The luckiest man alive

At a wedding this past weekend I had some interesting times trying to explain my relationships to people.  You see, I took my girlfriend to my wife's exhusband's wedding.  Like a lot of my current relationship status it makes perfect sense when you look at how it came about, but the one sentence summary boggles people's minds.

I ended up talking about that with a couple of different people at the wedding and I got the usual sorts of reactions.  Some assumed they had misheard and couldn't believe what was going on.  Some pretended to be okay with it but had no idea what to say.  Others leapt to conclusions that just aren't true.  The last one decided I must be some kind of superhero with magical powers of seduction.

The reactions to my polyamorous relationship web are massively charged with gendered assumptions.  People don't suddenly think "Wow, Sky's wife and girlfriend and other lovers are super lucky!"  They always leap to "Wow, Sky is the luckiest bastard alive!"  I can only assume a lot of them are assuming I have done something nefarious to manage to be in this situation.  What they don't do is assume that the other people I am involved with have much in the way of agency, or that they get anything out of it.

It just always seems to revolve around the expectation that the men involved in open relationships finally get to bang whoever they like, and the women put up with it for some inexplicable reason.  Obviously this stuff comes from common social assumptions about men and women, it isn't a mystery, but every time it smacks me in the face I get grumpy and try to push back against it.  I know lots of women who are in relationships where they want all the sex and their partners do not, and they struggle mightily with their desires to have more partners or more variety.  The baseline cultural assumption that they *don't* want those things also makes it extra hard.

The reaction that an open relationship is a windfall for me but a burden to the women I am involved with at the moment makes me angry.  It takes away agency from them and makes me out to be someone who is just taking advantage.  It puts me at the centre of it all, and my partners on the periphery.

I want my relationships, no matter the structure, to be something that works for everyone and makes all the participants happy.  It is important to me that the way I structure how I live is desired for everyone, not a burden to be borne because of the inevitability of my wandering eye.

I don't want to be seen as that lucky bastard who sold a bunch of women into grudging acceptance of his unending lust.  I want to be seen as a guy who works hard to make his relationships bring happiness to everyone involved, no matter if that means being conventional or not.

Just one more reason to storm the barricades yelling "Down with the patriarchy!" as if I needed more reasons for that.