People are living, dynamic organisms; you grow or you die. (Actually you die, period; growth is optional.) You will change. Your partner will change. Your relationship will change. This is a fact, something we must accept gracefully. If you fear change, if you cling too tightly to what your relationship is now and insist that this is the way it must always be, you risk breaking it. Yes, sometimes relationships change in ways we do not want, and people grow in ways that take them apart rather than bring them together. That's the risk you accept when you get involved in this messy, complicated business of romantic relationships.
The things you value in your relationship now may not exist in the future. The things you want now, you may not want in the future. The things you see in your partner now may not be there in the future. And that's okay. Adopt a fluid idea about the way your life will look, keep in touch with your changing needs and those of your partners, talk to your partners about these things openly and without fear, and you can build relationships that grow as you grow. If you do not, your relationships can become brittle and shatter.
For example, when your partner starts a new relationship, you will probably have less of her time and attention. Even in the most inclusive group relationships, this can happen. Any relationship is likely to need alone time; no matter how much overlap there is, you're still likely to lose some time and attention. Is that something you can accept? Is your relationship resilient enough? Do you have things in your life other than your partners that enrich it and bring you joy, or is all of your joy dependent on your partners' attention?
Allowing change with grace, without expecting to control how the change happens, is a key skill we have seen in people who create strong, resilient poly relationships. Be clear on what your relationship needs are, be willing to advocate for them, and accept that things are going to change. That way you'll be ready.
Re-evaluating relationships
In long-term relationships, usually a time arrives when the two new people you've become over the years stand there looking at each other and ask, "Whatever we believed or wanted a few years ago, do the people we are now belong in a relationship?" Sometimes the answer is yes: these two new people still want to be together. And then you move forward, perhaps stronger than before.
But sometimes the answer is no, it doesn't make sense anymore. This is normal and okay, and yet somehow we always seem blindsided by this realization. We become angry, and we treat a breakup almost universally in our society as though it shouldn't happen. In fact, people see this realization as a betrayal. Think of the accusation "I don't even know you anymore!" We act as though the ones we love should not be allowed to grow and change or, if they do, it means they love us less.
Since people change all the time, we can debate whether it even makes sense to make lifelong commitments, at least in the way society encourages us to. We're taught that marriage should mean our relationship never changes, rather than meaning we can be family for life but the shape the family takes can change. Instead of the idea of "breaking up," where the presumption is that you'll stay in a relationship until something makes you leave it, perhaps we should sit down every year or few and say, "Okay, who are we now? How is this relationship working? Do we like the way it's going? Should we change something? Do we even still like each other that much? Does it make sense to continue?" If we think of this as renewing the relationship every now and again, then even if the answer to the last question is no, the result does not necessarily have to be a "breaking." To use the widespread poly term, it's a "transition."
Expectations are brittle things. Not only do people change, but every relationship has a natural ebb and flow. Relationships can come and go and come again with the same person. When we acknowledge that, and allow space for changes to happen, we create relationships that can weather almost any storm.
The best way to evaluate whether a relationship is a good one, regardless of what form it takes, is to think about the things you need and want in the relationship, and evaluate whether it gives you those things. It's not the shape of the relationship that's important; it's whether it meets your needs. Another good technique is to interrogate your feelings. When you think about the relationship ending, what is your first response? If it's a sense of relief, maybe it's time for the relationship to end.
Of course, part of the fairy tale that's deeply ingrained in most of us is the idea that relationships only succeed if they last until someone dies. This is, if you think about it, a strange metric for success. If we manage to find one another's company pleasant enough for long enough, someone dies, and then we can claim success. Relationships are often measured in terms of longevity; if they end prior to the death of one of the people, we call them "failures."
In his book The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, columnist Dan Savage described his grandmother's unhappy marriage, which ended in her suicide. He commented:
The instant my grandmother died, her marriage became a success.
Death parted my grandparents, not divorce, and death is the sole measure of a successful marriage. When a marriage ends in divorce, we say that it's failed. The marriage was a failure. Why? Because both parties got out alive. It doesn't matter if the parting is amicable, it doesn't matter if the exes are happier apart, it doesn't matter if two happy marriages take the place of one unhappy marriage. A marriage that ends in divorce failed. Only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney's is a success.
Longevity is a seductive idea, because it can feel like even a joyless, loveless partnership is preferable to being alone. The two of us do not believe that just any relationship, no matter how unhappy, is preferable to no relationship. Rather, one of the core beliefs that underlies this book is the idea that only relationships that enrich our lives are worth striving for.
