Thinking of going Polyamorous?

My husband and I have been together for nearly a decade. We’ve been ethically non-monogamous or polyamorous for five of those years. Trust me when I say that neither of us could have ever predicted this at the start of our relationship. We were your average monogamous but very open-minded couple who didn’t really know any polyamorous people (on my part, outside of a few less than savoury dudes in college who used the term to mean “I can have sex with anyone I want and you’re not allowed to get mad at me because ‘polyamory’).

Our journey from the couple next door to the couple next door with a bunch of partners definitely didn’t happen over night and looking back now, there are a lot of things I wish i would have understood more fully before I started out. Things that would have smoothed the road on my journey a little bit more, though I can say this: the bumps taught me a lot!

If you’re looking to dip your toe into the wonderful world of open relationships or polyamory, please learn from my mistakes and consider these important factors before you dive in.

1. What are you hoping to get out of this arrangement?

Is it just the excitement of sex or flirting with someone other than your partner? If so, swinging or a more open-relationship style of arrangement might be a better fit for you. Polyamory is about more than just sex — a lot more — and if that’s not what you’re looking for, then it’s something you need to make clear from the outset. If you’re after more of an emotional, long-term connection with another person or group of people, then polyamory is the direction you’re likely headed.

2. Understand the lingo

Once you have a basic idea of what you’re looking for, you’ll want to make sure you know how to articulate it in the interest of being fair to the other parties involved. Swinging, open relationships, polyamory and kink are all different things, though there is some overlap, and you’ll want to understand exactly what they are if you’re going to be looking for like-minded partners, particularly using online singles sites or apps. And how do you do that? Glad you asked!

3. Do your research

Before you even think about reaching out to other couples, do yourself, your partner, and any future partners you might have a favour and do some research on the options available to you. If you’re interested in pursuing any kind of non-monogamy, I’d recommend the bible of alternative relationships — The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. It’s continually being updated with helpful new editions that move with the times, and it can help you decide if polyamory or ethnical non-monogamy is right for you. From there, there are plenty of wonderful books and online resources to explore. My personal favourites (aside from The Ethical Slut) are More Than Two by Franklin Veaux, The Polyamorists Next Door by Elizabeth Sheff and The Smart Girl’s Guide to Polyamory by Dedeker Winston.

Please note — if you’re more interested in the kink side of things, it’s an entirely different field of research and one that’s not my personal area of expertise. Many of these books will touch on it, but further solo exploration will likely be necessary.

4. Have difficult conversations

If you and your partner have already floated the idea of non-monogamy, you’ll want to revisit it and carefully go over all aspects of opening your relationship that might present problems. This can be a difficult conversation, so it’s a good idea to pick a time when you both have plenty of privacy and the opportunity to take a breather if you need it. A quiet Friday night at home over a bottle of wine is an excellent idea.

Maybe the idea of your partner having sex or being intimate with someone else brings up pain-points in your own sex life or your own understanding of your sexuality. Maybe you’re afraid your partner will meet someone they desire or love more than you. Maybe you’re afraid they’ll leave you. Speak up about these feelings and don’t dismiss your partner’s concerns when they bring them up with you in return.

If you are the one wanting to broach the subject of non-monogamy in a couple initially, it can be very scary to be the first to speak up. Be sure to make it clear to your partner that you are happy in your relationship and this isn’t about the lack of anything in your relationship, but rather enrichment. Be ready to reassure your partner and explain yourself without getting upset. Most important of all — be honest. If non-monogamy is something you really want, you owe it to your partner to be completely transparent about it so they can decide what they want to do with all the facts in hand.

5. Get ready to improve your communication

Maybe you and your partner consider yourselves pretty great at communication. That’s great! My partner and I felt that way too. But I’m here to tell you that no matter how adept you consider yourself at communicating with your partner, once you begin the path to ethical non-monogamy, it’s about to get ramped up to a degree you never thought possible. Ethnical non-monogamy requires a LOT of communication. It is constant, it is thorough, and it is never-ending. In order to be successful as a non-monogamous couple, you will need to check in with each other regularly about logistics, about how each party is feeling, about any issues that have arisen or that you are concerned might arise, about the future and about how things are going right now. I call them State of the Union conversations. You’ll have to get used to them.

If you have any issues with communication, you will want to resolve them before you get started. Whether that means reading books about effective relationship communication or undertaking some couples therapy, it absolutely must be ticked off your list before you embark on your non-monogamous journey.

6. Learn to sit with difficult emotions

Opening up your relationship and going against what society dictates a normal, healthy relationship should look like can be extremely uncomfortable. It will bring up feelings that we would often rather not experience — you might feel jealous, anxious, sad, even angry by the idea of your partner being with someone else. I have been doing this for some time now and consider opening my relationship to be one of the best things my partner and I ever did for our relationship, but that doesn’t mean I still don’t experience these feelings sometimes. I absolutely do! But as you learn with mindfulness, just because your brain is telling you that you are having these feelings, it doesn’t mean you have to surrender yourself to them.

Rather, what ethical non-monogamy teaches you is to sit with these feelings and begin to pull their thread, so to speak, until you uncover the underlying issue behind them. Relating to that…

7. Learn to take ownership of your feelings

Say my husband has a date on a Friday night, and I don’t. Maybe I’ve had a tough week, maybe I recently had a relationship of my own end. Either way, I’m in a more fragile than usual emotional state. Because of this, I might notice some feelings of jealousy, or anger, or self-pity bubbling to the surface of my mind. Before I started on my path to ethical non-monogamy, the ownership of these feelings would not have been entirely my own. I would have given some ownership to my partner — i.e. “You are making me feel this way, and you are responsible for dealing with it at least as much as I am.”

Rarely the case.

Jealousy, as I quickly learned, is often due to something that’s happening inside you, not something that’s happening to you. Where once I might have turned this around on my husband and messaged him to interrupt his date, or given him a passive aggressive comment about “leaving your poor wife all alone on a Friday night” on his way out the door, now I sit with my feelings because I recognise that they are mine, and not his. It is not about the fact that he is going out to enjoy his night while I am stuck at home (because some other night, our situations are sure to be reversed.) What it’s really about is me feeling lonely and emotionally vulnerable, and nobody is responsible for taking care of those feelings but me.

It is impossible to be effectively ethically non-monogamous if you can’t do this, and it is something that takes a lot of practice, patience, and again, communication. Start practicing now and I promise you, you will be in better shape than I was at the beginning.

8. Be fair to all parties involved

And no, I don’t just mean you and your primary partner. Being ethically non-monogamous means considering the feelings of everyone involved, including your partner’s partner, and your own additional partners. This means there’s no immediately cutting off contact/ghosting people you’ve been seeing just because your partner has a jealous freak-out. If you are worried that this is something that might happen, you should not be in this kind of relationship. It’s simply not fair to the other parties involved. It can be easy to fall into the trap of viewing everyone outside of your primary relationship as ancillary — but regardless of whether it’s a short-term or a long-term relationship, everyone involved are real human beings, with real feelings that deserve to be respected and considered just as much as your primary partner does. It’s fine to prioritise your relationship with your primary highest — it’s not fine to treat anyone else badly because of that. Period.

This is just a taste of what I wish I’d known before I embarked on my own journey of polyamory/ethical non-monogamy and they are things I have learned well over the course of my relationship with my husband and with others. If you’d like to hear more, I’ll be continuing this series by looking each of these topics in a more in-depth article in the following weeks and I’m always happy to answer any questions you might have within them. Even though I’ve been ethically non-monogamous for some time now, I’m still constantly learning and growing, as are my relationships, and I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with you all!

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