How to Disclose Your Non-Monogamy on a Dating App

Kate Sloan

While I’ve been “non-monogamous in theory” for years, I have limited experience being non-monogamous in practice. I recently started dating someone who has been polyamorous for a while, and has two steady partners other than me – and while it’s been difficult, I’m viewing it as an invitation to step up to the plate and take on the challenge I’ve claimed to want for ages. I am finally going to learn some real-life poly skills and see if I can hack it.

One of the first challenges I’ve come up against – other than my old friends, jealousy, greed, and anxiety – is figuring out how to pursue other dates ethically and honestly. I don’t want to downplay or lie about the existence of my boyfriend, but I also don’t want to make new potential beaux feel like there’s no room for them in my life. I don’t want to spend too much time and energy explaining polyamory to diehard monogamists, nor do I want to exclude people who’ve been monogamous thus far but are curious about their other options.

So many considerations! So let’s start with something small: how to communicate on your dating profile that you are, indeed, polyamorous. Here are some suggestions…

Choose your venue wisely. OkCupid and Tinder are full of young and/or socially liberal people, so you may have better luck with those than you would with services geared toward older folks seeking a marriage-track relationship, like Match and eHarmony. If you want to skip the hassle of disclosing your non-monogamy altogether, you could join a dating site designed specifically for non-monogamous people, like SwingTowns.

Consider what level of privacy you need. Whether because of your career, your family, or some other factor, you might not feel comfortable telling the entire internet that you’re non-monogamous. If that’s the case, it might be best for you to use dating sites where your profile isn’t publicly visible, or that have that option (on OkCupid, for example, you can check “Only allow other members to see my profile” in the settings panel). You could also try mentioning your relationship status within your first few messages instead of disclosing it publicly on your profile, though this is likely to be a lot of extra work on your part when monogamous folks decide to respectfully (or not-so-respectfully) ghost you afterward.

Use the app’s built-in relationship status feature, if it has one. Some dating sites allow you to set your relationship status alongside other relevant info like your gender and sexual orientation. Indicating your non-monogamous status makes it easier for monogamous people to filter you out of their search results, and communicates your “deal” to any profile-lurkers at a glance. However, some people don’t read this info (and some dating apps, like Tinder, don’t even have a structured way for you to provide it), so you may still need to do the legwork of explaining yourself in messages after all.

List your important identities upfront. Lots of people I asked on Twitter said this is their main strategy in online-dating while poly: they roll out their most vital identity words in the opening paragraph(s) of their profile. This might look a lot like my current Twitter bio: “Cis bi kinky non-monogamous femme feminist.” I think these are all important things for people to know, especially if they’re considering dating me. Front-loading this info makes it likelier that your potential paramours will actually read it, and will hopefully spare you some grief and lots of time and energy.

Define your terms. Some people don’t have a precise idea of what “polyamorous” means (let alone other non-monogamy terms like “swinger,” “polyfidelity,” “solo poly” or “primary partner”), so it’s helpful to explain exactly what you mean. For example, my Tinder bio currently includes this: “I’m poly: dating someone rad, and looking for dates/adventures/potential relationships with other cuties.” This hopefully reduces some of the stigma, anxiety, and confusion that might fill someone’s head when they read the word “poly” and aren’t sure what it means. It’s a succinct summary of how I am currently doing poly, and what that might mean for my partners.

Be prepared to explain yourself. Even if you think you’ve been clear in your profile text, folks still might have additional questions. Of course, you don’t have to answer missives you find rude, invasive, or exhausting – but it is part of ethical non-monogamy to ensure people know what they’re getting into before they get into it. (Informed, enthusiastic consent, and all that!) These convos might happen in your first few messages, or on your first few dates, but they should happen at some point. Set boundaries, establish expectations, talk about feelings. It’s all part of the process!

