Music learned by heart

For me, music gets right to my emotions – bypassing the intellectual logical bits – in a way that no other art form can, and in a surprisingly physical way. Sometimes this is amazing – the singer or the chord change that gives you goosebumps and makes you catch your breath – and sometimes less positive.

Music taps in to whatever is going on in my head and my heart. Having recently gone through a break-up, I lost a lot of music (I hope temporarily), in three different ways.

• There’s the music that specifically reminded me of the two of us together and of what we’d shared – music we’d seen together, music we’d shared with each other, music that connected us in some way. It was too sad to be reminded of the connection I’d lost, so I can’t listen to any of that. Entire artists and even genres temporarily wiped out.
• There’s the music with alarmingly apt lyrics that I’d somehow never noticed before. Stand up Joni Mitchell, Billy Bragg, etc; this is your moment. Just as when you fall in love, all the worst and sappiest love songs are all about you because no-one has ever loved like this before, when it all goes wrong then suddenly every song about a break-up becomes the most profound poetry ever created. Except it doesn’t leave you beaming happily to yourself; it unexpectedly reduces you to heaving messy sobs on the tube. And you can’t even console yourself with the fact that you’re so wonderfully sensitive that you’re being moved to tears by Great Art – some break-up songs happen to coincidentally be brilliant music, but many are total rubbish. But good or bad, any music that might sideswipe me with sadness, that’s definitely out.
• And this one I still can’t fully explain. In the really stressful times, the really difficult and heartbroken bits, I lost the ability to listen to anything other than simplistic pop and mainstream dance. Anything else felt too complicated, too detailed, too emotional for my battered heart to deal with. Even complicated chord sequences were too much; seriously. So meaningless pop music it was. I knew I was beginning the journey back to normality when I started to seek out more complicated music again.

I grew up with music, I’ve worked in music, I write about music, I sing. Music is part of my understanding of the world. To lose it, even briefly and temporarily, feels like losing a sense. I lost the desire to sing, too, for a while. That was hard.

Nothing lasts forever. Good and bad. I’m beginning to emerge, buoyed by unending love and support, into the sunshine (incidentally, can we keep this sunshine for a while? It’s amazing) and deliberately hunting out new music, new songs to learn, new sounds to accompany me. I continue to be inexpressibly grateful for the amazing people in my life who love me and care for me (I’ve discovered anew the Rake’s possibly-infinite reserves of patience). And whatever happens, endlessly wonderful music will always sneak around the edges of whatever walls I try and build, and will welcome me back the instant I’m ready.

Shining a light on monogamy

Why do people live with just one sexual partner, and are there problems that can arise with these relationships?

Many women, in the UK and around the world, live in monogamous relationships, where they are restricted to just one partner. Not only that, but the expectation is that they – and their one male partner – will remain absolutely sexually and emotionally faithful to each other for ever. Proponents of these type of relationships argue that this is a stable and fulfilling environment in which to bring up children, but failure to live up to this ideal can lead to the break up of the family home, costly legal battles – and worse.

Refuge, a charity devoted to preventing domestic violence and helping women and children escape it, states that:
- One in four women is abused during her lifetime
- One in nine is severely physically abused each year
- Two are killed each week.

Although it is hard to provide statistics on the number of monogamous relationships – the very nature of these relationships is intensely private – we can assume that the majority of these statistics are from nominally monogamous arrangements.

While there is little research specifically on monogamy as a lifestyle choice, some experts believe it is deeply problematic.

Dr Uninformed Expert, professor in social sciences at the University of Unreading, believes the main problem is that the isolation of monogamous relationships reinforces damaging gender roles and cuts both partners off from a wider support network.

“People in monogamous relationships expect that the relationship will be kept deeply private,” said Dr Expert, “and that the fact of their emotional and sexual fidelity means this relationship should be seen as separate and alone and more important than all others. Troublingly, this can lead to high levels of isolation in both partners, an inability to talk about relationship issues in order to avoid damaging the privacy of the relationship, and a lack of understanding of healthy relationships due to having no information or other models to learn from.”

