On Being a Secondary: A Summary

When I think about all the words I've used – in the last few blog entries, and elsewhere – to describe my experiences as a secondary, I have to admit that they're all a little... negative.

Want to know the first adjective I attached to my relationship with Scott, back in the days when our love was new and bright?

Doomed.

Here's what it boils down to: being a secondary means being in a precarious position.

It's an inbetween state, neither here nor there.

A primary relationship has a certain weight to it. Set off on a journey with a secondary, though, and you're on a ship without an anchor, at the mercy of the wind and waves.

Ultimately, of course, everything is impermanent. Unless you buy into the Mormon “families are forever” pyramid scheme, and I don't, there's always that 'til death do us part clause to remind you that being alive means being in a precarious position.

So I'd add that, in my experiences as a secondary, I have often felt very alive.

On Being a Secondary: Nowhere to Go

When I began this whole series on my own experiences as a primary, secondary, and tertiary partner, I debated about whether to put my relationship with Guy in the “secondary” category at all. I ended up deciding that I probably qualified as some kind of secondary partner during the five months or so that we dated each other.

Guy and his wife were swingers. For most of their marriage, they'd limited themselves to casual interactions with other like-minded couples, but they'd recently begun to branch out a bit. His wife had been dating someone for a few months, so maybe Guy felt like he ought to balance the equation on his side. Whatever his motivation – and other than a certain requisite degree of physical attraction, I don't have a clue what it might have been – he seemed to regard me as his girlfriend.

For my part, I was trying out “casual.” At the time, things with Lilianna and Rick were a mess.  I'd swallowed a pretty stiff dose of drama, and I was hoping a no-strings-attached relationship might help me to detox.

What did it feel like, being Guy's tertiary-secondary?

Pretty pointless. When we weren't driving toward orgasm, we weren't going anywhere together. From the very beginning, our relationship was at a dead end.

To be fair, Guy had been pretty clear that he wasn't “interested in a love relationship” with anyone other than his wife. Maybe I should have divined that this meant he wasn't interested in developing any kind of intimacy. I figured it out soon enough.

There was something else, too: my STD paranoia. Here I was, dating a man I hardly knew, who was married to a woman I didn't know at all, who was dating some guy who, from what I was able to gather, was screwing just about everyone. Yeah, Guy and I used condoms. Every time. Yes, he assured me that the agreement between him and his wife was that they were always to use condoms, unless they were having sex with each other. It still freaked me out to think that there was a chance – however vanishingly slim – that I might contract a communicable disease from someone with whom I wasn't communicating.

I decided that the relationship wasn't worth the risk, and I broke things off.

On Being a Secondary: Feeling Beside Myself

I dealt with the tenuousness of being Rick's secondary-secondary by attempting to make myself smaller. My tactic with Drew was exactly the opposite: I made myself larger than life.

Drew met me head-on, too. He's quite the character.

And there's the rub: we weren't ever real with each other. The realest thing Drew ever said to me was, “Sometimes I worry that all my relationships are shallow. And that what it means is that I'm shallow.” Coincidentally, perhaps, we never had sex again after this remark of his, uttered during a post-coital pause, in the hushed darkness of my bedroom.

But although our relationship wasn't substantial enough to nourish either of our souls for long, we did really enjoy being shallow together. You could even say that it was a passion of ours. I mean, we're talking some seriously intoxicating ego-gratification.  We were big, we were bold, we were dazzling.

It turned out, of course, that our bling was just dime-store-variety sparkle.  No matter: it was still a thrill to put it on and parade around together.  Even now, jaded as I am about the whole thing, I can still get a kick out of playing the occasional dress-up game with Drew, and I'm still pleased when I win the prize for "best costume".

Our most recent text session demonstrates our dynamic well, I think:

Drew (texting out of the blue): I know you are, but what am I?

Viny: Funny, I was just thinking about you, Mr. Beauty Queen...

