Before You Try Polyamory
Note: This article was plagiarized and ai-rewrite copied here: https://medium.com/@rfhdating/nobody-told-me-what-polyamory-would-actually-cost-me-6400c2a8818a that account appears to be attempting to use it to sell dating advice. But please be advised that I wrote the original article and mine is 100% human made. 😊
Thinking of opening your marriage? Met someone special but they are polyamorous and now you’re curious? Tired of toxic monogamy and feeling like you should try another path?
If any of that sounds like you, hi. Former polyamorist here.
And I want to do my best to give you the information I never had before I tried poly.
I’m not here to talk you into or out of poly, by the way. But I am going to be up front with one fact: the info I’m about to share might have made me change my mind if I’d had it beforehand.
So, let’s see if it changes yours.
Who the Heck am I? (And why would you listen to me?)
Let’s start with my demographics and background, shall we? I always find it helpful to check how similar to me someone else is when reading their advice or experiences. It gives me a gauge of how helpful the information might be for me personally.
So who am I? And why would I be qualified to tell you anything about polyamory?
Hi. I’m Avion. I’m a 37-year-old queer person, assigned female at birth, and passing as a cis woman. I spent about 10 years, non-consecutively, of my life, in polyamorous relationships.
I’m pansexual and panromantic with a preference for femme-leaning people. I’m also demisexual and mega romantic for those who know how that slots in here. I’m kinky with a strong lean towards sadomasochism and a slight lean towards submission.
I’m childfree. I’m autistic but usually allistic-passing. I’m politically moderate with a few leftist (actually leftist, not American leftist) leanings. I was raised upper middle class and have managed to hang on to a moderate-lower middle class lifestyle post-adulthood.
I’m not college educated. I am “high IQ”, enough that it qualifies as its own neurodiversity. I’m a creative. I’m agnostic with simultaneous atheist and spiritual leanings. I’m nerdy. I like cats more than dogs.
I grew up religious, conservative, and was raised homeschooled by parents who both had advanced degrees (one of which was in teaching). I’m the eldest of 7 kids.
Anyway…. that’s who I am. You get the idea of who you’re talking to, I’m sure. You can use all of that info to dissect everything I say below, put it in context, and evaluate its usefulness for yourself.
So here are the things about poly I wish someone had shared with me before I got involved.
Fact 1: Poly Doesn’t Just Meet Needs, It Creates Them.
I know this warning gets put out there a lot. But I really don’t think it can be said enough. Polyamory is relationships on hard mode. But no one actually tells you why.
If you go look it up you’ll see a lot of information about polyamory requiring intense communication skills, which it does. You’ll also find bits and pieces about jealousy, emotional regulation, healing internal traumas, and the need for Google-Calendar-fu.
But if I had to say what I found to be the absolute most difficult thing about polyamory, it was not the skills required to manage my emotions, communicate with my partners, or organize my calendar. It was the fact that polyamory creates just as many needs as it meets, and sometimes more.
When I first entered polyamory I thought that it would be challenging to adjust to but would ultimately make things easier for my life and relationships. I was truly under the impression that my needs for sexual fulfillment, community connection, romantic evolution, commitment, and bonding would be more supported. The idea is that many hands make light labor, ergo more partners means more supply of resources to meet needs.
But to steal a phrase from a commercial that I’m not sure anyone but me remembers at this point: “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
All of these areas actually became more complicated. One of the things we typically get wrong about sex and social matters is to assume that our needs exist in a vacuum. They don’t.
Just like adding a new workout program to your life will change your nutritional and recovery needs, adding a new partner to your life will change your romantic and sexual needs. Adding a new community to your life will alter your needs for acceptance, validation, and individualization.
When I started poly, though there were more people to meet my needs, I also found I had more needs. This is both because I was constantly giving more, not just receiving more, and also caused by the existence of new connections in and of themselves.
To put a very concrete example down: if you are single and lonely what you need is a partner. When you fall head over heels in love with John, and then find yourself lonely on a Saturday night, do you need “a partner”? Or do you need John?
