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Sep. 20th, 2004 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
geekchickHere's a poly-related question that's come up more than once now, and I thought I'd check to see other people's thoughts on the matter.
Say your partner is getting involved with someone new. What level of contact and outreach do you expect from this new person up front? Do you expect them to, for example, send you an email to say hello and to explain that they don't want to steal your partner from you? Do you expect them to make a concentrated effort to be actively friendly towards you and assume some sort of hostility if they don't, or do you assume things are fine unless there's some indication otherwise? For that matter, do you even consider your partner's relationship with them to be any of your business? (Assuming that your partner in question is not a spouse or primary-level partner.) How do you handle it when one person in a relationship web has got wildly different ideas (in either direction) on how much contact is required for comfort than the other people involved? [Edit: I seem to have been unclear on this last bit, based on some of the answers. When I say "how much contact is required", in this context I mean in the initial getting involved stage; say Partner A really wants Potential Partner B to check in with them while B is initially getting involved with their common partner or else they'll assume Partner B is hostile, while it may not occur to Partner B that there's any reason to check in in the first place. All of this is in the context of making initial relationship-noises.]
Usually my take on it is that while outreach is not unwelcome, it's far from required. If the only obvious thing that we have in common is that we share (or potentially share) a partner, I don't necessarily feel like I need to try to force some sort of friendship there. I assume things are neutral to okay unless I hear otherwise, and I honestly don't understand the mindset of assuming hostility from the outset.
Say your partner is getting involved with someone new. What level of contact and outreach do you expect from this new person up front? Do you expect them to, for example, send you an email to say hello and to explain that they don't want to steal your partner from you? Do you expect them to make a concentrated effort to be actively friendly towards you and assume some sort of hostility if they don't, or do you assume things are fine unless there's some indication otherwise? For that matter, do you even consider your partner's relationship with them to be any of your business? (Assuming that your partner in question is not a spouse or primary-level partner.) How do you handle it when one person in a relationship web has got wildly different ideas (in either direction) on how much contact is required for comfort than the other people involved? [Edit: I seem to have been unclear on this last bit, based on some of the answers. When I say "how much contact is required", in this context I mean in the initial getting involved stage; say Partner A really wants Potential Partner B to check in with them while B is initially getting involved with their common partner or else they'll assume Partner B is hostile, while it may not occur to Partner B that there's any reason to check in in the first place. All of this is in the context of making initial relationship-noises.]
Usually my take on it is that while outreach is not unwelcome, it's far from required. If the only obvious thing that we have in common is that we share (or potentially share) a partner, I don't necessarily feel like I need to try to force some sort of friendship there. I assume things are neutral to okay unless I hear otherwise, and I honestly don't understand the mindset of assuming hostility from the outset.
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Date: 2004-09-20 03:19 pm (UTC)In that case, I'd say basically 'it depends'; if the 'first secondary' is someone who's a very long-term and important partner - ie, really anything more than the 'friend with whom one flirts and has sex' - I would say outreach and discussion is polite and is certainly the mature and proper path, but that taking a failure to do so as hostile is a bit extreme, possibly even a bit of a warning sign.
Unless talking about one of those legally-necessary-but-unfortunate situations where you essentially have a bonded, non-V threesome (or foursome, or fivesome, but this seems to happen most often in threesomes), where two of the partners are married or living together and the third isn't and due to circumstance, not choice. For example, that pesky thing about marriage being two people, or cohabitation laws in the county/state/building/whatever. In that case, I'd view the hostility as basically coming from general and probably not entirely unfounded fear and irritation about being seen or just being the third wheel/adjuct/not-really-part-of-the-primary-relationship, and pretty justified. Then again, I'd also smack the prospective partner for being a thoughtless idiot and not including the non-married member of the triad in the initial negotiation with the other primary in the triad. ... and, in fact, probably decide they weren't up to my ethical/empathic standards.
But yeah, for the most part, if someone who's basically at the friend/fuckbuddy level is flipping out because you didn't email them, that's kind of psycho and would set off bells for me.