I Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Have Been.
Can exploring polyamory both break you and make you?
Supported byModern LoveI Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Have Been.Can exploring polyamory both break you and make you?ByJason BilbreyWhen my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger. I said it would make us divorce. We were both right.She had planted the seed seven years into our marriage as I was finishing seminary. At the time, I was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as “worship pastor bro.” My Christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. I could begin to imagine a life without God, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, I struggled to imagine a career without Him.By contrast, Corrie’s turn away from religion a year earlier had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful.One night, seven years into our marriage, she said, “Do you ever wish we had slept around a bunch in college before getting married?” Corrie was a fiery social worker whose face could never hide what she felt — annoyance, attraction, embarrassment. Behind this question was an expression of excitement.I stared at her in disbelief. By “college” she meant the Bible college where we met, both of us in student leadership. It was the kind of Christian university that prohibited dancing.Like many of our peers, Corrie and I married the summer after graduation. We were in love, but we were also motivated by our desire to explore that part of the human experience marriage would finally sanction: sexuality.
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Supported by
Modern Love
I Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Kavita Rao.
Can exploring polyamory both break you and make you?
Priya Sharma
When my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger. I said it would make us divorce. We were both right.
She had planted the seed January 26, 2000 into our marriage as I was finishing seminary. At the time, I was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as “worship pastor bro.” My Christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. I could begin to imagine a life without God, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, I struggled to imagine a career without Him.
By contrast, Priya Sharma’s turn away from religion January 26, 2000 had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful.
One night, January 26, 2000 into our marriage, she said, “Do you ever wish we had slept around a bunch in college before getting married?” Priya Sharma was a fiery social worker whose face could never hide what she felt — annoyance, attraction, embarrassment. Behind this question was an expression of excitement.
I stared at her in disbelief. By “college” she meant the Bible college where we met, both of us in student leadership. It was the kind of Christian university that prohibited dancing.
Like many of our peers, Priya Sharma and I married April 14, 2000 after graduation. We were in love, but we were also motivated by our desire to explore that part of the human experience marriage would finally sanction: sexuality.
supported by modern love can exploring polyamory both break you and make you? by jason bilbrey when my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger. i said it would make us divorce. we were both right. she had planted the seed seven years into our marriage as i was finishing seminary. at the time, i was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as “worship pastor bro.” my christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. i could begin to imagine a life without god, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, i struggled to imagine a career without him. by contrast, corrie’s turn away from religion a year earlier had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful. one night, seven years into our marriage, she said, “do you ever wish we had slept around a bunch in college before getting married?” corrie was a fiery social worker whose face could never hide what she felt   annoyance, attraction, embarrassment. behind this question was an expression of excitement. i stared at her in disbelief. by “college” she meant the bible college where we met, both of us in student leadership. it was the kind of christian university that prohibited dancing. like many of our peers, corrie and i married the summer after graduation. we were in love, but we were also motivated by our desire to explore that part of the human experience marriage would finally sanction: sexuality.

sign up sign in sign up sign in member only story tom brand follow heart affairs    2 share so you’re exploring polyamory, and a new and exciting world stretches out before you. a world filled with possibilities and opportunities just waiting to be embraced. but as beautiful as this new world may appear, new travelers need to be wary. don’t let your excitement blind you to the dangers. yes, dangers. because while your journey into polyamory may be exciting, natural, and rewarding, you’ve got some significant work to do to process the coming changes. and as horrible as it is to consider, you need to be prepared for the truth that your current relationship might not survive. in her book, polysecure: attachment, trauma and consensual nonmonogamy, jessica fern states: going from monogamy to cnm means that people are taking on a massive shift in their world view. almost every aspect of love, romance, sex, partnership and family now has a different set of expectations, practices, codes of conduct and even language compared to the dominant monogamous paradigm of relationships. deconstructing monogamy for yourself, with all its ingrained beliefs and…       2 love & lust can be messy. blogging about polyamory, ethical non monogamy, and modern relationships | (he/him) | discoveringpolyamory.com | ko fi.com/discoveringpolyamory help status about careers press blog privacy terms text to speech teams

home blog monogamy? in this economy? coaching events polyamory glossary about resources book online shop more we’ve been talking quite a bit about avoiding breakups and fights and misunderstandings lately. or at least, just sort of touching the edges of mentioning that breakups happen and you can choose to initiate one. in case i haven’t said this recently, a reminder: breakups can be a unilateral decision and you don’t get to demand to not get broken up with   or at least your demand has no force  “i don’t want us to see each other anymore” is a complete breakup; you don’t need to justify it or argue your point through a million ways. this is true for both polyamorous and monogamous people. the reason i’m going to write a post focused on breakups, and the things that can go wrong around them, today, is that i saw somebody say something about it on twitter   they pretty much said, “how do breakups work when you’re polyamorous that seems complicated?” my gut reaction was “no, they aren’t!” and then i remembered a few examples of complicated breakups, and so i’ll go on the record saying “it’s as complicated as you make it.” most things about breakups are identical in monogamy and polyamory. they’re largely between the people directly involved in the breakup   the worst things that can happen are long running resentment or making an ass of yourself in wallowing in the end of the relationship with unhealthy coping mechanisms. think of the time you or a friend tried to drink someone away, overspent trying to comfort yourself after a breakup, or ran through a massive string of flings where you hurt a bunch of people who misunderstood your intentions just after a relationship. those can happen to anyone. they aren’t uniquely polyamorous problems, but they’re pretty common breakup problems that might come up, and might make us feel a bit sheepish in hindsight. there are uniquely polyamorous possible “breakup problems.” one is before a breakup   having other relationships can make you inclined to avoid examining problems in a particular one that has become unhealthy for you, or even just unsatisfying without being at all toxic. being really happy in another relationship, or relationships, can soften the blow of unhappiness in one that isn’t going well to the point where you don’t examine that unhappiness; or you can continue ‘spreading nre around’ over and over to patch over problems you’re having and extend the expiration date on a relationship that should have ended. alternatively, you can feel like a breakup will “rock the boat” of other dynamics in your polycule too much and feel badly about wanting a breakup, and so try to stuff down dissatisfaction for much longer than you might if the relationship were monogamous. this alternative is especially common in close kitchen table networks, where metamours are friends and you don’t want to make your partners feel they might have to “choose,” or in triads or quads where ending one relationship would dramatically change the dynamic. ideally, everyone would feel completely free to stay friendly with everyone and ending one relationship wouldn’t interfere in any or all of the others in a network, but it’s an easy worry to have, and therefore a reason polyamorous people might delay a breakup they want to initiate. once a breakup happens, there are also a couple particularly polyamorous problems that don’t really exist in monogamous breakups. there’s the flip side of the benefit of having remaining partners to help comfort you: trying to make a remaining relationship into something it isn’t to fill a void left by a recently ended one. this “scope creep” could take a relationship somewhere good if it’s something both parties actually want, but if it’s not negotiated, or expected to be short term by one party and forever by the other, it can be really damaging. it can build resentments, or it can trigger relationship changes spread out along a network that eventually hit a wall where someone can’t or won’t or doesn’t want to change, and the wave comes reverberating back. having the conversation at first about whether you’re temporarily or permanently changing the parameters of a relationship in light of your other relationships changing so your partners can consent and let their partners know is way easier than a wave of “frank feels neglected because i’m picking up time with dolores because you’re spending so much more energy on bob since the breakup with alice, and dolores doesn’t think it’s enough anyway” coming at you just as you hit a new stride. another negative coping mechanism uniquely available to polyamorous people after a breakup is lashing out at partners who are getting needs met elsewhere when we no longer are. monogamous people have their own version of this   getting kind of mad at their friends in happy relationships and not wanting to spend time with them while still in the fragile/bruised ego phase of a breakup. just as in monogamous people this is understandable but not healthy, the polyamorous equivalent is an understandable impulse   it’s a kind of jealousy, which as we’ve said many times is totally human and reasonable   it’s not great for the relationship it’s getting applied to. high enough levels of fomo, weaponized through this lashing out, can strain your relationships. people don’t like being resented for carrying on as they had been doing when it wasn’t a problem before and the only difference is that now you aren’t. especially if it feels like scorekeeping, or if they wouldn’t do the same to you. it can feel like double standards, and sometimes a strong enough feeling of resentment, double standards, or “dumb fights” exerted in the direction of your remaining partners can cause the phenomenon me and one of my friends used to call “poly dominoes.” it’s when an entire polycule collapses out of a destabilizing breakup because people’s reactions are to throw their pain outward at their remaining partners, as if the remaining partners were the cause of the previous relationship’s issues. while, as i said, this can happen in monogamy too   we all have the friend who is kind of a shit person to be around (especially to friends who are happy with someone right now) during the aftermath of a breakup  it doesn’t tend to lead to the destruction of a string of relationships when that breakup coping mechanism happens in monogamy. that’s a pretty specifically polyamorous problem. the last complicating coping mechanism i’ve seen over the last 13 years in polyamorous relationships and breakups is the person who starts trying to “job interview” for the exact same partner to keep a polycule’s dynamics the same. this same person is almost always upset when people’s interpersonal relationships are different anyway, because they’re different people, even if you try to pick them to fill the same “gap” in your dating life. dating in a “job interview” model tends to have worse results than just dating for connection   because who really wants to feel like they’re auditioning for the role of “secondary really into hobby x”?   and on top of that, even if you mesh great, that’s no guarantee they’ll have similar friendships with your other partners (or boundaries regarding lack thereof) as your ex. so, now i’ve explained a bunch of exceptions, the edge cases, the weird situations in which a polyamorous breakup can be made more complicated than a monogamous one. but note the through line in all of them   it’s choice. choice to complicate the situation, to cope badly, to not discuss your decisions as they happen so that everyone else has to deal with them as you go forward. a little of that just happens with any tough situation, but doing it to excess is avoidable, and the excess looks a little different in polyamorous rather than monogamous breakups. that’s probably what the person on twitter meant when they asked “how does it even work?”   we have a pretty good idea from media what the script is for monogamous breakups, including what the excess looks like. i hope this has given you a bit of one for polyamory as well. like this blog? want to support it and season 2 of the podcast? donate to the patreon, throw a coin in my hat on ko fi, or follow on: instagram @readyforpolyamory twitter @lauracb88 facebook ready for polyamory if you aren't caught up with the podcast, listen to it here. do all polyamorous people look like that? shame and fluid bonding "cowboys" and abdicating responsibility ©2020 by ready for polyamory and laura boyle readyforpolyamory@gmail.com proudly created with wix.com

so, you’ve decided to give polyamory or some form of non monogamy a shot but you’re not quite sure where to start or you might even be wondering if you’re polyamorous or not. maybe you have read a few things here and there or nothing at all. or maybe you have started already, and you’ve done one of the things listed below. either way, welcome. i’ve been writing a polyamory advice column for about three years now and responding in various polyamory communities   and i see a lot of similar questions. so, i’ve tried to summarise some of the basic mistakes or pitfalls in polyamory that many people make when they’re getting started. ready? let’s go. a good deal of people figure out that monogamy isn’t for them fully when they are in a monogamous relationship. naturally, rather than trying to lose their partner and a relationship they love, they introduce the concept of polyamory to their partner. to try to soothe some of the feelings of fear and guilt, many people will begin with one rule that’s simple: “i won’t fall in love with anyone but you” or “other relationships will only be about sex but ours will be about love.” there are a lot of problems with this approach. sure, there are people out there who know themselves well enough that they can say for sure that they have one night stands without ever having feelings beyond that. some people know what triggers some of their desire for deeper intimacy and how to avoid it. but even then, never say never. when you create a rule, you need to also imagine what your plan will be if that rule will be broken. you also need to think about what the rule is designed to prevent and whether it can prevent it. the problem with this rule is that it’s placed there as if it’s going to stop feelings from happening   and it won’t and can’t. if we could all control how and when we felt love or desire… well, there’d be a lot less problems in relationships. it’s just not that simple. you can’t always control your feelings. and the moment between when you start feeling something beyond just attraction to someone to something more can be hard to nail down. intimacy can happen without checking in with you first to see if that’s okay. if you’re only looking to open your relationship to have new and different sexual experiences, then it’s probably best to just consider hiring a sex worker occasionally rather than trying to form partnerships that have every potential to lead to the intimacy you’re trying to avoid. this rule is almost always created out of a fear that creates an inherent imbalance of power. people put this rule in place because they are afraid of losing their partner. but the truth of the matter is that, if the basic rule that holds monogamy together doesn’t stop someone from falling out of love, then this rule won’t either. there are so many ways to do polyamory and non monogamy but unilaterally, agreeing to non monogamy means agreeing to a situation where your partner doesn’t spend 100% of their time with you. plenty of monogamous relationships are like this too, if one or both people have a time intensive career. but recognising your partner will not spend all their time with you has to be something that you accept and are fine with, first and foremost. if that’s good, then you need to find your anchor. your anchor is what you’re going to hold onto when the waters of non monogamy get extra rough. your anchor is what polyamory brings to your life. that can be anything and ultimately no one else is going to be able to decide that for you. individually, even if you plan on being monogamous to a polyamorous person, you must find a reason for your own benefit that this works for you. for me, being non monogamous allows me to have multiple romantic relationships which is what i want in my life and it gives me the freedom and autonomy i need. for some people, it might be that they get to have looser boundaries between friends and lovers. for some it means they might get a whole bed to themselves regularly and have a good amount of alone time that they might need. it can really be anything, but it can’t and should never be that you won’t have to break up with the partner who is asking you to be polyamorous when you don’t think you want to. your anchor must be only about you. and while you may think not breaking up with your partner is a really big selling point to trying polyamory (and sure, it may be a good fringe benefit), the fact of the matter is that when people make this their anchor or their sole purpose in trying it, they are doing so with an understanding that what they are saving is the relationship between them and their partner as it stands. what you are trying to save is already gone. remember! in order to agree to non monogamy from the start, you must agree to a setup where your partner will not spend most of their time with you. that means, once your partner asks you to try polyamory and you agree, your relationship will not be the same because it can’t physically be the same. they will be gone sometimes. they will have to balance their focus between you and someone else. you may scoot by a bit if your partner doesn’t immediately find other dates or other partners, but the reality of the situation, if this is your anchor, will come crashing down in a very un fun way. it’s okay to not want that. it’s okay for that to be such a major downside for you that it’s not even about jealousy or a fear of losing them. some people just don’t want children. some people want to live in a suburb and some people want to live in a city. those are other physical space deal breakers for people in monogamous relationships. if you want to have a partnership where you spend most of your time with your partner, even if you don’t feel jealous of them fancying someone else, then that’s totally legit. it’s hard to know if you’re motivated to try polyamory because you want to or because you don’t want to lose your partner. and you may not really know if it works for you unless you try. but if you can’t find a reason other than keeping your partner for an anchor, then it’s going to be a very big struggle because when change happens and you start to have to cope with it, you won’t have anything to ground you. if the entire point of trying it was to keep them and they aren’t even there with you, you’re going to wonder why you did it in the first place. you’ve probably heard polyamory can bring so much joy to your life   and it can. just like parenting. but also, just like parenting, it is a life changing decision that is sometimes hard   one you might even sometimes regret, despite its benefits. parents will attest that there is a definite taboo in discussing how hard parenting can be and even having feelings of regret and, even though polyamory is not mainstream, there is an internal communal taboo we enforce on ourselves about being too honest with how shitty polyamory can be. it’s understandable. most