“Rule Number One: Don’t you bring that, that person into my bedroom!“

That rule, or one like it is repeated in some 50% of the houses in these United States.

Rule Number One is my own wording but I got to thinking about it because Cunning Minx and Anita Wagner brought up the same dismay in Advice for Poly Newbies.

Minx will watch the Man Burn tonight. So will gekko.

50,000 enthusiasts came together in a Nevada Desert this past week to create Black Rock City, home of the Burning Man. The 2011 art theme there is “Rites of Passage,” an invitation to everyone there to camp on and create the trials by fire of life. They all depart on Monday, having left no human trace whatsoever.

I know a number of people there, either personally or virtually. Black Rock City attracts poly peeps who love gatherings. Poly Asylum, PolyBurn, PolyParadise, Queer Women’s Camp and more have set up theme camps.

Theme camps have become Burning Man’s core. And, since it is B-Man, any theme camp must be participatory.

The Polyamory theme camps may have orgies. But they also may have just people who love to talk about (and celebrate) the way they live.

Living is up close and personal in Black Rock City.

Readers who have had long-distance relationships know the effort it takes to keep the intimacy. We do it with text and email and phone and Skype and organized visits. We’ve often thought about how much easier it would be to live in the same place. Heck, it would be easier to live in the same state!

Or would it?

Rule Number One would suddenly be … challenging.

We all are newbies when it comes to building compressed relationships when in the same place with each other, so I’m not sure how John or Jane would take it if their sweetie hooked up with a hottie in the same (Black Rock) city or the same tent. Burning Man sold out; there were a ton of newbies this year. I’m thinking a lot of Johns and Janes have found out by now.

Rites of Passage could take on a whole new meaning this year.

As an aside, I’m not sure why there is the emphasis on techno rock when Light My Fire still burns strong after more than 40 years.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I shared the four-part polylocution that lead up to these afterposts. Please visit The Poly Posts for the entire series and for other resources.]

For the record, I adore Nancy’s balls.

Also for the record, it might have seemed strange to be on a date with Nancy and Don.

It is worth noting that Don was in California, cheering as the Giants hammered the Diamondbacks on Chase Field in P-hoenix. The guy is such an impassioned sports follower and rabid Giants fan, he was listening over the Interweb. Nancy and I were in the stadium watching as the Giants hammered the D-Backs. So much for the home field advantage.

Nancy is now three for three. She picked Jimmy Johnson to win the Sprint Cup race she attended with Anne. She picked the Giants to win the spring training game she attended with Don. She picked the Giants to win the game she attended with me. I, on the hand, maintained my own record; no team I root for has ever won a game I have attended.

It wasn’t too bad when the Giants scored the first run in the top of the first and Nancy texted Don to crow. It wasn’t too bad when the Giants held the D-Backs scoreless inning after inning and Don texted Nancy to crow. It wasn’t even too too bad when the Giants scored again in the fourth and Nancy and Don texted some more. When The Giants scored three runs in the fifth, I could tell the D-Backs were in a slump. Nothing slumping in the data flow, though.

Both teams went through five pitchers.

Of course, I was texting Anne at the same time Nancy was texting Don. I was trying to try to figure out if the teams were National League or American League. We probably should have asked Don. And Nancy had been texting me while she and Don watched that Spring training game. Come to think of it, both girls were texting me from the Sprint Cup Race; I don’t know if either of them texted Don that day.

Nancy asked me right after the ballgame if I minded that we were sitting there at the game while she rattled back and forth with the guy who wasn’t there.

Nope.

I’ve learned that reaching out and touching each other — those little keep alive messages — are the most important part of our friendship.

“But she’s supposed to be focused on you…”

The fact that she has room to share a funny story or upload a picture of her balls doesn’t detract a bit from what we, Nancy and I, have together. It adds to what we all have in our lives.

Besides, dogs don’t care if you’re naked.

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[Editor’s Note: gekko and I shared the four-part polylocution that lead up to these afterposts. Please visit The Poly Posts for the entire series and for other resources.]

