Sometimes I hear feedback from people who compare themselves to me and how confident I am with ENM.

Sometimes it’s from monogamous friends:

• “I could never do what you do, I’m way too jealous of a person.”
• “I don’t know how you keep track of it all.”
• “How do you handle not being someone’s top priority?”

Sometimes it’s ENM friends:

• “How do you NOT have “x” boundary?”
• “I’m polyamorous but I could never let my partner do that.”
• “How is this so easy for you?”

I’m happy that today I can be a resource for other ENM folks, and I’m happy I can help quell unconscious biases of monogamous folks. However, I didn’t get here overnight. The place I find myself today is the culmination of years of deliberate and committed self-improvement. I’m writing this post as a reminder that like the majority I, too, was raised with the belief that monogamy was the only option for relationships. As a result, I came into ENM with learned behaviors that weren’t always the healthiest. My journey hasn’t been without its challenges, and while I’m feeling confident in ENM today, I know that there’s always room for more growth.

The idea for this post came as I was listening to one of Multiamory’s latest podcasts, discussing aggressive fairness in polyamory. In the episode, they were discussing an example in which one polyamorous couple had some cringey rules in place. In that moment, I realized a bias I’d been harboring. My gut reaction was “yuck, I would never date someone with that rule”. However, as I thought about it, I realized that I had some similar behaviors and rules in place when I was new to ENM.

Alas. In an effort to be transparent, I wanted to write a post to highlight how much my behaviors have evolved over the years I’ve been ENM.

Rules, Rules, Rules

Quite possibly one of the biggest themes you will hear among the veteran ENM community is: Boundaries, not Rules. I’m a member of probably at least a dozen Polyamory Support groups where members solicit advice from others on various situations. I see the rules/boundaries talk come up daily.

As a quick refresher, a rule is something you enforce on others and a boundary is something you enforce on yourself. While both are meant to inhibit behaviors to protect us, mandating others change their behaviors for our sake, creating a rule, isn’t the most ethical way to go about it.

When I was first exploring ENM, I was in a relationship that had been monogamous for seven years. As we prepared to make the transition to ENM, we sat down and wrote out a laundry list of rules. We tried to think of every possible thing that might cause uncomfortable feelings and we slapped a rule in place. Back then, I had the mentality that I’d rather severely restrict myself and my partner by enforcing a bunch of rules than chance experiencing any uncomfortable feelings.

• Don’t want to feel loneliness at night by sleeping alone?
  • Make a rule that your partner can’t ever sleepover with other partners.
• Don’t want to feel awkward by accidentally running into your partner’s partner in town?
  • Make a rule that your partner can’t date anyone within a 20 mile radius.
• Don’t want to feel insecure that your partner may love someone more than they love you?
  • Make a rule that the moment romantic feelings develop, your partner needs to break off that relationship.

These might seem exaggerated, but these are some of the actual rules my partner and I put in place when we transitioned to ENM. Of course at the time, we didn’t have the depth to realize that each of these rules was an attempt at blocking various negative emotions: loneliness, awkwardness, insecurity.

These are all normal emotions, and it’s natural to want to avoid them.

However, one thing I’ve learned is that no matter how hard you try to avoid them, the negative emotions end up happening anyway. Rules are just temporary band-aids. Rather than avoid them and try to resist the inevitable, I’ve learned that it’s best to face those emotions head on.

Over time, as our relationships with others bloomed, the rules we had in place began to make us feel constrained. In some cases they caused subconscious resentment. It was only a matter of time before we began testing the limits to see how much we could get away with while still technically following the rules. I remember my partner would stay at his new partner’s until 4am and claim that as long as he was home by 5am it didn’t count as “sleeping over” at his other partner’s. At that point, I was more concerned with him driving safely and said if he was already set on staying out until 5am, there was really no difference in just sleeping there and coming home the next morning. We eliminated the “no sleepover” rule and while sure, some initial loneliness was felt by the partner home alone, it wasn’t unbearable.

Slowly but surely we began working our way through our list of rules, eliminating the ones that no longer served us. Soon after, we were educated in the importance of boundaries instead of rules and we went through the remaining list we had and picked apart each rule to get to the driving negative emotion behind each of them. Before we knew it, we didn’t have a single “rule” left. What we did have was a basic understanding of the individual boundaries we each had. Once the rules were gone, the resentment began to fade. My insecurities were no longer holding my partner’s other relationships back, and vice versa.

