Yesterday, I posted a tongue-in-cheek collaboration between a couple of snarky, but very wise men who were expressing concerns about how secondaries are often treated. Is it funny? Yes. Will it make some people cry because it was true for them? Sadly, yes.
This is not to say that a secondary relationship is automatically bad. It is a sad and painful truth that secondary relationships are often treated as disposable or experiments by newly-poly couples.[1]
While I don’t label my relationships according to a hierarchical standard, the reality is you could label some of my relationships as secondaries.[2] I don’t feel in the least disposable to them. I’m free to express concerns, ask for time, laugh, play, weep, and any of the other things one does in a human relationship without being treated as if my concerns or needs aren’t important, or that if I’m “inconvenient” I’ll be disposed of!
So, if you are in a secondary relationship, you do have the right to ask for what you want. You have the right to express concerns. You have the right and responsibility to own your own feelings. You’re not the caretaker of anyone else’s feelings.[3]
So, even though there is this snark going on in the poly community about being a secondary to a couple, keep in mind that it’s not that being a secondary is bad.
It’s being treated as a disposable thing that’s bad.
And we all know that sin begins with treating people as things, boys and girls, don’t we?
[1] At least, it seems more common among the newly-poly. That’s not to say that old-timers are never guilty of this.
[2] I don’t live with them, nor do I plan to. I do tend to mentally label primary/secondary according to physical realities rather than muddying it up with ranking according to emotional intensity. That’s way too variable for my life!
[3] There is a significant difference between wishing to be considerate and taking responsibility for another’s feelings. If you’re feeling like you’re walking on eggshells, you’ve fallen into the latter.
I have one primary, who I call that out of “physical realities” as you put it, and multiple secondaries who are no more disposable to me than my primary is. I just wish I could get to see my secondaries more often. (Long distances relationships are a pain that way, but that’s irrelevant to *this* post.)
I have a primary relationship, I don’t see the secondaies as disposable. Personally I find that because secondaries are not involved in the domestic day to day part of my life it means there is far more passion and energy when we do meet. This tends to make them really very important indeed. The only problems I’ve really encountered is when a secondary wants to become the primary. This is when it usually falls apart.
> It’s being treated as a disposable thing that’s bad.
I’d go one step further and say it’s being treated like any kind of a thing that’s bad.
Sure, I’d agree that a great deal of evil in the world comes from treating people as things.
Better yet, when they don’t have time for you and expect you to cast your feelings aside and be happy with what you have. When feelings are involved u can’t expect someone to be content with table scrapes…
the worst part of being the secondary is not spending special holidays with the one you love, it might not be comparable to being “treated like table scraps”, just not that important.