Polyamory is awesome. But as you read this book, you might wonder why anyone would walk down this road. We're asking a lot of you, dear reader. We tell you what can go wrong and illustrate our lessons with messy examples from our own lives. So you might be tempted to throw up your hands and say, "Polyamory sounds hard!"
But polyamory is awesome. By opening ourselves to multiple romantic connections, the two of us have built amazing lives, filled with love and brilliance. Every person we have invited into our lives has made them better. Despite all the hard parts, neither of us would consider for even half a second going to a life of monogamy. We are nourished by the people who love and cherish us. Every partner we have had, all the relationships we have built, have made us stronger, taught us, supported us, made us better human beings.
We keep hearing that polyamory is hard work. We don't agree—at least not for the reasons that people say. But developing the skills to be successful in poly relationships? That's a different story. Learning to understand and express your needs, learning to take responsibility for your emotions...that's hard work. Once you've developed those skills, poly relationships aren't hard. The skills we're talking about aren't all unique to polyamory; they'll benefit any relationship. But poly will be really, really challenging without them. These skills have to be learned. And, alas, they aren't often taught.
Think of it like tilling the ground before planting a garden, so that things will more easily grow. You're learning a way of approaching relationships that helps them run smoothly. What skills are we talking about? Communication. Jealousy management. Being honest, compassionate, understanding. These are not easy to master. Relationship skills are emergent phenomena; they come from developing ways of thinking about relationships and about yourself. Once you've developed those ways of thinking, practicing these skills in your relationships starts to feel natural. If you get a handle on communication, compassion and self-awareness; if honesty and jealousy management become a part of your approach to life, then managing multiple romantic relationships becomes easy.
These attitudes and skills will express themselves outside of your relationships too. For instance, jealousy is the bugaboo we hear people mention most often. It is beaten most effectively by developing a strong sense of self-confidence and by confronting your personal demons of insecurity. Determine for yourself what you actually want and need from a relationship, and learn the communication tools to ask for those things. Construct a sense of what is and is not acceptable to you. All of these skills strengthen you in other ways as well. They're life skills, and they'll help when you're looking for a new job, or negotiating a raise, or buying a car.
The same is true for things like communication and honesty in a relationship. Develop the habits of being open and honest with the people around you, and you'll likely find that communicating with a lover does not take work; it's automatic. Develop the habit of behaving with integrity, and all of your life will become simpler and smoother. Developing these traits is work, sure, but it's not relationship work—it's work you do on yourself. It benefits you in ways beyond your relationship. In fact, this is work that's beneficial to do even if you have no relationships at all!
We discuss some big concepts in this chapter and the next. Things like integrity, courage, worthiness, compassion. Don't get scared off. These are not states you need to attain, and there's no magic bar you need to cross before you'll be "good enough" to be poly. These principles are meant as guides, as stars to navigate by. They are not innate character traits but practices you can cultivate, skills you can learn.
Of course, two chapters in one book can barely scratch the surface of the self-work that's involved in learning to practice ethical polyamory. What we're presenting is not a set of instructions, but a collection of principles that we believe are most important in building robust, ethical open relationships. These principles are only a jumping-off point; you will need additional resources. Books that we consider must-reads for anyone who still has work to do on building a strong sense of self, setting good boundaries and creating healthy intimate relationships are those by Harriet Lerner and Brené Brown listed in the resources section, particularly The Dance of Intimacy and The Gifts of Imperfection.
And if the things we discuss are linked for you to genuine mental health issues, such as serious anxiety, depression or low self-worth, always consider professional help to work through those issues. We make this recommendation as people who have spent time in the therapist's office and have seen the transformative power of really good psychological help. Some problems can't be solved with self-help books. When you confront one of them, we urge you to get the help you need without shame or self-judgment. See Chapter 25 for information on finding a poly-friendly mental health professional.
"Know thyself." You can't have what you want if you don't know what you want. You can't build a relationship that's satisfying without first understanding yourself and your needs. A willingness to question yourself, to challenge yourself, and to explore without fear the hidden parts of you are the best tools to gain that self-knowledge. A quote often attributed to Francis Bacon reads, "Your true self can be known only by systematic experimentation, and controlled only by being known." Understanding and programming your own mind is your responsibility; if you fail to do this, the world will program it for you, and you'll end up in the relationship other people think you should have, not the relationship you want.
