Relationship Communism: An Infantile Disorder

RELATIONSHIP COMMUNISM: AN INFANTILE DISORDER
An antimoralist critique of The Relationship Anarchy Discussions (RAD) Content Library

PDF imposed for booklet printing:
https://archive.org/details/relationshipcomm-booklet

Anonymous
December 2023

As an anarchist I often feel weighed down by how few opportunities I think I have to actualize my desires while struggling to survive in a civilization that’s hostile to everything living.

The institutions that I would most love to see done away with are always the ones that feel way too big for me to even touch, let alone confront in any sort of way that doesn’t feel self-destructive or symbolic. At the end of the day, it’s always from this dark place that we as anarchists can choose to ask ourselves how we want to live.

A big part of my ongoing answer to this question involves experimenting with anarchy at a smaller, human-sized scale because it’s at this level I find the most capacity for action, thought, and play. It shouldn’t be surprising then that I’ve found I can feel embodied and able to express my agency as an anarchist in the relationships I share with others.

These relationships are so precious to me in part because it is within them where I can finally find so much room for things like risk taking, adventure, experimentation, desire and imagination. So many of the normal walls I run into are gone in this space. Over the years I’ve learned with others how to make our relationships more of our own creation by figuring out how to extricate ourselves from the baggage of things like scarcity, behavioral norms, gender roles, etc. It’s empowering feeling your relationships get richer as you shed off the things that suffocate you. My relationships nourish me, they enable me to do more with my life and continue to teach me how grow into a person I’m proud of.

I’ve never felt like calling myself a Relationship Anarchist because, to me, anarchy isn’t something that’s confined to any given aspect of my life. Still, I’ve learned a lot over the years from texts that have used this term and conversations with people who choose to identify that way. There are many worthwhile ideas and critiques to be found under this banner, and it’s nice to encounter writing that’s explicitly about practicing anarchy on a smaller person-to-person scale instead of broader theorizations around things like queerness, feminism, etc.

The Relationship Anarchy Discussions Content Library (RAD) is a group that’s been actively distroing zines about relationship anarchism. Even though a lot of the content they engage with is close to my heart, I am interested in critiquing the morality and prescriptive relationship to language that runs through their work. The morality in their project is important to break apart because it gets in the way of intimately engaging with what’s powerful in ideas like relationship anarchism. This kind of critique also feels worth pursuing because it’s so boring and upsetting how widespread the tendency to moralize has gotten within broader anarchist conversations.

Looking at the RAD Zine Down with “Partners”

I was first excited to read Down with “Partners” thinking it would be similar to the provocative Relationship Anarchist zine Kill the Couple in your Head. After giving a quick introduction and explanation of how labels can be stifling, RAD introduces a series of their theoretical concepts which are crucial to understanding the nature of their project:

Labels like “partner” typically refer to relationships based on the Relationship Escalator, a default set of norms for how relationships “should” look and progress through defined stages from casual interactions to merging into a shared life and family.
This performance of relationships is founded in Monogamism, a system that prioritizes sexual and romantic relationships that adhere to normative social scripts over other types of intimacy. It controls people’s behaviors and desires through amatonormativity (linkage of romance and sex with intimacy), the couple form (two autononomous individuals merging into a couple-unit), and pedestalization of sex (prioritizing sex as a distinguishing factor in a relationship, and valuing relationships that include sex over others).

RAD’s on to something when they argue that a lot of the ways that we are trained to practice and understand relationships are determined by oppressive forces like the nuclear family, patriarchy, and capitalism. These are the structures from which we inherit our ideas of the couple-form – that we’re taught to feel genuinely incomplete without a partner. It’s one of the ways we’ve been coerced into understanding desire from a perspective of lack and scarcity. It feels isolating to meet your needs when they don’t fit within the normative frameworks of our society; when life tends to feel so grey and restrictive, when everywhere you go people are more or less uncritically relating in the same sorts of ways. For many people it can be exhilarating to move beyond these compulsory ways of relating, and often people discover that their supposed “needs” were sadly just things they were abused into thinking they depended on.

RAD extends their concept of monogamism to include any kind of polyamorous relationship as well. They’re not only against monogamy, but the idea of any kind of relationship that’s qualified as romantic. It’s been worthwhile for me to challenge the ways I’ve prioritized romantic partners over friends in the past. It can be annoying to be with a group of friends and have one partner constantly take the other one out of the room.

