356 - Open: Non-monogamy and Sexual Liberation (with author Rachel Krantz)
Author and journalist Rachel Krantz
Rachel Krantz is one of the founding editors of Bustle, a talented journalist and award recipient, and author of the very newly released Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-monogamy. Rachel has graciously joined us today to give us a deeper look into some of the themes in her new book, including:
What draws people to non-monogamy and how that may shift over time.
Sexual liberation, feminism, and gender.
Abusive dynamics in non-monogamy.
Her spiritual journey.
Non-monogamous representation and telling her story publicly.
“Liberation doesn’t mean saying yes to everything. Sometimes saying no is the liberation.”
Rachel Krantz
Find more about Rachel or order her book on her website, and find her on Twitter and Instagram at @rachelkrantz.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we are joined by author and journalist Rachel Krantz to discuss her new book Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy. Rachel Krantz is a journalist and one of the founding editors of Bustle, where she served as Senior Features Editor for three years. Her work has been featured on NPR, The Guardian, Vox, Vice, and many other outlets. She's also the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Radio Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Peabody Award for her work as an investigative reporter with YR Media. That's a lot of rewards and awards.
Emily: Rewarding awards.
Jase: Thank you for joining us.
Rachel: Thank you so much for having me. This is a great way to celebrate the book coming out. I really appreciate it.
Dedeker: I wanted to take a couple of minutes just to talk a little bit about origin stories. It's funny to see things coming full circle because the way that Rachel and I connected was, I think 2016 when I was in the middle of the editing process for my book, and I was basically just broke and writing stories because I was broke. It was when Rachel was Editor at Bustle and you picked up a lot of my stuff, and I think that's how we got-- I just felt really lucky that it seemed to hit at a time when you were also on this non-monogamous journey and also really engaged in these things and also really interested in the things that I have to say as well as having really interesting things of your own to say.
It's really wonderful to see you also go on this journey and now have this book of your own. It's been a wild ride. That's for me, just witnessing from the outside. I'm sure it's been more wild for you living it.
Rachel: Thank you so much. I feel the same way. You're in this book and have been a friend to me at points on this journey, so it feels really special to be on the podcast. I know I've also told you how Multiamory loomed large throughout my journey, so it just feels very full circle to be on. It is a little surreal but also quite satisfying.
Dedeker: Let's get into your book itself, which is coming out today, and at the end of the episode, we'll talk a little bit more about where people can pick it up, but for all of our listeners who will not have had a chance to dive into your book yet and know your story yet, do you think you could sum it up in three sentences or so just real quick here.
Rachel: The best question. Yes. I think that the best way to describe it is it is a reported memoir of the story of my first open relationship, which also happened to be my first Dom/Sub relationship, and both of those things were relatively uncommunicated. It's also a partial cautionary tale of what happens when you try to explore a lot of these things without having a lot of direct, clear, respectful communication around them, kind of like the opposite of radar, I would say, but on that journey, I'm encountering and dating all kinds of people who are practicing different forms of non-monogamy and so you see me exploring and see other models of people in non-monogamous relationships, all different forms.
Dedeker: Something that I think it's important for our listeners to know is that this book is listed as a memoir and that's very much what it is, but you also bring your background as a journalist to the memoir-writing process. Can you talk a little bit about how this is maybe a little bit different from your mom's memoir-- Not your mom's memoir but the generic mom's memoir?
Emily: This is not your mom's memoir.
Dedeker: This is not your mom's memoir.
Rachel: My mom's memoir would be interesting as well. I think that I really brought both sensibilities, and part of the main political statement of the book is that this is both an extremely personal, at times very erotic and explicit memoir, where I'm really leaving none of myself protected and it's very vulnerable and lots of moments where people will be like, "Oh my God, I can't believe she's writing this."
Like, "I can't believe she's admitting this," but it's also a story I spent five years reporting and put a ton of rigor into it as a journalist in terms of doing dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews, reading all the books, doing tons of research, and also just immersing myself in the story as an immersion journalist who is also living it at the same time.
I think, in our culture, we tend to create these boxes for women especially where it's like either you get to be a respectable professional journalist or other kind of respectable career person or you're someone who talks about sex explicitly and talks about your feelings in extremely vulnerable detail. What this book is challenging the reader to do is be like, "Nope, I'm both." This book is both. Both those things can coexist because they do in almost everyone.
Dedeker: Yes, I think you talked about that in your intro as well of this is a little bit of an experiment of as someone who has this pile of rewards and awards and then also is kind of turning the corner from your normal work of just really being vulnerable and really laying it all out there, I guess what the public does with that with having to hold those two things at the same time.
