367 - FWB, Polyam-to-Mono, and More Listener Questions
Another Q & A
This week’s episode is answering more of your questions! This Q & A will be discussing some of our Patrons’ questions, like:
I want to start doing regular RADAR's with my partner but I have so many trains of thought and am in the process of unlearning/relearning that I tend to overflow and overwhelm others when trying to share. I'm worried I'll dominate our discussions. How do I move past this worry and start?
I often feel like there is a binary divergence between my partners and I when it comes to trust. I like to ask clarifying questions and be informed about things that might impact myself or my partners, but several of them feel like this means I don't trust them to hold my best interests in mind. How do I balance my need for informed consent with my partner's expectation that I trust them?
My best friend, who is not poly, became friends with my new partner's partner. I feel like I've let the boundaries between my social circles get blurry and my friend doesn't realize how her relationship with my metamour is impacting me. How can I have conversations with friends about my new boundaries when it comes to my polycule?
Where can I find a poly-positive, or at least poly-neutral therapist?
What are some best practice recommendations for engaging in FWB type relationships? How do you suggest reassessing/shifting boundaries with other partners if the FWB relationship starts to become more involved?
What advice would you give to someone who is transitioning back to monogamy after being polyamorous?
If you enjoy our monthly Q & A episodes, let us know! Stay tuned for the next one in about five weeks.
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're answering questions from you, our listeners, that you've submitted. We're going to be talking about managing friends with benefits, relationship check-ins, balancing privacy with boundaries, transitioning for polyamory back to monogamy, all sorts of things. A really great selection of questions for this week.
If you would like to get your question answered in a future episode, then you can join our Patreon community and post them in our new, special monthly Q&A posts where we will ask for submissions. If you want some kind of more specific, personalized responses to your questions, we now have a way of getting that through the Patreon group, but also everyone else gets to benefit from that answer too since there's often a lot of overlap between what someone might ask and what might help someone else.
Dedeker: I guess we have to give our usual disclaimer that none of us claim to be experts or all-knowing seers.
Emily: You don't, Dedeker?
Dedeker: I'm working on it. I'm working on my seer of cosmic truth certification, TM, TM, TM, TM. Until I get that, I can't make any claims about my infallible wisdom.
Emily: I do really like these episodes because I enjoy getting to hear the things that people are actually going through in their lives regarding topics like this. It's fun. I think that it's applicable to many people. It's like a nice grounded way sometimes for us to go back to these issues that may plague someone in their everyday life as opposed to sometimes we get into pretty heady, esoteric topics.
While those are wonderful, it's also nice to go back to our roots a little bit. Let's start out with our first question. "I want to start doing regular RADARs with my partner, but I have so many trains of thought and in the process of unlearning/relearning that I tend to overflow and overwhelm others when trying to share. I'm worried I'll dominate our discussions. How do I move past this worry and start?"
Dedeker: Well, first, I want to commend this person for their self-awareness. Both the people that I've known in my life who tend to be like this and the moments when I've been like this, usually, I've not been very aware of it myself or the person in my life is not very aware of it. I feel like, already, it's half the battle just knowing that this is a thing about you. The recommendations that I would give include, you can spend a little bit of time before your RADAR.
I think this is great for a lot of folks, but you can spend a little bit of time before your RADAR getting your thoughts in order even if it's as simple as I'm just going to write out just a couple of bullet points of the most important pieces of this particular topic that I want to hit or the questions that I want to ask, or if it's spending more time just dumping into a journal literally everything that you think and feel about it and just getting it out and then going back and saying, "Okay, what actually feels necessary to express or to ask in this particular situation?"
Emily: That's a very specific bit of advice from spewers and chewers, which is our Episode 264. Yes, I love that. We talked about that in our chapter in our book on the same thing as well.
Jase: Basically, to summarize that for people is that spewers are the ones who want to talk it all out. That's me and Emily. We process things by just spewing it out there, talking it through, processing it versus chewers, who more like to spend some time working through and thinking things in their head before weighing in or expressing how they feel. Dedeker falls more into that category. That technique, if you are someone who wants to spew, is maybe trying to pre-spew a little bit by writing so that you've done a little bit of that processing first before just dumping it all on the other person, especially if it's something kind of heavy and you're worried about overwhelming them.
I did also want to jump in real quick and just say that for those of you who are like, "RADAR what?" If you're a newer listener to the show, that's on Episode 147 is when we introduced RADAR. It's wild to me that 147 and we're on 367 now. Anyway, that's where we talk about RADAR, which is this regular monthly check-in, just in case anyone's like, "What are you talking about?"
