Polyamorous, Polyglamorous, Polyjammerous!

Polyamory is for everyone... sort of.

Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash

I love love! I love valentine’s day! I love stupid pink and red hearts and the epistolary nature of the tradition of paper valentines. So I wanna write about polyamory!

I have about seventeen million things to say about polyamory. I haven’t written about it here yet because, well, it’s a fucking fraught topic and a lot of people have downright narrow beliefs about love and possibilities therein, plus extremely rigid ideas about the correct way to do love, and an unnecessarily limited view of love. And a lot of people don’t have the ability to shut off their jealousy. And frankly, I don’t wanna fight a buncha internet trolls.

But you know what? Fuck it. It’s love month, the country is in peril, so I’m celebrating while i still can. Read on!

My Fave, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, describes being “in love” this way:

But, um, love is BIG. There are lots of different ways of loving something or someone. Sometimes, we say we’re IN LOVE with our new skincare products, or some kind of food or a show, band, or instrument.

I tell most of my friends I love you. Almost every time I talk to them.

And I love my kid in a way that, for me, defies description. It’s a more pure and elemental love than any I’ve experienced. I do not understand how people can put conditions on their love for their offspring. I feel so deeply, physically, emotionally, and intellectually connected to them that I can’t even really wrap my head all the way around it. It is a life-affirming feeling that, while I was not planning to ever have, I am grateful for.

I love my partner in a totally different way than I love my siblings and other family members, but both kinds are strong!

I’m sure you’ve heard there are many greek words for love, and some of these these are represented in what I describe above, and there’s also self love & love of god.

And I do think there’s a difference between loving a person and being in love with them, and both situations can have romantic components! Being in love with a person is like having all the, “let’s get married” feels, the “I would burn heaven and earth to be with this person” feels. It’s like a certainty that this is THE PERSON. Or THE MAIN PERSON.

Loving another person can take a whole bunch of other shapes. It can be compartmentalized (like, a person you love for their conversational skills) or broad (a person you just adore being around) or something else completely.

I’ve seen the concept of polyamory weaponized by people with selfish intentions, in the same way that some bad-faith male “feminists” abuse the concept of feminism, or crummy partners weaponize concepts they might’ve learned in therapy or in reading about therapy on the internet.

Weaponizing therapy concepts in relationships is discussed thoroughly in the above-linked Psychology Today article, but the tl;dr is basically this: People weaponize therapeutic concepts when they use them to do the very things the concepts are made to identify and help with.

So, for example, one partner puts pictures of them and their friends hanging out at a bar on their social. The other partner says that’s a violation of boundaries because it makes them look bad.

Incorrect.

The partner who posted the pics is free to post whatever they please, so long as they are not posting pictures of their partner without their consent.

The partner who said it is a violation of boundaries is spelling “my need to control you” wrong, thereby weaponizing the concept of boundaries.

And boundaries in psychology are ways to clearly define what a person is willing to tolerate. There’s no universal definition of boundaries, because something that is a hard no for me might be totally fine for someone else, and boundaries change as we heal, which is also why the concept is easily appropriated for use in emotional or physical manipulation.

Naming Needs

Relationships are made up of individuals. Individuals have specific needs. One of the challenges of being in relationships is negotiating around the individual needs for the good of the relationship.

There is one very important fact of needs that I will establish now: WE ARE ONLY RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR OWN. We needn’t anticipate our partners’ needs, or expect them to anticipate ours!

We must a) know our own needs, and b) be able to speak of them clearly and without the expectation that our partners can read our minds, and c) not view our needs as our partners’ responsibilities, at least without any input from us.

Let’s do an example: Say my partner is not super sociable. They want to go out like once a month. I, however, need a lot more exposure to other humans than that.

Is it fair for my partner to tell me I shouldn’t go out because it makes them feel insecure?

No. My partner’s security is not my responsibility. Just like my need to have more social time than once a month is not theirs.

However, in a healthy relationship, we could compromise. Because I obviously want my partner to feel secure, and they obviously want me to be fulfilled socially.

So let’s say, I agree to text my partner at intervals while I’m out n’ about, and they agree to do something during their alone time that is fulfilling for them so that they will be distracted from their worry or insecurity. When I get back, we have each kept our promises, so we talk about each other’s time, and are excited and delighted at each other’s enjoyment.

Maybe some follow up conversations can be brainstorming about ways to socialize together that don’t burn out my partner, or how to find support to build confidence that will lead to increased security.

Conversely, we are also responsible for our own behavior, and if we are being dicks, it is essential to be able to hear our partners tell us that, and accept accountability, and do better.

