I’m thinking about these memories a lot recently, because I have been struggling to build a similar community in my adulthood. And I have been reflecting on what my parents did right. When I was a kid, I didn’t know any of this was unusual. I thought strong communities like these were just something that happened naturally when people had enough in common. But I found out there was more to it than that. Growing up as an Indian immigrant in Tennessee, all of my extended family lived in India. I saw them once every couple years, but never felt particularly close to them. But my parents did not raise me alone. They had a reliable community of Indian people that lived around us that I knew as The Kitty Group. It was about twelve families who all had kids around the same ages as me.

The concept of the kitty group has always been fascinating to me since I learned about it. Growing up, I considered the kitty group family, but I had no idea there was a whole monetary structure it operated on. It goes like this:

• There are several people or families that make up the group

• Each month, one person or family hosts a kitty party

• At the time of the kitty party, every other person in the group gives the host $100 (or some other agreed upon amount). This is called the kitty.

• The money always gets re-distributed. Everyone you give money to gives it back when it’s your time to host.

So, my parents were in a kitty group with 12 other families. Let’s say their turn to host the party came in December. From January to November, they gave each family $100 bucks. In December, all 11 other families gave them $100 bucks each. So, in December, they get $1100 all at once.

So, what’s the point? You’re just slowly losing money all year and getting it back in one lump sum.

While they do have the financial function of creating a shared savings pool, the primary function of a kitty group lives in the community it creates. Everyone in the group is paying to continue seeing each other; a guarantee that once a month, they will all end up in the same room again.

My parents never once had to get me a babysitter, because our kitty group community was so strong and interdependent that there was always someone around to watch me. My parents’ friends in the kitty group will always be my aunts and uncles (even though they’re somewhat problematic, but that’s how family works). And their kids will always be my brothers and sisters. My parents moved to a new country totally alone, and because of the kitty group, I never felt like anything was missing. I have always felt like the community support system that I grew up in is just as strong, if not stronger, than people whose families have lived in the same city for generations.

Kitty groups create incentives for gathering. We live in a society that equates choosing ourselves with staying at home. And there is so much to keep us at home. Like doordash, and being able to connect through the phone, and working remotely. I see how American individualism is perpetuated through the systems that are so easily available to us. I used to think a lot of non-immigrant Americans didn’t have community like me because they inherently didn’t value it like immigrants did. But now I am seeing that we have become isolated because almost every institution around us is designed to let us opt out of one another. So, I think the solution to creating strong communities is to create structures around it, and to make showing up the path of least resistance instead of staying home.

You know the “can’t have a village without being a villager” thing? In the kitty group, there is a monthly cost to be a villager, but it always comes back to you. There is a cost for not showing up at the community gathering. If you don’t come, you still have to contribute to the kitty. So, your reason to not show up has to be worth a hundred bucks. You can be exhausted and still show up. You can be in a conflict with someone in the group, and you’ll still show up, because avoiding them would cost you money and also make the conflict bigger and more obvious.

My parents also bought their first set of furniture in this country with the kitty. You don’t notice the smaller sum that leaves your bank account each month, but once it’s your turn to host, the amount feels huge. You can spend it on things you did not plan for. The kitty acts as a collective savings fund.

Kitty groups have a more formal name in academia - Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, or ROSCAs - and there is research about how they have been used all over the world in rural areas by women who couldn’t rely on formal banking institutions to save their money. In India, they began after partition as a way for women to have money to spend without having to ask their husbands for permission (kitty is literally a British term for a shared pot of money). These systems exist all over the eastern hemisphere, and they serve people who are overlooked by mainstream financial systems.