Unmatch ruthlessly as needed. Some people will be jerks about you being non-monogamous. That’s just a fact of life as any kind of “sexual deviant,” unfortunately. But you don’t have to put up with it. Hit “unmatch” or “block” or “report” or whatever the site-specific equivalent is, and move on with your day. Fuck the haterz.

Non-monogamous folks: what are your best tips for disclosing and discussing your non-monogamy on a dating site/app? Got any horror stories or success stories to share?

Heads up: this post was sponsored, and as always, all writing and opinions are my own.

FYI: Still Bi

Kate Sloan

It’s Pride Month, my darlings; a time to reflect
On which values we value, which folks we protect.

But sadly, this month, I’ve felt flooded with doubt
Though I’m prideful as ever, and still just as “out.”

I’m bisexual, see. It’s a comfortable label.
My life may transform, but that word remains stable.

But other queers argue I’m being bi “badly.”
“Be queerer!” they yell. “But I am,” I say, sadly.

Yeah, I mostly date dudes, but that’s not the whole story.
My attractions are manifold. Sex strictures bore me.

Queers call me “straight” when I date a cis guy,
Or dress like a femme – but I’m still fucking bi.

They called me a lesbian when I “looked more queer,”
But hey, you know what? Still bi over here.

Whatever I do, and wherever I go,
I’m neither a homo nor a hetero.

I’m bi through and through. One hundred percent.
I’m neither confused nor a fraud. I’m content.

Whoever I date and whoever I bone,
I’m still always bi, and I let it be known.

Don’t tell me I’m fake or I’m “not queer enough.”
I’m bi. You don’t like my approach to it? Tough.

My identity’s constant, wherever I am:
On my blog, on my podcast, and everywhere. Bam!

So biphobes, fuck off. Here’s a big FYI:
I’ll always be queer and I’ll always be bi.

5 Ways I Flirt As a Submissive

Kate Sloan

1. Unprompted service. Three weeks ago, we went out to lunch and you ordered a Mill Street lager. Tonight, I show up for our scheduled fuckdate at your house, carrying a six-pack of Mill Street lagers. If you were a vanilla boy, maybe you’d seem surprised, or embarrassed that you didn’t get me anything in return. But you’re a dom perv who gets off on my diligent service, so you just take the beers from me, put them in the fridge, and say, “That was very good of you.” I quiver in my boots.

Halfway through explaining to a customer how a particular vibrator works, you accidentally drop its instruction manual on the sex shop’s tile floor. Without speaking, interrupting your pitch, or even giving it any thought, I kneel down and scoop up the booklet from under the toy counter where it fell. “Oh, you don’t have to –” you start, but then I hand it to you from a kneeling position before you, we lock eyes, you set your jaw, and you murmur with a small smile, “Thanks.”

2. Complimenting your dominant qualities. “Time to sweep and mop,” you bark, when there’s an hour left til closing time. Then your tone softens: “Sorry, that was bossy. Time to sweep and mop, please.”

En route to the supply closet to grab the broom, I retort over my shoulder, “It’s okay; I like it when you’re bossy.” I hear the pause as you process this, and then you reply, “I’m not sure how to take that…” I grin. And then I get to sweepin’.

Your cat is being an asshole: scratching at the door, yowling incessantly, fucking shit up. You say his name sharply, in the tone of a dad who’s just walked in on his kid drinking chocolate milk straight from the carton.

“I’m really weirdly into it when you get dom-y with the cat,” I enthuse swoonily. Your eyes slide over to me and narrow in mild confusion. “Yeah?” you say, and I nod, wishing you’d speak to me sometime with the sternness you reserve for misbehaving calicos.

3. Alluding to past experiences. At her request, you hit our friend with a leather riding crop so she can see what it feels like. “Wow! I’m surprised that didn’t leave a bruise,” she says, minutes later, as she examines the spot in a mirror. “Crops don’t usually bruise that much,” you and I both start to say, in different words but echoing the same sentiment. Our eyes meet. I feel a hot pop of recognition – the electric familiarity that clicks into gear when kinksters spot fellow kinksters. Oh, hello.

