DirtySurfaceWarning: Some Sexual Side Effects

This is an extended response to polyamory questions from my "Ask the Pornographer" section.

The golden rule in its original version is "Don't do unto others what you would not have them do to you" and I've listed many of these items below in the form of "don't do it". Framing instructions in the negative makes sense to me when the stakes are high. My goal is to provide a short(ish) list of some simple ways to cause less hurt, not the infinite and ever-expanding list of all the things that can feel good. My apologies in advance if that positions these very subjective suggestions as if I meant them to be a new generation of Mosaic commandments. I (mostly) don't.

- The basics of respect (be actively truthful, don't assume, don't coerce, don't trespass) are even more important as you add more people to a relationship or web of relationships. To spell out some of the really-should-be-damn-obvious applications for any intimate connection: Don't do anything with your lover(s) that they or you can't talk about. Ask for what you want and ask for the information you need to make informed decisions. Don't postpone telling your partners when you mess up, and don't neglect to apologize when you hurt them. Don't wait for someone else to start the hard conversations. Don't take silence as consent and don't take silence to mean that there aren't issues you should know about. Don't take previous consent as a contract for future consent. Don't be silent if you don't like what's happening. Use your words, use your brain and use your feet to walk out of what's not comfortable.

- The basics of respect extended to situations involving more than two people: Don't use one lover as bait to lure others. Don't presume that what works as three or more is workable or welcome one-on-one. Don't imagine that because someone wants your lover they want you too. Don't invite yourself along on a lover's date without checking well in advance that it's OK with everybody (and even if it seems to be OK once don't take that as license to repeat the invasion.) Don't try to get with one person by hooking up with their lover. Don't try to initiate a group scene or group relationship by hinting hopefully, adding intoxicants or setting up "spontaneous opportunities" that aren't spontaneous and may feel more like traps than opportunities.

- Don't expect people in a group connection (of any type or any time-span) to all be perfectly equally interested in each other or to develop interest at the same pace. No realistic arrangement requires this to happen, and nothing is less appealing than trying to force an intimacy that's not ready or not mutually felt. Some group dynamics have enough charm and charge to temporarily smooth out inequalities of attraction and compatibility. Enjoy that when or if you experience it but don't lean on it past its stale-date.

- Go slow, listen a lot, talk through even the most basic assumptions. You may need to go over even the definitions of the words you use, eg is "commitment" code for monogamy to one person while to another person it means "honouring one's word"? Does using the word "love" come freighted for some of your lovers with an expectation of diminished interest in other people than the person loved, or is it a word that to some friends feels out of place in friendships? What words frighten your lover when applied to other lovers? What words or relationship labels do you or your sweethearts feel territorial about? (In this document I'm using "lover", "sweetheart", "date", "partner", "playmate" and similar terms interchangeably, in part to underscore how utterly subjective the usages are.)

- Ask for the important parts of what you really want from the very beginning of a relationship, even if it needs to come with a far-future delivery date. There is no good time to hear that the person you want to be with wants things you can't handle, but for the things you CAN potentially handle more prep time is usually better. It's infinitely easier to negotiate timelines for activity within a relationship that is understood from the beginning to be open than to open a closed relationship. If you scare somebody away fast, be grateful for the time and pain avoided and be glad it happened before you'd merged your book collections. There will be other chances, other wonderful people.

- Be honest, always, especially when it isn't easy. Give too much information. Don't diminish the expression of your feelings or attractions to other people in order to please your lover. Get used to (and demand) similar honesty. Don't presume you know everything about your lover's other relationships, or that you need to know everything. Do establish a shared understanding about what you want to know and how you want to know it; what you can tell without breaching another lovers' confidentiality.

