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There was recently (err, well, a few months ago– I’m a slow writer!) some conversation on Facebook about this old post of Franklin Veaux’s, which had a lot of people saying (paraphrased) “but I’m in a relationship in which I don’t get to meet my partner’s family or I’ll be dumped if I’m a threat to the primary relationship, and I’m fine with it, and I’d actually be somewhat confused about why I would expect any differently!”
I think a lot of the problem with secondary rights discourse is that “secondary” is a very broad word. “Primary” refers (usually) to the most committed relationship(s) a person has; “secondary” refers to every other relationship they have. The term can encompass everything from “casual fuckbuddy I see maybe once every six months” to “my best friend and the love of my life.”
In fact, some people’s secondary relationships can be more committed than other people’s primary relationships! For instance, Alice might have dated her primary for the past six months. Things seem to be going well, but Alice isn’t really in a place for a long-term commitment. They don’t live together, have separate finances, and haven’t met each other’s parents. Conversely, Eve is married and has children with her primary, but she also has a secondary partner she’s been with for decades and plans to be with for the rest of her life. Eve’s secondary is her children’s beloved aunt, and the children would be heartbroken if they broke up. Eve and her secondary partner have cowritten three books and are working on a fourth. On every metric of commitment (prospective longevity of relationship, amount invested in relationship, amount the partners’ lives are entangled), Eve is far more committed to her secondary than Alice is to her primary.
This makes it really fucking hard to generalize about the correct way to treat secondary partners. For instance, it is perfectly reasonable to dump a fuckbuddy if they become inconvenient, but it is tremendously unkind to dump your girlfriend of five years for becoming inconvenient. Keeping the relationship secret from your partner’s family is easy if you never meet them. But if your secondary lives with you, and you just moved in your dad because you don’t want to put him in a nursing home, and your secondary is now required to avoid showing affection to his own boyfriend in his own house, he will probably have some very reasonable complaints about your behavior.
The strongest form of Franklin Veaux’s argument– the one he tends to make when he’s not being rather snarky, as he is in this post– is that it’s about whether the differences between partners are descriptive or prescriptive. A descriptive difference is “I’m in love with my primary and I’m not in love with my secondary and I don’t think I’m ever going to be in love with my secondary.” A prescriptive difference is “I have to be in love with my primary and I am absolutely forbidden from being in love with my secondary.”
Prescriptive differences tend to work poorly for four reasons. First, and most obviously, sometimes they are a product of the “if everyone carefully avoids things that make me feel insecure/possessive/like I’m going to be abandoned, then I will never feel insecure/possessive/like I’m going to be abandoned again!” mindset. Of course, if that mindset works for you, great! There’s no need to suffer unnecessary pain. If your partner not kissing other partners in front of you completely solves your insecurity issues, then that is a reasonable request to make (in a lot of situations, anyway). But for a lot of people if they say “you can’t kiss other people in front of me because then I feel insecure”, the only thing that’s going to happen is that they feel insecure about how pretty their metamour is instead, and then if they refuse to meet their metamours they toss and turn late at night imagining that every one of their metamours looks like Marion Cotillard and sucks cock like Stoya. The long-term solution here is to be less insecure, which is way harder, but also has the virtue of actually working.
Second, a lot of prescriptions about other people’s partners are attempts to control the uncontrollable. It is generally unwise to go about saying “my primary is not allowed to fall in love with other people or have other people fall in love with them!” I mean, this rule is completely compatible with monogamy, because in monogamous relationships one avoids the sort of situations that lead to falling in love. It’s even doable in some non-monogamous situations: for instance, if your primary sees sex workers or has casual one-time hookups. But if your primary is going on dates and having long-term relationships, you can’t be surprised when it turns out that they’ve fallen in love. This is the sort of thing that happens when you go on dates with people. Creating a prescriptive rule that they can’t just gives you a false sense of security and robs you of the ability to come to terms with the fact that your partner might fall in love with other people.
Similarly, if you are going about having unprotected sex with people, sometimes babies will happen. You can make a rule that your secondary partners have to have abortions, but you don’t actually have any ability to enforce this rule. You can manage your risk (through always using condoms, only having sex with people who use long-acting reversible contraception, not having PIV, etc.). But if you are in a situation in which there is a risk of pregnancy, saying “we have a rule that you can’t have a child!” gives you a false sense of security which (empirically) sometimes leads to people acting in wildly unethical ways when it is violated.
