When You Don’t Want the Relationship Escalator, But You Still Want a Map

Photo by Liliana Drew on Pexels

Once we start noticing and questioning all the hidden assumptions Disney movies and toxic love songs taught us about what shape relationships are supposed to take, it can be deeply disorienting to try to create something different, especially when we haven’t seen many models for what that something else could actually look like.

For more than 13 years, I’ve been practicing various forms of non-monogamous relating, which has included consciously unlearning mono-normative beliefs and actively dismantling hierarchy within my own once-very heteronormative partnership

And the more I deconstruct, the more I feel like a humble beginner, looking at the pieces of this puzzle we were handed about how to be intimate with others, what it means to belong, and how we’re supposed to build family.

For a long time, I’ve been very clear about what I don’t want in my intimate relationships. I don’t want possessiveness. I don’t want outdated gender roles that automatically place me in the feminine role of caretaker or domestic laborer. I don’t want heterosexual expectations that funnel my attraction toward a single, exclusive mate for life.

Even the word non-monogamy defines what we’re doing by what it isn’t: Not monogamy.

But after all that dismantling, especially when we’re already feeling sideways from insecurity or jealousy or grief, it can be surprisingly easy to forget:

What are we actually trying to build?

Once we stop using traditional milestones to tell us what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like, we’re left with a much harder question:

How do we know what actually works for us?

The relationship escalator gives us a pretty clear set of instructions for what we’re supposed to do next: date, become exclusive, spend more time together, move in, get married, combine your lives. And those milestones come with meaning attached to them. Moving in means the relationship is getting more serious. Getting married means greater commitment. Building more independence, spending less time together, or moving into separate homes can easily be interpreted as evidence that the relationship is moving backwards or something has gone wrong.

Increasingly, I’ve been thinking about relationships a little more like a journalist (my first career), and one answer is that we run short-term, defined experiments and see what actually happens. Sometimes living through something tells us what thinking about it for six months simply can’t.

When there isn’t a map to follow, lived data is often much more useful than the nuclear-family blueprint we inherited. An experiment can be deeply intentional. It simply allows us to update some of our predictions (which is usually based on mono-normative, heteronormative programming that perhaps we haven’t even realized is in there) with actual, lived experience.

Instead of trying to decide whether we should live together forever, we might try living separately for a month and notice what happens. Instead of concluding that we need more independence, we might protect one evening a week for ourselves and see what changes. Instead of deciding that a particular aspect of non-monogamy is simply too activating, we might change one variable (like the pace, the amount of information we’re sharing, or the way we reconnect afterward) and pay attention to what our nervous systems do.

I think this becomes especially useful when we’re activated, because big feelings have a way of making us want to make big, permanent decisions just to make the discomfort stop.

We could also resist deciding anything yet and get curious about what we’re actually needing. We can change the conditions, pay attention, and see what we learn.

Part 2 of My Self-Partnership Sabbatical

This September, I’m running a new personal experiment of my own that’s very close to my heart. It’s another iteration of a change in housing that began earlier this year.

In April, I cleared some drawers in my bedroom, left home for the month, and invited my metamour to move into the home I share with my husband while I had some adventures of my own.

I was honestly delighted to let her pay my Bay Area rent for a month, and I had deep trust in the experiment because it had a clear start and end date. I knew home would still be waiting for me when I was ready to return.

I began thinking of that time away from the daily domestic closeness of my marriage as a self-partnership sabbatical: time and space to deepen my relationship with myself as the foundation for this increasingly complex polyamorous ecosystem I’m building, for which I have absolutely zero culturally sanctioned map.

When I stepped outside of that shared environment, though, my attention reorganized in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I began to notice how much living with someone for more than a decade shapes the texture of daily life. Cohabitating means negotiating meals and schedules and household responsibilities, accommodating each other’s preferences and moods and ways of moving through the world. There is real intimacy in letting two nervous systems influence each other every day in these small, ordinary ways.

But without my husband’s rhythms influencing mine every day, I could hear some of my own subtle preferences and desires more clearly.

