Learning to love: from monogamy to polyamory
Today I want to write about my own journey letting go of monogamy… and allowing myself to love and be loved in the way that has always felt true to me. I want to share about what it has felt like to finally live and love more authentically, to acknowledge to myself — and others — what I have always known: that I am polyamorous.
I imagine this topic is new to most of you: or at least, a firsthand account may be. As you read, I encourage you to pay attention to your body and what is coming up for you. What do you feel yourself curious about, or drawn to? What do you feel yourself repelled by, or resisting?
I’m going to do my best to speak here to my experience. But of course I can’t talk about my relationships without implicating others, and my wife in particular. I’m working hard not to speak for her in this post, though she is in my mind and heart throughout. We have discussed my/our coming out process at length, and she has seen and consented to me publishing this post. I feel grateful for her support and her willingness to stretch to support my desire to be more fully seen and to create space for this public discourse, even where her natural inclination is toward more privacy.
I want my two lives… to be one life
Over the last five years I have gone on a deep intentional journey to reconnect with my erotic self, as part of a broader commitment to lead a more integrated and embodied life. Over the last two years that has included practicing ethical nonmonogamy (ENM). For me this meant opening what had been to that point a 15-year monogamous relationship.
[Explanatory sidebar: ENM and CNM, for consensual nonmonogamy, are terms that emerged to distinguish our practice from the most visible failure of monogamy — cheating on monogamous partners as an example of unethical or nonconsensual nonmonogamy. I prefer “ethical” because I think you can have consent and still not be ethical, though which term to use is a live debate in the ENM/CNM community. Both terms are intended to be an umbrella for a diverse spectrum of relationships that are not monogamous: everything from polyamory (multiple loving secure attachments) to swinging (usually mono-romantic, but poly-sexual) to what Dan Savage calls “monogamish” relationships.
I think ENM is a useful heuristic, though I also like the idea from Roy Graff that the prefix should also be applied to monogamy… since so much of monogamy as presently practiced is neither consensual — which implies meaningful choice — or ethical, given often-unacknowledged patterns of control and coercive power-over. For folks interested in exploring more, I put together a curated resource list of books, podcasts, etc. here.]
The last two years have been without question the most radical, provocative, liberating, scary, challenging, and deeply vulnerable in my entire life (all this while trying to raise two young kids, emerge from a pandemic, grieve with my wife the passing of her father, and navigate complex professional responsibilities). In this time my self-work has consistently pushed me to the edge of my capacity… and often beyond. The relational work with my wife continues to feel so deep, powerful, vulnerable, and intimate. And starting to date again after 15 years of monogamy felt (feels!) incredibly edgy, vulnerable, exciting, and challenging.
So why am I writing about this personal — even private — journey, in this very public forum?
First, everything about this journey is an expression of my own quest for belonging, and my own commitment to living an integrated life. This process of becoming for me is inextricably connected to my political commitment to co-create a world where everyone belongs. The radical act of trying to attune to my desire, to act on my deepest truths, and to do so from a place of intentionality and care for everyone involved… is not just personal for me. As early feminists remind us: it’s also political.
For me exploring the erotic and ENM (separate, but for me related) was precisely about refusing to hide/deny pieces of myself, about refusing to allow myself to be fragmented by the systems of oppression that keep us from full belonging. It feels weird for those who love me not to know about the most important thing happening in my life. It feels incongruous not to write and share about the aspect of my life most deeply connected to belonging that is affecting how I show up day-to-day, and contributing to my transformation. I want to express myself as fully and interdependently I can. But not only to express: to be witnessed. Seen. Supported, and loved, for who I am.
And it turns out, part of who I am is polyamorous: I have experienced ENM and my first deep polyamorous relationship as a coming home to myself. A felt sense of being fully free — and fully me — for the first time. As I have acknowledged that truth to myself, I have become less willing to hide that piece of who I am, the ways I relate, and those relationships that matter to me. This is not about my sex life: for me this is about what it means to be human, to relate, to practice interdependence… to belong. I teared up watching Colin share his own struggle about coming out (in the context of homosexuality) on Ted Lasso:
But there is a second reason. I am committed to building a world where everyone belongs, and to doing the best I can to dismantle the systems of oppression that prevent us from belonging. And I think the intentional exploration of how we want to experience and express intimacy; how we want to explore and experience the erotic; and the intentional inquiry into what kinds of relationship structures best serve us is absolutely foundational to dismantling patriarchy and the other systems of oppression that keep us separated from ourselves, our deepest longings, and each other.
