Okay, how many of you suckers really, really think I’m going to do a post about that?
What I am going to do is explain a bit about why there isn’t, nor will there ever be, a Misanthrope article analyzing OLQ’s breakup1.
The first is merely the tacky factor. I have a strong distaste, shared by my exes, for public displays of negative emotion. Friends, even the most amicable of divorces is painful, and really sucks. Feeding the suckiness isn’t something I wanna do. And at this late date, the suckiness is gone. That’s a good thing!
“Okay,” you say, “but what about the fact that you guys had this huge site about building a poly family and making it work. It didn’t work and we don’t know why! You owe an explanation.”
I actually did get an email to the tune of this back in July 2005 when I thought I was retiring from the poly community, but found I was really taking a sabbatical.
I never did write a response, but I actually did get up from my computer and swore for about five minutes without repeating myself before I was calm enough to decide I’d just let it go without saying anything.
As a response two years later: No, we don’t owe an explanation. Sorry.
But to be more forthcoming, you’ve heard the old saying, “There are three sides to any breakup: His side, her side and the truth.” Just as there are something like sixteen relationships within a quad, there are an equivalent number of sides in its breakup. Within months of that breakup, I wasn’t capable of a rational analysis and had the sense not to try — certainly not in a public forum.
Two years on, I feel like I have a more rational handle, and am even more disinclined to do a public postmortem than ever. The information that people need to solve problems in their own relationships is out there, and my own analysis would not add sufficiently to the body of knowledge to overcome any pain showing my own limited, and possibly inaccurate, point of view would cause my exes.
But you know what? You won’t go far wrong by following the advice on the PolyFamilies site. That showed a lot of what we did right, and problems we were right to work on. I don’t read any of those articles and cringe, nor do I feel ashamed of anything that’s up there. If I’ve changed an opinion, it’ll probably show up here with some level of analysis, but you ain’t gettin’ any juicy dirt.
I will say that OLQ, even in its breakup, did do something right. We decided “Screw the personal. How do we at least do our best for the kids?” We’re doing okay. Not perfect, because no-one’s perfect, but I’m proud of the fact that we do focus on the important stuff.
So, in the face of that, if you’re in the throes of a breakup, I’d like to give this advice which has worked for us:
- It’s a damn breakup, not a war. You don’t need troops to defend you. Look, in a breakup, you might be seeing things in black and white. You might very well feel like you are totally right and you want people to agree with how right you are. Enjoy your rightness quietly and don’t wave it like a damn flag, ‘kay? Trumpeting your rightness or jumping up and down to defend yourself in public because you were so badly wronged makes you like like a damn’ idiot. (Note that OLQ handled the breakup privately for a reason!)
- Never put anything in writing you don’t want to show up in court. This was not so applicable in my case. The legal issues were resolved without recourse to a court mediation. But if you’re facing one, remember that online forums ain’t private. Not even friends locks on LJs. Don’t be an idiot.
- The children are children, not messengers, nor allies. Keep the kids out of it. Don’t badmouth the other parents to the kids. Remember, the kids love your exes, even if you might have stopped. Being a good parent in the face of emotional upheaval is hard, I’m not going to say otherwise. But suck it up, buttercup, ’cause you have a duty.
- Of course you’re going to want to vent. Carefully choose to whom you will do so. Every time you say something privately to another person, it increases by an exponential factor the chance of what you were mouthing off about to get back to an ex and start drama. If you have a deep need to vent, a really deep need to just blow, get a professional counselor. If you want something nasty to get back to your ex, I’m sorry, I have scant sympathy. That’s bloody tacky. When it’s over, you shut up, suck it up and move on as best you can. Show a little damn’ class.
Anyway, this is about as much of an answer as I feel good about giving in terms of OLQ’s breakup and what have you. We’re still parents to the kids. We don’t have fights. We communicate about as well as can be expected in a very complex divorce. There are friendships among the exes, even if we’re not the Bestest Buddies Evah.
In my book, I call that good.
1And if I’ve not already discussed it with you privately, I’m going to decline to do so privately, too.
While I certainly agree that you never owed anyone anything — we don’t pay for this service, and you never agreed to do any kind of blogging about any subject you didn’t want too. So that correspondent was quite rude.
At the same time, the four of you DID make an example of your lives, how you lived them and the ways you organized your relationships through the ourlittlequad website. You became, in effect, poly celebrities at least online and I think it is understandable that people would want you to discuss, in a neutral way, what went wrong in your relationships so that we can learn from them like we learned from the other parts of your joint lives you chose to make public. That you choose not to write a postmortem of this kind of absolutely your prerogative, of course.
