Coming out
Nov. 12th, 2015 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI missed National (nation of internet?) Coming Out Day, partly because I was busy, and partly because it wasn't the right time to make this post.
There's an archetypal story about what Coming Out means, and I think this story or something like is behind the idea of National Coming Out Day. The idea is that the person goes to their parents and says, "Mum, Dad, I have something to tell you: I'm gay". And the parents react, either positively (plenty of glurge stories around the internet where they say something supportive like "we'll always love and support you no matter what" or "we were wondering when you'd tell us"), or negatively. And either way, it's done, the person is officially Out.
There are several problems with this. It assumes that everybody has exactly two heterosexual parents who are currently in a relationship with eachother, and the kind of relationship with said parents where it's important that they know your sexual orientation, but not the kind where that would come up in casual conversation rather than having to be a big announcement. And it assumes that people have a fixed, even innate, sexual orientation, usually something that can be described with a single word, and once they've decided what that is, that's their identity fixed for the rest of time. I think the biggest problem with the story is that even where all the other assumptions are valid, it isn't realistic to define Out or Closeted as a binary. Pretty much everybody I know who belongs to any kind of gender or sexual minority is more out in some areas of their life than others. Even people who are massively open about who they are, well, society makes heteronormative assumptions, so unless you tell every single person you interact with, hi, I'm $identity, there will be people who think you're straight and cis and binary gendered and conduct your relationships according to the standard pattern.
Recently came across on Tumblr one of those Ian McKellen being adorable gifsets that Tumblr is so good for. Transcript:
I happened to see some grumpy straight binary people on FB complaining about think pieces about experiences of homophobic and gender policing microaggressions. They said something like, why do these people always have to go on about their gender or sexuality, why can't they just get on with life without playing identity politics and making a big deal out of labels? Well, the answer is because IME every time you don't explicitly state that you're different from the default, people will assume you're straight and cis and all the rest. And sometimes that's ok, I don't in fact think that being bi is the most important fact about my life, if a random shop assistant making small talk assumes I'm straight, that's not a big deal. But what about people I interact with repeatedly, work colleagues, people at synagogue, readers of my blogs I don't otherwise know particularly well? I don't have a neutral choice, I either have to hide some part of my life, or I have to Come Out at some point. (People who don't read / pass as straight at all will have very different experiences from me, of course, but National Coming Out Day isn't really targeted at them either.)
Honestly, even with specific people I haven't found Coming Out to be a one-time, binary thing. People forget, or they don't really take in the implications of what you told them, and you find yourself having to remind them that you're Queer. And I can understand how that comes across as always going on about your identity, but there's such a huge gravitational pull towards re-closeting yourself if you don't do that. I never said to my parents, "Mum, Dad, I have something to tell you: I'm bisexual". Instead I told them I was in a relationship with a woman (having previously dated a male partner so they weren't too likely to assume I was a lesbian). And they reacted pretty well, on the whole, they said the right things about loving and supporting me, but they were also a bit bemused (this was the 90s and there just wasn't that much information available unless you went looking for it). But then there was a long awkward phase where they didn't really take my girlfriend seriously as a partner, and only gradually got used to the idea that I'm bi. Which I'm not saying to criticize them at all, I am really proud and grateful for how well my parents handled the information, even though it was a pretty new concept to them. There was a similar period of uncertainty, awkwardness and eventual adjustment when I told them I was engaged to my male partner, by the way, so it's not that they were homophobic, just that telling your parents some life-changing new information isn't as simple as media Coming Out stories.
These days Coming Out isn't just about sitting down and having a conversation with your parents; people make social media announcements. And again, that runs into the problem of, if you don't make a big announcement you are closeted by default as people will assume, but if you do, you're over-focusing on some aspect of your identity, that in our brave new world of happy acceptance maybe shouldn't need to be a big deal. A couple of well-known columnists recently came out as genderqueer, and wrote some rather poignant essays: Laurie Penny on How to be a genderqueer feminist and Jack Monroe asks, Please don't call me a girl.
So with that preamble, I too, a much lesser writer than Penny or Monroe, have something to tell you: I am polyamorous. That is to say, I'm currently in romantic relationships with several different people, all of whom know about eachother and are completely happy and supportive. I don't think this is likely to be a surprise to most of my readers; I've not been making huge efforts to keep it a secret, and I'm sure many of you whom I haven't told directly will have found it easy enough to read between the lines. But this is the first time I've actually said the sentence, I'm poly, on my public blog. And part of why I'm saying it now is that it's not only a fact about my philosophy of relationship, and I'm not even sure it's a fact about my identity at all, poly is more a thing I do than who I am. It's also a fact about my life and the people who are important to me.
