divabot

I saw this BBC picture of the Hemel explosion and said "Ka-BOOM!" in a Marvin the Martian voice. arkady's old flat, where she brought up her daughters, was a few hundred metres away, facing the bit that exploded. *shudder* redcountess and I saw the sky this morning and thought the weird colour meant snow was coming.

It's Hell for Suburban Husbands day. I made it out of B&Q alive with a 25kg bag of gravel, a plant pot, two plant pot trays, two powerboards and a 25-pack of blank DVD-Rs — I really need to back up my media disk and put FreeBSD 6 on the household server. The much-delayed date with Arkady depends how Liz is after a bath, though her breathing is much better even with the smell of the smoke.

cavalorn has posted a thread about polyamory (public when I posted this, now locked), as one who has given it up. So I shall now ramble.

There is no agreed-upon definition except "not straight-up monogamy." Demanding an explanation (implicitly or explicitly) from someone who subscribes to one thing that might be labeled "polyamory" for any other random thing that might be labeled "polyamory" doesn't feel particularly fair, any more than it would to require someone who said they thought they might be homosexual to defend anything whatsoever the person thought of that might be labeled "homosexuality."

I've conspicuously had the same wife and girlfriend for a couple of years, which apparently makes me some sort of expert. This is a frightening concept. OTOH, I've had few mono relationships that lasted as long as either, so it's a reasonable marker for success. And it feels at times like a bubbling explosive cauldron we have to keep from going off, but then a lot of relationships including my mono ones feel like that. So again, for my life it's going well. Which is good. By far the biggest source of problems in this poly V is that Liz is chronically ill and there's no easy way around that.

The sex, and potential for such, is a big part of it for me, because I am a tart. Liz would like the opportunity to tart even if she didn't take it (though she says there's definitely no such thing as sex without emotion for her), and Arkady has no tartlike urges at all. There's certainly no such thing as an emotional condom — I have an unduly high regard for anyone I've had sex with, even if they really don't deserve it, so I'm quite susceptible.

There's one person in Australia I can say for sure I'd be in a relationship with if it weren't for the tyranny of distance. We really like each other and click really well. Darn this being on opposite sides of the world! And a friend in the US I'd certainly be sleeping with on a regular basis if not for the distance. And there will be any number of people in London I could click just as well with I haven't met — there's a few I can think of off the top of my head that I am really keen on who are unfortunately monogamous. Falling in love with someone new will perturb existing things — falling for Arkady, which was completely unexpected (to us, if not to every single other person around us), did shake things with Liz a bit.

I am very much in love with my darlings and they make me enormously happy. I am in fact the luckiest man in the world; you just think you are.

Polyamory is a lot more work than monogamy. But then, most worthwhile things are more work than not bothering.