hartmans | Entries tagged with mrw-commitment

Saturday, Margaret and I acknowledged our commitment in front of our friends. I hope to write more later, although in truth, it may not happen, so I thought I'd at least set down a brief note. It was wonderful. We suspected this might be the case, but publicly stating a commitment does seem to make it more real. Of course, putting this together also makes it clear that we have nothing we're trying to hide and gave people a chance to see whether it seemed like things are working out.

There were so many wonderful things yesterday. I liked getting so many important people who have touched my life together and letting them meet and interact with each other. That was such a wonderful gift to a wonderful event.

A year ago today, I made a commitment to share my life with Margaret. I would have expected such an event to be heavily planned. It wasn't. We'd both been thinking about how important our relationship was. Margaret had wanted to explore some form of long-term commitment for a while, but I was still trying to figure out what I wanted. Late in November I realized that I was ready for a long term commitment. We didn't get a chance to discuss in detail what we wanted until our December Austin trip. The night of the second we discussed where we were headed. Then, shortly before leaving the third, we asked ourselves whether there was any thing we still needed to consider or think through before making the commitment. There wasn't so we agreed to share our lives. We were ready and so we took the step. The following year has been the happiest of my life.

Over the following month, we learned how to express the meaning of our commitment to ourselves. That month was difficult as we tried to explain our relationship to others. Our travel schedule and busy lives kept us apart for much of December which was difficult. But as December flowed into January, we continued to realize that we had made the right decision and that we had found joy and happiness together.

For me, this has been one of the best things that ever could happen.

Margaret and I picked up rings yesterday. I'm told they are shiny. They seem to have come out well, but now we have to wait until December before wearing them. Lately our focus on the event has been on event planning details: choosing invitations, getting details arranged, thinking about what we want to say. I guess I could and should write some about what we want to sa, but the rest of it has been the sort of typical things people go through when planning any sort of important event. I'm enjoying it.

Current Mood: cheerful

It's been a while since I've written about what is going on. By some counts I haven't done so since February. Things are going very well; I continue to be as happy as I've ever been. One really exciting bit of news is that Margaret and I have decided to celebrate our commitment to each other with our close friends and family this December. We are not making any new commitments, but we are sharing and affirming our existing commitments. This is turning out to be one part formal event planning, one part figuring out what symbols to use to help people understand and one part marketing/message control. O, yeah, with joy, excitement, nervousness and worry thrown in. We finally got done telling all the people we needed to tell before discussing it in public. Here are two previously locked entries on the subject:

In other life news, work is hugely busy, but is quite enjoyable. I'm liking my new boss a lot. However he understands my job more than my previous boss and thus asks me to do things. This is good except that I am hugely over committed and need to engage in load shedding over the next months.

In my personal life, I'm having success meeting new people and building relationships. My last couple of parties have been enjoyable for those who attended. The focus of those who attend has shifted somewhat. I miss some of my old friends but also am happy with the people I am finding time to see.

In more local news, this weekend was wonderful. It started Thursday night. Margaret and I went to choose rings and to confirm our selection of a venue. Friday had a minor interruption of work. I worked a normal length day, but it was uneventful. I got home and got together with bouncingleaf for a delightful evening. The next morning, Margaret and I finished dealing with the first round of mailings to tell people about our event. Then, we got together with chardin and eirl who were in town. We had a great fun-filled day.

Current Mood: happy

In planning an event to acknowledge our commitment, Margaret and I are constantly running up against difficult decisions trying to create an accurate perception of the importance of the event and of our relationship. In the last post, I discussed what we were trying to accomplish at a high level. Here, I'd like to muse for a bit about the more specific goals. People need to feel that the event is important enough that they are willing to fly across the country to attend. On the other hand, I want the primary focus of the event to be casual interaction between friends. Over the years, I've found that sort of interaction is how you build and maintain strong communities of caring friends: create a space where people come and can interact with each other in a comfortable setting; provide them a few focuses of commonality; and a community will begin to grow.