A year ago I became part of a quad, four people who are in relationships with eachother in various combinations. And it's been a completely wonderful year, full of new experiences, and we're all really hopeful that this can be a long-term, potentially a committed thing. When I was poly in the sense that I had various shapes of romantic-ish connections alongside my primary relationship, it didn't matter so much, partly because I don't identify as poly as such. People knew who I loved and who I was close to, and that was great, and it wasn't really anybody's business but the people involved exactly what form those loving relationships took. Now that I'm part of a quad, it feels like a different situation. Unlike with being bi, it's not that people need to know this fact about me and who I am, it's that I want people to know whom I love and the relationship structure I'm in. Every time in the past year I've referred to, or even introduced, my partners as "my friend" instead of "my partner" I've cringed internally; it's like going back 20 years and playing the pronoun game because I wasn't sure how safe it was to come out.
The thing about coming out about relationship structures rather than identities is that you're telling other people's secrets. The other three people in the quad needed to be free to make their own decisions about when and what to tell their respective parents. I told my own parents as soon as I was reasonably confident that the relationship was stable and not just a passing fling, and as when I told them I was dating a woman, they said supportive things and didn't entirely understand what I meant and have been slowly coming to terms with the idea that I'm in this multi-person relationship network instead of the dyad they expected when I got married. But, well, four people have a lot of parents between them, and part of why I missed National Coming Out Day was I didn't want to put anything on the internet until all the parents had been informed directly.
And even now I've made this post, I haven't just flipped the switch to being Out instead of Closeted. It's not that hard to connect this journal to my wallet name if you go digging, but I hope that a cursory web search on my wallet name isn't going to find this pseudonymous blog. I'm not out at work and I have no immediate plans to be; I'll carry on saying "spending some time with... friends" when people ask me about my plans for the weekend. And I'm not fully out within the Jewish community (though I'm out to individual Jewish people including obviously my parents), and both those things mean that I'm not likely any time soon to mention poly on Facebook.
In some ways being out about poly feels more scary than telling people I'm bi. That's partly because I've been lucky that I've experienced relatively little homophobia or biphobia. And I generally hang out with liberal tolerant types who at worst accept the culturally prevalent idea that gay people are just like "us" except that they happen to be attracted to the same gender. Poly in that sense is less "normal"; there are many people who generally see themselves as non-judgemental but have no paradigm at all for multiple or multi-person relationships other than having affairs and deceiving or cheating on one's (singular) partner. Even some LGBT campaigners and activists are so fixated on the assimilationist paradigm of "just like heteronormative dyadic relationships" that they are eager to distance themselves from any kind of poly or open relationship situation. But at the same time, although it's harder to tell people about my relationships with several people than it is to tell them about my (past) relationships with women, it still feels like it's my choices that are being disapproved of, not that I'm being oppressed because of something I just can't change about myself.
Anyway, I'm very happy and in love, that's the other thing I wanted to say, aside from all this political and angsty stuff. It's been a wonderful amazing year, in so many ways.
Please feel free to ask questions; I personally don't mind being a resource if you've not had much exposure to poly relationships before now. As you can see from this post, I'm being a bit cagey about the actual identities of my partners, but if you ask me general questions that I can answer without disrupting anyone else's privacy, I'll do my best.
There's an archetypal story about what Coming Out means, and I think this story or something like is behind the idea of National Coming Out Day. The idea is that the person goes to their parents and says, "Mum, Dad, I have something to tell you: I'm gay". And the parents react, either positively (plenty of glurge stories around the internet where they say something supportive like "we'll always love and support you no matter what" or "we were wondering when you'd tell us"), or negatively. And either way, it's done, the person is officially Out.
