When I reflected on how secure and loved I felt on the first Christmas I’d spent alone I realised there are gifts that my relationships and my polyamorous community and mindset has given me this year which are far beyond what I would’ve believed was possible when I first came out as polyamorous two years ago.
I wanted to share a few of the beautiful things I’ve gained as part of this journey to date but there’s so much more that I’ll be expanding on in posts throughout January.
Validation and growth
When you are willing to let yourself and those you love experience love from all angles it provides endless opportunities for building a deeper connection with yourself and pushing your potential as a human. For me the point of being in relationship with others has always been about growing together, even if it’s a fleeting connection it is valuable relationship if I have learnt more than I have lost. This sense of validation and growth doesn’t have to come via polyamorous relationships but the effect is multiplied when you’ve got a diverse group of loving humans who reflect back the different parts they love about you, help you to see the things you didn’t notice or understand before, and hold you accountable in your journey to becoming a better human.
Freedom and security
I’ve spoken to many people about the fact that one of my partners, Nick, is my first ever experience of a secure attachment. Like many people the way that I’d reassured myself in longterm relationships in the past was by remaining fiercely independent, assuming control or ultimately becoming detached from my own body to endure feelings of insecurity.
There is a solidness to my connection with Nick that I can physically feel. And it is that which makes us great at giving one another freedom to explore. Many people say polyamory for them is about ‘not expecting one person to be everything to them’ or having multiple people to meet multiple needs but that’s not the case for me. While I don’t expect or ever want Nick to meet all my needs or to be everything, the success of our polyamory to date is a result of the fact that mine and Nick’s bond is so deep that it could fill our hearts enough on it's own, and so secure that we know it will weather anything and everything. Contrary to the protectiveness that many couples create when they fall deeply in love, our love massively reduces anxiety around exploring other deep connections or the possibility of accidentally ending up in a toxic situation.
This isn’t intended to signify a hierarchy in how we relate to other partners, but more that a profound freedom and security for both of us was born out of our attachment and laid the foundations for us both to explore and confidently build meaningful relationships with others. And even if the shape of our relationship changes, we both know that what we’ve built together and within each other will endure.
Continuous curiosity
When you have the first two gifts it’s easy to remain in a fairly constant state of curiosity about the world around you. I still have plenty of anxiety due to my trauma and my autism but each day I connect more deeply to this endless source of universal knowledge and wisdom which calms me and allows me to flow through far more than I ever imagined.
My interests and my social interactions are deepening and widening as I learn to love simply being intrigued by the people around me, and allowing people to be intrigued by me and my life in return.
While this capacity to be continuously curious isn’t unique to polyamory it is becoming more and more apparent that many straight monogamous friends have so much that they take as a given - they rarely seem to lift up the surface to see what magic hides beneath. This is immediately apparent when they dismiss my gender or polyamory as being ‘something inconsequential’ or totally gloss over it. Whereas some of my favourite conversations these days are when someone totally new to polyamory goes “Wow that sounds beautifully complex, tell me more!” or when they haven’t understood the nature of “non-binary” people before and build the courage to ask detailed questions about how I experience gender.
Deeper friendships
Since coming out as polyamorous my friendships have flourished. And I believe this is down to two things. I’ve written before about how being polyamorous in principle can help dissolve the arbitrary divides and hierarchy between platonic connections and intimate or romantic connections. I’ve had the freedom to simply allow connections to become whatever they become and as a result there is less nervousness between me and friends around what topics or behaviours are “suitable” or “unsuitable”. We shape our friendships around who we each are as people and what is unique to how we communicate.
In addition the openness I’ve shown around my journey with polyamory (and sex and gender and autism) has meant that people feel able to speak openly about their own inner thoughts, desires and confusion. I’ve talked about the joys of strap-ons (and other taboo topics like stress wanks) with straight male friends, shared the adventures I’ve had with people who enjoy living vicariously, and been someone people have felt able to confide in and ask for advice from when questioning their understanding of themselves or their partner.
Experiences beyond imagination
I’m planning a whole post about words that need to be invented for some of the feelings and experiences I encounter as part of polyamory but much of my love life this past year has been beyond what is possible to describe with the English language. Whether it’s shifting from feeling like a best friend, a soul mate, a dominatrix, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, with one partner in the space of an hour, OR having deeply spiritual threesomes that last for hours OR physically sensing the NRE (“new relationship energy”) building as I witnessed my partner kiss my other partner, OR lying in bed worrying about the anxious nerves that my partner and someone he likes are having during their first date, OR declaring my desire for a good friend and becoming more deeply connected to them as a result when they reject me.
I’ve experienced all of these things and more this year. And every time it sparks magical feelings that I never even knew were humanly possible. And there a moments where I could happily lose myself in that feeling for eternity and I’d be content. The excitement of what is possible is somewhat overwhelming now that I’ve experienced far more in a single year than I’ve experience in a life time, but this is what I think it truly means to be a living, thriving being.
Limitless love that spans time and space
When you realise you only know and experience a fraction of what is humanly possible. When deep love and connection is welcomed in every corner of your life. When you allow yourself to feel so deeply that a single kiss feels like it could last forever. Time and limits lose all meaning. Many monogamous people often say weird comments about how “maintaining one relationship is tiring enough” (which usually just makes me think they are in the wrong relationship) but I suppose the sentiment is not that dissimilar people in the polyamory community talk about being ‘polysaturated’ where they can’t sustain more partnerships, or the decision to stop having children because you can’t juggle the competing demands of them.
I understand all this in a day to day sense, particularly if you buy into societal expectations for how people should show love (no partner of mine is ever going to consistently be getting presents on their birthdays and Christmas). But I have connections who I’ve loved so deeply in a single moment that they could walk in and out of my life and our love would endure forever. Knowing that it is possible to spark that kind of love repeatedly with my partners in whatever time we have at our disposal, or that at any moment I have the capacity to spark it with someone new, is utterly profound.
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