Year: 2013

I first made aware of the idea of non-monogamy by some friends, it was on the periphery of my life and I didn’t pay it much heed. I was aware of the general principle but for the most part I fell into the usual traps when thinking about ‘open relationships’ (basically, all the sex, right?).

Fast forward several years and I find myself slap bang in the middle of a wonderful set of relationships (where my girlfriends are girlfriends, and my girlfriend’s boyfriend and I get on well). So I’m an expert now, right?

Of course I’m not!

The (unwritten) tag line to my life is that I’m always learning and with every passing day I’m happy to say that not only am I happy, which is always a good thing, but that I’m learning more about how being part of poly relationships works, not to mention learning more about myself too.

That also seems to be theme as I continue to reach out within the poly community, read other blog posts, and learn more about how other dynamics work. So, when the PolyWeekly podcast peeps asked “What do you wish you’d known when you first started exploring polyamory?” I knew I had an answer.

@polyweekly what all the words meant! A lot of new things were expected but a whole new language was a surprise…

— They call me G (@Gordon) September 5, 2013

When my girlfriend first broached the topic of being in an “open relationship” with me it seemed pretty straightforward. We agreed we could see other people.

Pretty soon after that, of course, came the thoughts (the “what ifs” that can be dangerous) about the future. What if one of us met someone and fell in love? What if one of us met someone and the other person didn’t like them? What if one of us just wanted to be free to have one-night stands? What do you call the person A in respect to person B? What if the new person wants to introduce a hierarchy? What if, what if, what if…

So we talked and talked, and read and read. We bought books, we asked friends, we read blog posts and we talked some more.

Naturally, as the poly community starts to grow and be more vocal, language starts to play a part in helping communicate some of the ideas, but when you are new to the entire arena of open relationships and their various types, the words and phrases can seem alien; polyamory, compersion, deltas, NRE and so on.

Increasingly, as I become more comfortable with my relationship orientation, these words come to the fore as I talk to friends and family. It’s a whole new language, and a whole new view of the world.

Some useful links:

• More Than Two – http://www.morethantwo.com/polyamory.html
• Polyamory Terms – http://www.polyamory.org.uk/polyamory_terms.html

I read some advice the other day that suggested that, instead of reading up on how best to be productive, you’d be better served actually doing the things you need to do rather than trying to figure out the best way to ‘be productive’.

I guess the premise being that many people spend a lot of time researching methodologies, trying out applications and processes when, for most of the tasks they are tracking, they would be better to just do the damn thing already.

I fall squarely into that group of people. I’m very guilty of spending too much time figuring out the ‘best’ way to keep myself organised, sometimes at the expense of just doing things.

So, why do I even need any kind of system?

Well, mostly to counteract my awful memory but also, partly, to keep track of random ideas that float through my head, things I don’t need to act on straight away but I know are good enough to log somewhere with a view of revisiting them later.

But what do I actually need?

Let’s break things down. Fundamentally I need to keep three types of things organised:

• Tasks
• Information
• Schedule

For all of these I want to be able to access them all from any device I want, be it my laptops (work and personal), my iPhone or my iPad. Simple enough, right?

Tasks

There are tasks that I need to do and, broadly speaking, I can break them down across three categories: Work (capital W, day job), Personal, and work (lowercase w, side jobs).
Some of the tasks have a hard deadline (given to me, or driven by external forces), some of notional deadlines that I apply myself (or I won’t do them), and others fall into the ‘some time’ bucket (essentially these are the ideas that I need to follow up but which have no real urgency).

So I need categories, but I’m not fussed about sub-categories, and I need the ability to schedule repeating tasks because … well did I mention my awful memory?

Solution

Wunderlist. No, Any.do. No, Reminders. Dammit.

It’s here where I struggle to find an ideal solution but I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

For now, I’m sticking with Wunderlist.

I love the Any.do app but there is no website (or OSX app) to allow me more power and easier editing. No matter how hard I try, this is a must have for me so after a couple of months of Any.do I’ve switched back to Wunderlist (I considered Remember The Milk again but it’s user interface just doesn’t feel nice any more). Wunderlist has iOS apps and and an OSX app, allows for categories and repeating alarms.

The future development of Apple’s Reminders app may sway me away from Wunderlist. Tighter integration with the OS makes it very slick and (work proxy issues aside) the ability to sync my Reminders to iCloud (and so across all my devices) makes it very slick. If the UI improves I can see it being my go to app in the future. Add in tagging, something I’m keen to see in the upcoming Mavericks release of OSX, and the power of the Apple ecosystem, across apps becomes a different prospect again. But that’s for the future.

Information

There is also information I need to store. Be it documents of information, files to backup or share, lists of contacts, or other pieces of digital media that I need to keep organised.

Occasionally the information is snippets, not a full document, but the need is the same.

Solution

Dropbox – for file storage. Not just because I can access it from anywhere, and share folders with others if I need to, but because many iOS/OSX apps integrate with it, allowing me to use it for draft posts, for example, so I can work on them at any time. For the inquisitive, I’m using Byword on both OSes to write my blog posts these days.

