Should You Start Out Open Or Closed?
Libby answers a common listener question: Should you start a new relationship open from the beginning when you both know you want non-mongamy, or should you be monogamous while you establish your partnership? Even if you don't have this question, there's something for everyone here in Libby's thoughtful return to Making Polyamory Work.
Also! Libby has created a workbook based on the most popular episodes of the podcast — with simple practices and reflection questions so that you can apply this stuff to your life.
Go to https://libbysinback.com/workbook to get your copy.
Transcript
Welcome to making polyamory work. Hi, I'm Libby Sinback and I want to thank you for being with me today. I'm committed to helping people who live and love outside the status quo have extraordinary relationships because relationships are at the core of our well being as humans. I think love is why we're here and how we heal.
I'm back.
Oh, my gosh. It's been so long since I have been in front of the microphone in this way and I know many of y' all have been missing me. In fact, I just want to say thank you so much to all of you. There have been so many folks over the past year in Change who have reached out to me, telling me how much they appreciate the show and how much they miss hearing me. And also, y' all have been so incredibly supportive because, you know, we live in this world where it feels like everybody's a content machine. And what I've heard from folks when I say, yeah, I'm sorry, I just haven't been able to get an episode out is they're like, hey, take your time. We'll be here, we'll be ready. Instead of, yeah, why haven't you been putting out an episode every single week like a robot? And the truth is, I'm not a robot.
And I'm also kind of a mostly one woman show over here. I do have an amazing editor who helps me out on this show, but a lot of it is on me. And that's okay. It just means that I'm gonna give you a human product and not a robot product. In fact, I will never give you a robot product. If my stuff ever starts sounding like, AI, please reach out to me, or if you start hearing something that sounds like me but isn't, oh, my gosh, please tell me anyway. My intention moving forward so that I can potentially be more consistent about this show is to release episodes every two weeks. And I know that means you're going to have to wait a little longer for my new stuff, but I think it's going to be more sustainable for me to keep it going in a consistent way, which is my hope.
Just a reminder, I also put fun stuff on Instagram and I periodically send out emails to my email list with my thoughts and I'm trying to do that more as well. So so if you want to hop on over to my website and sign up for my email list or check me out on Instagram, I really welcome that. I've also been hosting monthly community calls on Zoom where we get together, we do a little grounding exercise, some people bring questions, I talk with that person about their question for a bit and then we have some group discussion and they've been really lovely. So if you're longing for more, that's another way you can connect with the Making Polyamory Work community. That's all I've got for now, y'. All. So without further ado, we'll move into today's episode.
So I've gotten this question a few times from listeners. I'm starting a new relationship and we know we want to be polyamorous. Should we start out closed so we can build a solid foundation for our relationship, or be open from the start? I love this question and I just want to say up front, even if this is not your current situation, like you're already in an established partnership or you're solo and that idea doesn't track with your relationship goals, I think this episode will have some useful thoughts for you. So stay with me. Before I give you my answer to this question, I want you to actually just pause for a moment and step back and check to make sure you actually are definitely clear on what everyone's intentions for this relationship actually are. I think this is good to do in starting any new relationship. Whether you're starting out single or you already have a constellation of folks, make sure you've had enough conversations about what you and your partner actually want, what you're hoping for, what your intentions are both right now and in the long term. It is way too easy to assume that the goal when you get together is, especially when you're both single, is a nested long term partnership.
But maybe that's not what you or your partner are seeking. Perhaps you're solo, a nomad, a relationship anarchist, or simply not interested in nesting right now or ever. Or maybe you want some pieces of the escalator but not others. You could also have really mismatched intentions but not realize it. Maybe one person is envisioning a shared life, a sense of we're building something significant here, while the other one is thinking, I like you. But I'm also open to exploring. I'm not looking for anything that involves merging lives right now. Your hopes and intentions can change, of course, but I always say this.
Believe and act as though whatever your partner is saying they want now is what they will always want unless they tell you something different. It's not respectful to you or them to build a relationship together in hopes that they're going to change. Hopes and intentions for your relationship are essential to understand because they inform the expectations you have and the ways you invest in the relationship. And again, assuming or having mismatched intentions could create quite a tangle when you then ask the question of whether to be open or not. But let's say you're both on the same page. You're both a definite yes to life partnership. You want to build towards sharing a home, sharing wealth, connecting your families, maybe having kids, growing old together, the whole escalator thing. And you know you also want to be polyamorous.