Drew: Don't hate me because I'm beautiful: hate me because I'm never a runner-up. (And because I won the talent contest.)

Viny: The tiara looks stunning on you, darling.

Drew: But this make-up is sh*t, don't you think? Wrong shade?

Viny: You're right. Lilac doesn't suit your eyes. And you've overdone the glitter, as usual.

Drew: YOU JUST WANT MY F**KING CROWN.

Viny: I don't need your crown, honey. True princesses don't need to wear anything: even naked, I'm royalty.

You see, with Drew, it was always about dressing up and dressing down. We were in the process of remaking ourselves, he and I. We were busy trying ourselves on: “Hey, whaddaya think, does this personality do anything for me?”

It occurs to me that Drew was also trying me on, posing in front of the mirror, admiring how I made him look. I think a big part of the attraction was that he got to feel all avant guard about associating with me. The whole poly thing both fascinated and frightened him. It gave me a certain cachet that I wasn't shy about exploiting. My relationship with Rick had put a serious dent in my self-esteem, and I was getting off on being exotic and dangerous for a change. The first time I kissed Drew – yeah, it was my move – he marveled, “Wow, I feel like such a badass!”

When we first began dating, Drew and his wife were preparing for a divorce. They hadn't had sex in years. This was his take on the situation: “I was feeling like a ripe fruit that was going to fall to the ground and rot, untasted” – so one day, he decided to take off. He went to New York and had a torrid four-month affair with a Latin lioness, and then returned home to begin the torturous process of extricating himself from his 20-year relationship for good. When I met him, he still shared a house with his soon-to-be Ex. But he had retreated to his bedroom, where he spent most of his time online, orchestrating his complicated correspondence with various besotted female hangers-on.

And there were an awful lot of them. Drew may not have been comfortable with the concept of polyamory, but he was certainly interested in spreading the love around. I had the dubious pleasure of dating him during a particularly promiscuous phase. We met on March 1, 2009, and by July 1, which was the date of our first full-on sexual encounter, he'd slept with three other women. I went on vacation in mid-July, and by the time I got back, he'd gotten sucked into a whirlwind romance with yet another woman. Much to my dismay, this meant that he and I were “off.” A couple of weeks later, after things had ended badly with Ms. Whirlwind, he came knocking at my door again. It made my head spin.

That was another thing about my relationship with Drew: it was highly contingent. His plan was to ditch me as soon as someone more suitable came along, and I knew it. In fact, that's exactly what happened. By mid-August, he'd begun to zero in on a particular midwestern divorcee – charming, intelligent, and grateful to the point of slavish abjection, which is to say, exactly his type. My growing attachment to Travis gave Drew just the excuse he needed to back out of our relationship gracefully: he got to play the part of the aggrieved lover, to pretend the end was my fault.

Or maybe we were both pretending. The truth is, I was getting tired of having to watch my every move on the Big Screen.  That larger-than-life me just wasn't me. 

On Being a Secondary: Plaint of the Lite-Weight

I'm not going to recount the story of how I came to be Rick's secondary. Suffice it to say that, around the same time as Rick's wife and my husband began their relationship, Rick and I began a relationship of our own.

There was no question that Lilianna was Rick's first priority, and that Parker was mine. We were on equal footing, two secondary-secondaries together.

It should have been a perfect set-up. It wasn't.

In the winter/spring of 2005-2006, Rick was under a lot of stress. For a time, I was able to provide him some respite, a much-needed break from business-as-usual. He called me his “oasis.” And I really didn't mind being his escape from the desert of domesticity – I completely understood where he was coming from, since I'm often tempted to approach my own secondary relationships in the same way.

The problem was that Rick was up to his eyeballs in relationship drama at home, and the last thing he needed was another relationship to maintain. What he wanted, ultimately, was the thrilling sweep of space: a clear vista, a soundless sky. He didn't want me.

