http://cosmicbabe.diary-x.com/journal.cgi?entry=20040408
This website talks about levels of poly, I will basically copy it here so that I can talk about it. 🙂
A fuckbuddy is someone you only see for booty calls, and normally there isn’t much – if any – emphasis placed on a friendship between the two of you. A fuckbuddy is someone you only see if you know you’re likely (or certain!) to get laid.
I am actually somewhat fond of the fuckbuddies I have had in my life, but I think I jump into being fuckbuddies too easily. Maybe I should learn some of that “restraint” business.
A FWB or tertiary is a friend you happen to have sex with on occasion. I definitely believe the biggest difference between a secondary and a FWB is whether or not the relationship stands strong, on its own, without the presence of a sexual aspect to that relationship. In a genuine FWB relationship, a friendship never needs the sexual aspect to be close, caring, or emotionally intimate & trusting. Being sexual with one another is strictly gravy, never a high priority in the friendship, and the friendship does not suffer in any way for lack of a sexual aspect when you choose to end the sexual part of the friendship.
Yay!! Indeed a level of relationship I am extremely comfortable with. Most of my really lasting friendships have some sort of sexual component somewhere.
A secondary, on the other hand, is someone with which you share such an emotional/romantic and/or sexual connection that you’re unhappy or discontent without a sexual aspect to the relationship, and the desire to have a sexual relationship is a strong component of the friendship. You can’t continue a secondary relationship as such if there isn’t a sexual connection, regardless of the level of friendship you share. Some secondary relationships have very little in the way of friendship, indeed – in the sense of whether the friendship would continue if the sex and romance ended. You are willing to extend to a secondary more privileges or commitment (spoken or unspoken) than you would a FWB, and a secondary often expects to be placed as a higher priority in your life than a FWB or most of your platonic friends (i.e. you don’t break a date with them to hang out with the boys/girls). With a secondary there may or may not have a commitment, and if there is, that commitment may or may not be intended to last indefinitely.
This is where I’m getting fuzzy.
(After a brief and unhelpful attempt at sleep I have some more points I want to add to this section.
I want there to be some sort of trial/testing state between FWB and secondary. I’m actually really slow to consider something a “relationship.” In my monogamous fumblings I consider myself to have had two relationships but many many testing periods. For me that means that only two people made it to more than three months of dating. Anything less than three months and it wasn’t really a relationship. Well, in some anal retentive fashion every one night stand is “relationship” but you know what I mean. Which I suppose means that I have had one secondary relationship so far and I am not quite to considering two others as secondaries yet? But putting stuff in terms of just time limits doesn’t work either. Somehow I don’t want to just think of stuff in terms of intensity of emotional reaction though. I find myself wanting to explain now why/how I think of the people I am interacting with but I don’t really want to go there. I feel like that can only be dangerous. Suffice to say, I have been blessed in the last 5 months with some truly amazing people in my life and I thoroughly grateful. Categorizing them is difficult and unwieldly.
How do I know when the “testing” period is over and something is a secondary? Ack!! I don’t know. And now I will stop before I fumble through trying to dissect my relationships here because I don’t want to do that.
A primary is someone with whom you share love, respect, trust, protectiveness, friendship, a sexual & romantic connection, the rights & responsibilities of an indefinitely-committed relationship, and a very high priority in your time, decisions, and considerations. Usually there is shared finances, housing, and life goals in a primary relationship, as well…but not always (there are plenty of “commuter or non-living-together marriages” that work well indefinitely, even if they’re not actually commonplace). I believe a primary relationship comes ahead of any children you might have, as long as the choices made don’t actually harm the children – because, while a parent’s job is to protect & sacrifice for & nurture their young, kids are supposed to grow up & move out to their separate lives, but your primary is supposed to be there for you forever, so those who don’t treat the relationship with that intention & level of respect are practically asking for dysfunction or divorce. A primary is intended to be a lifemate, and your actions reflect that intent.
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To further illustrate, I see several key aspects of distinguishing a relationship: sex, friendship, romance, and commitment.
“Commitment” is how much time, energy, attention, consideration, and priority that you allot a person. Commitment does not necessarily mean that you have promises of a spoken commitment with someone – since a spoken commitment reflects intent – but rather how your actions reflect the amount of time, energy, attention, consideration, and priority that you grant someone in your life. I view actions as far more important than intent.
