Managing Time

Image: Kevin Ku

How on Earth do you find time for more than one relationship?

I mean, it’s a fair question. “I don’t have time for that!” is probably the #2 objection to polyamory I hear, right after “I’m too jealous for that.”

And I mean, yeah, relationships do take time. If you don’t feel like you’ve got the time to invest in multiple relationships, that’s cool. Nothing wrong with that. If you’re happy, you do you. Nobody says you have to have more than one relationship—or any relationships at all, if you don’t want to.

So how do I make it work? I’ve found time management becomes easier when partners get along with one another and with the partners of their partners. I’ve had relationships where one of my partners refuses to be around and spend time with another, and it sucks. Never again. (Not just because enforcing that kind of separation means you spend less time with each partner—and this is aggravated when one of your partners doesn’t want to be around another but then gets surly and passive-aggressive when you spend time with the other—but it also leads to triangulation and other toxic behaviors.) Yes, relationships do need a certain amount of “alone time,” and having two partners can mean having less time to spend with each of them—but not nearly as much as you might suspect. As long as it’s possible to spend quality time with more than one person, having two partners doesn’t mean that each of them gets only half your attention.

When you can spend time with your partner in the company of his or her other lover, a minute given to that person does not mean a minute taken away from you.

I like spending time with multiple partners, and I often like spending time with a partner and her other partners. I really enjoy going out to dinner with my partners and their partners as well. We often go on vacation together; back in 2023, the extended poly network and I spent a lovely time in Barcelona. Of course, this requires that you know, and accept, that not all of the time you spend with someone will be one-on-one time. (And frankly, I think that’s a benefit; I’ve met some awesome people through my partners, people who have become my friends independent of our connection by dating the same person.)

But I bet you already know that, right? You spend time with family, with friends, with work colleagues—most of us already get that romantic relationships share time with other people in our lives. With polyamory, some of those “other people” are other partners, that’s all.

You know what else is awesome? Bringing your lovers into your hobbies and such. I co-author novels with two of my lovers. I do a podcast with two of my lovers. Everything is better shared (well, except maybe Fallout 4).

What about conflicts? What if my partner’s other partner wants time alone at the same time I do?

In any family, even a conventional nuclear family with two adults and a couple of children, it’s always possible to have scheduling conflicts. What do you do if your spouse wants to go see a movie, but you’d rather stay home and catch Altered Carbon on Netflix? What do you do if your child has a school play on the same night that your spouse is due to receive an award from a professional organization? These kinds of problems can happen in any home, and reasonable people can find reasonable ways to accommodate everyone’s needs. The same is true of a poly relationship.

To use a real-world example, I once had a situation where one partner wanted to go out dancing and another wanted to go to a movie. Simple solution: all three of us did both. Boom! Done.

Part of being a reasonable person, in any kind of relationship, is accepting the fact that you don’t get 100% of everything you want 100% of the time. Flexibility is key to healthy relationships no matter what your relationship structure looks like.

But I don’t want to give up any of my time! I want to make sure my partner is willing to give me the things that are important to me!

Well, sure. Nobody really wants to give things up in any relationship. Here’s the thing, though: in any relationship, poly or not, a good tool for keeping things running smoothly is the understanding that you can’t expect to have what you want if you don’t ask for what you want.

Often, people will make tacit assumptions about the behavior of their partners, without actually clearly saying what their expectations are, and then become hurt and angry if the expectations aren’t met.

It’s not enough to say “The new Batman movie is coming out next Friday;” instead, it’s important to communicate expectations clearly, and say “The new Batman movie is coming out next Friday, and it’s really important to me to go to the opening with you.” Just that little bit goes a surprisingly long way toward helping to resolve scheduling difficulties and hurt feelings.

Unstated expectations can become toxic to any relationship. The best way to have your needs met is to state them clearly and directly, without implied assumptions. Your partner can’t read your mind, and “If he really loved me he would know that I want thus-and-such” is a great way to make sure that you won’t get what you want (and drive yourself batty in the process). When everyone’s desires and expectations are communicated clearly, everyone has a good sense of what everyone else expects, and scheduling suddenly becomes so much easier.

