Philosophy of a sidechick

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Yesterday I was lying in a hammock with one of my partners, strung out of oxytocin, feeling the deep safety and pleasure of being in his arms. He said to me “You are such an anchor in my life.” He is such an anchor in my life too: such a stabilizing force, someone I know I can depend on, a relationship that shapes me and keeps me rooted, no matter what else is going on. I smiled when he said the word anchor and pointed out to him — “It’s funny because anchor partner is a word people use in place of primary partner when they don’t want to sound hierarchical. It’s a word that is used to describe relationships that are not like ours.”

In polyamory, despite the insistence on moving away from narrow compulsory monogamous scripts, people still tend to use the terms primary partner, nesting partner, and anchor partner, more or less synonymously. Polyamorous people form different relationships, each with its own unique container, but most still structure their lives around a relationship with a partner who they live with. For some poly people, the hierarchy is explicit and they use terms like primary partner and secondary partner. But even a lot of people who officially reject the hierarchy still subtly assume that the partner they live with is the “anchor,” the centre of their emotional lives.

My partner Colin, who referred to me as an anchor in his life, is not a partner who fits the typical descriptions of an “anchor partner.” We both live with other partners. We see each other once or twice a week, not every day. Our social worlds are not primarily overlapping. There is a lot of spaciousness and differentiation in our relationship. We talk every day. We share an enormous amount of intimacy. We love each other in a way that is staggering. We are committed to a shared future. And we are not on a relationship escalator. We are not aiming to become more enmeshed than we are now. We like our relationship as it is.

For six years of my relationship with my other partner, Jay, they had a partner who they had been with for five years longer than me. For seven years of my relationship with Jay, we did not live together and we saw each other once or twice a week, while talking every day. That whole time, Jay was by far my most serious, committed, and long term partner. I remember how difficult it was for me to face down other people’s incredulity and judgement about my relationship. The often repeated and unsolicited reminder from others that they could never do that. The loaded questions inquiring wasn’t it hard for me to have my main attachment relationship with someone I didn’t live with, with someone who had a longer standing attachment relationship with someone else. I remember a friend once telling me how she could never do that because she wants to be chosen. An implicit assumption in that statement is that to be chosen means to be chosen “over” someone else. Another implicit assumption is that to be chosen means to be chosen for a very specific kind of relationship: a live in domestic partnership.

Part of the reason why this constant subtle judgement of my relationship was so painful for me back then, is because of my sexual history in my “previous life” as a crazy street involved alcoholic having sexual relationships with heterosexual men. In another, earlier, chapter of my life, I was not polyamorous, I was promiscuous, and very often, I was the sidechick. A lot of men were cheating on their wives and girlfriends with me, the crazy, slutty, traumatized drunk girl they met on the street, or they were fucking me but never offering me more than that. I was not “wifey” material. I was not girlfriend material. I was a snack they enjoyed on the side, but they were not going to invest in me. They weren’t going to show me off, hold my hand in public. They were always going to be going home to someone else.

Patriarchy and misogyny have long divided women into two categories: virgins and whores. Wifeys and sidechicks. The virgin, wifey, girlfriend material woman is “chosen,” publicly claimed, kept. She is supposed to receive some protections from the worst violences of patriarchy and misogyny, by virtue of “belonging to” a man. She is expected to reserve her sexuality for “her man,” but it is still generally understood that “her man” is probably not reserving his sexuality for her, even in a monogamous context. He has access to the other category of woman: the legions of sidechicks. Whether through his consumption of pornography, his hiring of sex workers, his various affairs ranging from flirtations to full on cheating, patriarchy and misogyny grant him a fair amount of leeway in his interpretation of “monogamy.” His chosen woman is granted no such leeway.

I have received the archetypal sidechick phone call: Are you fucking my man? Why is your number saved in his phone? Finally hearing the voice of the woman whose position I coveted, and in her voice: anguish. She is never safe from the legions of sidechicks. I have felt the overwhelming grief of loving a man viscerally, lying on his chest where another woman’s name is tattooed. As an incest survivor who was taught in childhood that my primary value is as a sexual object, that I can expect to be used sexually more than I expect to be cherished and loved, being a member of the legions of sidechicks ached with the pain of a very old wound. Like all sidechicks, I was taught to be a class climber: I must find a way to leave the legions of sidechicks, to better myself so that I may advance to the other side of the Are you fucking my man? phone call.