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

by Franklin Veaux

Some people imagine that polyamory involves a fear of commitment. The truth is, commitment in polyamory doesn’t mean commitment to sexual exclusivity. Instead, it means commitment to a romantic relationship, with everything that goes along with that: commitment to being there when your partners need you, to investing in their happiness, to building a life with them, to creating happy and healthy relationships that meet everyone’s needs, and to supporting one another when life gets hard. Unfortunately, society has taught us to view commitment only through the lens of sexual exclusivity; this diminishes all the other important ways that we commit to one another. People who can’t commit to one person sure as hell can’t commit to more than one!

But happiness is something we re-create every day. And it comes more from our outlook than from the things around us.

If we accept the fairy tale, we may feel shaky and insecure whenever reality doesn’t live up to our expectations. We may imagine that if we are attracted to someone else, something is wrong.

Loving more than one person at the same time is not an escape from intimacy; it is an enthusiastic embrace of intimacy.

“Cheating” is violating trust by breaking the rules of a relationship. If taking multiple lovers does not violate trust, then it’s not cheating by definition.

AFLE or AFOG: “another fucking learning experience” or “another fucking opportunity for growth.”

Monogamy tells us what to expect. Polyamory does not. There are no rigid templates, only nuance and shades of gray.

Sure, it’s important to communicate what you want in your relationships up front—but it’s also important to remember you’re not ordering a relationship from a catalog. Leave space for them to grow, and don’t freak out if they grow in ways you didn’t expect.

Few are on the extreme ends of these scales. It’s more common to encounter people in the middle—for instance, who like living with a lover but still prefer to think of themselves as autonomous individuals, or people who pay close attention to how well potential partners fit together but still make relationship decisions themselves.

Polyamory allows for the possibility that we can remain in relationships that matter to us and have sex when (and only when) we want to, because we want to, and not because we have to because we fear losing someone we care for.

Above all else, trust that you don’t have to control your partner, because your partner, given the freedom to do anything, will want to cherish and support you. And always, always move in the direction of

greatest courage, toward the best possible version of yourself.

accept that all long-term relationships will contain some conflict, but do not want conflict, anxiety or pain to be a norm, and certainly not more frequent than joy, connection or comfort

The rights we talk about here derive from two axioms, which together are a lens through which any relationship choice should be viewed. These principles are: The people in a relationship are more important than the relationship. Don’t treat people as things.

You must give your partner the opportunity to make an informed decision to be in a relationship with you.

Learning to understand and express your needs, learning to take responsibility for your emotions…that’s hard work.

For instance, jealousy is the bugaboo we hear people mention most often. It is beaten most effectively by developing a strong sense of self-confidence and by confronting your personal demons of insecurity. Determine for yourself what you actually want and need from a relationship, and learn the communication tools to ask for those things.

Develop the habits of being open and honest

Develop the habit of behaving with integrity,

Understanding and programming your own mind is your responsibility; if you fail to do this, the world will program it for you, and you’ll end up in the relationship other people think you should have, not the relationship you want.

One way to think about (and seek) the kind of relationships you want without objectifying others is to think about what you have to offer (or not). Examples might be: I can offer life-partnering relationships. I can offer intimate relationships that don’t include sex. I am interested in supporting a family. I am interested in caring for a family. I am not willing to move from my home for a partner. I have only two nights a week available for relationships. And so on.

The problem with being idealists about polyamory is that we risk putting ourselves into situations we’re not ready for. If we do that, we risk hurting other people.

Minding the gap is being aware of where we are now and striving to move in the direction we want to go. That’s part of living with integrity.

The gap being the space between who we are now and who we want to be in the future.

Think of compassion and free will as values you strive for, not attributes you have. That way, you can more easily realign your actions with your values if things go wrong.

what’s important here is developing a sense of self-worth that protects you from internalizing these corrosive messages.

You need to find a way through difficult emotiona like jealousy and fear insteadof building walls around them

The only way to maintain good mental boundaries, to counteract social rejection and to assess when to disengage is to have self-knowledge and self-confidence and to engage in self-compassion and self-care. In other words, to commit to behaviors that will help you develop a strong sense of worthiness. And yes, feeling worthy is a practice too.

Worthiness is not the same as validation. A sense of self-worth comes from within, not from someone else.

