Recapping a series of guest posts: Don’t forget your audience

This week – after a preface – I featured three guest posts that were originally on FetLife and addressed polyamory.

And man, did the reason I wanted to share them really come out.

As I kept saying, there’s three big reasons why I posted them:

  1. They highlight and dissect some of the preconceptions around polyamory.

  2. They have a specific point of view and audience that may not be the same as my own (and that’s good).

  3. They show that relationships – especially polyamorous relationships, but it’s true of all relationships – are individual things.

In the preface, I retold a story that author told me. In it, some “conventional wisdom” things about polyamory – or hell, relationships in general – completely alienated an audience of BDSM folks. By sharing well-intentioned points of view, they managed to convince a whole mess of people that these two groups of people had nothing in common.

And that was kind of the point of sharing a series of posts from someone with a viewpoint that, while maybe it used to be common, is now a little less represented and respected in the (visible) polyamory community.

I’ve seen people driven away from the polyamory community because of people insisting that “hierarchy is always bad” or “rules are always bad” or “you should not be looking for this or that kind of partner”.  I’ve seen other people – myself included – completely fork up relationships by simply adopting those lines without really realizing what they meant, or the nuance that was needed.

I’ve yet to hear of someone driven away by “some folks want heirarchies, some don’t” or “some folks want more formal rules, others don’t”, and so on.

What continues to surprise me is that, in a community where every relationship is, by definition, individualized to the extreme, there are so many ideas that one way is the only right way and every other way is the only wrong way.

Hopefully this series of posts – and the discussion around them – has helped rectify that.

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