Should you start out that way or be closed while you focus on building your twosome? I would ask you, what's your hope in starting out closed? Is it because it feels safe and maybe feels familiar? Is it because it feels like maybe you need training wheels? Is it because you want to minimize.
Distractions from each other?
Is it because you're worried about too much complexity? Is there something you're afraid will happen if you're open? Are you afraid you or your partner might meet someone they like better?
Yeah.
So here's my tough love answer. I don't think any of these reasons are good to start closed if you know you want to be open. Starting out monogamous is full of so many problems. It makes it more likely that you'll skip having to define lots of things about your relationship and instead do more assuming in service of things feeling safer and easier. That's because that's literally the blueprint for monogamy. And we've been getting messages about that blueprint since we were old enough to speak. From our parents, families, community tv, movies, music, friends. Because of that preset of expectations, you might just completely skip a lot of questions that you need to answer, like what does partnership mean to me? What does it look like in practice? How often do you want to be seeing each other? How are we sharing what's going on in each other's lives? What kind of support are we exchanging? What does it mean to cheat? Is it okay to be friends with an example? Is it okay for me to eat the food off your plate when we go to restaurants without asking first.
And I think I get it. When you're excited about someone new and you see big potential for something long term, you often want to anchor it down. It's so common to find yourselves greasing the wheels so everything works so that you can have a secure foundation as quickly as possible. And part of that might be keeping out other people. The problem with that is that you often blaze past lots of potential issues that might cause that structure you're creating not to even work long term, because those things weren't addressed in the foundation. There's a moment in this show that I love, called somebody somewhere, by the way. Like, watch it. It's so good.
But it really captures what I'm saying here. So one of the characters, Joel, is getting ready to move into his boyfriend's house, and they're talking about what to bring into the shared home. He has this beloved upright piano. It's really meaningful. I mean, music is such a huge part of him. But his partner already has a baby grand, and Joel doesn't say, hey, this is important to me. What can we do? Instead, he just lets it go. Like, he sells it.
He folds. And you see him folding on. A lot of things that we know because we've been following him on the show are important to him for the sake of the relationship. And when his best friend calls him out on it, he says something to the effect of, well, this is what you do when you find love. That's the monogamy script. And yet, weeks later, they show Joel sitting alone in his car, crying because he gave up on so many things he loved and cared about that he wasn't sure would fit in his new relationship, and he didn't want to risk trying. Spoiler. Eventually, he does stick up for himself, and it made me so happy because I was so mad.
Anyway, this can also happen the other way around. You could be more like the boyfriend. Like, you have your unspoken preferences and expectations of how things should be. You might be assuming, hey, baby grand better than upright piano. We should just have mine. What's the problem? And so then you just proceed that way without even asking your partner if that's what they want. And then they, like Joel, just go along with it. Maybe they don't actually want to go along with it, but they don't know how to rock the boat.
Or maybe they don't know what they want, and so they go along with you, and then they're kind of deferring to you on everything down the line. This not only has a cost to your partner, but to you too. Your partner may end up resenting you or just being passive in the relationship with you, carrying all the mental load of the decision making for the two of of you. I'm not sure if this tends to happen because monogamy lets you skip that negotiating, or if negotiating just feels scary, or if we just don't know how to do it without it feeling like a power struggle. What I do know is that not having the ability to negotiate and co create your relationship and navigating differences together upfront is actually a huge reason a lot of monogamous partnerships ultimately fail. Moreover, let's say you have taken the time to start out closed and you've built this lovely monogamous relationship that has helped you feel free to be vulnerable because you felt secure knowing that for now you're the only one and you're the most important one. Or you've built it all on this foundation of less complexity for the sake of ease. When you open up, you'll still have to rearrange all of that to accommodate non monogamy.
Y', all. This is like building a house that you know you're gonna have to completely gut in a short amount of time. I mean, why you could do that, but that's gonna cause you so many headaches and possibly a lot of heartache and just time. Ask anyone who has opened up a previously monogamous relationship and how hard it was for them. What you're doing is you're trading the immediate term discomfort and risk of negotiating and dealing with the hard things now in favor of the long term potential pain of having so many mismatched expectations and all these tacit agreements that simply won't work with polyamory.
Hey, real quick before we get back.
To the episode, if you've been listening.
To this show for a while and you've been nodding along but been feeling stuck and making these ideas part of your reality, well, I made something for you. It's a workbook based on the most popular episodes of the show with simple.
Practices and reflection questions so that you.
Can apply this stuff to your life. Just head to Libby sinback.com workbook and grab your copy.
