Every morning I do these four actions on my phone: check for any missed messages and calls, play today’s Wordle, look at my calendar to see my schedule for the day, and check my email. That random Tuesday morning in January was no exception. I woke up just before the alarm went off, as I usually do. My boyfriend was sleeping next to me, so I grabbed my phone and started on my usual routine. There were no missed calls or messages. I figured out the answer to that day’s Wordle puzzle pretty quickly — it was “sugar.” The calendar was busy, like always, with no surprises. I opened the Gmail app ..read more

One day I was out on a date with Oliver. We were having dinner at a very romantic restaurant after a leisurely walk. He asked if I could help him plan a vacation. It caught me by surprise because we had just returned from one a week prior. “Honey, I don’t know if I could take more time off from work,” I said. “Oh,” he said, “You don’t need to worry about that. I’m planning a vacation for Kelly and me.” “Ah!” I said, “Sure. I’ll help. What do you have in mind?” Oliver and Kelly were in a long-distance relationship. The only way they could meet was by going on a vacation. Oliver and I were marr ..read more

“Clara asked if you’d be up to meet with her,” Daniel said one day. Daniel was my partner, and Clara was his wife. Ummm. What? I had a strong reaction to that idea. I felt a mix of emotions ranging from surprise to fear to relief. I’ve heard a lot about Clara, not only from Daniel, and had a reason to be nervous. I heard of her fiery temper and that she was beautiful. “Well. Okay. What could go wrong?” I said. I believed in the idea of kitchen table polyamory and craved to have a connection with Clara. Daniel gave me her number, and we arranged a date. We agreed to meet at a coffee shop on a ..read more

Emotional safety is about being authentic and sharing thoughts and feelings with another person without any fear. Frequent criticism and invalidating remarks, especially from a loved one, is a sure path to stripping any relationship of emotional safety. Unfortunately, growing up, I had never learned to share my emotions, especially negative ones, freely. First, I was protecting my mom from what I thought could upset her. Then my “protecting” spread to everyone else around me — my grandparents, my friends, and my boyfriends. Eventually, I carried this habit into my first marriage. Whenever I t ..read more

Last weekend my husband and I went to a wellness retreat in the mountains. As part of it, we participated in a consensual touch workshop. It was an enjoyable experience that ended in a wonderful cuddle puddle. Little did I know what would come next… But let me start from the beginning. We made it just in time for that workshop when we got to the retreat center. After we settled on some pillows in a giant dome, I looked around and noticed that everyone there was quite attractive. “I wouldn’t mind cuddling with any of you,” I thought. Anne, the facilitator, kicked us off with an intro and a gen ..read more

The more partners one has, the harder it is to mind everybody’s boundaries. — me. Everybody talks about rules in poly relationships. To have them or not, what they should be, and how to actually follow them. I think it’s healthier to be mindful of our boundaries than to follow a set of rules. What does it mean to be mindful of boundaries? In order to be able to protect our boundaries, we need to know where exactly they are. If we know where the territory of what’s acceptable ends, any unsanctioned border crossing will set off an alarm. How exactly can we find out where our boundaries are? Fee ..read more

Judging by Google search trends, interest in “open relationships” has doubled over the last fifteen years. I, too, had contributed to this trend when I started researching ways to revive the butterflies in my marriage. I didn’t know how deep that rabbit hole would take me back then. If only I knew then what I know now about open relationships, then maybe, just maybe, my journey could have been a bit less bumpy. I wish someone had given me a checklist of requirements we had to complete before opening up the relationship with my then-husband. Unfortunately, there was too much-unorganized inform ..read more

I thought I was polyamorous, but it turns I am monogamish. Both are types of open relationships, both have some degree of involvement with others… TomAYto — tomAHto, you might say, isn’t it the same thing? Not for me. I define polyamory as the freedom to ethically explore feelings and meaningful connections with more than one person. The most fitting definition for a monogamish relationship that I found is from Jor-El Caraballo, a relationship therapist. He explains monogamish as “people who are largely monogamous with a primary partner but occasionally, or rarely, engage in romantic or sexua ..read more

It was a random Tuesday morning when my ex called and asked what my lunch plans were. “Nothing much; we’ll probably just eat some leftovers at home,” I said. “I’ll bring some fried rice then,” he responded. A few hours later, we were seated at the table with my ex-husband and my boyfriend, devouring the leftover steaks that the aforementioned boyfriend grilled the night before and the rice that the ex brought over. One day my boyfriend and I were talking about an upcoming camping trip. It would be a seven-hour drive to some secluded nature spot for a long weekend. “If we were to invite someon ..read more

I had quite an interesting conversation with my ten-year-old friend Emilia the other day. She told me how her best friend Leslie upset her. Apparently, Leslie told Emilia that she’d rather go walk somebody else’s dog than video chat with her. “That’s so mean! Why doesn’t she care about my feelings? She should be a bit more considerate and not tell me things that may hurt me!” Emilia exclaimed. I hugged Emilia and told her I was sorry to hear that she was so upset. I also told Emilia that it was only up to her to manage her own emotions and set boundaries. If she didn’t like something that Les ..read more