You don’t have to agree with it if it’s not YOUR life.

A great article crossed my Twitter stream this morning, and I’m so glad I happened to be on when it did.

Polyamory works for us (Salon.com)

Right there, that author stated things perfectly.

*Warning: Rant ahead. Buckle your seatbelts and please keep hands and feet inside the moving rant until it comes to a complete stop.*

There is a common misconception out there that people who are poly are all about the sex, or are swingers, or are kinky, or are doing _____.

As someone who’s poly, I can tell you most of the things I hear from people are flat-out wrong when it comes to what they perceive a poly (or kinky) relationship to be.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that we’re poly. Right now, we have what we call a “closed monogamous N pack.” Sir and I are the points on the angle, with our respective spouses on the ends. We are NOT swingers. (I have friends who are swingers, but it’s not our thing and we never have done that.) We are not out there getting twice as much sex just because we’re poly. Most of the time Sir and I spend together is actually “vanilla,” non-sexual time, with maybe 5% of that time or less having anything to do with sexytime. We call ourselves a monogamous pack because none of us have sex outside of our group. (Hubby and Sir’s wife know they can pursue relationships with others if they were to meet someone they were interested in, but they have not as of yet.)

Our rules are pretty simple. Our spouses (our primaries) come first. Period. We don’t do anything that would put our primary relationships at risk. Our spouses have full veto power over what we do. We’ll always stay safe. We would never take any other partners without everyone else’s agreement. (The same rules would apply to our spouses should they ever meet someone they wanted to be with.)

When people who don’t know me hear I have a Hubby AND a Sir, they immediately think ooOOOOOHHH, lucky girl!

Well, let’s look at this for a moment. It means instead of one schedule, I’m juggling two. (I’m lucky that Hubby is retired and I work at home, so my schedule is very flexible.) Instead of one relationship, I’m juggling two. (The first with a laid-back Aquarius–I’m a Taurus. The second…with another Taurus on the cusp of Aries. Um, yeeeaaaah.)

Sir has a job that requires a lot of hours and energy. I have fibromyalgia. There are times where we get “together” time we’d planned to use for sexytime, and we end up collapsed on the couch watching anime or movies–or falling asleep–instead.

Now, how sexy is THAT? *sarcasm intended*

One recent long-anticipated “date” ended up with Sir doing a lower-end imitation of Vesuvius because of a case of food poisoning, while I sat and took care of Him and used the time for writing. (Nothing says love like hunting down housekeeping to get more toilet paper for the one who’s sick.)

Again, you feeling the sexy? *sarcasm*

I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong. But here’s the upside of this: Sir and I are absolutely BLESSED with two wonderful spouses who love us enough to know that by giving us this freedom, it doesn’t threaten our primary relationships. It only makes us happier, because then they aren’t feeling guilty because they don’t enjoy some of the things we do. (Shooting, skeet, anime, DnD, etc.) And Sir and I don’t feel guilty (or resentful) if our spouses come do something with us just because they feel they should, or we give up doing something we want to do to stay home with them because we don’t want them just to go with us because they think they have to.

Everyone wins.

I get soooo sick and tired of the anti-equality asshats who rant against same-sex marriages and poly and say really fucking stupid shit like, “Oh, it’ll lead to bestiality and pedophilia!” Or, “Oh, what about the children!”

Um, seriously? What makes you think that anyone (and I’m including BDSM practitioners in this, too) exposes their kids to inappropriate sexualized behavior? This is like making an argument along the lines of cows should be banned because you got sick on a glass of milk that went bad three days ago.

Does. Not. Compute.

The other thing I’m sick of is people automatically assuming poly and polygamy for religious reasons are the same thing. No, they are completely different beasts. Poly is about a level of freedom in a relationship, a higher level of communication and trust and negotiation, whereas religious polygamy (when done wrong, I’m sure there are some who are perfectly happy in their arrangement) is about control and rigid rules and a lack of freedom.

What’s better, to have a long line of serial monogamous relationships that fail, or have two successful, long-term poly relationships that succeed? Is it better for someone to cheat, or be miserable, in a monogamous relationship, or to have honest poly connections?

NO ONE is saying everyone HAS to do this. I’m not saying that at all. And if something happened tomorrow and Sir and I had to end our poly relationship, I would be sad about that, but it wouldn’t mean I’d go out looking for something else. Sir and I did not intend to become poly when we first met. All four of us started out as friends, and I started helping Sir’s wife and another friend of ours in Topping Him. Which gave Sir’s wife the freedom to bow out of doing something that she really didn’t feel like doing because she no longer felt a need to try to go do it for His benefit. (He wasn’t “making” her do it, mind you. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. But there were times she would have rather just stayed home or been doing something else. Ditto my Hubby, who isn’t a night owl, whereas Sir and I are both night owls.)

