New to Solo? Start here! This re-release from the early days of the pod covers a concept that comes up again and again—in the podcast and Peter McGraw’s book. The “relationship escalator” is the default path of dating, moving in, marrying, and merging lives. Amy Gahran, who coined the term, joins Peter to break it all down. We explore what the escalator is, why it’s so invisible, and how Solos step off it—through consensual non-monogamy, platonic partnerships, sexual friendships, or simply going Solo.
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Listen to Episode #255 here
Diverging from the Relationship Escalator (Again)
Welcome back. With all the new listeners and a back catalog of 255 plus episodes, I’ve started re-releasing popular, important episodes. This one is quite important. I talked to Amy Gahran, the creator of the Relationship Escalator, a concept that comes up time and time again in both the podcast, the book, and the solo movement more generally.
The Relationship Escalator is like water to a fish. It’s everywhere and unquestioned, unless you’re solo. Amy and I discussed the hallmarks of the relationship escalator and explored the many ways that people step off it, including consensual non-monogamy, platonic partnerships, sexual friendships, and, of course, the solo lifestyle. One more thing. I’m exploring offering a personal finance workshop for singles, maybe some group coaching or one-on-one solo coaching, perhaps even a relationship design workshop.
Not about finding a partner per se, but about designing the relationships and connections that actually fit your life. These will be paid offerings, and I’d love your input as I consider them. If you want to find out more or let me know what you might be interested in, send me a note via my contact page at PeterMcGraw.org or sign up for the newsletter there or join the solo community at PeterMcGraw.org/solo. That’s free. I’ll post more info there. I hope you enjoy this episode. It helped change my life. Let’s get started.
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Our returning guest is Amy Gahran. Amy is a writer and journalist based near Boulder, Colorado. When she’s not writing about energy, technology, and business, she’s researching and writing about unconventional relationships and the power of social norms. She’s currently working on a second edition of her delightful, wonderful, useful 2017 book, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator, a research-based guide to intimate relationship diversity. Amy was a guest on two of my favorite episodes, Getting Off the Relationship Escalator and Defining Solo. Welcome back, Amy.
Peter, how are you?
I‘m good. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.
Me too. You’re a good interviewer. This is always fun.
That’s high praise from a journalist.
If you ever get back to the Boulder area, I’m buying you a drink.
I would love that. I will be back at some point. This episode is part of a series examining relationships, both conventional and unconventional. This idea, this model of the relationship escalator, has been tremendously helpful to me and to my listeners. I want to say thank you for that.
You’re welcome.
What we’re going to do is a follow–up to a previous episode in which I had Kris Marsh, a sociologist, and Shane Mauss, a stand-up comic. We talked about the reasons for the hallmarks of the Relationship Escalator, or what I would call the criteria of these necessary conditions for the Relationship Escalator, and why they exist. What I want to do now is talk about how people may live an unconventional life, diverging from this model. Before we do this, let’s assume for a moment that the reader is not a regular reader and they don’t know what the Relationship Escalator is. What is the Relationship Escalator?
Defining the Relationship Escalator
The Relationship Escalator is the common bundle, at least in Western cultures, of social norms that define how relationships that are considered to be intimate in some significant way, what they’re supposed to look like, how they’re supposed to work, and how they’re supposed to progress. There is a trajectory. It works like this. You meet someone. You think they’re hot. You start dating. You’d probably start having sex. You have a lot of emotional investment in it. You fall in love. After doing that for a little while, you become exclusive. You move in together, then you will get married, probably buy a house, have a few kids, and until death do you part.
One thing you say is that the kids are optional. The marriage is probably going to happen, but even if it doesn’t, you’re supposed to be merged together. You’re going to live together. You’re going to merge your finances. People are going to see you as a couple. Is that fair to say?
When we start talking about merging, when we get into what the criteria of this Escalator are, it’s not just about how you do your relationship. It’s about your identity and who you think you are, whether you’re a “me” or a “we.”
I’m sure we could do a whole episode talking about this. I have had this where I’ve had friends who are couples, and you refer to them as a single unit, merging their names together. This is pervasive. One of the things that is striking about the work that you’ve done is that it’s something that we don’t even question. It’s just the way it is.
My whole process of doing this research in this book and books that will follow is, “Yo fish, there’s this stuff called water. You might want to think about it.”
It’s such a striking idea because not only do you see it in your own personal life, you probably have seen it with your parents, friends, siblings, and with yourself, but it is featured in songs, movies, and television.
It’s enshrined in law, finances, and the tax code.
As the previous episode did, it talked about why these elements, hallmarks, as you say, exist. Why is it that this coupledom is so important to the world, governments, procreation, and intergenerational wealth, etc? This will be familiar to anyone who read the previous episode. What I’m interested in is the criteria, the hallmarks of these relationships. You’ve done this work.
You’ve surveyed thousands of people. You can see among those people who are on the Relationship Escalator, who are riding it, until death do you part, that there’s a common set of criteria that are connected there. What we’re going to do is we’re going to look at how some people, perhaps the present company, diverged from this.
Before we do that, I have a general question for you, Amy. That is, suppose you’re not interested in diverging, or as I would say, using my narrative of solo recognize, rebel, and re-invent, suppose you’re not interested in rebelling, why should someone continue to read the blog as we get into these alternatives?
I’m glad you asked that because a lot of times, people who do want conventional relationships, whether they’re monogamous or merged in terms of living together, legally married, or whatever. If that’s what you want and value, then when you start to research the Relationship Escalator on Google, a lot of the first things you’ll find will have stuff having to do with polyamory or various forms of non-monogamy.
That’s because a lot of times, people who have already stepped off the Relationship Escalator in some significant way have the most reason to talk and write about it. This is not a concept for people who are non-monogamous or otherwise wanting to diverge significantly from social norms. You mentioned why this idea of coupledom is so important and why it is so enshrined in social laws, as I mentioned, even like laws, and in health insurance?
I would call them both written rules and unwritten rules.
A big reason why that is when you think about why people have relationships, any kind of relationship at all. A lot of that is to have a sense of belonging, psychological and emotional well-being, and also logistical support. None of us is an island. Everybody needs some support from other people in a variety of ways. The reason why we have relationships is to help do that.
The thing is, people are complicated. If you are relying on other people to help support you in your life, or if you are willing to help support other people in their lives, it helps to have a grammar for how that works. That’s why social norms exist. If you walk into a bar and I walk up to you and say, “Banana,” rather than “Hello,” you’d be like, “Huh?”
Social norms take the friction out of the interaction. Relationships provide support so that you can scale up. You’re not dependent on yourself for all parts of your life. Those things matter, but they can happen in a lot of different ways. The more they become popular and reinforced, social norms fade into the background, and people forget that there are other ways of doing things, which isn’t a big deal about greetings, walking up, and saying, “Hello.” When it comes to how you run some of the most intimate and vulnerable relationships in your life, they can become too limiting.