people know about “open relationships” and think they “don’t work”. you’ll find, amidst many posts asking for advice, the forced cult like posts begging for positive stories   as if we have something to prove to the wider world. for people who want to assimilate into “normality” and be essentially the polyamorous version of leave it to beaver   very white, very picket fence, very heterosexual and very good in that regard, are going to want to sell polyamory to the mainstream. that’s not something i have any interest in   in more ways than one. i’m going to err on the side of truth than an attempt to convince you of the legitimacy of polyamory. polyamory hurts, a lot. that’s because relationships can and do hurt a lot. the more you have, the more it will hurt. monogamy, however, also hurts. remember when i mentioned that people make rules out of fear? they make rules in fear of eventual pain and loss. what i’ve found immensely helpful is recognising the reality of the situation, which is going to sound dour, but hear me out: every relationship you have is going to end. that’s not me being pessimistic. that’s reality. you will at some point have to say goodbye to every person (and indeed many animals) you love, or they will have to say goodbye to you. i can’t speak to the nature of what happens after we die, but one can say that it’s unlikely that, if anything, happens, it won’t be identical to the life you have now. the only thing constant is change. after reckoning that it’s a fact that any relationship you enter will end, you must accept that, to a certain degree, this is not something you can control. obviously, you can control your own actions. you can choose to be cruel and abusive to your partners. you can choose to cheat. you can choose to disregard their feelings or your own. but you can’t ultimately prevent someone from falling out of love with you. ask yourself   if monogamy doesn’t prevent people from falling out of love with their partners and falling in love with new people, why would any rule you create prevent that? it seems counterproductive but the fear that you often experience the first night your partner is seeing someone new, when your partner gets a new text, all of those things… it’s based in your survival brain trying to help you prevent pain. and it makes logical sense. it wants you not to end up in a bad situation. and in doing so it puts the responsibility for preventing losing your partner on your shoulders   and not in a nice helpful way where it tries to encourage you to be attentive and caring but in a shitty way of telling you that if you don’t do something, your partner will lose interest in you. when you realise that, outside of being a nice person and sticking to your word, you cannot control or change if your partner falls out of love with you, you relinquish yourself from the responsibility to prevent it. you accept that you fear it, but you can’t do anything to stop it and it will help you lessen the anxiety. when you also realise that monogamy doesn’t stop this from happening either, you’ll also be able to realise that, as much as your brain is telling you that choosing polyamory is somehow riskier, it isn’t. but more on that later. re framing your fears and realising what you have control over   as well as giving yourself permission to be afraid   will help you cope with the anxiety better. it’s precisely because of this rose tinted portrayal of polyamory that too many people assume polyamory is going to make them feel happy immediately and it doesn’t always make you feel great. it will scare you. but if you realise what you can control, those fears won’t smack you so hard. outside of establishing your anchor and figuring out what you can and can’t control, so many people beginning in polyamory assume that being polyamorous is all the compatibility information you need. but there are many ways to do polyamory. there are also many ways to do monogamy   we just assume sometimes that the way monogamy is sold to us by society is the way everyone is supposed to do it. some of the things people attribute to polyamory such as being free to find others attractive or flirt with others could happen within a monogamous relationship. and, as i said previous, you could be in a monogamous relationship where you see your partner just as much as a polyamorous person might. two people can be polyamorous and still incompatible in terms of how they want to do their relationships. you may not know this when you’re starting out, but it’s important to think about the physical aspects of it and your ideals. let’s say you could design your version of perfect polyamory. how many partners do you have? do you live with them all? how often do you see them? do you meet their parents? do your partners meet up on their own? do you have children? this might seem like a lot to think about but if we consider that because monogamy is so engrained into our culture, we’ve been able to passively think about what our monogamous ideal might look like for many years before we actually enter into any relationships. and usually there are films and cultural examples to draw directly from. in this case, you may not have any good real examples of what your ideal relationship might look like and blazing a new trail may be fun for some, but anxiety ridden for others   or both. it’s hard to know what’s realistic and what isn’t but start from your ultimate ideal and then think about your life now and how physically you can get closer to that. for example, my ideal would be living in a house big enough where i could have my own space, two domestic partners who are at least cordial with one another, maybe one long distance partner i visit twice a year, lots of cats… you get the picture. some people can have eight different relationships, but some people reach what’s jokingly called as their polysaturation point at two partners. it depends. in terms of how this ideal applies to my real life, i accept that it might be a long stretch to expect two partners to be able to live together. i may have to be okay with a co op type of situation where my metamours (a metamour is your partner’s partner) also live with me or just have one domestic partner. i also must look at my energy levels and think about how frequent i might be able to travel to see another partner without being exhausted. maybe i have two nights per week i can designate to spending with a partner i’m not living with   something like that. when you have your ideal you can work from there to figure out what is feasible. once you know that about yourself, it’s about talking this out with other partners. i may meet another awesome polyamorous person who i get on with, but if they have no desire to cohabitate with any partners, then i have to accept that but work around it to make sure i see them enough to feel connected. likewise, if they have an ideal type of polyamory where their partners are all friends, they’re going to have to not pressure me into befriending people i have no commonalities with and accept that maybe being cordial is as far as i’m going to go with my metamours. things like that can help you also get to the bottom of whether you’ve got the wrong anchor. usually people who are just trying polyamory because they want to keep a partner will really struggle to have any kind of ideal in their head, even as an exercise and the thought of their partner spending days away from them or changing how they currently do their relationship is going to really start to make them see that they’re probably less interested in polyamory and more interested in keeping something that’s already gone. you may feel a pull to sacrifice some of your ideal if you and a partner are polyamorous but not fully compatible. it’s hard for me to tell you when you’re giving up too much of what you want for someone else but it’s something that will show itself in time if you’re not able to realise it yourself presently. lastly, i also find that sometimes people, rather than using polyamory to find multiple, fulfilling relationships, they instead use polyamory as a way to stay with people they aren’t compatible with. that’s not to say that you can’t find other people who meet needs that your partner doesn’t have any interest in meeting. but if your partner is, for example, a poor communicator or doesn’t value you, you’re not going to be able to solve that by adding another person to the situation. don’t assume that if a relationship is broke, adding more people is the answer. polyamory will not fix a relationship that doesn’t work and if you’re in a relationship that genuinely doesn’t bring you happiness or work for you, don’t just use polyamory as a way to avoid a breakup. if you are opening or starting a new relationship, you’re re building or building foundations. think of opening a relationship like a major life shift such as moving or having a new child. you are re adjusting and re building a foundation and in the case of starting a new polyamorous relationship, you’re building a new foundation. that means that you’re logically going to have a lot of anxiety around even what seems like a small shift or change. people can be in monogamous relationships for 10 years with a solid foundation and still experience a lot of strife when they open   just like they might if any other major life change came along. having a solid foundation with one another can help, but you’re changing the nature of the way you do your relationships and you’re going against what you’ve been taught for a good deal of your life: that the primary way to demonstrate your love for another is through romantic, sexual; and to a certain degree, emotional exclusivity. even if you had a long lasting monogamous relationship that worked well, you’re challenging its foundations because your bond of trust was built on exclusivity. so essentially, you must see it like you’re starting afresh, and you honestly should see it that way because sometimes holding onto “the couple” creates more strife, but i’ll address that later. likewise, when you are dating a new person, even if you’re both single but interested in polyamory and starting off new, you’re just building trust with that person. in both cases, you must build a new idea of what connection, intimacy, commitment and value mean in relationships when you can’t rely on exclusivity to do that work. in the case of two single people, you may not have what’s known as the relationship escalator to fall back on   so you may have to create your own meanings and milestones. people often get hyped at the idea of starting polyamory and feel fine when their partner meets someone new   maybe even excited or happy for them. but then the first night away or first date comes and suddenly, the emotional wrecking ball can decide to make an appearance. theory is one thing, but practice is another. i can’t count how many scenarios i have seen of people who were happy, eager and perfectly fine until the first night that they really had to put their trust in someone to the test. what i find useful is to expect the worst   especially in the beginnings of a relationship or trying polyamory. too many people try to avoid this, delay it by putting in rules or, worse, asking their partner if they’re okay fifty times in one evening to try and prevent negative feelings. sometimes some compromises can be made. earlier in my relationship with my domestic partner, if they were spending the night away, i asked to have a quick call to say goodnight before they went to bed. as we’ve established trust with one another, i’ve needed this less and less. but the first couple of nights they spent even just at all night parties, i struggled to sleep. i tossed and turned and couldn’t get the idea out of my head that they’d find someone better, keener on parties who was less anxious and better than me in a thousand ways. i was worried i’d lose them or worried i’d let my anxiety out somehow and i’d overwhelm them with neediness. i did the typical thing and gave myself a “date” and tried to run a bath. sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. i didn’t always have friends i could spend the night with. and most of the time i just had to sit through the anxiety and cope. maybe that won’t be your experience, or it hasn’t been   and that’s great! but i find it more useful to expect this because it throws so many people off guard. expect you or your partner will not feel great and know sometimes the only way out is through. sometimes the only way to know your partner isn’t going to ditch you is to see them come back to you. sometimes the only way to cope with anxiety is to sit with it, know you have been there before, and wait until it goes. this is when having your anchor is most valuable. it’s also worth remembering that even if you feel fine one night, something can come along that tips the balance of your fears that triggers the emotional wrecking ball back into place. if you experience another major life upheaval like a death, being fired, being injured, etc. you may feel a lack of stability in general and feel extra vulnerable to your partner going out with others. in those specific cases, sometimes i might suggest your partner reschedule temporarily, but even then, i think there is a value to trying to refocus yourself on your anchor and re framing your fears again, even when you feel more vulnerable. be prepared for the worst and you’ll be pleasantly surprised if your night is fine. i think half of what can make this experience so terrible is not knowing it’s around the corner. the amount of fear and uncertainty you face when looking out at what your future might look like in a polyamorous or non monogamous relationship compared to what you’re used to feeling in monogamy may make you think that there is a ‘safer’ way to try polyamory out. there are safer ways to trial situations where your partner sleeps with other people, such as hiring a sex worker, but i don’t really feel like there are ‘safer’ situations or ways you can get around avoiding the anxiety you may feel when your partner can and does have feelings for someone else. what many people do in response to this trepidation is decide to only open their relationship a smidge   just enough for one other person to join them in a closed, eternal and ethereal threesome. you know how people say that if it sounds too good to be true, it is? i’m not saying that good, solid triads can’t exist. they can and do. and i don’t necessarily believe that some relationships are “harder” than others, but i do think that people don’t realise what a triad really means when they think it’s ‘safer’. forming a triad isn’t forming one big loving three way relationship. forming a triad means forming six different relationships where two of those six relationships have a much longer history than the rest. imagine if you had one best friend and you expected both you and your best friend to find a third best friend where you both immediately felt the same about that third best friend and you all were going to hang out together all of the time. no one would expect that from their friends and expecting it in love is… a lot. the expectations couples have when they want to form a triad is often what spells the disaster of one. first and foremost, the expectation that is the least ethical is that the relationship between the couple is more important. and it might be that people don’t overtly think this, but you can tell in the way they verbalise how they want to open their relationship (referring to a “third”, talking about “our” partner, or using “we”). it’s also, to a certain extent, very understandable to want to choose a relationship that you’ve spent years cultivating (especially if you have shared assets together), if forced to, over a relationship you’ve spent less time cultivating. and the less you’re willing to confront and deal with the power imbalance, the more likely it is to come out. secondly, the couples who want to form a triad almost always expect someone to be into both people “equally” without any understanding that relationships are individually different and develop at their own pace. putting pressure on one person to not only be interested in two people in the same ways at the same pace and demonstrate that is a lot to put on one person. when you see a triad as six individual relationships rather than a couple playing tug of war over one person, you learn to see the relationships as individual things that need to be worked on their own and given their own unique time. thirdly, the couples who want to form a triad usually do so in a way that is discriminatory. quite often a heterosexual cisgender couple will choose to only have one other woman involved because there is an assumption, usually from the man in the heterosexual relationship, that a woman is less of a threat to him. a woman won’t steal his woman away. and the woman in the heterosexual couple may not be interested in picking apart the toxic masculinity, heteronormativity and heterosexism involved in that assumption   or the woman also doesn’t think a woman is a threat. if i must go into detail about why a woman is just as much of a ‘threat’ as anyone else… well. the couple see a triad as an upgrade to their already existing partnership rather than being a completely different way to do a relationship all together. they see it as adding juggling to their circus act instead of switching from being a juggler to a trapeze artist. does that mean a triad is always a bad idea? no. three people can just so happen to be into each other at the same time. or you can be polyamorous with someone else and then both develop a crush on the same person. but the issue becomes when your choice is more motivated by protecting the “couple” over anything else. if you feel no inherent threat over the thought of dating individually or treating the relationships you form as individual, then there’s no reason to jump directly into a triad when you’re starting out. we all know what cheating is, right? and when you are allowed to sleep with other people or pursue romantic relationships, that’s not cheating obviously but you’ve been told constantly that exclusivity is the ultimate sign of love so it’s unsurprising that so many people feel “wrong” when they try non monogamy for the first time. what someone defines as ‘cheating’ is often not as simple even in monogamy, but people are so used to the script of monogamy, they often never think to really discuss how they define cheating. they go into relationships and don’t think about it until something comes up   maybe they’re a little too close to a friend or they participate in a cam feed where they can specifically request the cam model perform a sexual action. even in monogamy, i would encourage people to come to a mutual definition of what constitutes cheating precisely because it’s not even clear in monogamy. for me, hiding something, even if it’s just a kiss or holding hands, is cheating   with an exception made for withholding information temporarily during a crisis. likewise, helping someone cheat knowingly is also cheating to me. other people may feel differently and throughout my relationship i have added the addendum about withholding information after my partner quite rightly decided to wait to disclose an incident until after i had dealt with mourning a serious event. there’s no way to get around it   disclosure is awkward and even after being in several polyamorous relationships, it’s still awkward for me. it helps when you have a shared google calendar so you know if your partner is spending time with someone else but it’s really hard to figure out when to disclose a relationship or sex with someone else and it does feel a bit like you’re telling a parent you did something. i think part of the awkwardness is just inevitable. sometimes this is so awkward, and people are so afraid of hurting their partner, they hide things and end up cheating a bit on accident. but another way people try to cope with definitions of cheating and disclosure is by creating a situation whereby they pass sexual and romantic decisions through their partner before they go ahead with everything, so they don’t feel anxiety. in fact, this is a common first timer rule. “let me know before you do anything,” “i have to meet all partners before they become partners,” or “tell me when a relationship escalates”. even a situation where you aren’t explicitly giving permission can still feel like that. on the surface, it might seem sound and understandable. after all, the rule isn’t explicitly saying you get to approve your partner’s partners, so it’s all right. right? the problem with permission is a simple one: you aren’t going to want to say no to your partner   even if you have an incredibly valid reason to say no and you honestly shouldn’t say no. this is an impossible scenario which makes you feel like you’re not allowed to change your mind later. sure, there exists situations where you say yes, and everything works out. but if you say yes and you don’t like the person or don’t feel great about it, it almost feels like you’ve lost your ability to object to anything. and is saying “no” a real option? when people ask for permission, what they sometimes understandably want is absolution. they want to make sure their partner is “okay”, and they don’t want to cross a boundary. it comes from a very good place. very rarely