It’s normal to experience a dramatic shift in what you need and who you need it from. Maybe that kinky hot night with your new dom was amazing… but now you badly need someone to ground you and remind you that you’re smart and funny and good at things that aren’t bondage. You never cared if your wife thought you were good at cooking before but now you really, really need her to notice how hard you try at that… so you can let your dom tell you how good for nothing you are later and still enjoy it.
And no, your dom reassuring you about your cooking won’t help because…
Fact 2: The BRAIN Wants What It Wants
Turns out, your heart isn’t the only organ that makes outrageous demands from time to time. Your brain is a very complex network of conscious and unconscious associations, networks, and needs. It forms specific associations with specific people. And you do not necessarily have control over who your brain and nervous system will accept what from.
For me personally, trying to bond with new partners is extremely anxiety provoking and my brain will actively seek out additional attention from existing, established partnership bonds while trying to form a new bond. And it would seem that this is not even slightly an uncommon experience.
So the more my new boyfriend told me I was gorgeous and he couldn’t wait to bang my brains out, the more I needed my established boyfriend to tell me how much he loved my creativity and how there was no one who could keep up with his board game desires like me.
It wasn’t just a need to feel special to both people. (This is its own different thing.) This was instead a need to feel secure in who I was.
Personalities are like chemicals: when you blend them you get something new. And additionally, humans are social creatures. Our identity does not exist as an island. We triangulate who we are based on our social circles. And, regardless of what relationship anarchists like to preach, some people matter more in how we understand and perceive ourselves than others. (This is not the same as valuing them more, giving them more hierarchy, or spending more time and resources on them, by the way. A great many of us are walking around with a parent we no longer speak to as the main voice in our head dictating our identity.)
The brain not only knows all of this, it does it by default. It also badly needs to understand and like who it is, or who it thinks you are.
In my experience, what I needed was social confirmation of an identity I could be comfortable in, supplied BY THE NEUROLOGICALLY CORRECT person. New boyfriend complimenting my creativity when I need that from my long term boyfriend would provoke anger and withdrawal, not bonding. Swapping the needs between the people out would not work. Nor would adding new people to fill the role.
And this is almost never talked about in any meaningful detail in the polyamory community. Nevertheless, it is true. When you enter poly, you will have to cope with your brain having its own system of values and identity needs and those frequently will not line up with what would be ideal for the situation.
At the end of the day your brain does not care what your ethics are, what you agreed to, or who you wish you were. You’re not an animal. You’re in control. And you can make choices accordingly. But the stress of an unsatisfied, bonding-thwarted brain trying to stabilize identity will never go away. And you’re not necessarily going to be able to move the needle on the things that trigger that stress.
Bare minimum, most people will need a solid, permanent coping mechanism for this stress. Most people except one group that is…
Fact 3: Narcissists Love The Poly Playground
Okay. Just to be real; I hate the modern day internet trend of calling everyone who is so much as moderately inconvenient to the person posting a “narcissist”. So I want to be clear in this section.
I am not talking about people who are a little over-confident, a bit impressed with themselves, or kind of assholes. Polyamory as a community has plenty of all of those.
But in this case I’m talking about low-empathy, low-attachment, low-remorse, exploitative, manipulative, dishonest, self-centering people. People who meet the “checklist” for an actual personality disorder. That’s who we are discussing.
And there are a lot of them in poly. God, so many.
Secondarily, I need to explain that we aren’t talking about people who just love to have unsustainable amounts of partners. Those people are problematic but not necessarily narcissistic.
The narcissists who thrive in the poly community actually aren’t there for polyamory. In my experience they don’t tend to make particularly good polyamorists. They don’t even especially care about the idea of having multiple partners. Frequently they have one or even zero partners.
So why are they even here?
Because they are predators, and poly people all too often make really good prey. (We will discuss this in a moment.) And poly culture supplies lots of great places to hide predation.