For some people, those norms can become difficult or even oppressive. The reason why people who want to follow those norms should know about this is, if you are looking toward having a particular relationship that’s gone beyond that escalator, ride it all the way to the top, gold star, and that’s what you want. You’re going to want to make sure that you are not coasting on assumptions and finding out after the fact that the other person has very different assumptions about what monogamy means.
Whether or how to merge finances, how close you should be to your friends, or how important sex is in your relationship. It’s called the Relationship Escalator for a reason because it’s coasting on this background of assumption. It feels like it has a momentum of its own. You’re being carried along. All the way, you’re making decisions. It’s the staircase, except that if you aren’t always conscious about making a decision to go along and follow social norms, it feels like you’re being carried.
If I understand you correctly, if you’re not interested in diverging, rebelling, as I would say, you should know this to make sure that you and your partner are on the same page, so you don’t discover something many years from now.
That would be a crappy surprise many years down the line. This is more important. We’ve learned a lot in the past decade, but especially in the last few years in the US and many other Western cultures of the importance of diversity and inclusiveness. There are lots of different cultures, backgrounds, and sub-communities. Diversity is a good thing. The Relationship Escalator is such a strong and heavily privileged collection of social norms that alternatives to that escalator.
Other ways of doing other kinds of significantly intimate or committed relationships tend to be diminished or stigmatized. That’s why they say, “Just friends.” That’s a diminutive just. That’s why when people even raise the idea of not being monogamous, other people go, “What?” They get a little freaked out by that. That’s what is called a disturbance in the force because there is a stigma there. Something is not normal, literally, not conforming to social norms. That can hurt people. That hurts everybody.
It hurts people who are stigmatized because their approaches and needs to life and to love are more difficult because they face a lot of stigma, barriers, prejudice, and bias. It hurts people who might want to be on that escalator, who like it. I’ll bet you that every single person on the escalator knows and cares about people who aren’t on the escalator or don’t want to be. You don’t want to hurt them. It helps to know more about this diversity so you can make the world safer for people who you probably know and care about who do life and love a bit differently than me.
I appreciate you bringing that up. I have seen this show, I have married readers who are on the escalator, and they read this because they want to be better at supporting their solo friends and family. There’s an old movie with Sidney Poitier called Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The modern-day version of that is Guess Who’s Coming to the Dinner Party. It’s Joe and Jane who are well-known swingers, and someone would be like, “I’m not sure we should invite them to the dinner party because they’re different and they’re a little scary.” Whatever it is, there’s misinformation about them. They were not even asking people to celebrate it. We’re asking them to accept it.
To accept it and make accommodations. If you’re having a wedding and you send out invitations, and it’s plus one. Somebody wants to bring their best friend or their two partners. Are you going to allow some flexibility for them?
It’s interesting to know this because this notion of singlism comes up. If you start talking about single living, you talk about how single people are stereotyped and prejudiced. The arguments are like, “It’s not the same as heterosexism or racism.” The answer to that may be okay. However, we know to your point that diversity is good and all diverse places are good. To stigmatize single people or folks who are diverging in these other ways is an act of prejudice, and we should be striving to avoid that. Moreover, sometimes these things intersect.
For example, to be prejudiced against single people, oftentimes, they may be single mothers and folks who are already oppressed, to begin with. I agree with you, regardless of whether you want to ride the escalator or diverge in some way, this will be a helpful lesson. Let’s jump in. I’m going to talk about one of these hallmarks, one of these criteria, and then let’s have a conversation about how people may not conform. Let’s start with the 800-pound gorilla. What’s that?
I didn’t make these up out of whole cloth. I did a fair amount of research on this. Just so people know, my book is based on a survey that I did where I got 1,500 in-depth responses from people to several questions that are various versions of, “Do you believe that your important relationships are unconventional? If so, how?” Some of the things that we’re going to be covering, these hallmarks, are things I know about, but a couple of them toward the end didn’t occur to me, but they are very important.
I haven’t done the research, but reading through this list and talking about it at length, both on the show and at dinner parties, they pass the smell test. They seem self-evident once they’re pointed out. I don’t think we’re going to run into many controversies, but the idea of having there’ll be some survey research behind this is helpful. As a behavioral scientist, I appreciate it. The 800-pound gorilla, sexual and romantic exclusivity, AKA monogamy.
Monogamy and Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM)
It’s not just exclusivity. It is exclusivity between two and only two people.
It’s commonly called monogamy. Where do we find people who are in a relationship that may not follow this?
First of all, let’s understand what monogamy is. A lot of times think that it’s about those two people in a monogamous relationship agreed to only share sex and romance between themselves. What it comes down to is that you agree not to share sex and romance with anybody else because it is very common in monogamous relationships for the sexual and romantic part of it to wing. You are not entitled to always have sex with your partner forever, but if you’re in a monogamous relationship, you’re not supposed to do that with anybody else.
I get what you’re saying. It’s about who you have sex with and who you don’t have sex with.
Who are you allowed to have sex with, but who you are not allowed to have sex with?
You’ve already alluded to something about sex versus romantic. What’s the difference?
A sexual connection can mean two things. It’s an erotic connection. That can be either the physical, you’re banging genitals or other bodily parts together in a radically charged way, or some people might even construe it to be kissing, hugging, cuddling, holding hands, or physical contact. There was an erotic charge to it. For instance, phone sex, no physical contact, but people who are partners in a long-distance monogamous relationship might engage in that kink. It can be emotionally charged and erotic, but doesn’t necessarily involve anybody getting naked or bumping anything up together.
Before we get into some of these ways, when I think about infidelity, it’s that you had sex with someone else, and you shouldn’t have done that. You flirted with someone else. You shouldn’t be doing that. It’s expressing some interest. This idea of sharing emotional details with some other person that you might not be with your partner.
This is why I’m working on a whole other research project and a book called Monogamy, The Fine Print.
It’s a complex constellation of behavior, supposed to be.
The point of monogamy is that there’s only one person that you share these important forms of intimacy with. Non-monogamy is very common, and it’s a social norm in two circumstances. The first is what’s commonly known as casual, uncommitted dating, casual, or uncommitted sex, which is commonly accepted in most social circles in Western culture with the exception of very socially or religiously conservative. The point is that’s something you do until you find the one person that you want to settle down with. The other circumstance in which non-monogamy is socially normative is cheating. The thing is that cheating people often look down on it.
That’s when you have sex with, share a romance with, or otherwise violate a monogamous commitment without letting your monogamous partner know you’re doing it. The thing is, there’s a lot of grammar of social norms. People know how cheating works, and it is extremely common. When somebody finds out that somebody else has been cheating, they may be angry or hurt. They won’t be confused. They know what’s going on. There were a lot of conventions that support the practice of cheating. Non-monogamy is common.