My friend finishes our lengthy spanking session, and I push myself up off the sex club’s gorgeous leather spanking bench, freshly and darkly bruised. “How was that?” you ask. “A good warm-up?” It’s a joke, but it’s also a challenge, a barometer, a test.

“I’ve had worse,” I reply with a saucy shrug. And then I take the paddle my friend was hitting me with and place it in your hands. I don’t know what you’ll do with it, if anything, but I’m curious to find out.

4. Honorifics. We hug goodbye outside the diner after a cozy breakfast. “Be good,” you tell me as we part ways. I shout back, “Yes, sir!” and watch the bemused smile bloom on your face.

We’re at a party, and I make a dumb joke that doesn’t land quite right. Someone calls me an awkward turtle, and I shake my head and inform them, “I’m not a turtle. I am an awkward bunny.”

You look at me with cool appraisal and say, “A bunny, huh? Yeah, I can see that.”

How did you know that “bunny” is one of my kink honorifics, despite the totally vanilla nature of the conversation in which it appeared? I have no idea. You have sub-dar, apparently. And it’s working. I attempt to swallow the sudden dry lump in my throat, and reiterate: “Yeah. I’m a bunny.”

5. “Is that an order?” We tread water in the heated pool under the stars. “Is the deep end really deep?” I ask conversationally, and you say, “Nah. You could definitely swim to the end and back, no problem.”

I bite my lip. “Are you telling me to do that?”

“No,” you say immediately, “you don’t have to,” and I exhale the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I do it anyway, like it’s a dare from the dom you unfortunately aren’t.

Plotting a threesome via text, I mention that multiple orgasms aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse. “What if you took a break from masturbating for a few days beforehand?” you posit. “Maybe we could get 3 out of ya ;)”

I pause, stare at my phone screen, try to breathe. And then I type a phrase so loaded for me, I’m almost scared to make it real by committing it to text. “Is that an order? ;)”

There is a minute of silence during which I become convinced I have scared you away forever by wanting too much from you, climbing too high on the kink ladder while you’re still meandering through the vanilla wilds below. But then your reply comes back: “That is an order. Are you gonna be a good girl and wait a few days for my cock?”

I scream at my phone, throw it across the room, and cover my face with my hands. I am going to be such a good girl for you, sir.

Review: BMS Factory Swan Wand

Kate Sloan

Here’s a fact about the BMS Factory Swan Wand: I once knew a super-hot sex toy salesperson who told me the Swan Wand was his favorite toy.

This piqued my interest on two levels. Firstly, when someone whose literal job it is to know about sex toys tells you their favorite toy – and indeed, he was hyper-knowledgeable about toys, moreso even than me – they probably know what they’re talking about. And secondly, when a hot person tells you about a sex toy they love, it’s hard not to imagine them using it. On themselves. On other people. On you. Whatever.

I didn’t own a Swan Wand at the time. But he kept telling me to buy it. And his very endorsement made me want to do what he said. (It certainly helped that he was pretty dommy, too.)

Here’s another fact about the Swan Wand: I once mistook it for a motor vehicle.

I had the vibe with me when I got on a streetcar one night, and must have bumped it through the side of my bag as I sat down. It jolted to life but I 100% assumed it was the streetcar’s thrumming motor I felt against my elbow. I had earbuds in, so I couldn’t hear the wand clattering against the other contents of my purse. It took me over ten minutes to realize what had happened. The Swan Wand’s vibrations are that strong and rumbly. (I cringe to imagine what the other streetcar-riders around me thought was going on in my bag.)

