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LadyNTrainer -> RE: Would you be monogamous with the all-in-one submissive man? (3/1/2010 9:13:14 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyAngelika
My question is then, is one of the reasons why you are open to poly because you cannot find all of what you are looking for in one man? If you could, would you stop being poly?
One of the reasons, perhaps, though I certainly have had partners who could give me enough of what I was looking for that I would have been fine being exclusive with them. But there are many other reasons and benefits to poly. Variety is only one of them. Though that's a nice benefit to be sure.
For me personally, I think it is healthier not to put all of my emotional eggs in one basket, and for my primary partner to do the same. Neither of us are very social people, and we don't tend to maintain a lot of friendships beyond a very casual level outside a relationship. The fact that we can both have an emotional support system that doesn't rely 100% on each other is a very good thing for us.
Also, there's tangible benefits to an extended family that can be there for you when you need it, either in a real emergency or a minor crisis where you need some kind of logistical support. It made me smile when I was able to give one of my secondary's partners a detailed rundown on the restaurants and hotels of the area she was traveling to, as I was home with Internet access while she and he were visiting another state. When I travel with my primary, I have reliable pet sitting and house sitting. These are little things perhaps, but they matter. I don't have any actual family in this state, nor close friends. So for me, my extended poly family is a crucial support network. In our situation, we don't have or want kids, and at this time we maintain separate residences and finances. But if we did, the benefits of a multiple parent and/or multiple income household should be fairly obvious.
With the good of poly also comes potential bad. Poly is exponentially more work, with more need for trust, honesty, communication and intimacy, not to mention regular discussion/negotiation that involves more than one person's time and energy and convenience and emotional needs. It can be a lot like herding cats. When it goes wrong, it can go wrong explosively. And when one person's unhappy, generally everyone's unhappy because of the ripple effect. So poly can suck when it goes bad, but the end result of a communication breakdown or expectations mismatch aren't any different in poly than in mono. It just sucks for more people.
On the upside, if you're doing poly in the first place, you should have at least a pretty good set of entry level skills in clear communication and negotiation of boundaries and needs, so it's reasonably likely that a poly person is better equipped to work through a communications breakdown than someone who is "running on default rules" for a relationship and has never clearly stated their expectations or has no experience negotiating rules and boundaries. That would also be true of most people with experience in negotiating BDSM relationships.
Would I stop being poly if I could? I'd really rather not. I've been willing to do that in the past, and I might be willing again in the future, depending on the circumstance. One thing I would have a very hard time doing is ending a relationship that I'd already started, so I'm very, very careful to spend a lot of time talking to the primary before adding anyone in the first place. Currently I have a primary and a secondary, though the secondary designation is more about his not living in the household than the status of the relationship per se. I am primary to both of them; the secondary has no other partners at the moment. I have another secondary partner of very long duration (10+ years) whom I am not currently intimate with, as he has a monogamous primary who decided after some experimentation that she would prefer not to share. We're still "family" in every way that matters though.
I might conceivably agree to stop having PIV sex with anyone but my primary, but if I was asked to entirely drop the network of family and BDSM relationships that matter to me, I would not be willing to do that, and I would consider it an unreasonable and unhealthy request.
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