The dark sides of polyamory that nobody talks about

- You’ll get sick more often. I’m not talking about STIs here: I’m talking about when the 3rd cold this month goes rip-roaring through your incestuous clusterfuck of a social network and strikes you down with a vengeance. Cough.

- You’ll always be missing someone. If you’re a radical post-geographic relationship anarchist type, you’ll be missing even more someones. As I type this, I am feeling the absence of sweethearts and comrades in Albuquerque, Berlin, D.C., Hong Kong, New York City, and Vienna.

- The depths of feeling you’ll discover are not limited to the positive. Watching your partners curled up together, you‘ll feel more lurve than you ever thought possible. Conversely, on that special occasion when more than one of your lovers are being total shitpickles, you will find out just how swole your inner Rage-A-Saur can get.

- No matter how skilled or experienced you are at poly, you’ll undergo a drama explosion at least once every 2 years. While monogamous relationships are not immune to drama, the number of ways communication can go pear-shaped grows exponentially when n > 2.

- Complex and ever-shifting relationship geometries make event planning challenging. Keeping up with who’s fucking whom (and who has recently undergone a messy breakup) is a Sisyphean undertaking in all but the smallest of communities.

- At some point along your journey, you will accidentally start a poly support group or book club.

- Your ability to enjoy infidelity plots on movies and television shows will be ruined. The Implied Infidelity trope, where a lot of angst could be avoided if characters would just use their words, is equally frustrating. As my friend Ian puts it, “It’s like watching a movie about a car breaking down, and nobody knows how to call Triple A.” While non-monogamy is certainly not for everyone, I’d like to see it acknowledged as a possibility for solving certain classes of problems.

- Sleeping in the middle loses its charm quickly.

- Poly representations in the media are still early stage. I want nuanced, relatable poly characters, dammit, not reality television.

- Without the forcing function that serial monogamy provides, polyamory can extend relationships past their expiration date. “Our relationship doesn’t have to end. It can just change.” Clinging on to dead relationships isn’t healthy.

That’s all the downsides: everything else is a radical fairy tale of unicorns and cuddle puddles. Okay, maybe not, but poly’s how I love. I wouldn’t want to have relationships any other way.