If you've heard anything about polyamory, you've likely heard this: "The first rule of polyamory is communicate, communicate, communicate." But what does that mean, exactly? Communication is trickier than it sounds. It covers a lot more than saying what's on your mind, and even saying what's on your mind can be surprisingly tough. Then there's the listening part. There are a thousand ways communication can fail and only a few ways for it to succeed. Yet good communication is a process, and it's essential to building trust, demonstrating respect and understanding the needs of the people you're close to.
When we talk about communication in polyamory, we're actually talking about a very specific type of communication: speaking the truth about ourselves, our needs and our boundaries with honesty and precision, and listening with grace when our partners speak of themselves, their needs and their boundaries. This kind of communication isn't really about words. It's about vulnerability, self-knowledge, integrity, empathy, compassion and a whole lot of other things.
Communication is such a complex subject that we've divided it into two chapters. This chapter addresses ways communication can run off a cliff, including being imprecise, dishonest, passive and coercive. The next chapter discusses strategies to help you succeed.
Fuzzy language
In poly circles, people often complain that conversations about poly always seem to come back to semantics. This is actually a good thing. The poly community tends to focus on communication, and communication relies on words having shared meanings. Arriving at that mutual understanding is what semantics is all about.
On the one hand, language is a marvelously flexible and resilient tool. If you read a sentence containing non-English flutzpahs, even if you've never heard of flutzpahs before you can often glork their meaning from context. On the other hand, the simplest way for communication to go wrong is when one person uses a familiar word in a way that another person misinterprets. For example, Franklin once had a conversation with Celeste that went something like this:
Celeste: Can you do me a favor and pass the sweeper?
Franklin: What's a sweeper?
Celeste: The thing that vacuums the rug. You know, the vacuum cleaner.
Franklin: Oh! Right. Okay, here you go.
Celeste: You never help me out around the house! You expect me to do everything! I ask you to do one thing and you won't do it!
Franklin: Wait. You asked me to pass the sweeper, and I gave you the vacuum cleaner! It's what you wanted, right?
Celeste: No, I asked you to vacuum for me. "Pass the sweeper" means "Pass it over the rug."
Small words can hide big misunderstandings. What is sex? What is a relationship? What do we mean by words such as permission, consent or commitment? A disagreement about the meaning of that last word popped up during a panel on polyamory Franklin once participated in at a convention:
Audience Member: It's obvious that people with multiple romantic relationships can't be committed, because commitment means you're dedicated to only one person. Someone who is not committed can't be trusted, because they have no commitment to you.
Franklin: But what if someone is committed to more than one person?
Audience Member: Impossible. That's a logical contradiction. Commitment means "dedication to only one person." You can't be dedicated to two people any more than you can divide a circle into three halves. A person who has more than one partner has no commitment, and therefore can't be trusted.
What's obvious to one person may not be obvious to another. As we discuss in chapter 19, on sex, even defining the word sex can create a thorny tangle.
Slippery words
When the two of us communicate about relationships, we try to steer clear of certain words. Some words come preloaded with expectations and emotional baggage, which makes them prone to misuse. These words easily become tools of manipulation, because they sound reasonable on the surface but have meanings that are difficult to pin down.
Respect. Many people are fond of saying things like "New partners must respect my existing relationships." And it sounds reasonable: after all, who would go into a relationship saying, "I plan to disrespect all the other folks involved"?
But what does it mean to "respect" a relationship? Does it mean to yield to the people in that relationship all the time? Does it mean to always do what they say? Respect is reciprocal; what respect are the people in a relationship prepared to offer a new relationship?
Rather than use vague words like respect, you will benefit from spelling out what your expectations are. If you believe that older relationships have priority in terms of time and scheduling, for example, say so. Using vague words like respect creates an easy way to accuse others of breaking agreements any time they do something you don't like, without actually having to make explicit agreements.
Come first. Another agreeable-sounding but vague phrase we've heard often is "My existing obligations come first." Nobody enters a relationship with a clean slate; we all have previous commitments that require tending, perhaps to children, a sick relative, a demanding job or a business association. This is true in monogamous relationships as well as polyamorous ones.
So if we say, "Existing obligations come first," does it simply mean we have outstanding responsibilities we intend to discharge? That's reasonable in any sort of relationship. Or is it a way of saying "I will look after your needs only if they aren't inconvenient to the other people in my life," as all too often seems true? Does it mean that an existing partner may always usurp time allocated to a new partner?