That said, your advice on breakups is choice, thanks for sharing it.
I agree with the commenter above in the feeling that although no one should be forced to divulge the “gory details” of a breakup, it isn’t entirely outrageous for someone to want to know what happened there (given your previous roles as examples and advisers to the community at large.)
If you had been following the directives of some famous financial guru– listening to his radio shows, reading his books, allocating your own personal funds and making investments based on his counsel– and then all of a sudden one day you were watching the morning news and found out he’d declared bankruptcy due to excessive personal debt, and he adamantly refused to discuss the matter with his audience, wouldn’t you feel a little bit… oh, I dunno… as if something wasn’t quite right there?
well said. i feel that throughout this blog you’re probably giving us all that anyone could ever need to know about the break up and the relationship. the lessons you learned from it. i very much enjoy reading your posts here and often find much to ponder, if not to apply to my own relationship.
Well, I can see where that e-mail was coming from… I felt similarly, though I wouldn’t say you *owed* anybody a damn thing. I sure *wanted* to know what happened to this relationship that I had been looking to as a good example that suddenly wasn’t together anymore (at least, it seemed sudden to me). But I think what you’ve written here is good enough. We don’t need to know personal details, open old wounds, or take anybody’s side. Letting us know that the advice that was given was in fact good advice, and that something set forth as being right didn’t blow up in everybody’s faces is all we really need to know. Thank you.
As others have said, if you make your life both public and an example, it is reasonable for others to ask about the breakup since it very definitely implies something about all the events leading up to it. At the same time, you don’t *owe* anyone an explanation but you also have no right (to me, anyway) to get so pissed off at someone for asking.
DDA,
Actually, I think under the circumstances, Noel (and I) had every reason to be pissed off at someone demanding that we provide explanations or claiming that we “owed” it. It was a highly sensitive time for us and we were well aware of the public aspect of our lives together. Basically, that was a tinderbox that was primed for the spark. It was an excruciatingly insensitive thing to do. I think that, in part, it was because we weren’t real to that person. We were symbols instead of real people and the writer showed no consideration for our personal feelings. So yes, the curiosity is understandable, but the demand was completely inappropriate.
Well, as you know, I asked specifically because I’m hoping to learn from others’ mistakes as well as the things they do right. I’m not interested in dish…I’m interested in “perhaps if we had realized X at Y time, Z would not have happened.”
Do I feel you “owe” an explanation? No. But you can’t blame people for wanting to know, given that you all were, for many people, the “shining example” of “poly done right”. When “poly done right” becomes “poly went wrong”, people naturally want to understand why.
But, that said, if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t, and I’m sorry I asked (and I know, you’d already written this before I did).
I think Serratia’s comment makes a good analogy, tho a somewhat flawed one, as finances are far more….quantifiable than relationships. Yeah, sure I’d like to know what went wrong, but at the same time, I’ve had the experience where I just didn’t feel for someone what I’d once felt, it just wasn’t there anymore. I think the fact that you and yours still manage to raise your children together amiably, and have friendships, says you managed your breakup in about the best way possible.
And I strongly disagree with DDA, that you have no right to get pissed off at being treated rudely. If the email had politely and respectfully expressed an interest, yeah, then getting pissed would be out of line. But demanding that you share intensely personal information is out of line itself! Just because you chose to share some personal info in the interests of helping others, does NOT mean you’re obligated to share all personal info.
Actually, in a quad there are only 4!/(2!*2!) = 6 relationships. 🙂
Your friendly neighborhood poly mathematics enthusiast,
stevie
No, Stevie, I meant what I said.
Draw it out with a pencil and don’t forget the triads within the quad.
Unlike DDA, I do indeed think that you had/have the right to be pissed at the person demanded and felt *owed* an explanation.
That said — do you know anyone who has friends-locked posts given to authorities?
I can see where if one of the friends is willing to print it out, then, it could be used, so even friends-locked can be dangerous. But, I’m wondering if this has born out to be a real situation.
*I* had the public portion of my LJ submitted as court-documents.
No, Sheye, I’ve never heard of friends locked stuff being subpoenaed, but I was presuming that if a diary could be subpoenaed, then probably that could extend to an LJ.
