Is veto actually abusive?
“Can you believe she still thinks she gets to be with you?”
Her name was Shelly Deforte. She said this after she’d just broken up with a woman I was also dating. Shelly didn’t believe in veto. Or rather, she didn’t believe in veto that affected her. As for being the one to issue a veto, well...I didn’t realize until that moment she did, in fact believe in veto very much.
We had, at that point, been together for about four years or so. We’d met at a group called PolyTampa, after she moved to Tampa with her husband at the time, apparently (so she said) in hopes that a change of scene might save their foundering marriage. (That didn’t work, of course. They ended up divorcing, and he went back to California.) In the time we were together, she went to school to get a postgraduate degree in biology and now does research in proteomics.
I was still married to my first wife, and my wife and I had a veto arrangement, meaning that she could at any point order me to stop seeing one of my other partners and I would be expected to comply. (I theoretically had the same power, though to be frank I cannot imagine why I would ever want to do such a thing.)
Abuse, power, and social control
If you read any books on abuse, particularly domestic partner abuse, one of the main ideas you’ll find is that abusers control their victims’ social connections. In monogamous relationships, this usually manifests as social isolation—cutting the abuse victim off from friends, family, and other sources of social support. In fact, many experts on abuse consider control over another person’s social connections to be one of the defining elements of abuse, along with intimidation, manipulation, fear, and violence.
Polyamorous relationships are a bit different, in that abusers in polyamorous people usually don’t, by the very nature of plural relationships, isolate their victims from all other social connections. However, the same dynamic still applies: abuse is fundamentally about power and control, and control over another person’s social connections and attachments of all kinds allows the abuser to extend control and isolate the victim from others.
When I was still with my first wife, she tried to veto Shelly. Shelly made a compelling case that veto is intrinsically toxic—that there is no healthy veto, and that any attempt to control a person’s other connections is intrinsically toxic.
Then I met someone I will call “Tina.”
Tina (not her real name) and I connected instantly, with that powerful, knock-your-socks-off chemistry some folks confuse with love at first sight. A few months later, Shelly and Tina also started dating, and all was well. For a time.
Tina and Shelly were, as it turns out, a poor match, to be tactful about it. Their relationship didn’t last a year until it blew up, and I learned that Shelly’s arguments about veto only worked when she was on the receiving end.
“Can you believe she still thinks she gets to be with you?”
She said that to me when she told me she’d broken up with Tina. “Can you believe she still thinks she gets to be with you?” That was her way of telling me she expected me to break up with Tina too.
In a different universe, a wiser and kinder version of me made a different choice. In this universe, I broke up with Tina. That was nearly twenty years ago, and I still regret it to this day.
Ironically, Shelly would later break up with me for a monogamous fellow, then break up with him for being monogamous, and eventually end up with yet another fellow in a 24/7 D/s relationship that went about as well as her relationship with Tina...and would then point to my breakup with Tina as “proof” that I am abusive.
So it goes.
Promises Not Delivered
Is veto intrinsically abusive? There was a time I would have said no. Hell, there was a time when I was in a relationship that had explicit veto, and I didn’t realize how toxic it was until it was used on me.
And I mean, I get it. I really do. I understand the seductive appeal of an emergency escape button that you can press if jealousy becomes too overwhelming to manage, that will eject the source of your jealousy from your life.
But here’s the thing about veto:
It doesn’t work. I know I’ve said this before, but you cannot demand that your lover do something that will hurt them, and another person, and expect to come out of it with a better, stronger, healthier relationship. It’s not the way real human beings work. Even if your partner agrees, you will damage trust.
But that’s not the worst of it.
As I learned with Shelly, who demanded in crude, coarse terms that I break things off with “Tina” and then turned around and said “See? He broke things off with Tina, look what a toxic person he is!”, the fact of the matter is that abiding by a veto (whether you agreed to it or not—more on that in a minute) forever makes you the bad guy even if your lover is the one who pushed the veto button. If you and the person who demanded the veto should ever break up, now your ex and the person who were vetoed suddenly become natural allies...because now they have an ex in common, and that’s you.
And before you say “nobody would actually accept this ‘I demanded veto, you agreed, that makes you a bad person’ narrative,” allow me to correct you: Oh yes they will. They absolutely will.
Over the years, my attitude toward veto has evolved. I started out thinking it was a reasonable relationship safety mechanism. Back when I co-authored the first version of More Than Two, I believed it was harmful and didn’t deliver on the safety and security it promised, but it wasn’t necessarily abusive.
