Be jealous. Make demands. Want more.

Here's to a passionate nonmonogamy where things aren't always fair and people are needy.

Two men embracing and kissing passionately, by Glodi Miessi on Unsplash.

Though every relationship in my adult life has included periods of nonmonogamy, I have never really identified myself as a nonmonogamous or polyamorous person.

My reasons for this are numerous, and not very enlightened.

I do not know that I would describe my general pattern of being in nonmonogamous relationships a part of who I am, or a reflection of my true relationship goals. I have often fallen into nonmonogamy as a temporary stopgap against the lack of sexual fulfillment or quality time in a primary relationship where I would be getting my needs met, if everything were up to me. Whenever my fantasy of a perfect, boundaryless love breaks down, I step back into nonmonogamy in a bid for sanity. I don’t like having my feet on the ground, though. I hate that reality has forced me to become so practical.

I’ve also slipped into nonmonogamy because it’s the standard in the communities in which I am participating. Most kinky people are some variety of poly, and so, though I have always longed for a kind of all-encompassing, lifestyle Dominant-submissive dynamic that could swallow me whole, I end up settling for short-term scenes with part-time players. What for me is dating new potential partners casually is, for others, the desired flow of traffic. If I didn’t let potential new partners assume that I am as poly as they are, I would be out of options pretty quick.

Another of the reasons that I shy away from the polyamory label is damningly basic: I find the term a little bit cringe-inducing and evocative of a kind free-wheeling, grimy, hackey-sack playing social politics that I’ve never associated myself with. I’m too hard-nosed and anal retentive to spend even one night at the gender-egalitarian punk house where nobody does the dishes. Even the cool, gender-fucky comedians that I love think polyamorous people have slovenly haircuts and hold court over the D&D table with a sinister air. I am still too sensitive to social judgement to shake all that off. I have never enjoyed camping or long emotional processing sessions. I don’t want to advertise that I will.

The final reason that I’ve maintained a chilly distance from polyamory has more to do with the ways in which the community has branded itself. In a bid to be seen as something other than silly and sex-obsessed by a judgmental straight public, a lot of nonmonogamous communities have emphasized the love and community support that their relationships can foster. Even the fact that polyamory has become the default term (rather than the actually-more-general nonmonogamy) is evidence of this desire to uncouple alternative relationship structures from sex.

I find this pretty alienating, as I’m mostly nonmonogamous because I can’t seem to stop having sex with random strangers the moment that I am dissatisfied. Wanting to have sex seems like a suitable enough reason to have sex with other people, for me.

A lot of polyamorous people speak about eradicating jealousy, extending love limitlessly, and using one’s close romantic entanglements as a way to build networks of support— as if we were all embarking on some shared social project for the betterment of the world, and not dating people because we want to and it feels good. They create TikTok videos about building attachment security when you are alone, and warn one another against imposing rules or making demands that would be unfair to your partner or their partners. The most breathless advocates for polyamory imply that it’s a better way to love, but say explicitly that it’s a lot of work, hours and hours of solo and partnered therapy to ensure that you are unfailingly self-aware, capable of regulating your troubling emotions on your own, and never so needy as to do anything that might limit your loved ones’ freedoms.

And honestly, fuck that. It’s not reality, even among the heavily-therapized polyamorists who pretend to never harbor their metamours ill will. No matter how much they dress it up in nonviolent communication, sometimes there’s just a bitch who gets on their nerves, and they may pretend that they are asking for needed quality time with their primary partner at the exact right moment to disrupt a date with that hated person. They are human, and their own life should actually come first.

Hesitant as most of us are to admit it, we enter into nonmongamous relationships because we have desires, and we’ve decided nonmonogamy (or polyamory) is the most strategic way to get those desires met right now. A lot of people have become poly because someone they thought was hot was poly. Numerous close friends of mine have admitted to me that they use polyamorous dating as their primary way to make friends. Some people enter into polyfidelitious triads because three paychecks make it easier to cover the bills. It’s not always a decision made for higher-order philosophical reasons, and even when it is, the messy animal in us that hungers and hoards its food and wants to attack emerges from time to time.

Where I differ from most of the polyamorous people that I meet is that I don’t think that’s a bad thing, the messiness and toxicity that sometimes comes to the fore. I frankly find it very sexy. I want to be wanted unfairly. And I certainly have my unfair, unascended, greedy little wants, and I think I’d like to be with someone who wants me clawing for them, too. And I think there is a risk of polyamory losing its acknowledgement of human passion, and a population of queer, kinky, nonconforming people who are already prone to erasing their needs not showing their full selves in their relationships, out of fear of being too outwardly demanding or jealous.

