship: for them, romantic feelings are closely tied to wanting to spend a life together. That means polyamory might be a bad fit for them (although you never know). But I think sometimes it’s because they think the lower-commitment relationships are less real or like the lower-commitment partner is being betrayed or mistreated somehow, and that’s not true.”
But what is true is that secondary partnerships and lower commitment relationships are lower in status than primary or higher commitment ones. And for a whole lot of people, status is a very important thing. To deliberately agree to a lower position is seen by some as lacking in self-respect.
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Can you rewrite your comment tabooing ‘status’? I’m not quite sure what you mean.
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Well, you are at X partners, the most you can handle. When you find a new potential partner and deciding whether or not to begin a relationship with them (necessitating breaking up with a current one) if you are not choosing which person to break up with purely by chance, then you are using some sort of algorithm to rank your current partners.
There is a common cultural meme that agreeing to be a second (or lower) ranked position in a romantic relationship is demeaning (I’m not saying that this is true/correct/good, just that it is commonly perceived to be true). Hence the insult “slut” for a woman who agrees to sexual relationships without demanding to be ranked first (or only). Or the masculine equivalents of “beta” or “cuckhold.”
There are piles and piles of literary/musical/etc references to being “the most important” person as part of the idealization of romance. Even the great sage Ciccone said “Don’t go for second best.” So it’s not too surprising that people would be saddened a little by entering into a relationship where they were giving up what they have been taught to value — primacy in another’s affections.
Something I find interesting (though maybe it’s an obvious coexisting trait) is that many (most? almost all?) people involved in alternative lifestyles and sexualities are more comfortable speaking truthfully than their culture as a whole. People are more ok directly saying “no” or agreeing to pre-established limits in their intimate relationships and this willingness to rely more on explicit communication rather than norms seems to be increasing, though that might just be a sign that I am aging into the “kids these days” phase of my life.
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I think secondary-ness isn’t necessarily ‘lower-status’ – not least because frequently the same people will be a primary and a secondary to different people.
So for instance, the guy I saw today, if we decide to take this thing forward, we will be each other’s secondary but each have our own primary.
But I also think there is a thing in poly where people get that you’re getting a different thing in a secondary relationship, and that that might be what you want, for whatever reason – maybe the two of you wouldn’t make good primaries, maybe you don’t have the time and commitment for a primary relationship. The point is that it isn’t assumed you’re settling for second best, because it isn’t assumed that you would be that person’s primary if you had the chance.
However, there will totally be people who see secondary as a lower status thing, and they’re entirely welcome to not do it. Unless they’re kinky and get off on that.
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So for instance, the guy I saw today, if we decide to take this thing forward, we will be each other’s secondary but each have our own primary.
But I also think there is a thing in poly where people get that you’re getting a different thing in a secondary relationship, and that that might be what you want, for whatever reason – maybe the two of you wouldn’t make good primaries, maybe you don’t have the time and commitment for a primary relationship. The point is that it isn’t assumed you’re settling for second best, because it isn’t assumed that you would be that person’s primary if you had the chance.
And this ties into what I mentioned earlier about how altfolk are more likely to engage in explicit communication of things that the other six billion people on the planet would make assumptions about.
Having said all that, it is very easy to say that two things are of equal value when you can have both. The hoary philo 101 hypo: “Burning building. You can save one. Will it be your partner, your offspring, your pet, or your art?” If a primary and a secondary partner discover new information about each other that makes them mutually antipathetic, do you choose to leave just one, both or neither (with the understanding the leaving neither means they both leave you)?
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First thought: wait, they would require me to break up with someone just because they didn’t like them? I’m going to break up with both of them, that’s incredibly bad behavior!
Second thought: maybe the news is that one of my partners did an Incredibly Bad Thing! I will break up with the one who did the Incredibly Bad Thing!
Third thought: so we’re in some situation where I can’t just keep the two of them from having to interact for… some reason… and neither of them did anything wrong, then… I would probably choose my primary because that’s part of increased commitment but I am really not sure why my secondary partner would take offense at this and in fact I would expect my secondaries with primaries to do the same.
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Third thought: so we’re in some situation where I can’t just keep the two of them from having to interact for… some reason… and neither of them did anything wrong, then… I would probably choose my primary because that’s part of increased commitment but I am really not sure why my secondary partner would take offense at this and in fact I would expect my secondaries with primaries to do the same.
Exactly. The secondary enters into the relationship with the full knowledge that if push came to another push, that they are the less important party in the relationship. And this cuts against the common expectation that a romantic interaction is providing someone with the primacy that they will most likely never achieve in any other human endeavor. Almost nobody (as the percentage of the population) gets to be the CEO, the Pope, or the head of the local Moose Lodge. Obviously people who enter into a poly relationship for the right reasons have a sufficiently different psychological makeup from the rest of the hierarchical species. Or at least think they do.
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I notice I am confused.
First, my primary is not the most important thing in the world to me. When I get married, I intend it to be for life, but if my spouse said “it’s me or effective altruism” or “it’s me or your writing” or (someday) “it’s me or the kids”, my spouse would find themselves being served divorce papers very quickly. And if someone considered me more important than their mission, I would find them approximately as attractive as a turnip.
Second, are you assuming that secondary partners aren’t allowed to have primaries? If you consider it very important that you be someone’s most important romantic relationship, you can… look for a primary partner… Many of the people who don’t have primary partners don’t want them (good for them! It’s not for everyone) and the rest seem to have about the same trouble finding primaries as monogamous people do.