I didn't want to be a burden, so I tried to make myself lighter for his sake. The result was the attenuation of intimacy. Pretty soon, Viny-the-Oasis had dried up. I was just part of his daily drag. Our relationship had become a less-substantial version of the kind of relationship he already had with his wife. Less friction, less passion; less pressure to interact, less communication. I started thinking of myself as Lilianna-lite.

I knew Rick cared about me. When he wasn't completely distracted, he could be extremely thoughtful. But I felt like I was slowly disappearing: the lighter I got, the less I mattered. Pretty soon, my burgeoning insecurity became a very weighty matter indeed.

The following is an email I wrote Rick in December of 2006 – I think it pretty much encapsulates how I felt about being his secondary-secondary:

I don't know if you've seen [Denali's] Tamagachi, or if you know anything about them; they're an electronic pet, and they're much more convenient than actual pets because you can put them on "pause" when you don't have the time to take care of them.  But when they're up and running, you have to make sure they're happy and fed.  You can tell whether they need something because they have "hungry" and "happy" meters.  If all four hearts are filled on "happy," for example, you can probably get by without playing any silly games or feeding it snacks for several hours, or even all day.  Sometimes, however, the Tamagachi gets sick, and a skull appears above its head.  If you don't attend to it immediately, it dies, even if its happy and hungry meters were okay.

Unfortunately, neither people nor pets are as convenient as the electronic version of anything, and the only way you know they need something is if they complain.  I hate complaining.  I resent having to do it.  Maybe because I tell myself I am so low-maintenance that I shouldn't need to complain, that even the most distracted kid can manage to take care of something that doesn't even mind being put on "pause" when attending to it isn't convenient.

But maybe I am fooling myself.  Maybe I am more like some desert cactus, which can go without water for weeks and months at a time -- but if it's always a drought, it's not going to make it.  I think that's a more accurate description of what's going on.  (Notice I'm still priding myself on being low-maintenance; the other possibility is that I have a completely inaccurate perception of myself.)  Now, a continual drought does not mean it never rains.  It means it never rains quite enough to make up for the preceding drought period, or that it doesn't rain quite enough for the cactus to make it through the next drought period without getting stressed. 

It keeps happening to me that I am not quite completely okay when I see you, that I don't quite make it without feeling a little water-stressed; then we have a conversation about it..., and there I am, complaining of drought while a nice steady rain is coming down, and I think to myself, "What was my issue again?"  And then I'm fine, until I'm not so fine.  In the couple of weeks before this past weekend, I was just beginning to feel ignored and generally not very important to you, but I told myself (accurately, I think) that this was probably due entirely to external factors, such as the fact that you and [Lil] were finally getting some long-overdue time alone together.  When you were telling me that you felt it had been a long time since we'd seen each other, or since we'd really connected, I was gratified to think that it wasn't just me feeling that way.  But then when you said that you never realized that you've missed me until you see me, I started wondering how this is going to work.  If I don't occur to you during the times when I'm not around, where is the incentive to ever get together going to come from?

So, as usual, I had a lovely time with you this past Friday.  Then, on Saturday, you were (understandably) rush-rush-rush.  Then, on Sunday, you were also (understandably) rush-rush-rush when I called to see about possibly getting together, and I completely understood why there wasn't time to do anything.  Then, although you said you might call Sunday night, you didn't.  And I figured that there was probably a good reason, even if the reason was simply that you went to bed early, although I did kind of think you might perhaps have managed a short email.  Then yesterday I didn't hear from you, either; I thought about pinging you and then decided that I probably shouldn't, because I knew how busy this week is for you.  And then last night, again, there was a very good reason for not hearing from you: [Lilianna] had just returned, and, I assume, had all kinds of things to say about the funeral and her experience in CA.  So you see, the way I am feeling is probably totally unreasonable. 