Let’s discuss — starting with this great question from a jealous polyamorous Anon:

Anon, I want to start by thanking you for writing in. You probably do not realize this, but you’re doing a number of other nonmonogamous queer people (and the curious) a great service, simply by speaking about your particular arrangement and desires. A lot of people still do not realize that a nonmonogamous arrangement can be asymmetrical, with one partner desiring far more casual sex than the other, and that it is possible to make such a dynamic work.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people enter into polyamory with a specific, highly regimented structure in their minds. They’ve seen the infographics claiming that polyamory is about sharing love and expanding one’s social circles, not about being selfish or possessive, and so they want everything to be perfectly fair.

It’s quite common for new polyamorists to keep count without really saying that they are keeping count: if one partner goes on a date, the other one is quick to find a date of some kind, too, in order to maintain the balance. The sexual activities they take part in with their dates might be similar. If a new polyamorist is single, but they start developing feelings for a casual partner who sees lots of other folks, then the new polyamorist will push themselves to be (or to seem) such as untethered and “fun.”

Your relationship demonstrates that nonmonogamy does not need to be that way, and it’s not for the majority of people who are experienced enough to know what they need. Though we might all use terms like polyamory or nonmonogamy to describe somewhat similar feelings, in truth every relationship structure is different, and reflects the unique preferences, insecurities, availabilities, and yes, sexual orientations of the people within it, at that point in time. And frankly, some people just seem to be more readily wired for the easygoing, friendly, buddies-who-have-sex-sometimes-but-also-go-Contra-dancing-and-are-friends-with-all-their-partners’-other-sex-friends style of polyamory, and some of us are decidedly not.

My tendencies lean more toward yours, Anon, so I think I understand how you feel. I do not experience attraction to persons or bodies, and emotionally opening up to new people is very difficult for me (it honestly takes years), so I don’t get much out of meeting a new person for a date and then hooking up. I don’t feel safe or comfy fucking friends, it just makes me wonder if they ever really valued me in a platonic fashion. And I am a fetishist to my core, so I need an intense power dynamic in order to experience a sexual connection, and building that kind of connection requires a lot of searching and time. I’ll try out a casual spanking session with a (vetted) rando sometimes, but it’s more of a guided exercise for me than a true connection.

When I do find someone that I can really submit to, the devotion I experience to them is a kind of love. It’s quite needy and emotionally dependent. But the intensity of it can be beautiful for everyone involved. I’ve found that my body can simply do more and attain more heightened sensations for a partner I feel that strongly about, compared to someone I have a casual dynamic and measured, “normal” boundaries with. Some people are able to decide that the kind of connection we can form together is worth the potential emotional risks. Others aren’t comfortable getting that deep, and that’s fine — but we both have to figure that out.

I don’t demand that a partner be exclusive with me, and in fact, because of the power dynamics in play, I can find it very hot and affirming if a Dom fucks other submissives while I disallow myself from seeing anybody else. I have sometimes asked for a Dominant to give me rules regarding whom I am and am not allowed to have sex with, and to be permitted to watch them Dominate other subs while I’m locked away in a closet or cage. I don’t take it personally if a Dom experiences attraction more freely than I do, but I do long to be made important to them, and to have the asymmetry in our relationship folded into the power dynamic. That really helps me feel safe and loved. And I find it really hot.

But I also know Dominants who remain exclusive with one sub, while that sub is free to go about and enjoy play with others. One of them is OneLittleKingdom, a 55-year-old Dominant male who writes fantastic advice about age play and polyamory on his Tumblr. Onelittlekingdom is in a long-term, contracted relationship with his submissive Pip, and while Pip sees other partners and the couple sometimes enjoys threesomes with other subs together, Onelittlekingdom does not date or seek a solo sexual connection with partners on his own (hence the “one” in his username — his home is a kingdom over which he rules, and Pip is the special princess).

Onelittlekingdom describes his choice to remain dedicated to Pip in this way:

“I think [polyamory] would create multiple relationships with women which I could not do justice to, due to my lack of time and energy. I also think it would take the shine off the relationship with the girl who is most important to me in this world, and ruin much of the success I have found in our dynamic by becoming unfocused on her. I do not believe it is a healthy choice for me and my relationship. I choose not to pursue being poly.”

The first time that I encountered Onelittlekingdom’s writing about the subject a few years ago, it made my heart sing — because I truly did not realize that I was allowed to be openly dedicated to a partner if they were polyamorous and saw other people. I had always feared that showing the extent of my devotion would render me pathetic, and put pressure on my partner to change their dating habits to satisfy me.

