More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (60 page)

Psychologists say the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) apply to grief over a lost relationship as much as they apply to terminal illness. It takes time to grieve the loss, even when we want to preserve a friendship on the other side. Ending relationships with dignity and grace means knowing the emotional storm is coming and being prepared to weather it.

There's no easy way to deal with the pain experienced when relationships end, at least not that we've discovered. The good news is that the pain eventually ends. It's natural to project our current emotional state into the future, and when pain is our current emotional state, it can be hard to remember that we've ever felt anything else…but pain ends. One thing that can help, at least a little, is to think of it as something to get through, like a bad movie you wish were over already, rather than a part of your identity. "I sometimes feel pain" is very different from "I am a person who has been hurt." When you make pain part of your identity, it's harder to move on from it without suspicion and bitterness. But good relationships require loving as though you had never been hurt before. A guarded heart is a closed heart.

EVE'S STORY
When Peter told me he felt that a breakup with Clio was coming, I didn't respond the way I expected to. I had seen for a long time that they had been slipping away from each other, but even so, I found myself crying. What had once felt like a little family was splitting up, and the situation was entirely outside my control.

It took a few months for their relationship to complete, and I struggled during that time with the lack of clarity. Clio and I had forged a friendship independent of her relationship with Peter; nevertheless, I knew that our relationship would change once she was no longer my metamour—I just wasn't sure how. I felt it wasn't fair to try to hasten a decision just to make the situation easier for me: it wasn't my relationship, after all.

Their relationship officially ended close to what would have been their fourth anniversary. I was traveling when they finally had the conversation; Peter sent me a message when it was over. Again surprising myself, I cried most of the night, looking at old Facebook photos of the two of them—and the three of us—together. I laughed at myself: I was acting like I was the one who had just lost a relationship. In a sense, I had: even though it wasn't mine, Peter and Clio's relationship was an important part of my life. He had grown and changed from it, and so had I.

Poly breakups are both easier and harder than monogamous breakups. They're easier in the sense that when you have more than one partner, you may have more support to help through the loss. It's nice to have people who can understand and empathize with your pain. However, this doesn't actually make the pain go away (though believe it or not, we've both been asked, "If you have two girlfriends and you lose one, it's still okay because you still have a girlfriend, right?" Which is a bit like saying, "If you have two children and one dies, it's still okay because you still have a child, right?") No matter how many relationships you may have, breakups still cause pain.

Poly breakups pose special challenges because the breakups can involve more people, and can create ripples of ambiguity and uncertainty throughout all your relationships. Your partner's breakup may also affect you very seriously, even if you're not dating the same person your partner is. When two people share a partner in common and one of those relationships ends, the pain is greatly magnified.

There can be a lot of strange carryover effects when a poly relationship ends. One common situation arises when a close, nesting partner or primary-style relationship ends—say, for example, a married couple divorces, or a live-in relationship breaks up. People who are less entwined can feel a pull to fill the void, even if they don't want to, and even if the pull is not intentional on the part of the person who broke up. This happened to Franklin when his marriage with Celeste ended. His partner Maryann, who had always been less inclined toward entwined domestic relationships, also backed away; she seemed to feel that his loss created a hole that he might try to fill by scaling up his relationship with her.

Conversely, there can also be an expectation that if a close, domestic relationship ends, the existing relationships are now eligible for "promotion" to a closer, more entwined status, even if that isn't the most natural form for them to take, or if the person experiencing the breakup doesn't want that.

When a relationship ends, it can help to sit down with the remaining partners and talk about what, if anything, that means for those relationships. In a hierarchical relationship that recognizes only one primary, the end of the primary relationship might create an assumption that one of the secondary partners will be promoted to primary, regardless of whether or not that's true (never mind whether the new relationship configuration will still be hierarchical!). When a relationship that formerly occupied a great deal of time and attention ends, there might be an assumption that this time is now available to the remaining partners. Explicitly talking about these expectations is essential.

It's common to see what we call Schrödinger relationships:
^*
relationships that are near-over in practice, but have fallen into a pattern of comfortable non-contact or non-intimacy. It's easy for poly people to let such non-relationships linger a long time, because when you have multiple partners, there's often no incentive to formally end a relationship in order to "move on"—and it can feel easier to drift apart than to have a tough conversation. This can be quite painful, though, if both partners are not aware of what's happening, or are not fully aware of what is happening, and one partner thinks of the relationship as "on" and the other thinks of it as "off."

Other members of the network can suffer too when the two partners involved in the breakup are not clear with each other, or with their other partners, about what is happening. At the very least, metamour relationships can become awkward if you don't know whether you're really relating to a metamour. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, many people need to grieve their partners' lost relationships too. Letting a relationship drift off into the ether without closure can make this process much harder. Clear conversations about relationship transitions can be important for
everyone
affected.