The narcissists that join poly are usually here to build cults of personality. They are there to be “teachers”. They write books, blogs, and essays. They are friendly and quick to welcome that new couple (especially the one of them who’s younger and more conventionally attractive), into the circle.
Culturally we have a somewhat idiotic idea that narcissists are in some way substantially handicapped in understanding the emotions of other people. This might be true in the world in general but in the poly community it absolutely is not. Why? Because the poly community provides so much detailed, granular, vocabulary rich information on the internal emotional realities of normal humans.
The narcissists will gobble that stuff up. They are frequently the ones who are most educated, most skillful, and most able to show off insider language. To new people coming in, and even to more experienced polyamorists, they sound dedicated and intelligent and sincere.
The reality is of course very different. These people are, at their core, looking for an environment where they can obtain power, control, and insulate themselves from accountability. They typically do this using a combination of “buck passing”, “let me help you”, “poly conga line”, and semantic abuse. (I will define all of those terms in another article but the names will give you a basic idea of what’s going on here.)
One thing that I personally ran into a lot with the narcissistic people I encountered in the polyamory community was the desire to break me away from existing, non-polyamorous support structures. Just like any standard abuser, they want to isolate you from protection. But these particular bad actors will start by defining polyamory as the in group and everyone else as the outgroup and subtly or overly encouraging that you disconnect from the people who are not inside of polyamory.
They also get really aggressive about pushing books. Multiple times during my time in the poly community there would be a book that suddenly was really popular not on a global or internet level but inside of a small pocket of the local community. Everybody was reading it. Everybody was passing it around. And when you finally got around to tracing it back to the original source it was always a somewhat beaten down partner of one of the people who was known to be an “educator” and a “thought leader” in the little local pocket.
They will sometimes acquire partners who are specifically a little unstable in mental or physical health and then utilize those people to exert influence over the rest of a group.
And the real problem is that it’s so difficult to spot these people until after they have done immense harm. Are they gaslighting you, or are they using radical transparency? Are they making you look crazy in front of the group when you complain, or are they holding you accountable for actions that affect the community? Are they manipulating you to support a project or point of view that you don’t agree with, or are they asking for your support as a loving partner? Did they abandon you when you desperately needed help for a legitimate emergency, or were they taking care of their human needs because they are a person too?
That last one is a big one that people need to know, not just about narcissists.
Fact 4: Poly Over People is The Watch Word
I actually feel like most of the polyamorous people I know will be with me right up until I make this specific allegation. I apologize to those of you who are my friends. But I do still believe I am correct to say this. And for at least a couple of you, it has come from watching your personal behavior.
There was a commonly touted philosophy inside the polyamory community that you are never, ever, under any circumstances permitted to stand in between one of your partners and their access to polyamory itself. Not for any reason. Not even temporarily. To do so is a major breach of ethics and anyone who attempts to do that is, by default, in the wrong.
Obviously this covers some pretty normal ground like “my husband and I agreed to be polyamorous but every time I try to go on a date he picks a fight and says I have to stay home so we can reconnect”. I don’t care if you’re polyamorous or not. Almost anyone can look at that and say “that’s some bullshit right there”.
But the idea of never being permitted to get in between your partner and non-monogamy extends a lot farther.
For me personally it took the following forms in multiple different experiences:
I had a brand new boyfriend who left his wife in the hospital while she was actively going through a major medical incident so that he could come and hang out with me. He assured me that she would be fine with it if he had asked her. He had not asked her. When I made him do so, she told him in no uncertain terms that she was not OK with him hanging out with a new partner while her life was in danger, thank you very fucking much. (I didn’t blame her one bit, by the way.)
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I had a situation where a woman that I was casually dating chose to miss her husband’s military promotion ceremony in order to be in bed with me. I didn’t know about this until after it was over. I dumped her for it.