Rachel: Like you all, I feel, I think a certain responsibility to be as open as I can because I have so many privileges where at least I have the chance to try to make this part of my career. I don't have kids to lose. I'm not worried at this point about losing a job because I don't have a job to lose. All these civil protections that don't exist for non-monogamous people, not to mention that I'm white, I'm cis, straight-passing, thin, all these other things that make it less likely that I'm going to be as badly harassed as other people.
I'll still be harassed I'm sure, but hopefully, I am able to help do my tiny part to help open up the conversation because if it's so taboo for me to talk about this in basically one of the best positions possible, then what does that say about how it is for everyone else?
Dedeker: Yes. Definitely.
Jase: One thing that we wanted to ask you about and it's something that we've been thinking about for ourselves as well, is this question of what is it that draws a person to non-monogamy and then how that might shift, like you might have gotten into it for one reason and then stuck with it for a completely different reason. I was just curious and maybe we could all even reflect on this, but how is that for you? What initially drew you to it and then how has that changed?
Rachel: I think I was familiar with the concept. An ex mailed Sex at Dawn to me after we broke up saying it had really helped him and he hoped it would help me too. I presented the passive-aggressive implications, but I also totally devoured it with a very focused interest, and it made a lot of sense to me and really shifted how I began to think about relationships. I was like, "Of course, I have been sold yet another capitalist patriarchal narrative. That makes total sense."
I also was a serial monogamist and would always end up feeling eventually trapped and bored in every relationship, and I was just hoping that was part of what being in your 20s is and that I would grow out of it. I was interested already and familiar with the concept of non-monogamy. I just wasn't sure how to go about practicing it. The idea made me nervous. No one I was with seemed experienced any more than I was or really mature enough to try it with.
When I met Adam, he was much older than me, had experience with non-monogamous relationships, was incredibly intelligent and compelling. On our second date before we even kissed basically said, "I'm looking for a primary partner, someone to share my life with, but if you were with me, I would never restrict you. You could still fall in love with other people, have experiences with other people." "I would just need to feel privileged and safe." I was like, "Oh, maybe this is my chance to explore this." It went on from there.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: Wow. Then, what did that turn into for you? Like what kept you there?
Rachel: At first, I thought that was a great offer. We fell in love very, very quickly intensely. I moved in in weeks, which was an early red flag, but also at that time, I thought, "Oh, I found it. I found my true love." It very much felt like a fairytale experience. I'd never felt so in love with someone in any-- Also newly submissive in any relationship. I'd always feel like I was the one in total control, and this was very much the reverse, so I was nervous about the idea of non-monogamy. I would start to feel myself get jealous when he would bring it up, which he kept doing every few weeks so that I wouldn't get comfortable in a delusion. I would feel kind of mad at myself that that was my reaction.
He said, "Okay, how about I'll be monogamous until you allow otherwise, you can just be non-monogamous." That was his way of demonstrating like, "I'm really serious about you. This is just my philosophy." It was the way he framed it, "You can explore." Then that meant going to sex parties at first. He then confessed he was into hotwifing, which is, for those who don't know, he never used that term, but it's basically another term for cuckolding except that cuckolding is actually more submissive.
It's like men who enjoy maybe sitting in the corner and watching or maybe they're not allowed to touch. Whereas, hotwifing is a fetish as it's known, which can exist in all gender and sexual permutations in other forms, other names, hothusbanding, whatever else, means you enjoy participating and the competitive aspect of it. It's like is very gendered but potentially sexy thing of seeing another man with me and then also being with me, and then when the other man leaves, reclaiming me afterwards.
That's what we did for a while, and it was very much part of the Dom/Sub play as well. Then, about a year in, I decided to try opening it up on both sides. It basically didn't feel fair, and by that point, I also had seen how amazing this was, how it only reconfirmed my commitment to him, an attraction to him. Every time I was given these freedoms, it made me want to double down on what we were building because I was like, "This is awesome." I think I saw how, even though I was scared, it would be really the only way he was going to consider staying with me long term, was if I eventually afforded him these freedoms as well. That began the second leg of the journey.
Emily: You talk a lot in the book about how this relationship with Adam culminated in this sexual liberation for you but it also presented some questions around what that exactly means, especially for women. I wondered if you could talk on that, what you felt your sexual liberation was at the beginning of this journey versus where you feel you are now in the present?
Rachel: It's a great question. Thank you for asking me to reflect on that. I think that in the beginning, I thought that sexual liberation, I think I applied a little bit of like almost a relationship escalator mentality to it of like you just keep getting more and more liberated and eventually you're going to reach the point and you'll know you're liberated. You'll just have the most mind-blowing, liberated orgasm, and from then on, it will be great. You'll be free.
Maybe when you meet your soulmate, that allows you to explore complete liberation. In a way with Adam, it felt that way sometimes because he was very good at helping form the narrative of our relationship of like we were destined. With him, I was exploring things I'd always wanted to explore that I'd been too afraid to including coming into my queerness. Non-monogamy, that was probably one of the biggest ways I began to feel more liberated.