Of course, I also did want to create some of that pressure, if I was being honest. A serious partner becomes a focal point of my life, and nothing brings me happiness like spending quality time with someone I am that attached to. When I love someone I want as much of their time, sex, Dominance, and attention as I can reasonably get, but because I’m not really wired to be poly and my partners often are, I didn’t know what was reasonable. I thought I had to defer to what felt normal for them, go on dates with them as often as they wanted, and fill my time with other casual hookups or second-string sexual partners I wasn’t as invested in to mimic my partner’s polyamory.

But these were the makings of a terrible explosion. I can’t just sit on my hands smiling and pretending to be happy with seeing a person once every three weeks when I’d really like to see them weekly or more. Eventually, the fact that I’m an entire person with needs of my own and my own baseline of what feels normal is going to assert itself — and in the past, for me, it asserted itself with big crying jags and freakouts, cheating and lying, ending things abruptly, or engineering situations in order to put a partner in closer contact with me without admitting outright that it’s what I needed.

It’s not a good way of going about things, Anon, and I don’t want you to ever suppress your desires to the point of a big toxic freakout, either. And really, the problem isn’t that you or I want “too” much, aren’t “really” polyamorous, or even that we can have feelings that are desperate and toxic. All of those things are completely human, and can be worked with, even loved on their own merits. Where a problem emerges is when we can’t articulate what it is that we really want, because we think that we have to meet some imagined standard of mentally stable, unfailingly fair “polyamory” in our minds, and so we keep ourselves from saying what’s really going on.

I don't think you should try to eradicate the jealousy or get over your feelings, Anon. I think you tell your partner that you're feeling a bit left out and as if things are imbalanced, and then you try to strike a compromise between your desire for more infrequent hookups, and their desire for routine connections with close sex friends.

The way that you and your partner approach your relationships is different, and your orientations toward sex and dating are too. That’s fine. But the relationship that you have together should reflect both of your orientations and needs just about equally — or at the very least, you should both arrive at a dynamic using a process of negotiation that both of you feel is fair.

Your feelings aren’t less legitimate than your partner’s simply because yours are “jealous” and theirs are supposedly “enlightened” and “loving”. They want sex and relationships with friends, you want special time with them. You both should go after what you want. Hopefully, you can both find what you want together. But none of that can happen if you suppress what is bothering you, for fear of your feelings.

So what is it, Anon, that bothers you about your partner seeing these three friendly sex partners? Really be honest with yourself. Write it down in the most over-the-top, snarling, selfish language that the jealous animal inside of you can find. Set a timer for twenty minutes and just get every sad, possessive word out. Maybe you’ll hear things like:

These were my friends first, and now [partner] is poaching them!!

What does my stupid-ass [friend] have that I don’t have? I’m clearly better and hotter than them!

I AM BEING ABANDONED!

I can’t believe [partner] took [sex friend] to that restaurant. That is supposed to be OUR PLACE!

Nobody gives a fuck about me anymore.

My friends are going to like me less than [partner] because they don’t get sex from me.

How fucking dare [partner] fuck [friend] the way they used to fuck me.

I fucking own [partner’s] dick/hole/mouth/etc. That’s mine.

I’m not a fucking slut like [partner].

I want to be SPECIAL, GODDAMMIT!

WHY AM I NOT ENOUGH?

After you’ve done this, try to put aside any judgement you might feel about being controlling, childish, pathetic, unreasonable, or any of those other words tinged with judgement that the polyamorous world can be so fast to reject. Affect is information, and the rabid beast of your jealousy is telling you that there is more that you need, and perhaps a lot that you aren’t asking for that you should.

If it feels like you are not getting enough quality time with your partner or enough of their sexual attention, you should ask to get a little bit more of those things. If your partner's more free-wheeling approach to sex makes you feel defective in some way (less fun? less desirable? some other insecurity?) you can share those feelings with them to get some of the reassurance that you might need. And believe it or not, if you hate that your partner is fucking your friends and it consistently rubs you the wrong way no matter what you try to do to overcome it, you can ask them to stop.

Some of us are not wired for the loosey-goosey version of polyamory where people have sex with lots of folks and can fuck friends of theirs casually and sit at a kitchen table with all of their partners’ partners. It is actually quite common for nonmonogamous people to feel safer when their dynamic is guided by some rules and boundaries, because those things can uphold the specific and special place you have within a partner’s life.

I have known many polyamorous people with strict “no fucking my friends” rules or the power to issue a veto over whom their partner dates. Some people have a set calendar of dates with their primary partner that are non-negotiable, or ask that their partners only see new people once, to prevent romantic entanglements from forming. But even if it wasn’t common to set these kinds of guidelines, you would still get to, because this is your relationship and you and your partner are the ones that make it what it is.

