Polite Paradise

This is a fairly new question for me, but one I had no idea where to ask until now.

My husband and I are friends with a couple- well, we're mostly friends with the husband and couple-friends with the wife. She's nice, we just... don't have much in common with her. We've known them for probably about a decade now. When we've lived in the same city, we'd hang out about once a week, occasionally more. When we were in different cities but not too much of a drive, we hung out about once a month. Now we're a farther drive away and, while they haven't been able to take us up on it, we do have a standing invitation out to them to come stay with us for the weekend.

Just a few weeks ago, the wife told us that they'd opened up their relationship a while back, and she'd been seriously seeing her girlfriend for nine months now. We met the girlfriend at a party shortly after that. The girlfriend also seems very nice but with very little in common with us.

So that standing invitation- should it include the wife's girlfriend? I have zero experience with polyamorous relationships, and if a single friend had a serious partner of nine months we'd probably include them in the invitation, but because this is the SO of only one half of the couple, I'm not sure where etiquette would fall. Is it that we're inviting our friend (and his wife), or our friends and their SOs (who happen to be each other and also this other woman)?

If we were still living close by, I'd probably handle it by specifically including the girlfriend in some of our invitations, but because we're farther away, it feels both like it would be worse to not invite her (because she's a serious partner) and worse to invite her (because introversion and hosting a near-stranger for a weekend). Any thoughts?

Yeah, that's a new one for me, too. My main thought is that "standing invitations" often don't lead to anything. But, if they should happen to call you up and ask, I would try to follow their lead. If they think it's important that the girlfriend be included, then I would cheerfully invite her. I'm sure they're used to people not quite knowing what to do--like how many bedrooms will they need? So if it does come up I would just try to be straightforward and matter-of-fact with any questions.

Every poly relationship is different.

Some have outside relationships and they know about them but they do not "mingle" together. So Wife, Girlfriend and Husband aren't going on weekend trips the 3 of them. It's different than a sister-wife kind of ordeal.

However others very much are all one family(?) unit.

It's totally acceptable to ask her about how they spend their time if they're a total package unit or if it's still just in couples so to speak.

I'm pretty closed off and would be freaking out inside with this much information going back and forth, I think it's great that you're seeking information about how to work around this situation.

Yeah, I'd just ask whether they prefer to be invited as a twosome or a threesome.

I don’t think you need to bring it up with your friends and it would be weird to. I definitely don’t think you need to make a point of making the invite again to include or not include someone when it’s just a standing invite.

Are you comfortable having all of them stay? If so just wait until they say that they are coming to visit and see what they say. I mean, you don’t even have to ask then, I’m sure they will ask if they want gf to come or mention she is coming if they think that it’s assumed.

Or is it that you’d rather not host gf and you’re not sure if you have an obligation to? If that’s the case then it’s a bit more complicated. I still don’t think you should mention it now. I don’t think you’re required by etiquette to host gf if you don’t want to but I would cross that bridge when/if you come to it.

It isn't clear to me whether the "standing invitation" status is that you will invite them to stay with you for a specific weekend (ball in your court) or they will tell you when they can come stay with you for a weekend (ball in their court). If the ball is in their court, I would do nothing at this point. It seems that you are closer with the husband than with the wife and I think you can sortof wait to see how this develops.

If the ball is in their court, and they propose a specific weekend to come stay with you, I think you can likely get a sense of what they are thinking/expecting by how they ask. If it doesn't work for you, for whatever reason, I don't think you are obligated to host one, two, or all three of them (unless you want to). I tend to view "standing invitations" as more aspirational than actual invitations.

Thanks for all the advice! I'll probably send my husband to talk to the husband about it, since they do online gaming together once or twice a week.

The "standing invitation" is that when either of us has free weekends we'll talk about the possibility of a visit. When we were all closer, we managed a weekend 2-3 times a year. Since we moved away, it's been hectic on both our ends (babies, ailing parents, loads of family weddings) and hasn't happened yet, but it's not just aspirational- we'll definitely have them over, we just don't know when yet. Life has settled down a lot in the last couple months so we're aiming for summer now. They live near our parents, so we've done dinner about every other time we're back that way.

It's definitely that the wife is a couple with her husband and also in a couple with her girlfriend. Which is where most of my confusion about what to do came in, since they all hang out together a lot. If she was seriously dating both of them, it would be easy- I'd definitely make sure to offer to include the girlfriend when we talked specific dates.

The etiquette question only comes in when you are dealing with a "must invite social units" situation -- like invitations to weddings, dinner parties, etc. -- not informal socializing (including visits). 

In the informal situations, I think there can't really be a rule, because there are times when you wouldn't even have to invite spouses.

The question about formal invitations, though, is really interesting.  And here is where I think it's important to remember that the etiquette rule is that you have to invite complete "social units" -- not that you must invite all "significant others."  Whether people will be offended if their significant others are excluded is another matter -- I'm just looking at the minimum etiquette requirement here.

Social units include married and engaged couples.  That's clear.  Gotta invite them together to things like weddings (not single-sex things like bachelor parties or group-specific events like book clubs or office parties).

And of course many authorities include other relationships as "social units," too.  Probably most compelling is in jurisdictions that don't recognize same-sex relationships, same-sex couples who get as close to "married" as possible for social purposes.  I think most authorities would call that a must-invite social unit situation. 

In my world, there are also couples, usually older and widowed, who don't marry or cohabit for a variety of legal and financial reasons, but are very definitely social units for social purposes.  The benchmark I use there is not whether they always socialize together, but whether they always co-host together themselves (social events, holidays, etc.).  Once someone co-hosts their SO's daughter's wedding, yeah, I see a social unit there.

Then it starts to get tricky, even when it doesn't sound like it would in the abstract.  Take cohabiting couples: most of us would invite both of them anyway just as a courtesy matter, but even that is not always clear as a must-invite situation -- sometimes people are just roommates, or friends who are getting to be more than friends, or there is another roommate with a couple, with whom the hosts are also acquainted, for example.  And you may have a very committed couple who don't cohabit who seem more like a permanent couple than a new cohabiting couple, so then you feel weird using that as a benchmark.

"Inviting all SOs" sounds easy in the abstract, but it can lead to problems when you have other people on your list who are in very committed relationships but don't live together, because it can be hard to draw the line on just which relationships "qualify" and it is horrible to be deciding who is "serious" or "committed" enough and who isn't.  Hosts end up either inviting all SOs (and perhaps even feeling that they must then also invite singles to bring dates) or none (which offends many) or inviting some and not others (which also offends).

Speaking for myself, I look at permanence (which I think is the idea behind the whole "social unit" principle anyway), not seriousness.  That both sticks to the reason for the SU rule and saves me from weighing or investigating (as in the case of a geographically distant cousin I'm inviting to a wedding who has a boy/girlfriend that I really don't know anything about) how serious other people's relationships are.

So it's hard enough when you are only dealing with groups of two.  When you get to poly situations, I think it's helpful to fall back on the "requirement is social unit, not significant other" rule.  In the OP's example -- and I am assuming we have two relationships with an overlapping person, Woman 1, not a single three-member relationship -- the man is their friend; they only include Woman 1 because she is a SU with him.  So I think they wouldn't be required to invite Woman 2.  They still can, of course, if they choose to do so. 

But in a situation in which three people see themselves in a single, permanent relationship, and hold themselves out as such socially, I think I would consider them a social unit that must all be invited.

Four?  Five?  What do you do when you get to twenty?!