Queer & poly animals rewrite "natural law." Research on why ENM succeeds. What an AI thinks we look like. Poly & psychedelics, new compersion book, more.

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First, announcements:

♥  From OPEN: "The Open Workplaces Initiative is a project between OPEN and the Modern Family Institute to foster inclusive workplaces for all family and relationship structures. 

"We're thrilled to announce our new Open Workplaces Office Hours, held weekly on Wednesdays at 4 PM PST / 7 PM EST. ...Connect and collaborate with the OPEN team and other non-monogamous professionals. Join us to discuss workplace advocacy, career-building, and more!

"...Our newly updated V2 Open Workplaces Toolkit is packed with actionable guidance and template policy language.

♥  Also from Open:  "[Less than] FOUR WEEKS until we kick off the global Week of Visibility for Non-monogamy! July 15 - 21.

"We just published the global event directory, with over a dozen in-person and virtual events and more being added every week! It's not too late to organize something for your community, too. Check out the Event Host Guide for helpful guidance, then register your in-person event or virtual event to add it to the directory.

"Here are the awesome events and activities that members of the community have planned so far:

VIRTUAL EVENTS

• Panel: Identity & Inclusion in the Non-monogamy Movement. Tue. July 16: RSVP on Luma or Plura
• Panel: Peek Inside our Polycule. Tue. July 16: RSVP
• Workshop: Is There a Right Way to do Non-monogamy. Wed. July 17: RSVP on Plura
• Workshop: Creating & Evolving Non-monogamous Boundaries. Wed. July 17: RSVP
• Panel: Non-monogamy Myths and Misconceptions. Wed. July 17: Tune in live on IG
• Panel: Are You Out. Thu. July 18: RSVP
• Mass Media and Non-monogamy. Thu. July 18: RSVP
• More events being planned including "Current Research on Consensual Non-monogamy," "The History & Culture of Non-monogamy Panel," and more – stay tuned!

IN-PERSON EVENTS

• Poly Poly Oxen Free! Wed. July 17 at Brooklyn Art Haus in Brooklyn, NY: Get tickets.
• Picnic in the Park! Sat. July 20 at Edgewater Park in Cleveland, OH: RSVP on Plura, Facebook, or Eventbrite.
• Polyamory Picnic Social! Sat. July 20 at Victoria Park in London, England: RSVP.
• Naughty Gym Kayak Trip! Sat. July 20 at North Alabama Canoe & Kayak in Brownsboro, AL: RSVP.
• Sunday Rooftop Brunch! Sun. July 21 at Whiskey Business in Chicago, IL: RSVP on Plura or Facebook.
• More events being planned in Oakland, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Indianapolis, IN; Martigny, Switzerland; New York, NY – stay tuned!

"Share your story:

"We're inviting you to share a story that highlights your experience with non-monogamy, and a photo of you and your partner(s) and/or family. By doing so, you'll be helping to create more visibility for real-life non-monogamous families, relationships, and individuals.... Or share online with the hashtag #NonMonogamyVisibility,"

♥  As always, you can find the next 12 months of polyamory/ENM conventions, campouts, retreats, and other regional gatherings at Alan's List of Polyamory Events.  Any missing? Let me know! Write to alan7388 AT gmail.com

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Now, on with Polyamory in the News.

● The Peacock Network is out with a fun 1-hour documentary, Queer Planet. Fun and important. Many hundreds of animal species are well documented to show homosexual and bisexual behavior and pair bonds — and also, sometimes, to form polyamorous family units raising their young. Nature is not just MF couples like you were told as a child.

So much for natural law, that 13-century concept originating from Thomas Aquinas justifying why governments should outlaw "unnatural acts." If it happens in nature it's natural by definition. Oops.

The trailer:

Some flamingo parents form triads and quads
to hatch and raise their chicks.

My wife Sparkle Moose has a zoology PhD. "Let me tell you about nature," she says with a grin. She gives talks.

This matters because at the US Supreme Court, the Federalist Society, and other centers of orthodox Catholic legal thought, there's talk of bringing back natural law (fundamental to Thomism) as a "non-religious" legal foundation for anti-gay and anti-poly laws. That lots of animals have gay sex was, in fact, one of the arguments presented to overturn anti-sodomy laws in the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision. But that was then, this is now.

