[A Preview] of [An Attempt] at The Building Blocks of All Relationships
An explanation of the past 30 days and the next 60
This post won’t have the building blocks, in a clear fashion. But it will describe my work over the past month, and over the next two months on this topic.
I have spent the past 30 days writing between 500 and 2,000 words every day on the topic of monogamous and polyamorous relationships. These posts form the foundation for the yet-untitled book I conceived of in 2022. I wanted to log my process of “writing a book” in case future me or anybody else was curious to see the rough stages. I also wanted to time-box the stages very clearly, and write a book by following a practice of writing a book.
The posts are messy, and clearly labeled in the archive as “Book Day 1, Book Day 2, et cetera.” These posts will be paywalled at some point, under the advice that “mess that is not free becomes valuable intimacy,” and I do not want to signal that the messy braindumping for a book forms my standard for what a public blogpost is supposed to be, but they will be up and available for some time. Meanwhile I will move onto the next stage tomorrow; a new experiment for the next 30 days.
I am surprised that after this 30 day process, “the content” is outside of myself. Of course, it has to be organized and explained a lot better, but in terms of squeezing the lemon and having the content somewhere outside of myself, with no content remaining inside, this first experiment has been a success. I do not feel that anything big, or small but meaningful, has been left out of my public notes.
The next experiment will focus on crafting diagrams and activities for what has already been written, while reorganizing the content into more distinct clusters.
Today, I will take some time to reflect on the material that I had already written.
The point of writing the book is as follows. Monogamy and polyamory are distinct cultures, but are also on a spectrum.
[insert diagram]
Having distinct cultural norms from monogamy is one of the main points of polyamory being a distinct culture and a distinct identity. However I had a thought that by examining this spectrum, you can find the building blocks of all relationships, and use those building blocks to overcome bespoke challenges you may be having.
Bespoke challenges often require bespoke solutions. What is hard about making bespoke solutions is that you generally have to move broader, and understand more than the general simplified context people often pull solutions from, in part because your problem is often a result of the simplified context being too simple a model of your current reality, or you yourself are doing something complicated such that the simplified model is not able to provide you with a solution. Therefore you have to more broader, and look at the more general phenomena that is happening, in order to get a specialized solution. You have to go broader in order to go narrower with more precision and accuracy.
[insert diagram]
[insert diagram of precision versus accuracy]
Therefore, I do believe that certain issues in monogamy, and certain issues in polyamory, are well-suited to an approach that considers the building blocks of both, rather than each. In modern dating, more and more people are suffering from problems unique to the edge cases of each. In the case of monogamy, people are feeling insufficiently confident in their own capacities to raise a family or really support somebody through all stages of their life. In the case of polyamory, more people have been having many partners in all kinds of vague structures that they have had to navigate and process using their own bespoke systems.
Thus, many people are already feeling the intense edges of both monogamy and polyamory! Each, as its own system, has a bit more meat on it, and fat, and sinew connecting itself to itself. A lot of people meanwhile are ending up in all kinds of tensions between systems, and within themselves.
The book therefore is meant to help people get more in touch with the “meat,” rather than feeling pulled in various directions by various forces that they have encountered, either through current partners, exes, social norms, or family expectations.
The major through line, or spine of the book is the concept of legibility. I mean legibility in a very basic sense — “being clear enough to read.” It keeps coming up over and over again. How do you create legibility? across different domains (for yourself, between yourself and your partner, between yourself and society, between yourself and your values) is the guiding light for all of the explanations, diagrams, games and exercises.
Let’s take a few important concepts to relationships, and see what happens to them without legibility.
Trust without legibility becomes either a blind leap of faith (I have no way to check the trust) or a lot of clutching surveillance (constant checking checking and re-checking of the trust because you cannot see what is going on).
Love without legibility can become love of an archetype or a hallucination, more than love of the human animal person. Acts of love can be closer to acts of self-expression, than acts targeted to somebody’s sensitivities or sense of meaning.
Respect without legibility can become hurting somebody pretty badly by either overestimating or underestimating their power level. It can lead to accidental abandonment or coercion.
Autonomy without legibility ends up being not-a-relationship. It can be mutual affection, mutual respect, even mutual love, but if the autonomy does not become legible, it will not be a relationship.
Faithfulness without legibility can end up being martyrdom. It can also be blind faith to a non-shared god.
Safety without legibility can mean some amount of actual safety, while some amount of psychological unsafety if a person does not know about the actual safety.
Forgiveness without legibility can end up feeling like simply forgetting.
For contrast,
Trust with legibility becomes a grounded confidence in how the other person tends to move, such that when they surprise you, you have a map for asking “what changed?” instead of panicking.
Love with legibility becomes love of a real, particular creature: you can describe what hurts them, what calms them, and what kind of care actually lands in their nervous system.
Respect with legibility looks like calibrating your asks and your power: knowing what a “yes” will cost them, what a “no” protects about them, and what their time and presence means to them.
Autonomy with legibility becomes a relationship between two or more centers. You can coordinate a life with a person instead of living in parallel.
Faithfulness with legibility stops being martyrdom and becomes a set of promises that both of you can name, check against, and renegotiate.
Safety with legibility opens up opportunities to take risks, because you know that you are safe and act as if you know certain safeties are in place.
Forgiveness with legibility becomes an update to the map: “this is what happened; this is why; this is what we’re doing differently next time,” instead of memory‑wiping or glossing things over.
When I talk about the building blocks of relationships, I do not mean a grand synthesis between monogamy and polyamory to make a kind of One True Model. I mean something both simpler and hopefully more useful to practical applications; I am outlining the concrete conceptual areas you can tinker with or change entirely, which will in turn change how you are able to navigate your relationships.
Over the next stretch of the project, I will be making all this more fun, both for myself and then hopefully, my readers.