300 - 300th Episode!!!
Six years and 300 episodes later…
It’s hard to believe that Multiamory has now been around for six years, 300 episodes, two international tours, nearly a thousand Patreon subscribers, 3 million downloads and hundreds of hours of content. This episode goes back to some of Multiamory’s roots for those who haven’t been with us for the entire ride. We’re starting from the very beginning and covering some of the more personal topics we don’t usually share much of in regular episodes:
Background and dating history with each other and others.
How Multiamory has changed from the first episodes.
Additions to the Multiamory team and how it’s helped streamline things.
Favorite episodes and future plans.
Personal anecdotes about how we have changed and where we are now in our lives.
Changes in the world on a global level and cultural shifts in understanding polyamory.
Similarities and differences from now versus 6 years ago when we’re interviewed.
Changes we see in ourselves as a result of the podcast.
Our favorite tool or piece of knowledge we’ve picked up along the way, and favorite locale during our travels.
Connections with our audience and what they’ve meant for us.
We’re beyond grateful to have such an amazing community and support system. Thank you all for being along for the ride and we hope for an even more fantastic future.
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, it is our 300th episode.
Dedeker: Yay whaw-whaw-whaw That's air horns kicking on with air horn sounds like. That's exactly what it sounds like.
Jase: After six years, two tours, which were both national in the US and a little bit international, we're almost 1,000 Patreon subscribers, almost 3 million downloads of our podcasts total, and hundreds and hundreds of hours of recording with YouTube over the last six years. We thought it would be nice to do a little bit of a retrospective.
Today we're going to discuss how we started this podcast. If you have been listening since the beginning, you've pieced that together in little pieces, but figured we could share that story for those of you who are interested, as well as how our lives and our relationships changed since starting the podcast, how the world has changed during the time we've been doing this podcast in terms of perceptions about non-monogamy and relationships, as well as potentially some plans and hopes for the future.
Dedeker: I went to look I was like, "Did we do a retrospective on 200 episodes. When was our 200th episode?" I went and looked and saw our 200th episode came out on December 3rd, 2018, and the title of that episode is 200 episodes later.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: Oh no.
Dedeker: I guess we must have done our retrospective then as well and also failed to spell episodes correctly. That reflects well on us.
Emily: We should try doing the better this time around. When was the 100th episode was like December 3rd, 2016.
Dedeker: Oh my goodness, no.
Emily: No, definitely it wasn't.
Dedeker: Our 100th episode, that was before recorded history. That was before we were recording our release dates in our own database. I'm sure we could go find it but I don't want to right now.
Jase: Episode 100 was on relationship resolutions, though.
Dedeker: Okay, cool. That was fun.
Jase: It came out January, 3rd, 2017.
Emily: Wow. Look at us. Look at us go. Well done, everyone.
Dedeker: We did a retrospective at 200. I don't remember what we talked about. I hope that we don't repeat ourselves too much. I hope we've learned something new between episodes 200 and 300. That's the course of like almost two years now.
Jase: Seriously.
Emily: Wow. The world has changed a ton in between now and then.
Dedeker: Oh gosh, you're right. You're right. Thinking about 2018 which is when our 200th episode came out, it feels like a freaking lifetime ago.
Emily: Yes. Wait, it was the end of 2018 when that happens. We had just gone on our second tour. I think we did our second tour in 2018.
Dedeker: Oh, my God really? Jeez.
Emily: April, May, yes, it was incredible too.
Dedeker: What has happened?
Jase: Remember all those dreams we had about doing a tour in this last year that--
Dedeker: Oh, Yes. We started planning a 2020 tour. Super fun. Then now here were are.
Emily: Then we wrote a book proposal instead. That was what we spent most of this year doing a lot of this year doing.
Jase: Emily, you mentioned when we were going to do this episode that you were surprised by how many people don't know our story or how we started the show or what was it that you've found out? How's that come up?
Emily: Yes, the three of us all did a little interview series for our different podcasts. It was very clear from the things that they were asking me that they didn't really know what our whole configuration is now and that I'm not non-monogamous now and haven't been for a number of years, things like that. I do once in a while when people slide into our DMs, stuff like that on Instagram.
Then, like, "Wait a minute, I'm trying to figure out what? Are you all three together? What's happening?" Some people clearly don't know. For those of you who are listening to this, maybe it would be interesting to you if you didn't already know what our configuration is the three of us to hear that story real quick.
Dedeker: I will say it has been interesting that I do occasionally get people who reach out to me, who are a little upset that we're not spilling more goss, about our personal lives on the show actually.
Jase: I've got that too.
Dedeker: I feel like we do, try to drop in real-life examples from our lives when we're talking about particular principles and stuff like that, but it's like this show has never really been we're going to sit and gossip about what's been going on with us. I've seen some shows like that. I feel like that's something that I noticed more about for instance, like swinger podcasts. I think there's a lot of swinger podcasts, which is just recounting what happened at this event? What happened at that event?
