Poly Processing

I awoke this morning to the dulcet tones of strangers engaged in poly processing (I was at a friends' house, but I didn't know a lot of the people there).  “Well, I want to be supportive of B's relationship with Z, but I just don't feel like she's been here enough since they started seeing each other.”  “I know, it was such a sudden thing for the two of you after all that emotional turmoil with your ex-wife.”  “I think she really just hasn't been paying much attention to either of our feelings lately...” blah blah blah.  I was reminded of why I was terrified of becoming poly in the first place.

What's “poly processing”?  It's the intensive discussion of feelings and emotions that most poly people argue is essential for maintaining healthy relationships.  Many people who sustain large poly families/group marriages often have at least one evening a week where the whole group gets together and processes their particular emotional and sexual needs and desires.  I have to admit that this sounds excruciating to me and enough to scare me straight into monogamy if I couldn't figure out some way around it.

As my husband, myrlyn, and I prepared to make our own plunge into poly—and this was a process that took years—it was accompanied by a spectacular amount of time processing.  We spent weeks worth of hours addressing how we felt about theoretical contingencies.  What would we do if I accidentally got pregnant (possibly by someone else)?  How did we feel about the other person spending the night away from us?  What were our expectations in terms of checking in with the other person when we were away?  How would he feel if I had an easy time finding other partners and he didn't?  It went on and on and on.  He was dying for me to sleep with women, but it took a lot of convincing from him to persuade me that he was okay with me sleeping with other men.  Eventually, as we got closer and closer to the point of actually seeing other people, I got so tired of the increasingly obsessive talking that I finally negotiated him into a deal: he could get an hour of processing for an hour of sex.  (I promise, that was kind of a joke.  But not entirely).  My friends and I started referring to this principle as the “sex to processing ratio,” with the general agreement being that if the amount of time spent processing in a relationship consistently exceeded the amount of time spent having sex, the relationship wasn't worth it.

Of course, I realized he was right all along, which was why I went along with this torturous process.  Once we finally did start seeing other people, our ground rules were well-established, and we escaped the oft-experienced poly panic[1].  Don't get me wrong.  We've had our poly problems, and we still do, but we both have agreed that they pale in comparison to our problems trying to remain monogamous.

In truth, I am a highly accomplished processor; if I weren't, my poly life couldn't have lasted even this long.  Like most women, I started discussing, dissecting, and analyzing relationships when I was quite young.  In our culture, processing is usually a gendered form of emotional labor.  Frequently, women are “good” at it and complain that men are “terrible” at it (such complaints are often accompanied by an insistence that men are “emotionally unaware”).  Lesbian culture is infamous for its excessive processing and lesbians regularly joke about it.  Poly guys, however, are generally much better processors than your average mono straight guy by a large margin—they have to be, or they generally aren't poly for long.

Personally, I consider processing to be a necessary evil of any good relationship, and even more necessary for poly relationships.  In triads, foursomes and other complex and overlapped poly configurations, the amount of processing required basically increases exponentially (e.g. cube it for a triad) because people have to ensure that every pair in the relationship chain is getting their needs met, in addition to ensuring that the entire configuration is supported.  When relationships are more disparate, the processing burdened is lessened considerably.

Needless to say, that more disperse poly dynamic is the one I have chosen for myself.  And even though I cringe at the intensive processing required by people in more complex poly configurations, I actually greatly admire their hard relationship work.  Most people can't even make dyadic relationships succeed.

[1]              Poly panic is when one partner realizes—often during or immediately after their partner's initial sexual encounter with someone else—that they are really not okay with this.  My good friend S's girlfriend almost literally pushed S out the door to go have sex with another woman, then called S halfway through to insist that she come home (they promptly broke up).