504 - Decolonizing Love with Millie and Nick
Welcome, Millie and Nick!
For today's episode, we're joined by Millie and Nick from Decolonizing Love for a spectacular conversation about polyamory, intersectionality, colonialism, hierarchy, and much, much more.
Millie Boella (she/they) and Nick (he/him) are a polyamorous couple from Toronto, Canada, who have been together for 14 years. Millie, of mixed Kenyan and diverse heritage, has always embraced polyamory, influenced by her Maasai background. She founded the Toronto Non-Monogamous BIPOC group in 2017 and is a professional writer. Nick, of Italian and Greek descent, is a healthcare consultant. He works on various community causes, including projects that help men unlearn toxic masculinity. In 2021, they co-founded Decolonizing Love, advocating for polyamory through a decolonial lens. Their work aims to make polyamory accessible and intersectional.
On this episode, they tackle the following questions:
Can you each talk about your history with non-monogamy and how you came to realize it was the relationship structure for you?
What is it like to be one of the biggest non-monogamy content creators out there?
Do you get a lot of pushback from people for the content on your channel? Do you feel like it comes mainly from people outside of the non-monogamous community or from within?
What does decolonizing love mean to you? Why is it important to decolonize love?'
Do you see polyamory as a political choice? What does it mean to be political in your relationship choices?
What steps can people take to be more political in their relationships?
We tend to take a stance that monogamy can also be a relationship choice that is valid if it is done as a conscious choice. Do you agree or disagree with that? Do you think monogamy is always a choice of oppression?
What are some of your favorite videos that you’ve created?
What goes into making a video? Why was it important to you to act out a scene for your videos as opposed to just talking about the topic?
Part of your content is educational for newbies to the polyamory world. What advice would you give people who are just starting out on their non-monogamous journey?
What is next for you? Where can people find more of your work?
Visit Decolonizing Love’s website to learn more about Millie, Nick and their work!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are joined by non-monogamy content creators responsible for the Decolonizing Love Instagram page, Millie and Nick. Millie and Nick are a polyamorous couple from Toronto, Canada, who have been together for 14 years. Millie of mixed Kenyan and diverse heritage has always embraced polyamory influenced by her Maasai background. She founded the Toronto Non-Monogamy BIPOC group in 2017 and is a professional writer.
Nick of Italian and Greek descent is a healthcare consultant who works with various community causes, including projects that help men unlearn toxic masculinity. In 2021, they co-founded Decolonizing Love, advocating for polyamory through a decolonial lens. Their work aims to make polyamory accessible and intersectional for everyone. Millie and Nick, thank you so much for joining us.
Millie: Thank you.
Nick: Thanks for having us.
Millie: So excited to be here.
Emily: Yay. Amazing. Yes, it's fun to talk to content creators that do something slightly different than we do because yours of course is more short-form content. I feel like it's very beautifully produced and you have all of these gorgeous videos and then you utilize memes and so many different things as well as obviously educational content as well, while we do, of course, more of the long-form thing. To start off, I'm interested to just hear what your history with non-monogamy has been, how you came to realize that this relationship structure was for you, and how you got to this place in your life.
Millie: My history with non-monogamy predates Nick's. I came to realize that I was non-monogamous while living on traditional Maasai land on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, which is where I'm from. Between the ages of 9 and 12, I've never been monogamous. My family is a mixed Kenyan heritage. I am part Maasai, but most of my family has assimilated and practices Christianity, except for two of my aunts who married themselves, but the rest of my family are monogamous.
I attended school in Nairobi which allowed me to contrast how the Maasai organized family and community with how assimilated Kenyans did, and I observed much more harmony, stability, and honesty among the Maasai compared to those who adopted Christianity and the nuclear family model of our former British colonizers. The hypocrisy and incongruence of colonizer relationship values was particularly striking during the wedding of one of my uncles who was on his third marriage.
I just always remember being in that church, seeing him say, "I do forever" for the third time, knowing that he was also a bit of a philander and cheated quite a lot and I was like, "But is anyone going to not say anything?" I would compare with the Maasai who were honest. Yes, only the men are allowed to marry multiple women, but women were allowed to have boyfriends, so I was like, they're a lot more honest and their families are much more stable, I'd rather just go back to tradition than follow the hypocrisy that I was seeing in front of me.
Dedeker: That's so fascinating because I think very few people have such stark contrast and real-life role models presented to them when they're young. I don't think we often get to have that direct one-to-one comparison. As you were starting to unknit some of these things, did you have conversations with your family about this?
Millie: I didn't really like say, "Why are we necessarily monogamous?" but my mom would always make comments about different aspects. She would talk about, for example, my aunts were married to themselves and be like, "Look at them marrying themselves. That's a little selfish," but almost be like, "But that's kind of cool. I kind of like their selfishness."
