Why It’s Hard To Expect Clear Communication In Beginning Polyamory (Or Beginning Anything, Really)

“Relationships are all about communication,” the saying goes – as if you just talk through things enough, you’ll be fine.

But there is a hidden “gotcha” in that: clear communication requires clear concepts. Communicating something you don’t actually understand all that well leads to garbled discussions – like when you’re trying to get a bartender to make your favorite drink when you don’t remember the name or what’s exactly in it, and you’re flailing “You know! With the bourbon! And that flavor!”

(For the record, the world’s perfect drink is the currently-on-pandemic-hiatus Velvet Tango Room’s Bourbon Daisy, a drink with a fifteen-second aftertaste that mutates on the tongue, and yet I digress.)

Now, that’s not to say the bartender might not eventually stumble onto the fact that you want a bourbon daisy – the genius part of communication is that it’s two-way, and sometimes a knowledgeable partner can intuit the part that you’re not saying.

But when you’re starting out? When you have literally the least knowledge that you’ll ever have about what you like and expect in open relationships?

Communication gets rough.

And though the idea of communicating what you need sounds really good, often starter polyamory is mucked up with a lot of things you didn’t actually know you needed until you get there – you don’t know how to be reassured in your insecurity, you don’t know what your partner is supposed to do when they go out on a date with someone else, you may not even know why you’re upset.

Now, constantly communicating can ameliorate some of that damage. If you discover that your partner needs to give you a night-night call before they go to bed at someone else’s house, informing them of that revelation as soon as is conveniently possible is A Good Thing.

But what I find beginning poly folks often do is to expect that communication will clear a path for them – whereas a new relationship is like walking across a strange room in complete darkness, barking your shins on a new piece of furniture every few steps.

A clear, constant communication won’t prevent you banging from your shin. It’ll let your partner know hey there’s a chair here, which is better than nothing, but you’ve still got a bloodied toe and an ouchie to Band-Aid.

And starter poly folk often feel weirdly betrayed by that hurt – We’re open! We discuss things all the time! This shouldn’t happen! – and alas, I’m here to tell you that it’s part of the process.

There will be communication, but it likely won’t be clear. You’ve got some work to put in, exploring the boundaries of your own comfort, discovering what helps you feel safe, learning the surprising intimacies you didn’t even know you had until you see your partner doing those with someone else and feeling that sting of Wait, wasn’t expecting that.

It’s fine. Constant communication should be expected.

Clear communication takes self-knowledge, which takes practice and time, and I promise you that you can mostly get there. But you have to realize that often, communication is what wraps the bandage around the bleeding wound and stops the infection, not what prevents the wound in the first place.

Respect For The Ones Who Come After You: A Cool Polyamory Tip

Hardly anyone who dates me has problems with my wife. I’d like to say that’s because my wife is eminently sweet and reasonable, which she is, but let’s be honest: my wife’s been with me for twenty-plus years now, and our bond is strong. If you had problems with my wife, you probably wouldn’t want to date me.

I also have a girlfriend I’ve been dating for eleven years. She’s less intrusive on anyone I date, partially because she’s a severe introvert and as such is less likely to meet anyone else I’m smooching. So it’s unsurprising that practically nobody’s ever complained about her presence in my life.

…but I have noticed a pattern with the people I’ve been dating for a year or more.

There’s rarely jealousy for the people I’m with when they start dating me. Those relationships are part of the Ferrett Starter Package – you get a Ferrett, you get a Gini, you get Ferrett’s Long-Term Partner and all the comets he’s seeing sporadically. That framework of relationships gets built into how someone interacts with me.

But after we’ve been going out for a while, I’ll notice that when I start dating someone new, it’s A Problem. This person is Unknown. They weren’t standing in line when the person I’m currently dating got here. And this newness often causes upheaval in quiet ways.

It’s not that they’re opposed to me dating other people. But perhaps me dating this person is the wrong decision. Or perhaps they weren’t expecting this relationship to blossom this quickly. Or perhaps they felt they deserve more of my time than this new person, or they’re not entirely sure this new person is good for me, or….

I’m not pointing fingers here; I’ve done it too, where the person I’ve dated picked up a new paramour and suddenly I was all like WOT’S THIS ERE THEN, OO’S NEWWWWW PERSON?

Yet there is a tendency to react to a partner who’s come along after you as though their addition some sort of special upheaval that requires managing, simply because the dynamic’s changed. And yeah, you definitely have to think about the dynamics when you’re dating, but…

What that resistance often is is a subtle statement of “I know my place in this hierarchy, and I don’t want to be budged.” Even if you don’t have a hierarchy.

