Family-of-Choice

A (slight­ly edit­ed) com­ment I left in Love­With­out­Sex:

Polyamory isn’t pri­mar­i­ly about sex for me at all, but about mul­ti­ple com­mit­ted rela­tion­ships with oth­er adults that may or may not involve sex. I have two SOs who are not lovers and who are very unlike­ly to ever be lovers. One of those rela­tion­ships has been sta­ble for many years now (more than five, get­ting close to ten).

Every rela­tion­ship is unique. Some include sex, some don’t. I don’t know that cer­tain rela­tion­ships “need” sex, but some of them def­i­nite­ly have a deeply sex­u­al vein. My pri­ma­ry part­ner and I have con­tin­ued to build rela­tion­ships with some of our for­mer part­ners that do not include sex, though those rela­tion­ships were as lovers in the past—things aren’t the same, but they’re still fam­i­ly-of-choice. They are peo­ple we val­ue high­ly, love, and would not want to lose. Some­times, for a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons, being lovers just does­n’t work with some­one. It might be a “right now” or an “ever,” but that does­n’t change the fact that those peo­ple are very impor­tant to us.

I def­i­nite­ly see a dif­fer­ence in qual­i­ty between friend­ships and SO/­fam­i­ly-of-choice rela­tion­ships whether they do or do not involve sex. I’ve had friends with whom I occa­sion­al­ly had sex, and I was­n’t as close to those peo­ple as I am with my fam­i­ly-of-choice (lovers and non-lovers). 

We keep our rela­tion­ships going just as we’d keep any rela­tion­ships going—we make time to be togeth­er. We com­mu­ni­cate. We don’t hold back. We call bull­shit on each oth­er, sup­port each oth­er through good times and bad, play togeth­er, work together. 

I can def­i­nite­ly see liv­ing with these peo­ple, rais­ing chil­dren togeth­er, stay­ing togeth­er for many years. That is one of the key indi­ca­tors, to me, that a rela­tion­ship is much more than a friendship.