We had a shared Google Doc titled ‘Ground rules for this relationship’. We could each edit it whenever we wanted. We said it was for noting down everything we needed and expected from each other, and we bulked it out with stuff about cooking and cleaning responsibilities and so on, but really it was mostly for handling the polyamory thing, or that’s the direction it soon took. To begin with, in a section with the heading ‘Sexual Freedom’, it just declared, ‘we will each take joy in the love and intimacy that the other can experience outside of the relationship'. That was then supplemented, as the weeks and months went by, with an increasingly long, complex set of points, covering, for instance, the need for each to inform the other (and then, later, the need for each to get occasion-specific consent from the other in advance), the need for it to not be anyone we might conceivably have romantic feelings for (and then, later, anyone we'd ever see again), the need for it not to happen in a location or with a song playing in the background or on a day or in any other manner that might have particular romantic-nostalgic significance for either or, ideally, both of us, the need for it also not to be anyone with qualities corresponding to insecurities the other had, or that the other strongly disliked or obviously would do, or that was an actual degenerate (according to the Collins Dictionary definition of a degenerate)… In the end, all that was gone again and I think it simply said: ‘Fuck you, you heartless, soulless piece of shit!’ I forget which of us wrote that now.