Of course, there's definitely a market and an audience for people who want to live vicariously especially someone who's living a slightly more scandalous lifestyle, necessarily. The weirdest thing I got was like someone reached out to me, I think this is a couple of years ago, reached out to me saying, "Well, I assume that all three of you only practice parallel polyamory because you don't really talk about your other partners in extreme detail on the show." I'm like, "Well, first of all, it's not really true but also second of all, I'm like, there's a thing called privacy."
Emily: Sure.
Dedeker: There is a responsibility where I don't want someone to date me and then be afraid that I'm going to turn around and just talk all on the podcast about how they were in bed and stuff like that. There's a balance there.
Jase: To be fair too, I think if that's what you're looking for in a podcast, there's a lot of podcasts out there that will give you that even more mainstream dating advice shows that I'm not a big fan of the advice they give, love to gossip about their personal lives or tease each other about them or talk about the sex that they had or whatever. I also think there's a lot of that already. If that's what you want, you can get it.
Emily: If you are interested in knowing at least like our backstory-
Dedeker: It goes all the way back to 1987 when I was born.
Emily: That was when you were born. I wasn’t even alive then, ok.
Dedeker: Emily wasn't around. Jase had already been on the planet for-
Emily: A good long while.
Dedeker: - A good 20 years or something like that.
Jase: No. I was five or six depending-
Dedeker: You were a little tiny baby.
Jase: -when we are--
Dedeker: I'm going to fast forward through history a little bit. When I think about my life before meeting Jase and Emily, oh, gosh, this might make me a little emotional, because it's really characterized by honestly, feeling really alone, not like, in my life as a whole, I had people but feeling really alone, I guess, in my identity, and in the fact that I was pursuing polyamory.
It honestly really felt like it's literally the only people I've talked about this or the people that I am dating, some of whom are really not receptive to that, some of whom don't really get it, some of whom are the people I'm dating and they shouldn't be carrying the full burden of needing to be all of my community and stuff like that.
I don't know. Before I met the two of you, I was definitely at a place where I was only just starting to take ownership of being polyamorous, really. I was only just starting to be very blunt about that with the people that I was dating. I definitely didn't really have any friends who were into that. I also up to that point had pretty much all negative metamour experiences as well.
Leading up to that point, I was dating people where metamours were pretty clearly secondary, or just hookups and stuff and so there wasn't really a need to meet them or they were dating people in not very ethical ways. There was just naturally some bad blood there often from the start between myself and my metamours. That's the place that I was before meeting all y'all. I feel like Jase and Emily, the two of you have talked a little bit more on this show about your process of opening up and how that went for the two of you and stuff like that. I don't know if there's anything else that you recall from that time of the pre-multiamory era of what strikes you the most from that time or what you remember.
Jase: Something we've talked about before on this show is that when we started this podcast, Emily and myself had only been doing polyamory for something around a year or so.
Emily: A hot second, yes.
Jase: A hot second, really.
Dedeker: You knew everything. We all knew everything at that point because we were like, "Let's start a podcast."
Emily: That's the thing. I am surprised at how much it-- I'm surprised and not surprised because that does seem to be the thing that people joke about, like, "Oh".
Dedeker: The phase you go through?
Emily: Yes. Like, "Oh, you know everything now. You've unlocked relationships and you understand everything about them and you're perfect at them." Clearly, we thought that and we were like, "We should tell other people the good news,
and spread the gospel of multiamory.
Jase: That's definitely something that stands out for me. I think that that's also why our first 75 episodes are gone. They are in the archive.
Emily: Bye-bye. No, thank you.
Jase: Because there's just stuff in those where-- I don't think there was a lot of stuff that's just 100% wrong or we've completely changed our mind, but more that we've maybe found better or more respectful ways to talk about these things or just some ideas that--
Dedeker: Got better at researching, got better at finding appropriate guests and experts and things like that.
Emily: We weren't just talking about our Twitter comments for like 45 minutes before we actually get into the meat of the episode, that kind of shit.
Some of you out there know what I'm talking about.
Jase: There are a few of you out there who remember those days. I think that really stands out to me. Just that we started a little bit more like a show of just like, "Hey, let's talk about our life doing this thing. It has become something more. That is we try to be as research-based as we can while still not being researchers. We are not scientists, but we're all people who--
Dedeker: We play scientists on TV.
Emily: I know, so we are not scientists, we're not scientists.
Dedeker: We play them on a podcast.
Jase: Yes, exactly.
Emily: Yes, no exactly.
Dedeker: I want to rewind the tape a little bit to talking about-- I think Emily was my first point of contact. Emily was the first one to come into my life in that my partner at the time, Brad, started dating her. What was really special about that was actually it was the first time that I was dating someone really seriously where when they started dating somebody new, they were pretty honest about it and cool about it and just like, "Oh, yes here is her dating profile. We went on a date and this is what we talked about," where I was really let into that process.
It was both exciting and a little bit scary because I remember when I found out that you were this huge video game nerd and super nerdy in general, at first, that was really threatening because I was like, "But that's my thing." Not at all realizing that I'm like, "No, that's actually a really good thing that my metamour and I have that kind of overlapping interest because it's not a competitive thing." It's like, "Oh, that means there's a much higher likelihood that we're going to get along and have stuff to talk about."