This is Poly House Party Weekend!

June 3-5 marked the first ever international DIY festival celebrating my polyamory my way. Of course, it could also celebrate your polyamory your way. And his. And hers. And theirs.

Organizers David Trask and Jessica Karels suggest it will be “kids of four parent households, poly-fi triads, primaries and their play partners, the ethically non-monogamous, the happily unpartnered with their lovers, the incidentally monogamous, the polysaturated, the overly or overtly single, the doubly heartbroken, the label-resistant, those too-complex-to-explain, and our wonderful not-wired-that-way supportive allies.”

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
–Socrates

Poly House Party weekend could have barbecues and keggers in Seattle, pot lucks and raves in Philly, picnics and blues dances in New Orleans, play parties and Tantric retreats in Montreal, game nights, field days, fundraisers, cuddle parties, and a black tie dinner in Key West.

“It is a community bonding experience, our way–because everyone will do it a little differently.”

I want a good wife. I’ll take a couple of them if they’re good enough.
–Mark Twain

The South Puffin Par-tay is a little different than everyone else’s. I cooked up my special batch of pulled pork (easy on the nyuk nyuk jokes, there, big fella) for the last few days and Joe came over for dinner.

See the girls are somewhere else. Or I am. One is taking apart a decrepit hot tub and the other has a weekend tournament which means I get to spend the Poly House Party weekend feeding my neighbor and making fun of Rufus’ taste in beer.

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.
–Lyndon B. Johnson

“Does not living together make polyamory easier?” Our long-married friend, Polly Dent, asked. She and her husband Paul live together and on the same block as his lover.

It certainly makes the logistics easier. Cuddle parties are unusual when the guests of honor show up on a Skype conference call.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
— Katherine Hepburn

Ahh, Kate. Who’d have thunk you were a hermit, too?

Nancy has retaught me the value of solitude without the negative of being alone. Anne has told me how much she likes to regroup alone occasionally.

Turns out that our polyamory our way includes a remote cabin.

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[Editor’s Note: gekko and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her recent piece, Regarding Bonobos, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]

Busy time in our world. Nancy “snuck” in some new thoughts here and Don gives us more to think — and talk — about over there.

Welcome, Don!

“My girlfriend’s in Florida, with her boyfriend,” the Hip one wrote. “But it’s okay! His wife is cool with it.”

Earlier in this series, we saw that relationships succeed because the people in them like each other. Nancy and I truly like one another. I know this is necessary for any successful, long-term relationship. That’s why my way to write that opener might be, “My girlfriend’s in California, with her boyfriend. But it’s okay! I’m cool with it.”

Nancy, Don, and I have all known each other Internetally for more than a decade. Regular readers may know my long-held belief that everyone on the Internoodle is just like me: we are all exactly the same age, have the same cultural background, and the same lifestyle and interests. After all, we all met in an Internet newsgroup where everyone is an axe murderer.

Yeah, yeah. I know it isn’t true. But I have bonded with and made attachments to the people I like there.

“This woman and I have an amazing connection, and when she’s away in her devotion to another, the alternative to laughter you can guess at,” Don wrote.

I’ll get back to that.

I understand the connection. You may recall that Nancy and I have shared the travails of our parents and our children, job gains and job losses, real estate conundrums, used dog stores, hermitting and hanging mirrors, … and laughter. And now Don. We have two important things in common: we like Mets baseball and we’re both paper-trained.

In The Aftermath, Part I, I wrote, Love is not a finite resource. Time is. Balancing expectations may be the hardest part of having more than one partner. It is for us, but Nancy makes it possible.

I sometimes lose a little bit of the tucking in and breakfast snuzzlings when my girlfriend has company but we’re working on ways to keep the flame alive with phone and email and pokery. Likewise, when Don’s girlfriend was in Florida with me, she kept up with him with email and FB and pokes. Surprised and pleased him, I’m thinking.

It is a big deal because I’m not always there to keep her happy. Neither she nor Anne can always be there to keep me happy. No one can be.