In Sudan, people call them Sandooq. Neighbouring Egypt refers to them as Gama’yia. Sri Lankans have Cheetu. Indians refer to ROSCAs as Chits or Kitties. Pakistanis call them Community. Iranians have Sanduuq, which refers to a box of funds. India, like Ghana, has legislation recognizing the role of ROSCAs. In Southeast Asia, Vietnamese refer to them as Hui while Filipinos call them Paluwagain. For Indonesians, it is Arisans. For Japanese, it is Kou. For Koreans, it is Kye. For all ROSCAs are very old practices that have endured despite modernity. - Caroline Hossein, The Banker Ladies (you can learn more about the micro-financial and community benefits of ROSCAs in this book)

The kitty party has always been about what you can do when you pool resources with people you trust, and it has always been built by and for people the existing infrastructure wasn’t built for. When my parents were trying to furnish our first apartment, they couldn’t have gone to the bank asking for a loan for a couch with no credit history. The kitty made sure they got that money without them having to prove why they needed it. All they needed to do was to keep participating in their own community. Which is why I keep thinking about what it could look like now, for queer people and people of color who are trying to do the same thing.

Queer people, especially trans people, face medical costs that insurance won’t cover like hormone treatments, surgeries, therapy. People of color are systematically shut out of generational wealth and homeownership. Queer and trans people are disproportionately likely to be estranged from their families of origin, which means no safety net when something goes wrong. We crowdfund for each other all the time for things like surgeries, for rent, and emergencies. But when you are writing a GoFundMe description for a surgery you need to survive, it requires you to earn that money. You have to turn a private medical need into a public performance to prove that you deserve it. Most of our safety nets right now are public (which is terrifying for marginalized people right now), and dependent on how many people follow you and share it. They are reactive to a moment of crisis, and you have to hope that it works. ROSCAs are proactive, offline (not surveilled), keep the money in the hands of the people you trust, GoFundMe can’t take a cut of it, and they strengthen our communities by bringing us together regularly

I am currently living alone, and I LOVE it. I love the independence it brings me, I love that I can be the rawest version of myself in my own space. But I think about community constantly. My friends and I have tried so much to take care of each other. We keep trying to create community through good intentions. We’ll say we’ll cook for each other every Wednesday, or have a standing movie night, or call every Sunday. But because we love each other, we’re also understanding when someone cancels. Then someone cancels again. Then everyone gets busy. And eventually the thing disappears.

When I think about community, I think about the difference between having friends you see when schedules align and being meaningfully integrated into people’s lives in a way that is mutual and structural and hard to opt out of. We talk a lot in progressive and queer spaces about mutual aid and chosen family and interdependence. I think we mean it. But I also think we treat community as optional and as a product of good relationship building - if we just find the right people who get along just enough, everything else will follow. But we don’t have the recurring obligations to keep us together. For some people’s families, that was church. But our Hindu temple was an hour away, so we had the kitty group instead.

I think we keep thinking that community will just happen to us. That our shared marginalization will just bring us together. And it does, to an extent, but these ties do not tend to be as strong as the community I grew up in. And I wonder if what’s missing is the structure behind it. Growing up, before I learned about the fact that the kitty group was A Thing, I also thought it just happened to us. I thought Indian people found other Indian people because they were lonely in this country. And I keep thinking I will find community with other queer people of color because of the shared challenges we are facing in this country. But I think what kept the kitty group together like a family, despite conflicts and tensions through the years, was the structure that made sure everyone had a reason to host and a reason to show up.

I want to start something like a kitty group - a community with built in mutual aid that brings us together regularly. I want to do it with queer twenty- and thirty-something people of color who are building chosen families and thinking seriously about what it means to be accountable to a community. I don’t think community can survive on good intentions alone; it has to be built into your life. And that means there has to be something stronger than everyone’s best intentions - like structure, and a reason to show up. The older I get, the less I think freedom is the absence of obligation. I think it’s choosing your obligations and knowing there are people whose lives are tied to yours because you’ve deliberately tied yours to theirs.

It was my first time seriously trying to manage two relationships at once, and I keep saying I got hazed into it. Within a couple of months of getting to know my girlfriend, many of my personal nightmares about being in a relationship with someone who is in a different relationship played out: her partner became uncomfortable with our connection, and they decided that we needed to stop our relationship for the sake of theirs. When we could restart it, I was shown a bulleted set of specific relationship agreements. Writing down relationship agreements wasn’t something that was super unfamiliar to me, especially being in the poly capital of the country (Oakland, California). I was open to it, expecting to read things about barriers and testing, levels of information sharing, and scheduling. But these ones were more like:

This one fucked me up. I kind of understood the rationale behind it when I first read it. This partner did not want to be looking for clues about intimacy with me by over-analyzing whether my girlfriend came home and showered or not. Okay, fine. But then I kept thinking about it. These rules were created as a reaction to my relationship with my girlfriend, with me in mind. It was a white person asking their black girlfriend to shower off her Indian girlfriend, just because she was around me (see: “regardless of whether you played or not”), before touching them again.