Think about all the measures we use to tell whether or not a relationship is successful. How long it lasts? How often they have sex? How many children and grandchildren they have? Perhaps how much money they make? It seems like whenever we try to figure out whether someone else's relationship is successful or not, it rarely occurs to us to ask the people involved if they believe it's successful.
We have both had relationships end. Almost everyone does. Neither of us would call these relationships "failures," because they contributed to making us who we are today. We have taken things from those relationships—joy, personal growth, learning, love, laughter—that have enriched our lives. We are better for having had them.
We propose a different metric for the success of a relationship. Relationships that make us the best versions of ourselves are successes. Those that don't are not, regardless of how long they last. A ten-year happy relationship that ends in friendship is more successful than a lifetime relationship of misery. That doesn't mean we think good relationships are always happy, 100 percent of the time, or that we should bail at the first conflict or trouble. All relationships have their ups and downs; it is not reasonable to expect otherwise. On the whole, good relationships promote the long-term happiness and well-being of the people involved; when that no longer becomes possible, and there's no clear path to making it possible, then it might be time for the relationship to end.
A fundamental premise of ethical relationships is that all relationships are consensual. That means people are free to enter relationships without coercion, and free to end relationships that are not meeting their needs. An ethical relationship is one where nobody feels compelled to stay against their will.
Coercion can be subtle. Most of us would say, "I would never coerce someone to stay with me against their will," but not all forms of coercion involve fists. Coercion takes a thousand forms. One particularly insidious form is the idea that everyone in a poly relationship should be on great terms with, or even be romantic or sexual partners with, everyone else in the relationship. This is an idea that's often given wonderful-sounding names (like "family" or "inclusion"), but there's an ethical trap built into the foundation. Say, for example, that you have a full triad—a relationship with three people who are all sexually and romantically involved with one another. What happens if one of those relationships starts to crumble, or if one of the people no longer wishes to be involved with one of the others? Often an implicit, or even explicit, understanding exists that if that happens, the other relationship will end too.
Cherise's Story Cherise started her exploration of polyamory when she was invited to join a relationship with a married couple, Pam and David. They were new to polyamory themselves, and after many discussions had decided they wanted to find a single bisexual woman who would agree to be with both of them in an exclusive relationship. This, they reasoned, would be a good way to avoid problems with jealousy, and to explore the world of polyamory without going too far outside their comfort zone.
The relationship went well for about six months. After that, things between Cherise and Pam continued to grow, but the relationship between Cherise and David became strained. Eventually, Cherise decided she no longer wanted to be sexually intimate with David.
When that happened, Pam and David became very upset. This wasn't the way they had envisioned things. The idea that one of them might date someone the other was not involved with seemed very threatening. So Pam gave Cherise an ultimatum: "If you end your relationship with David, I will break up with you." Since Cherise was exclusive to them, this meant losing not one but both of her relationships, with all the heartbreak that went along with it.
She reluctantly remained sexually involved with both of them for another few months. Even though she really didn't want to be intimate with David, the discomfort of his unwanted sexual attention seemed smaller than the pain of being dumped by Pam. Eventually the relationship deteriorated to the point where she could no longer stay. Things ended as badly as you might expect. When they did, David and Pam blamed Cherise for the failure; after all, if she had only stuck to the original agreement, nothing bad would have happened! 
Attempts to engineer an outcome are almost always thickly sown with the seeds of coercion. If there is only one form a relationship can take, the foundation is laid: play your assigned role or lose my affection. Any situation which dictates in advance how the relationship will develop disempowers the people in it, and disempowerment tends to turn coercive.
Expectations of sexual or emotional intimacy with one person as a price for intimacy with another are an example of this kind of coercion, but it can take other forms. If there is an expectation, for example, that metamours must get along, that implies that if they can't, one or more relationships will end.
And there doesn't even need to be any sort of threat for a relationship to be coercive. Sometimes internal feelings of guilt are sufficient. If you go into a relationship knowing the terms of engagement, and then those terms become hard for you to accept, it's easy to blame yourself: I knew what I was getting into! I agreed to this! I have nobody to blame but myself! Am I being a home-wrecker by not being able to make this work? Maybe I just need to force myself to be okay with how things are. I went into this with my eyes open, right?
