You Aren’t Ready For Polyamory

If you aren’t willing to communicate on a very high level and to be responsible for your own emotions

As Thomas H. Brand recently pointed out in his excellent story, 7 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Begin Polyamory, “there are a lot of assumptions bundled up with modern relationships that we don’t even realise are influencing us.” In other words, most people rely heavily on the structure of monogamy and the expectations that go along with that, without even realizing that it’s what they are doing. Because of this, there are so many things they’ve never really discussed with their partner that they would need to when changing relationship styles.

If you are in a happy and healthy monogamous relationship, you may think that you and your partner communicate quite well, but almost certainly, it is not nearly the level of communication that is needed to have a successful polyamorous relationship. My husband James and I discovered this for ourselves when we decided to open up our marriage about 6 years ago.

We thought we had a pretty egalitarian marriage; we thought we were quite skilled at conveying our thoughts and expectations to each other. Pretty quickly, we learned, that wasn’t actually the case. We were simply used to relying on the largely unspoken rules of…