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I hear some version of this almost every week: someone in pain, already trying to make sure they’re handling and containing it correctly.

They’ll be sitting across from me with tears welling in their eyes, their mind already several steps into a future they don’t actually know is coming. Maybe their partner is going on a date, or has simply expressed a desire that activates some old fear of being left behind, and before they’ve fully expressed what hurts, they’re already trying to put what they’re feeling into its proper place: I know this is my trigger. I really don’t want to be controlling.

There’s another layer underneath all of that, something closer to: I don’t want to be back here. They’ve worked hard to become more secure and trusting, and the return of an old fear can feel like evidence that they’re somehow moving backward, away from whatever state of “poly enlightenment” they thought they had finally reached.

I know this feeling intimately. I’ve struggled more with polyamory over the past several months than I have in years, as grief and loss have changed the emotional landscape I’m trying to practice it inside. Fears I thought I had long since metabolized have resurfaced, and there have been moments when I’ve caught myself thinking, with an annoying combination of frustration and shame, Really? We’re back here again?

But I keep trying to be compassionate with myself because I know that our capacity for holding the complexity of a non-monogamous relationship ecosystem isn’t static; what feels spacious and light when we are well-resourced may feel extra stretchy when we’re grieving, exhausted, lonely, overwhelmed, or otherwise carrying more than usual.

Many of us have worked hard to unlearn the idea that our discomfort should automatically determine what another person is allowed to do, to understand that jealousy isn’t necessarily evidence of wrongdoing, and to stop expecting our partners to protect us from every difficult feeling that non-monogamy might evoke. So when we suddenly need more reassurance, more closeness, or more help finding our footing, it can be surprisingly easy to interpret those needs as a problem, or to assume that if we were really secure or “good at poly,” we wouldn’t need so much from anyone else.

Yes we absolutely do want to own for our wounds and our big feelings. But growth and self-responsibility don’t necessarily mean that the frightened parts will stop showing up completely. And lately I’ve been wondering which part of us is speaking when we rush to qualify or contain what we’re feeling before we’ve even acknowledged what is alive within us, and what we might benefit from receiving from another person in those moments of fear, scarcity, or the urge to reach for control.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) has become one of my favorite frameworks for working with non-monogamy, in part because so many different parts of us can come online when we step outside the cultural map for how relationships are supposed to work. Of course one part of me can genuinely want freedom while another is scared shitless of what that freedom might cost me. Both get to be here.

IFS calls some of the parts that rush in when we’re scared protectors. They’ve usually gotten very good at whatever they learned might keep us away from pain, rejection, shame, abandonment, overwhelm. And, as I wrote about recently, they can get so urgent about protecting us that we hand them the keys and let them start making enormous relationship decisions.

And underneath all that protection are often more vulnerable parts that IFS calls exiles: parts carrying old pain, fear, shame, loneliness, or unmet attachment needs that our protectors have learned to stand guard around. Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS, sometimes describes these exiles as our “basement children,” an image I find painfully evocative: the young, vulnerable parts we’ve tucked away somewhere out of sight, still carrying their old fears and longings, still hoping someone will eventually come down the stairs and give them the care and nourishment that they’re so hungry for.

So when someone says some version of: I know this is mine to work through, sometimes I hear a protector trying very hard to manage the vulnerability of an exile underneath it. The exile may be carrying a much more tender fear: Please tell me you still love me. Please don’t leave me alone. Please remind me that I matter to you, while the protector, anticipating what might happen if that need is exposed, rushes in with its own instructions: Don’t be needy. Don’t burden them. Handle this yourself.

The protector may be trying to spare that vulnerable part the risk of needing something from someone else and not receiving it. But becoming more Self-led doesn’t mean teaching our exiles to stop needing care. We can learn to meet frightened parts with curiosity and compassion without pretending that everything we need as humans can be generated internally.

Sometimes what we want from them is incredibly simple and human:

Could you hold me for a minute?

Could we have some intentional time together before your date?

Of course, not every request for reassurance is necessarily helpful. Reassurance can help us settle enough to stay present with a difficult experience, and other times we start relying on another person to make our fear go away. So how do we tell the difference between asking someone to care for us while we’re activated and making them responsible for ending our activation for us?

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There are two reminders on the vision board I collaged back in January 2026 that now seem particularly relevant to this season I’m in:

One says Love again, lover, and the other says And begin again.

I keep thinking about the relationship between those two instructions.

My tender polyamorous heart has been broken more than once in the last few years; I wrote about tension between wanting more and accepting what is after one of those painful, confusing endings. And just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been holding a lot of grief around two relationships I was deeply invested in for the last year that have de-escalated. Both moved away from the direction I had once imagined for us, even as the love, care and friendship between us remains. I think that’s part of what has made these endings, or rather changes in form, so hard to metabolize… I’m grieving what I thought we were building together.

This is one of the things polyamory has given me: a lot of opportunities to experience loss without necessarily losing love. Because when we build a life around the possibility of multiple loves, and then allow ourselves to open up to deep connection with other humans, we are also building a life with multiple possibilities for grief. Sometimes we lose people entirely; sometimes we lose a particular form of relationship or a future we imagined living into, together.

Lately I’ve been feeling that the combination of all of that love and all of that grief has made my heart more resilient in some ways, because I’m still willing to let love affect me deeply even when it hurts. Each relationship has taught me something I perhaps could not have learned any other way. And through that process, I’ve accumulated evidence that I can survive the loss and grief that arises when important relationships change form.

The song Crack Me Open played through my speaker over the weekend, and there’s medicine for me in these lines:

Crack me wide open

Oh break, my heart in two

The depth of my love is only

The depth of my pain, I know

And I will not be ashamed

Of this heart that’s on my sleeve

I wear it with pride

I will not stop loving

No I will not run and hide

I will be true to my heart

And I will love again over over

Yes I’ll feel everything

These lyrics feel like a commitment I want to keep making to keep my heart open even after all the loss, and to let myself feel all of it. There is a way that grief and heartbreak actually expand my capacity to love by carving out space inside of me. And I think I’m also perhaps learning to love more wisely by getting better at distinguishing the difference between caring deeply for someone and actually being able to build something nourishing with them.

If love itself isn’t enough to tell us whether a relationship can thrive, what should we be paying attention to when deciding who to weave into our relationship constellations… and how deeply?

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For more than 13 years, I’ve been practicing various forms of non-monogamous relating, which has included consciously unlearning mono-normative beliefs and actively dismantling hierarchy within my own once-very heteronormative partnership

And the more I deconstruct, the more I feel like a humble beginner, looking at the pieces of this puzzle we were handed about how to be intimate with others, what it means to belong, and how we’re supposed to build family.

For a long time, I’ve been very clear about what I don’t want in my intimate relationships. I don’t want possessiveness. I don’t want outdated gender roles that automatically place me in the feminine role of caretaker or domestic laborer. I don’t want heterosexual expectations that funnel my attraction toward a single, exclusive mate for life.

Even the word non-monogamy defines what we’re doing by what it isn’t: Not monogamy.

But after all that dismantling, especially when we’re already feeling sideways from insecurity or jealousy or grief, it can be surprisingly easy to forget:

What are we actually trying to build?

Once we stop using traditional milestones to tell us what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like, we’re left with a much harder question:

How do we know what actually works for us?

The relationship escalator gives us a pretty clear set of instructions for what we’re supposed to do next: date, become exclusive, spend more time together, move in, get married, combine your lives. And those milestones come with meaning attached to them. Moving in means the relationship is getting more serious. Getting married means greater commitment. Building more independence, spending less time together, or moving into separate homes can easily be interpreted as evidence that the relationship is moving backwards or something has gone wrong.

Increasingly, I’ve been thinking about relationships a little more like a journalist (my first career), and one answer is that we run short-term, defined experiments and see what actually happens. Sometimes living through something tells us what thinking about it for six months simply can’t.

When there isn’t a map to follow, lived data is often much more useful than the nuclear-family blueprint we inherited. An experiment can be deeply intentional. It simply allows us to update some of our predictions (which is usually based on mono-normative, heteronormative programming that perhaps we haven’t even realized is in there) with actual, lived experience.

Instead of trying to decide whether we should live together forever, we might try living separately for a month and notice what happens. Instead of concluding that we need more independence, we might protect one evening a week for ourselves and see what changes. Instead of deciding that a particular aspect of non-monogamy is simply too activating, we might change one variable (like the pace, the amount of information we’re sharing, or the way we reconnect afterward) and pay attention to what our nervous systems do.

I think this becomes especially useful when we’re activated, because big feelings have a way of making us want to make big, permanent decisions just to make the discomfort stop.

We could also resist deciding anything yet and get curious about what we’re actually needing. We can change the conditions, pay attention, and see what we learn.

Part 2 of My Self-Partnership Sabbatical

This September, I’m running a new personal experiment of my own that’s very close to my heart. It’s another iteration of a change in housing that began earlier this year.

In April, I cleared some drawers in my bedroom, left home for the month, and invited my metamour to move into the home I share with my husband while I had some adventures of my own.

I was honestly delighted to let her pay my Bay Area rent for a month, and I had deep trust in the experiment because it had a clear start and end date. I knew home would still be waiting for me when I was ready to return.

I began thinking of that time away from the daily domestic closeness of my marriage as a self-partnership sabbatical: time and space to deepen my relationship with myself as the foundation for this increasingly complex polyamorous ecosystem I’m building, for which I have absolutely zero culturally sanctioned map.

When I stepped outside of that shared environment, though, my attention reorganized in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I began to notice how much living with someone for more than a decade shapes the texture of daily life. Cohabitating means negotiating meals and schedules and household responsibilities, accommodating each other’s preferences and moods and ways of moving through the world. There is real intimacy in letting two nervous systems influence each other every day in these small, ordinary ways.

But without my husband’s rhythms influencing mine every day, I could hear some of my own subtle preferences and desires more clearly.

What I came home wondering was less Who am I without him? and more:

What happens when I stop organizing so much of my daily life around my marriage and give myself more space to hear what I actually want?

That first experiment gave us all some data. And it left me with a new question (which I think is some of the best data an experiment can give us).

This fall, the three of us (my husband, his other partner, and I) are running another round of this resource-sharing experiment. The question I’m living in this time is:

What do I need to feel deeply resourced in this season of my life, and what becomes possible in my relationships when I give myself more of that?

I’m moving out for six weeks in September and October, bringing my fairly consistent neurotypical routines and schedules with me. My metamour (who has been in a nomadic phase herself) is moving back in with my husband so the two of them can sink into the experience a little longer and explore what a fully neurodivergent household feels like between them.

And yes: none of us have children at home with us, which makes this particular degree of experimentation, fluidity and collaboration considerably easier.

And as I get closer to packing up my car for 6 weeks, I keep having mixed feelings about the whole thing because the truth is, I like comfort and I dislike uncertainty.

I would be lying if I said I haven’t had moments when my adaptive child shows up and whispers that my husband is going to prefer living with his other partner, and that my home is about to disappear.

Tender stuff. Helpful to notice how the story changes when I’m well-resourced vs. when I’m not.

I also keep reminding myself that when we step away from the scripts we’re taught about relational security and commitment… it’s going to require some courage and discomfort.

When I’m in a grounded place, I am genuinely excited about the experiment and about where I’m going.