Better to spell out what existing commitments you have, and what you need to do to discharge them, rather than simply say they "come first."
Fair and equal. These words can conjure up images of relationships where everyone is doled out the same-size slice of pumpkin pie, even if some folks are hungrier than others and some are allergic to pumpkins. Equality of opportunity is a very different thing than equality of circumstance; if people want different things, then it makes sense that their circumstances will be different. What's most fair is not necessarily an even division of resources, but rather a distribution that meets as many of the needs of all the people as possible.
Rights. In chapter 3, we talked about the high bar something must reach to be called a "right." Few things rise to that level, so "right" is a word that should be used very cautiously.
Some things you do not have a right to expect in any relationship: to never be challenged, to always be comfortable, to always have other people navigate around your triggers and discomforts. Things you do not have a right to do include to treat people as expendable, to extract promises that someone will never leave you, and to control other people's relationships. All these things require negotiation. Relationships are always voluntary; you have the right to end a relationship that does not meet your needs (and so does your partner), but you do not have the right to demand that your partner do what you want.
Success. When you think of successful relationships, what comes to mind? Relationships that last a certain amount of time? Relationships that have no disagreement? It can be tempting to call a relationship successful if it lasts, but what if the members of that relationship treat their other partners poorly?
"Success" should apply to everyone involved, not just some of them. If a poly couple stays together for a long time, but they treat their other partners poorly or hurt a lot of other people in the process, we would not necessarily consider their relationships a "success." When you use the word success, are you thinking only about a particular relationship or about all of them?
Reasonable. The word reasonable (and its evil twin, unreasonable) get tossed around very easily. Is it reasonable to want to tell a partner what positions she is allowed to have sex in? Is it reasonable for a partner to kiss someone else in front of you? The problem is, what's "reasonable" is largely cultural and subjective. Most people would probably say it's not reasonable to have multiple lovers in the first place!
Polyamory is still new enough that we have not yet established cultural norms of reasonableness. So instead of talking about what's "reasonable," talk about the specifics of how something makes you feel. How do you react when you see your partner kiss someone else in front of you? Why? How can you negotiate with your partner about ways to do things differently? Talk about what you need and how your partner can help you, and negotiate a solution that works for everyone.
Healthy. This is an especially dangerous word. Some relationships are genuinely healthy and others are unhealthy. But all too often, this word is used to judge behaviors we simply don't like. A relationship that violates your consent is indeed unhealthy. A relationship in which you are threatened with violence is unhealthy. A codependent or enabling relationship is unhealthy. But your partner doing something you don't like is not necessarily unhealthy. Sometimes healthy relationships are uncomfortable. Instead of using the word healthy, we recommend talking directly about behaviors that trouble you and why they do. If you sincerely believe your partner's behavior is unhealthy, it might be time to seek professional help (with your partner if possible, and for yourself if your partner won't participate).
Dishonesty
Honesty is one of the defining factors that separate polyamorous relationships from cheating. It's also, not surprisingly, one of the defining elements of good communication. However, it can be harder than it sounds. Even though we all probably agree that honesty is important in a relationship, it's surprising how often we still choose not to be honest. Otherwise well-intentioned people who generally act in good faith can end up making that choice, for any number of reasons.
The most common reason is emotional vulnerability: fear of rejection, fear of being ridiculed, fear of being wrong, of hearing no, of being found less desirable by our partners. And even as we claim to want honesty, we may subtly discourage our partners from being honest with us because we don't feel prepared to hear truths that might be painful.
People who are dishonest with their partners, especially when they are dishonest not by lying but by concealing things or not saying what's on their minds, often seek to control information as a way to control their partner's behavior. Another reason people can be dishonest is that they fear "upsetting" or "offending" their partners. Especially about sex. If you don't enjoy what your partner does, you may say nothing to avoid making him feel bad. This tends to backfire in long-term relationships, because someone who doesn't know that his partner is unsatisfied will never improve, and an unsatisfying relationship is always under stress.
Problem is, one of the most basic rules of life is that you cannot get what you want if you don't ask for what you want.
Franklin runs a website of educational resources about BDSM (activities related to dominance and submission or sadomasochism). Many years ago, a person read his site and wrote to say he'd always wanted to try exploring BDSM but never had. He'd been married for ten years but never talked to his wife about it, because he was afraid of how she might react. He asked Franklin, "What do you think I should do?"