Which I mostly don’t; my wife comes first because a) I live with her and am financially entangled, but more importantly b) she’s been my best friend for twenty-five years and her advice has led me to being saner and happier than I ever was without her, so her words bear a considerable weight. But in general, I don’t weigh my relationships by the amount of time invested, I weigh them by how fulfilling they are at any given moment.

And my relationship dynamics are continually changing! I’m talking to new people, having old relationships fade or crumble, going to conventions (eventually) and sparking new crushes. All my relationships – and I have a lot of them, on various levels of intensity – are in flux, eternally. It’s not like things were in a fixed position ever.

So what I’m saying is this: often, what people do when a “new” person comes along is to register objections to the new person – sometimes as blunt as “I don’t like them” or as subtle as a vague dislike because something seems off about them. And certainly I’m not telling you to disable your dysfunction radar, but…

Ponder whether it’s the person you’re concerned about, or whether it’s your perception of your place in line that you care about. Because what’s actually happening is often a flurry of “Wasn’t I good enough for them? Why are they seeking out new partners when I should have fulfilled all their dreams? Do I really know my partner well enough to trust them finding new dates?”

Yet what you must remember in these poly-only situations is that at one point they were happy with the “old” partners and yet still saw something in you. It’s a subtle insult to everyone else they’re dating to imply that their falling in love with someone else is a failure in the relationship structure!

(Although, this being poly, let’s be honest: There definitely are people who do swing from partner to partner, feasting on NRE and starving the others. But then again, if you’ve been okay with starving your partner’s old partners as your lover has been spending all their time with you, then perhaps karma may have come a-knockin’?)

Truth is, if someone’s dated steadily, the fact that you’re no longer the newest addition doesn’t mean you’re somehow lesser. Each relationship within poly is unique, and you have to trust that – and I know from personal experience it’s scary when someone else comes along, drawing your partner’s eye with strengths you don’t possess! But you have to be comfortable that you have your own individual charms that New Person, in turn, does not have.

Good poly isn’t about standing in line. It’s about valuing the relationships you have properly. And it’s about being realistic in understanding where your concerns are coming from – you can’t fix your worries about “What do I mean to them?” by ragging, however subtly, on their other partners.

If they’re dating someone new, contemplate the true nature of your objection. Are they really a danger? Or do you just need some reassurance that you’re still fully loved as you can be within the framework of dating multiple people?

Because there is a difference. And wise poly people know it.

Your Superpower Is A Compensation For Old Trauma

My partner picked up on my moods long before I was even aware, intuiting a subtle discomfort from the shift of an elbow. “Is everything all right?” she’d ask from the far side of the couch, her head perking the instant I stumbled across a knot of complex code – or, in bed, she’d sense which muscles cried out for touch and when, moving to synchronize with my desires until I was left breathless.

Her talent was a flat-out superpower – being so attuned to my concerns that her understanding felt more like magic than body language. I envied her; I too wanted to be able to sense polite lies the way they did, to be certain when someone was genuinely joyous, to see the world as they did.

Yet as I got to know her better, I realized that superpower had a dark origin. She came from a place where her genteel caretakers could turn abusive at a moment’s notice – so she’d had to sense a violent turn coming long before anyone said anything.

I envisioned her skills as a superpower. But to her, I think, it was closer to eternal hypervigilance; she’d see me frown as I programmed and think, Is this something I need to flee from?

I think that’s a lot of superpowers, really.

Likewise, I’ve acquired a small following in part because I write a lot about relationships – how they come together, how to heal them, how they fail. People have been thanked me for boiling complex concepts down into an 800-word essay they could hand to a friend.

Yet I always reject it when someone calls me “wise.” I’m not wise; I’ve dated well over a hundred people, and most of them have left me, so my relationship skills are little more than sifting through the shattered remnants of past stupidity.

That’s not just me, though; there’s plenty of people with a lot of “wisdom” acquired with that especial frisson you get when you’ve bloodied your face running head-first into a brick wall.

So why, of all people, am I driven to write about it so thoroughly?

And for that, you have to look back at my origins – a lonely Ferrett in his bedroom, with no friends and no hope of friends, living in companion-free isolation during his formative years. I had my family, and they were some consolation – but every day I returned home from a school where the best I could hope for was literally to be ignored, so thoroughly were the bullies after me.

I sat in a room, reading books. Knowing my future was empty. I would get a job, slump home to an empty apartment, eat spaghetti and watch television, then go to bed – lather, rinse, repeat until I died.

That was my reality, and I only narrowly escaped it.

Now, the reason I publish the essays on my failed relationships is because I honestly want to encourage people to do better – if you’ve ever avoided any pitfall because I told you to watch out, well, I’ve earned my place on the planet for a day.

