Early on in her dating life, she felt like she was a kid in a candy store. She never thought she was a particularly attractive person, but she enjoyed getting attention from unexpected places.

Cabbage’s first relationship was someone random from the first dating app she’d downloaded. He was so cute, and he liked her. She thought, “I mean, what more could I want? I would not have had a chance with this guy back in high school.”

He even gave her flowers and cupcakes and went to do fun things with her, and one day, he just ghosted her. She just didn’t know what to make of it. But they were young.

Another guy she met on the street wanted her number, and he would take her out to all kinds of fancy dates and paid for everything. But he slowly started to tell her what was the “appropriate” thing to do. Like, “Oh, I don’t think you should be swearing that much.” Or “I don’t think that’s how you should show up to the interview. Let me make a suggestion. It’s really gonna help you.”

Even though it didn’t really feel right in her body, she just went along with it because she didn’t really have a reference point. She grew up thinking that it was always a good thing to listen to feedback because we are supposed to be always learning.

And the most recent relationship was one where they were very devoted to each other, but he had to move to a different city, and she had to move to a different city, and even though they tried to sustain the relationship for a little while, they got caught up in their own lives. Whenever she wanted to talk about something that was important to her, he just wouldn’t be as interested. And when he started talking about something important to him, she didn’t appear as interested.

So the dissolution was natural and organic as much as it was heartbreaking.

And each of the one-off dates she started going on after all this felt like a total wash because they were either trying to get laid, talking too much, or just boring.

Until…this guy.

She showed up to the date not feeling very hopeful because she was really starting to think that all men are the same. All the social media posts about how men can get duplicitous when they don’t get their way, all the violence women experience, and just red flags abound.

His name was Radish. He started the conversation with, “I want to pay for this meal not because I think you are less capable but because I just want us to not be worried about that kind of stuff right now. And I am not looking for anything in return. If you want to pay for the next meal, I am happy to receive, but I have no expectations.”

Wow.

I mean, it was impressive. It was not about paying for the meal. It was not about how well-spoken he was. It was just the level of consideration.

But given the unimpressive history and context of her experiences with men, Cabbage found a part of her wondering if he was being sleek. Like, wow, how much experience does he need to have had to be so well-rehearsed in consideration? Or maybe he’s transplanting language he learned elsewhere without actual soul in it?

But she could hear her ex’s voice in her mind already: “Why can’t you just be grateful for what you’re getting?”

She just appreciated Radish’s consideration and dismissed her suspicions.

The conversation went on throughout the night, and they were so engrossed with each other that the restaurant had to kick them out. Opening up about their upbringing and their wounds and emotions around them did not appear to be such a daunting task like the way it was for some of her past relationships.

And in the same conversation, she said to him that she has been toying with the idea of non-monogamy and polyamory. She wasn’t sure how he would respond, but she was not in the mood for holding things back in this particular conversation.

She said, “Just based on my previous relationships, I think it was a lot for either one of us to make each other responsible for all of our needs. I think that there was a sense of urgency in trying to build something together when there was so much going on in our lives.”

Radish responded honestly. “Well, I have heard about that, and it is something that I am open to. I don’t want to be immediately closed off to the idea; it’s just not something I am very familiar with. How about I do a bit of research and share with you my findings along the way? All I know right now is that I really like you, and I want to see you again.”

And so they met again. She was moved by his measured response and the certainty of his feelings. It was just so different from the previous relationships where people were not sure about her.

Cabbage also found it so hot that Radish was so considerate but without making things urgent. When she was sick, he brought her soup. When she asked him to do the most random things, he would come running.

And he would say, “Doing things for you brings me so much joy. I just love seeing you smile and giggle. Your laughter is my favorite sound.”

And on the weekends, they would go to protests together.

He would send her reels and articles that spoke to the injustices that Cabbage cared deeply about, and they would commiserate after a long day.

He would make her laugh like no one else ever had before. She felt like she could let her hair down and fart without any consequence.

The airy thought of “I think I found the one” kept floating through her mind.

Cabbage didn’t think that she could be loved even more.

A few months later, Cabbage brought up the thing about polyamory again.

She started, “I don’t know if you’ve been thinking about this, but I wanted to talk to you about the whole polyamory thing. I am committed to you, and your feelings matter to me the most, but I just want to make sure that we are not just sweeping this under the rug.”

He responded, “Yes, I’m sorry. I’ve been so distracted by just enjoying the moment with you that I have not been really taking this too much to heart. But it has been popping up in my mind here and there. And the thing that keeps coming up again and again is that I just love you. I love how you challenge me. I love that you care about the world. I love how bold and courageous you are. I love that you are different. I don’t think I will stop loving you just because you are polyamorous. How about we give this thing a try?”

And so they went on separate dates. They both found someone that they liked hanging out with. Those people also had either a life partner or a spouse, so the relationships were working really well. They were not quite there in polyamory, but they felt like they had a thriving non-monogamy practice.

Cabbage and Radish felt unstoppable.

And about a year into their relationship, he popped the question.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?”

Cabbage said yes, of course. They went out to her favorite restaurant and celebrated, and then they went to a fast food chain late at night to celebrate.

While they were feeling simply high on life, she started to wonder out loud: “what do you think will happen if we don’t get along? Or if we go through some serious life shit and realize that we can’t deal with each other?”

Radish responded, “Well, I don’t know how you’re gonna be, but I know that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with you, and I am committed to figuring out anything with you.”

She asked, “Why do you love me so much? You could have been with anybody else.”

He answered, “Because you’re you. I don’t know how else to describe it. The moment I laid my eyes on you, I just knew.”

There was something so heartening about his certainty, and yet…also something very dissatisfying about that answer. She chalked it up to her just being weird and sensitive again and brought herself back into the moment. She was getting exactly everything she had wanted. Everyone around her was telling her how lucky she was. And she did not want to ruin it.

In the first year of their marriage, Cabbage got a new job offer in a completely different city. She was nervous to tell Radish because he had just gotten settled in this city, and leaving the city would mean that he would have to find a different job and also leave his friends and lovers behind.

She didn’t have that much of her roots in the community, so it was an easier decision for her.

When she told him, Radish was not phased.

“Of course, I would go anywhere with you. I will follow you to the ends of the planet. I will tell my beloveds, and yes, it’s going to be heartbreaking, but we’re gonna get through this together.”

Cabbage felt like he had unloaded a million pounds off her back. She thought to herself, “Maybe this is what a true partnership looks like.”

And yet… in the back of her mind, she felt like he was maybe being too generous. And it didn’t feel right just up and leaving Radish’s lovers so easily like that. Did those relationships hold any weight for him? Again, she chalked it up to her inability to receive love and grace and generosity and started to pack up her bags.

In the new city, it took a minute to get adjusted to the climate there.

Both socially and geographically. But soon they found their rhythm, and Radish found a new job. He really liked the new job, and she really liked her new job. So many places in the city to explore, and a lot of time and resources to explore.

Radish thought it was the perfect time to have children.

“I love you so much, and I want to build a life and family with you. I talked to my friends and beloveds about this, and they are very supportive of introducing a baby into our gorgeous little polycule. Of course, this is your body, and I only want to have children if you want to have children.”

Cabbage was moved. She always wanted to have children, too, but there was a real part of her that was growing with doubts. Given the increasing evidence that the world is an increasingly unfriendly environment for raising children, she began to think more critically about what it would actually mean for her to bring children into the world. She loved her peace, but she also wanted children so badly.

She went to a trusted advisor for support.

And they said, “Of course, I cannot tell you to go one way or the other. But one thing I can tell you is that either way will be laden with unspeakable grief for the rest of your life. Women are demonized for having children. Women are demonized for not having children. Either way is an unfriendly environment for a woman to subsist. But at least the choice is yours.”

Cabbage thought about this a lot. She cried so much about it. And…every time she cried about it, she found herself grieving the life she would have had if she had children. She was not imagining forward towards that life; she was grieving that life in her tears already. With time, her mind began to register the fact that her body had already landed in a world where she would not bear children. Her tears were signaling for her mind to catch up with her body’s truth.

And the more she was resistant to that conclusion, the more she grew tired. And she felt less inclined to have sex. She was too submerged in her grief that, for an ongoing stretch of time, she could not find any real desire to be spontaneous or fun or playful with Radish the way they had always been.

When Radish heard news that Cabbage was not interested in having children, they grieved together. There was a part of Radish that was deeply angry and resentful because of how much he wanted to grow a family with Cabbage.

But he recognized that the weight on Cabbage’s shoulders were bigger than his, so he held her through her grief more than she could.

But at times, the grief was too big for either of them to hold together. There were days where Cabbage would lash out at Radish when she could detect even the tiniest smell that he wanted to have sex with her.

“How could you even think about sex right now when you can clearly see that I am a mess?”

He fell quiet and simply sat next to her. Sad. Rejected. But still present.

With time, Cabbage could see how much the lack of sex was affecting Radish.

“It’s really not about the sex. I am getting sex in other relationships, but I just want to know that you love me. I know that sex is not the only way to love me, but it’s just been so long.”

She saw how much he lit up every time they did end up having sex. How much he would take care of all the chores and errands each time he was able to release with her. And her body was increasingly tired from the relentless grief, that any capacity he had to take care of more of the errands was simply really helpful. She was really at point where she had to decide which exhaustion to opt into for the day.

So there were days when she found the transaction to be a bargain that she was willing to make instead of longer emotional conversations that followed the same loop with no conclusion.

The temperature of the relationship appeared to settle a bit, and they thought it would be a good idea to get a puppy and a kitten to support the grieving process. Their floof was exactly what they needed to taste what smiles and joy looked like again in their partnership, and taking care of them felt like a distraction from grieving what it would’ve looked like if they were taking care of a baby.

In between the weeks, Cabbage didn’t even have that much of a capacity to meet with her other friends and beloveds given the grief, but when she did meet with them, sex with them felt like an escape.

It felt like relief. Because none of those people knew about the grief well enough to ask about it, and none of them were so close to the grief where she felt like she could not take a breath, so it felt like a space where she could occupy without the grief following her.

Radish did the same. It was not that non-monogamy was new to them; it was just that Radish felt especially hurt when Cabbage was more willing to have sex with other people than with him. Even though he understood the rationale that Cabbage had so clearly articulated and that he agreed to it and understood it.

But there was no amount of reasoning in the world that could erase the hurt.

And it was around this time when Radish met Turnip.

Turnip was also a few relationships into her non-monogamy journey, looking to transition more to a polyamorous practice because she “just wanted more love in her life,” and she believed that polyamory would be the way.

So when she met with Radish and heard all about their adventures and how they had made it through so many difficult transitions in their lives, she was intrigued.

Their physical chemistry was instant. It had been a while since Radish felt this desired, so longed for. And they had so many similar interests that Radish had long grieved didn’t have with Cabbage.

Radish loved gardening and hiking, and Cabbage was more of a homebody.

Turnip had her own garden since she was a child, and hiking was her weekly activity.

So naturally, Radish began to spend more time with Turnip.

At first, none of this was an issue. Cabbage was so glad that Radish had finally found someone that he could connect with more emotionally. That was the whole premise of polyamory: a practice where everyone loved more freely and truthfully.

They had been doing just well for the past several years. Sometimes parallel, sometimes kitchen table. Sometimes somewhere in between. They were well-versed in practicing regard for one another.

And one day, their puppy Epsilon had caught a nasty infection in her kidney that required weekly trips to the vet. Cabbage gladly volunteered to take Epsilon during the day time because Cabbage worked from home, and Radish was out at work. It was a nice excuse to force herself to get out of the house and see that the world existed out of her grief.

Except…she started taking care of the weekend visits, too.

She brought it up to Radish one evening. “Hey, I’ve been taking Epsilon to the vet two weekends in a row, and I’m having some feelings about it. Do you mind taking her for the next visit? I can schedule her in for an evening so that you can take her. I actually am falling a bit behind work and my own errands because of all these visits.”

Radish asked, “Okay, what day?”

“Either Wednesday or Thursday? I don’t know, we’ll have to check,” Cabbage answered.

Radish said, “Okay, well I am seeing Turnip on Wednesday so can you ask if Thursday will work better?”

Cabbage slid in, “I mean, if you want the Thursday, you can call them and ask yourself.”

Radish retorted, “Okay, what’s with the attitude? You’re the one who wants me to take Epsilon in. I don’t think it’s a big ask to take care of the appointments. Besides, you’ve been taking care of the appointments this past month so you know the ropes.”

Cabbage was frustrated. “There is no attitude. And there are no ropes to know. You just call and make the damn appointment.”

Radish stood up straight. “Okay. There is definitely an attitude.”

“Alright,” Cabbage conceded. “I am sorry for being snippy. I know that you have long days at work, so I appreciate you taking her in.”

There was a part of her that didn’t mean the apology and just wanted to finish the conversation because she did not want him to latch onto the “attitude” he kept bringing up instead of hearing her pain.

She told herself, “He’s heard enough of my pain. We’ve been through enough already. I understand that he may not have the capacity at the moment.” Even though she really wished, in an undeniable part of her heart, that he would at least appreciate the effort she was putting in to take Epsilon.

Thursday evening came by, and Radish started heading out. Without Epsilon.

Cabbage grabbed onto Radish. “Hold on, I thought you were taking Epsilon to the vet appointment today?”

Radish seemed unbothered. “Well, we never resolved that issue. I thought you were calling them to make the appointment, and so when you didn’t say anything, I just assumed that you made another arrangement.”

Cabbage could not contain the irritation fuming out of her veins.

“What the fuck are you talking about? I thought I said, ‘thank you for taking her in.’”

“Well that doesn’t solidify anything,” Radish said firmly.

Cabbage was barely keeping it together. “Okay, even if you are right. Even if we did not fully decide on what we were going to do, why am I the only person taking care of Epsilon right now? If you did not hear anything from me, then why didn’t you check in with me on the appointment?”

Now Radish was up there with her. “I fucking hate ‘why’ questions. I cannot stand when you look at me like that like I am the worst person ever. Standing there like I fucked up SO BIG. Are you forgetting all the ways I DO show up to the relationship? It seems like you suddenly have short term memory whenever you get upset. I can’t do this right now. I need to get some air.”

Cabbage was dumbfounded and shocked at the sharp turn of this conversation.

She started to genuinely question herself:

“Was I that harsh?”

“Should I have been a bit kinder?”

“Maybe I was more demanding than usual?”

She audited herself to check whether she was out of integrity with herself. She concluded that she was meaner than usual and that she should not have raised her voice like that.

But there was still a part of her that could not quite reconcile what appeared to her as out of character for Radish. Was it something about his new relationship with Turnip that was affecting his disposition?

She didn’t want to make assumptions, and she wanted to focus on her relationship with Radish.

So the next time she spoke with Radish, she apologized.

“Hey, I am sorry that I exploded at you like that. I didn’t mean to ask you a ‘why’ question like that. I was just really upset.”

“I get it,” Radish responded. “And I am sorry I just ran out like that. I think I’ve just been feeling a bit removed from my relationship with you given everything going on. I’ll work on it.”

“That’s alright,” Cabbage said. “Do you want to go on a date this weekend? Maybe take a hike like you always wanted? Maybe this Saturday?”

Radish lit up. “Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s go to the Sunny Waterfalls down south from here. I haven’t been there yet since we’ve moved, and I think it will be great.”

It was Friday afternoon. Radish had just gotten home from work.

“Babe, was it tomorrow that we were gonna go hiking together?”

“Yeah,” Cabbage replied. “You mentioned Sunny Waterfalls.”

Radish said, “Oh crap. I am so sorry. You know how I am with calendars. I forgot to add to the calendar that I am meeting Turnip and her two brothers for an afternoon round of golf.”

“Golf???” Cabbage was deeply confused. “What do you mean golf? You never play golf.”

“Yeah, but sometimes you gotta make sacrifices to be with someone you love,” Radish replied.

Cabbage was surprised. “You love Turnip already? It’s been a month.”

“Yeah,” said Radish matter-of-factly. “I knew I loved you about a month in, too. Same with Beetroot. Same with Onion.”

“But golf?” Cabbage was still stunned. “That’s just a ways from anything you’ve ever been into. You also told me how much you hate golf because of how much your mom suffered from terrible clients at the golf course back home. I mean, what are their politics?”

Radish came to it. “Yeah, you know, they listen to those red pill podcasts. They joke about some inappropriate stuff. But I just let it in one ear and let it out the next. You just gotta let them do whatever they gotta do and laugh about it behind their back. You can’t reason with these people, anyway.”

Cabbage stuttered, “Wh-what? Why are you-, I mean, then why are you hanging out with-, I mean, what about this golf game with them is so important?”

“You know, they are owners of the golf club, and they’ve been teasing Turnip for years to get a proper boyfriend, and now that she finally has one, it’s almost like a way for her to get street cred and get them to buy her more meals and you know, things like that.” Radish continued, “And I’ll get free meals out of it, too.”

Cabbage couldn’t find words. “I just-, I don’t-, I don’t know what to say.”

“Listen, it’s not like I am going to turn into them.” Radish was so confident. “This is just a situational relationship that is beneficial to everyone at the surface level.”

Cabbage asked, “What does that even mean? I just can’t-, I can’t sit here and listen to you saying that you are going to play golf with red pill bros instead of hiking with me and repairing your relationship with me so that you can help Turnip get more money from her brothers.”

“Don’t worry,” Radish went on. “We can find another time. It’s just that they are leaving town the next day, so I have to make this work. How about Sunday?”

Cabbage was trying to take a pause, but couldn’t. “‘Don’t worry’? ‘I have to make this work’? Who am I to you? I don’t recognize you anymore.”

Radish was getting impatient. “Alright, you are judging me again. I get to do what I want for a woman I love. You have seen what it looks like when I love. This shouldn’t be a surprise for you.”

“I am not jabbing at your devotion,” Cabbage said. “I am just hurt by how quickly you have changed. Or maybe this was always already you.”

“Don’t come at me with those sweeping judgmental statements,” said Radish. “I am so tired of this.”

“Alright, okay. I’m sorry. I think I misspoke.” Cabbage slowed down. “I am not hurt by how quickly you changed. I am hurt by what appears to be a big transition in our lives. I am not asking you to withdraw from your relationship with Turnip. I am asking you to slow down just a little bit so that we can repair our relationship.”

Radish was quick to respond. “But haven’t I already done so much? Like, when will you be satisfied? I was there for you when you wanted to explore polyamory. I was there for you when you wanted to uproot my WHOLE LIFE just so you can take your new job. And you didn’t even stay there that long. It turned into a remote job! And I had to say goodbye to people I loved. And then I was there for you when you decided to not have a family with me, which is the only thing I ever wanted with you. And when you didn’t want me physically while you were sleeping with other people, do you have any idea how much I felt left behind?”

“Wait,” Cabbage paused. “I thought you were doing all of those things because you wanted to. So you are punishing me because you decided to show up in all the ways that you showed up?”

Radish rolled his eyes. “Oh my god, you are making this about you again. This is not about you. This is about my reclaiming my space. I WAS doing all of this for me, but I thought we were going for the same thing. I thought we were building a life together, and it turns out I was just doing whatever you wanted to do.”

Cabbage was perplexed. “And that means that you get to go with Turnip whenever you want? How is it that you are increasingly giving more and more to her?”

“Because she wants me,” said Radish. “She is kind to me. She takes care of me. She doesn’t ask me ‘why’ questions. She actually wants a family with me. She is devoted to me. She doesn’t want to be polyamorous. She thinks only about me. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find someone who loves me like that?”

Cabbage asked feebly, “But what happened to ‘I would go anywhere with you’?”

“That is still true,” said Radish so confidently. “But again, you have no idea how hard it is to love you. How much I have sacrificed to be with you. And to see that you don’t even want me. It’s hard to be around you.”

“So…then why are you still here?” Cabbage was trying to wrap her mind around a million things at this point. She added, “It’s not like we have kids together. You can go be with her if there is nothing left in this relationship for you.”

“Because I still love you,” said Radish. “I still want to be with you.”

Cabbage thought out loud, “Is it because I take care of the majority of the housework? And because I take care of our fur babies? And it would be a pain to sell the house that’s under our name?”

“You know what,” retorted Radish, “this is exactly why it’s so hard to love you and be around you. You think that I’ve just reduced this whole relationship into a transaction. You’re the reason we are in this mess.”

“Did I reduce the relationship into a transaction, or did I name what might already be happening? Where is the attack and defensiveness coming from? Is there a chance any part of this might be true?” Cabbage already regretted this flurry of questions.

Radish stood up. “Fuck this. Fuck these probing questions that carry no appreciation for all the work I’ve been doing all these years. I was so devoted to you. And you’re turning all of it into this giant indictment of my character, and I am NOT available for this.”

And he stormed out.

He felt so unloved, so unseen in that moment that he went to Turnip to cry into her arms and find the kind of comfort that he never found in Cabbage. He felt so held in his grief, so desired, so spiritually entangled with Turnip in a way that numbed his pain. The pain of having devoted to the one person he thought had ever truly loved with his whole heart and soul, and…feeling like he had gotten nothing in return.

He was so submerged in his pain that he didn’t care about using any barriers that evening. He felt justified in devoting only to his own pleasure with Turnip that night, knowing that she also wanted a child with him.

With no additional thought, no additional examination, he disappeared into what he believed was endless pleasure. “Finally,” he thought. “The kind of devotion I know I deserve.” Because he had been giving it all these years.

He became so lost in the moment that he did not even have the wherewithal to desire the night to never end.

And then…the night ended.

Turnip was still there. Ready to leave polyamory with him into the sunset.

Cabbage was gone. Sure, she was physically gone after a few conversations before she left.

But the truth was that her body was gone even before she realized that it was time to put on her shoes.

She just needed a moment to come to terms with the steep regret of having ignored her own suspicions this whole time:

“I wish we had had more conversations about where our politics came from, what it cost us, and how it evolved over time together.”

