The biggest disadvantage of poly I perceive is that it increases the total drama in your life. If you’re monogamous, then so long as things are good between you and your one partner, you’re good. If you’re poly, drama can come into your life via problems with any of your partners, or if you or they have problems with any of their partners.
On the up side, with poly you can just focus your time on attention on the relationship that isn’t dysfunctional at any given time. In that way of looking at it a monogamous relationship constitutes a single point of failure. Of course saying no to ‘drama’ takes a lot of maturity and strong boundaries to master.
with poly you can just focus your time on attention on the relationship that isn’t dysfunctional at any given time
In general I’ve found that it’s the relationship that isn’t going right that most needs time and attention. Of course it helps a lot that you can draw strength from other partners during that time, but this is a role that friends can also fulfil.
Of course saying no to ‘drama’ takes a lot of maturity and strong boundaries to master.
In my experience, you can say no to drama all you like, but sometimes it comes around anyway, and to care for those you love sometimes you just have to deal with it!
In my experience, you can say no to drama all you like, but sometimes it comes around anyway, and to care for those you love sometimes you just have to deal with it!
“Deal with” is not necessarily equal to “get involved in”, though. The “saying no” in this case would be saying no to the latter, rather than the former.
The only sure-fire way I know of to deal with a romantic partner intent on involving me in drama is to sever the romantic relationship. For me, that works—after a few false starts, I’m with a girl who always cooperates in tracing our rare disagreements back to a root difference in either factual beliefs or values, and resolves it with wikipedia or compromises, respectively. But my approach strikes some people as unrealistically draconian.
Is there a more subtle set of skills than “only become involved with rational people?”
Is there a more subtle set of skills than “only become involved with rational people?”
Yes. ;-)
If you’re seriously interested in learning them, I suggest David Deida’s book “Way of The Superior Man” as a conceptual primer, and the AMP “inner game” video series as practical illustration and coaching. Note, however, that the skills in question are more about maintaining your own emotional state and connection to your partner, than about getting anybody else to behave in a certain way.
As the AMP people point out, men’s response to drama is often to close themselves off from their caring, in order not to get sucked in to emotional turmoil—but this is just as bad for the relationship as it is to get sucked in or to give up/give in. Their training approach is to make it possible for you to stay open and connected, without being sucked in, giving up, or closing off.
It is not easy, but it is very rewarding. Initially, the tough part is that you go through a period of getting more drama in your relationship, because as your partner realizes it’s “safe” to express things emotionally, she may increase her expressiveness. I personally went through a rather trying period where my wife kept exceeding my then-current level of skills. ;-)
However, once you really “get it”, then what happens is that it’s like a storm that breaks over you and then goes calm, and there’s much more connection and passion there than there was in the flat, no-drama-at-all state, where I was trying to control situations to prevent drama from arising in the first place.
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is, to use a more colloquial phrase, “don’t stick your dick in crazy,” which is just another phrasing of your suggested approach. If there’s a better way to handle the drama problem, I haven’t found it.
I’m unsure of all the various types of drama that folks may be referring to, but by being more accepting and comfortable with various behaviors, one can decrease the (emergence of) drama in their life.
The question is then, which situations are you comfortable with, able to change to be comfortable with, and willing to change to be comfortable with? I don’t mean to imply that saying “no” on the third question is necessarily bad in any way.
In general I’ve found that it’s the relationship that isn’t going right that most needs time and attention.
Sometimes. Sometimes time and attention is exactly what it doesn’t need.
In my experience, you can say no to drama all you like, but sometimes it comes around anyway, and to care for those you love sometimes you just have to deal with it!
It depends somewhat on what we mean by ‘drama’ and on how experienced you are at handling emotional situations in a healthy way.
It seems like many polyamorous couples construct complex systems of rules to deal with the inherent complexity of their relationships. My girlfriend and I have one rule: no drama allowed. We crush drama. Rather, we proactively take steps against drama, by not putting ourselves in dramatic situations and letting potential partners know that this is our rule and that we really don’t tolerate drama.
I think drama in this context is just the tendency for people who spend a great deal of time together to discover each other’s flaws and become annoyed by them, and to then blow the resulting conflicts out of proportion to the original complaint or disagreement.
