So, in my thinking stuff through to write
this post, I found a tangent that I didn't want to go off on over there. Basically it spun off from this part:
But some women, the ones that I can feel compersion about, come to us with, I think, kind of a Golden Rule mentality. If she were me, how would she want her lover approached by a new interest? How would she want to BE approached by a new interest of her lover's? She wants to be with him, but she doesn't want anything he and I are already doing to crash and burn because of it. She's thoughtful, and engages both of us, and is communicative and open. She understands that to make friends is the most likely way of making everything peaceable—to find that unlikely sisterhood is a thing of beauty. She may never even say it out loud, but I feel it in her body language and her motions. She's never possessive of him in her body language around me. She never elbows me out. She smiles at me with her eyes.
And those women? With those women, I can return their consideration and openness in kind, without any difficulty. I feel true compersion—sometimes elation, even. It makes me want to be generous and kind and give them what they want, whatever I can give without giving away what I need. We can FMF our asses off and it's fine!
It makes me feel like I felt at the beginning of poly, before I knew that Claire hated everything to do with me: I wanted her relationship with Rider to succeed, and I wanted to be part of what helped it to.
If a woman came to me and said (like I wanted to say to Claire but she could never bear to look upon my face), "I know this has to be a little hard for you, but I'm glad you're welcoming me into your lives. I respect your relationship, and I know how much you value each other. I hope that we can build a friendship and all hang out sometimes. And I hope you'll let me know if you're having difficulties, so that we can work on it together."
Well, shucks...how could I say no to that?
I wanted to do that with Claire—even TRIED to—but she didn't want to hear it. She even publicly scoffed here on the boards about my letter to her in which I (in my usual whimsical fashion) spoke of hoping to be teammates in making Rider's life magical. She literally said "vomit" in regards to it, before knowing that I also posted here. I tried to tell her all of the ways that I'd been on the side of keeping their relationship happy and how I'd advocated for her, trying to provide evidence that these weren't just empty words, but she merely took it as my bragging about how it was me who goaded him into paying attention to her, like I was insinuating that he never cared to begin with.
So those women—the ones who come to us not with an agenda of "let's compete; I'm in it for me, so let's see what you've got for you. We'll tussle for every scrap!"—but the ones who come to us with an acceptance of what already is, and no desire to erase what we've built to make space for themselves...those are the ones who are not scary. Those are the ones with whom I think we could make FMF work.
And that's my thought about that.
So, completely related to all of this, Rider and I had a minor breakthrough last night when I was telling him I was thinking about this. I realized that there was something we hadn't been communicating about that was contributing to my Fear of Unknown People: I suspected—but did not know—that he wasn't being up front about being poly with new people that he meets. I knew he wasn't narrowing his pool to only poly people, but I didn't know whether he was narrowing his pool to POLY-FRIENDLY people, which it seems like would be a good idea.
I always am up front about that with new people I'm flirting with. I don't always just Mack Truck them with "WELL I'M POLY, SOOO..." in a way that makes things awkward, but I might drop "Well, one of my partners..." into the beginning of a story so that they know without having to stop to discuss it, kind of like if you're a non-poly partnered person, you might casually say "my boyfriend" to let someone know you're off the market without dissing them. If I meet people through OKC, obviously they know out of the gate, but in face-to-face meetings, there are ways to work it in.
The only time I am ever super Mack Truck about it is if we are really short on time and I want to exchange phone numbers or Facebook info with them. That's what happened with Beckett: we were at a fetish party and he was about to leave when I finally got to talk to him, and I was all, "So I want to trade Facebook info with you, but before we do, you should know that I have a serious boyfriend and we're in an open relationship." And he was cool with it, so we did, and we ended up dating for like a month.
I feel like anyone who will run screaming when they find out someone is poly is not someone who I should be dating. And I feel like the same goes for Rider. If he's interested in someone, he should make sure they are on board with the way his life actually is before getting attached. I feel like that's a great pre-screening to avoid trouble.
I talked to him about this, and he confirmed that, indeed, he was not telling people. He said that he thought that telling them he was poly would feel like he was prematurely inviting them into a relationship, when he might not yet know if that's where he wanted things to go with them. I told him that it definitely was not. I don't think anyone would assume that when you're telling them something about YOURSELF ("hey, I'm poly") you're actually making an offer ("hey, come be poly with me"). I told him that there are subtle ways of letting people know (like the thing about just dropping it in without making it the topic), and he said that makes a lot of sense, and he praised me on my communication skills.
I told him it would make me feel a lot better—like, A LOT A LOT better—if I knew without a doubt that anyone who accepted exchanging info with him also accepted that he's poly and that I exist. It seems like, while it doesn't COMPLETELY remove the possibility of crazy people and cowgirls, it cuts it to a significant degree. Someone would have to like him immensely right off the bat to be willing to go through the trouble of, well, making trouble. Whereas if someone has already been flirting with him for weeks and THEN finds out that he's poly, they might already have enough NRE invested for it to be worth their while to go after him despite my existence, even if they are not comfortable with it and will end up making trouble.
I think it will also run off the thrill-seekers (which is what I believe that girl at the party was)—the ones who get an ego boost out of feeling sexy and desirable enough to make a man "stray" from his agreements with someone else. One poly guy once told me that women would hit on him all the time despite his wedding ring, only to be creeped out when he told them he was in an open marriage and available. When they thought it was unethical, they got a charge out of the idea of being attractive enough to challenge his ethics, but when they found out he was just "allowed" then there was no special sauce about it—it was just one more available guy who was flirting with them.
This one little piece of missing communication was causing a lot of trouble, I think. I already feel so much better about the idea of Rider meeting people if I know he's going to be honest with them about poly, even if it fucks with his "game." The people who run away are the people I want gone. The people who stick around will be the ones worth getting to know. I'm going to sit with this for a while, and if I keep feeling this much better, this break might be a lot shorter than four months.
ETA: Dude, you guys have NO IDEA how relieved this whole thing makes me feel—and it's the tiniest thing! All it is is even more honesty and communication, but directed outward instead of between us. Why the FUCK didn't I think of it sooner?