“I wish we had put in place a structure where we have a rigorous practice of equitable labor in the home.”

“I wish we had talked more about what polyamory was for him, and how that affected the way he practiced regard for everybody in ecosystem, not only the people who fulfilled the most needs.”

“I wish I had followed my intuition when I felt dissatisfied and inquired more about where that was coming from instead of chalking that up to a personal fault.”

“I wish I did not make his love for me information about me but information about him...so that I may know more about him, the person I claimed to love.”

And even with all of these regrets, she wondered, “Would it have been different if I had done everything the way I would have done in hindsight?”

“Would I have had less pain?”

“Would less pain have meant something else?”

It was then that she recognized that whatever the pain meant was the one thing that was within her purview.

Deciding what the pain was going to mean for her was the one thing no one could take from her.

She held the ability to transmute the pain into whatever she needed it to be to propel her in the direction she ached for in her aliveness in this moment.

And so she did.

“Oh, this person is definitely different.”

“If they like me even after hearing my wounds around white people and still want to stick around to do the work, they must be different.”

And they are. They really are. They are different from the ones who cannot have a conversation about whiteness to begin with. They are curious. They ask questions. They want to know. They want to support. They have done the most foundational work of recognizing that I live in a world they have no idea about.

I let out a sigh of relief.

And they love me HARD. Nobody has loved me the way they do. They think about things that no one has thought about in consideration of me. We have similar interests that I could not share with anybody before. They are just so thoughtful and romantic in a way that gets me questioning, what did I even do to warrant this kind of royalty treatment?

And I don’t find this to be love bombing. It’s just plain old love. Love just happens like this sometimes. We make plans for the future. We also stay present. Sure, things could go wrong, but it feels hard to imagine that right now. We’re just spending a lovely time together. We are laughing together. We’re just existing, together, as human beings. I even go so far as to believe that we are actually dismantling racism right here in this relationship by loving across races. Like, oh, I must have finally found a place where white supremacy does not exist!

I feel stable. I feel like we are getting closer. I feel secure with this person.

(Even though, in the back of my mind, I am a bit concerned that I haven’t aired out the entirety of my politics, and I am not quite sure where they are in terms of my politics not just in the general sense but also when it comes to the nuanced subtleties within cross-cultural and cross-racial relationships. But things are so good that I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, so I want to keep the peace for now. It just feels like they will get it with time because they just love me so much. I chalk up my concern to my own past wounds and sensitivities.)

So we create a relationship where we can mutually thrive. They live their life, and I live my life, and where there are conflicts, we will figure it out. Everything feels so hopeful.

So they go on a few dates. I go on a few dates. They get a bit jealous, and I get a bit jealous. We talk through it. We hold each other through it. Gosh, we are so healthy I cannot tell you how proud I am of us. We are doing polyamory so well. We have always been polyamorous, and it feels even more fruitful doing this together with so much trust.

Every time we walk through conflict together, I just know how much we are meant to be together. They always come back to me. I feel so at home with them.

This goes on for a while. I feel so grounded while I am also on cloud nine.

One day, they go on a date that feels exceptionally amazing for them. I celebrate it. I have done so much work in encountering myself in jealousy, so none of this feels alien or foreign to me.

So I watch them find more time with this new person, Asparagus. They are another white person, but I don’t think much of it because the bond that I have with my partner is unparalleled, so unique, and so deep.

More time with a new person means that they get to explore more about themselves, so I want to support their self-exploration in all the ways that I can. I cannot wait to know more about what they find along the way.

So I ask them about their dates. How was it? How are you feeling? Where are you at with all this?

They tell me how comfortable they feel with them. How at home they feel with them. I get a bit jealous, but they pick that up right away and offer me the gentlest and the firmest reassurances that let me melt into their arms and fall asleep.

With time, I catch glimpses of them texting Asparagus here and there. It’s not that they did anything wrong; it’s not that they are texting in the middle of conversation. They are texting while waiting for the food in the microwave, and I happen to pass by them. I come home early and they are wrapping up a call with Asparagus. There is a part of me cannot shake the story of being unchosen because they could have called me, too.

But I chalk all that up to my mononormative programming and come back to focusing on myself when I can and focusing on the relationship I have with my partner. I don’t try to pry and be nosy. I am afraid of shaking the peace. What we have is just so good right now.

The next day I go to my partner about planning for the week, and they tell me, “Actually, I was thinking that I spend the weekend with Asparagus. You and I live together, so we have a lot of time together, but with Asparagus, this would be our first weekend together.”

Immediately I think, “You seem so eager to spend time with Asparagus. What happened to that eagerness that you always had with me?”

But again I keep chalking it up to mononormativity. I mean, gosh, mononormativity really did a number on me, brainwashing me to believe that I need to be the priority at all times.

But at the same time, I sense the fear of losing them coming up. I let that fear sit for a second.

And then I remember that I have such a secure relationship with my partner, so I decide to do that work on my own. I ask them to check in with me at least once a day because it would be helpful to know that they are still thinking about me.

They agree.

Friday morning comes, and they head over to Asparagus’ house. I give them a big hug. I kiss them goodbye.

And then, after almost fourty excrutiating hours, it’s Saturday evening. I try not to think much of it. “They must really be having a great time. Sometimes I lose track of time when I am with people that I love.” I try to watch baking shows on tv to let time pass.

And then I tear up a little bit. I start hating myself for having expectations. For centering romance. For assigning power over to another human being to have such a hold over my emotions. Why am I even counting the hours?!

All the while, I think of all the different scenarios. What really would happen if we broke up? What really would happen if they ended up finding a stronger connection with Asparagus? Is this new relationship energy going to impact our relationship significantly? Permanently?

I remember all the ways that I regret asking them to do superfluous things. Like asking them for reassurance when I didn’t really need it. Or when I asked them to do more reading around our cultural differences. Or when I got upset with them for not taking the trash out. I start asking myself if I had been too much. We were happy, but we weren’t perfect. I think about all the ways I may have pushed them out and start regretting my choices…while also telling myself that I was doing what I could with what I had. Is this why they are wanting more time away from me?

I go down that rabbit hole.

So many question marks, a handful of tears, and a series of distractions later, I fall asleep. And the next thing I know is that it’s Sunday morning, and I still have no notifications except a reminder text for my therapy appointment tomorrow.

There goes a hollow pang in my chest. I want this to go away, but there is nowhere for me to go. It’s just me and the pang sitting there, alone in the abyss. It feels like an abyss.

And I can’t really talk to a lot of people about this because not a lot of people around me are polyamorous, and even if they are, they are mostly white. There is always a palpable gap I experience when I talk to white people about polyamory because I don’t get to experience the kind of safety that is available to them not just in polyamorous spaces but everywhere else, too.

My partner said they will be back by 3pm, but I hear nothing from them until then, still. The clock hits 4pm, and the phone finally pings. Their message says, “Hey babe, I’m on my way. ETA approx 5ish. I think I’m too full for dinner, so I’m gonna rest at home for the night.”

Like…nothing happened? Like they are undergoing this sudden amnesia around our agreements? What happened to texting at least once on Saturday? What happened to getting home by 3pm? And there is no acknowledgement whatsoever about those broken agreements? And what does “rest” mean? Do they want me to just not talk to them about all this when they get home?

I am livid. So angry that I just see a fog in front of me. Like, I was undergoing a bit of an emotional turbulence this whole time, and I’m just sitting here wondering, what just happened? I find myself shaking that reality while also questioning my anger because they are acting like nothing happened. Maybe it’s true that nothing happened.

Not only that, they are already telling me that they are tired. Are they too tired to talk to me after spending a whole weekend resourcing another relationship?

I had been planning to get some work done and run some errands. But I am lying in the couch mid-vacuuming, watching the sunlight shift from one point to another through the window. I try a few times to get up. I try to judge myself for being so dramatic. I do manage to put some things away and fix myself some dinner.

It’s 5:48pm, and they walk in. The vacuum lies still where it was almost three hours ago. They see me lying on the couch and greet me.

“Heyyy.”

They let out a big sigh of tiredness. I am picking up that they don’t have much capacity to engage with me.

“Hi,” I say.

I look away because I don’t know what to do with my anger. I don’t want to show it, but I also don’t want to hide it. So it just burps out of me sloppily.

They finally ask, “What’s wrong? Are you alright?”

“I don’t feel that great. I don’t know.”

They heave another big sigh. “What’s happening? Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know if we can really talk about it right now. You seem very tired, and I don’t want to engage if you’re tired.”

“Well, I think this is important. And I also don’t want this hanging over my head.”

Now, I feel even more like shit. On the one hand, they say that this is important. But on the other hand, they just want to get this over with like it’s a chore. I can’t process this information while also letting my intensified anger run through my body.

So what feels like the most urgent truth comes out of me: “What happened to the agreement that you would text me on Saturday? And the agreement that you would come back by 3pm today? And you’re acting like nothing happened. Did I not come across your mind even once while you’re gone? And you’re acting like now I am some chore that you need to check off so you can have your precious rest.”

I feel like a kid throwing a tantrum but feeling so justified and righteous in my anger. There is a part of me that thinks, “There is no way they can push back on this. What they did was so completely fucked up. If they can see just how much of a pain I am in, they’re gonna listen first and take accountability.”

At least that is what I think is the only thing that makes sense.

Instead, they say, “Wow, this is the first time I am seeing you in three days, and this is what you decide to hit me with? You say these were agreements, but it didn’t feel very equal when we made them. These were requests that you made, and I said yes because you seemed like you were in a bad place. It’s human to lose track of time. Sometimes it happens. And you’re an adult. You are capable of taking care of yourself without me having to meet all your requirements. You need to take responsibility for your emotions without making them my problem like this.”

I lose sensation in my body. But I hear the faintness of my heart beating.

Who…is this person that I am talking to? A million thoughts and feelings flash before my eyes. I find myself feeling dumbfounded more than anything, including even anger.

What exactly happened over the weekend where I became a source of irritation for this person that I have been loving and longing for and walking with these past few incredible years? Maybe something had been building up in the background. Maybe it was the way I had asked them to take out the trash way too many times.

But what was this weird feeling like I was reduced to an annoying mosquito in this critical moment where I wanted my feelings to really matter? I didn’t know what to say next except stare directly at the floor.

Or was it that I was actually being irritating right now?

Maybe I was being sensitive.

Maybe I picked the wrong timing.

Maybe I could have picked a different set of words.

I simply stand there questioning everything.

Maybe they were seeing the impact their words had on me. They come over and stand with me as they give a hug. I feet instant relief. “They still love me.”

But I feel the tears streaming down my face like we’d just rung a bell that cannot be un-rung.

I still don’t know how their weekend went, what they experienced, and what they are really up to. I want to in my mind, but my body just wants to collapse.

I just pray that this won’t happen again, but I have this unshakeable feeling that this is just the beginning.

The next day, they suggest that we grab dinner together and come back to conversation. I think, “Okay, we are back on track.”

I’m nervous, but I remember the history and context we’ve shared so intimately in our relationship. I think about what we might do this weekend as a way to restore our relationship.

They make dinner, which feels romantic. They look at me and lock eyes and smile. They say, “I missed you.” I remember being smitten all over again while also feeling grounded.

As we grab out first bites, they jump right into it. They have always been so considerate. They tell me that yesterday was an anomaly. Even though the weekend was great, they still didn’t get a lot of sleep, and they had spent two nights in an unfamiliar place. So they were still adjusting back home, and they say they should not have retorted like that to me.

I tell them I get it. It happens. Sometimes when I come back from my trips and a long day at work, I am out of capacity.

I suggest that maybe this weekend we catch that movie we’ve been dying to watch all summer. It’s finally coming out this weekend. And maybe we can have our own getaway to a nearby lake just to get a bit of a refresh.

They tell me, “Actually, this weekend is Asparagus’ birthday, and I was planning to attend that party. Maybe we can spend the whole Sunday together?”

Oh. Okay. It doesn’t feel great that they are spending another precious weekend real estate time resourcing another relationship, but I guess I can work with that since they are spending the Sunday with me.

Except…this is four months ago.

It’s been four months since Asparagus’ birthday weekend, and it’s the same pattern but with a different flavor each time.

Nobody is technically violating any boundaries. We have agreed to exploring different relationships, and we are both technically spending enough time with each other, although they are spending more weekends with Asparagus.

Well actually, there were a few broken agreements. Kind of like that time when they forgot to message me or came home a few hours late.

Actually, more than a few. But they are not massive betrayals that I could specifically point to as massive violations that are worth addressing or leaving over.

Well…now I find myself in a mindfuck as I wonder to myself, “When did I become a doormat, and where do I even begin to enforce my own boundaries? And does this mean the beginning of the end?”

…and what does this have to do with white supremacy?

None of these things are specific to white people. We all do this. This is not a novel experience for polyamorous people. We undergo forceful permutations of our humanity over the course of dismantling our internalized mononormativity that pop up over the course of examining our hurt, our grief, and our expectations of one another.

But it’s the way I experience it differently from white people after feeling extracted from them my entire life.

The way whiteness renders the person entitled to answers and explanations for my choices.

The way whiteness renders the person fragile in response to my hurt and my pain.

The way whiteness renders the person ignorant to their inherent lack of understanding of what it is like to be me in my body while they benefit from my marginalization at the policy level, the community level, and the individual level.

Given all of this, their dismissals, denials, and defensiveness hit differently.

And on top of that, when I tell them that their behavior deepens the wounds I’ve experienced from whiteness throughout life and ancestry, my partner responds differently now.

“I get that white people hurt you, but chalking everything up to whiteness is worth revisiting.”

“You, too, have an enormous amount of privilege. When you’re talking only about whiteness, it really makes you ignorant of the privileges and power that you have.”

“If you talked more about how my decisions impacted you personally and stopped bringing white supremacy into the conversation, I think I would be more receptive to listening.”

And the wounds that arise from whiteness for me is slowly, but surely, squeezed out. There is no longer a place for my wounds to breathe in the language it wants to express itself.

In the beginning of our relationship, whiteness had been a point of connection. They would say things like, “Yeah, these people really suck, and they need to get a grip.”

It felt weird that they used the word “they” to describe white people when they were also white, but I didn’t try to make a big deal out of it because I thought that their whiteness dissipated in their affection for me.

And now, my partner can no longer separate themself from “the other whites” that they had been making fun of with me at the beginning of the relationship.

The relationship now has become a place where mutual thriving is harder to access because my lived experiences are challenged in this space, and their self-concept is challenged in this space.

And so I decide to go first. Because I form some sort of awareness and understanding of what is going on here.

I tell them that I can see how hard it is for them to feel like I am demonizing them. I tell them I am not trying to demonize them or that I am trying to fix them. I tell them that I am really only wanting to be heard and that I love them despite the gap in understanding because I know that they are a human being first and foremost.

We gather some warmth back into our relationship. They nod. They listen. It looks like they are processing what I am saying, but I don’t hear much from them.

So at some point I ask them that I would like some of my words to be reflected back to me, knowing that this is additional work, but also taking that risk to rebuild a space where making requests is safe and familiar again.

But they see this as a test. “I am listening. Why do I have to reflect these words back to you to prove to you that I’m listening?”

So I gradually cut back on the asks.

I feel isolated. I feel distant. I am rummaging through my memories to remember how much I love them and how I can “just work harder” to restore the connection.

But I hear them talking to Asparagus in a way that they don’t talk to me. Like the way white people talk to other white people. A bit more relaxed. A bit less politically correct. A bit more free in the way they don’t have to think about whiteness the way they need to with me. A bit more resourced.

I microdose on despair, repeatedly, to a point where I’ve developed a dependence on that drug.

But I don’t want to leave yet.

My brain wants me to leave while also justifying staying.

My heart is palpitating while finding regularity to re-grasp for certainty.

My body is…exhausted.

I know everyone is gonna tell me to leave. I hate that noise. They act like I don’t know that leaving is an option.

And then there are people who will tell me that I am over-reacting. That there is more work I can do to save the relationship.

And entertaining all that noise just deepens the self-erasure I am so desperately trying to escape.

I hide back in my numbness, whether that’s distraction through work or play or dissociation or something else. I get partial processing done in my hour-long therapy sessions. I sit down to journal through my grief, but my hands won’t move. I search for meaning.

I hate that I am having an existential crisis because of some white person.

But, is it that I am having a crisis because of a white person, or is it because I am trying to love in a world of oppressive systems that makes love incredibly dangerous?

I tell myself, “Fuck it, they can be with others who are easier to talk to. Easier to be with. Maybe more chemistry. I don’t need to be here for that.”

It’s not even jealousy at this point. It’s a matter of dignity, at least in my book.

But if I leave now, I cannot delete the story in my mind that our shared history and context weren’t real. I know in my mind that breaking up doesn’t have to mean that our relationship was a waste. But my body still feels distraught about what I’ve been taught to believe a break up is supposed to mean.

I am afraid to miss them.

I don’t trust myself to be able to handle missing them. The memories. The promises. The experiences I will never get back…again.

I am terrified.

But for once, I encounter myself in the terror. Instead of needing my terror to go away. Instead of asking my partner to perform my feelings away. Instead of pathologizing my terror…I breathe with it.

I stop trying to shut it up.

I notice the tremble in my deep breath.

I feel the heaviness of my cheeks.

I hold the gravity of my gaze.

And, at some point, I find an urge to write it all down. Describing the sensations. Naming what I am afraid to lose. Imagining a world where I am not afraid to be afraid. Grieving my righteous fantasies.

And at some point, I find the urge to cry. To dance. To vent. To lay my head down. To rest.

…all as ways to let my truth be alive in this moment.

Instead of dismissing. Denying. Or defending.

Instead of doing the same things to myself that other people have been doing in the face of my truth.

And so, for the first time in a while, I notice what it looks like to stay with myself instead of abandoning myself yet again.

In encountering the depth of my terror, I encounter the depth of my humanity. I discover the musculature of my own integrity as I watch myself have my own back in one of my the darkest moments.

I am here, standing. Trembling, but standing. On my own. With myself. An endurance that’s felt inaccessible these past several months of bargaining with reality.

In light of this contrast, I recognize with such clarity just how much I actually have been abandoning myself all this time in this relationship.

Not so much because of anything that the other did, but because of how unwilling I was to stay with myself in the wounds, the discomfort, and in the truth of my experience.

I am now finally willing. For the first time, in my terror.

In that way, I watch myself encounter myself in my own self-betrayal.

I watch myself scratch the surface of everything that’s remained dormant against my will.

I watch myself consider possibilities I did not consider before.

I watch myself recognize my own power.

I watch myself take a breath. For myself.

Note: This is a fictional story that is not about me. I don’t date white people. I do date men, though. Let’s see how long that lasts. 😂 Love, Angela.

Heppy pride month!

From what I have observed, and I could be wrong for some, but queerness is a spiritual identification. From what I have witnessed, it’s more than just who you’re attracted to. It is something I yearn to identify as but would like to do so only when I feel like it is the absolute truth coming from my roots.

Otherwise it would feel like a complete ignorance of my privileges I enjoy as someone benefitting from systems that oppress queerness.

To that end, I would love to know more about your queerness to the extent that you are willing to share.

What makes you queer?

How do you see your queerness?

What does your queerness mean to you?

I would love to learn in this way. I wish I did it earlier.

***I would like to collect and share as many of these as I can on a carousel post. If you would like me to tag you for credit, please submit your answer with a rainbow emoji. 🌈

Here are answers separated by asterisks.

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My queerness has been a path away from rigidity and towards freedom 🌈 IG @_bea.bop_

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Loving outside of structures and expectations. Loving wildly.

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Refusing heteronormativity and finding my own ways to enjoy and appreciate love and sex.

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Queerness is community. It’s culture. It’s the act of loving & existing radically! Queerness is tearing down what is old to build something better for all.

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Someone can be LGBT but not necessarily identify as queer; queer has political associations. “Not gay as in happy, queer as in fuck you.”

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Ocean Vuong summarized it: “Queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me.”

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Creating my own way of loving, looking, and existing in this world.

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From bell hooks: “Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

(two people submitted this quote from bell books)

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Possibility to be me in every color & challenge heteronormativity, binary gender systems, and monogamy. 🌈 IG @m_de_mamba

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For me, it means not fitting into cis het male culture, not limiting who I love.

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My queerness is a rejection of societal norms and a fluid approach to life.

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It’s so special and core to my sense of self. It’s freeing, it’s loving, it’s exploring and discovering.

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Listening to my body as the source of truth for who I am, who I love & how (/=society)

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To be like nature 💕

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It means I’m a cuttlefish, not a dolphin.

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It’s new, exploring, dungarees, ppl stopping me in the street, ❤️ anyone twirling their hair

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🌈 I just feel a deep “hell yes that’s me” when I hear the word “queer” IG @janisvogel

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My queerness means I can be and do whatever I want with my fking life!

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I value+prioritize than hegemony dictates. I live on my own terms.

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Queerness to me is a sense of belonging, feeling loved and being celebrated for my differences. 🌈 IG @ohkaydoris

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Queerness to me is about seeing life as an opportunity to create. To love in ways that feel true to us.

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It’s about abolishing gender, sexuality, and relationship norms. Just be yourself yall

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It means exploration, curiosity, learning, growth, connection, community, and love! 🌈 IG @peppertheshrimp

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Actively combating violent systems to the best of my ability when capacities allow 🌈 IG @moontwerk

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It means I have fluid. My attraction is fluid and shifting and changing.

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Queer means existing joyfully & lifting others outside the prescribed norms set by any system. 🌈 IG @the_s71n4

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For me it’s political and spiritual. It’s change. It’s liminal. But it’s been hard. Struggle.

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My politics, values, morals? All queer. It’s queerness, all the way down. It’s innate + a choice.

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Feeling the wholeness & sweetness of love vs. setting it through a window.

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Queerness for me is a sexual, relational, and political identity.