I felt more confident in having experiences with women first at parties. I gained more of a physical confidence and then I eventually met someone who I dated. I do think that already having the security of someone at home gave me a lot more confidence to explore that. In all those ways, trying new things, feeling more like, "Oh, I don't have to play out the script I've been sold." Like there's nothing wrong with being potentially insatiable. There's nothing wrong with me for having trouble with long-term monogamy. Maybe I get to write a different story. All of that was very liberating and things I carry with me.
I think the main difference now is that I've also learned the lesson that sometimes saying no is the experience, is the liberation, that liberation doesn't have to be saying yes to everything or continuing to just push yourself and push yourself and push yourself to new extreme emotional heights, which is kind of my tendency, just to see how far I can go, how uncomfortable I can make myself. In certain moments, that might be liberating but also sometimes saying no to that and knowing what your boundaries are is also a form of liberation.
Dedeker: I think that that ties really nicely with some-- A theme that we've explored on this show before when we're talking about things like sexual liberation and sex-positivity, that there's this other school of thought of sex neutrality or of being critical of sex-positivity. You mention the fact that sometimes we can confuse liberation for "I say yes to everything. I'm down for everything."
In a conversation that you and I had, you talked about perceiving sometimes monogamous women expressing some resentment around sex-positivity, around increasing positivity toward non-monogamy as well. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, about how sometimes ironically increasing sexual liberation and positivity can sometimes hamper our own liberation.
Rachel: Yes. I think a lot of the book is about how seemingly opposing truths often coexist, like both those things can be true at the same time. Sometimes it's not good if non-monogamy becomes yet another cool girl standard that you feel held to or if it becomes another tool for coercion or like you just need to be down or you're repressed. That is just another standard for people, usually women, to be holding themselves to in service of male pleasure usually. That's not a good thing.
I get that there would be resentment if non-monogamy is ever being used to do that. The same time, I think I really show in my story, in my journey how it gets really complex and subtle how some of that can be going on at the same time as it's a really good thing for me in my life to be exploring all this at the same time as you see Adam sometimes coercing me.
It's very complex, and I just try to explore those complexities and I think invite other people to do the same. I think that the more we can have these conversations in nuanced ways that don't try to whitewash any one model or claim that anyone is perfect or that anything is perfect, the more they'll be hopefully, acceptance for a wide array of approaches.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Yes. See, you also had a section in the book where you're having a conversation with your friend Aisha, and they say sexual liberation is still really unavailable to male and masked people. We don't talk about that except in some butch communities. We talk about masculinity in terms of damage, violence, toxicity. We don't have enough of a conversation about how to help free men and masks from that and provide loving alternatives. How did that conversation affect your thinking around those things and how have you seen that since then?
Rachel: I think that very much affected me in the writing of this book to approach, I guess, when I was describing what ended up happening with Adam in a way that hopefully avoids blame or simple categorizations of villain and victim. Instead recognizes what is the suffering of men under patriarchy as well? What drives someone to potentially as the story goes on, want to control someone else's behavior in mind and how could it be their own disowned emotional vulnerability that's driving that?
To try to really dig into that with psychologists. Throughout, it's really a narrative memoir that's reading as a story but you have psychologists and other people commenting in the footnotes or woven in of how this is indicative of larger trends, other things they see. I think hearing Aisha say that was just kind of a reminder that even though I'm describing me and Adam as individuals, it's not really about us. At the end of the day, it's about behaviors.
Even if I am describing him or me, it's always going to be an approximation not just because of the form but because everyone is constantly changing. It's really more us as the characters in this fable of what happens when you try to explore all these things and push against these norms but you're still under patriarchy, you're still under capitalism, you're still under these systems. More than that, this very gender normative power dynamic where the man is extremely dominant and the woman is extremely submissive and that there's nothing wrong with that.
We can explore all the ways that that can be chosen and pleasurable and explored in a consensual way. What goes wrong when that's the default and when it becomes below the line and taboo to even talk about in the relationship, because we also find it kind of taboo to talk about that in general and in society how that plays out. I very much view us as this kind of parable for how all these things are always at play, if that makes sense.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes. It's almost like this sense that, I mean I think that on this show, we're constantly and I know when I do interviews when people ask us questions, we're constantly trying to push against this narrative that non-monogamy is automatically more enlightened, more progressive, more feminist just by default. It definitely can be all those things, and one could maybe make the argument that it'll probably be more fun and cool if it is all those things.
Rachel: Yes.
Dedeker: But it seems like you're really laying out the fact that because of the air that we breathe, like all the things that are baked into the air that we breathe, it's like we can still be making choices to have more progressive sexual relationships or romantic relationships or friendships but there's still a lot of pit traps around.