Naturally Franklin said, "Talk to her. Tell her 'This is something I'm interested in. What do you think?' " About a week later Franklin received a reply. The guy finally worked up the courage to talk to his wife about exploring BDSM. He discovered that years before they met, she'd been involved in BDSM and enjoyed it quite a lot, but she had never talked to him about it…because she was afraid of how he would react!
Such failures to communicate happen when we lead with our fears instead of our hopes. If we spend too much time thinking about what can go wrong, we forget what can go right. Life is better when you lead with your hopes, not your fears.
Perhaps the most common justification for dishonesty in a relationship is the notion that the truth will hurt worse than a lie. A person who cheats on a partner may think, If I tell the truth, I will hurt my partner, but if I don't, my partner won't need to experience that pain. This reasoning says more about the person making the argument than it does about the person he is "protecting," because consent is not valid if it is not informed. By hiding the truth, we deny our partners the opportunity to consent to continuing a relationship with us. Controlling information to try to keep a partner (or to get a partner to do what we want) is one way we treat people as things.
And remember, honesty begins inside. A person who is dishonest with himself cannot be honest with anyone else. People are dishonest with themselves for many reasons, including having ideas about what they "should" be. If they think desiring multiple partners is dishonorable, they may convince themselves that they don't even if they do. Likewise, if someone wants only one partner, she may convince herself otherwise because she believes polyamory is more "enlightened." We can lie to ourselves for more subtle reasons as well. A woman whose husband is threatened by the idea of her having another male lover might tell herself, "Well, it's okay, I really don't want to be with another man," even if, in some corner of her mind, she would.
Passive communication refers to communicating through subtext, avoiding direct statements, and looking for hidden meanings. Passive communicators may use techniques such as asking questions or making vague, indirect statements in place of stating needs, preferences or boundaries. Directly asking for what you want creates vulnerability, and passive communication often comes from a desire to avoid this vulnerability. Passive communication also offers plausible deniability; if we state a desire for something indirectly, and we don't get it, it's easy to claim we didn't really want it. Stating our needs means standing up for them and taking the risk that others may not agree to meet them.
One way this happens is by couching desires as questions: "Would you like to go out for Thai food tonight?" (Or worse, "Don't you think it's been a long time since we went out for dinner?") To a passive communicator, such a statement can be a coded way to say, "I would like to go out for Thai food tonight." The problem is, a direct communicator might naturally hear only what was said and give a direct answer: "No, I don't really feel like going out tonight." This can leave the passive communicator feeling disregarded; she might end up thinking, He never pays attention to my needs! when, to the direct communicator, no request was stated; he was asked how he felt. The direct communicator might end up thinking, "She never asks for what she wants. She expects me to read her mind! If she wanted to go out, she could have said so."
When we're talking about dinner, indirect communication might not matter too much. When we're talking about things that are more complicated, like emotional boundaries or relationship expectations, indirect communication can lead to crises of misunderstanding.
Eve's Story My relationship with Kira lasted only a few months, but the damage it left was lasting. By the time it ended, I felt profoundly unseen, unheard and unknown by someone I had only recently imagined I had a deep intimacy with. I felt not like a person, but like an actor who had been cast for a role. As though everything—the flirtation, the relationship, the breakup—was scripted in advance by Kira's expectations and beliefs. And I felt that I had little influence over this trajectory because Kira and I could not communicate.
Kira was raised in a family that communicated passively, and she spent her adolescence in a culture where passive communication was the norm. The irony was that she valued, and often talked about, assertive communication—but her habits were too deeply ingrained for her to recognize them, let alone unlearn them. I learned quickly the disorienting, frustrating and often maddening consequences of being in love with someone for whom every statement had a double meaning.
To Kira, what mattered was not what I said, but what she imagined I had said, and that appeared to come from scripts deep in her psyche. Kira would imagine I wanted things I'd never asked for, give them to me as though they were her idea, and then blame me when she was unhappy about having given them. Her ideas that I wanted them came from cryptic readings of things I had said or done, and it did no good for me to deny I had wanted or asked for them. To her, I had asked. Passively. I was not permitted to deny the reality of the hidden meanings that Kira believed in but I had never meant.
