We have found that the really lascivious posts attract the most readers and the most comments. The dull political posts attract George and ofttimes Rufus.
Here’s an example: “The US is going overboard stomping on the rights of all citizens to avoid inconveniencing a few citizens.”
I could see my Sitemeter spiral down to zero.
Then there is Fred and Gwen and Bonnie and Carol. “I’m thinking about joining you and Carol at the Comfort Inn on Thursday night,” Gwen will soon tell Fred.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
In real life I’ve spent more than enough years herding cats. I thought about that while pounding nails yesterday — that and wondering why we havent brought management experience to bear on the question of change in relationships.
In the business world, we “change the rules” all the time. We buy new businesses, expand the product line, hire and fire employees, and generally do what it takes to grow the company. In our personal lives, we codify the rules. We maintain the status quo, keep the same product line, keep the same employees, and generally do what it takes not to rock the boat. Seems at odds with the old saying that a man marries a woman hoping she will never change and a woman marries a man planning to change him.
Except the old saying proves the “no change” explicitly. Man wants no change in his woman. Woman wants her man to change to match her image.
And nobody in that equation wants growth.
Sex is the commodity that drives that model.
“I think our society is completely upfucked about sex,” correspondent Peppery Patti wrote. “We have this romance novel idea that one person is going to satisfy our every need — intellectual, emotional and sexual, and dammit that just has to work or else. Sometimes it does.”
Sex drives the model because it is both the currency and the lingua franca that some couples use to bind themselves together. And, as our friend Dean “Dino” Russell says, the sex was just to get you to read about the color of the day. Pink, I think.
If you go on this fancy cruise,
I’ll make it worth your while.
If you buy me that shiny car,
I’ll warrant you a smile.
If you take me to our children,
I’ll pledge a big bouquet.
If you toss that other woman,
I’ll promise a BJ.
“The spouse who [steps out] is not, never was, a reflection of any lack on the part of the partner,” Nancy wrote. “It is, rather, a reflection on change.”
When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?
Maybe, just maybe, we keep worrying about the sex because we don’t want people to notice we’re worrying about the change.
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?
[Editors Note: gekko and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her piece, You Are Not a Mall, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]
“It has never been a secret but there are people who didnt know,” I wrote a couple of months ago. “It really is simple. Anne and Nancy are two beautiful ladies. Why ever would I not want share my love for them with the world?”
Despite the openness of this series, Nancy and I have been reticent to come out of the closet in our mainstream lives.
“That has less to do with freaking out,” Nancy said, “and more to do with the fact that most people don’t have to make a big deal out of their lifestyles because they step up to the ‘normal’ line.”
I like that. Anyone can read those blogs but the number who do so far seems limited to people we know and people we have invited. Plus the odd spammer. I’m not interested in having a relationship with the latter. And as match.com points out, “Polyamorous people generally discuss their [private] lives much in the same way others do: rarely, and only with people around whom they feel comfortable doing so.” It’s much the same as talking about politics or religion. Except, of course, that elsewhere on these pages I bash politics and religion, too.
“One of the most awkward things that can happen in a pub is when your pint-to-toilet cycle gets synchronized with a complete stranger,” Peter Kay said.
Keeping secrets = not sharing?
Secrets, not sharing: I’ve wondered about my Relationship status on Facebook. Only Mr. Zuckerberg knows why I can’t write “with Anne” and “with Nancy” but I know why I haven’t. Yet. We haven’t quite come out that far. We have cow orkers as friends. We have children. I have grandchildren. They all can read the poly blogs but they haven’t called us on them (yet).
A better status line might be “ask me and I’ll probably tell you.”
Not sharing = keeping secrets?
I will mostly answer any question asked but I volunteer only what I want you, dear reader, to know or what my audience expects to know. And I’m careful with restroom timing. That’s not sharing but it does mean I have one or two secrets.
Like knowing where to park in Key West.
The sharing question fits in with Nancy’s trip planning. She visited the Keys and told TUFKAS only generalities about the trip. I visited Arizona and withheld most details about that trip. Anne went to Arizona and told me all about Pringles. Nancy went on a family cruise and shared the typical vacation photos.
