Reverie
Active member
I have no pressing issue related to this question, but I have been pondering it casually because I don't really know where I come down on it.
How do you guys feel about information transmission and privacy issues between partners?
I, like many women I know, have the kind of relationship with my BFF where we tell each other almost everything. I have a very few deep, dark secrets that I haven't shared with her, but other than that, she gets the full report about everything, including what happens between me and my partners: everything from sex acts to what my partners' genitals look like, to sexual health stuff, to the nice and mean things we may have said to one another...I've had at least one friend that I've had that relationship with my entire sexual life (before my current BFF, it was a middle school friend that I stayed close with through high school). It's quite "Sex and the City."
And it's not just sex, either. We know every little detail about what is happening in the lives of our other friends, if it is tangential to the story we may be telling. I know about her other best friends' struggle with pill addiction, her friends' abortions, etc. We have screenshotted or straight up copy/pasted bits of our conversations with other people. We used to be judgmental toward people sometimes, but we are working to have a different perspective there. But I can't imagine that the flow of non-value-judged information will stop.
When I met my now-fiancé, he and I became best friends very quickly. We were platonic right at first, but it grew into a poly relationship. When we met, we were in relationships with other people, but we did not immediately share those sexual details like I do with my BFF, despite being best friends. Over time, though, and as we've gotten closer and closer, I do tend to want to tell him EVERYTHING. He now knows things about me that even my BFF does not.
But that makes it kind of weird for poly, if I wanted to eventually talk to him the way I talk to my BFF—giving crazy amounts of detail about all the people in my life. My instinct is to WANT that eventually, as long as we can get to a place where metamour-relationship-details don't make us jealous.
But...is it fair to the other people involved? Is there a difference between telling my BFF everything, like I have since I was 17, and telling my partner the same level of detail? Is it ethically wrong for my BFF and I to have been telling each other all of that in the first place?
I can't imagine that it is all that different to now tell two people where before I'd only be telling one, especially if I know that the buck stops with both of those people. I'm close enough to both of them to know that they would never pass something that *I* told them in confidence to a random other person. Like, I feel that it would naturally stop in a couple of degrees, because beyond that, no one even cares.
If Oona's other friend Melanie has an abortion, and Oona mentions it to me and to her boyfriend Toby, I am probably not going to mention it to my fiancé Rider. If Oona tries a certain kind of sex with Toby that Rider and I have, and Oona tells me about it, I will probably mention it to Rider, but it doesn't make sense for Rider to tell his other partners. It's kind of like the relationship nature of BFF and very close partners have a freedom of information flow that just seems natural. Like there are some situations that get a free pass from keeping one's mouth shut unless specifically instructed to. But when the information is related to a metamour, would or should that be different? Should we not discuss when, for example, we have an evening with a male partner (we are both bi) where the partner has an erectile issue? Or when a female partner is bleeding and so things don't go anywhere?
Do you guys kind of see where I am going with this? Opinions? I have not really come down anywhere yet, and I am really only considering this in great detail for the first time. I'd love to see what everyone else thinks.
How do you guys feel about information transmission and privacy issues between partners?
I, like many women I know, have the kind of relationship with my BFF where we tell each other almost everything. I have a very few deep, dark secrets that I haven't shared with her, but other than that, she gets the full report about everything, including what happens between me and my partners: everything from sex acts to what my partners' genitals look like, to sexual health stuff, to the nice and mean things we may have said to one another...I've had at least one friend that I've had that relationship with my entire sexual life (before my current BFF, it was a middle school friend that I stayed close with through high school). It's quite "Sex and the City."
And it's not just sex, either. We know every little detail about what is happening in the lives of our other friends, if it is tangential to the story we may be telling. I know about her other best friends' struggle with pill addiction, her friends' abortions, etc. We have screenshotted or straight up copy/pasted bits of our conversations with other people. We used to be judgmental toward people sometimes, but we are working to have a different perspective there. But I can't imagine that the flow of non-value-judged information will stop.
When I met my now-fiancé, he and I became best friends very quickly. We were platonic right at first, but it grew into a poly relationship. When we met, we were in relationships with other people, but we did not immediately share those sexual details like I do with my BFF, despite being best friends. Over time, though, and as we've gotten closer and closer, I do tend to want to tell him EVERYTHING. He now knows things about me that even my BFF does not.
But that makes it kind of weird for poly, if I wanted to eventually talk to him the way I talk to my BFF—giving crazy amounts of detail about all the people in my life. My instinct is to WANT that eventually, as long as we can get to a place where metamour-relationship-details don't make us jealous.
But...is it fair to the other people involved? Is there a difference between telling my BFF everything, like I have since I was 17, and telling my partner the same level of detail? Is it ethically wrong for my BFF and I to have been telling each other all of that in the first place?
I can't imagine that it is all that different to now tell two people where before I'd only be telling one, especially if I know that the buck stops with both of those people. I'm close enough to both of them to know that they would never pass something that *I* told them in confidence to a random other person. Like, I feel that it would naturally stop in a couple of degrees, because beyond that, no one even cares.
If Oona's other friend Melanie has an abortion, and Oona mentions it to me and to her boyfriend Toby, I am probably not going to mention it to my fiancé Rider. If Oona tries a certain kind of sex with Toby that Rider and I have, and Oona tells me about it, I will probably mention it to Rider, but it doesn't make sense for Rider to tell his other partners. It's kind of like the relationship nature of BFF and very close partners have a freedom of information flow that just seems natural. Like there are some situations that get a free pass from keeping one's mouth shut unless specifically instructed to. But when the information is related to a metamour, would or should that be different? Should we not discuss when, for example, we have an evening with a male partner (we are both bi) where the partner has an erectile issue? Or when a female partner is bleeding and so things don't go anywhere?
Do you guys kind of see where I am going with this? Opinions? I have not really come down anywhere yet, and I am really only considering this in great detail for the first time. I'd love to see what everyone else thinks.