Spotlight on the Glossary of Polyamorous Terms
The Language of New Relationship Paradigms
This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Glossary page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks!
Image: Devon
I first started working on the polyamory glossary page of what was then the Xeromag site and eventually became the More Than Two site back in...oh, somewhere around 1997 or thereabouts. I believe it’s now the oldest and largest continuously-updated polyamory glossary in the world.
Any new subculture tends to evolve its own specialized language, and the polyamory scene is no different. In fact, the poly scene tends to prize communication (or at least, polyamorous people often talk about prizing communication, though they don't always walk the talk—there’s a difference, as Morpheus says in The Matrix, between knowing the path and walking the path, and the world is filled with people who don't live up to their ideals), so it’s not surprising there‘s a lot of specialized poly lingo, much of which is quite useful outside polyamorous relationships as well.
Why all these new words? We think in language. Fuzzy language leads to fuzzy thoughts. Polyamorous people, in the process of deconstructing traditional ideas about relationships, have also deconstructed the language we use to talk about relationships, because that language often reveals the assumptions people make about how relationships should work.
Some of these new words reflect a sense of playful humor, like polycule, all the members of an extended polyamorous relationship—a play on “molecule.”
Others, like compersion, grate on me. I've always thought the word “compersion,” meaning the opposite of jealousy—that is, joy in a lover’s other love—was a bit of a caconym, that sounds to my ears like something that should be buried deep in a long bureaucratic document about construction codes for drainage ditches or something.
Metamour (the lovers of one’s lover) delights me, though for some polyamorous folks, metamour relationships can be fraught. When a partner experiences new relationship energy with a new lover, it can be easy to feel left out, which can cause friction with your other significant other.
Some folks desire kitchen table polyamory, where all the various people involved act like a single cohesive family that is sometimes polyfidelitous, or closed to newcomers; to solo poly folks, that idea sounds quite offputting, as they prefer parallel polyamory, with multiple indpenedent relationships that don’t (necessarily) intersect...though even solo poly people usually prefer polyaffective relationships where the metamours have vibrant, healthy relationships with each other when they do interact.
Some polyamorous people practice primary/secondary relationships, in which one “main” or primary relationship has greater weight than secondary relationships. Others prefer polytrothism, in which everyone has equal say in the state of their relationships.
Of course, there are only so many hours in a day, so eventually, even the most ambitious people will become polysaturated, unavailable for more relationships. Comet relationships—those where lovers wander in and out of each other’s lives, like comets that appear in the night sky before disappearing for a time—require less investment of time and energy than a co-spouse relationship, closer relationships in which multiple people behave like married couples even if they aren’t legally married, so a person with several comet relationships may remain polyunsaturated even if she has a fairly high number of partners.
And, naturally, you’ll find all sorts of different words for describing the various configurations polyamorous relationships might take: a vee (in which one person dates two people who aren’t dating or having sex with each other) is quite different from a triad (three people who are all dating and having sex with each other). An open network, like the one I’m in, is a polycule that extends for quite some distance.
Alas, every subcommunity has its dark side, and the polyamory scene is no different. Cowboys, monogamous people who think they can start a relationship with a polyamorous person and then drag that person into monogamy, are a constant problem; I’ve had to contend with a few of those myself. Even worse are the cuckoos, nominally polyamorous people who aren’t really okay with a partner’s other lovers, and so make themselves so disagreeable, so abrasive, and so generally unpleasant to their metamours they eventually drive them off. And unicorn hunters, inexperienced (and usually married) couples looking for a hot bi babe to be with both of them and have sex on demand with both of them, but not have sex with anyone else and not do anything to make the couple feel threatened, are a constant source of rolled eyes in poly circles.
Vernacular is the playground of culture. You can learn a lot about a community by the way it uses language: is it playful? Fun? Serious? Pessimistic? The poly scene has long been a source of vibrant language, quite a bit of which has filtered into the larger society around it.