What’s not common is consensual non-monogamy. That’s when people who are intimate with each other agree, they’re transparent with each other, that activity is not exclusive to the two of them. There are a variety of ways that they might engage sexually or romantically with other people. Some people set a lot of rules about it. Some people say, “That’s something that we do as a couple, like we might have a special guest star in the bedroom sometimes.” This can range from everything from this special guest star, the more monogamous approach, all the way up to polyamory, where you can have multiple concurrent, emotional relationships, more than one at a time, that might achieve some level of depth or commitment.
As a quick aside, I get a kick out of this, that special guest star. A couple might have a threesome where they bring someone in. Maybe it’s a sex worker, or it’s someone who volunteers for this just for the fun of it all. That person has a particular moniker in the world, which is a unicorn. It’s like a special person. I always get a kick out of being on the dating apps or whatever. There are these women who describe themselves as a unicorn. They’re not talking about themselves as a unicorn in that threesome way, but as a one-of-a-kind, special, mythical creature that’s not supposed to exist. I get a kick out of the fact that these ladies may not realize that there’s a double meaning to that term.
Terminology frequently conflicts in different subcultures. Welcome to the 21st century, roll with it.
You said consensual non-monogamy, which might be swinging that I mentioned earlier.
It could even be “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationships where they consent to having other connections, but you are not allowed to disclose to each other. You’re supposed to pretend it’s not happening. All those relationships are consensual non-monogamy is possible. I’m polyamorous, and my personal experience is that it is the consent that freaks a lot of people out more than non-monogamy.
They’re like, “You get to have sex with other people, but you’re agreeing with it? I might make this other person and talk to them, and you might expect me to be at least nice to them?” That’s the thing that freaks a lot of people out because the consent means that you are acknowledging the existence and validity of these other connections.
You said monogamish. Does Dan Savage get credit for that term?
As far as I know, he had a contest for it at some point.
What is monogamish?
It tends to refer to relationships between two people where they are primarily sexually monogamous, and they are definitely socially monogamous. They present as a couple or as a unit. They might occasionally have recreational sex with other people. Sometimes, they do that on the down low, and sometimes they’ll go to sex parties, strip clubs, or swinger events. That’s more of something that they do occasionally, usually as a recreational thing. It’s not usually an ongoing feature of the relationship on a day-to-day basis.
I have a buddy who describes himself to potential partners. He says, “I’m 90% monogamous.”
That’s a fair way to describe it.
Non-Merger of Life Infrastructure And Living Apart Together/LAT
Let’s move on to the next one, merging life infrastructure and identity. You move in, and you merge your finances. How might people not do that?
Merging is basically making a relationship difficult to disentangle yourself from. It demonstrates commitment by making it hard to leave. That’s one way of looking at it. It’s also a way of pooling resources to build a shared foundation and being able to scale up. Both of these are valid ways to look at it. However, because it does make a relationship more difficult to leave, and other people tend to see you less as an individual and more as part of a unit, you may begin to see yourself that way. A lot of people don’t like to do that because they don’t like to lose their individuality and autonomy within a relationship.
If I may, I’m glad to know that you say this because in our previous episode, those are the reasons that we came up with. One is survival, which is easier when you pull your resources in order to survive in a world that is expensive. The other one is that it’s harder to walk away when you have all this stuff. Shane Mauss, who was the guest on this jilt, has furnished several apartments of his ex, and he never took a couch with him on the way out the door.
Aside from matters of choice like wanting to preserve your autonomy, there can be logistical considerations. For instance, people might want to live together if it were possible, but maybe immigration restrictions. They might be in different countries or continents. There might be logistical considerations, like somebody might be neurodiverse somewhere along the autism spectrum.
They cannot stand to have a lot of chaos in their environment, and the other partner has young children. Living together isn’t an option, or somebody might be low-income and receiving public benefits, but if they were legally married, shared a house with somebody, or got any financial support from a partner, they would lose that financial support from the public benefit. There were a lot of reasons why people didn’t want to merge, but there are a lot of reasons why people don’t, for one reason or another.
A guy said to me, “I want my wife to be my neighbor.” He’s okay with getting married, but he doesn’t want her living in his house.
How do people not do that? A very increasingly common way to do it is what a lot of people call a living apart together relationship, or sometimes called “Apartners.” This is a relationship where it’s usually two monogamous people in a committed relationship. They might even be legally married. They might be co-parents, but for one reason or another, they choose not to, or cannot share a home.
It could be apartments in the same building. They could be homes on the other side of the country.
They do not share domiciles full-time. They may live together part-time or something like that. Another approach to it is when people may live together, but they choose to keep their finances very separate.
As a result, they might have budgets, or they have, “I pay this, you pay that.” They have agreements about how they divvy up and pay for things.
If they are moving in together or getting married, they might have some prenup, mutual, or other agreement specifying out, “This is my money and property, that’s yours,” which is very important. In the US, many states have common law marriage, where if you live together for a certain amount of time, you are legally considered married. If the relationship ends at that point, somebody might be entitled to part of your property or funds.
If I may disclose myself, when I have reluctance within relationships, this often comes up for me. It shouldn’t be surprising because I host a show called Solo. I have a very strong approach towards autonomy. I like my space a certain way. I’ve worked hard to achieve financial independence. It was uncertain for the first 40 years of my life. The idea of inviting someone into that and the risks that can come along with that, both emotional, financial, and psychological. It’s not one of those things where I say, “I would never do it,” but it’s not an obvious one for me. You were good in your previous episode, defining solo in talking about that solo mentality. Does that fit within?
Autonomy and Solo Mentality within Relationships
The unmerge relationship, or as I like to think of it as a more autonomous approach to intimate relationships? Yes, quite definitely. Solo is a way of approaching life. It doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding intimate relationships. It’s not synonymous with single, as single is conventionally defined as having no committed or ongoing intimate relationships. The thing about solo-hood for a lot of people is that you have worked hard to build your own nest egg. I’ve done that in my own life. I was married at one point and got unmarried over a decade ago. I’ve been long time self-employed. Personal resilience is very important to me. I worked very hard. I own my own home. I have housemates. They are housemates, and they pay rent.
I make sure that my property is my property in part because I didn’t have this experience with my own divorce. I have known so many other people who experienced severe financial disruption and even impoverishment and homelessness as a result of a bad divorce. It’s very important to me as a matter of personal resilience to maintain my own financial and property independence. I do that. That’s beneficial for me, and that does have some limitations. If I were married to somebody and we had twice the income, we could put down a hell of a lot bigger down payment on the house.
