“But it’s not fair!” is a slippery concept…
“It’s not fair!”
Children say this all the time. Once we grow up, we say it less often—not just because it gets beaten out with a reflexive “life’s not fair”(which is true, but it really ought to be), but because, when we get older, and our vision gets longer. We learn that fairness is a global, not a local, thing. Sure, if you did the dishes last night and it’s your sister’s turn to do the dishes tonight, but she isn’t doing the dishes because she just got back from the dentist, it may seem unfair to you from a purely selfish perspective…but really, would you want to trade places with her? And if you were the one who’d just been through the root canal, wouldn’t you appreciate it if you could give the dishes a miss tonight yourself? These things tend to even out in the end; sometimes, compassion means the rigid schedule of dishwashing responsibility should change.
By the time we’re adults, most of us have figured this out. That, or we’ve just given in to exhaustion and stopped worrying quite so much about what’s “fair.”
But in relationships, and especially in polyamorous relationships, our five-year-old selves still sometimes whisper in out ear “It’s not fair!” when things don’t go the way we want them to. Even when we don’t talk about our expectations. Even when we know our expectations are silly. Hell, sometimes even when what’s happening is not only fair, but most excellent as well. Sometimes, our notions of what’s “fair” become so deeply buried that we’re not always even aware of them, or aware of the expectations we carry around with us.
What do you do when your inner five-year-old starts saying “It’s not fair!” in your ear? That can happen when your partner’s an extrovert who finds it easy to meet new people and you’re an introvert; I’ve certainly heard polyamorous folks cry “It’s not fair that he seems to have prospective partners lining up around the block and I can’t meet anyone!” And yes, it’s true that some folks find it easier to go out and interact with people than other folks do, but that’s something we all have a measure of control over, after all. At the end of the day, what would be more fair? Forbidding one’s extroverted partner from being an extrovert?
But there’s another “It’s not fair!” monster that’s far more subtle, and wriggles its way deep into the murk of your default, unexamined assumptions and unvoiced expectations.
Your inner five-year-old is sneaky
This sense of fairness can creep up on you when you don’t really expect it, during times when you feel that you’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty for a relationship partner and you think that either your own efforts aren’t being rewarded the way you expect (even if you might think you don’t have any expectation of reward at all!) or that someone else is somehow benefiting from your work in ways you didn’t expect.
As a real-world example, many years ago I met a lovely young woman with whom I became close friends…eventually.
I say “eventually” because when I first met her, she was extremely introverted, had difficulty opening up to others, and had a lot of trouble communicating or trusting folks around her. She was unpartnered at the time, largely because of this. There were a lot of things about her I liked and admired, so I spent a considerable amount of time and effort in getting to know her and encouraging her to open up to me—a nontrivial investment in a relationship with a person who was never even a lover.
Some time later, at least partly because of the experiences she had with me, she found it much easier to talk to people and to extend herself to others, and she ended up finding a boyfriend. Would it have been reasonable for me to be upset, and to say, “Hey, look, I put in all the work here, and now someone else gets the benefit?” No, but I do know people who seemed to feel that I should have responded that way, and were surprised when I didn’t.
But here’s the thing: My friend didn’t “owe me” for the time and attention I spent on her. I didn’t do it because I wanted something from her. She didn’t owe me a relationship because I chose to invest in a friendship with her.
Crying “It’s not fair!” over investing a lot of work in getting to know someone and then not having that work turn into a relationship smacks of entitlement. She had no obligation to start dating me just because I took the time to get to know her, and I had no expectation that dating her was my just reward for all the effort I put in. Yet I’ve known folks who do, in fact, seem to feel this way. In fact, I would say this is the beating heart of “nice guy syndrome”—the notion that women owe sex to “nice” men as a reward for their attention.
Image: Cookie Studio
Another real-world example: Some people I’ve spoken to online were part of a polyamorous triad that included a woman who was facing major upheaval in her life. She’d just come out of a bitter divorce, and was feeling emotionally and financially vulnerable. She needed, and asked for, a great deal of support from her partners, which they offered without question. Later, when she found herself on more solid footing and felt emotionally ready to engage the world again, she began exploring a new relationship, which made her partners feel put out; they felt that since they had supported her through her divorce, they should have some more input in how quickly and to what extent any new partnerships formed.
