Answering a question: How hard is it to find the right polycule and work out all the “growing pains?”

In response to my recent post on Boring Polyamory, I was asked How hard was it to find the right polycule and work out all the “growing pains”?

It’s going to be a lengthy enough response that it warrants its own post and the incorporated links will take you a specific, relevant post on my blog. You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to.

So to answer the question: It was either very hard, or very easy – depending on your perspective.

It’s easy when it happens organically without any prior agenda the way winning the lottery is easy, but you’ll most certainly experience many losses along the way and a win is not guaranteed.

It’s a lot harder if you think you know what you want and go out into the world with the expectation that you’ll find exactly that.

Here’s why:

People don’t really know what they want.

I certainly didn’t. If you go back far enough you’ll see my post from April 2015 where I wrote this: I do not actually have a problem understanding why poly is a valid, worthwhile, and excellent choice for some people. It’s just not for me in the long term.

Immediately after that sentence I also wrote this: I reserve the right to change my mind. What I’m writing right now is how I feel on April 22, 2015. My thoughts and feelings on this topic have evolved a few times over the past few years and I don’t suffer under the delusion that they cannot evolve again.

So – first big piece of advice: Don’t assume you know today what future you will want.

That version of me from 2015 had been burned by men who claimed polyamory without the skills necessary to pull it off in the way they described it. They painted a picture of polyamory that I couldn’t see myself in. That version of me was also one year into widowhood, broken-hearted several times over, and only partway through a lengthy journey to unpack her codependent tendencies.

And then I met him.

It started off as a one-off rope scene. Then we started playing more frequently. He was polyamorous – I was friendly with one of his partners and hadn’t yet met the other – but that was okay because I wasn’t interested in becoming his romantic partner – I just wanted someone to tie me up from time to time. He seemed keen, so we became play partners.

I figured at some point I might meet someone who wanted to be monogamous with me and that would be the end of that – but something else happened instead.

I fell in love with him.

Second big piece of advice, courtesy of Star Trek Picard Season 1 Episode 4: A promise is a prison…do not make yourself another’s jailer.

I’d add to that to not make yourself a prisoner of past promises to yourself, either. I’d sworn off ever dating a polyamorous person again because every prior attempt had ended in heartbreak and anger. But here I was, engaging with someone who also claimed to be polyamorous but was somehow NOT doing all the shitty things my prior partners had done.

Over the years I’ve spent many, many, many hours in online support groups for polyamorous and polyamory-adjacent relationships. The newbies always want to know what rules and boundaries they need to establish in their existing relationship in order to avoid ever feeling an ounce of discomfort (or in order to placate a partner who’s grudgingly agreeing to this grand experiment).

I see how many people’s relationships get turned upside down and inside out trying to hold to the promises they made before they had an inkling of the challenges they would inevitably encounter.

But hey, that happens in monogamous relationships too – right?

So maybe polyamory wasn’t the problem. Maybe compatibility was.

Related blog post: How does it work?
Revisits my previous thoughts on my participation in a polyamorous relationship and shares some lessons I learned in that process.

Related blog post: The one that explains how I think boundaries work
tl;dr: Boundaries prioritize compatibility over attraction. This plays a big role in making relationships feel “easy”.

Related blog post: Rules are Condoms: An Imperfect Metaphor
People often use rules in their nonmonogamous relationships as a way to limit exposure to potential harm, but the rules are not foolproof.

I’m going to jump ahead now to 2020. There’s a lot more that I learned in that five year span, and if you want to read it all you absolutely can.

After my husband passed away I lived alone. My late husband was, among other things I don’t want to get into, an addict and a hoarder. I had zero personal space in that house when he was alive. It took three months just to empty it of all its contents after he passed away.

I knew that I never wanted to live with anybody ever again, and continued to happily live alone (mostly) for nearly seven years.

My priorities shifted when the pandemic hit. My metamour and I lived about 10 minutes apart, while our partner lived and worked anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour away depending on traffic. The isolation was getting to me, as was the stress of figuring out how to continue paying a mortgage without any income (I was a self-employed relationship coach but the majority of my income came from freelance event planning at the time).

We started talking about the possibility of my metamour and I pooling our resources together rent somewhere, but I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to work out until the night my sweet cat, Carlyle, had to be euthanized.

Both my partner and my metamour were in the car with me while Carlyle was being treated at the emergency vet. It was 2020 – we couldn’t wait inside. When the time came to say goodbye they said I could bring in one person.

And I chose my metamour to be that person.

From this blog post: This was a turning point for me. I think there was a moment when I had the full realization that a non-romantic partner could be as important to me as a romantic partner – which, when I type it out right now seems like, “well, duh…” but in that moment it felt like an epiphany.

By October 2020 we’d found a 3-bedroom house and moved in together. We were the polycule’s de-facto guinea pigs – if we could make it work living together, then maybe the idea of the whole polycule living together wasn’t so far-fetched.

Strangely enough, I didn’t do a whole lot more documenting about this experience in my blog post. By the end of that year I’d discovered tiktok and a lot of that documentation is in the form of hundreds of short videos that are nearly impossible to search through.