Millie: Their independence is something admirable. I didn't use to challenge necessarily relationship models, but other people did who influenced me. I think what I did start challenging my family more was on Christianity, and I think it was first on conversations around colonialism's effect that would have with my family. I didn't like the answer that they gave me. I was confused as to why we managed to break free from colonialism in all these other ways but it seemed like the internal aspect of colonialism was never being challenged as much, and that brought me through a rabbit hole.
Dedeker: Wow. What about for you, Nick?
Nick: I have, obviously, very, very different history there. I grew up in Quebec, and in Quebec, we tend to be a little bit rebels. In Canada, we're like the black sheep, some might say, and for the longest time, the Catholic church really ruled over a lot of society because of the French influence and everything. There was a period of time where there was a separation of church and state, and then a lot of Quebecers, they revolted against the church. Since then, there's always been this rebellious side, Quebecers.
Growing up, I would see a lot of romcoms on love and everything, and I kind of knew that this was the good way to love somebody, but I always felt there was a part of me that was a little critical, and maybe it was my Quebecer's side, but that this was somewhat of a performance or something, but I never really put my finger to it. Every time in my relationships, I'd be romantic, like the romcoms display those traditional views of romance, but I would not adopt certain behaviors such as possession, jealousy, as others would, and I always felt that was kind of weird, but I led a majority monogamous life.
Then I met Millie in 2010, and within the first month, Millie brought up saying, "Hey, just want to let you know, I've always been polyamorous, and this is the type of relationship I would want to have with you, an open relationship." At first I was just fascinated. I was just like, "This is freaking awesome." Little did I know there was a lot of unlearning to do, but I had these thoughts about, wow, I didn't even know this was an option. I didn't even know you could do this, but I just embraced it full-heartedly.
Very different from a lot of other people that we hear where a partner opens up and it's really the worst thing that could ever happen, I just embraced it, but I embraced it naively because I just didn't know when things were actually happen, how I would react to things. It was just kind of this idealistic view in my head. I think we started our relationship where when things actually got real and Millie started dating, that's when I was like, "No, these are the rules. You can't do this, you can't do this." I was just like, "This is how I want our non-monogamous relationship to be." Thankfully Millie was super patient with me, didn't really react. Millie ended up just saying like, "Why don't you read a little bit of things."
Nick: "Here's some resources, or there's these great Facebook groups that you can go and go talk to people."
Dedeker: Some other ideas to try on.
Nick: Yes. I actually did. I don't think I was defensive or anything. I think I was just like, "Okay, I will read." There was this great Facebook group that I just ate all up and I was just reading threads and everything, and when we ended up moving to Toronto, there was this Meetup group that would meet every month. Millie actually just said, "You go. You go, you learn, talk to other people," and I did, and I ended up having a great time meeting a lot of great people, making a lot of friends there, and I just ended up learning more. As I learned more, that's when the rules became no rules.
It became more like, okay, well this is what I want. These are my boundaries. How do you feel about this? Now it's like we're in a state where I've become more laissez-faire. In these media groups, there was also these group sessions, these facilitation groups, and because I was doing all this learning, they asked me to facilitate these groups. This is how it all started, where now I was the student, I ended up helping others that were coming in and everything. This was after years of being part of this group and everything. That's been my journey up until this date.
Jase: That's great. Something we talk to people about a lot in terms of how to have success transitioning into non-monogamy, you hit on two of the things, one is that you need to have your own belief in it, like your own motivation for it beyond just I want to be with this person who's non-monogamous. Then the other is doing the learning on your own and not just learning it all through the more experienced partner, and so that's awesome that you really landed on both of those right away.
Nick: I feel one of the things we mention a lot is that there's not enough models for us to rely on. I talked a little bit how I would look at romcoms a lot. These are models of monogamous relationships. Everybody can see models of monogamous relationships everywhere, and people get ways on how to act in these monogamous relationships. Thankfully, we're slowly starting to see in pop culture more models, albeit maybe not the best models at times, but I think the more and more we see more representation, people are going to see better ways of actually being non-monogamous, and this can help a lot of people.
Jase: I think that the dream is to get to this point where we have enough models, like we do with monogamy, where we can see some as positive models and some as negative ones. We have so many monogamous relationships, like in romcoms and celebrities and whoever, that we're able to look at some and go, "Oh, I don't want to do it like them." "I do kind of want to do it like them," or, "I like this aspect and not this one." With non-monogamy, we still have so few that it's hard for us to do that. I feel like if we focus too much on all the negative, then it's just like, oh, we're shitting on the few examples we do have, and that sucks too. Yes, that would be great if we could get to that point where we have enough that we can pick and choose what we like and don't like.