What I came home wondering was less Who am I without him? and more:

What happens when I stop organizing so much of my daily life around my marriage and give myself more space to hear what I actually want?

That first experiment gave us all some data. And it left me with a new question (which I think is some of the best data an experiment can give us).

This fall, the three of us (my husband, his other partner, and I) are running another round of this resource-sharing experiment. The question I’m living in this time is:

What do I need to feel deeply resourced in this season of my life, and what becomes possible in my relationships when I give myself more of that?

I’m moving out for six weeks in September and October, bringing my fairly consistent neurotypical routines and schedules with me. My metamour (who has been in a nomadic phase herself) is moving back in with my husband so the two of them can sink into the experience a little longer and explore what a fully neurodivergent household feels like between them.

And yes: none of us have children at home with us, which makes this particular degree of experimentation, fluidity and collaboration considerably easier.

And as I get closer to packing up my car for 6 weeks, I keep having mixed feelings about the whole thing because the truth is, I like comfort and I dislike uncertainty.

I would be lying if I said I haven’t had moments when my adaptive child shows up and whispers that my husband is going to prefer living with his other partner, and that my home is about to disappear.

Tender stuff. Helpful to notice how the story changes when I’m well-resourced vs. when I’m not.

I also keep reminding myself that when we step away from the scripts we’re taught about relational security and commitment… it’s going to require some courage and discomfort.

When I’m in a grounded place, I am genuinely excited about the experiment and about where I’m going.

I’ve lost two family members in the last six months, and underneath everything else life has required of me, I’ve noticed a very simple craving:

I want to be with the river.

During my sabbatical in April, I spent three weeks in a bobinsana dieta, working with this Amazonian plant traditionally known as a heart-opening and dream ally. And the river kept coming to me in my dreams.

Again and again, it showed up as a symbol of queerness: fluid, alive, refusing a fixed shape.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

So this September, I am heading to the mountains with the intention of dating the Yuba River, and I mean that more literally than you might think.

I want to get to know her just like I would get to know a cute human I’m curious about by investing attention and energy. I want to sit on the warm rocks and feel the cool water on my skin. I want to listen.

I want some more space to work on my book manuscript, which has recently emerged from a dusty drawer. I want to spend less time looking at screens, and give grief enough quiet to move at whatever pace it needs to move.

So I figured out how to create some of that for myself.

That, to me, is part of what self-partnership means: cultivating enough trust in my relationship with myself that when some part of me says I need something, I’ll listen. I may not always be able to give myself exactly what I’m asking for, but I can take the desire seriously and get curious about how I might resource it.

And importantly, I’m not doing it alone: dear friends are making room for me, my husband and metamour are participating in the experiment, and a whole ecosystem of relationships, both platonic and NRE-laced, are making this possible.

Louis Michel Eilshemius, Nude Bathing under a Tree., circa 1910

💛 Fieldwork for the Heart: Let’s Run a Community Experiment

The more I’ve been thinking about my own September experiment, the more I’ve wondered what would happen if some of you ran one alongside me.

I’m not asking you to run the same kind of “move out of your house and let your metamour move in_.”_ Don’t worry 😉

I’m imagining something much broader and personalized to you: a community laboratory for relational experimentation. Fieldwork for the Heart, if you will.

So I’m calling in my fellow relational explorers: anyone who has a question they’ve been turning over and over in their head and might be willing to spend a month actually living into it to see what happens.

What is a question about your non-monogamous relationships that you’ve been trying to answer by thinking about it? And what might happen if, instead, you designed a small, reversible experiment that could give you some actual information?

Your experiment doesn’t even need to involve a romantic partner. Maybe you spend September intentionally deepening a friendship, returning to a creative practice, getting to know your own body differently, or building a relationship with a particular place in the natural world.

Choose one small relational experiment to run this September, and share what you discover with us along the way.

Start with something you’re genuinely curious about and want to gather some first-person data about.