But to answer the question of how hard it was to work through those growing pains? Well, by the time we were living together my metamour had already been one of my best friends and chosen family members for five years. I went through eir cancer diagosis, treatments, and recoveries with em. Shit, I have power of attorney for medical decisions for em.

The trust was established. The compatibility as friends and metamours was established.

There were hiccups. We found compromises. We could assume that neither of us had bad intentions toward the other so if a problem arose or harm was caused we could bring it up, talk it through, find solutions, and forgive.

The thing I thought I’d have the hardest time with was the possibility of hearing them during their date nights; but honestly – the few times I did hear anything it didn’t bother me. The thing I actually had the hardest time with was letting go of being able to make every decorative decision in the household (exacerbated by my established trauma from living with my late husband).

So, yeah. It was fine. It was all fine. We renewed the lease for another year and that’s when we started talking about all of us moving in together.

Like the time before, it started off kind of as an exercise in “what if?” more than a hard-core plan. A house came up that looked like it might work for us – we went to visit it and it was a DUMP.

But seeing a real house did spur us to talk about various needs for our ideal home and we came up with these:

1. Everyone has to have their own bedroom
2. There needs to be at least three bathrooms and one bathtub (two of us really like to soak)
3. There needs to be a way to sequester the various pets (we knew they wouldn’t all get along with each other)
4. Two of us worked from home and needed enough space to do so
5. We needed to have a real yard – private outside space that we could actually utilize.
6. The kitchen needed to meet a certain standard (two of our ‘cule are chefs and I’m picky AF when it comes to efficiency in design)
7. It had to be within our budget and no HOA

That last one was the sticking point. There were ZERO options in Los Angeles County that could meet all those needs. We considered other states as well, and spent hours looking at houses in the PNW, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Colorado, but all of that still felt like fantasy and not active planning.

Then we saw a potential house – it was about two hours away and much further inland (near Lake Elsinore if you know the area). It was a fixer upper, but it had the requisite number of rooms and bathrooms and it was sequestered away from any neighbors.

And it was a DUMP. It was beyond the amount of fixing we could reasonably accomplish, but I did get a good feeling about the realtor, so after giving him a list of our needs, he went off in search of our perfect home.

I won’t bore you with all the details. We eventually found one and moved in on September 22, 2022 – seven years after that first scene with my partner.

There have been growing pains here too. Our communication styles vary. Our respective neurodivergences and traumas sometimes bump up against one another. I can speak for myself that I had different expectations about the amount of time I’d get to spend with our partner than he had. I had erroneously assumed that moving in together meant we could go back to the pre-pandemic two dates a week each on a set schedule.

That did not happen.

But, just like before, we assumed good intent, talked it through, found solutions, and forgave.

So, to revisit the original question and begin to wrap this up, I want to share the following with anybody who’s early in their experience in polyamory and thinks that a boring cohabiting polycule is end game:

Don’t rush. Fantasies are great and I super-duper love to fantasize about so many potential future scenarios (some of which have come to fruition), but when it comes to living in reality: focus on who you are today and make choices based on what you want today. Every day is an opportunity to choose to continue down that path or shift to a new one if and when your priorities change.

If you’re dating today looking for someone you’ll want to live with in 18 months then you may just pass up the chance to develop a really great bond with someone who said they never want to live with anybody else (or someone who says they’ll never date a polyamorous person again).

Don’t trap yourself with a label or a promise that no longer serves you; however, if you’ve made the promise to someone else, talk about it with them BEFORE you break it. Accept the consequences of making a choice for yourself that your partner(s) won’t like. Don’t try to hide it from them to spare their feelings. Don’t be cruel either – just be compassionately honest and allow them the autonomy of HAVING the feelings (as well as the information they need to continue consenting to a relationship with you).

If and when you make relationship agreements, accept that at some point you or your partners’ needs might change and those agreements will need to be revisited. (In another timeline I might have said relationship agreements are like the constitution, not the bible, but I’m not sure how valid that metaphor is now.)

In other words – stay fluid. Stay open. Both your desires and your needs will shift over time and so will your partners’. Sometimes they shift together, sometimes they shift apart. The more authentically yourself you are, the easier it is to connect compatibly with others.

It can be lonely sometimes because it’s WAY easier to find attractive people that you WISH were compatible, but changing yourself should be a self-motivated project, not a partner-motivated one.

Past me didn’t get to make decisions for current me. What past me did was make decisions for herself to invest time in her own personal growth. She unpacked and eventually moved past codependency, leaned into emotional discomfort rather than hide behind rules to avoid it, and (thankfully) documented a lot of that journey so I can look back from time to time and see how far I’ve come.

One of the reasons that my advice is usually well-received is because I acknowledge that this is all shit that’s worked for ME based on my experiences and the way my brain processes that information. Your methods may vary. I can’t know your life or your experience so if something I say doesn’t work for you, that’s fine.

I share my thoughts because getting them out is a form of catharsis, because writing them down makes it possible for me to view my life objectively from a distance years later, and because people have shared with me that it helps. I don’t do it for money or popularity and I don’t want people to view me as some sort of know-it-all educator.

The only thing I’m an expert in is myself.

That being said, I do enjoy thinking my thoughts and sharing them so if there’s any topic you want my input on, just ask. I probably have a related blog post already. Or a tiktok. Or I can make another one.

Cheers.