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On Dating My Partners

Here is a personal essay on being in a singlet-plural relationship, originally posted on cohost (RIP) and subsequently onto dreamwidth as well. Enough people liked it both times that I'm sharing it here as well.

So, dating and plurality are topics that get covered a fair bit online, when you know the right places to look. Tumblr's got a not-insignificant corner, even if I don't go looking for it. Unfortunately, the broader public not knowing a ton about plurality also means that there's a lot of facets of my relationships that I don't really get to share or talk about. I had a handful of opportunities to write about it recently, so now I'm making a big ol' post about it here. In case it helps people learn, or understand something a little better, or maybe gives some folks an idea of what their lives could look like.

Also! If you want to hear more about dating from plural folks themselves, I'd recommend you check out the work of LB Lee (on dreamwidth and itch.io), and the many videos available on the plural events youtube channel, the archive for the Plural Positivity World Conference. There are other written accounts on people's personal blogs and youtube channels, but these are the ones I personally go back to often.

--- 2 Girlfriends, 1 Butch, and Assorted Roommates in a Trench Coat My partner(s) and I started dating when we both thought we were cisgender. We'd figured out our respective flavors of queer, more or less, but transness was something that emerged over the course of our relationship together. There's nothing quite as fun as t4t high-fiving on the escalators as you swap places in the gender binary.

Of course, even with our established baseline of queerness (and even after my partner had already spoken to me about being nonbinary), I was nervous coming out to them at the time. It's a big deal after all, to tell your partner that you're not the person who you (or they) thought you were. In a lot of ways transness is an unfurling of what was already there, and a partner who is flexible and compatible enough will be able to accept this change as who you are, and keep growing alongside you. But also. How do you know if the person you are going to become is someone who will be compatible with them, or if they will stay compatible with you?

All this to say, I think in a very real way, our existing experience with coming out and transitioning in the context of a relationship prepared us both to better handle the syscovery when it happened.

I'm not gonna like, go into it in a lot of detail. That's really not my story to tell. I will say that I owe a lot to the educational and outreach efforts of folks who were already out and plural, from the 20-teens onward. My partnersys sorted their selves-discovery out with the help of some close plural friends and many good written resources around plurality, questioning, and figuring things out. Meanwhile I'd also benefited from casual internet friendships with both that same system and other systems who I'd met among other internet communities. As many of y'all already know, few things help better than simply getting to know people from the identity/affinity group and these folks becoming part of your normal. And several of them helped me way at the beginning when all of this was new and a little confusing and scary because it was new and not yet known or predictable.

Eventually, people in the system started taking on names, and figuring themselves out as individuals. And that's when I started getting to know them as them and not just as the gestalt single person I'd known up until then. And being able to do that has been one of the best parts of my relationship.

One of the major, baseline requirements toward respecting plurality is being able to treat different system members as independent autonomous people. Yeah, they're a collective in the sense of being all in the same body, and there's gonna be a degree of memory & knowledge sharing depending on the system in question. But like, they're still separate entities from each other, which means you gotta forge a relationship with each of them as individuals. What was once a relationship with a single person now is a multifaceted web across multiple people, with different comfort levels, boundaries, and personal tastes. That was the first major piece of advice I got, when I binged through a DID youtuber's channel[1], and watched the video their partner made.

In his case, he spoke about how his partner was Jess, the system host (not all systems have one, but this one did). The other system members were all distinct people who he forged unique relationships with. Some of them were still interested in physical affection/intimacy, while others weren’t, and they were simply roommates/friends. Even though they weren't all dating, however, he saw forming a relationship with them and getting to know them as an essential part of his relationship with Jess, and part of his duty as a partner. These were important people in her life, after all, and at minimum he didn't want to be an asshole. So he spent time with all of them, talked to them about their interests, and did stuff they liked together. No matter who was out, he respected them as a person, respected their autonomy and their boundaries when they differed from his partner’s, and didn’t treat them as peripheral or disposable, or do things like ask them to bring his partner back out, please. (Fewer ways to make someone feel unwanted than to directly ask them to get someone else instead. They have a place in this body and in this world as much as anyone else in the system does.)

Some systems do date as a collective, where every member participates in the romantic relationship. My partnersys does not, however, so our relationship is much more like the one from the youtube channel. Three of the most common fronters are my partners (the aforementioned two gfs and one butch [Edit: at time of this repost, we're now married]). The rest of the system members are either close friends, or similarly are people I care about because of their connection to the system and my partners. If they don't show up externally often, I may not be very close to them, but like. They're still people in my family unit and household.