- Be consistent and consistently scrupulous around safer sex practice with everybody you play with. Everybody. Always. In the long run it's just way easier that way. “Fluid-bonding” (agreeing to restrict the wetter kinds of skin-on-skin sexual contact to particular relationships) generally requires an exact match of understandings within that relationship about what constitutes allowable safer sex practice in every other relationship. That hasn't for me ever proved a very practical route, and I've seen it as a source of trauma in a variety of different situations. Your mileage may vary, and if you're deeply in love with barrierless sexual contact (or if your work requires it) this won't be the strategy for you. From my perspective, a simple minimum safer-sex standard that you can stick to every time (combined with regular full-spectrum testing) is more likely to protect you and your lovers than a long list of precautions in which you make exceptions for special circumstances. Consistency allows your partners to make an educated decision about play with you and it allows you to develop sustainable habits that come easily even under pressure. The parallel parts of this package: test often, don't get too wasted to make good decisions, know your own sexual health issues and and always be the one to initiate sexual health discussions with all your new and existing lovers, even (especially) when it's awkward. Try not to internalize other peoples' sexual-shame-masquerading-as-health-concerns, and try not to disguise your own issues around shame, control or jealousy as health concerns. (Addendum: Don't expect flawless logic of yourself or anyone else around safer sex and sexual health. The norm is superstition dressed as science, wrapped in blame, shame and wishful thinking. You can do better than that, but you won't be perfect.)

- Build strong, supportive community links with people who do poly in ways you respect. Avoid building sexual/romantic relationships with people who haven't done (or aren't trying to do) the same for themselves. Lean on your poly friends for advice and watch what they do. Where possible, extend this to choosing poly-positive doctors, therapists, etc. The longevity and comfort of a relationship is as dependent on whom all parties ask for support as it is on the people within the relationship. You can't usually expect people who haven't done multiple open relationships to give useful support about a paradigm they don't know.

- Multiple relationships seem to work best when they're functionally multiple for everybody involved. Everybody in any poly relationship being intimately involved with more than one person still seems like a required minimum balance for sustainability in my experience. I'd suggest that poly people hold out for lovers who are actually, actively striving to be in more than one relationship at once or who are already with someone else. Theoretical polyamory alone doesn't sustain balanced connections for long. (Try for balance, not symmetry. You don't all have to be doing the same kind or the same numbers of relationships at the same time, and you probably won't.)

- Beware a 15-page contract or an overabundance of rules. Communication and actively erring on the side of respectful caution are the primary content of the long-standing agreements I've seen work. If rules and guidelines don't shift toward the more relaxed over time, they're probably masking a larger problem of trust, without which no agreement is adequate. Lovers build or rebuild trust by approaching known issues gradually, building and adjusting shared guidelines one at a time, and allowing each other a relaxed space in which to address the unexpected things that pop up.

- Beware an unwillingness to state clear boundaries or an unwillingness to respect your stated limits. If your partners' unconditional acceptance of absolutely everything you do seems too good to be true, that's because it is. Doormats are deadly when they belatedly discover their boundaries. If they won't tell you what they need, escape while you still can. Similarly, if a partner regularly disregards your stated needs around "small" issues or won't agree to setting any boundaries at all together, run.

- Be aware as you plan and structure relationships that they will evolve beyond your plans. Guidelines imposing different behaviors for different strata of primary, tertiary, secondary, temporary and great-uncle-of-tertiary relationships seem to work for some people. For me that seems a nightmare of trying to regulate degrees of intimacy. Occasional humpbuddies will sometimes fall madly in love, romantic relationships will sometimes become platonic friendships, and the world will keep changing regardless of the categories we impose on it. Overcategorization seems to me a mostly symbolic approach designed to offset a lack of comfort within relationships about what constitutes genuine specialness and security. Closeness will wax and wane, availability and geography will change, trust will develop and some people will want more of each others' time. Increased closeness in one relationship doesn't automatically equal decreased closeness in another relationship. There is enough closeness to go around. There is not always enough time to go around, but that's what calendars and sleepless nights are for. Mutual willingness to plan time together is often a big piece of what makes one relationship different from another. If you're asking to be somebody's "primary partner", part of what you may be asking for is the concrete step of negotiating priority access to their planning calendar. Concrete elements like that don't replace symbolic ones, but they can often help to keep the symbolic elements in perspective.

- Try to make relationships feel intrinsically unique and special without too much reliance on their definition, their hierarchy or what they mean relative to other relationships. Find comfort in sharing positive actions that you want and enjoy with each lover, not in excluding other people from finding joy. If what makes your relationship with a partner feel good is that their other partners don't get to do the same things with them, you're leaning on a negative. That's not by itself a strong, secure reason to stay together, and it's not going to prepare you emotionally for when a partner and their other partner(s) find a shared pleasure in something you're not into or not able to do. "Compersion" and the concepts it points to are worth understanding.

