Polyamory Advice

When beginning to explore polyamory or if you’re already in a poly relationship, listen to the advice of others but always realize everyone and their situation is ultimately unique.

Among my many social media followers are friends and acquaintances who have quite a bit of experience with polyamory. So, I decided to ask my network if they had any good advice to offer.

I posted approximately this on a few of my social media pages.

To the polyamorous among you, if you had just one bit of advice to give people new to poly relationships, what would it be? Something concise in 2-3 sentences maximum.

Yes, this might be used for an article. No, there will be no attributions to quotes in the article. It will remain anonymous. And some repeated themes might get edited together.

So, what's your advice?

Wow. I was not expecting more than 200 responses. If you’re reading this and were one of those respondents, thank you.

Among the responses was a lot of great advice. There was advice I agree with vehemently and advice I don’t. But it was heartening to see so many people take an interest in the topic.

It would be far too lengthy to list all of the various permutations of advice. I decided to gather them together into some high-level themes that repeatedly recurred among the responses.

Communication

By far, this was the most common advice given. Communicate. Communicate with honesty. Communicate with transparency. Communicate openly. Communicate clearly and consistently. You get the idea.

I agree with this advice, but I’m always surprised that people often emphasize robust communication with multi-partner polyamorous relationships when they don’t nearly as often with two-person relationships. Maybe the reason is that people feel that polyamory requires more communication than other types of relationships.

Then there’s the question of the extent and depth of the communication. Does one need to alert other partners when they’ve briefly flirted with someone? If someone is highly sexually active, do they need to report every single erotic encounter even if it was quick and anonymous?

Anyway, since communication was a part of a large percentage of the advice given, it makes sense to pay attention to it. But deciding how much, how often, and by what means to communicate is a good idea.

Rules and Boundaries

Establishing rules and boundaries came up a lot. I’m all for reasonable boundaries, but when someone references rules, it makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Why? Rigidity.

Rules evoke rigidity. A common definition of a rule is “a prescribed guide for conduct or action.” (Source)

That sounds great but it’s nearly impossible to establish rules that apply to all situations. Typically, I tell people to establish values more than rules. Values in this case are principles by which one lives their life.

For me, values are like foundations upon which in-the-moment judgments can be made and are inherently more flexible to adapt to whatever one might encounter. I think values are much more useful than rules because an underlying value persists while a rule might not apply to every situation.

One respondent offered what I consider astute advice.

You don’t have to have the same rules and boundaries as your partners. Just the understanding and respect for theirs.

I really like how they put that.

Time Management

Ask anyone who’s been in a polyamorous relationship with more than two other people and the issue of time management seems to almost always enter into discussions. I know so many people who maintain a shared calendar with all of their partners so that everyone can enter when they’re available, working, out of town, and so on, as well as entries for specific things two or more of the people are going to do together.

Phew. Keeping a calendar for just me is a challenge at times. I’m not sure I’m cut out for maintaining a shared one. But that said, I’ve heard this strategy from so many people I know with happy relationships that I’m not going to say it’s a bad idea.

Love might be unlimited, but time is and that’s the gist of why time management comes up so often when asking people about how they best manage their polyamorous relationships.

Compersion and Jealousy

Ask any experienced polyamorous person what qualities to develop and often you’ll hear them say to develop compersion. Compersion refers to feeling good about the happiness and joy of others. In the case of polyamory, it usually means celebrating the happiness a partner feels when they are with another partner.

Compersion is often thought of as the opposite of jealousy and possessiveness. Maybe.

Yet another thing that came up among the advice I received is that jealousy is normal and feeling jealousy doesn’t mean you’re doing polyamory wrong. We’ve all been acculturated through religion, society, family, and mainstream entertainment to believe jealousy is the correct response to a partner being romantically interested in someone else.

It’s nearly impossible to quash all feelings of jealousy even among the most experienced polyamory practitioners. It’s more about learning to live with jealousy and move through it with love. At least that’s how I see it.

Personality Matching

The gist of this advice is that often people feel their poly relationship is successful if everyone gets along. If everyone doesn’t get along, that means it’s a failure. Wrong. Sometimes it just means the personalities aren’t a match.

You might otherwise be doing everything correctly in terms of managing a poly relationship, but if one or more of the partners isn’t a personality match with another within the configuration, that’s the issue, not how you’re managing polyamory.

When there’s a personality match disconnect, some solve that by figuring out how to maintain some distance between the people who clash. Sometimes that can work, especially if it’s a V (Vee) polyamorous configuration (good description here). Sometimes it can’t.

One has to decide how much work one wants to put into maintaining the distance or is it better to simply eliminate one of the people clashing from the relationship. There’s no correct answer here. Only someone in that relationship can decide.

Veto Power

Speaking of personality clashes, among the advice is the direct or implied directive that people in an existing relationship get to have veto power over who others in the relationship connect with romantically. Personally, I think this is a recipe for potential disaster.

Admittedly, I come at this from a perspective often called Relationship Anarchy or RA (I dislike the term, but we seem to be stuck with it). I see RA diverging from more mainstream versions of polyamorous relationship interactions in one distinct way.

I won’t ask you for permission to do things, but I will talk to you about how you feel for as long as you need to.

(Source)

I’ve always considered this the pivotal difference between RA and other forms of polyamory, offering true autonomy of each person in a relationship to connect with whoever they want. In other words, no one gets veto power.

Yes, communicate. Yes, listen to each other. Yes, accommodate when and if it feels appropriate to do so. But I think exerting veto power in a relationship tends to poison the water and lower trust levels. Some people will disagree with me, but that’s my perspective.

Primary Relationships

You’ll hear the term primary relationship a lot in poly circles. For example, if a husband and wife have been partnered for 20 years and someone else enters into the relationship in some way, the married husband and wife would be called the primary relationship.

The concept of primary relationship came up a lot in the advice offered. Usually, the advice was to always give deference to the primary relationship.

I dislike using the term. Again, I know many in polyland disagree with me and I respect that. But primary means “most important” and I think it sends a mixed message to the “non-primary” partner(s).

No one likes to believe they play second fiddle to anyone else. I think it’s more helpful to use verbiage that points out the differences between the relationship dynamics but not placing one in a higher status.

I’ve been together with a wonderful man for about 33 years. I don’t consider him my primary partner. He’s the partner I spend the most time with because that’s what I choose. But the man I’ve dated for more than 10 years and another man I’ve been dating for two years, as well as some other friends who are also romantic intimates, are not “secondary.” They are simply different relationships in my life.

There Was More Advice

Respondents offered more advice, but this post is already getting too long. Most of the advice tended to fit into one of the categories I’ve lumped them into here, but there was some other good and unique advice that perhaps I’ll offer in another post.

If you’re in a polyamorous relationship, I hope this helps. If you’re not poly minded, I hope this helps you better understand your friends who are. If you’re considering exploring polyamory, take all advice including mine as opinion more than definitive fact. No two people do polyamory the same way. Sure, we try to codify it like we do everything else so we have a vernacular and structure to guide our discussions and actions, but ultimately you have to do you and figure a lot of this out on your own, which is pretty much what we already do when we embark on any one-to-one romantic relationship. Ultimately, we’re always students of love and continually learning about ourselves and others.

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