Before I did this work, I was a journalist, and I keep thinking about the different kinds of source material we used to gather. Sometimes you can research the hell out of a question from your desk by reading other people’s reports, digging through research, and listening to podcasts. And sometimes the source material simply doesn’t exist yet…and you have to go out into the world and collect it yourself.

That’s what we’re doing here: gathering some fresh source material from our own lives.

Or, in the words of Mary Oliver:

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

Here are a few questions you might borrow or adapt:

• What happens if I stop trying to solve my jealousy and get curious about what it’s protecting?

• What helps me stay connected to myself when someone I love is connecting with someone else?

• What happens if I ask directly for what I want instead of hinting and hoping?

• Can I let someone I love have feelings about my choices without immediately changing my choices to make those feelings go away?

• What happens if I give myself some time to regulate before responding when something activates me?

• What kinds of community make me feel genuinely held and resourced?

• What happens if I loosen one relationship story I’ve been treating as fixed?

• What would it look like to rest and resource myself before I reach my breaking point?

Turn your Question into a Reversible Experiment

1. Name your question. Would having a little more protected time that belongs only to me help me feel more connected to myself?

2. Make a hypothesis. I think having some time where I’m not expected to orient around any partner might make me feel less resentful and more available for connection.

3. Design the smallest experiment your actual life can support. Maybe that’s one evening a week. Maybe you have kids, caregiving responsibilities, multiple jobs, or limited resources and an entire evening is laughably impossible. Could it be twenty minutes after bedtime? A solo walk on Saturday morning while someone else takes the kids? One afternoon this month that you ask your community to help make possible?

4. Decide what you want to notice. Was it hard to protect the time? Did I feel guilty asking for it? What did I want once nobody needed anything from me? Did even twenty minutes change anything? Did I discover that what I actually need is more support?

   And remember: your constraints are data, too.

   If the experiment you want to run feels impossible because there isn’t enough time, money, childcare, community support, or capacity available to you, get curious about that, too. Many of us are trying to build expansive relational lives inside a culture that keeps us overworked and under-resourced.

   Maybe your experiment becomes asking for help, sharing resources differently, or rebuilding enough of a village around you that your romantic or sexual partners don’t have to carry quite so much.

5. Go live the experiment. Pay attention to what actually happens. Your feelings are data, and your partner’s response is data. The thing you thought you wanted and then discovered you absolutely do not want is excellent data. So is the experiment that turns out to be impractical, or the one you abandon halfway through because something else starts to feel more important.

6. Bring your field notes back to the community. I’ll open up our Substack chat to all subscribers—free and paid—to use as our little relational experiment HQ. We can compare notes, share what we’re learning, and hopefully help each other feel more resourced with courage and compassion when the uncertainty gets hard.

And if we get this experiment humming in the chat, maybe I’ll open up some Zoom space later this fall so we can gather live and compare what we’ve discovered. I need community right now, too, and I’d genuinely love some company in the field.

My hope isn’t that we come out of September knowing exactly what our relationships should look like. I hope we enter the next season knowing something about ourselves that we didn’t know before.

Maybe that’s how we learn to love without a map: we pay attention, try things, let ourselves be surprised, and allow what we discover to shape whatever comes next.

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Fieldwork for the Heart: Claim Your Experiment in the Chat

What is one question about yourself or your relational ecosystem that you might want to explore through a short, contained experiment?

Come share and inspire others with what you’re curious to explore for yourself in these final days of summer.

Let’s see what new embodied wisdom we might harvest, together.

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Have a question you want some help thinking through?

If you’re sitting with a particularly sticky relational question and want to feel accompanied as you figure out what to try, I’m also continuing an experiment of my own: paid Q&As.

Send me the question you can’t stop chewing on (about jealousy, agreements, attachment, pacing, a relationship that’s changing shape, a desire you don’t know what to do with, etc) and I’ll send you a thoughtful written response.

I started offering these somewhat experimentally myself, and the responses have made me want to keep going:

“I am floored by the length, detail, depth and care of the response I got. It has given me so much to think about and implement. I am so grateful!”
— Emily

Send me your question for $50 & I’ll send you a letter in return →

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