Kira would forward me messages she had received from others, or ask me to view online conversations she was participating in, expecting me to be deeply offended or outraged by what I read. When I could not find the offensive statements, she would explain to me at length the hidden meaning of the conversation, what was "really" happening behind the words that were being said. She could create a detailed story from very few words.
Our relationship ended with her telling me such a story. I listened in disbelief and no small anguish as she told me what I had wanted, what I believed, what I expected—all of which had been read into my words or actions, and none of which was true. And the hardest part was that I couldn't counter any of it: passive communication was so second nature to Kira that it simply wasn't possible for her to believe that my words had meant exactly what I said they did—that not everything had a hidden meaning. To Kira, what she imagined lay behind my words was more important than my words—and that ended the possibility of communication between us.
Passive communication is the norm in many families, and indeed in many cultures. Every now and then some pop-psych article will surface that compares passive with direct communication and says that neither is inherently "better," and all you need to do is learn which style someone is using and adapt to it.
In polyamorous relationships, though, passive communication will fuck you right up—and your partners, and their partners. It's true that some cultures—the Middle Eastern culture that Kira grew up in, for example—do use very subtle, nuanced passive communication, and there's nothing wrong with that in its own cultural context. However, in cultures where passive communication is the norm, the paratext—the subtle verbal and nonverbal cues that tell you the hidden meaning—are shared and understood. We wrote this book for readers in the Western context, where it's almost certain that you, your partners and their partners will have grown up with different family and cultural backgrounds, and thus different assumptions about what subtle cues convey what unspoken meanings. Looking for hidden meanings in such a situation leads to a very high chance that you'll be quite simply wrong.
When passive communication includes implied threats or demands, it can tip over into manipulation. This can happen in many ways: concealing our real motivations by couching them in pleasant-sounding but leading language, for instance. "We wouldn't want anything unpleasant to happen now, would we?" Or by waiting for a partner to misinterpret our coded language and then springing something like "You never listen to me!"
Eve's Story I don't remember the exact circumstances under which I shared my Google calendar with Kira, or why. I remember asking her about it first, but she remembers it differently. I do remember that she had never shared a calendar before, and I wanted to show her how it worked. For me, sharing calendars was no big thing—at the time, many of my friends and people I worked with had access to both my personal and work calendars. If I wanted to keep information private, I would make a "private event."
We didn't discuss boundaries around the calendar or specific expectations about what sharing it meant. As it turned out, she had very different expectations than I did—but I didn't learn that until too late.
Because Kira was accustomed to passive communication, she understood my sharing my calendar with her to carry an implicit expectation that she would share hers, although this hadn't occurred to me—and I was quite surprised when she did. After sharing her calendar with me, she felt unacceptably exposed, as though I had full knowledge of her whereabouts at all times; in fact, I only viewed her calendar once during our relationship.
Ultimately the calendar was, to Kira, a symbol of the relationship escalator. Her fears about becoming bound by expectations or commitment became tied to it. The unfortunate part was, we never discussed any of this. She told me only when our relationship was at an end and any possibility of genuine communication had already been cut off.
A very common problem with passive communication is that people accustomed to it tend to see all communication as passive. They can't switch between passive and direct communication. No matter how direct you are, the passive communicator is certain there's a hidden message, an unstated request or a secret criticism buried somewhere deep in your words. Often a passive communicator will come up with interpretations that seem plain bizarre, even paranoid. But this just comes from their cultural expectations of how much meaning other people hide in their words.
The most effective way we've found for building good communication with a passive communicator is with patience, compassion and directness. Respond only to the surface words, without trying to divine or decode the hidden meaning. If the passive communicator becomes frustrated at your inability to see the actual message—and he will—reiterate that direct communication is the only way you know to make sure the message gets through.
Demonstrate clear, direct communication yourself. If your partner misinterprets something you've said, or extracts a meaning you didn't intend, be patient and forthright. State your intended meaning plainly. Reassure him that your words carry no hidden intent. Make it clear that you genuinely want to understand. Respond to vague statements with clear, direct questions. Ask for clarification when he says something ambiguous. And above all keep at it, and don't expect quick change. Passive communication takes a long time to learn, and just as long to unlearn.
