A myth at the core of mainstream monogamous culture is that once we have the right partner, that person will satisfy us in every way and we will not want anyone else, whether for romance, sex, hobbies, or what have you. This almost never actually happens. Healthy people in healthy relationships, monogamous or not, have interests and connections outside the relationship. This was assumed in our great-grandparents’ day when men and women had largely separate social spheres. But somehow modern romance lost track of the need for outside connection. Instead, our culture idealizes relationships where couples isolate themselves with “togetherness,” depend only on each other, and cut other people out of their lives.
This myth includes the idea that when you get involved with one person sexually, you suddenly lose interest in anyone else. While this is true for some people, most of the population still gets interested in others from time to time. The myth requires denying or hiding these feelings, and probably lying about them to the person you are involved with. In order to maintain the wall that modern monogamy tries to build between couples and the outside world, it is generally necessary to engage in deception of self or others.
To be sure, most healthy monogamous people get over this in time and learn to accept their own sparks of interest and those of their partner. But most of us start with deception as a basic aspect of how we approach relationships. This is why infidelity is epidemic in monogamy. I consider cheating to be part and parcel of the monogamous paradigm, though it’s disavowed as a violation of it.
This tendency towards deception and infidelity often stays with us as we move into our nonmonogamous journey. Which is to say, our first impulse is to hide what is happening, and to hide our partners from each other. Even folks who have made solid nonmonogamous agreements with each other tend to be wary about sharing details. A lot of people even start their nonmonogamous practice with an agreement to hide everything from each other, known as a “don’t ask don’t tell” agreement. These have a terrible reputation for brewing problems.
Men seem to be particularly susceptible to this urge to hide. In my experience, men are more likely than women to see truth as something that can be bent or simply denied. This is a generality—it is certainly possible to find women who constantly lie and men who are one hundred percent honest. But overall, men seem to be somewhat more likely to turn to deception as a default.
However, deceit is poison to any relationship, and triply so in nonmonogamy, where we do not have the support of the enclosing culture. In nonmonogamy we must negotiate our way to expectations and agreements—honestly and in good faith. The urge to hide anything from ourselves and our partners tends to scuttle most kinds of nonmonogamy. If people feel they cannot trust each other, connections are short-lived and fraught rather than strong and supported.
So, in order to be successful at nonmonogamy we need to learn to be authentic and have integrity, especially when it comes to sharing information about our lovers. This might sound easy in theory, but I cannot emphasize enough how hard it is in practice. Integrity has certainly been a lifelong journey for me. But at the end of the day, learning to just put everything on the table ends up feeling a lot safer, more rewarding, and all-around easier than deceit or omission.
Telling and Hearing the Truth
The first part of integrity is of course just telling the truth. This is harder than it sounds. There’s an ever-present temptation to minimize, omit important details, or tell supposedly harmless lies. A good question to always keep in mind is, would this person want to know the fact I am thinking about? If the answer is yes, it is important to tell them. Even if the truth is going to be hard to hear, even if it might start an argument. Never think you are protecting someone by being dishonest with them.
Some of my partners and I have identified what we call “that cheating feeling,” that is, the urge to not say a hard truth and instead just let it slide. We have even come up with a ritual around it, where one of us will say, “I’m getting that cheating feeling.” This signals to the other person that a hard truth is about to come out, and it is time to try to be open, understanding, and forgiving when hearing it.
This brings up an important point: truth-telling and truth-hearing is a two-way street. Being receptive to hard truths makes it much easier for people to tell them. The most honest relationships I have been in have been where both partners were open to hearing hard truths while reserving immediate judgment and avoiding quick emotional reactions. The primary responsibility for truth-telling lies in the person who needs to speak the truth, of course. But the skill of truth-hearing is equally important. If you blow up, get dismissive, or turn defensive when someone tells you a hard truth, they will stop telling you things.
I encourage you to practice truth-telling and truth-hearing regularly; these are skills that can be developed. This can be in the form of regular relationship check-ins, on the therapist’s couch, or in other forms that work for you and your partners. You can even set up practice sessions where the truths being spoken are not about important matters at all.
Talking About Emotions
It is sometimes hard to say important things, because it can mean showing vulnerability. Still, it is very important to share what is emotionally real for us in a gentle but direct manner. This again is a skill that can be learned. Some of that is learning to identify what we are feeling, and some of that is learning to communicate it. Practice makes it easier.
Communicating emotions is sometimes tricky because of the impulse—by both you and the listener—to try to fix things immediately when emotions are difficult. But stay away from attempted solutions at first. Let the emotions happen and handle them as best you can. Sometimes feelings are fleeting, and will go away on their own. Sometimes emotions are deep-seated, rooted in childhood and triggered by the current situation.
It is important to understand that emotions are not truly about something; they are kind of their own thing. They do have a logic, but it is not the rationalist logic of the everyday world. They do not necessarily make sense, and may not be controllable. Nor do they necessarily require action. The action that helps an emotion may not be the one that logically makes sense. It is important to embrace and feel our feelings, in all their illogical glory, because actually feeling them is how we handle them, get through them, and learn to master them.