Though this vibe has the word “wand” in its name and often appears in the “wand vibes” section on sex toy websites, it’s not really a wand in the traditional sense; it’s more of a super-powered G-spot vibe. I can take the smaller (1.5″ diameter) end in my vag comfortably with a good water-based lube, though I wish it was a little more tapered to allow for easier insertion without warm-up. The larger end, by contrast, has a 2.5″ diameter – so, while some people could insert it, I have not attempted it and tend to use that end more like I’d use an actual wand vibe: for broad, general stimulation over my whole vulva.

Each end of the Swan Wand has its own motor, and they feel quite different from each other – so cool! While both motors are remarkably strong and rumbly, the one on the larger end is rumblier: I can feel it physically thrumming against me like a jaguar that’s swallowed a jackhammer. However, despite this, I still use the smaller end far more often, because my clit prefers its pinpointed shape.

The Swan Wand is rechargeable (with a surprisingly long-lasting charge for a dual-motor toy), fully waterproof, and has a convenient travel lock (which I foolishly forgot to turn on before the vibe clattered to life in my bag that day on the streetcar, natch). There’s a lot to love about it. But I have a couple issues with it that make it unlikely to become a go-to for me.

First: the controls. The Swan Wand has two buttons – one to control each motor – and they both work the same way: you press once to turn the motor on, press additional times to scroll through the toy’s 7 vibration functions, or press and hold to increase the vibration speed. The toy’s LED light flashes gradually faster as the vibration speed increases, and then turns solid once you’ve reached the max speed. At any point while on a higher speed, you can press the button again to bring the vibe back down to the speed you started at – a useful function for people like me who get overstimulated easily and need to dial things back multiple times in a session.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to get used to this controls scheme. I keep accidentally hitting the button instead of holding it down, so I’ll flip to a different vibration pattern at the key moment when I needed to boost the speed. Additionally, I find it hard to get to the exact speed I’m looking for, because the press-and-hold system is imprecise if you have a somewhat slow reaction time like me. I would much prefer a simple “this button increases the speed, this one decreases it” interface.

Turning the vibrator off entails pressing both its buttons at the same time – a not-entirely-intuitive move for many. (God, I can’t even tell you how many times I had to help a blushing customer shut off our demo Swan Wand at the sex shop where I used to work.)

My other major issue with the Swan Wand is that the intense vibrations travel throughout the toy’s entire body, so you feel them in your hand the whole time you’re using the toy. This isn’t as annoying as it would be if the vibe was buzzier and more numbing, but it’s still pretty annoying, and often puts me off of using this toy when I would otherwise like to.

That said, you’re probably not gonna find a stronger G-spot vibe than this one. I find it stronger and rumblier than some of the industry’s other major contenders, like the Lelo second-generation G-spot vibes, We-Vibe insertables, and Fun Factory G4 and G5 vibes. G-spots typically respond best to deep vibrations such as these, rather than more surface-level ones – so if you already know you like vibration on your G-spot and want to kick it up a notch, the Swan Wand would be a great investment.

But I use vibrators externally almost exclusively, and this one is a bit too hand-numbing and unintuitive to operate, so I’ll probably only reach for it when I need a lot of power without much finesse.

 

Thank you to Adam & Eve for providing this toy for me to review, and for sponsoring this post! The discount code “GIRLY” will get you 50% off almost any one item on their site – including this vibrator, if you choose to buy it – as well as free shipping on your entire order in the U.S. and Canada. 

The Unbearable Bliss of the Trifuckta

Kate Sloan

Author’s note: I wrote this a while ago, so the relationships here described are no longer current – but I still love this piece and wanted you to read it!

 

The word first popped into my head two summers ago. Trifuckta. A trio of people you are banging on the regular. Of course.

It was a goofy portmanteau, sure. But it was also something I desperately wanted. At the time, I didn’t even have one steady partner, let alone three – but I felt the deep desire buzzing in my bones. Yes. That.