- People are utterly unique. Nobody else can offer your lover exactly the same good time you can. People are also by and large replaceable. If you are a miserable companion for long enough, your lover will move on. This is not a function of polyamory or open relationships, but of people wanting to be treated well. Multiple partners could slow or could hasten the process. They aren't the cause of your relationship ending if you were already making your lover unhappy.

- Don't set yourself up (or allow yourself to be set up) as a conduit for information, attitudes, direct quotes, etc., between your lovers, or as their referee. Let them tell each other whatever they need to say. You can't solve problems or make agreements between other people half as well as they can for themselves, and broken telephone breaks faster when the data being exchanged is about sensitive, personal matters.

- Having don't-touch rules about many specific people is not a good sign. Some people allow a partner to veto (have final word on allowing/not allowing) other potential partners. This is something one negotiates for, not something to assume the option of. Arriving at an agreement to allow a mutual option to veto works for many people much of the time. Actually using the option is best reserved for really drastic situations. If someone hasn't abused you (or abused someone you know well), isn't clearly an agent of immediate chaos or clearly disrespectful of you or your lover(s), I'd advise not standing in the way of your lover(s)' desire to be with them. The correlate of that is everyone being very, very careful not to date people whose dysfunctions are obviously going to impact on other relationships, whose motives seem suspect or whose behavior toward your other lovers is less than polite. (A mutual option to veto isn't so meaningful when everybody isn't involved with more than one person. This is another place where balance helps.)

- Don't mistake what somebody does with another being for something they're doing to you. Presuming basic sexual health issues are being addressed, it has no concrete impact on your life whether your significant other spent their time away from you on a sex date with three friends, getting strangers off for money, masturbating to pictures of their ex (or yours) or sleeping alone. Jealousy doesn't have root in rational thinking or a productive place in your relationships, regardless of how you structure your connections. Listen to your own jealous feelings and don't give yourself a hard time for having them, but don't feed them any more than you would actively nurture other hurtful thoughts. Jealousy happens, and it's as big as you let it get. Nobody can "make" you jealous. Be aware that it should diminish with time and is usually much more about personal or internal relationship issues than about the other relationship(s) it attaches to. Are there ways you can feel more certain of the respect and care your partners have for you? Ways that have nothing to do with other people? Focus on those things. Beware zero-sum math that is based in the idea of partner shortage, love shortage, attention shortage, etc.. This isn't a real or useful view of the world. Check in with poly friends if you find yourself thinking of acting on jealousy or aiming expressions of it at a lover, and seek professional help if you're unable to stop obsessing about your jealousy.

- Fight fair. You'll have difficulties, disagreements, breakups, re-connections and periods of uncertainty when you don't know what's happening within a relationship. It happens to everybody. None of these situations is an excuse to be an abusive asshat to anybody, including yourself, your lover, your lover's lovers, etc.. Finding relative calm and maintaining the same respectful boundaries during conflict that you'd maintain during good times is one of the differences between being somebody who finds a lot of love in their life and somebody who finds a lot of grief. Fighting fair is not a skill we're born with. Sometimes an external listener or an external mediator helps a lot to build the skills and provide a place in which to practice them. Disagreeing without hurting the people you disagree with is a whole lot easier within a situation that feels essentially safe, respectful and caring. The more you work to build those feelings into your relationships the easier it will be to handle conflict.

- Avoid doing things to punish your lovers. If you need to quit being with them, quit. If you need to negotiate for an improvement to your relationship circumstances, do it sooner rather than later. Punishment (in the non-fun sense) has no place in an adult relationship of any kind, but it's especially a destructive paradigm to introduce within multiple relationships. Imposing relationship limits in order to punish your lover for having fun with someone else is about as self-fulfilling as any strategy can be. Using the fun you have with one lover to punish another lover is similarly a fast route to stupidity and heartbreak. Nobody you'd enjoy being with wants to be the instrument you use to hurt another person.

- Love is infinite. Time is genuinely finite. Hoard it, schedule ruthlessly, allow some months of recovery time between ending and starting relationships when you can, allow yourself plenty of alone time and always schedule a minimum of 2 hours' padding between dates with different people, additional to travel time.

