In my first relationship, before I knew about alternatives to mono, I fessed up to being really attracted to a female friend of mine. He said he was too and suggested a threesome, but I balked. I didn’t understand my sexuality at that time and felt like he would have pressured things when I felt like I needed to explore my attraction with women without putting additional requirements or pressures or expectations into it. That, and… it wasn’t a healthy relationship. I felt like I wanted to protect her from him. So I tried to bury that attraction and just soak up any time with her I could get as friends.
Later I met this couple and she was so vivacious and flirtatious… she and I were at another friends house and ended up in a three way make out session. I also very much enjoyed giving her bf massages because he made such delightful sounds that fed my energy and hand stamina. After that, her flirting with me intensified and she invited me for a sleepover. I was giving him a massage while she prepped dinner, and the way his lips were moving made me long to kiss them. She came into the room, noticed what was going on and pushed me towards him, laughing and enjoying as I took the cue that kissing him was a perfectly acceptable thing to do, and I had this a-ha moment of “so this is what the word bisexual means… wanting them both…” I also got to add the word polyamory to my vocabulary that night.
I can’t imagine having a quota for a certain amount of people involved. I like having the freedom to let me feelings and attractions be what they are, but recognize that certain rules are necessary to minimize risk of disease transmission. Every person I have gotten involved with has the rules they want as ground rules. My heart is polyamorous. My spouse wants heirarchical polyamory for him to feel secure. It’s not exactly what I want, but it’s a lot better than some of the really bizarre rules that other people I dated wanted to have on my poly… like “okay, I’m fine with you being polyamorous as long as you only kiss girls you aren’t attracted to.”
Although I’ve been in a couple MMF make out sessions where one or both men was bi, it wasn’t closed and they didn’t last cuz the situations were weirdly complicated.
A guy and two girls has been much easier to establish long term stability in my experience, but probably won’t be everyone’s experience.
To my experience, one involves both partners getting to pursue loving relationships with the knowledge and support of their partner, while the other involves one or more partners pursuing other relationships behind the backs of their partner with all the added guilts and hurts that brings. I think all stable relationships require a lot of communication, but poly requires more time management and emotional management skills especially when it comes to handling jealousy. It also has the perks of compersion, seeing the joy of a partner from entirely different perspectives, getting to laugh with metamores over those little quirks a shared partner has that no one else knows about, or getting to bitch about their more irritating quirks with someone who totally gets it because they’ve experienced the same thing with that lover.
No matter what rules are carefully negotiated and set by couples intellectually, the NRE hormones are powerful and it can be really hard to keep the rules when the person is with that new lover and the hormones rush in full force. Errors can happen, especially with those who have forgotten the power of NRE and have difficulty recognizing those emotions for what they are. Forgiveness when learning is important, as well as a willingness to sort out what went wrong. The greater the clash between rules negotiated intellectually and someone’s true moral compass, the harder it is to keep those rules. Each person really doing the work to understand what they want vs what they need is important for coming up with solid ground rules. Books like _opening up_ have some great exercises to help with sorting out things like what fears are realistic and need ground rules to address (like std precautions) and what are unrealistic fears that would be better resolved by understanding and overcoming the fear.
