From the mailbag: I bet you say that to all the girls...

Rewording something I put up on Facebook, for those who don't have access to it: I have received a number of private messages asking me questions about my most recent blogs. Thank you so much for those: the Breadbin is only partly mine, and I will seek to answer anything I can here, bearing in mind my respect for privacy is absolute. You WILL NOT be named here; nothing I ever write will permit readers to identify you. 

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"How can I really trust someone who says they love me, that I'm beautiful, etc, if I know for a fact they say the same things to other people? Respectfully, it feels like your love is cheap if it's so easy to gain."

Ah. Yes. Good question. Thanks for asking it. 

There are two pernicious assumptions here. I don't blame you for making them, because they're so common as to go almost unquestioned in our world. They're rarely written as baldly as I'm about to write them, however. 

ASSUMPTION #1: WE FALL IN LOVE WITH PEOPLE, NOT THEIR QUALITIES.

ASSUMPTION #2: IF YOU LOVE MORE THAN ONE PERSON, THE LOVES CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT.

The first assumption is easily disputed, because everybody has a set of qualities they're looking for in a potential partner. But once you've found those qualities in that partner, you're supposed to forget that it was the qualities you were looking for and pretend, forevermore, that it was the person who has them. 

I love: sincerity, empathy, humour, and intelligence. These are not rare qualities, any of them (well, intelligence seems to be in short supply),  and even the four of them together aren't exactly impossible to find in one package. If you have all four of these things in copious quantities, you are beautiful, and I don't give a shit what you actually look like.  Beauty like that attracts me like a magnet. Each person I love has those qualities in slightly different proportions and expresses them in different ways...but they're all loveable as far as I'm concerned.

The second is equally stupid...at least I find it so. People have this need to compare themselves with other people, and they always seem to come up wanting. This extends into loves..."well, if you love her, who do you love more? It must be one of us."

No.

There is no "more". What there is, is love. I love you, and I love her, and I love him, too. 

There is different. I think I like the colour metaphor. I was talking to someone I think of as purple this morning and I asked her where my world would be with no purple in it. It would be a purple-less world, and poorer for so being. Other people are other colours, and without any of them, the world as it exists would be impossible. But the existence of purple doesn't eradicate blue, and green doesn't make gold disappear. 

There is TIME, of course, and that, unlike love, has limits. And love takes time, so there's a de facto limit to the love even the most devoutly poly person can experience. We call it "polysaturation"...the inability to take on more partners, simply because there aren't enough hours in the day.

Polyamory does mean that you don't have quite as much time with any loved one as you would in a monogamous relationship. Some people can't stand that thought because they're obsessed with whatever he's doing when he's not with them: those people aren't cut out for poly. For those of us who are, there's frank communication about the generalities of what's going to happen (who, where, approximately how long)...and "go, have fun".  

Because each colour is worth revelling in. The colours together make up a tapestry; the more colours, the richer the tapestry. I don't think purple is cheap (it is, after all, the colour of royalty)...but nor do I think that green is, either. Or pink, or brown, or....

"I bet you say that to all the girls"...well, I do try and make people understand that they're loveable, and many women feel they aren't. But each woman is loveable FOR HERSELF and herself alone.