If you’d have asked me at the beginning of my polyamorous journey, ‘What ways do you think polyamory is going to change your life?’ I would have only considered the ways in which my life would change externally, like having to explain polyamory to my friends and family, but actually, the five points listed below are all about internal change and growth!
I’m a sex-positive writer and content creator who loves writing about her experiences with polyamory. I’ve been in poly relationships for a couple of years now, which hardly makes me an expert, still in a short space of time, I’ve had a lot of different experiences and time to reflect upon the surprising ways in which polyamory has changed my life for the better.
Let’s start with arguably the biggest way polyamory has changed my life.
Becoming a better communicator
It’s so annoying that it’s not socially acceptable to put one of my skills as a ‘great communicator’ on my CV and list the experience as polyamory. There’s an endless list of things to communicate about in polyamory: Which partner are you spending Christmas with? How can we make each other feel secure when there are new connections? Should we discuss what to do when a partner comes over while we’re living together?
Three important things I’ve learned to communicate are my needs and desires, boundaries and expectations. What could this look like in practice?
- Advocating for your needs could look like… needing to be recognised as one of their partners by their family.
- Communicating your boundaries could look like… taking some alone time to process difficult feelings when they arise to avoid an emotional outburst at a partner.
- Communicating your expectations could look like… discussing the frequency with which you see each other.
Learning to become a better communicator got me thinking and discussing how I wanted my relationships to look.
Creating relationship structures and agreements together
When we grow up in this mono/ hetero-normative society, we are taught that relationships should go up a relationship escalator. This escalator looks like this: get engaged, get married, buy a house together, have 2.5 children and a dog, spend the rest of your lives together “till death do us part”, the end. There’s nothing wrong with that but I’ve learned if you don’t want all of those things there are other options. You can make it up together as you go along.
I’ve found this both empowering and really scary to co-create the relationship structure and agreements which work for you because there are few people to look to for representation to figure it out. I don’t think I’m going to do any of the above relationship escalator things with my current partner but that also doesn’t mean I don’t see longevity for our relationship. It just looks a little different and something that works for us.
This could look like seeing each other twice a month, spending some holidays together, hanging out with the polycule (the people we share a partner with), meeting each other’s families, and having periods of fostering pets together. It could really look like anything you want.
Raising my standards
This is my favourite way polyamory has changed my life. If I already have an amazing partner, why should I settle for less than that in another partner? It’s made me more intentional with who I date. For example, I know it’s important for me that the person wants a non-hierarchical relationship structure. They wouldn’t fit into my life if they wanted to be primary partners as I already have a partner and wouldn’t want to ‘demote’ them to secondary. It narrows down the dating pool to people who are hopefully going to be a better fit for me.
It’s also great to have a partner who has my back and my best interest at heart, especially when it comes to dating. If I stray away from my boundaries, e.g. they must want the same relationship structure as me in order to date them, I have someone to be accountable to, and they can remind me of the reasons why I’ve set the boundary in the first place – to find someone who could be a good fit and not waste either mine or the new person’s time.
Improving my relationship with sex
Again, it’s about raising my standards on who I’m willing to allow into my life. In the past, I’ll admit that I’ve had sex with people I wouldn’t hang out with on a day-to-day basis, maybe our political views haven’t aligned, or they’ve just been a general douchebag. I wouldn’t do that anymore 1) because I’m already getting the need of sex being met in a relationship and 2) my self-esteem has improved from said poly relationship and my own self-work. Having great sex with someone who makes me feel emotionally and physically safe made me realise that it’s really the bare minimum, and I deserve that going forward with anyone else I choose to have sex with.
Understanding jealousy better
I thought we’d end with jealousy because it’s often the first thing people think about when it comes to polyamory. It’s a common misconception that you have to consider yourself to be a non-jealous person to be polyamorous. A common response to telling people you’re poly is “I could never do that because I’m way too jealous”. Yet, I know a lot of poly people, myself included, who experience jealousy but choose to work through this complicated emotion.
I guess it’s actually rather unsurprising that being polyamorous has helped me understand this emotion better because I’m forced to confront it more frequently and pressingly than if I was in a monogamous relationship. The main advice, which is definitely not my own brainchild, is that jealousy can signal something deeper like an unmet need, or insecurity in yourself or your relationship. So, if you can figure that out, you can then share with a partner and work it out together.
As I said in the beginning, all of the unexpected ways polyamory has changed my life had to do with personal growth and I didn’t necessarily need polyamory for that, but it has pushed me to become more open-minded by challenging societal norms, improving my self-esteem and being kinder to myself.
Nicole Gleeson
Nicole, aka Big Clit Energy, is a sex-positive writer and content creator focusing on sex, kink, queerness and polyamory. You can find her writing on Substack under the same pseudonym.
