Poly Thoughts

sam­bear and I spent many hours yes­ter­day gam­ing and just hang­ing out with a delight­ful friend who we don’t see near­ly often enough, and her house­guest. I’ll call the house­guest R, and our friend F.  I’m not iden­ti­fy­ing them more specif­i­cal­ly because this isn’t real­ly about them as much as it’s about my reac­tion to R. Since I don’t know R oth­er than through Sam and F, I’m not address­ing any of this to her.

Both R and F have been involved with Sam to some extent in the past, well before I met Sam. F is, in fact, on our “yes list” pret­ty much per­ma­nent­ly. I adore her and would have absolute­ly no prob­lem with Sam being involved with her if both of them decid­ed to go for­ward with that.

I’ve heard a bit about R, but that’s it. She vis­its F every year and they go on hol­i­day some­where togeth­er. R and Sam had a “con fling” almost a decade ago. I don’t have any neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion about R and want to make it clear that I don’t have any neg­a­tive feel­ings about her now, precisely.

Any­way…

It was very clear that R was very much inter­est­ed in Sam. I mean, she was pup­py-dog­ging him in a big way. She gave him the “I’d rather have a kiss than a hug” look in a HUGE way when we arrived and left. She took advan­tage of absolute­ly any excuse to touch him, down to bring­ing in a damp tow­el and care­ful­ly clean­ing his hands of choco­late from a cake mishap rather than let­ting him clean him­self up. She was very solic­i­tous of him, con­stant­ly watch­ing the lev­el of water in his drink and hop­ping up to refill it as soon as it got low.

(Noth­ing dread­ful, by any means. If she’d act­ed in some way that was overt­ly out of line, Sam or I would have spo­ken up immediately.)

I was quite relieved to know that Sam not­ed her behav­ior, too. I’m not going crazy (in that respect, at least). Yet.

She seemed very uneasy when F jok­ing­ly said some­thing that made it clear that I knew that R had been Sam’s lover in the past. She did­n’t say any­thing, but sort of cut her eyes towards me and did­n’t respond in any way I’d con­sid­er “nor­mal.” In fact, she made very lit­tle eye con­tact with me at any point dur­ing a 6+ hour visit.

I do want to point out that the fact that she behaved the same whether or not I was in the room is reas­sur­ing. If she’d done oth­er­wise, I would be very pissed off right now.

I have no idea whether or not R is polyamorous or monog­a­mous. She has no con­tact with Sam oth­er than through F, so he does­n’t know, either. The only infor­ma­tion she’d have about our rela­tion­ship would be that gained from F. I don’t know if she assumes that we have an “any­thing goes” arrange­ment as he had when they had their fling, or if she just does­n’t care.

While I find it com­plete­ly rea­son­able that some­one would be very much attract­ed to Sam, and even more under­stand­able for some­one who has been his lover before to want to repeat that expe­ri­ence, I am not accus­tomed to hav­ing any­one throw her­self at my SO (in per­son) with­out check­ing to see if that’s okay.

I cer­tain­ly don’t own the man. He isn’t prop­er­ty. I’m not even jeal­ous or pos­ses­sive in the tra­di­tion­al sense. I just con­sid­er that kind of check-in to be polite.

I start­ed to say that I would­n’t behave that way with­out such assur­ance that it was accept­able, but hon­est­ly, I don’t think I could behave that way. I need to be pur­sued, so throw­ing myself at a man is not some­thing I could/would do.

Am I being unrea­son­able? What would you think of some­one behav­ing that way towards your SO?