Anne and the dear, close friend we called “Sally” are in the Keys this month. Up North, the girls bowl on Mondays and play cards on weekends. Here they don’t bowl, so they go to the beach and play cards every day. They drove to Key Weird yesterday. Anne hasn’t been to Key West for a while, so I gave her the piddle pass1, some high points to look for, and told her where I leave the car. Key West is a place for walkies.
“You’ve parked there with me before,” I said.
“Nooooo.” And I could see the “you parked there with her” thought go right across her forehead in bright lights.
Anne’s pique over parking came not because I found a nice (free) 10×20 piece of real estate in a tiny city where that plot is gold. It came because I did something with Nancy that perhaps I did not do with Anne.
The match.com article explores the day-to-day realities of poly living and loving to answer the question of whether polyamory might be the right lifestyle choice for you but it spends a lot of words on the (kinky) sex and it doesn’t look at how much you tell one partner about what you do with another.
How much do I share with one partner about what I do with the other?
That depends. Anne spurns the stories and photos of hugging the statue on the cornah in Winslow, Arizona, or watching a shark in the shallows off Crane Point. Nancy embraces the stories and photos of concert planning in North Puffin or the ferry across Lake Champlain, foliage, and a picnic at the Crown Point Historic Site.
1 My folks always called their unlimited Florida State Parks pass a “piddle pass” because they could stop to use the facilities at any of 160 state parks and reserves. As an aside, they usually saw somebody pretty cool there, too.
[Editors Note: gekko and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her piece, Those Scuffy Areas We Don’t Talk About, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]
“Apple announced this morning that Verzion Wireless will start carrying the iPad at its stores later this month.”
“The Verizon iPhone 4s early 2011 arrival, which many had interpreted to mean January 2011, is now being pegged as March 2011 by at least one analyst.”
Sayanara AT&T. Although it’s too little, too late, that’s annoying. When people have polyamorous relationships, society waggles a finger at them. A bad finger. When companies begin polyamorous relationships, society bumps up their stock prices.
I have an idea with a couple of data points to support it. Here’s the data:
Desdemona has a dear, close friend named Maggie; Like Anne and “Sally” and so many other close friends, they spend hours and hours together. Before hooking up with Maggie, though, Desdemona spent most of her free time with Susan. Their interests were poles apart so they spent their time differently.
We have previously suggested that one can have sex without love and, more important, one can have love without sex.
Desdemona and Maggie might fit our definition of lovers. Likewise Desdemona and Susan, except the latter pair seems to have become passe.
Fred and Gwen and Bonnie and Carol are our polyamorous friends from Part 2 and Part 3. Fred passed along something interesting. When he spends time in the library with Bonnie neither Gwen nor Carol cross his mind at all. Fred has tremendous concentration and he focuses entirely on Bonnie when she is with him. At the motel with Carol, Fred is absolutely unlikely to ponder a logical plan for resolving the nation’s economic problems.
But wait! There’s more!
I’ve watched Fred move his focus from one lover to the next. He pulls away slightly from Gwen even before leaving their house so he can better concentrate on his coming partner.
I often describe multitasking as that familiar circus act of keeping plates spinning in the air. I’ll bet you expected me to say “juggling,” didn’t you?
Wikipedia tells us that plate spinning is a “manipulation art where a person spins plates, bowls and other flat objects on poles, without them falling off. [It] relies on the gyroscopic effect, in the same way a top stays upright while spinning. Spinning plates are sometimes gimmicked, to help keep the plates on the poles.” David Spathaky holds the world record for spinning 108 plates simultaneously in 1996.
Like the juggler, the plate spinner plies his art by touching just one plate. (See, that way I didn’t have to say he holds just one of his balls in his hand at a time.)
We also know that “multitasking” is actually serial (mono)tasking with fast enough switching that Task #1 keeps on rotating on its own while one spins up Task #2 … and so on.
Desdemona serially switched from Suze to Magster. She keeps her BFFs in series. Fred task switches between Gwenny and Bonnie and Caroleena. He (almost) keeps his BFFs in parallel.
