I’m still lagging way-behind on writing-up the nonfiction I’ve been reading this year, and I’m long
overdue1 to share my love of
Holly Gramazio‘s debut novel, The Husbands. Which is excellent; truly
un-put-downable. I’d come across Holly’s writing before by playing Dicey Dungeons, but I hadn’t realised that until later when,
four chapters into this book, I decided to look her up (in the hope, perhaps, that she’d written any other books I could add to my reading list – the answer is… not yet).
Here’s the skinny. Lauren comes home from a night out to find her husband waiting for her. Which is immediately confusing and concerning, because when she left for the evening, she
wasn’t married. But all the evidence suggests that now, somehow, mysteriously, she has a husband: she finds letters addressed to the pair of them, her phone is full of photos of them
together going back through their wedding and beyond, and all of her friends back up the fact that she really has made a life with this man… that she just can’t remember.
But the weirder bit she discovers a little later. Whenever her husband goes up into the attic, he’s replaced with a different husband. A different man, it seems, that
she could conceivably have married, in some strange alternate timeline. By controlling how and when they do so, she comes to discover that she can cycle through a
seemingly-endless supply of husbands, and as she comes to accept and understand her new life, begins to use this as a kind-of… dating superpower? “Trying on” a husband for
as many minutes, hours, days, or months it takes to decide whether or not to “keep” him2.
That’s the premise, and it’s perfectly fun (although occasionally dark) – sort of a parody of “swipe-left/swipe-right” modern dating, taken to an extreme – but wouldn’t by itself be
reason enough to recommend it. But what comes next is what makes it so special.
Aaand… I feel like I can’t say more without spoiling it. And you really should read it! Suffice to say that the writing is compelling, and engaging, and there are plenty sufficient
twists and turns to keep you interested even if you wouldn’t normally go in for… what I’m going to describe as a romantic-comedy. Our protagonist’s situation feels relatable
even while it’s unfamiliar, and I enjoyed both laughing at her exploits while also grieving her losses. And again: the surprises and quirks are really fun.
Among the correspondence I engaged in following my blog post about my (boring) polyamory were a few examples of people being concerned
about the equality of our arrangement: how we keep things “fair”1.
By way of example, let’s take a look at a specific example that’s come up. Here’s something that I was asked recently:
Why does [my partner] Ruth not have her own bedroom? Both of her partners [JTA and I] get one!
Where does my partner sleep?
It’s been joked that polyamory is just a fetish for calendar management. Our family calendars are moderately simple, I imagine, compared to those of people in larger polycules or with
less routine.
Except when she’s travelling or otherwise elsewhere2,
Ruth spends her nights in an approximately even split3
between JTA‘s bedroom and mine.
This leads some people to observe that:
JTA has a bedroom of his own,
I have a bedroom of my own, and
Ruth “shares” both of those,
and this is unfair because her partners both get something that she is denied.
Superficially, this sounds true. But it conflates “fairness” with “parity”.
Fairness versus parity
Parity is making sure that everybody gets the same thing. It’s a simple, but crude, measure of equality. That’s probably why it’s so-popular with
children.
“My sister got a doughnut so I should get one too.”
“You had an iced finger instead. You said you prefer iced fingers to doughnuts. And your sister doesn’t like iced fingers. Both of you got what you wanted.”
“Yeah, but now I want a doughnut because she had one!”
– the kind of conversation that’s probably familiar to you if you have children
When you aim for parity, you’re trying to make sure that every person gets the same thing. But this isn’t ideal, because not every person wants
or needs the same thing!
“I don’t even want this. I just don’t want to feel like you’re getting something I’m not!”
Fairness, is aiming to for everybody to be content.
Ideally, everybody would get everything they wanted, all the time! But where that’s impossible, we can aim to at-least ensure that everybody is content. That everything is
“good enough” for everybody. Unlike a quest for parity, this respects the fact that people have different needs.
Me personally? I absolutely prefer to have a bedroom of “my own”! In fact, to go even further than that: if I were in Ruth’s position I probably would want a room of
my own, if it were feasible. Also, in some kind of hypothetical universe in which neither of us had other partners… I’d still ideally want to sleep alone some of the
time (maybe once every couple of weeks?), because I’m of an inclination to occasionally luxuriate in being able to totally starfish-out.