I’ve lost two family members in the last six months, and underneath everything else life has required of me, I’ve noticed a very simple craving:

I want to be with the river.

During my sabbatical in April, I spent three weeks in a bobinsana dieta, working with this Amazonian plant traditionally known as a heart-opening and dream ally. And the river kept coming to me in my dreams.

Again and again, it showed up as a symbol of queerness: fluid, alive, refusing a fixed shape.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

So this September, I am heading to the mountains with the intention of dating the Yuba River, and I mean that more literally than you might think.

I want to get to know her just like I would get to know a cute human I’m curious about by investing attention and energy. I want to sit on the warm rocks and feel the cool water on my skin. I want to listen.

I want some more space to work on my book manuscript, which has recently emerged from a dusty drawer. I want to spend less time looking at screens, and give grief enough quiet to move at whatever pace it needs to move.

So I figured out how to create some of that for myself.

That, to me, is part of what self-partnership means: cultivating enough trust in my relationship with myself that when some part of me says I need something, I’ll listen. I may not always be able to give myself exactly what I’m asking for, but I can take the desire seriously and get curious about how I might resource it.

And importantly, I’m not doing it alone: dear friends are making room for me, my husband and metamour are participating in the experiment, and a whole ecosystem of relationships, both platonic and NRE-laced, are making this possible.

💛 Fieldwork for the Heart: Let’s Run a Community Experiment

The more I’ve been thinking about my own September experiment, the more I’ve wondered what would happen if some of you ran one alongside me.

I’m not asking you to run the same kind of “move out of your house and let your metamour move in.” Don’t worry 😉

I’m imagining something much broader and personalized to you: a community laboratory for relational experimentation. Fieldwork for the Heart, if you will.

So I’m calling in my fellow relational explorers: anyone who has a question they’ve been turning over and over in their head and might be willing to spend a month actually living into it to see what happens.

What is a question about your non-monogamous relationships that you’ve been trying to answer by thinking about it? And what might happen if, instead, you designed a small, reversible experiment that could give you some actual information?

Your experiment doesn’t even need to involve a romantic partner. Maybe you spend September intentionally deepening a friendship, returning to a creative practice, getting to know your own body differently, or building a relationship with a particular place in the natural world.

Choose one small relational experiment to run this September, and share what you discover with us along the way.

Start with something you’re genuinely curious about and want to gather some first-person data about.

Before I did this work, I was a journalist, and I keep thinking about the different kinds of source material we used to gather. Sometimes you can research the hell out of a question from your desk by reading other people’s reports, digging through research, and listening to podcasts. And sometimes the source material simply doesn’t exist yet…and you have to go out into the world and collect it yourself.

That’s what we’re doing here: gathering some fresh source material from our own lives.

Or, in the words of Mary Oliver:

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

Here are a few questions you might borrow or adapt:

• What happens if I stop trying to solve my jealousy and get curious about what it’s protecting?

• What helps me stay connected to myself when someone I love is connecting with someone else?

• What happens if I ask directly for what I want instead of hinting and hoping?

• Can I let someone I love have feelings about my choices without immediately changing my choices to make those feelings go away?

• What happens if I give myself some time to regulate before responding when something activates me?

• What kinds of community make me feel genuinely held and resourced?

• What happens if I loosen one relationship story I’ve been treating as fixed?

• What would it look like to rest and resource myself before I reach my breaking point?

Turn your Question into a Reversible Experiment

1. Name your question. Would having a little more protected time that belongs only to me help me feel more connected to myself?
   

2. Make a hypothesis. I think having some time where I’m not expected to orient around any partner might make me feel less resentful and more available for connection.
   

3. Design the smallest experiment your actual life can support. Maybe that’s one evening a week. Maybe you have kids, caregiving responsibilities, multiple jobs, or limited resources and an entire evening is laughably impossible. Could it be twenty minutes after bedtime? A solo walk on Saturday morning while someone else takes the kids? One afternoon this month that you ask your community to help make possible?
   

4. Decide what you want to notice. Was it hard to protect the time? Did I feel guilty asking for it? What did I want once nobody needed anything from me? Did even twenty minutes change anything? Did I discover that what I actually need is more support?
   
   And remember: your constraints are data, too.

   If the experiment you want to run feels impossible because there isn’t enough time, money, childcare, community support, or capacity available to you, get curious about that, too. Many of us are trying to build expansive relational lives inside a culture that keeps us overworked and under-resourced.
   

   Maybe your experiment becomes asking for help, sharing resources differently, or rebuilding enough of a village around you that your romantic or sexual partners don’t have to carry quite so much.
   

5. Go live the experiment. Pay attention to what actually happens. Your feelings are data, and your partner’s response is data. The thing you thought you wanted and then discovered you absolutely do not want is excellent data. So is the experiment that turns out to be impractical, or the one you abandon halfway through because something else starts to feel more important.
   

6. Bring your field notes back to the community. I’ll open up our Substack chat to all subscribers—free and paid—to use as our little relational experiment HQ. We can compare notes, share what we’re learning, and hopefully help each other feel more resourced with courage and compassion when the uncertainty gets hard.

And if we get this experiment humming in the chat, maybe I’ll open up some Zoom space later this fall so we can gather live and compare what we’ve discovered. I need community right now, too, and I’d genuinely love some company in the field.

My hope isn’t that we come out of September knowing exactly what our relationships should look like. I hope we enter the next season knowing something about ourselves that we didn’t know before.

Maybe that’s how we learn to love without a map: we pay attention, try things, let ourselves be surprised, and allow what we discover to shape whatever comes next.

Fieldwork for the Heart: Claim Your Experiment in the Chat

What is one question about yourself or your relational ecosystem that you might want to explore through a short, contained experiment?

Come share and inspire others with what you’re curious to explore for yourself in these final days of summer.

Let’s see what new embodied wisdom we might harvest, together.

Join Us in The Chat

Have a question you want some help thinking through?

If you’re sitting with a particularly sticky relational question and want to feel accompanied as you figure out what to try, I’m also continuing an experiment of my own: paid Q&As.

Send me the question you can’t stop chewing on (about jealousy, agreements, attachment, pacing, a relationship that’s changing shape, a desire you don’t know what to do with, etc) and I’ll send you a thoughtful written response.

I started offering these somewhat experimentally myself, and the responses have made me want to keep going:

“I am floored by the length, detail, depth and care of the response I got. It has given me so much to think about and implement. I am so grateful!”
— Emily

Send me your question for $50 & I’ll send you a letter in return →

He’s convinced that if he sends a text, his partner will realize how much he’s hurting and they’ll cancel their date and come back and save him from this feeling that he’s about to get left behind.

Another proud, capable part of him prevents him from hitting send on a message. It feels too vulnerable. Don’t be needy, this part says. Play it cool.

But now that he’s home alone, the urgent part gets louder, and he feels a pressing sense that something needs to be resolved immediately. Which is one of the things about emotional flooding… it makes us feel certain that we know exactly what’s happening and what we need to do about it to make the feelings go away.

I know there have been moments in my own relationships when a part of me has been absolutely certain that if I could just change this one thing, I'd finally feel okay.

Sometimes that fear can get so big that waiting any longer feels almost impossible. We want relief and we want it now.

It can be really hard in the moment to separate what we actually need from the thing we’ve decided will finally make us feel better. We can get attached to the reassurance or the agreement that we think is going to make the feeling go away. But usually what we really need is to know: I still matter to you.

Learning to Get Comfortable with Uncertainty

Non-monogamy has a pretty predictable way of pushing on our biggest vulnerabilities and showing us the parts of ourselves we’ve perhaps tried to ignore or avoid. If we have an attachment wound that makes us feel unworthy or insufficient in some way, our culture has taught us to look to our partner to save us from that feeling. They’re supposed to be “the one” who completes us, after all. We hope their unconditional love will finally make it go away.

And non-monogamy complicates that fantasy because it asks us to tolerate a remarkable amount of uncertainty without many of the familiar scripts we grew up with (dating → marriage → growing old together). When we step off the relationship escalator, we don’t necessarily have a map telling us exactly where a relationship is going.

Most of us don’t do especially well with uncertainty to begin with. Then throw in NRE, jealousy, loops of comparison, or the fear of being left behind when someone we love starts bonding with someone new. Of course we can feel incredibly disoriented about where we stand. When we don’t know what’s going to happen, our brains start filling in the blanks and looking for some way to feel safer again.

And when that fear gets big enough, it can be really hard to care about our long-term values or what we said we wanted for our relationships when we were feeling grounded. We want the feeling to stop.

But often the intensity of the reaction doesn’t entirely belong to what’s happening today. The current situation has touched an old bruise, making the reaction feel much bigger than the stimulus.

This is where I’ve found it helpful to slow the whole thing down before making a decision about the relationship.

It takes conscious effort and practice, but if we’re able to pause, we may start to recognize: Oh. I know this voice.

And even that little bit of recognition can create some space between the fear and whatever we do next.

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One half of a couple is genuinely excited for their partner to start exploring. They encourage their partner to make a dating profile. They ask if they’ve matched with anyone, or messaged that person who they connected with yet. Maybe they tell them they hope they plan a date and have a wonderful time.

And then... nothing happens. Weeks go by, and the profile is still sitting there with no dates on the calendar.

There’s usually a perfectly reasonable explanation to wait a little longer: One more book that they want to read before they feel ready, or perhaps a busy season at work.

Eventually, a client put words to it so clearly that I began to understand the hesitation very differently:

“If I let myself fully receive this... what happens when I can’t give it back?”

I think this is where many people get stuck.

They assume the moment they receive this generosity, they'll suddenly have to become capable of offering the same freedom back.

And for many people, that’s when a fearful part gets really loud: What if I can never catch up? If I can’t offer you the same, will that change how you see me? Or worse: Because I can’t do this today, maybe I’ll never be able to. And maybe you’ll eventually leave because of that and find someone who can offer you what I can’t.

No wonder we hesitate. If we’re not in the same place as our partner, it’s easy to start believing we’re somehow falling behind.

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She smiled as she talked about it, sharing how they’d laughed and flirted for hours. Then she paused, and something in her expression shifted into a look of concern.

“I started getting really anxious on my drive home, rehearsing how I was going to tell my husband about it,” she admitted.

While she hadn’t broken any agreements, she knew that he struggled to hear about her dates. So on her drive, her attention quickly shifted from how lit up she felt, to trying to figure out how to tell him a more dampened version of her experience that would be a little bit easier for him to receive.

I've heard versions of this story from clients and friends for years. I've caught myself doing it too, trying to stay connected to my own experience while also calculating what someone else might feel when they hear about it.

Sometimes that might look like editing excitement before talking about an experience, or even changing behavior, like leaving a date early because a partner sounded anxious over text. Others sometimes decide not to pursue a connection at all because they can already imagine the heaviness of the conversation waiting at home.

The circumstances are always different, but the similarity is the way our attention shifts from being immersed in our own experience to anticipating someone else’s response: How is this going to land for them?

For many of us, there seems to be a surprising amount of relational suffering in that tiny internal move as we lose focus with our inner experience in the anticipation of re-orienting to someone else’s feelings.

Non-monogamy doesn’t create this pattern, but it can make it much more pronounced, especially when we’re anticipating a partner’s big emotional reaction when we connect romantically or sexually with someone else.

