Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Gah! My body clock really is quite broken – I’ve just woken up at 4am, thats it, I’m up now, no going back to sleep for me.

So, I was thinking about relationships, there seems to be a huge number of polyamorous people around these days and I wondered how it actually worked out for people. For me it’ll never work, lets face it I find it difficult to hold down a single relationship, but what about everybody else?

Comments screened, anonymous allowed, let me know the good and bad of your poly relationships…


Categories: Memories.

/ 2 Comments

2 comments

  1. ex_lark_asc

    I’m currently in the first even vaguely working poly relationship I’ve ever had, though I’ve known it’s something I want for a while. Oddly I seem to have come to poly in the hunt for a real live good relationship – as in, one that has good communication, affection and support instead of tacit assumptions, deceit and uncomfortable compromises. I was, to be fair, quite unlucky with men in my youth, including growing up in the aftermath of my mother’s failed first marriage and watching her second make her miserable – that may well have informed my taking the poly route towards the goal of “relationships that don’t suck”.

    I ticked ‘possible with effort and understanding’, but really none of the options are right there. Poly takes a huge amount of effort. You need a great willingness to discard all your assumptions about the way relationships “ought” to work and to start from scratch assuming you know less than nothing, as well as a lot of common sense, patience and humility. You need to be good at dealing with your own emotional discomfort as well, because your assumptions and expectations are deeply rooted and when somebody does something that contradicts them it’s hard to restrain the urge to just react in the way you “know” is right. If you don’t have emotional maturity, intelligence and open-mindedness when you go into a poly relationship, you’ll either learn them faster than you ever thought possible or the relationship will implode/you’ll get kicked out of it, depending on how (a) clued-up and (b) fond of you the other partners are.

    That said, when it does work you get shedloads of sex (well, you do if you’re the one at the centre of the star, as I am) and a wonderful sense of being really loved and supported :)

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  2. ex_lark_asc

    Oh and as for the curmudgeons who think poly is just an excuse to screw around, well, yes, there are plenty of arseholes out there who can and do do that, but there are also reasonable, honest people who genuinely want a non-monogamous relationship, and I’m one of the latter. Frankly I can spot the wankers a mile off, and my attitude is that polyfuckery and polyamory are not mutually compatible ways of life..

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