The Breakup: A Playlist

Well, I'm moving back to my hometown after a year in another town for work.

As a result, me and Mr Wonderful are no longer any sort of official "thing". It's been an emotional time, and I made a playlist to commemorate it.

The biggest thing I noticed when putting this list together is most of the songs are singing about women, and most of the time the perspective I was wanting to give was one in which Mr Wonderful was in the role of the woman. Otherwise some of the songs seem kind of arrogant, improperly placed, or weird. 

For those who may be interested, here's the playlist with a few lines from each song for context.

Relationships that can't last aren't such a problem in polyamory

Often, you see on dating advice columns or similar people asking for advice about their current relationships. They have a partner who they love a great deal and have a nice relationship with, but for some reason or other there's a point of incompatibility that, whilst small, is insurmountable. I often see this on reddit where a girl is childfree but her boyfriend wants kids, or a guy is fiscally responsible but his boyfriend throws money around on designer shoes, and many other examples.

In these situations, the sage dispensing their valuable advise will invariably say something along the lines of "You need to break up. I know it's going to be hard, I know you don't want to do this, but you can't stay together so it's best to get it over with."

This seems to stem in some way on the monogamous need to find "the one" - any time you're spending with this "dead end" partner is time you could be searching for "the one". In polyamory, you can date partners who "aren't marriage material" whilst still being able to date partners who are.

I can relate to this situation. Mr Wonderful is just such a partner; he's super important to me right now and my world revolves around him and I want to spend every minute I can snuggled into his shoulder, but I know on a deeper level that we're not compatible at this stage in our lives. (Maybe in 5 years that will change; who knows). I know that if I was monogamous, I would be seriously considering ending things with him because it would be the right long-term strategy so I could go find my prince charming.

But I am so, so happy that I'm not monogamous because I'm not ready to say goodbye to Mr Wonderful.

I might never be.

But I'm also not ready to marry him in the foreseeable future. And there's no problem with that.

Disengage!

I hate being in the closet.

Yeah, there's a polyamory closet. Parents, work colleagues, and friends don't necessarily take kindly to hearing their son's girlfriend has a guy on the side.

Me and Mr Wrong came out of the closet together around November 2011. This was pretty early into being poly; I made a post on the subject. In the intervening six months, my mother hasn't gotten more positive and isn't quite sure how she feels about us being engaged if we're not going to be "committed" to one another. (Being committed and being exclusive are, of course, two very different things!)

Mr Oldman sort-of-but-not-really came out to his Mum in January. He told her that his new girlfriend (me!) was dating someone else as well; in my mind, he communicated that I was casually dating two guys and would eventually "choose" one of them. He properly came out to his sister (in detail) more recently. He was speaking of coming out to his mother in more detail soon, which has made me really happy.

I hate the closet. I hate "being dishonest". Having dinner with Mr Oldman's parents while we were dating was really stressful for me - I felt like I was walking on eggshells. I keep on having to dance around the fact that I live with a guy I'm desperately in love with. Before I go to see them, I have to "disengage" - take off my ring. I don't like lying. I can't do it.

Strangely enough, I once encouraged Mr Wonderful to give the closet a go. He was having to choose between me and another girl, and was worried that the Other Girl's parents wouldn't approve of him having two girlfriends. I told him "the closet was invented for people like you" and pontificated on the benefits of introducing the Other Girl to his parents whilst keeping me his secret on the side. I think I proposed this partially because I knew the Other Girl wasn't poly inclined (so it would never happen), and I would have been okay with it because I wouldn't be the one lying to Mr Wonderful's parents. Plus, a stressful relationship filled with lies is better than no relationship at all.

Of course, Mr Wonderful hates lying even more than I do (he told me to swear never to tell his sister about us; within a fortnight he'd told her on his own), so it wasn't really an option for him.

But I really don't understand how so many poly people think the closet is acceptable in the long-term. I read about many triads who are outwardly a "couple" with a "roommate". Do these people really want to hide their loving, multiple-year relationships from the world? How can they do it, when I couldn't stand hiding my (at the time) ordinary, two-month relationship from my parents?

A little poly-hack I figured out...

Recently, me and Mr Wonderful have been able to go to bed together on weeknights while Mr Wrong hung out with our roommate. (Understandably, Mr Wrong doesn't want to be left bored and lonely by himself so I can sleep with Mr Wonderful).

However, our roommate is moving out so no longer will Mr Wrong have company. This made me sad, as I was left with the choice of not bedding Mr Wonderful nearly as often as I would like (bad), or leaving Mr Wrong to be bored and perhaps a little uncomfortable at the noises he heard coming from a nearby bedroom (also bad).

So I came up with a nice workaround - to take advantage of the fact that I won't be able to seduce Mr Wonderful by teasing him on those days, but not going to bed with him. I let him know my plans in that regard, and his response was to express a desire to be so dashingly sexy that he would seduce me despite my plans.

It will make our planned "date night" so much more satisfying after that much build up, whilst keeping Mr Wrong from getting too lonely in the meantime. Win-win-win!

This has taught me to look for opportunities in the restrictions that polyamory inevitably puts on your love life.

101 Reasons to Be Abstinent

On facebook, I found a reference to a pamphlet entitled "101 reasons to be abstinent" and I managed to track it down and find an online copy of the majority of the pamphlet. It was... interesting to say the least.

I felt like it deserved a thorough response (OK, rant...), so here we go.

60 is a LOT of reasons, though. I didn't even realise. Thank fuck I don't have the full 101 to contend with. So my coverage gets a lot less in-depth as time goes on, since my other option was to break it down into posts with sets of 10, or organise them by category, and I'm not sure if people are actually all that concerned about these things.

"Relationship Anarchy"

Several months ago, I heard a term called "relationship anarchy". At the time, I understood it to mean a different way of looking at relationships than "boyfriend", "husband", "best friend", "sister", "fwb" and so on. Instead, you have a relationship with everyone you know, and each relationship is unique with its own properties and levels of physical and emotional intimacy and committment don't necessarily map to one another in the 'traditional' sense.

Here's a couple of examples of the other sorts of relationships you might have:

• Someone who you sometimes kiss
• Someone you share all of your deepest, darkest secrets and ask for advice all the time, but have no physical relationship with.
• Someone you're in love with, never kiss, but sometimes go to bed with when you're both tipsy

I'm sure these are pretty poor examples - but the idea, at least as I understood it (and I may be understanding it wrongly), is that each relationship is a seperate entity and the standards for one do not affect the standards for the other, and labels like "boyfriend" have no meaning.

It's an interesting attitude to take when entering a new relationship - I asked my new squeeze, Mr Wonderful, out, and in response he said he didn't feel comfortable dating me but would be happy to be my FWB. We exchanged more information/ideas/impressions/expectations and realised that we both wanted the same things from one another, only I wanted to call it a romantic relationship and he wanted to call it an FWB arrangement. Neither term really described it adequately, so at the moment we're just not labelling it at all.

At the moment, the FWB label seems to fit better of the two but only marginally, and I'm convinced this is because our relationship is very physical at the moment because it's still such early days. Things with Mr Wonderful definitely feel different than things with 3. I think in the future other labels will get closer to describing it, and who knows, maybe one will stick.

But for now, there's not really any good way to describe our relationship other than Facebook's "It's Complicated".

This is really cool. It's really freeing.