“In addition,” commented Dr Expert, “these predominantly heterosexual couples find it hard to access models of healthy relationships – they have no other romantic or cohabiting relationships of their own, so the only other relationships they can see up close are those of their parents or those portrayed in the mass media. We are all aware of the problems of mass media portrayals of private relationships and the alarming gender stereotypes used for humorous purposes, and it’s an absolute lottery as to whether one’s parents had a healthy relationship.”

“It’s very common,” concluded Dr Expert, “to find levels of isolation, lack of communication, violence and abuse in monogamous relationships that would be clearly impossible in a non-monogamous relationship.”

We spoke to one couple who claimed to be in a happy monogamous marriage, but refused to be named.

“We don’t really understand what all the fuss is about,” said the woman. “We’re very happy, we like being committed to each other and we like keeping that emotional connection for just us, but we don’t really care what other people do.” Her husband also claims to be perfectly content with their arrangement. Both admit, though, that they rarely talk to family members or close friends about exactly why they chose monogamy or about exactly how their relationship works on a day-to-day basis. It can be difficult for monogamous couples to overcome this sense of shame or secrecy around their relationship.

We have encountered anecdotal evidence of monogamous couples in which:
- one partner is murdered by the other – often claimed to be in response to feared or actual infidelity
- domestic violence is a regular feature
- one partner is not permitted to work outside the home or keep control of their own finances
- one partner is kept perpetually pregnant as a form of control
- lying about infidelity has led to the unchecked spread of sexually transmitted infections
- one partner is lacking in employment skills due to staying home to raise children
- one or both partners have mental health issues
- both partners sometimes report dissatisfaction or unhappiness with their life
- both partners fear talking about difficult subjects like money or the in-laws
- both partners secretly read each other’s private communications (email, text, social media)

All this evidence suggests that, despite the claims of those who practice it, monogamy is deeply problematic.

We have even discovered that all of these have been known to happen in various other kinds of relationships – same-sex relationships, relationships with a substantial age gap, relationships with no age gap, same-race relationships, mixed-race relationships, cross-cultural relationships, relationships with two people who grew up on the same street. Clearly, this is cause for serious concern over the practice of monogamy.

“Despite listening to people who claim their monogamous relationship is perfectly happy, I am unconvinced, and have chosen to ignore their highly personal opinions.” said Dr Expert. “The evidence is not on their side; I fear they are deluding themselves.”

“Those of us concerned about the reproduction of inequalities will have some difficulty supporting monogamy.”

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In response to this BBC article.

Disclaimer: Yes, this is very silly; no, I don’t actually have anything against monogamy (keep reading the rest of the blog; I think it’s a marvellous life choice for many happy people). Others have written far more reasoned takedowns of this daft article, so I thought I’d write something equally daft in response. The only facts in here are those from Refuge.

You’re going to get hurt

I know someone who was recently warned off polyamory by a well-meaning monogamous friend saying ‘you’re going to get hurt’. It’s probably worth remembering that this is at the root of most opposition we face, in a personal way – it’s rare that anyone thinks you’re a terrible person or are doing something deeply sinful or bad by having polyamorous relationships. Instead, people care about you and don’t want to see you get hurt, and they don’t have many (or any) models of successful non-monogamous relationships to look at, so they worry that you’re heading towards a huge flaming disaster that – if only you’d listen to them – could be averted.

But as for the assumption of ‘you’re going to get hurt’ – yes, actually, yes you are.

You are going to get hurt if you are polyamorous. For certain.

