The Art of Balancing Yourself with those you Love

I firmly believe that our relationships should not define us entirely.  Who are you when your spouse is at work? With their friends? Visiting family? Your relationship is, of course, a huge part of your life and will define many parts of the life you build together.  This is no reason to lose sight of who you are when you’re alone.

There’s an art to balancing yourself as an individual – giving attention to that self, doing things you enjoy by yourself – and yourself as part of a partnership, or multiple partnerships.  Come to think of it, this applies to friends too.  For my single girls out there who are living it up and building a life with your close friends (I see you, and I support you.), you are still your own person and not just a member of a friend group.

So here are my thoughts and tips for embracing your identity when you’re alone and balancing it with your identity as its related to other people:

Hobbies that others aren’t invited to

So you say you’re thinking of taking a class on something or trying out a new activity – you don’t always have to invite everyone else who may enjoy it.  You’re not obligated to include them every time. You get to make a decision about when it’s something you want to invite them to do with you and when you want to branch out on your own.

Things you do as an individual you don’t have to do alone

Just because you didn’t invite your partners or close friends to this thing you’re doing for yourself doesn’t have to be a solo activity.  Maybe you’re catching a yoga class or joining a community sports team.  You can meet new people and enjoy a social activity all for yourself.  This isn’t about developing yourself in isolation so much as having a self that isn’t described in relation to another person.

Think of it this way, if you join a community sports team with your partner you’ll be people who joined as a couple – referred to by others on the team as so and so’s partner, etc.  But if you join without your partners you can be known for traits that are all your own, like your humor or your skills.

Family might still be involved

Maybe you’ll have something you always do with your mom, or a sibling.  Someone who has known you outside of your current relationships and will appreciate you in that light.  This walks a line in that if your activity involves other people like a team or class you might still end up defining yourself in that activity by your relationship to the family member you joined with.  That being said it’s a balance between being defined by your relationship to someone else and being known as your own person by the people around you.

It can change over time

You don’t have to have your set of things that you pick right now, and are all yours, and you do them forever.  Maybe there’s a series of new things you try or seasonal activities you enjoy.  It’s more about spending time valuing yourself and nurturing your own identity, and less about consistency in how that time is actually spent.

It’s one of the few areas in our lives where I don’t think consistency is particularily important for success and growth.

It doesn’t have to be only yours forever

When you do fall in love with somthing you might end up inviting people from your important relationships to join you in it after all.  Why deny them the chance to enjoy it just because it started as something you did without them?

There can be other things you do without them, as long as you’re paying attention to giving yourself that time.  Not to mention, if you’re inviting someone into an activity you’ve established yourself in you’ve already escaped totally defining yourself by your relationship to them at the outset.

 

All in all I think it’s easy to do things with our partners because they make us feel safe.  That’s why they became our partners, right? It’s part of loving each other to offer comfort and support to each other, and it’s easy to want to bring that comfort and support with you on new adventures.  In a world where I have three partners who I enjoy spending time and trying new things with I have found the importance of remembering who I am when I’m on my own. It’s a matter of knowing that appreciating and nurturing my own identity does not diminish my relationships or how fully I give myself to them.

What’s your fave hobby that your partners choose to sit out of?

New Relationships, New Boundaries

We’re all moved in! And we’re all super excited about it.

I’ve been thinking though, of what I might share about this process.  What have we learned and what has made moving in as a pod different from when I moved in with Ben for the first time?

One of the major learning curves for me has been, in all of my relationships, having two more people outside of it who know everything that goes on.

You see, one of the values my mama instilled in me about loving and being loved was to never air your dirty laundry.  If there was a disagreement between you and your spouse it was just that, between you.  There were a few other things, I’m sure you can guess, that are also on the list of “just between the two of you”.

But there are no secrets in poly.  To be clear, that’s a choice the four of us have made.  When we sat around the campfire and decided to rearrange our lives and let each other in we decided to be very picky about the boundaries we set.  Even the boundaries we originally set quickly became softer as love and trust grew between all of us.

The thing is that all of us were accustomed to open communication and freedom to behave with our spouses however we saw fit – as is true for most monogamous, married couples.  We all knew ourselves and had a strong belief that the success of our marriages came from the relationships developing and progressing authentically.  It didn’t make sense to put a lot of boundaries in our dating lives that would probably be more of an overall hindrance than a help.  Therefore we decided to be very picky and avoid setting arbitrary boundaries.

My mama also taught me not to keep secrets from my husband.  She never kept secrets from my dad and along with keeping your dirty laundry to yourself, she made sure that I knew this was part of a strong and healthy relationship.

So in multiple relationships how do I honor these ideals? How do I contain any disagreements or discord I have between myself and a partner, but not keep those parts of my life secret from partners outside of the disagreement?

