What is Polyamory?

Polyamory is a type of relationship. Polyamory is much like monogamy, in which there is love, enjoying time with a significant other, sex, sharing experiences, and living life with another. The main difference is the fact that a person is sharing their love and life with more than one person. Polyamory is built under the idea that there is infinite amount of love to be given to others rather than a finite amount. One person can love more than one other person at any given time.

It is simple to be married to one person and say you love them. What if your partner says they love their friends? I’m sure you will think nothing of it, as it is a different kind of love. Your partner does not want to be sexually involved with their friends, but only to share experiences and enjoy each others company. Polyamory is not much different. Rather than a platonic love, it is a sexually charged love as well. A deep caring and understanding love that surpasses friendship level is not uncommon in polyamory. Learn infinite love is possible.

Understanding Needs

Polyamory may not be simply about loving other partners and needing more deeply involved partners in one’s life. It may be simply about having needs met. Polyamory also revolves around the idea that no one person can satisfy all of another person’s needs. Lets say your partner wants to be involved in BSDM, but you are strongly opposed to being involved. Your partner may build up a frustration in their life for not having that need met. Through polyamory, your partner would be able to have that need met, and continue on with their poly lifestyle with you as well. This is a basic understanding of polyamory, but maybe non-monogamy isn’t for you.

Different Kinds of Polyamory

There are many different kinds of polyamory. Open relationships, triads, quads, swinging, polygamy, mono/poly, geometric, or even group.

With the many different kinds of polyamory relationships, there are even more, which are defined by the persons in the relationship. Every person or persons have their own set of rules in place to keep the relationship from going wry. It’s hard to say specifically what kind of relationship one is in with such blanket terms. My wife and I have an open relationship with polyamory tendencies. We date other people and other couples, and we may fall in love with them as well. Our long term goal, if you will, is to someday find another great couple we connect with and live within a small closed community with them.

What matters is not the term you give your kind of relationship, but how you define it. One type of relationship does not work with everybody, however, with open communication and honesty nearly anything is possible.

A quad is a polyamorous group of four people that are involved with each other emotionally, and/or physically. This does not mean there is group sex, or everyone having sex together, or even a crossover of sex from any certain partners to another. Lets say there are two women and two men involved in a quad. The two women may be sexually active with each other, and the two men are active with either or both women. The two men may not be sexually involved with each other, except maybe in the same room, but not with each other. On the other hand, the two men may be involved, but the two women may not be.

In another instance, the quad may have 4 men, or 4 women. The quad may live together or they may all live separately. There are many different variances of quads, some may be simply two couples dating each other and being intimately involved and label themselves as a polyamorous quad.

Within quads, there are still rules, there is still love, respect and communication that still happens in any relationship.

A triad is typically a group of 3 people rather than 4 or more. Within the triad, it can be made up of two men and a woman, two women and a man, or three of either sex. There are many variances of how a triad can be made up, and this does not mean sex would happen between all three people involved either. Perhaps two of the three people would be involved sexually, while the third person only has sex with one of the others. Or all three people will be sexually involved.

Within a triad the group may not all live together, but only spend time together or on the other hand they may all live together, sleep together and share everything together. Just like in any other relationship there is love between each other, sharing, caring and respecting each other.

Swinging is typically two couples who wish to only experience sexual fantasies with each other. This is sometimes referred to as couple swapping as well. In the swinging instance, they may also be single, there is no rule that says a swinger must be within a couple. A couple may swing with a single person, or with a group of people as well! Although swinging is generally referred to as simply just swapping sex partners, it doesn’t mean there is zero feelings involved. There are many groups within cities across the world that meet up to swap partners for the night and hang out together and have fun. While feelings may build up, typically there are rules in place along the lines of “What happens in Vegas; stays in Vegas.” So – if there are feelings building up between two people while swapping partners, typically the feelings stay in the room where they have sex and the feelings aren’t brought home to the families involved.

What is an open relationship?

My wife and are in an open relationship where we are able to see other people outside of our primary relationship. Within our open relationship we date other people, we have hot one night stands, we may have fuck buddies if we wish as well. We may have lovers with deep feelings or even fall in love with other people. With our instance of an open relationship we do not bring partners to each other and share with them. If my wife decides she wants to have a fuck buddy, she can, but I generally feel no need to meet him. Some open relationships do a welcome meeting each others partners and may even welcome sexual experiences or love between them as well! An open relationship is much more ambiguous than other polyamorous types of relationships as it has much less stipulations than the other types.