That lesson from that experience has come back in my life multiple times that if I have a partner who starts dating somebody and there's something about them that's a little threatening or something like that, that I remind myself that, "No, this could be the cue that I actually will really love this person, this metamour, and actually really, really could have a really wonderful friendship or base this partner relationship with them, potentially."
Emily: Yes, or both, yes.
Jase: Right. You probably weren't thinking of business partner yet. That probably came along .
Emily: Not with them, no.
Dedeker: Not yet. From my partner dating Emily, and then Emily going home and telling Jase, "Hey, this guy that I dated, also is dating this supercool sounding person, Dedeker." Then Jase and I started dating. That was the origin of the first quad that I had ever been in.
Jase: I think all of us, yes.
Emily: Definitely, that we had ever, yeah.
Dedeker: That was the origin of the quad which-- I want to hear from all you all about what you think about this as well. I think it's really easy for us to be hard on ourselves because we did make a lot of mistakes and went into it with a lot of assumptions. We were real newbies about this kind of stuff. At the same time, I found a really exciting time because it was just so new and felt so cool.
Emily: It was super exciting.
Dedeker: Super cool. I was like, "Wow, I just certainly have this group of three people that I can have hang out with me, and-
Emily: Sleep with.
Dedeker: - it feels great. And sleep with sometimes and that's super fun. There was parts of it that was really, really cool and I think even though there were so many mistakes and a lot of pain that ended up happening, I feel like it was really formative for me to also have those wonderful feelings of like, "Wow, this just great, honestly."
Emily: Absolutely. Jase and I had dated since the very beginning of 2011, met in 2010, and were monogamous until we-- When did we start being polyamorous, Jase? In the early 2014 or 2013, I guess.
Dedeker: It would have been 2013 because that's when we all met.
Emily: It seems so long ago. Really it was a long time ago. Really, the time that this episode comes out, we'll be right about my anniversary of meeting Jase 10 years ago which is pretty incredible. In terms of people in my life, I'd say there are few that I am as close with who I've known as long as you for sure. Really, that extends to you Dedeker as well, I think.
Co-workers and people come and go out of your life, but you two have very much stayed in a very meaningful way obviously. I think in terms of becoming this quad at the time, it was very much for me like a sexual awakening of so many things in terms of my own personal sexuality coming to terms with the fact that I can say I'm bisexual and deal with it, and it is a thing and being okay with that, but also understanding, I don't know, at the time, what? I was 25 maybe, 24, 25.
Dedeker: Oh my goodness. Oh my God.
Emily: I know. I think just by merit of me being as young as I was, I also did just believe like, "Yes, I know what the hell I'm doing and talking about and whatever. This is really flighty and fun and with no consequences which ended up not being the case.
Dedeker: I also feel like, and I'm thinking about that time as well, that not only were we in this quad, I feel like all four of us in that quad we're just dating like gangbusters.
Jase: Just all kinds of people.
Dedeker: It's like a combination of-- I think that phase that we see a lot of polyamory newbies go through of both once you've finally found the equilibrium and then you're like, "Oh, wow, I've figured it out and I know everything about relationships combined with that poly-joy of, 'I can date everyone if I want to.'"
Jase: I don't have to say, no, to any experiences.
Dedeker: I don't have to say no to anybody. I feel like all of us were just going on dates all the time. It was cool for the most part. There were little dramas that would happen here and there. I look back and right now I'm just like, "Jesus, where did I get the energy from?"
Jase: I know, .
Emily: Oh yes, we were younger. How about you Jase, young? How do you feel about that time in your life and being very new to it as well?
Jase: I'll second and third all of the things that you two said of, yes, that we were just dating a ton, going on tons of dates. Then also, the thing that always jumps out to me is how even though what we were doing, just being polyamorous and dating people and being up and about that, felt very radical.
When I look back on it, I think of how very normal or-- I don't know what the right word is but have very still standard in terms of how I was approaching gender at the time and what dating looked like, and what sex is, and what defines a relationship versus not. All that was still very, "normal", very standard stuff that I'd inherited from culture, from our TV, from our society. It's funny looking back on that now and thinking, "Wow, I thought I was being so radical and really I was still so mainstream."
I feel like I've gradually moved away from that, but that's been more of this slower process of various realizations or moments of epiphany or being presented with something that I hadn't considered before. I think a lot of that is thanks to this podcast being so, the fact that we do this every week, and every week being proactive about researching these things, or trying to find new guests, or looking at other people's podcasts or blog posts or things
really broadened my horizons a lot more than I probably thought was even possible when we started this.
Dedeker: As happens to many quads, we are no longer a quad.
Emily: Brad is not in the picture of it all.
Dedeker: I feel like when we had Kathy Labriola on the podcast last when she was talking about her polyamory breakup book, she talked about how she witnesses this collapsing effect that the quads maybe have a tendency to collapse into a triad, and then triads on their own often have a tendency to collapse into a dyad sometimes. Which is totally what happened. Those are the dominoes.
What was different for us was, we still ended up maintaining, again, what I call like our emotional triad, co-parenting, a little baby podcast that, I think for a number of factors you Emily and Jase have talked a lot about this, having that period where after you've broken up, like still living in the house together and still recording a podcast together and really having to navigate how do we both disentangle and re-forge a new friendship at the same time?