Emily: Another thing that I would recommend to not overwhelm someone in the middle of doing a RADAR is to potentially put a timer on the amount of time in which you are speaking and then do a timer for the amount of time that they're going to speak potentially just so that you do have more of a truncated time frame in which each of you can speak so that it doesn't feel like the conversation is super one-sided.
I know that the two of you talked about writing as a pre-spew, but also you can pre-spew to somebody else that's not that person. If that's a therapist, if that's a family member, if that's a friend, just even getting it out there into the wild with somebody else maybe may make your interaction with your partner easier when the time comes for you to do your RADAR.
Dedeker: Because of the fact that this person clearly is so self-aware that they have this tendency, I see that as a great opportunity to meta-communicate about that with your partner. You can talk about the fact like, "I know that I tend to do this, so let's come up with a plan during our RADAR. Let's come up with a micro-script or a code word or something where we can check in with each other, where if you're starting to feel overwhelmed or confused, you can, I don't know, give me a hand signal." I'll take that as a non-threatening, non-aggressive cue to maybe take a break or clarify my thoughts or things like that.
Jase: Then with this, especially since this would be your first RADAR or some of your first few, if you've been in a relationship for a while, this particular question asker said, I think, about five years is this relationship. That's a good chunk of time. There's a lot of stuff that's been going on that maybe hasn't been talked about yet, that you maybe haven't had that chance to really make that space to talk about it and bring up some concerns or some feelings that you've had.
You may both be reminded of stuff from several years ago in the relationship that never quite got finished for you. With that said, also giving yourself a lot of extra time so that you could do something like, "Let's break this up into half-hour chunks." I was like, "Okay, we're going to start going through our RADAR and we set a timer for half an hour. After half an hour, we're going to take a five-minute break to go to the bathroom, drink some water, whatever, and then have that moment to sort of process and think about, okay, do we want to keep talking like that? Do I need to take a step back? Do you need to talk more?"
It kind of gives you that ability to calibrate and check in as you go because if this RADAR is coinciding with-- Like I said, you've already been in the relationship for a while and also any kind of a big life change like you're opening up a relationship or you're moving or someone has a new serious partner, right? There's a lot of things that can bring up a lot more to talk about.
Just to be aware of that and give yourself that space and that time. Even if you don't get to everything in the first RADAR, that's okay, because the point of it is that it's something ongoing that you can do rather than, "We need to do this one time and fix everything," because that's not how it works. That's not going to happen. Going in with that goal isn't really helpful either.
Dedeker: Well, I hope this is helpful for you, listener. I hope this helps you move past that worry and just dive in and see what happens, and then you can tweak from there. I'm going to move us on to our next question, which is, "I often feel like there is a binary divergence between my partners and I when it comes to trust. I like to ask clarifying questions and be informed about things that might impact myself or my partners, but several of them feel like this means I don't trust them to hold my best interest in mind. How do I balance my need for informed consent with my partner's expectation that I trust them?"
Emily: This is really interesting because it almost just feels like a difference in communication styles or just somebody wanting more communication like over-communication versus another person feeling as though, "Oh, I can intuit X, Y, or Z thing from you, and so I don't need that abundance of communication." I know that we talk on this show a lot about discussing things like personal history and backstories and stuff that may have happened in previous relationships that cause us to want to communicate in one way or another.
I think that that's super helpful in a situation like this because people often will communicate one way and another person may take it poorly because they're like, "Wait a minute." To me, that feels like you're not trusting me or not feeling as though I have your best intention at heart. The other person's intention is not that at all. I think having some sort of history talk here would be really beneficial for both of you.
Dedeker: I think to go along with that, it's just a great opportunity for mutual investigation become a private eye of your own hang-ups. Basically, I'm the kind of person, I can relate to this. Very much, my coping strategy is the more I know, the more I can deal with, or the more empowered I feel. I used to think that that was the result of having some bad non-monogamy experiences or experiences where I was lied to or stuff was emitted.
Now, with my therapist, we're kind of uncovering. That may go back much earlier than beyond non-monogamy, but I digress. I think some good questions to ask as you're looking at your own history is to ask yourself questions like, "Okay, if I knew this thing or if I had all the information or if my partner gave me all the details of what I want to know, what would that get me?" That's the first question because that helps you get to the root of, "What am I actually longing for here and what am I actually seeking here?"
Another question you can ask yourself is, "If I didn't know some of the details or all of the details, what's the worst-case scenario? What am I apprehensive of? What's the thing I'm hoping doesn't happen as a result of not knowing something?" That can be really illuminating as well. If your partner or partners are down to have this conversation, you can ask them the same questions of, "If you had a sense that I just trusted you, what would that get you?" to get curious about, "What is your partner actually longing for in this situation?"
