As always, categories free us—until they don’t. Until they begin to feel either too small or too vast to hold us. Until something in us starts choking against their edges.
This essay is not about the origins of polyamory or monogamy. Other people will do a better job at tracing those genealogies, and to be honest, I’m not particularly interested in that work right now. What I care about is something far more immediate, far more embodied: what these relationship structures feel like inside a body, inside a life, inside a world that is already collapsing under the weight of itself.
What I know for sure is that something shifted for me when I started hearing white, cis, straight men list “polyamorous” as one of the first three adjectives to describe themselves. And in that moment, I knew that whatever polyamory had once meant to me, it was no longer that.
I spent most of my 20s practicing polyamory in Berlin. And I failed, repeatedly. Not because I did it poorly, but because polyamory—at least the way it is often practiced—redefines failure. It teaches you that rupture is feedback, that jealousy is material, that misalignment is information. In that sense, I didn’t fail at all. I learned. But god damn my heart is gone !
Not true, but damn I have been hurting. I have been hiding. And so it is from this place that I write to you.
There is a truth I wish someone had spoken more plainly: polyamory requires an immense amount of time, attention, and nervous system capacity. Under a crumbling empire, where survival already takes so much from us, sustaining multiple intimate relationships is not simply a matter of values—it is a matter of resources. And those resources are not distributed equally.
Only the very privileged can consistently hold 2, 3, 4, or 5 (!!!!) romantic relationships without collapsing themselves or others in the process.
And yes, I know the counterargument. Polyamory is not just about romantic multiplicity; it is about dissolving the hierarchy between lovers and friends, about expanding our capacity for care beyond the narrow scripts of coupledom. So I’ll tell you now: I am queer, I am Black and I am trans. It goes without saying that my friendships have always carried as much, if not more, weight than my romantic relationships. I do not need polyamory to tell me that love exceeds the romantic. When you live at the margins of every body’s care and romantic interest (desirability politics!), you don’t have to formulate theories to center friends in your life: they’ve saved it too many times.
So the question becomes (for me):
