non-monogamy

Polyamory & Trauma Are a Tricky Combination, But These Resources Can Help

Kate Sloan
Sometimes my traumatized heart feels like a stormy sea.

In mid-2017, I started having weird episodes when my then-boyfriend would go on dates with one of his other partners. I’m using the phrase “weird episodes” here because I wasn’t sure what to call them at the time – they felt more panicky and distressing than mere jealousy, but did not manifest like actual panic attacks, as far as I could tell. During those episodes, I felt like I was dying, and like I was an ugly failure, and like I had just been informed by the love of my life that they didn’t care about me and were leaving. Those emotions felt entirely real and immediate to me, and made me utterly unable to function. They would often continue for hours or days.

I was very confused, and frankly, so was my partner. I had been polyamorous before, and this had never been an issue. Sure, I’d felt twinges of jealousy or irritation now and again when my partners would spend time with their other sweethearts, but those had always felt manageable, momentary, and easily dismissed. These new episodes were entirely different in character, and were much more debilitating to my relationship and my everyday functioning.

What I later learned, through tons of therapy, reading, journaling, chatting with polyam friends, and reflecting on my experiences, is that I am a trauma survivor and that these episodes were a trauma response. Childhood experiences of emotional abuse had amped up my nervous system and had made me hypersensitive to the threat of being unloved, unwanted, and not good enough. These feelings came up more acutely in that particular relationship because we were in a DD/lg dynamic, which brought my deepest desires to life but also brought the most vulnerable and helpless versions of me to the surface psychologically.

So when that boyfriend/daddy dom started dating someone else, without checking with me first and without taking the time to make sure both Adult Me and Little Girl Me felt okay with that decision and felt safe in our relationship, of course I started getting triggered all the time. I had deep-seated childhood trauma and was being re-traumatized repeatedly by the embodied sense that my “daddy” liked someone else better than me – a situation which wasn’t exactly helped by him constantly texting with his other partner while we were together, conveying more enthusiasm about that relationship than about ours, and telling me I was overreacting and harming him by being triggered.

Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last. But what it taught me was invaluable. The intensity of my reactions in that relationship eventually led me to seek out trauma therapy and start finally unpacking my issues. So, even though that boyfriend treated me badly, in a way I have to thank him for showing me exactly what parts of myself I needed to work on in order to someday become my truest, highest, most healed self.

 

Learning about the ways that trauma impacts polyamory has been completely transformative for me, because it has given me the tools to understand my past experiences and a road map toward happier ones. When I first entered the non-monogamy world around 2012, there was an almost libertarian-esque fervor about “taking responsibility for your own feelings.” The general prevailing attitude in the community, so far as I could tell, was that if you felt jealous, that was your issue to deal with, and your issue alone. There was very little nuance in the conversation and very little room for the idea that people’s emotional responses are not always the result of a toxic monogamy mindset and are not always fully within their control.

This can cause traumatized polyamorists to feel that they’re “broken” or “bad at polyamory” for having these responses. In many cases, they think that because they’ve been explicitly told that by judgmental partners who didn’t understand what was going on. Triggering a shame spiral in this way helps no one, and yet it was the customary approach most polyam people seemed to take when dating a traumatized person at that time.

So I’ve been delighted to see more discourse about trauma and polyamory over the past few years, and more resources popping up to explain these concepts to folks and help them have happier, healthier relationships regardless of their trauma history. I’ve gathered some of those resources below for you to peruse if you need ’em, or if you think my tale of woe sounds like something your partner or friend has gone through, or if you’re just curious. Whether you want to be non-monogamous yourself and have struggled with it due to trauma, or you just want to work through trauma that affects your relationship(s) regardless of monogamy status, I hope you find these resources as helpful as I have.

 

Workshops

• Bar none, the most helpful resource on this topic for me personally has been Clementine Morrigan’s “Trauma-Informed Polyamory” workshop. While Clementine does teach it in-person sometimes, it’s also available online as a 2.5-hour video (with optional captioning) that you can purchase, download, and watch. What’s really remarkable about this class is that it brings together a variety of modalities I think are crucial for understanding and overcoming trauma responses in polyamory. These include nervous system work (i.e. understanding how and why your nervous system gets triggered and how to get it back into a place of safety) and attachment theory (i.e. the ways that our relationships with our caregivers in childhood can affect the way we approach relationships for the rest of our lives). If you choose to only explore one resource on this list, I think it should be this one, unless something else I recommend here sounds like it would resonate more for you.