I think it is very important for all nonmonogamous people to realize that you actually can be unfair in your relationships. If somebody truly cares about you and wishes to make a space for you in their life, that does actually require that they clear the way. The polyamorous cliche is that love is unlimited, but I still don’t understand how that can be true, unless we see love as a completely abstract, almost imaginary spirit-force that has no connection to how individuals live their actual lives. The way we show our love is with actions and choices. Our time, attention, emergency contacts, and housing space are not infinite. We all make sacrifices and compromises for the ones we love, and the demands their lives place on us right now.

You can be nonmongamous and be a demanding, jealous, needy, selfish bitch. You really can! This is your life, these are your relationships, and your actual feelings ought to exist in them.

I can't be with a serious partner that does not treat me like a priority. I have sometimes asked that a partner fuck, but not love, anyone else. I’ve made partners cancel months-long work trips across the country because I knew our relationship would not last without close contact, and they agreed. I can't be in a relationship where I don't feel comfortable expressing intense jealousy, insecurity, and attachment panic, and sometimes have my partner fold and make concessions because they care about me. Knowing that when push comes to shove they are willing to make a sacrifice to keep me around is one of the greatest feelings in the world. I’ve also made plenty of changes for my partners gladly, and seen how that investment in them bears real fruit.

Relationships change us, we are affected by other people, and it is okay to expect that a serious partner make changes in their life in order to keep you in it! You are worth the drama, baby! It's okay to have a large impact on the lives of the people you are with. It's okay to make demands. Your partners can always decide if they are not up for meeting those demands, of course, but please don't think that the goal in nonmonogamy is for everything to be dispassionate and fair. You can ask for all that you want, and what you want can be unfair, and sometimes you can still even get it. You just gotta advocate for yourself.

Over the years, I have gotten to know multiple people of color who have strict “no white people in the polycule” policies for themselves and their relationship networks. I remember that when I first heard of that rule, my initial gut reaction to it was that such a thing was not allowed, and that a policy like that could be used (intentionally or unintentionally) to control how a partner behaved in ways that the mainstream poly-world had always told me were unacceptable.

Certainly my own whiteness was a factor in how I responded. As a community, we don’t take well to not being made the focus of everything. But my judgmental reaction was also bolstered by the norms of heavily therapized, dispassionate polyamory, which often holds that imposing rules or limitations on the love of your partners is unacceptable, always, and that feelings of relationship threat are always your problem to sort out rather than a real reflection of something going on in the dynamic that you get to say something about.

At the end of the day, I realized that a person is allowed to put their expectations on the table, especially with regard to dynamics that get created when whiteness is a factor in relationships. Having a white person inserted into the polycule instantly changes how people relate to one another and exposes every person of color to a hell of a lot more risk of racist violence. It creates power imbalances that can shift how members of the polycule move through public spaces, travel across their cities, what kinds of attention get directed to them, how conflicts in the polycule are managed (that’s a huge one!) and more. The typical white partner will require extensive cultural baggage-unpacking and learning in order to be a decent partner or metamour to people of color, and it’s fair for someone to not want to put in that work for some clown they’re not even dating themselves.

Thoughts on Jessica Fern’s Polysecure

It’s far better to be direct about what you want, to even risk being "unreasonable" in your demands than to fold in on yourself, silently suffer, or have them come out in some toxic, sideways fashion months or years later into the relationship because you thought you weren't allowed to be selfish, or demanding, or god forbid, have any kind of impact on a loved one's life at all.

You’re partners. You are gonna affect one another's lives. I don’t think that gets talked about enough. And I think it is especially common for white poly people to not be used to this idea of actually making real changes and concessions for other people that we care about, because we are used to living such profoundly atomized, individualistic existences where anyone who threatens our freedom or peace gets immediately cut out. But if we’re actually going to build lasting, enriching relationships with other people, we must nourish them with frank discussions of conflicting needs and by making both compromises and demands.

So what would your ideal nonmonogamous arrangement look like, Anon? Here are some areas in which you might want to make demands — or to put it in a less combative way, aspects of the relationship that you and your partner might want to more openly negotiate.

• Time: How often would you be comfortable with your partner seeing other partners? How frequently do you want to see other people?

• Activities: What ways of spending time together do you want to be exclusive to just your partner and you? What restaurants, hobbies, clubs, or TV shows do you want to be just “yours”?

• Places: Is it okay for your partner to bring a date to your house? Do you want to be able to host, or should sex and romance with other people happen outside of your home? Are there any places that should be “off limits” for bringing other partners?