The purpose of invoking natural law will be, as always, to try to hide the howitzers of Catholic doctrine under secular-scientific looking camouflage netting.

As Moose can tell you, 13th-century biology is to modern biology as 13th-century astronomy is to modern astronomy. Earth does move, and bad facts still make bad law.

●  Here's a piece that's had a lot of internet notice: Why Are Non-Monogamous Relationships Thriving? A Psychologist Answers (Forbes, June 8)

"A surge in non-traditional relationships serves as an augury of
their appeal, despite the prevailing stigma. (Getty)"

By Mark Travers

Non-monogamous relationships have been gaining interest and popularity among people looking for love. ...

[But] a 2023 study published in the Journal of Family Theory and Review concluded that individuals in non-monogamous relationships are considered to be more promiscuous, perverted and untrustworthy than people in monogamous relationships. ... However, the glaring question remains—why are non-traditional relationships gaining popularity and flourishing despite unfavorable perceptions?

The following antecedents and consequences of non-monogamy help account for their surge, according to the study.

1. Why Do People Choose Non-Monogamy?

Several factors act as precursors to individuals preferring to stray from conventional relationship structures.

   –  Sexual demographics. People who are white, younger, members of sexual minority groups, non-binary or transgender are more likely to seek out non-monogamous relationships.

   –  Value-based differences. Individuals who perceive an abundance in romantic alternatives and hold liberal political and religious views are more open to breaking traditional relationship norms. ... Individuals high in openness exhibit a greater desire for non-traditional relationships, showcasing a preference for variety, change and new experiences.

   –  Unfulfilled needs also encourage individuals to gain diversity in their romantic lives. A 2020 study published in Current Sexual Health Reports found that 42% of participants believed their non-monogamous relationships provided the benefits of diversified need fulfillment. ...

2. What Do People Get From Non-Monogamy?

Non-monogamous relationships owe their popularity, in part, to the positive relationship and sexual outcomes they yield.

Individuals in non-monogamous relationships experience greater satisfaction and commitment than their monogamous counterparts. Non-traditional relationships result in greater satisfaction—boasting better communication, and more openness and need fulfillment than conventional relationships. A 2015 study published in Sexual and Relationship Therapy found that adults aged 55 and above were happier in non-exclusive, unconventional relationships compared to those in monogamous relationships. Non-monogamous older adults also reported more sexual frequency and better health than their traditional counterparts. ...

As society continues to evolve, it is essential to acknowledge and respect the diversity of relationship styles and the autonomy of individuals to choose the relationship that best suits them. It’s important to prioritize open communication, trust and mutual consent if we attempt to explore alternative ways of forming intimate connections. Engaging in thorough self-reflection and open dialogue can help establish clear boundaries and expectations. Ultimately, the success of non-monogamous relationships hinges on a foundation of honesty and empathy for all parties involved.

Two books

●  Writes longtime CNM researcher Marie Thouin to friends and colleagues,

I'm thrilled to announce the publication of the first-ever comprehensive scholarly book on compersion: What Is Compersion?: Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships.

This book is the culmination of nearly a decade of research; I consider this book a hybrid between a scholarly text and a practical roadmap on compersion. While the book is heftily referenced, the bulk of the content is based on STORIES from the study participants I interviewed between 2018 and 2023. So, I trust this book will appeal to scholars, therapists/counselors, and non-monogamous folks alike (as long as they’re at least a little bit nerdy).

From the publisher's description:

Each chapter features compelling stories from real CNM people.... Thouin addresses the broader social context, explaining how understanding compersion is a groundbreaking step toward a world that supports relational diversity and freedom. By disrupting the idea that jealousy is the only valid response to intimacy beyond monogamy, the existence and practice of compersion builds the foundation for a completely new paradigm of loving relationships. ... Indispensable for CNM individuals, therapists, counselors, and scholars, this book is also invaluable for anyone curious to learn about positive empathy, intentional relationships, and radical love.

Thouin just did a podcast interview with the Multiamory crew (June 18, Episode 484, 1 hour).