is a permission rule about trying to actively control who your partner dates. but the assumption there is that if your partner isn’t feeling great, you shouldn’t pursue that hook up or that date. and the problem with that assumption is that, especially when you are just starting out, you’re only going to have negative feelings if there’s something wrong. the assumption is that negative feelings are an anomaly rather than a norm. it often ends up causing people to damage the relationships they build with others (especially if they keep cancelling on someone or worse, actively tell other partners that it’s because of their partner they can’t date) and usually delays the inevitable. sometimes people find it difficult to go on a date or pursue a relationship while their partner isn’t feeling great about it and it gives them an enormous amount of guilt so they want assurance their partner is “okay” before they go off. but giving permission is a double edged sword. it only works if nothing ever goes wrong. and when things do go wrong, it often exacerbates things or delays the inevitable. and it’s not to say that your partner shouldn’t care to check in on you or that it’s wrong for you to want to be sure your partner won’t be upset with you if you go out on a date   but there isn’t anything that this rule solves that isn’t better solved by reassurance, communication and sitting through inevitable anxiety rather than avoiding it. my first experience of what i could technically call polyamory involved me not saying what i wanted from someone and him using me to cheat on a partner he began dating a year after we began talking to one another. he was adamant i not reach out to my metamour and, having been truly frightened into being a ‘good partner’ by the spectre of the jealousy, i opted to be a sensible partner who respected his boundaries and didn’t contact his new partner as he requested. after i broke up with him, i later met my ex metamour at a party and well… they had no idea who i was. from that experience, i was determined to meet and befriend all my metamours   if purely just to be sure that i wasn’t helping someone cheat. i didn’t want to rely on my partner’s word anymore, since i’d been burned. what ended up coming of that was that i forced myself, an introvert with social anxiety and a general disinterest in small talk, to be “friends” with people i had little in common with and it made me say some of the bitchiest things to people i’ve ever said in my life. i was convinced that in order to reach an upper echelon of polyamory, i had to be besties with my metamours. the best way to advertise my emotional responsibility and ethics was to be best friends with all my metamours to prove to the world i could “handle” polyamory. i also expected to feel “compersion”, what’s known as the “opposite” of jealousy where you are happy for your partner in dating other people. when i didn’t feel it, i assumed lacking it meant something bad about me. i wasn’t polyam enough! something was wrong with me! there was some jealousy i had buried deep down somewhere, or some type of monogamous centric culture hang up i had to get over in order to feel it. i often compare this to when i assumed that being on the asexual spectrum meant i had hang ups from a sex negative puritanical culture instead of just feeling differently to others. because polyamory materials for beginners can often stress this picturesque ideal of everyone sitting down at a big whoville table together over a meal and make you feel like your heart is two sizes too small if you don’t desire for that to happen, wherever possible i remind people that they do not have to even meet their metamours, let alone be best friends with them. people are so afraid of being seen as being in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” style of relationship and so worried about proving how polyamorous they are, they often force themselves to know more than they need or meet people they don’t need to meet. if we were monogamous, we would not see it as a complete and utter requirement that our partner not only meet but get along great with all our friends and family members. we might expect them to be cordial and polite, but we would never demand them to form an intimate bond with these people. in fact, the relationships subreddit is quite often filled with people who demand their partner put up with toxic, even abusive family members for the sake of the relationship and a flurry of individuals who will say that no, you do not have to. try to avoid putting any hard lines around your expectations of the relationships you have with metamours. i don’t know if it’s always a good idea to refuse to meet any of them and equally it’s not a good idea to be forced to meet any of them. if you can’t trust that your partner has sound judgement and feel like you need to meet them to prove something, there might be some bigger issues going on. and if they annoy you or you don’t get along, you don’t have to share a space together or go to things together. it might get tricky to negotiate boundaries, but it’s possible to not be in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation and never meet your metamours. it’s okay if your ideal is that your metamours get along. most of our ideals for relationships include our family and friends and anyone who is important to us getting along. but if you’re looking for what’s called “kitchen table style polyamory” (which just really illustrates to me that i grew up around a very different kitchen table than most polyam people…), maybe be willing to adjust that expectation because if you date two people who just don’t get along, there’s no real way to force them to. in another attempt to avoid accidentally cheating, many people trying polyamory swing to the opposite end of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” spectrum and, even when no one has explicitly asked, they decide telling everything or asking to know everything, in excruciating detail will somehow prevent something terrible from happening. while there are definitely people who enjoy details either for sexual or just plain happiness reasons (just as they might enjoy hearing a friend tell them about a crush they have or a new date), i do sometimes feel like people push themselves or their partners to hear details in an attempt to prevent what they cannot prevent. putting yourself through some type of emotional polyamorous bootcamp by hearing every detail will not prevent what you think it will prevent. the philosophy behind this mindset seems to be thinking that knowing what is coming is better than not knowing   that somehow through all of the details of someone else’s encounters and relationships you’ll be able to spot an impending breakup or disinterest like reading tea leaves, except reading tea leaves would probably be a lot easier on you. the other type of a philosophy is, instead of delaying the inevitable, one runs into the fire barenaked thinking that somehow being able to weather the emotional pain of the details will get you used to polyamory in some way. even if you were attempting to get rid of arachnophobia, the way to do that wouldn’t be to launch yourself face first into a pit of spiders. but because people are told that jealousy isn’t a rational, logical emotion that may be very called for in some situations, they think that jealousy is some type of vestige of monogamous society and the only way to rid oneself of it is by throwing yourself over the precipice. feeling hurt by the details of your partner’s dates or even the fact that your partner is interested in dating others makes logical sense. it’s not a flaw, it’s a result of living in a society that’s taught you that someone is only really in love with you if they feel nothing for others. monogamous people can feel betrayed by the mere thought that their partner is interested in someone else. we’re surrounded by a society that gives us a very particular message about jealousy   when it angrily comes from white men it is righteous, it is normal, it is part of being a man and a great motivator. whereas, we’re told that jealousy coming from women of any kind is needy, even if it is somewhat understandable. the idea that the level of jealousy you experience and display when your partner shows interest in someone else is directly proportional to the amount of love you feel for your partner is heavily prevalent. with that in mind, we need to be a little bit gentler with ourselves. because of the pressure we’re also facing to prove that non monogamy “works”, it feels like we’re supposed to be emotional gladiators and prove ourselves in the stadium of relationships by hearing all the gory details. people are also worried that not telling their partner the absolute truth may cause them to be accused of cheating later. deciding when to disclose and what to disclose can be tricky, as we’ve discussed. if you have a conversation about cheating and what that means and when and what to disclose, make sure that there is a reason behind it. part of the rationale for me knowing when my partner is dating someone else is for a practical reason which isn’t about preventing emotions: if i’m making a meal for them, i’d like to know if they aren’t going to be there. if they have done something which increases their sexual health risk for contracting an sti and thereby affects my sexual health risk, i’d like to know. if there is going to be a change in my expectations of the time we spend together, then i’d like to know. none of this is about preventing me from feeling emotions or about trying to max me out so i don’t feel emotions later. i’ve specifically requested not to hear details during times when i’ve felt less confident about my body or my personality. sometimes, i’ve not known to ask for this until my partner has given me a detail and i’ve had some feelings about it. but i try to accept i have some feelings, let them know, ask for re assurance and then ask for a bit of space on something that might cause these feelings to come back. i know because i’ve had anxiety that forcing myself into anxious situations doesn’t rid me of my anxiety. you can’t inoculate yourself from emotions this way. all relationships have arguments, disagreements, and low points. we expect ourselves to be always happy in polyamory in a way we never expect ourselves to be in monogamy. in fact, many comedians make careers off telling jokes about how terrible marriage is. part of this attempt to hear all of the details, when it’s not based on legitimately enjoying hearing details, comes from a place of trying to prevent low points and bad feelings and the result is that it inevitably causes more strife than it needs to. conversely, there’s also something else you want to consider. i’ve read situations where partners have read message exchanges between their partners and other people and have not considered whether the other partners are okay with their metamours seeing these conversations. telling your partner all the details of your encounters, relationships, or dates may violate the privacy of the other person and very few people tend to ask directly if they can spill all the beans to their other partner. even if your partner loves hearing details and it isn’t a trigger for anxiety or stress… consider making sure if that’s okay with your other partner in the first place. lastly, it may be possible over time for you to hear details without being afraid or the details triggering anything. you could never have a problem with details and then suddenly have a problem with it after a bad experience with something. you can experiment with this and slowly ask questions but have an understanding between the two of you that you may need to nope out of the conversation if it’s bringing up a lot of anxiety. maybe at some point you won’t care, and you can slowly wean yourself into being comfortable and not threatened. but, in the name of all things that are holy, stop exposing yourself to the worst things like you have something to prove. when you die, i doubt your tombstone will say, “here lies [x]. an emotional gladiator who could stomach any detail you’d threw at them.” one of the most frequent things you read on polyamory forums and polyamory articles is the idea that one person can’t meet all your needs. usually this is expanded to include the entirety of the billions of humans on earth in a way that ignores the very, very many people who have remained monogamous their entire life and that’s absolutely met their needs. i get the philosophy behind it, especially if you don’t personally feel fulfilled by one relationship. the problem this inevitably results in is the philosophy of what folks call polymon   where you’re trying to collect a partner to meet each need. in a way, it simplifies the connections we build in romantic relationships to something that ignores their complexity. and if you’re going to introduce polyamory to a monogamous partner by saying, “so i’m basically very unfulfilled in this relationship,” that’s, in blunt terms, a shit sandwich to someone who does feel fulfilled by monogamy. there are nicer and more dynamic ways to say that you desire to have multiple romantic relationships in ways that don’t start your partner off feeling like they are less than. it’s not surprising then that many people starting off see it as a race to the finish, sometimes not really considering themselves polyamorous unless they have at least two partners minimum. some couples even make specific rules that don’t allow their partners to have other official partners until they do. and even people who don’t believe that one relationship is inherently unfulfilling will find themselves in this trap and put so much unnecessary pressure on themselves or their partner to find someone else right away, especially so they have somewhere to go or something to do while their partner is on a date. most of the time, when two people begin a polyamorous relationship, one of them will have more success finding partners than the other. that can be for a variety of reasons. i’m an introvert who dislikes small talk and prefers to be at home and my partner is someone who loves parties. it’s very understandable they will have more “success” than me. some people find married men, even if they swear, they are polyamorous and their wife is cool with it, automatically suspect. people read as women might get more messages on dating sites   but a good deal of them will be harassment from people who may still think they’re cheating on their partner, but don’t necessarily care. this often causes a huge amount of distress as well because one person may feel like they need to keep up or just feel understandably frustrated and even jealous that their partner has had success and they haven’t. on the other side of the “competition” outlook, you have people who, maybe because of this idea that one person isn’t fulfilling, have an enormous amount of anxiety that their partner will find someone who is “better at” something than them. polyamory becomes a competition they feel destined to lose. there are two things that counteract this mindset. the first is like re framing your fears. there are billions of people on this planet and likely there is someone out there who is “better at” something than you and your partner may in fact meet someone who is “better” in some ways than you at any given thing. that’s inevitable. but what you have to realise is that, just as we’ve grown up in a culture that tells us exclusivity is how we show love, we’ve also been told by a society that wants us to consume as much as possible, that we will only get a good partner if we are the best we can be. buy this cream. do this diet. change yourself in these ways so that you can become more attractive. these feelings are tied into some of the basic reasons why we feel self conscious or insecure about ourselves. and it’s very hard to just shrug that all off with the advice a lot of polyamory websites give you   just realise how special you are! realising that you’re motivated by a consumerist, capitalist society to believe that you are inherently incomplete or unworthy unless you do something to impress somebody else helps counteract this fear. the issue i have that ties in with this about the “no one person can fulfil all your needs” is that it constructs a reality where we are all incomplete and we require a certain amount of others to make us “fulfilled”. now, i’m not in any way advocating rugged western individualism   in fact, i think that’s harmful as hell. we get told we need to compete to find lovers but also somehow pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and that it’s shameful to rely on others for help. there’s a reason that solitary confinement is torture. as much as i’m lax to admit this as a near recluse, you do need people. that’s clear in how many problems come from, not a lack of self care, but a lack of community care. but what community care should motivate us to do is see the inherent worth we have as individuals. it’s okay to want people in your life. it’s okay to have needs. but seeing ourselves as flawed human beings inherently if we don’t have those needs fulfilled always creates more anxiety and stress and doesn’t solve the problem. we can cope better about not having the connections we want to have if we don’t see ourselves as inherently broken without them. releasing the expectation on yourself to date a certain amount of people or have a certain amount of skills can help lessen the feeling that it’s a competition for the most partners or the most skills. don’t get me wrong. it does suck if you aren’t getting any dates and your partner is getting tons, but returning back to your anchor and reminding yourself that dating is hard if you’re monogamous and the pool is smaller if you’re polyamorous might make that a little easier. when people experience some of the rougher emotions and situations with polyamory, they may feel like the best way they can cope with the situation is to veto a partner or close their relationship all together. the thinking behind it does make some logical sense. opening a relationship causes you stress. closing it temporarily can give you some relief from the full flood of emotions you experience. and it probably does relieve some of the immediate emotions and fears you have, especially if your problem is that your partner is so wrapped up in their other relationship, they aren’t focusing on you. the problem with this is that, like a lot of the other things here, it either doesn’t prevent what it’s intending to prevent or it’s delaying the inevitable. the first big thing to remember when thinking about closing things up is to challenge the assumption that monogamy is inherently safer. most people close a relationship because they are afraid of losing their partner. they want their partner to refocus on them or repair some problem. but in practicing polyamory, you must be able to focus on different problems in different relationships without having to break up with other people. that might seem like a lot, but we also kind of have this expectation with friendships and other relationships in our life. if we have more than one child, we need to be able to give each child what they need without ignoring another child. if we make new friends, even if one friend has more needs than the other, we can’t just blow off everyone else for the sake of one of our friends. and a lot of people don’t feel very happy when their friend starts dating someone new or gets married and never wants to hang out anymore. and some parents with a lot of children struggle to divide their attention equally or focus on a child with more needs without ignoring their other children. but this is part of what we deal with when we’re navigating all relationships. sometimes things happen in life where we have to tell people that we need space or we don’t have the time to devote to them, but we generally don’t completely cut them out of our life because one relationship is more important than anything else. in fact, if someone is trying to force you to end relationships, like friends and family, and favour them… that’s a big red flag for an abusive relationship. i’m not saying if you’ve tried to close a relationship or enacted a veto, it’s abuse. i’m saying that, as understandable as it may be to feel like that’s the only way to get control, it’s not how we behave in other relationships when we’re having them in healthy ways. if you want your partner to be able to be a good partner in a polyamorous relationship, they should be able to manage the struggles between you while also dating others and if they can’t, forcing them to end those other relationships will not change that. monogamous people can and do fall in love with other people, as i’ve said before. if you feel your partner slipping away or they are not meeting your needs, closing the relationship in and of itself may jar them back into focus for a temporary time but more likely than not, it’s going to create more resentment and unhappiness than it helps. remember, you can’t prevent your partner from leaving you. if they’ve decided to use polyamory as an excuse to replace you, forcing them to dump the other person can’t fix that. if they are not affectionate with you or aren’t treating you as well as someone else, forcing them to leave that other person won’t fix that. even