family – Dan Q

My Polyamory is Boring

I was chatting to JTR about our shared experiences of being openly polyamorous¹ bloggers. Both JTR and I observed that it’s something that we don’t write about often.

We don’t say much about it… even though it’s probably something that, to some readers, would seem interesting and unusual. And also, perhaps, still sufficiently “taboo” that they wouldn’t feel comfortable asking us about it outright, either.

Why is that?

In my case, the single biggest reason that I don’t often write about it is… I think my polyamory is kinda boring!

A family of two white men with beards and one white woman sit at a picnic bench in a barn, alongside their two (blurred) children. They're holding baps with sausages, bacon, or eggs in, and surrounded by canned drinks and takeaway coffee cups. A tote bag nearby gives away that they're at the cafe of Diddly Squat Farm. — From left to right the adults you can see are: (1) me, (2) my metamour² JTA,³ and (3) my partner (and his wife) Ruth. On each side of her are our two school-aged children.

It’s boring… because it’s established

Part of the reason I think it’s boring is because, well, it’s far from novel! We’ve been doing this for the vast majority of our adult lives:

I’ve been in (only) nonmonogamous relationships for about 25 years.
The three of us – Ruth, JTA and I – have been together for 19 years
Of that, we’ve been cohabiting for 15 years, co-owning property for 13 years, co-parenting for almost as long

To me, this arrangement just feels like everyday life. We all know where we’re at and what we’re about, and we’re by now fuelled by long-established Old Relationship Energy⁴.

It’s boring… because it’s not scandalous

The second reason my polyamory is boring is because it’s free of drama; free of scandal; free of titillation.

We don’t go to swingers parties. We don’t have a dungeon in our basement⁵. We don’t revel in jealous chatter or gossip. We don’t spend most of our time naked. We’re not doing some kind of cuckoldry thing. We’re not doing this as part of some kink or fantasy.⁶

We don’t spend lots of time negotiating boundaries or handling jealousy or working out who needs an STI test: if you catch us discussing something, it’s much more-likely to be how we handle our savings account or who’s taking a kid to their swimming lesson or when’s least-inconvenient for everybody for the car to be serviced. Y’know: boring stuff!

We also only very-rarely “date” outside of our polycule⁷.

I’m confident that we attract a little gossip from the “school mums” or the nosy neighbours in our quiet rural village. But mostly, I suspect, it’s of the “hey, having a third parent around sounds super convenient: how can I get that?”⁸ type.

The same adults and children pose in a colourful escape room, with padlocked boxes and banks of light switches visible amongst cat toys. — We’re boring because we’re fundamentally just like any other family. Except with one more adult than is typical.

I love that my polyamory is boring!

Don’t get me wrong: I love that our relationships are unexpectedly-boring.

It’s a reflection of our stability and our commitment that the rest of my trio and I are a comfortably predictable. A perpetual landmark in the eyes of our families, friends, and children. We’re just part of the furniture. Just people, doing our thing, plodding along like everybody else.

Yes, Ruth gets to have a husband and a boyfriend. Yes, we’re all both “in a relationship” and “available to date”. Yes, our kids are raised by three parents (which I personally think is a huge advantage to them, and I imagine that they’d agree). But that’s where the excitement ends. We’re just regular-old common or garden humans.

So that’s the main reason I don’t blog about my polyamory. It’s just not that exciting. Sure: I could talk about how we organise our shared finances or who sleeps where on any given night or how we decided which adult does which part of the school run on which weekday… but it’s all pretty dull. And it’s frankly the kind of thing that any monogamous couple could talk about just as well!

Most successful long-term relationships are boring. Stability and consistency are not exciting.

But if I’m wrong…

…then tell me! There’s a comments form below⁹: ask whatever you like!¹⁰

And if nobody comments… then I’ll know that I’ve convinced you. I’ll know that I’m right. That my relationship structure, however uncommon, isn’t actually that interesting:

My polyamory is boring. And that’s great.

Footnotes

¹ Polyamory: the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners with the knowledge and consent of everybody involved. I’ll try to keep a glossary going here in the footnotes for any less-commonplace terminology.

² Metamour: the partner of your partner.

³ I apologise that my metamour JTA’s name is literally one-character different from that of JTR, a completely different person with whom I had the conversation that inspired this post. It annoys me to have to type it, so I’m sure it annoys you to have to read it.

