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I recently had an experience which I think encapsulates some of the things I mean when I talk about polyamory.
Recently, I had to speak on a panel for my job. I have social anxiety and, while public speaking might not actually be more feared than death, it is certainly terrifying. I really needed my husband’s support. Unfortunately, my husband’s parents were in town to visit our infant, and he wanted to spend time with them.
Here’s what I don’t get to say: “I’m the primary. I’m most important. You made a commitment to me. I have my first panel ever and I need to do a good job for the sake of my career, plus it’s going to drain all my ability to cope and I need you so I don’t end up melting down in the bathroom. You’re not allowed to sacrifice my legitimate needs for the sake of some ‘desire’ to have ‘fun’ with your ‘parents.'”
Instead, we compromised. My husband was very busy that weekend. His parents got to see less of him than they would have wanted. And while the panel went fine, I had a really awful meltdown the day before. It was a shitty situation and it made everyone unhappy– and I don’t get to fix it by saying “I’m your spouse, so only my needs matter.”
Here’s what I also don’t get to say: “I don’t consent to have a relationship with your parents. It’s okay if you want to have a relationship with them, I guess (although as your spouse I should really be allowed to veto your parents). But I don’t ever want to have to talk to them or be nice to them and you should arrange the visits so that I don’t have to see them.”
Of course, I don’t have to be friends with my husband’s parents. If it stresses me out to interact with them, I’m allowed to be busy the entire time they’re in town (even if “busy” means “in the middle of the Broken Earth series”). And if my husband has a toxic relationship with his parents, or his parents are mean to their grandkid, or if one of his parents deliberately ran over my cat, I could say “hey, maybe you should consider cutting these toxic child-hating cat murderers off.”
(None of those are true, by the way, my husband’s parents are lovely people and very kind to both children and animals.)
But there are very very few people you can date who are not embedded in some sort of social fabric. If it’s very important to you, you can only date asocial, friendless orphans; that’s fine, you’re allowed to have dealbreakers. If you’re dating a more ordinary sort of person, sometimes you will find yourself having to be civil to and make small talk with people you (for understandable reasons) have no particular emotional investment in, because someone you love has an emotional investment in them. And sometimes you will find yourself having to give up things– sometimes things you really need– in order to fulfill the needs of people you don’t particularly care about, because someone you love cares about them. That’s life.
Thing of Things 
Huh. It was my understanding that in mainstream American culture, people typically expect their spouses to stably prioritize them over the in-laws. I guess I might have misjudged this due to the fact that it’s certainly *more* true of American culture than of Russian culture.
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Inlaws are expected to be significantly (geographically) distant from the actual couple in question most of the time, and get lower general priority for that reason. When inlaws are not geographically distant, expectations are more limited and the culture does not generally make global predictions.
In my experience, American culture usually expects people to not have any particularly strong priority among parental, sibling, and spousal relationships, so people with exactly one such relationship involved in a conflict are expected to follow that relationship, and people with two such relationships are expected to choose essentially at random. In accordance with their own preference/personality, of course, and thus they would consistently follow the same relationship bond, but which bond will be consistently chosen assumed to be a random component of the person’s nature.
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*is assumed, dang it.
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Is it me or this post never talk about polyamory ? It only use the word “primary” once, and it could be replaced by “spouse” with zero loss of information except the loss of the information that Ozy is poly.
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I took that to be ver point. Maybe I misunderstood?
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ugh, “vis” I mean. Can has edit button?
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Now that’s an hipster pronoun I’ve never seen. Can we please stick to singular they ?
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You can stick with “they” if you like it. I don’t like it. I think a “they” where “he” or “she” would ordinarily appear sounds plural. I will probably always think it sounds plural, and I expect it will always confuse me a little bit when I hear it. The old examples people give of singular they are always places where “he” or “she” wouldn’t fit because the person is unspecified.
On the other hand if a person doesn’t want to be gendered I want to respect that.
Ve/ver/vis seems like the least linguistically awkward way to do that, at least to me.
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z-pronouns are the other commonly accepted way
v-pronouns are just weird and niche
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Are they? They both seem weird and niche to me. I’ll take your word for it.
Seems like The Kids These Days are all using “they”, and to their kids it will sound perfectly normal and not plural at all. But I don’t have to like it.
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I generally think of Ozy as “the Captain” (as in Cpt S D Carlos Devil, of course), at least in the past couple of years or so.
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@gazeboist
Hate to break it to you, but it’s [C-PTSD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-PTSD) [Carlos de Vil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_de_Vil)
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@gazeboist
*C-PTSD Carlos de Vil
edit button when ?
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It took this comment for me to notice that Cruella de Vil’s surname spells “devil” (I just thought ‘vil’ was picked to sound like/serve as shorthand for ‘villain’).
(And now I’m vaguely concerned that I might have been mispronouncing the nobiliary particle ‘de’ all my life…)
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@Histidine
de” is French for “from” (but also for “of” and “by”)
It is pronounced /də/ where “ə” is the “a” in “about”.
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@Histidine
Argh, this is is what I intended to link: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/de#French
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@PM I’m aware; the ambiguity in the URL is the joke. There’s also a bit of a “can’t unsee” effect, I think related to the fact that I generally type a unique three-character sequence (in this case ‘cpt’) to reach sites I visit frequently in Chromium.
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@Histidine
btw, “vil” is also a French word for “vile” (morally low), so this may also be intended (paging Scott for kabbalism)
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Singular they does seem to be winning out. It has solid historical precedent in its role for unspecified individuals, and I also note that most of the English-speaking world has taken to using the plural (and formal) version of the second person pronoun as their singular term, and outside of a few areas re-inventing the distinction with ‘y’all’, people don’t seem to find this awkward or confusing.
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If it helps, you can imagine that the sentence “and also all of this is true of secondary partners” appears at the end.
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I am bad at subtext.
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Wait, actually, I’m still not understanding the relationship between this and polyamory.
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No, wait, I got what you meant.
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So polyamory is like having extra in-laws? That’s plausible and normalizing but also seems like an argument against rather than for.
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It’s like having extra spouses. Who come with extra in-laws.
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Or extra friends, or extra siblings…
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Why the fuck is /r/slatestarcodex so anti-poly ? This post has 73% of downvotes there.
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Disapproval of this blog post doesn’t require disapproval of polyamory.
I personally found this a rather weird blog post. If you ignore the few mentions of polyamory, then it is a very bland post where the obvious is stated. If I go looking for subtext, then it seems to refer to criticism of polyamory that is either something that I can’t remember encountering, that I never encounter, that is a weak man or that is a straw man. So without some enlightenment on this matter, I’m not going to get anything out of this post.
It also doesn’t address how polyamory might be employed in these situations. Monogamous people have the option to seek emotional support with friends. Polyamorous people have the additional option to trade sex for emotional support from a non-primary. This has upsides and downsides.
Not addressing this and focusing on the commonalities & giving it this title, can come across as a dishonest attempt to normalize something by not addressing the differences to which people (may) object.
So from my perspective there are a bunch of reasons why one may dislike this post, with only some requiring (strong) disapproval of polyamory.
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I’m not even sure this is supposed to address criticism. This is a post which speak about relationships with metamours by making a comparison with relationships with friends or family of partners.
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I am talking about the ethical treatment of metamours. It’s not an article about whether polyamory is a good idea.
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It’s not exactly a secret that r/ssc is very right-wing. I think their current approved lifestyle is traditional Catholicism.
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And that’s only the front page, let’s not talk about the *gasp in horror* CULTURE WAR THREAD.
(Luckily, Scott has said that he support deleting it.)
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(to be clear, “it” here mean the culture war thread)
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