Storytelling
Humans are storytelling animals. We tell stories to ourselves, dozens of times a day, without even being aware of it. We use these stories to make sense of the world and to understand the actions of the people around us. Many of these stories relate to other people's motives. We know that people's actions aren't random. We build models in our heads that help us understand others. And because we don't come from the factory equipped with magical mind-reading rubies in our foreheads, these models are flawed. They're made up of observation, guesswork, projection and empathy.
Unfortunately, it's natural to react as though our models are perfect. We don't usually say to ourselves, "I'm convinced to about 65 percent accuracy that he is trying to replace me in my lover's affections, but there's considerable room for error." Rather, we say, "That bastard is trying to get rid of me!" The motives we ascribe to other people's behavior are colored by our own fears and insecurities; if we're worried about being supplanted, we tend to read signs in everything.
Worse, we are predisposed to view all other people's motives less charitably than our own. Research has shown that we tend to explain our own behavior in terms of the situation we're in, while we believe the behavior of others goes directly to their character. When asked why we cut someone else off in traffic, we might say, "I was looking the other way and didn't see him," but when asked why someone else cut us off in traffic, we are more likely to say, "She's obviously a reckless driver who doesn't care about anyone else on the road." (Sociologists often refer to this as the "fundamental attribution error.")
In polyamorous relationships, as you might imagine, this behavior can get pretty ugly. When we tell ourselves stories about other people, we tend to run with those stories, rather than what the other people say about the matter. Of course so-and-so says he isn't trying to separate me from my partner; that's exactly what he wants me to believe!
We propose a radical strategy to deal with what people say: In the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, believe them.
If we were to set out axioms of good communication (as we try to do in the next chapter), one of them would be that communication about any issue ideally involves the people directly affected. This sounds simple, but it's surprisingly hard to implement. It starts from an early age. Most of us who grew up with siblings can remember at least one time when we said, "Mom, Danny's poking me!" or "Hey, Dad, Miranda won't stay on her side of the seat!" And thus the seed is sown for some of the most tenacious communication problems we will ever face.
Triangular communication happens when one person has a problem, concern or question for another person, but instead of bringing it up directly with that person, instead goes to someone else. It happens when a child has a problem with her brother's behavior and petitions a parent to settle it. It happens online when one person has a problem with somebody else and goes to the faceless masses of the Internet to seek validation. It happens when someone at a company has a problem with another person's performance and approaches a coworker about it. And it happens all the time in polyamorous relationships.
Triangular communication can also happen when one person wants to control the flow of information between the partners. Most of us don't like conflict, and controlling the flow of information can seem like a way to avoid or reduce conflict. It can sometimes be a means of minimizing tensions or disagreements; if your partners aren't getting along, you can be tempted to try to interpret one person's words for the other, in a way that shows the message in its most favorable light. It can also happen when you don't trust what your partners might say to each other.
In practice, triangular communication leads to diffusion of responsibility. It becomes easy to tell one partner, "I can't do what you want me to do because Suzie might not like it," rather than "I am choosing not to do what you want me to, because I think Suzie might not like it." (Veto is arguably an extreme example of this diffusion of responsibility. More on this.)
Eve's Story Ray and his wife, Danielle, had a hierarchical relationship. Very early on, his wife stressed that I needed to remember she was primary. This was my first polyamorous relationship, I was head over heels for Ray, and Peter and I had assumed we would be using hierarchy as well, so at the time, it seemed entirely reasonable to agree to this. I was naively unaware of what it would actually mean—especially years in.
Danielle practiced what a friend of mine called "line-item veto." Ray and I were in a long-distance relationship, but if I came to visit him, I was expected to alternate nights with her, sometimes at a ratio of two nights hers and one night mine (in the case of a long weekend, for example). If we had plans together and she needed something from him, even if she'd just had a bad day, he had to cancel our plans so he could be with her—even if we weren't going to see each other again for weeks.
I tried negotiating directly with Danielle, which got even worse results—for example, I was going to be in town for a weekend, and she proposed that I share a meal with the two of them, as the only time I would see Ray. Over months, my frustration grew. I blamed Danielle: for being selfish, inconsiderate, demanding, needy. I was seeing a poly-specialist therapist at the time and was working with her through some of this frustration. She asked me why I was blaming Danielle for Ray's decisions. I didn't have a good answer.
