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What wares does baby peddle....

baby peddles baby

Hey so... we're in a relationship with someone who is singular and we were in a relationship with her before we were, uh. Us. And really she's supportive but I feel like we struggle with many things about being with someone who has little experience with plurality... like I want her to do a better job about not treating us all generally the same but it's also our fault we don't just say who we are when we front and leave her to it... Basically, any tips for like. Relationships or friendships with supportive singular people? Don't want to be asking too much of yall.

Answering this needs an immediate disclaimer: we are not a system who handles this kind of thing super overtly and proactively. We are open and we are always happy to discuss ourselves and answer questions, but we mostly bring things up as they arise, we don't do a lot of frontloading things day to day -- although we have frontloaded many initial conversations, which does help a lot.

Many of our friends and our wife don't interact very overtly with our plurality, and we're generally okay with that at present. There have been times we've felt it needs more focus and we have tried to talk about it when it's been needed, but by and large both our partner and our friends prefer to let us take the lead there. Although on both fronts, folks are gradually getting a lot more comfortable being casual and direct about it, which we do appreciate a lot.

However, we have had many conversations with some close friends and with our wife in the past, sort-of... establishing protocol, in a sense? Which we do absolutely recommend in general, if those people are open to it.

It's important for y'all to first sit down and agree amongst yourselves how you want others to interact with you. Do you want to wear some kind of fronting indicator? Do you want close friends or your partner to ask you each day or periodically who's in front or who's around? Do specific headmates have particular needs or wants that you can establish as a consistent ask when they're fronting?

And from there you can talk to folks and figure out what they can do to meet that, where you might need to compromise, etc.

As an example, we struggle to be forward enough to actively tell others who's fronting. Wife and us have both juggled a bit of the lead role on that, and at present it's mostly that we aren't super proactive about it but we will somewhat obliquely mention who's fronting if it happens to come up. She will at times, when she remembers or feels comfortable enough, also just outright ask who's around, who's in front, and so forth. And when she does know, she will generally have a decent memory of headmates she's familiar with and how to interact with us, but I must stress that's learned over time. It's been multiple years since we told her initially, and the first year or so was... certainly difficult at points, the initial few months sucked in some ways.

More recently, with some of us that are more overtly noticeable, wife has taken the lead in introducing them to friends. For us, that's mostly been Anya and I think a couple times Wren; Anya's got a relatively noticeable accent, so wife sometimes feels the need to explain that one for her 😅

But yeah, fundamentally I think this issue is not... a very new one. You do, at times, have to communicate with people to ensure you're on the same page and know how to treat each other. It's best approached as just a variant of that, in our opinion. It's not that different, at least it doesn't have to be. There are some resources here and there aiming to bridge some of the common gaps, but for the most part there is no one-size-fits-all; it's all about what y'all need, want, and how you and others can navigate that and communicate around it.