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Thanks for elaborating.
On some level, polyamory has always been part of my self-ideal; I have been committed to not being jealous, and to giving my partners whatever freedom they need to be happy. On the other hand, I've never felt a need for more than one partner, so for most of my life I've been monogamous because it was the norm, even if I made it clear to my partners that they need not be.
Discovering the polyamory community and, almost as importantly, the very term polyamory, representing a thing people could actually do changed that for me, and I've been in non-monogamous relationships for about a year and a half now.
However, my confidence has been a bit shaken by the degree to which I've seen problems. A girlfriend of about a year started acting very jealous of another girlfriend of about five years. The former has been outspokenly poly and in many relationships for more than seven years, and her self image was tangled up with being poly to the extent that she refused to admit that she was acting out of jealousy. She refused to talk about her feelings (unheard of for her, being a professional counselor), and would only say that she was "over it" and nothing was going to happen again. This ended up poisoning and eventually ending our relationship.
And while I've seen examples of this working---two of my other girlfriend's boyfriends have become good friends of mine (she knows how to pick 'em!)---I've also seen several examples of people who aren't being honest enough with themselves to make it work.
So polyamory, as always, matches both my own ideal of myself, and my idea for how a good relationship should be engineered, as you put it. However, I'm a little dispirited as to how many people can make it work, if the community is already so small that it consists of the people who most desperately believe in it, and they still keep falling down. I'm glad to hear of your continuing success.
Thanks, but I've been at this for a couple months -- congratulate me next year =)
As I say, I'm pretty new, so I feel really hesitant to say this, but it really seems like she was just doing it wrong.
I mean, I dance. Dancing is part of my self image. I go out and dance swing every Thursday evening and every Saturday afternoon. I'm not that good yet, but I'm getting better every week.
And sometimes it hurts. Sometimes my feet get sore. Sometimes I get really out of breath. Sometimes I get really warm and sweaty and uncomfortable. Sometimes I can tell my heart just can't keep up with the amount of oxygen my body's demanding. One time I fell straight over on my face and banged my knee, and it was painful to walk for the next couple days.
None of these things mean I'm not a dancer -- they're just things I deal with because I like dancing.
I'm new at this, so I suppose this is particularly to be expected, but still. I feel jealousy sometimes. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes I ask my partner for help/support/care and she helps me deal with it. Sometimes I seek a friend. Sometimes I deal with it on my own. And sometimes I just have to sit there and feel it and get on with what I'm doing. That doesn't mean I don't want to be poly, and it certainly doesn't mean that I'm lying when I call myself poly -- it means I like being poly so much that I'm willing to handle these things from time to time.
No, this is true. However, I would like to stretch your analogy a bit:
Some people are natural dancers, and don't really encounter the problems you're describing. Some people just know they want to dance, and deal with them.
The person in question is more of the former. In dozens of relationships she's never acted jealous before (I've known her for 10 years). She's never seemed to have an issue with it. This time, the first time I've seen her act jealous, she rejected the notion that jealousy could be the source of the problem because she was proud of the fact that she's never jealous.
I'm a dancer too, a really lousy one. By contrast, my other SO is a great dancer. Within six months of starting blues dancing, she was being paid to travel to other states and teach at blues workshops (by the way, if you like swing, you should really try blues). She picks up new dances all the time; I've worked for years on swing dancing and feel barely mediocre. If she encountered a dance style and had our experience with it, she might just give up. She doesn't deal with those difficulties because she doesn't have to.
In poly, I'm somewhere in between, but closer to "natural". I've felt jealous pangs a few times, but never felt them long enough for me to get a chance to talk them over with someone. I always mention them to the person they were regarding after the fact, but they've always gone away before I need to take action to get rid of them. If the next time it happens it lasts a lot longer, I think I'd know what to do, but it would also be so unusual and unpleasant that it could perhaps shake my commitment to poly. If it did and if my self-image was so wrapped up in poly that admitting that was unacceptable---I'd like to think better of myself, but maybe I'd just ignore that instance and move on.
Oh. I now feel really quite silly for not having immediately guessed that where there were naturals there would be a Curse of the Gifted.
I've heard really good things about blues -- basically I've heard that swing originates from a cleaned-up version of blues? -- and your comment is tipping me further towards "oh for goodness sake check this out already," so thanks for that ^_^.
I've heard that blues originates from a dirtied-down version of swing; at least, I think it's genesis is later. I just got back from an all-weekend blues workshop. Campbell and Chris were two of the instructors, and you can get some idea for what it looks like from the videos on their site. You can see that competition blues often looks a lot like (competition) lindy; maybe a little more varied, but a lot slower, fewer lifts and generally lower energy.
In practice (when dancing for a partner rather than for an audience), blues is generally much smaller and closer. Most dances are usually at least partially danced in close embrace, where the chest to chest and inside thigh to outside thigh connections are the main lead---so it can be a very sensual and intense dance. I've noticed a lot of overlap in the poly and blues communities, in that both are heavily populated by very physically affectionate and openly sexual individuals. Not that those attributes make someone poly any more than they make someone a blues dancer, but there is a strong correlation to each.
Thanks for that amazing link... is there an LW article on the curse of the gifted?