When you start dividing things up into categories, you can go a little crazy with the whole process. It's not enough for the Mormons to have three levels of heaven, or for Dante to have nine levels of hell. No, they've got to go one further and divide up the divisions.
Being category-mad is such a venerable tradition, even the scientists got into it: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order...
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that I feel compelled to divide up the divisions that already exist in Polyworld.
Yesterday I wrote about being a Primary. When I started thinking about how to generalize my experiences as a Secondary, I kept feeling like there was no way to be general before specifying which type of General: one star, two star, three star... yeah, apparently the military provides another good model for anyone who's looking to divide, sub-divide, and conquer.
In poly parlance, a “secondary relationship” is one in which romantic/sexual partners do not live together, pool finances, or mix genes – but they try to see each other regularly, and they share a significant portion of their day-to-day lives with one another. Kind of like boyfriend-girlfriend.
Almost all of my relationships with men other than Parker have been, technically speaking, secondary. But with Scott and Travis I was/am more primary-secondary, whereas with Rick and Drew I was more of a secondary-secondary, and with dang-it-I-can't-remember-what-pseudonym-I-gave-him, I felt pretty tertiary-secondary.
So, the next few posts are going to detail what it's been like for me to be a secondary in my relationships with five different men.
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