⁴ Old Relationship Energy (ORE), or Established Relationship Energy, is the contented kind of relationship happiness that comes with time, and trust, and familiarity. It contrasts New Relationship Energy (NRE), which is the buzzy, loved-up kind of excitement common to new relationships and sometimes called the “honeymoon period”. These concepts are common to many relationship styles (and, indeed, the transition from NRE to ORE can be a source of challenges for some relationships), but they’re more-often talked-about in polyamorous circles because their impact is more widely-felt. For example: observing your partner experience NRE with somebody new and remembering when you and they shared the same can be a source of friction or jealousy… or a source of compersion (vicarious joy at somebody else’s love), depending on the people, timing, context, and more.

⁵ If we did have a basement sex dungeon (which we don’t), it’d have long ago become a swimming pool when our house flooded earlier this year. Sigh.

⁶ No shade thrown if you are a drama-queen nudist swinger with a sex dungeon and a cuckoldry kink. More power to you. All I’m saying is that’s not us, and therefore – by comparison – we’re pretty boring.

⁷ Polycule: a network of romantic relationships, or the people within those relationships, that are all connected to one another. The simplest polycule is arguably the dyad: two people in a relationship together. There are probably two possible configurations of three people: a triad, where each party is romantically involved with each of the other two, and a vee – a “V-shaped” polycule where one person is in a relationship with two others, who are not in a relationship with one another. Letters of the alphabet are useful to summarise other polycule shapes too, like an N-shaped or O-shaped quad or a W-shaped or A-shaped quintet, but of course there are many other ways you can permute the people and relationships when you’ve got this number of participants. Some polycules are huge (and, usually, loose, with the most-peripheral people possibly less-likely to be in direct contact with one another); others are relatively small. There’s a philosophical argument that can be made either way about whether a single person is a polycule-of-one.

⁸ I’ve got to admit, triple-parenting is convenient, sometimes. I have an enormous deal of respect for solo parents because that shit is hard. Two parents is simpler, but three… three sometimes feels like playing on easy-mode. Not always – kids will quickly learn which parent is the one to appeal to if they want an extra half-hour before bedtime or you to buy them a new book, for example, and having more parents gives them more ways to do that! – but sometimes.

⁹ Don’t want me to know that it was you? You can ask anonymously, if you like. But you do need to type in something that looks like a believable email address to ensure you get past the spam filter. Here’s some throwaway anonymous email addresses if you want one.

¹⁰ So long as you’re not a bigot or an arsehole, you can ask whatever you like and I’ll try to answer. Tell me that I’m living in sin or that what I’m doing is bad for my children or that we’re cheating on one another and you’ll find that you don’t make it through the moderation filter.

Dan Q did not find GC4M7C4 Scouting About

This checkin to GC4M7C4 Scouting About reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The elder geokid and I had a search in all the likely spots we could find after attending her cousin’s 2nd birthday party nearby. No luck for us today!

Cold Giraffe

My mum painted a cold giraffe onto a postcard and sent it to me. It’s been added to my collection.

She sent it to my “send me a postcard” PO box (even though she’s got my actual address), which I’m guessing was an indication that it was being “sent” to me “as if” she were a stranger on the Internet.

Or possibly it’s just because I’m, y’know, living in a variety of different places with only intermittent trips back to my actual house, while my insurance company and their contractors do their work to dry out our walls and floors, assess the damage caused after my house flooded, 24 days ago.

Whatever the reason, it was an uplifting piece of mail to receive.

In other things-are-improving news, our insurance company (finally! – after lots of checks and paperwork at their end) accepted liability for paying for the repairs we’ll need and for our temporary accommodation (including the places we’ve already been living for the last few weeks).

Note #27831

Back at the Rollright Stones fire New Year’s Day, per family tradition. This year the younger child counted 74, the elder 59. The curse that prevents you counting the same number twice continues!

Happy Polyamory Day 2025

Happy Polyamory Day y’all. (Plus max props to Petra without whom I’d have forgotten about it, like most years.)

Closest thing I did to celebrating it was going out to the pub last night for beer and food with my metamour, while our partner-in-common took our kids to see a film. Polyfam life isn’t always glamorous; but it is full of love.

Family D&D’s Overworld Map

In preparation for Family D&D Night (and with thanks to my earlier guide to splicing maps together!), I’ve finally completed an expanded “overworld” map for our game world. So far, the kids have mostly hung around on the North coast of the Central Sea, but they’re picked up a hook that may take them all the way across to the other side… and beyond?

Banana for scale.

(If your GMing for kids, you probably already know this, but “feelies” go a long way. All the maps. All the scrolls. Maybe even some props. Go all in. They love it.)

Note #25428

Our family tradition on New Year’s Day is to go to the Rollright Stones. Legend has it that you can’t count the standing stones and get the same answer twice.

This year the younger child counted 37, the elder 67… so wide a difference that you can see how one might ascribe a mystical reason!

