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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
A clear breakdown of polyamory for beginners and the newly polyamorous
Polyamory literally means “more love”. Twenty-first century polyamory is the practice of engaging in multiple intimate relationships at the same time, with the full consent of all partners. Polyamory For Dummies gives you the lowdown on this expansive form of consensual non-monogamy, so you can go forth and prosper in whatever ways you choose. This straightforward, research-backed, and nuanced guidebook helps the poly-curious become poly-fluent. Embark on your non-monogamous journey via a healthy and sustainable path, with answers to all your big questions: Is polyamory is right for you? What does the “ethical” mean in non-monogamy? How do polyamorous people deal with jealousy and conflict among partners? Is it possible to “open up” an existing monogamous relationship? Find out everything you've been wanting to know, with this big-hearted, yet practical Dummies guide.
- Learn about primary partners, secondary partners, metamours, and polycules
- Discover how polyamorous relationships function, and how to co-create the right form for you and your partners
- Understand the universality of jealousy and learn how to deal with it constructively
- Get insights into centering consent, dating as a poly person, coming out poly, multi-gender and multi-sexuality polycules, parenting while poly, disability, aging, and more!
Everyday people curious about or exploring multi-partner, ethically non-monogamous relationships will love the practical advice and broad range of examples in Polyamory For Dummies.
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Seitenzahl: 565
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Polyamory For Dummies®
To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “Polyamory For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond This Book
Where to Go from Here
Part 1: The Basics of Polyamory
Chapter 1: Finding More Love, More Pleasure
Encountering Polyamory
Dreaming Your Polyamorous Dreams
Focusing on Polyamory’s Foundations
Loving Your Polyamorous Life
Dealing with Life’s Many Changes
Chapter 2: Laying Out What Polyamory Is
Defining Polyamory: More Love
Exploring Why People Choose Polyamory Today
Understanding the Surge around Polyamory
Chapter 3: Figuring Out Whether Poly Is Right for You
Discovering the Relationship Forms That Are Right for You
Pursuing New Relationships and Intimacies throughout Your Life
Tuning Into Your Desires and Exploring Your Fears
Sorting through Social Stigma and Familial Judgments
Going Back and Forth with Internal and External Barriers
Chapter 4: Discovering the Many Forms of Polyamory
Understanding That the Possibilities Are Endless
Finding the Right Form for You
Dreaming Bigger in the World: Vibrant Sexual Intimacies Can Help
Trying on Polyamory
Part 2: Building Relational Skills for Polyamory
Chapter 5: Understanding the Importance of Communication
Identifying Your Communication Style
Developing Communication Pathways That Work for Everyone
Chapter 6: Setting and Sustaining Healthy Boundaries
Discovering the Importance of Boundaries
Sustaining and Adjusting Boundaries
Practice Makes Almost Perfect
Chapter 7: Identifying Attachment Styles and Building Trust
Examining Your Attachment Story
Looking Closer at Attachment Styles
Building Trust Is an Attachment Practice
Getting Help
Chapter 8: Surviving Trauma and Exploring Polyamory
Understanding How Trauma Impacts Attachment and Communication
Drawing on Polyamory as a Healing Practice
Honoring Your Story
Part 3: Living Polyamory, Loving Polyamory
Chapter 9: Creating Your Poly Family Agreements
Crafting a Family Mission Statement
Putting Together Forms That Work
Realizing That Nobody Gets Everything They Want
Chapter 10: Opening an Existing Monogamous Relationship
Making the Decision to Open Your Relationship
Knowing What to Do: One Wants To, the Other Doesn’t
Trying Out Polyamory: Set HOT Goals
Success Creates More Success
Chapter 11: Coming Out Polyamorous
Deciding Who to Talk to or Tell
Considering Other People to Tell
Building Community: The Joy of Coming Out
Finding Polyamorous Friends: Going the Long Road Together
Part 4: Dealing with Common Challenges
Chapter 12: Coping with Jealousy
Realizing That Everyone Gets Jealous
Getting to the Root of Your Jealousy
Creating Support Versus Judgment
Understanding Compersion: More Love Grows More Love
Chapter 13: Recovering from Broken Trust
Taking Time to Recover
Adjusting Agreements As Needed
Recovery Is Possible
Chapter 14: Parenting While Poly
Making Clear Agreements
Dealing with Conflicts in Parenting Styles
Telling or Not Telling the Kids
Chapter 15: Breaking Up Poly
Deciding When Differences Become Deal-Breakers
Holding onto Values and Boundaries During Breakups
Chapter 16: Making Life Adjustments
Changing Jobs and Making Other Big Moves
Coping with Libido Changes
Handling Illness, Aging, and Disability
Part 5: The Part of Tens
Chapter 17: Ten Myths Debunked about Polyamory
Polyamory Doesn’t Exist
Polyamory Is Unnatural
If You Really Love Someone, Then Jealousy Is Natural
Polyamorists Are Really Just Cheaters
Polyamory Is a Cover for Commitment-Phobic People
Polyamory Spreads Disease
Polyamory Preys on Vulnerable People
Polyamory Is Immoral
Polyamory Never Works
Polyamory Is a Toxic Way of Life
Chapter 18: Ten Ways to Build Your Relational Skills
Dream Your Relationship Dreams
Create a Feelings Journal
Consider Getting a Therapist
Do Some Research
Look for a Bodyworker
Find Free Resources and Trainings
Attend a Free Support Group
Set Boundaries around Conflict
Show Appreciation to Friends and Lovers
Love Yourself, Just as You Are
Chapter 19: Ten (or So) Ways to Avoid or Address Jealousy
Own That You’re Jealous
Write an Angry Letter
Listen to What It’s Telling You
Walk in Your Partner(s)’ Shoes
Ask for Help from Poly Friends
Get Out of Your Head
Go Out of Town
Take in Some Good Resources
Go to a Support Group
Appendix A: Glossary
Appendix B: Resources
Books
Podcasts
Organizations and Websites
Help Surviving Violence or Abuse
Poly Movies and TV Series
Poly Playlist
Poly Videogames
Best Poly Dating Apps
Index
About the Author
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 6
TABLE 6-1 Values, Needs, Boundaries, and Consequences
TABLE 6-2 Comparing Boundaries
Chapter 8
TABLE 8-1 Tracking Your Trauma
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5-1: The 16 MBTI types.