If I didn't trust you, if I force you to tell me absolutely every single little detail, what's the worst-case scenario there for you? Being able to share and understand and listen and understand these things about each other, that lays the groundwork for being able to create some kind of compromise or some kind of experiment that you can try with disclosure, how much or how little.
Jase: This is reminding me too of some of-- Gosh, one of my early relationships, I think, when I was in high school maybe or early college or something, where this-- not even talking about non-monogamy and there wasn't pandemic safety to worry about at the time. I remember this experience where I had a girlfriend. There was something I would ask what to me seemed like pretty normal stuff of, "Oh, cool, you're going out and doing this thing. When do you think you'll be back?"
In my mind, going like, "Oh, so I can know when I could chat with you later or just want to know what's going on in your life." She reacted very weirdly defensively, at least to me, it was weirdly, of like, "Gosh, that's so nosy. Why would you want to know that?" We did end up luckily having the wherewithal to have a conversation and just say, "Oh, to me, that was just normal."
For her, it had to do with her upbringing. For her, it was like I was always-- I forget if it was that she always-- like her parents really kept a close eye on her. For her, it was, "Finally, I don't have to do that. I don't want anyone else to do that to me," or if it was that her parents were very hands-off and so someone asking felt really intrusive. I forget which side it was, but, really, it could be either. That totally changed that. It actually led to a really interesting conversation about that.
I've found that just naturally over time, I've found that I've needed or I've had less of an urge to ask those more specific questions just because it's, "Okay, fine. I'm fine to do my thing and not worry about it." That said, I do think the question asker here is talking about stuff that they feel affects their health and well-being and safety and because they talk about trust and wanting to trust that your partners have your best interest at heart or that they want you to trust that they will.
That to me brings up an interesting question about trust of, "Do you trust them?" If the answer is no, that doesn't mean this is a bad relationship necessarily. It just means they might have different values or make different decisions than the ones that you would be comfortable making. It's at least worth asking that question, or is it that maybe you do trust them and they've never done anything that felt not trustworthy but it's a newer relationship?
It's just like, "Well, I'm not there yet with you. I don't have that trust. I don't feel like I can anticipate how you're going to act in certain situations." That's also useful to talk about. In either case, having some way of more regularly checking in about that like doing a RADAR like we just talked about is good, but even if it was just, "Hey, let's schedule a time to talk about just this one topic each month, just about trust and about this and how's it feeling for you," so then it gives you that ability to, over time, tweak it of, "Let me ask a few more questions."
"Does that feel okay if you understand? It's just that I feel better knowing the information. It's not that I don't trust you" or "If I'm asking a little less, am I getting upset about that? Is that causing me distress?" and fine-tuning that together over time instead of trying to look for, "Who's right and who's wrong?" I think that it can feel that way, right? It's like, "Well, I just want to protect myself." They're saying, "Well, I just want to have a partner who trusts me." It just feels like one of us is right, the other's wrong, and it's neither of those. That would be my suggestion, is to do some kind of more regular, gradual calibration together. Like Dedeker said, get to the root of what's going on there.
Emily: All right, let's move on to the next question. "My best friend, who is not poly, became friends with my new partner's partner. I feel like I've let the boundaries between my social circles get blurry. My friend doesn't realize how a relationship with my metamour is impacting me. How can I have conversations with friends about my new boundaries when it comes to my polycule?"
Dedeker: Let's clarify this a little bit. Just so our listeners know, these are truncated versions of each question that we've edited down for time and listenability essentially. In consulting with the original email that this person sent, just to clarify what happened was their best friend became friends with their new partner really quickly. By extension, their new partner's partner also became friends with them. They're talking about how, "My best friend is, all of a sudden, in a relationship or in a friendship with my metamour and that's impacting me."
The first thing that I would point out is this question asker even looking at the email for context doesn't clarify what the impact is exactly. It sounds like maybe some kind of negative impact or bringing up some kind of feelings. I don't know. We can't speak to that in particular. I would say that if you haven't already done this, spending some time, thinking and reflecting, and really getting your thoughts and order around, what is the impact on me really?
How is this affecting me in the day-to-day life or is this affecting me just in particular situations that you can consider having a conversation with your best friend, but being sure to use the triforce or some kind of meta-communication as in being clear with your friend of, "Hey, I want to talk to you about how this situation is affecting me, but I'm not looking for you to change things or to take any action. I just want you to know. I just want you to witness or I want you to empathize or I just want to make my feelings known," if that's the case, or maybe it is, "I would love to collaborate with my friend on, how can we make this feel better so that my friend feels like they can have the friendships they want to have? I feel like this isn't a drag for me or I feel like my feelings are a little bit more considered," or things like that?