That said, many solo poly people and relationship anarchists do prefer to have much more fluid, undefined relationships that slip between friendship and romance. If this is the case for you, then clarity and "define that relationship" conversations may be much less important for you and your partners. Hopefully, however, you will have had early conversations with them about how the sort of fluidity you prefer in your relationships works for you—and can work for them.

As elsewhere in poly relationships, taking sides is tempting but dangerous during a breakup. It's natural to feel anger toward someone you perceive as causing your partner pain. It also tends to do more harm than good. The poly community is small enough that at some point you're likely to be friends with, or even in a relationship with, someone who is in a relationship with the ex, or knows someone who is. Few breakups involve obvious wrongdoing on one person's side while the other is entirely virtuous in thought and deed. Recognize that relationships end, the reasons for breakups are usually very complicated, and there's not necessarily a villain.

This does not apply, of course, to cases of actual abuse, violence, coercion or assault. Some relationships are genuinely unhealthy by the
criteria we set out
, and we believe it's a good idea to end them entirely.

In the era of social media, it's incredibly tempting to seek validation online. We recommend keeping breakups off social media—even if your former partner doesn't follow this advice. Taking a breakup onto the world stage, especially when you're dealing with the anger part of grief, has a way of backfiring. Remember, the poly community is small, and the people who you make witness to your breakups will probably be your pool of potential partners later.

Children are another special group often affected in poly breakups, since many people find themselves forming close relationships with the children of their partners. As mentioned in chapter 15, it's even common to have mutli-parent live-in households. When a breakup occurs between a child's parent and an adult who's not biologically related to the child, always consider the implications for any children affected. These implications are similar, of course, to those that arise when blended families split up. Even if the adults do not want to continue a friendship with each other, if a child is bonded to nonparental adults, it can be important to find ways to permit an ongoing relationship. This, in turn, makes it all the more vital to strive for amicable breakups. If the two adults find it to painful—at least for a time, as is common—to stay in close contact, metamours who are still connected to the child can often help facilitate a relationship with the former partner.

If there's a happy note on which to end this chapter, maybe it's this. The poly talk of "transitioning" a relationship rather than just "breaking up" is often a correct description, not a euphemism. In monogamous culture, the idea of ending a romance and becoming "just friends" is often treated as a joke. In the poly world, it's often entirely real. It's common for poly folks to be friends with their exes pretty much for life. But resuming contact may take a while; breakups are painful and raw, and a cooling-off period of no contact is often advisable, possibly for months or years. But time mellows all things, and poly exes often eventually find that they can build a lasting friendship.

*   After the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment in which we are asked to imagine a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

The monogamous world offers us few models for relationships that transition into friendships. In the poly community, which can be quite small, staying on friendly terms with exes is a good objective to strive for. Here are some questions that can help in that quest:

• How do I approach the end of my relationships? What do I want from my former partners?
  
• If a relationship ends, what does that mean for my other partners? Will I try to promote one of them to primary?
  
• When a partner's relationship ends, what can I do to prevent myself from taking sides or being drawn into conflict?
  
• What boundaries do I set around problems within my partners' other relationships?
  
• Have I ever spread bitterness in the community or set people against each other by taking sides or by not keeping confidences?
  

PART 5

THE POLY ECOSYSTEM

23

YOUR PARTNERS' OTHER PARTNERS

No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.

CLAIRE
LAZEBNIK

Up to now, we've focused on the internal realm—yourself and your feelings—and on your own intimate relationships. In Part 5 we look outward, to your interactions with those around you. Your "poly ecosystem" includes your partners' other partners; your pool of potential new partners; your family, friends and broader social network; and the rest of the world.

Multiple romantic relationships are as old as the human race, but modern polyamory is new in a lot of ways. It's rooted in the modern values of gender equality and self-determination. It places high value on introspection, transparent communication and compassionate treatment of others. But perhaps what sets it apart the most is the opportunity it affords you for connection with your lovers' other lovers. Poly people have invented several terms for them. The most common is
metamours
(from the Greek
meta
, meaning "above" or "beyond," and the French
amour
, "lover"). Some people call them POPs, "partner's other partners," or SOSOs, "significant others' significant others." You might call your metamour your co-lover or even, if you're all a family, your co-husband or co-wife.

How close or distant your relationship is to a metamour can vary enormously. He might be your deeply bonded co-intimate in a group that sleeps together in one big bed, or a guy you've never met. Whatever the case, though, the word
polyamory
carries an implication of goodwill and well-wishing among the people involved—an understanding that "we're all in this together" to some degree or another. Often your metamours become one of the biggest benefits of polyamory.

At least that's the ideal. Good relationships with metamours certainly make polyamory richer, or at least easier. These people can be important sources of insight, aid and support. And yet things get fraught when we try to script in advance what metamour relationships should look like.