How I Navigate Practicing Polyamorous Relationships

When Benny and Luisa invited me over for dinner, we all knew a threesome was in the cards. Not that it’d been said out loud, but the fact that we met through Berlin’s polyamorous community and had spent our first conversation shamelessly flirting was a pretty good indication.

As we sat around their kitchen table, sexual tension fizzing in the air, I thought the impending sexcapades would be the most memorable thing about that night.

But then Benny said something that has stuck with me ever since.

“I’ve always identified as polyamorous,” he told me, almost offhandedly. “And I never really experienced jealousy in relationships. It’s just not really a thing for me.”

The words struck me as remarkable, even though I was no stranger to ethical non-monogamy by that point. Four years earlier, I had instigated an impromptu foursome with my husband and our close friends. That set off a chain reaction that pulled me deep into the heart of the free love resurgence until I was spending most of my spare time perusing dating apps, attending 80-person-strong play parties, and participating in talking circles where poly friends swapped relationship tips.

But the idea of identifying as polyamorous had never really occurred to me.

My path into multiple loving relationships had been a difficult one — nothing like Benny’s easy-breezy innate polyamory. I had rewritten my understanding of relationships from the ground up, navigating the unpredictable and winding path that leads out of one paradigm and into an entirely different one. For better or worse, I had the deep sense that I had earned my polyamory.

After that first impromptu foursome, it didn’t take long for my husband and I to decide to enter into an open relationship. And I’d been more than happy with that — one committed partner and the occasional fling or group sex romp on the side sounded very nice, thank you very much.

But unlike me, my husband craved more. He dove straight into the deep end, spending countless hours poring over Reddit’s polyamory forums and expanding his concept of what a relationship could be.

This had all been happening behind the scenes though, so when he first told me he wanted a polyamorous relationship, I was blindsided. I felt physically sick, my heart raced, I broke out in a cold sweat; I literally felt like I was going to die.

When I finally recovered, the idea didn’t sound as shocking. Maybe we could do polyamory. After all, wasn’t that the most honest approach to relationships? To let connections grow organically without rules to limit them? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. And my husband’s somewhat heavy-handed encouragement certainly helped push things in that direction.

So I got my hands on every book I could find on the subject. I pored over Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s “The Ethical Slut.” I diligently studied Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s “Sex at Dawn.” I even painstakingly filled out every page of Kathy Labriola’s “The Jealousy Workbook.”

My bookshelf (and my brain) became overrun by the literature, the guidelines, the tips and tricks that were supposed to teach me what, to someone like Benny, apparently came naturally.

And to a large degree, it worked. By the time I met Benny and Luisa, I was seeing several people with varying degrees of seriousness, and most of the time I was loving it. But the rest of the time I was in absolute turmoil.

One day, I would be in pure ecstasy holding hands with my husband and boyfriend at the same time. The next, I would be breaking down in the middle of the sidewalk because my husband and his girlfriend wanted to stop using condoms. The highs were so high, but the lows were oh so low.

Which is why, two years after officially opening our relationship, my husband and I separated. And a few years after that, I found myself agreeing to monogamy with another partner.

For someone like Benny, that would be unthinkable. It would be an act of self-betrayal. And admittedly, it was something I struggled with. Because even though I would never say the words, “I am poly,” the fact was, I was deeply invested in the philosophy. I genuinely believed that loving freely and openly was a beautiful thing. Not to mention all the energy I had poured into learning those new skills in the first place.

And that had to count for something.

So, when, a year after entering a monogamous relationship with my new partner, he suggested opening up again, I was all for it. I had done the work, I had put in the time, I believed in free love, I could do this. At least, I thought I could.

But all those old feelings of jealousy and possessiveness came rushing back. Not that these are uncommon feelings, even within poly circles. But for most people they require work. And as it turns out, for those of us who don’t identify as poly but practice it, we really need to practice it.

So I did what anyone would do: I took an emergency 10-hour bus ride to Vienna to take part in a free love workshop. For four days, I shared all my fears and struggles and insecurities with the 40-odd others in attendance. And when I went back to Berlin, I was ready to try again.

Queue more high highs (sleeping with my best friend, having the queer sex I’d always hoped for, making out with two guys at a sex club), and more low lows (my boyfriend calling me a slut and then not speaking to me for three days).

Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last, but it was enough to make me wonder if I was cut out for polyamory at all.

Since then, I’ve been mostly practicing monogamy, with the odd dip back into ethical non-monogamy every now and then. But now, five years later, I still find myself in this strange limbo between believing in the lifestyle and struggling to practice it.

These days, my relationship is closer to monogamish than anything else. And though the thought of ethical non-monogamy is never far from my mind, I know I don’t identify as polyamorous. The more I think about it, the more I realize I might not identify as monogamous either.

I still believe loving freely and openly is a beautiful thing. I still get a flutter in my chest when I think about the prospect of life in an extended poly family. And maybe one day I’ll get to experience that again. And maybe after that I’ll go back to monogamy . . . and then back to polyamory . . . ad infinitum.

As much as I envy Benny’s certainty about his poly identity, I’m slowly coming to terms with my own ambiguity. The fact that I don’t strongly identify as polyamorous or monogamous means, at the very least, that there’s no right or wrong answer. And in the midst of all the trouble that this uncertainty brings, that does hold a certain kind of comfort.

All names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Jazz Meyer is a freelance writer and editor obsessed with the strange and beautiful nuances of humanity. She has spent the last 10 years writing about sex, dating, and relationships — some of her favorite topics. She is proudly queer but is figuring out basically everything else.