The Pain and the Glory of Nonmonogamy

I was nineteen, and I met a guy at a party in Idaho; he had sci-fi tattoos along his back, which I found awesome. We became friends; he told me he was something called ‘polyamorous,’ where he’s married but he and his wife still dated other people. I was immediately like, “Oh, that’s obviously what I am too.” It felt like I’d been brought up among women and finally saw a man for the first time; my body knew this was something I was built to be attracted to.

Looking back I realized it had always suited me. Once I caught my monogamous boyfriend sexting someone else; his sexting didn’t actually have any impact on our relationship, and it was obviously not a threat. My anger at him was entirely performative. But my immediate affinity to free love wreaked havoc in my relationship with the same sweet boyfriend, who could not understand why I would want to be intimate with someone else. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t.

I spent nights at my new polyamorous friends’ house; they were in their thirties, they had an adorable daughter I babysat, the wife’s boyfriend lived in the house too. I had a cliche coming-of-age journey over the summer that involved swimming in remote northern Idaho ponds and wearing a bikini for the first time (the wife let me borrow hers) and getting drunk on mead they brewed in their barn at a party they threw in the same barn. They set out a big rifle on a stand the floor at night and showed me how to lie down and look through the night scope and I gazed across their black fields lit green in the moonlight through crosshairs. I had sex with the wife on the floor after the daughter went to bed and the husband and boyfriend watched, and in the background the short film Harrison Bergeron played on the TV.

I cheated in the most autistic way possible: I told my boyfriend I was going to have sex with the tattooed guy, and then I did have sex with him, and then immediately afterwards I told my boyfriend “I had sex with him.” My relationship with my boyfriend understandably did not last after this; we moved back down to southern Idaho, and we didn’t go together. I loved him, but I realized no amount of love could make his monogamy and my polyamory compatible, and I became determined to never end up in a monogamous relationship again. I carefully made nonmonogamy a loud, open part of my identity, to immediately filter out anybody who was monogamous. I never wanted to hurt anyone like that again.

I really had no idea what I was doing. My only exposure to polyamory was the libertarian military redneck polycule in northern Idaho, and we hadn’t exactly discussed poly theory too much. My understanding was simple: just don’t stop your partners from having relationships with others. Don’t get jealous. It’ll be fine.

But I had no cultural wisdom about how to do it well, I had no nonmonog community and I’d read no books - didn’t even know there were books - and so I proceeded to bungle most of my following relationships by stepping into every obvious failure mode possible. Most of my own errors came downstream of one thing: I had an identity as someone who was polyamorous, and I had a rigid idea about what being poly meant, and that identity forbid me from acknowledging that I had, or was acting from, feelings that might not have aligned with that identity.

For example: I insisted I didn’t experience jealousy for an embarrassingly long time. I had gotten it into my head that poly people were chill and didn’t get jealous, so with unsettling skill managed to ignore my discomfort when a boyfriend would go on a date with another girl, or have sex with her, or tell me about it. “Oh I’m happy for you,” I would say, my heart in my stomach. “Are you feeling jealous?” my boyfriend would ask. “lol no I said I’m happy for you,” I would choke out, a gentle smile gently resting upon a leaning tower of dying inside.

I plowed through uncharted territory with sexually liberated fervor. With great freedom came a greater range of mistakes. I spent years learning hard lessons by falling into ravines that monogamous people couldn’t even conceive of. The margin for error was narrower; a level of communication clarity that would have worked just fine in monogamy would turn out to be utterly inadequate in non-monogamy. My uncalloused little body was brutalized by this hard terrain.

And the terrain really did sometimes get hard. It took me a while to learn making monogamy a dealbreaker wasn’t enough; I needed to elimitate people who were even open to it. A scenario that happened a few times was this: I’d tell a guy “I’m poly and this is non-negotiable.” He’d be like “sure, that sounds great.” We’d date. Eventually he’d meet another cute girl and ask her out. He told her he was dating me, he was poly. She said she was ok with this, could make it work, but in reality she was actually monogamous and lying to herself because she liked my boyfriend so much. Over time she’d start getting more uncomfortable with me, would be upset after me and our boyfriend hung out, and this would eventually drive a wedge between us, and the guy would then end up breaking up with me and going monogamous with her.

I realized: almost everyone is monogamous. If I wanted a man who wouldn’t get oneshotted by a scarcity-mindset monog girl trying to steal my boyfriend, I needed to only date guys who were absolutely dedicated to the non-monogamy cause independently of myself. After this I stopped considering anyone who was even open to monogamy. Polyflexible? You’re out.