You’re not going to get hurt because polyamory is fundamentally flawed and damaging, though. You’re going to get hurt because *people* are flawed and love is a big scary powerful emotion. You’re going to get hurt because you opened yourself up and made yourself vulnerable to someone. You’re going to get hurt because you expected someone to be different, or because you expected yourself to be different. You’re going to get hurt because sudden terrible vistas open up in your mind when you realise how much you’ve hurt someone else. You’re going to get hurt because someone didn’t tell you something important, or because you failed to tell someone your full truth. You’re going to get hurt because just when you realise how important someone is to you, you also realise that you could lose them, and it’s terrifying. You’re going to get hurt when you trusted someone to put your interests first, and they didn’t, or to guess what you needed or expected of them, and they didn’t. Polyamory is risky because you allow yourself to love, and to accept love in return, and that sounds so simple and beautiful – but it’s not, not always. There is vulnerability and risk and fear in loving and being loved, because we are not telepathic and can never be absolutely totally 100% certain of what’s going on in someone else’s head – so we trust, and we guess, and we hope. And we can’t always get it right. Even if you find the right relationship first time, and never break up for the rest of your life, no relationship – no matter how happy – is without its tiny hurts and sadnesses. They won’t last for ever, nothing can, but they exist and they hurt.

Now, of course, replace ‘polyamory’ with ‘monogamy’. It’s still true. It’s even true if you eschew romantic/sexual relationships altogether but still care about other human beings at all; people are wonderful and beautiful and infinitely fascinating and worthwhile, and also are flawed and pretty much guaranteed to let you down at some point, even with the very best of intentions on all sides. Living life and caring about other people means you wind up getting hurt, but with any luck – with thoughtfulness, and careful choices, and trying hard, and being kind – the amazing heart-singing joyous experiences you have in your life will outweigh those moments when you just want to hide in a box and ignore everything because it’s all gone wrong. The reason polyamory can sometimes feel riskier is that there are more relationships, more people, more opportunities for wonder and magic and love, and more opportunities to fuck it up.

So, yes, polyamory means you will get hurt. So does monogamy. So does caring and trusting anyone, ever. There is no magic ‘never get hurt’ life choice. All you can do is embrace and experience your happinesses as fully as you possibly can when they come, and when you are at your lowest hold to the thought that it won’t always feel like this, and you will be okay.

The importance – or not – of words

I think, often, we are extraordinarily skilled at deceiving ourselves. We know our own brains best, and are experts in coming up with tricks and evasions to direct our attentions elsewhere, to something else, somewhere else, anything but the real issue at hand.

I was thinking about the importance (or not) of word choices the other day, and the words we use to identify ourselves and describe our relationships. I’ve written before about the value of having the Right Words to describe a concept, and how if you don’t have the words to describe something, it becomes incredibly hard even to think about it, let alone to describe it to someone else. Human semantic ingenuity is pretty much infinite. So: hurray, we have a vast and ever-growing list of ways to describe our relationships! But that very abundance of choice – we are limited only by the words we can invent – can become more divisive than descriptive: ‘oh, that’s not polyamory, that’s just polyfuckery’; ‘we have an open relationship, we’re not polyamorous’; ‘we’re trinogamous, not polyfidelitous’; ‘that sounds closer to swinging than polyamory’ and so on and so forth. The strange outcome of this is that it can begin to feel as if all the different terms swirling around for consensual non-monogamy begin to form a ranking – with, of course, practically everyone keen to define their own relationship/s as ‘good polyamory’.

And this, in turn, can lead to relationship terminology being yet another thing to pick over in moments of insecurity and doubt.

Which words to use is not an argument or topic I’ve found particularly compelling when I’m happy and content in my relationships. Honestly, if someone else wants to describe a relationship of mine as poly, or an open relationship, or dating, or whatever – what difference does it make to me? I’m happy, I know where I am and the place I hold in my loved ones’ hearts; words don’t change that. It’s only if someone seems to have a notably disrespectful or hurtful misconception (like, non-primary partners don’t really matter or count, or that it’s all just a fancy term for cheating) that it needs addressing. No-one else will ever fully understand your relationships, by virtue of the fact that they’re not in them; accept that they won’t, and they will only ever get approximately close to the truth.

BUT – if you’re unhappy? Relationship terminology becomes yet another thing to pick at, because we are scared of what it might reveal. Why won’t she tell anyone other than monogamous friends that we’re polyfidelitous? Why would she describe her relationship with me as an open relationship but her relationship with her other girlfriend as polyamorous? Why would he call me his secondary and another partner his boyfriend? When he called me his girlfriend that one time, should I have asked more about what that meant?