Poly preparedness starts with taking responsibility for the work you need to do. It's not easy. We are very good at hiding the truth about ourselves from ourselves. Some of us are very good at making everything seem like someone else's problem. Others of us are too good at taking on other people's problems as our own. No one's self-awareness is perfect. But it starts with the simple act of looking inward, of asking yourself, "Is this my problem? What is the issue?" Self-awareness starts with awareness, period.
One of our readers recently said, "You can come with baggage, but you're responsible for knowing what's in the suitcases." This is often described as "owning your own shit." So what do you need to know? First, your needs. Most of us are never taught how to figure out what we need, let alone communicate it effectively. We are usually really good at feeling our feelings, but we tend to react to the feeling rather than the actual need. For example, we tend to think that when we feel angry, it's because someone else did something bad to us, so we react to that person, tell them how much they hurt us, and perhaps demand they stop. Sometimes anger really is about the thing you think it's about. But often, particularly in intimate relationships, the anger is about something else. It's about a need that's not being acknowledged or expressed, or even known.
Getting in touch with those needs can be really hard. So working to understand the needs driving strong emotions is a valuable practice. Then there's understanding your needs as they pertain to relationships. Do you need to be polyamorous? Do you need to be monogamous? Do you need at least the possibility of eventually moving in with a partner—or are you entirely closed to living together? Is sex an indispensable part of an intimate relationship for you? Are you open to nonsexual intimate connections? Are you willing to be involved in hierarchical relationships, where you are a secondary partner or subject to a veto? Or do you need to have a larger hand in the course your relationship takes?
You may find it helps to reframe some of what you are calling needs as things that feed you, things that give you joy. There's a dangerous side to focusing on needs, though, which we discuss more later. This is the risk of treating people as need-fulfillment machines. For example, it's not uncommon to see people create detailed descriptions of what their future partners will have to look like, be like and want: what role they should play. That's dangerous.
One way to think about (and seek) the kind of relationships you want without objectifying others is to think about what you have to offer (or not). Examples might be: I can offer life-partnering relationships. I can offer intimate relationships that don't include sex. I am interested in supporting a family. I am interested in caring for a family. I am not willing to move from my home for a partner. I have only two nights a week available for relationships. And so on.
This exercise can be useful in setting boundaries and helping clarify the kind of relationships you're looking for and can sustain. It also plays an important role in partner selection, something we'll talk about later. It's not going to be very satisfying, for example, for you to end up in a closed triad if what you really need is an open network with the potential to date other people. If you are looking for life partners, you may choose to be long-term friends, rather than romantic partners, with people who are looking for other types of relationships.
Minding the gap
Lots of polyamorous people we know, ourselves included, tend to be idealists. We have lofty goals for our relationships and how we want to conduct ourselves within them. But becoming the kind of person who can live those ideals is a never-ending process. Not only doing the work is important. Understanding where you are right now is just as important. That includes understanding whether you are ready to share a partner or to be shared. The problem with being idealists about polyamory is that we risk putting ourselves into situations we're not ready for. If we do that, we risk hurting other people.
Although self-awareness is important, so is self-compassion. We don't look inward so that we can pass judgment on all our flaws. We do it so we can be aware of how our behavior is aligning with our values, what effect we're having on other people, how we may be sabotaging ourselves and our relationships. Understand where you are, yes, but also understand that it's okay to be there, at least for now.
In the book Daring Greatly, shame researcher Brené Brown introduces the idea of "minding the gap." She's talking about the values gap: the space between who we are now and who we want to be. Minding the gap is part of walking toward the horizon we talked about in the previous chapter. There will always be times when we are imperfect, when we fall short of the best possible versions of ourselves. Minding the gap is being aware of where we are now and striving to move in the direction we want to go. That's part of living with integrity.
Eve's Story When my husband, Peter, and I opened up from monogamy, the first few months of my relationship with Ray were difficult for Peter, and for his relationship with me. He did a lot of work in those months to reach a place where he could come to terms with the connection between me and Ray—which flourished quite quickly—and give it space to grow.
When, about six months into that relationship, Peter started what would become a four-year long-distance relationship with Clio, I wanted to show him the same grace he had shown me—all at once. He'd done all that work, I reasoned; I wanted to show him I could do the same. But I neglected to give myself the time and space he had taken. I wanted to start out at the same place it had taken him six months to reach.