It’s generally exacerbated by one or both partners being unskilled at resolving conflicts; minor problems escalate because of, e.g., passive-aggressiveness, anger, avoidance, or ultimatum-setting.
[Drama] is just the tendency for people who spend a great deal of time together to discover each other’s flaws and become annoyed by them, and to then blow the resulting conflicts out of proportion
That does not explain why “drama” is more likely in a sexual relationship than among people sharing the same office or among roommates.
Sex is good at creating “drama” because it opens emotional connections: the beliefs and behaviors of one’s lover become terribly signficant to one. Women (or more precisely, women still in their child-bearing years) are particularly apt to have strong emotional reactions to changes in the relationship and the behavior, beliefs and moods of their lover.
A lover is likely to do something irrational or desperate in response to a change or perceived change in the relationship with a loved one for the same reason that a person is likely to do something irrational or desperate when faced with any other life change that has great emotional significance, like the prospect of losing one’s housing, winning the lottery or getting charged with a serious crime.
BTW, this tendency for the woman in a heterosexual relationship to attach strong emotional signficance to the relationship and the man is by far my favorite part of sex and sexual relationships: it means that she will be eager to learn all there is to know about me, and it means that she will feel hurt whenever I hurt and feel happy whenever something good happens to me. Adding to one’s social environment another person who really cares deeply about one is a very rare and valuable thing, and sex (at least for a straight man) is by far the most reliable way for an adult—well, at least a straight male adult—to achieve that.
Some men are prone to this, too, and now that the pattern has been pointed out, I recognize it both as something that I’m prone to and something that I value in people who I’m close to. In fact, this may be one of the main factors that determines whether a relationship feels romantic or not, regardless of sex.
Interesting since you have described yourself in these pages as “moderately-to-strongly asexual” and since the only men with whom the adults in my experience have very strong emotional connections with are kinfolk and the men they have had sex with. Well, actually, my first girlfriend cared a heck of a lot about a gay man she used to work with, but that is the only exception that comes to mind right now among my pretty limited social networks past and present. Actually one more: one of the women in my current circle has a very strong connection with a gay man—but the man has very high relative social status (practicing physician worth millions) and takes her on pleasure trips all around the world—and at her age, travel to exotic or fashionable destinations is a bigger pleasure than sex or anything else. Some of the women I know and have known have very caring friendships with other women, which I why I used the word “men” rather than “adult” in my first sentence.
In my experience, just my engaging a woman in a serious sincere ongoing discussion (during dates) about whether she should have sex with me has been enough cause the emotional bonding process (in which what happens to me causes her to feel happiness or pain) to progress much further than it ever has with all but one or so of my platonic friends.
So, Adelene, given what you have disclosed about yourself on these pages in the past, I am curious to what degree sex or serious sincere ongoing discussions about sex are necessary for you to start really caring about someone you are not related to.
Having sex seems to be moderately negatively correlated, for me, but that seems to be more of an artifact of my confusion regarding sexual relationships before I figured out that I’m asexual than anything having to do with the act itself.
Talking about the fact that I’m asexual is weakly positively correlated, but not observably causative: If I don’t feel comfortable enough around someone to be able to talk to them about that aspect of myself, it’s nearly guaranteed that I won’t bond with them (possible exception: if someone was very prudish, but we otherwise got along well, I would probably refrain from talking about the subject but would not count that against them if they weren’t aggressively judgmental about others’ sex lives) but the fact that I do feel comfortable telling them about that does not imply that we’re likely to bond. Someone’s reaction to finding out that I’m asexual can have a large effect on my subsequent relationship with them, but that carries similar weight to the effect of their reaction to learning other important facts about my personal identity, such as that I’m autistic—and the wrong kind of interest can be just as damaging as a negative reaction.
The other party in a relationship being willing to talk about their sex life is not necessary, but may be weakly useful; I don’t have very much evidence to draw from there. Of my two current very-close relationships, I know next to nothing about the sex life of the person I’m closer to, and a minor to moderate amount about the other person’s sex life, which does have an observably stronger effect than having a similar amount of information about, say, a person’s hobbies, but seems to be about on par with knowing about another aspect of someone’s identity.