All of us are tied by our mutual connections to the members I am dating, and our lives intersect closely due to us living together and all the system members sharing a body. Not all of the system members share romantic love with me, whether due to incompatibility, personal disinterest, or stuff like "being 12 years old". To a degree, I was already used to dealing with these sorts of incompatibilities or drastic changes in boundaries - they just used to manifest as shutdowns where my partner would suddenly withdraw from affection and not want to be touched. Some of that was more typical "I feel like shit and don't want to be touched", but some of that was also people with very different boundaries sharing a body in an atmosphere where they were socially expected to be available and receptive to touch at all times, and failing to do so was a mark against them as a Good Partner. (Even if I knew to respect sudden withdrawals, none of us are immune to societal messaging.) If anything, knowing what's behind it has made it much easier to accommodate and meet everyone's differing needs. It's made me better at being a truly safe person to be around, because I know they're there and can respond accordingly.

It is nice being able to date my 3 partners. In the same way that transness is an uncovering of what was there, I recognize aspects of each of the system members in ways they acted before discovering plurality. We have the many years of previous relationship history to build from, but it is a joyful thing to get to learn each of them as themselves. The things they like, the specific dynamics we build between each other, the ways they understand themselves and their relationships. All 3 of them are therian and bring those aspects of their identity into their relationships as well (i.e. ways they like to give/receive affection, ways they structure their relationships. The wolf has his pack, and one of the dragons has her hoard - each valued, unique, but never given primacy or ownership over her. I will be her husband, but she won't be my wife.) Getting to know them means each of them get to be loved as themselves, and like. Yeah, I am loved many times over because there are more of them. I love the cheerful energetic affection of Quinn, the gruff protective masculinity of Ace, the devastating femme elegance of Orchid. Each of them show up so differently even within the same body - in language, in voice, in mannerisms. I love how each of them love me in different ways, and how that feeds different facets of me. I love being shared by them, and the ways they'll tease me about each other. I love the act of caring for each other, and the ways those make our collective lives better because their needs are being met.[2] I love the ways that these have all added to my life.

--- Intersections with Polyamory: or, Sharing the Trenchcoat On top of me having this web of relationships, each of them also have their own partnerships with others. Some of these are spread across multiple bodies, and some of these are other folks within a single system. I make the distinction because sharing a body and therefore having to share consciousness and control of said body imposes some practical limitations on your daily life.

For one thing, you straight up cannot control who's at the wheel at any given time. Some systems have no control over switching, but even those who can control switching and consciously hand off front time to each other don't always have that control. Sometimes people might white-knuckle from stress and get stuck in front, to the point that even if they try to let someone else show up, they'll resurface by accident. Sometimes people run out of steam sooner than expected, or are struggling with something that makes being present too painful, and have to hand it off to someone else. Others might spontaneously show up because something has pulled them to front, or they get so excited they barge past everyone else.[3] They might be one of your partners, they might be someone else. It means that even if you're dating multiple people and hold them in equal esteem, you won't always get to spend as much time with them as you want. Or they might want to spend part of their limited slice of front time talking to other people, who they also have relationships and obligations to. Time is still a very present constraint, when the same 24 hrs and limited physical energy must be shared across multiple people.

Even if you can request people to get someone else...well, see what me and that other partner said in the previous section. That is not a request that can be made lightly, if you value everyone's autonomy. If you make someone feel unwanted, or disrespected, or less important/real than the others, you are Being A Dick. And that unequal treatment causes internal conflict for the system. Simply from a pragmatic point, you make shit worse for your partner if you cannot be nice to the people sharing their head.

In terms of how that impacts relationships and communication, for me it means having to save shit for the next time they're around. If I want to talk to Ace about a book we both read, I gotta wait til he's around. If I found some cute gay art for Quinn, I save it if she's out of town, so to speak. Yeah, if I post the link in our DMs, she'll be able to see it eventually, but I can't just keep spamming Quinn-links into the channel when someone else is there. It gets tiresome for them, especially if their interests don't overlap.

Their level of internal communication means that I can mention stuff to others and they can usually pass it on, or have a solid guess on what that person's response would be. For example, when I wrote a book review post and talked about reading it with Zanj (one of the "roommate" suite), I sent that passage to Quinn for a onceover before hitting post. Zanj eventually also showed up to comment directly (another reason to be careful with direct communication - you may unseat the current person in front if the person you've summoned crowds them out). For bigger things, like taking on a roommate or making travel plans, or anything that needs direct input from everyone, you do just gotta wait. The opinion of one person won't necessarily reflect the opinion of another, and while they can discuss stuff internally to reach a collective decision, that shit also takes time. Some folks may be difficult to reach, or they may need to resolve an impasse first.

Sharing the trenchcoat here also refers to the complications of dating multiple people in the same body. It is important that you not forget who they are. I've had moments where one person was out more consistently for a very long stretch of time, and when a different partner was out for a while, I treated them like the first person out of habit - got surprised by something the second partner did differently, or when they expressed an interest that the first partner didn't have. If you can see how that would be frustrating or hurtful to people who didn't share a body - congratulations. You now know exactly why that felt shitty for the second partner.

