Are you into Relationship Collage or Relationship Complete?

Collage or Complete?

  • Total voters
    11
S

SEASONEDpolyAgain

Well-known member
I didn't come up with this term/thread, I actually copied it from the poly and kinky group in fetlife. You can find the discussion there but I'll tell you how the OP defined these terms:

Relationship Collage - with this one, you believe that your relationships should together meet your needs. That means, for example if you are not sexually satisfied in one relationship, you seek another to fulfill that specific need

Relationship Complete - with this one, you believe that your relationships should be complete and fulfill most (if not all) of your basic relationship needs on their own. That means for example, if you are not sexually satisfied in one relationship, you might consider terminating or de-esclating the relationship
 
I am for Relation Complete. It seems very misguided and misleading to start something with someone only for them to fulfill "my need". I guess it would work in ENM, but with polyamory I would start from scratch when making space for someone.
 
Neither fits me perfectly but I lean more toward relationship collage.

Short story: married 18 years. Happily. Successfully. Weirdly healthy. But we wanted more on the sex front. Truly it was just that. Want more with and for each other and discovered we very much enjoy sexual feelings with others outside of each other.

Our reality is that we do not want to dedicate the time and energy into MAKING A LIFE with another mate outside of each other. One is hard. Haha. But including others into what we first termed a "side hobby" for me quickly became obvious that I have the capacity to love multiple people. Differently. But it's there.

My husband tends to keep his physical fun mostly separate from emotions, but from time to time he catches crushes and catches feels. And partly this is why I went in search of a community to sort of bounce this around with, because it isn't always easy to navigate being the one feeling left out when "side hobby" energy isn't equal on both sides. And it rarely is.
 
I lean "Complete". I'm not really interested in seeking new relationships for the purpose of filling a "lack" (at least, not right now I'm not). I want connections of whatever kind for their own sake.

Among other things, what led to the end of my last monogamous relationship was making connections with some new people. There was nothing in particular "missing" from my relationship with my partner that those people could provide (ok, a sense of novelty, maybe...)—but I wanted the connections, themselves, because they were fulfilling. I realized I wasn't willing to forgo them for the sake of exclusivity.
 
I guess a collage for me, as I don't require every relationship to meet my every need.
 
Collage. I am complete unto myself. I do not seek out people to fill "gaps". I accept people into my life that complement and add depth and texture to my life experience in mutually compatable ways. My needs are few. I am abundantly fortunate in that my relationships with others (friends, family, lovers) enhance and enrich my life. Curious how this may relate to Myers-Briggs. INTJ here.
 
Last edited:
I
JaneQSmythe said:
Collage. I am complete unto myself. I do not seek out people to fills "gaps". I accept people into my life that complement and add depth and texture to my life experience in mutually compatable ways. My needs are few. I am abundantly fortunate in that my relationships with others (friends, family, lovers) enhance and enrich my life. Curious how this may relate to Myers-Briggs. INTJ here.
Click to expand...
I think you might have misread collage, as it's about different relationships fulfilling different needs. If it's not complete, you go fill that missing bit with someone else.

Complete isn't about completing *you*, it's about being complete within itself. If it's not complete, it's reduced or discarded.

Personally, I'm in the "other" votes. I find both notions in the OP make my skin crawl.
 
I’m not sure I like either of those, but then I don’t tend to like categories. I lean _closer_ to collage. There are relationships that make me very happy but would be unsustainable were I monogamous - Knight and I just wouldn’t be physically compatible and I’d be miserable, but we work so well otherwise that I’d be miserable without him so I wouldn’t want to deescalate. (I suspect Artist and I would eventually not live together well, but I also don’t want to test that.)

But that said, I can’t _just_ get one piece of a collage from a person - I need something more approaching complete.
 
Complete. I have certain needs in romantic relationships. They are the same basic needs even though they can be met in different ways by different people. If someone isn't meeting those needs, then the connection isn't sustainable and I will end the relationship.
 
Personally, I would rather BE part of someone's relationship collage than be responsible for meeting all of their relationship needs. Especially when I was younger and prioritized working on making my own life complete on my own.

Now that I am older and more established in my own life, I can see the appeal of a more settled relationship style with fewer partners that I spend more time with and have more in common with.

However, I don't need any one relationship to feel "complete" and something about that framing bothers me a little. Like JaneQSmythe, I am complete on my own and don't have a lot of "needs," and don't really seek relationships to fulfill any needs per se. Other than that it's nice to have partnered sex and someone fun to talk to who isn't a totally casual stranger.

But I also don't like the "collage" framing either. I don't regard people or relationship as having "gaps" that I need to fulfill with a different person. But like icesong, I think a big benefit of poly is being able to have a relationship that wouldn't work if we were both monogamous (different sexual needs, for example, or incompatibility for living together, etc).

I guess it matters whether the incompatibilities that can be solved by being poly (collage-style poly) would eventually make the relationship totally incompatible regardless of poly. I still don't think of those incompatibilities as "gaps" though.

I don't believe one relationship is supposed to provide absolutely everything I'd want in a partner...for me, that is a main tenet of being poly, and why the "relationship complete" framing doesn't quite make sense to me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top