A few years ago, I drove to Mt. St Helens on the Oregon/Washington border to meet up with some friends for an art photography weekend. Driving from Denver, Google Maps showed a couple of different routes. The shortest one went up the near side of the mountain, and the other wrapped around the south side, touched the edge of Portland, then doubled back. The near-side route was significantly shorter, but also involved taking one road that looked like it might require a burly vehicle; the one I was driving would have been borderline. Still, we chose it.
Upon arriving at the turnoff for this “barely a road” I found it barricaded, marked impassable due to rocks, debris, and trail condition. Whether I wanted to try it or not, that path was not available as a means of getting to the destination. Exhausted, after driving twenty hours, and within only a few miles of the destination, there was no path forward.
Despite having the map, the planning, and the research, the way forward along that route was closed. “Almost there” was not the same as “possible to get there using this path”. Adding another two hours to the trip, the only choice was to double back, drive down the mountain, get to the highway, reset, drive around the mountain, and chose another way.
Although so very close, life said “You can’t get there from here”.
Changing A Foundation
It’s infrequent that we as humans choose to change the very foundation of something we believe, to the point that it impacts our entire reality. I’m in my 40s and what I am currently experiencing would mark my second time.
The first was a departure from the Christian faith I had lived sincerely and with extreme dedication for a dozen years, from 15 through 27. My faith was the foundation for everything in my life. It was my drive, it was my purpose, it was my security. While my departure didn’t actually change that much about who I was, at the same time everything changed. I could make choices I thought were right, but while trying to shake off over a decade of personal training to follow the teachings of my faith. I was untethered, I was free, I was slightly terrified, set loose. It was wonderful.
About three years ago I was given the choice to either terminate my new marriage or embrace my wife’s epiphany of being polyamorous. Polyamory was not the life I wanted, but I hadn’t tried it yet in practice, and as such had not been unsuccessful, so I stepped into it and gave it a go. I had prior experience in the kink and swing worlds, but polyamory was a new step that involved more emotions.
Throughout Covid lockdown (bad, bad timing!) and a rollercoaster ride into divorce, I tried to modify my monogamish self (monogamous in emotions, occasionally playfully ENM) into a polyamorous one. As I encountered challenges I would “do this”, “change that”, and get more open-minded about other things. I thought, with sincerity, that I was rewiring myself from monogamy into polyamory, and I made a huge amount of actual progress. This experience was world-changing for me, and yet from my current perspective, I feel that I approached it wrong, even with all of my sincere efforts.
I learned useful relationship skills in monogamy, and many of them will continue to apply to a new poly framework. Communication, boundaries, respect, and care, are all things that apply in all relationships. I also learned useful skills in the past three years I have been “doing poly”. Compersion, time management, releasing expectations, and navigating an interesting emotional landscape with partners and metamours. As I learned these skills I changed out bits of my more monogamous self, upgrading, repairing, and replacing various aspects of how I engaged the world.
Through a year and a half of the pandemic, the divorce, and then another year and a half since, I’ve been attempting to integrate this into my new self, working hard to make these “upgrades” to myself, learning, unlearning, and changing. It’s not enough. Polyamory is not the same as modified monogamy. Polyamory requires an entirely different mental and emotional foundation, and to succeed at it requires examining and tearing down everything I thought I knew about relationships and life, and rebuilding a new worldview foundation entirely.
It’s my view that success in polyamory requires a fundamentally different foundation from monogamy in terms of how we view relationships, partnership, sex, autonomy, and being human. It’s not enough to simply attempt to modify one’s self into a polyamorous version of monogamy. After a very long emotional drive, I now gaze upon my destination, one that seems so close, and hear the universe screaming out to me… “you can’t get there from here”. To succeed in polyamory requires a paradigm shift at the core of who I am and how I see the world.
Relationships and People
Polyamory fundamentally views relationships differently than monogamy. Poly is more open, and more accepting of mutual affection between humans, regardless of what other connections exist in those people’s lives. Love and chemistry are possible at any time, not restricted other than perhaps in practical ways.
The ways you see people who are interested in or dating your partner is different too. The stories we all grew up with involved true love, competition, jealousy, and struggle, with one suitor emerging victorious with the hand of their true love. Metamours don’t have to be competition; they’re part of your teammate’s team. They can become friends, even good friends, or even become your own lover or partner.
Those in polyamory can have primary/anchor partners, as well as additional partners. In monogamy, primary partners can leave you, just look at the astronomical divorce rates. They can also leave you in poly and my own biggest struggle is the notion that introducing additional intimate partners might result in this being more likely to happen.