• Sex: How often do you want to have sex with your partner? Are there any sex or kink acts you want to keep exclusive to just your partner and you? What sex do you each want that you aren’t getting in your relationship?

• Inclusion in life: How much should other partners know about your personal life? Is it okay for your partner to call them during an emergency? Can your partner talk about you to other partners? Do you want to be able to introduce other partner as partners to your loved ones or other friends?

• Love & commitment: Can your partner tell other partners that they love them? Buy them Valentine’s Day gifts or make grand romantic gestures? Do you want your other relationships to be able to romantically progress toward emotional intensity or some kind of commitment? Or do you not?

I imagine that a lot of these questions feel forbidden, especially if you’re read all the standard polyamory workbooks and follow a ton of polyamorous therapists/influencers online. People like to say that you can’t control the love of your partner, but our close relationships develop and grow based upon our choices, and you very much can ask that your partner not make choices that leave you feeling sidelined.

We don’t just tumble into deep, loving relationships randomly, we decide to spend long stretches of time with a person, expose our psychological wounds to them, show up when they’re hurting, buy them gifts, answer their texts before other people’s, take them to places special to us, listen to the music from their teenaged years, and send them videos of us jerking off into their panties. And we can decide not to do any one of those things if another partner asks us to. Or we can refuse. Either way, it’s better to have the conflict.

Maybe you will find, Anon, that you are more suited for casual nonmonogamy and your partner is more of a kitchen-table polyamory type. If that’s the case, you’ll both have to tolerate a little discomfort in order to make things work — fewer dates at home for your partner, more time keeping yourself busy and not spiraling for you. But you also might decide that you simply aren’t compatible in how you approach this stuff. That’s okay to realize too.

I am a firm believer that jealousy is not a thing to be risen above or overcome. It is a fiery, sexy side of you that compels you to grow closer to the people you want. Jealousy means you want more, and there’s nothing hotter than a person who is incandescent with white-hot want. Listen to that shit. You NEED something. You feel UPSET about something. You want to advocate for yourself over others. Yes, your own desires matter more to you than other people’s. That is fine and natural. You are you. You aren’t them. Leave other people to do the advocating for themselves.

Let your jealousy tell you what you are not getting enough of, Anon, and ask for that shit. And if you're still not getting it after doing so, you can put your foot down! You can have a fit, say that things aren't working, be an emotional wreck, beg for lots of reassurance, demand quality time, walk away from the relationship, and be hurt. Own that shit. Some partners even find possessiveness or jealousy in a partner to be very endearing or attractive, because it makes them feel wanted.

It's okay to need to be special. You are.

And here’s a quick little bonus question about asexuality to round this week’s column out:

There are lots of asexual people who want to have sex, Anon! I am one of them.

Where people get confused is equating sexual orientation with libido. Sexual orientation is about who or what you find attractive. But people of all sexual orientations can have all manner of libidos. There are gay couples who haven't had sex in five years, because they're both sex-repulsed, or on medication, or just have low libidos, and there are asexual people who do not experience attraction to other human beings but fuck five times a week because they're on testosterone and horny, or they're super kinky and love being tied up, or they just like the sensation.

The entire rainbow of possibilities exists, and it’s more common for people’s desires to change over time than it is for them to not. Our libidos shift because of things like hormones, past sexual experiences, mental health, physical wellbeing, boredom, need for a psychological escape, and so much more. Sometimes people lose their will to fuck for months simply because they had a lackluster encounter on their last date and they simply don’t have the energy to try again. It’s quite common for people to respond to trauma with a change in sexuality, either desiring far more contact or wanting never to be touched.

Wanting to have sex says nothing in particular about what your sexual orientation is, Anon, only that it is a physical activity that you enjoy. If you are not attracted to people physically you might even be asexual, but I’ll trust your own call that the label does not seem to fit for you. In asexual spaces it’s more common to speak frankly about sex repulsion or lack of desire, but in reality anybody can be sex repulsed for any number of reasons.

I’d try to be a little bit less prescriptive about your own desire. The seasons of our lives change, and what we want and what feels good in our bodies does too. Far more people go through boom-and-bust cycles of sexual profligance followed by dormancy than you might think. And if you think this will make finding relationships challenging, do not give up hope — as the polyamorous world does wisely teach us, relationships aren’t all about having sex. We get a lot out of our bonds to other people even when not feeling sexual desire for them, and if we’re in a sexually repulsed period, a partner’s unmet sexual needs can be satisfied somewhere else.

In short, Anon, yes there are a lot of people like you, but even if there weren’t your experiences still are real and are what they are. Any time the question is "does a person like me get to exist?" baby, the answer is yes, and you are the proof.