Talking about our emotions can be particularly difficult for men raised on the myth that showing emotions somehow makes us weak and unmasculine. The myth has it exactly wrong, of course—being vulnerable enough to describe one’s emotions requires character and strength. To build good connections with people, it is important to recognize and lay out our emotional states, rather than just reacting to them in opaque and confusing ways.
Sometimes this may be extremely difficult—for example, if you are losing interest in a relationship. Still, walling off emotions always tends towards disconnection, and sharing one’s feelings always tends towards connection.
It is important to speak truths, emotional or otherwise, with compassion. Some people use truth-speaking as a bludgeon. Instead, we should always consider the current context when speaking hard truths. If you are having negative thoughts about someone right now, but you are also very hungry or maybe frustrated by something at work, then perhaps you do not need to speak your thoughts until you have eaten or recovered. Keep your intent and your current emotional state in mind when speaking your truths. The goal of opening up with a lover is to be authentic, which then builds a closer connection. If you are using truth-speaking as a tool of manipulation or aggression, then that is not true authenticity.
Authenticity and integrity are especially important for nonmonogamy because we are not following the relationship rule book laid out for us by the culture. What we build, we have to build ourselves. Building new ways of connecting requires laying oneself on the line for one’s lovers and partners to see.
Let’s look at some common ways that authenticity shows up in nonmonogamy.
Compartmentalization
One way we are taught to be inauthentic is compartmentalization: dating people very separately, rarely having them meet, and hiding details about each connection from the others. This model comes from monogamous expectations. Compartmentalization is how people have affairs, and how most people date between serious relationships. We expect that introducing our lovers or being honest with each person about the others will create disaster. In a monogamous scene, it very well may. Most of us have experienced traumatic drama of this sort.
But in the nonmonogamy world, the opposite is true: being open about the important things in your life clears problems away, or prevents them in the first place. It takes a lot of experience in successful nonmonogamy to learn to trust in that truth.
I see a lot of men dragged down by their compartmentalized dating practice, going on a handful of dates with one woman, a handful of dates with another, and ending up frustrated when they fail to build any deep or lasting connections.
Strong connections are built on trust and at least a minimal amount of social integration. In nonmonogamy, that means giving up on having one’s connections remain entirely separate. Instead, find ways to bring people important to you together. At the most basic level, this means being up front and honest with each person about whom you are seeing. Be clear about what each person means to you, without downplaying, and avoid detrimental comparisons.
A near-universal nonmonogamous axiom is that having one’s connections meet each other and get comfortable leads to more strength in those connections over the long term. It builds trust if your lovers can talk to each other. They can see that you are not telling one person one thing and the other something else. It also makes everyone feel more human and tends to defuse jealousy. A developed sense of empathy with other people in your dating network is crucial to your nonmonogamous success.
Availability
Another piece of nonmonogamous authenticity is having good conversations about your availability. By that I mean what level of time and attention we expect to have available to each connection, with statements like “I’d like to see you once a month,” or “caring for my child comes ahead of any lovers right now,” or “I would like to see you socially more often,” or “I want to stick to nonsexual touch with you.”
Again, the monogamous world makes this kind of honesty difficult, even taboo. In monogamy, we are always supposed to be one hundred percent available to our one partner. Whether this is ever reasonable at all, it’s certainly not in nonmonogamy. On top of that, I think that men have been trained by culture to think women are trying to trap us into marriage. Nonmonogamous women usually aren’t, and they often have availability limits that supersede ours. This is another thing to get comfortable with. Boundaries are good, healthy, and necessary, and all parties should be able to set them.
Indeed, an inability to set or respect boundaries can quickly lead to disaster. Sometimes this happens because a connection grew past the limits of one partner, perhaps because they failed to state their limits. Or it could happen because someone felt unable to say no, and ditched out for self-protection. Having good boundaries is crucial, along with paying attention to the boundaries of the people you are with. And understand that boundaries may change and need to be redefined.
The need for the “availability discussion” has been a particularly hard lesson for me to learn. I have often been scared of telling a woman that I had some limit on my availability. But once I started opening up and actually having those conversations, I quickly discovered that the women I was dealing with were on the same page.
The other side of availability is also difficult. It can be hard to trust that a person really likes you if they are only available every other Friday. But nonmonogamous people are often especially busy. If someone wants to spend any of their time with you, that means they’re interested in you. You can always ask for more connection, but you should be open to hearing a no. Never try to pressure or coerce someone into giving you more attention than they are willing to provide. Try to enjoy the positives you are getting rather than being miserable about what might be missing when measured by monogamous standards.
Women and Authenticity
Your authenticity means a lot to nonmonogamous women who date men. Women tell me endless stories about guys who lied about their other partnerships, were deceptive about their availability, couldn’t manage to talk about their feelings, and so on. Women are so sick of this. They’re sick of having to pressure guys to get honesty out of them. As a result, many will just bail at the first sign of deceit, dissembling, or omission.
It is pretty sad how low the bar has been set. The silver lining is that it’s pretty easy to stand out from the crowd. The more authentic you become, the better life becomes for you and everyone around you.