It’s a balancing act but worthwhile because I will likely never go to Burning Man and Don will likely never go to Pago Pago but Nancy might like to do both.

We’ve said in past pieces that the reality of poly-tasking means switching quickly from one to the next but our experience means we can expand that definition. Nancy doesn’t switch from one to the other, not really. When she was “tasking” with me in Florida, she also considered Don and fretted over the loneliness and pain she knew he was feeling. When she was in California, she thought about me and whether I was getting what I needed. And so on.

That all means I have a different answer to Don’s sentiment, “when she’s away in her devotion to another, the alternative to laughter” could be tears. See, Nancy and I don’t lose our linkage when she is not physically with me. Ever.

Nancy asked me, “How do you feel, not in comparison to Don, but how do you feel about it?”

Nancy is joyous. She makes me blessed. I feel good.

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[Editor’s Note: Nancy and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her piece, An Unofficial Polynoodling Random Babbling Thing, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]

We may be hermits but that doesn’t mean we want to be incommunicado.

<thok><thok><thok> Is this thing on?
Can you hear me now?

Over there gekko says, “Don’t be jerks. Talk. Honestly.”

gekko and I talk by cell more often than by almost anything other means but smoke signals. Repetition and signal checks take up 13.3% of every conversation.

Hang on, my earbud fell out.

For the rest, we talk about what everybody does. Our families, our friends (yeppers, we most assuredly talk about you), the weather, our jobs, politics, the news, FOOFery, and what we watched on the t00b last night. Nothing unique there.

But we are blessed.

We can spin what the family foisted on us, what is falling on our heads, what we heard on the radio, what Facebook foisted on us into a nearly continuous conversation. Unlike teenagers, we rarely watch t00b “together” in different states but we do “hang out” on the phone.

I thought we knew a lot about each other’s families, but no. gekko didn’t know that my great grandfather paid my great grandmother’s tuition at Swarthmore before he would marry her or that my father’s first cousin Reuben, a profoundly deaf engineer, found his deafness an asset when he rode the centrifuge in the early NASA tests. I didn’t know her great grandfather presided over the trial of a notorious cannibal. Still lots more ground to cover there.

Most readers know we multi-task during drive time. I generally go on walkies while she commutes. That gives plenty of opportunity to engage in weatherly commentary because it is right there in front of us, talk about whether the owls have their heads up out of their nest, and to meow at passing pussycats.

Last couple of days we’ve talked about decorating styles. The family room of a “colonial style” two story home she described is predominantly black, white, and shades of gray and silver.

I’m not sure I have a “style” although my eye is most drawn to the houses of Chester County that I grew up in. I have a mix of Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton furniture, the latter mostly neoclassic, Federal style. I like the plain, straight legs and tapered arrow feet Hepplewhite often used. That is one reason I don’t own a sofa in North Puffin.

She has some podcasts and several Kindle books on the Droid. I have one audio book and a bunch of Podcasts on the iPod but she can store more on her Droid. We both listen to the “news” that way when we are driving or at the gym and not talking to each other. Podcasts help gekko facilitate the procurement of her bagel-shaped food objects and to listen to some Android Central info (did you know she has a Droid?). Newsweek broadcast a segment on treatment center cancer survival rates. The Naked Scientists explored neuromarketing or how a knowledge of your brain and behavior can help marketers to manipulate your buying habits.

And, of course, we dissected each of those.

gekko is not always interested in the 18-mile boondoggle here in the Keys. I’m not always interested in the project lead who caused her a bit of grief or whether TQM beats Six Sigma. But we talk about them because we are always interested in them.

“Don’t be jerks. Talk. Honestly.”
Speaking to the past. Speaking to the future.

Our list sounds kind of banal but we like it. Talking about all of that all the time means it is easy to talk about all of the other stuff like dates, and traveling, and marriage, and phone sex any time.

And, yes, we analyze our relationship. Incessantly. But you knew that, didn’t you?

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[Editor’s Note: gekko and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her companion piece, On Love, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]