If I’m being fully honest with myself, as I reflect on this, and this is to your point, it is useful for people to consider each of these criteria, to see how much their own preferences and lifestyle gel within that. To me, my reluctance to merge is less about the finances and more about my space. The idea of inviting someone into my space, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year, is not appealing to me, no matter how much I like them. This is not about how much I like or love someone. It’s about I enjoy some level of solitude. It’s good for me. It’s good for my relationship that I have a certain amount of solitude.
I have a similar experience. I being a solo and having structured my life that way means that I bring my best self to everybody I care about in my life. That’s not about my two sweethearts. That’s about all my friends. That’s about my family. That’s about my work relationships. That is very useful and valuable. For me, it was a late discovery. I’m fifth out of six kids. I grew up in a crowded house, and I went from there to moving in with my boyfriend at that time, who I later married.
It wasn’t until we got unmarried that I was terrified of the idea of living alone. It wasn’t until we got unmarried that I sat around and said, “This rocks.” I discovered a whole new level of psychological, emotional health and resilience that I had never had access to before because social norms prejudice me against the very option that was healthy for me.
You and I are similar, not in our story, but in our inner value. I’m working on a forthcoming series about the value of solitude and the mythology of solitude. One of the things that happens a lot is, as someone who values creative work, solitude is often a very good space to do creative work reflection. This is not to be modest, but to your point about bringing a full cup and being able to pour it for others is I had some old friends that I visited them and they said, “You’re not always around, but when you are around, you are fully present. You are 100%.” That was a touching thing for someone to say and to notice.
I’m going to misquote this, but Neal Brennan, who’s a comedian and a solo. That’s fair to describe him as having a solo mentality and who listens to the show on occasion. He has a joke about partners who want him 100% of the time. He’s a charming, funny, and smart guy. This is not quoting directly, but he’s like, “You can get me 40% of the time, but it’s a great 40%. You get to be my date to the Oscars. You can have 100% with someone else, and it might be okay.” This is a matter of partners matching in a sense.
I’ve found that most numerical or mathematical analogies to relationships break down because people and relationships don’t work like that. It comes down to what functions, what is healthy for the individuals involved, and within the context that they are connecting to each other. It’s as if you try to break down love according to how many people are involved, then my parents didn’t love me very much because I’m the 5th out of 6 kids.
I find that the more good quality connections that I have in my life, and they are very different types. They all take different levels of time and energy, and that changes over time because people are moving targets. What matters more is how good the quality of the connection is. What is it bringing to the people involved in it? That almost never breaks down numerically.
That’s fair to say. I know this intimacy coach, her name’s Amy Petoskey. She says, “Feel over formula.” She thinks that often, people have a set of rules when they should use their emotions to guide their judgments and choices. When it comes to people, especially, that’s useful.
This discussion about numerical analogies breaking us down brings us into the next hallmark of the Relationship Escalator, which is hierarchy.
Challenging Relationship Hierarchy (Egalitarian Approach)
Some relationships are considered more important than others. It becomes perhaps zero–sum where some win and some lose when it comes to choices.
Monogamy is such a weighty benchmark of the Relationship Escalator. It’s one hell of a hierarchy because there can be only one. You cannot get any more hierarchical than that. Hierarchy takes a lot of forms. For people who are in conventional relationships, who were riding the Relationship Escalator, it means that the escalator partner is not about who’s more important or who you love most. It is practical. It’s about which person or relationship takes default priority over any other relationship that is not rooted in caregiving.
That’s why people say, “Your kids come first.” If they’re not adults on their own, then you may have a caregiving responsibility. You have a caregiving responsibility to an elderly or disabled person. In a sense, working relationships or caregiving responsibilities because you have a responsibility to keep that part of the working relationship functioning.
When it comes to personal relationships, your escalator partner is supposed to take priority for your time, attention, and resources over your friends, family members that you do not have care-based responsibility for, over community commitments, over anything more than the absolutely most essential work or career commitments, and over your commitments to yourself. That’s a hell of a hierarchy.
This is not exclusive to the Relationship Escalator. For people who practice consensual non-monogamy, hierarchy is often, but not always, a feature or bug, depending on what side of the fence you’re on about it, of those relationships. For instance, swinging is a very couple-centric approach to consensual non-monogamy.
It’s often something that people, usually a married or a cohabiting heterosexual couple, not always, but usually, want to engage sexually with others in a very organized setting where recreational sex of various kinds is available. That’s something that they do as a couple. They set a lot of rules. They set the rules because they assume that, as a couple, as a privileged entity, they are entitled to set certain rules of engagement with other people.
If a single person came up to a couple in a swingers’ club. The single person’s requirements or rules conflicted with the couple. Guess who’s going to win that? Hierarchy in polyamory gets very different because in polyamory, it’s not recreation. It’s not romantic because remember people who are aromantic along that spectrum can be involved in any intimate relationship, including polyamorous ones.
For people who feel a certain deep level of emotional investment or other kinds of commitment to an intimate relationship, it can suck to realize that you were going to beat your needs, feelings, goals, and priorities will be intrinsically deprioritized during that relationship because somebody else comes first. A lot of people do hierarchical polyamory or non-monogamy because they want to reassure their partner that, “You matter to me because you’re going to be first out of everybody.” Think about how that plays out in real-time and in the real world for other people whom you claim to love.
I understand what you’re saying. This is related to what you were saying at the outset of this about the value of friends and how important they are, not only to survive but for us to thrive and flourish. I set out in a previous episode, Solo Thoughts 5, where I talk about a new narrative with this idea of recognize, rebel, and reinvent for the solo. In the reinvention stage, I talked about taking care of your foundation. Your health, your wealth, and your team, as I like to say, “Who are the people in your life that help keep you afloat,” to use Scott Barry Kaufman’s term. They can even help you flourish. They can help you catch wind to use his model.
I’ve seen this a number of times. To be honest, it bothers me. It bothers me even more now that I understand it all. I have a friend, someone comes along, and he or she becomes intimate with that person. That person suddenly becomes unavailable, or their behavior changes, where you can see that special status, that hierarchy comes out. You know it’s because of that person. Should they break up if the person wants to go back to business as usual?
I find that to be a bit of a problem in part because it’s waving it in your face. You are not as important as you thought you were to that other person. I am forgiving of it because I don’t think these people even know it. It’s not a conscious choice. It’s what you do. It’s the way it is. You’re swept up in it. It’s what’s normal. It’s normal to do that. It would be abnormal to continue to treat the friendship and give it the importance that it deserves.
Not just as an ordinary, but it’s socially normative.
That’s my mini-rant. As someone who’s finished a series on how valuable friends are, you could see why I might rant in that way without actually ranting. How do people diverge from this? How do they rebel against this special status of the hierarchy?
First of all, you’re preaching to the choir.
I’m preaching to the audience, also. I get emails from people who say, “It’s the only podcast I listen to that I find myself saying, ‘Amen,’ when I hear stuff on there.”
