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?
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!
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.
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.
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?
