Toward a Radical Relationship Anarchy
I spent a large part of my adult life in serial monogamous relationships that had their ups and downs but these relationships generally amplified my anxiety and reduced my autonomy until I felt inhibited and diminished. After each painful breakup, there was that fresh breath of freedom, which generally exhausted itself into sexual hedonism and culminated in loneliness. This cycle repeated itself through various partners and even a marriage until my romantic self and slut self coalesced. For the last six years, I have been polyamorous and navigated several relationship styles, landing on relationship anarchy (see relationship anarchy manifesto) as the most compatible with my sense of autonomy and anticapitalism. However, being recently solo again has given me the opportunity to reassess even relationship anarchy. For me, relationship anarchy is necessary, but it may not be sufficient.
Unethical sluts
Sometime in 2015, I got involved in a relationship with someone, which lasted about three years. In that time we began monogamously but also immediately kinky, which was an overall first for me to use implements and rope and power dynamics. Eventually, after a trip to Europe and an erotic couples massage that turned into a “soft” threesome, we opened up the relationship a bit and began exploring our local sex clubs. She was very jealous, so our play with others had a few conditions, namely that it would only happen together (never apart) and that it would be “soft” swapping only–I really don’t like this swinger terminology but it’s the most concise way of saying we had a rule against having penetrative vaginal or anal sex with anyone else (even this is inadequate because penetration can be with fingers, tongues, appendages, limbs, and putting “penis in vagina sex” on a pedestal reinforces a sex hierarchy I also disagree with, but more on hierarchies later).
Needless to say, I never agreed with her conditions, but I accepted them because it was something she needed to feel secure (also more on a false sense of security later). Eventually, I caught her lying–she probably broke both the rules she had made–but I didn’t care to investigate too much because I was already done with the relationship. It was ironic too because I had been reading The Ethical Slut at the time and developing an interest in polyamory, precisely because of the ethics aligning with my values and forcing me to realize that my relationship wasn’t.
When our relationship ended in 2018, it was the first time I had ever initiated a breakup and it genuinely felt much worse than when I had been broken up with. This may have been fuelled by the fact that our relationship had been codependent, so it took me much longer to get over her. Just like many of my previous serial monogamous relationships, when it was over, we cut off ties and stopped talking. Not at first. At first, we tried to keep seeing each other, continued to have sex, and I was hoping to rebuild a polyamorous relationship out of our now casual encounters. She was open to the prospect but still resentful over the breakup, so it ultimately ended with a complete disconnect–you’re blocked on everything and see you never.
One of the most devastating residual feelings, at least for me, is when you’ve built a long-term relationship with someone that ends with cutting that person out of your life completely because a part of you is also cut away. I never liked destroying relationships, even when it felt necessary. Sometimes you end a relationship and stay in touch but eventually drift apart and there’s somehow still a sense of continuity there that permits closure. When someone is removed from your life, closure is impossible so you have to find your own peace about it. This is why I wanted this to be the last time I willingly faced the death of a relationship.
Sartre and Beauvoir
In the summer of 2018, I was casually seeing someone and on my polyamorous way to beginning a new relationship that would exercise the ethics I had been so eager to employ. Nora entered my life in a whirlwind of drunken friction and torrential passion. We met through a friend of mine, who was her existing partner, and she and I got drunk together one night at a bar, began dancing when no one else was and until the lights came on after last call. From there, it was a cinematic sequence–bursting through my apartment door, tearing at each other and clothes flying off–until we crashed onto the bed in a heaving hot mess. She said she hadn’t checked in with her partner about the two of us playing so we wouldn’t be having penetrative sex–but whatever the boundaries of that word are, we stretched them. With our underwear still on and “dry humping” (she proofread this and said it wasn’t dry, that it was more of a swashing) we managed to push some part of me into some part of her and reach orgasm–well, for her–for me it was some serious chafing, but supremely gratifying in filthy psychological ways. We kept seeing each other and quickly fell in love. Our partnership only lasted about six months but it never died.