It has to be okay to end relationships. It has to be okay to end relationships without feeling that our support will be kicked out from under us, or that our other lovers will withdraw their love from us. When it's not okay to end a relationship, consent has left the building.
Poly breakups
There's a saying among many poly people: "Relationships don't end, they just change." It's a noble idea, and one that society in general could probably benefit from. In monogamous relationships, it's quite common to see ex-partners as potential threats, and many people don't want to maintain friendships with exes (or, more to the point, don't want their partners to maintain friendships with exes). In the poly community, where it's harder to avoid socializing with former partners, there's a greater emphasis on amicable breakups that preserve friendly, or at least civil, interactions.
But relationships do end. Even when friendship continues, the end of a romantic relationship is hard. It's normal to feel hurt. It's also normal to mourn the loss of a partner, and the loss of the shared goals and dreams.
Psychologists say the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) apply to grief over a lost relationship as much as they apply to terminal illness. It takes time to grieve the loss, even when we want to preserve a friendship on the other side. Ending relationships with dignity and grace means knowing the emotional storm is coming and being prepared to weather it.
There's no easy way to deal with the pain experienced when relationships end, at least not that we've discovered. The good news is that the pain eventually ends. It's natural to project our current emotional state into the future, and when pain is our current emotional state, it can be hard to remember that we've ever felt anything else…but pain ends. One thing that can help, at least a little, is to think of it as something to get through, like a bad movie you wish were over already, rather than a part of your identity. "I sometimes feel pain" is very different from "I am a person who has been hurt." When you make pain part of your identity, it's harder to move on from it without suspicion and bitterness. But good relationships require loving as though you had never been hurt before. A guarded heart is a closed heart.
Eve's Story When Peter told me he felt that a breakup with Clio was coming, I didn't respond the way I expected to. I had seen for a long time that they had been slipping away from each other, but even so, I found myself crying. What had once felt like a little family was splitting up, and the situation was entirely outside my control.
It took a few months for their relationship to complete, and I struggled during that time with the lack of clarity. Clio and I had forged a friendship independent of her relationship with Peter; nevertheless, I knew that our relationship would change once she was no longer my metamour—I just wasn't sure how. I felt it wasn't fair to try to hasten a decision just to make the situation easier for me: it wasn't my relationship, after all.
Their relationship officially ended close to what would have been their fourth anniversary. I was traveling when they finally had the conversation; Peter sent me a message when it was over. Again surprising myself, I cried most of the night, looking at old Facebook photos of the two of them—and the three of us—together. I laughed at myself: I was acting like I was the one who had just lost a relationship. In a sense, I had: even though it wasn't mine, Peter and Clio's relationship was an important part of my life. He had grown and changed from it, and so had I.
Poly breakups are both easier and harder than monogamous breakups. They're easier in the sense that when you have more than one partner, you may have more support to help through the loss. It's nice to have people who can understand and empathize with your pain. However, this doesn't actually make the pain go away (though believe it or not, we've both been asked, "If you have two girlfriends and you lose one, it's still okay because you still have a girlfriend, right?" Which is a bit like saying, "If you have two children and one dies, it's still okay because you still have a child, right?") No matter how many relationships you may have, breakups still cause pain.
Poly breakups pose special challenges because the breakups can involve more people, and can create ripples of ambiguity and uncertainty throughout all your relationships. Your partner's breakup may also affect you very seriously, even if you're not dating the same person your partner is. When two people share a partner in common and one of those relationships ends, the pain is greatly magnified.
There can be a lot of strange carryover effects when a poly relationship ends. One common situation arises when a close, nesting partner or primary-style relationship ends—say, for example, a married couple divorces, or a live-in relationship breaks up. People who are less entwined can feel a pull to fill the void, even if they don't want to, and even if the pull is not intentional on the part of the person who broke up. This happened to Franklin when his marriage with Celeste ended. His partner Maryann, who had always been less inclined toward entwined domestic relationships, also backed away; she seemed to feel that his loss created a hole that he might try to fill by scaling up his relationship with her.
Conversely, there can also be an expectation that if a close, domestic relationship ends, the existing relationships are now eligible for "promotion" to a closer, more entwined status, even if that isn't the most natural form for them to take, or if the person experiencing the breakup doesn't want that.