Still, I’m not convinced by RAD’s argument that being in a polyamorous relationship necessarily affords the in-group with distinct social privileges or means that there are coercive power dynamics at play.
With this basic understanding of their ideas, we can now begin to see how RAD proceeds to poison their project by introducing the idea of morality into it. In the next section “Visibility Against the Couple Form” RAD encourages the reader to do their part and politically fight the couple form:

Maybe you already challenge these systems and learned behaviors through Relationship Anarchy or some other practice of non-hierarchical, non-rules-based, autonomy-reinforcing, community-oriented relationship building. That’s great! Think about all the ways this creates joy, practical benefits, consistency with other political goals, and inspiration in your life and the lives of others around you. You may be modeling some of the values that will build a better, freer world. If you’re doing this, and still using “partner” to describe your relationships, think about what that communicates to others.
No matter how radical your intimate relationships are in private, the way you publicly communicate about them is what others will see. Even if you personally believe that the way you use “partner” is different and radical and opposes Straight hegemony, it won’t be perceived that way by almost any audience. Instead of inspiring others to anti-couple, anti-monogamist, Queer liberatory action, you are legitimizing the couple form and heterosexual script. By using this word, you lend support to the dominant relationship model and make it even more difficult for others to live outside the prison of normativity that traps them into monogamy, marriage, and Straightness.

It's in passages like this where I find a lot of issues with RAD’s project. There’s an important qualitative difference between challenging a way that society normalizes a behavior and trying to prefigure or create a world in which that behavior doesn’t exist. The first task is at a human scale, while the other one is monumental.

In Kill the Couple in Your Head, the authors argue that the couple-form is stifling and encourage the reader to unpack their adherence to it in order to re-conceptualize their lives and anarchist projects. They entice the reader with the possibilities of a beautiful life where you may do exhilarating things with the fellow travelers you encounter.

In RAD’s case, the emphasis is instead placed on how participating in couples is politically and morally the wrong thing to do. It’s healthy to be suspicious when reading “anarchist” texts that deal heavily with notions of sin, or ideas of Right and Wrong or Good and Evil.

I’ve been in relationships where I’ve used labels like partner/girlfriend/boyfriend before, and I still feel that these relationships challenged the learned behaviors that RAD critiques in their zines. My reasons for challenging these behaviors weren’t because it was Politically Good or because I was trying to build a better world. I challenged them because it was what me and my partner wanted to do together — it was for our own reasons and our unique sense of liberation. As anarchists we wouldn’t have been caught dead desecrating our outlaw love by putting it in the service of some higher cause.

There are two core issues with how RAD encourages you to drop labels like “partner”:

1. RAD seems to deny any kind of poetic expression that language may have. For instance, if I call two people my “partner,” that can mean a very different thing with each person. The words people choose to share with one another can be a gift, a term of endearment. I can make meaning with someone by choosing to use a certain word with within and against the flux of culture and context in which that word is used. Playing with language to create new meanings and sensations is enlivening. It’s a lot more fun to use language and concepts in your own way instead of being beholden to the supposedly fixed and inherent meanings of words and ideas. 

Why, in your own life, should you take language so seriously? Why hold it as something sacred, don’t you have enough sacred things governing you already? RAD seems like they are only able to encounter a word by chaining it to a fixed conception of it. It’s the same kind of chaining maneuver at play when they insist that it’s not enough to step outside of the couple form – you then have to immediately chain your newfound freedom to a higher political cause – throwing out one god only to instantly replace it with another. 

2. The other issue has to do with the educational campaign RAD suggests. I’m not trying to set any kind of example for the masses with my relationships (or any other part of my life for that matter). Whether or not in a given situation I choose to use words like partner, I’ll never have any interest in policing my expression in an attempt to coddle other people into following me. If someone in my life is struggling with how their normative relationship is going, I would definitely encourage them to explore other ways of being in the world. Encouraging the people in my life to break down dualistic categories like platonic/romantic is easy for me to do because it comes from a place of love and wanting to see those I care about thrive from self-determining their lives. On the other hand, it’s just another kind of work for me to encourage people in the abstract to change how they live – to teach the uneducated how to do the right thing. In fact, I do take a little pleasure in how onlookers tend to find the queer ways I relate to others as something… unintelligible and hopefully even a little grotesque. My anarchism will never adhere to our society’s frenzied desire for representation - so much of its power comes from it not being a public service announcement.

In the zines Cheat to Win and I'm a Proud #homewrecker, AMA RAD explores how the idea of cheating is permissible and tries to argue how it’s even an insurgent form of political direct action against Monogamism. RAD convincingly elaborates how the default for many relationships are rooted in sexist rules that tend to be structured via the possession of one person by the other. This state of affairs absolutely limits people’s access to resources and can keep people trapped in abusive patterns, sure. Putting aside the questionable efficacy of their homewrecking activism, what feels really sneaky here is how RAD is taking something which mainstream morality deems bad, like infidelity, and inverting that script instead of going beyond it.

