#5: How I define loyalty in my relationships

Being committed to exclusivity and being committed to a healthy relationship are two different things.

One night I was out with a group of friends after one of our monthly dinners. My partner stayed behind while I left to attend another event. As the night progressed, another dinner attendee cozied up to my partner, and they ended up going home together. My friends, witnessing this, were pretty shocked and uncomfortable. It was 2016, and our friends were new to the notion of long term open relationships and viewed this as a breach even though my partner and I were explicit with these friends about how we aren’t exclusive. As with all our external intimate encounters, my partner and I met up later on to debrief about the highs and lows of their rendezvous.

We continue to contend with other people’s reactions to our relationship dynamic, even friends who have known about it for years. I think about this summer when a good friend of ours was on the PR team for a music festival and offered free tickets to our friend group. My partner requested tickets for him and one of his lovers and this good friend called me to let me know, out of concern. “Morlene I know you guys do this but just making sure you know who [redacted] is and that this is above board.” I love my friend for looking out for me, especially when so many cis-men have made it hard for us to trust them. So I do get it. But my partner hadn’t done anything to imply he had been deceitful— I think my friend just hadn’t accepted that I could really be okay with my partner having other partners, out in the open.

A common misunderstanding of non-monogamous relationships is the idea that there are no holds barred and no sense of loyalty within these dynamics. Visions of promiscuity and selfishness rooted in avoidance and insecurity proliferate popular imagination. “Why be in a relationship at all if you aren’t going to be faithful” is a loaded question people in the lifestyle get a lot. The truth is that ethical non-monogamy follows a moral code and requires a commitment to that code. The assumption that there cannot be fidelity when you are not exclusive comes from a mono-normative lens that understands monogamy as the only legitimate relationship structure. As I write in my first post, there are myriad ways to find love, connection, and fulfillment. Being committed to exclusivity and being committed to a healthy relationship are two different things.

All relationships require negotiations. Within a monogamous framework, romantic and sexual exclusivity is expected, but there may be negotiations about how to spend time together, how to show up in the relationship, and what boundaries should not be crossed. My non-monogamous relationships also use verbal negotiations to come to agreements on how we can help each other flourish and feel safe within the relationship. Since we aren’t following a cultural script of obvious expectations as in with monogamy, we have to negotiate our boundaries explicitly and continuously. Continuously, because there will always be new situations that test the limits of the boundaries we set and bring out the ambiguity of those boundaries. It can be hard work, but I have found that building trust, honest communication, and being intentional with our time are tenets of loyalty in my relationships rather than any form of exclusivity.

Honesty

I request full transparency in my primary relationship. It isn’t the case that partners in every ethically non-monogamous relationship will want to hear everything about their metamours (metamour is the partner of my partner), but it is the case in mine. We have agreed to be explicit and honest about texts, dates, hook ups, and pretty much everything that transpires between us and our metamours.

There’s sometimes asymmetry in how much partners want to disclose to each other. My partner cares more about knowing the essence of my dates rather than the logistics of how and when we got together, but I want to hear a play by play of the early courtship all the way to the morning after. We’ve had many conversations about what is being included and what is being left out in our conversations about our metamours, and the nature of these conversations continues to evolve.

I personally want to know everything so that my imagination doesn’t fill in any gaps inaccurately. It is in my nature to ruminate, imagine and obsess about things I don’t know. I would prefer to have a clear understanding of my partner’s other connections because then I can fully consent to the relationship I have with him. I should add though, that if one of our partners tells us something in confidence, we will respect that secret.

One thing I’ve learned over time is that I cannot fully access every aspect of the relationships my partner has with other people because I am not part of them. I cannot feel any of those feelings directly and maybe that’s okay. Practicing non-monogamy has pushed me to introspect on what information I really need to feel safe in the relationship, and sometimes that is not necessarily knowing say, how long his last phone call with a metamour was. Having a strong foundation of trust and honesty translates to the way my partner and I communicate with each other, which is another way I define loyalty in my relationships.

Compassionate communication

Honesty forms the basis of trust, so honest communication in my relationships is paramount, but so is creating a compassionate emotional environment where it feels safe to tell each other the truth.