The short answer is: I don’t. And it’s a good thing. While sharing the less romantic moments of my romantic relationships with others originally made me really uncomfortable it’s become a benefit.  Any dirty laundry still stays between the four of us. But if there’s an issue the four of us solve it together.  I said that our boundaries have softened as our love and trust has grown. This has meant that if an issue arises we can address it as a family of four and it usually makes all of us feel better.

So this is the first change that became super obvious since moving in and in the process of moving in.

Thanks for reading,

Carmen

 

Focusing on Love

I noticed that I’d written two other “focusing on” titles, one for work and one for fitness.  I thought I might as well round out the unintentional series with a few thoughts on finding focus in love.

One of the major mental shifts in the transition from monogamy to polyamory has been paying attention not only to the amount of time I spend with each partner but exactly how we use that time.

When it was just Ben and I we could spend all weekend getting things done like grocery shopping, Costco trips, little fixes around the house and cleaning.  It might easily become much needed time to get to the things that, for one reason or another weren’t accomplished during the week.  As a monogamous couple, this sort of weekday procrastination and weekend productivity worked.  Now however if we blow through a couple days getting a lot of practical things done it feels like we really haven’t had that time together and before we know it we are out on dates with other partners and having second thoughts about what we did with our time together.

Of course, the housework doesn’t stop needing to get done just because our personal lives got busier.  So we have to be more careful about planning so that everything can get done without sacrificing too much personal time.

Since I work from home I try to get a lot of bigger household tasks like cleaning the floors and big clean-ups done during the day while everyone else is at work.  That way these things don’t become pressing on the weekend when someone else has the time to get to them. Besides, it’s easier to clean when there’s only one person home and that doesn’t happen often outside of work hours.

Getting tasks that require focus and labor like floors, windows, and other washing out of the way while everyone at work leaves the more passive tasks like running the laundry machines for evenings and weekends.  These tasks fit more easily into plans because you can just move the items and then go back to your date while the machines do the work.

It’s about more than chores though.  Sometimes even if we aren’t doing chores together we aren’t paying attention to each other either.  Almost eight years of monogamy meant getting used to having endless time together.  So what if one or two nights were lazy, spent doing our own things like me working on the blog and him playing guitar – there was always tomorrow.

Now that isn’t so true.  If we use our time together in separate endeavors we miss each other and again, rethink how we spent that time.

It takes more focus in each relationship to ensure that the time spent together doesn’t slip away without us actually connecting and appreciating that we’re together.

That doesn’t mean we have to drop everything either. It’s as simple as holding hands while you shop, taking a second in the car between stops to let your partner know you’re enjoying the time with them or grateful for them helping you get these things done and maybe stopping to enjoy a meal together while knocking tasks off the to-do list.

It’s funny how we don’t always think about the logistical side of running a relationship in relation to running a household but the two can either support or impede each other depending on how carefully time is considered and valued by all parties.

What’s your favorite way to slip a little romance into everyday life?

Carmen

What Commitment means when you’re Polyamorous

With Valentine’s day around the corner I wanted to put something out there:

Polyamory is the belief that we can love more than one person. There’s no reason why the love you give to multiple people has to be any different than the fairy tale love we’re familiar with.  Polyamorous romances can be just as intense, long-lasting and committed as monogamous ones.

The thing is that when I fell in love with my husband there was a script for what to do with our feelings as a young, monogamous couple. We could easily google, for example, what we legally needed to do to become wed. We could find out about the process of applying for a marriage license, where to send it, what documents we would need to complete this process.

 

My Husband, Ben, and I

We could also find endless resources for how to plan a wedding. We could get ideas on how to make our wedding come together from tv shows, pinterest, magazines, friends or family and everywhere in between.

 

It’s a little different when you’re polyamorous and fall in love.

There aren’t tv shows about planning a poly wedding.  And because in Canada where we live you can’t legally marry more than one person it’s much harder to just google what the process might look like.

That’s kind of scary, for about half a second, and then it’s totally freeing.  There isn’t a script – we get to write it!

So here are a few thoughts on commitment when you’re in polyamorous relationships!

 

Living Outside the Closet

I have a great respect for people who keep some aspect of themselves and their love lives “in the closet”. Whether it’s polyamory, a matter of sexuality, or gender identity – it isn’t easy. We kept our polyamorous relationships secret for the first couple months while we all developed our own understanding of what was happening. We didn’t want to tell people what was happening before we had all the answers. At first, we didn’t even know what to call each other, much less if this was going to last. Until we knew those things, we worked on our relationships strictly in private.

It was hard. Given that we’re all reasonably privileged and had never had to hide a

My girlfriend, Maggie, and I

relationship before it was frustrating and a constant, irritating limitation to check ourselves – not reaching for each other’ss hands or kissing in public.