Rachel: Of course, yes. It's human beings who are flawed, and just like with monogamy, there's going to be a wide array of every kind of relationship outcome and permutation from totally awesome to abusive. It's going to be the same thing with us. It just depends on the people and their dynamic and the way they approach it. I try to remind people that throughout hopefully, but of course, because we're so marginalized and there's so few mainstream representations, it's very tempting to make generalizations of like, "Oh, see, this is what all non-monogamous people are like."
I just try to call that out as much as possible in the book to keep checking the reader that this is just my story and this is what happened. This is not fiction, this is not a how-to guide, this is what happened. I'm not going to be dishonest about it even if it doesn't always make us look good in the immediate.
Dedeker: That leads us to our next topic here, which is, talking about the abusive dynamics and toxic dynamics that can show up in non-monogamy. On our show before, we've talked about the fact that sometimes non-monogamous relationships can become fertile ground for particular types of coercion or particular types of manipulation or for emotional abuse.
If our listener hasn't gathered already, that's part of your story. Is documenting this arguably slow, subtle decline into these more toxic dynamics. I'm wondering, do you think that there's a special flavor of emotional abuse that shows up in non-monogamy that's different from how it may present in monogamous relationships?
Rachel: I think I can only really speak to my experience, but I think that certainly-- Okay, so you have jealousy in monogamous relationships, is very dangerous. That's the first thing to say. Obviously, monogamy is a ripe breeding ground for abuse because that's where most of it happens and like most women who are assaulted, it by partner, and over half of women who are killed in the United States, it's a partner, and 12% of those homicides are associated with jealousy.
That's just to put that out there first of like monogamy is also, clearly jealousy obviously a ripe ground for all these behaviors because you can use jealousy as an excuse of, "I'm going to lock you up, why were you talking to him? What were you doing?" Obviously.
Dedeker: It's been used as an excuse in court cases also, like the straight-up defense, setting precedent for that. . Yes.
Jase: Yes.
Rachel: Absolutely.
Dedeker: Yes.
Rachel: I think on the flip side with non-monogamy, you're going to have the same kinds of personalities that might be prone to this kind of controlling or abusive behavior, spinning it as, "This is just in your mind. If you're having trouble with jealousy, it's more evolved to be non-monogamous, if you could just be more open and free and loving towards me, you wouldn't have trouble with anything I'm doing."
Kind of the reframing of any difficulties or complaints the partner might be having with behaviors that are happening as a weakness or a lack of being evolved on the other person's part I think might be a flavor that definitely showed up in my dynamic and that I've heard from other people since has been relatable to them in certain non-monogamous relationships they had.
Dedeker: Yes. I think that in a lot of non-monogamous communities, in relationships, there is this particular value around I guess I would call it emotional responsibility which as a value on its own is not necessarily a bad thing. It is good to own our emotions and not just completely project them or blame our partners for causing them or things like that, but that's the one that I see.
I've also seen this even in a straight-up, like couples therapist working with monogamous couples that sometimes there can be this very extreme, almost like emotional libertarianism of your emotions are 100% on you and it doesn't at all matter what your partner is doing and it's all on you to fix it.
Rachel: Yes. You're even quoted in the book, Dedeker, about how you see coercion play out, maybe sometimes specifically could look like someone feeling pressured to go through with the threesome or something like that because they feel like they'll ruin the night forever. If they don't, feeling like they don't have a choice in being non-monogamous if they're not going to have the partner withdraw from them or punish them otherwise.
Really feeling like you have to be down or I'm going to walk away from you immediately is another way it could show up. Of course, it can show up again in the reverse of a non-monogamous person feeling coerced to be monogamous.
Emily: To continue along this thread, you talk about gaslighting a lot in your book. I found it really interesting because you've laid out specific behaviors that your partner did that were sort of along the trajectory of what classic gaslighting looks like. Although you also discussed self-gaslighting, which was an interesting concept and something that I would like you to elaborate on a little bit, like what does that really look like for you and what did you mean when you were discussing that in the book?
Rachel: Well, I think that the way I was able to describe how gaslighting works was because I recorded so much of it. It's one of those things that's very hard to explain, it's kind of a thrown around term and because you internalize the other person's opinions about it, like a part of me still even rolls my eyes of it inwardly, like using it because his voice is still there. A part of what gaslighting is is that their voice becomes your interior voice.
It's basically manipulating someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. Where it gets incredibly confusing is that often the other person who is gaslighting you systemically might not be even conscious of it themselves, so they might just be incredibly convinced that they know what's best for you, that your fear or whatever they perceive to be as your undesirable behaviors are holding you back or controlling you and that if you could just adhere to their reality, their perspective, the way they think it would be best, you would be happy and they could just love you the way they want.
That's one of the cornerstones of gaslighting, and so as you fall deeper into that and the person pushes that narrative consciously or unconsciously and you believe it more and more, there becomes really hardly any difference between the gaslighting and the self-gaslighting. Most of it becomes internalized because you hear, if you're saying, "Wait, I'm not feeling like this is okay the way he's talking to me right now."