I realized then that regardless of his reasons, it was Ray who was canceling dates. Ray who wasn't giving me the time or attention I wanted. Ray who I needed to talk to about what I needed in the relationship, and Ray who could agree whether or not to provide it. This was an epiphany for me, and one that turned around my relationship with Ray. It simply hadn't occurred to me before to see Ray as the copilot of our relationship.
Eve's discovery was painful. It's much easier to blame a third party, casting you and your beloved as helpless victims, than to face the fact that your partner is choosing not to invest in your relationship. It can be hard to direct your anger and frustration at the person who is actually hurting you when he's someone you are intimately involved with. And for the pivot person in a vee? It's a lot harder to do the gritty work of negotiating solutions among competing needs and deciding how to share your time and resources than it is to stand back and pretend that those solutions are something your partners need to work out between themselves.
Metamours are not children, and as a pivot partner you are not Halloween candy to divide up. Negotiating resource investments in relationships is not like deciding who gets how many Snickers bars and who is stuck with the malted milk balls. Three-way communication is useful to build trust and get a clear understanding of needs and capabilities, but ultimately the pivot partner is the master of her own decisions and resources. If someone isn't getting what he needs from her, that's something he needs to take up with her, his partner. And she needs to take responsibility.
The solution to triangular communication is simple in theory—don't do it—but difficult in practice, because it's easier to talk about things that bother us with anyone but the person whose behavior is at issue. And because when we feel wronged, it's natural to seek allies. In practical terms, you can't make other people communicate directly with each other. The best you can do is to limit your own participation in triangular communication. Just back out and tell the people they need to talk to each other. And you should address anything that bothers you directly with the person involved.
Try not to be drawn into the role of rescuer when someone comes to you complaining about that terrible thing so-and-so just did. Reserve judgment of other people in your relationship network, and encourage the parties at odds to talk directly to each other rather than through you, without allowing yourself to become a go-between.
If you do find yourself stuck in a pattern of triangular communication, it may be useful to pick up Harriet Lerner's Dance of Intimacy, listed in the resources. To see how triangular communication can go spectacularly wrong, we recommend reading Othello, by Shakespeare.
When we don't want to communicate
Everything we've talked about so far assumes that the people involved are trying to communicate with each other. We all grasp the value of communication intellectually, but turning that understanding into reality can be really hard, because often, we don't actually want to communicate.
Communication is scary. We fear open communication when we fear the vulnerability that comes with it. Open communication means exposing yourself to rejection or judgment or trouble. It may mean finding out that what you assumed your lover thinks and feels is wrong. It presents the possibility of hearing no to your deepest wishes, and it may mean having your needs or desires turned against you if the relationship is unhealthy. There is no communication—at least not meaningful communication—without vulnerability.
Communication can be hard when it leads to embarrassment or shame. If you were brought up to believe that there are certain things (like sex) that you just don't talk about, shame can interfere with communication…and you might end up wondering, "Why is my sex life so unsatisfying?" and being afraid to hear the answer.
Another barrier to communication is the notion that there are certain ways people in a relationship "should" be, so there's no need to talk about it. "If he really loves me, of course he will know to do thus-and-such. Why won't he do thus-and-such? Everyone knows this is part of a relationship! It must mean he doesn't love me!" Yet another of these emotional barriers is the common trap of thinking in generalities and allowing them to take precedence over the specific details of the people in the relationship. As one possible example: "Everyone knows that men love getting head. So that means I don't need to ask him how he feels about oral sex, because men love getting head. If he tells me he doesn't want me to go down on him, that must mean I'm doing it wrong and I'm bad at it."
If a relationship involves some element of consensual domination and submission, people can fail to communicate because they believe submissives should simply accept whatever the dominant partner wants. Or they may believe submissives shouldn't have a say in their relationship, because submissives like to do whatever they are told and never, ever voice their own needs. Some people take this to such an extreme that they even believe submissive partners in dominant/submissive relationships shouldn't have needs of their own.
Almost always, communication tends to be most difficult precisely when it's most important. As the relationship coach Marcia Baczynski has put it, "If you're afraid to say it, that means you need to say it." When we are feeling most raw, most vulnerable, most scared of opening up, those are the times we most need to open up. We can't expect others to respect our boundaries and limits if we don't talk about them or, worse, pretend they don't exist. It's a bit of a paradox that even as open communication makes us feel vulnerable and exposed, it's essential if we are to protect our boundaries from being violated. We can't expect others to respect our boundaries if we pretend they don't exist.