●  And here's a book for therapists being newly republicized. The Many Faces of Polyamory: Longing and Belonging in Concurrent Relationships by Magdalena J. Fosse (2021). With polyamory a hotter topic now, the book's academic publisher (Routledge) is doing a fresh sales campaign. From their press release:

[The Many Faces of Polyamory] continues to inspire clinicians and patients alike... offering fresh perspectives and clinical insights into the longing to belong within concurrent relationships. The exploration of nonmonogamy within therapeutic settings is both complex and vital in a world where traditional relational norms are changing and evolving.

...Dr. Fosse is the current president of the Psychodynamic Couple and Family Institute of New England (PCFINE), and she is devoted to educating clinicians interested in developing skills and competence in couples therapy. 

...In The Many Faces of Polyamory Dr. Fosse offers  insight into understanding the dynamics of love, sex, jealousy, and compersion among those engaged in polyamorous and consensually nonmonogamous relationships. ... providing readers with a nuanced understanding of how to navigate these relationships....

●  And on another therapeutic cutting edge, or perhaps bleeding edge: Psychedelics and polyamory: an open marriage by Jules Evans (Ecstatic Integration, June 2, paywalled.)

We know that psychedelics can shift people’s metaphysical beliefs. What about shifting their attitude to monogamy?

Do psychedelics make people more open to polyamory? That topic is very much not on the research agenda at the moment, in fact it’s barely discussed. MAPS and other campaigners want to avoid all the controversies of the 1960s, and to show that psychedelics save marriages, strengthen the military, boosts the economy, and so on. The overlap between psyc… [paywall]

Much as I'm partial to psychedelics, mixing this mix is a mental-health explosive. Standard procedure in responsible psychedelic guiding and tripsitting, professional or amateur, is the agreement "No sexual contact during the session, except [maybe] between long-established partners."

This is for hard reasons. The 1960s counterculture, for instance, was famously lax about this mix, sometimes leading to emotional wreckage and the formation of abusive cults.

Evans himself writes on his LinkedIn page,

...Based on my informal survey, a far higher percentage of psychonauts are polyamorous or practice consenting non monogamy than the general public. Do psychedelics and psychedelic culture make one more open to non-monogamy? Over 60% of my survey respondents thought so.

But survey respondents and interviewees also told me of multiple experiences of boundary violations and ethical abuses in the world of psychedelic polyamory, including therapists and guides claiming their sexual touch in psychedelic sessions can heal traumatised vulnerable people.

● Canada's CTV News interviews family-law mediator John-Paul Boyd on gaps in Canada's laws that leave multipartner families stranded. Do laws need to change as polyamory increases? (May 3, five minutes). Boyd has been studying this issue for years. You may remember him in the news for, among other things, his 2017 research report for the Vanier Institute of the Family, "Polyamory in Canada: Research on an Emerging Family Structure".

●  Says Vanity Fair, The Summer of the Throuple Is Upon Us (June 21). They mean movies and TV.

Hot girl summer is over. This year, it’s all about the ménage à trois. ... What is most thrilling is that these new throuples are also marked by power dynamics that may be even more subversive than the sight of three people sharing a kiss at the same time. ...

●  A solid Poly 101 in yet another women's fashion mag, Grazia: Here’s What Polyamory Is Like From Women Who’ve Tried It (June 14).

●  And in the makeup-and-shopping mag Allure, What Exactly Is a Polycule Anyway? (June 21). Surprisingly good, considering.

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●  And now, I'm kind of astonished. I've heard lots of people's polyamory songs on YouTube, almost none of them radio quality. So how would an AI songwriting program do, based on prompts by someone who knows the subject?

Better than most! Joreth Innkeeper prompted for a song to be titled "Solo Polyamory" done in "gritty blues rock." She adjusted the lyrics and posted the result on YouTube:

Color me impressed. Joreth has presented at many polycons over the years, and the song does seem to capture her attitude. Any giveaways that an AI did it? Well, the music hardly grows any more elaborate or varied as it goes on. Easy fixes: Tell it to overlay a second, then third and fourth voices verse by verse. Alternate the voice additions female and male. Add a horn section behind the final chorus.

Gee, that was easy to type! Maybe I have a future in music.

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That spookily good result got me wondering. What would an AI think polyfolks look like? Image-generating AI gets its "ideas" from what is online and in archives. So then, would an AI portray an average of how the real world thinks we look?

I went to Canva and asked it to draw "typical polyamorists today." After a few incoherent jumbles it caught on and presented...