- How many relationships can you sustain? One way of deciding that is asking "How many relationships can you sustain when everybody's happy and horny and wants a piece of you?" That's a fun dilemma to consider, but it's no more the totality of the situation than considering how many relationships you can sustain when everybody's sad, achy, lonely, not into sex, needs career advice, needs hand-holding, needs help moving, needs a loan 'til payday- and wants to go out of town with you. Leave room for growth, change and the unexpected, because everything will happen all at once. Cycles will move into sync with each other. You will have times of feast and times of famine in every way. (Whatever you do, consider staggering your anniversaries.)

- Don't soft-pedal, candy-coat or compromise on your core values around poly relationship structures. if you're absolutely certain you can't handle anything that looks like sharing your lover, you're probably right. Don't go there until/unless you're ready, and don't settle for a half-hearted pseudo-monogamy to try maintaining a relationship with someone who is committed to multiple partners. If you're absolutely certain you want multiple relationships, don't settle for less. Our social surroundings are not on side with regard to non-traditional relationship structures and external pressures will weaken shaky compromises even further.

- Avoid jargon, conflict-avoidant social-work-speak and other non-specific language where possible, in the same way you'd avoid crude, abrupt, deliberately hurtful language. It does matter how we talk about stuff. Specify times, activities and amounts where you realistically can, remembering that if people are fearful they'll replace non-specific scenarios and quantities in what you say with their worst-case scenarios. "I'd like to get my butt caned by a professional Dom while you watch once every six months or so" represents a very different commitment of time, money and emotional energy than what someone might picture when you say "Let's hire and share a sex worker regularly."

- Aim to maintain a bed of your own in a room of your own, possibly in a space of your own, even if you don't often use it. Sharing sleeping/playing space because of mutual choice rather than by default seems to me one of the single most important pieces of maintaining respectful relationships with lovers, inclusive of lovers we live with. (It's also unavoidably an economic issue, but everything has a cost. Extra bedrooms are often cheaper than breakups in the same way that condoms are cheaper than medication ...or kids).

- One core idea of poly (that there's enough intimacy to go around and sharing doesn't diminish the available pool) also translates as "there's enough to go around that one doesn't have to climb aboard every passing train." Be aware that in a world of plenty not every connection has to offer you everything, but hold out for nearly everything. Save yourself for the phenomenally hot, smart, open people who suit you, have histories of treating people well AND are in the right mindset to offer you the kind of connection you want. You might be able to handle needless drama, tantrums, chronic disregard for your schedule, chronic inattention to contagious health risks, etc.. That doesn't mean you want to weather the ripple effect of these issues on your other relationships.

- Potential new lovers who can't interact in a friendly, adult way with all your other lovers will be liabilities in the long run. Where it's possible, introduce lovers or potential lovers to each other (or at least to knowledge of each other) as soon as that can happen in a relaxed, considerate way. Pay attention to how they deal with the situation. There'll come a time when your sweetie leaves their keys at the new lover's place and you have to pick them up, when you and your other beau get into a fender-bender halfway across the country and need a message relayed by their other lover(s) to your other lover(s), etc. At those times one really notices the clear functional differences between styles of poly: "Don't-ask-don't-tell" near-secrecy doesn't build the same kind of bonds as a network of people who know and care about each other. In those times things can either go more smoothly for you than they would without additional supporters or a minor issue can mushroom into multiple relationship implosions.

- Because the potential for both best-case and worst-case scenarios multiplies with multiple relationships, apply similar high standards to every connection. Bedbugs, broken prophylactics, winning a lottery together or getting trapped together by a freak storm could happen with a one-time drunken fling nearly as easily as with a long-term live-in partner. In any case you want the person you're with to reflect well on your judgment and to be able to engage usefully, openly and respectfully with the needs of the moment, inclusive of the needs you both may have involving your other lovers.

- Know that our surrounding society isn't rooted in poly paradigms, and will sometimes be hostile, indifferent or unsupportive when you and your lovers most need support. Build those supports in advance where possible by being as public about your relationships as you safely can, but be aware of the potential consequences of outing your lovers (consciously, by proxy or by accident) in ways that could impact their work, family, general privacy, etc.

- Everybody will have different understandings and different needs with regard to how they want to experience relationships. There is no one true way. Good luck.