Actions Dictated by Jealousy

As pointed out in my early post: Tackling Jealousy in Relationships, jealousy is a complex emotion that humans experience, similar to other complex emotions such as: guilt, pride, shame, and worry. We have no control over the emotions we feel and on its own, jealousy is neither good nor bad; it simply is. It’s how we act and respond to feeling jealous that can be helpful or harmful to ourselves and our relationships.

Looking back, there were absolutely moments I let jealousy dictate my actions in a negative way. When I think back to those moments, while I’m not thrilled with how I acted, each one was a learning opportunity and a chance for growth. In this section, I highlight various ways in which jealousy dictated my actions including:

• Possessiveness
• Aggressive Fairness

Possessiveness

One of the key behaviors that one has to unlearn when transitioning from monogamy to ENM is possessiveness. Possessive behaviors have been observed in humans as early as toddlers and being possessive over those we’re in a relationship with is commonplace in mononormative culture. Think about it – on Valentine’s Day, the “holiday for love”, we hand out hearts saying “Be Mine”. There’s something alluring about having a partner show some possessiveness over you; it can cause you to feel wanted, valued, desired. While experts agree that the presence of possessiveness isn’t inherently negative, too much can be cause for concern. ¹

In ethical non monogamy, one of the driving principles is that no one “owns” anyone else, so you’d think that possessiveness would merely “poof” away.

Unfortunately as we all know, it’s not that easy.

Possessiveness is a coping mechanism that emerges when we’re afraid we’re going to lose something of ours to someone else. In monogamy, when folks can only choose one person to be with at a time, we often feel fear and insecurity that our partner will abandon us the moment someone “better” comes along. Transitioning to ENM, those fears and insecurities still exist.

Thinking back to some experiences I had in the early years I was polyamorous, I can think of a handful of moments I displayed possessive behaviors as a result of jealousy and insecurity. I had been dating this partner for about a year when he began a new relationship with another partner. Prior to this, we would hang out twice a week, but we would text frequently on our off days. Now suddenly there was one night a week he would spend with this new partner, and he and I weren’t able to text as frequently. I felt jealousy because my relationship with him was getting slightly less of his focus, and I felt possessive that this new partner would take up more and more of his time – time I thought was mine.

SIDE NOTE: just thinking about the way I acted is making me cringe. If a partner of mine now acted the way I had back then, it would honestly make me reconsider the relationship. However, I keep reminding myself of the purpose of this post

• to serve as a testament that ENM and polyamory are all about growth
• to show that with time and dedication, it’s possible to work through the hard emotions and come out with healthier behaviors
• to demonstrate that even though it may seem like I have my polyamorous shit together now, it wasn’t without struggles and failures along the way

Looking back to that period of time with my partner, I knew I was feeling uncomfortable feelings but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to know what they were other than “jealousy”. I communicated that to my partner and because he cared about me and didn’t want to perpetuate any negative feelings, we came up with what we thought would be helpful coping mechanisms but in reality they were just ways for me to be possessive over my partner. He would always check in via text at least once during his date and he would always text me when he got home so I knew he made it safely. It seems innocent enough, but it definitely had some toxic energy. One night I awoke at 4am and checked my phone to discover my partner hadn’t texted saying he made it home safe. I panicked that maybe he’d gotten in an accident, only to discover he’d ended up staying the night, which ended up causing my insecurities to spiral even more. With the fear of “losing him” to this other person, I held on tighter and tighter and tried to find any little sign that he valued me more than her.

That was the moment I realized that my jealousy was causing some toxic, possessive tendencies and I knew that if I was going to make ENM work, I needed help working through the hard feelings. Thankfully there are a plethora of helpful resources available online, some of which I’ve listed in My Favorite Resources. Through countless sessions with my incredible therapist who is educated on all things ENM, hours of podcasts, and a few jealousy workbooks, I was able to get to a place where I don’t give in to possessive feelings. Now in relationships, if I start feeling the need to be possessive over a partner, I reflect upon the root cause. What am I afraid I’ll lose? What fears/insecurities are driving this?

Aggressive Fairness

Aggressive fairness occurs when one or more partners in a polyamorous relationship insist that if one partner gets something, the other(s) must receive exactly the same. ²

I can remember some distinct memories of having an attitude of aggressive fairness in early ENM relationships. In one long-distance relationship (LDR) I was in, my partner had 2 other partners and both of them were local to him. In his mind the way to keep things fair was to have a date day with each of them once a week. Every Tuesday was “date day” with partner A, and every Thursday was “date day” with partner B. Even though I wasn’t local, in an effort to feel special and valued, I asked that I, too, get a specific “date day” that we could spend virtually, be it video chatting, streaming a movie, playing a game online, etc. It seemed “fair” so we rolled with it. Wednesdays became our “date day”. As you can probably imagine, he quickly got burned out having every Tuesday-Thursday booked and our virtual date days soon fell apart.

