Hello Polyam Comrades
Hopefully your week is starting off well. To help foster a safe and inclusive space for polaymory discussion, we wanted to provide weekly discussion topics! The goal is that we share our stories and our experiences, listen to each other, provide safe space for each other, and learn from each other. Please ask questions and provide answers in good faith only, let’s be the wonderful communicators I know we all are.
This week’s discussion topic is: What Does Polyamory Mean To You?
This is a pretty broad topic and should provide a great baseline for future discussion. I’m excited to hear what you have to share!
Please feel free to use this thread to suggest future discussion topics as well, ideas you have to foster a better community, or feedback you have about the community.
What does polyamory mean to me? I probably should have thought about my own answer before posing the question
For me personally though I think polyamory is a fairly all encompassing term for any non monogamous relationship style that focuses on geninue emotional connection. There are lots of ways to construct or define non monogamy, but for me polyamory is constructed around that emotional connection. Many of us (monogamous or not) already define love in many ways, and I think polyamory expands the definition of love out infinitely in any and all directions. It allows us to love anyone in whatever way we agree to love each other. It allows us to define love for ourselves without accepting societal expectations of what love is “supposed” to look like or feel like. It allows us to explore ourselves, our world, and our community through love and connection. For me polyamory is freeing myself from the societal restrictions and expectations placed on love, exploring the discomfort that can come from that liberation, and allowing myself to accept the outcome of that exploration. I think a lot of the limits people place on their own expressions or experience of love comes from white western capitalist expectations and definitions of what love is, and for me at least freeing myself from those expectations has been a really important part of my anti imperialist journey.
So basically if you love multiple people in multiple ways, defined however you and those people define it…congrats you’re polyamorous. It doesn’t have to be complicated or clearly defined or fit into some rigid box, it just has to be liberative and ethical expression of many kinds of love to be polyamory.
That’s just me though!
That’s pretty much the definition that resonates most with me as well.