Nora showed me that it is possible to continue loving someone even after the relationship ends. Strictly speaking, the relationship never ended. I now use words like “transitioned” to describe a change in relational status, and we still love each other to this day. She’s had many partners since we transitioned to friendship. I’ve been friends with some of them, played with her on occasion, and sometimes together with her partners. We’ve had a fluid relationship that sometimes includes sex, other times we don’t see each other for months, but the constant is our commitment to one another that sustains our love. I told her that we have a relationship like Sartre and Beauvoir had, built on mutual respect, intellectual stimulation, a lifetime commitment to each other but also our independence, and the occasional sexual encounter. This relationship defined who I was becoming, but more on that later.
The rats nest
It was mid-March 2019 when I met my partner Syn, whom I would be with for the next five years. From the get-go, we were practicing relationship anarchy even before we had the language to describe it. We had no hierarchical structure to our polyamory and everything was negotiable. Our communication was immaculate, thanks in large part to Syn, who showed me the way to engage in arguments without fighting. This was something I had idealized for a long time and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince my previous partners to do with me, which I described as working as a team to resolve a communal problem. In this way, we would avoid tossing blame, being hyperbolic, using all-or-nothing statements, and deliberately hurting each other with malicious comments.
Our first fight, Syn requested that we wait until we got home to speak, and then sat me down face-to-face, asked me to start, and listened without interrupting until I was finished saying everything I had to say. I modeled their behaviour in turn and when they were done talking, I responded. We went like this until we answered all the questions we had for each other, addressed our feelings, and collaborated on a plan for the future to change certain behaviours as a strategy to avoid encountering the same problem. That was the first of only two fights we had in our entire five-year relationship. We had many arguments, but they weren't fights because they were respectful and healthy exchanges of beliefs and feelings that prioritized our deep care for one another, instead of prioritizing our individual feelings.
The reason I bring up our communication is that it’s not only essential for polyamory to work, but for relationship anarchy, you need strong and ongoing communication to navigate ever-changing needs and boundaries. Over the course of our relationship, Syn had three other consecutive partners, while I exercised my sociosexuality by going on dates, play parties, and having ongoing play partners (people I was not romantically involved with but had a consistent sexual relationship with). Naturally, I questioned my polyamory when I didn’t develop any other romantic relationships in five years. I thought that maybe I didn’t have the capacity to love more than one person, or I was too complacent, or too afraid to handle the complexities. But I always reminded myself that polyamory for me is a set of ethics that I practice regardless of who I am in a relationship with, or even when I’m not in a relationship with anyone. And, I was proud of myself for not only being OK with Syn’s other partners but actively learning compersion by seeing it as my ideal goal and working through jealousy to get there. Whenever I felt insecure, I reminded myself that compersion is what I value and this is the time to engage it by finding my way to feeling joy for the pleasure and love my partner experiences with someone else. Over time it became second nature, and I deeply enjoyed having metamours–also Syn chose great people, obviously (see me).
Syn had some struggles with their first two partnerships, specifically around intimacy, which always made our intimacy seem special and untouchable. In hindsight, this type of emotional security that one gains from having something “special” with a partner that isn’t shared with others–either deliberately or incidentally (like in our case)–was disadvantageous. When Syn began their third partnership, with Wren, their bond and intimacy grew quickly and intensely. Meanwhile, our relationship was struggling and I found myself on the other end of that “specialness,” which honestly felt like shit. Having a false security that only you can make this person orgasm, or they come the hardest with you, or love you the most, or have the deepest bond with you, is hierarchy sneaking its way into the relationship even when you think of yourself as a relationship anarchist. Norms are deeply entrenched and hard to excavate, so ongoing reassessment becomes crucial, otherwise you may end up having to do another kind of reassessment, like me.