It is also important that you share independent time with each person. Yes, they have collective memory, so a date night I enjoyed with Ace is something that all three of them can remember (and I'm pretty sure Quinn stole his leftovers the next day for lunch). But like. This follows once again from the basic principle of "they are independent autonomous people." They will want different things. One may enjoy much more casual intimate touch, another may be asexual and disinterested in that kind of touch. The ways you banter with each other or spend your time together will be different. And like, shared memory doesn't mean they will feel the same immediacy to that memory - memories Belong to the person they happened to, even if you share the same brain. Quinn and Orchid know about the date, but they don't feel connected to the memory in the same way because it happened to someone else. If I want to date them, I have to date them. Otherwise all I'm giving them is secondhand affection and care. Not a great way to prove that you care about and value them as a person.

At the same time, this relationship arrangement is also different from previous poly arrangements I've had with people across multiple bodies. It's certainly cheaper to find shared housing with three partners if they're all in the same meatsuit. I don't have to navigate travel or scheduling in the same way - they handle the sharing of time among themselves, according to ability and circumstance. I just wake up and see who's around that day. And even if they're not in front, they can still be around. I have physical tokens and reminders around - a plushie they like, or a necklace they own. I already liked keeping orchid flowers in the house for personal and cultural reasons - now I have one more. The person who's in front may also pass on commentary or reactions, and I briefly get to glimpse them from their life inside. They all have a shared collective history, and we draw from the same 8-year accumulated bank of in-jokes and shared language. They rotate in and out of my daily life with ease, immediacy, and fluidity. It was different from the much slower work of building from scratch with someone entirely new. But it is nice to do that work as well. There is a different kind of novelty in getting to know someone with an entirely different life history, or physical body. This doesn't diminish the value of my partners, or make them less real as individuals. Just a difference in circumstances.

--- Why write this post? Plurality is pretty damn normalized in a fair few corners of the internet. I can track my arc of education and acclimation from stigma to familiarity. But that didn't mean I was prepared for it to enter my life in this way. It's been a net good, but a lot of it was stumbling through a significant period of uncertainty and having to figure shit out as we went. Some of that is unavoidable, because paradigm shifts are kind of just like that. My partners couldn't tell me shit they hadn't figured out yet, and they had to establish their own baselines first before we could reach a point of stability. I think about transition and relationships, and the difference between partnerships that do or don't survive a gender transition. It's no mistake that as more people become familiar with transness, there are more relationships that survive intact. Sometimes people change in a way that does make them incompatible, and that's always a possibility even with partners who do understand and support you. I would be lying if I said that all of this was easy, or that it didn't require a lot of effort and patience along the way. And sometimes that is a source of incompatibility as well.[4]

But also I don't think it takes a saint to date a plural person, anymore than it takes a saint to date a trans person, or a disabled person, or to date interracially. The partner from the youtube channel knew very little about DID when he first started dating his partner as a teen. But his reaction to hearing her say there were other people in her head was to go, "okay, so when can I meet them?" Stigma and oppression make things harder, by exerting pressure on relationships and priming people toward suspicion, scorn, and fear, instead of the curiosity and open-mindedness necessary to support you as partners. It is scarier to face down a paradigm shift in your relationship if you have no understanding, or a misinformed understanding of what that change will entail. I think about "trans widows" who see their exes' transitions as harm done to them, or see their exes as fundamentally dishonest or deceitful people. I think about common public perception of plurality, and the ableism bound up in it. I think about what I might have done with my fear and confusion, had I not found safe and reliable sources of information, had I not already been cross-trained through my immersion in transness, had I not had safe avenues to process and handle those raw feelings without dumping them onto my partner(s). I think about what would've happened to my partner(s), had their selves-actualization come at the cost of a foundational relationship they'd built their existing life around. There is a world where this went much, much worse. I know the outcome we got is not something that everyone gets, and christ but I want to make that a little more common. I want to help even one person get a better outcome. So here's my amateur roundup of things you need to know, if a partner comes out as plural.

Don't panic. It may introduce a lot of new problems or factors you don't know how to deal with yet. But you can and will learn. People have done this before, and will be able to tell you how to do it. You just have to find the people and places to ask.

Be supportive. Selves-discovery is a complicated and scary process. They're gonna be uncovering a lot and learning a lot of necessary skills on the fly. And you, as an established stabilizing presence in their lives, will be an important source of support through this process. Be ready to listen to them, no matter how strange or contradictory the things they're saying might sound. They may describe things that sound physically impossible, like phantom limbs, or having teleported into the body from somewhere else, or feeling like they're a different age, ethnicity, or species from the body. They may vacillate between believing they're plural or thinking they're a fraud and it's all fake. Believe them about what is true for them in that moment. Brain stuff is weird and symbolically driven - your perception, especially if it's persistent, is real enough to directly impact you, and flat disavowal doesn't make the impact or perception go away. You have to respond to the impact, and do what makes your life easier to live. Even in a case of clear-cut denial, when you see pretty clear evidence of plurality, you have to meet the denier where they're at. Otherwise you'll piss them off or make them feel unheard.

