I'm polyamorous, but I'm not sure I should be. It's been three years of heartbreaks and scheduling disasters, ego death and love lost, threesomes, foursomes, and more-somes. Here’s what exiting the monogamy highway looks like. My hope is that, however you relate, this relationship diary could shift your worldview to accept more love in more forms and help you confront insecurities, attachment issues, and personal traumas—as have I.
Monogamy is down bad in 2023 year of our lord. Social media has devolved into a gender war of epic proportions. The state of conventional marriage and relationships is in shambles. More than a long-term partner, many of us would benefit immensely from bonding with ourselves.
You can’t go about the serious endeavor of loving someone without understanding what you need from love. That means how you prepare to receive love, what you do to offer love, and every attachment style and abandonment wound in between. You are your own best partner, beloved, but there’s a life-long journey to adopt that truth intimately.
Unless I’d read All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks, made a billion mistakes disappointing lovers and having them disappoint me, or became polyamorous, I wouldn’t know what love is.
I’ll keep it a stack: I still struggle to show love in its truest form. Love is an action, not a feeling. Love reflects who we are. And I’d dare to say that polyamory—however tempting and trendy a style—asks more of the lover’s verbs, and shouldn’t be a random checkbox on a dating site. I’ve loved poorly, desperately, and earnestly, before and after exploring a polyamorous lifestyle. I learned that what separates loving in name only. Sustaining deep bonds is the study and service of love.
Sex is beautiful and nourishing, enchanting and colorful—but it isn’t a substitute for intimacy, communication, or the other pillars of loving contact.
In his best song, “As,” Stevie Wonder sings, “Did you know that true love asks for nothing? Her acceptance is the way we pay.” As much as I love every bold note of Uncle Stevie’s devotional, this is wrong on so many levels. True love demands kindness, compassion, selflessness, selfishness, diligence, presence, generosity, and care.
So when I hear someone say they’re “open to polyamory,” I start bracing myself for the other red flags to come. Polyamory means loving multiple people to the fullest, most expansive version of that word. It may mean sexual intimacy and it may not. It may mean entering a relationship of dates and activities, and it could look like one long stroll on the Antiguan coastline. Everyone dates when they’re single, with some disclosing that they’re doing so and others not at all.
But that’s not polyamory.
Plenty of us cheat or take on “work wives” and “work husbands,” which is also not polyamory. These casual and socially accepted ways of being non-monogamous, in theory, point to the hegemonic influence of monogamy in practice. It’s like the concept of “emotional cheating,” which sprung from the monogamous rule that entering an exclusive relationship means signing a tacit contract that your partner must know (and approve) your internal thoughts and feelings. These behaviors and common ideas must be debunked, purged, and eliminated before walking the polyamorous road. And they’re hard to detach from. I know because I’ve done it. And, in many cases, I’m still doing it.
I remember watching a Jay Smooth video about becoming anti-racist, which compares the practice of clearing bigoted thoughts to brushing one’s teeth. You don’t just brush on Thursday and say you’re good for life. You get into the crevices and work every day to scrub away old stains.
For the poly-aspiring, I want to lay out some of the signs and warnings that you (or a dating prospect) haven’t scrubbed away limiting beliefs.
Your patriarchy is showing
This one is big because polyamory is a radical relationship style that rejects the primacy of maleness, or a male “head of household” role. The way this shows up in the world of polyamory is with couples that have a “one-penis policy” meant to center one man’s need to protect his manhood by restricting his female partner’s freedom to explore with other men. It may also show up as a man’s (or male-presenting person’s) reluctance to engage with other masculine types while holding the expectation that the women and femmes, bound to gender roles, keep the peace. Patriarchy pulls us apart by prioritizing how close our behaviors are to the colonial white head of state. It discourages women’s sexual freedom, keeps impossible “body count” standards, and just ruins the vibe.