You immediately hear his voice in your head/your voice, there's not really a difference anymore, arguing with you exactly why that's incorrect or why you're being oversensitive or why you basically shouldn't trust it, your own instincts. Yes, by the end, there is no difference really, but I guess the self-gaslighting was the constant undermining of one's self and one's own feelings.
Emily: Do you feel like you have a sense of potentially when is it good to question our own thoughts and feelings versus when is it potentially a sign of like an unhealthy dynamic when thoughts and feelings are questioned by another person or by yourself? You've been through so much here. I don't know if you can speak to that.
Rachel: Thank you. Thanks for asking that because that's one of the central points I hope to get across to people in the book and that I kind of come to towards the end of it, meet someone who's still one of my top mentors, advisors now, a Buddhist monk named Tashi Nyima. He helps me begin to disentangle these things because another thing that was confusing was that Adam introduced a lot of Buddhist thought that really resonated with me and still does as sort of another argument for why I needed to adhere to whatever he wanted.
Basically kind of that argument that non-attachment is a better way to love, that your feelings are just in your own fabrications, and if you can just detach from them more, then you get to decide how you're going to feel. There's a degree of truth in that, but what Tashi helped me see is, okay, it's good to examine your own initial emotional reactions and thoughts, to learn to meditate so that you can better observe them. The distinction is someone else should never be telling you what should and shouldn't be in your mind. That's a major red flag. That's very different. That's one thing.
If someone is saying no, you shouldn't be thinking or feeling that major red flag even if they're potentially correct that okay, you should take a step back and look at it. Someone saying that is very different than saying, "No, you're feelings are wrong, they're illegitimate," all those kinds of things that characterize gaslighting and emotional abuse. I think that's the main distinction I keep in mind now sure. Examine my thoughts and feelings but don't discredit them as unreal.
Another helpful distinction I'll just say quickly is, the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach who has been very helpful to me and she's also psychologist. She has a distinction she says is real but not true. Things can be real but not true. Same distinction, you could be having feelings of jealousy and even sit with them for a moment and say, "Okay, can I start to parse out how this is grounded in things that maybe aren't true. Fear that I'm unlovable, that my partner is going to leave me tomorrow."
Things that you know that are not true but can I look at that without discrediting my feelings as unreal or something I shouldn't be having in the first place or is my partner saying that because it's not true, it's not even a real or valid thing to be experiencing.
Jase: Yes, that's such a great distinction to make.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: I like how succinctly you worded that because that's something we do talk about a fair amount on this show about that. Like your feelings are real but that doesn't mean they're based in fact. Like feelings aren't facts but that doesn't mean they're not real. That's really well put. Thank you for that. I also-- Just something that you said really struck me was how you talked about how clearly non-monogamy is a part of your life now and also Buddhism is.
Both of those things came from someone who was abusive and used both of those things as a form of coercion. That is I think just something worth taking a moment for everyone to kind of recognize, that I think a lot of us in the polyamory community just in general, it's like, yes, we've been very influenced by some thoughts by people who maybe were abusers but that doesn't mean that those contributions weren't valuable to us.
Then, even for the three of us in our personal lives, some pretty formative concepts early on in Multiamory and sort of creating our own understanding of non-monogamy came from a partner who was really shitty and abusive to Dedeker particularly and also to Emily. It's like, we still got something from that, and it doesn't take away from the value that we got from that thing even if it was-- Wish it had a better source but that's great to still have that value.
Rachel: Yes. I would just add that I don't think abuser has to be a fixed identity either. I prefer to speak of it in terms of behaviors. In the book, I also exhibit abusive behaviors at times in reaction to being kind of yes, consistently, verbally and emotionally abused, but that doesn't change that I was also going back with sometimes name-calling towards him or any of these other things that are also abusive behaviors. I think also that Adam or anyone else is not fixed in being an abuser with a capital A, they might just have abusive patterns that they can also work on learning.
I think that that's also part of what kept me in the dynamic feeling pretty isolated a lot of the times, sometimes the dialogue didn't always acknowledge that, and the fact that people stay in these dynamics because the person who is abusing you sometimes or gaslighting you or whatever it is is hardly doing that all the time. They're not shitty all the time. They also often really love you. They're not loving you very well a lot of the times, but they're trying, and you fell in love with that. There's a lot of things about them that are awesome too often and very compelling still.
Yes, there's so many things that I will always be so grateful to Adam for, and I wouldn't take back any of it because I think I got exposed to all these wonderful ideas. It was just a matter of needing to learn the lesson, that I didn't need someone else to tell me what was correct and what I should be thinking or feeling about any of these ideas.