FIGURE 5-2: Autism, ADHD, and giftedness Venn diagram.
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11-1: My pod map.
Chapter 12
FIGURE 12-1: Jealousy stress response.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
Appendix A: Glossary
Appendix B: Resources
Index
About the Author
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Polyamory For Dummies®
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Introduction
Although monogamy is often championed as the one and only true way to have loving, successful relationships, polyamory has been around for thousands of years and is currently enjoying an explosion of popular interest.
Why the current rush toward multi-lover relationships? This book takes up this question and dozens more, including:
What do I say to dates or crushes about my interest in polyamory?
How can I tell my partner that I want to open our relationship?
How can I deal with my lover falling in love with someone else?
And most importantly, where are we going for the holidays, and with whom?
Even though much of the book addresses fears you might be holding as you consider polyamory, don’t lose sight of the main point: For many, polyamory is a transformational, freeing, and joyful way to relate to their lovers and build family life.
In these pages, you can dig deep into the story of your relationship history, desires, and intimacy needs. Here, I hope you find all the tools and support you need to strike out on whatever love and relationship path is right for you.
Because you’re the expert on you. And anyone telling you that they have the one and only true way for you is a danger.
About This Book
Polyamory For Dummies is for everyone on the journey to finding and building amazing relationships. Perhaps you’ve heard a lot about polyamory lately and wonder what the hype is about. Maybe you’ve left yet another monogamous relationship and are wondering why it doesn’t work for you and what it is about you that is so wrong (spoiler alert: nothing). Maybe your friends are exploring polyamory, and they seem happy and vibrant in ways that make you want to know more.
Relationships are demanding. Commitments to anyone, over time, involve sacrifice, conflict, and hardship. This is true regardless of the relationship form you choose. And love and relationships bring so much meaning and verve to your life. They drive, nurture, and feed you, all at once. They’re well worth the work.
This book takes up key relationship questions as they relate to polyamory:
How do people move beyond hypothetical or utopian ideas about polyamory to actually make it work?
What key social and emotional skills do you need to be a good poly partner?
How do you manage jealousy and the emotional demands of multi-partner relationships?
How do you deal with time constraints, housing, finances, parenting, the negative opinions of friends and family, and other high stakes issues?
What are some of the best practices for creating poly agreements and setting limits that take care of everyone?
How can you do polyamory when your trust has been broken?
How will you manage aging, illness, and other long-haul issues as a poly person?
How will you know if polyamory is right for you?
Although a lot of polyamorous literature and self-help books talk endlessly about processing in poly relationships, not anywhere near enough of them cover the joy of discovery and the astounding rewards of creating a life where new sexual partners and new intimate and emotional connections are presented over and over again. So prepare to be wowed.
Also prepare to have me talk about lovers and partners interchangeably, because some poly people have lovers, others have partners, and some have both. As long as everyone involved is cared for and supported, it’s all good.
Foolish Assumptions
In writing this book, I make the following assumptions about you, dear reader:
You’re curious enough to question the myth that monogamy is universal and the only true way to have caring, sustaining relationships.
You aren’t naïve enough to believe that having more than one partner will solve all your relationship problems and eliminate sacrifices.
You reject the idea that you must have a particular sexuality, religious or spiritual belief, family background, gender, or political affiliation to be polyamorous or consider polyamory.
Just as you question whether monogamy works for everyone, you’re skeptical about the idea that polyamory is better than monogamy or any other way of relating.
If there’s one core idea you get from the book, I hope it’s this: I’m thrilled to share my expertise on polyamory, and I offer it to support you in your quest to find the relationship path that’s right for you. Whatever that is.
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout this book you’ll see the following icons to draw your attention to important possibilities, concepts, and practices:
This icon highlights information that deserves special attention.
This icon gives you great ideas to consider and reinforces an important point.
This icon cautions you about bad thinking and roadblocks on your journey to self-discovery.
This icon introduces an interactive exercise that can help you figure out what your needs, values, desires, and next steps might be.
This icon introduces a personal story or example from one of the experienced poly contributors in my network of sex educators, activists, and poly enthusiasts.
Beyond This Book
This book is full of helpful information, analysis, self-reflection exercises, and resources about polyamory. But even more is available online! Just go to dummies.com and search for “Polyamory For Dummies Cheat Sheet” for additional support on your journey of learning about and considering polyamory.
Where to Go from Here
If you’re completely new to all of this, as many For Dummies readers are, just start with the first segment of the book and find context, definitions, core ideas, and opening reflection exercises. If you get confused by any terms, go to Appendix A for help.