One way or another, people switch focus.
“When I’m home, I’m home,” Jon Stewart told NPR’s Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, about how he separates the parts of his life. “I can’t not be at work but the real challenge is when I’m at work, I’m at work. I’m locked in, I’m ready to go, and I’m focused. When I’m home, I’m locked in, I’m ready to go, and I’m focused on home.”
One way or another, people switch focus but some people maintain a mental map of their frame of reference for each ongoing task.
“I serially task switch when it comes to Things That Must Get Done,” Nancy said, “but Dick has had a taste of me doing the micro-switching I am capable of when I texted my daughter, played Solitaire and carried on a reasonably in depth conversation with him.”
I’m not very good at true multi-tasking. I can carry on a conversation while I carry a load of lumber to the barn. I can listen to a polyamory podcast while driving across a bridge. But I cannot use the same brain center — communications in this case — to manage conversations with two or three people at once. I can, however, switch from one conversation about boat design to another about network integration almost seamlessly because I remember the context from one to the next.
Here’s the big idea: Since our monogamouses serially monogatask but the polyamouses appear to multitask, perhaps having poly tendencies has more to do with the way we manage time (and hold on to our memories) than the way we reach for love.
For those who absolutely need to know, Dez and Maggs go to a movie every Tuesday, play poker on Saturdays, and take a long weekend or whole week road trip about once each month. On the other hand, Susan swims twice a week at the Y so Dezzy swam twice a week. They played bridge with a couple of different bridge clubs, sometimes on Tuesdays or Saturdays. And, since Suze doesn’t like sleeping in an empty house, the girls had “sleepovers” once or twice a week when her husband traveled on business.
[Editors 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.]
Monogamists and polyamorists agree that home cooking is marvelous but polyamorists also like to dine out with close friends.
“At least 95 percent of married and cohabitating Americans expect sexual exclusivity,” said Judy Treas, professor of sociology at UC-Irvine, told ABC News .
“If only we could all free ourselves from the cultural brainwashing — almost put cultural brainwishing, and now I think, yeah that too!” correspondent Becky Sue wrote.
Last week, I changed our correspondents’ names to protect their Internet anonymity. Many polyamorists do not publicize their relationship status and many monogamous folks do not want to publicize their comments online.
Also last week, Anne told us she has not accepted my relationship with Nancy although she, Anne, originally gave it her blessing. We all hoped that she, Anne, would see this as an opportunity for growth, a way deepen our marriage and our friendship and not simply a way to “go screw [somebody] and get her out of your system.”
1. But what if you’re not married? How can you have any stake in the outcome? Anne certainly has a stake in the outcome.
“When we became friends,” correspondent Jamie wrote, “we were both at points in our lives where we were on the precipice of major decisions.” Those choices included “whether to do marriage, kids, conventional careers.
“I think we both were doing something at the time that was completely counter to any of that,” she continued. “The research project was something just for us, something that fed us. The draw for both of us was that neither one of us would be directly affected no matter what we decided to do with our lives, so it was safe to dither about them to each other. It allowed us to relax, I think. It allowed us to let that part of our brains develop in a safe place.”
But there was no stake.
“For me, later, it also gave me a place internally to go when I feel like all that creativity and spark is gone and remind myself that it’s always there. That’s a powerful thing. And the fact that there’s a person out there who kind of has a stake in that, or had a part in helping me develop that, is helpful.”
That’s a stake in the creation but no ownership in the outcome.
That isn’t enough.
A stakeholder /n/ is a person who affects or can be affected by changes in a relationship.
2. Why should poly people marry?
I can answer that question only for a civil marriage, not the religious ceremony. If God expects you to marry to sanctify your relationship, do so. It will make you, your spouse, and God, happier. The fact is that marriage in and of itself has little or nothing to do with love.
Perhaps you want personal or spiritual growth, to stabilize a relationship, to conform to your religious or political beliefs, a sexual guarantee, or you simply fall in love. Those are pretty much the same reasons people offer to explain any marriage.