Millie: That is the dream.
Dedeker: Yes, the dream is to have a volume of models. To bring it to your Instagram, so if you imagine that you're talking to someone who's never looked at your Instagram at all, what is decolonizing love? What does that mean to you?
Millie: For us, decolonizing love it means that we think in a system of domination and rigid traditional structures. We're able to love authentically, consensually, and fully. Colonization imposed strict scripts and norms on how we should love, often limiting our choices and knowledge about alternative ways to experience relationships in liberation and freedom. A lot of people don't know that monogamy for most of the world came about because of colonization. They don't know that models like the nuclear family are recent. A lot of our ideas about gender or heteronormativity, these are all also products of colonization.
What we do through our channel and through our work is to uncover these histories and also talk about that there were other ways that human beings were beforehand, and that we can return to them. By decolonizing love, we're challenging all these restrictive norms and so we can open ourselves to more, as I said, authentic and consensual ways of relating. It also means recognizing, yes, the impacts of colonialism, concepts like family, gender, and monogamy so we can have more meaningful relationships and an inclusive understanding of love. I just want to be able to give people tools, language, and a history.
I find so often when I'm also just talking about decolonization, I'm teaching so much history about colonization, which most people were never actually taught. I feel very blessed that I grew up in Kenya because that's something that I was constantly taught because we were a settler colony and we gained our independence in 1963. My family were in detention camps in Kenya, so my grandparents would talk about what that was like during colonization. Because when I was born, our country was only like 20 years old, is that it was still a mature conversation about the freedom movements, and so every year, I'd watch these videos about colonization.
When I moved to the West, I was like, I understood what colonization meant. It was a shock to find out that nobody did. I was like, "What do you mean you don't know what colonization is? What do you mean that--" I moved out to the Netherlands, my stepfather is Dutch, so I grew up in Holland during a lot of my teen years. The Dutch are very proud of colonization, of their colonial history-
Jase: Sure.
Millie: -which is so shocking to me to experience. With this page, we get to finally have these conversations and this history of not being had and then after talking about what colonization is, talk about how do you decolonize? It's not just about freeing yourself from the economic and the political realm. There is also an internal aspect.
Dedeker: One aspect of colonization that stands out to me is I think it creates this great forgetting. I do think the powers that can dominate with a particular structure that they want things to go, whether it's an economic structure, relationship structure, religious structure, and then there's a little bit of this painting over and creating the sense of, no, this is how it always was. It's like, forget everything that came before, forget what was important before, forget the structure that was here before.
This is what it is now and we should pretend like this is how things always were, and if we do ever acknowledge that things were different, it's within this lens of like, "Yes, but that was so clearly inferior." This is so clearly progress. We see that with so many things, with things like capitalism or even the institution of marriage or even Christianity, there's still this sense of, no, we want to create this through line that, no, this is how at least it always should have been and we forget anything that's outside of that.
Millie: Yes, absolutely. Colonization is taught as progress. Some of the disturbing comments that we've had on our channel is people said, but let's talk about the benefits of colonization.
Nick: We get similar comments as well about, obviously, it's monogamy is the better, because, look, it's the majority of the people now are monogamous. We've evolved to become that, and so it's a lot of these words such as evolved. I like what you said, Dedeker, about it's this forgetfulness, because a lot of people, they forgot about how things used to be. They don't know. A lot of this is not taught in schools.
We actually ask that question, how many people are actually taught on colonization, the actual things that happened. I know in Canada, I went to school here, and we got a very whitewashed version, and it's very much from the lens of the colonizer, so they're going to paint a picture of we treated everybody nicely, and we look at all the good things that we did. Unfortunately, we're not taught about a lot indigenous practices, which, fortunately, now we're trying to in Canada revive, because we're seeing that there was so much wisdom, and like Millie said, there is a learning, not only an unlearning process, but a learning process because we don't know this, we forgot.
Millie: I want to say also, the cultural erasure was one of the points of colonization. There's a reason why there was forced boarding schools and residential schools in a lot of the settler countries like Canada, so you forget the past, so you forget all these indigenous cultural habits and ways of being because they are threats to the colonial way of life. A lot of times they were the better way, and colonizers would often find a lot of settlers would run away and going to be with indigenous people because they found there was more equity rather than the inequality that existed in a lot of colonizer societies.
What they had to do was remove all those beautiful cultural relating ways of being, so there is no risk of you running away and joining that other side, and there is no community resilience, that was intentionally done. Some of the things that we talk about and teach a lot isn't just about monogamy and polyamory, but it's also about the importance of community. One of the reasons why monogamy was enforced was to break community. We always encourage everyone, please go into community, learn how to show up for community. That is one of the most important tools of decolonizing your love practice.
