75 - Primary Partners and Priority in Polyamory

Whew, that's a lotta P's! After many discussions inspired by our solo polyamory episode a few weeks ago, we decided to revisit the topics of hierarchy and priority. Some people insist that a primary/secondary hierarchy is the only that works for long-term polyamory. After all, if you want a house, kids, and any other number of long-term relationship milestones, most people choose to do that with a single, primary partner. However, we argue that it is possible to enjoy these things either with one partner or multiple partners, but without resorting to establishing a rigid hierarchy. We explore the idea of organic priority within your relationships, rather than prescribing hierarchical roles. 

If you want to support our show, the best way is to become one of our patrons at www.patreon.com/multiamory. In addition to helping us continue to create new content and new projects, you also get extra rewards and exclusive content and discussions.

Check out our sponsor, AdamAndEve.com, and use code MULTI at checkout to get free shipping, free gifts, and support our show.

Go to audibletrial.com/multiamory to try Audible.com free for 30 days, plus credit for a free audiobook download!

Multiamory was created by Dedeker Winston, Jase Lindgren, and Emily Matlack.

Our theme music is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand.

Please send us your feedback and questions to info@multiamory.com, tweet to us @multiamory, check out our facebook page, or visit our website multiamory.com We love to hear from our listeners and we reply individually to every message.

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: And this is the Multiamory Podcast. On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about primary partners and priority in polyamory.

Emily: Ooh, alliteration.

Jase: Alliteration, so clever. Yeah, so in this we're going to talk after our episode, two episodes ago, about solo polyamory, we've been talking with a lot of people more about hierarchy and also in other discussion groups, hearing people talk about their rules for their partners or how they refer to their primary and secondary or non-primary partners, things like that. And so we wanted to kind of go back and have this bigger discussion about hierarchy itself and about what it means to have a primary partner versus just giving a relationship priority.

Dedeker: For a long time on this podcast and in our lives, we've had a general non-hierarchy stance that we kind of stay away from strict prescriptive hierarchy. However, a lot of people hear that and then they think it means, oh, that means everything's egalitarian. That must mean you treat all your partners the same. Or that must mean maybe your relationships are not very intense. Or that means that you don't want to get married to someone or you don't want to raise kids with someone or you don't want to live with someone.

Jase: Yeah, they equate it with casual.

Dedeker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the thing is that obviously as human beings, we all have priorities for everything, even outside of the scope of relationships. So in this episode, we just wanted to talk about that fine line between what means making a relationship primary versus what means making a relationship one of your priorities. And so generally what we, to lay the ground, lay the ground rules?

Emily: Lay the foundation for the discussion.

Dedeker: For the field of play here is the way we tend to explain hierarchy to people is we make a distinction between prescriptive and descriptive hierarchy.

Jase: Well, yeah, and this is something that we got from talking with Franklin Veaux a bunch of episodes ago when we talked with him and Eve Rickert. And basically the difference is that prescriptive hierarchy is what most people are talking about when they say, oh, this is my primary partner. It's this idea that I've chosen one partner and I've labeled them primary, I've prescribed them prescriptive as primary. And so then I'm going to do things to try to keep them primary, whether it's setting up rules or making agreements that I'm going to spend more nights a week with them than anyone else or I won't spend a night with anyone or they have to give permission for any other partners or something. There are things put in place to try to ensure that this relationship stays above all the others.

Dedeker: And there's a reason that prescriptive hierarchy is so popular within the community of non-monogamous and polyamorous people. The reason is that we're trained growing up that when you're in a relationship with someone, they make you their number one. And you're the Queen Bee or the King Bee?

Jase: King Bee?

Emily: The King Bee?

Jase: That's not a thing.

Dedeker: You're like the Queen Bee or the King Cobra in their life. And so of course, to fit other partners into that, you've got to stay as number one and then everyone else kind of has to shuffle in behind is kind of the assumption.

Jase: I think also that a lot of people come to polyamory through opening up a relationship. And so coming from a monogamous relationship to opening up to an open relationship or polyamory is a scary thing. It seems threatening to that relationship. And so establishing this idea of a primary partner gives a sense of security. I think is the idea.

Jase: It also, like we talked about before, makes it more heteronormative. It makes it seem more like we're normal.

Emily: Exactly.

Jase: We're normal.

Dedeker: Our relationship looks almost exactly the same as it did before. There's just some extra things on the side, but other than that, it's all the same. It's all good in the hood.