They would have us believe that Cheating isn’t actually bad, it’s good. That it’s useful for achieving political goals.

It’s pretty unlikely that there’s really even such a thing like “winning.” Even if there was, I’m skeptical that it’d be achieved with enough people “doing the right thing.” Even if we (and it’s worth asking what higher power forms the “we” here anyway?) could “win,” it in no way seems like something desirable for an anarchist – again, doesn’t this just amount to replacing one dogmatic conception of intimacy with another one?

When thought and critique gets this soaked in morality it gets hard to even view this type of thinking as anarchist anymore, even if parts of it resonate and feel anarchistic. Through things like our schooling, mass media and our families, we’ve been taught to fear solitude and learned to try and possess others to numb this fear. But it was also at these very same institutions where we learned about good and evil. And these things aren’t separate.

There’s a fundamental link between our moral education and every misguided lesson about love and desire that we subject others to — it’s all cut from the same big cloth. Taken together, people use these teachings every day to run like a cockroach from anything fluid and ambiguous in life. If you don’t go beyond a moralistic approach to (relationship) anarchism, you’re going to be very miserable moving through a world that always manages to disappoint you and fall short of your otherworldly ideal.

In any case, it actually makes more sense to call a project that is essentially “Relationship Anarchy + Morality” something like “Relationship Communism” (hitherto referred to as such) because:

• There’s a vanguard. Here we have a group of people who claim to know what the Good and Correct political thing to do is. Armed with a sense of duty, they use language in a way they deem pure and proper – what they literally call propaganda - to enlighten other people by showing them the righteous path.

• Also, like communism, there’s a teleological aspect to RAD’s project. RAD seems to believe that there could be heaven on Earth if only everyone just put in the correct and righteous kind of work towards resolving the contradictions of Monogamism. People fighting teleological battles – communists especially - constrain themselves by looking at what could be possible only from their narrow vantage point. It is from this perspective that one defers living in the present so that life can supposedly begin in tomorrow’s better and just world.

The idea of relationship communism is further supported by how RAD conceptualizes touch as if it were a material resource, like money.

RAD uses (and maybe invents?) the word “Amatonormativity" to refer to how intangible things like affection, endearment and touch tend to be activities that you need to participate in the couple-form to have access to. I think it’s extremely unfortunate how much physical intimacy we deny ourselves — there have been many nights where I wish there wasn’t so much posturing and distancing I put between myself and people I care deeply about. I’ll never have those nights again, and what could have been said and felt if I wasn’t forcing myself to behave conventionally will always remain out of grasp.

RAD’s pointing at something important with their project, insofar as they show us that people tend to live neurotically — that people are taught to express their intimacy through social structures that foster insecurity and rarely satisfy their needs. We police ourselves every day through our strict adherence to the ways we are supposed to speak, love, and touch one another. There’s only loneliness and mediocrity within the walls we build around ourselves, and so long as we stay in our cages there are ways of living, creating and loving that remain inconceivable.

So then, what’s the problem with their idea of Amatonormativity? It’s that it uses morality to propose a democratic solution to an oppressive social structure. If we think of how the ways in which people limit intimacy as something that’s Bad, then it’s not hard to imagine how in the just world there would be a Good solution in which everyone would finally have their needs met. I’ve had conversations with relationship communists in which they were disappointed with how people in relationships would supposedly withhold affection from them. They argued that if the couple wasn’t a couple that their touch and affection would then be equitably redistributed throughout a community instead of privately held (and presumably the relationship communist would receive their fair ration of the couple’s cuddling too).

Isn’t this just a recasting of the Christian notion of the meek inheriting the Earth? Isn’t this democracy merely that same democracy of the schoolteacher who through discipline ensures every student gets the same amount of candy on Valentine’s Day?

The things (relationship) anarchists need to thrive in life don’t have their origins in the church or classroom. It’s profound what people can do and invent with their love once they go beyond the institution of the couple. It’s wonderful to bask in what happens when desire can be unleashed, when it’s ceases to be co-opted by the institutions of today or the hypothetical ones of a world to come. In short, when we finally learn to do what we want with it.

There’s so much we can say and do as anarchists once we move beyond structures that mediate our lived experience. My life was definitely bleaker when I felt beholden to ideas of the couple, or to any of so many other constructed categories. For a while, I didn’t know of much else beyond how these structures taught me to resent myself. It was only through taking risks with vibrant people I managed to encounter that I learned how to stop worshipping categories and started to create a fuller life.

