How Your Professional Relationships Can Make You a Better Metamour
I learned all I need to know about relationships with my partners' partners in the office
One thing that I’ve seen a lot of people really struggle with when they’re first starting out with the whole polyamory/ethical-nonmonogamy thing (and even when they’re not just starting out) is forming and maintaining healthy, positive relationships with their partners' partners.
There’s some good reason for that: those relationships can be complicated and can occasionally get pretty fraught. But I think a major cause of this challenge is that we don’t go into it with a good image of what that relationship is supposed to look like.
We know what a friendship looks like for us, and we know what a romantic or dating relationship looks like, and… a metamour isn’t quite like either of those, right? It’s in some ways more intimate than a regular social relationship, but is also a little bit contrived — “would we be friends if we weren’t dating the same person?” and so on. The closest analogue might be something like an in-law, and in-law relationships are notoriously prone to drama and conflict.
We know what a friendship looks like, and we know what a romantic or dating relationship looks like, but a metamour isn’t quite like either of those.
Because these things are so often so charged, a lot of people have a lot of strong feelings about what kinds of relationships “should" exist between metamours, from the “we should all hang out together all the time" of the kitchen table polyamorist to the “we should never cross the streams or make eye contact" of the strict parallel poly crowd. Having this kind of “should” is like buying one-size-fits-all: it saves you the trouble of actually trying stuff on, but it may not actually be a very good or comfortable fit.
Reflecting on my own experience, I’m realizing that I’ve stumbled into a winning strategy, and it’s one that may work well for you, too.
For me, a metamour is not a friend — a metamour is a coworker. Can they become a friend? Absolutely, just like your work friends can become your real friends. But fundamentally, the closest social script most of us are already familiar with is “coworker.”
Consider what a metamour is, structurally. To me, a metamour is someone…
- …whom you did personally not select to be in your life,
- …with whom you must maintain a good working relationship,
- …whose morale and wellbeing affects the entire team, and
- …who’s collaborating with you to achieve shared objectives (your mutual partner’s health and happiness).
To be clear, this is not a reduction of real and complex human relationships to transactions. Rather, it’s an invocation of a familiar social script to lower the cognitive and emotional burden of navigating what would otherwise be a new kind of relationship.
And the analogy can, of course, be taken further. Consider the social dynamics of a new colleague joining the team. As an established team member, it behooves you to make them feel welcome, to invite their input, and to do your best to adjust to changes in responsibilities without taking it out on them or interfering with their ability to do the things they were brought on to do.
Consider being the new colleague — it behooves you to pay attention to existing dynamics and try to fit yourself into them without excess disruption, to solicit and appreciate the experience of the people who’ve been on board longer, and to support the team in meeting its goals. As members of a team, each of us tries to avoid stepping on the others’ toes, to support the others with major projects, to ask for help when we need it, to constructively seek redress when there are grievances, and to generally create a comfortable and collegial environment.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that this is all a metamour can or should ever be to you. It’s a framework for establishing a healthy, sustainable baseline.
I have metamours I see every day at the office, and others I only see at the weekly conference calls, and others still who only occasionally pop up in the rare team-wide email. Some of them, I would consider intimates; others, friends; others, acquaintances.
We don’t all have to be bffs, or even like each other all that much (though I’d like to think that we do). We don’t have to all play Dungeons and Dragons together every weekend, as much as that might be every nonmonogamist’s dream. But the system as a whole works because we’re all committed to our shared goal: improving the lives of the people we care about. And because the people we care about also care about us, we can improve their lives by improving each other’s, by supporting each other, and by knowing that we can all have a good time at the company Christmas party even with the people we wouldn’t invite to weekend with us in Cabo or whatever the analogy is at this point.
The system as a whole works because we’re all committed to our shared goal: improving the lives of the people we care about.
Really, this is true for all people and not just our metamours — we’re all contributors to the shared project of building a world worth living in — but we can start by extending this spirit of camaraderie to the people most immediately in our lives, and then to the people most immediately in theirs.
I know this isn’t exactly revolutionary. But I’ve found it really helpful in my metamour relationships to focus on the collaborative element first. Not everyone is good at the same things, not everyone is always available to help in the same ways or at the same times… but ultimately, we’re all in it together and we’re all motivated by the same sort of care and affection for our mutual partner. And if things get tense or I start to feel threatened, my first step is always to look to that mutual partner: are they doing well? Are they happy? If so, I find gratitude in and draw reassurance from the fact that the system is largely working, and the problems that need ironing out — even if they feel like big ones — are largely in the details.
Welcome to the team! We look forward to working with you.
