One thing I’ve thought about a great deal, particularly since becoming poly, is the concept of emergence and how it relates to relationships. Emergence, in the context I’m using it, is when a system exists, made up of components, and the interactions between those components become complex enough that a new entity emerges from the system. It is utterly new, something that did not exist before the system, that cannot exist without the system, but that is greater than the system.

A common, if disputed, example is the way that the mind emerges from the brain. In my view, anyway, the mind is something larger and greater than the biological components that have created it. It is those components, but it is also something else, something which can interact with and influence the components that make it up, and interact with the world in a way that the individual components cannot. The pieces have combined in such intricate and complex ways that a sort of leap has occurred. Something new has come into existence.

Relationships between people are the same way. Two people interact with each other, and they do it in nearly infinite ways. A million tiny pieces intertwine in the space between the individuals. Every conversation, every touch, every shared experience, every commonality, every difference. Each interaction forms another connection, and the web grows exponentially as the interaction continues, until one day there is something there that was not there before. There are still the two people and all the things they put into the middle. But now there is a Themness. A Relationship. A living, dynamic, breathing entity that exists of and between them, that can influence their behaviors and be influenced by their behaviors.

When polyamory gets involved, things become exponentially more complex, and hence more emergent. Take a triad as an example. It’s commonly said that when three people are involved with each other, there are four relationships: Kevin and Jennifer, Jennifer and Mark, Mark and Kevin, Jennifer and Mark and Kevin. But I think it’s even more complex than that, because what we rarely pay attention to are the relationships between the relationships. The emergent entities interacting with each other and producing yet more entities. Bear with me, this has a point, I promise. So in our hypothetical triad above, we have:

Kevin + Jennifer = KJ
Jennifer + Mark = JM
Mark + Kevin = MK
Kevin + Jennifer + Mark = KJM
KJ + JM = KJJM
JM + MK = JMMK
KJ + MK = KJMK
KJ + JM + MK = KJJMMK

And on and on, you see. This is not just my wankery, perhaps despite appearances. It really does work this way. It’s more than just me and you and him interacting, the ways we interact with each other interact too, and things get way too complex to explain right quick. Do this enough, and you get more and more and more entities emerging from the ever-evolving mass of interpersonal connections: families, networks, subcultures, cultures, society. All these interact with each other too, and new things emerge from those interactions.

This seems to me to be the way everything works, on some fundamental level. Which makes the potential of the human race and life in general rather staggering, but that’s a point for another day. Here’s where I’m going with this: Emergence is everywhere you look, and I think people understand it on an instinctual level, even if they aren’t as fond of intellectualizing the fuck out of their existence as I am. Yet in many ways we talk as if it’s not true.

Let’s take sex as an example, because, well, what’s not more fun that way? Perhaps the biggest topic of discussion with regard to polyamory is jealousy. Fear. Specifically, fear of my partner having sex with some other person, being wildly enamored of their genitalia, and sailing off to moister pastures, leaving me to cry alone in an alley and buy some cats.

Here’s the thing: “having sex” is an utterly meaningless construct. It has no real meaning by itself, when it’s not populated by people. It’s a vague and enormous category of things, but we often speak of it as if it’s this static activity that we do with every partner. This a gross overgeneralization, one that generates an amazingly large lie that is the foundation of one of the biggest fears we face.

Because sex? Is emergent too. Which means that the thing that emerges between you and me? Cannot happen with anyone else. Ever. Not because you love me so much you won’t let anyone replace me. Not because I place this or that boundary on your relations with others. But because it’s impossible.

The sex I have with Kevin (oh, dear, now KJJMMK is even more complicated) is not just quantitatively different from the sex I have with Veronica. It’s not better or worse along some continuum of this one type of experience. It’s qualitatively different, and not just a little bit. The differences between the two experiences outnumber the similarities by thousands to one. The experiences are so different even down to a pure physiological level that using the same terminology to describe both is a bit erroneous.

The entire concept of my partner “having better sex” with some other person is so fundamentally in error that it doesn’t even make sense when you’re looking at sex as an entity that emerges from the specific interaction of a specific set of individuals. They can’t have sex with me with someone else. They certainly can’t have “better” sex-with-me with someone else. It can’t be replicated by another, because they aren’t me. There is no competition between the entities, because they’re incomparable to each other.

Yet we have to keep using the terminology, really. We have to discuss our experiences somehow, and abstract categories are really all we have to work with if we don’t want to get bogged down in every turn of phrase to the point where communication becomes impossible. I am hopeful, though, that we can find a way to hold the larger concepts in our minds, even if we can’t always articulate them.

It’s frustrating. Words suck, but we’re all stuck with them, slogging along doing the truth-encompassing equivalent of grunting incoherently at each other. At least until our language becomes complex enough that a new form of communication emerges, which given all available evidence is an inevitable occurrence.

Won’t that be an interesting day?