But the reason I analyze those failures that closely is because deep down, I realize that every relationship I’ve ever had could be my last, one mistake and I’ll be locked back in that lonely teenaged room stinking of body odor and despair, and I have to study what went wrong because oh my God I lucked out but the next time nobody will love me ever again.

It’s a superpower. But not one I’d want to inflict upon anyone.

Which is, I think, the source of a lot of unfortunate truth – if you survive some trauma, you often get what, to others, would appear as a superpower. You developed some inner strength to navigate this horrific world you got cast into it, and that strength sets you above others.

The trick is, you never wanted that superpower. It’s not like Superman, where you get to lift skyscrapers because you’re pure of heart – it’s more like Batman, where your parents got killed and the only way for you to survive was to bury yourself in self-improvement until you convinced yourself that you were so ready for the world that they could never take your parents from you again.

Maybe you have a superpower. It probably helps you. But it doesn’t make you feel better.

I hope you live in a world where you don’t need it.

Getting Ice Cream With My Therapist

In December, my wife chided me for playing a YouTube video too loud. My response was to exit the house in silent despair and drive for forty-five minutes in a random direction, unsure what I was doing with my life.

It was a complete overreaction, to be sure, but that’s how December was going. I was all out of cope. Even the tiniest things seemed overwhelming. The only mercy was that my wife fell back to sleep and had no idea I’d left at all.

Time to do a lot of therapy.

My wife suggested I join her in trying The Artist’s Way, which seemed simultaneously a little woo-woowy and also aimed at people who didn’t make a whole lot of art. (I don’t need a whole chapter to convince myself I’m creative, thankfully.) But I didn’t have any better ideas since my therapist was on her own relief leave for the winter, so I joined her.

And I’m glad I did.

One of the things the Artist’s Way has you do is to write three pages, every morning, on whatever pops into your head. It’s a form of automatic writing, where – if you’re like me – you write freeform enough that thoughts bubble to the top of your head. My first three entries were brutal revelations with what I thought about my low levels of fame (I don’t like it much), how I’d settled into a rut of writing – and only writing – because I feared failure, how terrified I was of audiences.

And over the last months, driving by the morning discoveries of how miserable I’ve been as a creator, I’ve started restructuring my art.

Right now, I think of myself as this Cronenbergian slurry encased in a protective cocoon – visceral smeared remnants of caterpillar stewing into wet pieces of butterfly, but not quite there yet. I’ve promised myself I’ll put my new projects public come Lent – because, well, might as well pretend God’s making me do these things – but at the moment, I’m spending weekends consumed by making podcasts, videos, new styles of essays but I’m not quite sure how I’ll be distributing those things to an audience.

(Nor am I sure what my relationship to my audience will be, but that’s another challenge. Oh well, got a month to ponder that.)

But as I sat down to do my morning pages today, there was nothing. My delving was doodling – no introspective visions, no realizations, just a happy doot do doo as my brain went blank.

I started to panic. I was supposed to be pushing the envelope. These morning writings were there to guide me. And now the muse had left, and I was all alone…

As if on cue, my hand wrote:

Ice cream with Don.

I didn’t quite understand that, but I knew the memory.

When I was in middle school, I got bullied so severely that my parents and guidance counsellor thought it was best for me to switch schools. And my mother and father, realizing I was pretty fucked up from all this abuse, got me into therapy to see if they could find me someone to talk to.

That person was Don – a kindly man with a huge crooked nose, huge blue eyes, and stubble that never went away no matter how much he shaved.

Don was quiet, but incisive when he spoke. He led me to understand that part of my problem was my isolation – I liked reading books, not so much talking to people. And yet I really needed people to get by, so slowly he convinced me that people were interesting – as much a challenge as any fictional character, really.

It was a lot of work, especially because I was both stubborn and smart – a terrible combination that lets someone justify terrible habits. But Don was persistent, slowly prying me away from my old ideas, and that first year in therapy was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life.

And then ice cream.

One day Don said, “You’ve been doing some good work. What do you say we take a break today and get some ice cream? I know a good place.”

As an adult, I am horrified – do you know how much my parents were paying per session? Get on the couch, kid – but Don took me to a place in Westport that he knew, and let me get the biggest ice cream I wanted, and we just sat down and talked like friends for a while. About my life sometimes, but about movies or books or whatever.

When you’re thirteen, having a grownup treat you like a grownup is that rarest of tastes. I craved it. I wasn’t a patient, then, just a dude hanging out with another dude.

We didn’t go out for ice cream often, though I always wanted to. I thought the ice creams would come the week after a big breakthrough, but no, we had more work to do.

The ice creams came when I’d managed to be calm. Placid. When there wasn’t much to report on because the work I’d done had let me sail straight for a week or two, and maybe we didn’t need to dig deep this week…

But we did need to relax. To appreciate the moment.

I got ice cream.

