Erin on how out she is about her polyamory
11/2016
Interviewer: How out are you? You mentioned you tell your family you’re not exclusive. What about other parts of your life like the dance community or with your jobs, your friends? Erin: With everyone else I’m pretty straightforward about it. If they ask, I’ll tell them I’m poly I don’t go and introduce myself, “Hi, I’m Erin, I’m poly.” It’s not part of my identity so I don’t say it. If they say that, “Oh you said you were dating this other person and you’re also dating this person,” then I’ll go, “Yeah, we’re poly.” That’s when it comes up. Interviewer: In context they get to know you well enough or they see you in certain situations. Erin: I’ve gotten way better at saying at the beginning of a date, “By the way, I’m in a poly relationship,” because I used to be really bad at that. Interviewer:  That’s an interesting question: When does that come up? Erin: I used to wait 3 or 4 dates and that was always a really bad call for everybody because it put different expectations on something that was already forming. Also, those people I was dating were usually from online or something random and had no experience with poly, had different expectations of it, just thought it was dating around kind of thing. I’ve been more up front about it as far as dating people. If I date online I put it on my profile. “In a poly relationship,” and there’s a picture of me and my local partner or something.  It changes the type of people I match with. I was doing Tinder for a while and when I didn’t put it on there, I felt like I got a lot more matches but when I put it on there I got less matches with people I find attractive and more matches with white guys. Interviewer:  Oh, interesting. Erin: There’s a lot of white guys in Seattle anyways. In this neighbourhood there’s more Asians. I didn’t get matched with anybody like that.