These lessons taught me how to interact with myself, my friends, and what goes on between us in unmediated ways.

By celebrating both my autonomy and my interdependence with others, I began to see a path beyond the miserable rationalistic cosmology that trapped me. This unusual strength I’ve obtained has led me to so many treasured experiences, but above all the lightest lesson it continues to teach me is simply how to sit with life’s expansive and often terrifying complexities.

That that we can finally move through the world together without needing to pretend that there’s some kind of total solution we can up with to fix everything.

Zines Mentioned:

Kill The Couple in Your Head https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-kill-the-couple-in-you...

Down With “Partners” https://medium.com/@camxfree/down-with-partners-a616da0930a0

Against Monogamism, For Liberation! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/your-friendly-local-anti-monogam...

Cheat to Win https://medium.com/@camxfree/cheat-to-win-strategies-to-build-anti-monog...

I’m a proud #homewrecker, AMA https://medium.com/@camxfree/im-a-proud-homewrecker-ama-ecd1781d2d3a

There are 50 Comments

"This performance of relationships is founded in Monogamism, a system that prioritizes sexual and romantic relationships that adhere to normative social scripts over other types of intimacy. It controls people’s behaviors and desires through amatonormativity (linkage of romance and sex with intimacy), the couple form (two autononomous individuals merging into a couple-unit), and pedestalization of sex (prioritizing sex as a distinguishing factor in a relationship, and valuing relationships that include sex over others)."

Jesus, just say you don't want to go on a date with me. You don't have to dress it up.

The formatting is lost here, but this is a quote from one of the zines mentioned in the piece and not original writing from this zine itself

People somehow turned free love into "against the couple form" and "against partners". You can all cry alone in the corner. My wife and I will be perfectly happy with dating other people and still being wives. We don't need the state to be married and nobody does. You don't need to be married, or even date anyone. The whole point is free love means you can pick that out for yourself. You claim to be critiquing the moralism of these set of arrangements but seemingly just do so yourself as well.

This shit is sooooo stupid and I mean the critique and the thing you are critiquing. And lets address the elephant in the room: people can be monogamous if they want to.

I'm sure people argue that if two autonomous individuals want to be monogamous or want to place restrictions in polyamory, then isn't that free association? But is it really when possessiveness over each other (especially partners) is soooooo woven into how the vast majority of ppl are raised and pretty much every aspect of the dominant society? It's worth untangling and deeply analyzing. Im genuinely curious on people's takes here: how are restrictions of how another person interacts with other people in the world, even mutually agreed upon, not based in control/possession?

And before anyone tries to derail by jumping down my throat, I'd hope it's obvious I'm talking about interactions in the context of consensual relations between adults or between teens dating each other.

Sex is not a binding act, no one owes anyone else anything for sex, but they can charge someone if they want, cos they own what they have and they are giving the other person(s) part of it to make themselves happy, right?

nice ive been looking for an alternative type of moralism about relationships. glad some upitt students could help expand my understanding of my love life

I appreciate this piece and agree largely with the critique of the RAD zine regarding the prescriptive nature and moralizing throughout their pieces. If the author is reading this comment, I'm curious about your section on "cheating". I think the concept only exists in a framework of ownership over others and largely agree with RAD's framing of it- if you have truly autonomous relationships then cheating doesn't exist . I'm not quite sure what your take on it is as laid out in this piece. Are you saying that RAD's assertion of cheating as a revolutionary act is harmful or that it just engages in an inverse of a binary? My perspective is it would seem more useful to disengage from a relationship in which someone asserts exclusive "access" to the intimacy of another person, but I totally hear RAD's position that disentangling can come with huge consequences for some people, so "cheating" is a safer way to seek intimacy outside of a stifling or controlling relationship than outright confronting or leaving someone. Mostly, though, I find RAD's pieces to be self-aggrandizing and full of pretty black and white thinking in how they seem to suggest one morally correct blueprint for anarchist relations. It's also interesting to me that RAD goes so hard against using "partner" but in their AMA they literally refer to people as "lovers", which feels like a contradiction to their denial of labels used to describe romantic relations.

I think these questions (about monogamy) are worth asking (how much our assumptions are so wrapped up in how we're raised that we can't avoid replicating bad power dynamics), but I would compare it to BDSM, in which people play with potentially fucked-up power dynamics within constraints (no pun necessary but sure, you do you).