Emily: I'm curious, because you talked a little bit about some of the pushback that you've received from, I'm assuming more kind of monogamous-leaning people, but have you ever found pushback from within the non-monogamous community about what you're talking about on your page as well?
Nick: All the time.
Millie: All the time.
Dedeker: That's surprising, because famously, non-monogamous people are very quiet, tight-lipped, don't want to share their opinions or feelings about things.
Nick: Oh, yes, 100%. Yes, totally.
Dedeker: It's really weird that you would experience that.
Nick: We get it from both ends. A lot of what we say is going to upset and trigger a lot of people because it's challenging some deep-seated beliefs. Obviously, when you hear decolonize, usually you think about Land Back, you usually think about land. We're starting to talk about decolonizing, it's like inside the body, but-
Millie: Internal sphere.
Nick: -the internal sphere, but we feel that the sacred cow here is our romantic relationships, and this is something we shouldn't be touching. Where we hit a nerve with non-monogamous people, I think we were one of the first to popularize online, I'm sure there were some people before us, but that the whole concept of hierarchy in non-monogamy and creating the link.
It's not necessarily we were the first to say that it was unethical, but we were the first to probably make that link to colonization and really tease out why it's necessarily bad and why it's a colonial way of thinking. I think that was the first time we really upset-- and then we were coming up with as things unraveled, it's like we were tying colonization to a lot of other practices about boundaries. I think it's really the messy list and having boundaries about that. I think that was also-- like, there was a lot of pushback for that.
Millie: I feel like I get pushback all the time from so many parts of the community. I'm like, "I don't even know where to start."
Dedeker: You can't say anything on the internet that invites pushback.
Millie: Yes. It's also the point that we come from a critical lens.
Nick: Yes.
Millie: I think when you're talking, you're always swimming against the status quo, and a purpose doing so, is that they're going to be people who are very much believe in the status quo who are going to be upset, and the ones who benefit from the system are going to be the ones who are going to be the most upset. At the beginning, our criticism was from within the polyamory community. I would say in the last month or two, it's been a lot from outside the polyamory community, where we've been targeted by right-wing sites, and I always knew doomsday was coming. I'm a little surprised it took them this long. To be honest, considering that we challenge colonization and-
Nick: The nuclear family-
Millie: Nuclear family-
Nick: -just super important to--
Millie: -a Black non-binary person kind of checks every single box against them in a way, but I think it used to be, I guess, a little bit more niche, and so the criticism was only from within the house. So much of the polyamory discourse was something that was-- a lot the thought leaders were white, were western, so there wasn't a lot of challenges of empire, but now here we come and we are like, "Hey, by the way, this thing that you guys talk about, this polyamory thing and the fact--
It's funny how you guys never talk about how monogamy, where does that come from?" When we start to be like, you can't position yourself as a solution without remembering that you are the problem. You're the one who created all this. A lot of people were not ready for that conversation and got very uncomfortable. Then unpacking things like hierarchy and going on.
Nick: BDSM as well.
Millie: BDSM as a recent thing. I'm not even anti-BDSM, but I always do talk about how BDSM is an obvious kink vampire considering that it's space and power play and domination, et cetera, but all of these conversations are for people who are not ready to have those conversations. It's upsetting and it's uncomfortable and the discomfort is something they're not ready for, so it's rather than deal with it, they attack us.
Nick: We've been told, it's like, "Can you make your account a little bit more fun?"
Millie: Yes.
Nick: It's too political.
Millie: I know. Please be less radical. Just it was a lot of that and just was like blowing my mind. You remember the first time-- I still remember this to this day the first time we were told somebody challenges some hierarchy, and I'm like, "Oh, we're a decolonizing page, isn't this obvious?" Then I never thought we would be the content creators to talk so much about hierarchy because I never planned on that at all, but because of the amount of pushback, we had to have to actually explain ourselves so much.
Dedeker: I want to talk a little bit more about the hierarchy thing, because I do think that probably starting 10-ish years or so ago was, at least from my vantage point, was when I first started seeing this, more people saying like, "Hey, maybe hierarchy is not so great." Maybe just building in these hierarchies into relationships, primary, secondary partners, all this stuff, maybe that's not really great, and particular secondary partners are really not enjoying getting the shorter end of the stick as it were. 10 years ago, a lot more people pushing for non-hierarchy and holding up non-hierarchy is a great option.
What I've seen that start to morph into in certain areas of the non-monogamy community is a little bit of this like, whatever we're doing, as long as we call it non-hierarchy, then it's fine. As long as we profess non-hierarchy, then it's fine. Then sometimes that has morphed even further into non-hierarchy is always automatically good and hierarchy is always automatically bad. I guess I'm curious of like, the pushback that you're getting from non-monogamous people on the hierarchy issue, is it from people who are still in the camp of non-hierarchy is good, "I have hierarchy in my relationships and it works," or is it something else?
