By Maria Padhila
What do you call yourself? What do you call your relationship? Are you genderqueer, cis, non-cis, femme, bi, poly, gay? Are you sure? That must be lovely. Do you give a name and label to the structure of your relationship? Write in to the comments if you can — it would be interesting to get some perspectives on these labels.
Obviously, I feel like people should call themselves whatever they feel like. With that needs to come the acceptance that not everyone is going to get what your label ‘means’, and that they might attribute all kinds of motives to your choices there.
There are plenty of people whose only exercise consists in getting huffy, and they’ll be happy to take you to the mat and call a news conference because you happened to refer to their V as a triad.
There are just as many who won’t, and disdain all labels. In last week’s Polyamory Weekly podcast, for instance, the commentating couple had a running joke about the group in Showtime’s Polyamory: Married and Dating reality show, and how their discussion of “The Triad” sounded like a superhero series just barely worthy of viewing over a bowl of Lucky Charms. You could indeed make a drinking game out of the returns to phrases like “we must defend The Triad,” and “you are not being responsible to The Triad.”
But an unrelieved cynicism in the end is as dull as unenlightened earnestness, so I have to check myself for the former. Besides, we have to call ourselves something.
For someone as fluid as myself, though, it can be a tough call. What’s the label for ‘like this, sometimes, unless’? Gemini, maybe?