How Many Relationships Do I Have?
Most of us tend to label and categorize our relationships with great specificity but that doesn’t always reflect reality for many of us.
Someone recently asked me how many relationships I have. I’m sure the question was prompted by the commonly known fact that I’ve embraced nonmonogamy and various forms of polyamory my entire adult life. I get such questions often.
Just as I was about to parrot my usual reply when asked this question by someone not in my kinky and poly community social sphere, “I’m partnered to a great man here in San Francisco and date two wonderful men in Palm Springs,” I paused. The reply didn’t seem honest to me.
Let me set the landscape for why it didn’t feel honest. Increasingly, I feel the labeling of relationships has a lot of downsides amid the obvious convenience of the readily available verbiage. Partner. Husband or wife. Boyfriend or girlfriend (which is going to have to morph over time to include nonbinary and other identifications). Dominant or submissive (for power dynamic kinky people) and all the flavors of such power dynamics. Then there’s the various polyamory relationship structure labels of triad, quad, vee, hierarchical, non-hierarchical, solo poly, and relationship anarchy.
That’s a lot of descriptors, and I didn’t list them all. Yes, they’re useful. Common language helps us discuss things using the shortcuts the language communicates so we don’t have to keep defining what we mean all the time. My own balking at these labels isn’t because I don’t value their usefulness. I do. But every time I use one of them I think to myself “Well, that’s close, but it’s not exactly what I mean” when describing my own relationships or sometimes when referencing the relationships of others.
It feels like at times I’m attempting to squeeze my relationship descriptions into neatly pre-defined boxes labeled with the currently popular vernacular.
When I was a young gay man, and having never had or wanted a monogamous relationship, I and most of my gay friends simply referred to our relationships as open. Partners who were open. That was all the definition we needed at the time, and it worked rather well. Within the open label was contained a bunch of variations of open that included most of the ways we look at relationships today. We just used less specific language, but we knew what we meant.
When I was about to parrot my stock answer to the questioner, after I paused, I went into a much longer explanation. It was clunky and not as well thought out as my standard answer, but it was more accurate. It went something like this but I’m admittedly expounding on it quite a bit here because I have the luxury of time as I write this and I’m trying to make a point.
I have a long-term partner of 33 years with whom I live. We’re open and polyamorous, but the truth is I take advantage of that far more than he does and we’re both fine with that. He knows he has the freedom to do as he wishes. We know each other so well that discussions and negotiations happen within seconds. I’ve had a wonderful man collared to me for 11 years as my submissive who lives 500 miles away. He has both a husband and collared partner of his own who live with him. A couple of years ago I began to date a man who also lives 500 miles away and we seem to have settled on boyfriends as a label, but the truth is we try to not define it much at all. He has a husband he lives with.
Additionally, the truth is I have a bunch of other relationships. I have a close friend of 25 years who on occasion I have sex with although most of our friendship isn’t sexual. I have another friend of 15 years I also have sex with more regularly. I can think of four or five other friends with whom I’m sexually intimate with some regularity and an even wider set of friends I see more rarely and we also bond physically when we do.
But those are just the relationships that include sex and I’ve come to value my close friendships and partnerings with other men (all my partners are men, it’s how I’m wired these days) just as much when they don’t include sex. One friend of 20 years, who I’ve only had sex with once, and I have such an obviously intimate relationship that when people see us out together they assume we’re a couple. We hold hands. We kiss. We’ve both heard from others that we’re “dating” and we’ve never bothered to deny those rumors because we kind of like it.
All of these relationships and others not mentioned have some version of love as a primary component. Love is a single word with a multitude of variations and nuances of meanings. We use the word love to describe so much, but it always feels like I should add a more accurate description of the exact flavor of love. But I don’t because that gets burdensome. So, let’s just say I love them all and leave it at that.
I know. That’s a lot. No, I don’t expect others to go into this kind of detail. On some level, I know no one is going to go into this kind of depth when thinking about or describing their relationships. Neither am I most of the time. But my point is that it’s far more accurate than is conveyed by a few socially defined words that we use as useful discourse shortcuts.
My hope is that anyone reading this doesn’t let the words we often use define their relationships because attempting to fit the uniqueness that is you, your partner(s), and relationship(s) into labeled boxes is unnecessarily constraining and too often inaccurate. Sure, use the words, but don’t let them fence you into a single way of thinking about your relationships. Let your relationships exist and function any way you deem appropriate, meaningful, and pleasurable.
I’ve said for many years that words are always an approximation of what it is they’re trying to define. This is true for relationships too.
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