All the Reasons I’m Not Polyamorous

I first encountered polyamory about seven years ago, after I’d moved back to San Francisco. My main sources of information (and curiosity) were two coworkers I was close with. They were both women dating men, one straight and experienced in polyamory, the other just starting to peel back the layers of her bisexuality and diving into post-graduate dating. The more I learned from them, the less appealing it seemed to me. Polyamory became another cultural overlap between the hippie past and tech future of San Francisco that I rejected, joining other ideas like microdosing at work, going to Burning Man, and biohacking.

I was happy to support them as a friend through their own explorations of relationship structures, but I always felt myself leaning back from polyamory, thinking “this clearly isn’t for me.” My biggest objections to my own participation in polyamory were, and still are, very real. But my perspective on those objections has changed dramatically in the last few years, especially as I continue on this journey to define what I’m looking for. Those objections may warrant a rethinking, so I’m happily chewing the fat on them here.

Objection #1: The straight men mostly have bad intentions - Initially, I saw polyamory as simply the way that woke men positioned themselves to be dogs. They could cheat or sleep around as much as they wanted and their girlfriends were not ‘allowed’ to be jealous or sad about it, because ‘this is just who I am’ and ‘I told you I was poly’ would invalidate those feelings. I knew all too well that the men I had dated, who were ostensibly monogamous, had used different excuses to invalidate my feelings in similar ways. The bad intentions just had a different mask in polyamory. I saw the polyamorous label as a reason to be less trusting of a man. And while there are certainly ill-intentioned men out there in the polyamorous community, I know there are ill-intentioned men out there is the monogamous community. I’ve dated a lot of them!

My perspective changed when I realized that filtering out untrustworthy or selfish men is always a part of the process, no matter which dating pool you are swimming in. As I’ve gotten better at setting boundaries and communicating, the men I’ve dated have increasingly shown their true colors earlier on. If I’m clear up front about what I’m looking for, the bad ones take themselves out of the equation pretty quickly. If I hold a high standard for how I’m treated and communicated with, it matters less to me how the man is clearing that bar. So while I still think straight men mostly have bad intentions, if I’m doing the filtering and communicating, I’ll weed out the ones in either community who are not engaging in earnest. Finding a good connection with someone who is transparent and kind is the goal, no matter what the relationship structure is.

Objection #2: I’m too jealous of a person to ever be able to handle the baggage of multiple partners - Jealousy is a funny thing. Up until a couple years ago, I would have described myself as generally jealous: I was jealous if someone else has a cooler job, is spending more time with my friend, is trying to date my crush, or gets more attention from someone I love. At some point (ok, years of therapy), I realized that my jealousy was just the surface level of a deep insecurity. If I was jealous that my sibling was getting more attention from my parents, it was because I felt I wasn’t good enough in their eyes. If my crush was dating someone else, it was because he wasn’t really interested in me. If someone else had a cool job, it meant there were fewer cool jobs for me out there (especially apt when I was struggling at work).

As I matured and healed some of those insecurities, the jealousy naturally lessened. My bestie having a strong friendship with someone else is additive to me, it does not take away from our friendship. Someone else’s cool job is a sign that there are cool jobs out there, and maybe something exciting is ahead for my career. My parents’ attention to my sibling took heat off me when I wasn’t feeling my best. And if another woman turned the head of the man I was dating, he was never mine to begin with (see Objection #1). I won’t say I’m fully healed or never jealous - that’s a very intense claim to make. But when I feel a surge of jealousy now, it’s a sign that I need to attend to my insecurities. In dating situations, it means I’m feeling uneasy about our connection or I need to ask about his feelings and intentions. Jealousy is a reminder to assert myself (again, see Objection #1) and not something to be avoided.

Objection #3: The sex goes up linearly but the talking goes up exponentially - My main objection to polyamory has been that it seems MESSY. Specifically, emotionally messy. And substantially more emotionally messy while adding marginally more sex into your life. The trade off just didn’t add up. I always imagined it was like a mutiplicative version of the Sex and the City episodes were Samantha dates a woman. Some amazing sex, but mostly a lot of talking and ‘being together’. This is not what I wanted, ever, from a relationship (monogamous or otherwise), so why would I want multiple relationships like this?

The reality is, I’ve been accidentally doing polyamory by default, as someone who is always dating. I often have multiple connections going, in different stages, with different levels of attachment and emotionality. I’ve always said that it would take someone really special to make me “not want to kiss other boys” (my 16 year old way of saying it). I had never framed my ‘usual’ mode as polyamory because it was rarely serious and it was always pointed in the direction of monogamy - everything was under the “dating” umbrella. Maybe there is some logrithmic function to all of these relationships - and the sex that comes with them - because my main takeaway from all of my experience is: it’s a flow. Sometimes I have many dates, good connections, lots of sex. Sometimes I have none, am mostly spending time solo, and don’t have any active crushes. Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down. That’s just a fact of life. Maybe polyamory is just the reframing of that emotional rollercoaster of dating or relationships building into a multi-dimensional emotional state. There is never a balance; there is only change and flux.

I’m not yet ready to wear the ‘poly’ label. I haven’t read The Ethical Slut or any of Ester Perel’s books and even my objections above leave out the role that queerness and queer culture plays in polyamory (something I feel in no way qualified to speak on). But my thinking keeps evolving. I’m open to where my heart and my experiences take me. Maybe I’ve been poly this whole time and just didn’t know it.