Saturday, May 26, 2012

The Broken Refrigerator

The broken refrigerator analogy is something that really spoke to me when I first read about it.

The analogy goes like this:
Imagine you have a refrigerator. One day, it stops working - you come home to find your ice-cream melted, your milk warm and smelly, and your vegetables wilted.

You have three options at the moment: you can figure out how to fix the refrigerator; you can throw it away and buy a new one; or, you can decide to keep it as it is but never buy any foods that need to be frozen or refrigerated.
The last option is patently ridiculous; and yet it is the one most people in the poly community seem to choose. That is, when someone feels jealousy at their partner doing a particular thing, they make a rule against the thing rather than trying to find the cause of the jealousy.

The article I linked to above goes into LOTS of detail explaining it, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't already read it and is interested in polyamory or open relationships.

I had an experience the other day that made me think back to the refrigerator analogy:

Miss Prism was joking to a female friend of hers, asking her if she wanted to have a threesome with herself and my beloved Mr Oldman. Watching this happen in front of me made me seethe with jealousy - I wanted to be part of such a threesome, thankyouverymuch! I wanted to provide Mr Oldman with an outlet for that stock straight male fantasy!

It got to the point where I was going to pull them both aside and tell them I wouldn't be comfortable with Mr Oldman having a threesome unless I got to be a part of it, even though I knew this proposition was a joke and the chances of the threesome happening were almost nil.

Then I thought about the refrigerator. Clearly, this hypothetical refrigerator of ours was broken and I was about to propose he stop buying frozen foods. Really, I should try and fix it instead.

I thought about Mr Oldman. I imagined the joy on his face if this hypothetical threesome were to occur, and immediately felt a little bit of compersion at the idea. I imagined how wonderful that day would be and who would I be to take that away from him!

Then I thought about why I was feeling jealousy - it's because I wanted to do something nice for my partner. I wanted to make him happy. And him having a threesome with two other women wouldn't infringe on that; in fact, my making a rule against it would have been the exact opposite of what I really wanted!

So, Miss Prism - if you can get that threesome for Mr Oldman.... go for it :)

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Jealousy and Compersion

As far as polyamory goes, I have been really 'fortunate' you could say, in that in all my relationships I was effectively the sole girlfriend and so was never confronted with jealousy head on. Mr Oldman has a girlfriend, but she lives in a foreign country so it didn't really affect me on a day-to-day basis. I tried my best to get Mr Wrong a girlfriend, to be a good wingman, but it hasn't panned out... at least not yet!

Then, Mr Oldman went on a couple of dates with one of my good friends. For some reason I want to give this friend the nickname "Miss Prism" after the character from The Importance of Being Earnest. I know she'll object to this, but I like it.

When they were on their date, I was spending the evening feeling super excited, wanting to know how well it was going, trying to imagine what was happening. The next morning I eagerly texted them both for details, and then I found out that Mr Oldman and Miss Prism both had a most delightful evening.

I felt jealous. I hadn't felt it before - at least for a long time. It was like a small thing squeezing my heart. It felt weird. I knew that this sort of thing is common and expected, even in poly relationships, so I tried to set it aside.

A few days later, I was visiting Mr Oldman in Perth and I asked him to tell me how the date went in detail. He gave me details from the dinner he cooked for Miss Prism, and even included some of the more saucy ones. As he told me the story of their date, that little squeezing feeling of jealousy evaporated so very quickly. Instead of it being an abstract feeling that he slept with somebody else, instead I had this beautiful feeling that he had this wonderful date with a great person. I had compersion in a big way. Let me be the first to say that compersion is AMAZING, almost on the level of new relationship energy. And the more details I was given, the stronger this feeling was.

I know details aren't for everyone. Mr Wrong hates me going into sexy details, but I think that's because I talk about my sex life so much that he knows he's going to hear me telling 3 or one of my other friends about it in short order anyway. But hearing Mr Oldman's sexy details made me feel so happy that I was glad he was willing to share :).


