What Polyamory means to Us

First and foremost: who are we?

I am Carmen, and my husband is Ben.
Maggie is my best friend turned girlfriend, and Tom is her husband.
Tom and I are dating, as are Maggie and Ben.
Confused yet, so were we!

Polyamory is, at its core, the belief that we can love and choose to have meaningful, romantic relationships with more than one person.  It is broad and inclusive.

Individuals subscribing to this unifying idea may still choose to shape their relationships differently. Many people who subscribe to polyamory reject any sort of limitation. They choose to maintain as many relationships as they are personally able to commit to and do not allow the existence of any one relationship to limit the existence or scope of the others.

That’s not quite how we have chosen to express our belief in polyamory.

We call ourselves a “pod”. We are two married couples with five relationships between us: the two marriages, myself and Tom, Maggie and Ben, plus Maggie and I. We are all committed to these five relationships and are not interested in developing any more romantic connections outside of our pod.

We firmly and fiercely believe in our ability to love more than just one person, and in the value of supporting our spouses and each other in all of our relationships.

This is what polyamory means to us. We are a family and we support each other and each others relationships.  No one relationships is valued over the others – instead, we recognize that everyone’s needs are met more fully when we work together. For example, when Maggie is sick she might find Ben’s company more comforting that Tom’s simply because Tom is more practical whereas Ben is softer in how he looks after Maggie. Given that she didn’t ask to be sick, I make sure Ben and I are available and don’t hold Ben all to myself just because he’s my husband.

In return, Tom and Maggie have both been flexible when Ben or I were craving the company of one of them despite everyone having other plans.

Furthermore we all fulfill different roles within the house. The same as you can ask any monogamous couple who does more cooking and who does more planning, we are all working together to make our household function smoothly.

So there’s a little bit about my family and what polyamory means for us.

Stay tuned for more of our crazy adventures!

 

Carmen