We do, of course, have to drop in the caveat that when we're talking about your own boundaries when it comes to your social circles and polycule, your boundaries are about you. It's about the actions that you decide to take. Maybe that's going to look like, "I'm going to make sure that I don't spread gossip between my social circles. I'm not going to gossip to my friends about what's going on in my polycule," or maybe for you, it's very intentionally, "I'm not going to intentionally try to introduce these people because I want to keep these social circles separate." That's the kind of thing that you may not necessarily have the jurisdiction to dictate to your friend.
Emily: Yes, 100%. I think it's interesting to think about reasonings why a person may or may not want a metamour to be deeply ingrained in their life. Perhaps, this person may think of their best friend as someone that they can come to for love and care. Maybe they feel as though that gets entangled in not a great way if, suddenly, the metamour is also a friend with their best friend, and that that may make the ability to do that more difficult. That's totally understandable.
I agree with Dedeker that you can't create a boundary and say, "Oh, well, if you're going to be friends with me, that means that I come first and that anyone who I'm dating, you can't be friends with their spouse or with their partner or whatever." That's just not really something that we believe in, that should be enforceable, and it gets into the question of what would the punishment for that look like, et cetera, et cetera. That's not really a great place to go.
I would just encourage those questions around meta-communication and discussing these feelings with your friend to, first, do a lot of self-introspection because there is that question of, why am I feeling potentially worried about this or hurt by this or as though my friend shouldn't be engaging in a friendship with my metamour? What's the cause of that? What are the underlying feelings here?
That may be a conversation with your friend is simply just to point that out, that they don't need to change anything, that they don't need to alter their behavior in any way, but just, "Hey, these are the feelings that I'm having. I care about our friendship and I worry potentially that it's going to change because now, all of a sudden, you're friends with my metamour." There's a lot to impact there for sure.
Jase: For sure. It is interesting too because there's an interesting dynamic of someone being a friend or a best friend, and then people who are romantic partners, and then people who are your metamours, that each of those, we tend to think of in pretty different categories in terms of how we think about these people, how we relate to these people, and what we expect from them.
I do think this is a good opportunity for just asking those questions of yourself really of, "Huh, what is the expectation I have that's different from my metamour versus my friend versus my partner?" Then more importantly, do those distinctions actually make sense? Is there really something to that? Is this actually a fact or is this part of that unlearning process of learning how to think about friends differently?
For example, just to give a personal example, when I first became polyamorous and started talking a lot about that with my romantic relationships, still with my friendships, I would refer to, "This one is my best friend and then these are other close friends," but there was still this sense of, "Well, but if I called someone else a best friend, then it's taking away from that first one." Just I still held on to that way of thinking about my friends, even though I was very proactively dismantling that way of thinking about romantic partners.
It wasn't until several years later that that caught up, that my thinking about my friends caught up with my thinking about relationships mostly, I think, because I didn't spend as much time examining those beliefs and those feelings that I had about friendships. I think that's also just something to consider there. Then the same thing with metamours too. I think the fact that you used the word "polycule" in the question is really an interesting one to think about. What if your polycule isn't just your partner and their partners?
What if it's the whole network of your close relationships, whether some of those are involving sex, some are not, rather than thinking of it as partners and not partners that it's more of a relationship anarchy approach, I guess, of what are the things I have with this partner or relationship, I guess, I should say? What are the things I have in this relationship with this person and what are the things I have in this relationship with another person, whether one relationship is a friendship, another relationship is a partner, another relationship is a metamour?
Just to see if there might be something there, if letting go of the categories might free up a little bit of thinking or feeling differently about them, not that it's like, "Oh, that's going to solve the problem. You just need to stop putting labels on it." It might open up some better options to then go back to the stuff that Emily and Dedeker have been saying of getting more specific in your communication about, "This is what I'm wanting. This is what I prefer. This is making me feel," and just opening up some new ways to look at that, think about that relationship or all those relationships rather.
Emily: I think you touched on something really interesting, Jase, which was just that we feel a certain amount of possessiveness over our friends. That is interesting when you are dismantling other parts of the way in which you look at your relationships, that the friendship-- if you aren't actively thinking about what that looks like that you still may think of your friends in a hierarchical manner and not want two sections of your life to overlap.
I guess I would encourage this person to look at that and to question like, "Hey, what is it inside that's causing me to want to put this person on a pedestal up here and say they're my best friend and they're not allowed to potentially be engaged with these other people in my life? What's going on there. What is there to unpack?"
