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I’m Part of a Polyamorous Family. Here’s What It’s Like

It taught me to share two of the most dangerous things: love and sex

When I broke up with the first partner I ever shared a home with, I decided I wanted to live alone, possibly forever. That decision may seem cynical for a twenty-four-year-old, but it was rooted in how stifled I felt as a traditional couple. The fact that my partner and I lived in a remote region of Eastern Canada, taught at the same school, and shared the same friends didn’t help. My whole identity felt tied to one person.

Plus, it bothered me that I experienced guilt for being attracted to a co-worker or flirting with the barista at the coffee shop. I loved my partner, but my choices were to either stay with him and never experience romantic and physical intimacy with anyone else or leave him for the idea of everyone else. I wanted a more open relationship model than the one society offered—and he did not.

After we split, I spiralled into an aching depression. It was different from my previous breakups; aside from the heartbreak, I started to believe I was fundamentally flawed, like there was something inherently wrong with me because the conventional relationship model had never felt quite right. I was envious of those who appeared content in traditional monogamous partnerships, and I questioned why I couldn’t find that same fulfillment. Was I afraid of commitment? Selfish? Bored too easily? Would I need to jump to a new relationship every time I hit the two-year mark?

Compounding the turmoil, I was simultaneously grappling with my sexuality and gender identity. I wasn’t straight, but I wasn’t gay either. Girlhood and womanhood clashed with my inner sense of self, but I didn’t know how or why. Everything seemed askew, like I was meant for something else, but I couldn’t pinpoint what. It wasn’t until I decided to experiment with polyamory that things began to snap into place.

My initial interest in non-monogamy stemmed from the desire to build multiple meaningful relationships with people I cared about and to have the utmost independence in my romantic life and living space. I made that clear to my next partner, Don, whom I met after moving to New York City to study educational technology. Don had come to the East Coast from Alabama to study psychology and conducted research on the trauma carried by survivors of heart attacks. He’d never thought about non-monogamy before reading my dating profile. But he was almost thirty-six and hadn’t been truly happy in a relationship for more than a year at a time. He was willing to experiment.

Don and I quickly developed joint long-term goals, but we intentionally decided not to move in together. We wanted space for alone time and to see our other partners, so we spent three or four days a week together at his place and rented my studio apartment on Airbnb for short-term stays. On the days that we were together, we were intentionally together, rather than simply coexisting in the same space. It felt refreshing to commit to each other over and over without the gravity of a shared home. And when I hosted another partner, I could be solely focused on them—in my space, with my art on the walls, and my energy filling the room.

Yet as time went on, I wondered if living on my own would really fulfill me in the long term. As my experience with polyamory deepened, so did my interest in cohabitation. When Don started dating Bridget, the bond I developed with her was unlike anything I’d experienced before—a mix of friendship, fondness, intimacy, and trust that stemmed from our romantic love for the same human.

While I still wanted some independence in my living situation, I began to develop a yearning to enmesh minute aspects of my daily life with multiple people. It’s a common misconception that polyamory is only a way to have sex or casual dates outside of a primary relationship. For some, it is. But for me, it quickly became a way to build a new kind of family, one that keeps me free to be my whole self and gives me room to evolve.

Polyamory had begun to make me more collectivist in every area of my life. It taught me how to share romantic love and sex, which culturally are the most dangerous things to share. Once I became........

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