After trying to work through our dwindling intimacy, Syn and I reassessed our needs and boundaries and transitioned to a friendship. I had heard my ex-wife use the word “friend” to ease the blow when she no longer loved me and left. A consolation prize for a six-year marriage that ended in her having an affair. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. So you can guess how well that post-divorce “friendship” turned out. Syn knew I had difficulty with the word friend being used by a partner because it triggered abandonment and the feeling that I was unworthy of love. It didn’t help that within a few weeks of our transition to friendship, I had a casual play partner and a new prospective partner also tell me that they saw me as a friend and no longer wanted to have a sexual or romantic relationship. Bad news comes in threes, right? (I’m not superstitious, but it is pretty ironic). All of this also came in the wake of an upheaval of all our lives–me, Syn, and Wren–in a fine mixture of love, pleasure, and agony with a backdrop of mourning and chronic mental health plights (see my piece Dust, Bones, and Polyamory).
Despite all the pain, I am in awe of each of us for the amount of love, support, and resilience we demonstrated through the process of navigating our intertwining relationships. I am set to move out of the home that Syn and I shared for the last two years and into Wren’s current apartment, while Wren will be moving in with Syn. This is taking place after processing some heavy feelings of being replaced without feeling any resentment for either Syn or Wren. In fact, it’s happening with their ongoing support and love. We are all friends who were also once lovers that were formerly in a Vee relationship (see polyamory relationship types), with Syn being our mutual (or hinge) partner and Wren and I being metamours. Or, what we affectionately call, the rats nest, because we often nested together like sweet little rats and my term of endearment for my favourite people is always some kind of rat (see sweet baby rat, honey rat, snake rat). All this to say, relationships change. I learned from Nora that relationships don’t have to die just because they need to change in ways that may be painful, and that love can still be the backbone of those relationships even when they are no longer romantic. I learned from Syn how to communicate with empathy and solidarity with partners, and now, how to continue that commitment as friends. I also learned from Wren how to move through pain with grace and vulnerability and still show up for the people in my life. But again, more on this later.
Toward a more radical form of relationship anarchy
Having been solo for a little while now, I realized that I don’t want another partner, ever! What I mean by that is I no longer want a categorical distinction between partner and friend. Polyamory is arguably radical in challenging relational norms around monogamy and providing an avenue for sexual and romantic liberation. Relationship anarchy is arguably the most radical form of polyamory for challenging hierarchical structures and norms in romantic relationships and focusing on autonomy. Nevertheless, I was recently flirting with the idea that polyamory isn’t all that radical and relationship anarchy is not radical enough. I even thought to call this piece “Polyamory isn't all that radical” but I don’t like clickbait titles and this sentiment is a bit arrogant and misleading. I don’t want to signal moral superiority by deflating the strengths of polyamory and the people practicing it because it is quite radical and fucking hard sometimes and also fucking liberating. What I want to do instead is share another way of practicing relationship anarchy that extends its anti-hierarchical, anti-amatonormative, and anti-mononormative practices outside of romantic relationships to apply to all relationships. Mind you, I think some people already have this broader interpretation of relationship anarchy.
When I explain polyamory to anyone who inquires–especially those who have a hard time understanding how it could possibly work–I begin by asking them what our most successful relationships are. It’s rhetorical. The answer is friendships. So then I ask, why not model our romantic relationships on our most successful relationships? We have multiple friends, some closer than others, and some of us have a best friend or several best friends. We have commitments to our friends, we spend time with each of them, sometimes together in friend groups, and though jealousy also comes up in friendships, we resolve it more often without resorting to possessiveness, entitlement, and a sense of ownership over our friends’ autonomy. I know polyamory isn’t for everyone, but this explanation often makes an important connection for the unfamiliar, which highlights why it's a reasonable avenue for people who do want an ethical way to be in love with more than one and enjoy sex with more than one.
Nevertheless, as I was recently reassessing my relationships I realized that there was still something hierarchical in the way we treat our friends versus our partners. We can build life-long commitments with friends and then a new partner comes into our lives that suddenly takes priority and monopolizes our time because now we’re in a “building-a-life-with-X” (insert partner’s name) mode with this person. We explicitly or implicity observe the norm that a romantic relationship is hierarchically above friendships even in polyamory and even in relationship anarchy (caveat: some people practice relationship anarchy in ways that include prioritizing friendships as well, though it is not explicitly stated in the relationship anarchy manifesto).
