I’m bored of talking about polyamory

I’m polyamorous and I’m bored by it.

Not by polyamory itself, but by talking about it.

When I first ventured into open relationships, I was extremely into it. Most people are.

I read the books, and I went to the meetings, and I wanted to learn the terminology and discuss the philosophy. For perhaps the first year I was keen to talk to people at every opportunity about what poly means.

I talked about metamours and compersion and triads and fluid bonding. It was all exciting to have a new group of friends I could learn about these things with. The shared ideas and language made for a sense of community that I enjoyed while I was settling into doing relationships differently.

That was about six years ago now, and since then polyamory has just become a normal part of my life. I don’t like to go on about it now, any more than I want to interrogate a regular couple about the philosophies behind their monogamy.

I’m bored to death by the buzzwords and the stock arguments about the unnaturalness of monogamy. It’s all so… unnecessary.

I tend not to even use the word anymore, I just tell people I have more than one partner. Interestingly, they seem to accept it more easily when it’s put like that, rather than In An Open Relationship or Practising Polyamory.

That said, people are becoming more accepting of poly and different models of relationships. When I first started seeing more than one person, I was terrified of work finding out.

I was actually more worried about being out as poly than as queer because I was so afraid of how people would react.

I don’t really care now. I’m well past any inclination to hide it, and I’d be surprised if anyone finding out was really that fussed about it. I’m aware of one person having been fired from their job a couple of years ago for being poly but that was from a Catholic organisation. Say no more, right?

I do get a bit snarky when people make assumptions about polyamory, like you must have one ‘primary’ partner, or that the whole thing is doomed to fail because it’s not monogamy. Few things annoy me more than people referring to a breakup as ‘poly gone wrong’. Come on now, we don’t call your divorces ‘monogamy gone wrong’.

The world does seem on the whole to be moving towards more acceptance of different types of relationships. I admittedly have the privilege of living and working in a city, and I’m much more comfortable being out as myself here than I might be somewhere rural.

In 2017, when most people are pretty okay about gay folks, and trans folks, and other people who aren’t in heteronormative relationships, I find it’s pretty safe to be out as poly as well. People tend to assume, in fact, that if you’re queer you must be non-monogamous. Which is probably a terrible thing to assume about someone if they’re not, but that’s a whole other discussion.

These days I’m not worried about anyone knowing I’m poly. I got all the talking about it out of my system years ago, and now I can’t really think of anything more tedious. I’ll certainly talk to you about my partners, but it’s pretty difficult to draw me into a conversation about what it all means.

As far as discussion topics go, having more than one partner is about as exciting to me as having more than one friend.