I want to destigmatize the erotic, and our right to pleasure. I want to destigmatize nonmonogamy. I want to create space in our cultural discourse for diverse ways of loving and being loved: to encourage everyone to attune to their own desires, to strive for interdependent relationships. And I can: I’m a heterosexual, class-privileged, white American, and am read as a man. There are many others (Black, femme, queer, trans, economically precarious, living in rural or religious or conservative communities) who don’t have the option to be “out.” My primary risks are judgement and social ostracization (both of which I have already experienced); others risk their livelihoods and physical safety.
I strive to live my life as an embodied invitation: to encourage others to live their fullest truths, stretch into their deepest sense of belonging. I want to do for this topic what I try to do with all my writing: share as honestly as I can what I am learning; and curate resources to support others in their own journeys, to find reflected in my story and learnings aspects of themselves and their own perhaps-not-yet-named inquiries. And to invite connection, deeper inquiry, and accountability: to help me practice in integrity.
A journey of becoming
I was fourteen years old, a freshman in my Catholic high school (before I had any interpersonal sexual experience at all) when I first encountered what struck me at the time as a simultaneously radical and obvious idea from Dan Savage: if in conflict between marriage and monogamy, choose marriage (if you’re already married… let go of monogamy and maintain the marriage). Even at that age it made intuitive sense to me.
Evidently I brought that mindset into my first serious relationships (which were monogamous, because I didn’t know there were other options). In a recent conversation with my first serious girlfriend — from freshman year in college, over 20 years ago — she laughed at my polyamorous revelation and said: “I could have told you that!”
After several significant monogamous relationships in/after college (I half-jokingly called myself a “serial monogamist”), I was bound and determined to remain single and non-exclusive for an entire year. At age 23 I defined for myself a set of goals for the kinds of relationships I wanted to pursue, and unwittingly described polyamory… though I didn’t have language for it at the time. I wanted to date multiple people; to explore whatever forms of sexual and romantic intimacy felt true between me and my partner(s); to be fully transparent with everyone involved; and to the extent possible try not to hurt anyone’s feelings (or at least to hold care for the feelings of everyone involved).
That lasted about six months… until I met the woman who would become my wife. I felt absolute clarity (a fact that still surprises me to this day) that this was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And I remember feeling sad that I would have to end the other sexual and romantic relationships I was in (not because she asked; I didn’t even consider that there might be other possibilities).
We dutifully followed what Amy Gahran has aptly called the “relationship escalator”: a set of largely-unquestioned mono-normative (and amatonormative, the idea that romantic relationships take precedence over other relationships) cultural assumptions that structure our relationships. We committed to sexual and romantic exclusivity (this is often the unstated assumption about what it means to become boyfriend/girlfriend); met each other’s families; and I asked her to marry me the following summer: she said yes!
We had a “state of the union” conversation while planning our wedding, and I confessed my two truths: I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and the idea of monogamy scared the hell out of me. I took comfort in the fact that we were able to have that conversation, and we returned to it over the years as we got married, moved across country, and had two children.
The courage to choose integrity
For me it came down to a question of integrity… and belonging. I was doing so much work in other parts of my life — professionally in particular — to live a more embodied and aligned life… and yet this piece of myself felt out of integrity. It was less about the relationship structure, and more about my commitment to feeling and expressing my authentic truth. I felt a call to become more connected to my erotic self: to better understand my own sexuality, desires, and ways of loving, being loved, and sharing intimacy.
I love hard work: I appreciate a challenge. My friends have observed about me that I tend to thrive on a degree of difficulty. And yet: it is difficult to overstate how hard it was for me to (a) be honest with myself about what I was longing for (b) admit that it was not an idle longing but a foundational need (c) ask my life partner to support me in pursuing that need, fearing that she would experience suffering as a result.
Ultimately, it wasn’t my own courage that helped me do what I needed to do. Rather, I sourced inspiration from outside myself. From people in my professional circles who I saw boldly stepping into their own erotic power, and women of color in particular: people like adrienne maree brown in Pleasure Activism; Sonya Renee Taylor in The Body is Not an Apology; Kim Tallbear’s work on decolonizing sex (and others cited in this post from two years ago, documenting my journey to that point, before we opened our marriage).
