More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (23 page)

Or say you answer yes to the question "Do I believe that if I am not my partner's only sexual partner, I am not special anymore?" The remedy there is to understand that value in a relationship comes from who you are, not from what you do, so if your partner has the same experience with another person that he has with you, the
feeling
of that experience is different, because nobody else is you.

• Am I worried that if someone "better" comes along, my partner will realize I'm not good enough and want to replace me?
  
• Am I uncertain about the value my partner sees in me? Am I not sure why my partner wants to be with me?
  
• Does the idea of my partner having another lover mean that whatever my partner sees in me will no longer be valid, or that my partner will want to choose that other lover over me?
  
• Do I feel that most other people are sexier, more good-looking, more worthwhile, funnier, smarter or just generally better than I am, and I am not able to compete with them?
  
• Do I believe that if I am not jealous, I don't really love my partner?
  
• Do I think that if my partner falls in love with with another person, he will leave me for that person?
  
• Do I think that if my partner has sex with someone "better in bed" than I am, she won't want to have sex with me anymore or won't need me anymore?
  
• Is sex the glue that holds our relationship together? If my partner has sex with someone else, do I think the relationship will come unglued?
  
• Do I believe that other people are willing to do sexual things that I'm not willing to do, and therefore my partner will like having sex with them better?
  
• Am I afraid that if my partner has sex with someone else, she will start comparing me whenever we have sex?
  
• Am I afraid that anyone my partner has sex with will try to persuade her to leave me?
  

PART 3

POLY FRAMEWORKS

9

BOUNDARIES

Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.

BRENÉ
BROWN

When we create relationships, we invite other people deep into our hearts. We allow them intimate access to our minds, our bodies, our emotions. This intimacy is one of the most wonderful, most profoundly transformative things life has to offer. It changes who we are. It tells us that in all the vastness of the universe, we do not have to be alone. But it comes at a price. When we allow others into our heart, and they allow us into theirs, we become exquisitely vulnerable to each other. The people we choose to let in have the power to bring us incredible joy, and to hurt us deeply. If we are to respect the gifts of intimacy we are offered, we have an ethical obligation to treat one another with care.

In practice, this can be hard. Even when we allow only one person to affect us so deeply, there's a balance to be struck between allowing our partner to be who he is, and creating a framework where we feel safe. When more than one person has access to our heart, this balancing act becomes much more complicated—and scary.

Here in Part 3, we suggest frameworks we can use to create safety and security while still respecting the humanity and autonomy of the people we love. Just as Part 2 began with a chapter about our selves, so does Part 3, because secure poly frameworks begin with our selves and our boundaries. First, let's explain what we mean by that word,
boundaries
. Many people use the terms
rules, agreements
and
boundaries
interchangeably. But these terms have subtly different meanings, and being clear about those distinctions can cut through Gordian knots in relationships.

Any discussion of these three words has to start with boundaries, because boundaries are about you and your self. Understanding boundaries is essential to understanding what kinds of rules and agreements might maximize your happiness, empowerment and sense of well-being. (More on those in the next chapter.) Having poor personal boundaries can be damaging to the self. Strong boundaries are vital to building healthy relationships. Boundaries are also essential to consent, and relationships are healthy only when they are consensual.

DEFINING BOUNDARIES

Boundaries
concern your self: what you alone own, and others may access only with your permission. Because boundaries are personal, we often don't realize where they are until they are crossed. But we can divide personal boundaries into two rough categories: physical (your body, your sexuality) and mental (your intimacy, your emotions, your affection).

Most people, unless they have suffered abuse, have a good sense of where their physical boundaries are. These begin where we feel physically affected by another person. For most of us they begin a little away from our physical edges, in what we call our "personal space." When we set physical boundaries, we are exercising our right to decide if, how and when we want to be crowded very closely or touched. Even in community spaces, where we can't necessarily control who enters our personal space, we have a choice; we have the right to not be there.

In romantic relationships, we often negotiate shared physical space, especially when we live with a lover. If "touch" for us begins beyond our skin, we may need to negotiate some space that we can control. For some people, this may be a room of our own. For some, it might be as simple as asking for quiet time on the couch. If you don't have the ability to negotiate for individual space when you need it, coercion has entered your relationship.

You may always set boundaries about your physical space and your body. If someone ever tells you it's not okay to assert a physical boundary—especially regarding who you will have sex with or who is allowed to touch you—look out! There's a problem.

Your mind
is your mental and emotional experience of the world, your memories, your reality and your values. When you engage the world, you let people into this mental space. Finding the edges of your mind is trickier than finding your physical edges. We are social creatures, and even the most superficial interactions engage our mental and emotional boundaries. The boundaries of the mind are both the ones we most control and the ones easiest for others to cross.