But here it is, anyway:  I feel ignored, taken for granted, not appreciated.  I fear that I am being horribly annoying for bring this up during your extremely busy week, and annoyed with myself for being annoying.  I feel annoyed and angry with you that I am in this position in the first place.  I feel like there isn't room for me in your life.  I don't see how I am going to get through the whole next couple of weeks until everyone is back from the holidays, feeling like this -- and I don't see any way out of it, because neither you nor I has any time to deal with this issue of mine right now.  I probably should have sat on this until later, in the hopes that the little skull over my head would go away of its own accord, but I didn't.  So I've dumped this on you at the beginning of a busy day, and I'm sorry, and I'm not sorry.  I am feeling simultaneously bad and pretty pissed, and I don't know what to do about it.  (Sometimes I think: what if [Lil] weren't going out of town on a fairly regular basis?  I'd never see you.  And how can I look at that and not feel like an afterthought?)

Time to wrap this up and take [Denali] to school.  Don't bother trying to respond to this today; I know you don't have time, and I'm just going to feel worse if you take time you don't have to deal with me.  But maybe we can talk tonight, or tomorrow night before we all leave (oh goody, you're thinking).

There's a letter I wrote him several months later that's basically a repetition of this one, which I will forbear copying here. Rick headed into what he later called “a Viny dormancy.” Perhaps it was just as well, since I was pregnant with Sienna at the time. A few months after Sienna was born, there was a brief Viny-Rick sexual renaissance, but by that time, we were firmly in tertiary territory.

On Being a Secondary: Inhabiting Paradox

When I woke this morning, it was still completely dark. The clock said 4:24. Somehow that seemed just about right, so I got up. It's now 4:47, still dark, quiet except for the hum from the computer and the occasional slow swish of a passing car outside (someone who works at a bakery, perhaps?). I'm going to see if I can write this post about Travis before my family wakes up and my day as a person with responsibilities begins.

Given my topic, it makes total sense that I'd be up at this ungodly hour, waaaay up the spine from the butt-crack of dawn. Travis has a habit of waking too early. He's also in Florida right now, three hours east of here, where the sun has already risen and the morning frogs are no doubt croaking their mating songs.

Yesterday, Travis's mother asked about me. “So, the fifty-dollar question: what's happening with you and Viny?” He didn't want to get into it just then, so he said, “Let's talk about that tomorrow.”

I'm a little nervous.

What is happening with me and Travis?

I've been watching the cursor blink after that last question mark for a good two minutes, and I still don't know. A little like the last two years, in miniature.

When Travis and I started dating, in June of 2009, he was seeing someone else, and I was married AND seeing someone else, which meant that ours was, in poly terms, a tertiary relationship. Some time in late August, between Date 5 and Date 6 with me, Travis broke things off with the other woman. He asked her how she felt about continuing to develop a relationship with him, given that he was interested in pursuing a more serious relationship with me, and she said No dice. It was an amicable parting. They made out in the parking lot and then drove off in their separate cars.

On Date 7, Travis and I slept together for the first time. It was kind of an accident.

Parker was at Burning Man. Drew had just spent the night at my place two nights earlier. I invited Travis for dinner, fully expecting that our date would be over long before pumpkin-hour chimed. But we lost track of time, and I forgot about how the gate to the community parking lot closes at 10, and also about how my gate-opener was kaputt. Travis and I stood in the parking lot, contemplating the closed gate. “Well,” I said, “I guess you're sleeping over.” His response was something along the lines of, “Oh no! Don't throw me in the briar patch!” I thought about giving him the downstairs couch, but that seemed wrong to me. So I bowed to the inevitable and invited him into my bed, even though I knew this night would spell T-h-e E-n-d as far as Drew was concerned.

Which meant that Travis and I had each given up somebody to be together. Maybe it shouldn't have been like that, but it was, and just as well: our relationship wasn't feeling “tertiary” to either of us anymore.

So, what has it been like, being Travis's primary-secondary?

