This year, in addition to renewing my passport to queertown, I have another announcement:
I'm polyamorous.
Like, extra-super polyamorous.
For many of you, polyamory is probably an alien idea. Maybe you don't even know what the word means! I'll attempt to answer some questions to make sense of it.
I expect that a few of you will struggle with the idea of polyamory, perhaps indefinitely. This is okay. When you feel comfortable, please ask me as many questions as you'd like; I would be more than happy to answer them.
After I came out to my best friend, she said, "When I first heard about it, I was kinda shocked. But then I thought about it for a few days, and I realized I wasn't shocked at all." I hope this sums up your experience!
So, what the heck is polyamory?
When I say I'm polyamorous, I mean that I have the tendency to form deep and enduring romantic connections with several people at once. I believe that it's a deep-down, predetermined orientation, an immutable part of a person's being, like being gay or straight.
That said, it is usually possible to sublimate one's core drives, at least temporarily. And certainly, I've been happily monogamous for most of my life, which is to say that the human connections I've experienced were amazing and deeply fulfilling, but the structure in which we allowed ourselves to love felt, to me, constricting and arbitrary.
Is this why you and Beezus split up?
Nope! But polyamory did give both of us a soft place to land when we did. His new girlfriend-person is pretty fabulous, y/y?
Are you dating anybody?
I've somehow convinced this army of fabulous people to waste their time with me, but in order to explain every connection, I'd have to draw you a graph, which is an art project for another day.
For the sake of this conversation, let's examine just one connection. I'm dating this pretty amazing girl named Michelle. She's hilarious and weird and kind of the purest incarnation of a manic pixie dream girl that you'll ever meet. Michelle is married to Josh, and they're nauseatingly in love with each other, even after enduring 7 years of each other's company. Since Josh and I are dating the same person, Josh is called my "metamour," which is sort of my favorite word/concept of all time.
With me so far?
If you have to share your partners with other people, aren't you constantly jealous?
It's true! Josh and I fight for Michelle's attention so much that I even wrote a book about it:
The book has only one sentence, which reads, "Thanks for letting me feast on your skull, gonna go flirt with yer wife now, brb"
As you can see from his giant grin, Josh is pretty upset by the situation.
No, seriously. Do you ever get jealous?
True story: I'm one of the most insecure people I know. And yes, of course I've felt jealous sometimes. But at least for me, jealousy is a pretty transient state. I've figured this out through scientific experiments: I faced my jealous feelings head-on, and no matter how intense they were, they've always melted away with a hug or a few words of reassurance. The more I practiced it, the less intense it became, and the more skills I acquired to handle it. This question is way bigger than what I can address in this quick Q&A; it warrants a post all its own.
Most of the time, I feel the opposite of jealous, which we poly-weirdos call "compersion." This emotion is difficult to describe to monogamous people, but for me it lies at the intersection of elation, connectedness, and love. Imagine how you felt at your best friend's wedding: listening to her new husband read his vows to her, you're probably crying happy tears because she found someone who loves her so deeply. Compersion is kinda like that, but even better.
For me, there is nothing better than watching my favorite people interacting with their favorite people. Sometimes I argue with my metamours, but the argument is generally along the lines of,
"You guys are cute!"
"No, you guys are cute!"
Isn't polyamory just like cheating, though?
Polyamory is the exact opposite of cheating. Cheating is done deceptively and against your partner's express wishes. Polyamory is done with mutual respect, honesty, and informed consent.
How did you figure out that you were polyamorous?
As happy as I was in any of my relationships, I've always had crushes on other people. Sometimes, they were small flickerings of attraction, and other times they were overwhelming and scary. There wasn't anything I could do to stop myself from having a crush, so the only option was to just communicate about it honestly with my partner.
I realized something powerful, one day: those extradyadic crushy feelings only made me love my partner more. And so, maybe my brain is just built to love more than one person at once.
I'm an extremely affectionate person, and I have a great capacity to form meaningful connections with other people. I want to exist in places where this is seen as an asset, not a liability.
So what, exactly, is your goal? Most people work towards building a hetero/monogamous lifelong commitment type situation with 2.5 kids, but if you're polyamorous, what do you work towards instead?
My goals are much more loosely defined. I believe in letting relationships be what they are, without trying to pressure them to fit inside a predetermined life script. My goal is to learn and to grow, to experience warmth and affection. That's it.
The greatest thing about polyamory is that you get to enjoy a diversity of human connections. Instead of constantly comparing your real-life connection to the idealized connection in your head (the real-life one, usually falling short and being slightly disappointing), you can simply enjoy what is.
Why are you telling us so much about your personal life, anyway?
Five reasons:
1) Do you have any idea the kind of contortions one has to do to hide a relationship? If you're straight and monogamous, you've probably never had to go through it yourself, so here's the spoiler alert: hiding a relationship is unbelievably energy-draining.
2) I'm really, really bad at lying. Even if I tried to hide my relationship(s), it wouldn't work for more than five minutes. You can see my crushes written all over my face.
3) I strongly believe in living honestly. It's really important to me to show people alternatives to mainstream ways of functioning, because even when I totally fuck it up, at least people can learn from my public mistakes. And when I get it right, maybe something I learned will resonate with you, and we can all benefit from that knowledge.
4) if y'all monogamous folk get to say, "I have a boyfriend," I should get to say, "I have eight boyfriends."
5) Who's gonna tell me not to? You? I'll kill you.
Where can I learn more about this "polyamory" of which you speak?
Franklin Veaux's website, More Than Two, is pretty stellar. Start there. Then, let's talk.
1Not actually a holiday. When I am president, this will be rectified immediately.
