Quite a while back Noah and I discussed what sorts of things should change about our lives when it comes to having children. As it turns out, we both feel pretty strongly that it would not be a good idea to have outside “relationships” while breeding and raising young’uns. Yes, there is the issue of potential disease risk, but mostly there is the little matter of heavily nesting and wanting to direct that sort of energy towards our family and our future. We both have a tendency towards “Ooh! Shiny!” and that isn’t a good thing to be doing while we should be spending our energy on other things. At this point we are quite firmly into the, “Kid could happen at any point. No really. Any.Day.Now. Ovulate already you stupid ovary!!!!” Heh.
What this means for us is that we are not polyamorous. We are not pursuing outside relationships as they take away energy and time that we want to keep between us. This brings us to the fact that we live in a binary society–if we aren’t polyamorous, we’re monogamous–right? Well, mostly. There will be no baby making sex any year soon as that is something we think would be a very Bad Idea to do while trying to breed. Paternity issues and disease risk just aren’t things we feel are worth the neato-ness of outside sex. Being us, we still really really like the idea of flirting and *some* sexual contact with other people. I suppose this means that we aren’t 100% completely and totally monogamous as oral sex does count as sex. But we also feel like such potential foreys into playing with other people should be done together and very rare. In fact, it isn’t for certain that this will happen and it will be all talked about and stuff and evaluated on a case by case basis of “how much drama could this person potential add into our lives.”
So yeah. That’s what “not really available” means for us. At least until last kid is a year or more old. 🙂 Of course I still like talking about sex, pretty much constantly. Please please don’t take this as a sign of “I want to have sex with you.”
so I’m reading this as; you can’t for obvious biological concerns and no double standards so he doesn’t get to either, cause thats only fair. But, once you’re done with the breeding stage you’ll reconsider it based on how much time and energy is left over for new shiney’s after being accountable to your jobs and focused on parenting, and good at being married — if you can fit in playing on top of all that without damaging it, then you will.
But that’s the order of priorities, give or take?
We actually doubt that we will ever make the jump back to being “polyamorous” because the amount of time and energy is pretty outrageous given the pay off. We strongly suspect that we will eventually do more playing with random people at Those Kinds of Parties. If we do stuff with random people once in a while when we are going to that kind of party anyway our overall lives won’t be impacted much. Especially because we won’t go to those sorts of parties very often given childcare and financial impact.
We are entirely against the idea of tag-team parenting where we trade off kid-watching duties while the other goes out to date. That is treating our children as burdens and we don’t like that plan.
I’m really really glad I’m not the only one.
Of course you aren’t! 🙂
We are entirely against the idea of tag-team parenting where we trade off kid-watching duties while the other goes out to date. That is treating our children as burdens and we don’t like that plan.
While I can think of scenarios where, from the outside, that plan seems to work *for the people involved*, I fully understand your feelings in this matter, and wish y’all the best in this regard.
The one advantage that the two of you have is that you have experienced the difference between emotional polyamory and the physical kind, and are most definitely not confusing the two. It makes your choice of monogamy that much stronger.
Yah I figured, hence the comment about having left over energy for it after handling job, marriage, kids