In a fuckbuddy relationship, the aspects are as follows:
Sex: Yes
Friendship: Possibly
Romance: No
Commitment: No
Main focus: Sex
In a FWB (friends-with-benefits) relationship, the aspects are as follows:
Sex: Yes
Friendship: Yes
Romance: No
Commitment: Yes, but not a romantic commitment
Main focus: Friendship
In a secondary relationship, the aspects are as follows:
Sex: Yes
Friendship: Usually
Romance: Usually
Commitment: Possibly, but not necessarily
Main focus: Sex & romance or sex & romantic friendship
In a primary relationship, the aspects are as follows:
Sex: Yes
Friendship: Yes
Romance: Yes
Commitment: Yes
Main focus: Ideally, all equally important; at the very least, sex, romance, & commitment
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I think it can become extremely difficult to distinguish between one type of relationship and another type if the people involved start blurring the lines. If you date your fuckbuddy or tertiary/FWB twice as often as your secondary, does that fuckbuddy or FWB become a secondary? Maybe, maybe not. But your actions reflect a level of priority (which is part of a commitment, spoken or unspoken) on that person that probably necessitates a re-evaluation of whether they’re “only” a fuckbuddy or FWB, and possibly you need to re-evaluate your relationship with your secondary, as well. That’s just one example of the many ways that the type of relationship can become indistinct.
Basically this is one hella cool woman. I recommend that people start checking her blog and such if they don’t already. Yay cool girls.
Interesting definitions. I can’t really argue with them at all, which is unusual when trying to define something with so many shades of grey.
That is why I thought this was so freakin cool! I’m going to have to read this chick more. She is insightful. 🙂
I thought the definition of secondary was pretty sucky. It’s like FWB but with potentially LESS friendship? Which makes it more like fuck-buddies but with more sex. It was a really useless definition, to the extent that it was even meaningful at all.
I always thought of a secondary relationship as being more on par with a primary relationship except with less time investment, less expectation of future committment, and, oh, the primary comes first on all dealbreaker decisions.
But then this is coming from someone who wishes she’d never even heard of poly and is trying really hard NOT to analyze it anymore because it serves no useful purpose to her.
Wow. Ok then. I can respect that poly doesn’t work for you. That is ok. I’m coming from a different place though.
I suppose I can see where you might interpret that she feels a secondary resembles a fuck-buddy with more sex but I don’t feel it is the interpretation she was going for. I could always be wrong. I read it more that a secondary is someone with whom you feel a strong enough sexual connection that not having the sexual connection is unnacceptable, but that there is more emotional/romantic stuff than a strictly fuck-buddy has. I agree with her that without the sexual stuff a secondary doesn’t continue to be a secondary. That is how things work in my little world. I also agree with her that a secondary might be someone with whom the general relationship kind of goes south when the romantic angle goes south. I can certainly point at people in my life with whom I stopped associating when the “romantic” stuff ended. I feel like I just wasn’t meant to be just friends with them, but having a relationship worked. I think that is ok. There are certainly people out there that I have chosen to have relationships with that I didn’t really mesh with friends-wise. We had great dates and better sex, but as far as just general hanging out… not so much. So her definitions fit for me. If they don’t fit for you, that is perfectly ok.
I have also had people who I would out and out label as a secondary move very firmly into the realm of “really great friend” and I am extremely grateful to have them in my life. It really rocks. These are people with whom the friend stuff was way more important than the sex stuff. As opposed to people with whom the sex stuff with considerable dashes of “romance” was more important. YMMV.
Overall I think she did a really great job of allowing room for someone to interpret things on their own. She was very good with “may or may not” to allow people their own space. Yay her.
I don’t know that I think of secondaries as being on par with primaries. I am ~extremely~ clear that I come second to the primaries of the people that I date. If someone tells me that they need any sort of concession to their primary I can’t jump fast enough. It is simply how I view things. I am also incredibly clear that my primary is the one and only person I will make huge decisions for. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about my secondaries or that I will treat them lightly, but that time is a limited commodity and in the scale of importance, Tom simply comes first. Although there is shitloads of messiness around my relationship with Tom right now so that is a load of drama all on it’s own. Oy! (Huge decisions in this sense being used to mean things like moving, where I live in general, where I go to school, big changes in my schooling, job stuff.)