In other words, we're all dealing with our fucked up upbringing, no matter what relationship model we use. I think it's ok to have opinions about specific monogamous relationships, or even better, opinions about our individual friends and how they are in relationships, but that's as far as I think it makes sense to go. I want more diversity in relationships, not less. The state is perfectly capable of subsuming or coopting poly practices and rhetoric, also. As an aside.

I don't think I'd compare monogamy to consensual BDSM practices though. Like, with BDSM there should always be a safe word that immediately stops the role playing. With monogamy, seeing someone else is considered a betrayal and usually results in huge fall outs that sometimes ruptures throughout an entire scene, because it's not role playing. There are real expectations, real feelings of betrayal, and real issues of possession over someone one else that isn't paused with a safe word or talked about as roleplaying. Obviously, im talking about careful, consent-focused BDSM. I know people can practice it in a way that can be harmful because of underlying behaviors, social norms, etc. But yeah, I feel like monogamy is an unexamined and asserted expression of power dynamics versus carefullt and intentionally playing with power in a way where I think there's more analysis and it's not a betrayal to pause, stop altogether, switch things up, etc. Idk if that makes sense, but it seems worth teasing out.

My point was more that monogamy could be more conscious and intentional, like good BDSM. If you define monogamy as something bad "unexamined, asserted expressions of power dynamics", etc. then it can only be bad. I don't think it has to be that way. I think that promising to commit to a single person (especially if it's not forever, but probably that's just me), can be a good challenge in this world of throw-away everything.

To be clear, my issue with monogamy isn't that two people are only stoked to be intimate with each other, or only have the spoons to date one person at a time, etc., but that expressing certain types of affection, closeness, or even support with someone outside of that relationship is a betrayal, "cheating", disloyalty, etc. I don't think we can just skirt around that as a fundamental problem of control, even if it's two people being mutually possessive of each other. I feel the same about permission-based, rules-based polyamory. Also, I do agree with you that we've all inherited a lot of fucked up ways of relating and practicing anarchist interpersonal relations doesn't mean those behaviors just vanish. But I do think the more we examine larger discourses and systems and how they may have shaped our interpersonal interactions and how we relate to ourselves, the more we can get freer of those systems and maybe the more we can shake off control-based interactions.

Again, you're making assumptions about what monogamy means (or has to mean). Why do you assume that a good (sustainable, appropriate, happy, etc) monogamous relationship constrains other kinds of relationships that the participants can have with others (aside from the no sex, obviously)?

Friends are very important to everyone, and the idea that we need to be able to have sex with people for them to be significant in our lives is pretty... odd.

I never mentioned sex? Intimacy can mean a lot of things to different people. I'm personally not a big sex-haver and it's not really a thing that defines my partnerships. But uh, yeah, limiting the forms of intimacy people are allowed to have with one another (including things like holding hands, snuggling, sharing a bed, very close emotional support, smooching, romantic gestures, going on cute dates, etc. etc.) is a form of control. But also, since you mentioned sex, even tho it's not something important and not typically present much in my romantic relationships, it's still controlling to tell someone who they can and can't have consensual sex with. But again, sex is far from the only thing I'm talking about and isn't my point, personally.

i define monogamy as two people agreeing not to have sex with other people. so i don't htink that specificying sex is suddenly out of left field.
sexual behavior does not necessariyl include things like holding hands or sharing a bed, although obviously those could be things that are romantic/sexually oriented, they haven't always been in my life, so context is of course relevant. (that is, IF someone wants to have sex with the other person in the bed, then there is a kind of edging that can be ext remely sexual)...

the anon above seems to be saying htat intimacy can happen without sex, and that monogamy is not necessarily trying to constrain all kinds of intimacy, just some kinds, and that people can do that consensually and it can be the right thing for them (better than some other model of relationship)

Even if the majority of monogamous relationships defined it as "only no sex" with other people, that's still controlling and ownership-based. But, I don't think this definition is even close to accurate for the vast majority of people who are in monogamous relationships. Like, the term "emotional cheating" is so common because so many monogs freak out when their partners seek close emotional connection with someone else, even without physical intimacy. There's definitely levels of restrictions within monogamy, but they're still all based in assertions of ownership of another person's body and interactions whether that's "only" no sex with other people, or "only" no physical intimacy of any kind with other people, or all of that plus no close emotional connections or spending lots of time with someone the other person feels threatened by, etc.

as long as you WEAR MASKS. anarchists MUST wear masks. an anarchist has a duty to conform to standard best practices in relationships. GET WITH THE PROGRAM PEOPLE!

i'm not denying that there are controlling monogamous relationships. i'm saying that monogamy can be the excuse for being controlling, rather than the actual reason. evidence: there are controlling non-monog relationships also.

but you seem really determined to only see bad things in monogamy, which is fine but not leading to a more interesting conversation here.

