When Dan and I got together in 1999, we decided that we were going to design our own relationship. We had no interest in being monogamous. We had no idea what that meant, as we didn’t know of anyone that lived that way. Not only were we going to be ok with each other having sex with other people, but we were going to be ok with developing relationships. It was going to be part of our lives.
We both had been married before and had wanted to be more adventurous with our previous partners. It didn’t go so well. Those relationships didn’t last.
Dan and I had talked and shared fantasies and shared what we’d really like out of a relationship. We’d like the opportunity to have other relationships, to feel our feelings and not have to step back from anything or anyone that we felt a connection with.
So, we tried to move slow. We’d been friends for years and didn’t know of anyone else doing this. No role models. But, having decided that this was going to be ok….it would be, right? Wrong.
Regardless of truly wanting to live this life, and after finally finding a support group…..that’s Poly Columbus…..and therefore finding others that were doing this…and finding a word for it….Polyamory…it should have been so easy. It so wasn’t.
We had to learn some tools. We had to learn to communicate. Everything we had learned in our previous monogamous relationships and from our bio families had to be unlearned. We needed to surround ourselves with healthy polyamorous peoples.
This took time and patience, both for each other and ourselves. Lots of trial and error while we tried to figure out the jealousy that we both didn’t understand. Lots of working on ourselves as individuals. Lots of working on past baggage.
We’ve made it through the struggles…though we know there could be more…emotions are funny that way and sometimes we can’t guess what might trip us up. But, if we trip, we’ll pull out our toolkit and see which tool will help with the situation…or develop a new tool.
In the meantime, we like to share these tools with others and have actually been doing so for the last 8 years. At first it was a class and some podcast shows on 8 tools we had put together. Over time, we had created some more so created a second class on the newer tools.
Then, as we went through more situations we created more tools. Now we had too many to talk about in a 2 hour class. So, instead of creating a third class where we were trying to cram everything in, we decided to put it in writing.
A book was born. All the tools that we wish someone had told us about when we got started or that we would have discovered much earlier on our polyam path…..we share with you.
https://www.eroticawakening.com/polyamory-toolkit/
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