I had a dear friend who was also at the time non-monogamous call me in tears because she had just gotten word that her mother had passed away and she wanted to go to the funeral. But her husband was presently on a weekend trip with one of his other partners. And when she had called him to ask if he could come home so she could do that he said “look, I have other people in my life who are important. I can’t just abandon them for you.” Her mom was dead, she needed her husband. He was on vacation, he felt that was more important.
And here’s something really important about all of those interactions. When those situations were brought before the community, the community sided with the person who wanted to focus non-monogamous activities, and chastised the person who was in sans partner during an intense event.
I would strongly encourage any person who is thinking of getting involved in polyamory to consider this part very carefully because it is going to play a role in your relationships at some point. This is a when, not an if.
And just to make it a little more complicated there’s one more thing you need to know. It’s not entirely unfair that the community takes this attitude because….
Fact 5: Conflicting Needs Produce Real World Trauma
Here I come to introduce to you what is unquestionably the ugliest piece of truth in both relationships in general and non-monogamy in particular.
Love, romance, sex, committed relationships of all varieties, these things are deeply connected to our sense of self, our sense of stability and security, and are coping mechanisms for the normal stresses of life. This is completely, totally, normal.
And there is no amount of therapy, self-help books, or personal gaslighting that will change the fact that these relationships are very important and have a huge impact on us. It doesn’t matter how many of them we have: it doesn’t matter if relationship anarchists would like to scream their heads off that this isn’t true.
So why do I go to such a huge length to emphasize that? It’s because the sad truth is that when we are in these types of connections with people, conflicting needs can produce real, lasting, trauma.
Everyone can recover from having conflicting needs with a partner a few times. But when the conflict between what you need and what I need becomes chronic, that does real, actual damage. And even worse: it’s not just about the person whose needs are not getting met. The person who is unable to meet those needs also feels the sting of trauma, and if they are normal, a sense of remorse and inadequacy.
Now the normal, healthy human way to deal with this is to talk it out, forgive, look for new ways to get needs met, maneuver some things around, renegotiate, etc. In fact this is how a lot of people wind up in polyamory. (A truly terrible idea which I will discuss in just a moment.)
For most healthy relationships there will be a certain amount of scar tissue, but everyone is doing their best and acting in good faith. And sincere effort and good intentions do a lot to prevent unnecessary damage and to heal the damage that does happen.
Monogamous relationships are a little bit safer in this particular area because while we do still face trauma from unmet needs and consistent disappointment, we also roll fewer dice for the number of people and times we encounter those problems. Just two people in a relationship can be remarkably complicated when it comes to getting everyone’s needs met in an acceptable way. But most of the time most people can figure it out with a little bit of patience, forgiveness, and maybe wise coaching.
But what about if you have three or four partners? What if every need you have would require someone else going without in order for you to be satisfied? What if everything you can do to satisfy any partner would require another partner being left behind? What if there is no such thing as any solution that leaves everyone fulfilled and unharmed?
Now what if it’s like that… forever. What if there’s never going to be a time when it’s not like this? What if there will never be a way to catch back up on the withdrawals you’ve made in these relationships? What if you will never have enough bandwidth to deposit back in?
Poly will provide you with a lot of opportunities to try to solve that ethical knot. When Partner A needs your full attention because they are overwhelmed with shared home life, and Partner B needs your romantic attention because they are deep into NRE (new relationship energy) bonding with you, and you need someone to give you 17 orgasms and a snack and not bug you for a few hours afterwards… and everyone in the situation has fragile mental health…
And everyone has been in some variety of this state for years.
The truth is that this does real, lasting psychological damage. For some people it makes them selfish, greedy, and controlling. For others it makes them feel deeply worthless due to their inability to meet mutually exclusive needs. For many it leads to a superficial obsession with polyamory while actually only having one partner and dressing it up as “I just haven’t found anyone else I really fell in love yet”.
Of course that last one may also just be here for the cookies…
Fact 6: You’re More Likely Lonely Than Poly.
I don’t want to branch off too far talking about the American loneliness epidemic but goddamn is it relevant here.
