More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (More Than Two Essentials)

by Franklin Veaux

Eve’s Story Despite all our preparation, Peter and I didn’t really know what to expect when Ray and I became lovers. I got caught up in a full-on flood of new relationship energy, and Peter, with whom I had settled into a low-key, eight-year-relationship groove, struggled with the intensity of it all. One day, when Ray and I had been lovers for about a month, Peter sat me down and said, “You’re falling in love with Ray.” He was right. Surprisingly, perhaps, we had never talked before about the possibility of falling in love. And there we were, and we weren’t ready. My growing relationship with Ray forced me and Peter to confront a long-buried structural problem in our relationship, one we had been able to sweep under the rug for years. One day, the day before I was scheduled to go visit Ray, Peter told me he wasn’t sure he wanted to be with me anymore. I panicked. I said I wanted to cancel my trip so I could stay home and work on things with Peter, but Peter said no, he wanted me to go. And he wanted me to stay with Ray until he had decided he was ready for me to come back. I drove the next day to see Ray, and that afternoon, we made love, and then I lay there sobbing in his arms, torn apart by conflicting emotions: fear and grief at the thought of losing Peter, joy at the new connection with Ray. And then, suddenly, I accepted the situation. I imagined myself without Peter, was able to picture my life without him, and I realized that even without him or Ray, even alone, I...

In reality, commitment and fear of loss are only indirectly related. Often the fear of loss is more closely linked to a fear of being alone than commitment to a partner; in monogamous relationships, losing a partner means being alone. And, paradoxically, if you want something too badly, the fear of losing it can become greater than the joy of having it. When that happens, we hold onto things not because they make us happy, but because the thought of losing them makes us suffer. Both having them and not having them become sources of pain. This is all a bit ironic, because the truth is that we will lose everything. Every one of our partners, friends, family members, everything that brings us joy will one day leave our lives—either through life’s normal uncertainty and change, or through the inevitability of death. So we have two choices: embrace and love what we have and feel joy as deeply and fully as we can, and eventually lose everything—or shield ourselves, be miserable…and eventually lose everything. Living in fear won’t stop us from losing what we love, it will only stop us from enjoying it.

Many problems we encounter in polyamory, particularly when we’re in a relationship that was previously monogamous, come from attempts to explore new relationships without having anything change. Sometimes those changes involve coming face-to-face with our deepest fears: abandonment, fear of loss, fear of being replaced, fear of no longer being special. Relationship change is scary. Sometimes it comes on us in jarring ways. On the blog “Journals of a Polyamorous Triad,” the blogger Polytripod wrote about something she and her partners called “the sushi factor.” Polytripod loved sushi, and she tried to share it with her partner—who expressed in no uncertain terms that he was not interested in raw fish. Long after she gave up trying to take him to the sushi house, he started dating someone new, who also loved sushi. High on the buzz of NRE, Polytripod’s partner agreed to try it—and discovered he loved it. Polytripod was, in her words, “less than thrilled.” It hurt her to, as she said, make a request of her partner, get a no, and then see him doing the thing she’d requested with someone else. In her post, she stressed what she saw as the importance of continuing to extend to longer-term bonded partners the same willingness to try new things as you’d give to a new partner. While it may take more conscious effort to maintain the same openness and adventurousness in a long-term committed relationship as you might naturally have in the early stages of a new romance, Polytripod arg...

Understand that your emotions often lie to you. Feelings aren’t fact. It’s possible to feel threatened when there is no threat, for example, or feel powerless when you aren’t.

If you have a relationship with Zoe, and Bridget is hotter and richer, then you can replace Zoe with Bridget and you climb the ladder. This approach leads to insecurity; if Zoe knows that she can be replaced by Bridget, Zoe won’t ever feel secure. The idea that people are interchangeable is fundamentally flawed. When we value the things that make our partners who they are, no one person can ever replace another.

Love isn’t supposed to hurt, and we should not and do not need to sacrifice our selves for good relationships.