Third, is commitment really the only thing you get out of romantic relationships, such that you can’t imagine why someone would want a romantic relationship that is neither maximally committed nor heading in that direction? Like, what about cuddles? Kissing? Long conversations about philosophy or the MCU? The thing where someone is SO GREAT and you want to find out ALL THE FACTS ABOUT THEM and then tell everyone how great they are? Somebody who will take you to dinner and a movie? That all seems much more important than the extremely unlikely event that Partner A takes offense at me dating Partner B and I neither decide that Partner A is being a controlling asshole or Partner B did something unconscionable.
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Starting with second and third first, I completely understand and completely agree with you. This all started (on my end) six days ago not as an objection, but an alternative explanation for the “sadness, ” to wit: opting out (in a particular relationship) from what they have been taught to value, and accepting the implication that goes along with it. Not that this reaction would be universal, but jealousy isn’t the only thing that makes (some) people averse to becoming poly.
As for the first, well, de gustibus and all that. I personally have a Lovecraftian-level horror of falling into a mental place where I put more value on an abstract idea or cause over a concrete human being. Yes, this limits the good I can do, but I’m not at all certain I know what good actually is, much less how to enact in on anything beyond a small (in human terms) scale.
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While I don’t agree with Fisher about the status problems, I have to say I am interested in how friction within relationships is handled, because we’re all humans (let us assume) and humans are not perfect and friction happens.
Taking the friendship model, it does not necessarily follow that if I am friends with Joe and Joe is friends with Bill, I will be friends with Bill. Bill and I may simply have nothing in common or there may be things about each of us that rub each other up the wrong way. It does happen that I may grouse to Joe about Bill and vice versa; if Joe invites Bill to come hang out with the gang on Friday night, I may decide not to go because I can’t stand the thought of spending two hours listening to Bill and his awful loud guffaw.
I probably would be a jerk if I told Joe “It’s Bill or me”, but what about primary and secondary relationships, where perforce there is a greater chance of A and B spending time together or being in one another’s company because they are both involved with C?
Is it unreasonable of A, C’s primary, to ask that they don’t invite B over to spend time while A is there? Can B complain about “You never let me come to your place, I can’t call you at home, why does A get to set the rules”?
A and B need not be suffering from jealousy or there is anything bad about either of them, they just don’t get on. But if C likes them both (as C must do, to be in relationships with them), what happens? It seems a big deal to break up with one or both of them over this, but on the other hand, if A and B would not be friends and by choice would never have anything to do with one another, how do you smooth over the friction?
(I don’t get any prurient thrills about sex in poly relationships but I’m fascinated how you make it work when you’re trying to negotiate three relationships where you have to remember who likes carrots, who is allergic to buttercups, and do we all chip in to pay the electricity bill given that C and D come over here to hang out for a good lump of time every week, even if they don’t live here, and C always uses the cooker and the kettle and the toaster?)
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Sometimes poly relationships fail. I mean, that’s really the answer to “How do you handle {complex situation}?” You talk about it. You make compromises. You sometimes split up. It’s really not a mystery.
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So Im going to represent as an ace aro-spectrum poly person to jump in and say that significant-other-type relationships (whether ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’ if you use those words) don’t have to be sexual or romantic.
But actually, I have a question. So, going with this explanation/definition, what is a *primary* relationship like? Because my brain is getting tangled up between a ‘settled into a very high level of commitment’ (so I guess like a friend who you see all the time and such) (in which case, how do you know where you draw the line?) and… something else, but I can’t figure out what the something else is. Something about intentionality…?
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A primary relationship is like a monogamous relationship that’s intended to be permanent (e.g. heading towards marriage), but without the romantic and sexual exclusivity.
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Thank you for answering.
That isn’t a definition in contrast to this one, though.
A get-dinner-every-six-months relationship (or whatever other kind of ‘secondary’/friend relationship) can be intended to be permanent.
‘Headed towards marriage’ doesn’t explain enough to be defining – depending on the laws of where you live, you might not be allowed marry a partner, you’re generally not allowed to marry multiple partners, and outside of that you could marry anyone you wanted to at any time as long as they agreed – including a ‘friend’/secondary, including someone you didn’t even know. So the ‘marriage’ part does not actually tell you things about the relationship. It’s the ‘heading’ part that seems important, but then, what does that mean, as an experience?
What I’m asking, basically is – given this as ‘what a secondary/friendship relationship is like’ definition, what is a primary relationship like that makes it different.
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That was meant to point to a cluster in thingspace, not be a rigorous definition. More things in that cluster: having children and co-parenting, living together (or, if long-distance, communicating often and/or having a plan to be short-distance in the future), intended to be permanent or at least very long-term, seeing each other frequently if you live in the same area but don’t live together, having or intending to eventually have a relationship resembling marriage regardless of whether you’d be legally married, prioritizing each other highly, being heavily invested in the relationship’s continuation.
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Wait! Why do we need to have one single model for poly? I mean, obviously we do not. But then what are we discussing? If some person has “primary” and “secondary” partners, well, what does that mean?
Obviously there is something in the primary relationship not present in the secondary, otherwise why have the labels. But what exactly?
Well, *you could ask*!
It’s probably the case that these people have their own structure worked out that differs in some important way from the next poly group you encounter.
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