This wasn’t the only thing that was hard.

In my early 20’s I fell in love with a boy, and a few months into our whirlwind of dating, I found myself trying to sleep in one room while I could hear him having sex with another woman in the living room.

This triggered something I think of as the Scary Attention-Hijacking. It caused me to feel physically heightened, like I was on stimulants. My entire attention was taken up by the noises, my mental landscape was locked into it like a steel trap. I felt as though I needed to notice every detail or I was going to die. I felt vaguely afraid, but not sure about what. I had an overwhelming urge to tell other people what was happening, but was confused about why I wanted to tell them. Did I want sympathy? I tried texting my girl chat friends but they were monogamous and just were horrified, which was not super helpful.

I at no point thought ‘maybe I don’t want to be poly’; that was as inaccessible as ‘maybe I don’t want to be straight.’ But there was still something hard about it.

I think the Scary Attention Hijacking was about a few things - one is violating social expectation. Our society carries overwhelming messaging that you are absolutely not supposed to be okay with hearing the person you’re in love with fucking someone else. That is the peak of all possible nightmares. Part of the Scary Attention Hijacking (SAHK?) was some part of me coming into conflict with the social pressure - I knew that if I expressed the faintest whiff of displeasure, hordes would coalesce into furious support for me. I was fighting against a current, trying to stop it from pushing the bomb of victimhood into my fingers. I wanted to figure out a way to express my discomfort without triggering that bomb.

This was made harder by the fact that I was genuinely scared. I was in the high-on-drugs phase of new love, and hearing another woman’s moans was an ancient threat to my burgeoning attachment. Would he leave her for me? Was she hotter than me? Was the sex better? Would this be the beginning of the end of our relationship? I was so scared. I listened to them in the same way I watched a horror movie.

But over time, the SAHK phenomenon faded. He did not leave me for her. He still loved me. He would have sex with more women, and then still not leave me. Eventually I’d hear him have sex with a lady he brought home from tinder, in our own bedroom, and I barely noticed; I was so secure in our relationship that this was simply no longer a real threat.

Scary Attention Hijacking still happened in new relationships, but it got more manageable as I got more familiar with it. Oh, it’s just SAHK again, I’d think, recognizing my brain start zooming in on the socially permitted horror. That’ll chill out after a bit. I’d let myself go HIGH ALERT with the initial rival intrusions, and watch it predictably calm down, a little faster each time.

How did I know I wasn’t lying to myself, though? Was I simply suppressing true resentment or insecurity? Maybe - but for me the diagnostic question was, would you do this again? If I could go back in time and press a magic button and have me and this partner be monogamous with no issues, never even having thought of nonmonogamy, where my partner would be perfectly happy with it - would I have pressed that button? And every time the answer was, without even the faintest doubt, absolutely fucking not. This was worth it. If sahk was the price to pay then I was happy to pay it.

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As time has gone on, I’ve gotten better at nonmonogamy. It was hard - our culture is extremely hostile to nonmonogs, both explicitly via stigma and implicitly via a total absence of good examples on how to do it properly (when was the last time you saw a healthy poly couple represented in media?). But I’ve finally figured it out, and the returns have been more than worth it for me.

I love letting go. There’s nothing quite like having a precious treasure in your hand, that you want more than anything, that fills you with euphoria and is a salve to old broken parts of you, and it sparks your agonized desire to finally be whole - where even still you love it so much that you know it can’t really be yours, that you can’t take its freedom away. And so instead of crushing it tight, you, in surrender and sheer terror, open your palm out to the world. You will not stop it from leaving, if leaving would be better for it. You will not cut off its ability to love others. You will not collapse its choice. You are not its owner. Your terror is an aspect of your own brokenness, and you absolutely refuse to use it to bind them.

Sometimes, the treasure leaves. But it’s the height of heights when it expands into the world and yet still, against all of that, picks you. It is holy, to be chosen again and again and again, even after you’ve surrendered. Every minute spent is alive in the choice. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

The most I’ve ever trusted another human has come out of this rugged terrain. It can be brutal, but the only way it’s worked for me is complete honesty. I know exactly the ways in which my partners feel met by me, and which parts I fail to fulfill. I know I am not the prettiest or smartest girl out there; I am under no storybook illusions that we are ideal for each other across all possible worlds.

