House Fireheart

Years and years ago, we (Sam Chupp and Cynthia Armistead) started working on a document to outline our explicit agreements regarding our relationship.

After more than a year of work that included much consulting with dear ones (SOs and otherwise), looking at other people’s agreements), joint and individual navel-gazing we created The Fireheart Manifesto 1.5 (it was 1.5 because there were so many revisions before we even released it to the public). It was a massive document that surprised us and everyone else. It was intimidating. It’s still intimidating. That’s what you get when you put two authors together with no editor.

We knew that our agreements would continue to change as we continued growing. We invited comments, particularly from anyone who found the document useful.

Cyn responded to one comment in her LiveJournal. We’ll respond to any future comments in this blog.

The process was more valuable to us than the document itself, but we shared the document because others asked for it. We continued to believe that a similar process is well worth the time for anyone, monogamous or polyamorous. Even singles could use the same process to define what they want in their partners. We intended to write an article about the process, and might still do that. Actually sharing it, though, seemed impossible.

Then came real blogging, and that, we finally realized, might give us a chance to share the revision process, to some extent, with others.

There’s another new tool in our box: a wiki. We’re moving the text from the PDF to pages in the wiki, so that we can mark them up and make our separate and joint changes. That’s where the real meat of the “discussion” will be happening.

So here we are again, airing our innermost thoughts and concerns publicly. We’re reposting the originally released document here as a starting point, but we may well decide to toss it out and start fresh, as our lives have changed radically in the last few years.