Jase: And then on the other side, so that's prescriptive hierarchy. And on the other side is descriptive hierarchy. And what this is is using the term primary or non-primary simply to describe a relationship to somebody else, but it's not something you've decided in advance, 'This is my primary and anyone else is going to be not primary and I'm going to enforce that.' It's just using primary as a term to describe how you're, like to describe the relative priority of your relationships. And that's what we want to talk about mostly on this episode is this concept of priority.

Dedeker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, and the last thing is, when people are using primary, non-primary descriptively rather than prescriptively, there's kind of a sense that this is also potentially fluid. So the idea being that there can be multiple partners that you consider primary. And maybe they will stay primary throughout the rest of your life, maybe they will not.

Jase: Which is really true of any kind of primary partner. We just pretend that it's not when we do the prescriptive hierarchy.

Dedeker: Which is something that we'll get to later in the episode.

Jase: Great. So taking from that, like Dedeker was mentioning earlier, that when you talk to people about being non-hierarchical poly or not having primary partners,

Emily: Yeah, like not picking a primary partner.

Jase: Right, right. And we described descriptive hierarchy of using those labels to describe your partners, but for us we tend to not even use those words descriptively because of how much people associate it with this prescriptive hierarchy of, you know, enforcing that someone stays primary. But so Dedeker was saying earlier that there's this assumption that when you say you're not hierarchical means that you don't want to entwine your life with someone. You don't want to do those normal primary things, right? Like sharing and really tying your lives together.

Dedeker: And so if you guys listen to our solo polyamory episode, one of the hallmarks of someone who identifies as a solo polyamorous means that they have multiple relationships, but they do not choose to do normal 'couple-y' things in any of those relationships, such as living together or sharing finances or raising children. But at that time, they're not choosing to do that.

Jase: Like not choosing to do that specifically with a partner.

Emily: With a partner.

Jase: Like looking for a partner to do that with.

Dedeker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing is, though, that these things that are on the relationship escalator, as it were, you know, these things that are the normal benchmarks of a progressing relationship, things such as living together, sharing a bank account, having kids, you know, maybe even owning property together, maybe even starting businesses together, maybe even recording a podcast together, that those are things that are all possible to have in your relationships without necessarily designating one person primary or without creating a really rigid hierarchical system in your relationships.

Jase: Right, exactly. An example that we talked about a little bit on that episode, which I wanted to come back to, is this idea of living together. That a lot of times the partner you live with just kind of becomes de facto your primary partner or that you feel like they would need to be your primary partner before you would live with them because there's this idea of security in having a primary partner. But like we were talking about before was this idea that you could live together with multiple partners, not necessarily at the same time, you know, where you could live half of the year with one partner and half with another or even something more complicated than that.

Emily: Which people do.

Jase: Which people do. There are lots of different options for that. Or like sharing a bank account, that this isn't necessarily something you could only do with one partner. Maybe with a couple different partners that are very serious committed relationships for you, you could have shared accounts that you each put money into to save up to take trips together or something like that.

Dedeker: And with childrearing, there are a lot of people who choose to raise their children with multiple partners in their home with them. So some people will choose to raise kids with their kids having a multi-parent home or some people may choose to be part of the childrearing process for another partner's kids.

Jase: Right.

Dedeker: You know, which means that they don't necessarily have to cohabit with that partner in order to be part of the childrearing process.

Jase: Right. And share in those duties of helping to raise that kid and take care of them.

Dedeker: So which is like so honestly just from a modern standpoint it's like so crazy. Like it's so outside the whole like Norman Rockwell picture of like the small nuclear family. However, I think it's just so important for people to know that you can have these things, but they don't necessarily have to look that particular way, and they don't all have to come from the same partner.

Jase: Yeah, definitely.

Dedeker: I feel like a lot of people think that, oh, if I do want these things, that means I have to have a primary partner, or I have to designate one partner as primary.

Jase: Right.

Dedeker: And, you got a wide variety of options, you know? Those all could come from one person. They could come from multiple people.

Jase: And so to go back to all of this, like we're talking about sharing a house or raising kids together or, you know, sharing a bank account or starting a business together, these are not, if you really did think that not having hierarchy meant that all your relationships would have to be equal, I can't imagine that if I had one partner that I felt comfortable sharing some of my finances with, that I would want to do that with all of my partners. That's absurd.