• While not trauma-focused, Reid Mihalko’s “Battling the 8-Armed Octopus of Jealousy” workshop was super helpful for me in learning more about jealousy triggers. There are a lot of different reasons why people experience jealousy, and it can be useful to understand your own triggers in this area so you can learn to work around them or create relational structures that prevent them from occurring as often. For example, I learned in this workshop that one of my biggest jealousy triggers is not feeling “special” to my partner, which is one reason why we have specific honorifics, kinks, and sex acts that we reserve only for each other and don’t do with other partners.

 

Books & Zines

• The book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Non-Monogamy by Jessica Fern has gotten a lot of attention in polyamorous communities over the past year, and for good reason. It’s a must-have guide to navigating polyamory when you or a partner is attachment-injured, i.e. experienced some kind of trauma related to their caregivers or other attachment figures at some point which continued to affect the way they feel and behave in relationships. If you’ve routinely struggled with anxiety and/or avoidant behaviors in your relationships, you might be attachment-injured and this book might help you. The thing I love most about it is that it emphasizes finding relational security through the quality of the connection, rather than through extraneous things that provide the illusion of relational security, like monogamy or strict rules. You should read this if you’re an attachment-injured person who wants to be polyamorous, or if you have a partner or potential partner who fits that description; it’ll give you a lot of strategies for calming attachment-related inner turmoil and finding a feeling of safety in your relationship(s).

• In addition to their polyamory workshop (above), Clementine Morrigan also wrote a zine called Love Without Emergency: I Want This But I Feel Like I’m Going to Die about their personal experiences with these issues. (That link is to the physical version of the zine; click here if you’d rather buy a PDF copy.) It’s less of an instructional resource and more of a calming, validating one. Sometimes I leaf through my copy when my partner is on a date, to remind myself that 1) other people experience what I’m feeling and so I’m not alone, 2) my trauma does not make me broken, and 3) there are ways out of those terrible feelings.

• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk is widely regarded as one of the best books on trauma, such that my partner and I frequently make jokes about the title when we need a moment of levity during a trauma episode (e.g. “damn, my body’s really keeping the score today, huh?!”). I haven’t had the emotional strength to read it yet, honestly, but I know that it’s largely about the ways that trauma manifests physically in the body, which is useful stuff to understand when navigating any kind of triggering situation, including those that can come up in polyamory.

• One of my all-time fave non-monogamy books in general is Building Open Relationships by Dr. Liz Powell. This one isn’t primarily trauma-focused but it does contain a lot of practical advice for navigating emotionally difficult situations that come up in polyamory, like what to do if you get anxious while your partner is out on a date or what level of detail you want to hear when your partner tells you about their dates.

• I haven’t yet had a chance to read Open Deeply: A Guide to Building Conscious, Compassionate Open Relationships by Kate Loree, but the author is trauma-savvy and it looks like it’s gonna be great.

 

Therapeutic Modalities

I’ve written before about how I used the filtering tools on PsychologyToday.com to find my therapist, by searching for practitioners who were LGBTQ-informed, kink-informed, and polyamory-informed, and who specialized in trauma. You can use that same method to find a therapist, or you can just voice a preference for particular modalities when searching for a therapist in whatever other ways are available to you. I’m no expert, but here are some modalities and strategies I’ve found helpful in healing from these issues:

• Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic model which emphasizes the existence of different “parts” of our personalities, which can be integrated through therapy. I never really used to believe in this stuff, but as I’ve been healing my trauma with the help of my therapist, I’ve noticed that my “inner child” is very wounded and needs a lot of love and compassion, which I had long been denying her by dismissing those sad, unloved feelings as stupid and irrational. Doing IFS work with my therapist is helping me reconnect with that inner child so I can “re-parent” her and help her feel safe, even when she experiences abandonment anxiety or insecurity because of my partner dating other people. If you’re interested in IFS but can’t afford/access therapy or just want to learn more, Dr. Tori Olds has an incredible series of videos about the basic principles of IFS; her work has helped me understand how this modality functions, not only emotionally but neurologically as well.

• “Somatic therapy” is a pretty broad term, as there are many therapeutic modalities that focus on the somatic, i.e. what our bodies are feeling and how that connects to our minds. However, I mention it here because it was something I specifically sought out when I wanted to heal from trauma, having noticed that modalities based on words and emotions (such as cognitive-behavioral therapy) weren’t easing my trauma responses at all. This, I learned, is because trauma is stored in parts of the mind that aren’t always consciously accessible to us, and because many people find that trauma manifests in their bodies, not just their minds. Doing somatic exercises with my therapist has been way more helpful for my trauma than CBT. Some examples of these exercises are locating the physical locus of anxiety within myself and having a “conversation” with it, or noticing while triggered that the bigness of my body means I’m an adult now and am not a powerless child anymore.