Dedeker: I just wanted to highlight something that you said basically about these identities or these patterns not necessarily being fixed. I think our culture has such a hard time when it comes to narratives about toxic dynamics or unhealthy relationship dynamics, whether it's the level of writing a memoir or just the level of telling your friends that our culture still encourages us to be like find the bad guy, find the good guy. That's the way our brains work. They evolved in that particular way to just kind of create some quick categories so we can make some quick decisions and we can survive.
I think that is the really frustrating thing, is that that's just the story that we seem to be craving, is identify the bad guy for me. "Okay, they're totally bad. I can throw them and everything associated with them in the garbage." Identify the survivor or the victim. "Okay, they're 100% totally good. Did nothing wrong. Absolutely blameless. Didn't contribute to that dynamic whatsoever. They were just the princess to be rescued, ironically," I think is the way that we think about it.
I think that holds back so many people from sharing their stories or sharing stories like this because we have this myth that if I did anything that was less than good behavior, that means maybe I'm to blame or I'm equally as culpable as the person who hurt me.
I just so appreciate that in telling this story, you are willing to be vulnerable and take ownership of like, "I did some shitty things too, it really wasn't great," but because I think even that just holds so many people back from being able to just be honest about what happened. We're going to keep going with this conversation. We're going to take a quick break to talk about the ways that you can best support this show to help us keep this information coming for free.
We're back. Another theme that you explore a lot in the book is the spiritual component of this, both in the sense of exploring some Buddhist concepts but also I think separate from Buddhist concepts, just the general journey of personal growth and really trying to sift through what's actually the good stuff here versus what's the not so good stuff. You do touch on spiritual bypassing quite a bit. We've talked about that on this show before, but we want to hear from you. I mean, how do you define spiritual bypassing? How did that show up for you?
Rachel: Dedeker, I love that you guys talk about it on the show, and I think you have in The Smart Girls Guide also, I think you
Dedeker: practice the spiritual bypassing, that's the reason why.
Rachel: I think for me it showed up as getting high every day, which was one of the unhealthy behaviors for me anyway. I'm not saying it's unhealthy for everyone to get high every day, but for me, it was a way of just making it so that I could be okay with whatever was going on and rise above it and look at it from the outside as if it were all this interesting story I could dissociate from and the idea that I would often just say to myself, if I was having trouble with anything, "Other people have real problems, look how lucky you are. You have this great life and this great partner that people would love to be with."
Just basically, "Rise above, rise above," and non-attachment, like, "Everything--" Just lots of that kind of stuff. All those things are true. Everything isn't permanent. Other people do have worse problems, and sometimes detaching a little bit can help you examine your beliefs in a way that could be helpful, but when you're basically gaslighting yourself, numbing yourself prematurely, skipping over your feelings by just spiritually rising above them, that's probably spiritually bypassing.
Dedeker: You just mentioned just briefly that for you, it was kind of rising above and trying to look at this like it's a story with some interesting aspects of it. I think the funny thing about reading this story is that fairly, maybe, I don't know what the halfway point is of your journey, but to me, halfway through the book is when already you've been approached to start thinking about writing a book. It's like it wasn't like you went through this whole experience and experienced this relationship and this journey, then you got to the end of it and then it was like, "Oh, now I'll start thinking about writing the book."
Do you think knowing that, "Oh, this might be a book project," do you think that that helped you have healthy distance from it or do you think that it became another form of spiritual bypassing at times?
Rachel: Both. Absolutely. I'll say that. I think I describe in the book how the motivations really fed each other symbiotically. It was like the idea of this all having some greater purpose allowed me to push myself further in the way that I already wanted to so that I could stay without him who I was by that point convinced was my soulmate and that I was on this journey where I was the one who needed to change because true love requires transformation. I was the one opening up to non-monogamy. This was my journey to go on.
It kind of made it have this external framework that I could imagine some sort of light at the end of the tunnel of, "Okay, if this is a book one day or story, that means I have to get to the end of it and there's only going to be like two ways out, leaving him or something and being embarrassed that I couldn't do it or finally vanquishing all my jealousy and becoming good at polyamory.
Yes, I think that it just also was a coping mechanism because as I increasingly began to lose more and more trust in my own capabilities, my own judgment, my own sanity as I was no longer sober most days, recording was pretty much the only thing I could do to have some sort of sense of solid reality outside of his. I used to be a more confident, assured person. What's happening to me, this is interesting.
The journalist in me, the person who was beginning to really practice sitting with my feelings, meditating a little bit, looking in my mind was like, "Okay, I am very caught right now. I have no idea how I'm going to untangle all this, but one day, I might want to be able to look back on what actually happened because I sure as hell will not be able to remember a lot of the specifics of it," because I'm stoned all the time and because his way of framing things was so masterful.