Nick: A lot of it comes down to a definition issue. We realize that after we engage with the few people that we have in the past, then we come up into, "Okay, well, first, what's your definition. How do you see hierarchy?" A lot of times it's this misunderstanding on what hierarchy is. We get people that say, "There's hierarchy everywhere in our lives," and we need to explain that, "No, that's not what we're talking about when we say hierarchy." When we talk about hierarchal polyamory, it's really an open relationship structure that organizes power by ranking primary partners over secondaries.
We're not talking about the fact that you have certain priorities, you have certain interests. You prefer to go play badminton with one partner because you just have that relationship with them. I mean, we do that with friends, so that's not hierarchy to have a certain preference, but it's really about the organizing of power. It's that power imbalance of people at the top dictating what happens to people at the bottom. When we frame it in that way, then people start understanding a little bit more, "Okay, well, no, I don't want that," and we're like, "That's what we're saying from the beginning." This is the unethical part.
Jase: Because I feel like the thing that we've seen is, like Dedeker was explaining, that move toward, "Oh, hierarchy is bad, so we're going to say that we're not hierarchical," but what we've seen is the negative side that can happen from that is, one is the assumption that non-hierarchy means every partner is equal sanding for you, which often causes us to mislead new partners as if like, "You're equally important to me as this person I've been with for 10 years," or something.
While maybe that person doesn't dictate the rules for you, ideally they don't, but I think sometimes we can steer too far on the other side of misleading a partner into thinking, "Oh yes, you're going to get equal priority in my life to this person who I've built more connection with or just have a longer history with." I've actually come around to thinking it's more ethical to be clearer about that instead of trying to pretend there's not that established connection there.
Dedeker: Yes, but even what you're saying, Jase, I feel like we do start to run into definition issues also.
Jase: For sure.
Dedeker: Because I think someone can have some weird sneakiarchy style rules or an agreement where there is power over that's dictating other relationships, but they can say, "Oh, this is just about priorities." It starts to get a little slippery.
Nick: We get that if you create an environment that hierarchy is bad, there's going to be sneakiarchy, but just the fact that it leads to sneakiarchy, does that make hierarchy any more right? It's like if you say racism is bad, and then people say, "Oh, I'm not really racist," but they really are, would you tell somebody, "Just be honest and say you're racist"? Or would you just say that, "No, the goal is just to not be racist, everybody. Just don't even sneak around about it, unlearn that"? I think the point is that it's important to drive it home that hierarchy is bad, and for those that do practice sneakiarchy because they're ashamed or whatever, call it out and let's unlearn that, but that's not a justification for being honest about hierarchy, because at the end of the day, hierarchy is still unethical.
Jase: On the one hand, I think it comes down to that definition thing, where I feel like people in saying, "I don't want to be hierarchical," confuse that to me, "and I also don't have any priorities," or at least communicate as if that's the case, and so, yes, I do think it's really important to be clear and to explain what your life situation is. I think it even makes this conversation here where I think the sense I'm getting is that we agree on all those things, but it's difficult to explain how the communication comes across because we don't have great words for it.
Nick: Right. We actually, we get that it's really-- because it's such a new concept that for people to grasp, it's very new because it's not a common thing. We talk about hierarchy is kind of like capital H, but when we get into the nitty-gritty, this is where, "But what about this? But what about this? But what about this?" We did have a post at one point where we talk about this is what hierarchy looks like in a relationship. This is what egalitarian hierarchy in different scenarios. This is what couple privilege looks like because a lot of people confuse couple privilege and hierarchy as well.
They're like, "Well, it's not my fault. I'm married or I have kids, it's not my fault," and they're saying that's hierarchy and we're like, "Well, no." We establish what would a hierarchical person say, what would an egalitarian person say in the different scenarios? I'll give a really quick example with priorities, for example. I don't know, Jase, if you can just give a random example, and I can tell you exactly what a hierarchical person would say and what an egalitarian person would say.
Millie: What a sneakiarchy say.
Jase: Boy, yes, put me on the spot.
Nick: What sneakiarchy would say.
Jase: Let's see, about I guess who to take with me to an event where I get a plus one.
Millie: All right.
Nick: Okay.
Millie: Let's go.
Nick: A great example.
Millie: Applying couple privilege.
Nick: Yes, yes. Okay. The couple privilege here is the fact that it's a plus one.
Nick: Why is it not a plus two?
Millie: Sure.
Nick: It's like society imposing that I have to bring just one person.
Emily: The implication, it should be a romantic partner also.
Nick: You're right. Absolutely. It could be a friend. Absolutely. This actually happened to me actually-
Jase: Sure. This happens a lot.