• Compassion and mindfulness. These are components of many therapeutic modalities, but I think they’re important enough to be mentioned specifically here. A lot of the work I’ve done on mindfulness, whether with the guidance of an expert or just in my own research and exploration, has been about accepting everything I’m feeling and experiencing at the present moment, including the things about myself that I normally dislike. Accepting yourself the way you are right now is a type of self-compassion, and self-compassion is vital for healing the anxieties and insecurities that can make polyamory feel impossible.

 

Other Resources

• I think reading polyamory blogs and forums can be super helpful when you’re feeling shitty about yourself for struggling with polyamory, because a lot of other people struggle with it too and have written about their struggles online. Kevin Patterson’s excellent blog Poly Role Models and the ever-insightful Poly.Land are great places to start.

• Sex educator and trauma expert Jimanekia Eborn hosts a podcast called Trauma Queen which is super validating to listen to as a trauma survivor. It’s not always focused on polyamory or relationships, but I think there’s a lot to learn from it in terms of trauma more generally.

• Jessica Fern, the author of the aforementioned book Polysecure, guested on my podcast and we had an interesting conversation about the monogamy mindset, nervous system regulation, healing from trauma, and more.

 

I’ll leave you with a metaphor that my therapist used in one of our sessions recently. Imagine you have a friend who went through a traumatic house fire as a kid. No one died or was seriously injured, but it was extremely scary and they’ve found fire very triggering ever since. But imagine that because of their ethics and values, they decided they wanted to become a firefighter. As they started training for the job, and then started fighting actual fires, what would you say to them when they kept getting triggered every day at work? What would be your advice for this person? Would you tell them to quit, or would you tell them to continue?

When my therapist asked me this, the answer seemed immediately obvious to me. “I’d tell them that the right decision would depend on whether or not they felt willing and able to put in the work to overcome that trauma,” I said. “I’d tell them they would have to think carefully about whether their values are more important than avoiding their trauma triggers. There’s no wrong answer, but they should think about it.”

My therapist said, “Exactly. And it’s the same with you and polyamory. Polyamory is very triggering for you. But you also know that you want to be polyamorous, because of your values and priorities. So the question becomes: Do you want it enough to put in the work of healing from your trauma so you can achieve your goal of being happily, healthily polyamorous?”

For the time being, I have decided that I do. So I will continue to revisit these resources, go to therapy, and work on myself. I will continue, at least for now, to fight those fires. I will continue to do the hard work I signed up for. Even when it hurts. Even when it feels impossible. Because I’m tired of being so damn scared all the time. I want to be brave and strong and healed, and I know that I can be. I just need help to get there – and, as this list has shown, there’s plenty of help to be found.

 

Do you have any resources to recommend on the subject of trauma’s interactions with polyamory? Feel free to share ’em in the comments, or let me know if you’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve recommended here. ❤️

How I Found a Kink-Positive, Polyamory-Savvy Therapist

Kate Sloan

A couple months ago, I decided I was tired of carrying around years-old trauma baggage, and wanted to start working through some of it. Blessedly, I also found myself in a stable enough financial position that, for the first time in my life, I could afford to see a therapist whose fees were not handled by the Canadian government. It was time.

I ended up finding a really rad person who is very much equipped to handle the exact problems I intend to work on. But as you may know, that can be super hard to do if you are – like me – queer, kinky, and non-monogamous. Finding a practitioner with a working knowledge of these topics – let alone someone who has lived experience in these communities – is way harder than it should be, as evidenced by the number of people who have said to me, “I’m so jealous! I can’t find a good therapist!” lately when I’ve relayed this news.

So, in the hopes of being helpful, here’s the process I went through to find my current therapist. Best of luck!

Step 1: Figure Out Your Priorities

Granted, when going through times of psychological distress, we don’t always know exactly what is causing the turmoil we feel, or what kinds of approaches might help. But if you have any sense of the therapeutic modality(/ies) you’d like to explore, that’s good to know, as most therapists have particular methodologies they like best and know the most about. I knew, for example, that I wanted someone who knew a lot about the somatic effects of trauma. I knew, too, that cognitive-behavioral therapy hadn’t been particularly helpful for these issues in the past, so I wanted someone who didn’t rely too much on that modality. And I knew I wanted someone who would push me toward actual action and change, instead of just listening to me and affirming my feelings (which is great, but not enough in my case).