I just began to record with his consent, to his credit, I began to record all our couples therapy sessions, all my sessions with Kathy Labriola, different state of the unions we would have together, arguments. I recorded so much and with other people along the way too. It just became this way of feeling like I had some sort of greater purpose to what was increasingly feeling like a journey I was sinking in.
Emily: I find that so interesting because in moments in my own relationships when things are taken strangely or something starts going awry, I'm like, "Fuck, I wish that I had this recorded" because I'm hearing something said back to me that in no way encapsulates what I meant to say to this person and yet they're taking it in such a way, I wish that I could rewind the tape and be able to be like, "No, wait, there it is again. Let's work through this or whatever."
I find that so incredibly fascinating that you did that, because I think so many of us could really find that useful in our relationships and yet it's difficult to "Wait, I'm going to turn on the recorder right now in the middle of this conversation."
Rachel: Yes, I definitely don't recommend it. I think it was a product of being in that dynamic-- First of all, was my predilections as a journalist, I was already writing about my life, doing a lot of experimental immersion journalism at Bustle. It was already kind of my modus operandi, but also, he was so often saying, "No. You're remembering things wrong."
Emily: Exactly.
Rachel: He was saying, "Repeat back to me what I said. That's not what I said." That was one of his favorite line, "No, you repeat back to me." Like subtext didn't matter. All that mattered were the exact words. At the same time, Me Too was happening, and later on the Kavanaugh hearings, and I had internalized that as a woman in our culture, I need to gather evidence if I want to ever be believed. It's not enough to live the experience or to claim you remember it.
I need to have hard evidence because look at this, no one is believing even these women who have transcripts and their therapists are testifying that they were talking about it decades ago. No one is believing them. I need to have actual tape with the therapists. It wasn't really because I was intent on exposing Adam in any way. It was more just that I think I had a sense of there was going to come a point where I was going to be on some other end of this and I was going to want to understand how this had happened.
I was going to want to retrace my steps and see what the patterns were and how you can slowly transform in so many ways, not just the losing my own sense of reality, because it wasn't just that, but also just, "Oh my God, all of a sudden, I'm into all these things that I wasn't into before. I'm apparently completely omnivorous in all these ways." Like I was opening so rapidly and so much that I wanted to live it, but I also wanted to I guess hold onto it and be able to make sense of it afterwards, but it's not a good way to live. I don't plan to continue recording all my relationships in life. It's not healthy.
Dedeker: Well, maybe. I mean, you could also just be a precursor to our future lives where absolutely everything is documented.
Emily: It is recorded, yes.
Dedeker: It seems like that's the trend we're going in and so maybe someday we will have that blessing and curse of, if we get out of a relationship, "Okay. Now let me sit down and watch the movie of this relationship to see if I can understand what actually happened."
Rachel: It's a Black Mirror episode
Dedeker: Yes, very sci-fi .
Jase: That's what I was just thinking of. Yes.
Rachel: I think that's the thing I realized, "Oh, even if I hadn't recorded all these things, the way we live now is so much more on the record, just text messages, emails, dating app messages." There was so much.
Jase: I love that in this conversation that we've been having, something that also comes through in your book is that you do really value the nuance and trying not to fall into some of these narratives about there's always someone who's 100% the good guy and one who's 100% the bad guy and how falling into those traps doesn't serve anyone. It hurts victims, it hurts perpetrators, like it hurts everyone. Like that's not making for good conversation.
Related to that, something that's come up for us and I think most people in the non-monogamous community, which is getting caught in this bind between wanting to have a bigger variety of stories about polyamory and non-monogamy including ones that talk about abuse or that talk about coercion or just general unhealthy relationships and yet at the same time, because there are relatively so few of those stories compared to the 10 gazillion monogamous stories that can be terrible, can be delightful, can be the whole range, that it's like, if we tell one bad story, there's this fear that the rest of the world is going to jump on that and be like, "See, even the polyamorous people admit it's shitty and people are awful."
It's like there's this fear, this scare of sharing those sorts of stories that would make all of us look bad. I was just curious, what was that part of the process like for you in terms of your own concerns about that of misrepresenting the community or betraying your fellow non-monogamous people by telling this story or something like that?
Rachel: Oh my gosh. Well, you just see me grappling with it in the book, in my conversations with Aisha and other friends throughout. I'm worried about this even before I'm sure I'm going to write a book. I'm preemptively worried how is this going to represent non-monogamy, how is it going to represent the community, because it's also a depiction of that gone wrong in certain ways or not practiced in the poster child way.
I mean, I think that in the end, I choose to believe that it will hopefully do more good than harm and that basically we're not going to have mainstream conversations and acceptance and nuanced depictions unless we admit to the ways we're also completely flawed human beings.