I had become so fixated on what was “fair” that I began tying my worth to the amount of time spent in “dates”. At the heart of it, the comparison of a LDR to a local relationship was causing a myriad of insecurities for me. In order to avoid those uncomfortable feelings, I masked them with trying to fight for “fairness”.

Aggressive Fairness is a Polyamory Red Flag that comes up when our monogamous conditioning leaks into our polyamorous life. Growing up in a monogamous world, we are given the expectation that our romantic/sexual partner will always put us first, no matter what. But in polyamory, that simply isn’t possible. Each relationship you might be in is a separate entity. Yes, all your partners deserve you doing nice things for them, but they should not be connected. You make romantic gestures because you want to, not because you’re obliged to.

(Brand, 2022) ³

Nowadays, whenever I have the gut reaction that I need to advocate for “fairness”, I stop to think about what’s at the root of that feeling. I’ve noticed that it often pops up when there’s a want or need I have that is being fulfilled by a partner of mine in a different relationship of theirs. Most of the time, it’s a want or need I wasn’t consciously aware of until that moment. When this happens, rather than resort to aggressive fairness, I communicate with my partner about the feelings I’ve experienced and the want/need I’ve been attuned to.

One example of this happened when a partner spent a three day weekend with another partner of his.

• If responding with aggressive fairness, I would have insisted that since another partner got a three-day weekend with him, I also needed to get a three-day weekend with him
• Instead I dug down to what about that experience caused the uncomfortable feelings:
  • I reflected on the fact that lately dates with this partner had been weeknights after work where we were both exhausted from the day
  • I pinpointed the aspects of the “three-day weekend” date I was craving:
    • A sleepover where we didn’t have to set an alarm and we could snuggle all morning
    • Enjoying breakfast together
    • Having a relaxing day with each other with no other obligations to attend to
  • I communicated these feelings and wants to my partner and we planned a date where we could satisfy those different date aspects
    • The date wasn’t a three-day weekend, and it didn’t need to be because deep down it was never really about the number of days.

One thing that’s become clearer to me over the years is what when it comes to dating someone in multiple relationships, comparing your relationship to any of their other relationships will likely do more harm than good. Each person is unique and as such, each relationship is unique. My partner’s relationship with me won’t be the same as his relationship with another partner because the other partner and I are not the same person. As humans, it’s easy to look at another relationship and notice all the things you don’t have, but it’s not as easy to see the things your relationship does have that the other might not. After all, that’s part of the beauty of polyamory. No two people are the same and no two relationships are the same. I’ve learned to trust that if my partner is in a relationship with me, they want to be in a relationship with me, which has helped shift my mindset away from aggressive fairness.

Mononormative Relationship Behaviors

As a person who was raised monogamously, some of the challenges I’ve had to overcome have been defaulting to mononormative relationship behaviors while in non-monogamous relationships including:

• Longevity as a measure of success
• Hierarchy as a way to feel valued
• Relationship structure as a measure of validity

Success Measured in Longevity

Had you asked me what I considered a “successful relationship” back when I was monogamous, my answer would have been: a relationship that lasts forever. This was something that took me a while to shake off after shifting to ENM. I found myself seeking partners for “forever relationships” in the same way I had been seeing a forever partner before I was ENM.

There’s nothing wrong in wanting a relationship to last indefinitely while you’re enjoying the company of your partner. However, I’ve learned that people are constantly growing and changing. Sometimes, partners will grow and change similarly, enabling the relationship to continue for a long period of time, but sometimes partners grow and change and different rates and the relationship no longer serves them. It’s similar to platonic friendships. Sometimes we have friends for short parts of our lives, and sometimes we have friends that have been around forever. I think back to my childhood and high school friendships and none of them are as big of a component in my life today as they were back then. It doesn’t mean that the time we spent together as close friends back then means any less. They were still important, successful friendships that formed who I am as a person. The fact that a romantic relationship ends doesn’t have to mean that it wasn’t successful.

