By Wayne Hoover
Polyamory has massively changed my life for the better. Monogamy is so widely accepted we might think that it’s the natural way things are. We are creators and have the ability to live our lives any way we want. We might still have cultural norms to fight against, but we can choose other ways of living if we want.
So we need not be confined to what society shows us through its history, through its media, and through its culture is the way things should be. Sometimes the automatic autopilot of beliefs that are implanted on us are not in your best interest given what you want to achieve in life.
I strive for greater truth, love, compassion, strength and flexibility in my life. There comes a time when beliefs become limiting and they must be taken off in order to keep progressing. Each person is different. Some people might gain just as much as I gain from polyamory as they do from monogamy, thats totally possible. I’m not here to say that everyone should switch and be poly, like poly is some sort of silver bullet. Rather I just want to show you that there is another way possible, another choice that should be respected just as we respect people who do karate and we respect people who weight train for exercise. They are two choices, and choosing one doesn’t make you any better than choosing the other.
But the key is that you make informed choices in your life. That you are in fact creating your life and not living on auto-pilot based on other peoples beliefs or just the normal way of doing things. The more informed you are the better decisions you can make in your life.
So if anything we should take away from this is that polyamory is a valid choice and we should all respect each other for our choices. Let us strive to become more informed in our lives so that we can make better choices to reach our goals.
OK then, so what is polyamory? How has it affected me?
Polyamory literally means many loves. It’s really just that, having in your life many loves at the same time. Many relationships at the same time, usually sexual but not necessarily. Polyamory isn’t cheating, polyamory is about being honest and ethical. Everyone knows about everyone here. So of course polyamory leads to a lot of talking, a lot of sharing. I’m also a fan of Polyamory without rules.
Polyamory has helped me get in touch with myself, to understand my emotions and to understand where they are coming from. It has helped me voice those emotions to myself, and heal myself via this process. Poly has helped me develop my communication skills, it has helped me speak my needs and desires in a direct way. Poly has taught me how to listen to others and not just wait my turn to talk. Poly has taught me how to really connect with someone and be present with someone. Because, time, time is our most important and precious commodity, and I think we are even more keen to this fact when poly, because we have to make sure our time used is time well spent. After all we don’t have infinite time with someone, and this is very clear when you have more than one lover.
For me poly has created a huge abundance of experiences in my life. You can (and will) find yourself in the most amazing situations that are just not possible in mono relationships. My connections with people have become stronger, I want to get to know people so much deeper and more than before. I no longer think about people as “everyone else that isn’t my partner”, there is EVERYONE and everyone is so amazing I want to connect with them all.
There is so much experience to be had, so many different combinations of things that can happen, its rather limitless if you start to think about it. This is a big reason why I like being Poly so much, it gives me so much freedom to experience so many amazing things and combinations I never knew even possible. It has literally opened a whole new world of possibilities for me.
But of course all of this goodness does take work. I have found myself working big time on jealousy (yeah, big time). I have been working on how to communicate better, and so many other little things about myself that I have wanted to grow better in. In my experience it is much easier to be mono that is poly. But I enjoy the challenge, I like growth, I like change. I would be lying if I said being Poly was easy, its not easy. But I do completely feel that for all its work the benefits greatly outweigh the amount of work you have to put in, I feel like it pays off 100 times over.
Poly doesn’t really bring certainty into your relationships either. Not in the normal way mono people think about relationships. Paradoxically poly does seems to bring certainty not to relationships, but the fruit of relationships, what we really want from relationships in the end. Love, Connection, Trust, these things are all there in my polyamorous relationships, big time, maybe bigger than ever for me. But I can’t be certain where they will come from, there is no one partner anymore that I can expect these things from.
Basically, the more I give the more I get with poly. The more I’m open and care about others the more I get that energy back. And being poly allows me to do that, it allows me to give more so that I may get more, and thats an amazing thing.