"Communication is rule #1 of a polyamorous relationship."
It's something you'll hear in the poly community so often, it's become a mantra. And rightly so; communication is arguably the single best indicator of the health of any romantic relationship, monogamous or polyamorous. A relationship which lacks good communication is built on a foundation that's fundamentally flawed, and a relationship whose members lack good communication skills is a relationship that has problems from the very beginning.
Few people really talks about how to build good communication, though, and that's unfortunate, because good communication is trickier than it sounds. (I've already written an essay about the ways communication can go wrong in my journal; this is more of a practical guide.)
There's more to communication than opening your mouth and saying what's on your mind. Effective communication starts with understanding what's on your mind, particularly if you're trying to solve a problem. It's not just enough to say "I feel uncomfortable about this" or "I'm feeling upset about that" or "I don't want you to do this;" real communication requires understanding what's at the root of those feelings and desires.
Now, hold on, smart guy! If I'm feeling something, I should be able to say so, without all this analysis crap!
Of course. But once you've said what's on your mind, what comes next?
There are people who believe it ends there. "I've said what I have to say; now it's up to my partner to behave accordingly." This isn't communication; in fact, this closes the door on communication, because it gives your partner no way to continue, short of doing whatever it is you want him to do.
Communication is about increasing understanding. If you simply say "This is how I feel" and leave it at that, the conversation is done, and you're not really increasing understanding, because your partner still has no idea why. In fact--
Hang on. I've said what I'm feeling and what I want my partner to do; who cares why?
You should, for one. Let's start with the most obvious first: if your partner does not understand why you feel the way you do, your partner may just end up violating the spirit of the rules without breaking the letter, because he does not understand what the rules are supposed to do.
But let's step back a little from that. It goes beyond simply experiencing an emotion you don't like and then letting your partner know about it so that he can stop doing whatever it is that's leading to your emotion. If you do not understand why you feel what you feel, you may not be able to get a handle on what might change those feelings. It might seem obvious at first glance; "I get jealous when my partner takes someone else to my favorite restaurant, so if my partner stops taking people there, I won't be jealous any more." But feelings are really sneaky, complicated things, and the actions that trigger a feeling may not actually be as directly tied to the feeling as you think. What might just happen is you might just find that you still feel jealous even if your partner promises never to take anyone to that restaurant again, and all that's happened is those feelings are now triggered by something else.
If you don't understand your feelings, then it's pretty damn tough to say with certainty what you or anyone else can do to address them. In fact, as I was about to say, often the roots of feelings and emotional reactions aren't obvious at all, and if you don't understand the problem, it's really difficult to come up with a solution with any real chance of success.
You're telling me that I don't even know what I'm feeling?
No, I'm saying that if you don't make an active effort to understand your feelings, you won't know why you're feeling what you're feeling. And if you don't know why you're feeling what you're feeling, it gets pretty hard to have a dialogue with your partner about it, and it gets even harder to come up with a plan of action based on it.
Not all feelings are true. You may feel something so strongly that you know for a fact that what you're feeling is absolutely right and perfectly justified, know it more surely than you know your own name--and still be wrong. Only by looking at your feelings can you understand the heart of where they come from, and only by understanding them can you really be sure they are appropriate and justified.
Remember what we're talking about here--dialog. You talk to your partner, your partner talks to you, you each come away with a deeper understanding of one another, and that deeper understanding is what helps you solve problems, right?
And solving problems is a lot easier if your partner understands what's going on in your head, which is a lot easier if you understand what's going on in your head. In fact, it very well might be that if you and your partner both have a clear idea about why you're feeling what you're feeling, you might find a better solution than the most obvious one! Saying "I'm feeling jealous so I want you to stop doing X" is a decree, not an honest attempt at communication; it closes the door to further discussion. Saying "I'm feeling jealous, and I think this is why, and this is what I've observed to trigger those feelings" opens the door not only to further discussion, but to finding some kind of solution that might not have occurred to you.
Communication is already difficult enough even if you understand perfectly whatever it is you're trying to talk about; if you don't understand what you're talking about, forget it.
What do you mean, communication is difficult enough? If I'm talking to my partner, and--
If you're talking to your partner honestly.
Okay, fine. If I'm talking to my partner honestly, and--
Funny you should mention honesty. That's another one of those little things that's trickier than it sounds. Honesty, like understanding, begins at home, with yourself. In order to be honest with another person, you must first be honest with yourself, and part of that means recognizing and acknowledging the reality of who you are and the reality of your situation.
This is true across the board, but it's most especially true in very difficult situations such as mono/poly relationships. For example, if one person has it somewhere in the back of her mind that she's monogamous, she wants a monogamous relationship, and if she can just make things complicated enough on her partner, her partner will give up this poly stuff, but she hasn't really quite admitted to herself that that's what she's doing, then any effort at communication is already undermined. She may believe she's talking openly and honestly with her partner, but because she hasn't really admitted to herself what's going on, she's not really being honest with him.
And before you say I'm picking on the monogamous person unfairly, if a polyamorous person is seeking multiple relationships because he has a deeply-seated but quite subtle fear of commitment or vulnerability, and so he's driven to avoid uncomfortable intimacy by starting new relationships over and over, then he's not going to be able to communicate honestly with any of his partners about what he wants or what his relationship goals are, because he hasn't admitted that to himself yet.