There are several problems with this. It assumes that everybody has exactly two heterosexual parents who are currently in a relationship with eachother, and the kind of relationship with said parents where it's important that they know your sexual orientation, but not the kind where that would come up in casual conversation rather than having to be a big announcement. And it assumes that people have a fixed, even innate, sexual orientation, usually something that can be described with a single word, and once they've decided what that is, that's their identity fixed for the rest of time. I think the biggest problem with the story is that even where all the other assumptions are valid, it isn't realistic to define Out or Closeted as a binary. Pretty much everybody I know who belongs to any kind of gender or sexual minority is more out in some areas of their life than others. Even people who are massively open about who they are, well, society makes heteronormative assumptions, so unless you tell every single person you interact with, hi, I'm $identity, there will be people who think you're straight and cis and binary gendered and conduct your relationships according to the standard pattern.
Recently came across on Tumblr one of those Ian McKellen being adorable gifsets that Tumblr is so good for. Transcript:
Sometimes I'm in a cab, there's a driver about my age, and he might say: "Have you got any grandchildren, Ian?" And I think: "Do I have to start telling him that I'm gay, and at the age when I might have become a parent, it was illegal to be gay?" So I make a decision in the back of a car, aged 76: "Am I going to have to come out to this stranger?" And of course sometimes I say: "No mate, I'm gay!" And he says: "Well, so am I!" The world has changed so much for the better.I mean, I'm wary of the It gets better narrative too, because yes, rich famous white gay men can be open about their sexuality and their relationships and that genuinely is great, but there are still an awful lot of people suffering violence and hatred because of their gender expression or sexuality. The thing is, even in this better world, even for the people for whom coming out is largely a positive experience, and I include myself in that category, it's not a one time thing, it's a constant ongoing calculation all the time.
I happened to see some grumpy straight binary people on FB complaining about think pieces about experiences of homophobic and gender policing microaggressions. They said something like, why do these people always have to go on about their gender or sexuality, why can't they just get on with life without playing identity politics and making a big deal out of labels? Well, the answer is because IME every time you don't explicitly state that you're different from the default, people will assume you're straight and cis and all the rest. And sometimes that's ok, I don't in fact think that being bi is the most important fact about my life, if a random shop assistant making small talk assumes I'm straight, that's not a big deal. But what about people I interact with repeatedly, work colleagues, people at synagogue, readers of my blogs I don't otherwise know particularly well? I don't have a neutral choice, I either have to hide some part of my life, or I have to Come Out at some point. (People who don't read / pass as straight at all will have very different experiences from me, of course, but National Coming Out Day isn't really targeted at them either.)
Honestly, even with specific people I haven't found Coming Out to be a one-time, binary thing. People forget, or they don't really take in the implications of what you told them, and you find yourself having to remind them that you're Queer. And I can understand how that comes across as always going on about your identity, but there's such a huge gravitational pull towards re-closeting yourself if you don't do that. I never said to my parents, "Mum, Dad, I have something to tell you: I'm bisexual". Instead I told them I was in a relationship with a woman (having previously dated a male partner so they weren't too likely to assume I was a lesbian). And they reacted pretty well, on the whole, they said the right things about loving and supporting me, but they were also a bit bemused (this was the 90s and there just wasn't that much information available unless you went looking for it). But then there was a long awkward phase where they didn't really take my girlfriend seriously as a partner, and only gradually got used to the idea that I'm bi. Which I'm not saying to criticize them at all, I am really proud and grateful for how well my parents handled the information, even though it was a pretty new concept to them. There was a similar period of uncertainty, awkwardness and eventual adjustment when I told them I was engaged to my male partner, by the way, so it's not that they were homophobic, just that telling your parents some life-changing new information isn't as simple as media Coming Out stories.
These days Coming Out isn't just about sitting down and having a conversation with your parents; people make social media announcements. And again, that runs into the problem of, if you don't make a big announcement you are closeted by default as people will assume, but if you do, you're over-focusing on some aspect of your identity, that in our brave new world of happy acceptance maybe shouldn't need to be a big deal. A couple of well-known columnists recently came out as genderqueer, and wrote some rather poignant essays: Laurie Penny on How to be a genderqueer feminist and Jack Monroe asks, Please don't call me a girl.
So with that preamble, I too, a much lesser writer than Penny or Monroe, have something to tell you: I am polyamorous. That is to say, I'm currently in romantic relationships with several different people, all of whom know about eachother and are completely happy and supportive. I don't think this is likely to be a surprise to most of my readers; I've not been making huge efforts to keep it a secret, and I'm sure many of you whom I haven't told directly will have found it easy enough to read between the lines. But this is the first time I've actually said the sentence, I'm poly, on my public blog. And part of why I'm saying it now is that it's not only a fact about my philosophy of relationship, and I'm not even sure it's a fact about my identity at all, poly is more a thing I do than who I am. It's also a fact about my life and the people who are important to me.