If you’re already exploring polyamory, use the table of contents or index to find the topics you really want to know more about. Appendix B has some additional ideas and next places to go. Get help on the issues that matter the most to you right now.
Remember to breathe. Considering polyamory can go against a lot of foundational ideas in families and religious traditions. It can draw big reactions from your friends, lovers, or partners. Breathe some more. Give yourself a break.
You may want to keep a journal as you go through this book. I often ask my coaching clients to start a journal and have a dedicated space specifically for their desire explorations. Doing so can create some safety as you ask yourself big questions. It can also give your process a place of honor.
It’s okay to question things — even big, fundamental things. It’s okay to be curious and to seek information, supportive conversation, and resources as you figure out who and how to love as you create the family of your dreams.
Part 1
The Basics of Polyamory
IN THIS PART …
Understand what polyamory is, beyond all the myths and chatter, and how people manage it.
Sift through and explore common practices in modern polyamory.
Start to think more deeply about your own desires for intimacy, sex, relationship, and family, and consider what relationship forms might work for you.
Take in the many different ways that polyamorous people are creating partnership and family.
Chapter 1
Finding More Love, More Pleasure
IN THIS CHAPTER
Discovering what more love means
Thinking about what’s holding you back
Taking your first steps on a journey of joy and discovery
In a time where your social, economic, and even geological security seems to be evaporating, polyamory holds out a tantalizing promise: more love.
Perhaps that’s why the pushback against it is so strong: Polyamory is just a fancy term for cheating. Polyamorists can’t commit. You use people. You spread disease and leave a trail of broken hearts in your wake.
Except, oops, you can name a dozen monogamous people you know who have acted in any of these ways, leaving their lovers and partners devastated.
This chapter serves as your jumping-off point into this book, where I take up a lot of your unanswered questions about this creative, expansive form of loving and making family. By day, I’m a sex and relationship coach with a doctorate in gender and sexuality. At home, I’ve practiced polyamory for more than 40 years. I’m also blessed to live in a vibrant community of people who have created all kinds of open, polyamorous relationships. Here, their stories bring all the theories and mysteries of polyamory to life.
What does it mean to be in love with more than one person? How do you do it without creating emotional train wrecks and hurting yourself and your beloveds? Buckle up. Here’s how.
Encountering Polyamory
Polyamory literally means: the love of many. This expansive relationship form rests under a larger umbrella of a variety of non-monogamous ways of relating like hooking up, swinging, having threesomes, and participating in party or conference sex, but it’s distinguished by the desire to create more significant bonds. People who are polyamorous often have a constellation or family of lovers, whose members may or may not be intimately, romantically, or sexually involved with each other. The following sections give you a brief overview of polyamory.
Recognizing what polyamory is
A hallmark of polyamory is the nurturing and maintenance of multiple, significant relationships, at the same time. And another core facet is that these relationships are all out in the open — everyone in them knows about everyone else. And all people involved are held with respect and care, even if their roles and functions differ greatly.
Although some poly people enjoy hooking up and have fleeting sexual encounters, people who describe themselves as polyamorous often inhabit a complex web of relationships that grow and shift and deepen over time. Chapter 2 discusses the historic practices of polyamory and what specific characteristics define this modern version.
Assessing whether polyamory is for you
How can you decide whether polyamory is something you can handle? Being in love with — or intimately connected to — more than one person sounds like a lot to deal with emotionally. And it is.
Chapter 3 helps you figure out why you picked up this book and what’s going on with you, in your relationships, that makes you curious about polyamory. There, I offer a lot of reflection exercises so that you can start to dig around in your thinking and feelings about monogamy and polyamory.
Your reasons for considering polyamory are uniquely yours. And, in my practice as a coach, people generally arrive at my doorstep with a handful of pressing motivations, such as:
You don’t know who you are. You’ve been living others’ expectations for so long — your parents, friends, church, or partner — you don’t even really know what your honest sexuality or relationships would look like. You’ve been covering over your true self for a long time.
You’re a serial cheater, or a serial failed-monogamist. You’re unhappy with or even ashamed of your relationship history. You don’t know how to break out of repetitive, destructive patterns. You wonder whether monogamy is right for you.
You’ve lost a part of yourself along the way in your partnership. You don’t know what your needs are anymore or how you got here. You feel trapped and may not have had sex or felt desirable for some time.
Your partner wants to open your relationship and you don’t, or vice versa. Often, there has been a breach of trust — an actual affair or an emotional affair. This is a period of crisis and great hurt, and it takes some time to sort through whether healing is possible (see
Chapter 13
), and if polyamory makes sense for you as a couple (see
Chapter 10
).
Some kind of crisis or huge shift has happened in your life that makes you question many things that have just always been a given — and monogamy is one of those givens that needs reexamining.
Dreaming Your Polyamorous Dreams
Engaging in personal reflection activities can help you stretch out into your polyamorous dreams. These activities assist you in figuring out what you aren’t telling even yourself about your desire and needs in your relationships and what you’ve always wanted to try but have held yourself back.
If nobody was looking or commenting, how would you conduct your intimate and sexual life and partnerships? Chapter 3 leads you through some activities to answer these questions for yourself. Chapter 4 gives you examples of how many others have already done so, creating joyful polyamorous practices and family life.
Focusing on Polyamory’s Foundations
While the emotional and intimate rewards of polyamory are enormous, its demands are also significant. Communicating openly and honestly with multiple lovers — so that everyone has the same information, and you aren’t hiding yourself, or manipulating partners through the omission of certain truths, or performing rather than relating to them — can be hard work! That’s especially true when you’re new to polyamory.
