More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (38 page)

At the beginning of a relationship, we can't predict what feelings we will have, or how deeply we will attach to someone, because
we aren't there yet.
Therefore, it's easy to say yes to rules that treat us as disposable, or don't give us a voice in advocating for our needs, because we don't have the needs yet. The true test of compassion is what we do when compassion is hard. Any well-implemented set of agreements needs to allow for the vulnerability of human hearts and the unpredictability of life.

RULES THAT CAUSE PROBLEMS

We have seen certain relationship rules among poly people fail again and again. The following agreements have proven to be fraught with problems and require great care if you attempt them.

"Don't ask, don't tell" agreements.
In these arrangements, a person says, "You can have other lovers, but I don't want to know about them." This often indicates that someone wishes the relationship weren't poly at all and hopes to pretend it's not happening. This charade makes it impossible to communicate about important things, or for new partners to verify that the relationship is in fact open. "We're in a 'Don't ask, don't tell!' " is a favorite lie that monogamous cheaters use to explain why you can't just call their spouse to check out whether the relationship is really open.

Rules that require a person to be sexually involved with another, or that require some other form of service.
When you make sex or intimacy with one person the price of sex or intimacy with another, you plant the seeds of coercion, as discussed in the section titled "
Service secondaries
."

Rules that fetishize or objectify people.
We have known people who treat a partner's other lovers as fetish objects, demanding detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of every sexual encounter for their own gratification. Your partner's significant others are not your sex aids. Unless they consent to having the details of their sexual encounters shared with a third person for the purpose of arousal, they have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Rules that restrict certain things, places, activities or sex acts to one partner.
These rules are often seen as ways to protect the "specialness" of one relationship. A person who does not already feel unique in her partner's eyes, however, is unlikely to gain greater self-worth by restricting others from "special" things. And over time, the
symbols
of specialness, like Bob's Crab Shack, can start to be more important than the actual
fact
of specialness. They begin to feel hollow, because they are. The feeling of specialness actually arises from all of the daily ways in which we invest in a relationship and express love. Such rules also court disaster when the lists of limited activities become—as they may over the years—long and complicated.

LEILA'S STORY
Molly and Jeff are a married couple with a notebook filled with rules, including a detailed list of which sexual activities are permitted with which partners. When Leila became involved with Jeff, the rules in the book were applied to her too. One of the rules was that Leila could not touch another partner on an area of the body covered by underwear without Jeff's permission. Leila assumed "underwear" meant briefs; Jeff assumed boxers. While on a date, she touched a new partner on the inner thigh. This led to recriminations and accusations, with Jeff claiming Leila had violated an agreement.

After the relationship ended, Leila described to us the feeling of trying to navigate these labyrinthine rules. She said, "A rule is not just an agreed-upon avoidance of consequences. Rules-based systems judge your moral character based on your adherence to the rules. It's a contract that frames things as acts of betrayal and leaves the 'betrayer' buried under moral judgment. The guilt or potential guilt in that situation is like breathing acid."

"LOVE ME, LOVE MY PARTNER" RULES

Human beings don't fall in love at the same time in the same way at the same rate with two people at once. It just doesn't happen. And when rules make assumptions about sexual access to someone's body ("If you have sex with me, you must have sex with my partner too"), they can quickly overrun personal boundaries, or even become coercive: Sex with one person becomes the grit-your-teeth price that must be paid to have a relationship with the other. Such rules discourage honesty. If your new partner loves you but not your partner, will she tell you that, knowing that telling you means being kicked out?

Rules that specify what happens if one relationship runs into trouble.
For example, there could be a rule that other relationships must be ended or scaled back. When a couple agrees "If we run into trouble, we'll drop any other relationships to work on the problem," they treat their other partners as disposable things. If a couple had three kids and decided to send two of them into foster homes to focus on a problem the third one was having, we might call them monsters. This kind of behavior is also a questionable way to treat romantic partners.

Rules that are disguised as personal preferences.
Sometimes a person might present a rule as just a statement of personal preference. An example from Franklin's experience is a married couple who had a rule that the wife was not permitted to have any male partners. When Franklin asked why this rule existed, she said it was just her personal preference; she didn't want any male partners.

So then why was the rule made at all? This was a big warning flag of underlying issues in the marriage. It took about two years for the wife to admit that, yes, she really
did
want male partners; she'd said she didn't to reassure her husband, who felt threatened by the idea and obtained the rule at what seemed like no cost to anyone. It took another five years for the dust to settle. In the end, she was able to have another boyfriend, but it took a lot of unnecessary turmoil and drama to get there. As uncomfortable as it was for her husband to come to terms with her hidden need, two years of him naively believing that she didn't want other male lovers only made him feel worse about the reality when he found out. Honesty from the beginning would have saved everyone considerable grief.

PAGING DR. MÜNCHAUSEN

There's one rule, quite common in hierarchical relationships, which we believe is particularly dangerous and deserves special attention: a rule that a person who is sick, injured or in crisis will only be supported by the primary partner. Other partners are not permitted to care for that person. This rule was part of Franklin's relationship with Celeste.