Third, most people want input into their relationships. Consider it from a monogamous perspective. A woman on a third date says to her prospective boyfriend, “I’ve made some plans about how my future relationship is going to work out. My husband is going to live with me in Portland, so that we can be near my family. We’re going to have three children. I’ve decided on a fair chore division: you get all the indoor chores and I get all the outdoor chores, except that I’ll do the laundry because I find folding clothes extremely meditative. You will take me out to dinner every Friday night because I believe a regular date night is very important. If you aren’t willing to accept all these conditions, dump me right now.”
This is not, needless to say, how third dates usually go.
Of course, nearly everyone has dealbreakers and visions about what their future life will be. But most people in happy relationships also negotiate their needs– they don’t just put it as a fait accompli. Maybe you care about date night, but going out bowling would be just as satisfactory. Maybe your partner also really loves folding the laundry, and so you can decide to fold clothes together. Maybe your partner is richer than you expected your partner to be, and he’s perfectly willing to pay to fly you up to visit your family as much as you like. Maybe two kids or four would also be fine.
But when a couple decides on the rules about secondary partners ahead of time and doesn’t let them renegotiate, that’s exactly what you’re doing! When you say as a flat rule “my secondary will not come on family vacations”, you’re not letting your secondary have any say in whether they love New York City and they love your kids and they want to take them around the museums for a couple days and, hey, it means you get some time with your primary too, so it’s a win for everyone!
Fourth, “secondary” is a really broad word that encompasses a wide variety of relationships, like I talked about earlier. “No family vacations!” might be a totally reasonable rule for someone you see once every few weeks, but if that relationship deepens, it might become unreasonable. If the rules are prescriptive rather than descriptive and– in particular– if they’re not open to renegotiation in changing circumstances, you can wind up sticking your relationships in a Procrustean bed, torturing them until they fit your preconceptions.
Thing of Things 
The rules aren’t the secondary’s to renegotiate. They can request for them to be changed, but it’s a matter for the primary couple, which can amend the rules, but the expectation should be that they don’t, and the secondary should plan accordingly going in. And on the part of the primary couple, while the rules can be amended by mutual consent, the expectation is that having agreed upon them, either partner should be free to veto future changes without hard feelings from the other.
More generally, if one partner has specific requirements for a relationship, the couple should figure out to what extent they’re flexible, but it’s better for these things to come up sooner, to discover relationship-ending incompatibilities as early as possible. I think people should be more like your straw third-date woman.
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I think it is ill-advised to enter into relationships in which a person who is not even in the relationship gets more say in the shape it takes than you do, and I would strongly advise prospective secondary partners to avoid such relationships. It is all too likely that you would wind up with your heart broken about a situation that could be resolved to everyone’s mutual satisfaction with more flexibility.
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That depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re already in a committed relationship with a primary and aren’t open to another, this could be a good arrangement. On the other hand, if you enter every relationship with an “I want to take it as far as it’ll go” attitude and don’t want to set it aside, this isn’t for you.
If one partner is held to be significantly more important than all other partners (including potential future ones), it makes sense to be clear and up-front that you’re going to prioritize them, and sometimes that could require telling a secondary that you’re only interested in a relationship if it conforms to certain rules. If this is unsatisfactory to the would-be secondary, they should decline the relationship. But to treat it as categorically bad looks a lot like monogamy-shaming.
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I don’t think there is anything wrong with monogamy or with monogamish relationships in which you hook up outside the relationship. But I think if you are poly and you are doing something my criticism of which could be reasonably described as “monogamy-shaming”, I… don’t think that is necessarily going to work very well? Poly relationships are actually different from monogamous relationships. If you want a monogamous relationship, that’s fine, but it does mean that you can’t date other people.
I am not sure what “more important than” means. Can you cache that out for me?
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It sounds like you’re accepting of the monogamy/-ish and non-prescriptive polyamory regions of the spectrum, but not some of the styles in between, and that seems arbitrary. If monogamy or non-prescriptive poly can both be best depending on the person, why can’t prescriptively hierarchical poly? If you’re close to the relationship anarchy end of the spectrum, then obviously hierarchical poly would work poorly for you for the reasons you list in the post. But maybe you just want some relationships in addition to your primary one, and want to do what you can to ensure that they stay secondary, and have some particular vision of how that should work. It could be good to find someone who’s in the same situation, or for whatever reason just doesn’t want a relationship to become too involved. There are good reasons to be cautious about controlling the uncontrollable and so on, but it’s not necessarily a bad idea from the outset.
It means that their comfort and well-being heavily outweighs that of other people you’re in a relationship with, that you’re committed to them in a way you don’t want to be committed to anybody else, and so on. It doesn’t by itself imply prescriptive hierarchy, but it combined with your and/or your partner’s desire to have a certain kind of relationship could imply it.
