When Polyamory Fails: Conor & Brittany's Broken "Open Relationship".

yeah everything is great like 99.9
of things are amazing and this this little area is not there is nothing wrong with people wondering like what does this mean for you in your relationship or even people feeling like this is an example of why polyamory doesn't work there's so many things to say i think and i'm sure that we won't be able to say them all and i don't really want to say them all it's hot it's really hot in this car just wanna like [Music] i think share throughout our process because this is something that so many people go through in one way or another and we really never get to see that process and although it is like the most vulnerable thing i could imagine sharing i don't know what to call this because we're not breaking up there's nothing to break and we're also just doing the same thing we've always done which is connecting with each other loving it out of each other more than ever loving each other more than ever and really loving and supporting each other unconditionally to the best of our abilities and doing the same for ourselves and we've been doing so much this last six years together and continually stepping into the unknown in one way or another and this is another manifestation of that and it feels really big right now and i think that for me it feels like there's a lot of lingering attachment to let go of how i attach to you and um fear fear about stepping into this unknown place and like what our relationship will look like this is [Music] something that neither of us knew exactly without really unearthing all these different things like attachment and and finding more of ourselves and finding more of our of our deepest needs and wants and desires without trying to be something for the other person and yeah i think you and i are so good together i [ __ ] love our relationship and i think you know we also want slightly different things right now and even though it's slightly different things it's affecting the entirety of our lives i don't know we need to do something different yeah and i do want to be specific and also like this is that's kind of the point yeah this is kind of where we're at yeah man i feel like we have the healthiest relationship of anyone i know and also for me i still put like these desires of what i wanted and like put you in my fantasies and like wanted you to be something or wanted to carry out this dream life with you and we align on so much of that dream life and one specific thing that we don't align on right the second is where we're living and specifically that we've spent a year living all together with bridgette and that's not something you want to do right now yeah there is nothing wrong with people wondering like what does this mean for you in your relationship or even people feeling like this is an example of why polyamory doesn't work this is the best way for me to personally navigate relationships which is to allow it to change and be really open to change and that is what you are watching that is what is unfolding is something being allowed to change and change is happening but the last year and the last two years really but the last year in particular i've already been mourning the change in our relationship and the things that i expected and wanted and and i think it's perfect it's perfect for me in this moment and the benefits you know we have spoken about in other videos but i'll just say again that i've never been able to be closer with you than i am now and yeah like me not wanting to live with your partner right now doesn't mean i don't want you to have another partner or that i don't want you to live with another partner it just means that like i don't want to do that thing right now and that's really okay for me to be honest with myself about and it's really okay for you to do what's best for you and it's really okay for us to support each other in our differences unless you add a whole bunch of adjectives to clarify the type of relationship you're describing when people say relationship we think of one person relating to another and naturally we then think of open relationships and polyamory in terms of just having more stars in the constellation problem is in practice that's not the case at all if you think about a workplace you do have relationships within your workplace that consist of one person relating to another but sometimes you have relationships to a room a department a table an abstract idea of a decision-making authority that may involve five or six people or may involve 50 or 60 right your relationship with the board of directors is not the same as your relationship with any particular person on the board of directors who may have lunch with you right in this strange way we relate both to people and abstractions and with time our relationships with people become poisoned by our preconceptions about them created by those abstractions what i see as the primary problem that brittany and conor have been dealing with these many years is that they don't relate to each other they relate to an abstract idea of what their relationship ought to be for them this is very much an ideology it's an ideology they preach and present on youtube and i've no problem with that anyone can come out and put out their shingle and start charging money for relationship advice on youtube that don't begrudge them you know their uh their business model right but they come to believe in that ideal of what their relationship ought to be then with time instead of just relating to the other person or instead of relating to the other people because they have other lovers at any given time on the one-on-one basis they're always relating to this abstraction which is much more present in the room than the average religion right we all know some pious sinners who you know can then condemn themselves to hell every friday and saturday and go and get saved and purified on sunday you know it might be just one day of the week or it might just be a few hours out of the week that are set aside for religion for even the most pious among us right but this couple they are beholden to the ideal of their own love and what it ought to be at all times and they measure themselves against that ideal in the same way that the pious christian or pious jew can never be pious enough to live up to the ideals set down in the bible or sit down for them by their own grandparents or what have you they're beholden to and always reaching for this perfect sense of what their relationship ought to be and you know they also relate to this ideal as a money-making venture now you could imagine a couple who just open a corner store a little shop that sells chocolate bars and bags of potato chips to some extent they relate to each other as individuals as lovers as two people who've fallen in love and to some extent they relate to each other through this ideal of what the business venture is supposed to be and what part in it each of them desires or assumes the other is going to play if the other person ever lets you down hey when we open this shop this is how i imagined you'd be contr i imagine you'd be waking up before me and mopping the floor because i'm the one who does the accounting you know like i felt that because i do the numbers in the books that you would spend more time walking mopping the floor and now you're letting me down or you're hiring another person to mop the floor instead of you and i felt that was your life is full of those kinds of minor conflicts and scraped knees especially when you have a business venture but for conor and brittany right their ideology is their money-making venture right and their ideology is this fetishized notion of what their relationship is supposed to be so to what extent to what extent do i relate to you just as you just man to man person to person however you want to say it and to what extent do i relate to you because you're the head of the sales department all right because of your role assigned that abstraction to what extent i mean i used to go for lunch with my professors and you could almost kind of feel the dial click you know when they stopped being my teacher and just started being my friend or do you know again sometimes i was only 10 years younger than these people they weren't so much older than me and they were had similar interests and similar frustrations you can even feel that when they switched from you know pretending to kind of be aloof from the problems the university they're complaining the exact same way students do about everything that's wrong about the university you could almost feel you know one mask come off and perhaps another mass goes on you know at the same time um abstract notions about your relationship can become an obstacle to just relating person to person and the problem with polyamory the problem with open relationships is that the more people you bring in the greater and greater is this hazard that you're no longer relating to people on that one-to-one basis but you're relating frankly to the board of directors you're relating to people in terms of the role they play in one venture or another even if that venture just is this abstract ossified notion you've got about what your polyamorous relationship is supposed to be my sling is editorial explicit material briefcase show live and stereo flow fill me