Tuesday, May 8, 2012

"Relationship Anarchy"

Several months ago, I heard a term called "relationship anarchy". At the time, I understood it to mean a different way of looking at relationships than "boyfriend", "husband", "best friend", "sister", "fwb" and so on. Instead, you have a relationship with everyone you know, and each relationship is unique with its own properties and levels of physical and emotional intimacy and committment don't necessarily map to one another in the 'traditional' sense.

Here's a couple of examples of the other sorts of relationships you might have:
  • Someone who you sometimes kiss
  • Someone you share all of your deepest, darkest secrets and ask for advice all the time, but have no physical relationship with.
  • Someone you're in love with, never kiss, but sometimes go to bed with when you're both tipsy
I'm sure these are pretty poor examples - but the idea, at least as I understood it (and I may be understanding it wrongly), is that each relationship is a seperate entity and the standards for one do not affect the standards for the other, and labels like "boyfriend" have no meaning.

It's an interesting attitude to take when entering a new relationship - I asked my new squeeze, Mr Wonderful, out, and in response he said he didn't feel comfortable dating me but would be happy to be my FWB. We exchanged more information/ideas/impressions/expectations and realised that we both wanted the same things from one another, only I wanted to call it a romantic relationship and he wanted to call it an FWB arrangement. Neither term really described it adequately, so at the moment we're just not labelling it at all.

At the moment, the FWB label seems to fit better of the two but only marginally, and I'm convinced this is because our relationship is very physical at the moment because it's still such early days. Things with Mr Wonderful definitely feel different than things with 3. I think in the future other labels will get closer to describing it, and who knows, maybe one will stick.

But for now, there's not really any good way to describe our relationship other than Facebook's "It's Complicated".


This is really cool. It's really freeing.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

New Relationship Energy and Rules

My secondary (how I loathe the term) boyfriend, Mr Oldman, has recently started being involved with a new girl. As a result, he's feeling this wonderful feeling that we in polyamory circles like to call "New Relationship Energy (NRE)". It's that feeling you get when you first get together with somebody, where you're checking your phone constantly for messages, thinking about them all the time and smiling to yourself, and unable to think about anything else and not wanting to.

(Aside: I, too, am at the beginning of a new relationship, so the two of us are both enjoying NRE for the first time since we began dating in September. This shit's addictive!)

Some background:  Mr Oldman and I are in a "medium distance" relationship. We live about two hours apart, and I see him most weekends. As a result, when I see him I get all excited and like to spend as much time as possible with him.

However, on a recent visit to see  Mr Oldman, he asked me if it would be OK if he spent the night with the new girl rather than me. I could relate to this because I was wanting to see my new squeeze as well, plus, I'd just recently heard  Mr Oldman talk about the wonderful night he'd spent with the new girl recently, and it made me feel so warm and fuzzy to hear about it, so who was I to refuse? And so they spent what I'm sure was another wonderful night together, and I stayed with my primary. (For the record, the following day my primary left me and my new beau alone for several hours, so I benefitted from a similar sort of arrangement).


The next day, the three of us (primary [Mr Wrong], secondary [Mr Oldman], myself) all went out for breakfast.  Mr Oldman  felt bad for blowing me off, but I legitimately understood perfectly the reasoning behind it. When you can't stop thinking about someone, it's kind of hard to pass up an opportunity to spend time with them. The feeling of NRE only lasts a couple of months at most, so it's important to take advantage of it while it exists. I told him as much.

Now, here is the part that I found really interesting: he said to me, "Let's make a rule that if you're visiting me, I have to spend time with you and not other people."

I gave him a look and said, "That's stupid. Let's make a rule that says 'do whatever you want (as long as it's not unfair)'. Most of the time, you're going to want to be with me on my visits; and times you don't want to be with me will be times you'd probably ask for an exception to be made to the rule anyway (you know, times like last night). So this would have the same effect but without any room for guilt tripping."

He agreed.