And closer to home: I felt like I was failing my children. I was not living the example I wanted for them of what an integrated and sex-positive life looked like. I was denying myself and my deepest truths for fear of the impact it might have on others… something I would never encourage or ask them to do.
It was those two factors that finally pushed me to do what I had been too afraid to do for my own sake: after 13 years of monogamous marriage, to ask my wife for her consent to explore ethical nonmonogamy. For me the moment Dan Savage named 25 years ago had finally arrived: I could not stay in my marriage and stay monogamous. Something had to give. I felt clear that I wanted to stay married to my wife… but I knew I had to let go of monogamy.
Breaking up with monogamy
At my request, my wife and I formally kicked off our ENM (ethical nonmonogamy) journey in the fall of 2021. Though I didn’t fully understand it as such at the time (she did!), it meant the end of one relationship… and the beginning of another. As Roy Graff notes:
Transitioning from monogamy to polyamory when you are partnered, involves consciously letting your old relationship end so you can create a new expansive relationship with the same person.
To be clear, this was — and is — incredibly hard work. Joyful and liberatory, yes, but the very nature of the journey requires unlearning 40+ years of deep unquestioned mono-normative cultural scripts. One of the reasons I married my partner was her ability to have difficult conversations. And to her great credit, she stepped into this challenge with impressive courage and care. I had already spent three intensive years (from 2019–2021) doing self-work: reading books, listening to podcasts, immersing myself in an intentional inquiry into the erotic and nonmonogamy. And now we were doing it together.
We were incredibly fortunate to find two high-quality therapists (in our small town in rural southern Oregon!) to support us on our journey: Victor Warring, a Black man with extensive experience navigating nonmonogamy and supporting people in open (or opening) relationships, and Emily Athena, a White woman with deep experience with female sexuality and relationships (but not ENM). They are both somatic sexologists: somatic meaning focused on the body, rather than cognitive/talk therapy, and sexologist meaning focused on the erotic and our relationship to sex and sexuality: precisely the skillsets we were seeking to practice. And both share my deep political commitment to the erotic as a source of power and liberation in the face of oppressive systems.
The willingness to lose… in order to gain
This was the hardest part: I had to be willing to lose the thing I valued most — my loving relationship with my wife, possibly to include the end of my marriage — to live more authentically. As Dan Savage put it recently on Ezra Klein’s podcast:
You can’t ask for what you want if you’re not willing to lose what you have.
Oof. The truth is… at the outset I wasn’t fully willing to do that. The foundation of our relationship felt so strong, we were excellent in so many other ways, that I couldn’t believe that we couldn’t find a way to make this work. Couldn’t we choose marriage, and let go of monogamy? Part of my/our journey to this point was me accepting this truth and being willing to let go: to surrender to what our authentic truths might be, whatever that might mean for our relationship.
Ironically, for me this felt like a return to our wedding vows, all those years ago: to find a way to be ourselves, and be in relationship. Harkening back to Prentis Hemphill’s gorgeous definition of boundaries: the distance at which I can love you and me at the same time. The goal for me has always been interdependence: finding ways to thrive without losing ourselves or each other. After all, as we read at our wedding: “the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
Interdependence begins with “i”
Here’s the thing: it is incredibly difficult to stay connected to yourself and connected to your partner at the same time… especially when you may want different things. Part of my wounding is I’m hyper-vigilant to others’ emotional states, and am prone to playing the “rescuer” (for folks familiar with the drama triangle). Which means I’m not always attuned to my own body, needs, or emotional state. And therefore not always sufficiently discerning about whether I’m trying to process my own emotions… or attempting to manage my partner’s (for the record: never a good idea).
As Brad Reedy reminds us, there are (at least) three dynamics we were/are working on at all times: me and my inner work, her and her inner work, and then us and our relational work. For the “us” to work we each have to be autonomous, self-sovereign, and open: we have to own what is ours, allow our partner to own what is theirs, and to work (and play!) together where our two selves intersect in our relationship. Esther Perel explains:
The core question is how do I stay connected to myself while I connect with you, and how do I stay connected to you without losing touch with myself?