Dedeker: Well, you know, actually it's funny in Islam, so in Islam men are technically allowed to have more than one wife. It doesn't go the other way, but men are allowed to have more than one wife. However, they really stress this importance of like, if you have more than one wife, you need to equally take care of each of them. As in, if you buy a $2 million home for your first wife, you better be able to buy a $2 million home for your second wife.

Emily: Right.

Jase: Or on all your other wives.

Emily: On all your other wives.

Dedeker: Which is kind of funny because on the one side, it's kind of good because it's like ensuring, sure, maybe you're marrying a bunch of wives, but you gotta make sure you're taking care of all of them.

Jase: Right, it's not like you're marrying the new one,

Dedeker: and then neglecting the old one and vice versa. Exactly. But then at the same time,

Jase: it's still this thing of actually strictly having egalitarian relationships is a little bit untenable. Right, so that's the thing is we wanted to stress that just like with any people in your life, right, you don't treat all of them perfectly equally in terms of the amount of time that you spend or the amount of money that you spend or the amount of trust that you have in them even. I mean, I hate to go there, but it's true, you know, there are some friends I know I can count on always 100% and others that, I know I can sort of count on, but like they wouldn't be the one I would call, you know, if I'm on who wants to be a millionaire and I really need them to answer the phone.

Emily: Is that what your inner hierarchy is? Who would I phone a friend to?

Jase: Exactly.

Emily: I didn't know. Am I on that list?

Jase: Well, we'll talk about that in another episode.

Dedeker: Okay, so the thing is with egalitarianism is that there's very few people out there who approach poly relationships actually being like, okay, two nights of the week with this person, two nights of the week with that person, two nights of the week with this person.

Jase: And then if you try to get a fourth partner, you can't do it because there's no more nights in a week.

Dedeker: Except in that Beatles song. Yes, but so there's very few people who actually take that approach. It's more what I see, especially with clients, is that when there's jealousy issues, when there's insecurity issues that someone will ask, okay, well, if you took a five-day vacation with so-and-so, you need to take a five-day vacation with me. If you spent $200 on a fancy dinner with so-and-so, you need to spend $200 on a fancy dinner with me. And it can be really tempting, especially when we're trying to advocate for our

Jase: needs, it can be tempting to fight for those things.

Dedeker: Well, that's fair for me to ask for what I want.

Jase: Exactly.

Dedeker: The problem being that life doesn't always fit into these nice neat little boxes. And so over the course of your life, your relationships will change. The importance of them to you will change depending on any number of factors: age, circumstances, geographic location. That's one that affects me and Jase quite a lot. Is that when we're not geographically close to each other, when we're on opposite sides of the planet, although we still prioritize each other, there are fewer

Jase: ways we can prioritize each other.

Dedeker: Exactly, like priority for physical affection and the time spent physically with someone else changes.

Jase: Right, I'm not leaving two or three nights a week where I'm sitting at home not doing anything so I can Skype with Dedeker, right? When we're not together, we're not going to, our priority level's going to change, whereas when we're together in Japan like we are right now, we see each other pretty much every day. So, you know, it all can change over time and vary and it's not about needing to create this idea of equality between your partners. It's more about not enforcing a top-down hierarchy on them, but instead having the priorities that you want to have, advocating for yourself, your partners can do that too. And maybe everyone's not always going to get everything they want all the time, but that's what happens no matter what. Like hierarchy doesn't fix that problem. People just think that it will.

Emily: Think that it does.

Jase: Yeah.

Dedeker: Okay, back in the game. Game on. Okay, so let's talk about priority. And the fact that if you are deciding, okay, well, I'm not going to have this strict primary-secondary prescriptive hierarchy in my relationships.

Jase: Right.

Dedeker: But what does priority look like? Because obviously, if you're looking into buying a house and you want to buy a house with somebody and you're trying to decide, well, which, where should I live, where should we go, what should I do, you're not going to ask the person you just went on a first date with what their opinion is to weigh in, to really seriously weigh in on where we should buy our house. You have priorities in your life, the same way you have in the whole rest of your life with different topics.