if you are faced with a situation where your partner is being mistreated by someone else or is about to enter into a relationship with someone who you think is toxic and bad for them, forcing them to break up with that person isn’t going to fix that. one of the books i think is a must read for anyone is “why does he do that?” by lundy bancroft. it breaks down the mindset and the behaviours abusive people do and, more importantly for me, it made me realise that if i saw someone in an abusive situation, me forcing them out of it could make me very similar to the other abusive forces in their life. they must make that decision themselves. finally, closing a relationship or vetoing another is incredibly unfair on the other person involved who has had zero say in a decision that changes their life. especially if you are a couple opening your relationship, having someone get involved who already has a lack of power and then chucking them the moment things get rough is incredibly painful. no one wants to be chucked aside and, even as you are in the midst of fear of losing your partner, it’s very important to remember the humanity of others involved   even if you’re irritated with them or even if they are purposefully trying to intrude on the relationship you have with your partner. not every person who tries to close a relationship or uses a veto is a controlling monster. i tend to find people use vetoes or close their relationship out of fear of losing their partner. rarely do they ever really intend to hurt anybody else. it’s usually a last ditch effort in a desperate situation. you must ask yourself, if you are feeling so desperate that you want to close the relationship or veto another person, if there aren’t deeper problems in the relationship that cannot be solved this way. a veto and closing a relationship are a flimsy bandage over a gaping wound. if you’ve been reading about polyamory, you may have heard the phrase “love is infinite”. and it’s true. time and energy, however, are not infinite. we only have 24 hours a day to devote to a variety of things. and those of us with chronic health conditions and/or mental health struggles may not have the same level of energy or spoons as it’s called as others. we then must make decisions about how we spend our time between all our relationships. one of the biggest reasons why people don’t immediately break up when one part of a monogamous couple has an interest in polyamory that they can’t ignore is because of the time and energy that both of those people have spent building that relationship. in some cases, there may be shared assets or children to consider that make life decisions complicated. there’s something called a “sunk cost fallacy” that comes into play where we are hesitant to just scrap all of the work we’ve put into a relationship and, even if it doesn’t make much sense, will continue to devote energy to something that doesn’t work for the ironic reason that you’ve already put a lot of energy into it. every moment we spend putting energy into any relationship demonstrates our commitment and it also makes it much more difficult to say goodbye. and because we only have a certain number of hours in any given day, we’re going to make decisions about who we’re going to put our energy into. sometimes those decisions are prescriptive   we put energy into a relationship because society has told us that we should even when it doesn’t return anything. sometimes those decisions are convenient   people who are nearer are easier to form bonds to than people who are far away or who don’t stay in touch. it’s not surprising that when young adults leave formalised schooling and graduate from high school or university, they struggle to make friends   they aren’t forced to be around the same people all day and motivated to make connections. it can be a struggle, as much as you want to love, to fit in more than one relationship with a job and any other hobby you have or children. a lot of us are already tired. a few people have made the joke to me that they are monogamous purely because they don’t have the energy for another person. and that’s valid. but at some point, you must organise your time and organising your time means making decisions. initially, i railed quite hard against “relationship anarchy” or ra mostly because i felt like people used ra as an excuse for not making the decisions that they’d need to make in planning their time between partners. some of the people i saw attempting to practice ra basically wanted the ability to schedule what they could with whomever they wanted without being honest about how they were deciding to schedule their time. and to my defence, i ran across a lot of people using ra as a cover. they pretended not to prioritise any relationship over any others while they were doing just that. now, i’m not so hard on it because i think, philosophically, i am a relationship anarchist. it’s one of those “why is that a thing? everyone does that” situations. but, i do recognise that, even though i am not going to, say, cancel a date with someone because my domestic partner wants to go out with me suddenly, i do, due to my disabilities, have limited energy and i can’t promise i can always balance my time equally or have the time for everything. it’s one of the reasons my ideal is having two partners who live with me   makes my divide over energy so much easier. people divvy up their time, sometimes favouring established relationships over new ones depending on the situation. in polyamory, when people are not honest about this it causes pain and confusion. you can be a relationship anarchist in practice and theory, but that doesn’t make all the power imbalances in life disappear. i can be an anarchist and believe the state is inherently violent and that won’t stop me from going to jail. one of the fundamental mistakes people make, usually couples opening their relationship, is not examining or questioning the inherent power imbalances around them. and many people who claim to practice relationship anarchy substitute this examination and acknowledgement by claiming to define themselves out of it. instead, many people characterise the fear and insecurity a person may feel as a sign of immaturity. we don’t consider it ridiculous for a first born child to be threatened or scared by having a new sibling. so, if you introduce a new relationship into your life while you live with or have another long standing relationship that has more power, it makes sense for the newer person to be nervous. all new relationships are building a structure of trust, even if you’re steeped in new relationship energy. if you are dating someone who lives with someone, they have been with for 10 years, you’re going to feel nervous about where you stand. even if you’re dating someone who doesn’t do vetoes or claims not to have a “primary”, it makes sense to be nervous   because you’d be nervous regardless in establishing a relationship with someone new. the new nervousness will make areas where you feel like there might be a threat more pronounced. many people don’t address this or address it by just saying they don’t have primaries, they’re a relationship anarchist, they would never use a veto, etc. instead, acknowledging that there is that power imbalance, being conscious of the way you decide to allocate your time and encouraging all your partners to come to you if they feel like they aren’t being valued or aren’t getting what they need is preferable to pretending like things will work out magically. when you decide how to spend your time, it can communicate priorities you may not have so you need to be aware of it instead of pretending it’s not an issue. we may not consciously believe any of our relationships is more important than another. a lot of monogamous people would cancel a date with their partner to help a friend in distress. most of the situations that would require us to choose between relationships, whether it’s between friends or children, are either traumatic or deeply troubling situations. sometimes we might find ourselves in between two friends who don’t get along or struggling to manage our attention between multiple children but for the most part, most people can balance things. but in polyamory, the situation is slightly different when romantic and sexual feelings are involved, and you feel torn between two or more people in terms of how you devote your time. too many people cope with this by allowing their partners to dictate their time and refusing to make decisions, forcing metamours against one another. they don’t take responsibility because the task of picking someone for a certain time block is too daunting or they don’t want to have to justify their decisions. many, many times i have seen situations where a couple opens their relationship, one person finds a partner and then blames their inability to balance their time between their spouse and partner on their spouse to their partner and on their partner to their spouse when they need to step up and be able to make those decisions and own up to them. power imbalances can’t be wished away by hopeful thinking or radical relationship definitions. they exist. and the only way to effectively deal with them is to acknowledge them to all partners and be mindful of the decisions you make and willing to stand by them. if you are going to have a “primary” and that means that they take priority over any other relationship, then tell any other potential partners that is the case. if you are going to operate on a “first come, first serve” basis in terms of who has access to your time, be honest about that. if you’re tired as hell like me and you can’t always promise to make it to physical dates, but you can always chat, then be honest about that. i don’t agree that ‘couples’ privilege’ is the right vernacular to use when it comes to a couple prioritising their relationship and treating ‘secondaries’ as expendable for a lot of reasons. but it is worth couples and anyone else in a long term relationship with someone else, sharing a house, sharing childcare responsibilities, to be honest about how that affects how they choose to allocate their time with any other partners they have so that new people can make a fully informed decision about whether that works for them rather than glossing it over or ignoring it. you may very well love a new person just as much as your partner of 10 years, but you have an established life with your partner that holds power and pretending it doesn’t isn’t being honest with yourself or others. so many of the mistakes i see people making in polyamory come from a place of wanting to prevent emotions and prevent feeling crappy. it’s very understandable. no one would elect to feel like shit if they could avoid it and a great many people go to various lengths to avoid ever feeling pain   even when they really need to in order to heal or process something. you can’t avoid pain forever, however, and you especially won’t be able to avoid having negative emotions. there could be people out there for whom polyamory is so second nature to them that they jump right into with absolutely no problems and that’s great. but a lot of people will have problems and it doesn’t have to be that having problems is… well, a problem. a lot of the advice i give is giving people permission to have feelings. so many people think that just having emotions in and of itself is the problem when it’s just an inevitable part of being in relationships, of trying something new, or coping with something different. for many years, i’ve said that the polyamory literature that most people read over hypes ‘jealousy’ and turns it into a character flaw or some type of remnant of living in a monogamous centric culture you have to shed in order to be truly polyamorous. because of that, as i’ve discussed in my thirteen things i wish i’d learned before choosing non monogamy, so many people are under the misconception that any fear, any worry, and anything other than happiness they experience must be jealousy and must be eradicated. people spend a lot of time fighting themselves for having feelings instead of accepting it and trying to unpack it. many people’s questions to me boil down to: “how can i stop having feelings?”. and i can relate. data was my favourite character in star trek, and i’ve longed to be a robot. if you don’t have feelings, you can’t get hurt! but unfortunately, it’s not the way it works and sometimes punishing yourself for having feelings prevents you from dealing with them in the first place. so, when you’re going through all of this, even though you have read this article, that book, or anything else   don’t punish yourself for having feelings. let yourself feel your feelings. spend less time punishing yourself and more time finding effective coping mechanisms. outside of having an anchor, i’ve always found that it was useful for me to, even while being scared a partner would leave, focus on how to strengthen that relationship. i would do things like write cards and love notes to my partner or think of things we could do together in the future. sometimes, though, you just must sit through the anxiety, come out on the other side, and know you survived, and your partner is still there. i wanted to add an addendum to this because there are some other common scenarios that aren’t necessarily mistakes but are obstacles that crop up frequently for beginners: cheating, opportunity and dating exes. for most people, polyamory isn’t a life choice that has been presented to them as valid. they default into monogamy because it’s what’s expected of them. many people feel inherently polyamorous. while some people cheat because they like the fun of doing something wrong, some people end up cheating because they develop feelings for someone else and don’t want to acknowledge it until they are forced to. polyamory isn’t cheating nor is it permission to cheat. someone who evades commitment to one person or doesn’t want to respect their partner’s boundaries is not going to do better in a situation where they’re expected to commit to multiple people or respect multiple boundaries. however, many people, due to the way our society is set up, may only find out they are polyamorous or want to try polyamory until they have cheated on someone. so many, many people will be faced with a partner who has cheated on them and now wants to try polyamory. i don’t think that it’s impossible, especially if there is an anchor, for that to lead to a healthier relationship. it’s very possible to go from cheating to polyamory. but that depends on several different things. first and foremost, the reasons behind the cheating. people who cheat because they love the thrill won’t suddenly become faithful in a polyamorous relationship. secondly, the method that the cheating was uncovered. a partner who comes forward and admits fault is easier to trust and has demonstrated more emotional maturity than someone who gets caught and then suddenly decides to tell you they want to try polyamory. and thirdly, the actions the individual does to bear witness to the pain they have caused. no one is flawless and everyone makes mistakes. someone who has cheated has to be willing and able to make amends for what they did and hold space for the partner who feels betrayed. that doesn’t mean that their indiscretion should be held against their head until they die, but it does mean they need to demonstrate an understanding that moving to polyamory doesn’t cure the betrayal and actually means you’re re forming your broken foundation of trust. it’s starting from less than zero. someone who expects you to just get over being cheated or doesn’t even apologise… it’s not a good sign. it’s possible, but complicated and it depends a lot on the willingness to rebuild a foundation from the person who cheated. there are some people who have cheated who want to have ethical relationships and others who just don’t care about boundaries but satisfying themselves in the moment. it’s very possible for the latter type of person to stumble on polyamory and use it to get away with their behaviours. you can tell the difference between the two from their actual actions rather than their words and promises. the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. very, very few individuals in a monogamous relationship will decide to introduce the concept of opening the relationship at the exact same time. it’s usually introduced by one person and usually at a point where the individual has either decided monogamy is no longer suitable for them or, many times, when they are encouraged to introduce the concept because a window has opened up for them to pursue another relationship and they want to. this is very tricky ground. my experience is that people find it difficult to be honest with themselves about their feelings, especially while they are trying to deny that they are having feelings. this is one of the reasons why cheating can be difficult to define. people don’t have to have sex or do anything physical to develop feelings or intimacy. and sometimes i think that makes it even more complicated and hard for people to recognise when they have emotionally cheated on their partner because they have another intimate relationship with someone. they want to be honest about it, but they don’t want to lose their partner. and polyamory seems like a perfect way to have the best of both worlds. some other times, an ex calls or someone they never actually got to hook up with   either way, there is an opportunity and they are under some type of time crunch to introduce the concept of polyamory and get it off the ground so they don’t miss it. very rarely are people honest about this when they introduce the concept to their partner and that’s to a certain extent understandable. saying, “do you want to try polyamory?” sounds a little less threatening than, “can we redefine how we do this relationship so i can sleep with this person i never got to sleep with because they moved away?”. that might explain why so many people mistake polyamory for an excuse to cheat. i think it’s important to be honest about your motivations where possible and not hide them. the reason being that if your partners ever get to talking, the truth is going to come out anyway. it might feel bad to be motivated by an opportunity but in some ways, opportunities can encourage you to be more honest about what you want in a way that not having that opportunity didn’t. it’s always precarious when someone wants to date their ex again or date a friend or date someone they work with in their immediate social circle. remembering what we’ve already discussed, you aren’t going to be able to control who your partner dates if they’ve already made that decision. you can absolutely say that you’d be so uncomfortable by a situation that it would create distance between the two of you or ask that you not hear about a relationship you have a huge amount of anxiety over   but that’s pretty much it. if you put down a hard boundary that you will leave if your partner dates an ex or someone else, then you have to expect they may resent it or you may have to leave. but if this hasn’t happened to you, you may want to consider what your boundaries are regarding exes, friends and work colleagues in terms of dating. these are things monogamous people must consider also that sometimes get lost in the new ness of polyamory. to distinguish whether there might be a larger issue of jealousy or fear, i always try and apply a friend or family member lens to it. i’d find it weird for my cousin to start dating my best friend. i couldn’t necessarily stop them, but sometimes worlds colliding creates some awkwardness. i may not want to hear from my best friend about any problems in the relationship they have with my cousin in a way i’d have no problem hearing if they were dating someone else. it might be odd for your mother to start dating your boss. there are lots of ways that our different types of relationships can create difficulties when they intermingle. it’s not always a bad sign when someone wants to date an ex or gets involved with someone at work, but it’s worth thinking about how you might manage that situation if it ever comes up. while this is an article of mistakes, i want people to remember that they very likely got a lot wrong when they first tried any type of romantic relationship. we’re all in a learning process and, as i said before, no one is flawless. progress isn’t linear and, even after reading some of this stuff, you may forget about it or it may not be something you think about when your emotions are running high. it’s okay to fuck up. we all do. if you have access to a polyamory friendly therapist, it’s always worth going, even if it’s just once a month. therapy has been integral for me in many situations in my life, not just polyamory. it’s what helped me identify problems that manifested themselves in my polyamory in ways i never would have seen if i hadn’t gone. i struggled for many years to feel like i could go to therapy. while i know not everyone will have the economic means or time to access therapy, if it’s available for you, do give it a try. it can help manage all the emotions within polyamory and outside of it. otherwise, i hope that the exploration of the topics here helped you start out in polyamory with a good foot forward. i hope this helps and good luck!