I also knew that whoever I chose would have to be reasonably knowledgeable about queerness, kink, and non-monogamy (as those are pivotal parts of the traumas I wanted to examine, and of my life itself), as well as gender (since my partner is nonbinary and many people I love fall under the trans umbrella). These things were non-negotiable because a lot of my roadblocks with previous therapists had come from them having little to no experience with clients in these communities and mostly just asking me, “What do other queer/kinky/polyam people do in your situation?” which, as you can imagine, wasn’t all that useful for me.

Step 2: Filter & Search

There are several websites dedicated to cataloguing therapists who work with various subcultures and marginal communities; Poly-Friendly Professionals is one, for instance, and so is Kink-Friendly Therapy. However, I wasn’t able to find as many practitioners in my geographic area on these sites as I wanted to. (If you live in a large U.S. city, your results might be different.)

After a little Googling, I discovered that PsychologyToday.com lets you search for therapists in your area and filter them by the issues they say they’re best equipped to handle (e.g. trauma), the modalities they use (e.g. somatic), and – best of all, for people like us – the communities they say they’re allied with (e.g. gay, transgender, kinky, non-monogamous). This is a total game-changer.

I narrowed down my search with a few filters and then opened a zillion tabs of different therapists’ pages so I could have a closer look at each of them. Most profiles on the site contain information about the practitioners’ degrees and certifications, how long they’ve been practicing, and what their rates are. This ought to give you a much more specific sense of which people are well-suited to you and which aren’t.

Step 3: Narrow It Down

Because I’m a nerd, I made a spreadsheet on Google Sheets of the top contenders from my PsychologyToday search. Its columns included: name, accreditation(s), rate, modalities, relevant identities (i.e. are they themselves queer/kinky/non-monogamous?), poly competency, trauma competency, and suggested next steps (i.e. whether their profile said they offered an introductory consultation call for new potential clients). This helped me see the bigger picture and eliminate some folks who didn’t seem like an optimal fit for me.

I sent out about 10-15 emails to therapists that fit the specifications I was looking for, and explained the issues I wanted to work on. Then I waited for their responses. Some never answered at all; some told me they weren’t accepting new clients at the moment; some wrote vague emails saying they thought they could handle what I’d asked about, without actually acknowledging the words of what I’d said.

Ultimately, the therapists who stood out to me were the ones whose replies specifically mentioned the issues I’d brought up, and related those issues to their own therapeutic approach(es). I also paid attention to how I felt when reading these emails, because a therapist’s “vibe” can be an important clue as to their potential compatibility with you.

Step 4: Consultations

Most of the therapists I contacted offer a free 15- or 20-minute consultation call (via phone or video chat) so the two of you can get a sense of each other and figure out whether you’ll be a good fit. I scheduled 3 of these calls, with the 3 most promising prospects from my shortlist: therapists who seemed confident they could handle my issues and whose rates were affordable for me.

In those chats, each therapist told me a bit about themselves and how they approach therapy. They allowed me to ask questions about their modalities of choice. I also made sure to ask them about their levels of experience, knowledge, and comfort around kink, queerness, gender, and non-monogamy, because – sadly – writing in your profile that you’re savvy about those things doesn’t necessarily mean that you are. I specifically brought up Daddy Dom/little girl kink in these conversations, because it’s a central part of my life and I know that some people are squicked out by it, so I wanted to make sure it would be okay for me to talk about it. It was also important to me that my new therapist avoid blaming my kinks on my trauma, or stigmatizing/pathologizing my kinks (the world does enough of that already!), so I made sure to mention that specifically.

When I talked to the therapist I ultimately ended up going with, I noticed she was listening to me very closely and would mirror my sentiments back to me in a way that felt very affirming. She also told me that she had lived experience with non-monogamy and non-normative genders, and that she’d worked with kinky clients and had a good understanding of kink but was not kinky herself. It was a mix of these more practical considerations and an overall good vibe that made me decide I should start seeing her.

 

I hope this helps you! Feel free to let me know in the comments if you have any tips of your own for finding therapists who are competent in these areas, or other niches/subcultures.

A Dating Site For Non-Monogamous People

Kate Sloan

One of the biggest questions I get from readers – whether they’re kinky, demisexual, polyamorous, or any other off-the-beaten-path sexual minority – is “How do I meet people like me?”

