I’ll start my telling you what I was going to write about, and then I’ll move on to a less controversial topic. I changed my mind on this week’s topic because I’ve been convinced by multiple people that my viewpoint is wrong (when my lovers ask what I’m up to, and I tell them I’m working on a blog post, they naturally want to know the theme. And then they give their two cents’ worth. Ideally, of course, I can just persuade them to write up the post for me).
For the original topic: I’ve got friends who live in an N (meaning two of them are married, and each of the spouses has another live-in primary). The married couple in the N is having marital difficulties, as tends to happen in any number of relationships, and they’re going through the normal protocol of what couples in trouble do. And there’s a very real chance that the relationship is going to crash and burn. The polyamorous twist is that each of the married people gets to keep their other primaries during the arduous process of working on the marriage. So some of their emotional needs for intimacy are taken care of by the other primaries.
A fairly common rule in polyamorous circles is: no nookie with someone else while you’re having a fight with the primary. It’s generally an effective rule; it prevents people from mentally checking out of a relationship by finding affection elsewhere, and it certainly motivates people to solve their relationship issues efficiently.
In this case, as there are multiple primaries involved, I would argue in favor of not “punishing” the uninvolved primaries for the married couples’ poor relationship dynamic, as refusing access to loved ones could be perceived. How would you feel if your partner asked you to move out for a couple of weeks because they were having a really big fight with their mother, and it needed to be resolved before they could deal with you?
I was told by all of my lovers that I am wrong in this case. So I’ll drop it for now and contemplate before laying out my argument (still, the people in the N in question obviously share my opinion). There is an overwhelming consensus in my circles that the spouse is the highest priority, top of the totem pole, be all and end all. If you’ve made the public promise to do what you can to prioritize this relationship, and if your external activities threaten your motivation or ability to fix things, it’s time to get rid of them so you can focus on the big problem at hand.
So a new question arises from this debate: how many primaries can one person reasonably have? Unless you’re particularly good at threesomes, the consensus seems to be one at a time. But the married couple in the N each thinks they have two. Right now there’s a conflict, and the marriage is in jeopardy. How much of that is overcommitment to too many primaries?
Multiple “primaries” seems to work well for people who think of themselves as their own primaries (solo polyamory, it’s called in The Ethical Slut). These people may live alone and have multiple very important secondaries in their lives, but there’s nobody else with whom they spend every night by default. In this case, all of the very important other people can have equal status and well-defined expectations about access, even if they’re not in fact more important than the practitioner of solo polyamory. This may be a question of semantics; for whom is the most important person in their lives not they themselves (Answer: I'm aware there are some people for whom this applies, though they seem to be miserable and unhealthy. And let's exclude direct offspring in this analysis)? It seems so obvious as to not count when assigning primary status.
And what’s the time frame in “one at a time”? I’ve admitted to having both a spouse and a non-spousal primary. Most people would call the non-spousal primary a secondary, and that may prove true on a long time scale. After all, one of these people has met my parents; the other has not. One has already been involved with me for over a decade; the other has not.
On the other hand, I could be spending the night with either of them on a given day. And on a short time scale, whoever is in front of me at the moment has my attention. My spouse generally doesn’t call if I’m with the non-spousal primary, but he would if there were an emergency, and I’d drop everything to respond. Come to think of it, I’d do the same for the non-spousal primary. Or the secondary. Or the secondary's primary. Or even the guy I'd never met before who's having a seizure on the side of the road (and here’s where I differ in my ideas of non-primary partners from The Ethical Slut: there is nobody with whom I’m involved that I would not take to the hospital if the occasion arose).
Maybe the relevant aspect here is that the non-spousal primary is low-maintenance. If he asks for little (which he does), then he generally can get everything he asks for, and I can make him the first priority for the small number of time and things he asks. If he’s demanding or high maintenance, then I’m pulled in a number of directions at once, and there may turn out to be a fight between priorities. And certainly, in a wrestling match like this, a spouse is likely to win.
But is that even an interesting question? It might be most efficient to choose partners whose temporal and emotional needs fit well with your own availability so as to preclude that type of conflict in the first place.