Dan Q found GC34G3G Coventry – Hertford Street

This checkin to GC34G3G Coventry - Hertford Street reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The rest of the family and I are visiting for my youngest’s birthday to do a handful of fun activities. Geocaching didn’t make the list, but that wasn’t gonna stop me finding this QEF while putting our swimming stuff back in the car before we eat our lunch. Thanks to the hint, this was in almost the first place I looked. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire!

PortAventura

Made it through a day and a half of theme park fun with the kids. Time for a much-needed beer, then as long a sleep as circumstance will allow.

Melià Barcelona Sky

Enjoying a glass of cava while the kids peer down out of the window of a Barcelona skyscraper.

Day 8 of my sabbatical. Think I’m doing this right?

Note #24813

Off to Spain! BRB.

Shared Email Addresses

Email Antipatterns

There are two particular varieties of email address that I don’t often see, but I’ve been known to ridicule when I have:

Geographically-based personal email addresses, e.g. OurHouseName@example.com. These always seemed to me to undermine one of the single-best things about an email address compared to postal mail – that they don’t change when you move house!¹
Shared/couple email addresses, e.g. MrAndMrsSmith@example.net. These make me want to scream “You know email addresses are basically free, right? You don’t have to share one!” Even back when most people got their email address directly from their dial-up provider, most ISPs offered some number of addresses (e.g. five).

If you’ve come across either of the above before, there’s… perhaps a reasonable chance that it was in the possession of somebody born before 1960 (and the older, the more-likely)².

You’ll never catch me doing that!

I found myself thinking about this as I clicked the “No” button on a poll by Terence Eden that asked whether I used a “shared” email address when in a stable long-term relationship.

Terence Eden (@Edent@mastodon.social) on Mastodon asks: "If you're currently in a stable, long term relationship with someone - do you have a joint email address with them?" — Of course I don’t! Why would I? Oh… wait…

It wasn’t until after I clicked “No” that I realised that, in actual fact, I have had multiple email addresses that I’ve share with significant other(s). And more than that, sometimes they’ve been geographically-based! What’s going on?

I’ve routinely had domains or subdomains that I’ve used to represent a place that I live. They’re convenient for when you want to give somebody a short web address which’ll take them to a page with directions to you and links to your location in a variety of different services and formats.

And by that point, you might as well have an email alias, e.g. all@myhouse.example.org, that forwards on email to, well, all the adults at the house. What I’ve described there is, after a fashion, a shared email address tied to a geographical location. But we don’t ever send anything from it. Nor do we use it for any kind of personal communication with anybody outside the house.

We don’t give out these all@ addresses (or their aliases: every company gets their own) to people willy-nilly. But they’re useful for shared services that send automated emails to us all. For example:

Giving a forwarding alias to the supermarket means that receipts (listing any unavailable products) g0 to all of us, and whoever’s meal plan’s been scuppered by an awkward substitution will know what’s up.
Using a forwarding alias with the household Netflix account means anybody can use the “send me a sign-in link” feature to connect a new device.
When confirming that you’ve sent money to a service provider, CC’ing one of these nice, short aliases provides a quick way to let the others know that a bill’s been paid (this one’s especially useful where, like me, you live in a 3+ adult household and otherwise you’d be having to add multiple people to the CC field).

Sure, the need for most of these solutions would evaporate instantly if more services supported multi-user or delegated access³. But outside of that fantasy world, shared aliases seem to be pretty useful!

Footnotes

¹ The most ill-conceived example of geographically-based email addresses I’ve ever seen came from a a 2003 proposal by then-MP Derek Wyatt, who proposed that the domain name part of every single email address should contain not only the country of the owner (e.g. .uk) but also their complete postcode. He was under the delusion that this would somehow prevent spam. Even ignoring the immense technical challenges of his proposal and the impossibility of policing it across the borders of every country that uses email… it probably wouldn’t even be effective at his stated goal. I’ll let The Register take it from here.

² No ageism intended: I suspect that the phenomenon actually stems from the fact that as email took off in the noughties this demographic who were significantly more-likely than younger folks to have (a) a very long-term home that they didn’t anticipate moving out of any time soon, and (b) an existing anticipation that people and companies wrote to them as a couple, not individually.

³ I’d love it if the grocery delivery sites would let multiple “accounts”, by mutual consent, share a delivery slot, destination, and payment method. It’d be cool to know that we could e.g. have a houseguest and give them temporary access to a specific order that was scheduled for during their stay. But that’s probably a lot of work for very little payoff if you’re busy running a supermarket.