It’s a fair question. When you’ve grown up already having non-standard sexual desires, it’s easy to feel isolated – and since the fulfilment of these desires often hinges on meeting other humans who are also into them, the whole ordeal can sometimes feel futile. “Why did I bother figuring out my shit and coming out,” you might wonder from time to time, “if I can’t meet anyone halfway decent to explore this stuff with?!”

Enter SwingTowns: a dating and networking site for swingers, polyamorists, and non-monogamists of various other stripes. Hallelujah!

When I signed up for an account, I was instantly impressed with the multitude of options SwingTowns offers its users to identify their gender and sexual orientation. These drop-down menus include (for gender) butch, crossdresser, femme, genderfluid, genderqueer, intersex, man, other, trans – F to M, trans – M to F, transgender, and woman, and (for sexual orientation) asexual, bicurious, bisexual, “bisituational,” gay, heteroflexible, homoflexible, lesbian, other, pansexual, queer, straight, and unsure. While these lists certainly aren’t exhaustive, I’m not sure it’s possible to make an exhaustive list of all the ways people can identify – and SwingTowns certainly has most other dating sites beat in this regard.

I also like that you’re able to choose to identify publicly as poly (“looking for friendships and emotional connection that may evolve into sex later”), a swinger (“looking for sex or sexual activities that may evolve into more sex and friendships later”), both, neither, or “other.” These are pretty broad categories, and certainly not all poly people or swingers would agree with the definitions given, but I do notice a pretty distinct schism between these two types of non-monogamist and their proclivities and codes of ethics in the communities I run in, so it’s nice to be able to state upfront what your basic relationship style is. You can also create a profile as either an individual, a couple, a polycule (3 or more people), or a club/group.

SwingTowns supplies good prompts for (optionally) filling out sections of your profile – it asks you, for example, what kind(s) of person you’re looking for, what your fantasies and desires are, and “Is there anything else you want people to know about you?” It doesn’t require your real or full name, and it doesn’t require photos that show your face.

As one would hope for a site of this nature, SwingTowns has granular privacy settings which allow you to change, for example, which users can see your photos, who can message you, who can see your profile at all, and so on. There’s also a blocking feature, and a reporting feature, though I can’t say for sure how robust these are (I have yet to find a dating site/app that really emphasizes safety and an anti-harassment stance as fervently as I would like). You can also filter out particular demographics – say, straight men – from your searches, though it’s unclear to me if you can ban them from being able to see you altogether. (You can, however, easily just reject every request you get from a straight man trying to view your profile or message you.)

I have had a few exchanges with actual humans on SwingTowns – mostly with couples seeking a unicorn for a threesome, or dudes “looking for some fun” – but many of the messages I’ve received on the site have been invitations to groups or meetups for swingers local to particular areas near me, like Hamilton and Niagara. To that end, I wonder if this site might be especially useful for non-monogamists who also happen to be vanilla – there’s a fair number of non-monogamy groups and events listed on FetLife, the social networking site for kinksters, but despite the high rate of overlap between the kinky community and the non-monogamous community, not all eschewers of monogamy are perverts in other ways!

The FetLife comparison is apt, because like that site, this one is nowhere near as slick and modern as a high-budget dating site like OkCupid. The interface is often clunky, confusing, and hard to navigate. For example, when someone requests access to my profile, looking at their profile doesn’t bring up options to accept or reject their request – as far as I can tell, you have to do that from the email SwingTowns sends you to notify you of the request. The site sends a lot of emails, by the way: I would recommend examining your notification settings ASAP upon joining, so as to shut off the deluge of emails you’re sure to receive – unless you want them!

There’s an ill-considered Tinder facsimile that shows you a photo of a user and allows you to “pass” on them or “like” them, but often the photos don’t contain faces or any meaningful details because this is the type of site where people would largely rather remain anonymous (understandably), so the “swiping” system is pretty hard to use successfully – especially since, when you click on someone’s photo to try to learn more about them, very often access to the person’s profile is restricted and has to be specifically requested. I can see how it would be challenging to create a system where people can feel safe sharing their private info (even just the fact that they’re non-monogamous, which, to some people, is very private info) while also making it easy to sift through potential matches. SwingTowns’ system is far from perfect, but it’s a noble attempt and I think they’ll keep working to make it better.