*******
Questions or comments? I’ve got opinions (and sometimes my lovers agree with me): polysaturated@rocketmail.com.
For the original topic: I’ve got friends who live in an N (meaning two of them are married, and each of the spouses has another live-in primary). The married couple in the N is having marital difficulties, as tends to happen in any number of relationships, and they’re going through the normal protocol of what couples in trouble do. And there’s a very real chance that the relationship is going to crash and burn. The polyamorous twist is that each of the married people gets to keep their other primaries during the arduous process of working on the marriage. So some of their emotional needs for intimacy are taken care of by the other primaries.
A fairly common rule in polyamorous circles is: no nookie with someone else while you’re having a fight with the primary. It’s generally an effective rule; it prevents people from mentally checking out of a relationship by finding affection elsewhere, and it certainly motivates people to solve their relationship issues efficiently.
In this case, as there are multiple primaries involved, I would argue in favor of not “punishing” the uninvolved primaries for the married couples’ poor relationship dynamic, as refusing access to loved ones could be perceived. How would you feel if your partner asked you to move out for a couple of weeks because they were having a really big fight with their mother, and it needed to be resolved before they could deal with you?
I was told by all of my lovers that I am wrong in this case. So I’ll drop it for now and contemplate before laying out my argument (still, the people in the N in question obviously share my opinion). There is an overwhelming consensus in my circles that the spouse is the highest priority, top of the totem pole, be all and end all. If you’ve made the public promise to do what you can to prioritize this relationship, and if your external activities threaten your motivation or ability to fix things, it’s time to get rid of them so you can focus on the big problem at hand.
So a new question arises from this debate: how many primaries can one person reasonably have? Unless you’re particularly good at threesomes, the consensus seems to be one at a time. But the married couple in the N each thinks they have two. Right now there’s a conflict, and the marriage is in jeopardy. How much of that is overcommitment to too many primaries?
Multiple “primaries” seems to work well for people who think of themselves as their own primaries (solo polyamory, it’s called in The Ethical Slut). These people may live alone and have multiple very important secondaries in their lives, but there’s nobody else with whom they spend every night by default. In this case, all of the very important other people can have equal status and well-defined expectations about access, even if they’re not in fact more important than the practitioner of solo polyamory. This may be a question of semantics; for whom is the most important person in their lives not they themselves (Answer: I'm aware there are some people for whom this applies, though they seem to be miserable and unhealthy. And let's exclude direct offspring in this analysis)? It seems so obvious as to not count when assigning primary status.
And what’s the time frame in “one at a time”? I’ve admitted to having both a spouse and a non-spousal primary. Most people would call the non-spousal primary a secondary, and that may prove true on a long time scale. After all, one of these people has met my parents; the other has not. One has already been involved with me for over a decade; the other has not.
On the other hand, I could be spending the night with either of them on a given day. And on a short time scale, whoever is in front of me at the moment has my attention. My spouse generally doesn’t call if I’m with the non-spousal primary, but he would if there were an emergency, and I’d drop everything to respond. Come to think of it, I’d do the same for the non-spousal primary. Or the secondary. Or the secondary's primary. Or even the guy I'd never met before who's having a seizure on the side of the road (and here’s where I differ in my ideas of non-primary partners from The Ethical Slut: there is nobody with whom I’m involved that I would not take to the hospital if the occasion arose).
Maybe the relevant aspect here is that the non-spousal primary is low-maintenance. If he asks for little (which he does), then he generally can get everything he asks for, and I can make him the first priority for the small number of time and things he asks. If he’s demanding or high maintenance, then I’m pulled in a number of directions at once, and there may turn out to be a fight between priorities. And certainly, in a wrestling match like this, a spouse is likely to win.
But is that even an interesting question? It might be most efficient to choose partners whose temporal and emotional needs fit well with your own availability so as to preclude that type of conflict in the first place.
*******
Questions or comments? I’ve got opinions (and sometimes my lovers agree with me): polysaturated@rocketmail.com.
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