EDIT: Google Blogger deleted the image, apparently as "misleading." Because it showed AI-generated people? In a story about AI??

Use this QR code:

...dashing hipsters. Could be worse. It even made the woman look central and powerful. How'd it know to do that?

Never mind the monster-hand hallucination draped over her shoulder. To generate images that are both creative and convincing, a neural net uses the same universal perception algorithm that psychedelics act upon in your brain.^[1] Sometimes it shows.

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^[1] Okay, here we go down this rabbit hole according to me. Skip if not interested.

Neuroscientists, using new technologies, have been finding out fascinating things about how  brains work, and these findings have shaped artificial-intelligence strategies.

Running all the time in your brain are neural feedback loops that compare bottom-up inputs, such as from your senses or subconscious thought fragments, against top-down "priors", assumptions built up from past experience or habits. These feedback loops test an input against priors for its likelihood to be real and, if so, worth noticing. The loops then either extinguish it as being unreal or irrelevant, or approve it and pass it up to the next, more complex level of processing and reality-development. And if it's approved, the process will often adjust some of the priors to let it pass easier in the future. The process repeats at increasing levels of complexity and abstraction, up and up. All this happens very fast far below consciousness.

These neural loops have actually been found to continuously implement the Bayes formula, the famous equation in statistics for calculating a greatest likelihood from multiple pieces of uncertain or partial information. Bayesian processing is apparently built in at a fundamental level. Reportedly, if you put a few of the pyramidal neurons from a brain's cortex next to each other in a dish, they will find each other and start implementing the Bayes equation right there in the dish. It's what they do.

In this way your brain creates, and continually updates, its best-estimate internal model of the world around you. Evolution has powerfully selected for this reality-judging mechanism, since it gives any creature with a brain its best odds to survive and thrive as it moves through the messy outer world.

These countless Bayesian feedback loops self-adjust on the fly to try to keep up with changes and new things around you. (The term is "active inference.") The loops run at all levels from the lowest and simplest, such as flagging lines and edges in a visual field, all the way up to the complex and abstract: "This thing is a dog", "That thing is a house", "Bob's barbecue party has started next door, because voices." The loops have been measured to run very fast, at speeds of some tens of milliseconds per feedback cycle.

Next point: This model-making process creates both your conscious perception (your experience of the world around you) and your interoception (your experience of your body and self).

The reason your brain has to create models, inside your skull, of the world and the self is so the brain can work with them at all. Because the neurons you think and act with are there inside your skull, not outside of your head in the dog or the house or your toe.

Key point: These internal models feel to you like just they are the real world, and like a distinct thing that is a body and a self -- merely as a shortcut to not waste brainpower having to map the model to reality piece by piece consciously in real time.

This algorithm has, at least, become the hot working hypothesis in the consciousness-studies field. And it's why implementing the Bayesian algorithm in a machine can make the machine act spookily as if it "sees" and "understands" like a human. Though often imperfectly, with hallucinations mixed in.

This scenario of multilevel Bayesian neural feedback loops, IME, also explains many psychedelic phenomena. Simply posit that the thing psychedelic drugs do is to re-weight the feedback loops, at all levels -- either by strengthening the force of the bottom-up inputs, or by weakening the top-down priors and filters that control what's allowed up to the next level. Or both.

That does it. It's no coincidence that the classical psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, etc.) are known to work by altering the input and output rates of those cortical pyramidal neurons.

So your "doors of perception" when tripping are not so much "cleansed," as Aldous Huxley famously put it in 1954, as reset to run freer -- to form looser, more directly bottom-up-driven constructs of reality. At every level. Which may then trigger, like a sudden revelation, the same "feels real" shortcut mechanism.

This includes accepting and amplifying loose inputs from normally unrelated parts of the brain itself, and from random, low-level neural noise. Both of those would normally be extinguished but can spur unexpected novelty and creativity when passed higher up.

I can even observe the "feels real" mechanism suddenly switching on and off when looking at a hallucination: going from "That pile of laundry looks like a weeping face" to "Goddamn, there that entity is, right here in the room with me just a few feet away!" This is the same reality-making process as in gazing at art painted on canvas, or pareidolia in clouds or tree trunks, or looking inwardly at hypnogogic images ("eyelid movies") that turn 3-D, or lucid dreams.