If it were me instead of Ruth at the fulcrum of our V-shaped polycule… I suspect I’d have different needs to Ruth. And that’s fine!4
I’m a big fan of people being able to have their own space if they want it.
When the three of us first started cohabiting I suggested that Ruth should have her own bedroom. In our first shared house, we ensured that she did! But in practice, it never
got used. Over time we’ve dropped it in favour of having a spare bedroom: a versatile space that can be place for gaming, or television, or guests5.
It was valuable to start from a position of assuming that we would all get “our own” room: parity is a good starting point! But fairness –
meeting everybody’s needs in the most-equitable manner – is a better finishing point.6
Communicating a way to fairness
The world sometimes sucks. Many of the social interactions humans engage in, on a day-to-day basis, are not rooted in fairness. Some human social interactions go to the
opposite extreme: they even exploitative.
Have you ever been in a salary negotiation? You might have heard the idiom that the first person to say a number loses. Salary negotiations are an adversarial
game. Both sides want to come out with the most money, and so neither side is incentivised to show their hand.
Everything I learned about salary negotiations… I learned from playing Theme Park. Just make sure you’ve got a
deal before you run out of biscuits.
Relationships between people who care about each another don’t have to work by adversarial rules (and, in fact, probably shouldn’t!7).
If you love and trust and want the best for one another, then – hopefully – you can be honest about what you want, and can be okay with being hearing whether or not it’s
something that your partner(s) can provide. Or else work together to find compromise position that best facilitates everybody’s needs!
So: if Ruth decides that she wants to have a bedroom of her own again, we can try to make that happen. If I start an additional serious/committed relationship and decide that I’m not
getting enough “alone time”, we can work out how to achieve that. If JTA’s work starts requiring a long and tiring commute and he needs fewer childcare responsibilities, we’d solve for
that. We tackle these problems as a family who love and care for one another, with the goal of getting an outcome that’s fair to everybody!
Those outcomes don’t have to mean that we each get “the same”. Just that we each, as far as possible, get what we most want.
Footnotes
1 Sometimes somebody – almost always a man – will claim that our arrangement is unfair to
both JTA and I who have to “share” one woman, as if her role were to be “owned” by one of us. Sometimes somebody – almost always a woman – will claim that our arrangement is unfair to
Ruth because she has to split her time and attention between two men. I find it hilarious that these two arguments, diametrically opposed, are most-often made on gender lines.
2 The other month, for example, Ruth stayed over at her aunt and uncle’s house after
celebrating her uncle’s birthday. JTA and I hung out and watched some RobWords until I, tired after an afternoon
of beginners’ tango, took an early night!
3 In actuality, Ruth spends slightly more nights sleeping in JTA’s room than in mine.
This, too, is one of those things where people will sometimes instinctively assume represents some kind of injustice to me and that I’m somehow being hard done by or deprived
of some kind of relationship “rights”. This is, clearly, nonsense.
4 Also: I couldn’t think of a better way to graphically represent us swapping around into
some differently-pivoted V-shaped relationship than by using the deck of playing cards that was on my desk anyway. I was feeling unimaginative, apparently. Can you tell?
5 Or – indeed – a spare room can be a space for for one of us to use, if we’re ill or
leaving early in the morning or something and don’t want to disturb a bedpartner.
6 If you’re looking for another example of the difference between parity and fairness,
consider taxation! A flat tax like a poll tax exhibits strong parity, because everybody pays the same, but it doesn’t
exhibit much fairness because the value of that tax burden is less for somebody who is wealthy than for somebody who is poor. We call taxes that favour parity over fairness
regressive taxes. I guess that we could call sharing of family resources in a way that favours parity over fairness
regressive sharing?
7 If you’re in a relationship that’s routinely adversarial, then… and I don’t mean to be
judgemental… that doesn’t sound like a very healthy relationship to me. Perhaps step back and re-assess whether it serves you both?
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!