Beyond the shower rule, I realized this entire set of agreements were dehumanizing me for the sake of this person’s comfort. The shower rule turned me into some kind of contaminant. The rest of them just framed me as a risk to their relationship that needed to be pre-managed. And on top of that, they were a set of rules that regulated what I could and could not do with my partner, passed down in a hierarchical system where a white person at the top created them. It felt like I was entering a relationship system that recreated oppressive societal structures - ones where white people make rules that center their comfort without much regard for the people who are affected by them.

And then, being in the poly capital of the country, I started to see it more and more in other people’s dynamics: white people with rules about where and when their partners can see other people, men creating “one penis policies” to control what genitalia is okay for someone else to hook up with so they don’t have to confront their own insecurities about their dick, and a white person who had an expectation of “reconnecting” after dates, which was just a rule requiring sex as soon as they saw their partner again for the purpose of re-establishing their perception of their own importance. These are all examples of control, disguised as boundaries (created using therapy-speak), used to avoid insecurity-inducing situations and feelings.

This dance of trying to pre-define boundaries and prevent hard feelings from happening is something I will call rules-based polyamory. The weird racial dynamics that the shower rule alerted me to made me realize that these broader oppressive systems and relationships with rules (especially written ones) that govern them are intertwined. Rules-based polyamory reflects broader systems of white supremacy which teach people that they can control circumstances, control their outcomes, and protect themselves from uncomfortable feelings and realities.

We see white people do this shit all the time. They gentrify black and brown neighborhoods, and then create homeowners’ associations that prevent people from gathering, making noise, and making themselves known. American immigration policies create documentation and visa systems so elaborate that it’s nearly impossible to comply, and then use non-compliance as a justification for deportation. These rules are always used as a basis for accusation, discipline, and ultimately exile - if you can’t follow the system we made for you, then you don’t belong here in the first place.

White supremacy conditions people to see discomfort as harm, enters spaces where it doesn’t belong, and creates rules to make it seem like the people who created those spaces never belonged there in the first place. Polyamory isn’t different. Many cultures made up of people of color already understand love as interdependent and relational rather than contractual. Community care and interdependence were never radical concepts we had to learn. But the books that shape mainstream polyamory like The Ethical Slut and Polysecure are written by white authors about white people for white audiences. Good rules and boundaries are celebrated as the keys to doing polyamory correctly. And just like the structural examples, it’s not just white people who are perpetuating these things anymore. Rules-based polyamory has replicated this insistence on control that we see everywhere else in order to create false comfort.

All the rules in the relationship agreements did not actually help the person who made them. They just allowed them to not address their actual feelings. In the case of the shower rule, this partner felt something uncomfortable, so they engineered circumstances that would help them deny reality. But they also did not have to reflect on why that was hard for them. In this framework, when a partner feels something hard, they can just make a rule to avoid it so they do not have to examine or name it. I always felt like there was a weird, racial aspect to the shower rule, but I never got the chance to tell them that. By the time the rule reached me, it had already been processed and legitimized. I felt like I had nothing to push back on, because it was framed as an agreement that had already been approved rather than a feeling with origins that could be examined. Feelings are flexible and ever-changing. Rules are more rigid and are often separated from the structures of power that create them.

Rules-based polyamory happens when people think that if they can just control the circumstances enough - like what can happen and who knows what - then they can control the emotional outcomes and protect themselves from ever having to feel too uncomfortable. But by doing all of these things to protect themselves from discomfort, they are inherently doing themselves, and their partner, a disservice. They are not “doing the work.” They are exerting control to distract from the real work that needs to be done.

