Amazing. It was one of those moments where I marveled to myself at how well my poly life is going. I'm doing that a lot lately--I almost hate to write about it, because I'm afraid it's like tempting fate. But for the first time in my life, I have a wonderful primary partner, and a wonderful secondary partner, and everyone involved is perfectly happy with the whole situation. It's just so cool that it sort of blows me away.
That's not to say Max and I don't hit the occasional speed bump. You expect to have difficult moments occasionally when you're polyamorous, and most poly people set up ground rules to help them through such times. "No Surprises"--that's a common rule for poly folks, and it's a rule for Max and I. What that means is I don't come home and say, "So, honey, I started a secondary relationship with this guy named Jim today, and wow, was he great in bed." No. That's not cool.
Closely related to the "no surprises" rule: You tell your partners the important facts about what's going on with other relationships. No lying and no selective omitting.
And you keep agreements: If you say, "I have a date, but we're not going to have sex, it's just dinner," and then you come home with hickeys on your inner thighs, that's a penalty flag for you, honey. It's easy to say, "Oh, I'd never do that"--but I'm a relatively thoughtful poly person, and I've slipped up on this once. Max was far more generous about it than I deserved, but what I realized afterward was that I had denied that sex was an option on this date because I thought Max might be unhappy about it. Bizarre, given that we'd been happily poly for several years already, but apparently some ghost of lovers past had taken control of my brain, and I fell into the trap of minimizing, both to myself and to him, what might happen.
Jealousy is the thing non-poly people always ask about, and yes, we've learned some lessons about that. One thing that's helpful is to understand that there are different types of jealousy, triggered by different things. For example, I'm quite secure in my relationship with Max, and I have no fear of him falling so in love with a secondary partner that he would break up with me and replace me with someone else. And if Max's secondary relationships were confined purely to the bedroom and the dungeon, I'd never have a flicker of jealousy.
But that's not the case. We both go out on dates with our secondary partners, in public and among our social circle. And that's where I have sometimes gotten a bit green-eyed. You see, my jealousy is always ego-based; that is, it's about what I imagine other people's perceptions to be. What if someone thinks she's his primary partner? What if someone thinks he loves her more than me? Oh, my queen-size ego does not tolerate such ideas easily. But I've learned, when that happens, to turn my thoughts to all the things Max and I do that sustain our identity as a couple, and to let go of these amorphous fears about what some random person might think, instead of letting such feelings rule me.
You might wonder why I'd work so hard to do something so inherently difficult. Why bother with poly if it's so hard? Well, I haven't noticed monogamous relationships always being a piece of cake, either. But, the bottom line is, it's about the love. Because I'm poly, I get to share intimate, sexual love relationships with more people, and I get to be the focus of their love and affection. I think that's the perfect Valentine's Day gift.