Even before reading this, I was going to say that I think that my monogamous partner and I have a strong enough relationship that we could become poly if we wanted without the expectation that our relationship would dissolve. However, we strongly prefer our low-drama relationship to the high-drama situations in which poly friends seem to thrive. The parent just confirms this judgment.
The biggest disadvantage of poly I perceive is that it increases the total drama in your life. If you’re monogamous, then so long as things are good between you and your one partner, you’re good. If you’re poly, drama can come into your life via problems with any of your partners, or if you or they have problems with any of their partners.
On the up side, with poly you can just focus your time on attention on the relationship that isn’t dysfunctional at any given time. In that way of looking at it a monogamous relationship constitutes a single point of failure. Of course saying no to ‘drama’ takes a lot of maturity and strong boundaries to master.
In general I’ve found that it’s the relationship that isn’t going right that most needs time and attention. Of course it helps a lot that you can draw strength from other partners during that time, but this is a role that friends can also fulfil.
In my experience, you can say no to drama all you like, but sometimes it comes around anyway, and to care for those you love sometimes you just have to deal with it!
“Deal with” is not necessarily equal to “get involved in”, though. The “saying no” in this case would be saying no to the latter, rather than the former.
The only sure-fire way I know of to deal with a romantic partner intent on involving me in drama is to sever the romantic relationship. For me, that works—after a few false starts, I’m with a girl who always cooperates in tracing our rare disagreements back to a root difference in either factual beliefs or values, and resolves it with wikipedia or compromises, respectively. But my approach strikes some people as unrealistically draconian.
Is there a more subtle set of skills than “only become involved with rational people?”
Yes. ;-)
If you’re seriously interested in learning them, I suggest David Deida’s book “Way of The Superior Man” as a conceptual primer, and the AMP “inner game” video series as practical illustration and coaching. Note, however, that the skills in question are more about maintaining your own emotional state and connection to your partner, than about getting anybody else to behave in a certain way.
As the AMP people point out, men’s response to drama is often to close themselves off from their caring, in order not to get sucked in to emotional turmoil—but this is just as bad for the relationship as it is to get sucked in or to give up/give in. Their training approach is to make it possible for you to stay open and connected, without being sucked in, giving up, or closing off.
It is not easy, but it is very rewarding. Initially, the tough part is that you go through a period of getting more drama in your relationship, because as your partner realizes it’s “safe” to express things emotionally, she may increase her expressiveness. I personally went through a rather trying period where my wife kept exceeding my then-current level of skills. ;-)
However, once you really “get it”, then what happens is that it’s like a storm that breaks over you and then goes calm, and there’s much more connection and passion there than there was in the flat, no-drama-at-all state, where I was trying to control situations to prevent drama from arising in the first place.
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is, to use a more colloquial phrase, “don’t stick your dick in crazy,” which is just another phrasing of your suggested approach. If there’s a better way to handle the drama problem, I haven’t found it.
I’m unsure of all the various types of drama that folks may be referring to, but by being more accepting and comfortable with various behaviors, one can decrease the (emergence of) drama in their life.
The question is then, which situations are you comfortable with, able to change to be comfortable with, and willing to change to be comfortable with? I don’t mean to imply that saying “no” on the third question is necessarily bad in any way.
I highly recommend your method, and don’t know of another method that I find palatable.
Sometimes. Sometimes time and attention is exactly what it doesn’t need.
It depends somewhat on what we mean by ‘drama’ and on how experienced you are at handling emotional situations in a healthy way.
Edit: What pjeby said.
It seems like many polyamorous couples construct complex systems of rules to deal with the inherent complexity of their relationships. My girlfriend and I have one rule: no drama allowed. We crush drama. Rather, we proactively take steps against drama, by not putting ourselves in dramatic situations and letting potential partners know that this is our rule and that we really don’t tolerate drama.
Having never been in a romantic relationship myself, would you be so kind as to explain what “drama” means in this context?
I think drama in this context is just the tendency for people who spend a great deal of time together to discover each other’s flaws and become annoyed by them, and to then blow the resulting conflicts out of proportion to the original complaint or disagreement.
It’s generally exacerbated by one or both partners being unskilled at resolving conflicts; minor problems escalate because of, e.g., passive-aggressiveness, anger, avoidance, or ultimatum-setting.
