Is Saturation Good or Bad?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at www.polymeansmany.com.

I’m going to try and write this month’s Poly Means Many piece without using the word that I think best sums up my approach to the topic of poly saturation because I’ve already dedicated an article to my thoughts on that topic. It begins with a b and ends in alance, but I’m not going to use that word here.

So, this month we are writing about saturation – is it just me or does at hint at lascivious activities? The dictionary definition includes: soaked, impregnated, or imbued thoroughly; charged thoroughly or completely; brought to a state of saturation.

Oh my.

That said, saturation also has a slightly negative connotation, as it’s frequently coupled with over, and as we all know, to be over saturated is not a good thing.

Of course when we apply the word saturation to polyamory, which itself is the notion of being able to love more than one person and suddenly the word saturation seems out of place, after all there is no such thing as ‘too much love’, right?

Love = relationships, regardless of how they are defined (and we should probably write about that word in the future, “relationships” will be a rich vein of thinking) so you could say, on the purest level, that it can’t be right that one person could have too many relationships, too much love.

But of course there are other constraints to a relationship, other reasons why someone who is poly may feel saturated, so I guess the real question I need to be asking myself is, how do I know?

Do I have too many relationships? Do I want to have more relationships than I can handle? How many is too many? How many is not enough?

As with most of these things, there is no one size fits all response. At present I have two relationships and have pondered, on and off, whether I could manage another, or for that matter if I even want another.

Being open about my poly lifestyle may help my own mindset, it may allow for a third wholly casual relationship (which may allow me to explore some other things my current partners can’t offer me) which itself would bring additional pressures on my current relationships both in terms of availability (time) and dealing with any New Relationship Energy (NRE) that would inevitably occur

And that’s all before finding someone who is happy with a casual relationship… and weirdly presumes that you can permanently keep a relationship in a single state. It’s no wonder my mind continues to churn.

Looking forward there are a myriad of thoughts to be considered and discussed both with myself and my partners and, as ever, that communication will help me see whether adding ‘one more’ to my current lifestyle is even feasible, let alone desirable.

Add in the other parts of my life, work, Yelp events, ISTC website development, holidays, getting to the gym more often, even down to the basics of keeping my flat tidy and other boring household chores… and yeah it might even come down to a matter of time, perhaps I am already happily saturated as it is.

Or perhaps the fact I even have to consider whether I am, or not, suggests that, at least emotionally, I feel that I still have some room in there for someone else?

Ultimately I’m not stressing about my current relationships, nor about whether I want/need another. These days the main advantage of being poly is one that I’ve not yet utilised, far from being in a place where saturation is an issue, I’m just enjoying the fact that being poly allows for that situation to arise naturally. The opportunity is there whether I force it (and seek out someone new) or it happens naturally and, for me, that’s a welcome balance to try and strike.

Dammit, I was trying to avoid that “b” word!