Readers might expect age-related answers. People of child-bearing/child-rearing years have certain needs. People our post-child age have some different needs but I was surprised by the similarity of their lists:
Commitment: This state of being obligated or emotionally impelled or pledged to a partner raises the stakes that each spouse will celebrate the bad times as well as the good with you and whatever family you create.
Continuity: Discontinuity is the Victorian standard (grow up, break away from your family, marry, have kids, divorce, marry again, perhaps divorce again, die alone). Most people crave continuity (stay connected to family, school friends, political systems, jobs, and lovers). A marriage contract offers the appearance of continuity. And the expectation of growing old together.
Financial Security: Two cannot live a cheaply as one but they can come close. My parents grew up “making do” in the Great Depression; I moved to a state, Vermont, where making do is the warp of the fabric of life. Sharing expenses is as natural as fixing a tractor here. The economy of scale, even a scale of two, ranges in everything from a single roof over two heads to buying better cuts of meat to sharing health insurance.
HIPAA: The Privacy Rule under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulates the disclosure of medical info held by health care clearinghouses and providers, health insurers, and the like. Protected Health Information (PHI) is interpreted very broadly and generally excludes non-family members from receiving any information about a critically ill loved one. Not to mention the fact that (“unrelated”) loved ones generally never get to see or help an ill partner.
Mandated sex: In marital law in some states, constructive desertion defines spousal misconduct so extensive that it makes marital relations impossible. The essential definition is one spouse leaving the marital relationship without leaving the marital home. The willful refusal of sex is often cited. Nagging is usually not legitimate misconduct.
If withholding of sex is grounds for divorce, the opposite argument must be true: the state mandates that sex must be part of a legal marriage.
Sharing: The marriage(s) in this example need not be group marriages where three or more adult partners live together in one household with more than one or two incomes going into keeping the home (the typical American struggle is a husband and wife fighting to pay the mortgage with one or two incomes, or with zero or one in this recession). The partnership adds playmates or supervisors for the kids and someone else to hold the ladder during home maintenance projects.
“In marriage you just have to learn the rules,” Jeff Foxworthy says. “Rule number one is, If she ain’t happy, you ain’t happy!”
Get married to be happy, not to be in love.
3. Why should poly people NOT marry?
“The other question I have [is] if you desire this lifestyle, why be married?” correspondent Charlie asked some time ago.
“You shouldn’t unless you want to,” Nancy said.
Some, like me, probably do want to. That and my innate desire to share the things that bring us great joy, to shout from the rooftops, “I love this person!”
Some, like Nancy, may not want to. That doesn’t negate her innate desire to share the things that bring us great joy, to shout from the rooftops, “I love this person!”
Economics may put the kibosh on marriage today.
The economics of retirement can force our elders away from marriage and the marital advantages. Matrimony can screw up retirement benefits, inheritances or wealth preservation, and interactions with adult children. And, while I approve of pre-nups and particularly Nancy’s proposal of a specific contract of financial and end-of-contract obligations, I suspect a marriage that needs the responsibilities for who pops the popcorn spelled out in triplicate is doomed.
The economics of state and Federal taxes means some couples actually send more money to their various governments when “married filing jointly” than as “single” filers.
Government policy drives living in sin. Imagine that.
4. Commitment issues: Should poly people have ‘civil unions’ or ‘domestic partnerships’ instead?
A civil partnership, civil union, or domestic partnership is a legal relationship between two individuals who live together and share a common domestic life but are joined by neither marriage nor a civil union. In California a Domestic Partnership possesses all of the rights and privileges of a Marriage.
Neither chicken dance nor birdseed required.
The advantage to a legal partnership is that it offers the commitment, continuity, financial security and medical benefits, and sharing of a legal marriage without some of the baggage. The disadvantage to a legal partnership is that not many states have it for heterosexual couples and no state allows “group partnerships.”
There is another, personal, reason for making a marriage or other partnership. While I don’t feel a sense of ownership in marriage, I do like the sense of belonging.
[Editors Note: gekko and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her companion piece, In Jealousy There Is Self-Love, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]
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1 My folks always called their unlimited 