Same, between you and me, also, Emily, figuring out how do we disentangle this old relationship re-forge this new friendship. I think that's the thing is why people get really confused. It is the hard thing that-
- by the three of us. It is the hard thing that when you're in the polyamory, or non-monogamy space, and especially online space, if you see three people in a picture together, "Oh, a triad. This got to be a triad." Especially if it's a man with two women, it's like, "Oh, it's definitely a triad." It's understandable that people get confused, especially when we're like, we feel like our relationship is actually better than it ever was when we are a triad. There's a lot of intimacy here and stuff like that.
I think that collapsing process that we went through with all the drama, and all the pain that came out of that period of time, I know at least for me, really crystallized a lot of the things that I realized were actually important to me about relationships. I feel like working on this podcast has definitely really crystallized for me a much bigger spectrum of what relationships can look like, like it's no longer just this tiny little box of are we romantic and sexual or are we not, that it's much more of a beautiful rainbow spider web.
Emily: Wow, I love that.
Jase: Rainbow spider web? Gosh.
Emily: That would be bitchin’ to see in real life.
I think that transition process actually took years for me, like truly, years.
Jase: I would agree with that.
Emily: Even though we talked about, oh, there was a six-month period where Jase and I were like, so it was a little challenging, and then all of a sudden it was cool again. Truly, even throughout that time and beyond, in order to really fully crystallize in our minds, in my mind at least, how to navigate a relationship with these two people who I was intimate with, who now I see being intimate in front of me and I'm not with them.
That was a big transitional period that took years honestly, for me to navigate mentally and emotionally, then also to kind of understand that it's not this one or other thing. It can be me, having a relationship with the two of you that is truly intimate and a friendship, but with all that added history, that I think is really beautiful and important, and not something that a lot of people ever really get to do or chose to do.
Dedeker: I feel like another part of that as well, along the lines of stuff that we think is interesting, but journalists and producers tend to not find very interesting.
Emily: They're like, "Yes, you're boring as hell, jeez."
Dedeker: They're like, "Oh, we just want to see you fuck and talk about how you're going to raise a baby together as a triad." That's all we want. I think that there was also a period of a few years where I don't want to say full-on identity crisis for the show, but I will say, definitely, Emily, as you were transitioning to being more like consciously monogamous, necessarily, I think there was definitely some questions around that. It's not like anyone very clearly laid down this expectation of, if you're going to talk about non-monogamy, you have to be living it. I think we definitely --
Emily: It definitely was a question.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely a question.
Emily: I was like, "Do I still have relevance on the show? Are the things that I say, are they relevant to the audience and all of those things?" At that point, also, it transitioned to a degree, the show away from justice exclusively being about polyamory and non-monogamy and non-traditional relationships, to being about something broader and bigger.
I feel like personally that also made my experience of learning in terms of how good and fulfilling relationships can be when you think about them from a different level than just what the normal, whatever is. It broadened my horizons as you said in that way as well.
Dedeker: I'm into it, because I feel like something that's connected to what I would like to see in the future for this particular community is, I would just love to have access to more community that isn't based solely on, we all have an interest in polyamory and so that's the only real little safe space that we can find. I do feel like my most enriching community experiences have been communities that are just like really welcoming with people who are in non-traditional relationships, but that's not the sole reason why we're gathering here today.
I really love this idea of being able to see like a space where it's like, we can have someone who's really traditional monogamous, or someone who's relationship anarchist, and someone who's polyamorous or someone who's solo poly, and no one's feeling inherently threatened or pressured by that. That's also been my hope and the fact that Emily, you're still here, being monogamous, but still talking about all these things. It feels like something that should be so easy and so obvious, and yet in our world really isn't.
Emily: It's a really great point that you're making. How do you feel about all this, Jase?
Jase: I agree and I think it's interesting because it changes the dynamic a little bit of what you can talk about. Say you have a community, that the thing you all have in common is that you're polyamorous, there can be this tendency to be like, "Oh, we're finally in our own space so we can talk shit about the normies, or the Mughals," or whatever term you're going to use.
The same thing is true in kink spaces. You can dig on vanilla people or because it's like, "Oh, we feel like we're always being told we're a little bit bad. Now we're finally together and we can talk about everyone else being bad instead." I think that there is value in having that opportunity, having that type of community when you're part of a community that doesn't get to do that in normal society.
I think that there's also a lot of value and it's sometimes harder to find that type of community like Dedeker was talking about that can be proactively inclusive enough, not just like, "Oh, we don't care what your orientation is," but like very proactively welcoming of something that's different from the normal, but also welcoming of monogamy and things like that.
It's redefining what unifies us, instead of just being this one relationship type. It's the fact that whatever we're doing, we're willing to question it, and look at it and examine what we're doing, instead of taking it for granted, maybe.
Emily: Jase, I think that it would be so cool as we continue to kind of evolve as humans and in this perhaps more progressive space that it feels like maybe the world is going towards that.
Dedeker: Have some hope.
Jase: Your lips to god’s ears.
Emily: Having our fingers crossed.