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If it’s not wrong to refuse to not want to vacation with a particular partner, why is it wrong to say ahead of time “I will never want to vacation with you” ?
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If this is a product of self-knowledge, then great, that’s descriptive. (You’ll note I said “I don’t think I ever will be in love with my secondary” as an example of a descriptive situation.) But in my experience, it is possible for facts about myself to change, and therefore most “I don’t think I will ever want this” statements come with at least a small probability that I will change my mind.
Of course, one occasionally does have to constrain the behavior of one’s future self: for instance, I have promised to stay married to my husband, even if I don’t want to, except for certain specific situations. But I think that those promises need to be entered into with great caution and care, a thoughtful analysis of the costs and benefits, and an outline of the specific circumstances in which the promise will no longer apply; if those promises are about another person, it seems very wrong to promise it without their consent, unless there is some grave reason. (I mean, I am not allowed to decide unilaterally to marry my husband!) Promising to stay married to my husband offers me considerable benefits (for instance, the ability to make financial plans assuming that I will continue to be supported by him and the ability to make parenting plans assuming I have a coparent). I must say I am somewhat confused what benefits would be offered by a solemn promise never to go on vacation with someone even if you want to and you think it would be a good idea, but certainly people’s relationship desires are very diverse.
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Question for anyone who can answer: Is the whole “description, not prescription” thing essentially what’s meant by “relationship anarchy”? Or is there more to it than that?
Anyway — you didn’t explicitly make the connection but it occurs to me that this post really ties into your last post, which was also about an attitude of “describe, don’t prescribe” and “look at the facts as they are, not at the label they’ve been bundled into”.
That is to say, there’s really something more general going on here, which applies to both these cases. I seem to recall, reading your Tumblr a while back, arguments over “labelling”. And to my mind this right here is most of the “anti-labelling” argument. The missing component is how easy it is to slide from description to prescription if you’re unaware of the danger. People just aren’t that good at distinguishing, natively; it’s something they have to learn. Raw facts become bundled labels become ossified bundled labels become prescriptive roles. Of course, once you put it that way, I think most of the substance of the argument goes away. Stay on the side of description and raw facts, beware of the slide into prescription and ossification of bundles; not really much else to say.
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I have no idea what relationship anarchy is. I’ve seen it characterized as anarchism applied to relationships, so I shy away from the label because I’m, like, not an anarchist.
I am aware of the worries about ossification of labels! This is part of the reason I tend to push “people’s identities change over time, it’s okay to change labels, it’s okay if you were one thing in the past and now you are a different thing.” I think that gets the benefits of labels without people feeling like they have to keep using labels that no longer fit.
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I guess I was wrong to say “most of the substance of the argument goes away”, then! I mean to my mind, that’s not really sufficient, as that seems to be a route to produce lots of pushing-back-to-the-center prior to the change and jerky abrupt change after it, not to mention it doesn’t accommodate anyone who has no intention of hanging around any accepted cluster in the first place. I just sort of assumed “don’t prescribe, don’t ossify” was basically strictly superior to that…
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Relationship anarchy also typically involves not making a discrete distinction between romantic and platonic relationships.
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To me that sounds like just another application of “describe, don’t prescribe” and “look at the facts as they are, not at the label they’ve been bundled into”! But I guess I omitted that second one in my initial comment…
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So I like this post and overall agree with the ontological flexiblity you show here, but I think the passionate pushback you get in the comments is pointing at something. It’s all well and good to say “ah, that’s prescriptive terminology, we should move away from that” (which again, I roughly agree with), but I think that overlooks *how deadly important this is to some people.*
It’s a flaw, but people feel a lot more secure when their *important* preferences are enshrined as a matter of social law. “My long term partner will prioritize me in various ways I am used to” is damned important to many people (and so is “getting in a relationship with this person does not bind my every moment in the future.”) They kind of want some assurance that if someone re-negs on that, the social community will damn them for it.
Most people don’t think all prescriptive terms should be respected of course. Just the ones they have come to rely on. And (being smart people) they can come up with very thorough explanations for why these specific terms are important. All of which circles back to “I want there to be something in my relationship I can count on.”
I don’t even think it’s selfishness really, just a desire for certainty. And the truth is there is no such certainty, as you yourself point out. Your partner’s views could change for any number of reasons, related to polyamory or not, and social censure usually won’t be enough to keep them the way they were. Thinking that about your relationship (the rock many people build their lives on) is very scary and it’s no wonder people set up these prescriptive terms instead, a sort of doctrine they hope will keep the chaos of messy romantic lives at bay.
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