What Is Polyamory? Real Life Polyamory True Stories

As the greatest and most adventurous romances all do, it started with a swipe. He turned up on my Bumble with his motorbike and his clean-cut Canadian vibe, and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t my jam. We had a few phone chats (highly recommended as an early screening process) and met up for a juice, where he told me he was 2 months out of a 5-year relationship and wasn’t looking for anything monogamous.

I’d long been considering non-monogamy as an interesting alternative to traditional dating. I never would have been the one to press the issue, because tradition is safe and cosy, but I’ve always been a proponent of ‘the more the merrier’.

In the reality of our first date, there were various factors in play: I was intimidated by his experience - he and his previous partner had dated women together and, seeing as it was our first meeting, I wanted to seem cool. Theoretically, I agreed with it; so when he brought it up, I probably responded with something like ‘yeah, sweet, I’ve always thought the government promotes the nuclear family because it’s the smallest possible reproductive unit and therefore breaks down community, decreasing the possibility of revolution, man”. Nailed it. Anyway, he was convinced, so we snogged outside the mall, arranged a second date, and went on our merry ways.

I was only around for a week or two before I flew back home for Christmas (I was doing a Master’s degree in Vancouver). During those weeks, we were like a couple of teenagers, with a total lack of self-awareness and all our hard-learned romantic cynicism thrown to the wind.

We monopolised each other’s time almost completely, so I accidentally lapsed into assuming that the polyamory thing was a fleeting comment. That’s how the script goes, isn’t it? You meet, you’re dating other people, and then you have ‘the talk’ and become exclusive. The only difference was that we were more open about it. From date six, we chucked around the L word and spent long hours gazing into each other’s eyes, and it may have been naive but I assumed, subconsciously, that we were sticking to the script.

While I was away, he spent a little more time with some other people he was dating, and a lot more time with one particular girl, but my ego was pretty certain it was just to fill the hours because he missed me too much to bear.

I got festive with a couple of fellas, but nothing was going to continue transatlantically. I went back to Vancouver after New Year’s, and was surprised to find that he was equally in love with my shiny new ‘metamour’ - a polyamorous term for your partner’s partner. Equally in love meant we were ‘co-primary’, both as important to him as the other. I knew that I was going to have to try and get along with her. While I wanted more of a let’s-go-for-coffee type of arrangement, her approach was to immediately try to become best friends with me. Her jealousy was more intense than mine, and she found the unknown far more distressing than the known, so during our first encounter, in the presence of a mutual friend, she mentioned the running - private - joke I had with him about wanting to get a personalised vibrator in the shape of his penis, and how she would like to help with the endeavour. I was displeased.

My metamour and I graduated fairly quickly to meeting up just the two of us, since we had such a large shared reference. We were both completely new to any kind of polyamory, so we supported each other through the experience in both envy and pride.

Bitching about your partner to your mate comes with a limit since, after a while, there is a danger of your mate thinking your partner is an a**hole. In our case, we both loved him, so there was no danger of this, and it rapidly became cathartic to be open with each other: to talk about issues and about how each of us were feeling.

After a few weeks, we had reached a good balance, but it wasn’t with a whole lot of stability: her jealousy continued its assault, and the job of consoling her often fell to me. Despite this, I was still able to be happy in my relationship with him as a separate entity, happy to be trying something new, and happy to get to know her in a very intense and novel capacity. On one occasion, I convinced him not to think about breaking up with her, but to give her a bit more time to get used to polyamory. I await my sainthood in the post any day now.

In the end, for a few different reasons, she decided to break up with him, so for the last two months, he and I have been polyamorous only in name. During that time, I have moved back to England; he may move here, or he may not, so the indeterminate nature of our relationship continues. I thought it would make it hard to know whether to move on or not; my emotions, however, have never responded to reason nor to entreaty, and so I suppose I will eventually move on if he doesn’t move here, and I won’t if he does.

In flippancy, the most important thing I’ve learnt about being polyamorous is that it’s like being vegan: you think everybody needs to know about it. More seriously, I learnt that there are many different facets to monogamy that are taken for granted, and to me, there is value in questioning them.

Monogamy is a valid choice that works for a lot of people, but I don’t think any relationship model should be the norm. If you accept that no person stays the same throughout life, the idea that any relationship will remain constant becomes nonsensical, whether it incorporates sexual or romantic feelings or not.

It makes sense to me, therefore, to have a channel of honest communication, and to frequently examine your emotions, to see what you are comfortable with and what you would rather change. That said, my experience of polyamory is, to date, fairly one-sided: I have for the most part experienced the harder side of the dynamic. If you would like a more compendious account, bring me a second boyfriend, and then we’ll talk.

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