Sam Hartman

Yesterday was the five year anniversary of mrw42 and my commitment to spend our lives together. Five years ago we were in a hotel in Austin at the end of a visit to friends there. Margaret knew that I was looking at making some changes in my relationships; she was concerned about what I wanted to do. She was delighted to learn that I'd realized I always wanted her and my life and I was overjoyed to learn that she left the same way. Shortly before we had to leave Austin, we discussed when we wanted to actually make a commitment to each other. There's no time like the present and lacking any reason to delay, we made a commitment then. She'd already talked to Kevin about how she felt and about the possibility of making a commitment. We didn't have much time to celebrate: Margaret needed to catch a plane for a business trip and I was staying in Austin. I spent the rest of the day bubbling over with joy inside while trying to focus on a difficult conversation with a friend and later on designing some extensions to IPsec.

That began (or perhaps continued) what has been a five-year journey of wonder and exploration. We worked to understand what our commitment meant to each other and then braced ourselves for the reactions of others. For the most part the reaction of our friends and loved ones started a wonderful trend: when you approach those you care about with happiness and joy, they reflect it back! We were nervous about how people would take things, but for the most part people had a few questions and then shared our happiness and joy. Not everyone has been comfortable with our relationship, but things have gone much more smoothely than expected.

A year later we were ready to stand in front of our friends and profess our love and commitment to each other. Again, we were nervous about how tha would go. We spent a lot of time exploring what it meant to us, and comparing it to other things. That was valuable for us, but it was yet another example that for the most part, openness, honesty and happiness works.

A year later our relationship continued to grow as we decided to have a baby together. Having Zoe and having Margaret as the mother of my child are two of the best things in my life.

For me, these five years have been an important growing experience as I've learned what it's been like to be part of a family, to be a father and to support your lovers through their life. Especially recently, I am appreciating how wonderful it is to have Margaret as a friend. I've always known that for myself, but over the last year I've gotten to watch her as she's been a wonderful friend to other people she cares deeply about. That's given me a new appreciation for how lucky I am!

Things have been rough at times. There's been a lot to learn and a lot to adjust to. I'm still struggling to figure out what I want and how to balance time. However, right now, I couldn't be happier. Throughout our relationship I've had the kind of deep love that truly allows people to grow beyond themselves. I look forward to the years to come.

It's unusual to have a three-parent family. In the past when I've thought about this I've focused on things inside the family. However since Zoe's birth I've been examining how our family interacts with the outside—doctors, friends, the government, etc. As I was starting to write this entry I was thinking about the problems we have run into and are likely to run into. However as I began to plan what I wanted to say I realized that things have worked out much better than I expected and that I'm incredibly happy. We keep running into cases where people just accept us as who we claim to be. Many friends writing back messages of congratulations after Zoe was born made it clear that they were happy for all of this. On one hand, it doesn't take much to be inclusive in a note of congratulations. On the other hand even in several cases where I don't think the people involved were familiar with what has been going on with my family, it was clear they were quite sincere. I really appreciate it when people just accept what's going on. We've received similarly good responses from Zoe's doctor. He was a bit confused who everyone was when we all showed up, he asked, and he has been happy to treat us as a family of three parents and was very supportive when he needed to give us a referral to a specialist. The hospital staff were also supportive.

Unfortunately we've run into a number of situations where laws and policies get in the way. You can only list two parents on a birth certificate. In terms of having legal guardians, a kid can only have two parents. None of this is surprising. However it is still painful to have to pick someone as the odd person out. It also means that we'll have to have significant complexity going forward to make sure that if a question arises about who can take Zoe out of school or who can get medical care for her, we have the necessary legal instruments in place.

We had a particularly painful situation at the hospital. The mother and one other person are allowed to check the baby out of the nursery or be with her while they were doing tests and examinations. They would not allow both Kevin and I to be with Zoe. I understand how this policy developed and that there is significant concern about making sure babies are not taken by unauthorized parties.

So far, I at least have not run into anyone other than my parents who has been particularly judgmental about our family. My parents are coming along nicely though; my mom likes to be a grandmother. I'm sure that I know people who are confused or disapprove. However there seem to be fewer than I expected and many who do disapprove seem willing to let me live my own life.

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.

A couple weeks ago, I was reading an LJ entry about the importance of being sensitive when seeking support from a mutual friend of both parties in a troubled romantic relationship. The entry then went on to describe how the situation is particularly difficult when the mutual friend is one member of a primary couple and the romantic trouble is between another primary and that primary's secondary. I was surprised at how negatively I viewed parts of the commentary. I was particularly surprised because if I removed the description of primary/secondary dynamics and just read it as a description of why it is particularly difficult when you are drawing on your lover's other lover for support with romance difficulties, I completely agreed with what was said.