Now. Do I think people fail to define or negotiate stuff when they start out open? Oh hell yeah. But if you start out your relationship without being able to assume all the monogamous norms and you're truly open to other partners from the start, you will more quickly find reasons to need to negotiate much sooner. That doesn't mean you'll be good at negotiating right away. Here's the thing inside Learning to openly negotiate in a loving relationship are lots of microskills that you have to develop to be good at it. You'll have to develop boundaries both with each other and with yourself. You'll need to practice hearing and saying no and also how to give and receive a genuine yes. You'll need to learn to state not just your wants and needs, but your preferences and be okay if your partner doesn't feel the same way.
You'll need to practice disagreement, AKA conflict with respect, curiosity and kindness rather than making either of you wrong or right. You'll need to be able to creatively and collaboratively problem solve. You'll need to learn to sit in tension together because sometimes negotiating takes time and there's a lot of uncertainty. As you figure it out, you will need to get really, really, really, really, really good at listening. And if you didn't grow up in a family where all of that was practiced so that you could just learn it through osmosis, it may take some time to get the hang of all this. However, relationships are the training ground to learn, and practicing this together with polyamory in your intentions from the beginning will help you build a relationship that is strong, strong at its core, so that you can handle the complexity that comes with being open rather than feeling safe because of what you decided to keep out by limiting each other. Now, am I saying when you're starting out a new open relationship that you both have to go out and date a bunch of people right away? No, that is not the point. If you want to do that, that's fine, but the important part is that you don't have a rule against it from the beginning.
And what you're building together is operating from the understanding that someone could come along at any time, which means you have to negotiate from the start, which means you're building that negotiating muscle. It's actually pretty common to be excited about a new relationship to the point where you don't have a lot of interest in other partners at first. Also, building takes effort and that effort might take more of your available time and energy. I mean, in the early days of dating Drew, we were non monogamous and I went on some dates, but I just couldn't find myself getting interested in anyone at that time. And Drew didn't date at all because, well, his other partner was actually his job and that was all he could handle at the time. Does that mean that if you or your partner does get excited about another person, that that Means they aren't focused on building this life partnership together. No, not necessarily. What it does mean is a lot more negotiating.
And now you have to include that other person in the mix of doing that. Asking them their intentions, checking for their compatibility, being willing to be in disagreement with them, but also listening, et cetera, et cetera. You see where I'm going now? You might be hearing all of this and saying to yourself, uh, Libby, I have no idea what I want when I'm starting this new relationship. I know I like this person, but I don't know what kind of future I want to create with them. I'm still feeling that out. I don't know if I want polyamory or not. It may not be for me or I know I do want polyamory, but I don't know what kind of. So how the heck do I build anything if I don't know what I'm building? How can I build a partnership with non monogamy in mind if I'm not even sure that's what I'm going to want? Like, how can I negotiate in all this uncertainty? First of all, of course you don't know.
That's really normal and that's really wise that you know that about yourself. I will go further and say that many of us who think we know what we want may not fully know ourselves yet. And we may also change our minds. Here's the thing about negotiating though. Even if you don't know what you want, you can still practice negotiating. You're just negotiating to find out. Instead of committing to something that your relationship will be built on. Negotiate in small time bound ways so that you can try things state upfront when you try something new together, that this is an experiment to see whether it works out or not.
Like, let's try texting each other every night before bed. See how that feels. Check back in later. Are we both enjoying that? Okay, let's try talking about the people that we're just chatting with on dating apps but might not actually ever meet. Okay, check back in later. Does that feel good or does that feel like too much information? Let's try sleeping over at each other's houses twice a week. Too much, not enough. Just right.
I hope you're picking up that this is a skill you can use when you don't know what you want, which you'll definitely run into many times in your life. Lastly, I'll say hopefully there will be all kinds of things in this new relationship that won't require much negotiation at all because you're just on the same page. You're finishing each other's sandwiches. You'll need that. Because if you have too many differences and you're negotiating all the time, it may be hard to have a relationship you're actually enjoying. When you find someone that matches you in so many ways, that feels magical and amazing and exciting, and it can feel like so much is already built between you, it's effortless. Just don't let that make you feel scared when there are moments that it's not, because that is where the real relationship happens.
So to recap, if you know you want polyamory in a life partnership that you're building, I really recommend starting open and negotiating all that up front, building those muscles and taking risks rather than playing it safe. Communicate your intentions, ask about those of your partner, and co create something that can hold the complexity of being open. Don't start with the walls around you, but by strengthening from the inside. This might mean going slower, being more intentional, but on the other side of that, you get to build something that is resilient, dynamic and authentic to both of you.