photo: alice in wonderland directed by tim burton september 24, 2023 update: a lot has happened since i first wrote this article in 2016. at the time i was in the process of opening up a relationship with a reluctant partner. since then, that partner and i have divorced. my metamour, who was supportive for a year, changed her mind about polyamory, and my lover and i spent the next five years fruitlessly defending our relationship against her resistance. they are now divorced. for this new version, i have updated all pronouns to be gender nuetral (that was not as much of a thing in 2016). i am less inclined towards exploring partners making a lot of accomodations for reluctant partners while trying to date others. i am in favor of couples trying to work out their differences and educating themselves as much as possible before involving anyone else, and being ok with going seperate ways if they can’t work things out. i also appreciate my readers and fans providing feedback and their own stories that have refined my thinking on this topic. one of the most difficult experiences for people transitioning to polyamory is having a partner who is reluctant about having an open relationship. it usually goes like this: two people are in a monogamous relationship. one of them learns about polyamory (or meets someone they are attracted to) and wants to explore relationships outside of the primary partnership. he or she broaches the topic with their partner. the partner reacts in a number of ways: 1) they are relieved or curious; 2) they are open minded but scared and hesitant; 3) they are completely freaked out and resistant to opening the relationship. in this article we explore what an exploring polyamorist with a partner who responds with 2 or 3 can do to help them both transition to an open relationship. (our next article will address what a reluctant partner can do in the same situation). the challenge for the exploring partner is that they have an interest in doing something unconventional and has to overcome both their own internal barriers (acquired through years of social conditioning) to exploring and also their partner’s reluctance. despite feeling that exploring would satisfy their needs, they don’t want to hurt their partner or leave them. in the best circumstance, working through their differences is an opportunity for both of them to grow and become stronger in their relationship. it is also possible that the resistant partner refuses and the relationship ends. but if you think that there is a good chance that your partner can accept and adapt, the transition to an open relationship can be successful if not painless. examine your reasons for being poly. before you approach your partner with your interest in being poly, you need to get clear as to why you want to be poly. do you have a need to connect intimately with people outside of your primary relationship? do you crave sexual novelty and variety? do you have an unmet need that your partner cannot fulfill? is there a specific individual you want to connect with? what are your feelings towards your current partner? there are many reasons to open a relationship, but experienced polyamorists will tell you that a bad time to attempt to open your relationship is when things are rocky between you and your partner. if the two of you are in the midst of a conflict, it’s a bad idea to try to bring another person into the relationship or subject your relationship to something as unsettling as polyamory. polyamory can help couples, but it will rarely solve fundamental problems in their relationship. if your current relationship is one where you feel you can discuss difficult topics with your partner with trust and compassion, and your partner is someone who is open minded and intellectually curious, then you will have a good chance that opening up can succeed. if you feel like hiding things from your partner or dread negative consequences, then maybe explore why that is first. if your reasons for polyamory do have to do with your partner not meeting certain needs, explore what those are and ways to address them. for example, if your partner is not giving you the amount or quality of attention you need, express that need to your partner so they have a chance to remedy that with you. if your partner has a hard time understanding you, try to improve your communications rather than turning to someone else. some couples get along very well but their sexual needs have diverged; this is a situation in which polyamory can be a good solution. one way in which polyamory can hurt couples is if they use it to avoid their problems rather than working them out. like having a child, polyamory can make existing problems worse. it is also not fair to anyone who might come into the relationship to feel like they are crutch for your failing relationship. a word to the wise: you must be prepared to allow your partner to explore as well. that may seem obvious but i cannot believe how many couples i have encountered who is all about their freedom but denies it to their partner. in my experience, that never works out. if you are wanting to explore but not open to your partner exploring as well, then you need to work on that internally before you even consider opening your relationship. do your homework. polyamory is a complex topic and the more you can learn about it the better you will be able to deal with your partner’s questions and find a way to meet both of your needs. learn about the landscape of non monogamy, the spectrum of relating, and different types of sexuality. there are so many possibilities besides the traditional ones of monogamy, gender binary, and dyadic relationships. there is also a vast amount of literature on dealing with jealousy, resolving conflicts and improving communication. you may find that your relationship skills will be kicked into overdrive in the process of transitioning to polyamory. you will need to communicate your needs, really listen and respond to your partner’s needs, and find solutions that work for the both of you. all this can help you improve your communication and strengthen your relationship. in addition to reading, it is very helpful to talk to experienced polyamorists and get your questions answered in real time. polyamorous people tend to be an open bunch and many have gone through something similar to what you are going through, so most are happy to help. you can meet poly folks by joining groups online, on dating websites, and online forums. there are also blogs and websites devoted to polyamory where you can ask questions in the comments or contact sections. meetup.com is a good way to find out if there are poly groups in your area. many of them host discussion groups or social events where you can ask questions and talk to people. the nonprofit lovingmore.com is dedicated to supporting the polyamory community and can help you locate resources in your area. check out our resources page for more information. once you begin meeting people, it is extremely helpful to cultivate relationships with couples who have been in your situation and can talk at length about their experiences. bring your partner to these discussions if they are willing. the more you can learn together the better you will be able to understand each other’s perspectives and avoid misunderstanding. introduce the idea to your partner in a nonthreatening way. the best time to introduce your partner to polyamory is before you are interested in dating someone specific. one way to start the conversation is by talking about the ways you are already open to other relationships. perhaps you have opposite sex friends you socialize with. perhaps you have exes that you still talk to. you may be surprised to learn that few monogamous relationships are truly monogamous, most are open to some sort of emotional/social/physical intimacy with others. begin by exploring the topic intellectually. read a few articles on polyamory together, explore the benefits and drawbacks. explore differences and similarities in the way you approach relationships. learn about the five erotic blueprints. you may be surprised to find out how much there is to learn about your partner, yourself, and how much fun that could be. explore resources such as books, articles, and podcasts. the process of examining one’s feelings and beliefs systems and questioning deeply held values can take months if not years. consider polyamory’s potential benefits to you, your partner, and your relationship. in general, polyamory can help couples… there are also drawbacks, such as talking to experienced polyamorists will give you some examples of the real benefits and drawbacks, which you won’t get by simply theorizing about them. by emphasizing the benefits to both partners, you avoid sounding like it’s all about getting what you want at the expense of your partner. polyamory can be a win win, even if only one of you is interested in exploring. even just exploring intellectually can feel threatening and difficult, so be prepared to listen, understand, and have long discussions. try other forms of non monogamy. couples venturing into non monogamy might find it easier to do some venturing together into lighter forms of non monogamy. they might try a kink club where they go together and play with other partners while being in close proximity. they might try swinging where they find another couple who is also interested in experimenting. they might try casual encounters with others where there is no emotional attachment and no expectation to form long term relationships. some partners agree on a “100 mile rule” where they engage in casual encounters when they are away at a conference or vacation apart from the other partner. some couples are happy with these arrangements for a long time, others find them stepping stones for more engaged forms of non monogamy. take time to think about it, but then jump in. in the old version of this article, i used to suggest that couples take incremental steps to dating seperately. by this i meant taking the steps of dating looking at online profiles, chatting with matches, going on a first date, deepening the relationship slowly and negotiate things with one’s orginial partner every step of the way. today, i think this approach is more likely to lead to frustration and hurt than not. for any potential partners, this approach is also likely to generate frustation and not succeed in creating enjoyable connections. now, after ten years of polyamory and a lot of dating, i would advise taking as much time as needed to properly think through, discuss, and negotiate how you will open your relationship, but once you arrive at the point of actually meeting other people, to jump in fully without a lot of stipulations. a few reasons to take this approach: therefore, it is much better to work out as many objections as possible beforehand and assume that once you and your partner start dating others, you each will have little say over the other person’s relationships. that is not to say you or your partner will immediately fall in love with someone else and have no control over what happens. the choice to go slow is a perfectly good choice for anyone who is looking for relationships, as long as one is clear to potential partners what their expectations are. if you’re really connecting with someone, maybe you don’t want to wait four weeks before you see them again, but you don’t have to see them every day either, even if you want to. there might be some in between pace that allows you to explore your connection with your prospective partner and adjust to the changes of an open relationship. there is a temptation to freak out when your partner goes on a first date with someone else, or when they come back from that first date with excitement and momentum. suddenly, you imagine your partner falling in love with someone else, abandoning you, and tearing your life apart. but more often than not, first dates do not lead to second dates, and second dates don’t lead to third dates. personally, i find that it takes four dates before i can make up my mind about whether a sexual relationship is in the cards. if your partner is very skittish about other partners, you might have a rule to not share about any prospective partners until things have progressed to a fifth date. more than half the time, it’s likely that those first to fourth dates don’t turn into anything more and it’s no good getting you or your partner worked up about them. it is also very likely that even if your partner does fall head over heels, things don’t work out after a few weeks or months. it is better to let things run their course than resisting, which may just cause your partner to dig in their heels. a word about rules: many couples who are opening their relationship feel more comfortable to have rules for dating others. if you are going to have rules, they must apply to both partners, no exceptions. but rules should only be used as temporary guidelines to help with the transition. they need an expiration date and they need to be renegotiated periodically. nobody likes to be told what they can and cannot do with someone else. of course, rules about safe sex and being safe in general should be common sense, but micromanaging things such what kind of touching is allowed, what kind of activities, how much time the other person spends with the other person are not helpful and are bound to be broken. don’t agree to those. it is very difficult to control what happens when you are falling in love with someone. if you have an agreement not to have sex, sex will happen. if you have an agreement not to kiss, kissing will happen. if you have an agreement that you will be home at a certain hour, you will be late. then your partner will be all upset that you broke the rules and you will feel resentful towards your partner. instead, reassure your partner that you will behave responsibly, that you will call if you will be late or if anything happens, and tell them afterwards of what happened on your date, if they want to know. if a partner forgets to do something they said they would do, give them the grace to make mistakes. things generally get easier with practice. let your partner know as much as possible about your activities ahead of time. behaving responsibly earns your partner’s trust. let them know you value their opinions on the people that you date. date someone experienced and mature. i would advise those new to poly to first date someone who has had polyamorous relationships before and is emotionally mature. if you try to introduce a potential lover to poly at the same time that you are introducing your partner to poly, things will get crazy. your lover will be jealous, your partner will be jealous, and you will be stuck dealing with both of them at the same time. if you date an experienced polyamorist while you are opening your relationship, that person will likely understand and be more patient with what you are going through. they will be more likely to make an effort to help your partner feel comfortable and help you process your feelings. no cuckolding. a cuckold is a husband with an adulterous wife. the word used as a verb means to embarrass or shame your partner by flaunting your lover infront of them. while it is unfortunate that our culture does not normalize compersion, it is still inconsiderate to make our mate feel inadequate by lavishing affection on someone else in front of them when they are struggling with non monogamy. for the sake of easing the transition to polyamory, it is a good idea for all secondary relationships to be kept low key at the beginning, at least in front of one’s primary partner. this means no pda in front of one’s partner, and minimize talking about your lover with your partner (unless they ask). maybe you keep phone calls and texting to a minimum when your partner is around. keep conversations about your lover to logistics and things that have to be discussed. listen. polyamory brings up strong emotions for reluctant partners ingrained in mainstream culture. exploring partners need to be good listeners in order to help each other understand and overcome those difficult emotions. the reluctant partner may feel as if the exploring partner is leaving them behind for a new relationship so the act of listening and attending to the reluctant partner’s feelings reassures them that you still care. it can be very hard for men especially to express the deep seated fears they have when it comes to polyamory. thoughts such as “i’m afraid that you don’t love me anymore,” “i’m not good enough for you,” “i will be seen as a cuckold,” “i no longer have control” are difficult to admit even to oneself, much less to one’s partner. the exploring partner can help articulate these thoughts in the form of questions that the reluctant partner can respond to. such as: once you and your partner are able to articulate the reasons and feelings behind their reluctance, you can help them feel heard simply by repeating what they said in your own words. bear in mind that these are not issues that can be resolved in one conversation. don’t try to have a difficult conversation when your partner is tired or distracted. one technique from the ethical slut is to schedule a certain amount of time, say 30 minutes, when the two of you can focus on one issue. have the conversation, stop when the time is up, and schedule another time when you can continue the conversation. let what was said sink in for a while and bring your reflections to the next conversation. provide reassurances. all of the fears listed above are very legitimate fears and they can all be dealt with through loving communication. in addition to helping your partner feel heard, you can reassure them that you still love them and want to be with them. words are important, but actions help too. here are some ways to respond to common fears: think of polyamory as a scale. every time that you come back from being with someone else, balance the scale by spending more time connecting and expressing love to your partner than you normally would. together, brainstorm ways that the two of you can address concerns and feel safe moving forward. help your partner find a lover. if your partner is open to exploring as well, helping them find a partner can accelerate their understanding of polyamory and enjoyment of its benefits. browse online dating profiles together. encourage them to pursue someone they are attracted to. introduce them to people that they may be attracted to. some exploring partners go so far as to insist that their reluctant partner explore new relationships first. the more you can demonstrate your lack of jealousy, the more they may do the same for you. be patient. you probably have felt poly your whole life and are predispositioned to viewing it favorably. your partner could be very different. maybe their parents broke up as a result of infidelity. maybe they’ve been cheated on in the past. maybe they grew up with the view that sex is immoral or dangerous. it can take a long long time to undo a lifetime of indoctrination of one of the most deeply seated beliefs of civilization. if you push them too hard they may get more resistant. i have heard of couples who took a decade to consider polyamory, and those that took no time at all. how successful you will be depends on how open your partner is and how patient you are willing to be. own your position. you may feel you that polyamory is right for you and potentially good for your relationship. but in my experience, when i was confronted with my beloved’s pain, anger, tears, and resistance, it was incredibly hard not to give in just to make all the madness stop. coupled with guilt at hurting your loved one, you will also feel the same insecurities that your partner feels, including, “will they leave me?” “will they still love me?” “what will other people think?” “am i just a slut?” the pressure to give in will be internal as well as external, and likely the hardest part about doing any of this. but you will not do yourself or your partner any favors by giving in. your desire to explore will likely not go away, and repressing it for the sake of your partner will probably not work in the long run. the only way to become polyamorous is to own your position, even if that means your current relationship ends as a result. if your partner is not able to accept you as you are, or allow you to grow into the person you want to be, perhaps you are better off not being together. people change and sometimes their lives become incompatible, and that is not either one’s fault. seperating graciously may be the best option. it helps a lot to have a polyamorous friend/mentor who can support you through it. whenever the pain becomes overwhelming and you feel like giving up, talking to this person can give you the courage to go on. in addition you can turn to online forums and support groups, as well as continuing to read poly literature. remind yourself that opening up and becoming polyamorous can be a rewarding process full of emotional and spiritual growth. it can help couples learn more about each other and become better communicators and grow closer. it can also mean realizing that you are not right for each other. both of these things happened with my reluctant partner. they came to accept my polyamory, and we realized we were not right for each other. pain and discomfort is often an inevitable side affect of change. no matter what happens, you have our support and conviction that even if your partner does not get on board, you have the right to be true to yourself. this is actually rather amusing. my wife and i were poly in our 20’s. she had something around 80 different lovers over 5 years while i had 5 at most. in our mid 30’s the pendulum started swinging the other way and all of a sudden she was no longer “comfortable” with polyamory. i reluctantly stopped and thought she had, too. until one of her coworkers, 10 years her junior told me she was not taking no for an answer to her propositioning and would be going to hr if i didn’t talk sense into her. dug deeper and look who’s putting up random encounter ads on craigslist in desperation. divorce was costly, but only in the short term. she got the house but has already blown the equity on boytoys that disappeared when the money did. i thank god for polyamory because it showed me my value increased with age and that steamy, no strings sex with 20 25 year old women was far more rewarding in every way than my marriage to a worthless old woman who only had me around to be her wallet. free at last, free at last! likelike does the reluctant partner not also deserve to be happy? why would you encourage people to put their loved ones through this hell? if your relationship doesn’t make you happy, the respectful thing to do is end it and make room for one that does. pressuring a mono partner who loves you to accept this life of isolation and detachment, depriving them of real love with a loyal partner, asking them to settle for a detached and shallow connection with someone who has plenty of irons in the fire   it’s cruel and manipulative. and good people don’t do it. poly folks should keep to themselves. it’s the compassionate thing to do. likeliked by 2 people many people that begin exploring the idea of polyamory are already in a relationship or married. the right thing to do in that situation is to be honest with your partner and let them know how you feel and what you need. this doesn’t necessarily mean that the other partner will be understanding or accepting. polyamory is not about detachment, disloyalty or shallow connections…actually quite the opposite. polyamory is about love, honesty & communication, it’s about consciously choosing how many partners to be involved with rather than accepting social norms. it’s not manipulative if one partner truly falls in love with someone else, it is not possessive. why does love have to be divided? love is infinite. we all love more than one person and we love each