It’s a wild concept to wrap my mind around but ultimately I believe that success and longevity are independent from each other. I’ve witnessed long, unsuccessful relationships, and shorter successful relationships. I’ve also witnessed long successful relationships and short unsuccessful relationships. Ultimately, I view successful relationships as ones where there’s mutual value and respect between partners. Boundaries are respected, communication is open and effective, and both partners put in work to make the relationship grow. If these things are happening, then the relationship is successful to me, regardless of how long it lasts.

Underlying Hierarchies

Now, I’ve written about hierarchy a bit in the past, and I fully understand that many, many polyamorous folks practice hierarchical polyamory, which is a completely valid and ethical way to practice polyamory. For me, personally, I’ve been trying to live as non-hierarchical as I can for a while now. What prompted this desire was the observation that I was using hierarchy as a way to feel valued. However, just as acting-out in jealousy is a way to avoid digging deeper to uncomfortable truths of feelings like insecurity, I felt like relying on hierarchies as a way to feel valued was a similar band-aid solution. When I was new to ENM, my NP and I had a bunch of unspoken hierarchical policies in place:

• when given plus-ones for events (weddings, work events, etc), we would only ever take our primary partner
• holidays/birthdays were always celebrated with our primary partner on the actual day; celebrating holidays with other partners meant setting up time before or after the actual holiday
• vacations were reserved for just our primary partner (whether that was going out of town for the weekend, or a longer trip)

These are just a sampling of some of the policies we had in place. (I’ll admit that for ENM folks who aren’t publicly out as ENM, some of these may be requirements to keep up appearances.) As a publicly out polyamorous person, I began to think about why these policies were important to me and I realized that these were all ways to guarantee that I was “chosen”. What if I didn’t get to celebrate my NP’s birthday with him on his actual birthday because he wanted to spend it out of town with another partner instead? What if my NP got invited to a friend’s wedding and took another partner as his plus one? What if we had a long weekend and my NP decided to go out of town with another partner? Did those possibilities scare me? Yes, but why? Fear of missing out on events, insecurity that I’ll never be picked, worried that in the eyes of the public someone else is seen as a more important partner than me.

One of the beauties of polyamory is knowing that your partners value you and choose to be in a relationship with you each day, though as humans it’s hard to trust that we’re actually worthy of being chosen. Ultimately I think it comes down to our desire to feel important. When someone chooses us first, (whether it’s mandatory or not) we feel special; we feel important; we feel valued. When someone else is chosen over us, we feel rejected; we feel undesirable; we feel neglected. What we need to remember is that our partner has chosen to be in a relationship with us, just like we have chosen to be in a relationship with them. In the grand scheme of things, one event, one holiday – they don’t make or break relationships. Releasing these hierarchal tendencies has allowed me to not take for granted the moments I am chosen, and it has empowered me to communicate with my partner on what makes me feel valued and unvalued. Additionally, it’s helped me to combat a toxic superiority complex and the constant need to feel better than my partner’s other partners. After all, if our partner is choosing to be in a relationship with all of us, and each of us are adding value to our partner’s life, then it shouldn’t matter who is “the best”.

Cookie-Cutter Relationship Structures and Their Biases

In monogamy, when we think about relationships, there are several types of relationship structures and each carry their own biases:

• Stereotypical relationship
  • use labels such as boyfriend/girlfriend
  • exclusive
  • known publicly as a couple
  • often marriage-minded
  • romantic and sexual
  • “high commitment”
  • see each other regularly
• Casual relationship
  • use labels such as FWB
  • not exclusive
  • not “brought home to meet the family”
  • not marriage-minded
  • typically just sexual
  • “low commitment”
  • sporadic/irregular get togethers

Raised monogamously, I was taught to understand that “stereotypical relationships” were good and “casual relationships” were bad. Individuals in casual relationships were afraid of commitment, desperate, and immature. Media plays into these stereotypes heavily. Think of any rom com with a casual relationship: they either end up realizing that what they wanted all along was an exclusive committed relationship, or one of the partners ends up finding their true love and ditching their casual partner who was “the wrong choice all along”. Casual relationships are stepping stones and never the final destination.

When I first stepped into ENM, I had a handful of casual relationships as I was exploring this new part of my life, but the whole time I had this negative connotation around it all. Because I was judgmental towards casual relationships and individuals involved in them, I judged myself. Very shorty after jumping into ENM, I discovered I was polyamorous and I used that as an excuse to once again look down upon casual relationships. However, all being polyamorous means is that I’m capable of feeling love for multiple partners at once; it doesn’t dictate that I can only engage in non-casual relationships.