Partners can also stick around, regardless of what else they have going on in their lives, and they can honor their words and their spoken heart. If they show up for you, they will hopefully keep showing up. It’s a different landscape and one where we make the best decisions we can.
There are no guarantees in monogamy; neither are there in polyamory. Hopefully, with freedom and honesty, we’ll get to continue to share and nurture the relationships that most matter to us for a long time.
Compersion
Often described as being the opposite of jealousy, compersion is the act of celebrating another person’s joy, or successes, even when you’re not a part of those experiences.
In polyamory, it includes being happy that someone you love has quality connections, even love, for people who are not you. It can be scary to step into this mindset, a leap of faith that fights against what we’ve been told so long to feel, but it’s so much better than living with the weight of concern or jealousy.
This applies to simple things like your partner having a warm phone call with a long-distance lover that they haven’t seen in a while, and it applies to things like them having a hot date and “nudge nudge I’ll see you tomorrow, probably”, with all that entails as the camera pans away and fades to black.
The woman I’m in love with loves to see me connect with other humans, in any way that’s positive. Maybe she’s involved in a particular social moment, maybe she’s not. She does a great job at compersion and is helping me to grow in that way myself.
This is where rebuilding the entire way someone views relationships could drastically improve one’s success. Integrating compersion into an existing framework, one that’s been based on monogamy for decades, can be difficult. The pieces don’t fit, and they won’t stay together. They never had anywhere to stick in the first place.
The idea of being happy for someone you care about, and celebrating their joy, should be an easy one. On a monogamous foundation, that celebration has limits. Those limits derive from rules that other people created, rules that don’t have to be there. To truly integrate compersion, that old foundation might have to go.
Sex
As we grow up, we’re told two simultaneous and conflicting messages. One is that sex should only be shared with a committed partner, assuming someone is in a committed partnership. Sex is love, and love is sex. The other is that sex is fun, spontaneous, exciting, and can happen with any person at any time. This is prevalent in TV, movies, the club and dating scenes, and mostly everywhere. Sex is fun, but it isn’t love. Additionally considering that so many have been subjected to domestic or sexual abuse, it’s even more reinforced as to why some people don’t equate love and sex.
When dating in a monogamous mindset, an individual might be in the ‘fun’ camp, and then switch to the ‘just with you’ camp after connecting with someone. This is great if that works for all involved but it’s also a confusing flip, especially if they have simultaneous sparks they were exploring with multiple people.
In polyamory, the lines are more blurred, especially if one chooses to extend their pursuits into a domain where they are also open to exploring casual encounters as they arise and appeal. In this context, there is no longer a single partner to share sexuality with. There might be multiple partners and additional casual opportunities. Those worlds might even overlap.
When you bring a monogamous mindset to polyamory, this is one of the hardest things to shake. If you think that your partner will only be physical with you, because you love each other, you’re not going to succeed. They will love others as well, and if they are currently poly they probably already do. They might just want to share experiences with others, and their worldview both allows and welcomes this. These moments with others don’t take away from their moments with you, other than how you might yourself filter it through your own brain and feelings.
One place this might not work out is a relationship that’s one-sided for physical interest, especially when the less-interested partner is actively interested in others. That’s a dynamic that might not be healthy. Short of that, if two people can show up for each other, mind, body, and spirit, and share moments that even monogamous people might call love, then new ways are possible.
Your polyamorous partner is probably going to sleep with other people, maybe many. You can too, or you can choose not to. It doesn’t mean they love you any less, they might even love you more as you show your support for them. Be smart and safe, and don’t break trust.
This is not a modified monogamous way, this is a paradigm shift of the heart.
Other People as Full People
Humans are not property.
In monogamy, a tightly coupled two-person relationship takes on a different life, with imagined intertwined rights or obligations. One human now feels some sort of societally-implied physical claim to the other, with perceived rights over their body or actions.
In polyamory, every person is autonomous, a self-contained human. While someone is in a relationship with you, they might make some form of agreement with you, or concession, or grant some sort of priority to certain acts, and those are the intentional choices of a complete human. Nobody owes you anything, especially when it comes to their own body.
If you make agreements with someone and then act in ways that don’t honor the agreement, you should be prepared to accept the fallout or consequences from that. Even while respecting bodily autonomy, people can still be hurt when promises are broken. Usually, this will not be done from a place of malice, but more likely from a place of other-person excitement, perhaps a burst of new-person-energy. That doesn’t make it less painful, but if someone matters to you then hopefully you can find your way through it. And if you matter to them then hopefully it won’t become a trend.