If I am doing something within our relationship that makes my partner feel insecure—such as being constantly dismissive or never focusing my full attention on our time together—then it is my partner’s responsibility to point that out to me, and my responsibility to work hard to do better. If I do not, then my partner has every right to end the relationship.

If we are both applying therapy concepts to our individual experiences with a view to avoiding responsibility for our own needs, then we will never get to a healthy place, and we are not going to find happiness in our relationship.

But what about needs our partners can’t meet?

For example, say I have to be able to talk about a TV show my partner hates. But they just cannot bear to listen to me talk about it, or watch it, or even acknowledge its existence.

But I have a best friend who LOVES the same TV show and will discuss with me ad infinitum, and we have a phone date to do this on Saturdays at 2 p.m. We also sometimes go to each other’s or other fans’ houses to watch the show together, and frequently text about new episodes. We have other things in common, too, that don’t have to do with the TV show. We have known each other forever, longer than I’ve known my partner. I love them, they love me.

If our relationship is healthy and my partner is reasonably emotionally mature, they should be delighted for me to have and maintain that best friendship. They should feel absolutely no threat from it. They should like the way I am invigorated by that relationship, and they should appreciate that I’m neither asking them to get into something they don’t dig, nor being angry and resentful that they do not want to. We are respecting each other’s autonomy.

I just described polyamory.

You: Hold up. Isn’t polyamory only like an open relationship with lots of fuckin’?

Me: No. Polyamory is simply the acknowledgement that it’s unrealistic to expect one single person to meet all of an individual’s needs, and the mutual commitment to communicating openly around getting our needs met by other people when expedient or necessary or desired.¹

You: So there’s not necessarily sex outside the relationship?

Me: Not necessarily, no.

This is how and why polyamory is for everyone. Polyamory is getting one’s needs met in healthy and ethical ways from a variety of humans. Whether these needs are sexual, intellectual, romantic, physical, or emotional.

So why, when Americans talk about polyamory, are they almost always only talking about romantic and sexual activity with more than one person?

This is where things get a little more challenging…

And why Polyamory is is only for everyone, sort of.

Many humans have a deep-seated belief that the only correct kind of romantic love relationship is between one man and one woman.

And we are inundated constantly and everywhere all around us that the result of cheating is rage and violence and jealousy, and that if our partners act controlling, it’s because they are jealous, which should flatter us because of the force of their love.

We love jealousy so much that it’s surprising and unusual to find media that does not represent it as the expected result of infidelity, or the force that stops infidelity from happening.

And for a lot of folks, this is working out just fine and they have no interest in or desire for a different kind of thing.

Until they do.

Which is a thing Esther Perel talks about a LOT on her podcast and in her books. I love her. She is so thoughtful, and has for many years offered polyamory or ethical non-monogamy (ENM) to couples seeking support after infidelity. She does this by helping each person in the couple to identify their needs that were not being met that led to the infidelity, and then asking the couple to think about either a) how to meet those needs for one another, or b) consider polyamory/ENM.

I’ve been writing this post in my head since the headline in The Atlantic last February, “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad,”² by Tyler Austin Harper, who seems to disdain the whole concept, but closes assuring us he does not, he’s simply upset that people most advantaged by marriage are having cake and eating it, too, and that people are turning to polyamory for wrong-headed, unproductive reasons that only reinforce their misery.

Perhaps this is true in the “ruling class.”

AND there are about a zillion different configurations for a polycule. Poly relationships exist irrespective of class, race, and gender. They aren’t all a cis, white, hetero couple who decide to switch it up in mid life. There are primary couples who have secondary and tertiary relationships, there are relationships with three or more primary partners, there are polyamorous relationships with every possible configuration of orientations and sexualities, and not all of them are all sexual. Just like not all love relationships or romantic relationships are sexual.

My thing is not so much that polyamory is often wrong-headed and unproductive, but the plain facts as follows.

1. Emotional maturity is hard.

2. Polyamory, actually ethical polyamory, requires emotional maturity.

3. Communication is hard.

4. Ethical polyamory requires honest, open communication.

5. Jealousy is a big, powerful feeling that a lot of people are unwilling to examine.

6. Ethical polyamory requires people who experience big jealousy to be able to breathe through it, discuss it, and negotiate around it.