Developing your communication skills — by assessing what kind of communicator you are, developing new tools, and finding peers and poly community — can help you build the capacity for sustaining a polyamorous life. The following sections give you a quick overview.
Communicating with your partners
If you can start to identify and assess your core behaviors as a communicator, you can begin to appreciate your strengths. You also might be able to see where you’ve struggled with communication in your past relationships, so you can start to build a plan for getting more support and growing new skills. Chapter 5 looks at all kinds of foundational aspects of communication — introversion and extroversion, fight-or-flight responses, and neurodivergence among them.
WHEN I KNOW, YOU KNOW
One of my favorite polyamorous practices is: when I know, you know. When people are struggling in their relationships, they tend to mystify basic truths. A partner will say that they’re confused or something is complex when the truth is, they aren’t ready to say the hard thing that they already know. They’re afraid of the consequences of their truth — whether a crush on a coworker, a realization that they don’t want to be monogamous anymore, or an epiphany about how their sexual needs aren’t getting met and they need a change. A common path from this kind of dodge is for a distressed or frightened partner to then make a series of bad decisions solo and then come to their partner with their often disastrous results — a breach of trust, an affair, or a series of lies.
Relationship coach Asha Leong, one of the many contributors whose stories you’ll read in this book, notes that this poly practice is her most cherished. Everyone struggles to figure themselves out. But holding back what you know because you don’t want to deal with a partner’s feelings, or are worried their response won’t align with what you want, isn’t honest. In the end, it doesn’t protect or help anyone and only reveals a kind of selfishness or disregard that is very hard to recover from. A foundational poly practice then: When I know, you know.
Becoming skilled at creating boundaries
Boundaries are to polyamorous relationships as breathing is to life. If you don’t know where your edges are around what you can and can’t handle emotionally and intimately — if you don’t know how to ask for what you want and can’t say no when you need to — then polyamory is going to be chaotic and painful for you.
In fact, many of my clients seek polyamory as a reprieve from painful communication patterns in their monogamous relationships. But polyamory isn’t an escape from being unable to articulate and honor your needs. Chapter 6 offers exercises and tips to assess your skill at speaking your truth and setting and maintaining boundaries. You can also find activities and resources to help grow your capacity in this crucial arena.
Building trust with your partners
Attachment theory (a psychological theory that examines early experiences of attachment and abandonment and their impacts on adult relationships) offers a great window on why boundaries might be difficult for you to set in your relationships. And why it might be hard for you to trust yourself and your partners. In Chapter 7, you can discover what kind of attachment disruptions you might be carrying from your childhood that impact your day-to-day relationships. Then, you can consider how might they play out for you as you consider polyamory.
Living with trauma while poly
Today’s culture is steeped in violence — emotional, social, physical, and sexual. Many people have experienced frightening, coercive, or controlling experiences in their youth, and many have survived physical and sexual abuse. Accordingly, as you figure out what kind of barriers you face as a communicator in intimate relationships, appreciating your history of exposure to coercion and violence can be very helpful. Past trauma can get reactivated in emotionally taxing situations and being in love with multiple partners who may have conflicting needs or very different ways of being is challenging. Chapter 8 can help you identify and affirm your needs as a trauma survivor and chart a path to developing the skills and relationships you want.
Loving Your Polyamorous Life
The foundation of your happy polyamorous life rests on a set of co-created agreements about how you and your partners are going to operate, to care for each other. For some, building these poly structures is a process of complex, detailed collaboration. For others, it involves a simple conversation with a clear, shared framework. Part 3 gets into some of the joyful and creative ways that people form their poly families. In this section, you can find many ideas about how to poly and also look at some of the big decisions you might make, like opening up your monogamous relationship or coming out to family members.
Establishing agreements and limits
Poly people love their relational maps. Chapter 4 includes several contributors’ illustrations that describe their swirling poly formations. Some poly webs are deeply interconnected, and others aren’t. Some polyamorists want to share everything with all their partners, and others want to keep their relationships separate, and the intimate activities they engage in with each partner private. Still others create a mix of privacy and integration among their partners and sexual practices. Only you know what you want and what kind of relating meets your needs and desires. In Chapter 9, you can consider what kind of agreements you want to make with your partners to support your desired constellation or web of relationships.
Going from monogamous to polyamorous
As a coach, a top reason people reach out to me is because they need help opening an existing monogamous relationship. Doing so can be tricky and tender work. Often one partner wants to do this more than the other. Sometimes promises have been broken by the time people make contact. And most often, a couple is on the precipice of monumental change — they’re rethinking a fundamental agreement they made to be exclusive, and it can be shattering, even when everyone agrees to the way forward.
If you’re considering opening an existing monogamous relationship and finding it difficult, you’re in the right place. Chapter 10 moves through this often fraught territory with care and lots of resources.
Telling others that you're polyamorous
Coming out polyamorous is no small thing. Many people who are vocal and forthright about complex or controversial topics aren’t out about being polyamorous, and for good reason. Poly people often experience social and economic consequences when coming out. In Chapter 11, you can assess your risks and vulnerabilities as you consider coming out and think about who your best supporters might be as you build your best polyamorous life. An important part of coming out is fortifying your support network, so Chapter 11 also provides an exercise where you can chart your pod of champions.