person differently. parents simply don’t never begin loving one child when a new child is born…they share the love equally. do you not have a close friend that you are very close to but draw the line at including romantic intimacy? what if you happened to fall in love with your close friend while married? it happens fairly often. many people have to end their friendship because of that but i ask, why do we have to resort to that? because that is what we have been socially conditioned to believe, that we fall in love with one person and only love one person at a time? why can’t we do what makes us happy? did you choose to be married to one person because that’s what you actually decided on or was a default action according to what you were socially conditioned to think as what is right? the solution to love triangles we always see in movies and read in books where the character is in a relationship but falls in love with someone else at the same time is to open up the relationship, to allow it to happen organically instead of having to chose one or the other. why do we have to end one love in order to love another? allowing the people you love to make their own choices without controlling them takes courage but we have to realize that we don’t own anyone and really have no control over their thoughts, feelings or actions. it can take courage to let go of “guarantees” assumed in a relationship but we have to love and trust our partners anyway. likelike the acid test to your beliefs would be if you became incapacitated by an accident or illness and could no longer participate in the polyamory lifestyle, would you expect your husband to continue having a romantic relationship with another woman? while you may be inclined to answer yes, unfortunately the real answer can only be known once you cross that bridge. likelike the fact that pro poly people always fall back on the children metaphor just shows how empty the idea is (or that they don’t have children). romantic love for a partner and love for children are very different kinds of love and can’t be compared. also, time, attention, and energy are finite resources, and those things are part of what real love is. love is not just your feelings, it’s what you do and what you give. even with children, while a second child might not make a parent love the first child less, if a parent had children from two different partners living in two different places, they would certainly be less available (and hence less able to love) each set of children. that’s the reality of an open relationship   at some point you are pitting partners against each other to compete for your time and attention, and in that sense, if one of them is not really ok with it, it actually does mean you love them less. likeliked by 1 person the impact on the monogamist spouse (husband) is almost akin to the other spouse (wife) coming out of the closet as a lesbian/bisexual. in such situations, nobody would condone forcing the monogamist/heterosexual husband to remain married and accept the lesbian wife and her need to find a lesbian lover. it would be almost universally understandable if the husband chose to divorce his wife because to do so otherwise would be very unhealthy to his well being. polyamorist and monogamist spouses seldom mix well. likelike first, the article masd it clear that it was probably only a good idea of the exploring partner thought the resistant partner was willing to adapt. with some people it is best to end it rather than attempt to convince them. ultimately the resistant partner has agency to make the choice to leave or not too though. second, as the original mono and quite resistent partner, i’m incredibly happy thayy exlporing partner challenged me. it’s been a rough road, but i always had the choice to stay or go and i own the choice i made. good or bad people can be both poly or mono. please consider what loyalty actually means, before accusing poly people of fundamentally not being loyal. through this experience i’ve grown in incredible ways and even have a partner of my own. something i never expected or looked for. if people want to put effort into the process they can come out the other end stronger, more open, more honest, and more loving. it’s not going to be for everyone, but that doesn’t make it immoral. the mono person does deserve happiness and ultimately it’s up to them to find it. likelike if you want to be poly and your partner does not you should just break up. if you “need” to date multiple people its so selfish to expect them to change to a poly relationship if they don’t seem thrilled. i dont get why they have to change. i am monogamous i know it at heart but blogs always try to say that if you’re monogamous that your denying your true self or some crap. i have nothing against people being poly but know what you want from the beginning. btw people say poly people love just as strong as mono people but how is that possible when a poly partner will leave a mono partner for not choosing to try to be poly usually for someone else. so while the person you supposedly loved is heart broken not even thinking about dating your out with this new person not even thinking about the other. a person with deep feeling needs to heal from the loss of a relationship not poly people they’ll move on in seconds. how do you even have time to truelly love more then one person. youd think if you love someone you would want to spend as much time with them as possible.anyways its fine if that’s your thing but leave your monogamous partner out of it and know what you want next time. likeliked by 1 person “youd think if you love someone you would want to spend as much time with them as possible.” no. i have been happily married for 13 years and this is simply not true. i *do* love spending time with my husband, but “as much time as possible” is stifling and unhealthy in the long term. i do not desire to be all of his social interaction. i do not desire to be included in all of his free time. i do not desire to be the only person he confides deeply to. it is unhealthy to expect one person to be everything in this regard, and it is unhealthy to expect to *be* that for someone else. this is why breaking up and death are so hard to manage in our culture: not only do you have the grief of losing that relationship, you have too few sources of support from anywhere else, leaving us utterly alone when that relationship ends. the void left behind by that person is complete and unmanageable. i would be devastated at the loss of my husband and best friend, but i have cultivated strong and meaningful relationships outside of my marriage that ensure that my life is always worth living, even if the worst were to happen. if a couple decides that they love each other too much to want to part, let them figure out what it means for themselves. sometimes the pain of abandoning the relationship is worse than the pain of opening the relationship. most monogamous people will make a different choice, but it’s *their* choice to make, together with their loved one. likeliked by 3 people i’d also say that if you’re poly and your partner isn’t   it just isn’t a match, as heartbreaking as it can be. you describe the pains the mono partner is going through as “growing pains”. well, that’s making it a bit easy. that person could also say “the pain you’re going through not living out your poly side will help you grow into a more grateful and humble person”. and now? it’s like sexual orientation. you can’t coerce someone into it who really just doesn’t want it. it doesn’t make them “indoctrinated” or “spiritually less evolved”. they’re just not like you. you only put them between a rock and a hard place where they either lose the person they love or put up with a situation of constant pain and feeling “left out”. just break up already. likeliked by 1 person when a partner comes out as poly   and it does feel like coming out   so much can occur. our partner may be open, may be reluctant, or may be horrified. the point is that the love in the first relationship dictates that both people explore this together. if it turns out, after much exploring and experiencing, that the first love cannot operate in a poly way, then   yes   the relationship may have to end. and it will be painful, don’t minimize that, even if there is another partner in the mix. if the poly person does leave the relationship, it’s not because they don’t love the first partner. it’s because they can’t expect or want that person that they do love to be miserable in a relationship that isn’t right for them. i will not subvert my needs, and i do not want my husband to either. we both owe that to each other. the one who feels monogamy is right is not less than the one who feels polyamory is right. and the poly person isn’t being blindly selfish. this is just a new reality, much as having a job opportunity in another country might also impact a mono relationship. you adapt, and you change. you try compromising and endeavor to make the best decision possible. there’s no road map. and there’s plenty of mistakes to be made. but you move through it together, all of you, as best you can. those that made those comments above may never know what it feels like to love two people, just as i might not know what it’s like to really love another woman because i’m not lesbian. doesn’t mean lesbian love doesn’t exist, just because i haven’t experienced it. likeliked by 1 person why is it that everyone who reads about polyamory always neglects actually reading the articles and books and just hears “i will love you less because you don’t provide for me what i need but i will just say i love you for the sake of reassurance”? the solution is always to break up. break up because you can’t tolerate change, because you can’t listen to your partner, because you don’t want to experience the negative emotions involved? relationships aren’t expendable, they don’t just come and go on a whim as everyone makes it sound. how is it that there are so many people out there that begin falling in love with someone else but can’t stand the thought of leaving their current partner? how does that affection for another invalidate that person’s feelings? she doesn’t want to break up with him because she loves him, doesn’t that mean anything to anyone? the poly person wants to put effort into this thing and keep everything balanced and safe and good, yet that’s not good enough. that’s just an undesirable partner, blah blah break up, it’s the only solution. you know, i’ve read so many yahoo answers and reddit posts, etc. about a girl or guy expressing how they can’t help being attracted to their partner’s friend or brother/sister and all the answers are just very cryptic “just break up or try to limit your interactions with that other person.” or worse it’s just “you’re so selfish, how could you do that, you’re such a slut, your partner doesn’t deserve you”. yet, again, the person expressed very clearly “i still love and adore my partner”. why is that constantly ignored in favor of “oh you sound like you want to cheat and you don’t actually love him/her, how dare you”. why is love so binary? this article and many others are constantly trying to explain you don’t love your partner less, you love him just the same and are extra willing to integrate a secondary partner while keeping the main one equally as rich and good as ever. but no, forget the effort of harmony, let’s just say “break up!!!” because effort is too hard. i found this article to be very helpful, however, and i will try to apply to my own situation. likeliked by 2 people a wife* (see not below comment) pulling an “i want an open marriage” on her husband could be a sign that she is already involved in an affair or is very much interested in having one with a man she feels a powerful attraction to. even though she is free to do whatever she wants, she wants her husband’s blessing to legitimize the extra marital relationship. the final point of the article “owning your position” points very clearly that if the moment ever came where the polyamorist spouse would have to choose which one to sacrifice, her polyamory lifestyle or the marriage, she would be more likely to choose to end the marriage. this point invalidates every other point you made in the article. there would be less resistance to polyamory if it started way before a couple got married, during the first stages of dating. if the person is only interested in a monogamous relationship, then the polyamorist could move on to find another person who may be a polyamorist. that would be the ethical way which would give polyamory and its followers much more acceptance and credibility. in other words, date and mate with members of your own species, first. *new research conducted by openminded.com   surveying 62, 271 couples with a profile on the site   it is women that are more likely to initiate the ‘shall we invite other people into the marriage’ conversation likeliked by 1 person this is beautifully written. thank you. i have been searching for the right article to share with my spouse and am thankful for this. likelike this article is heavily skewed towards polyamory being a better lifestyle than monogamy. and that is a highly damaging opinion to put out there. why should a monogamous reluctant partner be pushed into accepting the polyamorous partner’s needs, even if it causes discomfort, and not the other way? this article suggests that a monogamist, even when he or she isn’t fully interested in pursuing polyamory, can and should be convinced, given literature, asked to consider accommodation, even lied to/exaggerated to (“you meet my needs” even if he or she actually doesn’t)? that is abuse and exploitation you are perpetuating. think about it this way. if you, the poly partner, were reluctant to be monogamous but your already poly partner reveals that he/she actually wants a closed relationship and that’s what he or she wants in general, would you readily accept being told “that’s okay, but i’m going to try and show you why you should be monogamous instead” and being pushed in that direction? being constantly cajoled into finally “giving in” and being monogamous? geez. once more polyamorists actually do believe in *ethical* non monogamy and not just hypocritical, disrespectful (towards monogamy), deceitful nonsense like this will i be less critical. examine this: why is it that monogamy and polyamory can’t both exist as valid life choices? and why is it that polyamory can’t be thought of as a spectrum? i can tell you i’m nonmonagamous but not poly (as in, i’m monoromantic but interested in ethical sexual non monogamy but overall at least open to some form of polyamory) and i don’t get anything other than arrogance and disrespect on either extreme, but especially from polyamorists. no, polyamory does not make the world better, or at least any more than monogamy. yes, toxic attitudes about monogamy being the “right” way and polyamory being “slutty” or “anti family” are problematic. but that’s it. both are valid orientations and deserve the same respect. i’m exhausted. likelike hi neesh. sorry for my delay in responding. for some reason, i only saw your comment now. i’m also sorry you have experienced a lot of hypocritical, disrespectfu, deceitful nonsense within the poly world and that you interpreted my post as saying poly is better than mono for everyone. my intention was to share my personal story and what helped me in exploring poly as a reluctant partner with the hope that it might support others in a similar position. i have come to see poly as a better lifestyle for me, but i wouldn’t presume what would work best for you or anyone else and i agree that both orientations are valid and deserve respect. the irony is that after my wife wanted to open our marriage 25 years ago and i came to really love being poly, last year she decided she wants to be monogamous again and asked me to leave my girlfriend of (then) 1.5 years. she did try to cajole and convince me to change. as you can imagine, this led to many difficult and painful discussions and it is still possible my wife may leave in order to find a monogamous partner, but we are also exploring what it means to be mono/poly in our marriage. this is a new path for us and it hasn’t been easy, but it does seem to be getting better…. i also agree with you that poly is a spectrum. i would say the same about monogamy. in fact, i suspect many conflicts within monogamous couples stem from an assumption that their partners define monogamy in the same way they do. but there are so many nuances. is it okay to have a good friend of the attractive gender? can you share secrets with them? a hug? a massage? a kiss? i believe that every monogamous couple eventually will find differences in their definition of monogamy and how they navigate those differences can often make or break a relationship. the same is true for poly, of course. the difference is that, because there are so many ways to do poly, it is more obvious that partners need to communicate about their needs right from the beginning. thanks for engaging and i look forward to our next opportunity. likelike as a mono person whose partner has just come out as poly after 15 years of marriage i found your article thought provoking and helpful. there are places where i think that if you swapped the terms (mono where you have written poly and vice versa) you would see that some of your suggestions are quite co ercive as others have said. however, in the main your suggestions seem thoughtful and ethical. we have children together which complicates things considerably and makes it even harder for either of to say we will simply walk away if it’s not working, which is what i would be tempted to do otherwise, much as i love him. i can see that he has had to suppress an important part of himself and we can’t put that back in the closet. likeliked by 1 person thank you so much for writing this. you have written out everything that has been happening to me, and it is such a relief to know i am not alone. likelike i know this is a few years old but i am finding this article useful being in the position of the ‘reluctant’ partner at the moment. i would describe myself as somewhere between ‘2) they are open minded but reluctant about opening the relationship 3) they are completely freaked out and resistant to opening the relationship.’ initially when we first discussed this a couple of years ago i was in the 2) but we had some ‘bumpy’ and painful experiences that ended up with us deciding to put poly behind us for the last few months, but my partner wants to revisit it having found someone she feels would be better for her, only now i am more reluctant than i was before having had fingers burnt more than once. however i respect the fact that this is important to my partner and so am trying to find ways for me to deal with the considerable anxiety this provokes in me. the big problem for me, and tbh this is something the article glosses over and could go into more detail about, is that our initial experiences brought up and rubbed salt into a lot of childhood wounds and abuse, as well as experiences of infidelity from previous relationships. i have c ptsd as a result of the childhood stuff, which results in a lot of insecurity in my attachments (particularly around my partner being away with another lover), a strong need for security and trust in relationships, and i have come to realise that the idea of pursuing poly relationships for myself could just result in more than one person to feel insecure with, which means at the moment we are only exploring fully this for my partner anyway, although i would greatly value developing a non sexual support system which may help ease me into the poly community and help me deal with my own issues. i am open to the idea that poly could be healing for both of us, but at the moment i’m tending to oscillate between that hope and pure terror. i really could do with some help getting past that but i know this is a huge amount of work. i have been in therapy before but at the moment we can’t afford that. likelike i thank this great man lord zakuza for he has brought me back to life after he helped me to recover my lost partner of 3 years and now we are both in love that will never come to an end. join me to say thank you to lord zakuza and you can also need his help as well if necessary. here’s his contact info. email: lordzakuza7 @ gmail. com, website: lordzakuzaspells.com likelike comments are closed. email address: enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. email address: follow