So I failed to set boundaries, and I failed to take care of myself. During Clio's first overnight visit with us, we were walking down the street toward the party the three of us were attending together. I wasn't prepared when he put his arm around her and I felt my throat constrict and the ground drop out from under me. I wasn't prepared when, surrounded by people in a packed room that allowed very little movement, I got separated from them and watched from across the room while they sat together and flirted and I felt the walls closing in. And I wasn't prepared to lie awake the entire night while he spent the night with her in the guest room, or for my emotional meltdown the next day.
There were some basic things Peter and Clio could have given me that would have helped me ease into the situation and feel safe—we talk about those in chapter 9—but I didn't know to ask for them. In fact, I actively avoided asking for them, because I wanted to be the strong, noble poly person who never felt jealous or insecure. I was looking at where I wanted to be standing instead of where I was standing, at what I wanted to offer instead of what I actually could at the time.
As Eve's story illustrates, none of us are perfect. Our lives are filled with struggles and mistakes. The effort to be perfect only drives us away from one another and damages our self-worth.
The reason you need to understand where you are right now is so that you can understand your limitations. Your relationships will benefit if you can examine what your triggers are—not so that you can instruct everyone to tiptoe around them, but so you can be aware, when you're triggered, of what is going on. Knowing where you stand now will help you remember that there's not something wrong with you when you feel jealous, when the ground drops out from beneath your feet when you see your husband holding hands with his girlfriend for the first time.
You can't control how your partners' other relationships develop, but you can control how you allow them to intersect with and affect your life. You are allowed to set boundaries on your personal space and time. You don't have to make the first time you hang out with your husband and his girlfriend be a public appearance at a crowded party. You don't have to be okay with hearing them have sex, now or ever. Take care of yourself so you can take care of those around you.
When you make mistakes, think in terms of "I am a person who values integrity" rather than "I am a super-together person." Think of compassion and free will as values you strive for, not attributes you have. That way, you can more easily realign your actions with your values if things go wrong. For example, if you think of yourself as a person who values free will, you can respond constructively when someone points out that you appear to be trying to control someone. Minding the gap is about being able to see these things.
Very few of us make it to adulthood without getting a little broken on the way. None of us can see each other's wounds; none of us can really know what other people's struggles look like from the inside. But one thing's for sure: we all have them. Polyamory can push on our broken bits in ways few other things do. We may be able to build walls around deep-rooted fears, insecurities and triggers in monogamous relationships—walls that poly relationships will often raze to the ground. And because so many more people are involved, more people stand to suffer. We all have things we need to work on. Expect it.
Worthiness
Polyamory will challenge your emotional resiliency. Instead of building walls around painful feelings like fear and jealousy, you'll need to find a way through them. You may experience more loss: more relationships means more possibilities for heartbreak. And you may encounter judgment: slut-shaming, trivialization of your relationships, and claims that you're treating your partners badly or neglecting your kids are some of the most common forms. We discuss these more in chapter 25, but what's important here is developing a sense of self-worth that protects you from internalizing these corrosive messages.
You'll sometimes hear poly people say things like "Don't give other people power to hurt you." But that ignores the very healthy impulse to seek feedback on our perceptions of the world. Even the healthiest person, when persistently rejected, will be hurt. Rejection may erode your mental boundaries or your ability to engage in intimacy. The only way to maintain good mental boundaries, to counteract social rejection and to assess when to disengage is to have self-knowledge and self-confidence and to engage in self-compassion and self-care. In other words, to commit to behaviors that will help you develop a strong sense of worthiness. And yes, feeling worthy is a practice too.
Eve's Story The first time in my adult life I remember feeling worthy was when I was thirty-six years old. I was with my poly women's group. We were talking about worthiness and how it connects to our sense of belonging, which we get when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and are accepted as we are. But being able to allow that vulnerability requires—gotcha!—a sense of worthiness. To connect with others, we must take a leap of faith and believe we are worthy of connection.
