What with lots of couples going poly and thinking that they can experiment with other people’s hearts as an appropriate safeguard to their own marriage, I’d like to present the following for anyone considering being a secondary in a relationship.
The idea and most of the text is Edward Martin, III’s; and Franklin Veaux made it all purty for you guys. Big round of applause, ’cause this is a true service to the polyamory community!
You can download a pdf of it, too.
Bravo, well put.
My thought is that having btdt, I am reluctant to take a role as a secondary or tertiary partner in a relationship if I do not already have a primary partner of my own (and here is the kicker) to whom I am also primary (and kicker the second) AND only if my primary relationship is in pretty healthy shape. Likewise, I won’t inflict it on someone else unless those conditions are met on their end, no matter HOW much they might protest that they’re fine being secondary and don’t need a primary and don’t care if I can be with them on their birthday, Valentines Day, holidays… because stuff like that has a way of becoming important later, when you didn’t expect it. I know that might sound kind of arbitrary, but I’ve done the secondary thing enough times to know the boundaries and how it works for me, and how it won’t.
Holy shit, [she says, somewhat sardonically], you mean we’re allowed to discuss this?
Well, that’s a first for me, I must admit.
Happy to feel visible in that experience.
I’m in a pretty rocky, fairly new, relatively undefined poly relationship. I was hunting the Internet looking for information on poly relationships when I came across this. I read it, burst into tears, and after a few minutes realized: (1) the type of relationship I have is called “secondary” (which finally gave me some useful results in Google), and (2) I really, really needed to communicate better with my partner _and_ with his family.
May sound strange, but thank you so much for posting this. It helped me a lot.
-Cat
Funny, seeing this I went looking for a “secondary bill of rights” I saw on the web years ago. Only to find it was done by one of the creators of your posted card. 😉
Yes, indeed. The Secondary Bill of Rights is excellent.