When I first entered a polyamorous relationship, I tried to read The Ethical Slut. It’s often recommended as the book on polyamory, the one that makes it all make sense. But the more I read, the more I realized - it didn’t resonate with me.

Part of that is because the book is dated. It was groundbreaking for its time, but it reflects the culture and wounds of the era it came out of. To me, it painted polyamory as liberation, as a way of healing, as a kind of enlightened evolution. But what I saw between the lines was something else: pain.

It read less like freedom, and more like protection. A way of saying: “I’ve been hurt before. I’ve felt raw, vulnerable, broken. And I refuse to let anyone ever have that kind of power over me again.”

That doesn’t look like healing to me. That looks like avoidance. It looks like trauma wearing the mask of empowerment. Instead of working through that hurt, polyamory can become a shield - a way to say, “I’ll spread myself thin enough that no one person can undo me.”

And when I look back at my partner, with his avoidant attachment style, I can see how that logic made sense to him. Why give your whole self to someone, when giving fragments feels safer? Why risk intensity, when you can keep everything at arm’s length?

But that’s not love as I understand it. To me, love is about being willing to risk - to let someone close enough that they could hurt you, because the alternative is never really letting yourself be known. Polyamory, in my experience, was less about courage and more about control. And that’s not the kind of love I want to build my life on.

Around the same time, I read an article that critiqued The Ethical Slut. Unlike the book, this piece resonated with me. It pointed out the contradictions: the idea of “no hierarchy” that still relies on primaries and secondaries; the insistence that love is infinite when in reality time, energy, and attention aren’t; the suggestion that jealousy can be solved with bubble baths and crayons. The article called polyamory consumerism disguised as evolution - and honestly, that’s exactly what I felt while living it.

For me, this critique held more truth than the so-called handbook. Because what I learned in practice is that love isn’t about multiplying options - it’s about showing up fully. Not control, not avoidance, not fragments. Just one person, chosen deeply.