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“She was so positive through the whole journey. It’s a shining example of how attitude shapes reality.”

The sentence landed so deeply that I wrote it on the chalkboard in my hallway:

Attitude shapes reality.

I’ve been chewing on that line as I come and go.

The last six months have been a season of grief after losing two family members in a row, including my younger brother’s partner, who was in her thirties and felt like a sister to me.

There’s been a heaviness that has subtly changed the lens through which I’ve been connecting with the people around me. And on more than one occasion, the grief has felt like anger.

I noticed that unintentionally, I’ve become more critical of some of the people I love most.

The criticisms often felt true. Lately, I've found myself wondering what other ways of understanding my relationships might have been available to me if I hadn't been carrying the weight of so much grief.

Two nights ago, I was sitting in a room of mostly strangers in Oakland when the song leader, Ríomas, began singing the same line over and over...

What if it doesn’t mean what you think it means?

By the third repetition, I could feel something in me soften.

A particular relationship came immediately to mind. And I realized I'd become so convinced of one story about them that I'd stopped experiencing it as a story at all.

The Meaning We’re So Quick to Make

Humans aren’t passive observers of our lives. We’re meaning-making creatures, constantly trying to make sense of what’s happening around us. The strange thing is that we usually experience the event and the meaning we make of it as though they’re the same thing. By the time we notice we’re hurt, afraid, or angry, the interpretation has often already happened.

I’m beginning to think that’s partly because uncertainty is so uncomfortable for the human nervous system. We don’t just want meaning; we want orientation. We want to know what world we’re living in and what we’re supposed to do next. So when something ambiguous happens, our minds often settle on the first coherent explanation they can organize themselves around—not necessarily because it’s true, but because certainty is easier to inhabit than not knowing.

And I’m beginning to think the real work of non-monogamy is expanding our capacity to remain inside uncertainty just a little longer before deciding what something means.

Which is why that lyric landed so hard.

What if it doesn’t mean what you think it means?

I can’t think of many questions that would spare people more unnecessary suffering in non-monogamy.

With non-monogamy, a delayed text can become a story that they’re losing interest.

A partner’s excitement about someone new becomes I’m being replaced.

Jealousy becomes Maybe I’m just not cut out for non-monogamy.

Those conclusions can feel immediate because there is usually a protective intelligence behind them—some part of us trying to take an uncertain experience and turn it into something we know how to respond to.

If they’re losing interest, I can pursue them.

If I’m being replaced, I can prepare myself.

If I’m fundamentally too jealous for this, I can stop trying and protect myself from the vulnerability of not knowing whether things might eventually become easier.

Our nervous system isn’t only trying to understand what’s happening. It’s trying to decide what action will keep us safest.

What happened?

What does it mean?

What should I do?

Pursue.

Withdraw.

Prepare.

Protect.

The story may hurt, but it gives the nervous system a plan.

There is almost always an invisible sentence between what happened and how we feel:

...which means...

Your partner is distracted...which means they’re losing interest.

They cancel plans...which means I’m not important.

They fall in love with someone else...which means I’m being replaced.

We rarely notice ourselves filling in that blank. A protective part does it for us, often drawing from whatever explanation has helped it anticipate pain before. By the time we’re reacting, we’re no longer responding only to what happened—we’re responding to the meaning we’ve made of it.

When Stories Become Identities

One of the stories I hear most often in my coaching practice is surprisingly simple:

I’m a jealous person.

People usually say it with complete certainty—not as a description of what they’re experiencing today, or even what they’ve experienced in several relationships, but as a statement about who they are.

I’ve come to think that this subtle shift—from I feel jealous to I am a jealous person—matters more than we realize, because once a feeling becomes an identity, change becomes much harder. If jealousy is who I am, then perhaps every jealous reaction is simply proof that I was right about myself.

It’s helpful to remember that emotions are visitors.

They arise in response to particular people, histories, environments, hormones, agreements, ruptures, nervous-system states, unmet needs, and unexpected loss. They intensify. They recede. They sometimes return in a form we recognize and sometimes surprise us by not returning at all.

Identity feels more fixed.

When we turn a temporary—or even frequently recurring—experience into a permanent description of ourselves, we unknowingly narrow what we believe is possible.

The goal isn’t to eliminate jealousy or pretend it carries no useful information. Sometimes jealousy points toward a need, a desire, an agreement that no longer works, or a relationship in which we genuinely do not feel secure.

The invitation is simply to loosen our attachment to the idea that jealousy tells us who we are.

I’m experiencing a lot of jealousy right now.

Notice how different that feels from:

I’m a jealous person.

The first leaves room for context, curiosity, and movement.

The second quietly predicts your future.

I think this is part of what Buddhist psychology is pointing toward when it asks us to observe thoughts and emotions without confusing them for a permanent self—not because the experience isn’t real, but because our attachment to this is who I am often creates a second layer of suffering around something that was already difficult.

No emotional state is an identity… It’s an experience.

And experiences, by their nature, are capable of changing—even when we don’t yet know how, or when, or what might help them change.

What if it doesn’t mean what you think it means?

What if jealousy doesn’t mean you’re incapable of non-monogamy?

What if anxiety doesn’t mean your relationship is doomed?

What if this moment is real and painful without being a prophecy about who you’ll always be?

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They spend far less time considering what will happen within themselves.

Yet after working with hundreds of people navigating consensual non-monogamy, polyamory and open relationships, I’ve come to believe that’s where the deepest work begins.

The hardest part of non-monogamy is rarely learning how to communicate with your partners.

It’s learning how to stay connected to yourself while everything familiar becomes a little less certain.

Because most of the challenges people encounter aren’t actually about sex, dating, or agreements.

They’re about uncertainty, attachment, and developing enough self-trust that you can remain grounded while navigating relationships that don’t follow familiar cultural scripts.

Here are the five mistakes I see most often:

Mistake #1: Thinking non-monogamy is primarily a communication challenge.

Most people assume the skills they’ll need are:

• communication

• scheduling

• agreements

• boundary setting

Those things matter.

But what often catches people off guard is that non-monogamy is also a nervous system practice.

Sooner or later you’ll most likely experience:

• uncertainty

• comparison

• asymmetry

• longing

• disappointment

• fear of missing out

• fear of being replaced

What matters most is cultivating the capacity to stay grounded, connected, and intentional when these experiences arise.

I’ve seen couples with mediocre agreements navigate non-monogamy beautifully because they knew how to regulate, repair, and stay curious.

I’ve also seen couples with meticulously negotiated agreements collapse under the weight of activation because they expected agreements to eliminate difficult emotions.

One of the biggest shifts people experience is realizing that communication problems are often nervous system problems.

By the time a difficult conversation begins, one or both nervous systems have often already moved into protection. The words matter, of course, but they are arriving inside bodies that are bracing, defending, withdrawing, or scanning for danger.

Non-monogamy invites us to develop communication skills, certainly. But it also asks us to strengthen our capacity for self-awareness, nervous system regulation, and repair. It asks us to slow down to remain connected to ourselves, our values, and the people we love—even when things feel unfamiliar, uncertain, or emotionally charged.

Reflection Question:

How do I typically respond when I feel scared, left out, uncertain, or overwhelmed?

Want to go deeper?

If you’re realizing that conflict tends to begin in your nervous system long before it reaches your words, my workshop Understanding Your Trigger Signature & Repairing Relational Ruptures walks you through how to recognize your unique patterns of activation and return to connection more quickly.

If communication itself feels like the bigger challenge, How to Ask for What You Need Without Sounding Demanding or “Too Much” offers a practical framework for expressing needs without over explaining, apologizing, or abandoning yourself.

Mistake #2: Confusing activation with information.

This may be one of the most important skills in all of non-monogamy.

Imagine your partner goes on a date and you notice a familiar tightness in your chest. Maybe your mind immediately starts constructing a future in which you're being replaced.

“They’re going to leave me.”

“I’m being replaced.”

“Maybe this relationship isn’t going to survive this.”

What I’ve noticed, both in my own life and in my client work, is that the suffering often comes less from the initial feeling and more from the meaning we immediately attach to it.

A moment of jealousy becomes evidence of loss.

A wave of fear becomes evidence that the relationship is unsafe.

A feeling of sadness becomes evidence that non-monogamy isn’t working.

The nervous system experiences something uncomfortable and the mind rushes in to explain it.

Most suffering comes from the speed with which the mind converts jealousy into certainty.

And it’s important to remember that feelings, interpretations, and facts are not all the same thing.

One concept I teach often comes from Internal Family Systems.

When we’re activated, a protector has quietly taken the microphone.

(If this idea is new to you, I explore it in much more depth in my essay: When Protective Parts Take the Wheel: IFS Firefighters, Attachment, and the Nervous System in Non-Monogamous Relationships.)

Protectors are beautifully intelligent. Their job is to anticipate danger and keep us safe. But they aren’t always designed to perceive the present accurately. They often organize around past experiences of abandonment, betrayal, heartbreak or rejection.

One of the deepest skills in non-monogamy is learning to notice when a protector has taken over—and giving your wiser Adult Self enough time to gather more information before acting.

Instead of immediately asking, “What does this mean?”

Try asking:

• What am I actually feeling right now?

• What story am I telling myself?

• What are a few other explanations that could also be true?

You don’t need to believe the alternative explanations.

The goal is simply to remember that your first interpretation—especially when you’re scared or activated—may not be an accurate interpretation.

A partner can be excited about someone new and still deeply love you.

A relationship can be changing without falling apart.

A difficult emotion can be present without signaling that something is wrong.

Learning to hold multiple possibilities at once doesn’t eliminate difficult feelings.

It simply prevents us from turning every fear into a conclusion.

Want to go deeper?

If this pattern feels familiar, I created an entire self-paced workshop called How to Stop Interpreting Your Insecurities as Evidence in Non-Monogamy. It includes the 4-Part Spiral Practice I teach clients to help separate bodily sensations from the stories our minds instinctively create.

Mistake #3: Making one person responsible for your entire sense of belonging.

Monogamy often encourages us to organize our lives around a single primary relationship. Non-monogamy tends to reveal just how much weight we’ve placed on one person.

If your partner is currently your primary source of:

• companionship

• emotional support

• social connection

• sexual fulfillment

• adventure

• novelty

• entertainment

Then of course their absence is going to feel enormous.

So before adding more romantic relationships, consider adding more life.

Take a class. Join a climbing gym. Start a book club. Reconnect with friends. Volunteer. Invest in community.

Cultivate interests that belong entirely to you.

The goal is not to become emotionally independent or stop needing each other. Humans are wired for connection.

The goal is to create a life that remains meaningful, nourishing, and connected whether your partner is home on Friday night or not.

I’ve found that what people often identify as jealousy is sometimes something else entirely. Sometimes it’s loneliness. Sometimes it’s boredom. Sometimes it’s grief that a world which once felt expansive has quietly narrowed around a single relationship.

And sometimes what feels like abandonment is the realization that one person has become responsible for meeting nearly all of our social, emotional, and recreational needs.

Opening a relationship tends to go more smoothly when we have multiple sources of connection, purpose, joy, and belonging. Healthy non-monogamy often asks us not only to expand our capacity for our partner’s freedom, but to expand our own lives as well.