Jase: We have three more questions that we want to get to in this episode, but first, we're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show. This show is really important that we offer this content to everyone out there for free. One of the ways that we do that is by having advertisers in our show. If you please take a moment, check them out. We think they're pretty cool and you get some discounts and stuff to help support our show. We're back. Next question is, "Where can I find a polyamory-positive or at least polyamory-neutral therapist?" It's a great question.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. Well, we have covered this on some episodes of the podcast before. There's two parts to this question. One is, where do I even go to, I guess, maybe weed out, at least, the polyamory-negative therapists? First of all, there's a lot of people in local groups that will give recommendations. If you're connected to a local non-monogamy group or even if it's a local sex-positive group or kink-positive group, often those are great resources where people are more than happy to give recommendations via word of mouth for people that they've worked with, that they can vouch for.
That's probably would be the first place to go to just get some word-of-mouth recommendations. There's also a lot of-- well, not a lot of. There's a couple of databases out there. There's polyfriendly.org and then there's the KAP Directory. That stands for Kink Aware Professionals Directory. If you google both of those, you'll find them. Those are big directories of all kinds of professionals, not just therapists and counselors but also attorneys, for instance, accountants, things like that, of people who are non-monogamy-friendly, kink-friendly.
That's probably the first place that I would go. Secondly, I would create a list of questions when you're reaching out to a therapist or a counselor. You can ask things like, "What is your level of experience working with polyamorous populations or non-monogamous populations?" Now, that's a hard question to answer because it's not someone's like, "I'm certified Level 2 comfortable--"
Jase: Level 2 polyamory.
Emily:
Dedeker: Yes, at least not yet.
Jase: I have a brown belt in polyamory.
Dedeker: Not yet, but I just think tailor some questions to help you at least suss out a little bit about where this person stands, what kind of experience they have, and how comfortable they are. I am often filtering for what language do they use on their site or in response to these questions. Because sometimes if they're using particular language, particular vocabulary, that to me reads is more niche polyamory vocabulary.
For instance, I think the last time I was searching out, specifically, a polyamory-friendly counselor, the fact that on their website, they specifically addressed, "I work with people who practice non-hierarchical polyamory and hierarchical polyamory." I was, "Oh, okay," you know that there's at least a difference, right?
Jase: Right, yes.
Dedeker: You know there's at least different schools of thought. That made me feel a little bit more comfortable versus some folks who just slap on polyamory, but you have no idea if they've gotten training in that, what kind of books they've read, what kind of resources they've turned to. I know that already looking for a therapist and a counselor is a pain, especially right now when so many people are booked up, but I do find it is really helpful to do your due diligence and just send some questions via email. In my opinion, a good therapist or counselor will be more than happy to answer those questions honestly.
Jase: Something that you touched on earlier, I think, is really helpful is also looking at areas that just tend to make someone a little more polyamory-adjacent, I guess, because there's a lot more resources out there for things like queer therapists than there are for polyamory therapists specifically, or like Dedeker mentioned that KAP, the Kink Aware Professionals. It's about kink. If they're in that world, they're probably interacting some with the polyamory and non-monogamy world, so that's--
Dedeker: We've all at least heard of it. It's not going to be brand new.
Jase: Right. At least, they're not going to run screaming when you ask those questions. I do think that's a worthwhile thing to think about. I will say that a lot of those directories, depending on where you live, are not going to have a lot of names or the only name on it might be five-hour drive from you or something like that. I don't know. Maybe they do Zoom sessions or something. Sometimes you will just have to reach out to several and send those questions. Maybe make yourself a little template email and just send it out to everyone who's covered by your insurance or everyone in a certain range or everyone in your area with a sliding scale.
Just from those, try it out, and don't be afraid to switch if they're not working out, right? You don't need to spend money to teach someone else what non-monogamy is and how it works. I have heard of some people where they've had a therapist that they liked but who didn't understand non-monogamy, who would end up doing an arrangement of, "Okay, this session, you spent half the time just explaining to me how this stuff works, so I'm not going to charge you for this session because I, the therapist, am learning from you right now."
That's a sign of someone who's at least ethical about this rather than, "I'm going to sit here and make you justify everything and explain how it all works, and then charging money for it." I guess I'm saying like, "Don't hesitate to bring that up if that seems to be the case," and then also it sucks. Be willing to go and try to find someone else if it's not working out if you can get that sense of, "This person seems to keep coming back to this being the problem rather than helping me address what's going on or what I'm feeling."
Emily: I do have questions regarding apps like BetterHelp and stuff like that. Are there ways in which you think you can do the same thing and try to find a kink or polyamory-friendly therapists via apps like that?
