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Part of the problem with polyamory advice is that it usually comes from people who give advice.
This creates two distortions. First, many people who dislike commonly given polyamory advice would prefer something along the lines of “whatever works for you and your partners is great.” The problem is that this is really terrible advice.
As a comparison, consider a certain genre of sex-positive advice columns. These advice columns will answer every question with “talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” How do you eat someone out? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” How do you dominate someone? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” You like sex when you have it, but you’re rarely in the mood, so it’s easy to go weeks or months without having sex? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.” The sex is just kind of… meh? “Talk to your partners! People are diverse, so you should figure out what works for you.”
Of course, people are diverse, you should talk to your partners, and it’s a good idea to figure out what works for you. But this is also totally useless advice. If I knew what worked for me and my partners, I wouldn’t be writing to an advice column. And it’s not like there are literally zero generalities. You can say “in general, it’s a good idea to warm up your partner a bit before you approach her clit”. You can say “a lot of people find that making your partner call you ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ puts them in a good headspace.” You can say “that’s called responsive desire, it’s very common among people of all genders, and if you want to have sex more you can plan to spend some time kissing and cuddling on a regular basis and you may find that you’re in the mood for sex.” You can say “why don’t you try some different things that seem interesting? Even if most of them turn out to be silly or boring, adding a couple new things to your repertoire can stave off boredom.” Even though that isn’t going to work for everyone, it is sure as hell going to work for more people than “figure out what works for you!” without any guidance about how you do this.
Similarly, there are certain generalities among people in relationships. You should be familiar with your partner as a person, ranging from their favorite books to their problems to their deeply held values. You should try to be thankful about nice things your partner has done for you and to admire their good qualities. You should listen when they want to tell you something, even if you are a little busy. You should compromise. You should take a break when you feel like screaming at your partner.
Of course, these don’t apply to every relationship. There are people who are in happy marriages that are primarily an economic exchange and division of chores, where they don’t know much about each other beyond what is necessary to do their respective jobs. There are people who don’t mind being taken for granted. There are people who consider it an important part of respect for each other’s intellectual work that they never interrupt a train of thought with a question. There are people who thrive when their partner does whatever they want without taking their wishes into account. There are people who scream at each other and then have hot sex and feel like their conflict is resolved.
But that said, if I know that someone is unhappy in their relationship, and they don’t know how to fix it, and I know that they resolve all their conflicts by screaming at each other, I am going to suggest “why don’t you try resolving your conflicts through calm discussion and not screaming?” And I think that is much more likely to work than “whatever works for you and your partners is fine!”
I think this generalizes to a lot of the controversial polyamory advice as well. Is there somewhere out there a triad with an ecstatically happy bisexual woman partner who isn’t allowed to have sex with people outside the triad, is officially secondary, is required to love both of her partners equally, is an unpaid nanny/maid, and isn’t allowed to tell anyone whom she’s dating because they’re not out as poly? Probably! But I am not going to endorse this as a general practice.
Second, most people are reasonable, sensible people, but some people are ridiculous and terrible. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who write to advice columns are either ridiculous terrible people or reasonable sensible people who have somehow managed to get stuck in a relationship with ridiculous terrible people, because the reasonable sensible people generally have good relationships and therefore have no need to write to advice columns.
(yr humble blogger queers the ridiculous terrible/reasonable sensible binary)
So someone writes to the advice column and says “I won’t let my husband’s girlfriend kiss him except on the cheek or through a dental dam because she has oral herpes. She’s upset about this. How do I get her to see that this is necessary to prevent me from becoming a disgusting diseased herpetic?” And the advice columnist says “Jesus fucking christ, cut that shit out, you are ridiculous and terrible and also really bad at risk analysis.”
And then some reasonable sensible people read this and say “But I am immunosuppressed! I’m lucky enough not to have herpes, but if I catch it it would be really bad! It makes sense that my partners should have to take lots of precautions to avoid transmitting herpes to me.”
And a member of Team Do What Works For You is like “people should do whatever they want as long as it works for them and their partners! There is nothing wrong with making your metamour only kiss your husband through plastic wrap!”
My position here is that:
(1) We are, of course, going to follow the John Stuart Mill rules about people who are hurting themselves– one may argue with, attempt to persuade, or entreat a person who is making a poor decision, but one may not force them to do the thing you want or visit any sort of evil upon them for not doing so.
