The first year of our triad relationship, I mourned the typical milestones I would never experience by saying yes to being with both of my partners. As someone who believed she was (mostly) heterosexual for the majority of her life, I was raised with idealized concepts of dating and marriage to a man, and what that means.
In the US though I’m sure it happens across the world, expectations and norms push people onto the couple-based relationship escalator. You can read more about the relationship escalator from Poly.Land. But basically, two people start dating. They meet each other’s friends and family. Then cohabitation after marriage if you’re ‘traditional’, or cohabitation before marriage if you’re forward-thinking.
Because the goal, the ultimate prize of winning at the dating game is…Marriage.
We push everyone to make it to the marriage part of relationships. I don’t know what the big deal is, to be honest. It seems like a lot of expectation to put on people. In toxic displays of monogamy, your spouse becomes the only person in your life, forced to meet all of your needs. Frankly that is unrealistic, unhealthy, and unsustainable. I have yet to meet someone who went through a divorce after being in a difficult marriage who suddenly decided that instead, they should have stayed married and miserable indefinitely.
Did losing out on that sound so bad? No, not really. But what about some of the good things? There have to be good things about marriage, practically and emotionally. You might have other points, but my list looks like this:
- Ability to be added on health insurance through a spouse’s policy.
- Automatically being able to see my spouse in the hospital in the event of an emergency.
- Explicit and/or assumed invitations to events as a spouse.
- Acceptance that your relationship is valid because it involves two people, no matter what you do.
I am positive there is a long list of other reasons, but you get the gist.
In my particular case, it wasn’t just the relationship escalator I would lose out on. By being in a relationship with two people, and also being a parent with them to their children, I skipped over the steps required to ‘win’ a relationship. Since I hitched a ride on an already-established family unit, I had no framework to decide if my relationships were valid.
In fact, by saying yes to this structure, I would lose a sense of security. I had a whole new list of difficulties to figure out with respect to marriage and parenting.
- Not being able to talk comfortably about my partners at work, or even be in public, without fear of judgment, condemnation, or even the possibility of being fired, because people reject my “non-traditional” relationship grouping.
- The reactions from my partners’ friends, assuming I was angling to steal one partner away from the other to cause the collapse of their marriage.
- The fact that most social invitations come sent to a pair. The fear and anxiety of the reactions if I did show up with one or both of them. “Oh, we didn’t realize you’d bring a friend“.
- Would I be seen as a valid parent? Everyone would look at me as a pretend-parent because I didn’t give birth to the children. There are prescribed notions of being a mother or father, or even a step-parent, but none for being an ‘also-parent’.
- Since I’d never even lived with a partner, how was I going to figure out how to live with a family that had several years of a head start on established expectations and routines?
I asked myself a lot of tough questions that one day, I’ll be able to write in a long list. The process of asking the questions often led to more questions instead of answers.
The more I tried to quiet my feelings, the louder they sounded in my head.
Because it’s not just the expectations others place on us about the relationship escalator that causes us problems. It’s the benefits our society gives to couples, and specifically to heterosexual couples. More than anything though, it’s the expectations I had grown up with, ingrained in my mind, that prevented me from seeing my relationships as equitable.
That’s important to recognize. We won’t all be equal in poly relationships. We are working on building equitable relationship structures that make all the partners feel validated, loved, and supported. In my case, I had to mourn the loss of the rubber-stamp-approved model of relationship by society before I could reject it and replace it with new indicators of success.
We can’t immediately change how anyone else will see our relationships. Those of us in poly relationships have to lead by example. And the example is this: we make our own list of benchmarks and causes for celebration.
To those of you who are a “third” in your triad-structured poly relationships, make sure you talk to your partners about what your collective benchmarks are for your relationship success. Give a voice to the notions of what any of you lose by not being the partner who is married to another partner in your dynamic. And pay close attention to how your partners respond.
For me, it felt like a lot of emotional labor to give constant examples of how I was being ‘othered’. I could see it everywhere, all the time, so why couldn’t my partners see it? And that’s the problem with privilege, isn’t it? You didn’t do anything to get it, but it’s something you get to benefit from all the time. Even worse, other people give you that privilege even if you don’t explicitly want it.
Fortunately, my partners listened to me when I gave them examples. I had to make a lot of lists about things that would make me feel included. We are still working on what equity looks like for us. What is critical is that you and your partners work to define your own values. There is a lot to be said for everyone having the conversations, feeling heard, and making decisions as a group.
For most of us, there are invisible landmines we’ll have to learn how to navigate. It won’t be one simple conversation. We have to go through it, feel it, talk about it, analyze it, and draw our own path forward.
Me personally? I see a poly-friendly therapist who helps me put my feelings in the context of the system I live in, while looking at underlying learned assumptions about relationships. I do a lot of ‘unpacking’ of ideas that cloud my ability to give my life and relationships the validity they deserve. Most importantly, I keep having difficult conversations with the people I love and who love me. We’re in it together, whether or not we all have the exact same struggles. And that goes a long way.
Positive Poly Parenting 