Chapter 1

Finding More Love, More Pleasure

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering what more love means

Thinking about what’s holding you back

Taking your first steps on a journey of joy and discovery

In a time where your social, economic, and even geological security seems to be evaporating, polyamory holds out a tantalizing promise: more love.

Perhaps that’s why the pushback against it is so strong: Polyamory is just a fancy term for cheating. Polyamorists can’t commit. You use people. You spread disease and leave a trail of broken hearts in your wake.

Except, oops, you can name a dozen monogamous people you know who have acted in any of these ways, leaving their lovers and partners devastated.

This chapter serves as your jumping-off point into this book, where I take up a lot of your unanswered questions about this creative, expansive form of loving and making family. By day, I’m a sex and relationship coach with a doctorate in gender and sexuality. At home, I’ve practiced polyamory for more than 40 years. I’m also blessed to live in a vibrant community of people who have created all kinds of open, polyamorous relationships. Here, their stories bring all the theories and mysteries of polyamory to life.

What does it mean to be in love with more than one person? How do you do it without creating emotional train wrecks and hurting yourself and your beloveds? Buckle up. Here’s how.

Encountering Polyamory

Polyamory literally means: the love of many. This expansive relationship form rests under a larger umbrella of a variety of non-monogamous ways of relating like hooking up, swinging, having threesomes, and participating in party or conference sex, but it’s distinguished by the desire to create more significant bonds. People who are polyamorous often have a constellation or family of lovers, whose members may or may not be intimately, romantically, or sexually involved with each other. The following sections give you a brief overview of polyamory.

Recognizing what polyamory is

A hallmark of polyamory is the nurturing and maintenance of multiple, significant relationships, at the same time. And another core facet is that these relationships are all out in the open — everyone in them knows about everyone else. And all people involved are held with respect and care, even if their roles and functions differ greatly.

Although some poly people enjoy hooking up and have fleeting sexual encounters, people who describe themselves as polyamorous often inhabit a complex web of relationships that grow and shift and deepen over time. Chapter 2 discusses the historic practices of polyamory and what specific characteristics define this modern version.

Assessing whether polyamory is for you

How can you decide whether polyamory is something you can handle? Being in love with — or intimately connected to — more than one person sounds like a lot to deal with emotionally. And it is.

Chapter 3 helps you figure out why you picked up this book and what’s going on with you, in your relationships, that makes you curious about polyamory. There, I offer a lot of reflection exercises so that you can start to dig around in your thinking and feelings about monogamy and polyamory.

Your reasons for considering polyamory are uniquely yours. And, in my practice as a coach, people generally arrive at my doorstep with a handful of pressing motivations, such as:

• You don’t know who you are. You’ve been living others’ expectations for so long — your parents, friends, church, or partner — you don’t even really know what your honest sexuality or relationships would look like. You’ve been covering over your true self for a long time.
• You’re a serial cheater, or a serial failed-monogamist. You’re unhappy with or even ashamed of your relationship history. You don’t know how to break out of repetitive, destructive patterns. You wonder whether monogamy is right for you.
• You’ve lost a part of yourself along the way in your partnership. You don’t know what your needs are anymore or how you got here. You feel trapped and may not have had sex or felt desirable for some time.
• Your partner wants to open your relationship and you don’t, or vice versa. Often, there has been a breach of trust — an actual affair or an emotional affair. This is a period of crisis and great hurt, and it takes some time to sort through whether healing is possible (see Chapter 13), and if polyamory makes sense for you as a couple (see Chapter 10).
• Some kind of crisis or huge shift has happened in your life that makes you question many things that have just always been a given — and monogamy is one of those givens that needs reexamining.

Dreaming Your Polyamorous Dreams

Engaging in personal reflection activities can help you stretch out into your polyamorous dreams. These activities assist you in figuring out what you aren’t telling even yourself about your desire and needs in your relationships and what you’ve always wanted to try but have held yourself back.

If nobody was looking or commenting, how would you conduct your intimate and sexual life and partnerships? Chapter 3 leads you through some activities to answer these questions for yourself. Chapter 4 gives you examples of how many others have already done so, creating joyful polyamorous practices and family life.

Focusing on Polyamory’s Foundations

While the emotional and intimate rewards of polyamory are enormous, its demands are also significant. Communicating openly and honestly with multiple lovers — so that everyone has the same information, and you aren’t hiding yourself, or manipulating partners through the omission of certain truths, or performing rather than relating to them — can be hard work! That’s especially true when you’re new to polyamory.

Developing your communication skills — by assessing what kind of communicator you are, developing new tools, and finding peers and poly community — can help you build the capacity for sustaining a polyamorous life. The following sections give you a quick overview.

Communicating with your partners

If you can start to identify and assess your core behaviors as a communicator, you can begin to appreciate your strengths. You also might be able to see where you’ve struggled with communication in your past relationships, so you can start to build a plan for getting more support and growing new skills. Chapter 5 looks at all kinds of foundational aspects of communication — introversion and extroversion, fight-or-flight responses, and neurodivergence among them.

Becoming skilled at creating boundaries

Boundaries are to polyamorous relationships as breathing is to life. If you don’t know where your edges are around what you can and can’t handle emotionally and intimately — if you don’t know how to ask for what you want and can’t say no when you need to — then polyamory is going to be chaotic and painful for you.

In fact, many of my clients seek polyamory as a reprieve from painful communication patterns in their monogamous relationships. But polyamory isn’t an escape from being unable to articulate and honor your needs. Chapter 6 offers exercises and tips to assess your skill at speaking your truth and setting and maintaining boundaries. You can also find activities and resources to help grow your capacity in this crucial arena.

Building trust with your partners

Attachment theory (a psychological theory that examines early experiences of attachment and abandonment and their impacts on adult relationships) offers a great window on why boundaries might be difficult for you to set in your relationships. And why it might be hard for...