Again, this smacks of entitlement to me. We support our lovers because we love them, not because we expect that support to give us control over them. This is, I think, a vitally important concept: Support does not entitle you to control. Crying “It’s not fair!” when we support someone and that person doesn’t respond by turning over control to us strikes me as toxic, perhaps borderline abusive.
Entitlement and Transactional Relationships
These examples have one thing in common: the idea “I have done something for someone, so I should be the person who benefits from that work.” Interactions with other people are transactional. If I don’t get something in exchange, I have been deprived of something that is mine by right. Or, perhaps more simply, “It’s not fair! Look at what I had to go through to get what I got; why should other people get it more easily? How come I had to do all this work and the next person to come down the pike didn’t?”
The answer is “Nobody owes you for the experiences that you have had. In fact, you have done something wonderful; you have helped to bring down barriers in someone’s heart, and helped that person find a place where they can now experience the world more fully and engage others in a way that they couldn’t before. Go you!”
In other words, you’ve made a positive difference in someone’s life…and you’re now upset because you feel it’s not fair that other folks get to benefit from that? Well, that’s what happens when you make someone’s life better; the whole world gets just a little bit brighter. Why would anyone want to be stingy about that?
I think, when feelings like this arise (and they do in lots of little ways, all the time), the key thing to keep in mind is this: “Have I done what I did because I expected something in return? Would I go back in time and tell the other person, ‘I will only help you if you give me something I want’?” If the answer is “no,” then let it go.
It’s sneaky, sometimes, how the things we do can come attached to expectations we might not even realize that we have until they’re not met. And it’s important to guard carefully against these unspoken, unacknowledged expectations.
I’m not saying that issues of fairness have no place in relationships, mind you. The fairness that is important in relationships isn’t the tit-for-tat “I did the dishes last night, and we’re supposed to take turns, so it isn’t fair that I have to do them tonight too!” or the “I worked hard to carry Sally through a difficult emotional time, so it should be hard for anyone else to get close to her too!” variety.
In fact, sometimes a tit-for-tat approach to fairness creates a situation that’s unfair. Here’s another real-world example: Many years ago, I knew a married couple that was exploring polyamory. The wife had a girlfriend for many years, but when he finally found a girlfriend, the wife became overwhelmingly, irrationally jealous. After dealing with this jealousy in the typical fashion for a while (you know, passive-aggressive acting out, that sort of thing), she finally went to him and told him, look, I want you to dump your girlfriend. I’ll dump my other partner too, so it’ll be fair.
Three broken hearts for the price of one is a peculiar definition of the word “fair” in my book; which illustrates yet another important point:
Symmetry is not the same thing as fairness.
Life is not the same for all of us. If you are in a relationship where, say, your partner finds it easier to start new relationships than you do, or has three partners to your two, “fairness” does not mean “you shouldn’t be able to start new relationships until I find a lover,” or “you need to get rid of one of your partners to make it fair.” (Those might seem bizarre examples, but I’ve seen them both in the real world!)
Personally, I think the kind of fairness that really counts is the kind that begins with compassion. Doing the dishes two days in a row because your sister has just had a root canal is compassionate (I’ve had a root canal, and believe me, the last thing you want to be doing when the anesthetic starts to wear off is standing upright). On the other hand, saying “I’ll dump my partner of many years just to get you to dump yours” is hardly compassionate.
Fairness matters. Symmetry is not the same thing as fairness; fairness means saying things like “I realize that my own insecurity belongs to me, so I will not use it as a blunt instrument on you, nor expect you to plot your life around it. I may, however, ask you to talk to me while I’m dealing with it.”
So when does fairness matter? When it warns you of a power imbalance. If you have a partner who, for example, says “I am allowed to have other lovers but you are not,” and this isn’t something you agreed to (for instance, as part of a D/s kink), or your partner says “I have to approve of your other relationships and I can tell you to break up with other lovers, but you don’t get to do the same to me,” or says “I want to control how your other relationships progress/what kind of sex you’re allowed to have, but you can’t do the same to me,” that might seem unfair to you...and it is. Any sort of non-consensual intrusion that gives one person control over another is potentially problematic. Be cautious when you see something like this—your inner sense of unfairness may be warning you of something wrong!
This isn’t the kind of fairness our mental five-year-old understands. Our inner five-year-old is far more likely to be worried about someone else getting something that we don’t have, or getting something for a lower “price” than we paid for it. At the end of the day, though, our mental five-year-old isn’t really likely to make our lives better, no matter how much of a fuss he puts up.
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