The Summer Polyam Fam Experiment
photo credit: random stranger at the water park
If you follow me on Instagram, you may know that my polycule family engaged in a little experiment this summer. I planned to spend 4 weeks living with my long-distance partner in DC, having each of my kids join me there one at a time for 2 weeks at a time. The plan was to spend the last 2 weeks of June in DC with my younger kid, then all of us (me, my younger kid, my DC partner, his kids, my two partners in Atlanta, and my older kid) would spend the first two weeks of July together at the beach, and then I’d return to DC for the last 2 weeks of July with my older kid.
I want to note that we were able to do this because it was summer, there was no school for my kids, my DC partner had space available to host one me and of my kids, I have a remote-work job, and my Atlanta family has 2 cars, which enabled me to drive to DC and have the flexibility of my own car. All of that is a heap of privilege. I know what I was able to do just might not be possible for other people. Others may have even more flexibility than I have.
When I shared this whole plan on Instagram back in June, I presented it as a creative way to be with my long-distance partner, who is definitely an anchor person to me. I thought it would be nice to create a domestic/family experience together. We’d talked about it a lot over the years, wondering what it might be like, but never really experienced it. We’d spent a lot of time together as families, especially during the pandemic when we were each other’s pods. My kids and Tom’s kids are close like family, but we’d never been all that domestic together.
I had a lot of dreams about how this would go. I wasn’t under any illusions that it would be all blissful. I know that living together, especially living together with kids, is a whole different ball of wax than having planned weekly dates - protected and independent from our domestic obligations (which is what we did before we moved) - or brief regular visits where one of us was in the other’s space without any of our daily responsibilities with us (what we’ve been doing the past 2 years).
I did believe though that this time together it would give Tom and I things that we’d been longing for in our partnership (time, togetherness, collaborating on daily life). I hoped that we’d emerge from the experience feeling closer than ever.
I would love to tell you that it all worked out exactly as I thought it would. But that so rarely happens in my life!
Instead nothing went the way I expected or envisioned. I returned home with a lot to think about. Humbled. Reflective.
Tom and I didn’t break up or anything. We didn’t even really have a fight about anything. We still love each other, and value our partnership. We are still making plans for when we will see each other next.
We both agreed however that the experience of living together and parenting together and going about the day-to-day of our lives together was… hard.
I find myself coming back to something I said in my podcast episode The 9 Relationships of a Modern Marriage: not every good relationship is compatible in all the ways. In fact, most aren’t. You can have great going out together compatibility but poor at-home cleanliness compatibility. You can have great sexual compatibility but not good sleeping-in-the-same-bed compatibility. (These aren’t where Tom and I clashed - these are just examples.)
What Tom and I found were some important places of friction in the ways that we do life. Some were simple (but not easy!) like the temperature we like to set the thermostat for sleeping. (Him: quite warm! Me: I’m perimenopausal and I grew up in Georgia where even the garages are air conditioned…) Others were thorny, like how we relate to parenting our kids.
Most of the places where there was dissonance were things we already knew about - but experiencing them over and over and navigating them with compassion and love took a lot of our capacity. And speaking for myself, I didn’t always speak my frustrations with the level of grace that reflects my values.
“I returned home with a lot to think about. Humbled. Reflective.”
I ultimately feel like we did a good job talking about the places where there was tension. It was also IMMENSELY illuminating to me.
Here are my big-picture takeaways from the experience:
Not every relationship is compatible for every type of entanglement. And just because you want it to work, doesn’t mean it will.
You’re not entitled to ask the other person to change things that may be working for them. Compromising for someone else’s comfort or asking someone to compromise for your comfort is okay, but it’s important to stay humble. Just because it works for YOU doesn’t make it objectively better.
Sometimes an adjustment that someone else makes at your request doesn’t cost them very much, even if they wouldn’t have made it if you hadn’t asked. And sometimes it even benefits them. Believe them if they tell you that.
I need a lot of environmental support to parent well - more than what I think of myself as needing. Without my kids, I am more flexible and adaptable to a lot of environments. With them, I’m way more rigid. It was jarring to notice how fussy I can get when I’m in a space with my kids versus when it’s just me.