And this is why I started out talking about distractions. We like to distract ourselves with details and small things (the words to describe a relationship, why she ended her text with x rather than xx, why he made that playlist, why she won’t ever make Wednesday night plans with me but will with her other partner, why all his social plans now get made via his new boyfriend…) so that we don’t have to look at the big frightening truth: this relationship is not happy any more.

None of those things matter to us, in our hearts, when we are happy and secure. It’s only when they feel like symbols of something bigger and scarier and more fundamental that they matter. When you’re in a sea of doubt, you want certainty to cling to. If you can find a reason behind it, if you can explain it away, then it’s ok. If someone is using words that make you unhappy, or planning their time disrespectfully, then as long as you can get them to change those words or their plans, you’ll be happy again, right? But there’s not a lot you can do in the face of the stark and sad – and often sudden – realisation that a relationship is not a happy one and not working any more. It’s a sensation of powerlessness and foolishness that is incomparably miserable, so of course we come at it from every other possible angle to try and make it be something else.

I suppose my point, if I have one, is to remind myself (and perhaps you?) to be bold – if I find myself fretting over little things repeatedly, try and look up, see more. Try not to take far too long to realise that I’ve pushed a relationship past the point I could or should have let it go and sought happiness in a different way. Sticking at it too long holds back not just me, but others too.

I aten’t ded: or, a temporary hiatus

I’m taking a bit of a break from blogging at the moment, as real-job writing is taking up a lot of my wordbrain. Should be back in a month or so – meanwhile, check out the website for Poly Means Many for links to some other superb poly bloggers.

Is it wrong if…?

So one of my guilty pleasures (oh who am I kidding, I’m not even secretive about this) is advice columns, mostly down to my fascination about other people’s lives. I’ve started browsing the relationships subreddit to get my fix, and so much of it (understandably) is people looking for the objectively ‘right’ answer, which I find fascinating.

It would be so reassuring if there really was an objective right answer about some of this stuff (I can see how a religious code of morality could be very reassuring), but unless your question is something like “is it wrong for me to beat up my boyfriend when I disagree with him?” or “is it wrong for me to deceive my partner in x ways?” then you’re pretty much on your own. In fact, even violence and deception come with caveats – BDSM is in part mutually-agreed and consenting violence; some couples take a don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude to non-monogamy, which makes me uncomfortable but obviously does work well for some; there can be sad and complicated situations in which a little deception might be the lesser of two evils – and we all practice a little deception every day by not saying every thought that floats across our brains.

You make your own right answers, collaboratively. Sorry, that’s the harder option, but it’s true. It’s not wrong to want your boyfriend never to dance with other women, and it’s also not wrong to feel like that’s an utterly unreasonable limitation. It’s not wrong to want more date nights with your girlfriend, and it’s also not wrong to not want to take time away from your existing commitments in favour of a relationship. It’s not wrong to mind that your girlfriend won’t introduce you to her family, and it’s also not wrong to want to discreetly shield your boyfriend from rude and disapproving parents.

None of these wants are wrong. Almost no wants are wrong. It’s what you do with your feelings that counts. Rule 1: talk about it. Rule 2: be kind. The rest is up to you to make up as you go along, poly or not.

Poly Means Many: committed

This month, the Poly Means Many project is looking at commitment – which means this has to be another one of those ‘define your terms’ posts.

If you’re in a monogamous relationship, defining commitment is relatively easy – it’s widely understood to be how far down the track you are towards marriage-and-babies-and-lawnmowers. A couple who’ve got married are more committed than a couple who moved in together are more committed than a couple who just started dating a few months ago etc etc etc. And incidentally, this is partly why monogamous couples who don’t fit the usual model also break people’s brains a bit (‘what do you mean, you don’t want children?’ ‘why bother maintaining two separate households, is it so you can cheat?’). We have a model of how relationships progress, and however far down that track you are is equivalent in most people’s minds to how committed you are.