Framing Device

Doors

As our house rennovations/attic conversions come to a close, I found myself up in what will soon become my en suite, fitting a mirror, towel rail, and other accessories.

Wanting to minimise how much my power tool usage disturbed the rest of the house, I went to close the door separating my new bedroom from my rest of my house, only to find that it didn’t properly fit its frame and instead jammed part-way-closed.

“Oh,” I said, as the door clearly failed to shut, “Damn.”

Somehow we’d never tested that this door closed properly before we paid the final instalment to the fitters. And while I’m sure they’d have come back to repair the problem if I asked, I figured that it’d be faster and more-satisfying to fix it for myself.

Homes

As a result of an extension – constructed long before we moved in – the house in Preston in which spent much of my childhood had not just a front and a back door but what we called the “side door”, which connected the kitchen to the driveway.

Unfortunately the door that was installed as the “side door” was really designed for interior use and it suffered for every winter it faced the biting wet North wind.

My father’s DIY skills could be rated as somewhere between mediocre and catastrophic, but his desire to not spend money “frivolously” was strong, and so he never repaired nor replaced the troublesome door. Over the course of each year the wood would invariably absorb more and more water and swell until it became stiff and hard to open and close.

The solution: every time my grandfather would visit us, each Christmas, my dad would have his dad take down the door, plane an eighth of an inch or so off the bottom, and re-hang it.

Sometimes, as a child, I’d help him do so.

Planes

The first thing to do when repairing a badly-fitting door is work out exactly where it’s sticking. I borrowed a wax crayon from the kids’ art supplies, coloured the edge of the door, and opened and closed it a few times (as far as possible) to spot where the marks had smudged.

Fortunately my new bedroom door was only sticking along the top edge, so I could get by without unmounting it so long as I could brace it in place. I lugged a heavy fence post rammer from the garage and used it to brace the door in place, then climbed a stepladder to comfortably reach the top.

A small box plane perched atop a sloping door. — I figured I’d only need to remove a few millimetres, so I didn’t mind doing it from atop a stepladder. Hey: here’s a fun thing – when I think about planing a door with my grandfather, I think in inches; when I think about doing it myself, I think in metric!

Loss

After my paternal grandfather died, there was nobody left who would attend to the side door of our house. Each year, it became a little stiffer, until one day it wouldn’t open at all.

Surely this would be the point at which he’d pry open his wallet and pay for it to be replaced?

A middle-aged man carrying walking poles on an urban riverbank drags a car tyre that's chained to his waist. — I’m not sure there’s a more apt metaphor for my dad’s ability to be stubborn than this photo of him dragging a tyre around Gateshead as a training activity for an Arctic expedition.

Nope. Instead, he inexpertly screwed a skirting board to it and declared that it was now no-longer a door, but a wall.

I suppose from a functionalist perspective he was correct, but it still takes a special level of boldness to simply say “That door? It’s a wall now.”

Sand

Of all the important tasks a carpenter (or in this case, DIY-er) must undertake, hand sanding must surely be the least-satisfying.

But reaching the end of the process, the feel of a freshly-planed, carefully-sanded piece of wood is fantastic. This surface represented chaos, and now it represents order. Order that you yourself have brought about.

Often, you’ll be the only one to know. When my grandfather would plane and sand the bottom edge of our house’s side door, he’d give it a treatment of oil (in a doomed-to-fail attempt to keep the moisture out) and then hang it again. Nobody can see its underside once it’s hung, and so his handiwork was invisible to anybody who hadn’t spent the last couple of months swearing at the stiffness of the door.

A paintbrush applies white paint to the top of a door. — Swish, swish. *Now* I’m glad I sanded.

Even though the top of my door is visible – particularly visible, given its sloping face – nobody sees the result of the sanding because it’s hidden beneath a layer of paint.

A few brush strokes provide the final touch to a spot of DIY… that in provided a framing device for me to share a moment of nostalgia with you.

Sweep away the wood shavings. Keep the memories.

[Bloganuary] Traditions

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Write about a few of your favourite family traditions.

We’ve got a wonderful diversity of family traditions. This by virtue, perhaps, of us being a three-parent family, and so bringing 50% more different traditions and 100% less decisiveness over which to accept than a traditional two-parent family. Or it might reflect our outlook and willingness to evaluate and try new things: to experiment and adopt what works. Or perhaps we just like to be just-barely on this side of the line across the the quirky/eccentric scale¹.

But there are plenty of other traditions we’ve inherited or created, such as:

Pancake Brunch Sundays sort-of evolved out of a fried Sunday breakfast that used to be a household tradition many years ago. If you come visit us for a weekend you’ll find you’re served pancakes (or possibly waffles) with a mixture of traditional toppings plus, usually, a weekly “feature flavour” around midday on Sunday. For no reason now other than it’s just what we do.