Reflection Questions:

• Where do I experience belonging outside of my romantic relationships?

• If my partner started spending one evening a week with someone else tomorrow, what would I genuinely look forward to doing with that time? (And if the answer is "wait for them to come home," that’s useful information. It may be an invitation to invest more intentionally in friendships, community, hobbies, passions, or parts of yourself that have been waiting for a little more space and attention.)

Mistake #4: Trying to solve uncertainty instead of increasing your capacity for it.

One of the great paradoxes of non-monogamy is that people often respond to uncertainty by trying to negotiate it away. Most newcomers to non-monogamy spend an enormous amount of energy searching for certainty through more agreements, reassurance, information, guarantees.

Sometimes those conversations are important. But sometimes they’re an attempt to escape a feeling rather than solve a problem.

When we love people who are free to make their own choices, uncertainty inevitably becomes part of the landscape. Being in relationship with autonomous human beings means accepting that we cannot fully predict, control, or guarantee what comes next.

Eventually every couple reaches a place where no agreement can answer the question they’re really asking.

Can I trust myself if something difficult happens?

You will never be able to completely eliminate the possibility of change, loss, disappointment, or surprise.

The people who thrive are often the ones who have developed the greatest capacity to remain grounded when certainty isn’t available.

The opposite of control isn’t chaos.

It’s self-trust.

The work becomes less about controlling outcomes and more about trusting your ability to meet whatever emerges with honesty, flexibility, and care.

Want to go deeper?

Much of our need for certainty isn’t actually about our current partner—it’s about old relational conditioning asking to feel safe again.

If you’re curious about where those expectations came from, my workshop Rewiring Love: Deconstructing Possessive Conditioning for Secure, Conscious Non-Monogamy explores the inherited beliefs many of us carry about exclusivity, love, and security.

Mistake #5: Defining success by expansion instead of integrity.

Many people unconsciously define success in non-monogamy as:

• more freedom

• more partners

• more dates

• more opportunities

• fewer difficult emotions

But after years of doing this work, I don’t think that’s what success looks like.

I’ve met people with multiple partners and very little peace.

I’ve met people with one deeply nourishing relationship and tremendous freedom.

What seems to matter most is not how much you’re able to hold.

It’s how honestly you’re able to hold it.

Can you tell the truth about your desires?

Can you take responsibility for your choices?

Can you stay connected to yourself while remaining connected to others?

Can you communicate your limits?

Can you make agreements you can keep?

(One practice I recommend is regularly revisiting your agreements before conflict arises. I put together 100 Questions to Find and Create Healthy Non-Monogamous Boundaries & Agreements to help couples have those conversations before they’re emotionally activated.)

In my experience, the people who thrive in non-monogamy have learned to meet uncertainty, jealousy, and difficulty with integrity.

They tell the truth about what they’re feeling without making those feelings someone else’s responsibility. They honor their limits without abandoning their values. They repair when they cause harm. They remain curious when certainty would be easier. And when fear inevitably arrives, they don’t ask, “How do I make this feeling disappear?” They ask, “Who do I want to be while I move through it?”

What All of These Mistakes Have in Common

Perhaps that’s what all five of these mistakes have in common.

None of them are really about becoming better at non-monogamy.

They’re about becoming better at being with yourself.

Learning to notice your stories before believing them.

Expanding your life instead of shrinking your partner’s.

Trusting your capacity more than your certainty.

Returning, again and again, to your wiser Adult Self instead of allowing your protectors to decide what happens next.

Because relationships can never promise that nothing painful will happen.

They can only offer endless opportunities to practice meeting life—and each other—with honesty, courage, curiosity, and care.

Maybe that’s what freedom really is.

Not the number of people we’re allowed to love.

But the integrity with which we love them.

Reflection Question:
What would it look like to measure success by honesty, self-trust, and alignment rather than by how much freedom or expansion I can tolerate?

Join the Conversation

If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice before opening your relationship, what would it be?

And if you’re still considering non-monogamy, what’s the biggest uncertainty you’re carrying?

Share your answer below. One of my favorite parts of this community is watching people realize they’re far less alone than they imagined.

He changes his jeans, styles his hair, puts on the jacket she forgot he even owned.

He checks himself in the mirror one last time with a slight smile before walking out the bedroom door.

For a moment, she just watches him.

Then a painful thought arrives.

I can’t remember the last time he got dressed up like that for me.

The Kind of Grief That Looks Like Jealousy

When we talk about jealousy in non-monogamy, the conversation usually centers around fear—fear of being replaced, abandoned, or loved less.

Those fears are real.

But over the years, I’ve become increasingly interested in another kind of jealousy that tends to emerge much later in long-term relationships.

It often begins with a moment like this.

Noticing your partner come alive in ways you haven't experienced together in a very long time.

At first, many people assume what they’re feeling is simple comparison.

Of course they’re more exciting, they tell themselves. Everything is new.

They remind themselves that New Relationship Energy is temporary. They don’t want to become the partner who asks someone they love to shrink their joy or apologize for feeling alive.

And yet...

The grief doesn’t go away.

Because underneath the comparison is often a grief-filled question like:

Is this version of our relationship all that’s left for us?

Long-term relationships often evolve so gradually that most of us adapt as they’re changing.

Flirtation gives way to familiarity. Planning gives way to routine. Conversations become more practical because life becomes fuller. Careers grow, children arrive, parents age, responsibilities multiply. Before anyone consciously chooses it, the relationship becomes increasingly organized around keeping life running.

Then something interrupts that slow adaptation.

A partner who has seemed emotionally depleted for months suddenly has endless energy for long conversations. The person who always insisted they were “just bad at remembering things” recalls an offhand comment a new partner made weeks earlier. Someone who rarely plans dates spends an afternoon researching the perfect one.

What hurts in those moments isn’t simply seeing your partner experience New Relationship Energy.

It’s realizing that capacities you had quietly stopped believing were available to your relationship are still very much alive.

Suddenly the story you’ve been telling yourself begins to wobble.

Maybe they aren’t actually too tired to plan dates.

Maybe they aren’t just bad at remembering details.

Maybe they are still capable of curiosity, anticipation, and pursuit.

Maybe we both quietly adapted.

Which leaves you holding a much more painful question.

If those parts of them still exist... why have they disappeared from our relationship?

It’s tempting to tell yourself the answer is simply New Relationship Energy.

Sometimes it is.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

Read more

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat with a couple where one partner says, ‘It was just coffee,’ and the other looks completely shattered.

The person sharing is confused.

The person receiving the news feels blindsided and overwhelmed. Sometimes they're crying.

Neither of them understands how they ended up in such different realities.

More often than not, the answer has very little to do with the coffee date itself.

Imagine Yasmin (she/her) is in a committed, nesting relationship with Wren (they/them). They've been practicing non-monogamy for several years and both support one another dating independently.

A few weeks ago, Yasmin met Savannah (she/they), who she thought was cute, interesting, fun to talk to. Meeting this new person didn’t seem important enough to mention to Wren.

A few days later, Yasmin realizes she’s still thinking about Savannah. She wonders what this person is like outside the context where they met. Maybe Yasmin looks them up on social media. Eventually they’re messaging. The conversation is flowing. She finds herself increasingly curious about where the connection might lead.

Still, she doesn’t bring it up.

Partly because she doesn’t know whether the interest is mutual. Partly because she’s still figuring out if she wants to pursue something with Savannah. But mostly because she’s not yet convinced there’s anything important to share with Wren yet.

Then one day, Savannah asks Yasmin if she’d like to get coffee.

Yasmin says yes.

And when she finally mentions it to Wren, it feels like a relatively small disclosure.

“It’s just coffee.”

But from Wren’s perspective, they’re hearing about the attraction, the curiosity, the messaging, the growing interest, and the upcoming date all at the same time. They feel blindsided, even when no agreements have been broken.

What feels like a small update to Yasmin feels like a fully formed story to Wren.

Many people in non-monogamy aren't actually struggling with attraction itself. They're struggling with informational asymmetry: one person has been living with a developing story for weeks while the other is encountering the entire story all at once. Often the rupture isn't the crush. It's the difference in timelines.

I’ve had moments in my own relationships where I delayed sharing an attraction because I didn’t want to create anxiety over something that might amount to nothing.

What I’ve learned is that by the time I finally shared, I had often already had weeks to orient to the experience, while partner was encountering it for the very first time.

Why We Wait

Just because someone has agreed to practice non-monogamy doesn’t mean they’ve learned how to talk openly about attraction to other people.

Monogamous culture trains us to conceal attraction. Most of us have very little practice saying things like:

“I think I might have a crush.”

“I’m curious about someone.”

“I find myself wanting to get to know them.”

Those conversations can bring up guilt, shame, fear of hurting someone we love, or fear of creating unnecessary anxiety.

So people wait.

The logic usually sounds reasonable:

“I don’t even know if this is real yet.”

“What if nothing comes of it?”

“Why bring it up if I don’t know whether they like me back?”

“I’ll tell my partner once I know more.”

Most people are genuinely trying to be considerate. They’re hoping to spare their partner unnecessary worry. What they are often surprised to discover is that waiting makes the eventual conversation feel larger, faster, and harder to absorb.

Sometimes waiting is about protecting ourselves from having to tolerate our partner’s feelings while we’re still making sense of our own.

The challenge in non-monogamy isn’t deciding whether attraction should be private or public.

It’s learning how to remain transparent before we have certainty.

Most of us want to wait until we understand what we’re feeling.

Our partners often want to be included while we’re still figuring it out. The longer we wait for clarity, the more compressed the eventual disclosure becomes.

Most people believe waiting protects their partner.

In my experience, waiting often makes these conversations much harder to navigate.

Because nervous systems tend to struggle far more with compressed information than gradual inclusion.

Read more

Join Us Online

In Part 1 of this series, I explored the experience of the partner who reaches for closeness when fear activates. This time, we return to the exact same conversation from the perspective of the partner who reaches for space when emotional intensity rises.

Jules had been excited about the upcoming second date until Micah started crying. Almost immediately, Jules felt the excitement leave their body. Their chest tightened. Their eyes moved toward the door.

The date no longer felt exciting. It felt expensive.

Suddenly, Jules wasn’t thinking about what they wanted anymore.

How hurt was Micah? How much reassurance would he need? Would this become another long conversation? Would they eventually decide the date wasn’t worth the impact it was having? Would wanting more relational freedom always come with this much pain?

Their attention shifted almost immediately away from desire and toward impact—anticipating consequences, managing Micah’s emotional experience, and figuring out what wanting more freedom might now cost.

And beneath all of that, Jules began to feel the growing fear that they didn’t know if it was possible to have the life and open relationship they wanted without hurting the person they love most.

When There Doesn’t Seem To Be Room For Desire, Too

One of the biggest misunderstandings I see in open relationships is the assumption that the person who pulls back when their partner becomes distressed cares less or is somehow less affected by what’s happening.

In reality, many people who instinctively need space when big feelings arise—like Jules did when Micah had a painful reaction to the disclosure—care deeply about their relationships. They value intimacy, commitment, and emotional closeness just as much as their partners do. What they struggle with is staying connected to someone else’s pain while remaining connected to themselves.

Sometimes what gets labeled as emotional unavailability is actually profound overwhelm in the presence of another person’s distress.