I’m worried that too much of this time spent together and time spent scheduling will detract from the relationship I already have with my partner.

That’s a reasonable concern. There are ways to maintain multiple relationships while still nurturing and paying attention to each one.

In some poly relationships, people often do set up regular “date nights” with specific partners so that everyone has a sense of what to expect from the schedule. That’s an awesome tool to help let everyone know what to expect—though I would say that it’s also important to be somewhat flexible about it. Life isn’t always tidy, and should a conflict come up or should a partner become ill or injured, I think it’s reasonable to be able to rearrange the schedule without causing undue grief.

Regular date nights are a great way to help nurture any relationship, even a monogamous one. They create a setting where the people involved can get back in touch with the romantic part of the relationship, free of distractions like chores, housework, and kids. Sometimes, polyamory actually makes this easier; when you have more than two people involved, it becomes easier to have one person take care of the little things that always seem to need taking care of while the other people spend alone time together. As long as the same opportunities are available to everyone, and everyone involved treats one another compassionately and without resentment, this actually helps all your relationships to blossom.

I’m still concerned about the amount of time I might lose if my partner takes another partner. What’s wrong with just limiting the amount of time she spends with any new lover from the get-go?

That can be a dangerous road to walk down, and it opens the possibility of stunting any new relationship, which can breed frustration and resentment.

Any relationship can have time management problems. A person starts working longer hours at the office, a person picks up a new hobby, a person starts spending more time with friends, a person starts playing video games—when these things happen, people don’t generally say things like “If you start taking up photography as a hobby, I am going to want to start scheduling the time you spend doing it, because I want to be able to limit the amount of time you spend away from me.” We don’t see hobbies or interests in a time-constraint way; most of us would not think it reasonable to say “Well, okay, you can start playing the new Playstation game, but only if you do it for no more than seven hours per month on alternate Thursdays.”

Polyamory’s no different, yet we often see it as different. Good time management skills are the same regardless of the nature of the demands on one’s time. It feels different when we think “My lover is spending time with her other lover” than if we think “My lover is spending time in the darkroom,” yet from a practical perspective, the same sorts of tools for managing time still apply.

Compassion, respect, clear communication of desires and expectations…these go much further toward creating mutually beneficial relationships than seeking to control your partner’s time do.

What if I genuinely don't like spending time with my partner's other partners?

That's a difficult problem. In fact, I think that might be a problem that the poly scene has yet to solve. In the past, I've tended to be of the opinion that grown adults can decide for themselves how they will relate to each other, and if someone I love doesn't want to spend time with someone else I love, that's okay. It might limit the time we spend together, but it's one of the tradeoffs we have to be able to navigate.

My views on that have changed since I had a partner who was actively hostile and even abusive to another of my partners. She absolutely refused to be in the same room with my other partner, and tried to separate and isolate me from my other partner—at the same time as she demanded that I spend time with her other partner. I didn't realize how toxic that was until much too late.

These days, I think a lot of problems can be solved by choosing partners who can get along well. They don't necessarily have to be friends (and they certainly don't have to be lovers; telling person X that she is required to be sexually intimate with person Y as a prerequisite to being with me is creepy and gross), but they do need to be civil. A partner who is hostile to another partner is a warning sign that the relationship isn't sustainable and may be dysfunctional.

What tools do you use for managing time?

The standard answer in poly circles is: Google calendar! A shared Google calendar is a thing of wonder and joy. It can really help with the nitty-gritty of time management. Seriously, Google calendar is awesome.

This makes planning easy. It also makes it easier to deal with schedule changes; if something comes up, or something falls through, everyone can just glance at the calendar to see what everyone else is up to. Movie sold out and you have a sudden hankering for french fries instead? Take a look at the schedule and see what the other folks are doing, and who’s available for a late-night fast-food run! You get the idea.

Also, remember that time is valuable. You can't save it; you spend it at the rate of one second per second no matter what you do. The life you build reflects the places where you spend your time. If you want good relationships, spend your time in ways that show it.

You don't necessarily have to spend time in person to spend time together. Technology is marvelous: Zoom, Skype, FaceTime. My extended poly network uses Facebook Messenger to chat, and we have a weekly movie night that’s facilitated by TwoSeven.