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🌈 Queerness is anything sections of conformist society would shame in someone’s their lifestyle. IG @i_am_missing_autumn

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Queerness is more than a gender/sexual expression, it’s political. #freepalestine

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Queerness is breaking the mold and rebuilding it in a new, shameless, free way. It’s political & spiritual.

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Perpetual self and relational exploration.

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My poly feels like a part of my queer to me. Queer is my all expansive humanity reaching.

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Being united by our love for each other.

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Defying cis-hetero-mononormativity in love no matter how that looks like.

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I remember the bliss after accepting I was bi. Mental walls take a lot of energy. 🌈 IG @andypucko

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It’s a desire and willingness for any story to be mine.

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To me, queer means I feel attraction to people regardless of their gender. *pan for life 🌈 IG @dinixidoula

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It’s def not about attraction! Poly n queer means freedom to love who and how you want 💕

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Open to love in all its forms - including loving and accepting myself.

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🌈-ness for ME means being attracted to a person, their spirit, their energy, not their body parts. IG @honeythelovely1

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To me, being queer means being seen as a person before being seen as a gender. This means my queerness is expressed in the actions of others and its co-creation.

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I created me!! I am a creation of myself!!! My transness is creation!!!

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Fluidity, being one thing then changing my mind later if I wanted to or felt like it.

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Liberation from societal norms. And deep love and yearning.

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The thing that makes me queer is my refusal to conform. My queerness is about living the life. I want to live without making concessions to people who don’t want me to be happy. Queerness, to me, is about love, radical joy, collective action, and shaping new possibilities. 🌈 IG @jckofallnames

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I think respecting and identifying with other marginalized people makes sense but being queer is very much about our genders/orientations as much as our politics/spirituality. Why do you want to identify as queer rather than an ally? Because my queerness is about my community, my truth, being a raging dyke in tune with my ancestry, letting myself by curious about the world. Thanks for the ponder. 🌈 IG @bifariusaf

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Queerness is in my spirit, even before you know the word or its meaning the way you see people and the world around you, there are endless open possibilities with how you can connect and what a person can mean to you and the beauty in calling yourself queer and recognizing that you aren’t limiting who you can hold in your heart to love, spend your life with, fuck, anything you want can be yours when you are kind and let you queer spirit shine. There’s also such a shared experience between other queer people of homophobia that we can just understand each other and our struggles which is nice to feel that bond without so many words exchanged.

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Freedom in who and how I love, and what I prioritize in my life. The freedom to live free from the cishet male gaze. The creativity to design my gender and sexuality based on what feels affirming to me.

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Decentering men, dismantling patriarchy, questioning beauty standards and ableism.

Queerness is often considered a political identity and/or philosophy that informs someone’s relationship style/sexuality because “queering” something means to step outside of the norm. Therefore, being LGBT =/= queer (but there is often overlap). However, I think there’s an argument for straight people being able to engage in queerness (in the same way monogamous people can engage in RA) - this would require a high degree of unpacking monogamous culture though (imo those who are straight and poly often engage in a lot of oppressive practices because of patriarchy, but I digress).

Queerness is about questioning norms which often leads to people “coming out” in various parts of their lives (kink, poly, LGBT, etc.)

For me, being queer means recentering men, questioning beauty standards, ableism, and what is seen as “attractive.” It’s about addressing supremacy and power dynamics.

Queerness for me personally looks like being a lesbian who could have sex with a man in the right context (such a taboo) but not for his sake - for mine.

It looks like me not finding conventionally attractive people attractive.

It’s about being honest that I can never be monogamous, and yet, my poly identity also remains fluid. I am open to relationship styles that lie between ENM and RA depending on my partners. AND I still always want a nesting partner.

It looks like no longer believing I need to fulfill a partner’s every need, nor they mine.

It looks like me moving in and out of kink dynamics with people of all genders depending on the connection.

It looks like acceptance of my disfigurement and disability and acceptance that this isn’t a life sentence of loneliness.

It looks like being able to call in community members without cancelation because that is another form of supremacy.

It looks like understanding where you can share, and where you need to protect the self.

It’s about consent and relearning your mind and body.

I am a queer woman who enjoys looking like a woman and acting like a man - in that I embrace having normal bodily functions, swearing and taking up space unapologetically with heels and wing tipped eye liner on point.

Being queer means I continue learning to remove shame where I diverse, while questioning, understanding, and accepting where I want to participate in normalcy without guilt.

🌈 IG @samantha.june.artworks

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My queerness is a practice. To defy/subvert sex/gender/sexuality norms individually + with others! I feel like there are layers to queerness. I do it by myself through the way I move, dress, or medically alter my body as a gay trans person, and I do it in partnerships which are queer and trans.

But there’s also the element of queerness that comes through seeking community and comrades in this work of gender/sex/sexual defiance and subversion. And because those oppressive norms are far reaching, and inextricable from other power structures like colonialism, ableism, and capitalism - queer work is also to be found in other places.

In the broadest terms, I feel I am most queer when I am working with other towards this desire for myself and others to be able to love, care, and relate in as many different ways as we consent to.

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A defiant expression of everything I am. Fluid, flexible, organic. How I love myself. How I love others. My gender and those roles - I am mother and father.

***

Thank you to all of those who participated in this beautiful mosaic of responses.

If you see any errors or would like me to take down credits or add credits, feel free to send me a message on IG @itsangelahan.

This is not about whether I am right. This is about how I see the world from my perspective.

Because I am just one person, whatever fragment of my thoughts I have to share will be wrought with ignorance of YOUR experiences as a human being.

It will also be wrought with hypocrisies. I am not afraid of being called a hypocrite. In fact, I take that as a compliment because it attests to how many of my paradoxes and contradictions I am holding and grappling with, which I find incredibly interesting.

What I am afraid of, however, is the standardization of human experiences.

I am afraid of any accusation that I am “objective” or that I am “ethical” or that I am “good” or that I am “right.”

What does that even mean?

“Objective” according to which standard?

“Ethical” according to which philosopher?

“Good” according to whose definition?

“Right” for whom?

And when I am following somebody else’s rules, where am I?

If I don’t know where I am, who is showing up to the conversation?

Many of my beliefs and perspectives are informed by fear, and I don’t mind that.

I do not have that fear is a bad thing because, again, I don’t find it interesting to see something as good or bad, better or worse. This kind of binary is at the crux of supremacy culture where one thing is universally better than another.

And so when I say that a lot of my fear arises out of white supremacy, I also don’t have that white supremacy is an inherently bad thing, either. It just means that my fears result from my experience of white supremacy, and that informs the way I want to show up for or against the things I like and don’t like.

Here’s the unlikely experience where I found the spark to write at length about this today: the vast majority of people who give me unsolicited feedback are white.

Some examples:

Experienced moms telling me that it will “get better” if I just “hang in there” and “keep showing up.”

Older men who tell me that I should “keep doing what I’m doing” and “ignore the haters.”

Experienced polyamorists that tell me “this is how I can be happier” and how “I’m just not doing it right.”

And it all boils down to the same thing: the reality that I am experiencing right now is not satisfactory and must be improved.

My humanity, as it is right now, is not “good enough.”

Especially when I did not ASK for it. I find that teaching and learning is a sacred exchange that I engage with with consent and on my own terms.

None of this is to say that these comments are oppressive for me. These are just pixels on the screen that we will all forget about in short order.

But what this DOES do is inform of the greater supremacy culture where we must “always be striving to be better” or “having more” or “being more kind and patient and virtuous.”

When these voices become so loud and persistent, it erases the oppressive realities that others experience. These voices turn a blind eye to the reality that “improvement” is an extracurricular luxury for many of us because we are so busy surviving and barely hearing our heartbeat in a supremacist world that attaches our worth to how “good” and “improved” we are.

Which is one reason I detest the idea that I have to be “good enough” for anything.

In resistance to the culture that decides FOR me who I am and what I should be doing, I decide to behold the truth of what is real right now.

It’s why my priority is around what feels the most truthful, regardless of who or what prompted that experience.

(And sometimes, I desire a different experience. It just doesn’t mean that the experience I desire is better or worse. I do not have to have any additional story other than that I want something.)

So I decide to engage in ongoing examination of any shame that shows up to my system, especially given the systemic power differential where white people in the US and Western empires have been dictating the code of ethics for as long as it has reinforced their colonial roots.

Meaning, the foremost reason for settlers colonizing Indigenous land was that they had a “moral duty” to assert their dominance and commit violence.

They relied on what they believed was “ethical” and “right” instead of being truthful and congruent about how they wanted to be better and more powerful than other people so that they can have more than others.

And ethics soon became the ultimate weapon of shame against our own sovereignty because the following generations inherited the belief that whatever widely accepted ethics superseded our own spiritual compass around how we actually want to love the most truthfully and expansively.

…which, ironically, is why people are violating ethics all the time. They are chasing forbidden pleasure as the antidote to shame…which is, again, not a bad thing. Just rarely effective at getting us the kind of experience of love we are looking for.

Our DNA has been whitewashed into oblivion so that we ignore what actually feels true and real because “doing the right thing” and “becoming better” is the ultimate gateway to belonging.

…so much so that we do not even know what it looks like to find belonging in one another by actually being truthful about where we are.

So when we are looking for sustainable human relationships, standardizing the human experience via the approach of “ethics” doesn’t work. At most, it has severe limitations on its effectiveness.

The question is, what do I want, and what is working and not working?

…outside any inherited conditioning of what I “should” desire and what “should” work?

*

I don’t have that white supremacy is about how “you are white, so you think you’re superior, so you’re a terrible human being, so you need to do better.”

What I have is that white supremacy refers to the phenomenon that we EACH are ALL legacies of the rotten historical roots that presume that there is a superior way of being over another in ways that European white settlers enforced into being.

…which makes it easy for us to believe that an uncomfortable human experience makes us less human or inferior.

…which makes it difficult to love because the shame blinds us from witnessing the evolving and beautiful works of art that we are.

…which makes it difficult to locate the person that is showing up to the relationship.

I don’t know about you, but there is no love without YOU.

So my selfish desire - for the vision that I have in the kind of love I want to see more of in this world - is for more of YOU to be here for the world to experience more of.

Whenever we find ourselves thinking that we’re doing it wrong or need to be better or whatever the fuck, does it feel accessible to note that the voice is not ours but an inherited one that takes us away from how we actually want to love?

When you think that you (or someone else) “should improve,” I invite you to ask: is this the kind of love that *I* WANT to experience? Do I want to engage with the kind of love that hinges on someone’s improvement, or do I want to engage with the kind of love that follows my spiritual compass that directs me to my ever-evolving will and my capacity outside the reductive binary of GOOD or BAD?

Talking about white supremacy is never about blaming white people. Yes, I will feel unsafe around white people because I experience the most acute form of supremacy culture with them. But that doesn’t mean that I am ~so harmless~.

As a straight person, for example, my existence is already contributing to queer oppression because I am benefitting from the power structures that make it easier for me to access care and resources in ways that queer and trans individuals cannot under the status quo.

As long as I am benefitting from queer oppression, I am perpetuating it.

This doesn’t mean that I must be ashamed of myself. I find that to be another narrative of supremacy culture that requires me to believe that I am inferior for “causing harm.” (Which, I find ironic, because supremacy culture often has us more fixated on what is more blameworthy rather than actually tending to the harm.)

This does mean, however, that my identifications, my decisions, and my preferences are part of the collective experience. Which allows me to think critically about the ways I WANT to show up for humanity and the experiences of those I know nothing about.

The invitation to consider our internalized white supremacy hinges on the same premise.

This is not about blaming anybody’s whiteness. It is about directing our attention to our ability to love more powerfully outside the minimizing, oversimplified, and whitewashed paradigms of rightness and ethics.

…and bringing more of YOU to the conversation. Whether you are white or not.

What are your preferences? Your nightmares? Your dreams? Your desires? Your terrors?

And is it okay that we want different things?

Where do we decide to expand our capacity for discomfort if it means we can behold the other and connect more deeply on own mutual and sovereign terms?

To end, I want to note that white supremacy and colonization is not just a US and Western thing. Of course.

Colonization has been a historically persistent thing. My own family experienced Japanese colonization and survived a war torn Korea.

So I come to the US pretty tired of all this colonial way of thinking that has erased so much culture and connection from our roots.

Which is why I use my post-colonial privilege to reflect on the ways my experiences as a Korean and as a Korean living in the US informs and confirms the collective stories on how white supremacy affects the way we love today.

I don’t like the argument that colonizers have “advanced humanity in so many ways” because we will never have access to what would have happened had there been no pattern of colonization and domination in our history.

I may not even have been born.

And I don’t have that that would have been the worst case scenario. Nature is already violent.

And disrupting nature with “all these advancements and technology” rooted in colonial thinking has turned the only planet we have even more violent and unsustainable.

So here we are today.

Knowing that we cannot erase love from our humanity no matter how hard we try, I decide to love even when the resources I want are not available.

I decide to love by using so many of my privileges to express, be “wrong,” to experiment, and evolve at my own pace.

Every day, I resist that I must be anything different.

To that end, I behold myself as I am. And I behold you as you are.

And experiment with relating through differences as they arise.

If we aren’t looking for the “right” answers - if we aren’t looking for answers at all - what is the thing that feels most truthful to behold right now?

-

If you haven’t heard from me in a while, I am mostly on Instagram these days coaching polyamorous humans on loving well on their own terms. I very much enjoy working with individuals, and I have also been increasingly enjoying working with partners who want to relate through difference in real time. You can find more of my work on Instagram or find a way to work with me on my Linktree.

The drive-thru here is a bit tricky because Dunkin’ directs you to drive around a whole parking lot to get in line, but there is a shortcut that quite a few people opt to take even though there is signage telling you not to.

I got in line the long way, and an older white woman took the shortcut and got right in front of me.

Typically, I don’t give a shit. I have time.

Today was different.

I beeped for 15 seconds straight. Paused.

Beeped for another 15 seconds. Paused.

Repeated two more times.

So I beeped for a total of over a minute.

The point of this beeping was to tell her to get in the back of the line.

She kept trying to move her car back and forth, not knowing what to do. And eventually she stayed in line instead of getting in the back of the line.

I then resorted to staring at her, and she looked back at me and mouthing words as if to explain herself, and I didn’t understand what she was saying. I lowered my window.

She lowered her window and our conversation went something like this:

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get in the back of the line.”

“Well, this is my first time here, and I didn’t know.”

“Get in the back of the line.”

“Well, I’m here now, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Yes there is. You can get in the back of the line.”

“Oh, you’ll survive. You’ll get your coffee.”

“Get in the back of the line.”

“Grow up.”

“You grow up. Get in the back of the line.” I was shouting at this point.

I also said, “Such a Karen.” I regret saying this last part, but I said it.

And then a Black woman in a van zipped toward us and lowered the window.

She also shouted, “Get in the back of the line.”

And the white woman kept explaining herself as the Black woman got out of her car and walked toward the Dunkin’, probably to order inside.

There was a moment of silence as we inched closer to the drive-thru speaker where we were to place to order.

Just before it was her turn, the white woman got out of the line and drove away. She must have lost her appetite for coffee.

I gotta tell you, I had a justice boner so hard I didn’t know what to do with it.

One thing was very clear coming out of this experience: I am angry.

I am angry as fuck.

After over 73+ million people (and counting) voted against my bodily autonomy and for their delusions and privileges this past Tuesday, it became very clear that I have no tolerance for people who act helpless, entitled, and ignorant as they make decisions that deplete my own resources.

What happened at Dunkin’ was simply symbolic of what happened on Tuesday.

In the face of helplessness, entitlement, and ignorance, I will get angry. As a human being, I will attempt to make other people responsible for my emotions. The very thing I teach others against.

I will be goofy and reckless in the way I relate.

For the longest time, I felt shame around this.

I thought that I needed to be “better” and “take the high road” and “be more wise” in the face of unskillful relating.

But what I have found is that attempting to be “better” than my truth is a sneaky way of abandoning my truth of the moment and attempting to manipulate the other person’s experience of their humanity in response to mine.

Meaning, if I try to “be kind” when that is not how I really feel, I would often do that with an agenda for them to “see me as an example” or to “learn from my kindness” or “heal from my kindness” or some made up story like that.

In those made-up stories, I would subscribe to and perpetuate stories of supremacy where: (1) my kindness was better than my anger, and (2) the way I chose to show up to the conversation was better than the way they chose to show up to the conversation.

For a long time, I wanted to be different from the colonizers. So I would try to do everything that they didn’t do.

By chasing that ideal to be “different” and “better” than them, I would ignore and suppress my truth of the moment.

What ended up happening was that I was doing the exact same thing the colonizers were doing: minimizing and dismissing my truth.

I was ignoring the anger. Dismissing my sadness. Minimizing my grief.

The reality is, I am already different from everybody else. I am not better or worse, but I am already different because I am a human being, and every human being is different by definition.

As someone who inherited this world and its beliefs, I will find tendencies of the colonizer in myself as well as experiences of the colonized. But I will nonetheless still be the only person who has had more experience in my body as myself more than anybody else.

Which means that I have the most authority and sovereignty over my truth, and I decide to be known in my differences from others, my similarities with others, and my humanity as myself.

How the other experiences my words is not my business. I cannot control the way they experience their humanity in response to mine.

But I have control over how I decide to make myself known.

Sometimes, the way I make myself known will not be competent because it will not get me what I want.

Sometimes, the way I make myself known will be reckless because it is inconsistent with how I want to love.

But ultimately, I trust that I express myself in a way that feels most truthful to me in the moment because that is what is necessary for me to experience my own dignity in response to a world that refuses to reflect my dignity back to me.

I must admit, I am late to the game.

I thought I woke up to a whole new dystopian state this past Tuesday, but this world has been in a dystopian state for a very long time.

Black, brown, and Indigenous people, among others, have been fighting this fight for much longer than I have.

I have, in large part, been insulated from the need to put my foot down and stare at colonizers right in the eye because I have been feasting on my own class privilege, light-skinned privilege, able-bodied privilege, heterosexual privilege, among others.

I am just beginning to experience what Black people and queer people, for example, have been going through as I become more vocal about my polyamory and having children in an open marriage while being a neurodivergent Korean woman.

As I continue to make myself known, I will be putting myself at greater risk.

But I find that, with that risk comes opportunity, especially with the boatload of privileges I carry.

Sure, I will be at risk of being told to kill myself, being threatened to be raped, being sexually objectified, and being isolated from communities I’ve known for a long time. All of this has happened already hundreds of times over the past year.

But even as I witness my nervous system spike in the face of being deeply misunderstood and dehumanized, I can still hear my heart beat.

Despite every attempt to stop, silence, and suppress me, I refuse to do any of those things.

I decide to exist and still make myself known.

I decide to draw another breath.

All because of the privileges I have in being able to do so. This is how I decide to use the privileges that I have.

This is what I decide to do with the power that I have to write, speak, and show up on my own terms.

In the moments where I feel destabilized, I know how to connect with myself. I have not perfected this practice because, like I said, there will be times when I show up goofy and reckless.

But I will never stop choosing courage - where it feels true - to know more of myself and to make known more of myself in a world that tells me to stop.

If I decide to listen to them instead of myself, I don’t know who is showing up to the conversation.

And if I don’t know who is showing up to the conversation, I will remain a hollow existence that continues to fill myself with everybody else’s decision around what I need to do with my body and spirit because I have no access to my own knowing.

That looks more like a triumph for them. Not me.

I don’t find that to be acceptable.

So, I will follow the lead of those who came before to me to fight for our agency to exist as a whole human being who gets to make our own choices.

In this pursuit, I will not forget the privileges I have and the power to make my own decisions with those privileges.

I will remember my humanity.

I will remember my power.

I will remember to love…in a way that feels most truthful to me.

💗

You love your partner so much and want to open up not because your partner is not enough but because you have such expansive capacity to love more widely and deeply.

In fact, your relationship with your partner has been a place where you’ve evolved your relationship with love most extensively, which has deepened your curiosity for love.

💗

You’re not coming to non-monogamy as the last resort for “fixing all your problems” in your marriage.

Instead, you’re coming to non-monogamy as a portal to having more open conversations to know more about yourself and your partner.

💗

You have a knowing that the way you engage with non-monogamy is only going to be fruitful for the way you develop relationships and community.

Not because it’s easy but because living out who you are is worth the twists and turns and adventures along the way.

💗

You know that when you engage with your freedom, the way you show up for the things that you care about (like your productivity, creativity, activism, and connection) happens so organically in ways that felt impossible before.

💗

You know that dismantling the fascist concept of the nuclear family is not about hating your nuclear family but about building a community where your nuclear family can actually thrive outside capitalistic constraints.

💗

You understand that feelings are here to facilitate a more intimate connection to yourself.

You understand that uncomfortable feelings are not there to harm you but to inform you.

And that tickles your spirit.

💗

You know that non-monogamy is not just an escape but an actual form of infrastructure to break down the roots of oppressive systems that want to keep you feeling trapped and ashamed in your body.

💗

You know that the way you engage with your truth is at the center of deeper connection at every level across individuals, communities, nations, and factions.

Because, without our truth, who are we?

✨

Dan my husband and I are hosting a fireside on Monday, June 17 at 9pm Eastern to share our journey of opening up our marriage in a way that brings people closer together, starting with our own partnership.

Register here: angela-han.com/dangela

There is a subreddit called r/DeadBedrooms with nearly half a million people in it (461k to be exact, at the time of this writing).

So, you are not exactly alone if you resonate with what the dead bedroom feels like.

And yet the first thing we do is pathologize. Shame. Judge.

“I’m not attractive.”

“I’m not lovable.”

“I’m not enough.”

“I’m doing something wrong.”

“I should know how to handle this.”

“I am uniquely fucked.”

This is not a “you” problem. This is a systemic problem where we have been conditioned to believe that our humanity is a problem.

Capitalism and the patriarchy and white supremacy and every kind of oppressive system want you to believe that something is wrong with you so that you can keep racing and being “better” than other people according to some arbitrary standard of goodness and ethics that nobody even knows where it really even came from. (Maybe the Bible. And who wrote the Bible? Not God.)