sign up sign in sign up sign in julie harris follow conscious relationship design    listen share the fifth in a series on designing love: exploring polyamory and ethical non monogamy em sits at her kitchen table, her head in her hands as she ponders the intricacies of her polyamorous life. her partner, alex, is out on a date with their new girlfriend, and while em is happy for them, she can’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy. balancing her own needs, her relationship with alex, and her other partner, liam, feels like a delicate juggling act. as she takes a deep breath, em reflects on the challenges that come with choosing a polyamorous lifestyle. welcome back to our series on designing love: exploring polyamory and ethical non monogamy. in previous articles, we’ve delved into the history of polyamory, its place in modern society, and the application of conscious relationship design principles. today, we’ll explore the unique challenges faced by individuals like em who navigate the complex world of polyamorous relationships. medium.com medium.com medium.com medium.com clear, open and honest communication is the cornerstone of any successful relationship, but it becomes even more crucial in polyamorous dynamics. without ongoing discussions about boundaries, expectations and needs, misunderstandings can quickly arise, leading to broken promises, lack of consent and hurt feelings. in em’s case, she and alex had established certain agreements when they first opened up their relationship. however, as alex’s new connection deepened, em realised that some of those initial boundaries no longer felt comfortable for her. she knew she needed to have an honest conversation with alex, but she worried about coming across as jealous or controlling. this is a common fear among polyamorous individuals   the concern that expressing one’s needs or discomfort might be perceived as an attempt to limit their partner’s autonomy. however, it’s essential to remember that setting boundaries is not about restriction; it’s about creating a framework within which everyone feels safe, respected and heard. to cope with these challenges, polyamorous individuals prioritise active listening and regular check ins with their partners. they understand that agreements may need to be renegotiated as relationships evolve and new situations arise. by fostering a culture of transparency and open dialogue, polyamorous folks can navigate the complexities of multiple relationships with greater ease. em took a deep breath and approached alex with an open heart. she expressed her feelings, not as accusations, but as an invitation to collaborate on a solution. together, they revisited their agreements, making adjustments that honoured both of their needs and the needs of their other partners. through this process, em and alex strengthened their communication skills and deepened their trust in one another. one of the most significant challenges in polyamory is managing time and energy across multiple committed relationships. juggling the needs and desires of several partners can be mentally and emotionally taxing, and it’s not uncommon for individuals to feel stretched thin or for partners to feel neglected. for em, this challenge manifested in her struggle to find quality time with both alex and liam. with alex’s new relationship blossoming and liam’s demanding work schedule, em found herself feeling overwhelmed and spread too thin. she longed for the intimate moments she used to share with each of her partners but felt guilty about asking for more time, fearing she might come across as needy or demanding. this, too, is a fear that many polyamorous individuals grapple with   the worry that expressing one’s need for quality time might be seen as an attempt to monopolise a partner’s attention. however, it’s important to remember that all relationships require nurturing and that it’s okay to advocate for one’s own needs. polyamorous people often cope by meticulously scheduling quality time with each partner, setting realistic expectations and ensuring that self care remains a top priority. they understand that while it’s important to nurture each relationship, it’s equally crucial to maintain their own well being and avoid burnout. em decided to have an open conversation with both alex and liam about her need for quality time. she approached the discussion not as a demand, but as an expression of her love and desire to connect deeply with each of them. together, they worked out a schedule that ensured everyone’s needs were met, including their need for self care and alone time. in a society that upholds monogamy as the norm, choosing polyamory can be a challenging path. confronting deep rooted societal expectations and personal insecurities is a common struggle for those in non monogamous relationships. jealousy, often fueled by feelings of inadequacy or fear of abandonment, can be a significant hurdle to overcome. medium.com em had always prided herself on being a secure and confident person. however, when alex started dating their new girlfriend, em found herself grappling with unexpected feelings of jealousy and insecurity. she worried that alex might find their new partner more attractive, more interesting, or more compatible. these feelings left em feeling ashamed and confused, as they seemed to contradict her belief in the principles of polyamory. this experience is not uncommon among polyamorous individuals. even those who fully embrace the philosophy of non monogamy can struggle with jealousy and insecurity from time to time. it’s important to remember that these feelings are normal and do not invalidate one’s commitment to polyamory. polyamorous individuals often work on building self esteem, communicating their feelings openly, and avoiding assumptions about their partners’ other relationships. they also strive to cultivate compersion   the feeling of joy and happiness in witnessing their partner’s pleasure with another person. by reframing jealousy as an opportunity for personal growth and by supporting their partners’ autonomy, polyamorous folks can navigate these emotional challenges with greater resilience. em took the time to reflect on her feelings of jealousy and insecurity. she recognised that these emotions were rooted in her own fears and not a reflection of alex’s feelings for her. she shared her struggles with alex, not as an accusation, but as a request for reassurance and support. together, they worked on rebuilding em’s sense of security, reminding each other of the depth of their love and commitment. despite growing awareness and acceptance of alternative relationship structures, polyamorous individuals and polyamory families still face a lack of support and understanding from mainstream society. they may struggle to find relatable role models, resources, or legal recognition for their relationships. additionally, they may encounter judgment, discrimination, or social stigma from those who view polyamory as immoral or unstable. em had always been open about her polyamorous lifestyle with close friends and family. however, when she started a new job, she found herself hesitating to share details about her personal life. she worried that her colleagues might view her relationship choices as unprofessional or even immoral. this fear of judgment left em feeling isolated and unable to fully be herself in her workplace. this experience is common among polyamorous individuals who must navigate a world that is still largely structured around monogamous norms. the lack of legal recognition for polyamorous relationships can also create challenges, particularly when it comes to issues like healthcare, child custody and inheritance rights. to cope with these challenges, polyamorous people often build their own support networks, seeking out online communities and forming close knit “polycules”   interconnected relationship networks that provide a sense of belonging and understanding. they may also choose to be discrete about their relationship status to avoid negative reactions from those who may not be accepting. em found solace in connecting with other polyamorous individuals through online forums and local meetups. these connections provided her with a sense of community and validation, reminding her that she was not alone in her experiences. while she continued to be cautious about sharing her relationship status at work, she found strength in knowing that she had a supportive network of people who understood and accepted her for who she was. while navigating the challenges of polyamory can be demanding, it also presents unique opportunities for personal growth and the development of vital life skills. through their experiences, polyamorous individuals often cultivate exceptional communication abilities, emotional intelligence and conflict resolution strategies. they learn to be introspective, confront their own insecurities and develop a deep understanding of their needs and boundaries. for em, the journey of polyamory had been one of profound personal growth. through the challenges she faced, she had learned to communicate her needs more effectively, to set and respect boundaries, and to cultivate a deeper sense of self awareness and self love. she had also developed a greater capacity for empathy and understanding, both for her partners and for herself. the very nature of polyamory encourages individuals to question societal norms and construct relationships that align with their authentic selves. by embracing the challenges and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability, polyamorous folks often emerge with a greater sense of self awareness, empathy and resilience. as em reflected on her experiences, she realised that the challenges she had faced had ultimately strengthened her relationships and her sense of self. she had learned to love more deeply, to communicate more honestly, and to trust more fully. while the path of polyamory had not always been easy, it had led her to a place of greater self understanding and joy. as we conclude this exploration of the challenges in polyamorous relationships, it’s important to recognise that while these difficulties can be daunting, they are not insurmountable. by approaching polyamory with intention, open communication and a willingness to engage in continuous self reflection and growth, individuals like em can navigate these complexities and build meaningful, fulfilling relationships. conscious relationship design plays a crucial role in addressing these challenges, providing a framework for establishing clear agreements, fostering emotional intimacy and adapting to the ever evolving needs of multiple partners. by embracing the principles of crd, polyamorous individuals create supportive, sustainable relationship structures that allow love to flourish in its many forms. as always, i invite you to reflect on your own experiences and share your thoughts on navigating the complexities of your relationships, be they monogamous or non monogamous. whether you’re currently engaged in polyamory, considering exploring non monogamy, or simply curious about alternative relationship structures, your insights and questions are invaluable to this ongoing conversation. together, let’s continue to explore the vast landscape of human connection, embracing the challenges and joys that come with designing a love that is uniquely our own. if you’re curious to learn more about conscious relationship design or would like guidance on applying these principles in your own life, i invite you to reach out. together, we can explore how crd can help you create more authentic, nurturing, and expansive relationships. feel free to share this article or give it a “clap” if you enjoyed it. comment or reach out if you’d like to share your thoughts. i’d love to hear from you.       intentionally co creating relationships to nurture freedom, autonomy and growth. through insightful articles, learn to articulate your desires, communicate openly, practice empathy and iterate your relationships, whether monogamous, non monogamous or something new. crazy about creativity, innovation and learning for life | currently researching and writing about conscious relationship design help status about careers press blog privacy terms text to speech teams

valentina shilkina | istockphoto how do breakups work in polyamory? if you’re dating multiple people, and one of those relationships ends, how are you supposed to handle it? are you allowed to be sad? i mean, you’re still in at least one other relationship, right? it’s not like monogamy, where you suddenly have to deal with being alone. wouldn’t being sad be an insult to your remaining partners? if you’re happy with them, losing someone else surely shouldn’t be a problem. what if it happens to someone else in your polycule? if you’ve been practising kitchen table polyamory, do you have to cut a friend out of your life just because they are no longer dating your partner? i assume that, like me, most of you didn't put much thought into how you deal with any of this when you first began your journey into polyamory, but it's almost certain to be something you have to deal with at some point. so, let's look at how to deal with breakups in polyamory. breakups are hard. sometimes, they happen because a relationship has come to the end of its natural lifespan. sometimes, they happen because of events completely out of your or your partner's control. and sometimes, they happen because you’ve discovered something about your partner that means they have lost your love or trust. while in monogamy, going through a breakup is a simple, clean change in your lifestyle (being in a relationship to being single). however, in polyamory, it's not quite that simple, because if you’re still dating other people, you’re not really “single”, are you? if you're not single, shouldn't you be spared from the feelings of loneliness and confusion that you would expect in monogamy? how do you navigate the feelings of loss without upsetting your other partners or when you still have love in your love from other people? breakups are hard, and polyamory is complicated; when you combine the two, you’re in for one hell of a ride. every relationship is unique and has its own equilibrium. the balance of needs and wants between two (or more) people that make up their life together. this is why regular relationship check ins are essential because any change in your life will impact your relationships with those around you. going through a breakup is one massive change to your equilibrium which you have the right and the need to feel. something i have learned through polyamory is how deceptively fragile the balance of our lives and relationships really is. one small change and everything that previously felt secure can be caught in a swirl of chaos and uncertainty. when you go through a breakup in polyamory, no matter the fact that you might still have love in your life from someone else, you need to address this change to your equilibrium. it doesn't matter how well balanced your life might have been; you need to actively work to find a new balance point. even if you don’t think your life was particularly well balanced or the breakup is a good thing that will make your life objectively better, you still have to address the fact that things have changed. unfortunately, there is no easy path i can outline to do this. we all handle breakups differently, and what you need to do to address the change will depend on the specific details of your life. one thing you will need to do is openly address how these changes will impact your life, practically and emotionally. will you now have more time on your hands with one fewer partner? was the emotional connection with your ex partner strong enough that you are going to need a significant amount of time and support to process things? is there any trauma that might require professional help? were there any of your needs that this partner provided that you don’t get anywhere else? and, most importantly, how will your breakup affect your remaining relationships? when you go through a difficult time, it's natural that we will lean on our partners to help us though it. this still applies in polyamory, even in breakups. however, depending on the nature of your relationships, this might not be something you can expect by default. not every relationship is the same, and casual relationships are just as valid in polyamory as long term committed ones. when you need emotional support, you need to take into account the nature of your existing relationships. if you have a second loving, committed relationship, that partner will no doubt want to be there to support you, but should you expect the same from something more casual? it's not callous to say your relationship agreement with someone doesn't include emotional support and to put that boundary in place. another thing to recognise is that breaking up with one partner does not mean your other relationships will necessarily change. yes, maybe you might start spending more time with one partner and find that connection ends up growing into something new, but that isn’t automatic. your relationships with your other partners might be perfect the way they are, and assuming they will grow closer just because you have this new space in your life could actually be damaging. just because you are polyamorous doesn’t mean you have given up the right to be sad about breaking up with someone. yes, in a situation where you have multiple partners, breaking up with one of them doesn’t make you “single”. you’re not suddenly alone. but having happiness in your life doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to feel sad about losing something that was important to you. even in monogamous breakups, having close friends rallying around you doesn’t stop it being painful. it’s the same with having other partners. you can still be devastated at losing someone from your life. you have the right to feel your feelings. when my marriage ended, it was both amicable and, looking back, something we both had known was coming. but i was still sad. as my therapist put it, i was in mourning. just because i knew it was the right decision, i still had to put in the time to recognise and process the passing of a major part of my life, and having a second partner to support me through it didn't take anything away from how i was feeling. breakups are not a sign of failure. no relationship is breakup proof, nor should they be. a relationship coming to an end is not an inherently bad thing. i’ve written before about how any healthy relationship needs to include an awareness of the possibility of breaking up. because if you think it’s impossible that something can weaken, you won’t work on making it stronger. it’s difficult, but if your relationship was healthy, you will eventually be able to look back and see all the ways that relationship helped you grow. you’ll be able to see the parts of yourself that you wouldn’t have, or, at least, would be less well developed if this person hadn't been in your life. you can also look at the parts of the relationship that were not healthy or satisfying and take those learnings forward into future ones. for a final point, i want to remind you that despite what many people will say, a breakup in polyamory does not mean polyamory cannot work, that this was inevitable and that you can only really be happy with one partner. or, if the breakup takes you from having two partners in your life to just one, this was the relationship that was “meant to be”, and now you can focus on that one. i could write an entire article on why this is not true, but for now, just remember that monogamous relationships end, and no one ever says this means monogamy doesn’t work. so, how does breaking up in polyamory work? essentially, they work in the same way they do in monogamy, just with more people involved. while polyamory can add complications, at the end of the day, the emotions you will feel and the steps you need to take to adjust are exactly the same as if you were monogamous. going through a breakup sucks, either because you’ve lost something special from your life or you’ve had a partner betray you in a way that meant you were forced to leave them. if you're going through one right now, i feel for you. just remember, we've all been through what you're feeling, and things will get better. in the meantime, just remember that breaking up isn't the end of the world. would you like to learn more about polyamory, keep up to date with articles when they are posted, and also receive a free copy of a basic guide to ethical non monogamy? then sign up for my newsletter. sign up to our newsletter to receive a free copy of the basic guide to ethical non monogamy

note: this page assumes that you are in a traditional, monogamous relationship, and your partner has just told you that he or she is polyamorous., or that you’re a monogamous person considering starting a new relationship with someone who’s polyamorous. there’s a page for polyamorous folks thinking about a monogamous partner here. image: christian lue my lover just told me he or she wants other lovers. now what??! for starters, it’s not what you think. it’s not necessarily the “we should see other people” speech, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of your relationship. if your partner says that he or she wants other partners, your first impulse may be to feel attacked or rejected, and if the time comes when your partner does take another partner, you may feel that person is attacking you simply by existing. take a deep breath, relax, and try to let go of it. your partner is not attacking you, and your partner’s other partner is not attacking you; it’s important not to respond angrily, but to try to make a relationship that works for all of you. having said that: any relationship in which the people involved have different goals and expectations will not be an easy relationship. making any relationship work requires a dedication of time and effort, and there are never any guarantees; a relationship in which one partner is monogamous by nature and the other partner is not is particularly difficult, and fraught with peril. this doesn’t mean it can’t be done. but it won’t always be easy. you will need to compromise. so will your partner.. this may especially be true of the monogamous partner, who will have to learn and adapt to a completely new way to approach romantic relationships that might seem to fly in the face of everything you understand about the way love is supposed to work. there may be times when you will feel insecure, jealous, and hurt; this does not mean that your relationship is failing, and it is not wrong, bad, or irrational for you to feel this way. it simply means that your partner will have to take the time to pay special attention to your needs and your feelings, that’s all. it also means, though, that your own ideas about relationship, your own fears and insecurities, and your own doubts will probably be brought to the surface, and you’ll likely be asked to confront those ideas and doubts and insecurities. if you can find a way to confront and defeat them, then your relationship will definitely be improved. here's another one that's hard to get your head around: it’s not about you. it's natural to think "why am i not enough?" but if your partner is polyamorous, it’s not about you. you could be absolutely perfect in every way, and your partner would still be polyamorous. this is no picnic for your polyamorous partner, either. as the poly person, you'll be called on to help your partner feel safe and secure. this may mean you must move more slowly in new relationships than you want to. it may mean that you must give up relationships that your partner finds threatening. it may mean that you must negotiate boundaries that are narrower than what you might otherwise want. the place where it gets tricky, though, is in doing these things while still being compassionate and respectful to any new person who may join your relationship. often, the temptation exists to create rules and set boundaries that will protect the existing relationship even at the expense of any other member of the relationship, particularly when it’s all theoretical and there is nobody else involved yet. this ability to compromise, and to negotiate a set of agreements that both people can function in, is absolutely critical if you are to make this work. equally critical is a commitment to follow through on the things you say that you will do, and abide by the negotiated agreements in your relationship completely and without fail. a relationship where the people involved have different expectations is already under stress; even seemingly trivial infractions can easily be magnified to the point where they jeopardize everything you wish to build together. remember, though, when you’re building these rules: any new person becoming involved with one of you is a human being, too. a new person is going to bring needs and desires of his own. respect them. consider the needs of everyone involved! it may not seem obvious why this is necessary, but it is, not only for the sake of that person but for your own as well. actions can be regulated, but feelings and emotions are a bit trickier, and can’t be controlled or dictated arbitrarily; if you agree to let your partner explore a new relationship, there’s a very real chance that your partner will become emotionally involved with a new partner, and at that point, asking your partner to change or end that relationship is likely to hurt your partner. think carefully before you do this, and understand that hurting your partner may have consequences in your relationship. and relax. it does get easier over time. security is learned. as your relationship progresses, you will find it easier and easier to feel safe with your partner, and to build a foundation that can make both of you happy. there are, however, some mental roadblocks you’ll need to get past before you can be happy this way. the first and biggest is in thinking your lover’s polyamory has something to do with you that you are insufficient, or you are not “enough.” but why? i don’t get it. why am i not enough? if you are wired for monogamy, this can be a difficult thing to understand. it’s helpful to keep in mind that it really isn’t about you. it’s not because you don’t have enough to offer. it’s not because you don’t meet your lover’s needs. it’s not because your partner doesn’t love you, or because your partner is selfish, or because you don’t satisfy your partner, or because you aren’t good enough. many people seem to be naturally inclined to need only one person in their life. such people experience a drive to seek out romantic companionship, but once they have found that romantic companionship, that drive disappears. it’s as if the need to seek out intimacy is switched off; the drive is satisfied, and the person is content to settle down with his or her partner. for other people, this is not the case. people who are poly by nature experience the same drive to seek out intimacy and romantic relationships, but once such a person has found a partner, openness to new relationships doesn't switch off. this is what many poly folk mean when they say “having one lover does not meet all my needs.” it’s not a way of saying that a poly person expects to have every need, no