Which means, of course, that most people don’t much need to examine the notion of commitment. As ever, given that one of the tenets of polyamorous relationships might as well be ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, we need to look at it again.

When we say people are committed, what do we mean they’re committed to? They’re committed to each other, but perhaps more accurately they’re committed to the relationship. I’m going to look at some of the ways that commitment displays itself in all relationships, which should help us look at how it works in non-monogamous relationships.

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The most obvious display of being committed to the relationship might be that, for some things, people will be willing to prioritise the needs of the relationship above their own desires. This intuitively seems to fit quite well with a sliding scale of commitment; the relative importance of the desires that are being put aside seems to fit well with the levels of commitment involved. So for example, in a very new relationship (let’s say a few good dates in), at a fairly low level of commitment, it would be totally appropriate for me to set aside my desire to flake out on plans (and spend a night on the sofa reading) in favour of spending an evening with the new person, getting to know them better. But it would be weird for me to set aside my desire to live and work in London to go and move in with them in, say, rural north Wales. If the Rake wanted that from me, on the other hand, it would be a massive change and uprooting, and I wouldn’t necessarily be happy about it, but we would talk a lot about it and he’d have good reasons; it certainly wouldn’t be unthinkable for it to happen.

To some extent, what we’re actually talking about here is making sacrifices. I don’t really like the trope that ‘relationships require sacrifice/work’; I honestly think that a happy and healthy relationship mostly just rolls along quite happily on its own, with occasional bumps requiring a lot of talking and cuddles. However, I suppose that just because I’m generally making choices that I have no objection to, doesn’t mean they’re not also sacrifices of a sort.

Living with someone, for example – even just a housemate – creates certain obligations. I can’t just decide to get rid of a piece of furniture that’s in my way if it’s only half mine; I can’t come in from work and decide to rearrange my books all over the kitchen floor if my housemate or partner has friends coming over that evening; I can’t just decide to go out drinking after work and crash on someone’s sofa without letting someone know where I am; I can’t decide to bring everyone from the pub back for an impromptu party if my housemate or partner has to be up for work in the morning.

This concept of sacrifice is I think where most people would file the expectation of sexual fidelity. Most people consider it unreasonable to ask something of your partner that you’re unwilling to do yourself, in general; ‘I couldn’t bear my partner sleeping with someone else, so therefore I will also agree not to sleep with anyone else’. It’s a sacrifice made because both people consider it to be important to the relationship. Whether this comes from ‘I don’t really have any interest in anyone else so this is hardly a big deal’ or ‘I am constantly obsessed with other sexy people; this is a huge sacrifice for me and is definitely hard work’ doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s not ‘I couldn’t bear my partner sleeping with someone else but it’s different for me because Reasons; as long as they never find out, it doesn’t matter’.

I wonder if most people see this as the most important or biggest sacrifice in a relationship? If so, that might explain why a relationship that is totally committed in all other ways, but without the expectation of sexual fidelity, can cause such confusion. After all, it’s not as if polyamorous relationships are lacking in boundaries or rules or sacrifices – you just probably don’t hear about them on the outside, because they can be so personal and intimately negotiated. Actually, perhaps that’s it – it’s not that it’s the most important, but it’s the most obvious. The general social expectation is that two adults in a romantic relationship are a) having sex with each other and b) not having sex with anyone else. They may have all kinds of other agreements and boundaries, but because those are all personally and intimately negotiated, they’re not widely known. So monogamous people who go ‘bwuh?’ at the idea of poly have perhaps temporarily forgotten about all those other compromises and agreements they’ve made together that have nothing to do with sexual fidelity.

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A related idea is the extent to which you are willing to allow your lives to become entangled. This is one reason why ‘meeting the parents’ is culturally held up as a big deal; this signifies an entangling of lives and families beyond the time the couple spend in each other’s company. Similarly for meeting friends and work colleagues; making public statements with use of language (dating, girlfriend, partner, wife; all imply a certain level of commitment); practical entanglements like belongings (leaving a toothbrush and spare underwear at someone’s house is quite symbolic) shading into living together, shared financial responsibilities; and the ultimate, children.