Although yeah, the time investment is a big part of how/why my secondaries just don’t have the say that Tom does. I have been with Tom just shy of four years. Not that long in the overall scheme of things, but a considerable length of time since I am only 22. I think that considering the feelings of the person I have been with all of my “adult life” before people I have known just a few months is entirely prudent.
That being said, this conversation is likely uninteresting to you because you don’t want to analyze it anymore. 🙂 Maybe you can see why her definitions are somewhat valid from someone else’s perspective though?
like I said, I’m trying not to analyze it… but, like, not analyzing things rarely ever works for me. stupid brain. engineer brain sees problem, wants to untangle. The truth is that though my attempts at poly caused me a lot of pain, I also learned a lot about myself and how I deal with relationships and that has been valuable. I’m just feeling exceptionally bitter lately.
I have known people to have secondaries with whom they have romantic relationships but not sexual relationships. Some people work that way, even if you don’t. I was responding to [elided]’s statement that they were not definitions she could argue with. I found that I could. Indeed I really wanted to. I like the primary definition, I liked the fuckbuddy definition, the friends-with-benefits definition was OK, but the secondaries definition really rubbed me the wrong way. The definition isn’t at all flexible enough to encompass the range of relationships I have seen – it very much seems to be saying that sex is more important than romance or friendship, across the board, and that’s just not true.
It is great that some people can have romantic relationships without sex. They are probably more evolved than I am. 🙂
You have a different opinion. Ok. 🙂 Different opinions make the world more interesting.
Hey- is that you in the picture?
Uhm, yes. I like the picture and you can’t see my face. Which allows me to be stealthily somewhat anonymous-only-I’m-not. 🙂 And it is just a cool picture. I was only about 8 feet off the ground then, so it isn’t terribly impressive though. 🙂
Oh, and those are really my feet and legs in the boots too. 😉
As has been pointed out, the definition of “secondary” isn’t terribly satisfactory, but the original post has an emphasis on “as such” in the sentence “You can’t continue a secondary relationship as such if there isn’t a sexual connection, regardless of the level of friendship you share.”. I’m pretty sure that Lilith (the original author) meant that if sex is no longer a part of a secondary relationship, it’s no longer a secondary relationship, it’s something else. However, it’s possible to interpret it to mean otherwise.
The post completely ignores non-sexual friendships, but those aren’t unique to poly, and therefore they’re pretty understandable to most people, and so Lilith would see less need to write about them. However, it would be interesting to compare the levels of trust, affection, responsibility, etc, in some very close friendships to those in secondary or other non-primary sexual relationships.
I so am on the same wavelength as you. I woke up this morning pondering the very commited, deep friendships I have with a few people and how people who really want to classify everything in terms of poly would probably refer to those friends as secondaries. Everything is so relative.
Except that I classify everything, but I won’t classify a non-sexual relationship as “secondary” or “primary”.
My relationship with Beth has been closer at times than my relationship with women I’ve been dating at the time. We’re very good friends, and have shared a lot. We’ve never been sexual with each other, though I’ve been interested. We love each other, for some value of the word “love”.
Some people might consider Beth to be a “secondary” of mine. (Or possibly to have been, at times when we were closer.) I don’t, and never have. She’s never been my “girlfriend”, though she’s been a friend for 18+ years.
There are poly people who would argue that I was effectively poly when I was dating Stacy (we were monogamous). I might have been poly in my mind, but I wasn’t in my actions. My relationship with Beth at that time (and most others) does not challenge or break the monogamous paradigm. While there are monogamous people who are insecure or jealous enough that they would not be able to tolerate my relationship with Beth if they were dating me, there are plenty of monogamous people who would.
To me, the important distinction between monogamy and poly* is sex with more than one person. Most monogamous people love people other than their partner – they love their family, possibly some of their friends, etc. Most monogamous people can handle their partner having close non-sexual relationships with other people.
This was a common argument on the list where I met Lilith, and while I don’t remember her being insistent on that point, she and I were quite often the only people who seemed to have any common sense or realism on that list, so we bonded over our disdain for the theoreticians of poly who didn’t even have one parnter to gain practical experience with, and the fluffy-bunny-pagan-poly types who didn’t really understand why their relationships always went bad even though everyone was so gosh-darn sincere!