Polyamory is not just how I love, it is who I am.

I refrain from saying that I am polyamarous for a couple of reasons. The first, obviously, is that I have to be a punk-ass contrarian bitch who will wax poetic about the benefits of labels but then refuse to use one because it is so limiting. Okay, it's not really that. I just like to cuss myself out. It's not limiting as much as it carries meaning that is varied on a vast spectrum, and if I have to explain everything anyway, I may as well explain instead of using a term. Instead, I have always just used as a flashpoint, the phase: I date multiple people. I have always been this way, I don't remember there ever being a time in my life when I thought I would be with just one person. I have only had one monogamous relationship in my life, with my first boyfriend, it lasted about ten months, and I cheated all the fucking time. He considered the men I slept with "cheating" and the women I slept with "an expression of my sexuality," but heteronormativity aside, ultimately we both agreed, I was a terrible girlfriend.

After him, I didn't even try the single partner route, it was obviously not what I wanted. Of course, the journey that ensued was fraught with challenges, many of which I failed to recognise as they were happening, and most of them presenting in the context of my relationship with my ex. Our approaches to relationships were completely different and while that is fine, I didn't realise until after I left him that when it comes to poly (which, I don't love the term, but I will use it, because because because, labels are good and useful when used for convenience and not definition), it seems to matter more how I feel about my (potential) partner's style of doing poly than how I do it. Let me laboriously and exhaustively explain that. I am a very romantic person, even my "casual" relationships are loving affairs, even my one night stands can cause enduring (absent) love, I have no desire to "just have sex" outside my relationship. I want to reserve the right to fall in love at any time, all the time. The nature of the love is what really determines the longevity of the love, sometimes it is 45-minutes in the bathroom of a bar (because that is just how long our happily ever after was meant to be, my love), and sometimes it is seven years, but chances are I have loving feelings of some kind for every person I fuck for non-monetary reasons. It's not that I think sex is tawdry and hence more easily thrown around than my heart, it's that sex is my heart, and I engage with my cunt and heart at the same time, always.

Fuck all the ideas about having to separate emotion and sex to have successful casual sex or whatever it is that is meant to be accomplished that, that's like living in a world without STIs and pregnancy, and still using a condom each time you stick a dick in it. I refuse to emulate robots and honestly, I don't fucking buy the effectiveness of this technique. When people don't want to commit, they just don't commit, they don't have to be emotionless robots to accomplish that. If the presentation and expression of any emotions makes you scared that you may accidentally fall into commitment, you may be less in control of your emotions than you think. Really, it's like me and babies. When I was unsure about whether I wanted them or not, but always saying I didn't, I was scared of them or I found them annoying. Now that I am completely confident in my decision not to procreate, babies are adorable, give me a little foot to gnaw on and let's go shopping for tiny clothes. Babies didn't change, I became more aware and accepting of who I really am and who I really am with regard to poly is that I just like to fall in love and have all kinds of spectacular sex that comes with that. My ex, he liked to sleep around very unemotionally with other women. On the face of it, this doesn't have to be an issue. The reason it was is because he didn't like how I did poly and I was ambivalent about how he did it.

Ultimately, how I do poly is about more than a system of dating, it's about who I am. If your partner's comfort in your relationship requires you to change who you are so as to be the kind of poly that they are comfortable with, it's a little bit of a dealbreaker for me, a fundamental incompatibility which is rarely repaired by love. My ex always thought I was cheating on him, even though he always knew exactly what I was doing, and I always thought he was too dismissive and denigrating to the other women he slept with because he kept reducing them and sex to a meaningless act. I didn't like that about him, as a person. You can enjoy the type of relationship where you have casual dalliances outside of it, but if you feel the need to reduce those to meaningless acts or debauchery, and along with it the people you do it with, I don't really respect that. I came to realise that two people can do poly very differently but if you don't like or respect what the way they do it says about them as a person, or you see the way they do it as something that infringes upon your relationship with them, and you subsequently require them to alter their boundaries to suit you, that incompatibility is hard to circumvent. For instance, I don't like the "man with harem" requirements of poly, nor the kind where I need the permission of a primary or dominant partner to engage with someone else, so if that is the style of poly practiced by someone I want to date, I just wont.