By default, it’s hard to notice the ways we aren’t honest with each other. We hide from ourselves painful things, and hurting other people is a painful thing! So in a myriad subtle ways we are skilled at warping ourselves into a shape that other people will like and desire. Our own identities are cast within the lens of others.

But this is a death knell in polyamory. In monogamy you have the safety of cultural constraints, predictable norms, reduced surface area of relationships, and thus monogamous relationships can often survive quite a lot of dishonesty (“Do you find her attractive?”/”No honey of course not, you are the only woman for me”). But the same level of dishonesty will result in explosions in polyamory, which is why unskilled polyamory gets so much worse a rap than unskilled monogamy; it’s harder to hide the errors. Early on I tried to hide from myself and others that I was experiencing jealousy, and the constant exposure to rival romances did not let me persist comfortably in my illusion - I eventually had to admit to myself that Yes: I was the version of myself I didn’t want to believe I was.

Nonmonogamy is unsustainable if either of us hide our feelings from each other. The wonder of the treasure choosing you only works if you can trust it fully. If someone says “yes, you are my favorite person” because they are afraid of hurting you by admitting that you are not your favorite person, then this relationship is not safe, and it’s not truly free, it’s just two people trapped together out of fear.

To be in a healthy nonmonogamous relationship is an active process of making sure nobody is lying to anybody, not deliberately, not by omission, not by fantasy. You have to know. Knowing will save you. Knowing is also loving - I don’t want to love the illusion of someone shaped to avoid bumping into my tender parts, I want to love them with hard, fiery, terrifying skill.

When my partner comes back from a date, I want to know everything. Was she hot? What did you like better about her than me? What do you like better in me than her? Was it nice? Did you have a good time? I want to press myself into the terrain immediately. He tells me, and in his report I get to see more of him. I get to see the parts of him that come out with others, the things he values. I get to see his pride shine through, or his sorrow. A little bit of SAHK pipes up, but it’s been years, and I trust him so, so much. He doesn’t hide anything for the sake of my feelings, and I know with certainty that he has no hidden feelings from himself. I know that if this new girl would be a threat to our relationship he would tell me instantly (he’s done it before).

If my partner would be better off being more intimate with another person, then it’s in their best interests that they go do that. If they wouldn’t be better off, then it’s in their best interests that they spend their intimacy with me. A good relationship here also requires trust in someone’s maturity to know their own best interests, and not get swept up too much by fleeting novelty. And if someone is the kind of person to get swept up by novelty - would they really be a good partner for me?

This has been a long process of coming to terms with my deepest fears and insecurities. Sometimes my partner comes back from an especially good date during a time when I’m feeling down, and I am overwhelmed with insecurity. “I’m so insecure,” I say. “I wanna kill that girl.” I contort my face into a grimace. “No, you’re mine, she’s gotta get away. Do you think she’s better than me? Oh god.” The fear washes over me, and my partner simply holds me in it, not trying to fix it. He just stays with me as I go through it. “Ahhhh,” I say. He says something like “Yeah, it seems really scary.” I agree. It is really scary! “I’m scared I’m gonna lose you forever,” I say. “That’s intense,” he says, stroking my hair.

And in this, we become closer. I get to process my fear with him, without suppressing it, without him running from it, without me making it his problem. We’re two bodies here to Know each other, to observe with compassion. The fear is an object to be observed and accepted, not to be managed into a shape other than what it is.

Every part of our nonmonogamy - the freedom, the joy in expression, getting to see someone you care for flourish in connection with others, getting to express honestly everything you feel, growing closer in the fears and desires - all of these things have given me more surface area with which to Know another person. I treasure them so, so much. The thought of requesting my partner to stop their connections with others is viscerally repulsive to me. It would feel like cutting off my own limb.

To be clear: there’s much more to making polyamory work than just letting go; I’ve written more practical considerations in other posts - like ‘how do you build a life together if you need to rely on someone’ and ‘what if jealousy is simply too strong?’

It’s fine if nonmonogamy doesn’t work for you! But it’s so confusing to me when people describe polyamory as a casual, noncommitted fad, where the real relationship work can only be done within the bumper guards of monogamy. I remember these arguments as I hold my partner in bed, radiating with the gratitude of being able to Know him - all of him, the unconstrained, expressive version of him who moves the way he wants and is unafraid of telling me the truth of who he is, and through all of this has looked at the truth of who I am and decided yes - I want to be here, with that, now, again and again over the years. It’s so beautiful it brings me to tears. It is strange to me that people think this is somehow less meaningful. Maybe they can’t properly imagine the surrender it would take to pull this off and be happy?