You can upgrade to SwingTowns’ premium membership plan for $17/month (last I checked, anyway) or a discounted “lifetime” price. Similar to OkCupid’s “A-List” membership and other such services, this one gives you better search tools for finding matches, advanced privacy settings, and a few other perks that would make it easier to use the site. However, the basic features would work just fine for connecting with other non-monogamous people, groups, and events in your area – which, of course, is the whole point. It may not be the most polished dating site on the web, but given how hard it can be to find experienced and enthusiastic non-monogamous folks on standard dating services, I think the trade-off in ease of use is worthwhile for the types of connections you could make on a site like this.

 

This review was sponsored, which means that SwingTowns paid me to write an honest, fair review of their service. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

6 Big Things I’ve Learned From 6 Years of Sex Blogging

Kate Sloan

Oh wow: this blog is six years old today. That is unbelievable to me. When I started Girly Juice, I thought it’d be a fun summer project. I never envisioned it’d still be going strong years later, a major source of professional opportunities, social connections, income, and glee.

It’s been a major source of self-revelation, too. Here are six big things I’ve learned about myself, my sexuality, and my approach to relationships in the years I’ve been writing here at Girly Juice dot net…

1. I’m kinky as fuck. When I started blogging, I identified pretty squarely as vanilla. I had submissive fantasies occasionally, but figured they were just fantasies – not anything I’d want to try in real life.

However, two and a half years into writing this blog, I ended my very vanilla long-term relationship, and started exploring other avenues – at first, just in fantasy, and later, in reality. I tried things out with a couple of domly FWBs, dated some doms who helped me see in myself the submissive cutie they saw in me, and learned more about what being a “good girl” means to me.

I still suffer from “impervster syndrome” from time to time, feeling like I’m too kinky for vanilla folks and too vanilla for (some) kinky folks – but for the most part, I feel secure in my kinky identity. And I’m looking forward to exploring new kinks for a long time to come!

2. I’m non-monogamous. At the start of my blogging journey, I was in a long-term monogamous relationship, and was very happy and in love. But as time went on, I started noticing twinges of dissatisfaction. It had nothing to do with my partner – I adored him, felt blissfully supported by him, and was satisfied with our relationship in all but one dimension. Monogamous strictures made me feel owned and confined – and not in the fun, kinky ways!

Though we experimented with low levels of don’t-ask-don’t-tell non-monogamy in that relationship, it was clear that we were both compromising past our comfort levels, and that it wasn’t going to work long-term. We parted ways amicably, for this reason among others, and I started pondering what I wanted from my future relationships, vis-à-vis non-monogamy.

In the years since then, I’ve experimented with lots of different relationship structures: open relationships, hierarchical and non-hierarchical polyamory, solo poly, casual sluttiness, less-casual sluttiness. Right now, I feel like non-hierarchical poly is the best fit with my approach to dating and my interpersonal ethics. But, as with most of this stuff, I’m open to seeing how that evolves in the future.

3. A-spot stimulation makes me come a lot. I’ve written plenty about the A-spot (a.k.a. anterior fornix) over the years, after discovering – mostly through the use of sex toys – that it’s fairly key to my orgasmic process.

It’s been fun to teach various partners about this spot, and watch them light up when they figure out how to stimulate it. It’s been even more gratifying, however, to receive countless emails and tweets from people who didn’t know they liked A-spot stimulation until they read my articles about it. I never shut up about this spot because I don’t want anyone to feel like their body is broken or weird, like I used to!

4. You gotta ask for what you want. I’m great at telling other people to ask for what they want. I’m great at journaling about what I want, telling my friends what I want from my partners, and whining about how I don’t have what I want. I have historically been less great about actually asking partners for what I want.

This can be anything from “I want you to fuck me deeper and harder” to “I want you to answer my texts in a more timely manner.” Asking for things can feel embarrassingly unchill, but really, it’s the only way to get the satisfying romantic and sexual relationships you desire and deserve. I keep learning this in new ways all the time and it serves me so well when I manage to do it.

5. I prefer quality over quantity when it comes to sex and relationships.

Okay, some caveats here. First off, it’s possible to be slutty and/or dating lots of people and have all of those connections be high-quality, healthy, and wonderful. I know people who manage it. Kudos to them! Secondly, for some people, having lots of partners is their idea of a high-quality romantic/sexual life, and that’s A-OK too. If your sex life makes you happy, I applaud you and celebrate it with you!

However, I went through a “slut phase” and came out the other side realizing having a lot of romantic/sexual connections at once isn’t really a good fit for my particular brain and relationship style. Same with casual sex and one-night stands. The way those types of connections have functioned in my life, they don’t offer me the depth, support, and consistency I’ve discovered I crave. I’m suuuper glad I went through a slutty chapter of life, because it taught me a lot, but that’s not where I’m at anymore, and that’s fine!