Which is why, if you find yourself not “good enough” or “better,” you easily find yourself in making yourself a problem.

And it’s affecting not just poor people and women and non-white people. It is affecting everybody.

The collective decision that we’ve made to consent to this rat race has gotten us forgetting about what we really want and how much we inherently deserve it.

And here’s the reality: if you really want sex, you inherently deserve it. The end.

There is no justification, no rational basis, no prerequisite required for going after your desires. That is a lie that only benefits the people who want you miserable. Which are oppressive systems that are only interested in using you as a soldier to perpetuate its supremacist ideals around what is better and what is worse. Upholding these supremacist beliefs keeps us chasing after ideals rather than honoring the truth of where we are right now.

That ends now.

I have two scripts for two positions you may find yourself in: (1) you are the one with the lower libido or (2) you are the one with the higher libido.

How to approach talking about the libido differential with your partner.

There are more complex scenarios, but let’s start with these two.

Also, I hate scripts. But I hate them only if they are used as a replacement for what feels true to you. I am okay with them when they facilitate your own experimentation with words in a way that carries your truth most congruently.

From what I have experienced, even if you say all the right things, the transmission will not reach the other if it not a true reflection of how you are really thinking and feeling.

Either way, my own annoyances are my business. I trust that you will use these however you want as you are resourceful in your own way.

So, here we are.

(1) You are the one with lower libido

Hey, I know it’s been a while since we’ve been intimate, and I know that I’ve come up with all kinds of reasons that feel like excuses each time. I would love to have a conversation about this if you are willing and available. [insert here space to obtain your partner’s consent]

I want to start by saying that I love you so much, and I want to examine with you what it looks like to love one another deeply and in a way that is truthful to both of us.

Let me first address the elephant in the room: I have been avoiding sex. It’s not because I don’t find you attractive. Or maybe I actually don’t find you attractive. I don’t really know the truth because I never really got a chance to explore my own sexuality. I never got to explore how I want to connect with myself sexually. Never got a chance to look at what actually gives me pleasure.

Because I have been so occupied with how my sexuality is affecting you.

The reason I am occupied with how my sexuality is affecting you is that I don’t want to lose you. I love you so much. But I also realize that my fear of losing you and loving you are two different issues. In fact, those two issues may be in conflict because I wonder: am I really loving you when I am avoiding talking about hard things for the sake of not losing you?

When I am avoiding talking about hard things, I do so out of fear of disappointing you or upsetting you in some way. And when I do that, I am refusing to see the parts of you that are difficult for me to experience.

But here is what I have come to define love as: the willingness to extend myself to you for our mutual thriving.

If I am unwilling to extend myself to see more of you, am I really loving?

If I am unwilling to extend myself to love all of you, whom I am actually claiming to love?

I don’t want to love just parts of you. I don’t want to claim that I love you when I am not loving all of you.

When I say I love you, I want to mean it from the bottom of my heart. That means I am willing to experience the parts of you that may be harder for me to experience and partner with you as we go through those experiences together. This is how I want to extend myself, if you are open to it.

Which involves me telling you the truth because if I am to love all of you, I need to bring all of myself to engage with that love.

If I am not bringing all of myself to love you, I don’t know who is doing the loving.

So ultimately, I want to partner with you in knowing more of each other so that we get to see more of each other and love each other fully, as we are.

To me, that looks like building in some space for us to bring whatever story or desire that we’re grappling with. What if we start with the hour we have tomorrow after the kids go to sleep? (for example) [insert space to talk about logistics that are specific and relevant to you]

During this time, I want to establish: who wants to be heard first, how we want to set aside our own stories while one of us does the listening, and how we want to repair in case of rupture. How does that sound?

(2) You are the one with the higher libido

Hey, I know that it’s been a while since we’ve been intimate, and I know that I’ve reacted in ways that have not been the most ideal in response to your lower libido. I haven’t been so great at honoring your no every time I wanted a yes, and I would like to change that. Are you willing and available to partner with me on this? I would like to start by sharing where I am now and then talk about having a conversation about it. [insert space to obtain consent from partner]

What I have come to realize is that I have sexual needs, and I have been feeling both ashamed and entitled about having those needs. With the storm of thoughts and emotions swirling around my sexuality, I have ended up trying to make you responsible for having my needs met even when I tried my hardest to not make it your problem.

I have been resentful and angry about the ways you did not want to meet my needs because I made it mean that I am not attractive to you anymore, which I made it mean that you don’t love me anymore. And those stories turned into the belief that I am unlovable and objectively unattractive. Love and sex started becoming less and less accessible to me.

But I realize that those are stories that I want to rewrite, and I want to come back to and start with how much I love you and how I want to rebuild my relationship with you.

I want to have the kind of relationship with you where I honor your truth as much as I honor mine. Like when you don’t have desire for sex, I want to learn more about what that experience is like for you without making it mean anything about myself or my worth. And when I have stories about myself or my worth, I want to explore that with your witnessing without requiring you to tend to those stories and those wounds.

Partnering with you means we offer each other the safety and spaciousness to feel like we can talk about our wounds and our feelings without feeling like something is wrong with us.

I know for a fact that you are not “wrong.” Neither am I. It is not possible for us to be “wrong.” You are just you. You are human. So am I. And you are a human that I love. That means there are so many parts of you that I don’t even know about, and what I really want is to know more of the person that I love. That means I suspend any judgments, expectations, assumptions, or requirements when I talk to you.

I want to know more about your sexuality. I want to know more about things about you that have nothing to do with your sexuality. I want to know more of you and connect with you more deeply.

As we get to know more of each other, I hope we can know more about what we really want and how we want to get there. That might mean more scheduled sex. It might mean more spontaneous sex. It might mean an open marriage. It might mean we never have sex again. It might mean so many things, I am willing to experiment with you in finding out what’s next for us even if it might feel messy along the way.

Whatever the outcome, I find each possibility to be neutral. Of course, I might have feelings and grief around some of the changes that might be required in our marriage, but I am willing to experience those things and take responsibility for those feelings if it means that we create the kind of partnership where we both feel safe to be more of who we are.

Do you want to talk about setting up some times when we can bring some of the things that we’ve been meaning to get off our chest? [insert logistics discussion]

At the center of both invitations is the devotion to regarding the other as a human being.

So in order to craft your own invitation to talk to your partner about what matters to you, the first and foremost work is to remind yourself of your own humanity. When you find yourself pathologizing and shaming yourself, ask whether you are treating yourself as some idealized fictional character or as a human being.

Where you allow yourself to be more human, you get to connect with your partner’s humanity more deeply and truthfully.

Remember, we are here on this planet to love.

To love messily is not to be shamed but to be celebrated, witnessed, and cherished.

*

The Opener is a space where you get to practice difficult conversations that are specific to YOUR scenario.

And honestly, if you know how to have open conversations with your partner about sex, there is no difficult conversation you cannot handle.

You will be entirely untouchable.

Want to negotiate your salary? Easy. Because you can handle every shade of truth.

Want to stand up for a cause you care about? Easy. Because you know how to advocate for the parts of you you used to feel most ashamed about.

Want to speak on a stage? Easy. Because you know that, in the end, all that we’re here to do is love.

With each difficult conversation we have with our partners, we love more skillfully.

The effectiveness you are looking for in every area of your life is waiting for you in the skillfulness you cultivate in your closest relationships.

The Opener is a Discord serve where we practice having open conversations about sex, opening up our marriage, and the most difficult topics you’ve been avoiding. Whether it’s in real time during our live calls or through our discussion channel.

Where we liberate our own love story, we weave ourselves into collective liberation.

Practice love with us in community.

Join here or send me a message if you want to talk about joining.

When I look at my phone, I don’t want to be reminded of the reason I don’t have the kind of freedom I actually desire. Instead, I have a photo of a tangerine tree that I can look at for a micro moment of peace and nature.

I also never go into the living room, which is basically a play area for the kids. My body already goes on high alert whenever I step into that area. Cleaning up after the kids? Forget about it. Not happening.

No matter how much fucking “mind work” or “nervous system regulation” I do, triggers will be triggers.

Why am I so triggered?

Because there is a solid part of me that feels spoiled and entitled to freedom and comfort.

I am an only child. Growing up, I would always say I never wanted siblings because I wanted all the attention to myself. I was also the youngest out of all my cousins. So I was pretty much given everything I wanted and was tended to as the precious baby.

And then when I got married, Dan treated me like royalty. I also did whatever I wanted with the generational wealth I was born into. Law school that was fully paid for, and all the praise and pedestalizing from family friends who thought I was so smart and accomplished for being a lawyer.

I was like, “I am the shit, y’all. I am untouchable.”

So imagine this spoiled little princess all of a sudden having to take care of two small humans who are determined to use me as their personal chauffeur, couch, and punching bag.

What a jarring transition.

I could no longer move to anywhere I wanted anymore. I was such a nomad before kids. In the span of a decade in the US, I lived in four cities.

I could no longer travel at the drop of a hat. I used to go on road trips every single weekend, especially when I lived in Las Vegas and there was majestic nature everywhere.

I could no longer sleep without mentally preparing for the worst every single night. Panic checking the baby cameras to make sure they were fine.

Dan and I could no longer go on a spontaneous date (or any date, for that matter) without paying for a sitter with the guilt of spending money for ourselves and being away from the kids.

I was also no longer my own person. I am constantly measured against all kinds of standards on the role of being a mom.

Not to mention April 11, 2021, at 11am on a Sunday, when I fucked up at a cosmic level.

If you’ve been in my orbit for a while, you may already know this story. If not, it was the worst week of my life.

Rhea, my firstborn, had just turned one a couple weeks back. She was waddling around the house, and I was cooking soup. Korean ramen (Nongshim shinramen) to be specific. When it was done, I put the boiling pot of soup on the dining table placemat and went to the fridge to get some water. In that split second, Rhea pulled the placemat, and the soup spilled over her face, and she suffered second and third degree burns.

We rushed over the the county general hospital, and they told us to wait until the Johns Hopkins burn unit team came to pick us up.

Rhea didn’t stop wailing.

I remember stepping into the ER asking frantically for attention, and the receptionist would be asking for the name and date of birth. She asked several times because I couldn’t hear her through Rhea’s bawling. People started yelling at the receptionist to just let me in and get the specifics later.

So they let us in, and they got to start treating Rhea. But she was such a small baby that they had trouble finding her vein to administer the proper medication. It felt like they were piercing my own heart as they kept poking the needle into her tiny arm about a dozen times.

I had never felt more helpless.

Eventually, they gave up. They told us to wait, and Dan and I just sat there speechless. Unable to feel. Unable to find words. An unspeakable amount of guilt, shame, worry, and feeling like the world was crumbling down right before our eyes. Desperately wanting to turn back time just two more hours just so that I could have done things differently.

Rhea had finally fallen asleep from the exhaustion of crying at the top of her lungs for over an hour.

The Johns Hopkins team finally arrived. And when we got there, they again took another 30 minutes trying to find the proper vein. They told us to wait outside, and the room they took her to was supposedly sound proof. But there was no way I could mute out the crying that, again, just would not stop.

There was not a single second that went by where I did not think, “I could have prevented this.”

And while we waited, the staff took turns asking us what happened. I learned later that this is a common procedure to ensure that there was no abuse or neglect.

There was a part of me that just wanted to scream that yes, I was neglectful. This was not supposed to happen. I am so fucking clumsy and messy, and I caused this. I should be in fucking jail right now.

My baby was in the ER crying at the top of her lungs because I couldn’t get my shit together.

There was nothing in the world that could change my mind on that.

Absolutely nothing.

We stayed in the hospital for a week. I was still a lawyer at the time, so I remember asking for time off and my boss being very understanding. But the knee-jerk capitalistic guilt of not being a “good worker” was layered on top of the profound guilt of not being a “good mother,” and I kept asking myself, “What business do you have being a mother? Rhea doesn’t deserve this.”

“What business do you have being a lawyer? What a clown you are.”

“What business do you have moving through this planet if you’re going to cause this kind of mess? Get the fuck out of here.”

The voice was shame was relentless.

For months after leaving the hospital, we would have to change her gauze and balm out twice a day. And for about two years, we would make over a dozen more trips back to the hospital for bi-monthly laser treatments. We also had additional treatment in Korea, where it was even more painful.

And they told us to keep her out of the sun. She had just turned one, and it was getting to be a beautiful summer. And she had to stay home. Because of me.

Each time I looked at her face, I saw the more permanent scar right below her lips that none of the doctors was sure how long it was going to last. Every time I changed her clothes, I would see my inordinate fuckery etched into her perfect baby skin.

There would be days where I felt normal. And there would be days where I bawled my eyes out yelling, “What did I do to my baby?”

That was all I could say.

There was no hole I could crawl into to feel any less like a piece of garbage.

So I would find ways to still be “functional.” I would go to work, run my business, and meet people. It was how I tried to convince myself that I was doing fine and that I was totally a master of my own emotions.

It was also how I dealt with the magnitude of shame. The shame was telling me that I was not deserving of being functional, so being functional was the only way I knew how to fight it, which was to prove it wrong.

I was so busy making this whole thing about me and not about Rhea.

I didn’t even know where to start asking the question about how I wanted to love Rhea because I was too busy fighting my own shame.

At which point the shame deepened, of course.

There came a point where I had no idea what to do with this shame shrouding over me like the devil’s own two eyes, so about a year and a half after April 11, I enrolled in a class called the Shame Clinic, hoping to address my shame.

Out of the hundreds of people in the class, I raised my hand first. I was desperate.

And in front of hundreds of people, I told them the story. I shared what felt like a boulder of shame that weighed me down wherever I went. Every time I saw Rhea’s face.

I don’t even remember what the teachers told me. I just remember being witnessed. Bawling my eyes out. Sharing the dirtiest thoughts and judgments about myself.

After a while, I found two things:

1. I was no longer interested in “getting rid” of my shame. Sometimes I hate it, and sometimes I have a conversation with it. I decided to keep my shame because it almost felt like getting rid of the shame also meant getting rid of the anguish, humiliation, and dejection that I experienced with Rhea’s trauma. I was not interested in deleting or fighting any part of my humanity. If those feelings are here, I want to experience it. It is part of the full spectrum of experiences that my humanity has to offer.

2. When I am witnessed emptying my pockets and putting everything on the table, I no longer feel the burden to hold it all myself. Sure, there may be judgment. But that is their business. What I experience in the witnessing is that I am not alone. That I get to take up space in sharing my story. Whether anybody has judgment about it has no bearing on the fact that I decided to take up space to share my story. When I am witnessed, my story now has a place in the world. I feel belonging.

So I slowly learned to carry the boulder in a way that allowed me to encounter myself more deeply. Meaning, I was making the conscious choice to carry the shame that felt like a boulder instead of fighting it and trying to fix it. Whenever the shame took the driver’s seat, I observed the emotions come up. I watched myself throw tantrums. I watched myself hold them skillfully. I watched myself grapple with my own humanity, unwilling to ignore any part of it.

That brought me to a place where I built the skill to honor my own kids’ agency and their capacity to experience their own humanity. I began to have more trust around Rhea’s ability to move through the world with her scars.

But that didn’t mean that I stopped grieving.

It just meant that I was willing to carry additional emotions like delight and pride alongside grief.

And while I expanded my capacity to hold different emotions, I found myself expanding my capacity to love more deeply.

The way I define love is the willingness to extend oneself for another’s thriving.

Feelings change. Which is why love is a decision.

So, for me, making the decision to love Rhea, and myself, each time I showed up to our relationship, was bold and real because it was not shaken by the turbulent storm of emotions.

Because the love is that much real, I am that much willing to experience the turbulence.

Which is why I find myself in smithereens overwhelmed by the emotions that come up while deciding to love each moment.

Like when I lash out at Rhea because I am tired, I feel like shit. But that doesn’t mean I stop loving her. I keep going back to asking myself what it looks like to practice love and care more effectively next time. What it looks like to be less tired. What it looks like to hold my exhaustion. What it looks like to honor my capacity while honoring my love for Rhea.

It’s a lot of fucking questions and a lot of fucking emotional labor to ask those questions.

But the decision to love remains unwavering. I don’t find that I have a choice, really.

So it’s an ongoing onslaught of endless emotional and physical labor in the name of love.

Yeah, love has destroyed me. It has left me ripped apart, ragged, and dilapidated.

But the heart remains beating.

The heart refuses to die and is instead doing very well inside this exhausted body.

And without that heart, I wouldn’t be alive.

I wouldn’t be here to experience the fullness of my humanity, including the shame and the anguish.

So I am here, honoring the will of my heart, to love deeply.

Even if my body breaks, I know that my heart won’t when I stand firmly in the power of love.

I was like, “Okay, sure.”

And then we had sex. The kids were stirring, so he went to get them. I went to the bathroom to pee, and I found myself tearing up.

What was this weird feeling?

It had been a minute since I said “okay, sure” to sex with Dan. Ever since we opened up our marriage, we had been less frequent and more spontaneous in our sex life because I no longer felt a sense of obligation to be the only one to supply sexual resources to Dan. We had been getting our cups filled elsewhere as our libido arose because we have found that our libidos cannot coincide all the time.

So, oftentimes, when Dan came to me with a sexual advance, I have been turning him down because I listened to my body.

It was easier to listen to my body when I felt safe to say no and did not feel like I would be facing the consequence of upsetting him.

For a while, when we were monogamously married, I would feel like I would have to say yes even when I didn’t want to because I had internalized the conditioning that being available for sex was how I was a “good wife.”

Not only that, I would feel like relieving him sexually was a way to maintain peace and harmony in our marriage because I had experienced instances where it felt like his sexual frustration came out sideways. The story in my head was that he became more irritable about things he typically wouldn’t if he were sexually satisfied.

I felt that the only way to address the frustration was to put my body up to the altar even when I didn’t want to.

And even when I felt like I was doing the “good wife” thing very well, earning all the fucking gold stars, I still felt guilt and shame around the performance I was putting on just to fill that role.

I thought, “Wait a minute, do I actually love Dan, or am I just putting on a mask so we can maintain this manufactured peace and harmony?”

The answer, I found, was that it was both. I loved Dan, and I resented my own performance.

We had been grilled all our lives to believe that if we love our spouse, we have sex with them.

This is a lie and a manipulation.

Manipulation is a statement that attempts to control our actions by putting a condition on our value in the form of an if/then sentiment. Example: If you really cared about me, you would do the dishes.

Same thing here. “If you really loved your husband, you would have sex with him.”

When you really think about it, this sentence is such a crock of shit. Because it’s not true for me. What is true for me is the following:

• I love my husband.

• I have sex with him on my own terms. Only when I want to.

Those two true statements are unrelated to each other. They are unrelated because I feel more intimate and more in love with Dan when I can fart in front of him than when I have sex with him. When I laugh at an inside joke, not because it’s actually funny but because I just fucking love him. When I hug him after a long day knowing about the hundred billion ways he has my back when I am at my rock bottom.

Sex is not the only way or the best way to experience intimacy with our partners. It is simply one way that is available to us when we so desire.

So why is it that I have a higher libido for other men than I have for Dan in general?

Dan said it best when I brought up the tears that Saturday afternoon. Here is how our conversation went.

Me:

I am feeling a bit of resentment and sadness because I think I just said yes even though I didn’t really want to. It’s been a while since I did this, and the fact that I did it again for the first time in a while is really showing me how much this feels like a violation to my own body.

When I was peeing I was thinking to myself, “What am I doing with my body? What do I think my body is?”

And the unfortunate answer to that question was that I still had this belief that my body wasn’t really important. That it was simply a vessel for other people’s pleasure. I was still used to the idea that it’s “not a big deal” to use my body just for a few minutes if it meant that everybody was happy.

But I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t honoring my body in those few minutes by not listening to what she really wanted. And if I am not honoring my body even in those few minutes, then how am I honoring my body at all?

I think I also picked up yesterday that you had been frustrated about a few things here and there, and even though I know in my heart and my mind that it wasn’t your sexual frustration coming out sideways, I think I went into a bit of a panic mode, which informed the way I ignored my body as an ineffective means to assuage my panic.

Dan:

I really appreciate you telling me all of this. I know that, in the past, I have made you responsible for my needs. I had resentment around you not being available for sex, and sometimes my frustration came out sideways. Even though my frustrations yesterday had nothing to do with sex, I can see how that prompted the kind of panic response you had and how you responded to my desire for sex earlier today.

The other day, you had asked me if I had any feelings around you having NRE (new relationship energy) and increased libido for other people, and I told you I am happy for you, and I mean it. Of course you’re going to have more sexual desire and be more in touch with your sexuality with new people because you don’t have to carry any kind of context and history the way you do in our marriage.

In our marriage, for all those years, you’ve grappled with the conditioning that you have to be sexually available even when you don’t want to. And in a lot of ways, that probably created a wound that alerts your body to respond in a certain way when sex comes up in our marriage. In other relationships, you get to start from a blank slate.

I am glad that you feel safe to tell me exactly where you are, and I want to be a resource in how you tend to that wound. Are there some ways I can be that for you?

Me:

I think it’s two things. First is that when you ask for sex, I want to feel like my desires are being fully regarded. I know you already do this, and another way to do that is to actively remain curious about whether I want it as much as you do. I want to get rid of the feeling altogether that I don’t have much of a choice, and I can work with you on how that curiosity can be reflected in our conversations. [I am leaving out specific examples to honor Dan’s request for privacy on that particular information.]

The second is your willingness to examine the ways your sexual frustration may come out sideways in our marriage. I am aware that sometimes we get frustrated about things even if it is completely unrelated to sex. I am aware that I get triggered by your frustration based on the history and context of our relationship. But if you are willing to examine how they can coincide, I would appreciate that and examine that with you without judgment.

Dan:

I am happy to pick up those responsibilities. Now it’s about showing each other grace because we will mess up. We are good at this. We can do this together.