lasofia was the first person I knew who intentionally did this. I know for me and I think for Margaret that this has been an important
part of how I got to where I am today and how I had the necessary support to try something as risky (and rewarding) as getting involved with Margaret. So, while I realize that people from around the country are not going to develop friendships in an evening, at least as a symbolic component, I want this casual interaction to be an important focus of the event. Of course, one of the most powerful ways of signaling importance is to create formality or ceremony. That creates an apparent although hopefully manageable conflict with casual interaction. Another potentially conflicting goal is the desire for people to walk away thinking that the event meets their expectations; we don't just want people to feel that they have attended a party. Probably I'm looking for something more like, they feel that they have met others who are important to Margaret and me and have helped us celebrate our lives together.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we don't want to give the incorrect impression we're getting
married. However, we don't want to downplay the importance of the event or of our commitment to each other. There are a lot of factors that could create the impression that our relationship is not as important as a marriage. We're not living together or forming a family. However the commitments we do have are as important as a marriage. Finding a way to make this clear has been challenging. That part is hard to explain even to a lot of people from the poly community. My relationship with Margaret seems to follow the typical secondary relationship model on the surface. Besides both of us disliking the term, it typically implies that the secondary relationship is somehow less than a primary relationship. Les can mean things like will be selected against in a resource conflict. The poly community seems to understand the concept of multiple primary relationships although the examples I've seen suggest that's more about a group of people living
together than what Margaret and I are talking about. Of course, there is no recognized lexicon: I've seen a discussion of tertiary relationships today (whatever they are) and definitions of both primary and secondary relationships that fit what Margaret and I are doing.

On top of everything else there is a desire not to over-share or to spend time telling people details they're not interested in or don't want to know. I think all of this is possible to balance in an explanation; I think we can even do it. However it has proven tricky to think about and consider.

In December of 2005, Margaret and I made
a lasting commitment to each other. Approaching a year later, we
finally understand what that means well enough to explain it to
others, to ask our friends to support us and to publicly acknowledge
it. We're going to do that this December. I've decided to try and
write about this because we haven't found much to draw on when looking
for other examples of what we're trying to do. I think the world
would be a better place if people involved in non-traditional
relationships shared their experience. Then, those contemplating
doing something similar could go into the experience with more
information both about parts that worked for people and about the
risks and challenges.

So, what are we trying to do? We want to
publicly acknowledge our commitment, ask our friends to support us,
and have a celebration. Almost inevitably any discussion of this
quickly turns to what it isn't. Why is there a focus on what it
isn't? I think because there are a lot of wrong ideas that people
could come away with: they might think that Margaret and Kevin are
having trouble or that I am no longer looking for life partners. I
also think people struggle to find metaphors that allow them to
understand what we're doing in terms of something they are familiar
with. It's easy to latch on to the idea of life-long commitment and
conclude that Margaret and I are getting married. We're not. However
that does seem to be the closest metaphor, and even Margaret and I
find we're drawing from the symbology and shared understanding of
marriage. We've tried other starting points: as an example, we've
tried describing this as something closer to engagement except more
permanent. At least for me, that really didn't work. I've found
relying on marriage as a metaphor to be a bit frightening. It's
something a lot of people (including me) view as sacred. so, there's
a question of whether what we're doing is important enough to be
associated with marriage, or whether we are somehow misusing those sacred symbols.

But whatever starting point we choose to try and describe this to
people, we are doing something different so we need to help people
understand the differences between what is actually going on and the
initial starting point. Will people end up understanding the
important parts? Will they end up thinking we are crazy or freaks?
There's also the question of what to do about the people who will
inevitably think what we are doing is wrong. This ends up with a long
discussion of the positive and negative effects of social norms and
what you should think about before going against these norms. I may
come back to that in a future entry. How much energy is it reasonable
to expect people to put into understanding your confusing, complicated
non-traditional life?

Another huge question is whether people
will understand how important this is to us. One of the challenges in
putting together this event will be correctly conveying the importance
so that people will come and so that they will approach it with the
right frame of mind. However we also want them to walk away feeling
that we've done something that matches that level of importance. It
would be easier to do that if we were getting married because people have a good understanding of the importance of marriage. Even if the ceremony is casual, people understand it is important to the participants. But for the
actual event, we're going to be creating something new. We don't want
something religious. Hopefully we will come up with something that
works for us and for our friends.

I think that sets the stage for
what we're trying to accomplish and for why it is challenging and for
a lot of the questions that have been going through our minds. Don't
forget that on top of this, there is the normal event planning
questions: how much should we spend, where should we hold it, who
should be invited, how formal? At one level, I'm really happy that
I'm doing this. At another, I wonder what I've gotten myself into.