For some people, needing space became an important survival strategy long before they ever opened a relationship. Perhaps other people’s emotions consistently took over the room. Perhaps conflict felt inescapable. Perhaps closeness became associated with responsibility, obligation, or losing access to their own internal experience.

Over time, someone else’s pain may have come to feel like something that needed to be managed, fixed, or escaped rather than simply witnessed.

Seen through this lens, taking space is often less about avoiding connection and more about trying to preserve a connection to oneself.

Needing space is not the same thing as being avoidant. Wanting room for your own desires does not make you selfish. And caring deeply about someone else’s pain does not mean you are responsible for making it disappear.

When Freedom Stops Feeling Free

In relationships where one person’s safety strategy is closeness, the other person can sometimes begin to feel as though there is less and less room for their own desires because so much energy becomes devoted to helping their partner feel emotionally secure.

Many people who love deeply but become overwhelmed by emotional intensity find themselves spending hours processing conversations, explaining their intentions, clarifying what they meant, offering reassurance, softening impact, anticipating reactions before they happen, or carefully filtering how they share their desires in order to avoid creating more distress. And while much of this behavior comes from genuine care, after a while, something subtle can begin to happen.

The internal question gradually changes from:

What do I want?

to:

What will create the least amount of disruption?

One of the paradoxes of non-monogamy is that people often open a relationship in pursuit of greater freedom, only to discover that they are spending more and more of their energy managing the impact that freedom has on someone they love.

Will this lead to another difficult conversation?

Will it create more anxiety?

Will someone end up feeling hurt, rejected, or destabilized?

And eventually:

Is it even worth bringing up?

Especially in the early stages of opening a relationship, when nervous system activation is high, many people begin bringing less and less of themselves forward. They stop sharing certain desires, curiosities, hopes, or possibilities—not because those parts disappear, but because each new desire begins to feel like it carries an emotional price tag.

When Safety Strategies Collide

One of the most painful ironies in non-monogamy is that the very strategies people use to create safety can unintentionally intensify their partner’s deepest fear.

The person who fears abandonment often reaches for more closeness in order to restore connection. They want reassurance that they are still chosen, still important, still securely held inside the relationship even as their partner’s world expands.

The person who fears losing themselves often reaches for more space in order to restore freedom and reconnect with their own internal experience.

And without realizing it, both people can end up creating exactly what the other person fears most.

The more urgently one person reaches for closeness, reassurance, certainty, or emotional contact, the more pressure their partner may begin to experience.

The more the other person withdraws in an attempt to find room to breathe, the more alone and emotionally untethered their partner can feel.

And so the cycle intensifies.

Read more

I’ve been openly bisexual for years. I write and coach about polyamory for a living. I spend my days talking with people about love, desire, identity, and the courage it takes to build relationships outside the scripts we’ve inherited. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where most of my friends are queer and polyamorous, where rainbow flags hang from storefronts year-round, and nobody thinks twice when I mention a girlfriend.

And yet this spring, standing beside a lake in Guatemala on my first international trip with a partner of the same gender, I realized there were still parts of me quietly living in the closet.

Not the obvious kind. Not the kind built from denial. The subtler kind. The kind that lives in the body. The kind that only reveals itself when you leave the places where you’ve learned to feel safe.

Why did walking through Guatemala with a girlfriend feel more vulnerable than telling someone I have multiple partners?

I don’t have a complete answer. Part of it, I suspect, is visibility. Most people don’t know I’m non-monogamous unless I tell them. But queerness can become visible in an instant.

For my birthday in April, my girlfriend and I spent nearly two weeks exploring Antigua and Lake Atitlán.

The lake itself felt almost mythological. Three volcanoes rose from the water. Every afternoon strong winds called the Xocomil swept across the surface, rattling the trees and sending clouds drifting across the mountains. Mornings unfolded quietly. Coffee in hammocks. Bare feet against cool stone floors. Birds moving through the banana trees. Yoga mats rolled out side by side overlooking the lake. Some days we wandered textile markets. Other days we paddled canoes along the shoreline or hiked through the mountains to a waterfall with a local Mayan guide named Cheyo.

Something in me softened there.

Not all at once.

Gradually.

Like sediment settling after water has been disturbed.

My girlfriend had brought her flute, and some afternoons she would sit beside the lake and play while the wind carried the notes away. We cooked together in the outdoor kitchen. Harvested herbs from the gardens. One afternoon we joined a sweaty outdoor ecstatic dance party, moving barefoot alongside travelers from around the world as an incredible DJ spun beneath the trees. We laughed. We danced. We were wonderfully silly together. Around her, I kept meeting versions of myself that felt harder to access inside my ordinary life. More playful. Less defended. Less organized around responsibility and caretaking.

I had spent years thinking about relationships mostly in terms of compatibility or commitment.

Traveling with her made me wonder about something different.

Who do I become in her presence?

What parts of me come alive here?

What parts finally get to rest?

The trip felt expansive.

Part of what made it so meaningful was that I had spent the previous year getting honest about how much I wanted something like this.

The summer before, after my nesting partner traveled to Jamaica with his other partner, I wrote an essay about envy in polyamory. What I eventually realized was that beneath the envy lived a clear desire: a partner with enough spaciousness for adventure, quality time, and the kind of shared experiences that allow a relationship to deepen.

Naming that desire changed something.

It helped me stop focusing on what was missing and start paying attention to what I was genuinely seeking.

Now, less than a year later, I was bouncing across the lake in a boat and flying down dirt roads in tuk-tuks with a woman who had enthusiastically said yes to building this adventure with me.

In many ways, I was living inside the very thing my envy had been pointing toward.

Which made what happened next all the more surprising.

I froze in public in small, automatic ways. Reactions that were so immediate and familiar, they were almost imperceptible enough to miss at first.

Sometimes I’d reach instinctively for her hand while we were walking and stop halfway there. Sometimes I lowered my voice when conversations drifted toward intimacy. Sometimes I found myself scanning restaurants or public spaces before fully relaxing beside her.

Nothing had happened. Nobody had said anything. And yet I kept noticing these tiny moments of hesitation and faint calculations happening beneath conscious awareness. My body was behaving as though there was something to monitor before I could fully let my guard down.

At first I couldn’t understand it. I had been dating women for years by then. I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t confused. I wasn’t trying to hide. At least that’s what I thought.

Guatemala itself did not feel overtly unsafe, yet I kept trying to reason my way out of it. Maybe I was being cautious in an unfamiliar environment. Maybe I was overthinking things. Maybe I was imagining it.

Then it dawned on me that I’d grown accustomed to moving through environments like San Francisco and New York, where being queer rarely drew attention. My body noticed the difference the moment that changed.

The truth is, there’s a difference between being out and feeling safe. And there is also a difference between feeling safe and feeling free.

I think I had unconsciously mistaken the relative safety of the Bay Area for complete freedom.

But freedom is not just believing something intellectually. It’s the moment your body begins to trust what your mind already knows. The moment you stop constantly monitoring how others might respond or shrinking when your truth becomes visible.

Toward the end of the trip, my girlfriend and I became unexpectedly close with two other solo female travelers staying at our retreat center, one from Germany and the other from the UK. We hiked together, shared meals, listened to stories around the fire at night, and eventually participated together in a cacao ceremony and a traditional Mayan sweat lodge.

By the time we entered the Tuj, it felt as though we knew one another in a way that usually takes much longer.

The experience was beautiful. We prayed together. Sweated in the dark. Spoke about what we were releasing and what we hoped to call into our lives.

There is something about ritual that dissolves social distance.

For days, we had been slowly exchanging pieces of ourselves. Stories about divorce and reinvention. Family histories. Grief. Loneliness. Love. The ways life had surprised us. The ways it had broken us open.

We had cooked together, hiked together, laughed together, and sat in silence together.

The usual social scripts had softened.

By the end of the ceremony, these women no longer felt like strangers.

Which is why what happened next surprised me.

Wrapped in towels and still dripping from the cold plunge, one of the women looked at us and asked casually:

“So how do you two know each other, anyway?”

The question was innocent. But I felt my entire body hesitate. I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. It felt like there was so much to say, I didn’t even know where to begin.

My girlfriend glanced toward me and answered for us. “We’re dating.”

Both women looked genuinely surprised.

I felt myself tighten, waiting for their reaction.

“Oh!” one woman said with a laugh. “I had no idea:”

Then she smiled and added:

“You hid it well.”

A moment later she asked, gently:

“Did you mean to hide it?”

That question has stayed with me ever since. Because I didn’t know the answer. We hadn’t set out to hide anything. And yet I couldn’t dismiss the question.

I thought about the times I’d held back my affection. The assumptions I’d allowed people to make. The inconspicuous calculations happening beneath my awareness whenever visibility became a possibility.

None of it felt intentional, but it did feel familiar. Like an old reflex I hadn’t realized I was still carrying. In IFS language, I might call it a manager part—a protective aspect of myself that had learned long ago to monitor the environment, anticipate risk, and adjust accordingly.

This part had spent years trying to keep me safe, driven by care and a desire to prevent rejection before it happened. To assess the room before relaxing fully. To make sure it was safe before becoming visible because, somewhere along the way, living in a heteronormative society, it had learned that visibility sometimes carries consequences.

And to be fair, that lesson isn’t entirely wrong. For many queer people, caution is not pathology. It’s wisdom. There are still places in the world where visibility can come with real social, professional, familial, or physical risks.

What I was noticing wasn’t that this protective part existed. It was that it seemed to be operating automatically, even in moments when I wanted more choice.

The more I sat with it, the more compassion I felt. This wasn’t some flaw I needed to overcome. It was the lingering echo of an adaptation that had worked well enough to keep me safe in another time and place. An old protective measure that my body hadn’t fully realized could be consulted rather than obeyed automatically.

I suddenly found myself wanting to explain everything to our new international friends. That we had been moving fluidly between friendship and dating for more than a year before we settled into an official “girlfriends” label. That we both lived with men. That we were polyamorous. That this relationship was real even if it didn’t fit neatly into the categories people expected. That we were still learning the shape of what we were becoming together.

More than anything, I realized I wanted to be known. I just hadn’t realized how much of me was still waiting for permission or evidence that it was safe.

The irony, of course, is that the warmth of their acceptance and curiosity was immediate.

“How cool.”

Then questions.

Nothing terrible happened. No rejection. No judgment.

And yet that moment revealed something I hadn’t been able to see before.

The closet doesn’t always look like secrecy.

Sometimes it looks like self-protection. Sometimes it looks like waiting for proof that you’ll be accepted before revealing yourself. Sometimes it looks like letting people make assumptions because correcting them feels vulnerable. Sometimes it looks like quietly withholding the parts that feel most exposed.

What surprised me most was realizing that I had confused being out with being finished. In Guatemala, I realized there were still places where my body felt less free than my beliefs.

Not because I was ashamed. Not because I wanted to hide. But because visibility asks something different of us.

It asks us to be seen.

What Pride Means to Me This Year 🌈

This Pride Month, I’m thinking less about the first time I came out and more about all the ways I’m still learning to.

The places where shame is gone but caution remains. The places where I feel proud in theory but hesitant in practice. The places where my nervous system still hasn’t fully caught up to what my heart already knows.

One of the things I love most about Pride Month is that it reminds me how many assumptions we absorb before we’re old enough to question them.