Dedeker: Just so our listeners know, we're recording this before the election.
Emily: We're recording it on election day before the election has actually happened.
Dedeker: If we sound blissfully naïve in anyway, you'll have to forgive us.
Emily: Truly, this idea that maybe, through learning about other people and understanding each other and like actively doing the work that is needed in order to change a person's mind or even just bring awareness to someone, that's what I think this podcast has done for me in so many ways. It's brought awareness to things that I just truly was not thinking about, like I was completely ignorant to. Again, as I've said in multiple outlets, you can't unring the bell of polyamory once you've done it, and once you've lived it.
Even if I'm not actively doing it on a daily basis, I still can bring a lot of the ideas that I was utilizing in my daily life as a polyamorous person into my current relationship and into just my life in general and a bunch of other shit that we've learned on this as well.
Dedeker: Yes, I think the biggest change I've noticed in myself and how I approach the world in relationships, from the start of this podcast to today is, I do feel at the start of this podcast, I think because we were going through so much drama and so much pain and there was a lot of really difficult questions coming up.
I think it kind of shoehorned me into this particular set of ideas of like, "Okay I know what I know about myself and I think this is the correct way to do polyamory and this is the way that I think most people should do it and that's the way it is."
I think from doing this show and hearing about so many people's different experiences, in my work working with clients especially hearing so many people's different experiences, I really feel I've gotten to this point where I'm almost at a place of just feeling I almost kind of don't care what format of relationship you are in or you choose, just please do it in a way that's ethical and everyone is consenting and everyone has access to happiness.
I feel that clinging to that understanding, that new understanding is something that helps me when I feel tempted to slip into something say like gatekeeping in this community of like, "Oh your polyamorous is okay, but your polyamory is not okay." I still think it's important to have standards, again like holding people up to this rubric of like, "Well is everybody consenting, is everybody actually happy, is there kind of equanimity in this relationship, are people being kind to each other?" I feel like I'm more disinclined to gatekeeping that way just based on somebody's relationship format I feel.
Jase: We're going to take a quick break right here to talk about our sponsors and some ways that you can support this show to keep this going for another 100 episodes, we hope. All right, we're back. We're going to move on to talking a little bit about now how things have changed over time, not just in our own thinking but even outside of that as well.
The first thing that I looked up for this was a podcast about polyamory. Part of our story that we tell people about why we started the Multiamory Podcast was because there just weren't any resources out there or there weren't a lot of resources out there and there especially weren't any that were by young people which we believed ourselves to be at the time.
Emily: Are we still young?
Jase: I don't know. It's all relative.
Emily: Oh it's relative, yes.
Jase: Yes, it was all stuff like the ethical slut, or sex at dawn, or whatever else. All things written by people who are very much Boomers I guess we'll put it that way.
Dedeker: Was there some of Gen Xerss.
Emily: There was some Gen Xers, yes.
Dedeker: There's nothing wrong with that for sure but I mean definitely, there were very few people talking about social media or Tinder, or just like--
Jase: At least in the same way.
Dedeker: In the same way this just like a later way of non-monogamy and polyamory and stuff like that.
Jase: Then specifically in the world of podcasting, there was Polyamory Weekly was kind of the one podcast about polyamory and then there was like Tristan Taormino's Sex Out Loud, talked about it sometimes but it wasn't particularly polyamory focused.
Dedeker: Who’s Cooper?
Jase: There were some casts talked a little bit about polyamory, again, all of them a little bit from an older generation than us more, maybe Gen X-ish, but there kind of wasn't any so we're like, "Oh, we'll start this," and then just today. I did a search for polyamory podcasts, and I have here something in the neighborhood of 200 results are the first to come up.
That shows that either have polyamory in the title or in their description of the show is. This isn't even just episode topics, this is in your show description or in your tags or your title. Like 200, and when I search the word polyamory, that specific word shows up in the titles or the descriptions of around 100 of those within the first sentence of their description even.
It's enough of a focus that it's right there, and they are everything from shows that are very specifically about polyamory to things that are a little bit more general but polyamory is one of the main topics they've mentioned as being something they discuss. That's just pretty fascinating to see how different that is from when we were starting this podcast six years ago.
Emily: That's amazing. I think podcasts, in general, have really like exploded. Isn't that a joke now like, "Oh well everyone has a podcast." You're just like, "I'm going to start a podcast," but we did it before that happened which I'm proud of us about.
Dedeker: Slightly.
Jase: Slightly. We were still part of the boom. I don't think that we were before the boom, but yes.
Emily: We were on the upswing.
Dedeker: It's been really interesting. I've definitely found that when I think about-- I'm trying to think of the timeline here because of my book-- Yes, we started the podcast in 2014 my book--
Emily: Your book came out in 2017.
Dedeker: Yes. I started writing that book in 2015 came out in 2017 and it's been really interesting because it's like the times that I've been brought on for interviews, whether it's on TV shows or a live stream show or somebody else's podcast or a radio show or a news program or whatever, that the nature of the questions I feel has changed just slightly. There's still some old classics like, "What about jealousy?" Everyone likes to ask that question.
Jase: What about that one, yes.
Emily: Yes, classic.