Inside I was growing more and more distraught. I don't know how to feel worthy. Finally I asked, "How do we begin to believe we are worthy?" My group members said, "Well, maybe imagine what it feels like to feel worthy, and focus on that. Over time, it will begin to feel real." I took a deep breath and made a very scary and vulnerable admission: "I don't know what it feels like to feel worthy." I was surprised at how much it hurt to say those words—to admit that the concept of "worthiness" was so far outside my realm of personal experience that I couldn't even imagine it.
Unfortunately, because I'm not entirely sure how I learned how to imagine worthiness, I find it difficult to advise others. I know that I worked at it. I read, I blogged, I took risks with my friends by sharing more with them. I started keeping a daily journal of things I was grateful for. I had recently completed several months of intense therapy, and the work I had done there seemed to finally start to take hold. But the truth is, I don't know what the pivot was. One day I just…felt worthy.
Since feeling worthy does not come naturally to me, if I do not work at reminding myself the feeling fades, and then I slip back into a miasma of fear and self-doubt. Then I remember to start practicing again, and I work my way back out.
The good news is that once you know what worthiness feels like, only once, you know that you can experience it—even if you aren't experiencing it right now. A sense of worth is critical to counteracting the scarcity model of love and life. If we do not believe in our worth, we become disempowered, unable to advocate for our needs. We do not see or embrace the love that is actually around us in our lives. It becomes harder to treat our partners well, because we do not see what we bring to their lives. And if we don't understand our value to them, we are more likely to feed our jealousy and fear of loss. Notice that institutions built on the scarcity model—too many workplaces, too many families—always inculcate a sense of low self-worth.
Worthiness is not the same as validation. A sense of self-worth comes from within, not from someone else. It can be tempting to look to the outside for validation—to look to your partner and say, "She loves me, therefore I am worthy." That creates fear rather than reducing fear, because when we rely on outside things in order to feel worthy, we fear losing them all the more. In the end, we can't wait until we see evidence that we are worthy before we allow ourselves to believe it. We start by taking that leap of faith and believing we are worthy.
Our sense of self—what psychologists might term self-differentiation—has a huge impact on relationships. If we make mistakes that hurt people, we can say, "I did something bad" rather than "I am bad." And if something is our fault, that means it is within our power to change the outcome.
Low self-worth will try to protect itself, sometimes in sneaky ways. It can tell us that if we have a high sense of self-worth we might not get our partner's time and attention, because we're not in crisis. Emotional crisis can become a way to get our partners to give us what we need. The solution to this problem is tricky, but one place to start is to look at people who do have a strong sense of self-worth, and see if their needs are being met.
If you are struggling with worthiness, you'll find resources at the back of this book. If you are seriously struggling, professional help can be of huge benefit—not just in your intimate relationships but in all parts of your life.
Let's say you, as our intrepid mushroom hunter, get lost in the woods. Do you know a few wild plants you can collect to feed yourself? Do you know how to find water? How to make a shelter and stay warm? If not, how confident are you in your ability to figure these things out? Will you begin to panic? Will you think, Oh, my God, I'm going to die—I don't know how to survive in the forest! Or will you take a deep breath and say, "Well, I've never done this before, but here I am and I'd better get on with it. Let's see, it's getting dark. I guess the first thing is to look for some shelter and figure out if there's something I can eat."
There's a kind of calm that comes from believing you can handle a situation, even one you haven't faced before, and that calm increases your competence. This effect is called self-efficacy. Trying new things—like writing a book, or exploring polyamory—involves learning new skills, and research shows that key to learning new skills is simply believing you can learn them. Self-efficacy in poly relationships is the feeling that you can make it through your wife's first date. That you'll figure out a way to manage your jealousy, even if you don't know how yet. That if you have to sleep alone some night, even if it's been years and you don't remember what it feels like, you'll get through it and be okay.
All this may seem to have a flavor of New Age power-of-intention pop psychology, but the study of self-efficacy goes back four decades, and there's solid evidence supporting it. Whether or not someone believes they can do something has important effects on whether they can. This has proven true for everything from learning new skills to quitting smoking.
As to developing this calming competence, research has identified strategies for improving self-efficacy. Here are two simple ones.
Small successes. Step outside your comfort zone. Find something you can succeed at: something that seems hard to you, but not so hard that it will land you quivering under the covers in tears. Stay home while your wife is on a date. Talk to your partner about your insecurity or jealousy. Each small step will build on the last, giving you a stronger sense of your ability to tackle the next challenge. They won't necessarily become easier. But the key is to develop your belief that I can do this.