A year ago I became part of a quad, four people who are in relationships with eachother in various combinations. And it's been a completely wonderful year, full of new experiences, and we're all really hopeful that this can be a long-term, potentially a committed thing. When I was poly in the sense that I had various shapes of romantic-ish connections alongside my primary relationship, it didn't matter so much, partly because I don't identify as poly as such. People knew who I loved and who I was close to, and that was great, and it wasn't really anybody's business but the people involved exactly what form those loving relationships took. Now that I'm part of a quad, it feels like a different situation. Unlike with being bi, it's not that people need to know this fact about me and who I am, it's that I want people to know whom I love and the relationship structure I'm in. Every time in the past year I've referred to, or even introduced, my partners as "my friend" instead of "my partner" I've cringed internally; it's like going back 20 years and playing the pronoun game because I wasn't sure how safe it was to come out.
The thing about coming out about relationship structures rather than identities is that you're telling other people's secrets. The other three people in the quad needed to be free to make their own decisions about when and what to tell their respective parents. I told my own parents as soon as I was reasonably confident that the relationship was stable and not just a passing fling, and as when I told them I was dating a woman, they said supportive things and didn't entirely understand what I meant and have been slowly coming to terms with the idea that I'm in this multi-person relationship network instead of the dyad they expected when I got married. But, well, four people have a lot of parents between them, and part of why I missed National Coming Out Day was I didn't want to put anything on the internet until all the parents had been informed directly.
And even now I've made this post, I haven't just flipped the switch to being Out instead of Closeted. It's not that hard to connect this journal to my wallet name if you go digging, but I hope that a cursory web search on my wallet name isn't going to find this pseudonymous blog. I'm not out at work and I have no immediate plans to be; I'll carry on saying "spending some time with... friends" when people ask me about my plans for the weekend. And I'm not fully out within the Jewish community (though I'm out to individual Jewish people including obviously my parents), and both those things mean that I'm not likely any time soon to mention poly on Facebook.
In some ways being out about poly feels more scary than telling people I'm bi. That's partly because I've been lucky that I've experienced relatively little homophobia or biphobia. And I generally hang out with liberal tolerant types who at worst accept the culturally prevalent idea that gay people are just like "us" except that they happen to be attracted to the same gender. Poly in that sense is less "normal"; there are many people who generally see themselves as non-judgemental but have no paradigm at all for multiple or multi-person relationships other than having affairs and deceiving or cheating on one's (singular) partner. Even some LGBT campaigners and activists are so fixated on the assimilationist paradigm of "just like heteronormative dyadic relationships" that they are eager to distance themselves from any kind of poly or open relationship situation. But at the same time, although it's harder to tell people about my relationships with several people than it is to tell them about my (past) relationships with women, it still feels like it's my choices that are being disapproved of, not that I'm being oppressed because of something I just can't change about myself.
Anyway, I'm very happy and in love, that's the other thing I wanted to say, aside from all this political and angsty stuff. It's been a wonderful amazing year, in so many ways.
Please feel free to ask questions; I personally don't mind being a resource if you've not had much exposure to poly relationships before now. As you can see from this post, I'm being a bit cagey about the actual identities of my partners, but if you ask me general questions that I can answer without disrupting anyone else's privacy, I'll do my best.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-12 10:27 am (UTC)I agree that (many) people tend to be more confused than with non-heterosexuality. And I think part of that is representation. We've had LGBT people on TV for decades, but I can't think of any polyamorous relationships. And yeah, I've seen people leap immediately to either assuming that people are cheating, or that they have an open or swingers relationship a lot.
I hope that people are nice to you, and this doesn't cause too much drama.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-12 02:10 pm (UTC)And really I have the best parents, they're quite sheltered and quite conservative in their own lives, but they're also really really accepting. They're good at understanding that their offspring are separate people and not mini-mes. I mean, they worry about all of us when we go off and do things they have no experience of, but they're always really supportive even when they're worried. And compared to some of my partners' experiences of coming out, let alone other horror stories I've heard or read about, I feel extremely fortunate!
I think you may be right about media representation, too. I mean, there are lots of people who are not traditionally monogamous but don't officially call it poly, but you never ever see anything like that on TV.