 

That made the decision to come out easy for us. Make no mistake though, not all of the responses we got were easy to handle. We have a strong appreciation for why some people never come out.

But we’re glad we have and it makes thinking about living together, and staying committed easier to be excited about since we won’t have to hide the true nature of our relationships.

Where Do We Live?

Of course Ben and I had a perfectly happy little home, as did Maggie and Tom, before we all started dating. As the feelings grew stronger we had to start seriously asking ourselves where this could go. When we started dating our spouses that script was there to support us: if it’s going well, make it facebook official. When you don’t want to sleep without them anymore move in, and so on.

 

My boyfriend, Tom, and I

What about us now? Do poly people follow that at all?

 

The answer is – sure, if they want to!

And we do, so we are. Ben and I are moving into Maggie and Tom’s house. We have all acknowledged that this isn’t really for practical reasons – we were all perfectly able to run our own households. But we wanted the time together. We spend more time than we care to admit driving back and forth. Our current houses are about a half hour apart so it’s kind of a pain to always be commuting here and there.

When we sat down and thought out what we all value in our households, the presence of the people we love was number one. More broadly, our priorities and goals about how we believe a household should be run were compatible so the move makes sense for us and is underway.

 

To Ceremony or Not To Ceremony

Maybe we won’t do anything. Maybe we’ll just make our home and keep living our lives, happily ever after.  Then again, just because we can’t legally marry our new partners doesn’t mean that we can’t have a wedding. After all the legal part of getting married is a 30 second moment after the ceremony when we actually signed the paperwork.  It’s still a wedding without that moment.

As far as the ceremony goes… we get to make it up!  We can say vows that make sense to us, involve a wedding party or not, invite whoever we want… there aren’t a whole ton of rules for how this is done!

Just think – when I married my husband there were magazines and a tradition full of must’s and mustn’ts that I needed to follow in order to participate in the tradition.  Now though, commitment means designing something that reflects only us and nothing else.

Kids

At this point, children are probably the most popular thing for people to ask us about. Each of us being a couple years into our marriage, and between us having good jobs and stable relationships people were starting to ask us as married couples when we would have kids even before we got together.

The reality is that any thoughts of having kids have been shifted back a few years. We all really value forming tangible commitments before bringing children into the picture.  Give us time to live together and continue building our lives to match the new family structure before expecting us to add to the family!

That being said, people’s main concern seems to be who will parent the children. The short answer is: it’s not their business.

We all love each other. I don’t know who will create children with who, but I know those children will have 4 parents to love them unconditionally. And I expect that to be enough knowledge for the others who love our children.

 

All in all the most complicated part of being committed and polyamorous is figuring out how holidays like Valentine’s day work! We get to write our own script and I love that about the direction our lives are going.

Comment your questions and thoughts!

Carmen

 

What makes Polyamory work for Us

1. None of us are prone to jealousy and all of us understand our responsibility to cope with jealousy in a healthy way.
   Not being prone to jealousy doesn’t mean we’ll never look at our spouses with their boyfriend or girlfriend and think it might be nice if we had the same thing they have in a given moment.
   Instead, it’s committing to acknowledge those feelings and that jealousy ultimately is about us – not them. As an example: I need to remember, if I’m feeling jealous over something, that nothing between Ben and Maggie takes away from what I have with Ben or what I have with Maggie. Jealousy is sneaky and makes us feel like someone’s got it better than us when in fact we don’t mean to undervalue what we have.
2. We’re all genuinely happy to see each other happy.
   I guess this goes along with the low levels of jealousy but it’s deeper than that. There have been many aspects of Ben’s life that brought him happiness outside of our relationship – the bands he’s jammed with, music in general, a whole University degree that just dizzy’s my little arts brain (he’s a computer scientist.) I’ve always taken pride in supporting his interests and hobbies outside of our relationship so I guess it was a natural extension to encourage him when sparks flew between him and Maggie. This is just another way he as an individual can experience happiness that compliments, not complicates, our happiness together.
3. We’re so lucky we sometimes just sit around in amazement
   Seriously – it’s not that surprising that Maggie and I are compatible a partners. We found each other while both lost on a school trip and never let go of each other. We’ve been best friends for a decade and even when we did not see each other often we were always there to support each other. Our romance developing isn’t super surprising.
   But what are the chances that we would also be very compatible with each others husbands?
   Then again, people say Maggie and I are very similar while Ben and Tom are very different. It’s true that Ben and Tom have very different hobbies but at their cores, when it comes right down to values and how they prefer to live, they are not that different.However it happened, we’re glad it did!

Carmen

What Polyamory means to Us

First and foremost: who are we?

I am Carmen, and my husband is Ben.
Maggie is my best friend turned girlfriend, and Tom is her husband.
Tom and I are dating, as are Maggie and Ben.
Confused yet, so were we!

