"Seven Things You Should Know About Open Relationships"

HuffPost/Lifestyle/U.K.

The prolific and accomplished writer Louisa Leontiades, "activist for open relationships," has been posting a lot of interesting articles on her site MultipleMatch.com in the last few weeks. It's becoming a full-up online poly magazine of consistently high quality.

For her latest piece (which like most of them is crossposted to her blog at HuffPost/ Lifestyle/ U.K.), she gets Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert to give "a quick Cliffs Notes guide" to some of what'll be in their forthcoming book, More Than Two. Their book project's Indiegogo campaign is within $3,000 of its $19,800 goal this morning with three days to go. They expect the book to be 500 pages, and it looks like it's going to be a poly milestone.

For this article, Louisa comments, "We tried to focus the subject on pointers that would be more acceptable (i.e. less philosophical and radical!) for those who are more mainstream or newer to the ideas." Brief excerpts:

Seven Things You Should Know About Open Relationships

So you've thought about it, and you think you might want to try an open relationship.

An open relationship means more sex, right?

Well, maybe. But not before you've done a lot of talking. And reading. And researching.... Here are seven things to consider before you plunge into the world of non-monogamy.

1. It won't go the way you think it will.

I've talked to literally thousands of people involved in polyamory and other forms of nonmonogamy [says Franklin].... The normal social rules of monogamy prepare us poorly for nonmonogamy. I've known many people who sat down, decided what they wanted and didn't want, spent hours talking about the particular form their non-monogamy would take...

...and then, when the rubber met the road, discovered that it was nothing like what they thought it would be....

Which means:

2. Flexibility is important....

Which brings us to:

3. Don't try to lay down rules about feelings.... A rule that prohibits certain feelings really just sets us up for lying about those feelings.

And while we're on the subject of things that don't work:

4. Don't treat people as need-fulfillment machines....

One good way to do that is:

5. Think about what you have to offer, not what you want....

6. Think about how the things you want come across to others.

One day, somebody will make a dictionary that can translate between "things newcomers to nonmonogamy say" and "things those of us with experience in nonmonogamous relationships hear."...

7. Life will not always be perfect.

...Rather than trying to make relationship arrangements that protect us from these things, it's more effective to accept that sometimes we feel bad things and that's okay. We're not promised a life where we never feel anything unpleasant. Instead, we learn that these feelings don't have to rule us, that we can learn strategies to deal with and conquer them....

Read the whole article, it's worth it. And pass it along as a good example of Poly 101 community wisdom. (Oct. 3, 2013).

See also her Conversations with Franklin Veaux: An Uncommon Dialogue.

Update: Franklin and Eve's final Indiegogo promo video, including attack bunny in slo-mo:



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