Do you have differing levels of commitment with different partners? How often does jealousy come up, and how did you deal with it? What led you to try out polyamory? Has anyone started from a monogamous relationship and gone polyamorous? Anything else you think is interesting about your relationship? Give me the boring logistic details of your relationships, please!
I am currently without a primary so I'll discussed how it used to work in the past and how it works now. The first thing that I have to say is that polyamory requires communication. Any it is at times overwhelming and that is okay. Our former system of my primary and I is that we would talk openly about all of our relationships. It was impossible to believe that if I came home from dealing with a stressful, or joyous, or trying part of my relationship with someone else that it wasn't going to effect my partner. Being able to talk about it was crucial. We became primary with one another when we were dating other people. That isn't to say that we were exclusive, but we lived together and shared a lot of the common problems of any couple living together. We also dealt with jealousy and insecurity like in every other relationship. We spend our "family" life together. If there was a situation that called for gathering like we were family then we would spend that time together, the two of us. We did spend a good deal of time talking and working through what polyamory meant in our relationship, and tried to not bring in people that wouldn't or couldn't agree to that. Is poly for everyone? No.
Did we make it work? Yeah, I think so.
Are we still together since I talked about everything in past tense? No. It wasn't really a fault in the relationship's structure, just that we grew distant and agreed that the distance wasn't something we could overcome.
How did being polygamous effect your relationships with your "secondaries?" (is that the right term?) Were those relationships purely sexual? Or did you also make emotional connections with those people? And, like, did these other relationships feel "lesser," I guess? Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I'm really curious.
Hmm, I'm stuck in polypurgatory. I blew too much money trying to move to Detroit. So now I have to get help from my Mom. She doesn't want me to wander away until I finish school. I also have had to give up on the dream that I can support a woman or even a boyfriend. I could probably afford to be a lesbian, once I find a good job. For now I am dating someone who can take care of me. I am a really good secondary. I dated a guy who wanted to live with me, and sleep around, AND not have any of us sleep around. This and his other bullshit, lead to him spreading the herp. So as much as I would like an island of broken polys, it is a distant dream. I do have a primary now, who treats me really well. He is good at sex, but he is so vanilla. Super easy to make happy. He isn't a creep, who really wants me to bring home other girls. We disagree about politics, but we are both super passive and chill. Things are hunky dory. Except the scheduling.... He is so nice in fact, that he is raising his ex girlfriend's son. She after a year wont let him meet me. Really fucked up situation. Not really sure what I did to deserve this. He raises her son and works full time. I clean their house on weekends. She has a baby, with a guy ten years younger than my boyfriend, and collects public aid. I think anyone who wasn't poly, would have left the poor guy. Sorry it is not that exciting, right now.
I identify more as ethically nonmonogamous than polyamorous, and am a big fan of the notion of relationship anarchy. This means I do not have, nor do I want to have a "primary" partner in terms of a hierarchical relationship structure. This also means the delineation between relationships is far more fuzzy for me, and labels for said relationships is usually kind of pointless. I have people I consider to just be friends with whom there is sexual contact, and there are people with whom I have strong emotional bonds, but no sexual or romantic attraction. This is not to say that I don't have deep, intense, committed bonds, it's just that that said bonds don't have specific goals or intentions outside of honesty and enjoyment of shared company. A large part of my attraction to this path is the lack of pre-scripted expectations for relationships. There are no labels that have deep cultural ties and expected behaviors, so each relationship follows it's own course. This is done mostly by attempting to be completely open and honest about one's feelings, both with one's partners and with one's self. Knowing and exploring your boundaries and limitations is a big part of being poly or non-monogamous for me. And being able to express these boundaries with the people in your life is a skill that can take time to learn, I'm still working on it myself and have been actively identifying this way for about seven years. As for how my relationships function, I am seeing multiple people at the moment, though none are that serious. All are aware of each other, and some know each other outside of my connection with them. There are no established rules or expectations outside of honesty and openness, and even things like how much time is spent with each one in a given week/month is often very fluid. I religiously use Google calendar to keep up with my schedule, as dating/poly is one of many things that take up my time. It can be complicated at times, but it feels far more natural to me than monogamy ever did. And I recommend that if one tries it, that they focus on honesty and communication above all else.