And while we're at it, a quick word on honesty and lies:
A lie is any conscious, deliberate attempt to deceive or mislead. Many people will find all kinds of ways to justify lying, especially indirect lying; "Oh, I haven't told him about thus-and-such because he hasn't asked," or "Oh, I haven't told her anything that is not factually untrue, so I haven't lied."
A good liar tells lies that are mostly true; a masterful liar can lie without ever uttering a single falsehood.
Consider these examples. If I tell someone "I will be at your house at two o'clock," and at one forty-five I'm struck by a bus, I have not lied; I did not show up at two o'clock, but it was not my intent to mislead that person. If, on the other hand, I am having an affair and cheating on my partner while at my office, and my partner asks me "Did you cheat on me today?" and I respond "I was at my office all day," I have lied; I have given an answer calculated to mislead my partner into drawing the wrong conclusion.
Okay, then... I've looked inside myself, I understand what I'm feeling and I understand the reality of my situation, and I'm not going to lie, directly or indirectly. Now I'm home free, right?
Not only are you not home and dry, you're not even home and vigorously toweling off yet. It gets more complicated.
Huh? I understand myself; I understand what I need to say, I just have to say it!
And your partner needs to understand it, which is more than just a matter of speaking the same language. Remember, your partner has no way to crawl behind your eyes and see the world the way you do; your emotional reality is just an abstraction to your partner, and everything he knows about it comes only from what you tell him.
Indeed, two people can have radically different emotional realities, and bridging that gap is not easy.
So. Let's assume you're honest, you know yourself, and you're sincere about this whole communication thing. There's still plenty of things to go wrong; here's a few things you should keep in mind:
- Don't assume that your partner would feel the same way you do if he were in your shoes. "Well, just think about how I feel!" isn't terribly helpful; your partner may be thinking about how you feel, but if he doesn't feel the same way himself and wouldn't react the same way in your position, what he's thinking is likely to be off base. Tell him how you feel--and tell him why.
- Don't take somebody else's word for what your partner is doing or thinking, and don't rely on someone else to tell your partner what you're doing or thinking. Talking through a proxy never works. Seriously. Everyone has a slightly different worldview and a slightly different interpretation of events; what you're hearing when you're talking through a proxy is your partner's ideas filtered and interpreted through someone with a different take on reality, and there's really no way around that.
- Don't slam the door. Door-slamming behavior can be literal or figurative; it's anything which closes off dialog, as in walking out of the room and slamming the door, or simply cutting off your partner. It doesn't come just from issuing decrees; it comes any time you don't want to hear what your partner has to say or don't give your partner the opportunity to respond to what you have to say. And along the same lines:
- Don't make a habit of issuing ultimatums. An ultimatum leaves no room for negotiation; like a decree, it cuts off further dialog. Ultimatums, if they are necessary at all, are an absolute last resort, best reserved for a situation that, if it does not change, will definitely end the relationship. An ultimatum is appropriate only in the most extreme and dire of circumstances: "get help with your drinking problem or I will not be able to stay."
- Don't get caught up in your own assumptions or your own interpretations. This one is particularly devious, because we all tend to assume that what we think and what we see is the "right" way to think and the "right" way to see a situation. But your interpretation of something may differ dramatically from your partner's; it's helpful to get into the habit of mentally asking yourself "What if I'm wrong?" whenever you think you've got something all figured out.
So even if you understand yourself, you understand what you have to say, and you understand why you feel the way you feel, you still have to be careful.
Wow. Okay, so now I've got it licked...
Not quite. There's still the "Blue fish tuba" effect.
The who what? That makes no sense!
Precisely.
Each of those words individually has a simple meaning, but put together in that order, they make no sense. Often, that's what it seems like to someone who does not share your conceptual worldview. Communication on the one hand is quite robust, but on the other hand is very fragile; it's robust in the sense that language is quite resilient, but it's fragile in the sense that when you are talking to someone whose philosophical worldview is vastly different from yours, then when you try to explain a difficult concept, your words end up sounding like "blue fish tuba." It's the concept that's difficult; if the concept itself is foreign to your listener, then the words stop making sense.
For example, take a person whose idea of relationships is "commitment means exclusivity." If you tell such a person "It is possible to be committed to more than one person at a time," your words sound like "blue fish tuba," because the concept of commitment inherently implies exclusivity to that person--saying "commitment to two people" is about like saying "the tuba was so huge it was tiny." Explaining a foreign concept to someone is particularly frustrating; often, you need to invest a great deal of work in isolating and identifying the places where your conceptual frameworks don't overlap, and then carefully building a bridge between those different conceptual frameworks. In the example of a person to whom "commitment" means "exclusivity," this means trying to find a way to express the concept that it is possible to be committed to more than one thing at the same time; until you can communicate this concept, everything you say about commitment will sound like "blue fish tuba."
Wow. This does get tricky. But once I'm over that hurdle, I'm home free...right? Right?
Um...no. It still gets complicated...because there's the second half of communication, which I haven't even mentioned yet, and that is listening.
Listening is active, not passive. If you're planning out the next thing you're going to say, you're not listening. If you're looking out the window, you're not listening. If you're so wrapped up in trying to make your point that you've forgotten your partner is also trying to make a point, you're not listening.
And listening is confounded by the fact that people rarely remember the exact words told to them; they remember only the concepts. Which means if you misunderstand the concept, you're totally screwed.
One of the most common problems with communication from the listener's point of view is the problem of interpretation; if you think you've understood your partner, you may find that you assume your interpretation is the only correct one, and if you're wrong, you may find yourself resistant to what your partner was actually trying to say.