Be a safe person. If they ask you to keep their confidence, keep it. If someone new shows up and they're really scared/confused/sad/angry, help them de-escalate. They may not know who you are, or who/where they are, and need grounding. Find out how they're feeling, and what they need, and help them get it if possible. You may need to use the dementia toolkit (i.e. if they ask for something that isn't possible/safe, like "going home" to a place that no longer exists). Try to meet the need that's driving the request, whether that's feeling safe, or having autonomy, or wanting something familiar. I've sent scared kids off to work with a childhood stuffed animal, and while that didn't fix everything, it did help them calm down enough for an adult member to take the helm.

Give your partner space to discover things. This is the most important lesson I learned from transness in relationships. Open a trans subreddit or online community space and you will find stories aplenty of partners who tried to bargain folks out of their identity, or who imposed their desires over a trans person's exploration and self-definition. The same thing applies here. I kept my theories and thoughts to myself unless I was prompted. I let them tell me who they were, and asked questions about things I was curious about so I could learn more. And I also gave them space to be uncertain, so they could figure things out at their own pace instead of being forced to provide false reassurance or certainty. If they changed their name and pronouns, if they wanted to start presenting differently then they had before, I didn't get in their way. It will be new and will take some getting used to, but the principle is similar to transness. Here are people who have never gotten to develop an independent identity. You gotta let them do it. They will be happier this way.

Build your own support network and knowledge base. This may be difficult if you don't have many people in your life who know about plurality. My partner(s)' syscovery was also the creation of a new closet to maintain, and I needed safe outlets to handle my stress and uncertainty. For the latter, this meant turning to youtube and educational resources to learn things and dispel uncertainties. For the former, this meant hitting up online community spaces which had no connection to my partner(s) and asking folks who were knowledgeable about plurality to help me out. I could be scared, or frustrated, or messy, and return to my partner(s) after releasing that shit so it didn't drive my behavior toward them. You may also end up turning to loads of different people for their experience in completely unrelated things - an AAC user friend helped me a lot with supporting a system member who didn't talk out loud. You truly don't know what new experiences or identity axes each system member will fall along.

Respect everyone in the system. This includes angry or self-destructive folks. They may show up and try to sabotage shit, or say really angry and hateful things toward you or your partner. You don't have to lie down and take it, but you do have to remember that they're still part of the system, and they may likely be a permanent resident. They're also caught up in a situation they cannot control, with people they have to share a brain and body with, and cannot reasonably make any distance from. It would be surprising if no one flipped their lid from time to time. Try to establish trust and understanding - show them that you're willing to respect and listen to them. That is a much better basis for establishing improved relationships once they calm down, and are given the choice to cooperate with the collective.

I hope this was helpful, and thank you for reading. When I originally posted it on cohost, I'd intended it mostly as a chance to talk about my relationships and as an educational guide for singlets. What followed was a lowkey overwhelming amount of positive reception from plural folks, and I'm kind of jazzed as hell that I could write something like this well enough that many of y'all liked it too. So thanks for your cosign, I'm glad I could make something useful and good. Also! I would love to hear from others about their relationships. A lot of this stuff is individual, and I wasn't able to articulate some of the major points from here until coming across folks who experienced it differently. And it is nice hearing people talk about their relationships, and to swap stories with each other. ----------

[1]: For those curious, it was MultiplicityandMe. Very much a textbook DID system, and while I had to move past the DID framework into other forms of plurality (which can function in very different ways), their videos helped me a lot during the early syscovery days. Coincidentally, they achieved their final fusion goal right as I started watching them. [2]: One of the fun ones is that Ace is chronically sleepy as hell, due to being really badly understimulated. He needs a lot of physical activity, so recently I've started just fucking wrestling with him whenever he shows up. It is like night and day, how much happier and energetic he gets afterward. And even though I can't actually beat him, or get tired before he does, it's still just Fun to do. At the old apartment, he'd also sometimes just fuck off for an hour long walk, to basically the same effect. [3]: A particularly affectionate member once had to be "picked up like a puppy dog and dragged 10 ft back" after they stole someone else's designated cuddle time. It was extremely endearing [4]: I knew folks who broke up with partners because their exes couldn't adequately handle their mental health challenges. If you have frequent panic attacks, and your partner tends to spiral out instead of being able to calm you down, that's a major incompatibility even if this person is otherwise perfectly lovely

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