I guess a part of this is that we think there has to be exact reciprocity in poly relationships, and the other part is the concept of primaries (and I will get to that in a bit). The problem with reciprocity is that it benefits no one and serves only an arbitrary idea of fairness. If I am allowed to love, you are allowed to love. If I am allowed only to fuck, you are allowed only to fuck. I don't want to give my partner as much as they give me, I want to give them what they want, and if doing so does not align with who I am, then we won't be together. I don't want you to put yourself through the daily strife of managing expectations, normalising jealously (which, okay, certain measure is fine), feeling like you are wrong for not accepting how I love as how you love. No one needs to adjust to my poly and I won't adjust to yourself, if it aligns, it aligns, if it doesn't, it doesn't. The world is full of potential lovers. I don't want to see poly as the structure of how we will make it work between us, but as who you are. How you love is who you are and I don't want to turn it into a project of becoming someone else. Discovering myself, absolutely, training myself to live a different way, no thanks. I am not interested in the quintessential reasons for why poly is better. I don't really care if it is better because "better" for a species is judged by biological interest and I won't even procreate so clearly I am not so keen on biological interest. I want to be not with a person who is necessarily poly, but with a person who is perfectly comfortable with their choice in how they do relationships, and comfortable with how I do them as well. Without feeling the need to assert claim over my feelings for other people.

I didn't think this was possible until I met my husband, which brings me to primaries. I don't love this concept either because I don't like hierarchies except for sexual ones but that is different. However, for all *effective* purposes, my husband is my primary partner, I have most *shared life* with him. We live together, we have pets together, we are raising a (step)child together as well. That doesn't mean any other partners are *less important* or even that I wouldn't be open to participating in raising their children or getting a cat with them, it is just that all my responsibilities and roles within my relationship with my husband would not change for it. I would take on more things, but I will not subtract any of my life with him. Besides, and I think this is the part of poly we don't often discuss, our financial futures are tied together. There is having a life together and there is a having a bank account together and with my husband, our finances are linked. Essentially when we buy land, *we* buy land. That doesn't mean I wouldn't buy land with someone else, I could, it's just that they shouldn't do that without knowing my marital status could mean my husband is still entitled to part of that land. Poly is in certain respects, within the purview of exclusion by class divide, because relationships do cost money, and if within the lack of (disposable) income your primary partner is spending money on someone else, that may cause resentment or other issues. Of course, even within a relationship as legally binding as marriage, we both retain a measure of financial autonomy, it's difficult to have a marriage where you don't merge at least part of your finances and often your partner's feelings about how much money you spend on other partners will give you information on how they really feel about how you do relationships, and it is a form of communication that is worth paying attention to.

Sometimes you have to listen to all the signs, I see all of the issues with my ex so clearly now, but of course a better recourse than signs is exhaustive communication, which is something else I only learnt when I started to date my husband. The thing is, and I am sympathetic to this thing, that often it's hard to tell exactly what all relationships your poly includes. For instance, my friends, they're like full on relationships in my life. I don't have sex with them, but actually I really only have a purely platonic relationship with one person in my life, with all others there has been love, sex, the desire for sex, weird d/s play, an asexual romance, an erotic friendship. Regardless, the point is that I treat my friends like they are romantic partners. Our relationships demand the kind of attention that romantic partners do as well, and in different circumstances, I could totally see raising a family with my friend(s) as a not-quite-platonic-but-mostly-platonic family. I also carry old relationships into new ones. Like, there are people I just never stopped loving and never really broke up with, and when I talk about them I will do so with an active love, when I see them, we may have sex for three days and pretend like we are still in the same relationship as before, and we kind of are.

I don't need anybody to accept all these conditions of me as part of dating or loving me, I need the person who loves me to love how I love, and I want to love how a person I love, loves. My husband, he doesn't have the same feelings as I do. He has dalliances with other people. He is loving, affectionate, communicative, available and respectful in his relationships with others but he is mono-romantic. He can only love one person at a time. Can he love other people by me? It is actually not for me to decide, but he is fairly confident in who he is, and the fact that he doesn't want to love other people doesn't make him want to make me conform to the same narrative, and I don't feel guilty because I love more people than he does. He delights in my love for other people. I delight in his flirtation or passion for another. He delights in my ability to loose my heart on a walk, I delight in the joy his brand of loyalty makes him feel. I love him for who he is and how he loves. He loves me for who I am and how I love.

Because that is really it, poly is not just how I have relationships, not even just how I love, it's part of who I am.

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