Dedeker: I feel like back in the day--and again, we're talking about the span of less than a decade here which is wild to think about but back in the day it was either I was being interviewed by someone who is already all-in on polyamory or it was a little bit more of the sensationalist, "Let me ask you about the sex, how the heck does this work? Who do you think you are that you can get this to work?"
A lot of people that I would count as "outsiders" to the community sometimes doing a little bit of a sideshow ask like, "Hey let's talk to this weirdo for a day or something," like a little bit more that sense. I never really had any like truly awful experiences but that was just kind of the sense that I got. Nowadays what I've noticed happening a lot more is people reaching out to me for interviews on their show, for their article, for their live stream show, whatever it is, and asking a lot of questions, being really really curious.
Then as soon as we're off the air, inevitably it's like, "Okay actually me my boyfriend has started talking about this like six months ago, and I started reading this stuff and that's how I came across your book so I was really interesting and just wondering if you have any like advice for this?"
Emily: Like, "Oh my god, read the book."
Dedeker: It happened so many times of where it's people are I think just feeling more comfortable to be curious about these things and to be honest of like, "Hey actually, I'm thinking about this for myself and that's leading me down this particular rabbit hole of research."
Emily: Like I said before, the cultural understanding of it I think is there's just more understanding, it's not completely, "Whoa this is taboo and weird and I am not going to be okay with it because it's something that I've never heard of before." It is more in like the understanding of those people who are in the relationships space or just, in general, I think it's even in some of our TV shows as we've talked about twice on this podcast and devoted two whole episodes to.
Yes, I think maybe we're just starting to have people find it to be less sensational and so it's just being they're asking harder, more detailed questions perhaps about it.
Jase: It's almost like the overall narrative about it even if for most of the culture it's still kind of this weird thing, this weird experiment that you could do that I think that I've noticed that the narrative is less around opening up a relationship is just something you do before you break up or while you're looking for something better and now being like, "This is a thing that you can try and it doesn't necessarily mean your relationship's over."
I think that subtle change in how people look at it has maybe made more couples willing to at least entertain the idea or look into it because there's less of this sense of like, "We can't take that step because once we do that we're doomed." Instead, it's like, "Well, I don't know maybe. Maybe that's something that we could try, I don't know and if it doesn't work out that also could be okay we could go back to being monogamous." I think that's definitely a big change from my impressions and the ways people asked me questions about it when Emily and I first opened up.
Emily: Yes, for sure.
Dedeker: That reminds me. Literally just the other day, I had a news article fed up to me from Slate, it was like Slate's Advice Column and the headline was just, "Oh this guy I started dating just dropped a bombshell on me, what do I do?" For a second I was like, "I wonder if it's polyamory," and I was like, "Ah, it's probably not, it's probably something else," and I clicked on it and that's what it was.
She was like, "I was talking to this guy, seemed like we really meshed well. It was the first person I've met a long time online that I felt this with but then he told me that he was poly, and I know about myself that I'm like really emotionally needy and I have low self-worth and so I don't know if I should go for it or not," and I was just bracing for what the response was going to be because it's sometimes still a little bit of a crapshoot of how people are going to respond to it.
I was so surprised. It was two people who were responding to this advice column that they were actually-- they did not make polyamory the thing that they attached to. Instead, they were like, "Oh, it's actually kind of sad that you feel like you're super needy and have this low self-worth. Let's talk about those things.
Maybe you could talk to a therapist about those things, because that's going to be helpful for you in general, and maybe polyamory is not for you or maybe you could find that actually, it's really fantastic and great and this person is wonderful.
It was just so refreshing to see, these two people who are giving this advice would not necessarily in the community, and I don't think either of them identified as polyamorous to at least give this fair shake take on maybe it could be bad for you, maybe it could be good which that also feels rare. It feels still a little bit rare. I feel like mostly in the space that's outside of the polyamory community. It's a lot of either direct condemnation or very pro. I don't know what your impressions are of that.
Emily: I think that as I've talked about, on the show, I've gone to like one therapy session, like a one actual therapy experience in college, but then I did go to couples of therapy once within the last five years. I was amazed at the time, like, how when polyamory got brought up, the therapist didn't Blanche at it. She didn't freak out or say that that was the root of any issue that my partner and I were having, but rather than it just let's talk about that some more.
I do think people are educating themselves more like therapists and advice columnists or whatever, educating themselves more and so it is becoming at least just another option that, let's explore that, as opposed to being the cause of all of your issues that you ever have and that's inherently bad or something.
That's good. That's a good change. Liked rapid-fire I just had some things that I wanted to ask regarding the podcasts and what it's meant. Do you two have a favorite episode that we've done, a favorite guest-- They're all amazing, we love all of you but favorite guests or a favorite tool that we've created or piece of knowledge that we use on the podcast?
Dedeker: That is like six questions.
Emily: No. It's three questions. It was three questions. I had my fingers up and you saw them so yeah.
Dedeker: I'm sorry. With favorite episode or with favorite guests, that's a little too hard. We've had just such amazing guests on the podcast who covered such fascinating topics. That's a little too hard so I'm not going to answer those. As far as like, most used tool or favorite tool, that's a hard one too. That's a really hard one too.