A boy in blue-and-brown striped pyjamas, on a table stacked with plates of waffles, slices into a birthday cake with six candles. — Sunday Brunch stops for nothing, not even birthdays.

Family Day is an annual event, marked on or near 3 July each year, with gifts for children and possibly an outing or trip away for everybody to enjoy. It celebrates the fact that we get to be a family together, despite forces outside of our control trying to conspire to prevent it.²
Family Film Night takes place most months: in rotation, the five of us take turns to nominate a film or two that we’ll all watch together along with snacks and sweet treats. It might be seen as a continuation of the pre-children tradition of Troma Night from back in the day, except that we don’t go out of our way to deliberately watch terrible films: now that happens just as a result of good or bad fortune! We also periodically schedule a Family Board Games Night, and a Family Videogames Night.

Family members read books in a living room, seen over the top of the pages of an (out of focus) book in the foreground. — Books! Books books books! BOOKS!

Christmas Eve Books: a tradition we stole from Iceland is that we give books on Christmas Eve. Adults in our household now don’t really get Christmas gifts, but everybody present is encouraged to exchange books on Christmas eve and then sit up late reading together, often with gingerbread, chocolate, and/or a pan of mulled wine keeping warm on the stove. I find it a fun way to keep my reading list stocked early in the year, plus it encourages the kids to read³
Festive meals, while I’m thinking about that end of the year, are pretty-well established. Christmas Eve is all about roast duck pancakes. Christmas Day sees me roast a goose. New Years’ Eve is for fondue. Plus vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) alternatives to the otherwise-unsuitable things, of course.

I’m certain there must be more, but the thing with family traditions is they become part of the everyday tapestry of your life after a while. Eventually traditions become hard to see them because they’re always there. I’m sure there are more “everyday rituals” that we’ve taken on that are noteworthy or interesting to outsiders but which to us are so mundane as to be unworthy of mention!

But every single one of these is something special to us. They’re an element of structure for the kids and a signifier of community to all of us. They’re routines that we’ve taken on and made “ours” as part of our collective identity as a family. And that’s just great.

Footnotes

¹ Determining which side of the line I mean is left as an exercise to the reader.

² It’s been what…? 6½ years…? And I’m still not ready even emotionally to blog about the challenges we faced, so maybe I never will. So if you missed that chapter of our lives, suffice to say: for a while, it looked like we might not get to continue being a family, and over the course of one exceptionally-difficult year it took incredible effort, resolve, sleepless nights, supportive families, and (when it came down to brass tacks) enough money and lawyers to seek justice… in order to ensure that we got to continue to be. About which we’re all amazingly grateful, and so we celebrate it.

³ Not that they need any help with that, little bookworms that they are.

[Bloganuary] Attachment

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?

I really struggled with this question: I couldn’t think of anything that I was especially attached to as a kid.

Maybe it was just that I couldn’t think of anything; that the memory was lost to time and age.

So I did the obvious thing… and reached out to my mum.

It turns out that apparently my recollection is correct: I really didn’t have any significant attachments to toys or anything like them. I didn’t ever have any kind of “special thing” I slept with. I recall in my later childhood being surprised to learn that some people did have such things: like all children, I’d internalised my experience of the world as being representative of the general state of things!

Why, I wonder, are some children different than others and get this kind of youthful attachment to something? Is it genetic?¹ Is it memetic, perhaps a behaviour we subconsciously reinforce in our children because we think it’s “normal”?

A young girl asleep on a stone floor, her head on a doormat, napping alongside a French Bulldog. — Being attached to napping with a dog doesn’t count, right? (‘cos I’ve definitely done that at least once, although for obvious reasons I’ve only managed to take photos of *others* doing the same.)

I’ll bet that some clever psychologist has done some research into this already², but that sounds like a different day’s exploration.

Footnotes

¹ I’m not genetically-related to our kids: they’re biologically the children of my partner and her husband, but consider all three of us to be their parents.

² And that a dozen other psychologists have reinterpreted this research in completely different and incompatible ways.

It’s boring… because it’s established #

It’s boring… because it’s not scandalous #

I love that my polyamory is boring! #

But if I’m wrong… #

Footnotes

Email Antipatterns

You’ll never catch me doing that!

Footnotes

Doors

Homes

Planes

Loss

Sand

Footnotes

Footnotes

It’s boring… because it’s established

It’s boring… because it’s not scandalous

I love that my polyamory is boring!

But if I’m wrong…