Next step: This same Bayesian model-making algorithm also creates, using your interoceptions, a working model of yourself.

Which also feels real, like a separate conscious being-- not what it is, just an emergent phenomenon of neural activity: a model. Which, again, comes with the useful working shortcut illusion that you're seeing a reality directly.

For me, grasping this scenario has made pretty much everything on psychedelics more understandable, easier to work with, and often even adjustable on the fly. Which I take as a sign that this is indeed what the psychedelic mechanism actually is.

Including that sense of expanded consciousness. By weakening filters, the drug allows you to see things going on at deeper levels in your brain that would normally be suppressed so as not to distract you from the job of operating effectively in the real world.

But knowing this comes at a cost!  Me, Alan, I, am revealed as not the captain of the Ship of Alan as it navigates in the world, but as merely an internal neural model of a self -- which, again as a shortcut, feels like a real, distinct thing. It's as if the Ship of Alan turned transparent and I look down and see the machinery in the engine room that's actually driving it and creating me -- plain, material-world neural machinery that has spun off this subjective experience of an "Alan" as a byproduct, a wraithlike emergent phenomenon. Its evolutionary role is to efficiently pass best-judgment data from the instruments on the ship's empty bridge to the engine room.

This suggests that the experience of consciousness is a useful spinoff, which evolution strongly selected for as soon as it emerged, because it provides motivation -- experiences of horrible pain and ineffable reward, desperate fear and driving hope -- whereas something that is unconscious like a robot doesn't care. And thus won't be motivated to try so desperately hard.

Talk about existential crisis! When people tell you not to take psychedelics frivolously, listen to them.

And yet, what an incredibly rich, complex, meaningful social-reality world we emergent phenomena have created! Our species' strong experience of being a self became the most important thing about us and enables us to dominate the Earth. How amazing is that? Don't forget, emergent phenomena themselves are real things. . . but abstract derivative things, not the first-order entities that our souls feel to us like they are.

Outright illusions are also things. I've concluded that you cannot grasp what psychedelics do without fully grasping the fact that that the external reality, and our experience of external reality, are two utterly different orders of being.

Confusing the two, I've also come to realize, is the cause of so many human misconceptions, delusions, and dead-end false beliefs.

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The weakening of the Bayesian loops' priors and filters about choosing what is worth spending brain power on, relative to the power of upwelling input material, also explains other effects.

One is how psychedelics famously send ordinary, philosophically uninclined people into experiencing revelatory plunges though ultimate philosophical rabbit tunnels -- mystical experiences of insights into matters that might even be ultimate truths of some kind -- which would normally be extinguished as seizing too much brain attention away from effective functioning in the real world. Think of the stereotyped acidhead mumbling and gasping about life, the universe, and everything as he wanders out into traffic. Millions of years of evolution have selected against that kind of thing. 

Therefore, we find ourselves lacking the words or tools for understanding, or working effectively with, deep possible realities beyond the world and body that we simply never evolved to handle. 

(The usual Ukraine stuff will return next post.)

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The New York Times' star conservative takes us on... and not badly. Two more women's open-relationship stories on the way. And, psychedelic-assisted poly transformation.

Chacruna Institute

●  Ross Douthat is house conservative columnist at the New York Times. That can't be easy; he can't write dumb shit but has to be consistently worth reading for people who disagree with him. 

He discusses us polyfolk as his central focus in a pick-apart of society's current sexual transitions: The Quest for a New Vision of Sexual Morality (March 27). He starts with a recent New York magazine cover story about the pop-neuroscience men's influencer Andrew Huberman, who he agrees is an abusive pig:

...The portrait of a figure like Huberman would be interesting under any circumstances. But the special focus on his sex life, the detailed testimony from allegedly mistreated girlfriends, marks this as very much a post-#MeToo profile. Huberman is not accused of any sexual crime; he’s seemingly just a creep, cheat and control freak. But that kind of misbehavior is treated as essential to any judgment of his public career. Whatever the new rules of sex might be, it’s clear that we’re supposed to judge the cad’s lifestyle as regressive, deplorable and wicked. [Well yeah?]

So what kind of lifestyle might be preferable? Well, here we can turn back a few issues to a New York magazine January cover story on polyamory, featuring both a profile of a specific polycule and an extensive guide to “opening” your relationship or marriage.