Why do people have relationships at all? A lot of that is to have a sense of belonging and to have a mutual support network. Friendships are relationships that are completely voluntary. There is no legal enforcement of friendship. If you break up with a friend, nobody gets alimony. When people decide that hierarchy does not align with their values, or at least hierarchy as determined by social norms does not align with their values.
They have people who are important to them, and they are not going to choose between those people or those choices are made situationally and not by default. You don’t necessarily always have to put your spouse ahead of your close friend or somebody who might not be as close or a friend, but as somebody who’s in need of support right now, or something that is a pursuit for yourself, needing some more time alone, develop your own interest, or do your own education.
When people do not practice hierarchy, which is the default prioritization of one or a certain type of relationship, what they end up doing is a more egalitarian approach to relationships. There’s a lot of confusion about what an egalitarian relationship needs. A lot of people assume incorrectly that it means attempting to equally dole out your attention, affection, resources, or whatever, among a certain number of people. If you’re polyamorous and you have three partners, you try to spend exactly 33.33% of your time with each of them. It doesn’t work like that.
Numerical analogies break down when it comes to real relationships with real people. It’s not necessarily an attempt to make relationships identical or to have the goal that they should all eventually become identical. Just because somebody is polyamorous, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily looking to co-habit with all their partners. Some polyamorous people do prefer that, have situations like that, or have that as a goal or a fantasy. A lot of us don’t. I don’t want to live with any of my partners.
You live with other people and not your partners.
I have two housemates who give me a check every month, but neither of them has a sexual or romantic partners. I do have two sexual romantic partners. They are my sweethearts. They are not necessarily more important than the other people that I consider to be my close people. It’s not to say that you have to treat everybody the same. Somebody off the street, I’m not going to treat them the same as one of my dearest friends of many years. Egalitarianism is important to me in my close personal relationships.
In those relationships that I choose to invest that level of myself in, I am not going to necessarily say that one is more important than the other. For instance, I have two sweethearts. They’re wonderful. They both live not terribly far from me, but it’s pandemic times. They both live alone. One of my dearest friends, who also happens to be my former spouse, lives right across the street from me. I see my friend, who’s my former spouse, almost every day. My two sweethearts, I see each of them usually once a week.
This divergence, this rebellion, also happens, and this was part of a previous episode with Rhaina Cohen about Making Friends the Center of Life. I’m curious, Amy, if you know a better term for this. Rhaina calls them platonic partners, which is an awful term. This term, like big friendship or something like that, where she kicks off this Atlantic article with a story of a woman who meets a man and says to him, “You’re never going to be number one.
You need to know that because this other woman, my friend, is number one. She was here before you, she’ll be here with you, and she’ll be around after you.” That’s turning that hierarchy on its head. Do you have a good term or language for someone who might prioritize friendship or this non-relationship escalator relationship in a way that gives it higher status?
I think of it as an egalitarian approach to important relationships. Those relationships can be of almost any kind. It could be with an academic mentor, co–workers, a business partner, a neighbor, some community that you’re involved with, or yourself. The idea that a relationship should automatically be ranked ahead and default prioritized above others just because it involves sex and/or romance doesn’t work for me.
Sex and romance have such a capacity to hijack human psychology and lead to bad decision-making if you aren’t consciously reminding yourself that other things matter in your life, too. You have other priorities. Personal resilience is very important to me, and being egalitarian, being very conscious about the commitments I make and walking my talk on them, regardless of what’s happening in other relationships. If I can’t, for some reason, I’m being very transparent and renegotiating those relationships, that’s very important to me.
I feel the same way. It’s good for people to know this. I have gotten far in life because of my friendships and sometimes in spite of my romantic relationships. I’m not going to cast aside my friends just because I have a new partner. There’s a story I heard. I wish I could remember who it was who told me this. It might’ve even been secondhand. It was a story of a couple who were on the Relationship Escalator. One of the members of the couple was behaving very badly.
This person said, “I love you, but I love myself more. If you keep doing this, I’m going to break off this relationship. I’m not going to put you ahead of me.” That stands out to me as something that seems extraordinary because of the rules, the norms that exist in the world, which is like, “I would die for you. I would lay down my life in order to see you survive,” and to have someone articulate and articulate in that way, which I thought was still compassionate. I don’t remember if it was his or hers. It doesn’t matter. Their own identity and their own well-being.
There is a flip side to the hierarchy, which is when people are in relationships that are by default deprioritized, given a lower priority, whether that be a non-sexual, non-romantic friendship, because friendships can include sex and/or romance too. It’s a whole other thing. A neighbor, a mentor, or somebody you are mentoring, those sorts of things. If those relationships get deprioritized because somebody has a new romantic partner or because they have a jealous spouse, or whatever.
In monogamy, it’s very common for people to say you shouldn’t be too close to your friends. It’s referred to as a greedy institution. Esther Perel has called it that. I love that way of looking at it because it is. It demands all the attention. If you are default-deprioritized, you are supposed to accept that. You’re supposed to know your place.
You’re supposed to know your place and defer to that default higher priority relationship willingly, gladly, and accept whatever substitute or treads of what you used to have in that relationship are available to you. That’s not to say relationships can’t change, but when you are deprioritizing yourself in your own relationship in deference to a relationship that you were not in, that sucks. Doesn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been a fan of anything that says I’m supposed to know my place. I make my place.
There’s a phrase in The Departed that says, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.”
These things are very individualistic, and we’re talking a lot about individualistic approaches to a relationship. Individualism has its trade-offs, too, which is why relationships are important. That’s not to say, “How dare you deprioritize me?” People who choose to deprioritize their network of support in order to put all their eggs in one basket tell you a lot about how much you can rely on them.
To me, individuality and community are not mutually exclusive. I think they can operate together.
Interdependence is a thing.
Indeed.
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That’s it for part one. Thanks for listening. In the next episode, we will continue the conversation with a look at the next hallmark of the Relationship Escalator, a sexual and romantic connection. At the end of part two, Amy will also be presenting some tips if you’re interested in exploring how to step off the relationship escalator. If you’re enjoying the show, please consider rating, reviewing, telling friends and family members, signing up for the solo newsletter, and joining our private solo Slack channel, which you can find more about at PeterMcGraw.org.
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Our series on conventional and unconventional relationships continues with part two of a compelling conversation with Amy Gahran. We pick up our discussion of the hallmarks of the relationship escalator, continuing with sexual and romantic connections. We explore ways that people deviate from that and other criteria. If you stick around to the end, Amy presents some tips if you’re interested in exploring how to step off the said relationship escalator. The last thing, please consider rating and reviewing the show, telling friends and family members signing up for the SOLO newsletter, and joining our private SOLO Slack channel. I hope you enjoy the episode. Let’s get started.