So when people ask me whether I am afraid that Dan is going to leave me or whether I am going to leave him, the chances of it happening is so low because we have built the kind of safe space that takes years of practice and love to build.

It is a space where we can empty all our pockets and lay everything out on the table without feeling like we are absolute idiots.

As long as our marriage feels safe for us, we will use the privilege of using this space as our home from which we can build relationships with other people.

How did we get here?

Love.

As bell hooks says:

[Love is] the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Dan and I were both willing to extend ourselves to one another by setting aside our own judgments, expectations, assumptions, and stories around how things ought to be in the world.

Whatever upsets me is my experience and my responsibility. Dan gets to be a resource if he so chooses, but I do not require that from him. That is why he gets to make the choice himself on whether he wants to be that resource for me.

The more we take responsibility for our own stories, the more we create space for others to care for us and love us on their own terms. More freely. More expansively. More truly.

Of course it’s painful. It is fucking painful to be wrong. It’s painful to recognize that our partners never “caused” any hurt. It’s painful to recognize that they only pointed to the hurt, almost as if to flag for us so that we can take a look at it and tend to it.

It is infinitely easier to blame and shame sources outside of ourselves.

But we realize that this path is rarely sustainable.

So, in our marriage, we partner on crafting the kind of love that works for both of us. When our triggers come up, when conflict arises, when ruptures happen, we find a way to examine what all those things are pointing to within ourselves.

When we have the capacity, we become a resource for the other in experiencing these large emotions that are not meant to be experienced in solitude. In that way, we partner on loving each other more deeply. We partner on loving ourselves more deeply.

The more we become skilled at the practice of love, the less fear and shame takes hold on our humanity.

The more we feel like we can tackle together, in partnership and in community.

*

By the way, you’re the first to know: I am dropping a brand new fireside happening Friday, May 17, at 11am Eastern.

It is called “Resolving conflict in marriage.”

This is for you if:

• You want to address recurring issues in the marriage that just doesn’t seem to go away.

• You don’t want to be afraid of bringing up things that feel important to you and the relationship.

• You’re battling constant feelings of anger, resentment, jealousy, envy, disappointment, frustration, and other uncomfortable feelings in your marriage that don’t seem to know where to go.

• You find yourself thinking, “This can’t be how I’m supposed to live for the rest of my life, constantly dealing with conflict.”

• You find yourself asking, “Am I loving my partner the right way? Is love supposed to feel this shitty?”

• You’re burning through so much time and energy dealing with conflicts in marriage that you’re losing focus at work.

• You feel like you just never seem to be doing the right thing in your marriage.

By the end of the fireside, you’ll walk away with actionable tools to relate and love your partner more deeply through conflict and differences.

Register here.

*Note: I am a non-monogamous relationship coach, but you are not required to be interested in opening up your marriage to attend this fireside. I do not use the practice of evangelizing anyone to open up their marriage as I do not find it an effective practice of relating.

Here’s what I responded:

It matters to me because I actually want to be free.

As Fannie Lou Hamer says, “Nobody is free until everybody is free.” Even if I am “free” from the construct of monogamy at the independent level, I am not actually free at the interdependent level because it is still unsafe to be non-monogamous in a monogamous world.

And, I want non-monogamy to be so fucking common that I can hit on every single human I find attractive on my path. That is approximately 30 people per day.

I want to be able to tell people the truth of how I feel about them without being persecuted.

And finally, more sex.

I want to elaborate and share a bit more with you.

I grew up believing in my bones that I was objectively ugly and unattractive and unlikeable. I was always off beat the way I am right now. Very outspoken and forward, including when I had a crush. In high school, I would just go around holding hands with the people I had a crush on. They did not like it. It may have even qualified as harassment. I was quite the nuisance.

So nobody liked me.

Not only that, my mom and my relatives would side with them.

“Of course they’re not gonna like you. You’re too much.”

I started to accept the fact that no one was going to like me for the rest of my life.

It just didn’t stop me from being too much. It’s not that I didn’t care about what other people thought. It’s just that I couldn’t control being myself.

Some people have told me it’s autism or some sort of disorder. Well, great. I happen to believe that autism is just a pathological term for humans who are great at being themselves instead of boxing themselves into any construct.

Whatever the case, the belief that I was simply unacceptable was lodged so deeply into my brain that I never really even tried being liked by people. Not because I didn’t want it but because I thought it was impossible.

So even when people told me that they liked me, I would shrug it off as some sort of delusion on their part. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Maybe it was my disbelief. Maybe it was my unskillful enthusiasm. Either way, I did not know how to respond to anyone’s advances in a way that sustained any relationships with those people that liked me.

More evidence that I was going to be alone for the rest of my life.

When Dan came around and started loving me, again I thought it was not going to last. And for the entirety of our marriage, I was certain that his eyes were broken and that he had no understanding of what “attractive” meant.

Throughout the whole time, though, my subconscious was screaming somewhere that she wanted to be loved. She wanted to feel attractive. She wanted to feel validated. But she didn’t know how to even start going after something like that when my consciousness was already sure that it was not going to happen.

So the incongruence drove me to make unsustainable decisions. Decisions that would satisfy nobody because I had no idea what I really wanted and what I was doing. One thing I did was that I followed outside superficial standards around what attractiveness meant and looked for the fastest possible way to get there.

That meant that I was bulimic for almost a decade. It meant I obsessively checked my weight. Focused on the blemishes on my face every time I looked at the mirror.

Some people call it body dysmorphia. Whatever the case, I was constantly tugging at the two conflicting thoughts of “I am so unlovable” and “I want to be loved.”

Looking back, I am so angry that I never had the tools to actually examine these beliefs and reconcile them in a way that didn’t feel so incongruent.

When we opened up our marriage, I had sex with the most gorgeous people I did not even fathom in my wildest dreams would ever want to have sex with me. And some of them, I actually like as human beings at the intellectual and emotional level.

I had to sit down for a second.

I was like, “So, you’re telling me that I am actually likable? People actually want to come after me? People don’t find me disgusting?”

I can’t change my past. I can’t change people’s decisions in the past in telling me how unlikable I was.

But I am still fuming at the fact that compulsory monogamy kept me from really seeing how much I am actually in demand. I was required to be loved by just one person for my entire fucking life and be satisfied with that.

It was only after opening up my marriage that my 33-year-old belief of “I am unlovable” that drove most of my self-hating decisions were wrong.

Sure, I could do the fucking “self-work” of loving myself and seeing my inherent value for myself and all that shit. But the reality that people won’t tell you is that most times, self-love is such a gigantic project that it requires community care.

Sometimes, a big hug at the right time is more medicinal than a solo meditation.

Sometimes, a conversation with an elder is more medicinal than journaling on my own.

Sometimes, exquisite and mind blowing sex is more medicinal than fucking chanting to myself that I am lovable.

Not only that, requiring myself to stay in compulsory monogamy kept me squarely focused on a goal that was never mine: “Be happy with one person for the rest of your life.”

I required myself to be happy.

Which meant I required Dan to be happy, too.

So my happiness almost depended on Dan’s happiness.

That is how our entanglement began: requiring each other to feel certain feelings in each other’s presence so we can feel like we are doing a good job with life.

We were obsessed with those proverbial fucking gold stars.

And fortunately, we were happy for the most part. Which is why we were so reluctant and ignorant of the possibility of a sustainable open marriage. Because we were trained to be fine with “good enough.”

That’s the other thing I am upset with. Being told that I should be grateful and happy with no conditions attached if things are “good enough.”

What a shit rule that I no longer have any interest in following.

Okay, so great. I am now free of monogamy, and Dan and I are having the time of our lives.

But that doesn’t mean that we are actually fully free.

As I quoted Fannie Lou Hamer at the top, “Nobody is free until everybody is free.”

When we are unwilling to examine our own paradigms, our first instinct is to turn to judgment of others.

Jealousy. Envy. Resentment. Rebuke.

I have been on the receiving end of all of that by people who have no interest in going after their own freedom and instead have all the interest in going after mine.

When I feel like I need to be vigilant of my own freedom, I don’t have actual freedom.

Even when people are not outright pouring judgment right onto my face, there are limitations around how I get to interact with people.

I find human beings beautiful. I absolutely love telling people how stunning they are inside and out. I love telling people the truth of how I experience them.

It is something I had a dearth of growing up. Something I did not fully experience myself until I opened up my marriage.

Sure, I can do the “mindset work” and just tell people how beautiful they are without regard to the consequences. That doesn’t mean that the consequences don’t exist.

That is why, while I am “free” from monogamy at the independent level, I am not free at the interdependent level because my independence freedom is not celebrated and honored for what it is.

I consider this a tragedy given how short our lives are.

As a privileged person with all my basic needs, my biggest goal in life is to laugh and entertain and feel alive in my body as much as I humanly can.

Any construct that gets in the way of that can go fuck itself.

Unfortunately, not everybody agrees.

We are so Serious because we are Serious Adults who needs to do Serious Things and have Serious Conversations and overall just take things Very Seriously.

It’s like, I’m trying to find places where I belong. I have gotten good at that. But it has taken a lot of time and energy to find places where I actually feel like I belong. It still does.

And I don’t like that it feels so exhausting for people like me to fucking exist in this world.

Simply because it’s not “acceptable.”

Acceptable to whom?

The biggest mistake I made was believing that acceptability was a universal thing. If I am not acceptable to one Very Important Group of People, then I must be unacceptable to the rest of the world.

But I found the opposite to be true: The more unacceptable I am to Important People, the more acceptable I am to people who don’t give a fuck about being important.

I advocate for each person to feel free in their bones, in their homes, and in their communities.

With the very short life I have, making it easier for us to love on our own terms is what I find to really important. I envision a world where judgment is not as interesting as the freedom we get to each experience for ourselves.

*

Want to join me in building sustainable open marriages?

Opening up your marriage sustainably looks like:

❤️

Facilitating your spouse’s “Hell no, I would rather eat dirt than become non-monogamous” to “Holy shit, where was non-monogamy my entire life?”

Not because you are “persuasive” but because they start remembering who they really are underneath the surface level familiarity and comfort of compulsory monogamy.

❤️

No longer fighting about sex or the massive libido differentials because:

(1) Each of you get to have sex on your own terms at the intensity and frequency of your choice with whomever you want; and

(2) You know how to experience jealousy and envy in a way that is generative, not destructive. Even if you’re thinking right now, “I could never get over jealousy or envy. It would destroy me.”

❤️

No longer finding the need to avoid, attack, or defend because you know how to listen to what they are actually saying underneath the words that appear hurtful at first glance.

And knowing how to get closer to each conflict because you are hearing what they are saying, not trying to be right.

❤️

Not scrambling through Reddit anonymously for urgent support on nuanced and complex relational issues only to find that all they have to tell you is to “just break up and move on because you deserve better”

Without regard to the history and context of the relationship and the tenderness of what you are really feeling.

❤️

Saving the hours of having ruptures that end up nowhere and preventing the exhaustion that follows.

No more watching yourself dissociate or lash out at work as a result of having nowhere else to blow off steam for relational conflicts that even your closest allies don’t seem to understand.

❤️

Watching yourself enjoy your family even more by:

Feeling more present with the kids because you are taking care of yourself as much as you are taking care of the kids.

Feeling much less resentment towards your parents and siblings because you no longer feel entitled to being loved by them competently when you’re already being loved in so many different ways from your community and connections.

❤️

Finding a community where you can be yourself instead of continuing to find yourself in places you don’t belong and feeling the need to hide yourself.

Building an ecosystem of support where you don’t have to feel like a criminal for having different desires.

❤️

Finally recognizing what love really means to you by:

(1) Loving your spouse so much that you honor each of their decisions, including the potential decision that they might leave you;

(2) And then finding that that kind of love is exactly what makes the marriage safer for both people to partner and grow together through the practice of non-monogamy. Not because non-monogamy is better, but because it’s the right fit.

❤️

Opening up your marriage can feel hard, but it doesn’t have to feel impossible.

The Opener is a community where we arrive at sustainable open marriages instead of feeling like separation is the only option for resolving differences.

I wish I had this community a year ago when I felt so alone in opening up our marriage.

Join us here or send me a message if you are interested in joining.

But for the sake of starting somewhere, I decided to create a cute little roadmap.

This is also roughly what I shared during the fireside I hosted earlier this month on opening up your marriage without losing everything. It was a lovely fireside, and I loved that I got to share this with the people who attended. I thought it would be shameful if I kept it a secret because it saved my fucking marriage and my sanity and my humanity.

But everybody is in different places in their mind and their body when it comes to opening up their marriage, so as always, feel free to pick up whatever you want to pick up, and discard the rest.

So here we go.

Step 0: The Regard

I am in a space called “Regard” with my teacher James-Olivia Chu-Hillman and a few other people, where we literally sit around for three hours every other week to simply regard the other. We show up, bring whatever feels true, and the conversation goes from there.

To me, a self-designated relationship junkie, that space feels like a spiritual balm. It is where I practice requiring nothing of myself or anybody else.

To regard is to tend to, to pay attention to, and to heed.

There is no agenda or outcome. There is simply walking with the person or the people that are with us.

So the very first question is: How do you practice regard?

When you find yourself wanting to have sex with other people, do you tell yourself to stop or do you wonder why we’re not allowed to fantasize?

When you find yourself feeling shitty, do you pathologize your feelings or do you allow yourself to experience your humanity?

When you find others feeling shitty, do you rush to make them feel better or do you experiment in caring for them the way they want to be cared for?

There are no right or wrong answers here. There are only answers that you like or don’t like. Sometimes, I will wonder to myself, “Why the fuck did you ever have sex with that person?!” Because sometimes shaming myself is hilarious.

There is no moral ground I am interested in subscribing to here. It tells us nothing about what we actually want.

Throughout the course of opening up your marriage, there will be a billion opportunities to look at the things we are ashamed of:

• Am I doing this right?

• I should have been more loving.

• What am I even doing?

• Is this a total waste of time?

• I am definitely, for-fucking-sure, doing it all wrong.

• I should not want to have sex with other people.

• What the fuck am I doing when I should be working?

• I hate everything.

All of the above, over and over and over again. Ad nauseam.

When these moments of shame arise, it is an excellent opportunity to practice regard.

Most times, shame lives in the word “should.” So when we encounter a “should,” here is my favorite way to turn that shit around: reverse the sentence, replace “should” with “would,” add “of course” in the beginning, and add some expletives as you desire.

Examples:

I should have been more loving. → Of course, I would not have been more loving. My body is telling me to take care of myself first.

I should not want to have sex with other people. → Of course, I would want to have sex with other people. Who made up this stupid rule?

I should be better at this by now. → Of course, I would not be better at this by now. Nobody taught me this. How fucking brave am I to even take a stab at it?

I should be working instead. → Of course, I would not be working instead. Who decided that shareholder values are more important than my goddamn life?

If the 180-degree turnaround doesn’t feel very accessible to you, what is also available is to simply poke at the “should” statement.

If you feel like you should have been more loving, for example, you don’t need to turn that sentence around. Instead, ask: is that really true?

Challenge those should statements and see how they meander around in your head thereafter.

When we regard and tend to the thoughts that give us the ick, we build skill in witnessing our humanity without spiraling into paralyzing shame.

We get to see more of who we really and what we really want.

This is an ongoing practice, whether it’s before, during, after, or anywhere outside the opening of a marriage.

Step 1: The Invitation

The mechanics of the invitation itself is very similar to any other kind of invitation. It’s essentially this specific question:

Hey, I want to do something with you. Will you partner with me?

The reason this question feels so charged for opening up a marriage is that the person receiving the invitation (the invitee) has ideas around what it means about them.

They typically have two main questions:

• What the hell does an open marriage mean?

• Am I not enough?

And they typically answer these questions on their own, which is when they begin writing their own stories around what must be true from their perspective. Stories like:

• My partner’s gonna fall in love with someone else and leave me.

• I am not good enough. I did something wrong.

• If I had done something differently, none of this would have happened.

These are fascinating and understandable stories, but stories nonetheless.

The reason we remain attached to our stories is that we don’t have any evidence to the contrary.

So we are looking for evidence that you will not fall in love and leave and that they did not do anything wrong.

That kind of evidence is impossible to find because (1) we cannot predict the future around whether you will fall in love and what you will do about it and (2) it’s not helpful to decide whether anybody did anything wrong when we’re trying to find out what we want.

When there is no such evidence that is available, we build trust in our own knowing.

Meaning, we find support in the deep knowing that we are loved and lovable regardless of the circumstances.

So we love.

To break it down a bit further, that may look like involving three of the following ingredients to the invitation:

• A remembering of how much you love your partner

• The willingness to set aside your own judgments to understand their experience from their perspective.

• Willingness to set aside any expectations of how the conversation will go.

Here are some common objections that I’ve seen and experienced, along with my brief suggestions on how to respond to them.

• Did I do something wrong?

  • You did everything right. That is why I feel safe enough to explore parts of me that have been shamed. I am coming to you with this invitation because I feel like I have experienced the greatest heights of love, which has animated my capacity to love even more.

• Does this mean I am not good enough?

  • “Enough” is not a standard I measure you against. You are essential. Every part of you is essential - even the parts of you that are “inconvenient” or uncomfortable. You’re like my heart. Just because you are essential and keep me alive doesn’t mean I don’t need other organs to sustain me. I am committed to breaking down this cultural narrative that your role in my life is any part diminished because I decide to go after what sustains me, and I would love to do that work with you.

• Will you leave me?

  • I don’t know what will happen in the future. But what I know is that there is no chance I want to leave you right now. I love you so much, and that is why I want to partner with you on what is important to me. This question is not as important as partnering together on finding a way to love that works for both of us to feel alive.

I kept these short because these are just my words. They are almost useless coming out of your mouth because you are an entirely different person who carries different truths at different times. Feel free to use these to the extent that they remind you of your own truth in relation to your own partner.

Step 2: The Disentanglement

Entanglement occurs when two people become intertwined in ways that compromise their own sense of agency.

Entanglement is often confused with love.

We often believe that when we fall in love, we need to hop on the relationship escalator where we “need” to move in, eat together, do household chores together, get married, have a garish fucking wedding, have children, do childcare together, have regular sex, and it just all never ends.

No wonder people are so afraid to fall in love. We lose almost everything.

Entanglement often feels obligatory. Because we often feel the need to abandon our sense of agency, we engage in incompetent relating by engaging with things like contempt, coercion, and manipulation to regain a sense of control.

Contempt is the act of disregarding another in an ineffectual attempt to be seen. Example: “I would not come home after 8pm. If I were you, I would come home before 8pm.”

Coercion is the act of forcing physical consequences for another person’s decisions. Example: “If you don’t come home before 8pm today, I will lock the door.”

Manipulation is the act of forcing mental consequences for another person’s decisions. Example: “If you don’t come home before 8pm today, that means you’re a really bad partner.”

And now we find ourselves outside the territory of love because we no longer have a sense of agency.

Love, as bell hooks defines it, is: “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual and emotional growth.”

The key word here is the word “will.” There is no will to entertain when we don’t have a sense of agency.

That is why we turn to interdependence instead of entanglement.

Interdependence occurs when we love one another out of the willingness and compassion to be a resource for the other.

I scribbled a little illustration to draw the distinction between entanglement and interdependence below.

In entanglement, neither line can really go anywhere without the other because their lives are to intertwined.

In interdependence, we go out own separate and interesting paths, but we remain in proximity and extend ourselves to the other as we are able. Sometimes we extend more, and sometimes they extend more. It is all out of love.

To create some space for interdependence, we keep in mind this particular paradox:

• What your spouse experiences is not your business.

• You can always offer to be a resource based on your capacity.

For example, if you made a decision that disappointed your partner, we first recognize that their disappointment is their experience and that it’s nobody’s “fault” because mistakes are relational. Meaning, your decision to make pasta for an evening can be a very neutral event for someone while it is a very deeply offensive event for another given the history and context of your relationship with them and their own life experiences.

We then recognize that, based on our own capacity and willingness, we can offer to be a resource. It could be asking them how you could be a resource. It could be apologizing. It could be staying with them in silence. It could be giving them a hug. We have so many ways to experiment in how we want to be a resource for their experience of their own humanity.

I want to emphasize here that there is still no moral ground in looking at entanglement and interdependence. Neither one is inherently “better” than the other.

Sometimes, the human experiences we encounter are too big to handle on our own, like childcare. When you have two whole living beings whose safety you are responsible for with your partner, that partnership will have moments of entanglement because we are so burnt out.

It also doesn’t have to be something so big like childcare. Even if it is something as simple as a bad day, you may experience moments of entanglement where you find it easy to manipulate your partner into doing things for you. Sometimes it is a tool we use because we are human beings. When we notice that scenario, the only question here is what I didn’t like about it, if at all, and how I want to do things differently next time.

Step 3: The Renegotiation

In monogamy, the terms of the marriage have already been defined for us: no romantic relationship with other people, build a nuclear family, and try not to get divorced, ever.

The Renegotiation is redefining the terms so that they are your and your partner’s terms.

A marriage is simply an institutionalized word for partnership.

A partnership is a relationship in which two people partner on certain things they have consented to partnering on.

Sometimes it’s sex. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s childcare. Taxes. Household chores. Planning parties. Relationships with family. The list goes on.

None of these are requirements, and yet the institution of monogamy have led us to believe that they are.

One obvious term we renegotiated is that we are not required to be the only provider of sexual pleasure for the other.

We also do not require the other to do anything else, either. But we talk about how it would be wonderful to still partner on childcare and taxes because we don’t really like the alternative.

The basic element of renegotiation is boundaries.

Boundaries are if/then statements that inform your response to a scenario.

For example:

If you have sex with someone who has not gotten a negative STD/STI panel, I will not have sex with you until you or that person obtains a negative panel.

Boundaries can also be in the form of declaration statements, like:

Don’t have sex with someone who has not gotten a negative STD/STI panel.