Jase: I will say something that I liked about-- Gosh, now, I don't even remember which one that I did a few years ago, but what's nice is that you get to fill out a little thing of like, "This is what I want to talk about" or "This is why I'm here." I made sure to mention polyamory a bunch in there. I want someone who's queer-friendly and I put those checkboxes where I could, and then also threw that word in several times because they're going to match you with someone.
I'm like, "I just want to be sure that whoever happens to look at this, that's obvious," and they'll go, "Oh, if I happen to know one of these people does that, I'll put them with that person." In a way, it makes it easier because that process of emailing all the people, they do some of that for you at least. If you don't like them, you can switch.
Dedeker: My experience with BetterHelp in particular is 50/50 as far as the matching goes. I wouldn't call it a brilliant algorithm necessarily, but I've done as best as I can to just whenever you're doing, intake paperwork of any kind, whether it's through a service or an app or if you're just with an independent person who's in private practice, really just being upfront about this is something that's very important to me.
Just state it very plainly. This isn't a passing thing. You could even go so far as to be very granular of like, "These are the issues I want to work on. I want to be able to discuss X, Y, and Z. Some of that overlaps with my non-monogamous identity. Some of it doesn't. I don't want to be having to be on the defensive." Seriously, I'm just like, "Go for broke. Just be--"
Jase: There's no reason not to, right?
Dedeker: Yes, there's no reason not to talk about your best-case scenario or worst-case scenario here. The more that you go for broke and just being very clear about what your expectations are and what you're wanting, the better chances you'll get of being able to find someone who can match that.
Jase: Yes, absolutely. We talked about this with dating profiles. It'd be super clear right up front. If you're polyamorous and you've got multiple partners, put that right on the front. You'll save yourself a bunch of time dating people who don't want to do that and aren't going to change their minds. Same with your therapist, even easier because you're paying them, right? This is a business relationship and so let them filter themselves out.
Emily: All right, well, let's move on to our next question. "What are some best practice recommendations for engaging in friends-with-benefits-type relationships? How do you suggest reassessing/shifting boundaries with other partners if the FWB relationship starts to become more involved?" I wonder why boundaries need to be shifted with other partners if the friends-with-benefit relationship becomes more involved. Maybe just based on, I don't know, safety or things along those lines?
Dedeker: Yes, I suppose, hypothetically, it could be, "Oh, actually, I'm wanting to spend more time with this person than I initially thought that I would commit to a friends-with-benefits relationship," and so then I'm having conversations with other partners to let them know that this is what you can expect or this is what I'm wanting to do, wanting to spend more time or whatever. I guess that would be my guess here. I don't know. I freeze up around the topic of friends-with-benefits relationships. I don't think I've ever been good at them.
Emily: Really?
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: I've had a lot of them. That was great.
Dedeker: Have you?
Emily: Oh yes.
Dedeker: I've had them for sure, but it's like, for me, in my experience, either I've fallen into the unrequited, unreciprocated feelings category from my end or I've been on the receiving end of someone's unrequited feelings. Gosh, yes, I don't remember the last time I had a friends-with-benefits relationship where it was all "chill and cash." I don't even know where to begin here.
Emily: Maybe Jase and I were better at it.
Jase: I've had a number of great ones.
Emily: Yes, me too. All of mine were right when I moved to Los Angeles and also my last year of college, I think. I had multiple people that I was dating during that time. Some were a little bit more entangled than others, but I would call all of them pretty much friends with benefits like just enjoying each other's company and dating multiple people at once. That was at a time when I wasn't officially practicing polyamory, which is funny looking back because I literally was dating five dudes at the same time.
I made the bad mistake of not telling them about each other really. It was implied. That made potentially some social situations a little more awkward than I wanted them to be. I would say, there, in terms of engaging if you're going to be in friends-with-benefits situations, inform everyone and be kind and compassionate about that. I think also, don't put a lot of expectations on the situation. It may evolve. It may become more fun or, also, it may just not and that's also totally fine. Comet relationships can be super awesome and also like something to look forward to whenever they come back into your life.
Dedeker: Now, I can speak. Now, I know what I have to say.
Dedeker: This is something that I've noticed coming up as a recurring theme, both in my client base, a lot of conversations I have with clients along with stuff I've been reading, even from outside of the polyamory community and the non-monogamy community. Basically, I think that we have this weird thing where we think that for our friends-with-benefits relationship to work, everything has to be very arm's length and maybe even cold. It's like we really strictly want to keep it friends with benefits. We're not going to entertain the idea of any kind of feelings, whatsoever. Often, that means we scrub all emotion and all kindness and all tenderness from the friends-with-benefits relationship.
