In the
past year, I’ve thought about a lot of ways to model relationships that are a
touch more complex than your normal (statistically speaking) romantic/sexual
monogamy (or attempted monogamy as the case so often turns out to be). I
started with the simple family tree style graphic, lines connecting people on a
two dimensional space, this got confusing quickly, as different kinds of
relationships were hard to separate from one another, and the cohesion of the
whole quickly got lost in a tangle of lines and double lines. I also tried a
more 3D molecular model, with lines connecting members in space, allowing
meaning to be shifted from line type to position in space, but this too became
confusing quickly. The modeling method that I liked the best (though it’s still
not without its flaws), is the house model – in my dream house, how would space
be divided? Although this method relies heavily on conventional assumptions to
do the work I want it to do (namely to separate sexual/romantic relationships
from non-sexual/romantic ones), it is clean and clear and maintains the unity
of the whole while allowing for a variation of types of relationships bound together
by the whole, as well as providing opportunities for emphasizing other aspects
of community development that I think are important chosen families.
Another
thing that the floor plan modeling allows for is the processing of the nature
of the group relationship, as well as aspects of individual relationships
within the group. The place informs the people in it, and the rooms you plan
for say something about the relationships you want to nurture, and how you want
to do it. All of my plans (involving more than just me), have a few rooms in
common:
·
- Kitchen/Dining room – food is critically important to any relationship, it is in eating together that we grow together.
- Living Room – again, spending time together, in the presence of the people you love is important to me, as well as having a space to be a host, since by hosting others the strength of the primary relationships is strengthened.
- Art space/ Office space – Supporting the hobbies and skills of the other people in the relationship is important, since that is part of being invested in each other.
- A Common/shared bed – Haptics are something that I’m finding increasingly both pleasant, and important for the building of deep relationships, and the common bed, a place to sleep together in the most non-sexual sense of the phrase.
- And finally, each design has individual bedrooms- places of privacy, to create a place for the individual amid the group, or a place for a romantic/sexual relationship within the non-romantic/sexual larger group.
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