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Date: 2015-11-12 04:08 pm (UTC)Would be curious to hear any thoughts on how your polyamory relates to your Judaism... polyamory (polygamy specifically, I suppose, in general) is a rather complicated question for halachic Judaism.
(no subject)
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Date: 2015-11-12 09:03 pm (UTC)Sometimes textual geekery jumps ahead of reason... I might analogize it to sending away the mother bird, where I've heard people talk about finding a nest and rushing to try to send away the mother in their excitement about the rare opportunity to do such a geeky mitzvah, and only afterward realizing that now they have to figure out how to cook the egg and eat it, and did they really want to eat the egg that badly to begin with, and isn't it still pretty cruel to the mother bird?
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 01:07 pm (UTC)I answered the questions partly because you did in fact back-pedal from just firing them at me as theoretical text questions. And partly because I'm in the habit of doing this with questions about Judaism. Ironically usually from non-Jews, but people do ask all kinds of bizarre things when I'm the first Jewish person they've ever met and I make a pretty big assumption of good faith and try to answer if I can.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 03:08 pm (UTC)I have the same impulse for the same reasons, and I'm sorry for taking advantage of yours.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-12 10:41 pm (UTC)* in general, love is a good thing, and so is sex, and we are generally in favour of maximising goodness in one's life (see also: tikkun olam manifest in love)
* most of civil halakha (bein adam lehavero rather than bein adam lemakom) is basically formulated around "respect other people, don't destabilise communities, and don't be an asshole"
So if poly is your thing and you can make it work without hurting the people in the relationship, and it's not destabilising to the community (I mean more in the civil sense than the freaking-out sense), it's not inherently incompatible with being a good Jew.
Like, having lots of wives and concubines in contexts where that's normal, that's fine--but it wasn't working in the Rabeinu Gershom context because it was too far detatched from the dominant culture.
The patriarchal marriages are distressing because they're setups where people can't observe the commandment of "respect other people." But one can't really fault the matriarchs for that, it's not that easy to be chill and respectful when you live in a society that sees you as a possession. See particularly Rachel and Leah on that one, the bit where Leah is obsessively churning out babies and saying "Maybe THIS time my husband will love me"--that's messed up but Leah's not got options, really.
So that's a possible philosophy of fitting contemporary poly into contemporary halakha, but I've not taken the time to articulate it in halakhic language. Partly because halakhic development seems to work by just quietly dropping the bits it doesn't wanna do (see: lending at interest, failing to pay day workers daily) and justifying it in halakhic language after the social reality has shifted. We're in a shift period as regards this.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 12:12 pm (UTC)I'm not so convinced we're in a shift period about poly. I mean, yes, we are shifting towards egalitarian, companionate marriage which includes various gender combinations. But I think most observant Jews are still pretty monogamous and that's certainly the community ideal, and not only in the Orthodox world.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 01:45 pm (UTC)Anyway, shift period--I meant a LONG shift, like 100 years. We've made lots of progress on untraditional partners, and we might make more.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 02:01 pm (UTC)And ok, taking a centuries scale view rather than a years scale, I think that's a good reason for optimism about expanding the definition of legitimate relationships.
*deep breath*
Date: 2015-11-12 08:37 pm (UTC)In my late teens I was starting to think about how I wanted to approach sex from a Jewishly informed, ethical standpoint. And I knew I was bi, I hadn't fully worked out everything about my identity and I still haven't, but I'm definitely attracted to both women and men. The basic halachic stance available to me is that I'm not allowed to have any sort of physical contact whatsoever with any men. I'm niddah, and I have absolutely no way of dealing with that because what mikveh in the world is going to immerse a non-Orthodox, unmarried woman? (OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, I think there's one place in LA, maybe, but certainly no mikveh in Europe is open to me.) On the other hand, pretty much no authority has any sort of issues with me doing anything at all with women, except maybe the Rambam who says that sex between two women isn't tznius. That's pretty much untenable for an egalitarian bi woman; I did consider and reject the option of essentially political lesbianism, but in the end decided that I was going to try to cobble together something less gendered but still within a Jewish framework as far as possible.
What I held to for a while was that I had sex only with people who were in some sense hypothetically permitted to me, people I "could have" married if I decided to get married. (At this time I was assuming I'd never marry, in fact, for reasons that aren't relevant here.) So I had sex in committed, publicly acknowledged, (serially) monogamous relationships with other Jews, who were not married to anyone else. But that still didn't deal with the issue of taharat mishpacha, and it felt like a weird compromise.