I know that I don't like the term secondary, but I didn't realize that I had that strong of a reaction. I'll admit that fully 50% of my problem with the term was a initial misunderstanding about what the poly community means by secondary relationship. However even as I have grown to understand what is meant, I've had a deep-seated negative reaction. I think I'd feel more comfortable being described as someone's fuckbuddy than as someone's secondary. I don't particularly see myself in a relationship based on sex without emotional connection, but if I were, fuckbuddy is at least starkly accurate. I think that if most people from the poly community considered my relationship with Margaret, they would describe me as her secondary. However the term (and that way of thinking about things) doesn't suit either of us. As I began to consider my reaction I noticed the following link in the original entry to a site on being a secondary. That page is wonderful both because it does an excellent job of showing the reasonableness of core concepts behind a secondary relationship and showing why I find the term so problematic. The term secondary relationship emphasizes the limitations rather than the nature of the relationship. This is bad for the secondary because it is too easy to think of yourself as less important and to trap yourself into the belief that you and your needs don't matter. This is bad for any primary partners because it focuses so much on safety through boundaries that it is easy to forget the importance of compromise and love. If you're trying to sell a loving relationship, and you find you need to write a Bill of Rights expressing basic human dignity and respect in terms of your relationship concept, you need to rethink your marketing and message control. Terminology does matter and it influences how people think about things.

This introspection was useful to me for another reason. I can completely understand the appeal of the concept behind secondary relationships even if I don't like the term. A lot of what I do even fits within that concept. However for myself, I cannot reconcile hard boundaries like the idea that if it becomes necessary to choose between the primary and secondary then you choose the primary with my concept of building a loving relationship. Conflict is hard, but I have not found it improved by hard boundaries. I can see commitments like always agreeing to support your family and I can see how such commitments could come very close to being these hard boundaries. There is a key difference though that I'm still working through. Anyway, this was a wonderful introspective experience into what I'm looking for and how I'm going to view my relationships with others.

Time management for poly relationships is hard. Everyone who has thought about being involved with multiple people realizes this; it may be the single thing the poly community can actually agree on. I thought I knew what that meant and I thought I was doing a reasonable job. On the immediate level of balancing time and actually seeing people I think I was.

Recently I've been thinking about long-term commitments—about what I want going forward and about what relationships make sense. I guess one approach might be to avoid long-term commitment: spend time on each relationship and allow the priorities to float as they will. If a relationship doesn't seem to get enough time then perhaps it should fade away. Perhaps but that approach is not for me. I don't see how you would build families under such an approach nor how you would work through hard times in a relationship. So long-term commitment is desirable. Clearly there are a finite and small number of commitments you can have just as
there are a finite small number of relationships you can be in. So again a time and resource management problem arises.

I've been pondering how to manage this issue. Interestingly, I have not really wanted to do a bunch of research into how others have solved the problem. I may do that now, but I felt it important to find my own solution first. The results have been painful. First, I'll take a look at how this works in a sort of idealized model of a monogamous relationship. Typically people spend some period of time trying to see how compatible they are. Dating serves an important winnowing function: is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with? At least if you are looking for a life partner, you eventually move on to something like engagement or move on to another relationship.

Of course there is some of the same going on in a poly relationship. It's always possible to find out that you cannot stand someone you're dating. But things are more complicated. You can
determine that the relationship has limits: you might find that you would never want to form a family with someone. Just because there are limits doesn't mean that the relationship should end. Instead I find I'm faced with painful decisions. I need to balance commitments based on comparisons against existing and potential future relationships. This is good for us is no longer sufficient reason to commit to something; it is impossible to avoid comparing to other priorities. For me this has been very painful because there are some ways in which I am not able to just treat each relationship as its own experience.

Inherently, there is going to be a lot of getting close to people, and making tough decisions about how long things should last and about balancing an ever decreasing set of resources. But you cannot let the possibility of future pain limit how close you get to people. Doing so would make it impossible to discover exactly the sorts of relationships I'm looking for. So, I'm faced with
a life of growing as close to people as I can only to find that there is a probability of painful decisions and realizations at the end. I think this is the point where a lot of people would admit that time management really is too hard and perhaps a less painful lifestyle is in order. That's just not me: I could not give up the ability to continue to grow close and to love.