{"id":568,"date":"2011-08-20T10:30:36","date_gmt":"2011-08-20T14:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/2011\/08\/20\/package-deals-in-polyamory\/"},"modified":"2011-08-20T10:30:36","modified_gmt":"2011-08-20T14:30:36","slug":"package-deals-in-polyamory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/20\/package-deals-in-polyamory\/","title":{"rendered":"Package Deals in Polyamory"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the record, this letter was a bit longer. I’ve edited it for brevity, but I hope that I kept the salient points:\n<\/p>\n

For almost half a year now, I’ve been involved in a polyamorous relationship with a married man. His wife and I are very different people. I’ve been trying to find some common ground between us, but we might as well be from different planets. I don’t dislike her, but it’s been obvious from our first meeting that there wasn’t anything to connect us apart from our partner. And I’m fine with that. I thought she was too – until two weeks ago, when my partner told me that his wife was upset because of the plans we’d all been making for some festivals. Because we like different things, I’d said I didn’t mind organizing my own trip there by myself, so they could just plan to go together without anyone having to compromise on which performances to see and such. Apparently, this upset her because if we were all going to the festival anyway, she wanted to go together and do things with the three of us. So I thought, ‘wow, I must have completely missed her attempts to make friends with me, I’m such an ass’ – except that further discussion revealed that no, she didn’t feel any particular connection with me either, and she hadn’t been putting any effort into trying to create one. She didn’t want ME specifically to go to the festivals with them, she just wants his other partner(s) to be people she could be friends with and who would form ‘their little group’ and I’m not someone who fit that picture in her head.
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I didn’t enter into a relationship with her, I entered into a relationship with her husband; and while I realize that she ‘comes with the package’, so to say, I don’t feel obliged to do anything other than show her general friendliness, courtesy, and honesty, especially after my attempts to find common ground earlier in the relationship failed
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I could use some advice on how to reopen the dialogue, or just a fresh perspective on the whole thing. I don’t want her to be miserable, and of course I don’t want my partner to be miserable, but I don’t know what I should do. I know I’m a rather headstrong, inflexible person, so maybe it’s me who’s at fault here. Am I being a complete pain in the backside and should I just adapt? I guess she could be feeling excluded, though she hasn’t phrased it like that.
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It is not unusual to go into polyamory with an attitude of what an ex of mine use to refer to as a “group hug” mentality. He said it with a level of extreme frustration, and I think that frustration was pretty justified in retrospect. Part of the appeal of polyamory for some people is you get your gang to hang out with. Many poly people, and I’ll include myself, like the idea of this group that’s all mutually supportive and on each other’s side and hangs out with each other all the time and\u2026\n<\/p>\n

And that’s just dandy if it just works out that way. Trying to engineer it? Forget it. It won’t work and there will be explosions. The more you try to force it, the worse the pushback.\n<\/p>\n

With that perspective, I do have some things to offer about opening a dialog:\n<\/p>\n