Many queer people grow up assuming they’re straight. Not because they’ve carefully examined every possibility. Because it’s the default. The water we’re swimming in.

Relationships often work the same way.

We inherit scripts about love, commitment, marriage, family, and belonging long before we’re old enough to decide whether they fit.

And for some of us, adulthood becomes the process of questioning those scripts.

Not just once. Again and again.

People often ask me whether queerness and polyamory are connected.

The answer is both yes and no.

No, because plenty of queer people are monogamous and plenty of polyamorous people are straight.

But yes, because both have asked me to practice the same thing: Trusting my own experience more than the stories I inherited about who I was supposed to be.

The courage to tolerate uncertainty. The courage to withstand misunderstanding. The courage to disappoint people who wish I had made different choices. The courage to keep moving toward what feels true even when there isn’t a clear map.

Maybe that’s what Pride celebrates.

Not certainty. Not arrival. Not the fantasy that one day we’ll finally be done becoming ourselves.

Maybe Pride is the willingness to keep stepping out of every closet we encounter.

The ones built by culture. The ones built by fear. The ones built by habit. The ones we’ve forgotten we’re still living inside.

And to trust that on the other side of visibility there may be exactly what I found beside that lake in Guatemala: Not rejection. Not judgment. Just the possibility of being known.

Looking for Open Community & A Place to Be More Fully Known?

One of the quiet challenges of exploring non-monogamy is that many of us don’t have many places where we can talk openly about the questions we’re exploring, the challenges we’re facing, or who we’re becoming.

On July 6 at 5pm PST, I’m hosting a free online community meet & greet in honor of Pride Month and OPEN’s Week of Visibility for Non-Monogamy.

Register for this Free Event

Whether you’re newly curious, actively practicing non-monogamy, queer, straight, questioning, partnered, solo, or somewhere in between, you’re welcome.

Come meet some thoughtful humans and feel a little less alone 🫶

Join the Conversation

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

What part of yourself is still waiting for evidence that it’s safe to be seen?

Where do your beliefs and your nervous system still tell slightly different stories?

What truth about yourself feels easier to believe than to embody?

Leave a comment

More on the intersection of queerness and non-monogamy:

Personalized Relationship Guidance

Before we get into today’s article, I want to share that I’m experimenting with a new way of offering personalized relationship guidance, especially as my coaching waitlist has grown longer: You can send me detailed relationship questions directly. For $20, I’ll respond within 48 hours with thoughtful, compassionate guidance tailored to your situation.

Send me your questions

Here’s one review from Anastasia, who used this new Q&A service: “Thank you so much. I felt genuinely understood by your response. It gave me a lot to think about and landed surprisingly deeply, especially the sections on neurodivergence, attentional anchoring, and attachment concentration.”

Why One Partner Feels Freedom While The Other Feels Loss

Micah’s partner, Jules, surprised him one night while they were lying in bed.

“I have a second date planned next weekend,” Jules said.

Micah was already moving through a particularly vulnerable season physically and emotionally, which meant his nervous system capacity to hear about new connections was already low.

And almost instantly, he could feel it happening.

The tightening in his chest.
The sudden feeling of distance between them.
The part of his brain beginning to scan for meaning:

Am I about to be left emotionally alone again?

Am I becoming less important?

Am I the only one trying to hold us together?

“I don’t think I can handle that right now,” he said quietly.

And then came the familiar emotional drop.

The hopelessness.
The exhaustion.
The tears.
The feeling that no matter how clearly he explained himself, he would somehow end up alone inside the fear.

Across from him, Jules’s body had already begun having its own reaction.

The more emotional Micah became, the more Jules could feel themself bracing internally. Somewhere deep in their nervous system, emotional intensity had become associated with pressure, obligation, and the fear that there would no longer be room for them too.

As Micah reached for reassurance, Jules’s nervous system started hearing something much bigger:

I’m getting trapped.

Nothing I say will be enough.

I’m losing freedom.

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do here,” Jules said, already sounding frustrated and defensive. “Why does a simple dinner have to become such a big thing?”

And within minutes, they were no longer having the same conversation at all.

One person was fighting for emotional safety.
The other was trying to protect freedom.

And both of them felt deeply misunderstood.

I witness some version of this dynamic — where one person reaches for closeness while the other reaches for space — more than almost anything else in non-monogamous relationships.

When Non-Monogamy Stops Feeling Mutual

One of the hardest things about non-monogamy is that nervous systems rarely expand at the exact same speed.

One person may feel exhilarated by growth, novelty, desire, and possibility while the other is still trying to emotionally stabilize around the last rupture, difficult conversation, or wave of activation.

And when those timelines diverge too far without enough care, one partner often starts experiencing the other person’s expansion as relational destabilization.

Many people can tolerate discomfort surprisingly well when they still feel emotionally accompanied inside it.

What becomes much harder is feeling like one person gets most of the excitement, novelty, freedom, or expansion while the other quietly carries most of the nervous system destabilization alone.

This is one of the reasons non-monogamy can become so confusing emotionally.

You may genuinely believe in autonomy, multiple loves, sexual freedom, or relational expansion while simultaneously finding your body flooded with grief, vigilance, fear, comparison, or panic once attachment starts feeling unstable.

And that dissonance often creates enormous shame.

Because people start asking themselves:

“If I believe in this, why does it hurt so much right now?”

Struggling emotionally inside non-monogamy does not automatically mean you are bad at it. (And layering shame on top of the struggle almost never helps). Supporting non-monogamy philosophically does not guarantee your nervous system will immediately feel safe inside it. Sometimes struggling with the complexity simply means your nervous system is having a harder time metabolizing the current amount of uncertainty, change, differentiation, or emotional destabilization.

When Non-Monogamous Freedom Starts Feeling Like Abandonment

The two people lying in bed that night had learned very different things about what relationships require in order to feel safe.

For Micah, safety was deeply connected to emotional closeness. When fear activated, his nervous system instinctively reached toward connection, reassurance, emotional contact, and togetherness.

For Jules, safety was more connected to autonomy. When pressure or overwhelm activated their nervous system, they instinctively reached toward space, freedom, decompression, and self-protection.

This is an incredibly common dynamic.

Despite having opposite impulses, both nervous systems genuinely believe they are trying to restore safety.

One of the most painful parts of this dynamic is how quickly each person’s protective strategy accidentally intensifies the other person’s fear.

One person asks for more care, emotional presence, or discussion before their partner spends time with a new connection.

Their partner immediately feels pressure.

So they pull back.
Defend themselves.
Minimize the conversation.
Or insist they are being controlled.

Which makes the first person feel even more emotionally untethered.

So they reach harder.

Ask more questions.
Seek more reassurance.
Need more orientation.
Try to restore intimacy before the distance grows.

Which then makes the other person feel even more trapped.

And the escalation continues. Dysregulation is contagious.

Suddenly two people who genuinely love each other are both internally asking the exact same question in different ways:

What about me?

That’s the part that breaks my heart every time.

Because underneath the arguments about texting, pacing, boundaries, care plans, outside partners, or emotional labor, most people are not actually fighting for control.

They are trying to figure out:

Will there still be room for me here if I’m not the only one?

Read more

It’s not a conscious decision, but again and again, she forms connection with someone who already has a primary relationship. Someone with built-in limits. Someone emotionally meaningful—but structurally unavailable in certain ways.

At first, the dynamic feels ideal.

There’s chemistry, depth, and care. But there’s also distance woven into the architecture of the relationship itself.

No pressure to escalate. No expectation to merge lives. No one asking for more than Lena knows how to give.

And for a while, that feels like freedom.

Until eventually, something more tender begins surfacing underneath it.

A quiet longing for greater closeness: More consistency and emotional presence.

And right alongside that longing:

Relief that this relationship was never actually going to require those things from her anyway.

That’s the part people don’t talk about enough.

When Freedom Starts Feeling Safer Than Closeness

Sometimes what we call “autonomy” is partially a nervous system strategy.

For some people, intimacy can feel safest when there are built-in limits around how close someone can actually get.

And in non-monogamy, that pattern can become incredibly easy to mistake for alignment.

Because from the inside, it doesn’t necessarily feel like fear.

It feels intentional. Like someone who simply values spaciousness and independence in relationships.

Sometimes the pattern only becomes visible when closeness stops feeling hypothetical.

When someone has the capacity to move toward them more directly, more consistently, more intentionally. And instead of feeling settled or nourished by that possibility, their system feels exposed.

Not trapped, exactly.

Just suddenly aware of how vulnerable it would feel to truly be depended on. To fully matter. To be deeply chosen by someone who actually has the capacity to stay.

And almost instinctively, the impulse for distance returns.

Maybe they slow the pace.
Pull back slightly.
Redefine the relationship.
Convince themselves they need more space.

Not because the connection is wrong.

But because intimacy itself has started activating something deeper.

In attachment theory, some of what’s being described here overlaps with what’s often called avoidant attachment—a protective relational strategy where closeness begins to feel activating, and distance restores a sense of steadiness.

Not as a rigid label, but as one possible lens for understanding why intimacy can sometimes feel difficult to stay inside of.

And non-monogamy can sometimes make this easier to sustain.

Because there are often built-in explanations for distance:

Different partners.
Busy schedules.
Non-escalator mentality.
Intentional spaciousness.

And sometimes those things are deeply healthy.

But sometimes they also create enough structural distance that intimacy never has to deepen beyond someone’s threshold for vulnerability.

Sometimes a relationship feels safe precisely because it never asks someone to move beyond their protective limits.

Which is what makes this pattern so hard to recognize.

Because externally, it can look exactly like healthy independence.

But internally, something very different is happening:

Healthy autonomy creates space for connection. Protective autonomy creates distance from it.

Read more

Even when he’s with another partner, part of his nervous system is still closely tracking me.

Wondering how I’m feeling.
Thinking about unfinished conversations.
Carrying awareness of our relationship in the background at all times.

He seems to carry a level of ongoing relational tracking and background processing that I simply don’t experience in the same way. His awareness is constantly juggling me and his other partner simultaneously in a way that honestly sounds exhausting sometimes.

When I’m with someone, it’s usually fairly easy for me to become deeply immersed in that connection. Other relationships soften into the background enough that I can fully land where I am.

Not because I care less about anyone else. Not because I forget them.

My nervous system just naturally transitions more fully into the environment I’m currently inside.

Because we actually have what feels like a very secure relationship after almost 15 years together — including putting our connection through the absolute wringer while stumbling through non-monogamy in the early years (with very little support or resources) — I can’t help but wonder whether some of this difference between us has to do with neurodivergence itself.

He was diagnosed with ADHD about two years ago and honestly, thank goodness. So many things suddenly made sense to both of us. It gave us language and awareness around friction points we’d struggled to understand for years.

And the more I’ve reflected on this, the more curious I’ve become about how many neurodivergent people in non-monogamy experience relationships like multiple browser tabs constantly running in the background.

It almost seems as though ADHD may make attentional transitions feel stickier, where emotionally relevant people or unfinished relational loops remain psychologically active in the background even after the environment changes.

I — a fairly neurotypical person — somehow seem to be constantly surrounded by neurodivergence.

My closest friends. Many of my clients. Multiple partners.