Evernote deserves a mention here too. For shorter pieces of information, and particularly for clipping information from the web, it’s excellent. It means I can grab recipes, add to my Evernote powered wishlist, and just generally use it as a database of things that might be useful to me in the future.

I should also mention the Drafts app for iOS here. It’s a simple text based editor which has several ways to take what you’ve just typed and fire out an email, send it as a note to Evernote and more. It’s a good quick way ‘in’ to my information system.

Schedule

Finally there is my schedule/calendar.

Due to personal circumstance this area is a lot more critical than it used to be, as I need to be able to schedule my leisure activities based on the whereabouts and plans of three other people.

Solution

Google Calendar – which allows me to share my own calendar and view those of others, making planning a night with one or more (or all) of those people a lot easier.

Email

One item I’ve not included in this waffling ramble is email. Quite simply because I have an excellent solution.

Gmail + Mailbox

My personal email is all filtered into Gmail. I can access it anywhere I want on any device I have. Where the real bonus for me is that, by using Mailbox for iOS I can now manage my emails much better. If I can quickly reply, I will. If something needs followed up I can quickly schedule it to ‘reappear’ in my inbox.

And that’s where I am currently. I don’t stick to a productivity methodology, I try and just do things when I can, but for now I have a system that works for me and does get massively in the way of me actually doing things.

I’ve use this word a lot and over the years finding emotional balance has become increasingly important to me as I start to understand how I work and function best. In the past I’ve been very guilty of taking on too much, either explicitly or without realising, and leaving myself open to the big dark clouds that occasionally loom when I start to failing to deliver on my promises or living up to (perceived) expectations.

Thankfully I’ve gotten past a lot of that and, whilst I will always want to try and make things better for people, to fix things that are broken, and generally try and make sure that the people I care about are happy, I know it’s not just down to me to find the balance in my relationships.

These days I’m think I’m getting better at picking up only the things I need to, although I’m still learning which issues and problems aren’t mine, something which takes on a whole new dimension in a set of poly relationships. If someone is upset or worried about someone else, should I be upset or worried too?

On top of my own character flaws and foibles, adding in not one but two loving relationships brings new considerations and I’ve found both the need for, and the challenge of, maintaining balance across those brought into sharp focus.

Whilst it can be hard to find that centre point it’s definitely not impossible. There are some simple tips we’ve picked up from others that help; Balancing time is managed by shared calendars for example, and everyone understands that we all need our own space from time to time. But of course it’s not quite that simple and I’m realising that the trick is understanding that having the time and taking the time are two very different things.

Understanding each others expectations plays a part as well; knowing how much time someone wants or needs, how much time the other person I want to see has to give, what the other person wants to do when you see them (stop giggling at the back!), all that, and much more, can impact the balance and has the potential to leave people feeling either neglected, exhausted, or overwhelmed (sometimes all at once).

So it’s a challenge. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. Arriving at the end of a week feeling loved, realising that you can be happy for days on end (no matter what else life throws at you), and knowing that you are very lucky to have so much love and affection in your life, well I think that’s well worth a few changes and compromises here and there.

Written in response to the monthly theme on Poly Means Many: Types of Nonmonogamy

I’m not big on definitions and labels, and as I’m still new to the concept of non-monogamy itself (he said, neatly avoiding having to label my own relationship type for the moment) all of the terminology around this lifestyle is something that I’m still getting my head around.

However, whilst my preference is to try and avoid applying labels I understand that they help communicate the construct, status, or hierarchy of a relationship to other people. Mind you that presumes that anyone that I’m discussing my relationships with knows what each specific label means and, for the most part, that isn’t the case. So I find myself trying to come up with a workable, easily understood, description.

I’m trying to take a wider (higher level?) view which allows me not to have to define specifics nor worry about which box I fit in, or which label applies.

The facts of my current relationships are thus; I have two girlfriends, both of with I have amorous feelings towards. They have their own (non-romantic) relationship with each other, and one of them has another boyfriend.

The boundaries of each individual relationship are understood but as yet are not completely rigid. We all understand that these things may change over time, that life is not static and the emotions may change over time. I am steering away from such terms as primary and secondary, as I’m not sure they apply (other than in terms of time spent with one partner or another) and may cause more harm than good.

Of course, at present we still have the benefit of all of this being ‘new’ to us all. That fact drives a lot of the discussions, revelations and agreements, so it’s safe to say that our relationships are still evolving.

Fundamentally, I believe I am capable of loving more than one person at a time, and that my feelings for one partner don’t diminish my feelings for another (oddly it seems to enhance them instead, still trying to figure that out).

When my initial partner and I originally discussed trying an open relationship, we realised we were definitely aware of the idea of polyamory, of loving two (or more) people and if that’s where the new relationships ended up then we would figure things out when the time came. If the relationships didn’t pan out that way then we’d simply be in a different situation emotionally, but still have to talk, understand and agree boundaries with respect to that form of non-monogamy.

In short: I am an ethical non-monogamist and at present I have two loving relationships.

Simple enough.