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Parental enthusiasm--blessing or curse?
Dec. 13th, 2009 02:31 amIt's been a few years now since I came out as poly to my dad, and it turns out we weren't done with the subject by a long shot. Not that I thought we were never going to speak of it again, but I don't think I realized how much more progress was still to be made.
At first he was afraid the whole concept wouldn't actually work very well and I would wind up miserable and alone or some such thing, and it took him a while to truly believe otherwise. Seeing me in a fairly serious poly relationship helped some, and I think just the cumulative effect of my repeated reassurances helped as well. We've never deliberately sat down and Had A Talk about the subject, but it's come up in passing enough times that I think he's just gotten more and more used to it, and more and more swayed by my sanguine attitude.
I didn't use the word "polyamory" or anything like it for a long time when talking to him, because I suspected he'd be more nervous about the idea if he thought I was subscribing to some sort of Established Group, with Rules and Regulations and a Prescriptive Ideology (seriously, I had a therapist once who thought polyamory was some kinda cult), and I wasn't confident in my ability to convince him it wasn't. Anyway, telling people what your life is actually like in terms they already know is usually more useful than giving them a whole new vocabulary to digest--with words you'd either have to define for them in terms they already know anyway, or just leave them to look up on their own and get definitions that don't even match the way you meant to use the words--so I just told him how my life works and left the poly jargon out of it.
But the more comfortable he's gotten with poly in general, the less I've figured he'd be weirded out by what other people had to say on the subject--so a few months ago, I dropped my vocabulary filters and started letting the occasional bit of jargon into my conversation, in cases where the meaning was clear from context.
And now I think it probably was indeed prudent of me not to do this four years ago, because his research instincts have kicked in to an even greater degree than I anticipated. To wit, now that he knows what search terms to use, he's gone and acquired a copy of nearly every poly-related book he could find that I didn't already own. (And wow, there were more than I knew about, and that's saying something.)
He seems underwhelmed so far, though. His verdict on the ones he's just read: "To me they seem as if they should be titled HOW TO HAVE FUN WITHOUT MAKING TOO MANY PEOPLE MAD and HOW TO HAVE MORE FUN WITHOUT MAKING TOO MANY MORE PEOPLE MAD." Which...I'm not sure I can argue with, and yet I somehow feel that it is perhaps a degree more reductionist than is warranted.
Then again, maybe the poly books he's just read really aren't as good as the ones I've read. But when I think about it, I suspect he'd react this way to the other ones too, because I have been noticing that pattern in him; he seems to think a lot of new ideas are just common sense once he's heard them explained, as if the fact that they can be explained so clearly makes them so obvious they don't need to be explained. And in a sense they are obvious once someone sees them in the first place, but I think he overestimates how easy that first step is.
At first he was afraid the whole concept wouldn't actually work very well and I would wind up miserable and alone or some such thing, and it took him a while to truly believe otherwise. Seeing me in a fairly serious poly relationship helped some, and I think just the cumulative effect of my repeated reassurances helped as well. We've never deliberately sat down and Had A Talk about the subject, but it's come up in passing enough times that I think he's just gotten more and more used to it, and more and more swayed by my sanguine attitude.
I didn't use the word "polyamory" or anything like it for a long time when talking to him, because I suspected he'd be more nervous about the idea if he thought I was subscribing to some sort of Established Group, with Rules and Regulations and a Prescriptive Ideology (seriously, I had a therapist once who thought polyamory was some kinda cult), and I wasn't confident in my ability to convince him it wasn't. Anyway, telling people what your life is actually like in terms they already know is usually more useful than giving them a whole new vocabulary to digest--with words you'd either have to define for them in terms they already know anyway, or just leave them to look up on their own and get definitions that don't even match the way you meant to use the words--so I just told him how my life works and left the poly jargon out of it.
But the more comfortable he's gotten with poly in general, the less I've figured he'd be weirded out by what other people had to say on the subject--so a few months ago, I dropped my vocabulary filters and started letting the occasional bit of jargon into my conversation, in cases where the meaning was clear from context.
And now I think it probably was indeed prudent of me not to do this four years ago, because his research instincts have kicked in to an even greater degree than I anticipated. To wit, now that he knows what search terms to use, he's gone and acquired a copy of nearly every poly-related book he could find that I didn't already own. (And wow, there were more than I knew about, and that's saying something.)
He seems underwhelmed so far, though. His verdict on the ones he's just read: "To me they seem as if they should be titled HOW TO HAVE FUN WITHOUT MAKING TOO MANY PEOPLE MAD and HOW TO HAVE MORE FUN WITHOUT MAKING TOO MANY MORE PEOPLE MAD." Which...I'm not sure I can argue with, and yet I somehow feel that it is perhaps a degree more reductionist than is warranted.
Then again, maybe the poly books he's just read really aren't as good as the ones I've read. But when I think about it, I suspect he'd react this way to the other ones too, because I have been noticing that pattern in him; he seems to think a lot of new ideas are just common sense once he's heard them explained, as if the fact that they can be explained so clearly makes them so obvious they don't need to be explained. And in a sense they are obvious once someone sees them in the first place, but I think he overestimates how easy that first step is.