My current poly situation looks like this: a long-distance boyfriend I talk to every day and have a super intimate relationship with; a local, casual, somewhat romantic partner I see on occasion for rope bondage and giggles; and a highly casual but still much-adored friend with benefits who I fuck about once a month. My emotional and sexual needs feel pretty well taken care of, and it’s so nice!

6. Anything can change at any time. You can develop new kinks, or lose interest in old ones. You can have a sudden, radical shift in what you want out of your relationships. You can learn new ways to orgasm, and get bored of your former failsafe methods. You can notice strong feelings for a new person, or abruptly lose interest in someone you thought you’d love forever. You can think you know what you need, and then realize you need something totally different.

I have “this too shall pass” tattooed on my inner wrists to remind me that everything is ephemeral. When you truly, deeply know and believe that, you develop a Zen-like appreciation for the good things in your life at any given time, knowing full well that they might not always be there. It sounds bleak, but it’s actually liberating – uplifting, even. There are things that bring you pleasure and joy now, and there will be more things like that in the future, and they might not always be the same things, but that’s fine. Pleasure springs eternal. Isn’t that lovely?!

What have you learned about your sexuality and approach to relationships in the past few years?

5 Monogamously-Minded Mistakes to Stop Making

Kate Sloan

I’m no expert on non-monogamy. Nope. Not by a longshot. Sometimes people try to interview me about polyamory and I’m just like, “LOL, don’t ask me, I’m a baby. Go talk to Samantha or Kevin or Tristan or somebody. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

That said, I have learned a few things – mostly from doing shit wrong, and getting hurt by other people who were doing shit wrong. I’ve noticed that a lot of polyamory slip-ups happen as a result of clinging (consciously or not) to a monogamous mindset. We can’t quite inhabit a healthily polyamorous paradigm if we’re still living at least part-time in monogamy-brain, if you know what I’m sayin’.

Here are 5 of the most common manifestations I’ve seen of this problem. If any of these remind you of something you’ve done, maybe it’s time to examine that and think about whether you’d like to change this behavior or thought pattern. I’m definitely not saying my way of doing poly is the only way or the best way, but I do think eliminating these behaviors would help most non-monogamous relationships work more smoothly!

Implying you’re in competition with your metamours. (Just so we’re clear, a metamour is a partner’s partner. So if I’m dating Ben and he’s also dating Sally, then Sally is my metamour.)

I once asked a partner how he felt about another guy I was seeing, because there had been some jealousy afoot. He responded – ostensibly jokingly – “It’s okay; I think I can take him.” Pro tip: do not threaten to beat up your metamour, even as a joke!! Not only did I not find this even remotely funny, it was also hurtful to me; I care about all my partners and don’t like to hear them disparaged. I set a boundary with that person that he was not allowed to talk shit about my other partners unless he believed one of them was being genuinely toxic/harmful to me. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable boundary to set.

This problem can manifest in other ways too: self-pityingly joking that your partner probably likes your metamour better than you; trying to get your partner to admit your blowjobs are better than their other partners’; pouting when a partner opts to spend time with a metamour instead of you… It’s okay to feel your feelings, but you should process them yourself as much as possible, rather than looping your partner into a competition that probably only exists inside your own head. Their relationships with other people are not a threat to you – that’s the whole point of polyamory – and when you imply otherwise, you put your partner in a super uncomfortable position. Don’t do it!

Comparing your partners to each other. This is sort of the inverse of the previous point. If you don’t want your partners to feel like they’re in competition with each other, DON’T FUCKING COMPARE THEM TO EACH OTHER. EVER.

Sometimes there might be occasion to usefully elucidate the differences between your different dynamics, e.g. if you need to designate one partner as a primary and one as a secondary (hierarchial polyamory isn’t my fave, but it works great for some people). But putting any kind of value judgment on one partner over another – whether sexual, emotional, or in any other category – is not cool.

If you find yourself wanting to make an observation like “Partner A is more fun to have sex with” or “Partner B stresses me out less,” that might be a red flag about the overall well-being of the relationship. Or it might just be a signal that there’s an issue you need to address. Can you give Partner B some more explicit sexual instruction, or sit down with a Yes/No/Maybe list together to pep things up? Can you set some useful boundaries with Partner A so they aren’t, say, relying on you for all their emotional needs while you’re trying to spend quality time with another partner? Making unflattering comparisons is a sign that something needs rebalancing, somewhere. And it’s rude to communicate those comparisons to your partner unless absolutely necessary, because you will fill them with insecurity and doubt.