From left to right the adults you can see are: (1) me, (2) my metamour2JTA,3
and (3) my partner (and his wife) Ruth. On each side of her are our two school-aged children.
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.
We were already pretty well-established before Ruth & JTA’s fabulous wedding, all those years
ago. Gosh, we’ve been doing this a while!
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.
We’re boring because we’re fundamentally just like any other family. Except with one more adult than is typical.
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.
…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
1Polyamory: 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.
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.
4Old 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.
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.
7Polycule: 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.
Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying “ethical non-monogamy”?
Nobody feels the need to say “ethical monogamy”; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.
I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word “ethical”
and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)
I’ve had a few breakups, but I’ve only been made redundant once. There’s a surprising overlap between the two…
And with that, I’d better get back to it. Today’s mission is to finish checking-in on my list of “companies I’ve always admired and thought I should work for” and see if any of them are
actively looking for somebody like me!
(Incidentally: if you’re into open source, empowering the Web, and making the world a better place, my CV is over here. I’m a senior/principal full-stack
engineer with a tonne of experience in some radically diverse fields, and if you think we’d be a good match then I’d love to chat!)
I’ve never been even remotely into Sex and the City. But I can’t help but love that this developer was so invested in the characters and their relationships that when
he asked himself “couldn’t all this drama and heartache have been simplified if these characters were willing to consider polyamorous relationships rather than serial
monogamy?”1,
he did the maths to optimise his hypothetical fanfic polycule:
As if his talk at !!Con 2024 wasn’t cool enough, he open-sourced the whole thing, so you’re free to try the calculator online for yourself or expand upon or adapt it to your heart’s content. Perhaps you disagree with his assessment of the
relative relationship characteristics of the characters2: tweak them and
see what the result is!
Or maybe Sex and the City isn’t your thing at all? Well adapt it for whatever your fandom is! How I Met Your Mother,Dawson’s Creek, Mamma
Mia and The L-Word were all crying out for polyamory to come and “fix” them3.
Perhaps if you’re feeling especially brave you’ll put yourself and your circles of friends, lovers, metamours, or whatever into the algorithm and see who it matches up. You never know,
maybe there’s a love connection you’ve missed! (Just be ready for the possibility that it’ll tell you that you’re doing your love life “wrong”!)
Footnotes
1 This is a question I routinely find myself asking of every TV show that presents a love
triangle as a fait accompli resulting from an even moderately-complex who’s-attracted-to-whom.
2 Clearly somebody does, based on his commit “against his will” that increases Carrie and Big’s
validatesOthers scores and reduces Big’s prioritizesKindness.
3 I was especially disappointed with the otherwise-excellent The L-Word, which
did have a go at an ethical non-monogamy storyline but bungled the “ethical” at every hurdle while simultaneously reinforcing the “insatiable bisexual” stereotype. Boo!
Anyway: maybe on my next re-watch I’ll feed some numbers into Juan’s algorithm and see what comes out…
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.
In Pierce’s defence, “my email is on that computer” did genuinely used to be a thing, before the widespread adoption of IMAP and webmail.
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.
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.
Sainsbury’s aren’t going to bring us any Raspberry Peelers. I’m not sure who ordered them, but I’m confident that
it’s the kids who’re gonna complain about it.
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.
Has anyone informed work/colleagues about being ENM and how was it received?
I’ve informed a few colleagues but I am considering informing my team as part of my Team Champion and EDI role.
…
I’ve been “out” at every one of the employers1 since I entered into my first open/nonmonogamous
relationship a couple of decades ago.
I didn’t do so immediately: in fact, I waited almost until the point that coming out was an academic necessity! The point at which it was
only a matter of time before somebody thought they’d caught us “cheating”… or else because I didn’t want to have to lie to coworkers about e.g. from whom a romantic gift might have
come.
I guess I’ll squeeze in “come out to colleagues” in between the project planning meeting and working on rolling out the server upgrades.
