Over the last few weeks, a topic that has come up in conversation several times with several different people in different contexts has been relationships; specifically, why I don't believe in (or understand) monogamy.

In order to explore my own beliefs (they're by no means fixed; and I don't know that I fully understand them myself) I want to start a conversation here about them. You should hopefully see some contributions from a pseudonymous guest blogger (or commentor, at least) shortly...

I don't expect anything I say here to neccessarily be correct; this will be a work in progress, and it's likely that my beliefs may change over time; or, in exploring my beliefs, I may find inconsistencies or errors which need to be corrected.

To kick things off, I'd like to outline my threetwo guiding axioms.

* I accept other people and situations as I find them.

* I am a whole, complete being, needing no-one else to fulfill me.

Everything I understand/believe/feel about relationships stems from these tenets.

For instance, the most common place this has come up is in the context of what I'd do if my significant other slept with someone else. My response is - not much. They are certain circumstances that could cause me to see this as a problem - to take an extreme example, if I'd taken a day off work and travelled for three hours to meet my partner somewhere, but they didn't show up because they had decided to shag someone else instead but hadn't told me, then I'd care. However, the issue here wouldn't be that they'd slept with someone else - it would be that they'd been inconsiderate and severely disconvenienced me by not giving me notice.

However, I would accept my partner as they are, including the fact that they slept with someone else or that they showed little respect for my time. I may, or may not, choose to continue, discontinue, or attempt to alter the relationship at this point - but regardless of the choice I make, I will continue to accept the other person as they are.

Incidentally, if you don't want to have to put up with all the other guff I write here, you can choose to see only the posts on this topic, or for a more automated way of achieving the same thing, add the RSS feed of just these posts to your aggregator of choice.