Control Tower

Beginning Polyamory

by Mistress Matisse

I’ve talked here about my life as a polyamorous person, and I’ve gotten some very interesting e-mails in response to that, e-mails from people wanting information from me about how I manage having multiple love relationships, and asking me questions about how they can do this, too. Obviously, everyone’s experience is different. But I do have some opinions about how one can begin constructing a life as a poly person.

First basic rule: In polyamory, everybody knows what’s going on. If you’re having sex with more than one person and any or all of them believe you’re being monogamous with them, that’s not being poly, that’s fooling around. So being a poly person starts by telling everyone you’re involved with—or want to be involved with—that you want to love and be sexual with more than one person.

That can be a scary prospect if you’re in a committed monogamous relationship with someone who you think will be unhappy about the news. If that’s your situation, you will almost certainly not be able to say, “Guess what, honey, I’ve decided I’m polyamorous!” and immediately run right out and start getting involved with other people. (Not without being an insensitive jackass, anyway.) Sorry, I don’t know any secret techniques to make someone’s partner instantly feel okay about transitioning from monogamy to polyamory. You just have to work through whatever issues there are, either alone or with a poly-friendly therapist. And you may have to choose between being poly, or staying in the current relationship. I have some sympathy for people who get caught in that situation—I’ve been there myself. It’s wrong to just abandon a commitment without trying to solve the problem. But I think it’s also wrong to give up a significant part of who you are because of a partner’s fears about it. You’ll have to decide for yourself where that line falls. But being poly means more work and more responsibility to one’s partners, not less. If you’re not willing to make the effort at this stage of the game, you’re unlikely to do well later.

Assuming you get past that hurdle, then you have to decide how you want to structure your poly-ness. There are a lot of ways to organize poly relationships. The system Max and I use, the primary/secondary arrangement, is fairly common. Max and I are primary partners, we live together, and we consider ourselves committed to each other first and foremost. We have separate secondary partners, and by “separate” I mean: none of our secondary partners are lovers with both Max and me. Our secondary partners are an important part of our lives, and we care a lot about them, but we have no plans to try to create a three-way arrangement with a third person. That would be called a triad—although there is also something called a “V” relationship, meaning one person is lovers with two others, who don’t interact sexually with each other. There is also something called polyfidelity, which means an arrangement—usually involving at least four people, sometimes more—in which the participants make a commitment to keep all sexual activity within the group and not have outside partners. Poly people tend to be creative, and I have seen people arrange their love relationships in other ways, but I have found these to be the most common.

Jealousy happens. I don’t know any poly person, including me, who’s never felt jealous at one time or another, even if only briefly. But I think the key difference is that (successful) poly people don’t treat jealousy as a sign that their partner is doing something bad. It’s cause for self-examination, and you can talk to your partner about it and ask for their help in coping with it. The ideal response to having one’s partner share feelings of jealousy is to not get defensive, but to ask them what you can do, within your relationship with them, to support them feeling loved and secure. Note the wording: It’s not about changing your behavior with another person, rather, it’s about demonstrating your love toward the insecure partner in a way that helps them manage their own emotions.

One of the other questions I got was, “Can a poly relationship last?” I think so. Max and I recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of our first date. I know a poly couple who just had their 16th wedding anniversary. Sometimes polyamorous people do break up, but monogamous people do, too. There are healthy relationships and unhealthy ones, and they come in all varieties. The best way to put yourself in the first category is to be as honest and as real and as loving as you can.