(2) We are not going to get more liberal than John Stuart Mill and assume that tolerance requires that no one ever think you’re making a bad choice.
(3) Some people have good reasons for making their metamours kiss their partners through plastic wrap.
(4) For the vast majority of people, this is a horrible idea and your relationships would be a lot better if you instead learned how to do reasonable STI risk assessment.
(5) The majority of people would not force their partners to kiss their partners through plastic wrap, it would never occur to them to do so, and find the whole idea vaguely horrifying.
The problem of ridiculous terrible people comes up particularly with the cluster exemplified by vetoes, rules, relationship contracts, and hierarchy. Ridiculous terrible people can get up to all kinds of ridiculous and terrible shit with vetoes, rules, relationship contracts, and hierarchy. As an example, in the book More Than Two, a man vetoes his wife’s relationship, refusing to even allow her to talk to him again to say goodbye, because he makes her too happy (?!) and this makes him feel jealous (?!?!).
If I were reading a bunch of letters from similarly ridiculous terrible people or their partners, I would probably be pretty down on veto too.
But in practice, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference between Reasonable Sensible People Polyamory With Rules and Reasonable Sensible People Polyamory Without Rules. My husband does not have a veto over whom I date, but he does get to have opinions. Naturally, I respect my husband’s judgment about other people, so I will listen to him to see if he’s seen something I’m blinded to by new relationship energy. Naturally, my husband respects my judgment about other people, so he will listen to me about the merits of the person he’s judged distasteful. Naturally, he doesn’t want to make me unhappy, so he will swallow his dislike and be cordial if necessary. Naturally, I don’t want to make him unhappy, so I will avoid squeeing about the awesomeness of people he dislikes. And if in spite of all this we can’t resolve the conflict, we’ll figure out how to manage it while keeping the lines of communication open so we can maybe find a resolution.
I am dating people whose partners do have veto power, and in terms of actual relationship dynamics as opposed to rules, they do the exact same thing. “My husband has veto” translates to “I respect my husband’s judgment and don’t want to do things that make him unhappy, so if he dislikes one of my partners I put a fairly significant amount of weight on that.”
In this case, I feel like a veto is harmless. I personally don’t have one, because I dislike having a power that I would never actually exercise. If I am relying on my husband’s care for my happiness and respect for my judgment, I prefer to say that rather than having it disguised as a rule. Other people find that having a veto gives them a sense of comfort; it feels like a strong signal that their partner has respect for their judgment and cares about their happiness, which is very important in any relationship. Still other people have truly abominable taste and their partners have a veto as a way of recognizing that they must be continually saved from themselves; in this case, the veto is Past You and Present Partners conniving to harsh the buzz of Present You, who is absolutely convinced that this one-eyed three-legged dog is totally worth saving and, see, they only bite a little bit. (In my anecdotal experience, in such situations, their committed secondary partners sometimes also have veto, possibly because Present You is more likely to listen to four people yelling about why you shouldn’t date people with four restraining orders and a domestic violence conviction.) There are probably other decent ways of handling it that I’m not thinking of.
And, indeed, if ridiculous terrible people didn’t have vetoes they would probably be going around being ridiculous and terrible some other way. The core problem with “your partner is making you too happy! I’m upset! I’m vetoing your relationship!” is not the veto. It’s being upset because a person you claim to love is happy.
The actual solution here is probably something like honesty, compassion, forgiveness, courage, growth, fairness, joy, empathy, respect, a sense of humor, a sense of perspective, and all the other virtues. But “be more compassionate! The details will work themselves out” is also kind of terrible advice, because “be more compassionate” is not exactly taskified. So instead we’re stuck with the “don’t have veto” thing.
First, talking to your partners to figure out what works for you is the relationship equivalent of “have you tried turning it off and on again?” – it’s underutilized despite its effectiveness and seeming obviousness. It’s not helpful advice for those who already know to try it first, but there are many who don’t. If someone doesn’t know how to do it or has questions about something that may come up, or if they’ve already tried it without success, then it’s time to be more specific.