Believing that you can be alone and thrive, that you can survive the end of something and rebuild, are important elements of self-efficacy.

The path of greatest courage also seems like the hardest: it takes us right past the places where our fears live. But just as we cannot put off learning to swim until the day we magically know the butterfly stroke, we cannot put off learning courage until the day we magically become courageous. This is work we must do, now, to create fertile ground within our relationships that allows us to move with integrity and compassion.

It’s impossible to “make” another person be secure. We can provide a compassionate and supportive environment by providing reassurance, by listening, by acting in thoughtful ways, but these actions cannot make someone else secure. Internal work is required for a sense of security and confidence.

It’s almost impossible to build a strong relationship

of any kind amid insecurity. This seems especially t...

Insecurity invents its own evidence and supports its own premises. No amount of someone else’s time and effort is enough to make an insecure person see the light and realize that the insecurity is unfounded. He or she must intentionally and deliberately challenge, understand and then choose to move past the insecurity. Intentionally and deliberately challenging, understanding, and choosing to move past insecurity is frightening, uncomfortable work. Staring our inner demons in the face is so uncomfortable that it can make crawling through broken glass dipped in alcohol and rattlesnake venom seem like a cakewalk. It is the rare person who’s willing to do this without being prodded into it. And this principle has a corollary. Trying to avoid upsetting a partner by giving in to their insecurity, or steerin...

As counterintuitive as it may seem, sometimes a lasting sense of security comes more from knowing a partner is free to go but chooses to stay than from a...

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.

Know that you are lucky to have people in your life with the power to break your heart, because it means you have love.

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 argued that the payoff in deepened trust and intimacy was more than worth it.

People don’t always change in the ways or on the timetable we want them to.

New experiences with other partners might raise unexpected conflict in a relationship. People will change with new partners and new experiences and we can't expect partners to adhere to an imposed schedule of change.

it’s common for people in a relationship to seek to use the power they have to constrict, limit or regulate a partner’s other relationships, in the hopes that this will make those other relationships less disruptive or threatening. People try all kinds of structures to do this: enforced power hierarchies, limitations on how much a partner is permitted to experience emotional or sexual intimacy with others, rules that an established couple will only have sex with a third person if both are there for it (often on the assumption that this will prevent jealousy), and so on.

An important skill in creating happy poly relationships involves learning to see other lovers, particularly a partner’s other lovers, as people who make life better for both of you rather than a hazard to be managed.

When we hold an abundance model of relationships, it’s easier to just go do the things that bring us joy, without worrying about searching for a partner. That tends to make us more attractive, because happy, confident people are desirable.

It is true that there is scarcity among poly relationships however there is abundance too as the pool is quite large regardless. Viewing it this way may lead to a more positive mindset eg. Losing a relationship. If you believe that, despite criteria you have for potential partners, the pool for new partners is still a reasonable size then you will be less likely to dwell on a loss.

If we believe relationships are rare and difficult to find, we may not give up a relationship even when it’s damaging to us. Likewise, if we believe that relationships are hard to find, that may increase our fear of being alone, which can cause us to remain in relationships that aren’t working for us.

being uncomfortable is not, by itself, a reason not to do something, nor to forbid someone else from doing something.

We have to be able to allow ourselves to be present as an equal with another person, recognize the darkness in them and accept it—and that forces us to embrace, as well, the darkness within ourselves.

Compassion requires a willingness to hold other people accountable for the things they do, while accepting them for who they are.

Compassion means coming from a place of understanding that others have needs of their own, which might be different than ours, and extending to them the same understanding, the same willingness to appreciate their own struggles, that we would want them to extend to us. We practice it every time we feel that surge of annoyance when someone does something we don’t like, and then check ourselves and try to see the reason for their behavior from their perspective. We practice it every time we are gentle with others instead of being angry with them. And we practice it when we apply that same gentleness to ourselves: every time we accept that we are flawed and imperfect but are good despite that. We practice

Try to treat yourself the same way you would treat someone you cared about who is having the same problem: with compassion and acceptance.

When we talk about communication in polyamory, we’re actually talking about a very specific type of communication: speaking the truth about ourselves, our needs and our boundaries with honesty and precision, and listening with grace when our partners speak of themselves, their needs and their boundaries. This kind of communication isn’t really about words. It’s about vulnerability, self-knowledge, integrity, empathy, compassion and a whole lot of other things.