I think this has been one of the hardest mononormative behaviors to overcome because even throughout the polyamorous community, casual relationships continue to be stigmatized. It’s like we’re fighting so hard to justify polyamory to monogamous folks that we bash casual relationships as a way to assimilate. Monogamous folks often have the same biases towards ENM folks as they do toward casual relationships, and us polyam folks try so hard to change that narrative that we justify all the ways we’re not like “those casual relationship folks”.

“We value commitment, our relationships are not just sexual, they are full-fledged relationships, we just have multiple at a time.” (aka we do relationships like you just with more partners)

With all the judgement going on, it took a long time for me to realize that, wait a minute – casual relationships aren’t inherently bad. Individuals in a casual relationship aren’t afraid of commitment, desperate, or immature – that’s a misconception and a negative stigma. It took me a long time to realize that in polyamory, relationships don’t all have to look like the stereotypical mononormative relationship. Sometimes that relationship structure works well, but sometimes it doesn’t.

I’ve started trying to unpack relationships from the tiny boxes I’ve been keeping them in. Relationships, to me, don’t all have to look like the “stereotypical relationship” described above. As I’m learning and growing in ENM, I’m learning that relationships can form organically to be whatever it is that works best for both partners involved. Sometimes that includes making time for each other at least once a week, sometimes that includes making time for each other every other month or so. Sometimes that means texting every single day, sometimes it means texting sporadically every so often. Sometimes things can be “casual” and if it works for both of you, there’s nothing wrong with that. If a partner and I enjoy getting together solely to Disney+ and chill every once in a while, and we’re both on the same page and happy with that being the entirety of our relationship, that is a completely valid and acceptable relationship. Every single one of my relationships can be an entirely different structure, I don’t have to have just “casual” or “non-casual” relationships. It’s valid to feel fulfilled in various relationship structures.

I was chatting with a friend who happens to be an ex-partner. We were catching up because we hadn’t talked in a long time due to our hectic schedules and he mentioned that at least for right now, he has realized he doesn’t have time for any relationships outside of his wife, due to work, parental responsibilities, and hobbies. He said he had come to terms with the fact that he wouldn’t have time for the relationship a potential partner would want. I asked him to elaborate on that and he said “it’s fair for potential partners to want more than someone who can only talk a few times a week and maybe go out once a month.”

It got me thinking about my own relationships. I have one I’ve been in for 4 years now and it has fluctuated over time. In the beginning my partner was extremely busy with other things and he was only able to get together a couple times that year. Then his schedule opened up, but mine was packed with other things, but still we maintained our relationship, as limited as it was. Now this year, we’re both in a place we have more availability and we’ve been able to see each other more often. I really appreciate the fluidity it has. I appreciate that his and my availability can fluctuate but we still enjoy the relationship and decide to keep it going year after year.

For a long time I had the belief that relationships had to meet the following minimums: daily texting, weekly hangouts, and sleepovers once a month. I judged relationships that were less than that. Now that I’ve shifted to letting each relationship form organically and be fluid as time goes on, I feel incredibly fulfilled and the relationships I’ve formed with partners have been healthy, strong bonds regardless of the structure each relationship has.

Wrap Up

Just as my journey through ENM has evolved, so did this post. It’s much lengthier than I originally intended, but the more I wrote the more aspects of growth I became aware of. Hopefully now you can see that I am human. And I’m a human raised in a mononormative society, like the majority of you reading this. Like all aspects in life, I’ve stumbled and had to learn from mistakes. Getting to where I am today didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen passively. It required conscious dedication toward self-growth. I’m still not an expert at polyamory or ENM, but I’m happy to be a resource in whatever way I can by sharing my experiences.

References:

1. Firestone, L. (2017, February 14). Be mine: Dealing with possessiveness in a relationship. PsychAlive. https://www.psychalive.org/relationship-possessiveness/ ↩
2. Lindgren, J., Matlack, E., & Winston, D. (Hosts). (2023, October 10). Why aren’t you being fair? Exploring aggressive fairness in polyamory (No. 444) [Audio podcast episode]. In Multiamory. Multiamory LLC. https://www.multiamory.com/podcast/443-why-arent-you-being-fair-exploring-aggressive-fairness-in-polyamory ↩
3. Brand, T. H. (2022, May 29). Red flags in polyamory: Aggressive fairness. Discovering Polyamory. https://www.discoveringpolyamory.com/blog/red-flags-in-polyamory-aggressive-fairness ↩