Commitment Without Escalation

In my article Non-Romantic Partnerships I talk about how the term partnership seemed like the best word to describe what I was looking for in my most intimate relationships. I was using the term quite lightly, but even then, I think I was too quick to employ the term without thinking of all the conceptual baggage (for lack of a better word) that comes with it.

I have since thought and written more about partnership and realized that it wasn’t quite what I had in mind (or in my unconscious) when I was first dipping my toes into CNM and writing Non-Romantic Partnerships. I am someone who has a more mutualist view of partnership; so much so that I really don’t even feel like a partnership is necessary for me to get my emotional needs met. If I care about someone, as long as I am in their life and able to connect with them and seek to better our respective lives, that’s good enough for me.

I think what I’m looking for is something more like “commitment”. I’m not looking to be someone’s everything and I certainly do not want someone to be my everything.

What does commitment look like?

Commitment to me in part is simply committing to being with someone for a certain duration. I don’t believe in forever and always, but I think there can be something more manageable and immediate, like monthly or yearly. I’ve heard the term “handfasting” (coming from an old Celtic ritual) been used as a way to check in at some interval to see if you still want to continue the relationship, but I’m sure there are other terms and rituals out there used by people as well.

Additionally, to me commitment is closely related to the idea of investment, as in investing in the relationship. It means that you won’t just try to coast or passively pay into the relationship when you have the time, but (a) actively making an effort to (b) maintain the relationship.

(a) Actively making an effort

This looks different for everyone and is context dependent. Active effort is sometimes hard or impossible, but as long as I can gather positive intent then that’s usually good enough for me.

(b) Maintaining the relationship

In Jenny Odell’s talk/book “How to Do Nothing”, she talks about maintenance. She essentially says that even just maintaining a baseline actually takes a lot of work, and this kind of work is greatly de-valued. Anyone who has lived in an apartment knows just how much cleaning is constantly being done for your home to even be remotely clean. However, that work is invisible to anyone. I liken it to treading water, where from the surface it looks like you are just floating doing nothing to stay in the same place, but under the water you are exerting yourself to stay there.

The relationship will of course grow and change over time, but that isn’t my goal because change is a law of the universe (“The only constant is change” - Heraclitus?). There can be specific goals like being better at communicating your needs or something like that, but the goal isn’t necessarily change, it’s just that it’s a necessary part of the process.

Progression and Escalation

Progression and escalation on its face seem very similar, and they are, but with some subtle differences that I think are important to discuss separately.

Escalation

The Relationship Escalator is a term coined by journalist/writer Amy Gahran. It describes the cultural expectations surrounding courtship to marriage to sharing a home to raising children, etc. There is a certain automaticity and hierarchy to the steps of the escalator.

In my opinion, escalation is the only lens through which we understand romance in our current society. This is partly why polyamory can be difficult and/or delegitimized. Conventional social scripts of a relationship escalator don’t really allow for the relationship escalator to be done with multiple people. It also just is hard to do it with multiple people! Are you gonna get married and move in with multiple people? You certainly can and I won’t stop you, but I think that this is really a small portion of ENM practitioners.

The fix isn’t to adapt the relationship escalator to fit polyamory. Instead its to make us feel comfortable with the idea of not following the escalator. This is where the idea of progression comes in, but it also ties back to “How to Do Nothing” as well.

Progression

We as a society (in the U.S. at least), value progress. If you are not growing, changing, progressing, then you are standing still, and you are practically dead. Combine this with social enforcement mechanisms of your parents or in-laws asking about when you’re going to move in together and have children means that there is real pressure whether internal or external to always be moving upward.

You shouldn’t have to feel like you need to be working toward something in your relationship. You can try to get deeper with your partner, buy a house, or these other things, but that’s only if you want to. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.

There are no milestones that you have to hit as a relationship. Thinking this only makes you prone to compare your relationship to others and feel like you are somehow behind.

The relationship is the point

If there are no goals then there can be no progress. Progress towards what? There are no failures, but no successes either. You are not moving toward a more perfect relationship, you aren’t moving toward anything.

The relationship itself seems like the point to me. Any choices to me seem like they should be made to help facilitate the relationship. There are dynamic needs in a relationship because it is made up of people who are going through things in life who will need different things at different times. You might hang out more, or less; have much to talk about or sit in comfortable silence. As long as all the parties involved in the relationship want to continue the relationship, then you have a good relationship in my book.