Now, as I have read more about abuse and talked to more people who work with abuse victims, I believe veto is straight-up abuse. Most abuse experts will tell you that control over a person’s social connections is a defining element of abuse, and veto is not just control over a person’s social connections, it’s control over the most intimate of a person’s connections. Abuse dynamics manifest differently in polyamorous and monogamous relationships, and I believe that veto is a sign of unhealthy coercive control in polyamory.
So what do you do if a partner insists you break up with a lover?
I absolutely believe the only winning move is not to play. At this point, I end the relationship with the person demanding the veto.
The Non-“Veto” Veto; or, Life with Grima Wormtongue
When I was dating Shelly, she and I did not have an agreed-upon veto arrangement. In fact, she was dead-set against veto (until she wasn’t), because she and I started our relationship under the threat of veto, and she vowed never to live that way again, though that didn’t extend to not making others live under that shadow. (This might’ve been my first realization that when a person figures out something is hurtful and wrong when applied to them, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll have the empathy or compassion it takes not to do that same thing to someone else.)
So if we didn’t have any formalized veto agreement, how did Shelly veto “Tina”?
Ah, here’s a thing.
When you invest in a relationship with someone, you give that person tremendous power over you.
A lover, especially a live-in partner, has countless ways to make your life miserable if you date someone your lover doesn’t, for whatever reason, approve of.
It need not be as direct as what Shelly did, with her demand that I break up with Tina immediately and her faux-incredulous “Can you believe she still thinks she gets to be with you?” snark.
Sometimes, it might take the form of Drama, simply making a fuss and making your life (and the life of your other lover) absolute misery until one of you breaks and decides the relationship isn’t worth the trouble.
Sometimes, it might be more like Grima’s incessant whispering in your ear: “She’s not good enough for you.” “He doesn’t treat you right.” “She’s such a child.’ “Look at how immature he is!” On and on, day after day. I’ve had a lover do this to me, feeding me daily nonstop whispers about how another person I wasn’t even dating wasn’t good enough, wasn’t mature enough, wasn’t worth my time and attention, was too needy, too childish to be worth my time. That can absolutely wear you down.
It’s important to understand that social isolation is not always “you can’t see anyone else.” Sometimes it’s more subtle: degrading the victim’s friends or family, undercutting them, creating mistrust and discord, belittling them. In polyamorous relationships, this kind of abuse can also mean trivializing your other relationships (this happens to solo poly people all the time), deliberately undermining trust between you and your other partners, undermining their worth and value, or creating smear campaigns in the rest of the polycule, all to sow doubt and manufacture uncertainty. (n fact, that was ultimately the last straw that broke my first marriage: my ex-wife always whispering in my ear that Shelly wasn’t serious about her education, that she only went back to school to impress me, that she would drop out the minute she no longer felt the need to impress me.)
Image: Sergey Nivens
And honestly, who wouldn’t want to protect an investment in a long-term relationship? Who doesn’t listen to an established partner and consider their words? That’s what makes this sort of disguised, non-consensual “veto by a thousand cuts” so effective...and so very, very toxic.
What, then, is the solution?
The Only Winning Move is Not to Play
I have come to the firm conclusion that there’s only one reasonable, compassionate choice when faced with someone who wants veto power, whether it’s direct or covert:
Go. Leave. Bye-bye.
That may make you a villain in some people’s eyes. But the sort of people who consider you a villain for this are those who think telling another grown adult who they are allowed to associate with, so what, really, have you lost?
But Franklin, I hear you say, what if my partner is with someone who truly is abusing or mistreating them?
And that absolutely can happen, though I should point out that everyone who wants a lover to break up with someone probably genuinely believes they’re on the side of the angels.
But here’s the thing about abuse:
You can’t simply order an abuse survivor to break up with the abuser. Abuse is about power and control. Someone in an abusive relationship is unlikely to respond well to yet another person trying to control them.
And there may be plenty of reasons why an abuser is not in a position to “just leave.” Even in polyamorous relationships, abusers can make it difficult for someone to leave, by controlling them financially, by using violence or intimidation, by exerting control over their living space...there are lots of reasons.
I had plenty of people in my life warning me of red flags in a relationship where I was being abused. There’s a difference between “here are some things that concern me, are you aware of these?” and “you need to leave person X right now.” In my particular case, those who did the former were far more helpful, and after I did leave far more supportive, than those who did the latter.
I don’t have perfect answers. I’m still trying to feel my way through this myself. I have no doubt, though, that veto absolutely can be toxic, and one of the most under-explored forms of veto is the unacknowledged “veto through manipulation or force of drama.” If there’s a way to distinguish this from garden-variety abuse, I have yet to see it.