These can still be communicated as boundaries for the sake of conversation, but ultimately they will be harder to enforce and may more easily prompt a rupture because expectations without clear consequences are easier to violate.

So the question here is: what are the boundaries that are important to me?

We start there.

And a common misconception about boundaries is that they are set in stone, inflexible, and solitary.

Boundaries often evolve with time and new information, and we discover new boundaries all the time.

For example, one time, Dan had a guest over and had dirty dishes from the drinks they had. When I saw them in the sink, I had a swing of resentment come over me, and I realized I had noticed a new boundary. I told Dan that I am not available to clean up after his guests.

However we bring boundaries into our relationships and develop them with time, we will likely experience ruptures from a miscommunication or a misunderstanding or a straight up violation of a boundary.

Here are some questions to consider as we move forward in our partnerships:

• Am I willing to repair our relationship from this rupture, and what resources do I need to feel prepared for the repair?

• How do I want to be prepared if I want to use the rupture to bring us closer together rather than drive us apart?

• How am I willing to extend myself and my partner grace as we continue to learn and unlearn stories that play a role in our relationships?

The renegotiation piece is heavy in the beginning, but it is ongoing, and we get more skilled over time.

Step 4: The Opening

Of course, my favorite part. The Opening.

The Opening is where both parties fully consent to opening up the marriage where we feel free to exercise our own agency in meeting people and developing relationships on our own terms outside of the marriage.

This is where we feel a bit more skilled in the way we relate to others but find endless opportunities to remain humble and open in the face of meeting a lot of different humans that inhabit this planet with us.

As you continue to build your relationship with yourself, your spouse, and other people, look out for the following:

• Assumptions: what I think is true without proof

  • Example: When we first opened up our marriage, I had made the assumption that nobody would ever want to date me. It was an assumption I felt great about because it kept me feeling familiar and safe. I collected new information that this assumption was not true when I decided to challenge the assumption by meeting people and finding out what was true.

• Expectations: what I think should be true

  • Example: “This conversation should result in sex.” This is often how a lot of relationships go awry. People feel entitled to a certain outcome after putting in effort into the relationship. The remedy to this problem is to extend yourself only to the extent that you are willing without need anything from them in return. The question here is, what does it look like to love with desire but without making anybody responsible for that desire?

• Judgments: an evaluation of whether something is good or bad.

  • Example: “This guy is a total wreck.” Sometimes judgments are helpful because it gives me information about what I don’t want. And sometimes judgments are not helpful when I use it to put someone in an inferior place without getting the information that is helpful for making my next decision.

Any information you extract from examining the above are great bits of information to collect about yourself, what you want, and how to get it.

The question here is: what are my assumptions, expectations, and judgments telling me about who I am, what I want, and how I am showing up to the relationship?

Whether I know I am getting the relevant information is often revealed in whether we feel powerful or deflated. If we feel like we are getting the relevant information, we will most likely feel powerful and armed with what we need to move forward. If we feel deflated, chances are, we are using assumptions, expectations, and judgments to concoct stories about the world and shame ourselves in ways that feel conclusive and uninspiring.

Here are things to note:

• Examining your assumptions, expectations, and judgments helps you quickly identify your share of the contribution in any rupture or conflict.

• NOT examining your assumptions, expectations, and judgments is an exercise of grace for your humanity.

Both are equally valuable.

*

There you have it, the essentials of opening up your marriage.

But let me tell you. Even if you were to follow everything on this roadmap to the dot, it will still feel like a total mess. Because there is not one roadmap in the world that will help us avoid our humanity altogether.

So if you find yourself marinating on just one sentence from this entire piece, that is sufficient. I trust that your body will tell you what you where you want to go next with that information.

And if you find yourself scratching your head and wanting someone to sail with you as you navigate these tough waters, send me a message.

I’m game if you want to talk about:

• Whether an open marriage is even the right fit

• Wanting to quell some of the shame that arise in being curious about an open marriage

• Realizing that there is a very specific problem that you just can’t figure out on your own

• Having some things you wanna talk about that you don’t think you can talk about with anyone else

• Needing some space to breathe with this whole fucking open marriage thing.

I recognize the magnitude and the monstrosity of this work, so there is no part of me that wants to rush you. If you’re experiencing darkness that resonates with some of the stuff I’ve shared, I honor that experience and how little I know of it. I only remain curious about how you relate to your own darkness.

Send me a message only if it feels right in your body to talk about it.

But I have an even larger community online, and I have not actually spoken to the majority of you. That doesn’t feel very congruent for me when I am talking about how much community care matters.

Some people have reached out for support in their relationships, and I often don’t have the capacity to offer free work.

But this morning I just felt like I had expanded capacity.

So here I am. I want to talk to you.

I serve best around opening up marriages and relationships, though I am also very well-equipped in walking through any wrinkles you’re experiencing in any of your relationships.

Some examples:

• Getting into a tiff with your partner around what feels like the tiniest issues, like the dishes or picking up the right stuff at the grocery store

• Resentment around doing most of the emotional labor, feeling like you need to manage all the feelings in the household

• Shame and guilt around having desires that you don’t think you can talk about anywhere else

• Cultivating even greater safety in your relationship so that it feels like home, not a battlefield

If you want to feel lighter in your relationships, this call is for you.

Not because you need any fixing or changing but because community care is part of how we practice love.

Respond to this email directly for a scheduling link.

1. One person in the relationship (usually the guy, in a heteronormative relationship) wants to be the only one open.

Meaning, he wants to be the only one meeting other people while his wife does not meet anybody.

This is very understandable because we have been conditioned to believe that possession is power.

As much as we don’t want to believe it, when we attempt to decide for our partners what they should and should not do with their bodies, that is control.

Control is an attempt to exercise the illusion that we are entitled to have power over anybody else’s agency.

Even if we have agreed to enter into a monogamous relationship where the terms of the relationship are that we are committed to sleeping only with each other, our desires, preferences, and capacity change with time and new information.

Today, I might feel totally committed to you based on all the information I have about you and about myself. Tomorrow, the information I have might change, and that may update my desires around how I want to orient myself to you.

When we force loyalty because it’s the “right” thing to do, we are evaluating the validity of a human being’s actions based on what they wanted before the present moment. To evaluate the validity of a human being because of the evolution of their desires is unjust.

To tell a human being that they are being inhumane because of their humanity is a contradiction and a falsehood.

So the only thing left to do is this:

Make yourself known in what you desire, and have no expectations around how the other person is going to be a resource for that desire.

In conversation, it may look like something like this:

“Right now, my desire is that you do not meet other people, but the way I want to practice love and care is that I honor whatever decision you make with your own mind and body. If that ends up hurting me, I trust myself to be able to take care of my own human experience. There may be a point where I come check with you to see if you are available to be a resource for me and hold me while I grapple with my own humanity. But in the end, I have no requirements.”

Here, we make two things clear: (1) Your desire for your partner to not see other people is not wrong. (2) But we do not make our desires anybody else’s responsibility. We do not get to evaluate others’ desires based on our own. That is putting your own desires on a pedestal above others’.

We all get to have desires and ask for support in those desires without any expectations.

That is real power.

You trusting yourself to experience your own humanity without needing anybody to be different.
You creating space to love more deeply the human being in front of you because you don’t require anything from them.
You becoming maximally self-sufficient and maximally interdependent because you know how to honor your own agency as much as you honor others’ agency.

So the question is, what kind of power do you want: the kind that relies on other people’s decisions, or the kind that relies on each of our unlimited capacity for love?

2. The person who opened up the relationship ends up having less of a great experience after opening it up.

So many stories like these: “I opened up the relationship, but my partner ended up having more fun than I did.”

We have been conditioned so deeply to believe that when someone has something we don’t have, that means we are not good enough.

This is quite an entertaining story, but we don’t have to be available for it.

A more handy story is that their experience signifies possibility.

Which is why I start taking notes when someone is experiencing something I want to experience.

Like in my marriage, even though I opened up the marriage, Dan fell in love first.

So I took out my notes and asked him what that was like. How he got there. How he sustains his experience of love.

And then I peruse those notes and lift whatever information feels most suitable and applicable for me, and go from there.

It’s like, wow, I can learn from Dan’s experiences so that I can craft an even more discerning experience of my own love story.

When you think about it, we have the power to turn every instance of fear into possibility.

3. People in poly relationships have difficult relationships with their metamours.

Metamours are your partner’s partner. So Dan’s other partner would my metamour.

Having a difficult relationship with a meta is also a common experience. Here are some bits from my approach:

• I have no judgments around whether a meta is good or bad. There isn’t anything interesting there for me. Especially when I could be spending that time and energy going after what I want for myself. Though, of course, we can always pass judgments because it’s entertaining. But I always remind myself that those judgments are information about me, and not the other person.

• If I am going to have a judgment about the meta, the most fun thing to do is to have a positive judgment about them. For example, I love to look at how sexy and amazing my metas are because that only reinforces that Dan has great taste. Same for my other partners. If their partners are awesome, I only take that to mean that I am also awesome because we don’t deviate from high standards. Especially if we have found people who meet those high standards.

• I trust Dan. I am in partnership with Dan because I trust him in a lot of things, which is why we work together on a lot of things like childcare, household management, and emotional support for each other. So when it comes to metas, I trust that he is able to find partners that he would love to have around his own family, and I trust that he is capable of experiencing any hurt or fallout from his relationships.

• If ever a meta and I have a disagreement, I trust my ability to relate through our differences. I know how to listen. I know how to witness. I know how to practice drawing boundaries. In the end, in maintaining relationships, the basic skill we need is know how to relate. We often find ourselves incompetent in this because we have so many requirements of the other people without examining how we want to actually see them as human beings.

So there we go. Three common issues we find in opening up the relationship.

But let’s not operate under any illusion that this one article is going to completely rewire our brains. We can’t just turns off generations and centuries of conditioning that we are not good enough no matter what.

This is why, when we learn new information and unlearn old information, we give ourselves grace first and foremost.

Learning and unlearning is not a violent affair.

We make the kind of progress we want by honoring the pace of our own bodies.

That means that if we feel like shit, we don’t need to judge that feeling by telling it to go away or saying that it’s a bad thing. It’s not.

It’s human.

So if you find this piece helpful, collect the parts that are helpful and apply them as you so desire. As I like to say, nothing is required.

Your wholeness is the only thing I advocate for, so we operate in service to your wholeness.

*

Giving yourself grace is much easier when practiced in community. Which is why I created The Opener.

The Opener is where we learn how to have open conversations with open hearts so that we can open up our relationship on our own terms.

This space is for you if:

• You are trying to open up the relationship and have no idea where to start.

• You don’t know if you want to open up the relationship but want to know how to have open conversations nonetheless through the recurring conflicts that arise in your relationships.

• You have tried to open up the relationship but you keep running into the same problems.

The Opener is a virtual speakeasy hosted through a Discord server where I share private transmissions on skillful and open relating, offer coaching on the unique wrinkles that you’re experiencing in your relationships, and host calls to walk through these experiences in real time.

Not because you need any fixing or healing. But because part of the way we love is by practicing community care.

When you are in here, you are changing the course of how the world gets to love more expansively.

Because having more expansive and skillful love in the world begins with each one of us.

Join here: angela-han.com/opener

Now, I want to tell you more about the practical aspects about being a slut and respond to some commonly asked questions about sleeping around.

Q: How do you meet people?

A: Two main places. First, dating apps. I have written pretty comprehensively about my experiences in the dating apps in a previous article, but the key takeaways for me are the following:

• Be as transparent as possible what’s important to you, especially the things you feel like hiding. My main things were: you need to be at least fluent in non-monogamy, you need to at least be extremely progressive, and you need to want to shower me with all the attention and validation. With less transparency, the higher the chance that you end up wasting a lot of time once you match because if any of those requirements are a problem for them, you will find your relationship unsustainable at a very fundamental level after you’ve spent some time with them.

• Continue to be transparent about what you want without making them responsible for it. Guessing games are ineffective tools for sustainable dating. Tell them what you’re up to. For example, I was telling a connection the other day, “I would love to spend more time with you. Would you like to partner with me on making that happen?” I might want a lot of attention and validation, but it is up to me to communicate how I want to get it from them. If they are unavailable for it, I can use that information to decide how much room in my heart I can have for this relationship. And then also be open to that also changing over time as we either build the relationship or dissolve the relationship or something in between. This is how we honor each other’s agency.

The second, *more interesting* place I like to meet people: literally everywhere else. 😂 When you are non-monogamous, pretty much everybody feels like a candidate. In the beginning, this was fun because I was flirting with, uh, everybody. For example, it is a common practice for me to tell the bartender how hot he is in the middle of a date with my husband or any one of my connections and partners. I just like being congruent and find joy in telling people the truth about how I experience them. How they receive my congruence is not my business.

Even when I am not flirting, I just get to enjoy being around people I find attractive. If I want to take action on it, I will start a conversation and gather more information. And that’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Chances are higher that I will meet people I desire more deeply in places where I feel at home. There is one person I have met in a class I was so excited about, and we bonded because we shared so many common values and interests that the class addressed.

When you’re looking, you will find so much.

Q: How do you take care of your sexual health?

A: I was not so diligent about this in the beginning because I was unaware and having fun. Looking back, this is what I would recommend to my six-months-ago self:

• Get a consultation with a provider who is fluent in sexual health and is able to recommend a thorough STI/STD panel because there are different levels and kinds of testing available depending on the provider. During the consultation, talk about what the process looks like if you test positive for an STI: how you will be notified and whether you will need to come in for additional lab work or treatment, etc.

• Generally educate yourself on sexual health, like the kinds of vaccines that are available for the different STIs, how they are transmitted, what their incubation period is, risk levels. For example, I learned recently that HPV is an STI that cannot be tested in men. I also learned that there are preventive measures for HIVs that is not commonly known among the medical community.

• Get tested at the very beginning of your slut era and every three months just to keep tabs on the state of your sexual health.

• Be transparent with all of your partners the results of your panel.

• Require a negative panel from all of your partners before having any sexual contact.

• Continue your sexual health education from experienced experts you trust and follow.

Given that I have lost track of how many sexual partners I’ve had, I am lucky that I’ve had a negative panel after all that (except for cold sores, which I’ve had my whole life and which most people on the planet have), but I decided to be more diligent moving forward given that I had my first panel done and realized more firmly that I would like to keep it negative.

Q: Was there any jealousy on Dan’s part?

A: I had a conversation with Dan about this, and here’s the short of it (because I don’t remember everything he said). Because we had such extensive conversations around how we relate to our own experiences of jealousy, he found it easier to experience it in reality. In his words: “At first it was kind of weird, but after the first time you had sex, it was like, wow, the world is still turning. You still love me, and I still love you. Nothing has changed.”

Of course, it’s not always that simple. There will be feelings of jealousy that come up throughout different scenarios, and what we do there is relate. To relate is to connect by knowing more of the other and being known by the other. The way we address jealousy is to treat it as an indicator that there is some part of us that is not being seen or that some part of our needs are not being met. Are you willing to have a conversation around what that is without needing that to mean that you are a bad partner or a bad person?

And, everybody’s path is different. Even if we have done the work of rebuilding our relationship to jealousy, we can still feel differently once reality hits us. One thing I like to say about jealousy is that it is simply an indicator that we are not getting what we want. So, what is that? I speak a little more on jealousy here.

Q: What if I don’t really have a lot of experience with sex, or it’s been a while since I’ve had sex with anybody other than my spouse/partner?

A: Well, that is probably one reason you are interested in being a slut. I mean, that was definitely one of my reasons. I did not date seriously before Dan, so he was my first sexual partner. So when I watched my sexuality finally explode back in September after opening up our marriage, I was so excited to be “bad” because we just get tired of being all buttoned up and performative everywhere else. You know?

The way I eased into my experiences was that I was transparent about it. I told my partners that I was inexperienced. If there was any judgment on their part, I would probably feel less connected with them, so I would probably lose interest having sex with them. If there was just a lot of sincere endearment and appreciation for my transparency, chances are higher that I would feel more connected to them and find myself more attracted to them.

Q: What if the sex is bad?

A: Yes, what if? Sex is sometimes bad. And then you decide what you liked about it and didn’t like about it, and then you decide how you’re going to go after more of what you do like.

I also want to note that whether sex is good or bad is based on your own standards. What are your standards?

For me, the way I measure whether sex is good is whether I feel closer to them through the experience. This has nothing to do with whether someone climaxes or not. So often, I have found that cis het guys that I have sex with have found it problematic that they couldn’t get it up “fast enough” or couldn’t climax “at the appropriate time.” For me, there is no such thing. If I get to know you and your body more, that is all that matters to me.

All these arbitrary standards around sex has gotten us wondering if we are doing sex “right” when the only question is how we feel having sex with them and what we want different next time, if at all.

Q: What needs to happen for me to call my slut era “a slut era”?

A: Nothing except your own decision. I simply said, ooh I feel like a slut. So I called myself a slut. There was a period of time where I felt like a slut. So I called that period a slut era.

There is no “right” amount of people to sleep with or how that needs to happen.

I had a lot of terrible dates, a lot of canceled dates, and a lot of false alarms thinking I was falling in love. What I got out of it was a treasure chest of information of what I wanted next, which was deeper emotional connection with a fewer number of people. So what is what I am now after and am getting. Whatever I experience during this time of my life will offer another set of valuable information about what I want next.

**

I think this is all I can think of in terms of the Q&A for now. You know I’ll report back with more when I think of more. 😘

By the way, if you haven’t signed up for the fireside on opening up your marriage, this is an excellent way to ask me any questions live, whether it’s about opening up hearts or opening up legs. 😉

There is no dumb question to ask. In fact, one of my self-appointed job titles is Dumb Question Collector. I go around collecting questions that you think are the dumbest because those are the most fruitful and valuable ones.

The fireside is happening Friday, April 5 at noon ET.

We’re going to go over some general principles around opening up your marriage, including a framework specifically for opening up your marriage and essential relating skills to relate through any difference. We will have plenty of time to talk through wrinkles that are specific to your own curiosities and what you are grappling with right now. There will be opportunity to ask your questions anonymously.

Register here: angela-han.com/open

I was a total dating newbie as of September. So even after I announced the opening of our marriage, I literally sat around for like two weeks just watching dating shows online and just enjoying the fact that I can go out at anytime…without actually going out.

And then I met someone at a random meetup where we had a brief spark, and during that time, I watched my sexuality explode.

So between October and January, I lost count of the men I had sex with.

My experienced polyamorist friends tell me that this is a common thing to experience when we first realize that we can sleep around. We enjoy the freedom in this way at different intensities and lengths, and for me it was very intense for like 3 months.

Until it got to a point where I had a pregnancy scare, I learned more about STIs and STDs, and I saw that I was having sex with people I realized I didn’t like after the fact.

There was no part of me that regretted this period. I have learned more about how the world works than I did during the 5 years of lawyering I did.

And my primary takeaway is this: Women have so much more power than we’ve been told to believe.

The whole “feminist” movement to get women moving up the ladder? That entire propaganda is an illusion to make us believe that we are attaining more power when, in fact, we’re just being trained to be more like men.

We already have so much fucking power.

Regardless of whether we climb the corporate ladder. I am not saying that climbing the ladder is a bad thing. What I am saying is that your power exists regardless of whether you do that or not.

In the patriarchal systems of oppression that the mostly white male colonizers have created, white men have so much power because they created it. They designed corporate systems so that they can have more power. You can see this in the way women are systematically pushed out of their jobs, the way “leadership” is defined primarily by men, and how women’s attire and appearance are measured against men’s standards.

At the workplace, men generally have more power in sustaining their job than women do.

In the bedroom, men are generally powerless in the face of their raging sexuality.

[I want to acknowledge that I am speaking in very general terms without addressing the nuances of abuse and non-heteronormative dynamics that are not often talked about. I do not have much knowledge around those topics and apologize for any exclusionary language here.]

Even when I was at my horniest, I was often nowhere near where my counterparts were. Even when I was turned down, I could easily find sex elsewhere. For free.

Whereas, for men, if they are unable to find sex, they cannot as easily find sex elsewhere. That is why they have to suppress their sexuality or pay for sex or otherwise resort to committing a crime if neither option feels available to them. That is why sex has become so violent for so many of us. That is why the sex work industry is a multi-billion dollar industry.

It is also why the sex work industry is shamed to no end.

It is where women have all the power.

In the corporate world, women can run an entire company satisfactorily all on their own without needing or desiring any kind of support from men.

In the bedroom, heterosexual men find it harder to find satisfaction all on their own without any support from women.

The patriarchy does not want us to know this. It wants us to be so busy with shame around using our bodies in any capacity that it is impossible to recognize our inherent power.

That is why they give us gold stars for climbing up the corporate ladder because we are keeping our power in the confines of our brain.

I call this brain supremacy. (This is not my original idea. I heard it from someone but have forgotten the source. It was a classmate I admired and someone who was very well-versed in Indigenous culture and practices a few years back.)

When we keep our path in suits and slacks, we follow the paradigm that we need to “earn” our place through “professionalism” and using our “smarts” to play the game.

A game that we did not create.

A game that was initiated in the Industrial Revolution (and likely existed before, but primarily boomed during the Revolution) where men could escape a workplace of equal importance - the home - from 9am-5pm and fight their way up the ranks for more perceived and more publicly seeable power.

This is not to say that capitalism is valuable in a lot of ways to the extent that it has supported the livelihood of generations and communities and ongoing advancements. But like anything, the human limitation is such that we often take things too far to the point where we become ignorant of the ways it is oppressive and harmful to the people we want to take advantage of.

The way capitalism took things too far is that, by the time we had created a culture where women could take advantage of the “equal opportunity” to participate in the game, it was already too mired in promoting toxic masculinity that women did not have any space to grow in their own ways.

Examples of toxic masculinity*: competing to work more than other people, measuring professionalism by how much men like what is presented because they are the primary decision makers, inability to practice humility and relating through uncomfortable differences.