Dealing with Life’s Many Changes
If you’re like me and you choose to live a poly life over many decades, you’ll run into a lot of challenges and changes. Change is a constant in any type of relationship, but in poly life, you must navigate these with multiple partners. Part 4 covers some of these challenges and changes, such as:
Parenting while poly:
Chapter 14
addresses some important considerations, including aligning around core parenting values, deciding who has parenting responsibilities, and navigating whether or not to come out to the kids. Refer to the nearby sidebar as well.
Breaking up while poly:
Chapter 15
explores breakups in interconnected poly constellations, helping you figure out when a relationship is really over and what to do if your other lover doesn’t want to break up with the person you’re breaking up with. This chapter also helps you think about how to navigate all this emotional complexity.
Major life changes:
Chapter 16
examines all types of life changes, like aging, libido shifts, geographic moves, illness, and disability and walks you through managing big changes in poly relationships over time.
Life in any relationship form is full of change and unfolding obstacles. Polyamory offers many people a creative, freeing, and joyful way to relate to those challenges, and to build the life you want.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON
You may be familiar with the sci-fi, Lost in Space, in which the family robot constantly alerts the young hero, Will Robinson, when danger is afoot.
If only you had a danger-discerning robot in your family! When you’ve invested deeply in a partner or lover, you might struggle with recognizing or tell yourself the truth when you’ve chosen someone who is a danger to your children. Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of children is rampant in this country, partly fueled by authoritarian parenting mores that silence children and teach them to submit to various kinds of authorities — be they parents, clergy, teachers, or coaches.
For many years, a lot of abuse prevention in the United States centered around the risks presented by strangers. But thanks to women’s and racial justice movement organizing and research over the past 40 years, the research shows that the most common perpetrators are people the children know.
Who you bring into your household matters so much. And the best way to prevent abuse of your children is to have a handle on your own abuse history — to fully understand the emotional, physical, or sexual abuse in your story, to take in the harm done, and to invest in your healing process. Only then can you be awake and aware enough to be able to interpret risks to your child’s well-being.
As a survivor of childhood abuse myself, creating a household free from violence for my children has been an incredible joy. But I had to grow the capacity to listen to my intuition again, because it had been silenced by my abuse. And then I had to commit to staying awake, regardless of whatever new tantalizing crush crossed my path.
Over the years, I’ve stopped seeing a number of people who were attractive and interested in my family. People who were outwardly loving, but who also activated my intuition around my safety. Sometimes it was because I could see inconsistencies between the values they espoused and the ways they operated with other people, all while being very cherishing toward me. Sometimes it was because they seemed to need to improve me or control things as we were just getting to know one another.
These were red flags that people often miss in the early days of having great sex or a wonderful crush. And I’m grateful to have lived in a community of survivors invested in our healing over many years because I was able to recognize early on that these behaviors were problematic. That recognition helped me decide not to invest. The truly astonishing thing is that I now have my own, internal robot: Danger, Jaime Grant.
Chapter 2
Laying Out What Polyamory Is
IN THIS CHAPTER
Discovering the unique facets of modern polyamory
Pondering what poly life might look like for you
Considering the key drivers of polyamory’s popularity today
When I was growing up, I never heard the word “polyamory” because it didn’t exist yet. As a teenage girl in Boston in the 1970s, what I did hear constantly was that sex was dirty and dangerous. That if I had sex before marriage, I’d destroy any possibility for a good life. That girls who had sex with anyone — but especially more than one person — were sluts: destined to be outcast. The only road to a good life was monogamous marriage after years of careful, chaste dating.
And here was an important detail: All I had to do to make that happen was to sit attractively still and wait for the right man to pick me out of the crowd.
What my Irish Catholic immigrant community didn’t tell me — and likely didn’t know — was that polyamory was common among our Irish ancestors. Colonization and Catholicism had suppressed these practices and covered over our history. And that this erasure had been common across cultures and nations around the world over the last 400 years.
COMPULSORY MONOGAMY
Like my Irish forbearers, First Nations people in North America practiced various kinds of non-monogamous and polyamorous family-making before colonization; English settlers deemed these practices savage and forced monogamous marriage onto the New World order. Peoples of the African continent were met with similar violence by their Dutch, Belgian, French, Portuguese, and English colonizers, suppressing multiple partner marriages and other non-monogamous familial arrangements.
My parents couldn’t have anticipated that I would be growing up in the decade that ushered in an era of free love. They were unprepared for the explosion of social movements that pushed back on all kinds of authority. Throughout my childhood, the anti-war, civil rights, Black power, American Indian, LGBTQ+, and women’s movements broke away from many long-held views of what was proper and acceptable.
It was out of these movements for peace and social change that a range of interracial, interfaith, cross-cultural, queer, binary-busting, and non-monogamous ways of relating emerged, including polyamory, a term coined within the West Coast Kerista commune in 1990.
This chapter looks at polyamory and examines the current explosion of interest — how did polyamory move from communes to your kitchen table? What does polyamory mean and look like at this moment in time and why is everyone talking about it?
Defining Polyamory: More Love
Polyamory literally means the love of many. A subcategory within the broader concept of non-monogamy, polyamory is distinguished by the desire to have more than one significant other, intimate, or lover as a core part of one’s family.
You can think of non-monogamy as the big umbrella — under which a whole range of open-relationship arrangements and activities lie, including hook ups, swinging, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, extramarital sex on business trips, birthday free-passes, and threesomes.
Although people in polyamorous relationships may choose to have hookups or other casual encounters in addition to their core partners, polyamory describes a relationship constructed by and for multiple, committed partners over time.
