Don’t have anything specific I want to talk about today, or the spoons to put together a nice orderly post about this or that idea.
So I’m just going to take some time to riff on polyamory, finance, and shit and see what we get. Not quite going to be stream of conscious, but something close to that.
“Finance” isn’t a word most people use to talk about personal money matters. My upbringing is showing there, upper-middle class family with a rich grandpa who gave out stock certificates for Christmas. After over 10 years of struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over my family’s heads, that upbringing has combined with life experience to give me a not-unique-but-certainly-not-common view of money, life, and keeping the bills paid.
But “finance” really just means “money matters”. Whether those money matters are keeping a personal budget, managing the bills for a large polycule, or getting into esoteric things like stocks and bonds and hedge funds it’s all finance.
Similarly, polyamory is really just a way of describing our relationships Whether you are single and polyam, part of a closed triad, building a constellation of relationships stretching across a dozen states and three countries, it’s all polyamory.
What they both have in common, I think, is priorities.
In polyamory, we have chosen to prioritize our need or desire for multiple relationships over societies push for monogamy. We choose whether to prioritize the individual or the group in our relationships. We choose whether to prioritize entwinement or autonomy.
With finance, you are choosing to prioritize risk or safety. To prioritize now or the future. To prioritize short term goals or long term goals.
Making polyamory and finance work together is, in the end, about knowing your* priorities and making sure your priorities for polyamory and your priorities for finance are supporting each other, not in conflict with each other.
I think I’m going to be exploring this idea of polyamory and finance priorities and how they work (or don’t work) together over the next few weeks. For now, I need to go make breakfast. Catch you later!
*this ‘your’ is both singular or plural, because both your individual priorities and the priorities of the people you are in relationships with are important here.