Polyamory is, at its core, the belief that we can love and choose to have meaningful, romantic relationships with more than one person.  It is broad and inclusive.

Individuals subscribing to this unifying idea may still choose to shape their relationships differently. Many people who subscribe to polyamory reject any sort of limitation. They choose to maintain as many relationships as they are personally able to commit to and do not allow the existence of any one relationship to limit the existence or scope of the others.

That’s not quite how we have chosen to express our belief in polyamory.

We call ourselves a “pod”. We are two married couples with five relationships between us: the two marriages, myself and Tom, Maggie and Ben, plus Maggie and I. We are all committed to these five relationships and are not interested in developing any more romantic connections outside of our pod.

We firmly and fiercely believe in our ability to love more than just one person, and in the value of supporting our spouses and each other in all of our relationships.

This is what polyamory means to us. We are a family and we support each other and each others relationships.  No one relationships is valued over the others – instead, we recognize that everyone’s needs are met more fully when we work together. For example, when Maggie is sick she might find Ben’s company more comforting that Tom’s simply because Tom is more practical whereas Ben is softer in how he looks after Maggie. Given that she didn’t ask to be sick, I make sure Ben and I are available and don’t hold Ben all to myself just because he’s my husband.

In return, Tom and Maggie have both been flexible when Ben or I were craving the company of one of them despite everyone having other plans.

Furthermore we all fulfill different roles within the house. The same as you can ask any monogamous couple who does more cooking and who does more planning, we are all working together to make our household function smoothly.

So there’s a little bit about my family and what polyamory means for us.

Stay tuned for more of our crazy adventures!

 

Carmen

Accidentally Polyamorous

The very first question I get when I reveal to people that my husband and I are dating another married couple is….”How on earth does something like that develop!?”

It’s a fair question, I mean when you’re married you aren’t exactly supposed to be thinking that someone else is attractive and how you might like to have a chance at dating them.

So how do 4 married people all break that rule together?

Well there’s the story we use when we don’t really want to explain: We are all very good friends and have been for years. The friendship was so close and we were all so supportive of each other that feelings it was something beyond friendship developed naturally and we’ve all consciously decided we would allow that to happen.

It’s not untrue at all, it just leaves out the actual moment when things changed. Well, the two moments.

First of all my best friend and I got wine drunk watching Game of Thrones and ended up very distracted by each other.  Even while heavily intoxicated we were having an open conversation with both of our husbands (who were present for the Game of Thrones viewing, of course) about the quickly developing interest my friend and I had in each other. They were both very okay with what was happening even though it didn’t involve them. They both knew that both of us were bisexual and accepted that having feelings for and attraction to each other didn’t change anything about the marriages.

Now, my friend and her husband had talked about having a more open relationship.  It is difficult to pin point a name – open, non-monogamous, monogamish, polyamorous…. there’s many names and formats for relationships that include more than two people.

My husband and I had not really talked about actively engaging in anything like this. In passing of course we had chatted about it. I would come home and say “Hey my friend —- has this cool relationship where they see more than one person on these terms. Have you ever wanted anything like that or thought about having us and something more?” The conclusion was always the same: He was open to something like that at some point but the time was never now. There was always enough love between us and we made each other so happy. We had more growing to do together before we wanted to seriously consider adding someone else in any arrangement.

Then, a few weeks after the Game of Thrones my husband tried to send a sexy message to me requesting I send something sexy back but, as happens from time to time with our phones, he missed my name and sent it to my best friend.

Of course we tease him about how that’s a great excuse for when you send your wife’s best friend a sexy message out of nowhere one Tuesday morning.

She immediately messaged me and asked what I thought – should she tease him? Ignore it as a mistake? Or fulfill the request just to see what he would even do?

He also messaged me right away to make sure I knew what had happened.

I was busy getting ready and told both of them to have fun with their conversation and that they should send to each other whatever they felt comfortable with. I trusted both of them and really just needed to get ready for work.

As they started to enjoy flirting and teasing each other my best friend texted me to say if her and my husband were getting to connect, I should send her husband a message. I did – to say that I was on my way to work but I had a little time to chat. We got to work on getting to know each other more than anything else but Tuesday wasn’t over yet.

After work my husband called and asked what I wanted to do about the days developments and getting caught up. I told him to bring KFC home and we could chat about where we were at and where we wanted it to go.

Once we decided that we were both interested in continuing the flirtation and taking our friendship in to something more we called our friends and went to their house.

We sat around the campfire redesigning our own marriages, and how we related to each other.  We formalized my best friend and I’s habit of hooking up in to a relationship we both acknowledged out loud, and agreed that we would also start seeing each others husbands.

A few weeks later we settled on the terms dating, boyfriend and girlfriend. We have been so happy together that sometimes it amazes even us.

And that’s the long answer to “How on earth does something like that develop!?”

 

Carmen