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Poly Problem: can't always have your (qt) pi and eat it, too.

NYC lover: 'On March 14, do you wanna wake up, fuck, spend the day at that bathhouse spa that overlooks manhattan, then omakase after?'

Philly lover: 'Hey, this coming March 13-17, wanna join me and bae for a week of kinky sex, massages, homemade dumplings, and Peaky Blinders marathon?'

DC lover: 'Wanna spend March 13-16 hanging out with me and a cute doggo? While we're at it, we could endeavor to find the porn that most inspires us to stage a gloriously smutty photoshoot and subsequently, a slow, indulgent fuck. Your company is welcome/desired.'

Sometimes, no amount of gCal can save you...

jk, spoke too soon — 24h later, DC lover found a #PolySolution: proactive scheduling + self-effacing radical honesty:

Beware the ides of

March's madness. Bask instead

in April showers. 💦

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#PolyProblem: When you get conflicting feedback from lovers...

"You're like a human hitachi"

"You're like, some kind of sex god"

"You make me feel so present, so safe, so horny, so stupid"

"I'd compare initiating sex with you to...sort of like trying to convince a really dumb cat to drink water from a dish. You need to point to the dish, splash the water a little, make 'pss pss' sounds, tap the dish again, even pretend to lap it up yourself..."

"I remember in the hotel room I drunkenly said that you’re the only person I could cuddle with on a bed in a hotel room that doesn’t make me feel like I have to have sex with you. Which weirdly enough made me want to have sex with you."

"One of the things you do best is make each iteration of sex better than the last. It sets an expectation that the next time will be even better, or at the very least, just as good, which currently holds the title of the best — and that expectation is always met. The way you do it is consistent, because it's methodical. You are always trying new things out, asking for feedback, and then remembering it, doing it consistently, experimenting with variations of it, hearing that feedback, ad infinitum, plus the occasional completely out of left field thing which is somehow consistently exactly on point?"

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Today's #PolyProblem: Trying to convince AI Spock that polyamory is logical*

*or at least, that it could be the logical choice for his bourgeoning (and precarious) relationships with Nurse Chapel and T'Pring?

...how do you think I did?

so uh, what are the chances Spock explores polyamory in SNW season 3?

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Poly Problem: You can never grok your lover's unique pillow scent because all their other partners share the same bed.

"Sorry, we've only got the house blend."

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if my google calendar had a spirit animal it would be this 😅

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TFW you’re playing Cards Against Humanity and wondering which of your friends knows you entirely too well. 

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When your provincial government accidentally endorses non-monogamy, but frustratingly only for closed relationships 🙄🤣🥶

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Poly Priors

Friend: “Are people still in fucking quarantine?” Normal People:  “Yup” Poly People:

Are people still fucking in quarantine? Are people still in quarantine fucking? Are fucking people still in quarantine? Are people fucking still in quarantine? Are quarantine people still fucking in? Quarantine people are still in fucking. Quarantine people are fucking still in. People in quarantine are still fucking. People fucking are still in quarantine. People are still fucking in quarantine. People are still in fucking quarantine. In quarantine, people are still fucking. In quarantine, people fucking are still. Still fucking in quarantine, people are. Still in fucking quarantine, people are.

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Pandemic Poly Problems

If you’re stuck in quarantine with one of your poly partners, and you won’t be able to see any of your other partners for the foreseeable future, what do you do?  Serious question. What are you doing to handle this?  I imagine it’s almost easier if you were stuck in quarantine with just yourself, so you could distribute your attention appropriately across all your partners. But when you’re living 24/7 with just one of your partners (assuming this wasn’t the case before lockdown measures went into effect), what do you do to ensure the proper care and feeding of your other relationships? I imagine this gets way more awkward if you’re quarantined in a studio apartment with your partner, particularly if they don’t really know your other partners and don’t necessarily want you to be having phone sex in the middle of your (only) room. 

Do you resort to giving camshows to your other partners from the bathroom? 

Do you wait until your partner is asleep? 

Wat do?

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Some call polyamory an evolution beyond monogamy. Some call monogamy a structural constraint designed to reign in the chaotic potential of the rampant non-monogamy of our species’ past. Politics aside, it’s important to create and hold space for our partners to show up as they are, and to approach unfamiliar or triggering situations with empathy and care. It’s also important to practice creating and nurturing a safe observational zone between our immediate perceptions and our emotional responses to those perceptions, so we can welcome new and unfamiliar information with curiosity instead of careening directly into a reactive state in which we shut out any new information that could shed clarifying light on what we believe we just perceived. Reality is messy, and we as humans, with our lumpy little flesh brains, do our best to stitch together all that we perceive each day into the ever-expanding web of what we believe to be real and true, in the hopes of making better decisions tomorrow. Our deepest introspective work oftentimes occurs when we begin tweaking and expanding that web of internalized proprioception, diligently crafting the foundational structures and stories that our brains assign to reality as we navigate through each new day.  We may get some things wrong from time to time, and fall victim to our natural cognitive biases, but never forget just how many things we get right. Waking up and getting out of bed in the morning is a genuine marvel of biology and evolution. Even having a physical bed is an enduring testament to all that our species has gotten right along the way. Give yourself a little love and appreciation. You’ve got this. 

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Can we talk about how fantastic it is that this starts with taking “I feel love for both Alex and Kim” as a valid premise? That nowhere does it say, “Ha lol no I don’t really, I must be mistaken?” It acknowledges that some people do choose to adhere to monogamy in spite of their experience of feeling love for more than one person, and it references a common rationalization for such a choice (i.e., one of these loves is “real love” and the other is–who the hell knows, “just love?”), but it very much depicts it as a choice to forego a relationship with one person you love over preserving a monogamous relationship with another person you love. It doesn’t depict it as, “Ha lol no being in love with more than one person isn’t a thing I’m just infatuated with Kim and clearly Alex is the only one I could possibly love.”

I spent years actively experiencing feelings of connection and love with more than one person at a time, but all I was told by standard relationship narratives was that that wasn’t a thing. And if I found myself thinking that it was a thing–if I thought at any point that I was really actively in love with more than one person–then I must be mistaken about one of them, or both of them, or all of them, or maybe the relationship I’m in isn’t the right fit, or maybe there’s just work we need to do instead of getting sidetracked by this “grass is greener” stuff, or maybe this other person is meddling and manipulative and trying to ruin my relationship, or maybe I’m just a selfish jerk who can’t stop wanting to have her cake and eat it too and everyone I think I love would be better off with other people who really do love them and aren’t selfish jerks and can do this better. It took so, so long for me to look at my experience of loving more than one person and just say, “You know what this is about? It’s about the fact that I love more than one person. That is a thing.”

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A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but what happens when the bush has 50 million birds in it? What happens when date night becomes date scheduling night? We’ve kept the poly, but have we lost the amorous? (Kudos to @slimesunday for such an incredible photo)

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That moment when you're texting with someone whose number you just got from a dating app and you don't yet know whether they're poly, and they ask if you're free saturday morning and while you technically are, you feel like it would be conscientious to first check in with your current serious poly partner about whether they had already been planning to do something with you for that saturday morning, but when you start typing "hey, saturday morning could definitely work! before confirming, I want to loop back in with one of my serious partners to confirm she didn't already plan something for us for saturday" you then realize that this person, if not poly, wouldn't interpret this as a honest, transparent, and thoughtfully nuanced answer to their question, or even enthusiastically enquire about the nature of your other relationship(s), but would instead reply with suspicion, anger, and gruff indignation, "what? a partner? you're not single? wtf? are you cheating? why are you even on the dating app?"

p-p