Open to Interpretation

The question was raised this weekend (outside of my earshot, I heard about it later) on what the "end plan" was for Frisbee and I. I'm not even entirely sure that was the wording, he was telling me about it later and I may have been tired and/or drunk at the time of retelling. In any case, the general gist behind the question was what exactly Frisbee and I have as far a future is concerned.

Answering this question from a poly perspective is an interesting conundrum. First, you're never really sure if the people asking are genuinely interested in the continued success of your relationship, or if they're just asking in hopes that you'll say something really fucked up like, "we'll be moving to the commune in Los Angeles where we'll have our commitment ceremony officiated by the Frog King." Second, answering questions like, "what is the long-term plan for this relationship?" involves a lot of discussion and negotiation because you've got the possibility of other people being in the relationship. It's not possible to just say some variant of, "well, I guess we'll get married and then move in together and then maybe think about getting pets or house plants or maybe even a tiny baby thing."

I mean, those were all the things I said when people asked me the same question when Now-hubby and I first got together. Because at that time, that's what we weredoing, and it wasn't really necessary to open things up and have the big explanation time about, "and maybe we'll have other people that we have sexytimes with or maybe even other awesome relationships with." I'm not a big one on explaining maybes to people who aren't directly involved in the relationship. Now-hubby and I had talked a lot about how we were going to format our relationship, we knew the eventual "maybe" of having other partners was out there, but it wasn't important for everyone else to know about it as well.

Going outside the set narrative makes it difficult to define exactly where you'll be in the status of a relationship at any given time. Even if I was to find some other V out there in the world (read: relationship between a woman and two men where the woman is involved sexually with both men but the men are only friendly/platonic with each other) and try to get advice, there would be different aspects to the relationship that would make comparison or advice almost impossible. It becomes just a sort of wistful hope that if that relationship's made it successfully, maybe somehow mine will as well. Hypothetical situations can be raised, and discussions can be had about, "what if x, y, or z?" until you have exhausted every possible situation that could arise within a relationship. Ultimately, though, the only way to know if something works is to just try it. And that can be scary as fuck.