Polyamory in the News: Big batch of poly in the media shows up pre-Valentine's Day

'Tis the night before Val's Day, I'm calling it quits,
And just posting these stories, 'cause that's all that fits.

For now, anyway. I think this is the biggest year yet for a pre-Valentine's runup of poly in the media. Click the titles for the full articles. I'm sure this batch isn't complete, but it's bedtime for me.

Courtesy Kimchi Cuddles. Used with permission.

● On Cosmopolitan's website: Sex Talk Realness: What It's Like to Be Polyamorous (Feb. 13, 2015):

By Rachel Hills

Imagine if your "one and only" was one of many? Polyamorous people believe that you can love more than one person (sexually and/or romantically) at a time. In this week's Sex Talk Realness, Cosmopolitan.com speaks with four women about what it's really like to be polyamorous....

● At Connections.mic, 3 Things We Can All Learn About Love From Polyamorous Couples on Valentine's Day (Feb. 13, 2015).

By Sophie Saint Thomas

...I'm a bisexual woman with a male partner who is supportive of my relationship with another woman. For me, figuring out what the hell to do for Valentine's Day makes multiple Klonopin sound more appealing than multiple orgasms.

Logistics aside, the annual holiday is a celebration of love, and in no context is this clearer than in polyamorous relationships that fully embody the inclusivity, generosity and and limitlessness of intimacy. Here are some of many lessons lovers in all types of relationships can learn from those in polyamorous ones.

Embrace the awkward PDA moments. This day is about you, not onlookers....

..."My partners (and their partners) comprise a distributed network of love and support," Tilde said. "My metamours (in poly parlance, my partners' partners) are amazing. There's a word, 'compersion,' for when your partner being with someone else brings you joy. To me, compersion feels like a cloud of glitter poofting all over my metamours and me."...

Spice up your V-Day to-do list. A lot.

Sheila is a 37-year-old female member of the poly quad behind the app The Poly Life, a tool that facilitates planning polyamorous Valentine's Day dates.... "In my case, the to-do items are a little racier, like what sex acts I'd like to be done to me and vice versa."...

Valentine's Day is longer than 24 hours.

...This year, Sheila is celebrating with Eric and Jill as a triad. "On lucky Friday the 13th, Jill and Eric are having their private date, to honor their primary relationship. Amanda and I are going to a strip club and buying each other lap dances!" said Sheila. "On Valentine's Day, the night of the 14th, I'll join Eric and Jill in their hotel suite for our Valentine's date. I love threesomes!"...

● KQED in San Francisco is an important player in public radio nationwide. Friday morning it broadcast a thoughtful, 51-minute (!) interview with four of our leading lights. The program blurb:

The Bay Area has the largest polyamorist community in the country, and it's growing. Polyamory encompasses a variety of consensual, non-monogomous relationships, from a couple who occasionally sees other people to a group of seven all living together in a group relationship. We talk with a panel of polyamorists about the how and why of their relationships.

Guests:

– Marcia Baczynski, open relationship coach and author of an e-book on becoming non-monogamous, "Four Mistakes Couples Make When Opening Up and How to Avoid Them"
– Pepper Mint, member of a polyamorous relationship for 12 years
– Polly Superstar Whittaker, author of the memoir "Polly: Sex Culture Revolutionary" and founder of the San Francisco sex positive communities Mission Control and Kinky Salon
– William Winters, polyamory community organizer

It was on at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. PST. Listen anytime here:

● Rachel Kramer Bussel has a nice piece in the Philadelphia City Paper, coincidentally a week before the Poly Living Conference begins there. Her story is titled Love the one you’re with — and the one they’re with, too (Feb. 12, 2015).

...To explore this more, I asked several polyamorous people about their relationships with their metamours (essentially, the partners of their partner or partners). I'll use Cunning Minx, Polyamory Weekly podcaster and author of Eight Things I Wish I'd Known About Polyamory: Before I Tried It and Frakked It Up, as an example. She's in a long-term relationship with LustyGuy, who is married to L....

The same story greeted readers of (at least) the "U.S." website of the Metro freebie commuter newspaper, with the headline Exploring Polyamory: Why you should love the one you’re with — and the one they’re with, too.

Some last-minute tags to cut out and fill in:

Courtesy Kimchi Cuddles. Used with permission.

● Meanwhile in the mainstream Philly Voice, an online regional newspaper founded just last year: Open relationships: Boundaries, benefits and drawbacks (Feb. 10, 2015).

By Sharon Margolis

“If we’re going to talk about couples opening up their relationship, it would look like 'Choose Your Adventure,' like those books from when you were a kid,” Dr. Jennifer Pollitt, of Widener University, told PhillyVoice.com. Pollitt's studies focus on human sexuality education.

That’s right, relationships, just like handbags or ice cream sundaes, can be tailored just exactly to your desires. They’re called designer relationships....

“I don’t have any rules with any of my partners,” Dr. Annalisa Castaldo, a polyamorous professor of English at Widener, told PhillyVoice.com over email. “I would consider it rude, at the very least, to tell my partners who they can and can’t date, or that certain acts are allowed or not with other partners.”