Emily: This happens .
Nick: -two years ago, yes. This happened to me at my cousin's wedding. We got the invitations and it's like, write down who's your plus one if you are bringing a plus one. Then I called my cousin and I was like, "I got two partners. Is it okay if I bring two people?" She was like, "Yes, sure. Not a problem. The more the merrier." I was lucky to get that type of reception, but sometimes it just takes a phone call because people are just normalized into just that plus one, and if you just challenge that a little bit, then it allows you to bring that plus two.
That's a way to dismantle the couple privilege. A hierarchical person would be, "Well, my longstanding partner of 20 years, or my wife or husband, they get priority." That's what a hierarchical person would do. Egalitarian person would do is be like, "Okay, I'm going to ask both my partners and see who's free." Now if they both say they're free, like who wants to come? Like, who's interested in coming? Now if they're both interested in coming, well that's where I can just say, "Okay, well, I'll just bring both of you."
Nobody's going to be like, "You have to bring one person." You can always challenge that in everything, but it's very rare, at least in my experience, and a lot of people bring these-- it's like scenarios about-- it's like two of your partners were in the hospital, who would you go visit, or who would you-- these things hardly ever happen. Like, why are we debating these scenarios that never happen?
Dedeker: I had someone ask me once, which partner I would prefer to have die.
Nick: That is horrible.
Jase: You're like, when are you going to--
Millie: No.
Jase: We're not all Batman begins.
Millie: Holy shit.
Jase: What? Come on now.
Nick: Yes, how likely are both your partners going to be free for an event? Both of them are going to want to come? The chances of that happening are very low, and even if that that happens, you have an opportunity to tell the person that invited you, "Hey, I'm bringing another person as well," and that's how an egalitarian-- If ever reason, you had a gun to your head, you have to choose one, what I would do is I would just do, "Okay, rock paper, scissors. Seriously, let's make this fair. Let's pick out of a hat."
You want to create this fairness. You don't want to create this idea that one partner is going to be superior or is going to always get the invite and everything you want to make everybody feel like-- especially when you're dealing with things about love, like polyamory. If you truly love somebody, would you rank partners if you truly love them? We can go in a whole debate on what love is and everything, but in my opinion, this is not love if you're going to say you're below this other human. That is not my idea of love.
Millie: I'm also going to say is that one of the things that I think a lot of people have a hard time in understanding egalitarian polyamory versus hierarchical polyamory is the difference between equality and equity. I think a lot of people conflict the two because we're never asking for equality, so a lot of people think when you say, "Of course I have to be hierarchical, we can't have equal relationships," we're like, no one's asking you for equal relation-- equal respect, yes, but otherwise, apple oranges, can ever actually be entirely equal? It's more about equity. Do they have consent and ongoing agency? That's really the issue here.
Emily: I think over a long period of time, this podcast has taken the stance that a relationship structure like monogamy is okay if it's done consciously and understanding what you're getting into, what that's going to mean, creating agreements and understanding between two people in a relationship. I'm just curious in terms of monogamy also, do you feel like that's still a system of oppression regardless of whether or not it's done consciously?
Millie: No, not at all. We think that monogamy is a valid relationship orientation and a spectrum of other relationship orientations that span from soloamory, and that's the person who does not want to be partnered. Ambiamory, polyamory, and that monogamy-- polyamory is not any better than monogamy, is that it's just another type of relationship orientation.
However, the problem is enforced monogamy, also known as compulsory monogamy, and most of the world lives in a compulsory monogamous cultures where other relationship orientations are indeed suppressed where it's whether polyamory is suppressed, but also if you don't want to be partnered, we live in an amatonormativity world where it's thought to be a full adult is to be in a relationship in a romantic partnership. All we do is we believe that people should be brought up knowing that there are other options besides monogamy and that everybody should have the knowledge about this and they should be supported in making alternative choices.
However, if somebody realizes consciously that they're polyamorous and still choose to be in a monogamous, in a closed relationship forever, I think that's still a valid choice. I think we're not here to tell people and force you must choose your natural orientation. I think that it's about just empowering people to be able to make the choice that's best for them, whatever that choice is.
Dedeker: I apologize that I have not watched every single video that you've put out before preparing for this episode.
Nick: You haven't watched the 500 videos that we watched?
Dedeker: Never watched. I haven't even listened to all of our own podcasts, honestly. If anything, I've listened to a very tiny fraction of my own podcast. My preamble is just, I apologize if you've covered this or done content about this, but do you have any thoughts about what it looks like to decolonize monogamy or decolonize a monogamous relationship?
Millie: Ooh, I love that question.
Jase: This is the next video now. Great.
Dedeker: This is the next Instagram account.
