What Polyamory Is Teaching Me About Discernment

Agnes Pelton, Sea Change, 1931

There are two reminders on the vision board I collaged back in January 2026 that now seem particularly relevant to this season I’m in:

One says Love again, lover, and the other says And begin again.

I keep thinking about the relationship between those two instructions.

My tender polyamorous heart has been broken more than once in the last few years; I wrote about tension between wanting more and accepting what is after one of those painful, confusing endings. And just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been holding a lot of grief around two relationships I was deeply invested in for the last year that have de-escalated. Both moved away from the direction I had once imagined for us, even as the love, care and friendship between us remains. I think that’s part of what has made these endings, or rather changes in form, so hard to metabolize… I’m grieving what I thought we were building together.

This is one of the things polyamory has given me: a lot of opportunities to experience loss without necessarily losing love. Because when we build a life around the possibility of multiple loves, and then allow ourselves to open up to deep connection with other humans, we are also building a life with multiple possibilities for grief. Sometimes we lose people entirely; sometimes we lose a particular form of relationship or a future we imagined living into, together.

Lately I’ve been feeling that the combination of all of that love and all of that grief has made my heart more resilient in some ways, because I’m still willing to let love affect me deeply even when it hurts. Each relationship has taught me something I perhaps could not have learned any other way. And through that process, I’ve accumulated evidence that I can survive the loss and grief that arises when important relationships change form.

The song Crack Me Open played through my speaker over the weekend, and there’s medicine for me in these lines:

Crack me wide open

Oh break, my heart in two

The depth of my love is only

The depth of my pain, I know

And I will not be ashamed

Of this heart that’s on my sleeve

I wear it with pride

I will not stop loving

No I will not run and hide

I will be true to my heart

And I will love again over over

Yes I’ll feel everything

These lyrics feel like a commitment I want to keep making to keep my heart open even after all the loss, and to let myself feel all of it. There is a way that grief and heartbreak actually expand my capacity to love by carving out space inside of me. And I think I’m also perhaps learning to love more wisely by getting better at distinguishing the difference between caring deeply for someone and actually being able to build something nourishing with them.

If love itself isn’t enough to tell us whether a relationship can thrive, what should we be paying attention to when deciding who to weave into our relationship constellations… and how deeply?

Read more

Comments

Join the conversation — create a free account to comment.

Join the conversation

Loading comments…