Technically it makes sense, what I'm hearing, and I probably should have seen it coming, but, it seems surreal to me that consent questions have boiled down to questions of if, when, and how to break up.
Well, it's on the extreme end of nonconsent. I'd like to think that more consent questions work like a negotiation. At least, they have in my relationships. But a negotiation is boring in terms of dramatic potential. It's less fun to discuss in the hypothetical.
This fake conversation more closely mirrors the flow of consent and permission in my relationship with Guitarist:
"We can try polyamory, but I would be very uncomfortable if you started having sex with your girlfriend right away."
"Okay. Your feelings are important to me, so I'll hold off. But why?"
"I want to give myself time to get my feelings in order. This isn't a hard and fast rule, just let's talk about it later."
"Okay, I enjoy sex a lot and I'd like to have it, but I can live with that."
"I've worked through my feelings, and I think I would be fine if you had sex with her, but just not in our bedroom."
"Okay. That sounds weird. Why not?"
"Because the thought makes me anxious for no reason I can discern. It's the place I sleep. It has my smell in it. I don't want other smells there. I'm apparently very territorial about the bedroom. I wish I wasn't, but I am, and I'll work on it. So could you just ... not."
"Okay. It's valid that you struggle with that. This is inconvenient but we'll have sex in other places."
Or consent and permission in my relationship with Purr:
"I don't want to control your other relationships, but I want to know when you have them."
"Okay, why?"
"Because I'm worried about STDs and sometimes condoms or gloves or whatever breaks and if you're possibly exchanging fluids with someone, I will just be more comfortable having that information."
"Well, I'm not comfortable with that. How about I just tell you who I'm on that kind of level with, instead of every time I have a new interest?"
"That addresses my concern. We can do that instead."
I mean, there are a million places any one of us could have had a complete breakdown of consent and permission. But since we're reasonable human beings who care about each other, we stretch whenever possible to accommodate each others' needs. I think the breaking up would only happen if the needs are irreconcilably, diametrically opposed (ie, You're polyamorous but I need monogamy! I practice DADT, but you want to know when I'm having sex with other people! I need honesty but you cheated!).