Polyamory for Dummies Cheat Sheet

Just as monogamy works for countless people, polyamory is a joyful and generative way to love and make family for many others. Polyamory literally means to love more.

Like other forms of open relationships, polyamory involves having multiple lovers simultaneously. But polyamorous people often create deeper bonds than hooking up or friends-with-benefits arrangements. Polyamorous relationships typically involve being in love with more than one person at the same time or making family with multiple partners. This Cheat Sheet gives you a quick overview of the foundations of polyamory, its expansive potential, possible challenges, and the skills essential to managing the complexities of loving more.

Principles, practices, and issues in polyamory

Although polyamory is an ancient practice, modern polyamory has some important innovations -- mutual respect, full consent, and transparency or full disclosure are its hallmarks. As you explore polyamory and all of its potential and possibilities, keep in mind the following principles, practices, and issues:

• Monogamy creates a scarcity game around love and partnering that fuels jealous competition. Polyamory rejects this, centering an abundance model that embraces openness and connection to your lovers as well as your lovers’ crushes and lovers.
• Strong relational skills and self-awareness, especially around direct communication and setting boundaries, are crucial to practicing polyamory.
• Understanding your burdens around attachment, abandonment, violence, and harm in your childhood and dating history can help you assess your capacity to connect with your partners and minimize jealous and controlling behavior.
• Co-creating poly agreements to grow the unique form of your polyamorous family can be an enlivening and intimacy-building process.
• The calendar is often an essential tool in polyamorous life for while love is infinite, time is limited.
• Coming through on your poly family agreements generally creates more spaciousness and decreases the need for rules and regulations in poly life. Breaking agreements has the opposite effect.
• Coming back from breaches of trust is hard but not impossible. Making a sincere apology, committing to honesty, being consistent, and giving your partners time to heal creates an opening for recovery, while understanding that there are no guarantees.
• Jealousy is a fact of poly life. You can work on ridding yourself of scarcity-driven fear and jealousy, but everyone experiences this, and that’s okay. It’s what you do with your jealousy that matters.
• Navigating the emotional complexity of being in love with multiple people at once can be a lot. Having poly peers and community can help you learn creative ways of managing this.
• Considering parenting and polyamory can feel overwhelming. The good news is many people are happily parenting while polyamorous.
• The idea of aging without a singular partner committed to taking care of you often scares people away from polyamory. But poly families often find relief in the support of multiple partners while managing aging, illness, disability, and other challenges.

There’s more than one way to live, love, and build family. Polyamory provides a pathway and set of practices you can use to create the expansive social, sexual, and familial life of your dreams.

Diving into your discovery of polyamory

Start with a little self-reflection on what prompted your interest in polyamory. Ask yourself these questions:

• What’s happening in your social, emotional, and sexual life right now?
• What’s working? What’s not working?

Buy a journal or open a digital file dedicated to your questions and reflections. Block out time just for you to record your thoughts about these types of questions:

• What are your top five needs from a lover or partner?
• Do some of them seem to be conflicting? Or a stretch for one lover to meet?
• Have you had periods of being in love with more than one person at a time?
• What if you and your partner(s) had no conflict around loving multiple people at the same time, how would your life be different? What might your life look like?

Next, seek out support. Think about the people you have in your family and friend groups. Consider these questions:

• Is there anyone there who is experienced with polyamory?
• Is there anyone who is open to experimentation in general?
• Who among these confidantes has best supported you in the past?

Sometimes exploring polyamory means you need to find new friends and sources of support. If that’s true for you, consider joining a meet-up or online discussion group where curiosity, attentive care, and information-sharing about polyamory are valued.

Next, check out poly people and profiles on dating apps. See who and what’s out there. Draft your poly profile or personal ad. Here’s another great reflection exercise:

• What does your ideal polyamorous configuration look like? Do you want to live in a throuple — a threesome?
• Do you want a nesting partner — a partner you live with — and then have many less committed and perhaps rotating sexual connections? Or do you want deeper relationships with one or more others?
• Would you prefer that your partner and you find a couple to connect with — a committed foursome or quad?
• Do you want all your lovers or partners to be sexual with each other, or do you want to keep all your sex and intimacy private — as in, known by all, but not involving or observed by your other partners?

Tell at least one person if you’re considering polyamory

Tell one person in your life (maybe two!) that you’re thinking about polyamory so you can start to build a curious, open conversation about polyamory.

Here are few tips on who might be good candidates to tell:

• They adore you and delight in all your curiosities and explorations. These folks love to hear your thinking about things and don’t try to fix you or provide answers. They laugh and imagine new worlds with you. They’re serious about the right things and hopeful. Put yourself in a position to get enlivening and creative feedback to your poly declaration.
• They aren’t likely to blab. They respect your privacy. You know your friend group or extended network of friends and acquaintances. Some of them take your confidential discussions to the grave. Others are texting the details of your recent disclosure into the group chat before you’ve even left the bar.
• They aren’t adjacent to a problematic person in the picture — an unhappy ex-lover, a parent, or sibling with an agenda for you. You want to minimize the messiness. Disclosing your polyamorous contemplation to a sibling who has no boundaries with your mother is a recipe for disaster (see Chapter 6 for more info on boundaries and enmeshment). Telling someone who might inform an ex-lover who was always upset about your various crushes is likely to bring on more drama.
• They have some experience with ethical non-monogamy. Anyone who truly cares about you will be a good candidate for a discussion of your exploration of polyamory, but those who care deeply and have some experience themselves will be especially wonderful as you think through all the possibilities. You may not realize that there are experienced polyamorists in your extended network of friends, loved ones, and collaborators. Putting your poly dreams into the world tends to open up conversation and reveal relationships that may have been hidden or privately held.

Start a book club, study group, or conversational salon

Choose a small group of friends or acquaintances whom you know are also interested in or curious about polyamory. Meeting in person is great, but a video gathering also works.

Do you have a favorite resource on polyamory? Maybe you have a few. Gather together the other poly-curious and poly-exploring people in your life and create a short-term discussion or book group. Note: Book groups and salons are great places to find crushes and cruise. They’re the nerd equivalent of the bars.

Keep these two points in mind when choosing whether to meet in person or online (by video or phone):

• The method doesn’t matter. In-person connection isn’t the best or even possible for everyone. Connecting online and on-video and by phone is real and often expands the accessibility of your group. Some people prefer meeting online.
• People need each other. Connection is the key. Humans do better with connection. Poly-minded humans do better with lots of different kinds of connections. The important thing is to connect.

Figure out what form best suits you. In your living room or on a video chat or at the local bookstore or coffee shop, gather your people and discuss. Polyamorists love nothing better than a lively exchange of ideas.

Talk about polyamory with crushes or lovers

Let your disclosures be fun and free flowing instead of heavy or a big reveal.  How you start is how you finish. Your tone can have a big impact on the interaction. Enjoy the possibilities. Think about creating opportunities to share great stories or poly dreams. You might ask your crush:

• What has been your favorite polyamorous experience to date?
• What’s an ideal polyamorous situation for you?
• Tell me your top three polyamorous fantasies.

If you’re talking with someone new, feel them out. What has their experience of polyamory been? Are they new to this world of poly? Do they have strong feelings? Might this person be someone you could explore polyamory with?