(*I don’t like to throw around the word “toxic” because whether something is toxic depends on the person. Something that is toxic for me may not be toxic for another person. The reason I mention it here is that there are nonetheless certain patterns that we cannot ignore if we are to address how it affects the way we recognize our own power.)

So, by leaving out women in the conception of the patriarchal and capitalistic systems of oppression, it was easy to keep us out. It had created standards by which we were to required to perform against our own nature in order to succeed in the game.

One good example is that we experience a lot of hormonal and emotional changes in our cycles. A way we experience time, for many of us, is in cycles. And that is how nature is. It goes in cycles. The rotation of the Earth. The seasons. Everything is in circles.

And when we honor the flows and ups and downs, we are othered and demonized for it.

“She’s too emotional.”
“She’s not cut out for the ‘fast paced’ environment.”
“She’s not a ‘culture fit.’”

All euphemisms to indicate that they are unwilling to relate to and recognize talent in the differences we bring.

So women have been conditioned to believe that we are the ones with something wrong. More so for non-white women who are removed from white male power one more degree. So we believe that we need to either be more like white men, compete against other women, or just stay home and take care of the kids “like we’re supposed to.”

There is no “supposed to.”

Imagine if we all truly recognized the power of women to use their bodies as much as their bodies. Imagine if there was no brain supremacy and honored the woman’s decision to use their bodies as much as they wanted to used their brains.

They would, for example, not have to feel stuck in a relationship where the man had more power for controlling the bank account because she could go anywhere and get paid for her exquisite female body. Because literally, no matter what your body looks like, the woman’s body is so fucking powerful such that there will always be a good crowd at any given moment to throw cash money just for the opportunity to experience it in some way, according to her own terms.

But no. We have all been duped to believe that monogamy and “commitment” and “loyalty” are are default ways we “need” to be so that we can be “good” people.

“Good” is often used as a weapon to keep ourselves trapped in the oppressive systems designed to blind us from recognizing our inherent power.

Not only do we see “good” in the nuclear family, we also see “good” in the beauty industry. We have been taught to believe that the beauty of our body is conditional.

That is why I have body dysmorphia and have always thought that I was ugly because there has always been some standard that I was not meeting to feel like I was beautiful.

There was no education around the fact that I am my own standard.

It took me eons to arrive at the fact that the way I am right now is the standard.

The folds, the wrinkles, the blemishes, and the discolorations are all part of how I radiate in my own grace and beauty in the world. It is inherent, and when we hide from the inherent nature of our beauty, we submit to the outside standards that whip us into the belief that we will never be good enough.

This is not to say that our power is only in our bodies.

To be very clear, our power is in however we decide to use it.

I like to use my power in a lot of ways, and the way I use it is by doing exactly what I want to do.

Whether it’s when I write, when I snap a sexy pic and share it with whomever I please, or when I laugh.

Whatever it is that I decide to do, here’s the message I am declaring: I get to exist however I want without dehumanizing myself the way I have been trained to do.

That’s it.

When there is no shame in any of my decisions, I watch my creativity and courage reach unlimited depths.

I exist and express myself despite every force wanting me to silence me.

So the big lesson from my slutty era?

There is no chance I will be slut shamed.

When I am a slut, I am in my power.

When I am with my kids enjoying a meal, I am in my power.

When I am bawling my eyes out mourning my relationship with my mother, I am in my power.

I am in my power because all of the above is how I decide to experience my own humanity without regard to any rules around how I am “supposed” to be.

There is no force that can extinguish the inherent and limitless power that lies within.

This applies to anyone and everyone. Whether you’re a woman or otherwise. Even if you’ve participated in oppressive systems (which, unfortunately, we all do), how do you want to recognize your own power in a way that nourishes and not destroys?

Power really just means ability. You have the ability to do a lot. What do you want to be able to do right now?

**

The fireside on opening up your marriage is on Friday, April 5 at noon ET.

If you want to be able to open up your marriage without losing everything, you are invited.

This is where we remember just how much power we have in loving deeply, even through the biggest changes.

We have been forced to forget our power to love for too long.

In a world that is so inhospitable to love, vulnerability, and care, it takes courage to love differently.

If you are looking for an extra dose of courage, we find that together in community.

Register here: angela-han.com/open

I was just about to start law school, and I had not done my due diligence on where I was going to live. But your girl is a spoiled princess who has a rich ecosystem of support even when she doesn’t even try.

My aunt had a friend who had a house in the DC Metropolitan area, and that friend was going to be in Korea with his wife and his younger son for his sabbatical that year. He said I could stay in the house while they were gone.

On the very first night, I locked myself out of the house.

Thankfully, I had my phone, which was at 4%. I rushed to get in touch with the owner of the house, and he said that his older son is in the area and can drive over to open the door for me.

That older son was Dan.

When he showed up, I was like, ew.

“Whatever my type is, he is not it.”

As a single virgin living in the city trying to be very ambitious with her future and pretending not to be horny and being completely clueless about her own sexuality, I was trying to play hard to get before anybody was even trying to “get” me.

After I thanked him, we parted ways, and I thought I was probably not gonna see him again.

The following week, I damaged their furniture.

It was a really expensive and valuable antique furniture that belonged to the matriarch of the house, who is now my mother-in-law.

I felt very uncomfortable upsetting the owners of the house that I was staying in. So I was like, “Why don’t I get on their good side by becoming friends with their older son?”

I called up Dan, and we hung out “as friends.” But it was so clear that he was nervous and was attracted to me. I was like, “Time to take advantage of this.”

I mean, I was fucking lonely. I knew nobody in the city. I already knew that I was going to hate my classmates. (If you are on a bell curve competing for the highest paying jobs, stressed out the ass, the capitalistic pigs in each of us will come out and fight. At least that was the assumption I felt comfortable with at the time.)

We hung out a few times, and at some point I asked him if he liked me. He said yes. And we talked through the whole night. And at some point I asked him if he wants to date me. He said yes.

I was quite the initiator.

I thought, “Well, I’ll just experiment here. I don’t find him physically attractive, but he seems like a decent dude. I will probably date for like 2-3 months and get the experience I need to date ~for real~.”

But within the first month, we moved in together. Shortly thereafter, he said he loved me. I bawled my eyes out because I knew how much he meant it, and I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I had gotten into the relationship for all the “wrong” reasons and treated him like an experiment. And yet, he saw past all that and simply loved the human being that I was, including all the fuckery.

I never felt so fully held by someone.

Fifteen months later, we were planning for our wedding. Two months later, we got married. Just before the spring break my 2L year. This month marks our 8th anniversary.

But here’s another wrinkle: I actually did not fall in love with him until after I got married.

Even though I felt so loved by Dan leading up to the marriage, I still did not know what it was like to love. I was so terrified of falling in love because I genuinely did not know what that looked like AND I was so fully subscribed to the belief that I needed to do love “right.”

It was only after we got married and watched Dan show up for me over and over and over again that I learned by watching. I was like ohhhhhh, so THAT is how you love. You simply extend yourself to the other out of delight.

It was easy to extend myself to Dan out of delight, too, because he gave, gave, gave effortlessly.

He was the embodiment of compassion. And when you’re around compassion enough, it’s easy to feed off it and be more of it.

I had always believed that I needed to love myself first before I sought for love elsewhere. Dan broke that paradigm into pieces and taught me that I am deserving of love without a single condition.

So that is how I found my very first love.

It happened without physical attraction.

And I always felt guilt and shame around this.

“If you are in love, aren’t you supposed to want to have sex with them 24-fucking-7??!”

Nope. It was just the wrong rule.

This is my position on shame: When you encounter shame, it always tells you about a rule that was never yours to begin with.

I thought that the rule I was supposed to adhere to was that I should be physically, emotionally, and intellectually attracted to my partner at all times if I am to proclaim that I am in love with him.

But then I realized that if I am always breaking that rule, that is not my fucking rule.

Here is what I discovered was my rule instead: I am in love when I decide that I am in love. Physical attraction, emotional attraction, and intellectual attraction can all happen separately, and sometimes concurrently. There is no experience that is “better” than the other. Each relationship fills me in ways no other relationship can.

Very importantly, I trust my decisions.

In my world, I am the monarch. Where have I betrayed my own sovereignty to submit to standards I have not consented to?

At several points in our relationship, even before we started talking about opening up our marriage, we had many conversations around our libido differential. There had been many times where he felt like he was not attractive because I was not physically attracted to him.

Only after we had decided to open up our marriage, we had serious conversations around our own relationship with our insecurities and stories that we brought into our relationship.

After extensive investigation and interrogation into the paradigms we realized we were no longer interested in, at some point Dan told me, “For the longest time, I made you responsible for my need to feel attractive. That is why I was upset with you for not wanting to have sex when I wanted to have sex. Needing that validation from you* was not how I wanted to love you. And the story I had in my mind was that in order for you to be attracted to me, you need to be physically attracted to me. But I can now see that you can still be attracted to me and be in love with me even without the physical attraction. I was able to believe you when you tell me you are attracted to me and love me. I see you. It took so much unwiring and rewiring to get here, and I am sorry that it took so long.”

(*I want to note here that we can want validation all we want. It just doesn’t have to come from a particular person. We can seek and welcome validation without requiring anybody to be different.)

And here we are, more in love than ever.

Wanting to spend more time and conversation with one another.

Because there is nothing that we feel ashamed of in our relationship. Nothing that we feel like we need to hide.

Because we do not make our insecurities anybody’s problem.

So when we feel so free to share transparently what’s going on in our worlds, we become even more curious about the other. We love knowing more about the other. We love being known by the other. We connect deeply.

We relate without expectations.

And, here’s the big bonus: Dan now has other partners who would find it baffling that I did not find him physically attractive and can fill the cups I was not able to fill.

And another big bonus is that we find ourselves being more willing to be a resource for the other. Meaning, we have more spontaneous and high quality sex because we honor each other’s no as much as we honor each other’s yes.

When I feel like I can say no at any time, I spend less time worrying about whether my answers are going to upset Dan. I have more time to witness the beautiful human that he is and connect with the emotional attraction (and increasingly, physical attraction) that allows for truer experiences of our sexual partnership.

To me, there is nothing more attractive than someone who is willing to witness and hold all of you, as you are. Even the differences. Especially the most uncomfortable ones.

If there were no right or wrong way to experience love and attraction, how do you experience it, and how would you like to experience it?

Let those juices flow. (Literally and figuratively.)

**

I got to experience the kind of love that I never thought was a possibility for me. Of course I wanted more. It felt like an injustice to have this kind of love with just one person.

That is why I resisted yet another rule that was not mine: once you’re married, you’re only supposed to love that one person for the rest of your life.

That makes absolutely zero, ZERO sense to me. If you are capable of growing the most magical and magnificent experience of love, why stop at one?

That is one big reason we decided to open up our marriage.

I advocate for loving however much we want, however way we want.

All while practicing the highest level of consent, including yours.

Did you fully, fully consent to the kind of love you are practicing now?

If you haven’t already heard, I am hosting a fireside on how to open up your marriage without losing everything on April 5 at noon ET.

I’ll share:

• How to open up hearts to open up conversations about anything, including opening up your marriage

• A loose framework that you can deconstruct and reconstruct for your own particular path of opening up your marriage

• What relating actually looks like while going through the biggest changes in your marriage, including repairing from ruptures

• The toughest kinds of dangerous relating to examine as we prepare for difficult conversations

• Taking a closer look at the kinds of shame that arise in opening up your marriage and how to destroy the fuck out of those prowlers

If you have even one iota of curiosity around opening up your marriage, you are invited.

Register here: angela-han.com/open

February revenue:

• Returning client: $2,000

• One new monthly Substack subscriber: $8

• Three returning monthly Substack subscribers: $24

• Five founding members of The Opener: $500

• Total: $2,532

The biggest reason I do these monthly reports is that it is interesting to see what is actually happening behind these numbers to examine how we build and sustain businesses on our own terms.

This month, what felt most interesting to me was going even deeper into how I am showing up for love. The specific question I was asking myself was: how am I practicing care effectively - for others and for myself?

That meant that I was a hawk about detecting any sort of expectation or judgment when I showed up to relating to others or when I showed up for myself.

That doesn’t mean I say that I stop judging. It just means that I detect it and find out what it is trying to tell me.

For example, I had a judgment about someone making an assumption about how I decide to have sex with people. My judgment was that I didn’t like it. So I stopped talking to them. 😂

Often times, it’s as simple as that. We are allowed to not like people and things. Sure, there may be a “lesson” in my own judgment, but I don’t have to be available for every lesson. I get curious about what I want to learn, when I want to learn, and how I want to learn on my own terms. And that is typically in an ecosystem of love and support from my own community.

And when I am not judging, I show up to the conversation with the default setting of suspending any judgment. I am here, talking to you, wanting to know more about you, and wanting to be known more by you. That is all.

So when I am in a place of practicing curiosity and care, I notice myself following my desires rather than obligations. Doing things because I “have” to is no longer interesting to me because I can’t be curious when I am doing things out of duty. And when I am not curious, I am not learning effectively or experiencing my aliveness effectively.

Which is how I arrived at the following desires:

1- I want to teach people how to open up their marriage without losing everything.

That is why I am stewarding the community called The Opener.

This has been such an incredible experience so far. We just “get” each other. Although I talk about opening up the marriage, the people in this container know that opening up the marriage is not at the core of our work. We don’t care so much about opening up our marriage as much as we care about opening our hearts.

I am invested in all of us being in a marriage where we feel so safe that we feel comfortable talking about some of the most charged topics, like opening up a marriage.

Which is why, in The Opener, we talk about how we can actually feel comfortable being vulnerable, carrying the load of emotional labor in our marriages, and having difficult conversations that we actually look forward to.

I will shout until the cows come home that the way we relate in the home informs the way we relate outside the home.

And here’s the paradox: there are days where we feel so uncomfortable and unsafe in our marriages, and there are days where our marriage cannot get any better. We hang onto those amazing days and delude ourselves into thinking that we don’t need to expand our relating skills.

Which is why my own delusion came to a head when it was time to talk about opening up our marriage. I realized just how much I was hiding and keeping from him that fueled those unsafe and uncomfortable days.

I advocate for the kind of world where we no longer operate under the lack of awareness of where we can be even more loving to the people we love in our lives. Without feeling like it’s work.

A more loving and kind world is made up of our individual family units. “World peace” starts with us.

And we are doing this exact thing in The Opener!!!

God I love my work.

2- I am exploring virtual sex work.

I am protesting the culture of brain supremacy where I am supposed to use only my brain for my livelihood and my aliveness. No, thank you. I will use my body as well as I please.

I have been sharing more of my body and sex life on Instagram (@itsangelahan), and I have gotten a good amount of attention for it. (Of course, there will always be a handful of people who report me or otherwise drop out of my community because they somehow find a woman’s body so repulsive 😂)

If I am commanding attention, it only must mean I am offering something that merits attention. It’s so wild that I’ve let oppressive systems tell me that I would be a whore for transacting with my body.

But the reality is that human interactions are inherently transactional. We are always exchanging resources. The question is whether the exchange is actually and completely transactional.

We all have resources that we want to give and receive. Things like: sexual resources, financial resources, emotional resources, and so much more. Capitalistic systems have pedestalized financial resources when, in fact, the resource that is the most important is the one that we are interested in exchanging at the moment.

Sometimes I want to offer my sexual resources in exchange for the other’s sexual resources. Sometimes I want to offer my sexual resources in exchange for emotional resources. Sometimes I want to exchange emotional resources.

What is important is what is important to me at the moment. That is the only thing that informs my wholeness.

Financial resources are not the “most important” resource that we need to steward the most carefully to the point where other resources like sexual resources and emotional resources are less valued. This kind of supremacy culture around money is why we are shamed for exchanging sexual resources for financial resources. Unhelpful constructs such as these produce experiences of shame.

I am not interested in shame.

I am interested in what I want at the moment. Which can change at any time.

When I embody this, I am able to see that I am a vast ocean of all kinds of resources I can offer. So is everybody else. And now we have endless possibilities on how we make exchanges on our own terms.

This is the ultimate form of community care.

*

This is what it looks like to build my business on my own terms. Existing against the current of what oppressive capitalistic systems and supremacy culture have said I need to be and do in order to exist. Nope. I am existing even though I am doing none of those things that I’m supposed to do.

What feels like an oppressive rule that you find yourself following at the moment?

Let’s flick that right off this planet. It has no place here.

What do I mean by “emotional labor”? I am talking about my sensitivity. My ability to read the room. My super talented ability to calm myself down so that I can tend to his emotions first.

Fuck, I was resentful about it.

Like, why do ***I*** have to be the one who has to calm down first?

Why do ***I*** have to be patient first?

Why do ***I*** have to be the one to listen to him first??????????

I was like, there is no way this is going to be sustainable. Which is why I asked for divorce several times while we were monogamous.

But there was such a deep, strong part of me that knew that divorce was not the answer. There is a reason I fell in love with this man. I love this human being. It would break my heart to part ways with him permanently.

I just kept wondering how I could address this resentment until it all came to a head when we started talking about opening up our marriage.

The stakes were much higher.

The amount of emotional labor required was unprecedented.

I had to ask myself this question: Am I going to indulge in my resentment towards Dan, or am I available to interrogate where I am refusing to take responsibility for my own experience of our marriage?

What a rude fucking question.

I finally admitted to myself, fine. Indulging in my resentment is not going to get us anywhere.

It was not going to get us to where we both wanted to be: an open partnership that was more loving than ever.

That meant I started looking at the assumption that I was actually putting in more emotional labor than he was.

Because, one thing I know is that when we think we are better than anyone, that judgment often comes flying on our face in a disastrous splat.

The place where I thought I was putting in more emotional labor than he was was where I thought I was listening better than he was.

Boy, was I in for a rude awakening.

The literal definition of listening is “to give one’s attention to a sound.”

Was I giving attention to the sounds that Dan was sharing?

When Dan got elevated, he shared a number of sounds: noises of elevation, the silence in his elevation, words of elevation.

But instead of giving attention to those sounds, I responded with my own elevation because I thought his elevation was a problem.

And when I became elevated, that was another problem.

I had found for myself two dandy fucking problems in my hands at that point.

So instead of giving attention to any sounds that Dan was sharing with me, I was giving attention to my own elevation, and my brain was running a mile a minute thinking of ways to resolve my own elevation.

In the middle of all that shit? Of course I was not really listening.

And the reason I was not listening was that I believed that our elevation was a problem.

Is our elevation really a problem, or is it a natural part of our humanity that tells us something about what we care about?

Sure, the elevation can become a problem when we use the elevation to make someone else responsible, but even this is something we can often skillfully relate through - a whole other discussion. In any case, the elevation itself is a feature of our humanity that doesn’t have to be a problem.

But, because I made the decision that both Dan’s and my humanity is a problem, I was in problem-solving mode rather than in listening mode.

Neither one of our humanity was being honored.

The very first step of skillful relating is to recognize that our humanity is not a problem.

When I recognize that neither of our elevation is a problem, the only thing I am left with is curiosity.

Which is how we grow our capacity to set aside our own judgments, assumptions, and expectations so that we can follow our curiosity of the other’s experience.

One surefire way I found out that I was not listening was that I came out of the conversation not knowing anything more about what he really cared about.

I did not inquire around what his elevation was telling me about what he cared about.

I had not engaged in listening or relating in any skillful capacity.

Much to my dismay, I was actually not as competent as I thought I was in relating to Dan. I was *not* putting a disproportional amount of emotional labor the way I thought I was.

What I was doing instead was doing exactly what Dan was doing that I was frustrated about: not listening.

This is the cold, hard truth that took me a while to accept (I might still be actively in the middle of accepting this right now): my partner’s ability and capacity for skillful relating is a reflection of my own ability and capacity for skillful relating.

We are more likely to agree to listening when we first feel like we are listened to. Especially when we are the ones bringing to the conversation the desire to be heard on something.

“But Angela, I think it is still deeply unfair that I am the one who even thinks about these things. Why am I the one who wants our marriage to be different? This is still fucked upppppp.”

Yes, 10000%.

If you find that you are the one who wants things to be different, you might almost feel cheated on because you’re the one who is doing all this research and labor to see how you can make changes in your marriage.

The resentment may also come from the fact that you have been often made to feel wrong for wanting more.

I can’t stand this either.

Which is why I have an invitation for you to consider an alternative story:

What if you were designated to have more and different desires in your marriage to raise the standards of relating for everyone?

Chances are, the reason your spouse is not doing the kind of research and labor for a more loving partnership is that they already think the partnership is sufficiently loving.

They probably believe that the partnership is sufficiently loving because their standards are largely inherited, and they don’t really see a reason to revise the standards.

Perhaps they don’t find revising them as interesting as you do.

They may be interested in something else that you are not interested in at all.

Could be anything, like career advancement, expertise in their industry, pickleball, or collecting a multi-truckload of vinyl records.

And what they are doing with their desires is expressing it so that they can feel like they belong in the world.

Chances are, their expression of their desires is benefitting someone in the world.

Whether it’s because they are so good at what they do - they might make an incredible leader in their field.

Or whether it’s because they are very talented in collecting those vinyl records - they are participating in the lively culture of enjoying and preserving music in their own unique way.

Similarly, your desires for an evolving, open, and loving partnership in your marriage is alive because the curiosity that sparks the work to create that result is benefitting not just your marriage but the people who get to witness it.

Starting with your own children, I would gather.

Now, this is not to excuse deadbeat dads who try to weasel their way out of skillful relating because they are “busy being an industry leader.” (Which, by the way, “being an industry leader” becomes much easier and more sustainable when we expand our relating skills.)

In the end, a loving partnership is still a partnership.

It requires the equitable participation of both partners.

Your only additional contribution to the loving partnership is introducing this work into the partnership. Your spouse is responsible for partnering with you to raise those standards to sustain the partnership with you.

Which is where skillful relating comes in.

This is where both parties take responsibility for making the loving partnership happen by connecting with one another to know one another more.

