More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (24 page)

For example, consider a reasonable boundary: "You are free to do what you like with your body with other people. I am free to decide my level of acceptable risk to my sexual health. If you engage in behavior that exceeds my level of risk, I reserve the right to use barriers with you, or perhaps not have sex with you at all." If this is a boundary, and the other person has sex that exceeds your level of risk, you assess the situation and take appropriate action. You might, for instance, say, "Since you are not choosing to use barriers with this other partner, I will use barriers with you," and then do so.

On the other hand, if this is actually a
rule
being stated in the
language
of boundaries, you may feel the other person did something he shouldn't have, or that you were
entitled
to make him always use safer-sex barriers with others. If there is recrimination, anger or punishment in response to your partner's choices, then you had instituted a
rule
, regardless of the wording. Genuine boundaries recognize that others make their own choices, and we do not have the right (or ability) to control those choices. Rather, we have the right and ability to determine for ourselves what intimacy we choose to be involved in.

HEALTHY COMPROMISE

No two people have the same needs. Whenever we tie our lives to others, especially in romantic relationships, there will be times when we can't have everything we want. The ability to negotiate in good faith and to seek compromise when our needs and those of others conflict is a vital relationship skill. To understand where we can make compromises and where we can't, we must first know our own boundaries, which will limit what we can compromise on.

EVE'S STORY
In "
Minding the gap
", I told the story of Peter's first weekend together with Clio at our house. Before then, I had never taken the time to consider what boundaries I might need; I was so grateful for the freedom I'd had with Ray, I wanted to be able to reciprocate all at once. Unfortunately, boundaries are not transitive: the work Peter had done to become comfortable with me and Ray did not translate into my being equally comfortable with Peter and Clio.

I lay awake for most of their first night together. I spent the next day at a seminar, but could barely focus. As the day wore on, I felt more and more anxious, and more and more angry—but I knew Peter and Clio had done nothing wrong. I was upset because I hadn't taken care of
myself
.

I rushed home after the seminar and was barely through the door when I asked Peter to speak with me alone. I told him what I'd been feeling. I had five specific requests to make of him and Clio:

• I wanted them to clean up any signs of sex, including towels left on the floor, immediately afterward, before I woke up and saw them.
  
• I wanted Peter to wear a robe or other clothing when moving between my bedroom and the room he was staying in with Clio.
  
• I wanted Peter and Clio to shower after having sex and before coming to bed with me (we agreed after the first night to try co-sleeping).
  
• If Peter and Clio slept with me in our bed, I wanted them both to wear pajamas or other clothing.
  
• I wanted Peter to return to bed with me before he fell asleep.
  

We soon scuttled that last one, as I grew more comfortable and Peter and Clio's relationship deepened. I relaxed many of the others too, over time. (Now an empty condom wrapper on the floor elicits an eye-roll and smirk, at most.) They were crucial, though, in the early days of Peter and Clio's relationship, as my emotions struggled to catch up with my rational mind.

The best compromises are those that allow everyone to have their needs met in ethical, compassionate ways. For example, say you want to go on a date, but your partner wants you to spend more time with your kids. A compromise might be to schedule the date for late in the evening, after you've had time to help your children with their homework and they've gone to bed. Both objectives are met.

On the other hand, a compromise like agreeing not to have any other relationships until the kids have left home might be a boundary violation. If polyamory is essential to your happiness and part of your identity, this compromise requires giving up a part of who you are. With such a compromise, it's reasonable to question whether "spending time with the kids" has become a proxy for "I want a monogamous relationship, so I'm using concerns about the children as a pretext."

When we are asked to compromise in ways that require us to give up our agency or our ability to advocate for our needs, these compromises also threaten to violate our boundaries. Many parts of our lives are available for negotiation, but compromising away our agency or bodily integrity (for example, by agreeing to have sex with someone we might not want to, or agreeing to limits on what we are allowed to do with our bodies) means giving up control of our boundaries.

BOUNDARIES AND SINGLE/SOLO POLY PEOPLE

People who value autonomy highly and take a "solo poly" or "free agent" approach to polyamory face some special considerations around boundaries. Relationships that don't follow the traditional escalator (dating, moving in together, marrying, having kids) are often perceived as less important, serious or legitimate than traditional relationships. So, unsurprisingly, these relationships are sometimes not treated seriously, even in the poly community. Many polyamorous people still carry conventional social expectations about how relationships "should" look.

For these reasons, free agents must state their boundaries and advocate for their needs very early on. "I'm never likely to live with you, but I still consider this relationship significant, and I still want to feel free to express what I need and have you consider my needs" represents a reasonable boundary. As a single/solo poly person, you also need to be clear on the value your existing relationships have to you and what your commitment is to them, or they may be trivialized in the minds of potential partners who don't understand what commitment looks like to you.

A common complaint from solo poly folks is that many people assume they're only looking for casual sex. Because society so tightly conflates sex, relationships and life interconnection, this can be an easy mistake to make. But not wanting to move in does not necessarily mean only wanting casual sex. Negotiating boundaries around sex, particularly the expectations attached to it, is important to help solo poly people navigate the tangled thicket of assumptions that might pop up.