Nick: I can probably say what it looks like. I'll let Millie maybe answer the how to get there, but how I see what it looks like, the end goal of a decolonized monogamous person is a conscious monogamist, really. It's a person that chooses, that understands the world we live in, understands where monogamy comes from and chooses for themselves that they want to be monogamous but doesn't impose a closed relationship on an individual that they just so happen to date that is non-monogamous or is polyamorous, and so it's a person that will entertain a monopoly relationship and be very comfortable with that. That to me is what a decolonized monogamous would look like. How to get there, I don't know. I'll let Millie answer that.
Millie: No, you can answer that too.
Dedeker: Before Millie jumps in, just to make sure I'm understanding what you're saying, because it sounds like there's something about separating the choice to be monogamous with the choice to control.
Nick: Yes, I think that a lot of what we talk about the vestiges of colonialism is this desire to control and dominate over another person, be it a metamor or be it your own partner. This imposition or this force to control or to possess another human being, that's where the colonial mindset comes. When you're decolonizing your mind, you're unlearning this, and so love becomes less about possession, love becomes less about trying to control your partner and letting them live the way they want to live, whatever relationship orientation they have.
Millie: I like that. I love the concept of decolonized monogamy. When I think about decolonized monogamy, it's also asking different questions not just about your relationship orientation and becoming consciously choosing monogamy because it's your natural orientation rather than it's a script that you're following. It's also about asking other things about how you love romantically. It's also about your desires, desirability politics. It's also about how you relate to others beyond your romantic partner. Do you just center romance? Do you privilege only romance, or do you also honor other relationships in your life like your family, your neighbors, your community?
It's about always being critical about how you relate to others, and does it align with your spouse values? Examining how all your ideas of love, where they originate from, what narratives, who taught you what is attractive? How do you communicate with other people? How do you assign value like in relationships like hierarchies, and learn about how other cultures approach relationships and being open to growth, being challenged about your worldviews and changing and considering how you communicate, nonviolent communication. I think all those things would make for a decolonized monogamy.
Jase: As you were talking about all that, like that willingness to be challenged, like you were talking about, it reminds me of something that often comes up whenever I'm talking with men who are struggling with this identity that they have of being straight or being monogamous or something and they want to step outside of that a little bit, but then they struggle with this, "But then am I still this identity?" Usually, the thing I end up talking to them about is that we're taught that it's a thing you need to hold onto really tightly.
I think that maybe that's part of this colonialism piece that you're talking about is this tight belief in like an absolute right or an absolute truth or an absolute better and worse that it's like when we're taught so much that you have to hold onto these things tightly against challenge that it makes it so we're-- like they become much more brittle and we're much more defensive about them and it's harder for us to be willing to be challenged and the kind of holding onto the labels a little less tightly can help us, yes, maybe we still keep that identity or maybe we still keep most of it, but by holding onto it less tightly, it lets us invite in some of that challenge.
Millie: Absolutely.
Nick: I like how you frame that. I would add to that, that maybe one enabler to holding it less tightly, because I always think about the end goal, but I think about, "Okay, how do we get there? How can we do that?" I feel like in a lot of our discussions, one of the enablers is to actually, the more you understand why you think that way, what influenced you to think that way, the less power you hold on to those identities because now you get to see that, "Oh, this is all this giant coup or-
Millie: Conspiracy.
Nick: -it's a conspiracy." It's like the more we understand, for example, gender, that it's a performance and everything, the less we hold on to these very strict gender roles or performances, and so it's a little bit about masculinity as well. The more as men we understand how we're pushed into this man box and the less that idea of masculinity becomes strong in our minds.
Millie: Yes. Exactly. It says so much about colonization was indeed about categorization. Colonization happened at the same time as the scientific revolution where everything was about discovery and then categorizing it. I think one of the beauties of indigenous cultures, it's so much about just embracing and not having this protesting work ethic. You live to live. Life itself is beautiful gift and we're not here just to be capitalist production machines. It's about being curious about this life and living in that curiosity and how we relate.
One of the things I love about my Kikuyu tribe the most, because my Kikuyu tribe has different options of relating, women can marry yourself. You can be polygamous. You can be monogamous. I always felt that was because the tribe cared more about you discovering who you are, coming back, and then telling the tribe, "This is who I am," and then you could have a wedding for yourself with bridesmaids and everything. I think that's what life really should be about. It's about you not following the script, but you just being curious about your soul's journey here in this life and then moving away from these categories. Words just be about poetry that makes your life, right? Rather than it boxing you in.
Dedeker: The two of you teach workshops specifically about unlearning hierarchy in relationships and in your life. I'm curious about who it is that shows up to the workshop, because my hypothesis is that the people who could potentially stand to gain the most from unlearning hierarchy may be the people who are the least likely to go out of their way to go to a workshop to learn about it, because, fundamentally, any kind of hierarchy most benefits the person who's at the top. Right?
