My Twitter feed at the weekend drew my attention to an event called ‘OpenCon’, in Dorset. It sounded quite fascinating – a conference exploring ‘consensual non-monogamy’, with serious discussion amidst (one would guess) some rather entertaining evenings amidst such like-minded folks! It wouldn’t be for me – I’d find something like that frankly terrifying – but I passed an interesting few minutes reading their well-written and thoughtful website. Some of the definitions in particular, were interesting:
An open relationship… is one that includes the possibility for either partner to have sex with people outside the relationship with the other party’s knowledge and consent
A polyamorous relationship is one where it is possible, valid and worthwhile to maintain (usually long-term) intimate and sexual relationships with multiple partners simultaneously.
In the past, I was happily ‘poly’ for several years, as longer-standing readers of my blog will know. And the ‘usually long-term’ aspect of the definition made me feel rather rueful. Many friends have, at some time or other, described themselves as ‘poly’; very few indeed have done so happily, securely and successfully in any long-term way. In the vast majority of cases, those poly relationships have been transitory – perhaps inevitably in some cases short-term from the outset – but after the delights of happy times for a few months or years, they’ve seemed to invariably end in (sometimes painful) break-ups.
And so whilst poly really isn’t for me these days – being very committed to one partner and having no interests in ‘relationships’ with others that go beyond close friendships – I hope the good folks at OpenCon did share ways with one another of making it work ‘long-term’ for those who want it to.
There was one other definition I really liked, by the way:
Ethical Non-monogamy is an umbrella term that covers the whole spectrum of consensual and negotiated alternatives to monogamy.
I never thought I’d describe myself as an ‘ethical non-monogamist’, but it’s a rather nice (if slightly pretentious-sounding) phrase. I like the way it incorporates both ‘consensual’ and ‘negotiated’ – any non-monogamous relationship requiring huge amounts of trust, ‘compersion’ (“the joy of a loved one being made happy by another”) and, yes, negotiation. And, I guess it’s fair to say, even scene friends who are entirely sexually exclusive with one another (of which more to come in a future post) are still – by virtue of playing with other people – to an extent non-monogamous, if one classes spanking as to an extent a sexual act. This stuff isn’t easy to get right. But it’s worth working at. And it’s nice to see that there are groups helping people to make a success of it.