Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

one was that in a group i was in, someone was mentioning how they have a long-term partner who does not want to escalate their relationship to engagement or marriage, and they were fine with that until the partner proposed to a new partner. and now they’ve been struggling with jealousy. which… of fucking course!!!! they’d taken it as a given that the partner just wasn’t interested in marriage and then it had turned out they were, but not to them! that’s heartbreaking! it is!! frankly it’s a slap in the face (unless you’re also on board with the non-escalation). and they were coming for help working through that and that’s when it clicked for me… there’s no real stability. in at least the standard modern of relationship that poly communities embrace, autonomy means that at any point you can be shifted or downgraded or deprioritized and you’re expected to just “do the work” to make yourself ok with it. and what it looked like to me is that a huge percentage of poly advice is “do the work to make yourself okay with it.”

another thing was talking to someone who’d been poly for 10 years and was still struggling with things like sadness over having less time with a partner who didn’t live full-time with them bc of the time the partner was spending at another person’s house, and realizing that oh, time spent doing the work doesn’t make this better. discomfort with a setup like that is not “monogamous conditioning.” it’s someone not getting their relationship needs met. and that’s what it is for me, the idea that you cannot hold expectations of another person to meet those needs.

i do want to say that there are i’m sure many poly folks and polycules who do prize relational care and who do meet one another’s relationship needs. i’m sure there are many stable poly relationships and folks who are genuinely fulfilled and happy in them. this is not me saying “polyamory is bad and no one should do it,” it’s me naming some strains of toxicity i’ve identified in the community and its norms. i also acknowledge that i’m getting a lot of this from online polyamory groups (mostly support groups) where almost all of the posts are by people who are struggling while the people who aren’t, aren’t posting.

but with that being said, i’m not basing these opinions on the volume of individuals struggling but rather the way they’re encouraged to think and the way things are framed. for example, so many shitty and disrespectful things that people would post about would receive “you can’t tell them not to do that, it violates their autonomy.”

case in point, what inspired this rant, years after i left the community? a discussion i’ve been seeing. i didn’t see the original post but here’s what i’ve gathered: a pregnant woman found out her partner had also impregnated his other girlfriend, whose due date is a few months later, and she’s upset about it. she’s building a family with him and this throws a wrench into everything. and, someone respected in the community is saying that she doesn’t have a right to have asked him not to impregnate someone else, because that would violate his and the gf’s reproductive autonomy.

and i understand where that perspective is coming from. but essentially that is a framework that denies someone the right to stability, and right to have expectations of a partner about their future, the right to a certain family setup. if you want to impregnate multiple women then don’t date a woman who doesn’t want that! it’s fuckboy behavior. i guess at its most stripped down level you don’t have a “right” to tell someone else they can’t conceive a child but you can absolutely feel hurt and betrayed. and frankly yes you should be able to be in relationships where you can expect your partner not to intentionally do this to you.

polyamory will have you excusing all kinds of fuckboy behaviors under the guise of autonomy. it will have you thinking that expectations to the contrary are derived from control. but they’re not, they’re derived from the desire for safety and stability. the difference between a postpartum woman caring for a child who has her partner’s full support and time vs. a postpartum woman caring for a child whose partner is splitting his time with another household and baby is huge! him having a baby with someone else is a life-altering choice. it’s a choice that affects her and their child. and that’s the thing about the standard narratives of polyamory — a refusal to accept that one’s actions affect others. and that those effects can’t be washed away just by “doing the work.” no amount of inner work will make up for the fact that he will have another baby he has to split his time with.

this is just the most dramatic example but it highlights for me just how often micro versions of this dynamic are presented and folks are expected to just be fine with it. it’s a question of whether you take responsibility for how your choices affect your partners, or not. again i am sure there are plenty of polyamorous people who absolutely do take that responsibility, but i think also it’s given a free pass quite a lot.

