To “primary” or not to “primary”
My boyfriend went to the ER today. He had been in pain for a few days and been out of work that whole time as well, which is unusual for him. He rarely gets sick, and when he does, he doesn’t like to succumb to it. He’ll be okay, though. He’s already out. I’m glad he got the help he needed. He’s incredibly self-sufficient, which 90% of the time is a good thing, but a side effect is that he doesn’t like to seek professional help because he’s convinced he can take care of himself or the problem will go away, and that’s not always going to be the case.
I found out from a Facebook status this morning, and I was texting his wife for updates. She was there with him, taking care of him. I’m happy he had someone there with him, someone that he loves and trusts, someone who is also hyper competent.
I had already been thinking about primaries a lot recently, but this exacerbated it. No one in my polycule uses the word “primary” because of the connotations about importance that it calls up. No one intentionally and routinely prioritizes one partner’s needs over another, and no one thinks that one partner is more important than another.
Even so, I wasn’t there. I didn’t cancel my plans today. I didn’t hop on a bus and travel the hour to get to his town and then take a taxi to the hospital. I would have if it had been more dire. But I also would have, regardless of the level of severity, if it had been my other partner. That’s just the nature of our relationship. For my other partner -- my longer-term partner, the one I live with, the one who is for all intents and purposes my “primary” -- we are each other’s go-to person. Our “in case of emergency” contact person. We care for each other out of love and respect and duty. Duty, here, is the key term -- I love and respect my boyfriend, but I do not feel a sense of duty towards him like I do towards my partner. And I think the feeling is mutual. If we were both in the same area and one of us had to go to the hospital, the other one would of course be right alongside them. But we aren’t going to rush to each other’s side from a distance. We aren’t going to sit by each other for a full day, counseling each other about health insurance and job applications, like I do with my partner, like he does with his wife.
The emotion is what makes us partners. The duty, or lack thereof, is what makes us non-primaries.
It’s something we know, very obviously. We live it daily, in the way our lives are structured, in the ways we worry about one partner and not the other. But, I think, in refusing to use the word “primary” for the negative connotations it has, it glosses over the ways in which the two sets of relationships are not actually equal.
We spoke about this a few weeks ago, while we sat upstairs in my empty bathtub smoking out of a nearby window. We spoke about moving -- how, if his wife decided she wanted to up and move to SoCal, or New York, or Japan, he would go with her pretty much automatically, but if I were to do the same thing, there would not be the same sense of “automatic”. And it was the same for me: I moved to a city that I hate, away from a town that I love, largely to be with my partner, even though it meant moving away from my boyfriend, and I did so pretty much automatically. (It was a strategic move, as well: there are more jobs here.) I’m okay with all that, I think, but I wanted the truth to be acknowledged. I’ve read and heard from my various poly resources that you should be able to have a say in any decision that affects you. I said that I would never ask her not to move away, and I would never ask him to not go with her, but that their decision would still affect me and I would not really feel like I had a say in the thing that was affecting me. I said I at least wanted it to be a conversation that perhaps I would go with them, that the decision isn’t automatically yes, but it isn’t automatically no as well. And he seemed okay with that. He said that he and his wife had been considering moving already, now that she’s just finished school, and he doesn’t really want to move for several reasons (he loves his town, his job is there, his friends are there, etc.), but the biggest reason he’s told her why he’s hesitant to move away is me.
That was kind of... surprising? In a good way. I’ve written here (I think) about how I have a problem seeing myself as important, or understanding that people will still prioritize me and my needs even when doing so is inconvenient. So to hear him say that, without me prompting him at all, was... I mean, it was really nice. Nice is an understatement. I think I started tearing up. My heart felt light and fluttery. This conversation, after all, came in the midst of some tension because he stayed with me for that weekend, in a city that he hates (and so do I), and was having feelz about missing his wife. It kind of made me pause, and I think the conversation ended shortly after that, because I was sort of dumbstruck in the face of my negative self concept bullshit that someone would actually weigh me that heavily in an important life decision.
I don’t know what kind of relationship I want to end up with, as far as he’s concerned. I love him, and I want things to work, and I want things to continue working forever, because the alternative to that is things not working, and that is just balls. But it’s weird. With every other partner I’ve had -- all mono relationships, or ones that began as mono anyway -- I’ve known. I’ve been able to envision our future. It was all the same kind of thing: house, marriage, maybe kids, definitely cat, maybe dog, some money, vacations, Christmases. Standard American Dream stuff. I still want that with my “primary” partner. I’m building a life with him in a way that I’m not with my boyfriend, at least not yet. But I could envision a life where he and his wife become a more integral part of my life. Where the four of us -- two sets of “primary” partners -- make important decisions together. I don’t know if I want that, but mostly because it’s complicated and I don’t have a precedent for it. Not having a precedent can be really scary, and in poly, there are so few precedents because of the multitude of ways one can “do” poly and because we’re silenced in the mainstream and the media. I’d like to have a precedent. But I have to learn how to make do without one, I think.
(N.B.: This post has... not exactly gone in the direction I expected it to go?)