Loneliness has been classified as a public health emergency by more than one government at this point. People who are lonely and isolated are likely to die 10 years earlier, and in much worse health and circumstances, than people who are not.
Today, the way that we work, the way we connect online, the economic circumstances as many of us live in, the culture of dividing by political/ideological/religious/other subgroups, and the total lack of conflict resolution skills that leads to the cutting of ties over fairly minor problems have produced an intensely lonely culture in the United States. Immediately after the pandemic nearly one in three Americans said they had no close friends at all. One in five said they didn’t know anyone who could take them to the hospital in the event of an emergency. One in 10 said that they were pretty sure there wouldn’t be anyone to take care of their personal effects if they died.
As a people, Americans in particular, are being crushed under the weight of bone breaking loneliness. We are desperate for people.
And simultaneously with the rise of social media and work from home and economic factors that cause isolation, American culture in particular is dealing with the fact that we are absolutely obsessed with romantic relationships. This is one place the relationship anarchists are correct. There is way too much emphasis on the importance of romance and not nearly enough emphasis on the need for friends and community in American culture. They are absolutely right about that.
So how do you get a culture that prioritizes love, sex, and romance and deprioritizes everything else related to social matters, community, and friendship? Easy. Build community and friendships around sex and romance.
And to be blunt: that’s what 90% of the people in the polyamory community are actually there for. They don’t really want to date anyone else. They don’t really want multiple sexual partners. They don’t actually want to have to juggle multiple romantic relationships. They may or may not think any of it is hot/interesting. But the vast majority are actually there because this is a group of people they can reliably geek out about a specific topic with. The polyamory community is actually pretty good about having social events, building friendships, and allowing you to see other people face-to-face on a regular basis.
The number of times I got to witness people talking openly and sadly about how they really didn’t want to sleep with any of their partners… They wished they could just invite them over for coffee, or just catch a movie with them periodically, or just turn them into a regular pickleball partner… I literally lost count.
Most of us who are sexually and romantically average will go through the process of experiencing some level of attraction to a person who would otherwise be a platonic connection at some time in our lives. That is normal. And for most of us we look at that and go “oh, they are kind of hot.” And we have a little bit of a crush about it for a while and then we forget about it.
But polyamory has shoehorned in that little human tendency to every social situation and then cranked it up to 11. If you notice that your platonic board game partner is hot… that means that you have a desperate need to try to develop a romantic connection with them. Do you feel a sincere admiration for someone in your book club and the way that they think, speak, and interact? That’s an indication you should go to bed together.
It starts to get silly after a while.
And what I would sincerely beg anyone considering entering non-monogamy to ask is this: do you need a new lover? Or do you need some friends who will actually pick up the phone when you call?
Are you romantically unfulfilled? Or just lonely?
Is your marriage actually in crisis? Or do you just need somebody who genuinely shares your interests in a way that your spouse doesn’t to geek out with once a week?
Of course, it may be that your marriage genuinely is in crisis. That’s a real thing that happens. And that brings me to the last thing that I want to say:
Fact 7: Poly is Not A Crisis Solver
Far too many people enter polyamory as a way to solve an acute crisis of the heart, the soul, or their mental health. I was one of those people. I was one of those people multiple times.
And what I can tell you from bitter experience and from watching those in the community is this: under no circumstances is polyamory ever a solution to a crisis of any kind. Trying to use non-monogamy in any fashion to fix some sort of near collapse or personal devastation is the equivalent of trying to learn to juggle chainsaws because you just broke your leg.
Non-monogamy may have many benefits for many people. Polyamory specifically may have even more. But something that neither of them can do in any capacity is fix a crisis. They just can’t. They are too complicated, too unwieldy, too intense.
The best outcomes that I have ever seen of people who tried to use these systems to solve a crisis usually wind up as one partner in a marriage extremely happy and excited about their new non-monogamous lifestyle and the other person quietly becoming suicidal and/or making plans for a devastating divorce. And those are the good outcomes.
