She’s beautiful.
Those were the first words that popped into my mind when I saw Angela* sitting on the barstool, on our first date at Cornerstone in Berkeley. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and she didn’t color the middle-aged silver in her hair, which communicated a self-confidence I found sexy. She had “liked” my long-neglected profiles on multiple dating sites, which had caught my attention. Drawn in by the smile in her pictures, I had been the first one to write.
Those online exchanges had been terse, and on that first date, she still seemed to be withholding a lot about herself. She raised questions in my mind that needed answering. That desire — to know — is the fulfillment of the promise of every first date.
After our one-hour lunch, I texted my partner Michelle. “She’s a natural beauty,” I wrote. For months afterward, Michelle teased me about those words, saying things like, “Oh, are you seeing your ‘natural beauty’ tonight?” I guess she thought it was an uncharacteristically clichéd thing for me to say. But she was also managing feelings of insecurity that she did not talk about until much later, when she eventually felt safe with Angela: Does he think she’s more beautiful than me?
Monogamy trains us to take such measurements. Mainly, it seems to me, for the purpose of pitting people against each other. Polyamory demands a different skill set.
Polyamory is usually defined as carrying on multiple intimate, romantic relationships. It implies the ability to love more than one person simultaneously. However, to me it seems more helpful to describe polyamory as the capacity to have many different kinds of relationships.Part of the art of being polyamorous is to discover and to hold the distinctiveness of each human being.
The point is to discover what makes each person beautiful, on their own terms, from the outer shell to their most secret selves. Eroticism isn’t sex — or isn’t just sex, anyway. It’s curiosity. Plenty of nonmonogamous relationships end when sexual curiosity has been satisfied. But other relationships don’t need to be sexual at all, which challenges the common monogamous assumption that getting laid must be the entire point of polyamory.
Monogamy resists change in favor of stability. Till death do us part. Polyamory makes no such promises, because it puts the stress on freedom.
I’m choosing to write about Angela and Michelle—while I have other relationships—because I think ours will feel most comprehensible to monogamous people. It’s also true that these two women loom largest in my days and my mind. With me and them, the answers to that erotic question —who are these people? —have only gotten deeper and more nuanced over time. That means I can look into Michelle’s deep-set, dark brown eyes and they will destroy me, every single time. She is the one who made nonmonogamy possible for me in adulthood. (In fact, I’ve never really been monogamous, but life hasn’t always allowed me to be fully myself.) There’s a wildness in her that makes me just a little more feral than I’d otherwise be. Meanwhile, I can look into Angela’s eyes — green like the sea glass you find on beaches — and feel renewed. In self-disciplined, level-headed Angela, I find a calm that slows my heart and steadies my mind.
That’s why I sometimes joke to myself that Michelle is the devil on one shoulder and Angela is the angel on the other. Of course, those are lazy, artificial dichotomies that exist only in my head. I’ll probably see them both differently in a year. Polyamory is a stern teacher. One of the first lessons is this one: People change, in part because they reveal more of themselves to you, in part because it is you who changes. Relationships are what emerge from those changes, moment to moment.
Monogamy resists change in favor of stability. Till death do us part.Polyamory makes no such promises, because it puts the stress on freedom. I cannot be a polyamorous man and tell Angela or Michelle how to be, what to think, who to love, where to go. (Although it hasn’t stopped me from trying. I fall short of my own ideals all the time.)
I hope these two women will love me until I’m dead, but I’ll never ask them to promise that they will. The way we live our lives teaches me that feelings are not under my control or theirs. I must always be asking: What am I doing? Why? How do I feel? Who are they? What do they need, right now? In practice, this means that I tell them both every single day that I love them. I can never take them for granted. I try to never miss an opportunity to say, “Thank you.” At any time, they could both take other lovers and those lovers could change them and their relationships to me. There is no rut to fall into, because there are so many wagons on the road.
People tell me all the time that they’re too jealous to be polyamorous. I’m not free of jealousy, either, or of any of the negative emotions that can come with lust and love. Michelle and Angela do have other lovers, and so I’m often pathetically jealous. Those are times of weakness, when I’m looking outward for sources of jealousy — for what they’re doing or saying. When I’m feeling stronger, I know that Michelle and Angela are free, and that jealousy is a signal that it’s time for me to look inside myself, to see what might be missing. Part of what changes in polyamory is my relationship to myself. The hardest question of all, for me, is this one: What do I need, right now? As the answer changes, as I change, so do my relationships.
Strength in a polyamorous man means supporting other people’s autonomy and well-being, not trying to control them.