Totally agree there can be controlling non-monogamost relationships. And in fact, I've already spoken about that. I said I have the same issues with rules-based, permission-based polyamory. I'm talking about monogamy largely because it is the extremely dominant model and because some folks have asserted here that it doesn't have to be rooted in control. I disagree and I'm not too concerned if that's uninteresting to some folks (and, for whatever it's worth, am kinda bummed that you seem to be reaching for insults now rather than dialogue. I have appreciated the conversation mostly). I think relationships based in ownership of each other are antithetical to anarchy. That is true of monogamy and permission-based polyamory. Which, to be fair, I have already said much further up in this discussion. I don't think the existence of controlling relationships outside of monogamy is evidence that monogamy is inheritantly controlling. Rather, I think it's evidence that, like you stated, we all have a lot of fucked up shit to deal with in regards to how most of us have been raised and how that comes through in relationships. So, of course, poly relationships can have basically the same underlying thread of control that defines monogamy. Non-rules based, non-permissiom based relationships, however, I think attempt a strong divergence from that thread of control.

Damn, I meant to say *I don't think it's evidence that monogamy *isn't* inherently controlling*

Again, if one is defining monogamy as something that is just bad (in this case, also non-anarchist), then there's not much point to *this* conversation, because you've already decided on your definition, and you don't seem interested in challenging your definition, or recognizing the rhetorical corner that that definition paints you into (even if you like that corner, recognizing it is one can be useful).

Another way to say this is that all relationships have bad parts and good parts to them. I think it is appropriate to point out when our friends are doing something we think hurts them, but it's not our place to judge the details of how people (especially people we don't know) -- who are happy and choosing a relationship -- deal with each other.

I mean, we're just disagreeing, bud. I've had years worth of long conversations and reading pieces to form my stances and maybe you have too. I also don't tend to subscribe to the "not our place" assertions. It feels like a pretty good way to shut down larger analysis about dominant cultures, systems, and just conversations in general. Feels similar to parents who get mad defensive because strangers disagree with their parenting methods, but I tend to support pushing back against what someone sees as harmful practices, oppressive structures, etc., outside of their own friend or family group. It's easy to stay insular in your thoughts and practices if you can kind of just wall out criticims on a "mind your business/not your place" model. But cheers to you.

i went through a whole personal chapter of my life about this exact issue recently

for at least 10 years, i had an understanding of voluntary monogamy (for most of that time, with some brief poly experimentation here and there) as non-coercive. then i learned more about my partner's mental health struggles and realized they were using it as a form of control and everything changed. patterns of what i thought were voluntary behavior suddenly looked very different!

anyway, i still accept the theoretical possibility of a couple form that's completely nontoxic but i've had to chew on how something pushy and belligerent was hiding in plain sight for me for a very long time and i was calling it love and voluntary support and being naive with my good intentions...

Replying to Lumpy: what you're describing is definitely part of my issue with monogamy/ownership-based relationships. I don't think it's impossible for two people to be stoked on each other for 60 years and not form intimate relationships with others, but the freedom to do so just feels like it's at the heart of defining autonomous relations.

I agree with you about the importance of pushing back, not accepting accepted parameters, etc... But at this point I'm more worried about anarchists (et al) creating new orthodoxies than I am about my friends being brainwashed by the culture/their own desires.

Obviously both are things to be concerned about.

And you saying "we're just disagreeing, bud" is as dismissive to debate as someone saying "some relationship things can't be monitored/judged." Just disagreeing is fine, but surely the point of talking about this is about challenging our own definitions, assumptions, etc? For example, here I've been challenged about what monogamy means, what kind of behavior it includes. We could be talking about what the ramifications are of including hand-holding and bed-sharing, how that supports or subtracts from my points and from yours. Just a thought.

The "we're just disagreeing, bud" point is in response to you saying there's no point in continuing a conversation because I'm still holding to my original view point. But I see how that sounds dismissive. It's starting to feel like this conversation is getting more accusatory than conversational and I think it's totally fine to continue a convo without ceding an originally stated view. Like, yeah, I find relationships based in rules of what types of interactions partners are allowed to have to be controlling. That's not gonna change for me, but I'm interesting in talking about why I feel that way and hearing what other people think. I think there's still value in that. I hear your worry about anarchists creating new orthodoxies or inversions of dominant systems. I dislike a lot of RAD's pieces that the author of this piece is criticizing for that reason. My issue is with rooting out and calling out inherent control in common interactions (like permission-based intimate relationships) but I'm definitely not interested in prescribing a blueprint or creating some vision of a Morally Correct (tm) anarchist relationship. I think most people would call it a huge red flag if a person tries to prevent their partner from forming new friendships. But it's largely socially acceptable for someone to bar or try to prevent, guilt, manipulate, etc. their partner from forming new intimate relationships (lovers, partners, what have you). Isn't there just a massive issue with this that does run counter to autonomous ways of living?