I also think these can be divided into visible and invisible entanglements. Whether healthy or not, it would be possible to have a relationship that’s publicly almost invisible (never meeting friends or colleagues or family, never introducing each other as anything other than friends, not living together) but highly entangled privately – and in fact this is a great example of how non-primary relationships can get problematic. If both people have different expectations of those public signs of commitment and life entanglement, it can lead to heartache.

(Incidentally, there is a brilliant article currently doing the rounds about how to treat non-primary partners well. I’m going to put another link to it at the end of this post so that you can go and read it when you’ve finished reading here.)

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Another commitment signpost is time, and how far into the future you’re willing to look. There is a lovely shift in a new relationship, when you find yourself able to comfortably make plans together for a week into the future, then a month, then six months, then next year… Speaking for myself, there are many people (not necessarily lovers) who I hope will be in my life for many years to come, but I am only willing to actually talk about and plan decades into the future with a very tiny handful of loved ones, including family.

It’s not infallible, of course – like so many other things, it’s possible to misread or misunderstand. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of foolishness when you’ve been planning for five years away, only to be surprisingly broken up with. And we all know the divorce statistics, but I doubt anyone gets married thinking ‘well, this probably won’t last’. But how far into the future you’re willing to look is another good indicator of your level of commitment.

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I’ve managed to identify various signs of commitment (what have I missed? Let me know in the comments!):
- prioritising the relationship over one’s own desires; the scale of sacrifices made
- life entanglement, visible and otherwise
- time, and how far ahead you can plan

But I’ve left out the most important thing: commitment as a predictor of what you do when it all goes to shit. Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to – in an evenly uncommitted relationship, no-one much minds if one or the other bails when times get hard. Just how much of the bad times you’re prepared and planning to put up with is a pretty good rule of thumb for how committed the relationship is. There’s a reason that traditional marriage vows include ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health’ – without thinking and planning ahead of time to stick together no matter what, the extraordinary stresses that everyone undergoes over their lifetime (money worries, illness, bereavement, career setbacks, family problems) can easily break a relationship.

And this, which seems to me to be the heart of commitment, doesn’t have anything to do with sexual or emotional fidelity. If you are committed to taking care of your partner when they need you, to allowing them to take care of you in return, to sticking with them through dark times, then how on earth can that be affected by offering that same commitment to more than one person?

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Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers – ALBJ, An Open Book, Delightfully Queer, More Than Nuclear, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin – will write about their views on one of them.

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Finally, I promised that link again. Non-primary partners tell: how to treat us well.

Clouded vision

Sadness makes us truly selfish. “Never mind that,” we want to say, “what about me, me, my thoughts, my pain, what about me?” Hurt, anger, disappointment; they trap us in a fog of our own making. Someone who is hurting is stuck in an almost visible cloud of fog – they can’t see out clearly, to see the truth of other people’s behaviour, and they can’t hear clearly, to hear what people are really telling them. They can’t reach through it; everything they can perceive or understand is coloured and filtered by this fog. And the fog twists and tangles up their words when they speak, from what once seemed well-intentioned into unkindnesses; cruelty, sarcasm, dismissiveness, aggression.

I try and remember this: if out of nowhere someone behaves inexplicably hurtfully, it rarely has anything to do with me. It’s harder, sometimes, to remember to apply it to your own fog, and realise that you’re not seeing or understanding clearly because you can’t see past your own hurt. But it’s essential. Some people never manage it and get permanently stuck; what an extraordinary amount of hurt someone must have experienced, and how sad they must be, if they seem to be a truly unpleasant person.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” – Ian Maclaren (often misattributed to Plato)

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” – the Dalai Lama

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies – God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Poly Means Many: Born This Way?

Is being polyamorous a choice, or a sexual orientation, like being gay or straight?

I come down firmly on the side of choice… Mostly.