In practicing non-monogamy, I fully own and honor my desire for multiple people outside my primary relationship by communicating about these feelings to my primary partner, and vice versa. We view desire for other people as a tool for discovery, and often it’s something to be treated with excitement and celebration. With this understanding, I bring any news about my lovers to my partner from a place of positive anticipation and empathy. I’m looking to him to celebrate the wins and mourn the L’s with me.

At the same time, it’s totally possible that sharing information about our dates will trigger a different kind of emotional reaction, like jealousy, inadequacy, and possessiveness. We hold space for the full range of human emotion, and respond with love and compassion. Jealousy can teach you a lot about yourself and isn’t necessarily a feeling to run away from, but an opportunity to understand and communicate what needs aren’t being met. Talking about jealousy has been a catalyst for growth and positive change for me and my primary partner. By leaving room for emotions like sadness and jealousy, I hope to prevent some of the self-censorship, suppression, and lying that occurs in many monogamous relationships. I have much more to say on jealousy and will dedicate a future post to it.

Boundaries, rules, and agreements

Just because I am non-monogamous doesn’t mean I’m up for everything that would be classified as non-monogamous. It’s important that every choice is intentional, clear, and uncoerced and this is where boundary/rule discussions come in. At the same time, I see my function in my primary relationship as helping my partner flourish in his life and facilitating that happiness where I can, and he does the same for me. We do not make rules for how the other should conduct their life, and that distinction is important.

Rules are declarations, whether agreed to or not, that you will enforce someone else’s behavior otherwise they will face consequences

Boundaries are clear definitions that you state about what you are comfortable with. They indicate someone’s personal bounds or limits

You can come to an agreement about boundaries by finding common ground with someone.

These may seem like semantic differences, but we can look at Jonah Hill’s toxic messages to his ex-girlfriend while using the language of “boundaries” to assert coercive control and see the clear difference. He’s claiming to be setting personal boundaries when he is unethically creating rules about how another person should behave.

Ugh, I know

This comes up a lot when my partner and I discuss emotional fidelity, which is when you reserve emotional intimacy for 1 or more partners while allowing sexual interactions with others as long as they do not become emotionally intimate. I’m going to keep it real here, and say this is still evolving and we’re unpacking this thorny topic in real time. But mostly I want to say that early on in our relationship we started from a place of wanting to limit each other’s emotional intimacy with other people, and have come to a place where we realize that it isn’t something within our control, nor is it necessarily something to be afraid of. So now, instead of enforcing a rule about how romantic one of our external relationships can get, we can say that our boundaries are that we’d like to be kept in the loop about how a relationship is developing, continue to create a space where it feels safe to express feelings of jealousy and possessiveness, and prioritize spending weekends together so that we’re getting enough quality time with each other. We can’t anticipate how we’re going to feel ahead of time, and rules create a false sense of security, so we generally do not create rules for each other. I do have exceptions about sexual safety, but maybe I’ll save that for another post. The commitment to always consider each other’s boundaries and come to agreements about them is the utmost expression of love to me but also a practical necessity in having a healthy relationship.

As I wrote this post, I kept coming back to the question of whether loyalty was the appropriate word to use. I thought about using commitment and fidelity but realized the way I’m using the word is inherently elastic and evolving because it’s more about agreeing to learn and grow together than it is about being in a static, rule-bound structure. This is particularly true when things are more turbulent.

Earlier I alluded to times when my partner and I grappled with developing serious feelings for people outside our relationship and the parameters we initially set to curtail these feelings. One of his relationships really tested these parameters, and while it felt like an emotional minefield, through compassionate conversations we had a lightbulb moment in realizing we don’t need to have complete parity to feel happy in the relationship. For example I found that once something developed into the relationship stage, I prefer to meet my metamour, whereas this is less important to my partner. Instead of following the Golden Rule do unto others as you would have others do unto you, which presumes others are like us, it’s more thoughtful to follow the Platinum Rule. It says to do unto others the way they want us to do unto them. This was an important realization for us and released us from the imperative to make sure everything we did was exactly equal.

Prioritizing communication, following through on agreements, and renegotiating them when they aren’t working have been big lessons we’ve learned over the years in ENM. In this view, this relationship structure is not the absence of loyalty but more so the commitment to bring nuance and compassion into this new uncharted territory. We are writing our own script.

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