And please keep in mind: that’s not an outcome of polyamory. That’s an outcome of using polyamory to solve a crisis. In those stories one person got their half of the problem solved, mainly by shoving the entire problem down the other person’s throat.
For myself, my own crisis came in the form of having absorbed really toxic messaging around Christian monogamy. I wasn’t just taught one partner at a time. I was taught one man, one woman, forever, for life. No exceptions.
Also, men are lascivious dogs. Women are fragile, delicate, and require a paternalistic protection. Also it’s their fault if anything bad happens to them. Also, men are incapable of fidelity without the specific intervention of Jesus Christ.
I was expected to marry one of these men, but Christianity did a spectacularly poor job of selling. And I was expected to be one of these women who frankly sounded disgusting. And it was supposed to be me and that one man forever, for life.
Not a very encouraging thing to hear when you are queer and actively falling in love with two people at the same time. It’s also not at all useful for navigating modern dating even outside of a poly or a non-monogamous context.
I tried to run away from the toxicity of patriarchal Christianity by entering into polyamory. I thought that polyamory would be the antidote to all of the toxic things that I had been taught both that I was and that I should expect from others.
But polyamory doesn’t do that. Callback: “that’s not how any of this works”.
If you take nothing else from this piece I would encourage you to take this: if you are at a place in your life where you feel like you have run into a wall, or are facing a drop off a psychological cliff… polyamory cannot help you with that.
You may need a psychiatrist. You may need a new job. You may need a divorce. You may need an alternative religious experience that involves a lot of questionable herbal remedies and being dunked in cold water by strangers in Peru.
But you don’t need polyamory.
And at its very best, polyamory can be something that healthy, consenting people carefully orchestrate to build a meaningful and beautiful connection that includes more than two individuals. But that is a best case scenario, with experienced people, who are, all things considered, relatively stable.
If you are in an active crisis you are by definition not “relatively stable”. Adding an emotional bomb to your life is not going to help whatever you’re going through. Period.
Conclusion: How Would I Do Things Differently?
Am I trying to talk you out of going into polyamory?
Believe it or not, no. I’m really not. There are many reasons that lifestyle is not right for me. There are many reasons that community is not one I would prefer to be part of. But that doesn’t mean it’s not right for anyone.
What I have shared here is simply the list of what I would consider to be insider information that I wish somebody had given me before I got involved. Not only would it have possibly changed my decision to get involved… it would’ve changed how I approached things if I did choose to engage.
First of all, understanding what I now know about how polyamory creates additional needs, I think I would’ve worked really hard to bolster my platonic friendships and community before engaging in the non-monogamous community.
Second, I would’ve been more aware of what was going on with my brain when I went through intense periods of stress, depression, anxiety, and confusion. I would’ve tried to equip myself with tools for sorting things out faster, and reaching out to somebody to give me clarity if I needed it.
Third, I would’ve been a heck of a lot more careful who I chose to associate with inside of the community. I would’ve approached people who were really well liked and seemed to be “in charge” with a “trust but verify” attitude as opposed to going with the flow.
Fourth, I would’ve done some substantial thinking about my own capacity to meet the needs of others and what I expected from other people and done a really intense analysis of how I would be able to tell if I was living up to my own ethical standards and if my needs were actually getting met. This would’ve saved me a lot of heartbreak in the long run.
And finally, I would’ve been prepared for the reality that polyamory just simply doesn’t do everything. It is not a cure all. It’s a complicated, high skill, high risk, high reward system that requires stability, competency, and incredible levels of personal work ethic to engage with in a positive and safe way.
Would all of that have meant that I chose not to be part of polyamory? I don’t know. There is a legitimate chance that if I’d been aware of all of this upfront I would still be in a polyamorous relationship.
Maybe me sharing this will allow somebody else to think ahead, prepare properly, and build a beautiful, non-monogamous life.
Or possibly it will simply let somebody know that polyamory is not for them, and spare them the heartbreak and trauma I went through.
Either way, I hope it helps.
