House Fireheart

And then we’ll fig­ure out the tech­ni­cal difficulty.

I think the impor­tant issues can be stated in the “covenant,” leav­ing any nig­gly stuff to be explored over time or for “care and feed­ing” sorts of things, should we wish to cre­ate them. We needed more doc­u­ment the first time, as we needed more process, because we were learn­ing a great deal about each other and mak­ing sure we were using the same words to mean the same things.

What I’d like to see is a pretty sim­ple state­ment of our com­mit­ment to each other that we can show to new peo­ple. I don’t expect them to agree to it or sign off on it (after all, they aren’t par­ties to it), but if they can’t respect it, they’ll know in advance that we aren’t peo­ple they should get involved with. If some­one becomes a new SO, devel­ops a seri­ous rela­tion­ship with one of us, it might be worth­while to work out such a writ­ten com­mit­ment with that per­son (if he or she wants one).

I think it is a good thing to think about our bound­aries and expec­ta­tions. How­ever, the more I live poly, the more I under­stand that I’m going to be hard-pressed to throw around blan­ket state­ments about what I’d be OK with. A lot of it is con­di­tional based on the indi­vid­ual in ques­tion. But I’m going to think more about it.

Then again, I think back and the times when we’ve been at our health­i­est, poly-wise, has been when we’ve done things like insisted on time between us being a pri­or­ity (which is one of our core Poly Val­ues) and also just gov­erned our­selves accord­ing to the inten­tion that we love each other and still want to be together: every­thing else fell into place as a result of that.

How about approach­ing this dif­fer­ently this time? Rather than com­ing up with our agree­ments first, we start with our indi­vid­ual needs and bound­aries, then their inter­sec­tion. As new peo­ple come into our lives, we could ask them to con­tribute their indi­vid­ual needs and bound­aries, and then work out how they inter­sect with us, rather than pre­sent­ing them with a doc­u­ment that seems closed and “done.” What do you think?

As depressed as I’ve been, it would be a bad time to think about start­ing any new rela­tion­ships. So why bother rewrit­ing our rela­tion­ship agree­ments, which really only kick in when we get involved with some­one new?

This may sound silly, but hav­ing any­thing left out­dated offends me. That really is part of it.

But really, writ­ing up such things because you’re want­ing to get involved with a par­tic­u­lar some­one NOW is touch­ier. You’re very likely to uncon­sciously twist things to favor that per­son, rather than think­ing neutrally.

There are always peo­ple Sam is involved with, or on the edges of involve­ment with. It’s some­thing I try to accept. I knew soon after meet­ing him that it’s nat­ural, and would always be so. There are now, includ­ing some­one who he has been involved with, who is still on the “yes” list.
It’s not the case for me—not any­more, any­way. It was at one time, when I was more out­go­ing, when I had the energy to be.

So one of us, at least, will be neu­tral. One will be as neu­tral as he can ever be, which is pretty good, considering.

We have more data now than the last time, hav­ing a few more years of expe­ri­ence, obser­va­tion, and input from oth­ers. It can only get better.

Cyn

“Never apol­o­gize for show­ing feel­ing. When you do so, you apol­o­gize for truth.”

– Ben­jamin Disraeli

Well, folks, here it is. We’re work­ing on another edi­tion in earnest.

I have shared this doc­u­ment with numer­ous peo­ple — some of them have been peo­ple I’ve been inter­ested in roman­ti­cally, some of them have been just curi­ous out­siders, some are poly folk try­ing to fig­ure out what is impor­tant to them.

Nearly all of them have com­mented on how incred­i­bly com­plex the doc­u­ment seems, and how daunt­ing it is to sit down to read it.

Yeah, it isn’t sexy writ­ing, it isn’t com­pelling and persuasive.

And although I want to clar­ify the doc­u­ment, I have to say that the doc­u­ment itself has been some­thing of a fil­ter­ing tool.

If you’re inter­ested in a closer rela­tion­ship with me and you don’t even have time or incli­na­tion to read the doc­u­ment, then well, that says some­thing. Yes, it takes time and patience to get through. But it’s worth it in the end.

I have uncov­ered a lot of poten­tial prob­lems in poten­tial rela­tion­ships for the future as a result of this doc­u­ment. And I have had a few peo­ple get through it no prob­lem and are still there, inter­ested, at the end.

It’s not per­fect, much of it is no longer rel­e­vant to our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, but the doc­u­ment has been very, very good to me. It is a good part of my over­all “Slow Poke Poly” thought process.

I look for­ward to mak­ing it even bet­ter in days to come.

Wow. We’re at it again.

It’s going to take a while to trans­late the cur­rent ver­sion into the wiki. And might I say I really, really hate learn­ing yet another markup lan­guage unique to the wiki? Thank you.

But it does make a good col­lab­o­ra­tive edit­ing tool, so it’s worth the effort.

In gen­eral, I just wanted to say that I want to make every­thing sim­pler. Yet, as I read this thing again, I’m remem­ber­ing very vividly why each part was included. I recall the cir­cum­stances that arose, for us or those we know, because of the lack of cer­tain explicit agree­ments. Some things are clear between me and Sam, and we had assumed would be obvi­ous to any­one with two neu­rons to rub together, but obvi­ously aren’t.

Assump­tions cause trou­ble. Trou­ble makes hurt. Hurt is not lov­ing. Hence, spelling each thing out, which makes for verbosity.

But surely, there are things that can be made sim­pler. We don’t have young chil­dren now. Child­care and cus­tody con­cerns are no longer issues for us. My health has become more of an issue. How will those things bal­ance out? I sup­pose we’ll see.

If you’re into that kind of voyeurism, pull up a screen. You’ll want to check out our orig­i­nal agree­ment, either all at once or split up in wiki form. Both ver­sions include intro­duc­tions by Cyn and Sam, which will be updated in the wiki as we rewrite the document.

(We did not include a few pri­vate pro­vi­sos, and will not be pub­lish­ing them. They remain pri­vate. It is to be expected that any­one would have such pri­vate agreements.)

Please feel free to com­ment, and know that we will lis­ten to any­thing said hon­estly and respect­fully in the same spirit. If we weren’t open to feed­back, we wouldn’t be going through this process publicly.

Namaste,
Cyn & Sam