(fallen london stamps by 
[This was a draft I'd been preparing for about a week, and finished it maybe a day before the cohost shutdown announcement went down. This is definitely a different atmosphere than I expected to be posting this into, but. This was important to me and I'm not about to let it sit forever unread. I'll also be exporting it and a lot of my other posts to a dreamwidth before everything goes read-only.]
So, dating and plurality are topics that get covered a fair bit online, when you know the right places to look. Unfortunately, the broader public not knowing a ton about plurality also means that there's a lot of facets of my relationships that I don't really get to share or talk about. I had a handful of opportunities to write about it recently, so now I'm making a big ol' post about it here. In case it helps people learn, or understand something a little better, or maybe gives some folks an idea of what their lives could look like.
Also! If you want to hear more about dating from plural folks themselves, I'd recommend you check out the work of LB Lee (on dreamwidth and itch.io), and the many videos available on the plural events youtube channel, the archive for the Plural Positivity World Conference. There are other written accounts on people's personal blogs and youtube channels, but these are the ones I personally go back to often.
Alright, onto the post.
[Edit: Now archived on dreamwidth! https://dismallyoriented.dreamwidth.org/729.html]
This is a really, really good essay, and I'm glad that you shared it into the plural tags. Whenever you get around to crossposting it, I'd love to have a link so I can drop it on my site and recommend it for inclusion into some archives?
A lot of the stuff in your essay, I feel, is honestly really relevant to having any kind of close relationship with folks in a plural system, not just dating. And it's even relevant to relationships between people in different plural systems, because unfortunately, being plural yourself doesn't mean you don't fall into some of the mentioned pitfalls (treating folks in the system who you aren't dating as peripheral, for example). I've seen some folks in the plural community angrily argue that it's immoral to date Just One/Some people in a system, that you Have to date Everyone*, and that's... an incredibly icky take I super disagree with, to say the least, but I see the places that it comes from. I think "make an effort to really get to know and care about everyone in the system as they feel comfortable, especially the people you aren't dating" is a better way of addressing partner-peripherality, and your essay does a really good job of illustrating what that can look like.
(also, it really says something about the state of the general online plural community that I consider an essay by a singlet ally more helpful and useful than any of the microlabels-and-identity-policing sludge that gets churned out in the community proper, huh)
*every system works differently, and there's nothing wrong with an individual system deciding that they're a group package when it comes to romantic relationships - however, the context in which I've heard this angry argument posits it as a universal rule, rather than an arrangement individual systems agree on.
