The tricky choices

Sometimes people ask about the tricky choices involved in polyamory.  Usually it is about how you avoid catastrophic jealousy when your partner goes out with somebody else, or how you cope with telling your children, or who sleeps where when a lover comes to visit you and a domestic partner.

Mostly this stuff just works itself out incredibly easily for me.  I have had a couple of moments where I felt jealousy, but it was easily worked out with an honest conversation.  I just tell my kid all the things that I would if I were single and dating people, and figuring out who sleeps where has never really been a problem.  Many of the things people think would be an issue are just easy, in large part because of a paradigm shift.  Once you get away from the norms of behaviour that mononormativity suggests the answers fall out without much effort most of the time.  Also these issues are one offs, usually, and once I have solved them I can just walk away.

One thing I have struggled with recently is figuring out how to deal with two long distance relationships at once in a single city.  Nothing bad has happened, but there has been a lot of thought spinning through my head at times trying to sort out what the right thing to do is.

It started with the simple decision of whether or not to pursue anything in the first place.  I have been dating The Flautist for a year and she lives in KW.  I met someone new and exciting who also lives in KW, and we did a lot of chatting for a few weeks.  That was great, but it left me trying to figure out if I should actually pursue a relationship.

The trick is that there is no neutral option.  If I refuse to follow my attractions I will feel cruddy about it, but I think The Flautist would too.  She wouldn't want to be the reason that I don't pursue other people.  But if I do pursue it, then I risk being in a position where I pit two lovers directly against one another in terms of the time I can spend with them.  It isn't like two people in the same city as me; none of us is able to travel between the two cities constantly.  I can ratchet up my time in KW a bit but there are serious practical limits.  Any realistic assessment will conclude that the time I have there will have to be divided up to some extent, and this means both people will end up feeling time pressure from each other.

And as anyone that knows me well is certainly aware, when faced with no neutral option I will go for broke and pursue the Whee! option.  And I did, and now the Danthropologist and I are dating.  This is great so far but the crunches for time are real.

Seriously though, Toronto has a lot of people in it.  How is it I am worried about dividing my time between two different people in a much smaller centre!?!

There are so many things to consider when I have to figure out where I will spend my time.  I want to see both of them, but I have more preexisting plans with The Flautist.  But how much do I weigh that?  I also really don't want to run my relationships in an overly hierarchical fashion, and since I was dating The Flautist before the Danthropologist (I decided to capitalize one The and not the other, and I don't know why) there is a real risk of putting The Flautist higher, and I don't want to do that.

But on the other hand, my feelings for The Flautist are bigger and more powerful, in large part because they have had so much more time to grow.  Surely spending more time with people you have big feelings for is reasonable... but how do you balance that against the desire to find time for new feelings for someone else to flourish?  I want that; the opportunity for it for certain, the actuality is more of a thing that will happen or it won't.

The jackass part of my brain wants to answer with "Obvious solution.  Threesomes.  All the time!  Problem solved." but this isn't actually a solution.

If it was a solution I would win at life and everybody else could just play for second place, but it isn't.

This problem isn't one I can solve.  It isn't going to be resolved permanently, I hope, because that will really only happen if one relationship blows up.  It is just a constant thing I have to balance and consider, and because needs and circumstances are rarely simple or equal it will never be trivial.  People move and need strong arms, or have bad days and need comforting, or come up with exciting plans on particular days.  All of that must be carefully weighed.  That weighing is something I take really seriously, and although I am sure I get it wrong at times, I always think carefully about it.  This is precisely the sort of thing that keeps me up at night, worrying at the edges of the problem, trying to find better solutions.  I don't like disappointing anyone but you can't avoid that entirely.

Of course I recognize that this is about the best problem to have.  There are two smart, driven, interesting women that make me happy and who want to see me.  I have to figure out how to balance that.  This is exactly the sort of thing that #firstworldproblems was made for.