That does not explain why “drama” is more likely in a sexual relationship than among people sharing the same office or among roommates.
Sex is good at creating “drama” because it opens emotional connections: the beliefs and behaviors of one’s lover become terribly signficant to one. Women (or more precisely, women still in their child-bearing years) are particularly apt to have strong emotional reactions to changes in the relationship and the behavior, beliefs and moods of their lover.
A lover is likely to do something irrational or desperate in response to a change or perceived change in the relationship with a loved one for the same reason that a person is likely to do something irrational or desperate when faced with any other life change that has great emotional significance, like the prospect of losing one’s housing, winning the lottery or getting charged with a serious crime.
BTW, this tendency for the woman in a heterosexual relationship to attach strong emotional signficance to the relationship and the man is by far my favorite part of sex and sexual relationships: it means that she will be eager to learn all there is to know about me, and it means that she will feel hurt whenever I hurt and feel happy whenever something good happens to me. Adding to one’s social environment another person who really cares deeply about one is a very rare and valuable thing, and sex (at least for a straight man) is by far the most reliable way for an adult—well, at least a straight male adult—to achieve that.
Some men are prone to this, too, and now that the pattern has been pointed out, I recognize it both as something that I’m prone to and something that I value in people who I’m close to. In fact, this may be one of the main factors that determines whether a relationship feels romantic or not, regardless of sex.
Interesting since you have described yourself in these pages as “moderately-to-strongly asexual” and since the only men with whom the adults in my experience have very strong emotional connections with are kinfolk and the men they have had sex with. Well, actually, my first girlfriend cared a heck of a lot about a gay man she used to work with, but that is the only exception that comes to mind right now among my pretty limited social networks past and present. Actually one more: one of the women in my current circle has a very strong connection with a gay man—but the man has very high relative social status (practicing physician worth millions) and takes her on pleasure trips all around the world—and at her age, travel to exotic or fashionable destinations is a bigger pleasure than sex or anything else. Some of the women I know and have known have very caring friendships with other women, which I why I used the word “men” rather than “adult” in my first sentence.
In my experience, just my engaging a woman in a serious sincere ongoing discussion (during dates) about whether she should have sex with me has been enough cause the emotional bonding process (in which what happens to me causes her to feel happiness or pain) to progress much further than it ever has with all but one or so of my platonic friends.
So, Adelene, given what you have disclosed about yourself on these pages in the past, I am curious to what degree sex or serious sincere ongoing discussions about sex are necessary for you to start really caring about someone you are not related to.
Having sex seems to be moderately negatively correlated, for me, but that seems to be more of an artifact of my confusion regarding sexual relationships before I figured out that I’m asexual than anything having to do with the act itself.
Talking about the fact that I’m asexual is weakly positively correlated, but not observably causative: If I don’t feel comfortable enough around someone to be able to talk to them about that aspect of myself, it’s nearly guaranteed that I won’t bond with them (possible exception: if someone was very prudish, but we otherwise got along well, I would probably refrain from talking about the subject but would not count that against them if they weren’t aggressively judgmental about others’ sex lives) but the fact that I do feel comfortable telling them about that does not imply that we’re likely to bond. Someone’s reaction to finding out that I’m asexual can have a large effect on my subsequent relationship with them, but that carries similar weight to the effect of their reaction to learning other important facts about my personal identity, such as that I’m autistic—and the wrong kind of interest can be just as damaging as a negative reaction.
The other party in a relationship being willing to talk about their sex life is not necessary, but may be weakly useful; I don’t have very much evidence to draw from there. Of my two current very-close relationships, I know next to nothing about the sex life of the person I’m closer to, and a minor to moderate amount about the other person’s sex life, which does have an observably stronger effect than having a similar amount of information about, say, a person’s hobbies, but seems to be about on par with knowing about another aspect of someone’s identity.
Even before reading this, I was going to say that I think that my monogamous partner and I have a strong enough relationship that we could become poly if we wanted without the expectation that our relationship would dissolve. However, we strongly prefer our low-drama relationship to the high-drama situations in which poly friends seem to thrive. The parent just confirms this judgment.