My First Poly Relationship

...wasn't.

My first  and so far only, stab at a real honest to self and everyone else polyamorous relationship was an unmitigated disaster.

It was twenty years ago. My idealism was completely untempered back then, and it mixed not at all with a nasty streak of self-centredness.  Polyamory made emotional and logical sense, therefore it would work, damn the real world feelings, full speed ahead.

Looking back at it now, I find it hard to believe I could be so stupid. Or, actually, in the context of the lost decade that was my twenties, all too easy to believe I could be so stupid.

The ONLY thing I can say in my defence is that in 1995, we were all pretty much flying by the seat of our pants. There were few local poly groups unless you happened to live somewhere near Hippieville, U.S.A. The first book to even take an end run at polyamory, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy's The Ethical Slut, had yet to be published. The Usenet news group alt.polyamory was only four years old and still a small enough community that we all pretty much knew each other (for online values of "know".) Poly back then was trial and error, lots of error, for almost everyone.

That's no excuse, though. Even if you're flying by the seat of your pants, or maybe especially if so, you'd think you'd put a belt on, check the weather forecast, complete some sort of rudimentary safety checklist...something.

I'd been in a relationship with Claire (names have been changed) for a few years at that point. She knew I was polyamorous before I knew there was a word for it: spend much time with me, then as now, and it's kind of hard to miss. She was completely accepting of it to a point, the point being where it would actually have a real effect on our relationship.

Claire couldn't decide if she was hardwired monogamous or if she had just been thoroughly culturally conditioned; polyamory in the abstract fascinated her. She spent a fair bit of time soaking up that alt.polyamory newsgroup, paying particular attention to the threads like "I'm mono, she's poly, can this work and how?" (Some things never change: that's a staple of /r/polyamory on Reddit today). Some people told her to run, far away, fast; others told her that yes, it could work, in theory. The latter group included the founder of the newsgroup and also a woman who went on to write a highly respected book on nontraditional relationship styles; between the two of them and a few others, she was convinced to give it a shot. Tentatively.

 You should know I was perfectly okay with Claire looking for another partner--demanding freedom in a relationship without being willing to grant the same is disgusting behaviour. I may not have known much in 1995, but damnit, I knew that much.  Claire didn't want another relationship, though.  She wanted one, with me, and she was terrified that one would turn into a half of one. I assured her this would never happen.

Enter Colleen.

Actually, Colleen had existed all along, and there's another big red flag: it's generally not a good idea to have a third all picked out before you've even remotely squared things with your partner. You can maybe see how that might be perceived as just a tad threatening.

I didn't. I was oblivious. I had met Colleen online, and developed that near-instant, seemingly deep chemistry so easily mistaken for "love". She lived about six hours away--close enough, after a time, that she started to talk about meeting me.

Yes, I was honest with Colleen about Claire's existence and place in my life. That much I did right. And I talked with Claire at some length about what might happen and what definitely wouldn't happen if and when Colleen actually did come.  Claire gave her okay, but (she argued later, and persuasively), under duress.

Better and better!

AND I didn't suss out Colleen's feeling on the state of things beforehand. That's Poly Sin #1: Assuming any one partner is in agreement with something and not bothering to check. In this case, the "something" was rather important: what framework the relationship was to take.  It turned out Colleen and Claire agreed on two things: one, they'd be willing to put up with what they both insisted was "half a relationship" for a short period of time; two, the endgame for both of them involved one monogamous relationship with me.

To recap: I had not communicated near enough with Claire, I'd barely communicated AT ALL with Colleen, and I was moving waaaaaaaay too fast. What could possibly go wrong?

Colleen came for a summer weekend, one of exactly three weekends I ever managed to book off from my job in something like four years. On the surface, everything seemed fine at first. She'd brought gifts for both Claire, me, and Claire and I with her; all three were thoughtful and the the gift for Claire and I was decidedly meant for both of us. I resolved to pay Claire just as much attention as I did Colleen, to prove to both of them that I was serious about this whole poly thing.

That was, of course, another error on my part. What I should have done was skew the affection in Claire's favour--instead of 50/50, it should have been something like 90/10 Claire.

On Saturday we went to Toronto. Highlight of the trip: my first visit (Colleen's, as well) to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Do I have to tell you just how big a hockey fan Colleen was and just how big a hockey fan Claire wasn't?

By the end of Saturday, Colleen had taken Claire aside (without telling me) and let her know that she--Colleen--and I were "meant" to be together. Claire was already deeply insecure (can you blame her? I hadn't said or done anywhere near enough to make her feel otherwise),  and this caused her to break down and isolate herself.

And then what did I do? Again, entirely the wrong thing. I made a token effort -- very token -- to try and calm Claire down, all the while knowing I was leaving Colleen alone two rooms away. When it became clear to me that a few words weren't going to do the trick, I (God, this hurts to admit) abandoned Claire entirely, figuring I could deal with the aftermath better once Colleen had gone home the next day.

Ugh. NRE--"new relationship energy"--the bane of any priorly existing poly partner. Falling in love causes all of us to go just a little bit gaga, and it's way too easy...if you're immature and stupid, like me--to get your priorities all buggered up when in its throes.

Two friends of mine were along for the ride that weekend and saw it all. Shockingly, both of them still talk to me.

Claire and I stuttered along for a few months after that awful weekend, but both of us knew it was over. There were lots of problems in the relationship with Claire--maturity on my part being by far the biggest--and as the poly saying goes, you can't fix a relationship by adding people to it.

Colleen and I had a brief fling the following summer, but that chemistry I had thought so powerful was only superficial, certainly not enough to maintain anything long distance.

And me? Polyamory remained an ideal for me, but one bad experience that I had engineered entirely myself had me convinced, for years, that an ideal was all it would ever be. In retrospect, I had made yet another mistake: blamed polyamory for failures which were mine and mine alone. For a while, I took to calling poly "personal communism"--lovely idea and ideal, great in the abstract, but fraught with peril if applied.

It doesn't have to be that way. Add a healthy dollop of maturity and emotional intelligence, increase the communication by a factor of ten, and simply be considerate of ALL the relationships in any given polycule...and you have a recipe for successful polyamory. There will be bumps: there are always bumps. But if you follow the Poly Golden Rule: "the people in the relationship are more important than the relationship"--those bumps won't capsize you.

Oh, yeah, and dating within your species certainly helps. Mono/poly partnerships do exist and do work, but they are understandably rare. Even attempting one in 1995 showed considerably more guts than brains.

I wish I could get a do-over on all of that. Neither Claire nor Colleen was right for me...but I didn't have to hurt either of them the way I did coming to that conclusion.