There is a sequencing in the dance of interdependence. It has to start with the “I.” This is both obvious and radical: of course “I” is part of “We.” And yet, as Martha Kauppi, a therapist who recently published a book on how to support people in nonmonogamous relationships, explains:
Some people haven’t yet given themselves permission to get in touch with what they want.
Yes, that resonates. We are all socialized to internalize dominant culture desires: a very patriarchal heteronormative and objectifying view of desire. I grew up knowing what society wanted me to want… which did not resonate with me. Yet I had very little access to what I actually wanted… and very little social/cultural support to identify that for myself (much less the relational skills to communicate those desires, even if I were in touch with them). This is doubly true for people socialized female, with the attendant burden of a cultural expectation of catering to male desire.
I want you… to want me
This is about boundaries: knowing (and being able to communicate!) what we need to feel safe, to feel like we are able to be our full selves. But it’s also about attuning to our desires, which I actually think is much harder (I tried to unpack these concepts in the context of nonmonogamy here). Martha puts it bluntly:
These are not behavioral skills, these are developmental tasks.
Yes! This work is not optional for anyone who wishes to be in loving relationships, regardless of what structure you may choose.
This is what I’ve always wanted (maybe what all of us have always wanted?) I want you — your autonomous, boundaried, beautiful self, centered in your own desires — to want me. To want the authentic, vulnerable, autonomous, and expressive self that is me. But I can’t trust that you are acting from choice if you haven’t first done the work to center yourself and your boundaries and desires. From that grounded place — and only from that grounded place — can you then express authentic interdependent desire for me. As adrienne maree brown wrote in Pleasure Activism:
The first step of consent is tuning in to your own desire.
This for me was one of the epiphanies of polyamory as a relationship structure: it makes me feel safe. I realize this sounds paradoxical; most people find safety (or at least the perception of it) inside monogamy. But for me monogamy always felt forced: how could I be sure my partner was choosing me, and not defaulting to me because the structure demands it?
This is my core wounding as a large White male-bodied person under patriarchy: my life experience has taught me that I can’t fully trust the “yes” of people with less social/structural power, because the very conditions under which we are engaging are rife with oppression that make it difficult — and often unsafe — for people to be honest with me about their truths.
ENM relieves me of this burden. I know each day that my partners are choosing me… because they don’t have to. They could be with anyone… and still choose to be with me. That for me is security: I can relax into knowing that I am chosen, and loved. As this random Twitter user put it:
Opening deeply: the power of choice
This is actually what it’s all about (with a nod to Kate Loree for her new book with this title). Polyamory is my truth; monogamy may be yours. Both can be beautiful ways to relate: provided we choose those structures from a place of agency and desire as expressions of our deepest truths for how we choose to love and be loved. I love this definition of “open relating” from Roy Graff:
Open Relating is about creating and maintaining conscious, connected and autonomous, expansive relationships, regardless of their dynamic and how many people are involved. Doing so requires first an honest unflinching look at our own vulnerabilities, fears, needs, wants and desires.
Yes. That’s what I’ve always wanted. I’m encouraged by the movement toward concepts like “conscious monogamy” and “radical monogamy.” Like my embrace of polyamory, it’s about doing the hard work to get in touch with your desires, and to co-create with your partner(s) a relationship structure that enables interdependence. As Marie Thouin notes:
Monogamy from a place of freedom is absolutely wonderful! But “default monogamy” from a place of social pressure is a choice made on your behalf — and that breeds all sorts of trouble. Freedom isn’t a relationship style: it’s the sovereignty behind it.
And it need not be sexual: many asexual people prefer polyamorous structures where there isn’t so much pressure on one person trying to fulfill all of your needs.
I’ve loved the radical invitation to really feel into what type of intimacy I seek in my relationships, and have been inspired by the Relationship Smorgasbord. The tool invites us to think about what forms of intimacy we wish to share in any given relationship, and to be explicit about that. I think this tool can also be hugely helpful for monogamous relationships, to help step off the “relationship escalator” and be more intentional about the kinds of relationships you want to create: I wish I had this during my monogamous years.