We've been asked whether talking about everything takes some of the mystery out of a relationship. We find that question surprising. We are all, every one of us, complicated and dynamic and always changing, and relationship dynamics are filled with mystery as it is. There's no need to invent more! There is easily enough mystery between two people to fill many lifetimes, even when they're both paying very close attention and are as honest and transparent with one another as it is possible to be.
Relationships based on honesty and transparency, in which the people really pay attention to each other and work to see and understand each other, are more subtle and profoundly complex than relationships that avoid this kind of honesty and knowledge. The more you get to know a person, the more you find that there is to know. And we are all moving targets; we change every day. There will always be new things to learn, no matter how much we communicate.
Coercive communication
Coercion doesn't always involve physical violence or direct threats. It's actually quite easy for relationships to become coercive when the stakes are high—and when we are deeply attached or committed to another person, they are high. Coercion happens any time you make the consequences of saying no so great that you've removed reasonable choice.
A subtle sort of coercion arises any time you believe that your partner owes you something. For example, if you think your partner owes you intimacy, and you are just "expressing your feelings" about what you're owed, there's a good chance you're being coercive. If your partner says no, and you start preparing for a fight instead of accepting their choice, you're probably being coercive.
If your partner sets a boundary or says no to a request, she probably has a good reason. That reason might not even be about you. It's important to respect a no even when you don't understand it. Show appreciation for your partner's self-advocacy and self-knowledge, be grateful for the intimacy she has shown you, and make it clear that you respect her autonomy and ability to make choices—even if you don't understand what's happening or why.
We're talking about boundaries your partner sets on herself, which as we discuss in chapters 9 and 10, are quite different from rules she places on you. It is always appropriate to negotiate things another person places on you, though it sometimes takes careful attention to recognize the difference.
It's also possible that in setting boundaries a partner is being manipulative, using boundary-setting as a way to coerce you. Withdrawal and silence, classic techniques of emotional blackmail, can initially be difficult to distinguish from healthy boundary-setting. A person could be withdrawing just to punish you. But that doesn't change what you should do. The solution is never to try to force someone to do something they don't want to do. Thank them, and respect their choice. If you can't respect their choice, it's time to examine your own boundaries.
If you're hurting because of a boundary your partner has set, knowing how to practice active listening can be especially useful. Active listening involves asking genuine, open-ended, non-leading questions, then listening quietly to the answer, and then repeating back what you heard so it's clear that you heard it correctly, as we discuss in the next chapter. It is especially critical in these moments to be careful not to twist your questions into accusations or statements of intent. "Why would you want to hurt me this way?" is a manipulative, coercive statement, not an attempt at genuine communication.
Even without disproportionate power, people manipulate one another in relationships in many subtle ways. People might seek agreement by shifting blame, appealing to a sense of fairness, or implying that the other person is negotiating in bad faith. Statements like "Why do you have to have sex with someone else when you know how much that hurts me?" are a common tactic that shifts responsibility for one person's emotional state onto another person.
Appealing to social norms is another way to try to coerce "agreement." This tends to be more common in mono/poly relationships or with couples who are opening up than in relationships that are poly from the beginning. It includes statements like "Why can't you just agree to normal relationships like other people?" (Eve's former partner Ray once said he could not accompany Eve and Peter on a vacation because he wouldn't be able to explain to their parents and social circle why he was going somewhere without his wife.)
Still another technique for manipulating agreement involves preying on fear of abandonment. Statements like "What would you do without me?" or "I don't know why I even stay here and let you do this to me" can be attempts to use emotional blackmail to compel agreement.
Now that we've covered the ways communication in poly relationships can go wrong, what strategies can you use to help it go well? That's the subject of the next chapter.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Communication in relationships, and polyamorous relationships in particular, can be like a proverbial minefield. As you attempt to negotiate this potentially dangerous territory, here are some questions to guide you:
- Do I use words the same way my partners do? Do I often find myself in discussions about the meanings of words?
- If I have a problem with someone's behavior, do I discuss the problem with that person?
- If my partners have a problem with someone else's behavior, do I encourage them to bring it up with that person?
- Do I communicate passively or directly?
- Do I look for hidden meanings in other people's words? Do I bury my real meaning?
- Do I communicate authentically in ways that make me vulnerable?
- In what ways do I actively listen to my partners?