Poly Lessons I Learned From My Monogamous Parents

[joreth]

How To Share:

One of the biggest concerns/complaints that I hear from poly newbies (or, rather, from monogamous partners of poly newbies who are only reluctantly poly) is the division of time. If I work 8 hours a day, spend 1 hour a day in commute traffic, and sleep 8 hours a day, that gives me only 6 hours a day with my spouse. If some of that

Comments

[nasu_dengaku]

Thanks for writing this up. There are a lot of good points in here.

[geisha_kitten69]

Nicely put :)

[james_the_evil1]

I'm not disagreeing with your point, it's a perfect analogy & I wish it were more common. I think it's healthier for mono families to relate that way, too.

I think this's something that's gotten lost with a lot of cultural shifts over the last few years where extended families have become broken up & increasingly rare so "big gatherings" are less common, and as there's been more focus on the couple as the basic family unit with kids coming later & often 1 kid being the norm & parents having it hammered in to them by many means that they need "alone time" to focus on being a couple (which I'd say is necessary to a point but not in the way it's promoted).

How would you reach out to them?

[joreth]

First of all, I used major celebrations like weddings and anniversaries, which even those who have the "basic family unit with kids coming later" drummed into them can relate to. Second, I also talked about the nuclear family itself with just parents and kids being "a couple with a family", so those who do not have ties with their extended relatives are still not left out. I also covered the "need 'alone time' to focus on being a couple" by not ignoring the fact that all these relationships are built on various sets of dyads, by calling them "couples with a family" instead of just "a family" and by comparing alone-time to group-time as different, not unimportant.

The only people this post doesn't apply to are monogamous couples who have no children and no ties to extended family and no friends whom they treat as intentional family. If that's the case, they're probably not reading my journal anyway.

[allburningup]

I'm monogamous and childfree, and while my husband and I do have some friends we treat as intentional family, they don't get to witness that much of our relationship. I mean, they witness more of it than casual friends or acquaintances do, but mostly we are quite private and the dynamic between my husband and I isn't something we let others in on except just little hints of it. We are fine with physical affection in public, but the way we talk to each other, even when around our closest friends, is quite different from the way we talk to each other when it's just the two of us. Which is how it mostly is. That's the heart of our relationship, and it's private. To let others in on our dynamic would be a higher level of intimacy than I want with them--but that doesn't mean they're not family. I'm just not wired for high levels of intimacy in platonic relationships. (That doesn't mean it's *low* intimacy. More like medium.)