Jase: Yeah, definitely. And so yeah, you gave that example of buying a house. But also in terms of your priorities, there are things in your life that's not just, you know, who am I going to spend a little more time with, but also who am I going to, you know, things, priorities like, commitments, I guess, is how I would think of them more than just, because when we say priority, people could think, oh, that's fine for just on a whim, like, oh, I just feel like spending more time with this person. But when we talk about priority, we are talking about commitments as well. And the example is, if you did buy a house with somebody, you are committed to that mortgage payment with them, right? And so in budgeting your money every month, that money for that mortgage together is going to take priority over your free, frivolous spending or taking trips or something. Well, hopefully you're responsible with your money like that. I mean, if you have children, of course, like, not only is that child going to take priority in terms of your money and your time, but also probably the partner that you had that child with. Or if it's not your child, but one that you're helping raise, that family group is still going to be a priority. And that's something you're committed to. It's not just kind of on a whim. I think most people with children would say, yeah, absolutely. That's my priority above anything else. But then there's also temporary priority changes. And the example of this is if you have a partner that's really in need for some reason, this could be struggling with an illness. And so you're going to make them a priority to be there with them. It's not just like, well, you're not convenient, so I'm out.

Dedeker: Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. I mean, I've witnessed unfortunately some really sad situations, particularly with people who had a strict hierarchy where like maybe a secondary partner was super super sick or really needed help but the primary partner was like, well, sorry, this was the night that we decided that we were going to spend together, so you can't go take care of this other person that you love.

Jase: That's where it can start to go wrong.

Dedeker: Yeah, like the sense of priority is something that's more flexible than what hierarchy allows for.

Jase: Right, right.

Dedeker: But it's kind of the same way that if one of your kids gets super super sick,

Jase: Right, obviously you're going to spend a little more time taking care of them.

Dedeker: You're going to spend a little more time taking care of them. Exactly, and it doesn't mean that you're going to totally neglect the healthy one. But it means that for a little while, that kid needs a little more prioritization of your time and energy. And the thing is, this all sounds like really basic, super common sense stuff because it is, but for some reason when it comes to bringing in multiple romantic partners, people get all freaked out about it.

Jase: Panic about it.

Dedeker: And panic about it.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: Like, well if we don't have, if I'm not your primary partner, what happens if I get sick or I lose my job? I'm not going to be convenient and you're just going to spend all your time with someone else and it's ignoring this idea that we are still committed to our partners and still love them and care about them, not just because they're convenient. And so yeah, I mean if someone's sick or even if, in terms of money priority, if I have a partner who had some, you know, an accident happen where all of a sudden she had much less money or lost her job or something, I might prioritize a little bit more of my money to taking her out or maybe I'm not going to pay her rent for her or something but doing more nice things or buying her stuff if she needs them because temporarily she's in a situation where she needs that. And that it's not to say like that's always the person I'm going to spend more of my money on. But you know we we do care about our partners and hopefully and we talked about this on our Metamours episode on a few of our different Metamours episodes, but this idea that that as a good metamour, part of what you'd want to do is support that. And say, yeah, if a metamour of yours is having trouble, saying, yeah, of course, please spend some more time with them, support them, because I would hope that you would do that for me in the same situation, right? That we want to care for our metamours like they're also our friends.

Dedeker: Yeah, yeah. So ultimately, I think the big takeaway that we would want here, which is a takeaway that we come back to a lot, which is that really, flexibility and fluidity is going to serve you and your relationships much better than something that's a rigid structure. As in the flexibility and fluidity of priority is going to just give more lifeblood to your relationships in general rather than trying to keep everyone in a little box and trying to keep everyone in this hierarchy.

Emily: Right.

Dedeker: Like trying to essentially force priority to happen in certain areas.

Jase: And I know that this is a scary thing and a lot of people really resist this because it's so different from how their relationship's been for a long time, especially if they were originally monogamous and then opened up. And I get that. It is a scary thing. It is something that you can struggle with, but if it helps, if this is at all helpful, is to realize that that scariness simply comes from the scariness of that idea rather than the reality of it. That we have this idea that things like marriage make your relationship more secure. But they don't actually. Marriage is a symbol of a commitment, but the marriage itself isn't what makes your relationship secure. It's that relationship itself. And it's also not the thing that keeps it secure when it's bad, right? And same with primary. It's a label we put on something or something we try to do to defend something, but really ultimately that relationship is what it is. We can't force feelings to be a certain way. But also, if you have been together for a long time, you have so much history, so much old relationship energy, that you don't have so much to be threatened by, right? You probably are going to stay prioritized, you know, because of that history together. The longer you've been together, having a good relationship, the more you just are going to be a priority. The more your lives are going to be intertwined. You don't need to force that to have it. So it's not like saying by taking away that hierarchy you're going to lose all those things. No, you're probably going to have them all still. You're just not going to be forcing it and you're going to save yourself from some of those temptations to do that tit-for-tat sort of thinking of like, well you spent two nights with them, so you got it with me now. But it can be a little more flexible.