Here's another direction to go in.

What is the line for between someone having appropriate boundaries about how they want to be treated ("please always show up for my birthday, even if that day is also your other friend's birthday," "please don't make out with someone else in front of me at a party," etc), and being "permission-based"?

I.e. what defines an appropriate boundary to you?

Yeah, totally, boundaries does sound like a good concept to discuss, and I also think it's weaponized to prevent people from having consensual interactions with others. So like, I've been in multiple scenes where there's drama because a person in a poly relationship wants to draw a "boundary" about what they're comfortable with their partner doing. Like, "I'm drawing a boundary because I'm uncomfortable with you hooking up with others on your trip to Europe while I'm not there". To me, and hopefully, most others, this isn't a boundary that someone is drawing to retain control over their own body but a demand on someone else and how they interact with others. Or like, a common "boundary" ppl in poly relationships set is that they need to tell each other before starting a new relationship. It's one I used to participate in before realizing that's also another form of control and totally isn't a boundary- it's a rule we were imposing on each other rooted in jealousy stuff. But like, "hey, I'm drawing a boundary that y'all don't have sex while we're all in the same bed" I think is totally valid because it does impose on someone else's sense of safety and bodily comfort to just fuck inches away from them while they're trying to sleep. But, personally, "please don't make out with someone else in front of me at this party" I think isn't so much a boundary as it is a request that might be asking a lot of your partner rather than dealing with your own emotions and leaving if you're uncomfortable. But maybe for some folks that's a fine request. I do think those kinds of questions are a lot more individual. Although, I do get suspicious when there's lots of agreements that seem to cater to someone else's jealousy. I think jealousy is a normal emotion but personally, I really want to deal with my own jealousy as it comes up rather than try to restrict my partners to soothe those feelings. So I guess what I'm saying in a nutshell is I think it's super useful to tease apart boundaries related to one's own body vs. requests and how jealousy may play into those requests.

"because it does impose on someone else's sense of safety and bodily comfort to just fuck inches away from them while they're trying to sleep"

that's according to your standards, and is really subjective. otehr peple can legitimately (as in, based on previous actual experiences) feel unsafe and uncomfortable when someone they love is ignoring them in a social setting to pay lots of attention to someone else. it's subjective and it depends on so many things (all the context). another way that, while it's great to hypothesize about what is good/bad about various relationship forms, all that people re generaly doing is talking about what they as individuals like andwant.

i mean, of course we all want people to be brave and not impose (too much) of our fears and anxieties on otehr people, friends, lovers, or anyone, but we do, and arguably that's what close relationships are for, is to cater to our shit at least until we work it out. not pretty, but we're not robots.

"So I guess what I'm saying in a nutshell is I think it's super useful to tease apart boundaries related to one's own body vs. requests and how jealousy may play into those requests." definitely.

I wouldn't say that close relationships are for catering to our shit. And yeah, there's obviously gray areas that are super messy and hard to figure out. I'm not suggesting that everyone is uncomfortable with people fucking in the bed while they're trying to sleep. I'm saying if someone is, I think that's a totally reasonable boundary. Like, idk if you've ever been in that situation, but the un-involved person can get super jostled and unintentionally touched and it literally often involves them in a sexual act they're not interested in participating in. If it's also their bed and a shared room, then it's not just an easy matter of leaving, ya know. And yeah, it's also my opinion. Fear of abandonment, of losing someone's interest, of not receiving enough attention, etc., sounds like what you're describing with this party scenario. And personally (note that I keep saying personally, because yeah, this is getting into the messy stuff that is more individual, which isn't a bad thing), I would try to separate my fears, insecurities, anxieties, etc. from boundaries. Those feelings are all real but it's super easy to unintentionally or intentionally manipulate partners to restrict their interactions based off your own stuff. And that isn't to minimize that stuff, but just to say that I think it's really worth the hard work of untangling. Of course there's lots of messy nuances with all of this stuff, and again, it's part of what I dislike about some of RAD's assertions because it feels too blueprinty. And totally agree that especially as you get to more finer details, the more messy, blurry or individual a situation can get and I think it makes sense to negotiate things especially in small shared spaces. And obviously there's no One Correct Take on the boundaries vs. requests vs. demands issue. But if we don't tease those out and critically analyze them, then I think lots of us can stay stuck in dominant patterns or fall back on them. I know that's certainly true for me.