The flip side of that is to address how you cope with "failure," if it turns out you weren't quite as strong (yet) as you'd hoped. People with high self-efficacy tend to be resilient in the face of failure; they know that often you have to fail many times before you succeed.
Role models. An important factor contributing to a person's idea of whether they can do something is whether they see other people doing it. We can't stress enough the usefulness of having polyamorous role models, ideally people in your social network who you can talk to and get feedback from. Find your local poly discussion and support group, or start one. As polyamorous people we are surrounded by a culture that tells us, "You can't do this," "That's not possible," or even "That's morally wrong." It can be hard to maintain a belief in yourself and your abilities in the face of this social censure, especially when things get hard. That's why it's critical to establish a poly-friendly support system and find people you consider to be good examples. We discuss this more in chapter 25, on social and community support.
Building self-efficacy in other areas of your life also builds success in poly relationships. It takes the bite out of two scary monsters: "failure" and being alone. For many of us, for example, our first breakup is the scariest, because it's our first taste of romantic "failure." Will we find love again? What if the person we just broke up with was The One? Believing that you can be alone and thrive, that you can survive the end of something and rebuild, are important elements of self-efficacy.
A special kind of commitment
An essential aspect of successful poly relationships, in our experience, is a commitment to being poly. Sometimes learning the skills is hard. We have to practice and muddle through painful situations when they befall us. At some point, poly may just feel too damn hard.
Eve's Story Despite all our preparation, Peter and I didn't really know what to expect when Ray and I became lovers. I got caught up in a full-on flood of new relationship energy, and Peter, with whom I had settled into a low-key, eight-year-relationship groove, struggled with the intensity of it all. One day, when Ray and I had been lovers for about a month, Peter sat me down and said, "You're falling in love with Ray." He was right. Surprisingly, perhaps, we had never talked before about the possibility of falling in love. And there we were, and we weren't ready.
My growing relationship with Ray forced me and Peter to confront a long-buried structural problem in our relationship, one we had been able to sweep under the rug for years. One day, the day before I was scheduled to go visit Ray, Peter told me he wasn't sure he wanted to be with me anymore. I panicked. I said I wanted to cancel my trip so I could stay home and work on things with Peter, but Peter said no, he wanted me to go. And he wanted me to stay with Ray until he had decided he was ready for me to come back.
I drove the next day to see Ray, and that afternoon, we made love, and then I lay there sobbing in his arms, torn apart by conflicting emotions: fear and grief at the thought of losing Peter, joy at the new connection with Ray. And then, suddenly, I accepted the situation. I imagined myself without Peter, was able to picture my life without him, and I realized that even without him or Ray, even alone, I would be okay. I would mourn, but my life would go on, and I would rebuild. I wrote in my journal that day, "After a few days of feeling in free-fall, it's like I suddenly looked behind me and realized…Oh. I have wings."
A couple of days later, Peter called and said it was okay for me to come home. The ground beneath our relationship had shifted dramatically—as it would continue to over the next few years, as we found our new normal. But coming face-to-face with the reality of losing Peter inoculated me against some of the fear that accompanies the biggest changes and greatest uncertainties. Having looked the worst-case scenario in the eye, I found it no longer so scary.
Eve has called this kind of time the "dark night of the soul" moment. Unless you are truly exceptional, you will experience it at some point, usually early on. Maybe your partners are struggling. Maybe you're tired of fighting your inner demons. And this is when it really matters whether you've committed, with all your heart and soul, to being poly. If you don't commit, if you aren't ready for that dark night of the soul, and you back away in fear when it comes, then you and people you love are going to get very hurt.
So be ready. Because if you step into it and keep walking, you will get through it. It ends. Know that you're not alone: thousands of people before you have walked this path—not exactly yours, of course, but just as dark and scary. It ends. And it's better on the other side. Getting through that dark night removes its power over you, and that's what it takes to get you (and your partners, and their partners) onto a solid footing that will lead you to happiness, a place where you can make clear-headed decisions focused on the good of everyone.
The longer people avoid confronting that dark night of the soul, the more power it has over them and their relationships. Some people elaborately construct their entire lives to avoid confronting fear. Many people use the hearts of their lovers or their metamours as sacrifices to the unknown beasts they think live within the darkness they're not willing to explore.