Castaldo, who's married, is also in a relationship of six years with another man; he has a full-time live-in partner himself. Her husband, in turn, is seeing two other women, both of whom are in multiple relationships.

Relinquishing control is at the heart of the process of opening up. It’s a rational skill that allows relationships to continue separately and be accepted and understood by those on the outside.

As Pollitt says, there are two factors that may determine who’s going to take the leap into open love: Time and intellectual curiosity.

...One of the most important rules relates to sexual health, especially critical to people so closely and intricately entwined. Some require showing test results, but testing positive for infection doesn't always mean no.

“[Having a sexually transmitted infection] is not necessarily a deal-breaker because there are so many folks that do have STIs, but it would have to be a much more lengthy discussion in terms of susceptibility and risk, not only to me but to anyone else that I would then partner with,” my anonymous source says....

Benefits

It’s all well and good to talk about living on the fringe of society, but what draws people in? And what makes them stay?

For some, it’s the combination of real intimacy and mutual independence that can’t be found elsewhere.

A strong core relationship (not everyone agrees, but generally, the leading two members of a relationship, the "First Couple," as it were, are referred to as “primary” partners, their other partners “secondary,” and so on) can, in fact, grow stronger, as the bonds of trust and honesty about a person’s unfulfilled needs necessarily take deeper root....

Drawbacks

Reports are inconclusive as to whether the tendency toward polyamory is innate. But as new-fangled as this lifestyle may seem, some conventional wisdom holds. When you’re in a relationship already on shaky grounds, it doesn’t help to open up that relationship.

That’s not to say that a designer relationship has to begin with two people already in a monogamous bond. But when it does (and it often does, since the love chemicals that attract us to one another initially bond us in a monogamous holding pattern), that initial union must be strong, or else risking vulnerability can go awry.

You can't prevent the pain of adjustment as your loved one falls in love with someone else and doesn’t pay as much attention to you as they would have before....

Butterflies in your stomach? As it turns out, the day-to-day of open relationships is not so different. Love is discrete, but it can multiply. Love knows no bounds. For love is love by any other name.

● Be Mine, And Hers, And His: The Requisite Valentine's Themed Post On Polyamory, at the online woman's magazine Ravishly (Feb. 11, 2015):

By Jetta Rae DoubleCakes

This time of year casts a shadow of glib apathy over me.... Most might look into a crowded restaurant and see celebratory loving couples. I see dozens of tired actors, forced to re-audition for the parts they’ve already landed....

Sexual and romantic exclusivity is my idea of hell, and for a lot of you celebrating Valentine’s Day, I would reckon it’s the same. Bachelor parties. Mancaves. Girls Night Out. Your monogamy has an entire culture of triage built around it, desperately trying to hold heteronormativity in place as it hemorrhages, free-falling into chaos. The future is upon us. The future is beautiful. The future wore three matching wedding dresses and is having a baby.

Come out into the cold, my dove.

I know you’ve heard things.

But jealousy is not the hardest part of polyamory. When you learn to name and own your feelings, and have space to process them without judgment or reprimand, then to fall apart under their weight like some Jenga of neediness is not the end of the world, but rather the potential start of a healing conversation....

● The Santa Fe Reporter profiles the local poly discussion and social group: Three’s Company: Santa Fe's polyamory Community is Small but Proud (Feb. 11, 2015).

By Emily Zak

...Mim Chapman, author of What Does Polyamory Look Like? and founder of Santa Fe’s only poly group, defines polyamory as “the belief that one can openly, honestly, respectfully and mutually decide to love more than one person at the same time.”

When Chapman started Santa Fe Poly a decade ago, there were few local outlets for polyamorous people to connect with each other. She inititally held monthly potlucks at her house, where as many as 50 people would show up to hot tub and drink wine and talk....

...Chapman sums it up best. “[Polyamory’s] a valid option for people who deal well with complexity, who like communication and depth and feedback from a number of loving individuals. I would love it to be an option for everyone; I would never wish it to be something everyone should try,” Chapman says. “I really hope that at some point it’ll be accepted.”

● In Ireland, in the major daily newspaper The Irish Times Polyamory: ‘People think it’s like a swingers’ party’ (they explain that it's not). With a 2:22 video (Feb. 13, 2015). More on this one later.

● At Identities.mic, a gay perspective on the many sudden social acceptances that have been happening: Here Are 6 Legitimately Amazing Reasons to Celebrate Love This Valentine's Day (Feb. 6, 2015). One of them is,

We're finally taking polyamory seriously.

Polyamory was a taboo subject just a few years ago. But as our ideas about love and sex have evolved, so have our ideas about monogamy. There's still a lot of misconception about why people seek polyamory, but there is growing understanding that consensual non-monogamy is a healthy option for those who don't subscribe to traditional romantic structures. More and more, our society is rethinking what a relationship means, what it is to love another person (or multiple people) and to commit.

● At YourTango, an online women's magazine, How Polyamory May Overtake Monogamy, by Mr. Mike Hatcher. It's undated but seems to have just gone up. BTW, I don't believe the title. And the piece is poorly written.

More to come, I'm sure.