Polyamory Advice For New Poly People

It's much less scary than you think it is

You're Going To Be Fine

Most advice books about polyamory say that polyamory is incredibly demanding. No one with unresolved trauma or attachment issues need apply. You need to be able to identify all your needs, boundaries, and emotions, and not ever end up going "...I dunno, I'm upset for... some reason...?" You need to handle your feelings by yourself, except of course when instead you should get support from others-- two situations you can tell apart perfectly, of course. When you need something from a partner, you always talk like you swallowed a self-help book and certainly never raise your voice or get angry. You definitely have never come home from a date sobbing on public transit.   It starts to feel like no one can be poly without at least five years of therapy, three meditation retreats, and a personal letter of approval from Marsha Linehan herself. 

This is a conspiracy by Big Advice Book to sell more advice books.

I'm not going to say you shouldn't be an emotionally mature person with good relationship skills. Those things are good and lead to happy relationships. I recommend them. 

But I have been poly for my entire adult life, and my communication and emotional regulation skills are rubbish. No one has died, there has been no significant property damage, and no one has showed up at my doorstep to take my polyamory card away for craziness crimes. I'm even friendly with most of my exes. It's working out fine. 

To be honest, polyamory hasn't demanded a tenth of the relationship skills from me that marriage has. 

To be sure, some people have picked very compatible partners or are just good at feelings and communication to begin with. But in my experience, marriage brings out your personality flaws like a lovely blue dress brings out your eyes: your messiness and flakiness, your anxiety about money, your habit of emotionally distancing yourself from people who love you when you're overwhelmed, your tendency to take out your bad days on people who aren't involved, your difficulty setting boundaries, your bad temper. There are special kinds of dysfunction you can only have with two people who spend every day together, share a home and finances and maybe children, and love each other. Marriage is hard. 

And yet every day hundreds of thousands of people get married, and most of them do not have particularly high levels of emotional maturity. Sometimes they have horribly dysfunctional relationships; sometimes they get divorces, or spend the rest of their lives making each other and everyone around them miserable. But a lot of the time it's just... fine? People muddle through, making mistakes and forgiving each other for them, accommodating each other's flaws that will never get fixed, practicing compassion and acceptance and personal responsibility as best they can, having marriages that aren't perfect but are good enough. 

No one would say “marriage is hard, therefore only self-actualized people with incredible relationship skills can get married.”

It's okay. You can muddle through polyamory. Your poly relationships might not be perfect, but they can be good enough.