I want to remove the distinction between partner and friend. I want to only have friends. Some that I’m in love with. Some that I have sex with. And some that are platonic. The possessive “my” also carries an implicit norm of ownership that I want to reassess. Perhaps moving away from “my partner” or “my friend” to “we are friends” is what I’m looking for, but I haven’t fully thought this part through and awkward language can sometimes be more of a barrier than an improvement. Nevertheless, I want to build a life with all the friends that I am committed to and allow for those relationships to change with grace and support. This is what it means for me to practice radical relationship anarchy (I’m also not sure this is the title I want but it’ll do for now). It means building relationships, commitments, and community without hierarchies and constantly reassessing the norms that come up, collaboratively. To be clear, I am not saying I want to treat partners as friends, but more along the lines of treating friends as partners. I want to extend the same level of commitment, boundary setting, communication, and prospect for building a life with all the people I am committed to regardless of sex or romantic involvement. The label “partner” or “friend” isn’t all that important either (some people may still want to use both partner and friend, just like some use friend and best friend). What’s important for me is reassessing the implicit normative commitments that come with the distinction between partner and friend.
Some of you might be asking yourselves, aren’t you just talking about solo polyamory then? Not really. Solo polyamory is having multiple intimate relationships but prioritizing yourself as your most important relationship. Meaning, you will typically live alone and independently, maybe have a single lifestyle, enjoy doing things alone and spending time alone, and prioritize yourself and your well-being in making decisions. There’s probably some flexibility in this definition, but ultimately, solo polyamory prioritizes oneself and people practicing solo polyamory have partners as well as friends, which is not what I am personally interested in. Solo polyamory gets some flak for seeming selfish, but I understand that some people do have a strong need to be independent and live alone.
My issue with solo polyamory is prioritizing oneself in a growing global capitalism that already individualizes us to the point of alienation from others and sometimes to the point of narcissism. This is not to say that people who practice solo polyamory are necessarily hopeless victims of capitalist individualization or that they’re narcissists, but rather, to point out one of the reasons I am not particularly drawn to solo polyamory. The other main reason is that solo polyamory doesn’t seem to meaningfully shatter the hierarchical distinction between partners and friends, even if some people practicing it treat their friends and partners equally or equitably. Moreover, I do want to commit to my relationships with my friends rather than committing to myself. I don’t want to be solo, live alone, or be alone, but that doesn’t exclude solo polyamorists from adopting my approach (at least to some extent). The next section should clear up what I mean by radical relationship anarchy.
Temporality and relationality
Let’s get a little thick with theory. Temporality refers to time, which is a weird dimension that may be independent of three-dimensional space or combined with it to form a four-dimensional spacetime continuum (I don’t even know if this part was necessary but I indulged myself). Regardless, it seems that one of our best understandings of what time actually is, is change. Without time we don’t have change and without change, we don’t have time. Change is the measure of time. So why talk about temporality when it comes to relationships? Well, it’s to highlight that, like all things, relationships must change because they happen over time. If we accept the premise that all relationships must change, then we can better prepare, intellectually and emotionally, for navigating those changes and directing them toward our mutually desired outcomes.
Love tends to ensnare us in a romantic obfuscation of intent (sorry, indulging myself again. I just mean we let ourselves get swept away) and we only begin to work on relationships when they start to fail, which is often too late. But if we are aware of change as a necessary condition of relationships from the start, we can hopefully anticipate problems before they arise and work together for those mutually desirable outcomes from a place of strength and competence, not from insecurity and disappointment.