MODERN POLYAMORY’S PRECURSORS
Non-monogamy emerged in the United States well before the 1970s — one need only look back at the work of turn of the century free-love organizer Victoria Woodhull, the writings of the flapper era (The Great Gatsby anyone?), or the music of Black queer blues singers in the 1930s to find many versions of non-monogamous life in the United States in the early 20th century. But in the ’60s and ’70s, a perfect storm of movements for liberation lit a fire for reconsidering the family, women’s rights, sexuality, gender, racism, and war. Within that storm, a vibrant group of communes took hold, including the Kerista commune, where member Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart used the term poly-amory — the love of many — to describe their intentionally rotating relationships in 1990.
So, to boil it down to its core simplicity:
Poly is:
An open, caring, relationship structure that equal partners co-create or consent to with respect, excitement, and aspiration.
Poly isn’t:
A secretive, confusing, coercive, ultimatum-driven, or dread-inducing relationship agreement that may or may not be grandfathered-in after a breach of trust.
The following sections focus on the pillars of modern polyamory as a relationship form.
Understanding the definitive characteristics of polyamory in the 21st century — consent, full disclosure or transparency, and mutual respect — is key to fully grasping how it’s being practiced and reshaped. Here I explore how the growing emphasis on practices of full consent, honesty, and respect have created new possibilities for more love in the current era.
When you look at the non-monogamous experiments of the 1970s that led to the creation of the term polyamory, there’s a lot to love there.
People were questioning authority of every kind and trying to create a new world.
The emergence of birth control meant that people could experiment with sex and new family forms without the fear of unwanted pregnancy.
Many people created extended families of lovers in this era that joyfully persisted against all odds and carried them through their lives.
And, like all starting places, there were big problems.
WHEN I LOOK AT MY FAMILY
Don’t let people tell you polyamory doesn’t exist, or that it’s a made-up thing by a handful of people on the fringe. Polyamory has been around forever, and indeed, if you look hard enough, in many of your families. Here are three examples:
Aredvi: My immigrant parents lost their families by moving away from their hometown. Then, I doubled down and moved away from my family. As valid as our reasons may be for moving far away, the cost of this loss remains significant. This is why for me polyamory is less a modern practice and more a reclamation of my ancestral and indigenous roots.
During short visits to my parents’ hometown, I watched small and large clumps of people come together in many formations to celebrate, grieve, eat, and play. I long for the expansiveness of showing up around other people and letting connections form organically.
Bishop: I have an aunt who I grew up very close with and I always saw her date multiple men at the same time. I remember being young just thinking my aunt was a “ho” because she was unmarried and dating multiple men, and everything I saw in the media told me that that’s what hoes do.
But something that I observed watching my aunt was the amount of time she spent having very direct conversation with the men she was seeing. I remember asking once, “Auntie, when are you gonna get married?” and she laughed at me and said, “Probably never, I don't want to be married.” I went on to ask if the men she dated would be mad if they knew she was dating them all, and she told me, “No man comes into my life without having a complete understanding of how I date … because I refuse to have someone knocking on my door trying to stick a ‘Cheaters’ camera in my face!” That conversation has stuck with me, and that style of very direct and clear boundary-setting sits at the core of my poly identity.
Mija: I never heard polyamory as a word growing up, but I did have an elder who told me, “Nobody cared who or how you dated — you knew you weren’t in the relationship anymore when your shoes were left outside.”While aiming for new, revolutionary ways of relating, many of the people practicing supposedly free love were stuck in very old ways of being. Most of the communes were shaped by World War II-era thinking about masculinity and the family. LGBTQ+ people were often closeted or ousted. While championing openness to all, these experiments were overwhelmingly white and middle class.
Accordingly, some ideas that were promoted as free love in this era were actually forced-love as was the case of one commune that required that members rotate beds and lovers each night.
Often, when people — women, especially — in various experimental relationships expressed dissent or difficulty with these new free-love practices, they were pressured by the pronouncements of the leaders and the power they held in the group. This is where we can have a lot of gratitude for the current state of polyamory. So let me state, unequivocally:
There is no forced sharing of bodies, hearts, beds, or commitments in 21st century polyamory.
Consent among relative equals
The modern practice of polyamory involves consent among relative equals, full disclosure among all partners, and mutual respect — even if each lover has a different role, significance, or meaning in one’s life. Consent is so central to polyamorous practice that it’s also often referred to as consensual non-monogamy (CNM).
Consent among relative equals is a complex idea. You can see the evidence of gains in the fight for equality all over polyamorous communities:
Women and LGBTQ+ people are writing the lion’s share of books about polyamory, leading this conversation and the growth of equitable practices.
BIPOC polyamorous experts and communities are reclaiming pre-colonial poly practices and de-centering whiteness in the practicing and nurturing of modern poly ideas and community.
Women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people historically disadvantaged under laws governing marriage, parenting, home ownership, and work have made legal, political, and economic gains over the past 35 years. They have the means to better define the terms of multiple partner relationships.
Four hundred years ago, when my Irish Ancestors were practicing multiple-lover relationships, families that consisted of multiple partners generally grew out of the choices made by the patriarch of the household.
In most cases, men held all the decision-making power. Women often had limited options and couldn’t reject or leave these arrangements without dire social and economic consequences. Rather than polyamory, these families were practicing polygamy or polygyny, which is a family where one man defines and oversees a household consisting of multiple female partners.