Dedeker: Well, I mean, I understand why people do this is because obviously, like we said, it is scary and there's kind of this fear of like, if I don't get a promise ahead of time from my partner that they're going to make me a priority, then they won't. There's this fear that unless I set it up ahead of time that I'm not going to get what I need. So there's that fear. And then I think there's also the fear of, oh, I might have to actually ask for what I need.

Jase: Maybe.

Dedeker: Because I think there's this thinking that if I set this relationship as primary, that means my partner is going to automatically make all the decisions in favor of me and in favor of this relationship. And I won't have to actually ask for what it is that I need.

Jase: And you'll just get it.

Dedeker: Yeah, yeah. Because I think that's another thing coming in because, as relationships shift and change and relationship landscapes are in flux, there might be a time where maybe I have to come to you and be like, hey, you know what? Actually, we haven't been texting as often and I kind of like that. Could we maybe try to text more often rather than fuming, hey, you said that I was a priority and you're not texting me.

Jase: Right. And I know that you're texting this other person,

Dedeker: Yeah.

Jase: and so, yeah, yeah, exactly. You get it. So, yeah, it leads to those kind of destructive rules or trying to limit another relationship out of defense of your own that ultimately will hurt your own relationship and possibly end it. So that's kind of our big takeaway from that. And to end out this episode though, we want to talk about a fun little topic.

Dedeker: Yeah, now we're going to take for something completely different, take a little bit of a left turn.

Jase: Yes.

Jase: So this is from an email that we got from one of our listeners named Ivy Nelson. She said, I've started working on a series of romance suspense novels that will feature a polyamorous woman as the main character. I'm actually working out my own issues in polyamory, and I've found that writing about it helps deconstruct my own dilemmas. Because it's a series, I've considered making a different one of her relationships the focal point of each novel. What are your thoughts on that? Would it be better to weave all of her relationships into all of the stories? I'm going back and forth on the issue. On the one hand, focusing on one relationship will allow readers to get to know each of her partners very well, over the course of the whole series. On the other hand, doing it this way almost feels like I would be sticking too close to the one relationship formula that most romance novels follow. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'd also love to hear about some things you would enjoy seeing in a piece of polyamorous fiction. I know poly fiction is very scarce, but have you found any that you like?

Dedeker: This is like, this could be really, it could be a whole topic to talk about like poly in the media and...

Jase: You know what we should do when this comes out? We should put this discussion question in the Patreon-only Facebook group for the Patreon subscribers. Because some of them are writers as well. And also, you know, really actively contributing. That would be a cool discussion to talk about what we would like to see. Because we've been talking about what we'd like to see in poly video content on the web. It'd be cool to talk about this for novels as well. That would be an awesome place for that.

Dedeker: It's interesting, I go back and forth on her talking about making each book focus on a different relationship. Because I do like the idea of giving each relationship weight and detail and giving readers a chance to really know the ins and outs of that relationship. But I get how she doesn't want to fall into just the formula of like, well just this one relationship's important and then the others are all just kind of chop liver. I don't know.

Jase: Yeah, because I wouldn't want someone to just read one book and assume that it's that it's like, well, there's obviously this primary and then all these others are like casual dating, which is where people tend to go when they look at it from the outside.

Dedeker: My question is how long is this series? How many partners does this woman have?

Jase: It's going to be like a 10-book series? The thought I had was what about what if each book rather than like, each book might emphasize certain partners more based, you know, like in the second book maybe she could get a new partner and it's kind of more about that, like how that changes things for their current partners. Maybe she has a game-changing relationship like we've talked about before.

Dedeker: Okay, hang on though. She says it's a series of romance slash suspense novels. What is the suspense mechanic? Is it suspense over her romance? I assume it's like... Is it a whodunit?

Jase: Like she's also a detective.

Dedeker: Is it like, I have so many partners I need to figure out who I promised that I would go on a date with to this thing,

Jase: cause my Google Calendar crashed 'cause that's a suspense novel. Like, I remember I had a date but I don't remember who it's with so the suspense is like who's going to show up?

