Asking the Wrong Questions

One of the things that I find most difficult to deal with are the wrong questions that people ask me (or ask in my vicinity). Things where ... in order to really answer that question, I have to dig back into the assumptions that make the question possible in order to point out that they're misapplied, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. And people are resistant to having their axioms argued with, a lot of the time, and reject, mock, dismiss, or otherwise just fail to adjust to actual encounters with reality.

One of the places this gets particularly egregious is around subject of polyamory. Everyone has their vision of what someone like me's life is like, and very few of these visions have even a passing relationship with reality. I mean, it's a running joke in some poly circles that the universal response to being tagged as someone polyamorous is, "Do you all sleep in the same bed?", which is, of course, a veiled enquiry about the target's sex life.

But try to take that apart, and you have not only the sex-centric nature of the question, the invasion of personal space required to immediately leap to asking a veiled question about sex, but more fundamental things like the assumption that 'you all' actually means something.

Taking apart 'you all'? There's the One Big Relationship notion, some sort of Stranger In a Strange Land collective mishmash. Probably with transitive relationships, in which my partners are presumed to be partnered to each other in some fashion, in order to form this magical 'you all'. And who's in and who's not? And ...

... and my husbands have another wife, and I'm not married to her or romantically involved with her, and is she a part of my 'you all' like we're in the same family unit? Is my long-distance partner, with whom I do not have a sexual relationship in any case, part of this entity known as 'you all', despite neither of my husbands having met him? How about my [legal] husband's long-distance partner and her husband - my ex (who has met my long-distance partner) - and their local poly family grouping, are they part of 'you all' despite being three thousand miles away and the posited bed being somewhat implausible by the laws of physics by this point? What is this 'you all', where are its boundaries, what does it mean?

I have three romantic relationships. Two of them are marriages. For the situations in which sharing a bed comes up as a relevant concept, all the people in the relationship share the bed. The value of 'you all' that actually has some bearing on reality is 'two', for which the scope for prurient investigation into the strange lives of other people rather fails on the 'strange' point.

I'm sure from that the astute reader can figure out some of where "How did you find someone to add to your marriage?" falls down, too. And I don't even have to go into the bit where I start jumping up and down and shouting about how people are not marriage accessories and why the fuck would I want to be munged onto someone else's relationship rather than having one of my own thankyouverymuch.

Though the rant would be a segue into "How do you share your partner?" where I either want to jump up and down and shout about how my partners are not my property to dole out or store in a trunk because I failed at kindergarten playtime or fume about how, no, actually, I'm not sharing a damn thing, my relationships are mine (and the relevant partner's) and someone who wants a piece of that can get their interloping arse kicked for 'em. They want a relationship with one of my partners, they can build their own rather than trying to cadge a piece of mine.

One of my favorites is "Why do you put up with that?" because I'm the one who refuses to consider monogamy. So I'm left with, "I'm ... putting up with ... being treated like someone who has input in her relationships? The problem is?" Of course, under this question is the sexist notion that women are intrinsically monogamous and men just want to fuck around and so any sort of open, poly, or nonmonogamous structure is for the benefit of teh menz and leaves teh wimminz suffering and alone and certainly never suggesting something like, "Why don't you go spend the day with your other wife because I can't stand having humans within about twenty feet of me right now?"

This is related to "What happened to you that you don't feel you deserve someone all to yourself?" Which I have been asked, in so many words, though it may have been a rhetorical question. And to which I could get nasty about the 'all to yourself' and the overwhelmingly broken social construct that one's romantic partner is the be-all and end-all of one's social interaction, but I don't generally bother, because I'm too busy wanting to snap people's heads off over their imaginary abuse wank fantasies.

"Why isn't one person able to meet your needs?" takes the nexus of presumed damage out of my past and plonks it in my current psyche, inventing some sort of greedy defective with a checklist of requirements, looking for other human beings to fill the niches created by projected deficiencies in each partner. There is one person able to meet my needs; me. Projecting that onto other people does not strike me as healthy. I'm not poly because I have 'needs' in excess of others'; I'm poly because my 'ooh, that person is shiny' meter shuts down at two serious relationships rather than one and I'm happier under those circumstances. (And I also learned - by painful experience - how to parse more subtle forms of shiny and fondness.) Related questions: "Why isn't your partner enough?", "What's wrong with your relationship?"

Or, "How can you think of bringing children into such an environment?", which mostly leaves me wondering what's wrong with a loving, stable family situation in which everyone is more or less supported in their sanity and emotional stability needs, work is well-distributed among the family members with reasonable flexibility, and people are happy with each other. I'm pretty sure that this is one of those really intensely veiled sex questions, predicated on parade-of-lovers and soap-opera drama, but I'm generally not interested in breaking my intrinsic boringness for long enough to dig that deep.

I seem to have gotten off on a run of the really annoying ones, rather than the just silly, which is unfortunate, but they do remind me of each other a lot so I suppose it's to be expected. Ah well. I think I've covered most of "What do you think this adds to your marriage?" before, aside from the whole, y'know, not having the single-relationship-plus-others model in the first place and not pursuing relationships for spicing.

And nobody comes right out and asks me how often I have sex, so I can't disabuse them of their notions of vast orgiastic parties every evening. I'm pretty sure my imaginary self gets laid a whole lot more than I do, and in much more exciting ways. I'm okay with that.

(Then there are the 'questions people don't ask but probably should instead of just running on the assumption that they know the answer', like, "Are you hitting on me?", "Are you into casual sex?", "Are you bisexual?", "Are you looking for someone new right now?", "Are you trying to convince me that I should open my marriage?" Sigh. I mean, some of the comments that come in on that are just plain intended to be nasty - the one I remember was full of how clearly emotionally unstable I had to be to be 'sleeping with all of these different people'.)

The whole illusory assumption thing is wearying, really. It's hard to be funny about it in the long run, just because of being imaginary all the time. It'd be nice to have a bottomless well of funny to throw at some of this stuff, but instead I have a bottomless pit of aggravation, occasionally leavened with funny.