When I wanted to try the other side of the coin, since Sir and I already had that trust-bond in place, I asked Him to Top me because I knew He was a switch. And that led to further exploration when we discovered that the impact play helped alleviate the “bad” pain of my fibromyalgia and arthritis. Which led to a deeper relationship and lots of discussions with our spouses that eventually led to what we have today. We were friends first and for a long time before sex ever entered the picture. And again, most of our time together still has nothing to do with sex, it’s spending time together with each other as friends, doing stuff we enjoy before we go home to our spouses.

I’m sure there are Bible-thumpers and others out there who will scream we’re wrong because it goes against their religion. To those people, I say: Fuck. You.

That’s like, as the meme states, being pissed off at someone else for eating a donut when you’re allergic to gluten and on a diet.

Does. Not. Compute.

I’m not asking people to approve of what we do. Frankly, it’s none of their business. All I’m asking for is respect, the way I respect people who are monogamous, or who are swingers, or who have open relationships. (Although I won’t respect cheaters, who frequently use swinging/poly/open as an excuse for their actions, when cheating is anything BUT a healthy expression of non-monogamous feelings.)

I write erotic romance books that show a lot smexyness between people in poly situations. But if you want to know the reality? Take out the smexyness and replace that with falling asleep in front of the TV, or taking a sick pet to the vet, or going out to eat, or going to the movies, or doing home/auto repairs, or… _____.

But, unfortunately, writing THAT won’t sell me many books. If people wanted boring and mundane, they could look no farther than their own home.

But you want the truth about non-monogamy? Just take a look around. The “truth” is that in the majority of their lives, non-monogamous people (or same-sex relationships) are NO different than anyone else. There are probably people you know who you’d NEVER think would be into non-monogamy who are, yet they have to carefully guard their “secret” for fear of being ostracized. Worse, out of fear for their jobs, and even in some cases custody of their kids. There are non-monogamous people who have to pretend they don’t have other people in their lives who they care for or even love very dearly because they have to worry about those kinds of things.

And THAT, to me, is the true crime, the TRUE outrage.

You want to worry about “issues?” Worry about poverty and child hunger and homelessness and unemployment. Worry about crumbling infrastructures and roads and bridges and pollution.

Stay the fuck out of people’s bedrooms. You and your religious views do NOT belong there. Quit wasting money on “family values” issues in government. How many hundreds of millions of dollars have been WASTED on anti-equality campaigns across the nation? And yes, fortunately, those laws are being struck down one at a time. So it was money TRULY wasted that could have been put to better use IMPROVING peoples’ quality of life.

In another twenty years, hopefully, people will look back and say the same thing about the anti-equality asshats as they did about the people who fought so hard to keep Jim Crow laws in place: What the FUCK were those narrow-minded bigots thinking??

Because if you’re against marriage and relationship equality, you’re no better than those pinheads who used to use their Bibles to say why whites and blacks couldn’t get married.

I’m sick of the small but very vocal legion of right-wingers who use their religious views to claim they’re being persecuted when someone else simply wants the same freedoms the right-wingers have. Yet, if you tried to flip the argument, the right-wingers would be the first ones screaming about persecution.

You don’t want a poly or a same-sex marriage? FINE, don’t get one! No one’s saying you have to get one, or even like that someone else is getting one. But don’t say someone else can’t have one if the people involved are consenting adults.

It is NOT attacking a religion to insist that our laws reflect equality. Don’t even give me the twisted arguments about the “founding fathers.” Some of those founding fathers also believed women and people of color had lesser standing than men, and some of the earliest “founders” of our country also killed people for “witchcraft,” so STFU. You want to quote your Bible at me, then you can’t cherry-pick the stuff you want out of it, you have to take it all, in its entirety, including the passages like tattoos are bad and you need to stone people for various offenses.

You don’t get it both ways. It doesn’t work like that.

Look at the divorce rates in this country. Do you seriously think same-sex and poly relationships could do worse than that? Seriously?

The problem is that some of the very same people who scream they want less government controls in their lives are also the very same people who scream they want the government to prevent same-sex and poly relationships.

O_o

Does. Not. Compute.

You canNOT have it both ways, bucky.

So stay out of my bedroom, and I’ll stay out of yours, okay? Because the boring truth is that my relationships aren’t founded in my bedroom. My relationships are founded on trust, communication, love, friendship, and honesty. If all you can do is see the “sex” part of it–which is just a tiny part of the overall picture–then I suggest YOU are the one who is the “pervert” and has a problem, NOT me. ‘Cause I could’t give a shit what you do in your bedroom as long as it’s consensual and only involves adults.