You’re on the Relationship Escalator
For anyone who’s gone through a “talking stage,” or who lives by that process, the “relationship escalator” is a model you should get to know. In Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator, author and sociologist Amy Gahran asks non-monogamous people how they entered their relationships and what they prioritize to fulfill emotional, spiritual, physical, and social needs. People who are “open to polyamory” have a lot of trouble with this, in my experience, because they don’t always see themselves as following a monogamous pattern. Yet most of us do. On the escalator, the stops include dating, sex, cohabitation, a proposal, marriage, and children. Anything short of completing those steps, in order, is seen as unsuccessful or futile or plain silly.
Relationship escalator riders will ask questions like “What are we?” or intrinsically devalue the present by bringing up what they presume can’t happen in the future. A relationship escalator rider also does lots of testing to make sure your responses match their need to be soothed. They may request your presence at times you’ve said you won’t be around or otherwise occupied. They’ll hang your no over your head and tally times when you couldn’t make their requests but offer few, if any, alternatives. And lots of guilt trips.
You can’t accept time constraints
An ethical polyamorous person will let you know what their schedule is and offer viable times for connection with specific parameters and heaps of gratitude (“Let’s FaceTime at 8 on Thursday! I have about two hours and it would be lovely to see your face!). If they can’t make a date or need to try another time, you’ll hear gracious but clear responses like, “That time doesn’t work for me, but I may have a day later next week, like Friday afternoon,” or, “I’m disappointed we can’t seem to make our schedules align, but maybe when you’re free, we can revisit hanging out.” The “open to polyamory” person outright chafes at scheduling and starts immediate resistance. The mere idea of securing your time niggles at their relationship self-esteem and causes problems that can’t be overcome by any amount of compromise or calendar-syncing.
People who are “open to polyamory” cause a lot of heartache in their clingy tendency to make connections mirror monogamy and, in forcing the issue, cost valuable energy and regard.
We’re all entitled to state what works for us and even to shift as those boundaries become more evident. We are not entitled to each other’s time. We’re all deserving of clear communication between people about what may work or not. We’re not entitled to constant complaints or passive-aggressive emotional blackmailing.
If a poly person’s need to schedule doesn’t work for you, express that it will be a challenge to get what you need from that kind of relationship and exit. People who are “open to polyamory” cause a lot of heartache in their clingy tendency to make connections mirror monogamy and, in forcing the issue, cost valuable energy and regard.
You’re overly focused on sex
The “poly” in polyamory might be most tempting for its many possible sexual connections. Instead of fighting for your hypothetical hall pass or celebrity crush, your mind may wander into the deep sea of adventures new romantic variety avails. Still, the wide berth opened via this new lifestyle’s principles is not exclusive to sex and romance. An over-emphasis on sex misses the point. The fruits of connection flower in many ways, from the shared enjoyment of a new hobby to the exploration of a bond that doesn’t turn romantic.
One thing I’ve taken to heart from my years failing at monogamy and constantly seeking selfhood through bedsheets is that sex is one small part of how love emerges. Possibly the smallest. Sex is beautiful and nourishing, enchanting and colorful, but it isn’t a substitute for intimacy, communication, or the other pillars of loving contact. As I form new partnerships, thick and real bonds form in realms I may not have expected or planned for and that wouldn’t exist if sex was all I sought.
I’ve found a writing partner where our dates include craft and meditation. I have a long-distance love who sometimes shares their troubles with adjusting to the pressures of dating as we age. There’s a friend who shares the best memes and Twitter updates before I see them. These bonds aren’t sexual nor do they need to be for them to fulfill and nourish. And for readers who may be thinking “aren’t those just… friends?” Yes! I love my friends, and endorse treating our closest affairs like our dearest friendships because, in the end, you’ll want to remember how you treated lovers when you weren’t laid up with them. And they’ll remember you for that, too.
Subscribe to Andrew Rickett’s newsletter The End of Monogamy for more of his musings, insights, and adventures in non-monogamy.
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