What about relationality? This one is a bit denser than temporality, but I’ll try to be less indulgent and more clear. Relationality is a theory about intersubjectivity. Husserl coined intersubjectivity to say that we understand ourselves (subjectivity, or our identity) through the relations we have with others (hence, inter which means “between”, compared to intra, which means “within”) through communication and feelings. Levinas talked about relationality as part of intersubjectivity to suggest that we have relations to other people and to society that are based on ethical responsibilities to one another. We come into this world already in a network of relations to others and when we become conscious of other people, those relationships are immediately recognized as a sense of responsibility to those people, which is what makes them spontaneously ethical relationships. What all this means is that we don’t understand ourselves from within because we come into this world already in relationships with other people, and it is those relationships that let us know who we are because they are based on an ethical responsibility to each other. We exist in a world with and for other people in relationships defined by our ethical responsibilities to each other, which then shows us who we are in the process of engaging in those relationships.
Relationality is a powerful concept that can help us shatter the individualizing capitalistic framework that alienates us from building community and communion with others. If our best way of understanding ourselves is not from some mystical journey within, but a real material and concrete network of relationships with other people, then we have the ability to find connectedness with others and shared meanings about the world and about existence in an otherwise increasingly meaningless and alienating world. We do not live inside ourselves but out there in the fucking world with other people and we are progressively more alienated from these connections because we are convinced that every fucking problem we have is somewhere inside ourselves and that we need to solve them alone before we are even ready to connect with others (You should have seen how hard I was hitting these fucking keys, my keyboard barely made it through my anticapitalist rant).
OK, exhale. I’m very passionate about relationality because once I understood it, it was like a goddamn light switch–the relationships I have with others is how I understand myself, and what a beautiful thing it is to realize because it makes loving the people in my life so much easier. Inadvertently, it also makes it easier to love myself, because the things I love about my friends are what influence me to be better. The virtues of the people I admire in my life become my aspirations and I think of them each time I act, like my personal saints. It’s the, “What would Jesus do?” philosophy but I substitute Jesus for my friends who have shown me how to act with kindness, compassion, patience, resilience, strength, or softness even when it’s hard. I don’t need deities to represent a hierarchically higher state of being to model my behaviour on–when I am constantly moved and inspired by the very real humanity of the people around me–which shows me what I can be, not some impossibly absolute benevolence. Supernatural power isn’t so impressive when you witness your friends weave real magic into your life by showing you possibilities you didn’t know existed for you.
This is why I want to bring relationality into relationship anarchy along with temporality. Relationships necessarily change and we can be a more integral and collaborative part of that change, and those relationships and their changes are what also change who we are and how we understand ourselves. If we form hierarchies and follow unassessed norms in our relationships, we limit the possibilities for who we can become, which is inherently a matter of liberation. But, I don’t just want personal liberation. I want collective and communal liberation. This is what I want to build, and a radical relationship anarchy with the people in my life that I love and am committed to, is a hopeful way forward. Also, to be clear, I don’t assume that hierarchies are entirely avoidable. Not all my relationships are equal. Relationship anarchy is about reassessing the relational norms we’ve internalized to challenge (or dismantle) existing hierarchies so that we liberate ourselves to be able to collaboratively create and recreate our own boundaries and norms based on our changing needs and relationships. Radical relationship anarchy extends this framework to all our relationships, not just our romantic partnerships, so that we can build a life with all the people we love, regardless if that love is romantic or platonic.
So this is the “more on this later” part I alluded to earlier when I was talking about who I was becoming and what I have learned from my relationships. Indeed, I learned a lot about who I am from the relationships I’ve had so far and I am supremely grateful that these people are still in my life and more so, want to be in my life as much as I want to be in theirs. Nora taught me how to love someone through the many changes in the relationship. Syn taught me how to communicate collaboratively and prioritize the relationship, not ourselves, but also without having to sacrifice our independent and autonomous needs and feelings. Most of all, Syn taught me kindness, which they got from their mom, and what a fucking gift it is to pay it forward (approaching conflict with kindness is magic). Wren taught me grace through hard changes and how to retain our love when we are no longer metamours but friends. And “friend” is no longer a word that scares me. I’ve made a new association with the word friend, as one of the things I value most in my life. To my friends, which includes the few people listed here but also many more (and you know who you are because I tell you all the time how you influence and support me), I am indebted to you for being who I am and forever becoming a version of myself I can love.
