Livre d'Or

Ooh, icon love, and thank you for the supportive comment along with it!

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.