I found an image describing what they call the laws of detachment. The first two are: Allow others to be who they are. Allow yourself to be who you are. Everyone you engage is a full human, and so are you. Nobody will complete you; let’s strive to find individuals who will add to our experience in this blink-of-an-eye we call life.
Primariness
There are many types of polyamory. Some people have ‘primary’ relationships, then other ‘secondary’ or peripheral relationships, emotional or physical. The academic body of the poly world often argues for a non-hierarchical approach, where a phrase like ‘primary’ is replaced with something less level-involved, like “anchor partner”.
People coming from monogamy have likely grown up with the notion, and hopes, of having a life partner. This would be someone they consider an adventure partner, someone they might marry, someone to share a house or finances with, someone to grow old with. This would be a companion who is a lover. I still like this notion and it’s one I find resistance to releasing. I don’t need to be my primary’s only partner, but I do want a good feeling about our intention to stay together for a long time if we are to merge lives in a way that is hard to undo. I want to feel solid as I put any emotional stock into a perceived future together.
For some, primariness can include a sexual dynamic that’s free from the use of protection, where the agreement is to use barriers when engaging all others. This steps into logistics, but only works with one singular partner or a small closed-loop of partners; biology, this is the way. My partner and I trust each other to disclose anything necessary related to such, and understand that we’ll act accordingly if something shared requires action. This part isn’t a paradigm shift, other than that engaging physically with others is an active part of the landscape and not relegated to acts of infidelity.
My partner and I present as primaries; this makes me feel good and brings some of that security I’d seek for moving a partnership forward. We don’t limit each other with rules, other than having a few intentions and agreements about how we ourselves want to work. She is very independent and in the spirit of the laws of detachment, I will only succeed with her if I embrace who she is. We’d like to find out how far we can take things together in life, and we both trust the other to act with that in mind and to communicate openly if anything about that were to change.
Some poly people like the concept of having a primary, and some don’t. Me, I’m here for it, but I have to re-train my foundation about what that means and what is possible.
Logistics
Love is not a finite resource, but time is.
For many, the biggest challenge in polyamory is scheduling. In my monogamous experience, more often than not my partners and I would do social things together. Sure, we had independent activities and nights but when a Friday or Saturday rolled around we were usually making joint plans.
My experience in polyamory is that time is a most precious commodity, and I’m likely to get less of it from any given person, including from my primary partner, than I’m used to. This has probably been my own biggest challenge, as I try to plan my days, weeks, my time, and my life. Timing expectations that in monogamy used to be a given just don’t work the same way in active polyamory. My partner has other people she wants to see, and quite often it’s going to be at times that my first inclination would be to try to spend time with her.
My release of this hope/expectation on time, meaning both the overall quantity of time spent and regular structure, will be a vital part of my success as I continue to move from monogamy to polyamory. I’m protective of my time, and I want my time to be respected. This aspect has been hard for me and absent a foundational shift in how I approach this, will continue to be a struggle for me, so it has to change.
I regularly remind myself that it’s an honor to be able to share in someone’s time at all, that they are explicitly making time for me, and that even as they are wrestling with their own scheduling challenges, they have deemed spending time with me important, and are choosing to act on it. If this falls short of what I might have otherwise chosen, it’s still a huge indication of interest, love, and a reminder that I very much matter to them.
Additionally, in compersion, I want to support the people that matter to me, and the people that matter to them. I want to give them support and freedom, with the intention of only speaking out against their plans or actions if I think something is unhealthy. Short of that, I want to support each of us having rich lives.
Partner Dynamics
The way a polyamorous you interacts with your partner or partners will be different, so vastly different. You’ll be celebrating their happiness as they partake in things that used to threaten you. You’ll be living your own life with a supported freedom that you didn’t know was possible within a partnership.
Twenty years ago, when I was first monogamish and stepping into something more open, I was very concerned with knowing the landscape and the rules of what we were doing. I wanted to know the shape of things and I wanted to do it right. We made a document and talked through all the scenarios we could think of. It was rigid and stressful. I lived by the letter of the agreement where it would have been so much healthier to live by the heart of the agreement.