Like living in a house on the beach, between low tide and high tide. If I look out the window in the pearly dawn light, or just before sunset, I can sometimes see little sandpipers of possibility running toward the future, making hieroglyphs that shine for a moment in the wet sand before they are erased by lapping waves.

On Being a Secondary: Who's Got the Tiara?

When Scott and I first started dating, he had a primary partner, Monique. That made me his secondary partner. Except that early on, it became clear to me that I was more important to him – which put me in kind of an uncomfortable position.

This is from my July 4, 1999 journal entry, just before Scott and Monique got married: I think I complained about the timing [of the wedding] for some reason & [Scott] asked if I wanted him to call it off. I said of course not. He said he would if I wanted him to, seriously. That is a scary thought, even if it isn't entirely true. Sometimes [Scott] says scary things. Like when he said, when I was worried about taking too much time one day, that I was what was most important. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said that [Monique] was also important & we'd have to share pre-eminence. Then a minute later as he was hugging me he said, “Well, you know what? Maybe you and [Monique] are equal in importance...but you're more special.” Kind of a weird little thought there. I never know what to do with sentiments of that kind & I assure you they are entirely unsolicited. In fact they make me nervous.

Not surprisingly, given Scott's priorities, his marriage didn't last long. For about a year after his divorce, I was his only partner, which put me in a different kind of uncomfortable position, because there was a big gap between how much time he wanted to spend with me and how much time I could afford to spend with him. I was simultaneously relieved and totally freaked out when he started dating Chani. On the one hand, some of the pressure was off. The imbalance between what he wanted and what I had to give was lessened. I had two partners, he had two partners: even-steven. On the other hand, Chani wasn't happy about me being in the picture at all, which worried me: was I going to be ousted from Scott's life entirely? After a few months, it became clear to me that, regardless of what Chani might have wanted, I was still Scott's first priority...a big relief, and a return to the familiar sense of guilt about the fact that, however crazy about him I was, Scott wasn't my first priority. There was also the discomfort I felt about “winning” at someone else's expense: I had felt bad for Monique, and then I felt bad for Chani.

The following journal entry from October of 2003 highlights the jockeying-for-position problem: Also heard from [Scott] that [Chani] is having a hard time and she sat him down & made all these demands, such as that when he's visiting me, we can't talk about her at all. Now I know why she is taking this tactic – it isn't just wanting to keep things separate, to keep her relationship w. him uncontaminated & in her power, it is also that she is petrified of what [Scott] might say, how he would represent her, and rather than torture herself with the possibilities she is trying to make it so that she doesn't need to wonder since no talking about her is going to happen – but it just burns me that [Scott] is capitulating to this demand at all. He only told me about this because I specifically asked, and said he thought she was taking it too far but he needed to respect how she's feeling & that he didn't really need to talk about her. I know this is just a power struggle – my wanting him to talk about her is my way “in” to that relationship, and therefore my way of asserting some control (via being in the know) where I really have none. But she and I are in direct opposition: she wants to pretend I don't exist, and I need to show her that I do, and if [Scott] seems to be taking her part in this, which last night he was, then my anger and frustration get directed at him – unfairly, perhaps, since he's only trying to balance in a precarious position. But it does make me totally pissed off at him, in a very childish way: I want to say fine then, see ya. No [Viny], presto, [Chani] is overjoyed, and then we'll see how important she really is to you when I am not around (because I do not think [Chani] is what he really wants – she's just a good [Viny] supplement to him, which is really a shame when you consider how it would feel to be her, which is why I can't really blame her for her bad behavior – it's really more his fault).

Yeah. Kind of psycho.

In all, I spent six years as Scott's primary-secondary. In December of 2004, I moved away – partly because I could no longer tolerate the pressure and the guilt (not to mention the beauty pageant drama, given what it cost everyone for me to keep holding onto that goddamn tiara) – and my relationship with Scott became more of a tertiary thing for both of us, with various ups & downs.

On Being a Secondary: The Preamble

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.