I broke up with my last long-term partner in 2004, and for a while I didn't have sex with anyone, in large part because I still wasn't entirely comfortable with how to reconcile my own ethics with the halacha. An then I had a brief and not as exciting as it sounds phase of having casual, or at least non-relationship, sex with non-Jews. At this time I was getting more involved in Queer communities and questioning relationship norms a bit, and still didn't expect to marry ever. Equally I was developing an idea of sexual ethics that was based a little bit on Musar and a little bit on Levinas, which mostly boils down to, treating sexual partners with the deepest continuous respect I can muster, never defaulting to using someone else's body for my pleasure, but treating all sex as profound intimacy with a fellow human being. That's a standard I still try to live up to, and it's certainly starting from my Judaism, but I can hardly call it halachic.
And then one such relatively casual connection turned into a serious relationship and eventually he asked me to marry him. And I spent about half a year trying to decide whether it was acceptable to me to marry a non-Jew, and I came down on the side that I was willing to make that commitment to my now husband as a life partner, although obviously we can't be married Jewishly.
There's AFAIK no plausible halachic basis for consensual polyamory, most certainly not for a woman to be involved with more than one male partner. It is completely assur for any married person to condone a partner's adultery as much as to commit it. But my marriage isn't Kiddushin anyway, so it's at least ambiguous what "adultery" means in this context. I'm not at all sure what I would do in the hypothetical case where a Jewishly married, Jewish man wanted to be in a poly relationship with me (assuming I had spare space for new relationships at all, which right now I really don't!)
Poly, for me, to some extent arises out of my commitment to Levinas-inspired love and respect for my partners. From where I am at the moment, it feels wrong to lay a claim to someone else's body or to restrict what connections they may want to form with other people. And of course people may mutually agree to be monogamous, I haven't forgotten that moral option though I have moved away from it.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-12 10:25 pm (UTC)I have a love hate relationship with labels. On the one hand I don't see how they are anyone's business and on the other I understand how they help social relations form. I also know how strange it can be to not find yourself fitting the labels society presents us with. People call asexuality, for example a 'tumblr sexuality' and yes a lot of information on it grew from there but the way loads of people went 'hey...wait...that...YES' was clearly nothing about being hip or trendy or whatever they are calling it these days.
Omg back to you. Ahem. I hope that your other partners had as good results with their parents as you did with your own! Are you all in relationships with each other or are there a partners within the dynamic that are not in romantic relationships with? I understand if you don't want to delve into that further. I merely ask from curiosity as it is not something that is talked about often and frankly the only example of poly I can remember seeing on tv or films that I have seen have been 'big love' and that was a mormon man with 3 sister wives which I very much doubt is representative! It is the stereotype that is most known though.
If you do feel comfortable and of course with the consent of your partners any details of your day to day lives and how you work together going forward on your journal would certainly be informative. ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 03:16 am (UTC)It doesn't feel as though coming out to someone/about something (specifically, as bi and/or poly) changes me: it might change my relationship with someone, or it might change that person (especially if they aren't aware as knowing anyone else who fits in those categories), but what I'm coming out about was true before I started the conversation, and wouldn't be less true if I didn't tell that person.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 12:29 pm (UTC)I see what you mean about coming out being brash. Labels are hard, definitely. And yes, the details of my personal identity and especially sexuality aren't the business of random acquaintances, but whom I love and who's important in my life seem like they should be public, for the same reason that we don't expect people to put a taboo on mentioning their spouse even though we generally expect spouses to be in a sexual relationship or at least one where many aspects of the relationship are intimate and private. Equally the ability to find other people who are like you and get information is important, but you don't want to identify exclusively with a label which is never going to describe a whole person.
As to the shape of the quad: it's definitely a quad, we're all in relationships, pair-wise and threes and all four of us. Within that the two straight men are not romantically involved with eachother; they certainly have a relationship, but they're not in a relationship, if that makes sense. It's not me with three sibling-partners, not at all, much more intertwined than that. But equally less intertwined than some groups of four might be, we're two separate households, for a start.
Details of daily lives and how we work together is a good question, but a big one, and yes, I'd have to work out how answer it while protecting everybody's privacy.