And today, I realized that Don’s still there, because here I was, frantically thinking I had to batter down the walls of my artistic limitations, and today’s writing was ice cream. It was okay to have nothing much to say. It was okay to just write doot do doo ideas, plotting random novel fragments, because I’d done the work and it couldn’t be all arms aching, slam-the-pickaxe-into-the-shale kinda work.

I was okay. For today.

Let that okayness flow.

Later on, I got a car. I figured out where that ice cream stand was in Westport. And I drove by it a couple of times, thinking I’d get ice cream, but… I never did. It didn’t feel right to pay for my own ice cream there. Don had to buy it for me.

It’s been, what, thirty-five years since then? But in my mind that ice cream store is still there, even in pricey, snooty Westport, waiting for a kindly therapist to pull up in his fancy car to get a kid some chocolate marshmallow ice cream.

Thanks, Don.

Ya taught me good.

Are You ADDICTED TO GREAT GAINS?!?!?

It’s 2021, and the tarnish is blooming on those New Years’ Resolutions. The diets are giving way to pizza and sugar, the workout plans collapsing into sleep. And there’s a lot of reasons those good intentions collapse into tangles of soggy dreams, but here’s one you should know:

You can’t be addicted to progress.

Which is to say that when I started working out three years ago, I showed up at every sessions expecting MASSIVE GAINS. I’d go in there with a pep-me-up-coach-I’m-ready attitude, expecting to make some huge breakthrough.

This happened more often than not at first. Not that I was overhead-lifting refrigerators, but I walked out of each session with a new posture, some new technique I’d learned, something new and exciting.

But those soon dissolved into days where I just, you know, showed up.

I didn’t do much those days. I didn’t beat last week’s lifting record. I didn’t do more reps. I just showed up like some schmuck, did a task I’d done five times before, and left wondering why I bothered.

Let’s be honest: It’s hard to show up if you’re not pushing forward.

The trick is, some days you’re stopping yourself from sliding backwards.

Those days weren’t satisfying, but they kept my rhythm up – here I am at the gym again – so not going would feel weird. And they kept my body stable – I wasn’t making great strides, but I wasn’t tumbling backwards into couch-and-Cheetos-dust Ferrett from 2015, either.

No, my body wasn’t making progress that day. But it was creating a stable platform for future progress.

But looking at all my past brushes with fitness, that expectation that every time would be magical is what stopped me. I wanted every workout to be exciting and fresh, with some stunning surprise that would wow me… and when I didn’t get that, I assumed something had gone wrong and I wandered off.

Trick is, some days you just show up. That’s it. That’s all you get.

Waiting for the fireworks is actually what will cost you the real Fourth of July.

And that’s true in almost all areas of life – I used to only write when I was INSPIRED and READY TO WRITE THE PERFECT NOVEL, but it turns out that regularly putting in 500 words got me a lot further than these mad days of 3,000 words.

(Plus, as an added bonus for creators, the correlation between “How I feel about my art that day” and “The quality of my art that day” is a lot looser than I’d suspected, with some of my best work coming on so-called “crappy” days and some of my magnificent inspiration leading into useless corners.)

I used to think that every day in a relationship had to uncover something NEW and DELIGHTFUL about my partner, or else the relationship was surely on the backslide. We had to be continually propelling ourselves upwards, like a rocket fueled by pure love! Except after twenty years of marriage, I’ve discovered that some days – some weeks, some months – are just comfortable living, where you look for breakthroughs without panicking if you don’t find them.

(Plus, as an added bonus for lovers, that pressure to EXTRACT A NEW AND SPECIAL FORM OF LOVE out of your relationships with every date can lead to intensifying relationships that are not fundamentally stable enough to withstand the searing dragonfire of ultimate intimacy. Sometimes you let it go slow because you’re carefully putting weight on the bridge between you to see what’ll hold.)

Point is, a lot of life is just maintenance. It’s not exciting, watering the flowers. The flowers themselves can be exciting, but it’s not always gonna be spring bloom time, and you still have to watch after them even in the dead of winter if they hope to come back.

A lot of what you’ll do is just showing up, cranking out some effort, and then going home. There won’t always be shooting stars or headsplodey revelations. But if you learn to wean yourself off of that idea that this isn’t worthwhile unless you’re continually unearthing MASSIVE PROGRESS, well, you’ll often skip past all those mundane intermediary steps that aren’t a trip to Thrillsville but they are the left you hang in Albuquerque to get to Thrillsville.

It’s three years of regular fitness. I am not a muscle-bound dreamboat with cumgutter abs and biceps that could strangle pythons. But I don’t have back issues any more, I lift heavy pieces of wood in my shop from my core, and I sleep better.

That’s worthwhile, even if it’s not the Schwarzenegger dream.