I think that if you're at the top of any hierarchy, you're less motivated to want to unlearn it. The second part of my hypothesis is that maybe the people most likely wanting to dive into this topic are the people who have been burned by hierarchy, the people who have not been on the top of hierarchies. How does my hypothesis hold up with what you found in real life?
Nick: Do you want to answer? Because I have an answer to that.
Millie: I have an answer, no, here's the answer.
Nick: Okay, go first and I'll--
Millie: We have such diverse people in our workshop. It's so beautiful to see all ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, different places in their polyamory journey, people who've been secondary, people who've been hierarchical. I love it when people are curious and they're willing to challenge themselves and might be like, "I feel hierarchical." I love seeing people start off as being like, things like people who are very stringently hierarchical polyamorous, and then over time actually start to change, and that's incredible to me, because I do think that it just shows that for most people is that there's a sense of what love looks like that's intrinsic to being human and what dignity looks like.
I think most people want to be good. I think there's very few people out there who are trying to be bad and hurtful and cruel. We have a lot of pushback, but I also see a lot of people change over time, including the people who started off with a lot of pushback. Actually, one of the people is our moderator. We have a moderator who at first used to come on our page really pissed and actually ended up becoming one of our strongest supporters in the younger hierarchical polyamorous-
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: Oh, wow. Interesting.
Millie: -and he's actually our moderator-
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Millie: -now.
Jase: That's awesome.
Millie: People change.
Nick: I would say, Dedeker, that your hypothesis is probably a little correct. People gravitate towards things that they agree most with, and it's very against their worldview, but like Millie said, our pipeline starts with our videos and it starts to chip away a little bit, and then they get curious, and then they engage. At first I remember when we were just on TikTok, we were having to respond to everybody, and we got really good at formulating our arguments and framing in a way to get people to understand, but now we hardly ever, because our followers are doing it for us, they've understood that-- and so now they're actually bringing other people along with them as well.
At our workshops, to answer your question, we also get people that are in a relationship with individuals that there's some sneakiarchy or there's hierarchy and they're dragging their partner. They're like, "You need to learn this." We do have a module in our workshop about identifying sneakiarchy, what to do when you're confronted with sneakiarchy, how to call it out. That's a part. We don't force, but slowly, slowly there are people that are opening themselves up and the more they understand the message that we're trying to get across, the more they're open to coming and learning.
Dedeker: Right. That makes sense. I guess that's also a lesson to any followers or listeners, you don't have to go to bat for anybody in the comments, but when you do, it is much appreciated.
Emily: Definitely.
Dedeker: It's much appreciated.
Millie: Oh, I love those followers.
Emily: That's great. This has been an awesome conversation. I think there's so much that we touched on and so much that we could continue to talk about and hopefully in the future, for sure. Before y'all go, can you just let us know what's next for you, where people can find your work and any other things that you want to promote that are coming up for you?
Millie: Sure. This interview is happening in August, but in a couple of weeks, we are going to be launching our first web series at the Toronto International Film Festival, actually.
Emily: Oh, nice.
Millie: That's in three weeks. For our listeners, Toronto International Film Festival is the biggest film festival in the world. We are doing this because we think that there needs to be more models of polyamory and what better time than during one of the biggest narrative festivals in the world. We deserve more representation as polyamorists, and so we are going to be doing that next. Then there's also our website, and I'm going to let Nick talk about that.
Nick: Our website, we do have-- we're going to be having on our website-- Something that I'm particularly excited about is, obviously, we need a website. We've been using our social media as our website, our Instagram, our TikTok, but now we're going to have a page where we're going to have a lot of resources available for people. One thing, like I said, that I'm particularly excited about is on our website, there's going to be the opportunity for people to create a customized relationship agreement and polycule agreement.
This is something that we've noticed that people were very curious when we did an interview for Insider Magazine a while ago. This was last year. We had a lot, a lot of positive feedback of people wanting the template of our five-page relationship agreement. Obviously, we could have shared it, but at the same time, we felt that every relationship is very unique and different, and so instead of sharing a template, why not help people develop it with whomever they're with?
It's going to be a questionnaire that's going to take about an hour to complete, and then you'll be receiving in your inbox, your own customized relationship agreement. We feel like that is in a lot of our coaching sessions that we do, we realize that a lot of the issues could have been just resolved had they had a relationship agreement. Hopefully, we really think this is going to add a lot of value to a lot of people, and so this is something that's going to be coming up as well.
Emily: Nice.
Jase: Nice.
Emily: Amazing. Your Instagram handle, just so that everybody knows, what is it?
Nick: @decolonizing.love, and our website is going to be decolonizing.love also.