This blog post comes to you from Seattle, Washington, where we’re getting ready to do one last podcast before the More Than Two book tour wraps up for good. Looking back over the last seven weeks on the road, it feels like we set off a million years ago to tour the country in a camper van talking about polyamory. And yet, at the same time, I almost don’t want it to end.
In June of 2003, I added a new page to my rapidly-growing site about polyamory. The new page, Polyamory for Secondaries, had a section on it called “A Proposed Secondary’s Bill of Rights.” My partner Shelly, who has contributed her thoughts on consent and “family-style” relationships right here in this blog (and whose writings and ideas about consent and ethics in romantic relationships were instrumental to us as we were crafting the ethics sections of More Than Two) contributed significantly to the Secondary’s Bill of Rights.
Two nights ago, Eve and I were hosting a book signing event in Bellingham, Washington. We usually do Q&As at these events, and invariably get some really interesting questions. At Bellingham, one of our readers asked us our impressions of the language and jargon that’s grown up around polyamory.
Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about the assumptions we make in our relationships, and how those assumptions can influence our relationship outcomes, for good or for ill.
I’ve been meaning to revisit that idea for quite some time, specifically with an eye toward the assumptions we make in polyamorous relationships.
It is a fact often unacknowledged that we are all born, and in many ways predisposed to remain, egocentric little monsters.
That’s not a criticism, mind; just a statement. If you want to see unadulterated egocentrism in its purest form, before the crucible of life alloys it with empathy and concern for others, just look at a two-year-old. We ship with egocentrism as our core framework; most things beyond that are installed separately.
Folks already familiar with my writings over the years won’t be shocked to hear me say I’m deeply skeptical of rule-based romantic relationships. It’s a theme throughout most of my writings on polyamory, and in the book More Than Two, Eve and I argue that rules-based systems rarely seem to create structures that work (at least for everyone, including all the people who are not present when the rules are made), and often create harmful structures. When they do work, it’s quite common to credit the rules for the success of a relationship even in situations where the relationship likely would still have succeeded without them.
Our attention was recently drawn to YouTube spam advertising a free download of the eBook version of More Than Two. As you might imagine, this concerned us greatly.
Recently, my attention was called to a message in a polyamory forum about turbulence in a polyamorous relationship caused when one person wanted to start dating a friend, and that person’s existing partner wanted to impose a “No dating existing friends” rule.
I haven’t seen many examples, at least so far, of people prohibiting other people from beginning romantic relationships with anyone who was already a friend. Yet as I read this message, it seemed many other people on that forum had, or wanted, similar rules.
Does the the September release date seem just too far away? Are you just dying to get your hands on a copy of More Than Two for your summer reading? Never fear, dear supporters, there is a way!
I recently encountered, during the normal course of my regular trawling across the width of this thing we call the Internet, an essay posted on the Psychology Today Web site. The article is a rejection of the notion that adultery is okay (an argument made by a different essay on a different site) and, as far as that goes, I have no quarrel with it. If you’re going to make a promise of sexual fidelity, keep it. If you can’t, renegotiate the relationship or end it.