So these rules don’t help anyone. The person who creates them gets to live in their delusional denial world for a while, but those feelings just bubble up and come out in a different way anyway. But beyond not helping anyone, they also often hurt the relationship they are trying so hard to save.

In the process of over-communicating, scenario control, and expectation-setting, something very foundational to a romantic relationship is lost: the need to attune to your partner. Explicit agreements replace the ongoing process of paying attention to your partner and being able to respond to their needs intuitively. I’ve heard agreements like “if something doesn’t feel good for you, you need to tell me.” That’s fair as a general guiding principle, but not as a rule that needs to be followed, which I have seen it become. There’s a lot of information in those moments where your partner feels off, and doesn’t want to tell you for some reason. They might not have the language for it, or might not know what it means, or it’s a small feeling that they aren’t sure needs attention yet. These agreements don’t leave room for nuances like that, and it can turn into a violation to let the feeling sit (“you told me you would let me know if something was up”), or even for the other person to ask if something is off (“I told you I would let you know”). The work of noticing your partner, and the trial and error around that, is what a relationship is. Learning to adapt to one another’s patterns is the whole point. In the same way you can’t agreement your way out of discomfort, you also can’t agreement your way into intimacy.

If rules-based polyamory turns feelings into policies, the alternative is so much simpler. I would argue that the most ethical way to do ethical non-monogamy is BASED ON VIBES!!!

Vibes polyamory is rooted in trust and the ability to navigate uncertainty together. My partner and I have agreements too. But they are one word long: love, trust, care. I’m not saying we are doing everything perfectly, but I am saying there is no perfect way to do things. We are trying our best, with the knowledge that discomfort is just part of the experience. When jealousy shows up, or fear, or uncertainty, I aim to take it as information about myself, not something that I could use to control her behavior.

Rather than turning an emotion into a rule, vibes polyamory turns emotion into reflection and then conversation. It’s communicating for the sake of showing care and love to your partner, instead of for the sake of trying to do something the correct way. Once you really acknowledge that people and their feelings about things are constantly changing and no amount of pre-negotiation can account for every feeling or situation that might arise, it becomes much easier to just let the fuck go.

By choosing to be poly, we are going about love in a way that pushes up against everything we have ever been taught about relationships. It brings up insecurity, fear, jealousy, and uncertainty. For me, the autonomy that polyamory makes possible is worth that discomfort. I commit to handling those feelings as they arise instead of trying to engineer circumstances where they never appear. The desire to see multiple people alone is not enough to sustain polyamory. Instead, it is the willingness to live with the fact that circumstances will be difficult, unpredictable, and outside of your control. And the understanding that that is literally what you signed up for. If it’s not a deal you want to make, not doing polyamory is completely valid and okay (like, even if you’re a queer person in Oakland. I promise).

But not being willing to be uncomfortable, and therefore doing polyamory in the white, rules-based way is not okay or even harmless; it has consequences that harm people of color the most. Our autonomy is already constantly under negotiation and we are already having to bend to the rules that white people make to control us. We already know what it feels like to have our existence treated as something that needs to be managed. When rules-based polyamory extends that same logic into our intimate relationships and calls it ethical practice, it reproduces the very structures many of us are trying to escape.

My personal orientation towards polyamory comes from a very deep and basic desire for autonomy. I grew up in a strict, Indian household where my romantic life was constantly surveilled, judged, and every choice I made went through my parents’ approval. Every generation before me had an arranged marriage; their entire romantic lives were chosen for them by other people. Replicating any version of this dynamic through rules in my adult romantic life is something I am unwilling to do. I want the option to pursue connections whenever they arise literally just because I want it. And I don’t want to have to filter what I can and cannot do with them through the comfort of someone else, even if I love them.

Sacrificing something I desire because someone else does not desire it for me feels like a violation of my autonomy, which as a person of color, is both structural and personal. This contemporary form of white polyamory, that is based in rules, boundaries, hierarchy, and not vibes, is incongruous with the place where my desire for polyamory comes from in the first place; that’s why this type of polyamory has never made any intuitive sense to me. Because rules-based polyamory does not encourage autonomy. It’s just another elaborate system of control at the expense of someone else’s dignity.