Here’s how it went to be “out” at each of the three full-time jobs I’ve held over that period:
We lived and worked in and around a small town, and in our small tight-knit team we all had a reasonable handle on what was going on in one another’s personal lives. By the time I was
actively in a relationship with Ruth (while still in a relationship with Claire, whom all my coworkers had met at e.g. office parties and the
like), it just seemed prudent to mention it, as well as being honest and transparent.
This photograph – featuring some of my coworkers – was taken in 2005. At that point, they probably all thought of me as a regular, normal person. At least, as far as my relationship
structure was concerned. Not in any other way. Obviously.
It went fine. And it made Monday watercooler conversations about “who what I did at the weekend” simpler. Being a small team sharing a single open-plan office meant that I
was able to mention my relationship status to literally the entire company at once, and everybody took it with a shrug of noncommittal acceptance.
The Bodleian Libraries was a much bigger beast, and in turn a part of the massive University of Oxford. It was big enough to have a “LGBT+ Staff”
network within its Equality and Diversity unit, within which – because of cultural intersections2
– I was able to meet a handful of other poly folk at the University.
This motley crew were exactly as warm and accepting a bunch as you could ask for.
I mentioned very early on – as soon as it came up organically – the structure of the relationship I was in, and everybody was cool (or failing that, at least professional) about it.
Curious coworkers asked carefully-crafted questions, and before long (and following my lead) my curious lifestyle choices were as valid a topic for light-hearted jokes as anything else
in that fun and gossipy office.
And again: it paid-off pragmatically, especially when I took parental leave after the birth of each of our two kids3.
It also helped defuse a situation when I was spotted by a more-distant coworker on my way back from a lunchtime date with a lover who wasn’t Ruth, and my confused colleague
introduced herself to the woman that she assumed must’ve been the partner she’d heard about. When I explained that no, this is a different person I’m seeing my
colleague seemed taken aback, and I was glad to be able to call on a passing coworker who knew me better to back me up in my assertion that no, this wasn’t just me trying to lie to
cover some illicit work affair! Work allies are useful.
I’ve been with Automattic for four and a half years now, and this time around I went one step further in telling potential teammates about my relationship structure by mentioning it in
my “Howdymattic” video – a video introduction new starters are encouraged to record to say hi to the rest of the company4.
Some full-on MSPaint grade titling made it into that video, didn’t it?
A convenient side-effect of this early coming-out was that I found myself immediately inducted into the “polymatticians” group – a minor diversity group within Automattic, comprising a
massive 1.2% of the company, who openly identify as engaging in nonmonogamous relationships5!
That was eye-opening. Not only does Automattic have a stack of the regular inclusivity groups you might expect from a big tech company (queer, Black, women, trans,
neurodiverse) and a handful of the less-common ones (over-40s, cancer survivors, nondrinkers, veterans), they’ve also got a private group for those of us who happen to be both
Automatticians and in (or inclined towards) polyamorous relationships. Mind blown.
My relationship structure’s been… quietly and professionally accepted. It doesn’t really come up (why would it? in a distributed company it has even less-impact on anything than it did
in my previous non-distributed roles)… outside of the “polymatticians” private space.
In summary: I can recommend being “out” at work. So long as you’d feel professionally safe to do so: relationship structure isn’t necessarily a protected characteristic
(it’s complicated), and even if it were you might be careful about mentioning it in some environments. It’s great to have the transparency to not have to watch your words when a
coworker asks about “your partner”. Plus being free to be emotionally honest at work is just good for your mental wellbeing, in my opinion! If you trust your coworkers, be honest with
them. If you don’t… perhaps you need to start looking for a better job?
Footnotes
1 I’m not counting my freelance work during any of those periods, although I’ve been
pretty transparent with them too.
2 Let’s be clear: most queer folks, just like most straight folks, seem to be
similarly-inclined towards monogamy. But ethnical non-monogamy in various forms seems to represent a larger minority within queer communities than outside them. There’s all kinds of
possible reasons for this, and smarter people than me have written about them, but personally I’m of the opinion that, for many, it stems from the fact that by the time you’re
societally-forced to critically examine your relationships, you might as well go the extra mile and decide whether your relationship structure is right for you too. In other
words: I suspect that cis hetro folks would probably have a proportional parity of polyamory if they weren’t saturated with media and cultural role models that show them what their
relationship “should” look like.