(no subject)
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Date: 2015-11-13 02:52 am (UTC)One of those things that usually happens when people don't understand everything that goes on is that they reduce everything to bedroom arrangements.
Instead of asking about that, I'm more curious about how the relationship is structured - a lot of poly stuff we read is in a "primary-secondary" dynamic, but I'm pretty sure that's not the only way to do things, and that it's used as a way of getting to get poly to be more relatable to people who are otherwise in dyads.
If you can explain this in a privacy-protecting way, I'm curious to know.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 12:58 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about everybody fixating on the sex and bedroom part of things, I'm quite used to that with being out as bi. Actually bedroom arrangements involve ongoing complex negotiations about who's sleeping where, especially since I'm out of town 4-5 nights a week...
More seriously, you're astute to notice that primary/secondary is easiest to explain to monogamous folk but not the only way. We're very much not like that, because we are two couples who got together into a quad. The original couples are, well, we have been together for 8 and 12 years respectively, for a start, and that's a different dynamic from one-year relationships. Even before you add in things like living together, partly shared finances, and the fact that one of the couples are raising children together. But we're not in a situation where, say, my husband and I have a "primary" relationship and I see my girlfriend and boyfriend just for casual fun dates when it's not too inconvenient but nothing much beyond that. And we try as much as possible to make decisions as a quad about things that affect the quad, rather than the primary couples just deciding stuff and the secondaries having to put up with it.
I can imagine a situation where I would describe the quad as my primary relationship, or that I'm doing completely non-hierarchical relationship anarchy type thing, but I think it would be at least premature to say that and most probably fully inaccurate. But the relationships are all intertwined in a close network, rather than parallel like that V-shaped situation where a person has a spouse and a secondary mate who don't interact much.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 05:58 pm (UTC)We see each other maybe once a month for dates and a couple of times in between for family events, my children are comfortable with him, but he doesn't get involved in any family decisions, nor ask me to help him make decisions.
It's funny, because in my social group now, I see more of the heirarchical or anarchical models of polyamory; when I was a child, I knew several children whose parents were part of quads or other clusters, and it just seemed nice to pool resources. They always had an adult around, and always someone who understand where they were coming from. So I guess I idealised that family structure somewhat? The pool your resources, it takes a village, style of poly maybe?
But to me, I want to describe it as 'quite simple really' but I guess that people who aren't me get confused.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-13 06:05 pm (UTC)But friends-of-Liv who'd like to get to know me better perhaps may wish to know that I will be doing December Days and that might be a good place to ask questions?
Ghoti
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-14 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-16 01:00 pm (UTC)I know easy is not the same as simple, but to a great extent it just works and doesn't take more active upkeep than any other type of family.
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Date: 2015-11-19 11:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-20 12:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-16 03:44 pm (UTC)I think it's because so many social norms and so much etiquette is tied up in this too. So, for instance, I have never quite figured out whether, if I'm inviting my friend A to dinner, whether I need to invite all of her partners, or the partner I know best, or the partner she lives with... or none of her partners. It's not that I dislike any of the partners but I have limited space around my dining table..
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-17 10:18 pm (UTC)I personally have a bit of a horror of being perceived as a package deal, even when it's just me and my husband I try to make it clear to friends that they can invite me to stuff separately from him if they want to, especially small intimate social things. I mean, it would be a bit weird if there were an open party and someone pointedly invited me and their entire social circle but not my partner, but if it's a dinner party or just spending time together, then I would by default expect that only the directly invited people would be included. This partly comes from my attitude that I value platonic friends as well as romantic partners, and partly because when I was a kid with three close aged siblings, we quite often didn't get invited to stuff at all because people felt like they had to include all four of us and that was too much. I don't want to replicate that as an adult.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-18 08:19 am (UTC)I think that's more because I tend not to want to socialise without the children, certainly for parties, but it's actually easier to socialise now because we can be divided into pairs in any direction, so leaving a parent at home with the children if that's necessary/desirable.
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Date: 2015-11-13 06:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2015-11-17 06:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2015-11-18 09:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-20 04:05 am (UTC)"Honestly, even with specific people I haven't found Coming Out to be a one-time, binary thing. People forget, or they don't really take in the implications of what you told them, and you find yourself having to remind them that you're Queer. And I can understand how that comes across as always going on about your identity, but there's such a huge gravitational pull towards re-closeting yourself if you don't do that."
TRUE DAT. This is a rather constant complaint of mine. :P