When the Huberman profile appeared, some social-media voices suggested that there’s a tension in publishing a takedown of a man juggling six girlfriends after celebrating the juggle just a couple of months previously. But in reality the two cover stories are entirely of a piece. The implied critique of the neuroscience cad isn’t just that he has sex with lots of different women but that he does so deceptively and selfishly — instead of following the kind of open, complex process of negotiation that’s ethically required to be the kind of person who has sex with six different people at a time.

That idea of sex-as-process, with the sexual act itself embedded inside a kind of “best practices” of dialogue and interaction, seems to be where social liberalism has settled, for now, in its attempt to create a post-Hefnerian sexual culture. Thus the general fascination with polyamory, manifest in trend pieces, books and essays too numerous to count, isn’t just about envelope-pushing and shock value. It also reflects a desire to maintain the permissive sexual ethic that men like [Playboy founder Hugh] Hefner turned to their own exploitative ends, but to make it healthier and therapeutic, more female-friendly and egalitarian, safer and more structured.

Polyamory isn’t being offered as an alternative to conservative monogamy, in this sense, so much as an alternative to more dangerous, irresponsible, and deceptive forms of promiscuity — a responsible, spreadsheet-enabled, therapeutic version of the sexual revolution, in which transparency replaces cheating, and everything is permitted so long as you carefully negotiate permission.

Sounds pretty good! Especially because conservatives (of the old-fashioned type) are always talking about personal responsibility.

But I think he is committing a swap of cause and effect here, as people weak on history often do. In this case, our history.

For most of us old polyfolks who were there when today's movement settled on its current shape in the mid-1980s through 90s, polyamory (as opposed to broader forms of ethical non-monogamy) was not about tidier promiscuity. It was about actual heart-centered love — for people you truly want to treat well because you truly care about them. It was about the generalization of limerent, romantic love — that thing that has awed and obsessed and driven humans since humans existed — from the isolated couple, where society has carefully walled away its power, into wider, community-like fields that, we discovered, are not only imaginable but actually possible. Sometimes.

In the history of the poly movement, personal Road-to-Damascus revelations about such larger, agapé-style erotic-romantic love came first. Today's best poly practices developed not by an antiseptic therapeutic ideology, but by experiment and experience amid the early poly community's often bitter trials and errors. The wider world only later started to notice the emergent best practices — those found to improve the chance of success — as awareness of the movement finally began to spread mass-market.

Douthat continues:

A glance at some actual human relationships should raise some doubts about how well this model really works. Whatever Huberman’s failures of honesty and communication, for instance, he appears extremely well versed in the kind of therapy-speak that’s supposed to tame libidinous excess — suggesting that predators and cads can work through this system as well as any other.

Too true. 

...Or again, the new mom-with-an-open-marriage memoir by Molly Roden Winter, “More,” reads more like a testament to marital suffering than any kind of guide to the good life.

Also true. But as conservatives frequently say, getting to a good life often requires hard work and suffering. Ad astra per aspera. Roden Winter herself declares it was worth it.

●  Speaking of open-relationship memoirs by women, Rachel Krantz's Open comes out in paperback in June. Interviews and podcasts with her are already showing up. The book is sure to get more attention in the current environment than it did when it came out in hardback two years ago. From the publisher's description:

Krantz documents her dive into polyamory, from Brooklyn sex parties to swinging and beyond, in her extraordinary debut memoir. As she attempts to write a new plot for her love story with Adam, she runs up against miscommunications, gaslighting, and ancient power dynamics, and seeks solid ground in a relation-ship where the rules are ever-shifting. An award-winning journalist, she interviewed scientists, psychologists, and people living and loving outside the mainstream to understand what polyamory would do to her heart, mind, and life.

Here's a poly reviewer of the book for NPR two years ago: 'Open' explores polyamorous relationships through personal experience.

...I'll admit that I was trepidatious when I first approached this memoir. I've never really hidden the fact that I am polyamorous, nor that my partner of seven years and I have always had, to one extent or another, a non-monogamous relationship. Anyone who is poly (or polyam, the short form Krantz uses in the book) or non-monog knows when to share this information and when to silo it away in order to avoid the judging eyes and skeptical questions of the monogamous overculture. Knowing the memoir was about Krantz's introduction to non-monogamy — and not only that, but that she was introduced to it by a straight cis man, a demographic that is often assumed to abuse this relational preference — made me brace myself for a traditional happy ending about how it was a valid life choice but simply not for her.