We urge you, if you are going to explore polyamory, don't just dip a toe in. One, that's not going to give you the strength and tools to succeed. Two, you'll be treating people as things.
Of the people who do decide to make that commitment, to live polyamorously and treat their partners ethically even when it means confronting those heart-shaking fears, no one makes quite the same trip. Everyone charts a different path through that dark night. But it begins with commitment: knowing you are going to do this, and that you can.
Courage
When many of us think of courage, we think of heroics, of facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square. But everyday, ordinary courage is the courage it takes to confess a crush. The courage it takes to say, "Yes, I am going to open my heart to this person, even though I don't know what the outcome will be." The courage to love a partner who loves another person even though you do not have the trappings of security that monogamy promises. The courage to sleep alone. The courage to begin a relationship with someone who's already partnered, trusting that person to carve out the space for you that you're going to need.
This kind of moral courage comes from a willingness to be vulnerable, and to accept that you will be okay even though you don't know what will happen. And you know what? Courage is required because sometimes what we're trying doesn't work. The tank rolls over us. Our vulnerability is rejected, or worse, mocked.
That's the whole thing about courage. It can't promise a happy outcome. We can't say, "Just be brave and vulnerable and you will obtain love and master happy poly relationships ever after." It wouldn't be courage if there were any guarantees.
You may feel like saying, "Well, I'm just not that brave." But we're not talking about something you are or are not. We all have times when we act with courage and times when we don't. In fact, it's something that we and our partners struggle with all the time. Like everything else we talk about, courage is not a destination. Courage is a verb, grammarians be damned: it's not something you have, it's something you do. You practice a bit every day. And if you fall down, if your courage fails you, you always get another chance. Always. Courage happens in increments.
You'll need courage because polyamorous relationships can be scary. Loving other people without a script is scary. Allowing the people you love to make their own choices without controlling them is scary. The kind of courage we're talking about involves being willing to let go of guarantees—and love and trust your partners anyway.
So how do you learn to have courage, to develop this practice? Imagine you want to learn how to swim. You sign up for swim lessons, you get yourself a swimsuit and goggles, and on the day your lessons are to begin, you show up at the pool, nervous and eager. Imagine if, to your surprise, the swim coach takes you out onto a boat. What, maybe you'll learn to swim off the side of the boat? But instead, he spends the entire day teaching the basics of sailing—how to tie knots, how to tack against the wind, how to work the sails. "When you have mastered the art of sailing," the swim coach intones, "you will know how to swim."
You would know that that's daft. Yet often, that's exactly how we try to learn skills like trust and courage. We try to build the skills that can help us face our fears by doing things that are completely unrelated to courage—things like avoiding the triggers for our fears, or creating structures that shelter us from the things we're afraid of, waiting until we feel brave. If we fear that a partner might want to leave us, we lay down regulations telling her not to. If we fear being replaced by someone sexier than we are, we are tempted to create prohibitions that restrict certain kinds of sex.
We do not learn courage, or trust, by avoiding the things that trigger our fears any more than we learn to swim by trimming the sails on a boat. In fact, the time and effort we spend doing this is time and effort we are not spending learning to swim.
As you well know, you learn to swim by getting in the water. Maybe you start with kicks at the shallow end of the pool, but you need to get wet. We learn courage by taking a deep breath, steadying ourselves, and then choosing the difficult, scary path over the easy way out. As the theologian Mary Daly said, we "learn courage by couraging." The path of greatest courage also seems like the hardest: it takes us right past the places where our fears live. But just as we cannot put off learning to swim until the day we magically know the butterfly stroke, we cannot put off learning courage until the day we magically become courageous. This is work we must do, now, to create fertile ground within our relationships that allows us to move with integrity and compassion.
Questions to Ask Yourself
To become more self-aware and identify your personal strengths, weaknesses and fears—especially as they relate to relationships—here are some questions to consider:
- Why do I have romantic relationships? What do I get out of them?
- What do I consider essential, indispensable elements of a relationship?
- Are there specific kinds of relationships that I know I am looking for? Kinds that I know I don't want?
- What do I bring to the table for others?
- What makes me feel cherished, loved and secure?
- What makes me afraid in relationships? Why?
- In what ways do I protect myself from being hurt? Do those strategies help or hinder my search for connection?