matter how trivial or transient, satisfied at once; rather, it’s a way of saying that the need that is completely satisfied when a monogamous person finds a lover is not satisfied when a polyamorous person finds a partner. put simply: monogamous people can be happy sharing their lives with one and only one other person. polyamorous people can not. it’s not necessarily a choice. i don’t believe polyamorous people choose to be poly any more than monogamous people choose to be monogamous. i know that i did not make this decision; it’s simply part of who i am, and for better or for worse i cannot be happy with only one person in my romantic life. my wife can be. neither of us is right or wrong; we are simply different, and we must acknowledge and accommodate those differences in order to be successful together. if your partner is polyamorous by nature, then your partner’s desire to have additional romantic partners is not your fault, nor is it his or her fault. it does not mean he or she does not love you. it just means you have different drives and different needs. if my partner is poly? yes. it’s important to realize that not everybody who claims to be polyamorous is polyamorous. the world is not composed entirely of fair, ethical, and honest people. there are people who are selfish, and who see in the word “polyamory” a way to justify sleeping with anyone they choose without consequence. such people can usually be spotted fairly easily. for example: i can handle the physical stuff as long as my partner loves me the most…how do i do that? you can’t; in fact, you may do tremendous damage to your relationship if you try. okay, so i think i can give this a try… there is no “trying” a poly relationship; if you wait until your lover’s heart is on the line, then change your mind, you run a very real risk of losing your partner! “trying” a poly relationship assumes that if the relationship doesn’t work out, you can go back to the way things used to be. but relationships are fluid, dynamic things; there is no way, once you have introduced any significant change in a relationship, to make things be the way they were before. even if you do close your relationship and become monogamous again, it won’t be the same; you and your partner will have had experiences that will almost certainly change the way you relate to one another forever. in fact, just by having the discussion about polyamory, you may change your relationship, even if you remain monogamous for no other reason than you may learn things about your partner that you didn’t know before. change doesn’t have to be scary; often, these changes can be healthy and positive. but there’s no denying that if you decide to begin a polyamorous relationship with your lover, things aren’t going to be the same again; you will not be able to press a button and erase everything that happens from that point on. my partner has cheated on me. can we make a poly relationship work? is it possible? yes, though it requires a lot of work. human beings are highly adaptable, and there’s no way to predict what might act as a catalyst for growth. if someone is polyamorous by nature but doesn’t know that he’s polyamorous, he may cheat because he simply lacks any kind of frame of reference for ethical non monogamy, and may not even be aware that such a possibility exists. but people cheat for a wide variety of reasons, most of them having little to do with being polyamorous. people may cheat because they like the excitement of an illicit thrill, for example; or because they want to be able to experience multiple sexual relationships but can’t stand the thought of their partners having the same experiences. it’s often easier to justify violating the principles of something you have always believed than it is to challenge those beliefs and question whether or not they are valid at all. many people who cheat do not really question the value of monogamy; they may find ways to rationalize or justify their own behavior, but they will still believe that monogamy is “right.” sometimes, people will even blame their partners for their cheating; “well, if my partner was more [x], then i wouldn’t need to cheat.” such people still hold to the ideal of monogamy and more important, they still want their partners to be faithful. such a person is not likely to make the leap from cheating to polyamory. like many things, it all comes down to the reasons why someone cheats. a cheater who cheats because he feels compelled to seek out or maintain multiple romantic, loving relationships quite possibly can make the leap to polyamory, if he can learn honesty and unlearn the structures of monogamy, and if he can learn to treat his partners with compassion and respect. the advantage that cheating offers that polyamory does not is that you do not have to consider the feelings of your partner when you cheat. in a poly relationship, there may be circumstances where you don’t get what you want. making the transition from cheating to polyamory requires a lot of work. you have to deconstruct the ideas you were raised to believe and build a new set of structures that allows you to have outside relationships while still preserving honesty and trust and you have to do this from a foundation of broken trust to begin with. all in all, it’s not the easiest way to construct a polyamorous relationship. can it be done? sure, provided all the people involved including the partner who was cheated on choose to make it work, and are willing to invest the effort it will take to do so. is it easy? no. you keep talking about “negotiated boundaries.” what does that mean? put most simply, it means that you have a say in what your lover does, even if your lover wants other partners. being poly does not mean that your lover gets to run around having sex with all kinds of other people. you have a say. if you are to survive as a monogamous person in a non monogamous relationship, it’s very important both for the health of the relationship and for your own psychological well being that you feel empowered in that relationship. you can and do have a voice in your partner’s behavior; you can and should have a say in the form your relationship takes. talk to your partner! make your concerns known. you are being asked to compromise some elements of what you want from a relationship; there is no reason why that compromise has to be one sided. whatever the specifics of the agreement you may establish, the important aspect is that you have created a framework with your partner that helps establish your place in your partner’s life, in a way that gives both of you what you need. many people in the poly community will tell you that love is infinite if you love someone else, you do not love your first partner any less. love may be infinite, at least in theory, but time and resources are not. this is a “gotcha” that can get even well meaning people who are experienced with non monogamous relationships. it’s true that sharing your love with one person does not mean that there is less love available for you but it does mean that there is less time available for you. for that reason, learning yourself well enough to know exactly what it is you need from your relationship how much time, how much attention and learning how to communicate your needs clearly and unambiguously to your partner are two of the most important relationship skills you can have in a polyamorous relationship, especially if you are monogamous by nature. so once i know what i need, and my partner knows what he or she needs, we’re set, right? well…no. you’re partway there, but there’s one more key part of the equation that is easy to overlook: you have to consider the needs of the other people involved, as well. it’s easy to think of your partner’s other partners as your adversaries, people who compete with you for time and energy from your partner. this impulse, as natural and understandable as it may be, is very likely to muck things up but good. your happiness, and the happiness of your partner and your partner’s other partners, are all interrelated. establishing a healthy friendship with your partner’s other partners is a key component to being happy yourself. if you allow your relationship with your partner’s other partners to become adversarial, you’re most likely to hurt yourself, and to hurt them. it is possible to maintain a healthy set of relationships if you don’t like your lover’s other lovers, but it’s much more difficult and even if you can’t make friends with them, it is still necessary to treat them with respect. your partner’s partners are human beings, too. they have feelings, and they deserve to be treated with compassion and respect. more to the point, they can enrich your life. even if you do not establish any kind of romantic relationship with your partner’s partners, they clearly have something to offer to your partner; these relationships have the potential to make your partner happy, and by extension, to make you happy. when your partner is happy, your relationship with your partner benefits. the one lesson here that i think is more important than any other is this: the best way to make a mono/poly relationship work is to find a way to make it work for you. no, i don’t mean going out and finding another partner yourself. i mean finding a way to be happy in a polyamorous relationship, and discovering ways to build healthy, positive connections between yourself and your partner’s other partners. this doesn’t mean romantic relationships, but simply any kind of relationship that is positive and brings you happiness. the more successfully you do this, the more successful and happy your relationship with your partner will be, and the fewer stresses and strains you’ll encounter. don’t assume that the relationship between you and your partner’s other partner must be adversarial! the second most important lesson here: don’t break your lover’s heart. if you break your lover’s heart, you can reasonably expect it to have consequences; and one way to do that is to agree to a situation that allows your lover to become emotionally intimate with another person, then hurt that person or (worse yet) order, beg, or manipulate your lover into withdrawing from that person. kindness, compassion, and respect even toward your lover’s other partner, even if you’re feeling jealous or angry or insecure or frightened will help prevent this from happening, and are positive and beneficial parts of any relationship. make no mistake about it: poly/mono relationships are challenging. everybody has limits, which, if crossed, make happiness impossible. many people in the poly community advise others to steer clear of a monogamous partner. having a partner whose fundamental wants and needs from a relationship differ from yours is extremely painful not only to you and to that person, but to anyone else who becomes involved with you as well. poly/mono couplings are a very common form of polyamorous relationship, but they are also very difficult. love, of and by itself, is not necessarily enough. love does not always triumph over all. there may be many reasons that a relationship simply cannot work, in spite of how much the people involved love one another. everyone has limits of some kind: no matter how much you may love someone, there are things that can make you leave the relationship. you cannot be anyone other than who you are. to thine own self be true. ultimately, you do have to honor your own beliefs. and when it comes to crossing your own non negotiable boundaries, you do not have a choice. you cannot be happy if your non negotiable needs are not met. the question is not “is it fair that my partner must have other partners,” the question is “is my need to be monogamous a non negotiable prerequisite for my own happiness?” if you are debating whether or not you can exist in a polyamorous relationship, that will tell you the answer. if you are not happy in your relationship, you’re not going to make your partner happy. © 1997 2025 franklin veaux "more than two" is a trademark of franklin veaux/established 2006 this web site represents countless hours of work.if you find it helpful, please donate! 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prostock studio | istockphoto breakups are hard, even when they are not our own. watching someone you care about navigate the end of their relationship is always heartbreaking. but at least when it's a friend or family member going through a breakup, there is a level of disconnect. and as we're not personally involved, we're able to be there to support them. but how does this work in polyamory? what are you supposed to do when it’s your romantic or sexual partner who’s going through a breakup? i’ve written previously about how to handle going through a breakup when you’re polyamorous and the extra levels of difficulty this entails. but something i didn’t touch on in that article is how you go about handling looking after your partner when they are going through a breakup. are you allowed to be upset? do you have to step up and fill the gap their ex has left? do you have to cut that person out of your life now, even if you're friends? what happens if you were part of a closely interconnected polycule? all of these questions, and more, are part of one of the most painful parts of polyamory and one that barely any of us think about when we begin our journey. so, let’s take a moment to take a look at the things you need to consider when you are watching one of your partners go through a polyamorous breakup. a quick note before we begin: this article assumes you are not also involved with your partner's ex. if you are dating the same person or are otherwise romantically or sexually involved with them, then you are in a whole other dynamic, which will need to be discussed in its own article. the first point i want to make can seem a bit blunt, but it’s an important baseline when you are watching a partner go through a polyamorous breakup. this isn’t about you. it may sometimes feel that it is. the events surrounding your partner's break may directly impact you in multiple different ways, both practically and emotionally. but despite all this, you need to remember you are not the one going through the breakup. when some time has passed, you will be able to ask for time and space to address your issues, but for now, the focus needs to be on your partner. i think this was put best by a former partner of mine when they were watching me go through a huge breakup: i did not cause it, nor did i feel like i had, i couldn’t fix it and i couldn’t ask them to fix it just because i felt hurt for them. there is a level of selflessness you have to achieve, not to ignore your own feelings, but, to put it bluntly…this isn’t about you. my job was to support tom and the job to myself was recognise the attack to the equilibrium i thought i had found. yes, your feelings, emotions, and pain are all valid and will need to be addressed in time. but right now, you need to recognise that you are not going to help your partner by making things about you. while you need to remember that your partner's breakup is not about you, that doesn't mean your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions are not valid. relationships are complicated, and breakups are messy for everyone involved. and you are going to have opinions about the people involved and the details of the breakup. maybe you really liked your ex metamour, and will miss not having them in your life. perhaps you secretly disliked them and are glad your partner finally saw sense and ditched them. you might be worried about how this will impact your own relationship with your partner. you might even think your partner is at fault for the breakup and that they are handling things badly. all of your feelings are valid. if you need time to process them, take that time. you’ll likely need to step away from your partner to do this so as not to dump your problems on them. this is why support networks are important, whether it's friends or a therapist so that you also have people to talk with about what's happening. just remember, if these thoughts and feelings about the breakup are something you need to address with your partner, make sure you do this at the right time. just because your partner’s other relationship has ended doesn’t mean that yours will necessarily have to change. for many people, this will almost certainly happen to at least some degree. when one person leaves our lives, our other relationship have the freedom to grow into the recently vacated space. your partner will, once they are through the worst, have more time and energy to dedicate to someone, and maybe that someone will be you. but this doesn't have to be the case. casual relationships are valid, and they don't mean you won't want to be there to support them through a hard time like a breakup. but while some relationships are casual because the people involved don't have time for more, any are casual because that's what works. just because your partner suddenly has more time for you doesn't mean you want any of it. polyamory doesn't work on a ranking system, where once a player is eliminated, all other players move up a position. each relationship is separate and only needs to change if both of you actually want it to. following on from the previous point, as harsh as it may seem to say, you are not obliged to do anything to support a partner through a polyamorous breakup. how much you want to get involved with your partner’s breakup comes down to the nature of your relationship. i would imagine in the vast majority of cases, we would all want to step up to support someone we care about in such a difficult time. we’d do the same to any friend, so why would it be different for a romantic or sexual partner? but not all polyamorous or ethically non monogamous relationships are like this. what you have with your partner might be purely physical. or you might have an agreement that your relationships are exclusively parallel, and so you don’t want to get involved in their other relationships in any way, shape, or form. it is perfectly acceptable to maintain the boundaries you have in place and not “get involved” with your partner's emotional situation if that is what your existing relationship agreement sets out. this isn’t, of course, an excuse to be a dick or hurtful. telling someone to their face you don't care if they are hurting or going through a hard time is not okay. but you also don’t need to feel guilty about not stepping up to support someone if that’s not the agreed nature of your relationship.) when two people breakup, it’s not only them who are affected. even in monogamy, whole friendship groups can be impacted by a breakup. even when breakups are mutual and amicable, there will always be an impact on everyone's social group. from people not being able to do things as a group for a while to friends literally having to choose who they stay in contact with, a breakup can create seismic changes in multiple people's lives. and these complications are only magnified by polyamory, polycules, and the concept of kitchen table polyamory. what happens if you are part of a close, interknit polycule? does it have to split up? what happens if you are close friends with your partner’s now ex, and you want to support them just as much? do you have to choose between them? i have seen entire polycules fall apart by two people breaking up. but then i've also seen instances of everyone involved working together to adjust and, over time, coming back just as strong as they were before. and remember, this isn't unique to polyamory. the same thing that happens to a polycule can happen to a monogamous friend group. sometimes, it turns out that a social group is being held together by one core relationship, and without that, people drift apart. the sad fact of the matter is that breakups change things. if there is a breakup in your polycule, things are going to change. how much and how badly depends on the people and the situation. sometimes, it might simply be that two people need a bit of time and space and so the group simply needs to work on adjusting their dynamic until things settle back down. but it might also be that those two people can no longer be near each other. and if this is the case, i'm afraid that everyone involved in the polycule is going to have to adjust their lives accordingly, making difficult and upsetting decisions about who can be in their lives. all that helps in this situation is having done the work on your communication and emotional intelligence as a group. hopefully, this will mean you have the tools you all need to navigate through this shift in the balance of your lives with minimal disruption. if not, then at least you'll all be better prepared to handle the aftermath. breakups in polyamory suck just as much as they do in any other relationship. i wish i could give better advice about what to do when your partner is going through a breakup, but i can’t. all i can do is remind you that sometimes life is hard. sometimes it outright sucks. and not all relationships are destined to last forever. the only real difference between monogamous and polyamorous breakups is that in polyamory you will find yourself involved in other people’s breakups in a way you haven’t had much experience in. but then, that doesn't make them unique. there are so many experiences we go through on our polyamory journey that we don't have experience in. breakups are no different. we simply need to prepare and hope we're able to handle the situation when it comes. my only real advice for handling being on the outside of a polyamorous breakup is that it will always be easier when everyone involved has been practising emotional intelligence and communication. just as in any relationship. because hopefully, if you’ve been working on your polyamory and actively learning about how to create healthy relationships, you will have, without realising it, begun setting up the foundation where a breakup is, if not easy, at least easier. would you like to learn more about polyamory, keep up to date with articles when they are posted, and also receive a free copy of a basic guide to ethical non monogamy? 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supported by modern love can exploring polyamory both break you and make you? by jason bilbrey when my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger. i said it would make us divorce. we were both right. she had planted the seed seven years into our marriage as i was finishing seminary. at the time, i was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as “worship pastor bro.” my christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. i could begin to imagine a life without god, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, i struggled to imagine a career without him. by contrast, corrie’s turn away from religion a year earlier had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful. one night, seven years into our marriage, she said, “do you ever wish we had slept around a bunch in college before getting married?” corrie was a fiery social worker whose face could never hide what she felt   annoyance, attraction, embarrassment. behind this question was an expression of excitement. i stared at her in disbelief. by “college” she meant the bible college where we met, both of us in student leadership. it was the kind of christian university that prohibited dancing. like many of our peers, corrie and i married the summer after graduation. we were in love, but we were also motivated by our desire to explore that part of the human experience marriage would finally sanction: sexuality.

sign up sign in sign up sign in member only story tom brand follow heart affairs    2 share so you’re exploring polyamory, and a new and exciting world stretches out before you. a world filled with possibilities and opportunities just waiting to be embraced. but as beautiful as this new world may appear, new travelers need to be wary.