The perks of polyamory

The alarm goes off and I don’t want to get out of bed, but it’s a work day so I have to. My lover to my left grumbles sleepily in protest. The one to my right shifts slightly. Reluctantly, I disentangle myself from the bundle of limbs and drag myself out of bed. As I leave, I kiss both of them goodbye. ‘See you very soon?’ I ask. Both nod enthusiastically.

After work, where I campaign for an NGO, I have a date with a regular companion. I tell her all about the night before, that glorious tangle of limbs, and she grins with approval. ‘Not too tired, I hope?’ she asks. I answer honestly that I’m not in the least too tired to give her my full attention tonight.

If you’d asked me five years ago if I thought my life would end up this way, I would have laughed. But things have changed, and now there is a word for the things I once fantasised about: polyamory.

Polyamory — or poly, as most of us end up calling it — is the recognition that it is entirely possible to love, fancy and form meaningful relationships with more than one person at a time. There are a lot of different forms that poly relationships can take: some of us have a regular partner and also see other people; some of us live in three-, four- or more-way relationships; some live in big tribes of partners and friends. The possibilities are endless.

I’d fantasised about polyamory ever since I was a child. I wanted lots of husbands and wives and things. But it was only four years ago, when I was 24, and reading about it on a feminist blog, that I realised this was an actual thing. I immediately rushed out to buy a copy of The Ethical Slut — sometimes called the poly bible — which is a guide to the poly lifestyle. It was another six months or so before I met another poly person, on the dating site OkCupid.

As I got more involved in radical and feminist politics, I met — and dated — more poly people, although the community is far more diverse than the little corner I occupy. I think I’m reaching saturation point with poly women on the dating site I use, as everybody I am a high match with turns out to be someone I already know socially. We hold conferences and events, we talk to each other on Twitter, and there’s even poly speed-dating. Outside major cities, the scene is smaller, but I don’t doubt that there are poly people everywhere.

It’s difficult to describe poly relationships, as so much of our language favours the dominant model of monogamous relationships. I suppose I occupy a grey area between what some might call ‘single’ and ‘in a relationship’. I’m dating someone, and seeing a few others less frequently; all of these people started out as friends, and things progressed after the ‘I like you’ conversation. To describe some of my past relationships, it’s probably easiest to talk shapes. I’ve been in a relationship shaped like a triangle: three people, all together with each other; and a relationship shaped like the letter V — two different partners who sleep with me but not with each other; and all sorts of other permutations and shapes. Is there even a word for when five people, after a night out, decide they’re really attracted to each other and all end up in bed together? A pentagon?

By following a few basic guidelines, I’ve found that my capacity to love is limited only by the amount of time I have — and the size of my bed. Obviously, the key to making any relationship work is good communication. When relationships are in the plural, communication is just as crucial, if not more so. As a child, my favourite book was a lovely story called Six Dinner Sid. It told of a cat called Sid who lived on a street where nobody spoke to each other and everybody thought they owned Sid, so he was fed six times a day. When all six of Sid’s owners found out about each other, they started limiting Sid’s food, which made him sad, so he left. Eventually, he found a new street, where everyone talked to each other, and they were all cool with Sid’s culinary preferences.

This is basically how poly communication works. It involves everyone being as honest and upfront as possible about what it is they want, so as to ensure everyone is on the same page and can address any problems that might come up. Back in my monogamous-relationship-with-a-man phase, when I went out with a guy for about five years in my early twenties, the relationship ended due to dishonesty on his part: he’d cheated on me and hadn’t told me. It was the fact he’d lied to me that broke my heart, not that he’d been seeing someone else. This was the start of my poly journey: that it’s truthfulness, not physical or emotional exclusivity, that matters to me.

Unfortunately, perfect communication doesn’t always work in poly relationships. Sometimes conversations can be gruelling and difficult, and it can be hard to find words to say, or even work out what it is that you want. Sometimes I need to force myself to say, ‘Hey, this isn’t OK,’ in some situations, like if I feel I’m being controlled or I’m being treated as though I don’t matter. I know that it is just as important to be honest about the bad as about the good, and I know that being honest is the only route to me fulfilling my needs — intimacy, passion and liberty — and being sensitive to my partners’ needs is the only way I can do this. All of the bad stuff is ultimately outweighed by the good. Phrases like ‘I love you’, ‘I’m happy for you’ and ‘I really fancy you, shall we go out?’ couldn’t happen without emotional honesty.