I was reading this really interesting article, where the writer was talking about the sex-positivity movement and how the inner acts with feminism and what it's gotten for us and what it's taken away from us, and basically making the argument that we're at a weird time where, especially for women, a lot of women have become much more comfortable and maybe even feel more entitled to casual sex or one-night stands but don't feel entitled to kindness from those one-night stands or from casual sex or the friends with benefits. As far as best practice recommendations, I think that's the thing that I want to drive home to folks, is just because it's a casual relationship or a comet relationship or friends-with-benefits relationship, you can still expect the bare minimum of friendship from somebody, right?
Emily: Totally.
Dedeker: Think about what you do expect from your friends, which is they respond to my text messages. We hang out together. Maybe we can even be affectionate and kind to each other or complement each other. For some reason, I do see this practice that people are so afraid of, "Oh, if I do any of those things or expect any of that, this person's going to think I want a commitment or that I want to escalate." I call bullshit, man. I really got to raise the standard for what we're willing to accept from friends-with-benefits-type relationships. That's my soapbox.
Jase: I was going to say, the ones when I think about my friends-with-benefits relationships that have been the best, they were that where the friends is an important part of the friends with benefits. In a couple of cases that I'm thinking of, it was just we were friends. We were either in a similar social group or we just met each other somehow, hit it off. His friends were into each other and wanted to have sexy times.
Also, neither of us were really interested in either really devoting the time to a super serious romantic relationship or we just weren't feeling those vibes with each other. They'd been awesome and, in both of those cases, did eventually end super chill. One, it's like both of us happened to start dating someone else more seriously at the time and we were both monogamous at the time.
It was, "Hey, so I started dating this person," "Oh, I've dated this person too and I was thinking about being more serious," "Okay, cool, that's awesome. Wow, congratulations to you." It was super chill and we stayed friends and brought that new partner to go see a play that my friends with benefits had been in, whatever, It was just cool. Another one, same thing. We just didn't see each other for a while and then they got into a monogamous relationship, and then had one where we were dating first.
Then just, gradually, the romance part wasn't as much there and we weren't having sex as often. We started calling ourselves like friends-with-full-benefits package, where we would sometimes go on a date for fun. We'd hold hands when we'd walk down the street and sometimes would have sex, but it didn't quite feel like, "Oh, we're dating or we're doing this particular type of relationship." We came up with this other term for it.
Emily: That's cute.
Jase: I think with all that, it's about not artificially limiting what the relationship can be in terms of like Dedeker said, affection and care and closeness. Because with your friends, you would expect those sorts of things, at least sometimes. Then I would say on the other side, I've also had situations that could have been an awesome friends-with-benefits that then I tried to push to become something else, either because I felt guilt about having a friends-with-benefits-type relationship.
Well, if I like this person, I better try to pursue a relationship with them because somehow I'll feel less shameful or guilty about that, then I screwed it up and it didn't work out. Looking back, I'm like, "Man, that could have been an awesome friends-with-benefits relationship if I hadn't tried to make it that." It's almost like on either side, right? Don't artificially limit the closeness, but also don't feel like you need to force some other connection to be part of this just because of social pressures or something like that. I'd say that happens more often than people realize or at least it has to me. I guess I can only speak from my experience there.
Dedeker: Okay, let's go to our final question for this episode. "What advice would you give to someone who is transitioning back to monogamy after being polyamorous?" Well, Em, I think you're the expert in that arena.
Emily: Yes. Well, I will say this. The brain has very intensely-formed neural pathways when you are doing something for a long period of time. Just like it is difficult to unlearn monogamous tendencies, I think it's difficult in a lot of ways to look at the world to try to transition back from looking at the world and the potential for partners in the world when, all of a sudden, that becomes not a thing that you're doing anymore. A good friend of mine pointed that out to me. He was like, "Yes." All of a sudden, the doors on that are closed a little bit again. It really did take me a long time to not have that mentality. I saw an attractive person, I'm like, "Oh, I could date that per-- Oh no. No."
Emily: That's totally fine. I'm very happy in the relationship that I'm in. It's a switch. It's a change. I think something that I have taken into my monogamous relationship is realizing that I am not a person who owns anyone else that I'm putting a check on my possessiveness that I think I had, even in some of my polyamorous relationships that it's really fascinating to go from one to the other, and then back again.
Because all of the things that polyamory teaches you about personal autonomy, about being somebody who is able to be introspective in a way that perhaps you wouldn't have to be in monogamy, stuff like that, all of that are really good best practices to bring into monogamy once you've had to do them in polyamory. I'd say give yourself time and grace in understanding that the way in which you view the world and your tendencies and maybe even things that you don't assume with your partner that, okay, something that you feel like might be okay is not going to be a boundary for them because the rules of relationships apply differently to different people.