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Asexuality and Aromanticism vs. Presumed Sexual/Romantic Connection
The next one is asexual and aromantic connection, at least at first. If you’re on the relationship escalator, because of monogamy, the exclusivity around asexual and romantic connection, feelings, and contact is supposed to be part of this relationship escalator bundle. It’s supposed to be what makes that relationship so special, which gives a hierarchy. For some people, sex and/or romantic feelings or expressions just aren’t their thing.
It’s not part of how they experience intimacy. It may even be repulsive to them in some ways. Asexual and aromantic people exist along that spectrum, and it is a spectrum of all the hearts and flowers or lust and fantasies that tend to be at least the initial part of many monogamous relationships. It isn’t significant or it doesn’t play a big role, or maybe no role in how they prefer to experience relationships.
Here’s the thing. I say it’s a presumed connection at first because there are plenty of people in a monogamous relationship who have agreed not to share sex and romance with each other, but they never really did that much with themselves, or maybe not at all. There are lots of relationships like that. Also, sex and romance that intensity tends to fade over time. Often, not always. When that happens, does that mean the relationship doesn’t exist anymore?
You notice when people end up in what’s called a sexless marriage, loveless marriage, that’s something that’s seen as a problem unless there’s a hell of a lot of explaining that goes along with that. A lot of people have a companion in relationships that are very important to them that may not be sexual or romantic in any way. For people who fall in the same spectrum of asexuality or aromanticism, they have a legitimate beef with the relationship escalator because it says that all of their most important intimate, most vulnerable connections don’t care. I think that sucks.
I had an episode with an asexuality advocate, and we dove into some of these kinds of topics. By the way, I have to say this, talk about something that no one talks about is this idea of asexuality and aromanticism, and yet it’s incredibly common. There’s not great data on this, but at least 1 out of every 100 people is identified as asexual. That’s a lot of people, and that’s a pretty wide group of people. Some people who have never felt this, and then other people who are in a stage in life, perhaps developmentally, where they’re not, and so on. You are excluding a lot of people who are not allowed to ride the escalator because they don’t desire a sexual connection or need one.
What’s been interesting to me is to realize how many people who prefer celibacy in the sense that they might have sexual or romantic inclinations choose not to act upon them, in part because they don’t like the other parts of the escalator. This is especially common among older women who may be open to having to dating somebody or having an ongoing relationship, but they may refrain from sex. For them, sex equals a commitment to a certain relationship. A lot of times, women, especially older women in heterosexual relationships, don’t want to go down the path of having sex with somebody because they don’t want to end up being a caretaker.
I have a friend, and I heard about this friend’s parents, where one of the partners has just decided, “We’re not going to have sex anymore.” My response was, “Can the partner have sex with other people?” Can you guess what the answer was?
Probably not if they never negotiated their monogamy in the first place.
That’s right.
Where monogamy is negotiated rationally, it often can be renegotiated.
I can imagine that to be the case. That strikes me as unfair that one of the people gets to decide. It’s fine for that person to decide, “We’re not going to have sex anymore.” That’s the case. For them to also determine that a person is not allowed to have sex with anyone else except himself or herself, that strikes me as a serious flaw in the system.
Here’s the thing for a lot of people who value the escalator and want the escalator, the idea of sacrifice is often closely entwined with their idea of commitment. This can be a sacrifice that some people are willing to make in order to prove their commitment to a monogamous relationship. It’s a sacrifice you’re willing to make because they know if they were to ask for, or even suggest, let alone do things that would fall outside of the traditional agreement of monogamy. It would cause pain and distress to somebody whom they love very much. Again, there’s the aspect of sacrifice.
I’m not saying sacrifice is invalid. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. Some people, even though that trade-off might be difficult for them, even though it might seem unfair to other people, it might be okay with them or it might not. The escalator concept is helpful because it helps people negotiate their relationships upfront. It makes it easier to have conversations that might be very awkward or uncomfortable later. It gives you room to renegotiate.
This bears mentioning before we get to the fifth and final, which is that the relationship escalator is privileged, and it may whisk you along, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy.
It doesn’t mean it’s easy, and like any big choice or set of choices in your life that involves other real people, it has trade-offs and it’s subject to change or disruption.
Number five, continuity and consistency, correct?
Relationship Fluidity and Non-Continuity (Failure vs. Change)
Yes, at least as a goal. If you don’t mind, I’d like to read a little something from my book here because this explains it better than anything I could do off the cuff. “The norm of continuity and consistency, or at least having a goal of is that the escalator is supposed to be a one-way trip. They’re not supposed to pause or step back to a less merged or less continuous state. Also, escalators are supposed to have defined permanent roles. For instance, intimate partners aren’t supposed to shift between being lovers and platonic friends.”
This does often happen in long-term traditional relationships, but usually, it’s not acknowledged. The relationship is supposed to last forever until death do you part. Death is the only way to end and escalate a relationship that isn’t automatically branded a failure. Despite that, the reality is that most relationships, including relationships on the escalator, are fluid. They change because people change over time.
The thing is adhering to escalator norms and not talking about how you don’t adhere to them or are not overtly acknowledging the changes that do occur over time, like, “Maybe you don’t have sex with your spouse anymore.” Those are things that people don’t necessarily talk about. The thing i,s important relationships do shift and change over time, whether they’re on the escalator or not. They aren’t always continuous. In fact, that can be a feature, not a bug. There are some relationships that are like comets. They periodically swing through your life, and then they’re out.
This is something that is very common in friendships. You probably have those friends whom you don’t talk to for a couple of years, and then you’re on the phone for six hours. You visit them maybe once a year or so, and then you’re out of contact for a while. That can happen in relationships that also include the kind of emotional intensity that is considered romance. It can happen with relationships that include sex. It can come and go. Another way that relationships might not necessarily be continuous is that they might be agreeably finite.
For instance, that person that you always hook up with at Burning Man, a relationship that you know you’re both eventually going to leave college and move on, or that only lasts as long as you are both involved in a particular community. It might be a community of interest or something like that. There’s some constraint that says, “This relationship works in this context, and we are not going to attempt to extend it beyond that.”
That doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Sometimes people wrote in their survey for my book about some of these relationships that changed their lives. They’re some of the most important, valuable, and valid relationships that they ever have, but by escalator metrics, they either didn’t count, were failures, or were broken somehow.
When people tell me they got divorced, I say, “Congratulations.” I say that in part because I know what goes into what has to be happening for someone to get divorced, how hard it is. Also, I don’t want to ever diminish the fact that their relationship ended, and that I agree with you. You can have a relationship that might be brief relatively, and it’d be incredibly important to you, life-changing. Compared to someone else who has a 40-year relationship, it doesn’t make you a better person in any way. If anything, it makes you a worse person. To judge the quality of a relationship by its length of time can be perverse.
