My Real Life

In my real life, I am a woman with two long term partners. I am out about being poly, to all my friends and family and anyone else that wants to talk about it. (I'm also out about pretty much everything else I am in this life: kinky, pagan, pansexual, artist, rabble-rouser, hedonist, dancer, etc.).
My partners are both married, they live with their spouses while I live alone, in an apartment in Portland with two cats. I occasionally date others, but mostly in the last two years I've been rather focused on my existing relationships and my outside social/sexual/dating activities have been limited to a very few close friends and special people. I love my partners deeply, and I honestly expect them both to be part of my life going forward. I don't know for certain what my future holds but my desire is that they both be there to share whatever it is that happens.
I work at having open, stable relationships with my partners and my metamours and, as an extension of that, I try to keep in touch with the others that are connected to this polycule around me. The friends, companions and playmates of my partners and metamours matter to me. These people make up a lot of my world, some are close connections and others are more distant but they are all linked into my life in important ways. In addition to this network, I have my birth family and my own collection of friends, these are people who are vitally important to me.  Most of them live hundreds or thousands of miles away from where I am currently so I don't get to see or talk with them as often as I might like. They don't know my poly peoples all that well, because they haven't really had the opportunity to meet face to face and get to know one another, but they know them by name and by relationship to me. The things that go on in their lives profoundly affect me, if a friend on the other end of the country is sick or hurt it matters to me, if a family member 1400 miles south of here is doing something awesome I celebrate, if a friend on the opposite end of town (or the state, or the country) is in need, I'm there as soon as I possibly can be (if I can be). Its a big part of who I am, my connections and commitment to people I care about, and that is a big part of how I do poly. This is my web, and like any web what shakes one strand will reverberate throughout the web.

I find that many folks can’t fathom egalitarian relationships. Relationships  have history and unplanned turns and I know that I cannot tell my heart how to feel evenly for everyone.  Each relationship is unique and touches me in a different way, and that does play out in my planning and prioritizing. Egalitarian relationships are about giving each relationship the space to grow and be whatever it is that the people involved in that relationship want it to be, they are not about keeping score or giving exactly the same thing to everyone, and they are most certainly not about an outside person determining what can or cannot happen within a relationship that they are not directly involved in.
I despise hierarchical language, and more often than not I think people are just lazy when they think relationships are simple enough to be defined in these ways.  Being referred to as a "secondary" makes me want to hiss and scratch and bite, not in a good way. If someone wants to have a relationship with me that has set limitations, I expect them to be honest with me about that from the beginning.  Though I will admit, the likelihood of my wanting to start a emotional/romantic/sexual relationship with someone who says, we can't ever spend holidays together, or weekends are off limits, or overnights are not an option, is slim to none. On the other hand, if I find out later that this is the case and they were not honest enough to tell me about it or they haven't actually made the effort to think or talk out any of this until now, I'm unlikely to stick around.  So, yeah, if you and your "other" have a yearning for strict hierarchies, I'm probably not interested in letting you into my heart or my inner circle.
In my real life, I am a mass of chaos and confusion, nothing is simple or plain (and if it was, I'd likely get bored).  So yeah, polyamory.  Because I require connection and independence.  I think that there is space enough in the world and in my heart for more than one person, more than one friend, more than one lover, more than one anything.  I believe in soulmates, they are the people in this world that just belong in your life, there can be lots of them for different times and places and reasons.  But I don't believe that a good relationship means I am "part" of another person, or that I am incomplete without any particular relationship. I want to love whole people who choose to love me. Because I choose this life, every moment of every day.