On calling nonhierarchical relationships "secondary"
I often get downvoted when I mention this, but I am strongly averse to "primary"/"secondary" language.
For one thing there's my visceral distaste for the word "secondary" itself, which to me definitionally denotes a meaning of "less important", which feels antithetical to polyamory where we support the development of multiple important relationships that are important in different ways, relationships that can be structured based on mutual desires between two people rather than mononormative expectations of what a relationship "should" look like.
But I've been trying to puzzle out a little more about why I feel this way, because I knew there was something more structural and non-semantic about my reaction to this type of label, and I think it's this: when we say someone is a "secondary" (i.e. "less important") partner simply because they do not nest with or legally marry or otherwise entangle, it feels mononormative to me.
That because I'm not married to my boyfriend but his wife is, that means our relationship is less meaningful or important. That the only way to make your relationship "really" important is to hop on the escalator. As a "community" (I use this term very loosely) we have theoretically acknowledged that the relationship escalator is not the only pathway to a meaningful commitment, so why do we automatically rank any non-escalator relationship lower than a marriage or nesting partnership?
And for someone who doesn't think nesting or marriage is required for a meaningful relationship, as someone who has no desire to nest or marry because of how much I do not value those things and reject them as important for my own happiness - my relationships being called less important because I don't do those things just does not sit right with me.
People are of course to free to label and structure their own relationships as they see fit and I know that a lot of people who use that language don't in fact devalue their secondary partners or relationships and actually really enjoy that structure, and I'm not at all judging or invalidating those personal choices - but when I see folks blanketly calling all relationships that look a certain way "primary" and all other relationships "secondary" it just doesn't sit right with me.
I am not at all denying hierarchy exists in a marriage or nesting partnership and I have zero issues with that. I just think that automatically assuming that anything non-hierarchical is "secondary" to anything hierarchical flies in the face of the work we do to deconstruct what a meaningful committed relationship could look like.