I read a lot of poly blogs (a lot, not "alot"). I read them because I'm curious. I'm curious about other people, their perspectives, their experiences and any advice they may have about situations that I may find myself in.
Many of the blogs I have been reading lately are written by people who are relatively new to poly relationships, and some are written by people who have been involved in poly relationships for a lot of years and have been blogging about them for a very long time. Some are written by people I know personally or have social connections that are far less than 6 degrees of separation, and some are written by people I have never met or heard of before stumbling onto their blogs.
Here are some helpful lessons I have learned from blogs:
1) Everyone is different, and so their poly will look different: People come to polyamorous relationships from all sorts of different situations and experiences. People want different things from their relationships, they view poly in different ways and they have very different values attached to their way of doing poly. I like to think that there are some basic underpinnings that make poly "Poly", but beyond that there are so many versions of poly out there that I am sometimes fascinated, sometimes horrified, by the things that people write about in their blogs.
2) Everyone makes mistakes, poly = more people = more mistakes: People say and do things that do not go well for them or their relationships, and its reassuring to read about other peoples mistakes and what they did about them. I could be accused of being a bit of a looky-loo about other people admitting to the mistakes that have been made in their pasts. I find it incredibly brave when people write honestly about the things that went wrong, either things that happened to them or things they did. Sometimes I'm not surprised, sometimes I'm saddened, sometimes I laugh, but I always take a moment and think about my current and past and possible future relationships and how something like this might or might not happen to me or someone I care for. It's also my (perhaps naive) hope that I can avoid making those same mistakes in the same ways.
*Note: This doesn't stop me from making very similar mistakes in new and different ways.
3) Just because someone writes about polyamory doesn't mean they are an expert: This one is big Big BIG! I don't care how long someone has been blogging about open/poly relationships, they are not an expert by default. Thinking that any particular number of years is proof of someones depth of understanding, knowledge or ability is a really bad assumption, one that I know that I have made myself. Just because Person A, or Group B had been has been blogging about poly relationships for XX years does not = they have all of the stuff worked out and they know exactly how to make things work and how to be poly ever after. As a matter of fact, just because someone writes about how to have poly relationships doesn't even mean that they actually apply any of the things they write about to their real life relationships.
I started writing poetry in Junior High School, so I could claim that I've been doing it for about thirty years now... that doesn't make me an expert on poetry, it doesn't even guarantee that I'm a half-way decent poet. Just because someone writes or talks about a subject for a long time does not necessarily mean they have any better idea than you do how to actually work through things and be successful.
4) All those non-experts have really awesome insights: These insights may or may not be applicable to anyone else, but they do give me new and interesting things to think about. It is especially interesting to see how people who are new to poly are shaping their ideas about polyamory based on limited information, media portrayals or contact to others in the poly community. Learning about someones default assumptions can be really fascinating, as is learning about how those ideas evolve and change with time and experience. These views into other people allow me new opportunities to look at how I talk about Poly and what someone might absorb from my words.
So get out there and explore the bloggosphere... the poly people are out there writing about more things than you might have thought to ask about so far. "If you're not careful you might learn something before its done!"