Good article, and thanks for writing it. I, too, have had some folks approach me off-list “demanding” to know gory details, but I think it was more in the interests of having something juicy and gossipy to gnaw on, and to create some kind of framework to take a side so there could be all the usual nasty snickering and giggling. After a couple of screw-ups my standard response is now honed to: “My ex-spice are wonderful people and they’re great parents. If you want to know Noel’s/Moonstaff’s/TheBeast’s viewpoint, GO ASK THEM YOURSELF.” Great bit of writing.
Having just very recently split from my ling-term Primary partner, I can empathise *hugely* with the above article.
Personally, I’ve barely said a word publicly about what’s happened either generally to freinds/co-workers and especiallyon my LJ. Part of this is down to the excellent advice “Never put anything in writing you don’t want to show up in court” listed above. I have had heavily filtered posts passed onto those who should in no way get to hear the contents of those posts, so I have no compulsion in believing that anything could potentially be fair game in a court of law.
My ex-partner, on the other hand, has ranted more publicly to freinds of both of us and on her Livejournal. I’m not going to comment on what others are doing, but I’m certainly not going to join her and cause the demonic LJ dramallama to induce chaos amongst my freinds.
Sheye, my ex made a “motion to preserve evidence” that named friendslocked as well as public LJ entries. It never wound up getting as far as court, but e had every intention of dragging it in there if he had to. (His hope was to use slashfic I’d written as evidence that I was an unfit parent. Grrr.)
Thank you for your advice. I find it useful.
While this is most likely incredibly late I felt I had to reply. Your advice and articles have been great. For me and my partners we’ve found humour, hope, and realism in what it’s like to be in ANY relationship. With all the pitfalls and joys of them. For that alone we owe you so much to think you owe US is ridiculous.
I just wish to say I am glad that your past the upset at least. I don’t equate a relationship ending with it being a failure. Maybe something changed, people change. We try to change together but that isn’t always the case. So for a million reasons, a relationship may not last the rest of our lives, but that does not mean it was a failure. What you had, from our POV, was good, and was nourishing and enriching. I’m glad you can take that, that we can all take that with us.
A sabbatical is quite often needed, glad you had one, and glad your back in the Poly community, owing no one but who you choose to owe anything to. All our love to all of you.
2 things:
1) As someone who has been online long enough that some poly newbies come to me for advice, and someone who has chosen to make her life public so that others can learn from her mistakes, I completely agree that you owed no one anything, but I also have heard from others how valuable my experiences were for them.
My method of handling that is to take some time to gain some objectivity to the situation, then write about it in such a manner that only those who are already privy to those “juicy details” can figure out who I’m talking about. My post on Confronting The Monsters is such an example. I felt the lesson learned in that breakup was incredibly valuable and needed to be told (the lesson on confronting fears and direct communication). But I did so with pseudonyms, no dates or timelines, and not enough reference material to pinpoint the players unless you already knew who they were (for instance, I didn’t say if I was living with them or not, etc.).
I am quite public about all the good stuff (I’ve recently created an NRE tag on LJ and on Twitter), but I abhor the thought of dragging out all the dirty laundry for the public to ogle. I think it’s poor form and it doesn’t make matters any better, and usually makes things worse. So I applaud you for not wishing to contribute to that.
But if you can find a way to write it so that the lesson is what is taken from the story, and not the juicy gossip, it is sometimes helpful to see when a public figure has messed up and how, and not just the good stuff.
2) ProfStevie, she’s right, it’s way more than 6 – I think the actual number is 11 relationships in a quad. That is not the correct formula. the correct one can be found on a t-shirt at Poly Tees dot com. It’s far too complicated for me to type here in a plaintext box.
*chuckles* I frequently write about lessons I’ve learned, Joreth. Just not from personal stories.
The insistence on Explanations reminds me of the classic illogic of a guy thinking he can ask one particular girl, “So what do you like when it comes to cunnilingus?” and that will somehow apply to his experience with all other girls. Your very particular set of circumstances and experiences would take massive simplification and reduction to express to the world even if you wanted to (and as you said, the geometries are so complex that any one person’s perspective is much less of the whole picture than the he said / she said of a dyad would be).
More broadly, I want to express my complete support for your position. This is really a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. You had the strength and generosity (and you took the time!) to be out and be a model for everyone’s analysis/consideration, and then this was some people’s response. It’s surprising to see the volume of people who were essentially still making demands for answers from you in these comments (and I’m sure elsewhere too).
My family is being public/out and we’re figuring out the material forms that will take (and especially, with a newborn, how to make the time :)). I truly appreciate everybody who’s forged the path before us. You owe us nothing.
Late reply, but FYI, I *DO* know someone whose friends-locked posts were submitted to court in a custody case.