Realistically most used for me in my life are like the Triforce and Radars. Honestly, I do feel like Radars, and specifically and just having the freedom to have a relationship check-in has freed up so much in my life and in my relationships. It's freed up so much brain space. It's really changed the way that I feel about confronting partners on things. I would say that.
Jase: I know, I wish I had a different answer. Also, I think Triforce and Radar are the biggest ones for me. Interestingly, about the Radar, what you were saying about giving you permission to have check-ins, that I think that whenever you and I, Dedeker have had to have, or even the three of us for our company meetings too, whenever we've needed to have a like, "Okay, let's sit down and figure out this thing," Dedeker, nd I recently-- and maybe we'll talk about this on a future episode, we tried out this system for dividing household chores.
There's a whole structure to it, which we like because it reminds me of Radar a little bit that there's specific steps and specific things you do and it's a little bit like a game. Doing that was very much like we came in having all the tools that we've developed from doing our Radars, of just we know how to take breaks, how to meta communicate about what we're communicating about. Just all of that, really, it's developed a lot of skills and tools that I think I use very regularly, even outside of my romantic relationships.
Then the Triforce is just one that I've just found not only really helpful for myself, but really helpful for explaining to other people, because it simplifies this concept of sometimes you're not giving someone what they actually want in an exchange and that understanding what they want can help you give that to them, and help demystify, like, "Why is it that this person gets upset with me when I'm trying to help them?" I think that's just been such a big one that I've found really helpful to tell other people.
Emily: I gave someone the Triforce advice on Sunday when I was at work. He was like, "I gave my girlfriend advice and she was like, 'That's not what I want from you.'" I said, "Well, why don't you try asking her next time what it is that she wants when you get in a conversation like that?" Ask her like, "Do you need some love and care and affection and just poor baby or do you actually want to problem-solve this with me, or are you just telling me? Like what's happening here?" I tried to like, infuse the Triforce a little bit on them.
Dedeker: Infuse. Nice infusion.
Jase: You know what I'm going to add one too. I'm going to say also, the idea that we've talked about from the Gottman Institute, which is about taking other people's bids and the importance of that. I think that's one that I've found comes up with my parents, with my siblings, with my friends, with my co-workers, in addition to my relationships, that just this idea of, I guess, realizing how important it is to do what you can to acknowledge a bid and to say yes to it, even if it's not a, "Okay, we're just going to do what you said," but acknowledging that by treating this bid seriously, and taking it seriously, and turning toward it, I'm improving our relationship and making sure that person doesn't feel rejected or ignored.
And then similarly, if I'm ever feeling rejected, or ignored, or not appreciated, I'm able to step back and see it's like, "Oh, right, it's because those bids aren't being accepted, maybe I could also take a different approach of when I give those bids, or just not take it so personally." When I try to give any bid to Dedeker, within the first two hours of her waking up in the morning, it's not going to go well.
Emily: Oh my gosh. She's just going to be coughing, and such.
Jase: She's just going to be grumpy with me. By understanding bids, I'm able to take that outside of this is how she thinks of me and more just how is she able to receive my bids or not?
Dedeker: What about you, Emily?
Emily: I use Triforce. I think so many of the tools that we've created, and that we've learned about have truly been, for us, from like a bigger granular level, being able to like, even if whatever we're doing isn't quite working on the other person, or the bid isn't being taken or whatever, we're able to step back and say, like, "Hey, I understand what's happening. I understand the bigger picture of, what's occurring there and I don't need to take something so personally, or be so upset about it."
I think my personal for lack of a better word, anger in relationships, or being judgmental of myself or other people, or it being pissed off or upset at someone, that's taken a step back over the years, because I've been like, "Hey, it's okay." I get what's going on here and I understand like they probably didn't mean to do that, even if I'm getting frustrated or upset about it.
I can understand like, maybe where they're coming from, or maybe I just need to approach something in a different way. What you said as well, I think it enables more self-awareness, in addition to being aware of how other people tick. You understand that you personally can take a step back and not take everything so personally.
Jase: That's great.
Dedeker: I think that there's been this overarching theme for me of realizing that creating structure and systems can be great actually, even like tiny, tiny little systems like the micro script stuff that we came up with in the past. Literally just the other day, Jason identified, like, "Oh, there's this regular interaction that we have where the way that one or both of us reacts to a particular prompt, sets off the other person and it makes us both annoyed." It was like, "What if we come with a microscope for that."
It's like something about feeling really empowered to be like, we can create even a tiny little system, a tiny little tool, a tiny little bit of structure that helps us to communicate really intentionally and really well and in good faith, and act as a team instead of just falling into old habits or falling into assuming that someone's out to get me or someone's out to hurt me or stuff like that, that we can-- It's like that meta-level processing and creation within a relationship.
Emily: Exactly.
Jase: It's funny because it reminds me a little bit of our episode from two weeks ago, talking about you stress and distress, that having that agency
of I feel like this problem is not insurmountable, but we can come up with a system, or we can try things so that we can get past it. That is a key part of the tools and stuff is seeing, "Okay there's ways, there's other ways to talk about this or go about it, we can try things," or Dedeker likes to say, "We can put on our scientist hats and do experiments on ourselves to figure out what's going to work for us."