3 Unwilling to lie, I made absolutely clear that I was neither the father of either of
them nor the husband of their mother (among other reasons, the law prohibits Ruth from marrying me on account of being married to JTA), but pointed out that my contract merely stipulated that I was the partner of a birth parent, which was something I’d made completely
clear since I first started working there. I’m not sure if I was just rubber-stamped through the University’s leave process as a matter of course or if they took a deeper look at me
and figured “yeah, we’re not going to risk picking a legal fight with that guy”, but I got my leave granted.
4 If you enjoyed my “Howdymattic”, you’ll probably also love the outtakes.
Our household costs have increased considerably over the last decade, not least because children and pets are expensive (who knew?).
Sample data
For my examples below, assume a three-person family. I’m using unrealistic numbers for easy arithmetic.
Alice earns £2,000, Bob earns £1,000, and Chris earns £500, for a total household income of £3,500.
Alice spends £1,450, Bob £800, and Chris £250, for a total household expenditure of £2,500.
Model #1: Straight Split
We’ve never done things this way, but for completeness sake I’ll mention it: the simplest way that households can split their costs is by dividing them between the participants equally:
if the family make a £60 shopping trip, £20 should be paid by each of Alice, Bob, and Chris.
My example above shows exactly why this might not be a smart choice: this model would have each participant contribute £833.33 over the course of the month, which is more than Chris
earned. If this month is representative, then Chris will gradually burn through their savings and go broke, while Alice will put over a grand into her savings account every month!
“Land, Bread, Peace… and Spreadsheets!”
Model #2: Income-Assessed
We’re a bunch of leftie socialist types, and wanted to reflect our political outlook in our household finances, too. So rather than just splitting our costs equally between us, we
initially implemented a means-assessment system based on the relative differences between our incomes. The thinking was that somebody that earns twice as much should
contribute twice as much towards the costs of running the household.
Using our example family above, here’s how that might look:
Alice earned 57% of the household income, so she should have contributed 57% of the household costs: £1,425. She overpaid by £25.
Bob earned 29% of the household income, so he should have contributed 29% of the household costs: £725. He overpaid by £75.
Chris earned 14% of the household income, so they should have contributed 14% of the household costs: £350. They underpaid by £100.
Therefore, at the end of the month Chris should settle up by giving £25 to Alice and £75 to Bob.
By analogy: The “Income-Assessed” model is functionally equivalent to splitting each and every expense according to the participants income – e.g. if a £100 bill landed
on their doormat, Alice would pay £57, Bob £29, and Chris £14 of it – but has the convenience that everybody just pays for things “as they go along” and then square everything up when
their paycheques come in.
You know what else is surprisingly expensive? Having the roof of your house taken off.
Over time, our expenditures grew and changed and our incomes grew, but they didn’t do so in an entirely simple fashion, and we needed to make some tweaks to our income-assessed model of
household finance contributions. For example:
Gross vs Net Income: For a while, some of our incomes were split into a mixture of employed income (on which income tax was paid as-we-earned) and self-employed
income (for which income tax would be calculated later), making things challenging. We agreed that net income (i.e. take-home pay) was the correct measure for us to use for the
income-based part of the calculation, which also helped keep things fair as some of us began to cross into and out of the higher earner tax bracket.
Personal Threshold: At times, a subset of us earned a disproportionate portion of the household income (there were short periods where one of us earned over 50% of
the household income; at several other times two family members each earned thrice that of the third). Our costs increased too, but this imposed an regressive burden on the
lower-earner(s), for whom those costs represented a greater proportion of their total income. To attempt to mitigate this, we introduced a personal threshold somewhat analogous to the
income tax “personal allowance” (the policy that means that you don’t pay tax on your first £12,570 of income).
Eventually, we came to see that what we were doing was trying to patch a partially-broken system, and tried something new!
Model #3: Same-Residual
In 2022, we transitioned to a same-residual system that attempts to share out out money in an even-more egalitarian way. Instead of each person contributing in accordance
with their income, the model attempts to leave each person with the same average amount of disposable personal income at the end. The difference is most-profound where the
relative incomes are most-diverse.