Second, it’s not as vacuous as you’re making it sound. Taken seriously, it’s radical in its implications – it means optimizing your relationship for what works best for you and your partner, not (to list a few examples) conforming to social norms, meeting your family’s expectations, or maintaining some aesthetic or image, except to the extent that those things are relevant to you and your partner being happy. It implies stepping back from your preconceptions and building a better relationship even though it could end up being weird.
Third, it’s not only a piece of advice on its own, but also an asterisk on all other advice, resulting in something like “[Specific advice] is something that people have found to work well for them, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it that way, and if it doesn’t work for you, see what you and your partner can figure out, and if the two of you are already happy with what you do, you don’t need to change it”.
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At a deeper level, it also reflects that we’re talking about people who give sexual advice — that is, people who have been romantically and sexually successful in a narrow enough set of ways that encourage talking at length about it.
Dan Savage’s insistence that condoms couldn’t possibly be the cause of any practical problems in the bedroom is readily debunked by study after survey showing those frustrations to be the main cause of improper use, but I can absolutely believe that it’s something that hasn’t come up with his partners since high school. Not because I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt despite the odds, but because the folk who do have trouble keeping it up while wrapped up aren’t going to the sort of scene Savage does.
That’s tragicomic when we’re talking about condom use, but it’s even trickier when you’re seeing folk promote “talk to your partners, figure out what works for you!” That’s a wonderful norm to promote, but when you’re not preselected from the tail end of openness to experience it’s also not a practical one. The other three quarters of the graph are not merely outside of the domain and experience of the experts, but in many cases outside of the experiences of the vast majority of their partners.
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This feels like an extremely specific complaint which has been disguised as a more general one.
It’s not relevant to the situation at hand: are any poly people *not* preselected from the tail end of openness to experience?
It’s not relevant to general sexual advice: talking to your partners and figuring out what works for you both is important in any sexual relationship. Even setting aside discussion of kink, people don’t come with standardised anatomies, libidos and schedules, so couples do need to have conversations with each other about those things in relation to their sex life.
I’m assuming there’s some specific situation which has caused you to believe that “talking to partners about what works for you” is generally impractical for people with low Openness, but it’s hard to imagine what.
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My partner is one of those weird exceptions, I guess; I tend to get better responses when I *do* go straight to tongue on clitoris than when I try more conventional foreplay.
/me shrugs
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Your point about the lack of difference between poly with rules and poly without rules is quite right but I would phrase it differently.
Rules can never supplant the underlying relationship dynamic in resolving conflict. Short of creating a system of rules so complicated that their application actually constitutes running a human level AI rules will never be perfectly appropriate to every situation and someone with ill will could always rule lawyer in obviously unfair ways. So no matter what rules you specify you are ultimately counting on the other people’s desire to relate to you in a happy productive fashion. On the flip side even without rules one always has the same recourse that someone whose partner broke the rules has: break up with them.
But if rules are ultimately dependent on the relationship dynamic for their enforcement what are they doing? Why do some people find them helpful?
I think the right way to look at this is that rules are one way of specifying the social default against which relationship behavior is to be evaluated. A sexual relationship or marriage in medevil Europe starts with an entirely different set of expectations and norms than one in ancient Rome. In our modern world there are a whole host of different default expectations that people can have and it is important to agree on default expectations with one’s partners to have a common framework to understand variations from that default.
Rules are one way of conveying this understanding. A veto rule is a way of communicating the fact that one understands that jealousy is a normal part of the relationship and that some degree of monogamy is the base case from which deviations can be allowed but not a matter of right.
I think much of the problem with advice about poly comes from this attitude that it’s not ok to acknowledge that relationship norms are inherited from wider social expectations and that these expectations matter.
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I agree that the “whatever works for you and your partners is great” approach is unhelpful. And the critiques-of-advice that you’re discussing seem like they’re often used for nitpicky one upping, rather than helping anyone.
I would support some kind of standardized disclaimer that would let advice givers go on giving useful advice, without needing to address every edge case every time.
We should be able to assume:
1. General, publicly given advice is advice and not binding arbitration. Readers can ignore anything obviously wrong or inapplicable.
2. The person is asking for advice because they’ve already considered or tried the obvious things
3. The asker would have mentioned anything that made their case non central or massively constrained.
4. The advice only applies to cases that are reasonably similar to the one the asker laid out
I think these sorts of assumptions would head off a lot of the unfair “gotcha” responses that seem to force advice to be so vague.
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