In polyamory, I like the idea of laying down whatever few agreements govern a given dynamic, with an emphasis on “few”. I propose broad and forgiving strokes drawn with a welcoming, loving, and compersion-filled heart. Live within those very few agreements and intentions, and anything that doesn’t break an agreement is acceptable. Understand that both of you will do your best and that most of the time you’ll succeed. When you fall short, provided it’s not rooted in malice or betrayal, most things can be overcome. Give your partner the benefit of the doubt, and talk to each other with a heart of love, and mutual interest. Trust their words as much as you can.
Living in a spirit of forgiveness and acceptance, when a previous foundation was legalistic and rigid, invites a new foundation.
Regarding disclosure: I like the idea of having a general idea of what’s going on in my primary partner’s life, on a relationship or sexual level. I don’t need juicy details but understanding the big picture is important to me when planning a joint future, or potentially running into metamours in the wild. In monogamy, these additional dynamics would generally be called cheating and not have a place in planned communication nor in my existing foundation for relationships. My foundation needs this place of acceptance because I have a new reality.
I have an amazing and wonderful partner who lights up every room she sets foot in. I’m not the only one that sees that, in fact, she’s basically the queen of everywhere, and she catches a lot of attention. We live in polyamory; other people desire to be in her life too, or in her life more than they currently are, or in her life more than she is currently offering them. They might pique her return interest and they might not. Things will fit in certain ways and not others. Sometimes those involved need to take a step back and re-evaluate what’s there to see if it’s still good. My monogamous foundation doesn’t have a provision for what will be a lifetime of welcomed advances toward my primary partner. I need a foundation that supports that.
Companionship looks different in polyamory as well. In monogamy, people get married and when things get stale or bad they often choose to stay together for various reasons. Sometimes it’s for the kids, but sometimes it’s the institution of monogamous marriage rooted in religion or convention. In polyamory you don’t stay together because you have to, you stay because you choose to. This is an everyday choice.
Sometimes this feels riskier; there might not be a committed long-term legal life bond and we might both be more vulnerable to the new-person-energy of shiny new people. At the same time, it might be more honest. Partners can’t take each other for granted or they will no longer be partners. Being able to let go of the expectation of increased relationship longevity due to a past agreement (marriage?) needs to be part of my new foundation. I need to show up for my partner every day. If I’m made aware of a problem then I need to listen and address it. Those parts aren’t new to me, but they have an added importance now.
Self Work
Rigidity will destroy you in polyamory, even as it might help reinforce you in monogamy. As a devout Christian partner, I was resolute in my commitment to my partner, to be true, and to be hers in partnership. If someone had randomly offered to kiss me (haha, back then, hypothetical), I would have declined in the spirit of my commitment.
Fluidity, however, is important for polyamory. A lot of what motivates poly practitioners is the opportunity to engage with life as it comes, with people as they cross their paths. Supporting a partner in this spirit is far more important than being legalistic about a technicality on a checklist of dos and don’ts.
Being the ‘best partner possible’ to someone will have a very different shape than within monogamy; it will have a very different shape partner-to-partner within polyamory. Being singular in your sexual focus, and not having eyes for someone across the room, plays into a monogamous way. By contrast, supporting your partner as they are about to head out for a sexy date with a partner who is passing through town, or setting up spicy scenarios, or celebrating opportunities and experimentation, are better ways to be a partner to someone with an adventurous spirit of polyamory.
Both of these are valid in their respective contexts, however these two approaches are completely opposite from each other, and attempting to get from one to the other invites the destruction of the entire expectation-foundation.
Tear that foundation down, build a new one, and stand on it with pride. It will be scary, it will be unfamiliar, and it will be hard. I have found that with familiarity comes increased success, and the act of doing it, living it, makes each subsequent time that much easier.
Everything is made up; every rule you know or think you know. We have the freedom, the power, to choose for ourselves what works, what we want to keep in our lives, and the bits we want to remove or add.
Conclusion
Trying to succeed at polyamory, even after I made the choice to BE poly and not just to try it, has been hindered by my approaching it with a relationship foundation rooted in decades of monogamy. I’m blowing that foundation up and I’m building a new one with intent.
I don’t do anything half-assed. I’m deeply in love, I have a lot of emotions on the line. The path I’ve been on has taken me close to where I’d like to be, finding success in polyamory, but the more familiar I’ve become with the path, the more I see the areas that need work, and blockades that perhaps can’t be passed with me using my current relationship foundation.
It’s scary to completely rebuild the basis for how I engage people and the world, but I see where I want to be and yet I can’t get there from here, using the path I’m on. It’s time to retreat, rebuild, and move always forward on a platform that has been custom-built for success.