and even worse is the framing around de-escalation and non-escalation and the relationship escalator. if you want to marry your partner and they don’t want to marry you, that hurts! that is a rejection! if you’re living together and they decide they want to live separately, that’s also a rejection and it’s kind of a mini-breakup. i am not advocating that people consider themselves obligated to escalate or not to change the terms of a relationship when it’s not working for them. you are allowed to say no i don’t want to marry you. you are allowed to say no i don’t want to live together anymore. BUT! the person on the receiving end of this rejection is allowed to see it as a rejection, they’re allowed to be hurt, they’re allowed to reevaluate the relationship, theyre allowed to take a break to reassess. and hot take but they are even allowed to feel lead on, angry, or resentful, as long as they do not harm the other person in the process, ie don’t start screaming at your partner.

what i’ve seen several times are reels popping up in my feed of people talking about their deescalations (sometimes full deescalations that are effectively breakups) and how they may have been a little sad at first but quickly moved on into accepting the new setup and how actually this process was so good healing and etc etc and like. look if that’s your real genuine experience, great! but it does not and should not have to look like that. you are actually allowed to grieve losses, and yes losing a relationship is a loss. you are allowed to be sad for more than a moment. you’re allowed to feel empty, or miserable, or confused, or any of a range of emotions. so much of this is toxic positivity and trying to spin things that are painful into something happy and fluffy. not everything is happy and fluffy. you are allowed to take time to process a de-escalation, or even a no to an escalation request, and don’t just have to go “thank you for telling me” and seamlessly move on in joy to the new paradigm.

this for me is the core of the issue. self-gaslighting, blaming people for struggling, toxic positivity, detachment, and the assumption that everyone is cut out for all of this if only they do the inner work.

again i have no issue with the concept in itself of being in multiple relationships. or with reimagining relationships. my issues are:

- ignoring the very real friction points that polyamory causes

- reimagining relationships in ways that don’t make space for genuine reactions and emotions

- valuing autonomy for its own sake so highly that you leave behind relational care

- not understanding that one person’s actions affect other people and that the more people involved, the more true that becomes

- situations where the only successful emotional strategies are detachment or self-negation

- the expectation to make yourself feel okay with things you genuinely don’t feel okay with

so yeah. i’m sure a healthy polyamory could exist but right now this is what I’ve observed of polyamorous communities and norms and i haven’t seen much evidence these issues are being meaningfully addressed.

But yes, the community toxicity you're talking about is very real. I was once bullied out of a poly group for saying that it's natural to prioritize a longstanding relationship over a new one by default, and that that's not the same as imposing an artificial hierarchy.

Healthy polyamory requires treating all of your partners with respect, taking their needs seriously, and being willing to compromise. It also requires being open about your own needs, and expecting respect, consideration, and compromise from your own partners. It cannot be one partner's sole responsibility to "do the work". You need to work together.

And it can absolutely be done! I've been in a healthy, stable, loving open/poly relationship for about 14 years now. When one of us has concerns about the other's other relationships, we talk about it, and we work through it together. Sometimes just talking about it resolves the issue, and sometimes it requires a compromise (so we compromise).

That's something that I really want to emphasize - you are absolutely allowed to have concerns about your partners' other relationships, and you are absolutely allowed to talk to them about it. You should talk to them about it. You don't have to suffer in silence.

You are allowed to get upset, or angry, or even jealous, and you are allowed to express those feelings, and so are your partners. Having those feelings doesn't mean you're doing polyamory wrong; it means you're human.

Unfortunately, yes, there are a lot of fuckboys (of all genders) in the community who do expect their partners to suffer in silence, to bottle up their feelings and "do the work" on their own. Those people suck, and the rest of us hate them. But as is so often the case, the assholes tend to be the loudest voices in the room.

Polyamory is not for everyone. If it doesn't appeal to you, or you don't think you could handle it, then don't do it. But it can absolutely work. And when it does, it's wonderful.