Obviously, there's lots of people doing that like you guys, but this was just one more way by simply telling the truth of what happened in its nuance that I could hopefully complicate the narrative and in so doing, make it more relatable to most people because I've seen a lot of initial comments from advanced readers who review it on Goodreads or whatever saying, "Oh, I was expecting this to be another polemic on why non-monogamy is so great, and instead, it was this story that made me think about all these things and was really nuanced" and I was great.
That makes me so happy to hear because I get that tendency to be like, "I don't even want to hear about you because you think you're perfect." I guess I'm sort of a little comfortable with that too or familiar with it because of, like Emily, I'm a vegan, and I've been a vegan activist for many years now, and that's another group that people are immediately, more sometimes, really angry or antagonistic towards because they feel that same kind of cognitive dissonance or disavowed things in themselves that make them uncomfortable.
Yes, there's a lot of whitewashing that I was also complicit in in the beginning of saying, "Oh, it'll make your health perfect or it's not an eating disorder. There's no eating disorders here." Again, of course, because vegans are humans, sometimes they're going to have eating disorders, and because non-monogamous people are humans, they're going to sometimes be in not perfect relationships and are having to claim to be in perfect relationships is another restrictive box that I think we only get to break out of by being more and more honest and vulnerable potentially because then we're human and relatable.
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes. In the book, specifically in this section, you're talking about polyamorous people, but you ask the question why should polyamorous people have to prove they're only in happy relationships in order to be respected? I guess the same thing with veganism is like, "Why does someone who makes a particular diet choice or living choice have to prove this is 100% good for you?" The sacrifices that you're going to make are only going to bring good things to your life in order for that to be respected.
I guess that was just another example of just the broader dualistic black and white thinking that we're also comfortable with just being applied in many, many different situations.
Rachel: Yes. I think you see all different marginalized groups go through these stages of media representation. We're pretty early on, non-monogamous people and vegans, actually it's pretty early on where you hardly ever see us. If we do, it's like a joke or it's some brunt of a joke or a bad thing. I think that used to be true for queer people, that used to be true for people of color in movies. Then you sort of had the stages where they're deciding, "Oh, okay, you're allowed to be a character now."
First, you're a sidekick. Then, in the first depictions of when you get to be the hero, we're so self-conscious that you're going to call us discriminatory now that this hero has to be perfect, and they're flawed because we don't want to be called homophobic or racist or sexist or any of these things. The female superhero has to be just like the man. All these things have become their own boxes but are understandable stages, but now, we're at a place where, because there have been incrementally more and more increasingly complex stories, we can have a gay villain, we can have a hopefully female antihero. That's real equality really.
Emily: I wish I pulled this quote, but you do have this wonderful quote in the book when you're talking about queerness and about how also idealization and putting a particular practice or a particular sexuality or a particular type of relationship on a pedestal can be just as tokenizing and fetishizing and appropriative and harmful as when we're approaching it from a more negative space, which I feel like maybe we're on the cusp of understanding that broadly in our culture, but we're not quite there yet.
It still feels like, "Okay, the way that we're going to undo all this harm done is to go completely the opposite direction and go into full-on idealization of whoever it is that we're trying to heal this harm with."
Rachel: Yes. I mean, I don't think the idealization is usually more harmful than the actively negative or discriminatory attitudes, but yes, I do think it seems to go in stages of it's like, "We hate you." Now in the middle, you get to be this kind of inhuman, perfect, tokenized, non-real dimensional character, and then hopefully as there's more and more acceptance, you're a multidimensional human being.
Dedeker: Yes, hopefully.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: Wow. Well, Rachel, this has been a really amazing conversation. I feel like we could discuss so much regarding your book and just non-monogamy in general for a really long time, but we are running close to time, although we are going to continue the conversation in our bonus episode for Patrons. I am interested where can people find more of you and your work out there?
Rachel: Thank you so much. This has been so fun. I could talk to you all for hours as well. You can find Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy wherever books are sold online or in your local bookstore. There's also an Audible version which is narrated by me, so that's one.
Emily: Yay.
Rachel: You can get that. Yes, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at my name, @RachelKrantz.
Dedeker: Yes. Rachel's book comes out today right in this moment, right when you're listening to this episode, so come on down and don't delay. We're going to be staying on with Rachel for our bonus episode. We're going to be talking a little bit more about the writing process. We're going to be looking at how we tackle storytelling when it involves people who have heard us. Then we're also going to keep having a discussion about Rachel's conversations with the Buddhist monk Tashi about non-monogamy.
We want to hear from you what does liberation mean to you? You can find that question and submit your response on our Instagram stories this week. The best place to share your thoughts on this episode with other listeners is on this episodes discussion thread in our private Facebook group or Discord chat, you can get access to these groups and you can join our exclusive community by going to patreon.com/multiamory.
In addition, you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Multiamory is created and produced by Jase Lindgren, Emily Matlack, and me, Dedeker Winston. Our episodes are edited by Mauricio Balvanera. Our social media wizard is Will McMillan. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from The Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.