That is really empowering I think and it helps fight that feeling of helplessness that I personally have experienced in a lot of relationships that have been having trouble, and that I see constantly in people's relationships, this feeling of helplessness of just like, I can't do anything about this, I can't do anything to fix this. I can't escape this, I can't make it better kind of a feeling.
Emily: Yes. We are more powerful than we ever think that we are truly. I don't know, at least I've found that for myself in my relationships, and then on the flip side if that relationship isn't going the way that I want to, I can also exit it which I know that I've heard both of you say and that something that like our relationship, the three of us together has also shown us that relationships can be really good and really healthy and functioning at a really high level and I really appreciate that too.
Dedeker: Yes. I think that leads to if we want to close this up by thinking about the future, thinking about the next 300 episodes, what a year.
Jase: Why don't we started with just the next 100, because 300, that's like 6 years more or less.
Emily: I tried to look at it that Joe Rogan has done like 1500. He's super controversial, but yes I know that he's done 1500 episodes of his show or something and I think that he said like, it took like 500 to get like super in the groove of things. No, we're not even there yet, and personally yes--
Dedeker: What is the groove can be, in fact when we-- gosh.
Emily: When you're just like, there's no problem, it just flows. It flows like the eustress stuff that we talked about.
Jase: Is he a good podcast?
Emily: Oh, I don't know. He does like three-hour podcasts though, I cannot imagine.
Dedeker: He couldn't be daily. He came out in 2009. He's been doing this for 10 years.
Emily: It must be weekly. Yes.
Dedeker: Wow. Okay. Right. What I would want for this show and what I feel like I want in my work into a certain extent, I feel like it's a little bit of my life's purpose that I want to forward on this earth is, I've realized about my own life. I feel so happy and so lucky and so fortunate that I have this handful of relationships like Emily and Jase and my partner Alex, and my close friends and like my sister. It's like, I have this handful of relationships that are these little points of light.
They're like little stars in a night sky when it's really dark and it's like, these are things-- Wow. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Getting the emojis. They're just like these little points of light that keep me going when things are really tough and really awful, and I'm just so glad to have these really life-sustaining, life-giving relationships and coming from a place where it's been very much the opposite, coming from a place where my relationships have been very draining and very depressing and bad and toxic and really unhealthy for me and just realizing that it really doesn't have to be that way.
We come onto this earth and we don't have to have bad relationships, toxicity and unhealthy dynamics and pain do not have to be a fundamental part of loving somebody, and so I feel like, for me, it's just thinking broad strokes about what I want for the show moving forward, is just more of that.
Ultimately it's not even about monogamy non-monogamy, sex or no sex, or things like that. It is just about, how can you just make your immediate sphere around you feel better and be restoring life and energy to you in your relationships. I do think that's how we change the world is by changing our relationships, like really at the end of the day.
Jase: That's great.
Emily: I don't think I could say it any better than that. That's unbelievable. Yes. You can't see it, but we're hurting all of you out there.
Jase: Little heart symbol. Yes. I would want to say just to like some concrete goals for the next 100 episodes.
Emily: Oh, please yes.
Jase: Is our, hopefully, hopefully our book, our book will get published at some point in that next 100 episodes. That'll be cool to do something like that together and to put that out into the world. Also for a while now, we've been working on putting together a study of polyamory. That would be something ongoing, actually contributing to the research that's out there since it's still, there's more research now on non-monogamy, but it's still something that's not very well funded in the world of research. It's not a ton of interest in that.
That's something I'm excited about on a more concrete level. Eventually, I'd love to go on tour again, once we can travel the world again, that'll be awesome.
Emily: So we can get out of the United States of America again? Yes.
Jase: Yes. Just for those of you who are shouting at your podcast machines a moment ago, Joe Rogan is a daily podcast. That's how his numbers are that high.
Emily: Holy shit.
Dedeker: Good Lord.
Jase: They're all like three-hour episodes. It's wild.
Emily: That what I thought.
Jase: Every day. It's bonkers.
Emily: Yes. I would love to connect more with our audience, and I think we'll maybe talk about this a little bit more in our bonus episode, but I have so loved getting to know some of you out there and on a more personal level, and we have an amazing mod team. For our Facebook group, we have some amazing people who we work with that have brought the show to such a higher level than it ever was before when we were around one recorder, underneath a blanket in fricking 100-degree weather, and Jase in my apartment when we started this thing.
Yes. Thank you all for that, for being a part of this, and going on this journey with us together. Yes, I'm so excited to get more perspectives, raise people up on our platform who maybe wouldn't get a good platform before, if we can help in any way, like all of those things I think is-- will be great. We've got a lot of work to do, but let's move that progressive agenda forward and have everyone be more understanding of each other.
Thank you all for going on this journey with us as we have said for the last 300 episodes, and here's to at least 100, if not 300 or 1,000 more, we'll see how it goes. We're going to talk a little bit more in-depth in our bonus episode and just go even deeper here for all of you in our Patreon Group, so we're excited to do that.