In 1997, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy published The Ethical Slut, which grew to become a Bible among modern polyamorists. In it, Easton and Hardy coined the term ethical non-monogamy (ENM) to describe a wide variety of non-monogamous practices that all shared the trio of the core aspects of modern polyamory discussed here: consent, transparency, and respect.
Despite many legal and social gains, inequities persist. The echoes of inequality in intimate and partnering spaces are tremendously distressing and can be found especially in lop-sided federal statistics on health access and outcomes, home ownership, disability, and intimate partner violence, where women, and BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people fare worse by many measures.
Those who historically have been on the vulnerable end of the equation in forming any kind of relationship remain there. And stepping into a polyamorous relationship may carry increased risks of abuse, ill-health, and impoverishment.
The simplicity of consent among relative equals is this:
You know what being treated like an equal feels like.
You know when you’re at risk because your basic humanity is disrespected or dismissed.
You know when you aren’t saying what you mean, or need, or want because you’re afraid of judgment, or shunning, or losing your partner.
Consent feels like care:
Consent is relational, not transactional. One person isn’t just trying to get over on or take something from another.
Consent among equals feels like people give a damn about what you say and that none of your opinions or feelings are dismissed as problematic or immature.
Consent among equals doesn’t mean that you risk your health, job, or housing security to be in this relationship while your other partners are relatively secure and haven’t addressed or even noticed that risk.
The idea of consent among relative equals doesn’t mean that you and your lovers are all the same. Your lovers don’t have to be the same age or race, have the same level of education, possess the same physical or mental abilities, or be living on identical asset bases for you to be partnering with them as an equal. Relative equals means that whatever differences that exist in that mix of realities — you’re able to represent yourself and your needs on par with your partners. That none of the differences in arenas where power often plays out irresponsibly or harmfully have rendered you silent or less worthy or less influential in any discussion of how you create your lives.
Full disclosure and transparency
Full disclosure and transparency are core values of polyamory. Full disclosure means that each person is informed about all the other members in the polycule (another term for poly family), understands the significance of each person, and is fully apprised of any limits or boundaries that arise from those relationships.
A simple way to understand full disclosure is to use the over-the-shoulder rule:
If any other member of the polycule were in the room while you were talking to your lover about the family structure, its members, and your agreements, would they feel loved and respected?
Are you speaking about everyone in a way that properly describes their significance, honors them, and honors your commitments?
If the answer is yes, congratulations! You’re living the values of full disclosure and transparency.
Another simple way to evaluate whether a poly constellation is achieving transparency is this: No one shares or withholds information that would betray trust or harm another person in the group.
You know you’re in a bad polyamory situation when something as simple as honesty becomes mystified or hard to define. No matter how complex your poly constellation is, honesty is simple.
Practicing full disclosure in polyamory
Practicing full disclosure involves a certain level of self-awareness. First, you have to know yourself well enough to know when you’re lying to yourself — perhaps as a means of self-protection, or possibly as a means of manipulating others to get what you want. And secondly, you must commit to telling your partner(s) what you know, when you know it. You can refer to Chapter 1 for more on this important concept around honesty in polyamory. This next activity also explores this concept.
Use your current or a past relationship to consider the following:
Do I refuse to look at relationship difficulties and wish them away?
Do I hide my emotions and experiences and create confusion?
Do I create hidden intimacies with others as a way to hide out from relationship difficulties?
Do I deny what’s really going on with me when asked directly?
Do I pretend not to know things to hide out or deflect responsibility?
Do I decide major relationship issues without consulting my partner, and then just report on or impose my conclusions?
If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, you aren’t practicing the You Know When I Know activity from Chapter 1 in your relationships.
Handling lies in polyamory
In my polyamorous arrangements, I have a commitment to not connect with anyone, even casually, who isn’t committed to full disclosure with their other partners as well. Although this is a baseline value in many polyamorous constellations, it’s not universally practiced. For me, if my lover is deceiving their lover or hiding our relationship, that person is a danger to me and my polyamorous family.
And even if that lie doesn’t boomerang in a way that hurts me and my partners directly, it’s a deceptive fact in some other person’s life that I’m party to. It just doesn’t align with my core values as a polyamorous person.
The poet Adrienne Rich has said that a lie is a shortcut through another person’s humanity — and that poetic truth has driven my commitment to honesty in my poly relationships for 40 years.
Encountering lies in polyamory
Discovering a lie or lack of transparency can be hard on a poly constellation, especially when a member of your polycule gets interested in someone who is essentially cheating on their other partner. How do you handle this? Each constellation has to figure out what their bottom-line values are and what boundaries or deal-breakers exist for you.
Some of my poly acquaintances believe that a casual or even a core partner’s commitment to transparency (or lack thereof) isn’t really their business. That’s a hard one for me. Lies are everyone’s business in a polyamorous constellation. Everyone’s choices about something that could rock the foundations of each other’s commitments feel like my business.
Being transparent in today’s world
A poly friend of mine recently noted that one of their core partners is stuck in a situation where they’re exposed to violence and full disclosure would put them in physical danger. Another has shared that their partner is committed to raising her children in her marital household, and full disclosure would bring on displacement and economic ruin.
The structures of economic inequity and social and physical violence often make it hard for people who are the most vulnerable to be fully honest. Given that women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC people are suffering high rates of economic and physical violence — full transparency is often a privilege.
And yet poly people aspire. Like a lot of things in poly life, living values of openness and honesty demonstrate a yearning for a better world.
