For all that I often make cracks about couples looking for that bi-chick to move in with them for lives of Perfect Poly Bliss, sometimes you really do find someone who might really want to form a family with a couple.<\/p>\n
When moving from a couple dynamic to a triad, you’ve kinda gotta be willing to let the coupledom go first. No, stop looking at me like that. I know you’ve been together for fifteen years, and have a house and kids. If the couple<\/em> part is that damn important to you, do everyone a favor. Be<\/strong> poly, if you want. Form relationships and enjoy them. But stop bloody well looking for someone to “add” to your marriage to “make it complete”.<\/strong><\/p>\n If you really want a triad let it be<\/strong> a new relationship. You’re really not going to be able to preserve the original couple with exactly the dynamic it had. The dynamics are all gonna change, anyway, and probably in ways you couldn’t have anticipated even if you thought you had all the facts. That’s okay. New relationships are new relationships.<\/p>\n I’d like to offer some helpful ideas to consider if you’re wanting to form a new triad.<\/p>\n \u00b7 <\/span>Move into a new<\/em> home together. Move out of the house the couple shared.<\/strong><\/p>\n I don\u2019t blame you if this first one makes you squawk. Lemme esplain\u2026 No, that would take to long. Let me sum up.<\/p>\n If you have been living in a couple for any length of time, you have your own space. You\u2019ve filled that house to make it \u201cyours\u201d. It\u2019s very difficult to integrate a new family member into the old space. It can<\/em> be done, but let me ask you a few questions:<\/p>\n Do you have unspoken rules about who gets to touch what and when around stuff?<\/p>\n Does the kitchen sort of \u201cbelong\u201d to the primary cook, and is this person even slightly territorial? I was, and didn\u2019t realize it. When OLQ moved in together, it was a very good thing, indeed, that we did move into a new house, as the kitchen wound up \u201cbelonging\u201d to the cook of the night rather than have territorial issues between people in the household. Moving all of us into a new home was something we did right. (Yeah, we did things wrong, too, but that wasn\u2019t one of them).<\/p>\n Is there a workbench or garage that is the primary \u201clab\u201d of someone in the present household?<\/p>\n Do you have a method for filing books\/papers\/CDs\/DVDs?<\/p>\n If you all create a new home together, it\u2019s a good way to get around these issues. I promise you, they\u2019re very real. Don\u2019t think you\u2019re exempt. It\u2019ll bite you.<\/p>\n After observing poly households and listening to various living arrangements for a long time, I begin to think the Oneida Community had the right idea \u2013 give every adult member a small<\/em> bedroom of his or her own.<\/p>\n If you have a \u201cmaster\u201d bedroom with a couple and then another bedroom for the new member, you\u2019re screaming that there is a hierarchy to the relationship. Maybe you\u2019re okay with that, but the sort of person who is independent enough to deal with a poly live-in relationship won\u2019t be in the long run.<\/p>\n And the whole \u201call adults in one bedroom\u201d thing? Just\u2026 Don\u2019t. Not unless each person has another totally private space of his or her own. I don\u2019t give a damn how extroverted and in love with having people around you all the time you are. Everyone needs some little space of their own. If they don\u2019t get it physically, they\u2019re gonna start creating it in their heads. Not a good thing if you\u2019re looking to keep relationship bonds.<\/p>\n \u00b7 <\/span>Establish rules about parenting if there are children.<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve written more about poly parenting, I think, than any other subject. Just click on the parenting tag here in this blog and you\u2019ll come up with most of what I have on the subject that I think is really useful. I\u2019m not going to reinvent the damn wheel here.<\/p>\n \u00b7 <\/span>Expect individuals to have individual lives (and possibly loves)<\/strong><\/p>\n Something OLQ did that was radically and horribly wrong was that we tried to be a single unit of four people rather than four individuals with lives who chose to live together. My God, we were so foolish. We did it with the best of intentions. One of us had come from some incredibly tightly-knit generational type family, so the joined at the hip type marriage was all that one knew. Others loved the idea of together, together, together.<\/p>\n Until it started to chafe.<\/p>\n A standard monogamous marriage can just barely stand doing all social things together, taking all vacations together and going to all events together. Even then, I\u2019m not so sure that\u2019s really the healthiest thing in the world to do.<\/p>\n When you\u2019ve got more than two people?<\/p>\n Well, think about it: Even the most compatible of people are going to have their own individual tastes, goals, needs and desires. Make sure that you allow for those however you can. It\u2019s actually good to do things as a family, but make sure that each individual adult has things that are Not Part of the Family that they\u2019re doing as well.<\/p>\n \u00b7 <\/span>Don\u2019t try to engineer everything<\/strong><\/p>\n If your family rules start to look like a corporate merger, you might be stifling things a bit. While I\u2019m all for<\/em> having things out in the open, talking them out, and certainly writing a property sharing contract, allow for the serendipity that you\u2019re going to find in any effective life. Just because you\u2019ve been studying group dynamics for a long time, can quote all the mistakes you think the Oneida Community made, have elaborate theories on why the Nest system from Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em> wouldn\u2019t work, and have studied cult theory until you could write a thesis on it without checking any more references, don\u2019t think that this theory is going to trump the infinite variety of human choice. Real people are cranky, cantankerous and gloriously unpredictable. It\u2019s why sociology is more of an art than a science.<\/p>\n I\u2019d actually encourage anyone who wanted to form a group poly household to take a few cues from some business models of relationships. No, no, don\u2019t think I mean that it needs to be all cold and corporate. Believe it or not many large organizations these days are clueing in to the fact that the people are really the important part of any organization and that making sure that everyone\u2019s needs are served is a good way to have a healthy, happy organization. I\u2019ve recommended The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People<\/em> more than once here, and I\u2019ll beat the drum for it again.<\/p>\n But, don\u2019t by whatever you hold holy, think you can make a triad some sort of \u201ccouple plus\u201d relationship. It\u2019s not \u201cjust like a monogamy, but with more people\u201d. Let it be what it is and you\u2019ve a better chance at the relationship working out happily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For all that I often make cracks about couples looking for that bi-chick to move in with them for lives of Perfect Poly Bliss, sometimes you really do find someone who might really want to form a family with a couple. When moving from a couple dynamic to a triad, you’ve kinda gotta be willing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-relationships"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polyamorousmisanthrope.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}