Being the sole parent for my kiddo meant that a lot of my time and energy from about 6PM to 9PM was spent with my kid. Dinner, book-reading, bedtime cuddles. And by the time I was done, many nights I was done. Having that tiny sliver of time be the main time Tom and I got with each other was not what we are used to, and it was hard.
I live better with more than just one other adult. I haven’t lived with just one other adult since 2013. Sharing domestic labor with just one other person actually doesn’t really work for me on a regular basis. I either feel like I’m doing too much or not enough, and both feelings are stressful. Having 3 adults in my home in Atlanta to share the domestic labor keeps me out of this cycle.
Figuring out how you like to live in your home takes time, and Tom and I are in different points in our journeys on that. There is a lot that I have figured out, and there is a lot Tom is just starting to figure out. That can create a harmful power dynamic that I don’t want to be in - and it was also hard not to be in it because I know how I like to do things. One of Tom’s strengths as a human is how open and flexible he is; however, my need for things to be “just so” can harm his sense of agency in his own space.
I love my home and the people in it, and being away from them for as long as I was was not ideal. Both Kyrr and Drew remained supportive of the experience, but we missed each other a lot. Maybe two weeks was just too long.
Parenting one kid at a time was great for my relationships with my children. I feel so much closer to each of them having spent this time together. Parenting one kid is much easier in many ways as well. However, being a solo parent with a 2nd/4th grader in a city I didn’t live in, while also working, meant that I had precious little time for my adult relationships, including Tom. I rely a lot on my coparents, family and community in Atlanta, and I didn’t have as much of that in DC.
There were a lot of moments of awesomeness in the time we spent together this summer at Tom’s place. A lot of places where our partnership really shined in a way that only our unique alchemy can shine. Even when things were tough or frustrating, we were able to keep remembering love with each other.
So ultimately, I felt grateful for the time together. I’m grateful for being able to be so present in each other’s lives.
I’m also grateful for what it showed me. And grateful that we aren’t trying to live together right now. I even found myself grateful for the distance at which our relationship has to operate right now, even though it’s sometimes painful because of all the ways we are SO GOOD together.
I think the biggest takeaway I have is that I never want to live in a home with just one other adult EVER again. Living with more than one adult that you get along with is just awesome. It smoothes out so many bumps. When I really think about it, I may not be domestically compatible with any of my partners 1-on-1. I’m trying not to beat myself up by making up that that means I’m a uniquely difficult person to live with (but maybe it’s true!)
Regarding Tom, I know that things work remarkably well when the four of us, Kyrr, Tom, Drew and I are all under the same roof, as we are during our annual summer beach vacation. Even though we are collectively parenting 5-6 kids. I think we all balance each other out beautifully - the same way a 4-legged stool is much stronger than a…2 legged stool? (Does that even exist?) I think that’s why the friction we had 1-1 surprised me so much. But maybe domesticity and parenting during that vacation time actually works as well as it does for Tom and I because we’re part of a larger group. (Well and we’re on vacation, so we don’t have work pressures pushing down on all of us…)
I feel more strongly than ever that many of us would benefit from getting more creative about how we live and define family. Queer folks have been reinventing family for decades. I am grateful that folks like Diana Adams and the Chosen Family Law Center, Chanee Jackson Kendall of Intentional Polyamory, the folks at Remodeled Love and so many other unconventional families who are challenging the conventional nuclear family structure. It simply doesn’t work for everyone. It definitely doesn’t work for me.
What’s next for Tom and I?
One thing I didn’t mention yet: I ended up leaving the second two-week visit a few days early. Not because we couldn’t stand each other anymore. Someone in Tom’s ecosystem got COVID, and it just wasn’t within my risk tolerance to stay and risk contracting it (nearly all my family had already dealt with it in May.)
Even so, me deciding to leave early caused us both to heave a big sigh of relief. We’d been trying so hard to make things work and feel good, but knowing that it was coming to an end took a lot of pressure off of both of us. After that decision to go home early, the last few days we had together were some of the sweetest and most connected of the whole visit.
Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is let go.
Though I don’t imagine we won’t try other ways to stay as deeply connected in person as we feel in our hearts, we’ll no doubt apply the lessons we both learned from this summer experiment.
What experiments in alternative living arrangements have you tried or heard about along your polyamory journey? I’d love to hear from you!
With love,
Libby