When we engage in intimate relationships, we open up our mental boundaries. We let a chosen few affect us, deeply. This is beautiful and amazing, and one of the things that makes life worth living. But your mind always belongs to you, and you alone. Your intimate partners, your family, your boss and the woman at the grocery store only ever get your mind on loan, and if that intimacy is damaging you, you have the right to take it back. Always.

That means we all have a fundamental, inalienable right not to extend ourselves emotionally to anyone we don't choose to. Every one of us has the absolute right to chose whom we will or will not be intimate with, for any reason or no reason.

Setting mental boundaries is different from setting physical boundaries. When you set a physical boundary, you are exerting clear control over what you do with your body. "Don't touch me there," for example. "Don't move closer to me." "Leave my home." With emotional boundaries, we have to take care to not make others responsible for our mental state. When we tell another person, "Don't say or do things that upset me," we are not setting boundaries; we are trying to
manage
people whom we have already let too far over our boundaries. If we make others responsible for our own emotions, we introduce coercion into the relationship, and coercion erodes consent.

When we talk about setting boundaries, we're not talking about restrictions on another's behavior except as their behavior regards access to
you
. Of course, whether you choose to grant that access may in fact depend on how they are behaving. Examples of boundaries include:

• I will not be involved with someone who is not open and honest with all other partners about dating me.
  
• I will not have unbarriered sex with partners whose sexual behavior does not fall within my level of acceptable sexual health risk.
  
• I will not become involved with someone who is not already committed to polyamory.
  
• I will not remain in a relationship with a partner who threatens me or uses violence.
  
• I will choose the level of closeness I want with my partners' other partners, subject to their consent.
  

The difference between "boundaries we set for ourselves" and "rules we place on someone else" might just seem like one of semantics, but it is profound.
Rules
tend to come from the idea that it's acceptable, or even desirable, for you to control someone else's behavior, or for someone else to control yours.
Boundaries
derive from the idea that the only person you really control is yourself.

SACRIFICING YOUR SELF

One way to damage a relationship is to believe that your sense of self or self-worth comes from your partner or from being in a relationship. If you constantly seek reinforcement of your worth from your partner, your partner becomes your source of worth, rather than your equal. This kind of codependence is exhausting for your partner and destructive for you.

This is especially likely to happen if you have trouble setting boundaries. Fuzzy boundaries can lead to a loss of self-identity and an inability to tell where your self (and your responsibility to set your own boundaries) ends and your partner begins. Losing your self-identity opens you up to being manipulated or losing your ethical integrity. And you must be true to yourself if you are to be true to those you love. When you feel that you "need" a relationship, you may become afraid to raise your voice and assert the other things you need. It's hard to set boundaries in a relationship you feel you can't live without, because setting boundaries means admitting there are things that might end your relationship.

EVE'S STORY
I was probably eleven or twelve when I began believing that my worth was tied to a relationship. As a teenager, my favorite heroine was Éponine from
Les Misérables
. Her death from taking a bullet for the man she loved was one of the most romantic things I could imagine. I loved (and still love) Oscar Wilde's short story "The Nightingale and the Rose," in which a nightingale gives her life to help a boy woo the object of his adoration—who rejects him anyway.

So when I began to accept, ten years ago (give or take), that relationships were actually supposed to be fulfilling for
me
, that laying my own needs (and even my own personality) at the feet of a partner was not actually a noble or desirable thing, the idea was a game changer. It nearly ended my marriage—twice. And I still struggle with it.

Which is why I needed this poem, by Franklin's sweetie Maxine Green, which I coincidentally discovered online just a few months before I met and began dating Franklin:

I give, and you give, and we draw lines in ourselves where we stop.

I draw a line here, do you see it?

It's the place just before it hurts me to give,

because I know, if you love me, if you love the way I do, this is where you would beg me to stop.

That poem, and some other things that happened to me around that time, helped me realize that loving someone—or giving to someone—is
not
supposed to hurt. And if it does, something is wrong. But drawing that line can be so, so hard. And on those occasions when I must do so, often the repercussions resonate at the same frequency as my own guilt and self-judgment until they shake the foundation of my convictions. For me, self-sacrifice is conditioning that goes very, very deep.

One form of sacrificing the self is embedded in many versions of the fairy tale. There are many toxic myths about love, but perhaps the worst is that "love conquers all." This myth hurts us in all kinds of ways—such as the untold zillions of hours and wasted tears spent by people trying to heal, reform or otherwise change a partner. Especially pernicious is the idea that we're supposed to "give until it hurts"—in fact, for some of us, that the measure of our worth is our ability to give, right down to the last drop of ourselves. That is wrong. Love isn't supposed to hurt, and we should not and do not need to sacrifice our selves for good relationships.

BOUNDARIES VS. RULES

For a person accustomed to passive communication (see chapter 6), the difference between a boundary and a rule may not be clear. A passive communicator may impose restrictions on a partner by stating the restriction as a boundary, using "I will" boundary language when she is actually applying "you will" restrictions. The difference is in what happens if the other person doesn't behave as desired.