We often believe that gargantuan projects that require skillful relating, like opening up our marriage, is not possible because “the other person is not as open as I am.”

False.

Their level of openness is a reflection of my own openness.

Which means, if I want more openness from my partner, I start asking myself where I can be more open.

But I find this to be excellent news because it means that we have more power than we think we have.

Like, holy shit, my partner’s openness is going to be the direct result of my openness? Two birds, one stone.

Some questions to consider as we reflect on our own openness:

• How will I take responsibility for my own emotions without making it someone else’s problem?

• What is one thing I want to know about my partner, and do I have capacity to actually listen to them by suspending my own wants and needs while I listen?

• How will I be resourceful in what I want when I cannot get what I want from my spouse?

• Where am I committed to being right about my own judgments about my spouse than I am committed to pay attention to what they are saying?

Every time you find space and capacity to ask these questions, you are raising the standards for how human beings relate because your humility will be reflected in the way you relate to others.

You are raising the standards in how we experience our individual and collective humanity.

*

Listen, doing this work all by yourself can be a bitch.

I mean, sometimes we need that space to ourselves to reflect.

But if you’re thinking to yourself, I need a place to breathe where I don’t feel so wrong about all this and don’t feel like I am doing this all by myself, I created The Opener for exactly this reason.

Opening up your marriage is not only a lot of work, and it is the kind of work that a lot of people just don’t understand.

We have such a shortage of support for those of us who are trying to open up our marriage and raise the standards of human relating.

The Opener is a virtual speakeasy (hosted on a Discord server, a cooler version of Slack) where I teach you skillful relating to open up your marriage, and we practice together.

We are building a community of people who care deeply about loving on their own terms so that they can experience love with the kind of intensity, frequency, and magnitude that our ancestors could not even fucking imagine.

There is no topic that is off limits, and we practice consent, safety, and responsibility at the highest level.

There is no chance you will ever find yourself incompetent at relating through opening up your marriage (or anything else) once you start practicing with us.

Join here: angela-han.com/opener

One persistent hangup is that keeps nagging at you is this question:

Is something wrong with me?

Whether it’s you who wants to open up the marriage or your spouse who wants to open up the marriage, nobody did anything wrong. You have simply been programmed to believe that what you want or what anyone else wants is a bad thing.

We have all been duped to believe there is a right or wrong to our desires.

You did nothing wrong that prompted your spouse to want to open up your marriage.

You did nothing wrong that prompted you to want to open up your marriage.

Let me break this down to five essential things to know when opening up your marriage.

Let’s get right into it.

1. You do not need a “legitimate reason” for opening up your marriage.

First of all, who would be the judge of whether you have a good or bad reason? Nobody. Because there is none.

(Nope, not even your mom. Or my mom. Or your priest. Or your boss. Or your friend. They are all just as human as we are.)

Here are some of the possible reasons you may want to open up your marriage, all of them equally legit:

• You just want to.

• Your spouse wants to, and you’re curious and you want to be prepared.

• You and your spouse have a huge gap in libido, and you want to meet your sexual needs without requiring it from your spouse.

• You have a crush on someone. Even though you may not want to pursue it, you want to know what it looks like to have the freedom to do so.

• You have a crush on someone, and you are intent on pursuing it.

• You’ve always felt like something was off in your marriage, even though you love your spouse very much. Maybe it’s the institution of marriage, maybe there is something about your spouse that doesn’t quite “get” you. (Even though you love them from the bottom of your heart!)

• You wonder if opening up your marriage is going to be the panacea for all your marriage problems. Even though you don’t think it’s going to work, you want to at least explore it.

• You have a feeling that opening up your marriage is not just going to be about sleeping around with people but actually having open conversations with your spouse about things that matter. Things you have been avoiding for a while.

• You want to be prepared when your spouse suddenly wants to open up your marriage out of nowhere.

• You think it’s kind of ridiculous that you’re supposed to have sex with one person for the rest of your life.

• You want to have feelings for other people without feeling like a dirtbag.

…and so much more. I boycott this culture of requiring a “good” reason to do anything. Who is the determinant of this imaginary moral high ground?

The only requirement in opening up your marriage is that the desire exists. That is all. Whether you have a tiny spark of curiosity or whether you are raging with desire, whatever degree of desire you have is sufficient.

2. You do not need to “work on yourself” before opening up your marriage.

I don’t know who’s been telling us to “work on ourselves,” but this is the biggest lie. We need to uproot this weird attachment to “working on ourselves” before we do anything in our lives.

What does “working on ourselves” even mean? This assumes that there is some sort of destination of self-actualization that we need to arrive for us to pursue any kind of desire. There is no destination. Just like there is no destination in the entire universe. Nobody even knows where the depths and stretches of the universe even ends.

There is no end to our humanity.

And one of the most generative and informative ways to explore those depths is by relating through our differences. We are forced to do this when we open up our marriage. When we talk through all our fears, wants, and needs, we see more parts of ourselves and we become skilled at holding the parts of ourselves that we’ve been told to hide and suppress.

The reason we shame others in their differences is that we shame ourselves in our differences.

In opening our marriage, we confront those parts of ourselves that we’ve been told to hide. We become skilled at loving those parts. We become skilled at having those parts loved by other people.

Shame takes a back seat because we become so skilled at love.

So here is my invitation: if you are stressed about “working on yourself,” stop. Stop working on yourself. There is so much to love and know about you right now, especially the parts that you feel are “broken” about you.

(Because, if no one’s told you, we fall in love with imperfect humans. Not perfect humans. Because they don’t exist.)

3. You are not “too early” or “too late” to the game.

This is a juicy one because there is no such thing.

Let me start with those who think they are “too early.”

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but polyamory is, like, everywhere now. Just in the past month, we’ve had major platforms offer opinions about the increasing popularity of polyamory (Washington Post, The New Yorker, New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, etc.).

People are annoyed with it, threatened by it, intrigued by it, whatever. The conclusion is that people are having feelings about it.

And when people have feelings about something, it means that they are digesting the idea through their systems. Which means that it is a possibility that they will consider it at some point in time. People are already considering it as a possibility, even as they are outwardly muttering the words “I could never.” You can only arrive at the conclusion of “I could never” after having entertained the possibility to a measurable extent.

I started thinking about polyamory when I saw that someone else was practicing it proficiently. So I learned from them how I can practice that in my own life.

Because we are interdependent beings, the chances of us practicing our desires become much more likely when we see other people doing the same thing well.

Which means, even if you start dating or marry someone monogamously, you never know if/when they are going to start considering polyamory. Thirty-three years of my monogamously oriented brain did not stop me from finding my home in the practice and identity of polyamory.

So the question is: how do you want to be prepared?

Now, let’s move onto the thought that you are “too late.”

“Too late” often means “the damage is already done.” Underneath this statement is often the assumption that the damage is irreparable.

I don’t know what you have tried. May be couples therapy, nonviolent communication, spicier sex, sweeping things under the rug, going on more dates with one another, and even some fruitful conversations. And perhaps you are wondering about the parts of your relationships that still have yet to be addressed.

You may have tried opening up your marriage and feel like you failed. You may have an open marriage already and feel like things are not going very well. Neither case is any indication of whether you are “too late” to try opening up your relationship in a different way.

When you feel like you are “not cut out” for something, it rarely means that you are actually cut out for it. Nobody is ever cut out for anything in particular. What actually happens it that you decide that you want to do something, and you stumble your way to proficiency.

Now, if you feel like opening up your marriage feels too stressful and traumatic, that is a different story. We do things only at the pace of our own body.

But if you feel like opening up your marriage feels exciting but you don’t know if you’re cut out for it, that is a different story because your body is already there, and your brain just needs to catch up.

So here, the question is: what am I waiting for?

4. Your ability to hurt people by opening up your marriage is limited.

We often think that we are going to hurt our spouses and our children when we open up our marriage. The thought often is: I am so selfish for wanting something different, and everybody is suffering because of it.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize: we overestimate the power we have other others, and we underestimate the power we have over ourselves.

Let me give you my example, starting with my spouse. When I first told Dan that I wanted to open up our marriage, these are his words: “I am devastated.”

So at first glance, it looks like I totally destroyed his world. I mean, I did.

His values of love, commitment, and family - and his ideas of monogamy, jealousy, fear, resentment - everything - was put to the test. He needed to look at this relationship with all of those concepts under a microscope.

It was devastating because it meant that he needed to confront the truth of what he really, truly wanted from the bottom of his heart, and it was different from everything he was taught his entire life. It meant that he needed to be wrong about things he was so sure he was right about his entire life. (And same for me, too. I was right there with him.)

To say that it is painful to be wrong would be an understatement. Especially in our 30’s, 40’s, and beyond, where we have grown to become so sure of everything we’ve been practicing for ages in our lives.

But I don’t think about this as being wrong. I think of it as coming back home to ourselves after being taught to abandon ourselves for the longest time.

We got really good at practicing love the way we’ve been taught because that was just the default. And now we are choosing courage to dismantle those false paradigms so that we can finally practice love on our own terms.

So when I chose to make my truth known, Dan had the option to pick the easy route and file for divorce. It was an option he actually contemplated for the first time in our marriage. (And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with this option if it is an accurate reflection of his truth.)

But he decided to confront his own truth, which allowed him to see that what we really wanted was more space for more love. We became really good at honoring each other’s desires, which freed us from the chains of jealousy, resentment, and fear that often clouded our judgment in our relationship.

Dan’s experience of hurt was more of a reflection of the magnitude of how much he had to question his own paradigms and less of a reflection of my ability to hurt him.

By taking responsibility for his experience of hurt, he arrived at his own truth in response to encountering my truth.

So the question here is: am I hurting people with my desires, or are they processing their own discomfort in encountering their own desires?

Next up, our children.

I get this a lot:

“What if they are bullied at school because you are polyamorous?”

“How could you abandon your kids for your own selfish desires?”

“How jarring is it for them to see both of you have multiple partners?”

Which are all reflections of their own projections of what needs to be true in this world.

We are afraid of the new because we doubt our ability to experience the new.

This has nothing to do with our children’s ability to experience the new. They are experiencing new things all day every day. They have been on the planet for way fewer years than we have.

We’ve had Dan’s partners visit the home and grow closer with them every time. Just yesterday, one of his partners Kirby held my 4-year-old Rhea in her arms and whispered, “I love you.”

Rhea smiled. She kept being goofy. I got to watch her receive more love from more humans in our whole ecosystem of love and support.

Here’s my question: where are we deciding for our children how much love they can receive because of my own stories around how much love humans are capable of giving and receiving?

Each day, I get to witness just how unlimited our capacity is in love when there are no restrictions around how we can love.

And when my children experience such profound depths of love from multiple adults in all kinds of ways, chances that they are capable of handling any hate and bullying goes up because they know how to love through differences.

So if my selfishness means they get to love more deeply than I ever have, I don’t know who is experiencing the hurt here.

5. Yes, there is a potential that you will lose your marriage.

Let’s not sugarcoat things here. There is always a potential that we can lose our relationships.

Now, there is a difference between accepting the potential of losing the marriage and being terrified at the thought of losing the marriage.

When we are terrified about losing our marriage, we allow fear take the driver’s seat. When we allow fear to drive us forward, we tend to suppress ourselves and focus on pleasing the other person.

I am willing to bet that that experience has been exhausting because you never get to experience your own pleasure. It’s always a constant debate on whether your decisions will be good enough for the other person, and you end up finding no room for yourself.

So the question here is: are you willing to lose yourself first before you lose your marriage?

This is a question I grappled with myself. Before opening up our marriage, I noticed that I was trying to manage Dan’s emotions and his own experience of his humanity, and I became resentful when I never found satisfaction in the way I was loved.

Even though I loved him more than anything in the world. (Which is a stark paradox. But as my teacher Simone says, “I distrust anything that isn’t a paradox.”)

That paradox got me curious about what it would look like to stop being so terrified of losing Dan and to start maximizing my experience of love with him. And where I arrived at was that my fear was rooted in my belief that I have any control over his experience of his humanity.

In love, there is no room for control. There is only room for care and support.

When I want control, I ask: how can I “make” him “feel better”?

When I want to care, I ask: how can I be a resource the way he wants, and do I have the capacity for it?

When I want control, I ask: how can I “make” him want me more?

When I want to care, I ask: how can I trust his desires?

Incidentally, those are the questions I get to practice asking myself.

Instead of trying to make myself feel better, I ask myself how I can be resourceful for feeling more supported.

Instead of trying to force my own desires, I start practicing trust for the desires I have right now.

When we open up our marriage skillfully, we get to honor the other person’s experience of their humanity.

When we honor them as they are, the chances of losing the relationship plummets dramatically.

Often times, marriages fall apart because of the need to control our feelings and the other person’s feelings. We try to fight against the current instead of witnessing the current. That kind of friction is what results in irreparable incompatibility.

So ultimately, it is not non-monogamy that destroys the marriage. It is how we use monogamy or non-monogamy to relate to the person we are in partnership with.

So the more relevant question here is: what is the relationship orientation that supports how spacious I feel in our relationship, and how can I use it to relate to the other?

There is always risk of losing relationships because our desires, capacity, and preferences change over time. Do we want to carry that risk skillfully by relating through it with the other, or do we want to carry that risk incompetently by trying to manage the other person’s feelings?

***

It is possible to open up your marriage to find that you are more in love with one another than you’ve ever been. In fact, that outcome holds the greatest possibility when we learn to relate skillfully through our differences.

You may find yourselves no longer arguing about whose turn it is to make dinner or do the dishes for the night.

You may also find that you get so much more work done because you don’t find jealousy, resentment, or disappointment interesting anymore.

You may also find yourself feeling all giddy, excited, and surprised by the kinds of relationships you get to build (romantic or otherwise) because you know how to relate to anyone so skillfully.

This is what we practice in The Opener, where I teach you everything you need to know to open up your marriage the way you want to.

It is a virtual speakeasy where we get to open up our marriage and practice love on our own terms…outside the prying eyes of the outsiders who have no idea what it’s like to love freely because they are so busy following all these rules around how we ought to love.

You get to bring your own signature cocktail. Your own feathered hat.

You get to experience your own sexiness because you decided to show up for all of your desires.

There is no topic that is off limits in The Opener.

It is also where we practice consent at the highest level.

We honor each of our capacity to be known in our uniqueness and to know the other in theirs.

There is no other place like this on the planet.

In here, we can finally let our hair down and dare to love differently.

Join here: angela-han.com/opener

Yesterday morning, I told Dan about a decision I had made. He was disappointed and frustrated about it. (It was understandable it because my decision affected both of us, and I didn’t like my decision either.)

A year ago, I would have wanted to make all his uncomfortable feelings go away. I would have said something like, “What if I did this? What if I did that? Would that make you feel better?”

Or, I would’ve rushed to say sorry profusely before I even got a chance to process what I was apologizing for.

Or, I would have offered up my body for sex so that I can facilitate an experience of pleasure to “cover up” or “make up” for the experience of uncomfortable emotions.

Or, I would have gotten frustrated with him because I felt powerless for not being able to make him feel better.

This all assumes that his feelings are a problem.

It’s not. Feelings are part of our humanity, and we are allowed to feel frustrated and disappointed.

In that moment when Dan was experiencing his frustration and disappointment, I sat with him. I decided to regard his experience, meaning, I was present with those emotions without needing them to be different.

I was present with him without needing him to be different.

Listen, I’m not gonna lie - it was a long ass two whole minutes. I noticed all the whirling desires within my chest wanting to jump out and start the conversation first.

But I waited. I practiced care by witnessing his humanity first before tending to my desperation.

During those two minutes, I also got a chance to see the gravity of how much my decision affected him and ask myself how I wanted to regard his humanity more effectively in my decisions moving forward.

So when he appeared to be prepared to talk again, I was able to speak with congruence. Meaning, what I was telling him was a true reflection of what was going on inside of me.

I said to him, “I know that this was not a decision that served either one of us, and I am sorry that it affected you this way. If and when you are available, I would love to relate to you on how I can exercise care more effectively. I love you.”

Way too often in conflict, we attempt to fix because we think that our humanity is a problem.

But our humanity is not a problem, and conflict is a place we get to experience the most uncomfortable emotions that tell us where we want to go.

Our capacity to hold space for our uncomfortable emotions is directly proportional to how much capacity we have to talk about what is really going on behind those emotions.

So every time we have a conflict, we see it as an opportunity to expand our capacity to relate and regard one another. This translates to our capacity for other people as well.

*Now, this doesn’t mean that we automatically have massive capacity to relate to everybody and everyone. It just means that we are aware of our capacity and expand it at our own pace.

Because of our foundational ability to regard one another’s experiences without taking responsibility for them without consent, here are five key ways our skills manifest in our marriage:

1- We never argue about how we want to be more loved by each other.

For years, we would have endless requirements of one another. I would require that he want to spend more time with me than with his video games. He would require that I put the dishes away the way he wanted.

But it was never about the video games or the dishes. It was about our aching desire to be loved by one another. We kept looking for evidence that we were in partnership. That resulted in assigning responsibility to the other for our feelings around how much we felt loved.

This was a fruitless pursuit.

Now, we don’t get resentful of how much time or energy or effort we put in for the other because I already know how much I love him, and he knows how much he loves me. It is uninteresting to debate this.

The way we got here is that we transitioned out of needing to be anything for each other and into honoring one another as infinite beings with so many parts to them that are interesting to know and explore.

(We do, however, argue passionately about each others’ music choices and volume. We also sometimes argue about driving because he appears to be under the delusion that he is a better driver than me. Just kidding. He actually is a much better driver. Anyway, none of it has to do with whether we feel sufficiently loved by the other.)

2- We are always prepared to have on-the-spot disagreements without getting heated.

For years, we were afraid to disagree with one another because we thought that it meant something was wrong with one of us.

Now, we don’t find disagreements so scary because we don’t take disagreements personally. We know that our disagreements have nothing to do with the other person and everything to do with ourselves.

We have disagreements around values and logistical matters, like how to parent, how to handle dinner, and how to spend our money. We are prepared to have those discussions as they come up because it is also another opportunity to see what the other person is really like, and we get to love one another more deeply in our differences.

3- If we don’t have capacity to handle disagreements on the spot, we find a way to have a discussion at a designated time.

Oftentimes things get busy because we take turns going on dates, have two kids, and generally have fires come up left and right by virtue of being human beings on this planet.

But we don’t let our disagreements get lost in the shuffle. We prioritize handling that because the way we handle conflict now informs how we handle conflict in the future.

We have a whole system. Part of it is called “Dangela Time.” 🤣 It’s a weekly dinner date + time to look at any unresolved disagreements we’ve had over the week.

Another part of it is that, if one of us brings up an issue, and the other person does not have capacity, the person without capacity takes the initiative to communicate first when they are available for it.

Before, we would typically shove things under the rug and kind of wait around until the other person brought it up and would get offended that the other person was not bringing up the issue first. We decided to stop playing games and actually communicate our needs and desires as they come up.

4- We tell the truth, no matter what. Even if it might hurt.

I keep remembering what a monogamous friend said to me once: “When you are monogamous, you often hide what is really going on.”

This is not true for everyone, but this was true for us in many ways because we were terrified of losing one another when the other person saw how fucked up we were. This was not sustainable because (1) we presumed what was and wasn’t fucked up in the other person’s eyes, and (2) we presumed how much capacity the other person had to relate through our differences.

We were not transparent about what was really going on and how we were going to actually relate through those differences.

This is no longer the case in our marriage. Ever.

Even at the end of a tired day, even if we have some unresolved issues, we tell each other where we are at.

“I don’t have capacity for this discussion right now.”

“I am feeling a little resentful about your decision.”

“This is hurtful and disappointing for me.”

We put all our truths on the table and decide together how to relate through them. This is essential to building trust because we rarely encounter surprises or explosions anymore. We don’t suppress or silence. We express our truths as they are right now.

This leaves so much room to delight in each other’s presence because nothing is left to guesswork.

5- We have no expectations or requirements of one another.

We find that our only job is to honor each other as they are and revel at the uniqueness of who they are. We don’t find a point in doing anything else.

Even when we draw boundaries, we don’t require the other person to meet them. We state our boundaries and trust ourselves to handle any breach as it comes up. Because we’re human, we will make mistakes.

We have this arrangement even if it means we experience hurt and even if it means we arrive at irreparable incompatibility because in the end, we have no ownership over the other. The present moment is the only chance we get to love one another fully, and we cannot do that competently if we have requirements and conditions for the other to be in the relationship.

That allows space for us to commit to those boundaries even more because the lack of expectations reflects the way we love each other without condition.

I get to say that our love is powerful, sustainable, and safe and actually mean it.

***

The way we relate doesn’t guarantee that we stay together forever because skillful relating doesn’t account for changing preferences, beliefs, desires, and capacity. But it makes the relationship much easier to maintain for as long as we are in love.

Therein lies fertile ground for us to build relating skills that we can apply to any other relationship with those we care about.

And here’s the incredible news that helped me tremendously when we opened up our marriage: Only one of us had to be skilled and practice those skills for the other person to pick up the same skills.

Neither one of us was skilled a year ago. 

Only one person has to know how to relate first so that both people can relate together.

It’s kind of like you drawing up some tea and bringing two cups to the table so you can enjoy together the tea you made.

When we engage in skillful relating, we are no longer frozen in fear in the face of differences and getting what you want.

Whether it’s opening up your marriage.

Whether it’s opening up conversation about your disagreements in parenting.

Whether it’s opening up conversation about sex for the first time ever.

Whether it’s opening up conversation about how much you are hurting.

Skillful relating gives you what you actually want in your relationship: a loving partnership through your differences so that you can both get what you want.

You can pick up those skills and practice them in The Opener. This is a Discord community where I teach everything you need to know so that people around you won’t just say that they love you but will actually know how to love you.

Bring your specific relationship issues and we problem solve together.

$100 for lifetime access: angela-han.com/opener