Dedeker: Like I remember I told somebody about my schedule change, but who?

Jase: That's ridiculous. It'd be funny to only 10 people.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jase: Very niche.

Dedeker: But...

Jase: Okay, so, I don't know. I think it'd be fun to deal with certain themes. Like, maybe one could be about some sort of change in a relationship maybe brought on by a new partner that she falls super in love with and kind of navigating that. Maybe she could model herself after Dedeker and then she starts traveling the world and all of a sudden has to deal with long-distance relationships and new partners.

Dedeker: I could write a whole romance suspense novel series about my life the past 10 months or so.

Jase: Yeah. Or whatever, like that it could be about different themes within relationships and still kind of dealing with all of them. In one of them there could be a conflict between some of her partners or her and a metamour that hopefully would get resolved by the end of that book. There's lots of different themes that you don't have to focus on just one specific partner to be able to focus on a specific theme.

Emily: I think that makes sense.

Jase: That's where I would lean.

Dedeker: which relationships seem more relevant for exploring that particular theme.

Jase: Just because I would worry about that whole... But the partners you deal with in each book would be very interrelated. So it's not like you're trying to tell three different totally separate romance stories, but you know maybe two of the guys are roommates or a guy and a girl that are roommates and she starts dating both and then has to navigate that like are we suspenseful. Are we a triad or are we a V? Like what's happening?

Dedeker: So much suspense. Oh, poly mysteries.

Jase: But the question I have though that I think would be the one for the discussion group is what are some themes, what are some things that you wish you did see in polyamorous fiction? We were having a long conversation actually just a couple days ago about movies and TV shows specifically, but if trying to think of characters who were not just polyamorous because there's not very many of those, but characters that are some kind of non heteronormative sexuality.

Dedeker: Or gender expression or something.

Jase: Right. That are in a show or a movie where the movie's not about that. Like that's not the only thing that defines their character. Something we were thinking about. We couldn't really come up with many examples.

Dedeker: At least not off the top of our head. I know that on the internet people have compiled lists and databases of these things.

Jase: But it is definitely something that's less common.

Dedeker: Yeah, but it kind of falls into that trap is that in any kind of current piece of media or fiction is that you can't have necessarily a polyamorous character where that's just a piece of trivia about them.

Emily: Right.

Dedeker: That's not like the main basis of their character.

Jase: Like we talked about in Scott Pilgrim, his roommate is gay and that's acknowledged but it's never a thing. His roommate never even really dates anyone.

Dedeker: Yeah he does, he brings people, because he brings guys home and stuff like that.

Jase: But it's not a thing.

Dedeker: He's still a character on his own. Yeah, yeah.

Jase: He's just a character who happens to be gay. It's one of the few examples of that but I think you couldn't do that yet with poly.

Dedeker: Probably not.

Jase: Because not enough people, like you say gay and everyone goes, yeah, okay, got it. I understand that. Poly's not there yet.

Dedeker: Poly stole the discussion.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: Okay, cool.

Jase: Awesome. The one thing I did want to say about that in terms of themes for a poly book is about, in a lot of times in romance, the conflict is the romance itself. And I think it would be interesting in content about polyamory, and this I haven't seen yet, it's content where the conflict, like the resistance or the obstacle isn't a struggle with polyamory.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: That it's something else.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: You know, that it's something to do with your job or this is a suspense series so maybe it's about the mystery case.

Dedeker: Maybe it's about the freaking weird crack operatives. Who the heck knows?

Jase: Right, but the idea that you can still focus on the romance and maybe have some sort of B story arcs that have to do with things in the polyamory relationships, but that the struggle isn't dealing with how weird and different poly is. That's something I would love to see.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: I think there's still... Well, it's kind of...

Dedeker: like most, I feel like that's the narrative that's being told in most instances in popular media.

Jase: Of what?

Dedeker: Of mostly that when they introduce poly into a storyline, it tends to be about the struggle to get there. Yeah, exactly.

Jase: Yeah, so I think it would be interesting to see some things that are not dealing with that aspect. Or if this is a series, maybe she could at first and then moves on from that. I don't know. Who knows? Some thoughts. Awesome. Well, I hope this is helpful, Ivy.

Dedeker: Yeah, well Ivy, we're going to put this question into our little private Facebook discussion group for our special patrons and see what their thoughts are.