Rachel Krantz

I couldn't have been more wrong. It's no spoiler to say that Krantz still identifies as polyam, at least according to social media, and... it's neither a manifesto of polyamorous ideals nor an argument against it. It's Krantz's sincere and curious reckoning with the cultural messaging we all receive about gendered expectations and power dynamics in romantic and sexual relationships in general. How do we untangle those from our own desires? How do we differentiate between those desires and the things we think we should want, or that our partners want us to want? The highs and lows of a first non-monogamous relationship prove the perfect canvas on which to explore these fundamental questions.

At first, things between Krantz and Adam seem rather rosy, although readers familiar with gaslighting and manipulation in relationships may recognize the red flags early on. ...

●  Holly Williams is another woman with a book coming out. She writes in the UK's Independent how she went back to monogamy brimming with good poly lessons: An open relationship taught me everything I needed to know about love (April 2). Her novel The Start of Something starts shipping next week. It's already a Cosmopolitan best book pick for 2024.

...The best lessons I’ve learned in how to be a good partner, and have a good relationship, came from exploring non-monogamy. ... I’m now in a happy, basically monogamous relationship. But starting out non-monogamous actually proved a pretty fantastic bedrock for long-term, committed love.

...My second novel, The Start of Something, tells the story of 10 characters via 10 interlocking sexual encounters. I wanted to explore the different shapes sex, love, and relationships can take in the modern world. ...

Running through The Start of Something is the belief that what makes love work is honesty – it doesn’t matter the structure, as long as you can communicate within it. This is hardly a new or radical take, I know. But – and it’s a big but! – it can still be alarmingly difficult. And while you might assume that opening a relationship would make it thornier, my own experience suggests the opposite – exploring non-monogamy made me a better partner.

...When I got into a serious relationship in my twenties, obviously it was monogamous, because I thought that was what being in a relationship meant. That was the point.

...[It] ended because of my unfaithfulness. Cue crushing, terrible guilt – and a new certainty that monogamy was Not For Me. ... I needed to be free: no one was ever going to tie me down again!

A pinball of pent-up horniness, I rebounded my way through Tinder, Feeld, and the nightclubs of east London. But I didn’t know how to communicate my need for freedom, and so often took a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. ... Still, there were clues that “just not mentioning it” was not working amazingly: the racing heart, the niggling guilt… And I did hurt people, by not being honest, and not really taking their feelings into account.

...It wasn’t until I started seeing people who were already in their own open relationships that I really understood what it took to make things work. What I learned was pretty simple: the more we properly talked about what we were looking for, without any moralising or persuading, the easier and safer it felt. If you’re gonna do ethical non-monogamy, my god you’re also gonna do a lot of talking. You can’t muddle through on vibes and hunches – there have got to be explicit boundaries, because there are a thousand ways to “do” non-monogamy. It meant planning before certain situations, and debriefing after: Are we all happy going out together? Will I stay over afterwards? So, how did it feel…?

...It all felt uncomfortable at first, and then it felt liberating. Have you ever been trapped in circular discussions with a partner, where you expect them to silently know what you need and if they don’t, you subtly punish them? There was way less of all that. Fewer games. Almost no sulks. Dating poly people made me more upfront, more realistic, less embarrassed about my true desires; it made me think harder about what’s behind feeling jealous, or insecure.

When I began dating my current partner Tommo, I was still seeing someone else. But then… as we fell in love, we also fell into monogamy. I believe that romantic love is not a finite resource: you can love more than one partner, like you can love more than one child, or friend. However, time is a finite resource. I soon found I wanted to spend more of it with Tommo than with anyone else. But I maintain that the open beginning was a great basis for the relationship. From the off, we learned to be calm, transparent, and clear in our communication. Our trust in each other is not predicated on exclusivity – but on honesty.

It helped us ditch any assumptions of what a relationship “should” look like…

Knowing this makes me feel both more free, and more secure. ... We talk about what’s working and what’s not. We ask the big questions. Including whether or not we should open up. I don’t want to just slot into a societally-approved, till-death-do-us-part model – I want to allow for movement, and growth.

