The Anxious Person's Guide to Non-Monogamy Quotes

“compersion – sometimes described as ‘the opposite of jealousy’, compersion is a feeling of joy or happiness in witnessing or hearing about a partner’s attraction or love for another person and/or relationship successes or wins.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“It’s easy to be under the impression that your drive to find other partners is motivated by a desire to try to be polyamorous instead of a dissatisfaction with your current relationship.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“polyamory is not about finding multiple unfulfilling relationships until you reach a level of permissible stasis.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“I’m now excited to have a house to myself or a bed to myself for a period of time unless I’ve experienced something that’s impacted my mental health. If you’re brought to polyamory or non-monogamy because a partner is asking for it and you’re struggling to find a good reason to try it yourself, the first night can be even more difficult without an anchor.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“All relationships will end, whether through a ‘breakup’ or because one of the people within them dies.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Just because sex isn’t love doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning or isn’t important.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“I think it’s important for people, monogamous or polyamorous, to be comfortable with not having any romantic relationships in their life, because if you’re terrified of being single, you can end up staying in any kind of unfulfilling relationship simply to avoid being alone.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“If you are in a place where your nervous system is constantly agitated, where you are fighting with yourself, where you are unhappy with yourself and where you are barely listening to yourself, it’s going to be a struggle to really be able to see if a relationship is actually fulfilling.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“outside of a few basic incompatibilities, the relationship is actually fulfilling.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“One of the things I frequently remind people is that polyamory is not about finding multiple unfulfilling relationships until you reach a level of permissible stasis.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“recognizing what you can control and how your learned helplessness can contribute to your situation isn’t about shaming yourself or about believing you can outperform any obstacle that comes your way. It’s simply about recognizing not only what is out of your control, but also what is in your control and how you can change it.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“It took me a long time to understand that being disabled wasn’t about wallowing in anything. Accepting certain things about my body and neurology as differences was actually part of taking responsibility for myself.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Always take responsibility for what you can control.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“you’re also going to be coming to grips with what anyone who tries to talk about abuse goes through: the more popular someone is or the more social capital they have, the more likely it is that the people around them will not want to hear anything negative about them.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Another thing that Bancroft’s book highlighted to me was that abusive relationships are rarely all bad and that people who abuse can often be great people when they aren’t abusing their partners. It’s not as simple as finding a complete monster among angels.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Whether you’re monogamous or polyamorous, you still have to cultivate a relationship with yourself and prioritize your own needs so that you can actually show up fully for other people.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“While I do think it’s important to recognize that blaming other people for causing your emotions is reductive, disempowering and, at worst, manipulative, the idea that a person has no responsibility for the emotional pain they cause can be used just as harmfully.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“One of the most common things that people who abuse or hurt others have – whether their behaviour stems from past trauma, brain structure, inadequate socialization or anything else – is the assumption of entitlement.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“But you have the capacity to define what fulfilment means to you and you alone and there’s no time like the present to decide.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Remember that you are more powerful than you give yourself credit for.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“When you understand that you can experience strong emotions without having a dysregulated nervous system, it changes your relationship to big emotions and makes them far less terrifying to face.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“the biggest breakthrough was realizing that for some people a ‘calm’ nervous system is unnatural to them and they might seek out or attempt to do things that cause nervous system reactions because they feel so uncomfortable in the ‘calm’.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Forgiving myself and having compassion for myself for making the mistakes that I did led me to a place where I had a lot more compassion and forgiveness for others.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Once you stop blaming yourself for everything that has happened to you, you can actually shift too far into the opposite end of that – which is continuously blaming other people or other circumstances for things you have the power to change.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“If you could prevent bad stuff from happening to you then you could have prevented what has already happened to you. Because so much is out of your control, putting all the responsibility to prevent something from happening to you completely on your shoulders is unrealistic”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go

“Point blank, if we could simply control whom, when, why and how we were in love with or attracted to anyone, the world would be much simpler. There are obviously things we can change, such as going out more to meet people or working on being more communicative, that can make us better partners overall. We can challenge our assumptions in a lot of ways and work on ourselves. But through your actions you can only control who you become, not whether or not someone appreciates or loves who you are.”
― Lola Phoenix, The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy: Your Guide to Open Relationships, Polyamory and Letting Go