I’m not saying longevity doesn’t count. You can learn a lot and develop a lot of strength and depth in relationships over time, but it is not the be-all and end-all. This brings us back to the point we were talking about at the beginning, about how learning about these concepts can be helpful to anybody, regardless of whether they want to ride the relationship escalator or not. You say congratulations when somebody tells you they got divorced. To somebody who wants to be married, that might hurt to hear that reaction.
The way I tend to approach those situations is I let people tell me whatever they want to tell me about their identity, their relationships. I do not try to press them for additional information about it, but if they say something and then leave a pause, like it’s a big deal. I say, “Do you want to tell me anything more about that?” I look for clues in what they’ve chosen to volunteer, whether verbally or through other cues, body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, what that information means to them, and how they feel about it. If I’m not sure, I might ask about that. This comes down to the point of being inclusive, about making it safe for people to have their own experiences and approaches to life and love. It is not for you to judge their lives and their loves by your benchmarks.
I still am inclined to say congratulations. I take your point. That’s a useful note.
Do that. It’s better than automatically saying, “I’m sorry,” or something that I’ve encountered. As I said, one of my dearest friends is my former spouse. By relationship escalator norms, when you end a significant relationship and especially when you get married or when you get a legal divorce, it’s assumed that the social norms are that you don’t like each other.
You don’t want to spend any time around each other or communicate unless you have to like if you’re co-parenting, running a business together, something like that, and that’s supposed to be normal. Why is it normal that you were supposed to hate somebody that you shared so much of your life with? The reason is that it makes it less threatening for somebody else to jump on the escalator with you. You have cleared the decks. You have moved on. You’re not hanging on to an old flame. Screw that.
What bugs me is that when people see that I have a very close relationship with my former spouse and some other people who were intimate partners of mine, “Isn’t it nice that you have a good relationship with your ex?” Why should this be special? Why should that be remarkable? I know they mean well by it. I know the intent is a compliment, but it bugs me because it belies the norm that says if you end a sexual or romantic relationship, and especially if you break up from an escalator relationship or get a divorce, that you are not supposed to have anything to do with each other. Maybe you even hate each other. That’s a social norm that I think officially frigging sucks.
I agree too. As someone who, as I’ve gotten older, I was much better at maintaining friendships with my exes, I see how valuable those relationships are. There was something that drew me to these people and vice versa. Just because some elements of this have gone away doesn’t mean that it all has to go away. It’s unfortunate that the pressure is to separate totally, entirely, and disengage.
I don’t think breakups are necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of people in relationship anarchy, which is a whole field of having consent-based relationships of all kinds or consensual non-monogamy very explicitly, and say, “You shouldn’t have a breakup. You should de-escalate or transform a relationship.” Sometimes there was a place for that, and that works in some situations for some people, but sometimes having the clarity of saying, “This relationship has changed.”
Something about it has ended, and it may continue in a different form. Breakups are not necessarily bad, but if the only way you can bring yourself to make a big change is to work up a lot of negative, emotional energy, a lot of resentment, hatred, argument, that’s a sign that the social norms are not working.
I have a forthcoming episode about relationship anarchy. It’ll be fun to dive into that, and it’ll follow this one, I suspect. Amy, I want to bring this to a close, but before we do this, if you’re willing and able to give the readers some advice and tips on they to pursue an unconventional relationship. If they are going to rebel and reinvent their relationships to diverge from some or all of these hallmarks, these criteria, how should they go about thinking about it and behaving in a world that never often does, where you can consider this? As you said, it acts like it doesn’t even know the water that it’s swimming in.
The first step is the same for people who want to diverge from the escalator and for people who may not want to diverge from the escalator, but want not to make the world a more difficult place for people who do diverge from it, who want to be more inclusive. That is to broaden your social circles deliberately. Seek out people who are doing relationships differently and make friends.
How might you do that, or where might you do that?
For almost all the kinds of relationships that we’ve just talked about, whether it’s more egalitarian relationships where relationship anarchy might be a consensual non-monogamy, swingers, or polyamory, there are online discussion groups. The pandemic does not matter here. I’m not talking about online forums where people post stuff and other people post stuff. I’m talking about meetup groups that might be happening over Zoom.
If you go on to Meetup.com, you will find things for what they call consensual, ethical non-monogamy, polyamory, swinging, or relationship anarchy. You will find tons of groups for asexuality, aromanticism. You will find more discussion of the egalitarian approach to relationships in groups that are either more focused on relationship anarchy or solo polyamory. A lot of solo polyamory people like me aren’t so cool with hierarchy because we almost never benefit from it.
Any poly community that’s not couple-centric, that has a lot of solo poly practitioners in it that would probably be more egalitarian. As far as the continuity and consistency part of it, again, a great place to discover places along the spectrum of the universe that exists off the relationship escalator is to get to know more queer people if you don’t know a lot already, and a diversity of queer people. Not just lesbians who are also riding the relationship escalator, nonbinary people, or gay men who are coupled up in that very escalated way.
The thing about people who specifically are not conforming to social norms having to do with sexual orientation, gender presentation, who may be asexual aromantic or who might be on the neurodiversity spectrum are already having to think hard about social norms, what parts of social norms work for them and what don’t and forge their own relationships, which take a lot of different forms.
If you look toward those communities, you will find it. I would encourage people. A lot of times, they established communities that have an online presence tend to be very white. It’s very helpful to get to know your local LGBTQ center, support them, and specifically see if you can help out with events, especially helping out with events for queer people who are also people of color.
It’s still in its beta phase, but there is a new social media app called Clubhouse. That is a real-time conversation. It’s not taped. There are a lot of people on Clubhouse having conversations like this. It’s a very diverse place, and it’s also a place where you can search by club. You can also search by topic, and you can find exactly the types of groups and the types of people that you’re describing. You can drop into a room and listen to a conversation. You can raise your hand. You can come up with a stage where you can ask questions and participate. It’s a place that would be along the lines of the Meetups, and so on, that you’re talking about.
These things are all great. When it’s not pandemic time anymore, go to events. Go to conferences, go to meet-up groups, but the point is to make friends. Get to know people who do things differently when you’re not out there looking for someone to date. We absorb social norms. A lot of it is from the people we know personally. The more you make these friends, the more you will adjust your idea of what relationships can look like and how they can work.
Not everybody will be doing unconventional relationships perfectly. They won’t always be healthy or mutually beneficial, but the same thing’s true for the relationship escalator. When you have made those connections, and if you want to explore unconventional, say you want to find some asexual, intimate partners, let’s not even talk about monogamy and sex.
Let’s say that asexuality is part of your identity and you want to find other people to do that. Once you have gotten to know more asexual people, have absorbed those norms, and have become a known quantity in those communities, guess what? They’re going to find you. If you are out there on dating apps and some unconventional aspects of relationships are either you know they are part of your identity and you want to pursue or you think you might want to explore them, fine.