When a relationship ends, it can help to sit down with the remaining partners and talk about what, if anything, that means for those relationships. In a hierarchical relationship that recognizes only one primary, the end of the primary relationship might create an assumption that one of the secondary partners will be promoted to primary, regardless of whether or not that's true (never mind whether the new relationship configuration will still be hierarchical!). When a relationship that formerly occupied a great deal of time and attention ends, there might be an assumption that this time is now available to the remaining partners. Explicitly talking about these expectations is essential.
It's common to see what we call Schrödinger relationships:* relationships that are near-over in practice, but have fallen into a pattern of comfortable non-contact or non-intimacy. It's easy for poly people to let such non-relationships linger a long time, because when you have multiple partners, there's often no incentive to formally end a relationship in order to "move on"—and it can feel easier to drift apart than to have a tough conversation. This can be quite painful, though, if both partners are not aware of what's happening, or are not fully aware of what is happening, and one partner thinks of the relationship as "on" and the other thinks of it as "off."
Other members of the network can suffer too when the two partners involved in the breakup are not clear with each other, or with their other partners, about what is happening. At the very least, metamour relationships can become awkward if you don't know whether you're really relating to a metamour. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, many people need to grieve their partners' lost relationships too. Letting a relationship drift off into the ether without closure can make this process much harder. Clear conversations about relationship transitions can be important for everyone affected.
That said, many solo poly people and relationship anarchists do prefer to have much more fluid, undefined relationships that slip between friendship and romance. If this is the case for you, then clarity and "define that relationship" conversations may be much less important for you and your partners. Hopefully, however, you will have had early conversations with them about how the sort of fluidity you prefer in your relationships works for you—and can work for them.
As elsewhere in poly relationships, taking sides is tempting but dangerous during a breakup. It's natural to feel anger toward someone you perceive as causing your partner pain. It also tends to do more harm than good. The poly community is small enough that at some point you're likely to be friends with, or even in a relationship with, someone who is in a relationship with the ex, or knows someone who is. Few breakups involve obvious wrongdoing on one person's side while the other is entirely virtuous in thought and deed. Recognize that relationships end, the reasons for breakups are usually very complicated, and there's not necessarily a villain.
This does not apply, of course, to cases of actual abuse, violence, coercion or assault. Some relationships are genuinely unhealthy by the criteria we set out, and we believe it's a good idea to end them entirely.
In the era of social media, it's incredibly tempting to seek validation online. We recommend keeping breakups off social media—even if your former partner doesn't follow this advice. Taking a breakup onto the world stage, especially when you're dealing with the anger part of grief, has a way of backfiring. Remember, the poly community is small, and the people who you make witness to your breakups will probably be your pool of potential partners later.
Children are another special group often affected in poly breakups, since many people find themselves forming close relationships with the children of their partners. As mentioned in chapter 15, it's even common to have mutli-parent live-in households. When a breakup occurs between a child's parent and an adult who's not biologically related to the child, always consider the implications for any children affected. These implications are similar, of course, to those that arise when blended families split up. Even if the adults do not want to continue a friendship with each other, if a child is bonded to nonparental adults, it can be important to find ways to permit an ongoing relationship. This, in turn, makes it all the more vital to strive for amicable breakups. If the two adults find it too painful—at least for a time, as is common—to stay in close contact, metamours who are still connected to the child can often help facilitate a relationship with the former partner.
If there's a happy note on which to end this chapter, maybe it's this. The poly talk of "transitioning" a relationship rather than just "breaking up" is often a correct description, not a euphemism. In monogamous culture, the idea of ending a romance and becoming "just friends" is often treated as a joke. In the poly world, it's often entirely real. It's common for poly folks to be friends with their exes pretty much for life. But resuming contact may take a while; breakups are painful and raw, and a cooling-off period of no contact is often advisable, possibly for months or years. But time mellows all things, and poly exes often eventually find that they can build a lasting friendship.
* After the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment in which we are asked to imagine a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead.
Questions to Ask Yourself
The monogamous world offers us few models for relationships that transition into friendships. In the poly community, which can be quite small, staying on friendly terms with exes is a good objective to strive for. Here are some questions that can help in that quest:
- How do I approach the end of my relationships? What do I want from my former partners?
- If a relationship ends, what does that mean for my other partners? Will I try to promote one of them to primary?
- When a partner's relationship ends, what can I do to prevent myself from taking sides or being drawn into conflict?
- What boundaries do I set around problems within my partners' other relationships?
- Have I ever spread bitterness in the community or set people against each other by taking sides or by not keeping confidences?