Also, a word (or several) about "fulfilling needs".
This is part of the standard poly propaganda: you have needs, they must be fulfilled, and it's immoral not to fulfill your partner's needs, or to set him or her free to fulfill own needs; it means you don't really love your partner and are a selfish, jealous, possessive git.
The problem is that these aren't needs, they're dissatisfactions. I am entirely dissatisfied living in the part of the country where I live; I don't belong here; I don't enjoy the climate or several of the cultural norms; what passes for architecture is painfully ugly to my eye; I miss several geographical and botanical features of other regions deeply.
However.
Is moving a need? No, of course not. I'd like to go, yes. But I have a child who does belong to this place, has family and community here, and is happy here. The schools are great, it's affordable, etc. Maybe most important: if we moved, we'd both lose our support structure and it'd be replaced by nothing. She'd be left to acclimate more or less on her own while I tried to get started making a living. This would likely be damaging to her.
When she's grown, I will move. I'm the grownup here, which means that some of my desires take a backseat to the kid's overall welfare. I will survive in this place and manage to enjoy myself for a span of years, and then I'll go.
Likewise, do I have unfulfilled sexual desires? Baby, do I. But no, I'm not going to die or feel my life has been in vain if I don't get to go running around with my ass in the air. More important: My kid doesn't grow up in a home where there's a parade of grooly men. Also more important: Her mother doesn't put herself at geometrically increased risk of STDs. I can make do with what I've got, thanks, till my life's my own again.
Let's talk a little bit about actual needs.
Almost every parent of young or multiple children that I have met has a crying physiological need for more sleep. These people have generally been sleep-deprived for years, and yes, it has a real and physical effect on their bodies, as does lack of time for proper exercise. Most mothers I have met, particularly mothers of young children, are half-crazy with loss of identity, because young children literally need help and attention every several seconds or minutes. They desperately need an entire day to themselves; many need time and freedom to do work that's important to them beyond childrearing. Do they go and get it? Generally, no. And that's because they understand that (a) the children's needs come first; (b) this is temporary and they are grownups, they will deal.
The poly response to this is "oh, well, that's why you need more sexy adults in your house, they'll look after the kids". It's a great line that, sadly, has nothing to do with reality. Adults seeking sexytime pleasures are not generally interested in doing hours of parenting work for a roll in the hay, and they aren't interested in committing far enough to make it safe for small children to bond with them. Furthermore, unless a poly prospect is interested in getting up at 5:30 am to drive someone else's kid to band practice, or help pay for that kid's first car, or is putting away dough in the kid's college fund, or is willing to be the heavy sometimes and sit there training a 7-year-old to clean her room while she pitches a fit, and is willing to stick around for a decade taking lip from snotty adolescents, I don't want to hear about it. I'm guessing that weeds out maybe 97% of all people interested in poly lifestyles.
(Incidentally, future poly lover, I've been meaning to have a garage sale for like two years now, so if you could make that happen then totally mwah. Because I'm too busy with the living-making and the kid-raising and all. We might have sex later if I'm not too tired.)
The poly talk about needs is intensely selfish and comes from the land of individual psychotherapy, where you exist in a bubble with your therapist and are merely arranging thoughts in your head. It has very little to do with the real and competing demands of family life, including the reality that the kids are more vulnerable than the adults are, and need more, and need inconveniently. That kind of individual selfishness, taken out of a therapeutic bubble, is amoral in the sense of being unwilling to think seriously about consequences.
If you can find a stable arrangement of multiple responsible adults who get along well and all want to be married to each other, formally or not, for long enough to get kids grown, and share values closely enough to be able to pull it off, then dandy. But considering how difficult it is to manage two psyches in such an arrangement, I don't hold out a lot of hope for three, four, five. By way of comparison: I work at a university, where tenured faculty live and work together in departments together for decades, bringing in new people one or two at a time, maybe once a year or less often. If you want to see a model of psychopathology, that's it. The only reason most of them stay is that no one will pay them that kind of money anywhere else, and no one will let them have at their special interest anywhere else, and besides most of them have never lived outside universities and they're scared. But an awful lot of them just loathe each other.
It's a nice (or notnice) fantasy, it's hardly new, it's not a game you want to play for real unless you are in fact a selfish git or you haven't got (and really don't want) kids.
28 May 2012, 6:12 pm