With the example family above, that would mean:
The household earned £3,500 and spent £2,500, leaving £1,000. Dividing by 3 tells us that each person should have £333.33 after settling up.
Alice earned earned £2,000 and spent £1,450, so she has £550 left. That’s £216.67 too much.
Bob earned earned £1,000 and spent £800, so she has £200 left. That’s £133.33 too little.
Chris earned earned £500 and spent £250, so she has £250 left. That’s £83.33 too little.
Therefore, at the end of the month Alice should settle up by giving £133.33 to Bob and £83.33 to Chris (note there’s a 1p rounding error).
That’s a very different result than the Income-Assessed calculation came up with for the same family! Instead of Chris giving money to Alice and Bob, because those two
contributed to household costs disproportionately highly for their relative incomes, Alice gives money to Bob and Chris, because their incomes (and expenditures) were much lower.
Ignoring any non-household costs, all three would expect to have the same bank balance at the start of the month as at the end, after settlement.
By analogy: The “Same-Residual” model is functionally equivalent to having everybody’s salary paid into a shared bank account, out of which all household expenditures
are paid, and at the end of the month everything that’s left in the bank account gets split equally between the participants.
Our version of the spreadsheet has inherited a lot of hacky edges, many for now-unused functionality.
We’ve made tweaks to this model, too, of course. For example: we’ve set a “target” residual and, where we spend little enough in a month that we would each be eligible for more
than that, we instead sweep the excess into our family savings account. It’s a nice approach to help build up a savings reserve without feeling a pinch.
I’m sure our model will continue to evolve, as it has for the last decade and a half, but for now it seems stable, fair, and reasonable. Maybe it’ll work for your household too (whether
or not you’re also a polyamorous family!): take a look at the spreadsheet in Google Drive and give it a go.
I dislike recipe posts that, before you get anywhere near the list of ingredients, tell you what feels like the entire life story of the author and their family.
“Every morning my mother would warm up the stove, and this was a wood-fired stove back in the day, and make these. We lived in Minnosota…” I don’t care. I can’t begin to tell you how
much I don’t care. Just tell me how to make the damn muffins ‘cos the picture’s got me drooling.
This is different. This is the latest and
so-far only exception. This, I care about:
When we moved into a house of our own, I bought us a tea kettle that whistled in harmony when it boiled. Rent was cheap, and we were happy. Those were the days of sweet potato hash,
wilted kale, and increasingly exotic baked goods. There was the Me-Making-You-Tea-in-the-Morning-Because-You-Hated-Mornings Phase, but also the
You-Making-Me-Tea-in-the-Morning-Because-You-Went-to-Work-at-5am Phase.
…
Lucy tells a story so rich and personal about her and her wife’s experience of life, cohabitation, food, and the beauty of everyday life. I haven’t even read the recipe for The
Eggs, even though it sounds pretty delicious.
…
Over the years I’ve found words for people who have done what we’re doing now, but I’ve also found a deeper truth: our queer community doesn’t demand a definition. They know that
chili oil can change a life just as much as a marriage. That love is in the making and unmaking of beds. The candlelit baths. The laughter. The proffered feast that nourishes.
Queerness makes room within it for these relationships, or rather: queerness spirals outward. It blooms and embraces. That is the process by which we broaden our palates, welcoming
what might seem new to us, but which is actually older than we know.
…
It’s a great reminder about focussing on what’s important. About the value of an ally whether the world’s working with you or against you. And, of course, about how every relationship,
no matter what shape, size, or form, can enjoy a little more queering once in a while. Go read it.
Dr. Doe’s latest Sexplanations vlog is on polyamorous language, and despite being – or, perhaps, because I’m – a bit of a long-toothed polyamorist these days, fully a quarter
or more of the terms she introduced were new to me! Fascinating!
A slightly tongue-in-cheek (see the “serial monogamy” chain and some of the subtitles!) but moderately-complete diagram of popular varieties of relationship structure. Obviously there’s
gaps – relationships are as diverse as their participants – and lots of room for refinement, but the joy of an infographic is making visible the breadth of a field, not in providing
encyclopaedic comprehension of that field. I especially like the attention to detail in “connecting” often-related concepts.