Somebody may think, "Yes, it's totally fine to chill with a former partner and cuddle and hang out," and then somebody else may be like, "That's literally cheating." You do need to try to be as, I think, specific with your monogamous partner as possible and question like, "Okay, what is okay with you and what is not? What can we come to some sort of agreement on?" because those aren't necessarily going to be things that you agree upon immediately. I think in any relationship, regardless of what it looks like, you got to ask those questions and you got to figure out where your agreements lie within your relationship configuration.
Jase: I think that's something we've talked about way back on the show. In monogamy, there's a lot of stuff you think. You just assume everyone feels the same way that monogamy means what I think it means and they don't. News flash, they don't. I think having that conversation is great. That's an awesome thing to learn from non-monogamy, where you don't take for granted that everyone has that same understanding, or at least, hopefully, you don't.
That's a really cool takeaway from that. I wonder also about what you said, Emily, about those neural pathways from doing a thing a long time if there's also that of when you switch back to monogamy, falling into stuff that you maybe used to think or used to do back when you were monogamous before. I'm just thinking about that. We have those associations. Does it bring up some of those things? I could see that happening.
Emily: I have to say, my possessiveness factor just went way down when I became monogamous again. Almost to a point where I felt like I was more possessive in some ways when I was polyamorous. Having that fall away was really profound for me for whatever reason to where I get people asking me like, "Well, if your boyfriend cheated on you, what would you think?"
I would be like, "Ugh, probably, I wouldn't give a shit." I would also ask questions like, "What's going on here? Let's unpack this," but it wouldn't be such a deal-breaker for me. Whereas I think maybe back in the day, it might have been. I don't know. It's just stuff like that. It's interesting. We all are just like ever-changing and evolving and so that's a part of it.
Dedeker: That's funny that you bring that up because I think I read a research study, I don't have it pulled up, so I'm sorry that I can't cite my sources here, that found that most people, I think, when they're perceiving or imagining a partner, I forget if they were having people imagine a partner cheating or if in surveying people who had been cheated on in particular.
I forget which it was, but that was basically the finding that a lot of people expressed that the hurtful part wasn't them having sex with or kissing somebody else. It was the covering up, it was the lying, it was the deception. Of course, that's not across the board. Different things upset people for different reasons, but I do think that it sounds like for your journey, Emily, there was very much that-- That neural pathway still stayed there, right?
Emily: No, totally. Anyways, I wish you luck. Time is so interesting because I feel like I've changed so much over the years that I have been on this show. That transition period was extremely tumultuous for me like just uber. I feel like in the last couple of years, I've really gotten out of that. My relationship is so much more stable now, so it may not be easy is all I'm saying. It's interesting how difficult transitioning to polyamory is, but transitioning back is also difficult. It can be, especially if one person felt like the more non-monogamous of the two.
Dedeker: I was going to say that. Again, take my words with a grain of salt because I've never successfully transitioned back to monogamy, at least not intentionally. I only have so much understanding of this, but I think that would be the thing is, of course, the reasons for transitioning back to monogamy. In this particular person's situation, we don't know the exact reasons. People transition for many, many different reasons. I think that what I would recommend is, yes, I think like Emily said, being easy on yourself and understand that going back to monogamy is not going to make everything suddenly feel easy or suddenly feel safe.
Emily: No, I'd say over-communicate if you can.
Dedeker: I think just being aware of the fact that some things are probably going to get easier and some things are going to get harder. That doesn't necessarily mean that it was bad or it was good or it was successful or unsuccessful. It's just you have to be constantly evaluating for yourself of what's easier and what's harder, and how do I feel about that and does that feel sustainable?
Jase: This is fantastic. I love getting to talk about all these different questions that people have. It gives us this opportunity to think back and explore some of these memories and even to share some parts of our personal stories that we don't always get to share on episodes. This has been really cool. Thank you to everybody who sent in their questions that we talked about this month. It seems like in about five weeks, we'll be doing another one of these.
For people in our Patreon group, we'll put a post in there asking for submissions for that next one. If you want to get your question in there, go ahead and join our Patreon so you can get involved. For our question of the week this week, we're curious to know, what's the biggest way that you've changed in the last 10 years? I think that's been a trend that's come up in a lot of these. What's the biggest change in yourself in the last 10 years?
That's a tough one, but I'm really excited for the answers. We're going to post that in our Instagram story on the day this episode comes out. We're looking forward to seeing all of your responses there. If you want to discuss this episode further, the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to patreon.com/multiamory.
In addition, you can share publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our episodes are edited by Mauricio Balvanera. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh & Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.