And the more I reflect on the experiences of the neurodivergent people in my life, the more curious I become about how differently attentional transitions may function for some neurodivergent nervous systems.

My guess is that non-monogamy places unusually high demands on attentional shifting, nervous system transitions, and emotional processing, which are capacities many neurodivergent people already experience differently.

So the shift from one relational environment to another may require far more intentional awareness and nervous system support, especially if part of the previous connection remains psychologically active in the background long after they’ve physically left.

For those of you who live at that intersection of non-monogamy and neurodivergence itself…

Do you feel like partners remain closely “online” in your nervous system even when you’re physically somewhere else?

Do you struggle to let the person you’re not with soften into the background long enough to fully arrive where you are?

If you’re ADHD, AuDHD, autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent and you struggle with this kind of attentional transition between partners — where part of your nervous system still feels like it’s actively tracking multiple people at once, making it difficult to fully settle into presence with the person in front of you — I’d genuinely love to hear your experience in the comments.

Leave a comment

“Why Can’t I Just Be Present?”

When the nervous system is busy tracking multiple emotionally relevant people at once, true mental rest can become harder to access.

While there’s very little direct research on neurodivergence and non-monogamy specifically, there is substantial research connecting ADHD and autism to differences in attentional switching, cognitive flexibility, executive functioning, and emotional processing — all of which non-monogamous relationship structures naturally require.

Research on ADHD has consistently linked it to difficulties with executive functioning, attentional switching, and cognitive flexibility.

Autistic systems can also remain deeply engaged with unresolved information or emotional continuity.

Add non-monogamy into that ecosystem and multiple emotionally significant relationships may remain psychologically active simultaneously for long stretches of time, leaving far less opportunity for cognitive quiet.

Even while physically with one person, another relationship may still feel active in the background of the nervous system:

• replaying unfinished conversations

• wondering whether someone is okay

• carrying anticipatory guilt

• tracking emotional equilibrium

• mentally preparing for re-entry later

• struggling to fully release the previous relational environment

• remaining partially activated by unresolved emotional tension

No wonder this can feel so overwhelming for some neurodivergent people.

If your nervous system is already prone to persistent processing, attentional overlap, or difficulty task-switching, non-monogamy can start to feel emotionally and cognitively exhausting without intentional transitions, environmental regulation, and enough uninterrupted recovery time for the nervous system to fully settle again.

Read more

My client’s partner was married. They lived with their nesting partner, shared finances, routines, holidays, and major life decisions together.

And intellectually, my client understood that.

They weren’t asking for equality. They weren’t expecting the same level of entanglement as a long-term nesting marriage. They understood hierarchy existed.

What they were struggling with was the growing gap between what was being emotionally discussed… and what was actually being structurally created.

For months, the hinge had talked about taking my client away for their first overnight together.

There was a specific place attached to it. Over time, the trip became emotionally symbolic — not just the experience itself, but what it represented: movement, priority, expansion, a relationship deepening beyond the margins of the life the hinge already shared with someone else.

The hinge seemed genuinely excited about it too.

They brought it up repeatedly. Talked about it warmly and hopefully, like something naturally unfolding between them.

But there was never a concrete timeline.

Never a direct conversation about whether the hinge had actually negotiated that level of expansion with their nesting partner.

Never clarity around:

• whether overnights were fully available yet

• what agreements were still in process

• what pacing the primary relationship could actually tolerate

• whether this was an immediate plan or a vague future desire

• whether the hinge truly had the logistical and emotional capacity to create it

And then one day, the secondary partner saw photos of the hinge there with their spouse instead. Same place. Same experience. Same intimacy that had been verbally building for months.

And suddenly the confusion became unbearable. Not necessarily because hierarchy existed. But because nobody had clearly named how much power hierarchy still had over the situation.

Hierarchy Isn’t Always the Problem

I think this is important to say clearly: Many people can emotionally navigate hierarchy when it’s transparent.

A married partner may:

• prioritize family emergencies first

• share more financial entanglement with a spouse

• make large life decisions with a nesting partner

• move more slowly around overnights or vacations

• protect certain rituals or routines inside the primary partnership

That’s not automatically unethical.

What becomes destabilizing is when hierarchy is simultaneously:

• structurally present

• emotionally minimized

• and relationally denied

Especially when the hinge speaks as though expansion is already available before they’ve actually secured the agreements necessary to support it.

One of the hardest things to figure out in hierarchical polyamory is whether someone genuinely lacks the capacity for deeper expansion… or whether they’re avoiding the difficult conversations inside the primary relationship that would be required to make that expansion possible.

Desire Is Not the Same Thing as Negotiated Reality

This is where many hinges accidentally create confusion. Because emotionally, they may genuinely want multiple things at once.

They may sincerely desire:

• deeper intimacy with a secondary partner

• emotional safety with a primary partner

• less hierarchy

• more expansion

• everyone feeling valued

• everyone feeling chosen

But wanting something emotionally is not the same thing as having created the structure to sustainably support it.

And in hierarchical polyamory, that distinction matters enormously. Because the hinge often doesn’t have unilateral decision-making power. Especially in newer openings.

Overnights, trips, holidays, introductions, hosting arrangements, scheduling shifts, public visibility, and emotional escalation often affect the nervous system of the primary partnership in very real ways.

But instead of naming that directly, some hinges speak aspirationally.

They speak from longing instead of from grounded agreements.

So the secondary partner hears:

“I want this with you.”

without understanding:

“I have not actually secured the relational conditions necessary to offer this yet.”

Those are very different statements.

Hope Without Orientation

One of the hardest emotional states to live inside is sustained hope without clear orientation.

Especially for secondary partners trying very hard to be:

• understanding

• flexible

• non-demanding

• emotionally mature

• “good at polyamory”

They often override their own confusion because they know hierarchy exists.

They tell themselves:

“Of course things move more slowly.”

“Their marriage has to come first sometimes.”

“I need to be patient.”

But sometimes what hurts isn’t the pace. It’s the lack of clarity.

Because there’s a difference between:

“My spouse is not ready for overnights yet, and I don’t know if or when that will change.”

and:

“We’ll get there.”

The first creates disappointment, but clearly names reality. The vagueness of the second creates prolonged emotional suspension and keeps possibility emotionally alive, without grounded structure underneath it.

Conflict Avoidance Often Masquerades as Hope

I think many hinges overpromise because they are trying to reduce pain in the moment.

Especially hinges who:

• hate disappointing people

• feel guilty about hierarchy

• want everyone to feel important

• are caught in New Relationship Energy

• are afraid that honesty will cause rupture

So instead of saying:

“I don’t think my primary partnership currently has the capacity for that level of expansion,”

they say:

“I want that too.”

Instead of:

“I haven’t actually negotiated that yet,”

they say:

“It’s going to happen.”

Instead of:

“I’m afraid of creating conflict at home,”

they say:

“I just need more time.”

And often, they genuinely mean those hopeful statements when they say them. But meaning something emotionally in the moment is different from being able to actually create it.

The Nervous System Cost of Undefined Futures

One of the reasons this dynamic hurts so much is because the nervous system attaches to imagined futures.

To symbols.
To movement.
To expansion.
To what experiences seem to represent relationally.

So when a hinge repeatedly evokes future intimacy that never fully materializes, the secondary partner can end up trapped in an exhausting psychological loop:

Should I trust this?

Wait longer?

Lower my expectations?

Advocate more clearly?

Become more patient?

Or recognize that this relationship may never structurally become what it is emotionally implying?

That uncertainty can become profoundly destabilizing over time.

Especially because the secondary partner often starts questioning themselves instead of the ambiguity:

“Am I just insecure?”

“Am I asking for too much?”

“Is this simply what secondary relationships require?”

“Do I need to become more evolved?”

Sometimes growth does require learning how to tolerate limitation and uncertainty.

And sometimes the confusion you keep trying to work around is actually telling you that the relationship structure itself still hasn’t been clearly defined.

Clarity Is Kinder Than Possibility Inflation

I think the deepest responsibility of hinging is not promising expansion from desire alone.

It’s learning how to speak from what is actually available in the here and now.

Not from fantasy.
Not from longing.
Not from the version of the relationship you hope might exist someday.

But from the real, current shape of the structure as it exists now.

Because people can usually metabolize disappointment more cleanly than prolonged ambiguity.

What slowly erodes trust is not always hierarchy itself. Sometimes it’s the repeated experience of emotionally being led toward futures that the secondary relationship was never actually structurally supported to grow into — because the primary relationship had not created the agreements, capacity, or space necessary to hold that expansion yet.

For Deeper Hinge Support

If you’re a hinge trying to navigate hierarchy, emotional accountability, expectation-setting, scheduling, agreements, and the complexity of balancing multiple attachment relationships with more clarity and care, my guidebook The Hinge Handbook goes much deeper into these dynamics and offers practical tools for creating more stable and emotionally honest polyamorous relationships.

Explore the Guidebook

Join the Chat

Have you ever struggled to tell the difference between someone genuinely being at capacity… and someone avoiding accountability for how they were showing up?

Or have you ever found yourself overpromising as a hinge because you genuinely wanted everyone to feel loved, valued, and hopeful?

I’d love to hear what this brought up for you.

What hinge dynamics have felt most stabilizing — or most confusing — in your experience?

Something shifts. Your partner feels a little farther away, or responds in a way that doesn’t quite land, or shares something that stirs up discomfort—maybe they mention someone new, or a connection starts to deepen, or their attention moves in a way you can feel.

Nothing catastrophic has happened. But your body registers it: A tightening. A quiet sense of unease. A subtle awareness that something has changed.

And then, almost automatically, your mind begins to organize around a solution:

If they changed this one thing, I’d be okay.

If they texted more.
If they didn’t see that specific person.
If they prioritized me differently.
If they reassured me better.
If they just made me feel wanted again.

It’s subtle, but powerful—the sense that if something out there changed, this feeling inside would go away.

And here’s the tension most people don’t want to sit with:

If the only way you can feel steady is for the situation to change… what happens when it doesn’t?

Maybe you start watching your phone differently. Replaying the conversation in your head. Feeling yourself get tighter, quieter, more alert.

And now your peace is tied to something you don’t actually control.

Read more

A spike of fear.
A tightening in the chest.
A spiral of thoughts you can’t quite turn off.
The urge to ask questions, seek reassurance, or regain control.

It’s loud. It’s reactive. It’s hard to miss. But not all jealousy feels like that.

One of my long-distance partners started seeing someone new. Someone local. They began seeing each other weekly—a standing date that felt predictable, consistent, easy in the way things often are when proximity does the work for you.

And I noticed something shift in me. Not sharply. Not in a way I could point to and say, this is jealousy.

I wasn’t upset. I understood it. Glad for them, even. And yet, something in my body started looking for footing.

It felt like standing on sand as the tide slowly pulls back beneath your feet—nothing dramatic, nothing broken, just a quiet sense that the ground isn’t exactly where it was a minute ago.

And that was the confusing part. Because nothing was actually wrong.

No boundaries had been crossed. No agreements had been broken. Nothing about our connection had explicitly changed.

And yet… something still felt off.

That’s the kind of moment we don’t always know what to do with in non-monogamy.

When you feel genuinely happy for your partner to find a supportive new connection… and still feel unsettled in your own body. When there’s no clear problem to solve…but your system is trying to orient to something it can’t quite name.

