Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Moz,
Ooh, this is funny: http://www.babynames1000.com/gender-neutral/ Baby names from 2011 ranked by how often they're given to both genders.
Oh, come on. Armani is clearly a boy's name.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Hebe,
Emma might have had non-Dalek-related plans for today. She might be hard-out sulking.
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Hard News: Sub Mission, in reply to Bart Janssen,
missing "r"
Pro brono?
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Lilith __,
Oh, I've been laughing for about half an hour. Where is this tide of inescapable free porn? It's like, if there's a shop she can't choose to not go into it, if there's a book she can't not read it. If she's that compulsive I think kink.com would love to have her and her credit card drop along.
My favourite line is "Porn used to know its place."
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Hard News: Sub Mission, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
As when subbing for the Dom ?
Sorry don’t understand.go ask Emma...
I have wanted a job subbing for the Dom for ages now, just so I could constantly make that joke. In the meantime I content myself with my pro bono work.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Sacha,
bet she has lots of friends, eh
She is great fun at parties, I can attest to that.
However, have you considered that for a poly person, a strictly monogamous relationship might never be fulfilling, no matter how much love there is between those people and how much time they get to spend together?
I suspect, unfortunately, that this might be one of those things that's easier to understand with specifics. So. Huh. My Other Significant Other and I have discussed the impossibility of the two of us ever being able to have a fulfilling monogamous relationship together. We each have needs the other doesn't satisfy, and we both know that, so we'd always know the other was unhappy.
That's one thing that's true. Another is that, from my point of view at least, we have quite simply the fastest and most astonishingly profound intimacy I've ever known in my life.
And I can totally understand people finding it difficult to imagine how these things can co-exist. But I also know that they do.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Stephen Glaister,
Granted some very basic assumptions (which you and many others aren't prepared to grant me) that fulfillment/intimacy work like time/attention/focus
A/ These are not so much "basic assumptions" as the foundations of all your work, without which it's basically meaningless. Whether they're true, therefore, is far more important than whether the maths is correct.
B/ They're clearly not true. That's why people aren't granting you them. Perhaps the clearest example of this is that if time/attention/focus = fulfillment/intimacy, then for any stay-at-home parent, their most fulfilling and intimate relationship would be with their child. (As long as they only had one child. That relationships would immediately lose significance in a group setting, of course.) And it's about here that you begin to see that the content of the time spent might have something to do with how fulfilling and intimate the relationship is. That perhaps two hours with someone who can make that Descartes joke is worth about ten hours with someone who calls everything "Ba!". And when you start looking at content, at quality rather than quantity, assigning a quantative value to a relationship starts to look... about like it should.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
It would be really interesting to hear from a New Zealander who's currently in a polyamorous relationship, especially a long-term one.
I have just linked to this comment thread from a discussion on polyamory on a NZ-specific board at FetLife. I think the people with appropriate experience here have opened up about as far as they can.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
but certainly by your assumptions (e.g. that it is necessary for someone to be in two places at once for PA marriage to work).
Yeah. Only being able to be in one place at once does NOT equal only being able to be with one partner at a time. My first poly relationship, we initially worked on a schedule, but after a while we shifted to all cohabiting, and occasionally co-sleeping. I had a very dear net-friend who was in a genuinely triangular relationship with two other men. They all always slept together. Time spent with one was not time taken from another. It's not necessarily a zero-sum game. And it'd be my assumption that the kind of people who want a group marriage are the kind who are, for instance, already all cohabiting, and living their lives jointly.
Poly people are really aware of the demands and delicacy of trying to share time and attention. Love is infinite, time is not. I think they're more aware of it, generally, than people who find themselves pushed juggling their monogamous relationship and their job, or their kids, or their other commitments.
But one of my mother's friends did persist in calling me "Lucinda", which irked me greatly.
One of my mother's friends persistently called me Emma-Jane. That's not my name.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to James Butler,
I'm not even going to go into the fact that we don't assess hetero couples on their probability of happiness before allowing them to marry
See, I wasn't going to go into the whole implication that I don't "really" love my partners. But this? This is the absolute essence. This is requiring that poly people undergo a marriage test (whether that's "sufficient affection" or "sufficient time/attention") that monogamous people don't. People might disapprove of loveless marriages, but they're not illegal. The spouse of a friend of mine spends half the year in Brazil. No-one told them they couldn't get married.
Also. Both my marriage and my civil union have been non-monogamous. According to Stephen's graphs, therefore I surely shouldn't be allowed them, right?