Because solo poly people place a high emphasis on personal autonomy, things such as veto, hierarchies and rules that constrain how the relationship is allowed to grow are especially problematic.
Most solo polyamorists we have met will not enter such arrangements. Ironically, people who do seek prescriptive hierarchies and look for "secondary" partners will often gravitate toward solo poly people, erroneously believing that if solo poly people don't want the trappings of a conventional relationship, they don't become seriously invested in their relationships. This misperception often leads to pain.

The free-agent model can also have a dark side. Just as people who try to prescribe a specific relationship structure can misuse boundary language to control others, people who prefer a free-agent model can use boundaries around their personal decision-making as a way to avoid responsibility for the consequences of what they do. The choices we make belong to us, but so do their consequences. If you emphasize personal autonomy to the exclusion of listening to your partners' needs, you're not asserting boundaries, you're being a jerk.

SETTING NEW BOUNDARIES

Early in our relationships, when everything is going well, we're inclined to overlook faults and annoyances. Our hormones are telling us we want to become one with our partners: share everything with them, love them forever. This is when setting boundaries is most important in order to lay a good long-term foundation—and also when we're least likely to set them.

This is also when codependency can take root: patterns laid down now can entrench over the years, our personalities can polarize in overfunctioning/underfunctioning dynamics (where one partner "takes care" of the other, removing their agency) or other unhealthy patterns, and the boundaries around our sense of self can blur. If we get stuck in a dysfunctional dynamic and want to reclaim our selves and re-establish a healthy relationship balance, we need to learn how to set new boundaries in old relationships.

Even in perfectly healthy relationships, people can change. What was okay last year may not be okay today. When relationships are good, they make us better, they make our lives bigger, and it's easy to forget about our boundaries, because there is no reason to enforce them. Yet when communication erodes, when trust comes into question, when we feel out of control or deeply unhappy and
then
we try to set a boundary, the experience can be terrifying.

Setting a new boundary is a change, and change is rarely comfortable. To your partner, the change can feel non-consensual. The key with boundaries is that you always set them around those things that are
yours
: your body, your mind, your emotions, your time, intimacy with you. You
always
have a right to regulate access to what is yours. But by the time the boundaries of your self have become blurred with those of your partner, setting boundaries and defining your self feels like taking something away from her that she had come to regard as hers.

Harriet Lerner's
Dance of Intimacy
(listed in the resources) is an excellent tool for anyone needing help with setting relationship boundaries. Lerner describes the "change back" responses that are common when a new boundary is set. When we establish a new way of doing things, our partners work to re-establish the old, comfortable pattern. Countermoves take numerous forms, from outright denial to criticism to threats to end the relationship. The trick with countermoves is to not try to stop them, but to allow them to happen while holding firm in the change we have made.

And if
your
partner is setting a new boundary, remember that he has a right to do so, even if it means he's revoking consent to things he agreed to before. The change may hurt, but the solution is not to violate the boundaries or try to talk your partner out of them. No one should ever be punished for setting personal boundaries, or for withholding or revoking consent.

PUSHING GENTLY BACK

People rarely cross our boundaries intentionally, unless we're in an actively abusive situation. However, people sometimes cross them accidentally. Because of this, healthy boundaries need flexibility. They can't be so brittle that the slightest touch threatens to end a relationship. There must be some allowance for the fact that we are all born of frailty and error. We need to be able to accept a certain amount of push, and reassert our boundaries by pushing gently back. We need to be able to say, "Hey, I would prefer you not do this thing," rather than "You monster! How dare you!"

This is a tricky balancing act, because predators and abusers are skilled at probing boundaries. One of the tools of a predator is to ignore a no in small ways, testing how we respond, finding weaknesses, and choosing people who won't reassert a no. (Gavin de Becker talks about the
"tests" a predator gives
to potential targets in his book
The Gift of Fear
.) Protecting ourselves from those who have genuinely evil intent means being willing to reassert our boundaries—or end a relationship—in the face of repeated infringement, even as we allow some flexibility for unintended boundary violations (such as the ones Eve experienced early in Peter's relationship with Clio, described earlier).

SUDDEN LEFT TURNS

Over the years, Franklin has received thousands of emails through his polyamory site. Some of these emails are heartbreaking: they might start off describing the ordinary sorts of difficulties that can happen in any poly relationship, but midway through, they suddenly veer off into wildly unhealthy, dysfunctional dynamics.

Franklin has started referring to these as "sudden left turn" emails. They start out normally, but then take a sudden left turn into the swamp. In one such email, a woman wrote to say that she and her fiancé had always had a monogamous relationship, with no mention of polyamory. Then, after the wedding, her husband told her he felt monogamy was unnatural and harmful (as she put it, "he said the idea of monogamy is even more perverted than homosexuality" and "monogamous relationships cause sexuality to atrophy"), and he demanded that he be free to have other lovers.

Another talked about a couple opening up to polyamory, in which the man told his wife, "If we do this, I only want you to have sex with other women. I don't want you to have sex with other men." As mentioned previously, it's common for men to feel threatened by other men and to seek to forbid their partners to have other male lovers. In this case, however, the woman identified as straight. Her partner demanded that she become bisexual.