Honestly, I think everyone has the capacity (if not the inclination) to form multiple loving relationships. Setting aside sex and romantic love for a second, most people have multiple loving relationships; close friends, workspouses, family and chosen family, the ex who somehow morphed into a best friend. And as for being in love with two people, ‘having to choose’ is common enough to be the plot of endless novels and films. And yet, most people are in monogamous relationships, and happy about it; maybe because it’s just the done thing and they’ve never questioned it, maybe for the intensity of it, maybe because it’s less risky (in all sorts of ways), maybe as a sort of loving and happy mutual self-denial, maybe they only want to share the sexual/romantic side of themselves with one special person, maybe they wouldn’t want their partner to form relationships elsewhere, or maybe they just like it just because. It doesn’t really matter.

Given that I think everyone has that ability, I don’t think there’s something special or different about people who identify as polyamorous. The difference is that they’ve chosen to form their relationship/s with (at the least) the option to form additional relationships elsewhere.

In my own life, I know I could have taken a different path, and been happily monogamous. I’ve never cheated on anyone; never even been tempted (honestly); for me, an open relationship was not an avert-the-worst decision to sidestep the ‘inevitable’ infidelity, as some people say it was for them. It was an addition, a bonus, it just seemed like it might bring extra joy and happiness and would be worth exploring.

Technically, it’s still a choice I could make – just not one I’d want to, not now, not any more. It feels like alternate universe speculation, really; I can imagine a universe in which I had taken a different path and was living my sort-of-current life but happily single, for example – but I couldn’t get there from here, it wouldn’t make sense. Aside from the fact that a monogamous relationship with anyone would have to mean the heartbreaking and unthinkable end of existing relationships, I would also miss the freedom – both for myself and for whoever was my partner. I was thinking seriously about this the other day, about how it would feel to me now to be in a monogamous relationship, and I couldn’t do it – I’d really miss even the small things, being able to say ‘she’s gorgeous and checking you out – I’m going to the loo, go and talk to her!’, let alone the big things, of being able to see the sheer joy brought to someone I love by someone else who loves them, or loving and being loved by more than one amazing person. It would feel to me as if something drastic and essential in the relationship were missing.

Even if all my current relationships were to somehow collapse disastrously, I would not choose a monogamous relationship. I may be wrong, I may regret writing that in years to come, but I suspect not.

That still doesn’t make it an orientation; it just makes it a choice that I do not consider optional. Maybe it would help to take it out of the realm of sexuality: I’ve made a succession of career-related choices, for example, starting with what I chose to focus on in school, what I chose to study at university, jobs that I’ve chosen to accept or not, additional projects I’ve taken on, voluntary work, and so on. This has led me to a position in which I couldn’t, now, choose to take on just any job anywhere – I couldn’t decide tomorrow that I’m going to go and run an oil rig, because I have neither the experience nor the interest or inclination. It doesn’t mean that not working on an oil rig, or working in my current field, is something innate – it just means that this is a combination of where my choices have led me and what I want to be doing.

The temptation is often to define sexualities as nature rather than nurture, because that sidesteps the attempts from less tolerant people to claim that it’s a lifestyle choice, and therefore everyone can and should choose to be heterosexual, monogamous, marriage-and-babies-and-lawnmowers. But why should making an active (and, one hopes, considered and informed) choice be any less valid than an innate orientation? Unless you proceed from the assumption that anyone who deviates from the norm is either wicked and choosing to be so, or a poor thing who can’t help how they were made and deserves to be pitied, why should it matter how someone came to live as they do?

I roughly think of polyamory as a descriptor of your relationship structure (or relationship options) which would explain why I think of it as a choice rather than an orientation; it’s not a label of Me As A Person or of Who I Am, just of how my life is structured and what I like and what makes me happy. Not everyone would agree with me – there are people who identify as polyamorous but who are happily in monogamous relationships, for example. And actually, to really pull out whether polyamory is an orientation or a choice would require us to have a complete understanding of how we determine whether personality traits are nature or nurture, and would also require us to have an absolute understanding of the distinction between nature and nurture, neither of which we (as humans) currently have! There are so many complicated factors thought to contribute to sexuality, including genetic, hormonal, and environmental – orientation vs choice seems like a far less important issue than allowing people to live in safety and respect, whatever their relationship structure.

