Introduction

This post was written and published January 19th, 2023, but backdated to put the posts in order.

• I created this blog to share my experiences with “Ethical Non-Monogamy” (ENM).
  • I want to share about the ways in which it has helped me heal and grow,
  • the challenges and struggles I’ve faced along the way (as well as the triumphs and joys!),
  • and even how it has interacted with my faith as a Christian, and my relationship with God.

Ethical Non-Monogamy

• I like to point out that Non-Monogamy is practiced by a huge portion of the population–just in an _un_ethical way. i.e., lots of people have or are cheating in some way on their partners. Google the statistics on this–they’re staggering.
• Ethical Non-Monogamy, in contrast, is the practice of allowing your partner to have sexual and / or emotional connections and / or relationships with other people, but with full transparency, open communication, and full consent between everyone involved.
• A Google search suggests that it’s practiced by 4-5% of the population, but I think it’s on the rise since COVID and the “deconstruction” of values and identity that so many people went through as part of that experience (this Vogue article has some interesting perspective on that).
• ENM is a minefield, to be sure, and I’ve had to do a ton of self-work and skill-building in order to try and navigate it successfully.
  • Everyone I’ve met so far who applies the “ENM” label to themself is well aware of this, and very deliberate in how they approach it.
  • It’s hardly the “wild sex parties” and out-of-control behavior that you might picture.
  • In fact, many of the people I’ve met in it are huge nerds, like myself, that approach it all rather intellectually!

Polyamory

• I’ve recorded our story over the past year in lots of notes and essentially rough drafts of posts to share.
• I think it’s worth noting, here at the beginning, that there was a significant shift in our values mid-year which changed how I would write about it all today.
• When we started out, we felt strongly that ENM was about opening up sexually, but not romantically. We saw romantic relationships with other partners as a major threat to our marriage, and put boundaries in place to prevent anyone from coming between us.
• At some point, however, we transitioned to “Polyamory” (literally, “multiple loves”) giving each other consent to have both physical and emotional connection with others.
  • I wanted to point this out because it means that my values have changed, and so there are undertones to some of my earlier writing that I wouldn’t agree with today.
• Polyamory is a form of ENM.
  • While there are many nerds in the ENM space, in my experience Poly is hugely nerdy.
  • To want to support multiple romantic relationships, you need to be very interested in the topic of how to do relationships well.
  • This may be largely because we don’t have it modeled for us in our culture, so you need to do a lot of studying to make up for that.
• Kate and I transitioned to Poly as we began to recognize many of our incompatibilities, and how hard it is for us to meet each other’s relational needs.
• An advantage to Polyamory is that you can have different needs met by different relationships.
• We saw Poly as a possible way to preserve our marriage despite our incompatibilities, by allowing us to need less from each other.
• Ultimately, it didn’t provide that solution for us, and we recently decided to end our romantic relationship, which I’ll cover in the next post.
  • Kate, in particular, found that she wasn’t as interested as I was in being Poly.
  • And I strongly suspect (haven’t quite made it there yet) that this big transition in our relationship is really the better choice for us.