It would be another year before I materialized a trifuckta of my very own. It fell together quickly, almost magically: a first few dates with a handsome nerd from Twitter, a tentative flirtation with a lawyer I’d met at a party, and a reunion with my on-and-off fuckbuddy – and suddenly, I found myself seeing three men in regular rotation, all of them aware of each other and A-OK with their role in my life. Every day was blissful. My heart felt full.

What I loved most about this arrangement was that each partner brought out different sides of me. This had long been a perceived benefit of #PolyLyfe for me, and I was elated to discover it was as lovely as I’d anticipated. I gave them code names – “Almost-Boyfriend,” “Lawyer Beau,” and simply “FWB” – and talked about them gleefully on Twitter (with their consent). Almost-Boyfriend treated me with tender revere, got me high in his roomy apartment, let me cuddle his cat while we talked about sci-fi and politics, and fucked me languidly in his cozy bed. Lawyer Beau took me out on drinks-dates and peered seriously at me from across the table while we discussed feminism and morality. And FWB, as always, regularly made me laugh so hard I cried and made me come so hard I entered the astral plane. It was a beautiful few weeks.

Unfortunately, it all dissolved as quickly as it had begun. In the course of one week, my entire trifuckta imploded. First, there was the bitter break-up with Almost-Boyfriend, both of us crying numbly over the phone. Then there was the revelation that Lawyer Beau had been lying to me about his poly status and was actually committed monogamously to someone else. And then – the kicker – there was the tearful conversation with my FWB after a party, where I admitted I was in love with him, he admitted he knew, and we decided to take some time off bangin’ each other. To say the least, I was crushed.

The way I remember it, I barely got out of bed for days. Hygiene and nutrition fell by the wayside. Nothing seemed worth doing anymore. Because I had lost these three men who had been so important to me, and I had also lost the parts of myself they each brought to the surface.

Now it’s many months later, and I’m thinking about this episode again, because another trifuckta is materializing in my life. It is rising from the ashes of my old trio, tentative and slow. There’s the salt-and-pepper good-natured dork I sometimes bang at a sex club and make out with in a swimming pool, the buff perv who fucks the coherence out of me late at night, and the articulate cutie who kisses me with a thoughtful slowness and makes me laugh during post-coital cuddles.

Once again, I’m struck by how they each bring out different sides of my personality. A sardonic wit, a happy-go-lucky sass, an erudite poise. But I’m also struck by how these sides aren’t that different. I feel more unified with this particular trifuckta than I did with my last one. Maybe that means I’m growing up, consolidating, gaining confidence in my whole self. That’s an important lesson too.

None of these people are romantically committed to me, nor would I necessarily want them to be. I declared on Twitter recently that I was having good compersion feelz about these relationships – enjoying the way these men congratulate me on my good dates with other dudes, or cheer me on when I get fucked well by someone else – but that this was a preview of the poly life I hope to lead someday, rather than a poly life in and of itself. “It sounds like you’re already poly,” some followers pointed out. But while it’s true that I’m non-monogamous, and that polyamory may be my romantic orientation rather than just my chosen relationship style, these connections are missing the “-amory” part of the equation. I’m fond of these men, but we’re just bangin’. I’m holding out hope for a future trifuckta that’s laced with romance, too – love, commitment, and intimacy that lasts beyond the bounds of our sexual encounters.

I’m even more aware than usual, lately, that what I’m looking for now is a romantic, primary-partnership type of thing. And there is a part of me that thinks the universe would deliver this to me more quickly if I cut off all my other sexual entanglements. “You must make room for what you want to attract before it can show up,” as some of my spiritual mentors have advised.

But another part of me believes I deserve good sex while I’m waiting for my Actual Goddamn Prince(s) Charming to drift on over. I deserve sweet slow kisses, late-night laughs, and some semblance of intimacy. I deserve a precious preview of the poly life I hope to cultivate. I deserve my trifuckta.

It may not be perfect, or exactly what I want, but few things in life ever are. So for now, I’m happy, and cozy, and nearly satisfied.