The Cons of Spreadsheet Non-Monogamy

Try to see categories as tools, not as goals

A running joke among many non-monogamous communities goes something like this: 

What’s the one thing everyone needs to make non-monogamy work? A calendar!

The setup softly leads you to look for some warm emotional “thing”, like “trust” or “healing” or “compersion” etc., and then instead delivers something rather cold and concrete. It’s funny to those who tell this joke because dating multiple people involves doing an awful lot of scheduling and “let me check my calendar” is the first thing a lot of people say when asked out on a date even by someone they’ve been seeing for quite a long time. And so we are led to expect something exotic and instead brought to something familiar.

Non-monogamy can involve a lot of defining and quantifying - not only of time, but of the people you gravitate to. Some see monogamy as putting horrible, unwarranted pressure on one person to satisfy each and every one of your emotional and sexual needs, and so then get to work defining their emotional and sexual needs and slotting distinct people into distinct emotional and sexual categories. Perhaps you have your ‘domestic partner’, the one you come home to - your ‘kinky partner’, the one with whom you indulge your deliciously dirty fantasies and don’t really talk to otherwise - your ‘adventure partner’, the one you take with you on excursions to far-away destinations - your ‘bowling partner’, the one you take bowling on Tuesdays because nobody else in your life wants to, and also you two exchange orgasms in the parking lot. 

In this view it’s not just the calendar that is necessary, but the spreadsheet too - one partner per row, well-defined in terms of the needs they meet and the needs they do not, a clean line drawn around where they stop and where the other intimacy in your life begins. Your attention and time are defined and optimally distributed across each relationship to create the perfectly nourishing, perfectly stable balance, a perfect love stitched together by all the pieces of intimacy.  

One of my big problems with theory, modernity, contemporary politics, etc is the practice of relating to people first and foremost as instances of a category. Reflecting on ourselves, on what we have in common and what we don’t, on what we’re looking for and what we have room for in our lives, is great to the extent that it brings us closer together, in my opinion. Where it falls short for me is when we start relating to people first and foremost as, say, ‘my domestic partner’ rather than as the person they actually are, in and of themselves, a beautiful and ever-surprising mystery, someone with a name. 

Where it works is, say, going on a dating app and laying out exactly what you are looking for and having that clarity help connect you with someone who wants that same thing too. And then, once that job is done, the category can be discarded, like a ladder kicked away once climbed.

The point, as I see it, is to actually love the people you are with as the particular people that they are - not as a replaceable instance of a category, and not as a mere means to an end of enacting non-monogamy.