I think polyamory is a choice – for me it was a choice – but I also think it doesn’t and shouldn’t matter if I’m wrong.

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Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers – ALBJ, An Open Book, Delightfully Queer, More Than Nuclear, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin – will write about their views on one of them.

Open, up to a point

I’ve talked fairly often on here about how I’ve been lucky enough to get, at worst, indifferent responses to disclosing poly. Even in terms of families, the responses we’ve had have ranged from confused-but-accepting, through to genuinely positive, supportive and interested. Myself, I’ve ended up in a position where I have very little to lose by being out about poly, personally or professionally – which is, perhaps, a privilege, though it doesn’t always feel like that. So as a result, I can afford to stick my head above the parapet a bit and will often mention both The Rake and Fafhrd in conversation with colleagues or casual acquaintances, and I hope that can go some way towards normalising non-monogamous relationships for those who can’t yet be as open.

Not everyone I’m connected to is able or willing to be as open, for many very good reasons. There are photos of happy times that I love but I don’t put on Facebook, there are anniversaries I don’t publicly comment on, there are congratulations I will only offer privately or in person; the internet is very very leaky. I am often far more open in person than, for example, on social media. This blog is a tricky sort-of exception. Some people have commented on how open and honest it is, but actually, I am mostly open and honest only about myself – not about others. Those are not my stories or thoughts to tell. Sometimes I wonder if that makes my writing alarmingly self-obsessed, but then… it’s a blog, about poly. What did you expect?

I REALLY hope it never is, but if this blog were ever linked to my real-life name, there’s nothing here I wouldn’t stand behind. I’d far prefer it to remain pseudonymous, but it wouldn’t devastate me if this became googleable under my real name. I’ve always written it with that in mind, and any mention of others I will always run past them before I publish it to make sure that they’re happy with the level of information I share. There’s a lot I don’t and won’t write about here.

Over the last few years I’ve gained a greater understanding of the power of secrets, funnily enough completely unrelated to polyamory – more specifically, the fact that as soon as you have something you want to keep secret, you are handing over power to someone else. The more secrets you keep, the more power you hand over. Families can keep secrets for generations, but the explosion when it finally comes out can be unexpectedly terrifying. The instant you have a secret, as soon as someone else gets even an idea of it, you’ve handed them power to hold over you – at worst, you see this in blackmailed politicians and the like, but it can have extraordinary impact even in ‘ordinary’ lives.

I don’t like keeping secrets.

But secrets are necessary; even essential. For myself, what I keep secret is often out of consideration for others – for example most of my friends (or, worse, family) certainly don’t need or want to know the details of my sex life. Disagreements or difficulties are only the business of those going through them. Worries are eased by sharing them with close friends and loved ones, but perhaps not everyone needs to know. Private relationship moments, the wonderful and the less-so, are exactly that – private. If anything, polyamory can teach the value of discretion – it’s rarely appropriate to vent to friends about how much your partner annoyed you over something minor and silly and one-sided, but if your friend’s boyfriend happens to be also dating your partner, it’s even more inappropriate.

I suppose what I’m talking about isn’t secrets, but discretion – there’s nothing in those examples above, or any number of other areas, that I’d be devastated by someone else revealing without my consent. I’d be annoyed at their rudeness, and possibly embarrassed, but there’s nothing anyone could reveal that would break me. I’d be most upset by a disclosure making someone I care about feel uncomfortable – whether by revealing something about them too, or by giving them information they didn’t want or need to hear. I value discretion tremendously in others, and hope to manage it well myself.

But then, I’m lucky. There’s nothing in my life – polyamory included – that I need to keep secret for fear of losing custody of children, being disowned by family, putting myself at greater risk of violence or abuse, or losing my job. Not everyone has that luxury; I know it, and I’m grateful.