Be open about that. If it is something that you do not already have a lot of experience with, please tell people, “I am new to this. I don’t know how I’m going to react until I’m in this situation,” and then go slow. This is important in any relationship, even on the relationship escalator. I know it’s tempting to fall in love, be all excited, dive into it, and want to have all things right now, but no.
Pace yourself because you know yourself, know how you tend to want to run your life and interact with people over time. Don’t oversell yourself. Don’t spend 24 hours texting with somebody if you know that’s not how you’re going to operate over time. Keep reminding yourself that you were just getting to know yourself and the other person in this context.
Give it time. I’m talking for a year or more to see how your emotions settle out and what patterns get established. How well do people’s claims about what they initially want or can offer in a relationship really match up to establish patterns of behavior? If you go slow, you are going to avoid a lot of the really bad crashes that can happen in any intense relationship.
Let’s say you do all these things, and you gather the information. You take it slow.
Read books.
I know one really good book. It’s called Stepping Off The Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life. That’s more or less the title.
At OffEscalator.com.
That was a good book. You gathered the information, you experiment with it. You take it slowly and you decide.
You expand your social context because that is a really powerful part of human psychology.
Navigating Stigma and Being Out about Unconventional Relationships
Now you start to live off of the escalator in some way, shape, or form but you’re still living in a world. What do you do, Amy? If we can close with this idea because this will be important for people to have. Do you hide it? Do you talk about it unabashedly? Do you wave it in people’s faces? What do you do?
People have a lot of different approaches to this all for valid reasons. The stigma sucks. It not only is unpleasant but for some people, it can be actively dangerous. Recognize that everybody has a right to make their own decisions about how out or in the closet they want to be about being non-monogamous, about being asexual, about anything. Respect other people’s choices about that.
Be clear with yourself wherever you fall on that spectrum, whatever choices you’re making, why are you making it? What goal are you trying to achieve? Trying to conceal something as important as deep, intimate relationships are to a lot of people’s life is a very complicated and difficult thing. It is also nearly impossible to do perfectly in the age of the internet, cell phones, GPS, and all that.
In small communities, exes, and so on.
If you have any aspect of your identity, and this is not even necessarily about relationships with other people. I have a number of friends who are transgender and non-binary. A lot of them do, or have for some part of their life, try to conceal that part of their identity because the stigma against non-gender-conforming people is fierce, brutal, and dangerous. What they tend to do is have a plan. Think it through.
If you are outed for any reason, how are you going to handle it? Don’t just think, “I won’t tell anybody, so nobody will ever know.” How will you handle it? Also, think about the real risks that you face. A lot of people who are married and parents choose to be in the closet about polyamory because they’re like, “What if my in-laws call child protective services on us because we’re poly or whatever?” Maybe they’re afraid that their employer might discriminate against them, or they might not be able to get housing. Those sorts of things are things that can happen.
Think about what risks you actually face, and don’t just assume it. If you’re not sure your employer might discriminate against you, take a really good, hard look at the employee manual and maybe talk to the HR department. Figure out what risks you face, and then what you can do in your life to minimize those risks. For instance, if you feel that your parents might disown you if they knew that you were a swinger, what effect would that have on your life?
Are you financially dependent on your parents in some way? Are you figuring that you’re going to have to be caregivers for them, and then you might worry that they might end up rejecting support that they might need from you at some point? Think through those situations and figure it out. Once you know what you’re trying to preserve, that’s a goal. You can find multiple ways to achieve a goal. It makes it less necessary, or at least less crucial, that you conceal information because then if they find out anyway, you have other ways to approach it.
In terms of social stigma, if you can feel safe and confident enough to be out about whatever part of your identity, relationships, or life is unconventional, it’s a benefit to be out about it. You don’t have to wave a flag about it, but you cannot conceal it. As I say in casual conversations with my sweethearts, “Do this.”
For instance, just so happens that both of my sweethearts have the same birthday, and people start talking about birthdays, and I bring that up even if the people I’m talking to are not poly. All those little things help to normalize it. They actively reduce the stigma because when people start getting peppered with those little things from all over the places, little mentions include, and not everybody does relationships in the same way. Diversity becomes more obvious. It becomes part of the water that the fish is swimming in, and people can adapt to that.
That makes the world a safer place for everybody. It’s up to you to assess your own risk. Some people who might be marginalized in other ways, people of color, disabled people, elderly people who are in assisted living, which is a surprisingly very socially restrictive environment, who do relationships differently. They might have a lot more at stake from stigma. Don’t judge them if they decide they want to handle their outness differently. If you feel like you are safe and empowered enough that whatever risks you face are things you can handle, you are helping other people by being as out as you can be.
By launching a podcast, perhaps?
By writing a book.
That’s useful.
Even more than that, like I said, just casual conversation, casual mentions. For instance, in the workplace, if somebody mentions their spouse, are you going to assume they’re having sex? Mentioning my two sweethearts is not inappropriate if I’m not telling you what I’m doing in the bedroom with each of them.
That’s great what you’re highlighting. I appreciate your thoughtful response to this very big question, is you can see the tension between living the life that you want to live and living the life that society wants you to live. How do you go about navigating and negotiating that?
It’s paying attention to those disturbances in the force. Any time you feel like mentioning something about doing relationships differently would be inappropriate, then you can poke that disturbance in the force a little bit. You don’t have to be a jerk about it, but you don’t necessarily have to censor yourself either.
You can feel as empowered and free to mention the salient aspects of your life as people whose identities or relationships are recognized and privileged by society. That’s how change happens. That’s how we got from stone wall to legal same-sex marriage. It wasn’t necessarily because of big protests, although they helped. It wasn’t necessarily because of legislative action, although that helped. It’s because people knew people who are gay.
With that, Amy, I want to say thank you very much for your time. That’s a great way to end this. Thank you for writing such a wonderful, useful book and for providing me not only vocabulary but a perspective by which to think about solo living and to share it with our readers. I appreciate you for that.
I’m very glad to be helpful. Thank you for doing this show. I’m enjoying it. I’m learning a lot from it. Thanks very much for all your efforts on this.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Amy Gahran on LinkedIn
- Getting Off the Relationship Escalator – Previous Episode
- Defining Solo
- What Makes A Relationship (Un)Conventional – Previous Episode
- Apartners
- Solo Thoughts 5: A New Narrative for Singles – Previous Episode
- Making Friends the Center of Life – Previous Episode
- Atlantic article -What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
- Meetup
- Clubhouse
- Stepping Off The Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life
- Peter McGraw
- Solo – Peter McGraw
About Amy Gahran
Amy Gahran is a writer and journalist based near Boulder, Colorado.
When she’s not writing about energy, technology and business, she’s researching and writing about unconventional relationships and the power of social norms.
She’s currently working on a second edition of her 2017 book, “Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator” — a research-based guide to intimate relationship diversity.