It’s that time of year again when I comparison-shop for car insurance, and every time I come across a new set of reasons to hate the developers at Confused.com. How do you confuse me?
Let me count the ways.
No means yes
I was planning to enumerate my concerns to them directly, via their contact form, but when I went to do so I spotted this bit of
genius, which clinched it and made me write a blog post instead:
Clicking the word “Yes” means “Yes”. Clicking the word “No” means “Yes” as well.
Turns out that there’s a bit of the old sloppy-paste going on there:
Honestly, I’m used to my unusual name causing trouble by now and I know how to work around it in the way that breaks the fewest systems (I can even usually
get airline tickets without too much difficulty nowadays). But these kinds of (arbitrary) restrictions must frustrate folks like Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe’ekahaunaele.
I guess their developers didn’t realise that this blog post was parody?
Also, that’s not my title!
This one, though, pisses me off:
As everybody knows, there are only six titles, and two of them are “Dr”.
This is a perfect example of why your forms should ask for what you actually want to know, not for what you think people want to tell you. Just ask!
If you want to know my gender, ask for my gender! (I’m a man, by the way.)
I don’t understand why you want to know – after all, it’s been illegal since 2012 to risk-assess/price car insurance differently on the grounds of gender – but maybe you’ve
got a valid reason. Which hopefully you’ll tell me in a tooltip. Like you’re using it as a (terrible checksum) when you check my driving license details, that’s fine!
If you want to know my title, ask for my title! (I prefer not to use one, but if you must use one I’d prefer Mx.)
This ought to be an optional field, of course, and ideally you want a free text input or else you’ll always have missed somebody (Lord, Reverend, Prince, Wing Commander…).
It’s in your interests because I’m totally going to pick at random otherwise. Today I’m a Ms.
Consistency? Never heard of it.
It’s not a big thing, but if you come up with a user interface paradigm like “clicking More… shows more buttons”, you ought to stick to it.
Maybe their internal style guide says “a More… button with three additional options should use buttons, but four additional options should be a drop-down”. But it seems more-likely
that they just don’t have one.
Again, I’m not sure exactly what all of this data is used for, nor why there’s a need to differentiate between married couples and civil partnerships, but let’s just assume this is all
necessary and legitimate and just ask ourselves: why are we using drop-downs now for “More…”? We were using buttons just a second ago!
This was just crying out for a type-in field. But I guess the same developer who did the “Title” question did this one too, and wanted to show off the fancy “more buttons” control
they’d written. (Imaginary style guide be damned!)
What’s my occupation again?
There’s so much to unpack in the “occupation” part of the form that I’m not even sure where to begin. Let’s just pick out a few things:
I never answered a question this hard even in the exams I did when I was a student. Why do we care where students live… except if they’re postgrads? If I’m a mature student
studying a postgraduate course in medicine while living at home with my parents… which of the five possible options should I pick? And, again: what difference could it conceivably
make?
The student thing is just the beginning, though. You can declare up to two jobs, but if the first one is “house person/parent” you can’t have a second one. If you’re self-employed, that
has to be your first job even though the guidance says that the one you spend most time on must be the first one (this kind of thing infuriated me when I used to spend 60% of
my work time employed, 20% self-employed, and 20% studying).
I’m not saying it’s easy to make a form like this. I know from experience that it’s not. I am saying that Confused.com make it look a lot harder than it is.
Well that clears everything up. Also, I think you mean “houseperson”, unless you’re referring to somebody who is half-house/half-person, like some kind of architectural werewolf.
What do you mean, you live with your partner?
At a glance, this sounds like a “poly world problem”, but hear me out:
What you’re seeing here is a reference-identity error. I can’t possibly be living together with somebody as a couple if their marital status isn’t “Living With Partner”.
I put Ruth‘s martial status as married, because she’s married to JTA. But then when it asked how she was related to me, it wouldn’t accept
“Living together (couple)”.