Most people wouldn’t recognize this as jealousy. But it’s still a form of activation—just one that doesn’t announce itself the way you might expect.

In non-monogamy, this is one of the most disorienting experiences to navigate. Because if nothing is clearly wrong…but something doesn’t feel steady… What are you actually supposed to do with that?

Many people either:

• override it (“I shouldn’t feel this way”)

• or escalate it into something bigger than it is

But there’s a third possibility, and it changes how you respond entirely. And that’s the moment where many people start to question the relationship… when what they’re actually struggling to understand is the shift.

Read more

“I’m not going to be in a relationship with someone who cannot fulfill my needs.”

And honestly… it makes sense. If you’ve ever been with someone where you felt under-met, misled, or slowly depleted over time, that statement can feel like a self-respecting boundary.

But there’s something inside that declaration that’s worth slowing down and looking at more closely. Because if you take it literally, it leads to a conclusion that doesn’t quite hold inside non-monogamy: That one person should be able to fulfill all of your needs.

And if they can’t, the relationship isn’t worth being in. But the entire premise of non-monogamy gently disrupts that idea. When we move toward a relational ecosystem—where needs are met across multiple connections—we need a different way to evaluate whether a relationship is actually working.

This is where the conversation gets more nuanced.

Read more

I had shared a desire to explore relationships with women. He was fully supportive—enthusiastic, even (and, unsurprisingly, eager to plan a threesome).

For the first early years, we explored exclusively together. But over time, it became clear we wanted very different kinds of experiences.

I found myself craving something softer and more intimate: queer connection, romance, emotional depth. He was drawn toward kink, power dynamics, and D/s exploration.

Eventually, we agreed it was time to start dating separately. Mentally, we were fully on board with what this shift would require. But we quickly learned that we didn’t yet have the tools or nervous system capacity to actually navigate it with ease.

The Quiet Pattern Most People Don’t Talk About

This was the part I didn’t feel prepared for. I wanted this. I choose this. I felt aligned with non-monogamy in my values, my vision of freedom and abundance, my expansive sense of what love could be.

And yet I still found myself destabilized in moments I thought I’d be able to handle.

I hear versions of this all the time from friends and clients. While we understand what’s happening logically, it’s still hard to relax when a partner starts seeing someone new. Many people wonder if they’re just “not built for this.”

So they try to close the gap: Reading the books. Practicing communicating more clearly. Reminding themselves why they chose this. They attempt to be grounded, open-minded, secure. They want to show up as easy-going, understanding, flexible.

And still—the big, confusing same nervous system reactions keep happening.

Which leads to a deeper question:

If I want this… why does it still feel so hard?

The Core Tension

One of the most disorienting parts of this process is realizing how differently your mind and body can respond to the same situation.

For many people practicing non-monogamy, a quiet split begins to emerge:

You can feel clear in your values. Thoughtful in your approach. Fully consenting to the structure you’re creating. You’ve had the conversations. You’ve made agreements. You understand why this works for some people.

And still—your body hasn’t caught up yet.

That’s because this isn’t a thinking problem.

It’s a physiological one. You’re trying to reason your way out of a state your body doesn’t yet feel safe in—and those operate on different systems.

Non-monogamy often stretches us into unfamiliar, culturally unscripted territory.

There isn’t a blueprint for how this is supposed to feel in your body.

And at the same time, your system is still shaped by a lifetime of conditioning that taught you:

Closeness equals safety.
Exclusivity equals security.
Being chosen means being okay.

So when something falls outside of that—even when it’s consensual, thoughtful, and aligned—your body experiences it as unfamiliar. And unfamiliar, to the nervous system, can feel like risk—even when your mind says otherwise.

Common Non-Monogamous Mind–Body Disconnects

Even when we consciously step outside of monogamy, mono-normative conditioning doesn’t just disappear. It often lingers in the body.

And for many of us, that creates a kind of internal split—where what we believe and what we feel don’t quite line up.

It can sound like:

• I want my partner to feel free to explore other connections… and my whole body still freaks out like I’m being replaced.

• I believe in love without ownership… and I still feel threatened when my partner bonds with someone else.

• I understand my partner isn’t rejecting me… and I still feel unsafe when they desire others.

• I’m reading, learning, and checking in regularly… and no amount of knowledge stops my nervous system from panicking.

• I believe in autonomy… and I still freeze when they tell me about another date.

• I want to be open… and I’m afraid I’ll never feel secure enough to actually enjoy non-monogamy.

This kind of internal both/and conflict is incredibly common. It often means your cognitive understanding has likely expanded faster than your nervous system’s capacity to hold it. That gap between insight and embodiment is exactly where this work begins.

Your Body Decides Before You Do

Your nervous system is constantly scanning your environment for cues of safety or threat. Not consciously. Automatically.

This process is called neuroception. It’s your body’s way of asking, moment by moment: Am I safe here?

Neuroception doesn’t rely on logic. It doesn’t update just because your beliefs have changed. It’s shaped by your past experiences, your attachment history, and the patterns your body has learned over time.

So when something new happens (like your partner expressing attraction, excitement, or intimacy with someone else) your body isn’t evaluating it philosophically.

It’s comparing it to what it already knows. And if it doesn’t recognize it as safe, it can register it as a threat. It’s responding the way mine did in that kitchen so many years ago—before I had time to make sense of it.

That’s why you might feel a drop in your stomach, a tightening in your chest, or an urge to pull away—even when another part of you fully supports what’s happening.

Your mind might say, this is okay, at the same time your body is sounding an alarm, warning you: this feels like something I need to protect against.

And until your system has new experiences of safety, that response actually makes perfect sense.

What’s Actually Getting Triggered

When you feel activated in non-monogamy, it’s rarely just about the present moment.

There are layers.

The present: your partner is connecting with someone else.

The conditioning: mono-normative beliefs about love and security that reinforce the idea that love must move in one direction (upwards and forward) to be valid, deepen over time, and prove itself through exclusivity.

The memory: moments where you felt replaced, overlooked, or not enough.

The nervous system imprint: past experiences like relational wounds, attachment ruptures, or even subtle moments of disconnection that taught your body what to expect and what to protect against.

When these layers stack, the experience intensifies.

What might look like a small moment externally can feel overwhelming internally.

Because your body isn’t just reacting to what’s happening.

It’s responding to what it has learned, what it has been shaped by, and what it’s trying, in its own intelligent and strategic way, to keep you from feeling that kind of pain again. Because to your nervous system, avoiding that kind of hurt, rejection, or loss is a form of protection.

Capacity vs Alignment

Before we go further, it’s important to name something clearly: This work is not about tolerating harmful, unethical, or non-consensual behavior.

It’s not about convincing yourself that something is okay when it isn’t. It’s not about overriding your instincts to maintain connection.

Because sometimes your body isn’t overreacting. Sometimes it’s recognizing that something is off.

Some discomfort is expansion. Unfamiliarity. Nervous system stretching.

And some discomfort is misalignment. Unmet needs. A relationship style that doesn’t actually work for you.

The work here is discernment.

Learning to ask:

Is this an old pattern being activated?
Or is this a signal that something here needs to change?

Growth asks you to stay.

Misalignment asks you to tell the truth.

Expanding your capacity should never require abandoning yourself.

Not every relationship—or every season of life—is resourced for non-monogamy in a way that feels grounded, mutual, and sustainable.

And sometimes, after exploring, stretching and experimenting with some form of open relating, you might realize:

This doesn’t actually feel good in my body. This doesn’t create the kind of stability I want to build my life on.

That’s not failure. That’s clarity.

Because one of the most common patterns I see—especially in people who deeply want to make non-monogamy work—is saying yes to a structure, a pace, or an agreement not because it feels aligned…but because they don’t want to be seen as the difficult or insecure one.

If alongside the big nervous system reactions, you are feeling pressure to expand, or a sense of quiet self-abandonment, read this next: Consent Isn’t Just “Yes or No.” Because it’s essential that you are able to say no to a non-monogamous structure if it doesn’t actually work for you or align with your desires. Monogamy is a valid, conscious choice, not a lesser one. What matters isn’t which structure you choose. It’s whether the way you’re relating allows you to feel safe, expressed, and sustainably connected over time.

Expanding Your Window of Capacity

I used to teach this through Dan Siegel’s Window of Tolerance—the idea that there’s an optimal range of emotional arousal where we can stay present, think clearly, and respond rather than react.

But over time, I’ve found myself shifting the language. Because this work isn’t about how much you can tolerate. It’s about how much you can stay with—while still having access to choice.

We don’t want to increase our ability to tolerate misalignment or override our instincts. We do want to expand our capacity to remain present in our bodies and connected to ourselves when something feels activating, unfamiliar, or emotionally charged.

Expanding this window happens through gentle, intentional stretching—not by pushing past your limits, but by meeting them with awareness:

• Staying with discomfort for a few moments longer instead of immediately escaping it.

• Naming a fear without collapsing into the story it creates.

• Learning to pause intense conversations until you can return with presence and curiosity.

• Letting your body move, breathe, and process instead of suppressing or overriding big emotions.

Over time, the aim shifts. Rather than trying to get rid of your nervous system reactions, you begin to relate to them differently: building the ability to stay with yourself when they arise, and to hold the complexity, ambiguity, and emotional range that non-monogamy often brings.

Capacity Builds Through Experience

You don’t move from monogamy to easeful non-monogamy overnight.

It’s a gradual process of building capacity for the big new experiences:

The first time you hear about a partner’s attraction to someone else.
The first time you your partner has an overnight or weekend away with someone else.
The first time you meet a metamour.

Each experience, when approached intentionally and processed with care and reassurance, expands what your system can hold.

What matters is flexibility.

Knowing your edges.
Pacing yourself.
Integrating what you experience.
Tending to your triggers.
Communicating your limits.

This is bending—not breaking.

When your system is activated, you don’t need a perfect response.

You need something that helps you stay with yourself.

A slower exhale.
A moment of noticing sensation instead of getting lost in thought.
A small movement that brings you back into your body.
A reminder that you can ask for support.

These aren’t quick fixes. They’re ways of staying connected to yourself while something hard is happening. And over time, that changes things.

This isn’t just about non-monogamy. This is about learning how to love outside the scripts we were given—scripts that equate safety with control, certainty, or exclusivity.

Learning how to stay present in forms of connection that don’t follow familiar rules. Learning how to generate a sense of safety that isn’t entirely dependent on what someone else does.

A Workshop to Build More Capacity

Your values can be ahead of your nervous system.

And that gap is where the real work happens.

It’s where you learn how to stay present in discomfort, how to listen more closely to your body, and how to build the capacity to hold something that doesn’t yet feel familiar.

If you’re in that space right now—where your mind understands, your heart wants to trust, but your body still reacts in surprising or disorienting ways—check out my free 45-minute masterclass called Bend, Don’t Break for exactly this stage of the process.

Inside, I walk through how to begin building the somatic and emotional capacity that makes non-monogamy feel steadier, clearer, and more sustainable—from the inside out.

Join the Conversation

When it comes to open relating, where do you notice the gap between what you understand… and what your body is actually experiencing?

What patterns are you beginning to notice in your nervous system?

Share in the chat what resonated—I’d love to hear where you feel that tension between desire and capacity.

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