I particularly appreciate the provocation to distinguish between emotional and romantic intimacy, and physical and sexual intimacy; and I love the idea of keeping the categories of kink and power exchange separate from sexual intimacy. It’s been hugely helpful for me in distinguishing between the kind of intimacy I seek in ALL relationships (emotional and intellectual, yes please!), and the specific forms of intimacy I seek in specific relationships.
Learning (and un-learning) how to love… and be loved
In a future post I want to explore more fully some of my learnings from this journey to-date, and what I see as the fractal implications for the world (beyond the narrow I/We that is my practice ground). But I want to name three things that I have appreciated most about this journey. To be clear, I think most of these benefits are accessible inside of monogamy: it just requires that much more intentionality to combat the mono- and amato-normative patriarchal culture we are socialized into.
- There is no place to hide. As someone who loves self-growth and shining light into the shadows, this is one of my favorite things about ENM. The very nature of the structure forces us to upskill our capacities, especially around communication and processing feelings. To give one example: jealousy is a common issue (in all relationships, but in nonmonogamy in particular). In monogamous relationships, a common way people deal with jealousy is by removing the perceived “threat.” I feel jealous when you hang out with your attractive coworker after work; please stop doing that. In nonmonogamy, we are invited to do the deeper work to understand what the jealousy is trying to tell us. Is there some deeper attachment wounding there? Fear of abandonment? Insecurity about our own appearance or self-worth? Is it actually envy (wanting what someone else has) rather than jealousy? Is there an unmet need or longing that hasn’t been voiced? To me that deeper inquiry is what it’s all about: better understanding myself and my partner(s) is to me the hallmark of intimacy.
- The erotic is the best playground for embodied interdependence. Interdependence is difficult under normal circumstances: it’s incredibly hard in the realm of the erotic. In our patriarchal sex-negative culture, the whole enterprise is cloaked in shadow. We have to peel back layers of shame, social stigma/expectations around body image, around performance, about self-worth, about our right to pleasure, about identifying, naming, and negotiating our desires. I love to play Betty Martin’s 3-minute game with new partners, because it’s such a radical practice: to set a baseline foundation of consent, and on top of that foundation to reach for desire… is transformative. And: it’s all in the body. My brain is no refuge in the bedroom: my body is tracking cues way faster and more accurately than my cognitive brain can, and it forces me to pay attention, and to slow down. To be in dialogue not only with my partners’ bodies but also with my own, and to extend equal care to each.
- I am a different person with different people. More accurately: different people reflect/refract back different pieces of myself. And there is something about the subtle dynamics of intimate relationships — and sexual relationships in particular — that brings a lens not present in platonic or familial relationships. In monogamy I only had one partner with whom to gain insight about myself in that sphere, so it was hard to discern what was about me, what was about her, and what was about our unique interpersonal relationship. With multiple partners, it becomes much clearer: oh. Turns out that’s a pattern I need to look at, and it’s not about my partner at all… I’m the common denominator here. Or: oh, that’s a function of patriarchy and the system, not any particular person. Feedback lands differently when I hear it from multiple people. It’s also a great invitation to celebrate what is unique and special about each relationship: to see them as positive sum and abundant, and not in competition with each other. To honor that I get to express different aspects of myself (and so do my partners!) in different relationships… and that I (and therefore We) are stronger because of it.
I want to stop here. There is so much more to say, and so much that feels difficult to put into words. I feel so grateful for my wife as my partner in this journey: I feel more connected and loving to her now than I did when we opened our marriage. I have so much respect for her integrity, the work she has done and is doing, and the support she has shown me in becoming the person I am.
I feel grateful to those who have lent a supportive ear or held space for me, especially my sister Trina. To the many trailblazers and content creators who continue to influence and shape my journey, and offer an invitation for what a more embodied and integrated erotic life might look like. To the partners I have been fortunate to learn, grow, and practice interdependence with on this journey. And especially to Leela, who has helped me feel and embrace my polyamorous identity, and continues to push me to be a better version of myself.
I’m so proud of the work my wife and I are doing, and the example we are setting for our children. I am excited they will get to grow up in a household where they feel fully at choice to form the types of relationships that work for them: to expect consent and reach for desire. This is hard work, and it’s deeply liberating.
I welcome any thoughts and reactions — provided they pass through Rumi’s 3 gates :-) To hear more about my own journey, please check out this YouTube conversation with friend, collaborator, and fellow ENM explorer Bella.
In community,
Brian