If I put Ruth as the primary policyholder (proposer) though, I don’t even get the option of “living together (couple)” to describe her relationship with me. ‘Cos it’s physically
impossible to have a partner and be married, right?
Even if you don’t think it’s odd that they hide “living with partner” button as an option to describe a married person’s relationship to somebody other than their spouse… you’ve still
got to agree that it’s a little bit odd that they don’t hide the “spouse” button. In other words, this user interface is more-okay with you having multiple spouses than it is
with you having a spouse and an unmarried partner!
And of course this isn’t just about polyamorous folks: there are perfectly “normal” reasons that a person might end up confused by this interface, too. For example a separated (but not
yet divorced) couple, one of whom has a new partner (it’s not even inconceivable that such a pair might share custody of a car). Also interesting is the fact that the form doesn’t
care about the gender of your spouse (it doesn’t ask for “husband” or “wife”) but does care about the gender of your parent, child, or sibling. What gives?
Half a dozen easy fixes. Go for it, Confused.com.
Given that their entire marketing plan for most of the last two decades has been that they reduce customer confusion, Confused.com’s user interface leaves a lot to be
desired. As I’ve mentioned before – and speaking as a web developer that’s been in the game for longer than their company has – it’s not necessarily easy to get this kind of
thing right. But you can improve a form like this, a little at a time. And every little win counts for something: a more-satisfied returning customer, perhaps, or a new word-of-mouth
recommendation.
Or you can just let it languish and continue to have the kind of form that people mock on the public Internet.
It’ll be a year until I expect to comparison-shop for car insurance again: let’s see how they get on, shall we?
Update (21 January 2021): Confused.com Respond!
I didn’t expect to receive any response to this post: most organisations don’t when I call-out the problems with their websites (not least
because I’m more than a little bit sarcastic about it!). I never heard back from the Digital Climate Strike folks, for example,
when I pointed out that their website was a great example of exactly the kind of problem they were protesting. But Confused.com
passed on my thoughts to Product Manager Gareth who took a look at them and gave me a £20 Amazon gift card by way of thanks. Nice one, Confused.com!
For the first episode of the Human Tapestry, I talked to Dan, a bisexual man who lives in Oxford, England, with his partner and her husband in what he describes as a “polyamorous
V-shaped thingy”. Listen as we talk about relationships, identities, the “bi-cycle”, and various forms of vegetarianism.
…
Fellow Automattician Mike has just launched his new podcast, exploring the diversity of human experience of relationships, sexuality, attraction, identity, gender, and all that jazz.
Earlier this year, I volunteered myself as an interviewee, but I had no idea that I’d feature in the opening episode! If hearing people in your ears is something you like to
do, and you’re interested in my journey so-far of polyamory and bisexuality, have a listen. And if you’re not: it might still be worth bookmarking the show for a listen later on – it
could be an interesting ride.
Possibly SFW, depending on your work. Specific warnings:
Some swearing, including use of a homophobic slur (while describing the experience of being a victim of homophobia)
Frank discussion of my relationship history (although with greater anonymity than appears elsewhere on this blog)
Annoying squeaky chair sounds in the background (I’ve replaced that chair, now)
Skimming-over-the-details of specific events, resulting in an incomplete picture (with apologies to anybody misrepresented as a result)
Caveats aside, I think it came out moderately well; Mike’s an experienced interviewer with a good focus on potentially interesting details. He’s also looking for more guests, if you’d
like to join him. He says it best, perhaps, with his very broad description of what the show’s about:
If you have a gender, have attractions (or non-attractions) to certain humans (or all humans), or have certain practices (or non-practices) in the bedroom (or elsewhere), we’d love to
talk to you!
I’m still lagging way-behind on writing-up the nonfiction I’ve been reading this year, and I’m long
overdue1 to share my love of
Holly Gramazio‘s debut novel, The Husbands. Which is excellent; truly
un-put-downable. I’d come across Holly’s writing before by playing Dicey Dungeons, but I hadn’t realised that until later when,
four chapters into this book, I decided to look her up (in the hope, perhaps, that she’d written any other books I could add to my reading list – the answer is… not yet).