And also want to acknowledge what you're saying about us not being robots. I dont think its really useful to shame each other for having complicated, uncomfortable emotions. I know I'm a wreck sometimes, especially when mental health stuff collides with chronic exhaustion. I'll say shit I don't mean or just am straight up wronf about, feel like a fuckin turd about it, and then need to acknowledge my shit and try to make amends. Anyone acting like they don't isn't looking inward and/or is selling some kinda program.

Like, just to draw on my own life. I rarely have super close intimate relationships with more than a couple of people because I'm a chronically ill, exhausted, anti-social-leaning person lol. But! I don't expect or ask my partners to not have as many intimate interactions with other people as they want. I've been in a poly relationship for 2 years before that was literally just me and that person because we were both grumpy and uninterested in hanging out/meeting with a lot of other ppl, but the understanding was still there that at any time we supported each other in developing more and new intimate relationships.

Another poster here, that's actually a very non-authoritarian relationship, I'm in a similar situation and completely understand that this arrangement is the most sensitive way to navigate intimacy, loyalty and empathy in one package.

Another poster here. I call bullshit, it's never another poster. Quit talking to yourself.

I don't even know what to say to this. Except, like, sure, think and make whatever accusations you want? You could participate in the conversation, but uh, I guess being shitty online with no real way of being disproven without having access to backend site info feels better?

We are the same person. We can be as mean to ourself as we want.

(and I know that we can commit to more than one person at a time. That last sentence was a non sequitor, so disregard.)

If you don't punch every person you come across, you are not radical enough. Every person is the embodiment of every toxic relationship and everything that is wrong with the world. Are you going to just stand by that? I've never met a person I haven't punched in the face immediately. I will not stand by and be accomplice to the status quo and normal ways of relating. I literally cannot, will not, relate.

Calling it an infantile disorder is ageist!

I'm not really sure what Lumpy's issue with non-monogamy is. I guess I don't really understand it and hope that he'll be more specific in future postings.

Couples suck... couple culture sucks... honeymoon phases are repugnant... I'm a grumpy old man stuck in a much younger body. Whatever. I'm just a hater when it comes to this shit. I am in fact against the couple form, against the nuclear family and against heteronormative (10-dollar mofuckin word) assumptions. I personally cannot put myself into a monogamous role (I tried for years before understanding I can't), and I have a distinct distaste for the compulsive nature of monogamy (in the sense that it is the default mode of partnership, often unquestioned, and is largely how we are conditioned to conduct our relations).

At the same time, I'm utterly turned off by the kind of polemics put out by RAD and similar projects. At times they present sentiments I can easily agree with, but the holier-than-thou attitude is never charming no matter who it's coming from. The exhortation to stop using the word "partner" is just idiotic. They seem to be largely interested in policing not only the way other people engage in relationships but even the way they EXPRESS how they engage in relationships. Comes across like a desire to micromanage. Unattractive to say the least. So I feel what the author of this piece is saying.

I've also never been a fan of all the verbiage that comes along with polyamory culture (I realize also that RAD is apparently against polyamory as well, whatever). Really never been attracted to poly culture in general, and as someone mentioned earlier it's obviously true that non-monogamous relationships can be as terrible as the alternative. Still, monogamy is characterized by things that make it inherently poopy, as far as I'm concerned. Keep that mommy-daddy bullshit away from me. Keep the exclusivity away from me. It's a queer life for me.

There's a lot of non-heteronormative, monogamous COUPLES btw... Welcome to the 21st century if you were still stuck in the '50s or the Deep South,maybe?

So my point is yes, fuck the couple, but also understand how it's bad aim to be dismissing the couple as an heternormative cultural form. Still I agree that normie hetero couples are fucking annoying to have around due to all their delusional sense of common happiness and shit, which is all just the result of a commodified social formatting. i.e. my first fuck was from a bullshit job at the shopping mall, where everyone felt like on a closet meat market.

how is heteronormative a $10 word? asking because i would love to have a less "complicated" sounding word for the same context. would be a lot easier to explain stuff to people that way.

i use "straight" for this, but also as a synonym for "normie"

ymmv

that's at least 7 or 8 bucks worth of syllables, you kiddin? just in raw materials!

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