You will often see caring for someone in need billed as a way for a primary partner to preserve a sense of intimacy and specialness. Caring for a partner is one of the most loving things we can do, but the idea that only one person should be able to do it is very troubling.

When someone is sick or injured or in crisis, the focus should be on that person. Rules that say "Only the primary can provide support" divert the focus from the person in need, shifting it to the issue of who can do what. Worse, if a person's sense of specialness or intimacy
depends
on caring for someone in need, that's codependency. In its most extreme form, it becomes Münchausen by proxy syndrome, a recognized psychiatric disorder. When someone is in the hospital or laid up, this is not the time for displays of territoriality or ego.

WRITING IT DOWN

"Good fences make good neighbors"—or so they say. Many people who give poly advice will urge you to write down and even sign your agreements. The "relationship contract" is quite common in polyamory (and is growing in popularity even among monogamous people, or so we hear: Mark Zuckerberg's wife famously negotiated a contract with him guaranteeing 100 minutes of his undivided time for her each week). These written agreements can range from a few sentences on a Post-It note to, in one case we've seen, approximately 48 pages of single-spaced type.

Certainly there are many situations in which explicit, written agreements are just common sense. Eve won't do business with a new client without a contract (and usually a deposit). It's too easy even for honest people to remember a verbal agreement very differently from each other, or for one to genuinely forget they even made it.

But while written relationship contracts might seem like good communication, they contain a hidden trap. Communication is a dialogue. A contract—especially one that's presented to new people as a done deal—very often isn't. Communication and discussion are essential for the health of any relationship. This is why, as we have said before, we see agreements as far better than rules. The difference is that agreements are mutually agreed to among equals, but turning an agreement into paperwork too soon can become an expression of power.

We've seen two different types of written relationship contracts: those that are written when all the people affected come together to work out a solution to a problem everyone is facing, and pre-emptive contracts that one set of people (often a couple) writes down, expecting any new partners they meet to sign on.

Some written relationship agreements are intended to address only a particularly narrow subject, such as safer sex boundaries, or whom the partners can be out to, or whether a veto exists and how it may be used. (Some people have found it just as helpful to record that veto does not exist as to record that it does—such a reminder can be helpful when times get rough.) Other agreements include some of the provisions mentioned above, concerning permitted or forbidden sex acts or restaurants, ranging all the way to pet names that new partners are not allowed to use. We even know of one contract that limits playing certain kinds of strategy war games to only certain partners.

In general, written agreements are more successful when they

• are short enough to remember without needing to reference them often—generally less than one or two pages long
  
• have a narrow focus
  
• are intended to solve a specific problem among a specific group of people
  
• concern only those people present in negotiating them: in other words, "I will do this for you," not "Others will or will not do this" or "I will or won't do this with others."
  
• include statements of goals or intentions: the purpose of the agreement (such as
  Eve's wedding vows
  ).
  
• are flexible and open to review and renegotiation
  

Written agreements tend to work poorly when they

• are lengthy and highly detailed
  
• attempt to define or regulate every aspect of a situation
  
• affect people who are not present in negotiating the agreement
  
• prescribe specific actions to implement a stated intention (that is, allowing only one way to get there)
  
• attempt to control things beyond the control of the negotiating partners, such as
  future intimacy
  or the behavior of others
  
• allow no room for renegotiation or change
  

Successful written agreements are documents that you hold
yourself
to, not something others hold you to. They are reminders to yourself of commitments you have made and tools for communicating those commitments to other partners. They should not be used as devices to shame, manipulate or punish. And remember our ethical axiom:
The people in the relationship are more important than the relationship.
If you find yourselves haggling over clauses in an agreement and whether they have been violated, rather than discussing the hurt feelings, the needs behind a partner's actions and ways to make amends, you've probably reached a place where the people are serving the rules, and not the other way around.

Perhaps the most serious danger in written contracts is when they are inflexible. The longer and more complex they are, the more they are likely to be trying to script a relationship or treat people (at best) as a threat to be managed and (at worst) as a commodity. If one partner is finding herself unable to hold to a provision of the agreement, there's a good chance the agreement needs to be renegotiated to work for all partners—and not that she is dishonest or doesn't care about the agreement.

People who keep long, complex written agreements often build relationships that are unable to change when their needs change. They often spend a lot of time rules-lawyering (consider the story of Leila and Jeff).

Imagine that you were looking for a conventional monogamous relationship, and on a date, somewhere between the Caesar salad and the barbecued shrimp, your date pulled out a 48-page document and said, "This contract spells out how our relationship will go from here. Sign here, here and here, and initial here, please." You would quite likely find it off-putting—especially if the contract specified that you couldn't play Scrabble, couldn't go to Bob's Crab Shack, and were expected not to engage in oral sex, all so that your date's best friend from college wouldn't feel threatened by you.

Good written agreements are instead reminders of our own boundaries or commitments. One very short contract we've seen contains elements such as "My partner is important," "Do your chores before going on a date," "Don't spend joint money on your own dates," and "Don't fuck it up." An agreement that's about what you will each do to care for each other is a very different thing from an agreement that tells new partners how
they
are expected to behave.