7. People are not always honest about their feelings.

8. Ethical polyamory requires honesty.

9. Vulnerability is super duper hard.

10. Ethical polyamory requires vulnerability.

11. It’s hard to hold up your end of a compromise where love is concerned, because sometimes love makes us act funny.

12. Ethical polyamory requires you to be able to self-regulate and do the right thing even when it’s hard.

A lot of folks just can’t do those things. Because of trauma? Emotional immaturity? A more rigid orientation that I do not understand? Any of these or many more possibilities to be sure. And, I think that’s also beautiful. Because love and love relationships are beautiful. And people are in charge of their own.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Is polyamory a sexual orientation, like pan or bi?

When I first realized that I am polyamorous, I was in a real sticky situation in my interpersonal life. I had, not for the first time in my life, real big fondness for and physical attraction to a person who was not available. I was unwilling to indulge my physical attraction to the person, and I was incredibly uncomfortable with my own feelings, even though they were also exhilirating! I was trying to honor them, sort them out, and deal with them in healthy/productive ways as much as possible.

I did a LOT of journaling, tarot reading, and talking about it during that time.

I discussed my feels with the person, and with my therapist, and with my friends, and my perfect sister³ (ad nauseum, thank you so much for your support during that time). A lot of people asked me if I was in love with him, and I maintain that I was not. I was definitely feeling big, definitely love, feelings, but those never felt all the way safe, and I never wanted to feel them. I think my feels were also about my personal struggles at the time—I’d ended my longest adult relationship recently, I was not having sex with others because I wanted spend some time alone to heal from that relationship, and then it was COVID, so sex with others was, for a time, impossible. Woof.

AND, he was one of the only men I’d ever been in any kind of relationship with who did not call me intimidating, and who liked the things about me that I like about myself, and who seemed to value me for the whole of my pretty intense self. At the time, I found that to be damn seductive. Plus, we had fun together.

During that time, one afternoon I was home cooking stuff, and I found this book on Audible, The Ethical Slut.

As I listened to it, I realized a couple things have always been true about me.

1. I have always enjoyed sex for its own sake, people I know, people I don’t know, strange bodies, etc.

2. I have never felt strongly jealous about people I love enjoying other people besides me. The only time I have has been when the person doing the enjoying forbade me from doing the same, or accused me of such in a cruel, baseless way.

3. I have always developed big crushes on people quickly, and enjoyed them while they were on. I joke sometimes that I fall in love ten times a day.

4. I love meeting people and discussing/exploring the world with them.

5. I contain multitudes, and I am and have always been broadly and multiply interested which has meant that, in monogamous love relationships, I have been, sometimes, limited by my partner’s interests. (But not in healthy relationships)

The discussion of polyamory in The Ethical Slut normalized each of those things by helping me learn a whole new way to think about relationships and love.

And I was like, ‘OH MY GOD, THIS IS CHANGING EVERYTHING, I UNDERSTAND MYSELF SO WELL NOW!!!’ Plus, it let me release a lot of the guilt I’d been feeling about having love feelings toward an unavailable person and the needs that relationship was meeting for me.

It was liberating, too, to consider for the first time that I didn’t have to figure out one single human to meet my pretty broad set of needs! And that it was possible to deal with jealousy if everyone is committed to doing that. And that it was not wrong, so long as I was talking about it with everyone involved, to outsource some of my needs from my primary relationship, should I ever choose to have another one of those!⁴

I felt eleven feet tall. Which, as a short broad, is pretty great.

Once things opened up again, and I was able to meet my physical needs with others, my feelings toward that conflicting person shifted a bit. And then some time later, his behavior shifted and that cured me of all but my warm friendship feelings. Which was a massive relief. (And then of course I went down this whole rabbit hole of “omigod maybe i just thought i was polyamorous because i was feeling guilty and i am really just the same old mostly straight lady” and then I imagined that I had to go back to my prior way of thinking about myself and relationships, and I was like, um, nah.)

So—maybe polyamory is only for polyamorous people?⁵

What do you think? Love to hear your thinks in the comments.

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If you want to ask any question or for advice, try out Ask Auntie April.

And last, if you’d like to help for free, here are two great options:

1. for more on this, read The Ethical Slut by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton

2. forgive me for the paywall. If you want to read it without subscribing, go to 12ft.io + paste the link. With thanks to Joosey.

3. It would be really smart to subscribe to Ellen’s Substack.

4. Which i have, with a person who also identifies as poly, and who loves and appreciates me, but does not want to own or control me, who also has meaningful relationships outside of our relationship.

5. Other resources to learn about or read about polyamory are Practicing Polyamory Podcast, Multiamory, and the book, Polysecure. There are groups on social media, too. Esther Perel’s The State of Affairs is also a wonderful reframing of fidelity, and beautifully written, too.