The thing I love about polyamorous constellations is that full disclosure and transparency are championed. They’re practiced with such care. In fact, a lot of jokes around poly community center on exhaustion from endless processing conversations about transparency and that other key issue — setting clear boundaries, or limits (see Chapter 6 for more on healthy limits).
In a perfect polyamorous world, interpersonal violence would be eradicated; war and displacement and homelessness would be things of the past. In this utopian poly life, there wouldn’t be a single lie — by commission or omission — circulating in any poly family because everyone’s spirit and humanity would be equally cherished.
Mutual respect
An important part of the mutual respect construct in polyamory is that respect is universal in the poly unit — everyone is respected — even if each lover has a different role, significance, or meaning for you.
HONESTY ISN’T ALWAYS THE SAFEST POLICY
I once dated a person who seemingly wanted to spend all their time with me. As a solo polyamorist, I value my alone time and began feeling that I didn’t have enough time to myself. I addressed the issue, and my partner shared something they were hesitant to tell me from the start: The partner with whom they were living had been physically assaulting them for months — and they were concealing our relationship out of fear. Immediately, I understood why they wanted to spend so much time with me, and we figured out a plan so that they could stay at my place several times throughout the week and then also crash with some loved ones of mine. —Kamilah
Mutual respect in even a complex polycule has a kind of breathtaking simplicity:
Mutual respect feels amazing. You feel amazing.
Mutual respect means that you can speak your mind and people listen.
Mutual respect means that you’re not worrying, rehearsing, or burying conversations that are important to you about how you’re feeling or about something difficult that has happened in the group.
Mutual respect means that your limits are respected, your basic needs are met, and your wants are of interest to everyone in the poly family.
In the 1970s experiments of polyamory, in some communes and poly arrangements, people who were distressed by some of the free-love practices were silenced. Their opinions were dismissed as false consciousness, and the group or family’s leader(s) exerted power over the ways things operated — all while talking endlessly about freedom and free love.
This can happen in any poly family. A way to assess whether mutual respect is upheld in your group is to ask yourself:
Am I able to be myself here?
Do one or two people’s opinions really hold sway over all others?
Can I talk about the hard stuff in this relationship? Am I afraid?
Polyamory is about much more than having sexual relationships with multiple people at the same time; it’s a method of wholly transforming our relationship to ourselves such that we can become partners with a keen sense of self-awareness, the ability to vulnerably and effectively communicate about even the most difficult subjects. —Kamilah
How does mutual respect work? Imagine a polyamorous constellation where you have a core partner and you each have lovers that you see regularly, but infrequently. You’ve set up a monthly date with your paramour (another term for lover) and it’s on your shared calendar. Two hours before one of your dates, your primary partner says they really want you to come to this social hour with their work colleagues. On your end, you’ve been jealous of how much fun your partner has with these colleagues, and they’ve never invited you to this social hour before. What do you do?
A. Scold your partner for short notice, say you’d love to come to the next social gathering, and go on your date, which your other paramour has to travel for an hour to get to.
B. Think: My primary partner is my priority. I’ve finally gotten an invite! And text your paramour and say sorry, I have to cancel, my partner is sick, and I’m in the ER with them.
This might seem like an insignificant little lie. However, if you want your poly relationships to work, and if you want to continue to like yourself and come through for your partners, then the answer is an emphatic A.
Mutual respect means that each person’s life and well-being have equal value, even if the commitment levels to each person are different.
Last year my mother had a health crisis so I was flying back and forth across the country trying to be there for her. I was exhausted. My partner of three years was seeing someone new and she just wasn’t there for me. When I called her on it, she said something to the effect of, “You have a primary partner and isn’t this why we are poly?” And I thought, Wow, absolutely no. I’m in a crisis and you have zero time or space to call or text and support me? That’s the opposite of poly for me. —Sonja
Exploring Why People Choose Polyamory Today
Monogamy as a relationship form is so universal that you may barely notice it. It’s the air you breathe. Prom Night. Engagement reveals. Every romcom you’ve ever seen. Say Yes to the Dress. The Bachelor. And Love Is Blind. In U.S. culture, monogamy is monumental.
Foundational to the marketing of monogamy as the only legitimate or functional way of relating is a crazy paradox: This one-true-love experience is the rare pinnacle of love that only so few people will ever get to experience, and yet everyone is compelled to pursue monogamous relationships and marriage only. The romcoms and reality shows really don’t ever tell you how that’s supposed to work.
But like all mythologies, this story line has holes. Despite the juggernaut of religious, cultural, and familial messaging on the essential role of monogamy in your lives, your families, and even the survival of civilization (!) — divorce statistics, monogamous relationship horrors in your friend groups, coercive family demands, and the failure of romantic love to conquer all as it is professed to do — leave many people wondering if monogamy is right for them.
In these sections you can consider whether you possess some of the relational preferences and personality traits that align well with polyamorous relationships. You can also engage in a brief activity to consider what your poly sexuality and partnerships might look like.
Polyamory may fit better than monogamy
When I think about the people in my life who thrive in polyamorous relationships, they all share a number of traits or ways of being that I describe here. In general,
They have an expansive capacity for intimacy:
Loving many people simultaneously feels good, natural, or easy.
Often they have a group of very intimate close friends.
They’re sexual explorers:
They want to try out new sexual practices with different people over their lifetime.
They’re open to sexual ways of being that they haven’t tried or maybe even imagined yet.
They enjoy novelty:
They thrive on new lovers, new intimacies, and new energies.
New relationship energy is something they want to experience throughout their lives.
They appreciate variety and flow:
They embrace flexibility when relationships change.