Because for me, monogamy shouldn’t be the default: it should be a question. ... Right now, I’m happy spending all my romantic energy on just one person – but I think the reason that works is because there was never the assumption it had to be that way.

●  An example of some early best practices surviving, mostly intact, into today's mass market is this quickie little Open Marriage 101 in a women's mag: The 4 Do’s and 3 Don'ts of a Successful Open Marriage, According to a Non-Monogamist (PureWow, March 25; reprinted on aol.com and Yahoo).

"We chatted with Ally Iseman... a speaker, non-monogamy educator and practitioner and organizer in the sex-positive community in Los Angeles....'"

The subheads:

DO: Establish Your "Why"...

DON’T: Think This Will Fix Anything...

DO: Have Weekly Meetings Where You Discuss the Specifics of Your Agreement...

DON’T: Expect Your Partner to Be a Mind Reader...

DON’T: Go with the Flow...

DO: Connect with Fellow Non-Monogamy Enthusiasts...

DO: Decide How Much You Want—or Don’t Want—to Know...

●  Lastly: Old forgotten revelations, if they are correct rather than illusory, do not die but lie dormant, reawaiting their time. How Psychedelics Can Guide the Transformative Journey of Polyamory is a serious new paper by ketamine-assist therapist Justin Natoli, JD, LMFT, in Los Angeles (Chacruna Institute, April 2).

In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found few opinions that feel as personal or divisive as those around monogamy and polyamory. I hold a mindset that different arrangements work better for different people, and what works best may change over the course of one’s life. However, I also observe that institutions of power put monogamy on a pedestal in the postindustrial world. The result is a queering of other healthy forms of relationship that limits the love we share as a human family.

My intention with this paper is to help balance the scales. First, I will offer an expansive definition of polyamory and explore how it can be a journey of healing and transformation. I will then identify the three primary struggles I have observed along the polyamorous journey: shame, past trauma, and difficulty transcending labels. I will also illustrate how the spiritual and therapeutic use of psychedelics can help guide us through those struggles. To be clear, I make no claims for or against monogamy in this paper. I simply wish to highlight polyamory’s transformative potential and reclaim its validity.

The ideas in this paper come from my own psychedelic and polyamorous experiences, my clinical observations as a psychotherapist, and 25 transcribed interviews. All personal statements in this paper come from these interviews with the participants’ consent. I found interview participants by posting queries in Facebook groups related to psychedelic healing. The participants who responded were diverse in age, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, socioeconomic status, and preference for monogamy or polyamory. Each interview lasted approximately 30 minutes and followed a structured series of questions.

Chacruna Institute 

...Psychedelics help us transcend our labeling ego to see the full complexity and potential of our relationships. By removing limits and expectations, we are able to access what Hardy and Easton (2009) call “clean love”:

How many times have you rejected the possibility of love because it didn’t look the way you expected it to? Perhaps some characteristic was missing you were sure you must have, some other trait was present that you never dreamed of accepting. What happens when you throw away your expectations and open your eyes to the fabulous love that is shining right in front of you, holding out its hand? Clean love is love without expectations. (p. 59)

To illustrate how psychedelics help us access clean love, it is fitting to share my own story. ...

(Obligatory caution: These substances are not to be taken lightly. Read up.)

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Meanwhile, as the larger world stage darkens. . .

Call or write your representative.

(Look up their phone / email.)

    

Here again is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with Ukraine: I've seen many progressive movements die out because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support, which is increasingly unhidden.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this updated list of vetted organizations (Oct. 2023) or elsewhere. We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern front trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your granddad did this from a trench against Hitler's tanks— for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're also stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion (pre-invasion article). More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  

Ukraine's LGBT military unicorn.
The thorns and barbed wire
represent old restrictions
now being cut away.
 

Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Speak up for it.

Your congressperson's email and phone. Putin-aligned Republicans right now are blocking some $60 billion in aid, especially ammunition, that the Ukrainians desperately need in order not to be overwhelmed by Russian advances. Just a handful of other Republicans getting some courage to do what they know is right would be enough.                         

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders in a trench in the Donetsk region

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update April 14, 2024: More than a year later Vidma is still alive, still in the Bakhmut area, and posting TikToks. Her unit is at the front in or around the battle for Chasiv Yar, a town just walking distance west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age has showed up to join their fight. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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