But more than jealousy, there is love, of course — more than I’d ever imagined for myself. And gratitude for how much they give me. I have felt contrition and forgiveness, and in that clumsy dance between transgression and repair I have felt grace. That’s what polyamory looks like to me, most of the time. Yes, I have more opportunities to be jealous than do monogamous counterparts, but there is also no shortage of chances to feel empathy and show compassion. Polyamory can elicit the worst from me, but far more often it brings out the best.
That’s why I’m polyamorous. Polyamory asks me to understand myself, to grow, to be more mindful, purposeful, altruistic, empathic, and compassionate than monogamy ever asked me to be. Every day, polyamory expects me to be stronger than I believe I am. Strength in a polyamorous man means supporting other people’s autonomy and well-being, not trying to control them.
There are times when it’s too much and I feel overwhelmed. I have repeatedly found myself stretched too thin across too many people that I loved. Once, last year, I was ready to explode with frustration. I told Michelle that I’d thought polyamory would help to alleviate burdens. Instead, I had learned that love creates responsibilities. Michelle looked at me with a pity and compassion that were alarming, because her eyes told me that the root of my suffering was that I wasn’t seeing myself.
“Sweetheart, you’re a giver,” she said. “That’s your nature. You’re polyamorous because giving meets some deep need in you.”
We’re a community and a culture — one that is growing, where I live in the Bay Area, especially — and the social capital and the diversity that come with polyamory are not-small reasons why I choose this life.
That changed everything for me. I stopped looking to my relationships to make life easier. The problem wasn’t the burdens they imposed, it was my lack of boundaries. You can’t keep giving if you don’t know when to stop. Boundaries are simpler for monogamous couples — they draw a circle around themselves and within that circle our culture expects maximum cooperation and sharing. I get that. Life can be so tumultuous and confusing, so it’s good to have someone to count on. It’s good to know who your date will be on Valentine’s Day. The monogamous always know the answer to that question, or hope they’ll know.
What does a polyamorous Valentine’s Day look like? For us, it’s never the same. This year we’re going to the Starry Plough to see Rachel Lark, a local performer who sings about a sex-positive, polyamorous life. There, Michelle and I are meeting my girlfriend *Kaitlyn and her partner *Dominic, as well as our beloved ex-partner Cris and her new fellow Philip. Our dear friends *Maria and *Andrew will be there with all their partners. We’re a community and a culture — one that is growing, where I live in the Bay Area, especially—and the social capital and the diversity that come with polyamory are not-small reasons why I choose this life.
Angela will be home with her kids that night, but Michelle and I will swing by her house after the performance. I’ll probably bring her chocolate and flowers and a card, because I’m old-fashioned that way. At some point, I’ll probably hold both their hands and tell them each something about what they mean to me. Our Valentine’s Day is still a celebration of romantic love, but for us the love is more communal and more transparent than it is for monogamous counterparts. There’s still a circle of care and cooperation, but it’s much wider and more inclusive than it tends to be with monogamous couples. If you find this prospect exhausting, then you’re probably not polyamorous. If it sounds ideal, then you might be a member of our tribe.
The psychologist Alex Bove studies male “metamours,” the beloveds of your beloved. Michelle and Angela are each other’s metamours. Bove found the number-one ingredient for a successful metamour relationship between men is a shared sense of purpose. “Being on the same team,” he recently told the hosts of the podcast Multiamory. “I heard over and over again men saying, ‘If we’re on the same page, if we have a common goal being to take care of our mutual partner,’ that’s when they get along really well.”
This insight struck me and Michelle as profoundly true. Seven months after our first date, Angela needed emergency surgery. “Go to the hospital,” texted Michelle, when I told her. “I’ll get the kids and feed them dinner.” When I saw Angela in the recovery room, she was pale and still and wrapped in a sheet. “You look like a nun,” I said. Her eyes narrowed and she smiled weakly. Angela’s other boyfriend *Victor (my metamour!) met us at the hospital and drove us to her home. In the week that followed, Victor and I — with help from Victor’s wife and Michelle — took turns taking care of Angela. Her surgery gave us a purpose and the purpose brought us together.
Even on perfectly normal weeks, I see Michelle and Angela support each other and support each other’s relationship with me. “When a couple has an argument nowadays they may think it’s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever,” said the author Kurt Vonnegut. “What they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: ‘You are not enough people!’” In polyamory, that’s a problem we have solved.
From time to time, I encounter people who imagine my ego must be huge, to have multiple beautiful women on my arms. In fact, it’s humbling, and sometimes even humiliating, because they have people on their arms who I sometimes worry are more beautiful than me. Some of those people, I know, can reach places in my beloveds that I cannot. The trick is to see those people as family and community, instead of competition, and to see myself as one part of the team that strengthens and supports the women I love. That can be a struggle — but it’s a beautiful one.
*Names have been changed.