Only telling partners what you think they want to hear. Two weeks into my last relationship, my boyfriend started seeing someone else, but he told me he didn’t think it would get serious and that I would continue to be the “girlfriend” while this other person would just be his “lover.” I breathed a sigh of relief, which was, in itself, a bad sign; I was definitely still stuck in the paradigm that said anyone else entering his romantic life was a direct threat to me and our relationship. (I still feel this way sometimes, admittedly. It’s a process.)

Unsurprising spoiler alert: things did get serious with that other partner of his, and when I found out just how serious they were getting, it crushed me. I had believed I was “safe” from that kind of “intrusion” into our relationship, so I didn’t start processing that shift in our dynamic until it was already way too late. I’m not blaming my partner – I genuinely don’t think he knew things would unfold how they did – but if he had felt relationship-level feelings toward this other person right off the bat, I wish he would’ve told me that upfront, so I could have adjusted to it at my own pace and processed it in my own way.

Similarly, you shouldn’t tell your partner only bad things about their metamour (in an effort to make them feel better about themselves or more secure) or only good things (in an effort to be like, “See?! They’re not that bad!!”). Humanize your partners to each other. That means sharing the good and the bad, when relevant. (This process definitely benefits from metamours meeting each other in person, if they’re comfortable doing so!) Shielding someone from your true feelings in an effort to avoid hurting them usually just ends up hurting them more.

Using superlatives. Ohhh, this is a tough one for me! I didn’t realize this was a problem until there was a discussion about it in a poly group I’m in, and I went: Oh. Fuck.

Superlatives are words like “cutest,” “favorite,” “hottest,” “sweetest,” etc. I tend to use these a lot, in an affectionate way; I’ll call both my best friend and my brother “my favorite boy” (which is true, they are tied for the position of my favorite existing boy) or I’ll sometimes call someone “the handsomest” or “the cutest” when I’m flirting with them. I’ve been trying to be more mindful about this because it doesn’t really work once you’re in a poly situation.

A lot of language we recognize as “romantic” is rooted in a monogamous paradigm, and that includes referring to a person you’re dating as your “favorite [x]” or “the [x]-est” or whatever. This comes back to what I was saying earlier about comparing partners to each other: it’s a shitty thing to do, and also kind of misses the whole point of polyamory. My mom once asked me which of my two beaux I “liked better,” and I honestly didn’t even know how to answer that: I liked them both a lot, for different reasons, and also for some of the same reasons (their intelligence, humor, kindness, etc.) – so how the fuck could I pick a “favorite”? In poly, there should be no such thing. (Unless maybe you’re hierarchical and everyone involved knows that and is cool with that.)

Relying on your romantic partner(s) for all your social and emotional needs. Dean Spade says that polyamorists should treat our friends more like our lovers, and our lovers more like our friends. This has been an incredibly important insight for me – so much so, that I should probably write a full blog post about it sometime. It’s essentially the idea that you shouldn’t put all your emotional eggs in one basket – both because that’s hard on you, and because it’s hard on the “basket” (your partner[s]).

A monogamy paradigm teaches us that your partner is your “other half,” that they should be there for you through thick and thin, and that whatever you need, you can get it from them. This is fine for the people for whom it works, I guess (although I don’t know who those people are; even deadset monogamists often run into trouble when they over-invest in and over-rely on their partner). However, I think it’s safer and more respectful for everyone involved if you view each partner as just one piece of your support network, rather than the entire network in and of themselves.

That’s the “treat your lovers more like your friends” piece, but I’ve found the “treat your friends more like your lovers” piece to be equally important. This is not about sexualizing your friends or making them uncomfortable! It’s about valuing your friendships as much as you value your romantic relationships, putting effort into keeping those friendships healthy and mutually fulfilling, and asking for support from your friends when you need it. My close friendship with Bex, for example, is a foundation that allows my other relationships to thrive. If I didn’t have that intense, reliable, baseline intimacy with them, I would desperately seek that type of intimacy with other, potentially less trustworthy people, which might get me into unwise romantic/sexual situations.

It’s important to note here that people don’t exist to fulfill your needs. They can, but that doesn’t mean they’re obligated to. View people as people, always, and not just in terms of what they can offer you. That goes for friends as well as dates.

What monogamous-minded trope/pattern/belief have you had to unlearn?