Franklin Veaux’s polyamory blog

A Relationship Cheat Sheet

Some years ago, I answered a question on social media about the things I would include in a Relationship Cheat Sheet, a quick guide to the habits and skills that lead to good relationships. This is distinct from the Relationship Principles poster I made some years back; it’s more a “here’s a list of skills and attitudes and such that’ll help you end up in better relationships.” I kinda wish I’d known about these when I first started this messy, complicated business of human relationships all those years ago. Anyway, I’ve dusted off and revised that antique social media essay, so I would like to present: The Revised and Updated Relationship Cheat Sheet: Things to Keep in Mind for Healthier Relationships image: Everton Vila #1: Partner selection. A lot of relationship problems can be avoided by careful partner selection. Many people feel feelings in their feel-parts, then plunge headlong into a relationship, naively believing that Love Conquers All. Then they Read more

By Franklin, ago

How to Express A Fetish (Without Being Weird)

Say you have a fetish, something that really does it for you. For example, say you quite like sniffing panties or something. Whatever. And say you have a new lover. What are the odds you can tell your new lover about this thing of yours, whatever it might be, without causing them to run screaming for the hills? Image: Huha on Unsplash Okay, so here’s the thing: Sex is largely a matter of basic social skills. Springing a fetish on a new lover out of the blue is, generally speaking, not good social skills. Not using good social skills in sexual situations is, generally speaking, a recipe for disappointment. Now, yes, there are exceptions, but as a general rule, keeping your fetish under wraps until you blurt it out to a new person in your bed doesn’t generally lead to outstanding outcomes. The problem is, some folks will, upon doing this and chasing the person who was in their bed Read more

By Franklin, ago

Love and Communication Considered Harmful

Image: yupiramos “Polyamory is abundant love! The first rule of polyamory is communicate, communicate, communicate!” Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard one of those things. Raise both hands if you’ve heard them both. Today I’m going to throw cold water on your hopes and dreams, commit an act of heresy, and possibly make you angry: Both of these mantras are nonsense. In fact, no, I’m going to go further than that: Both of these ideas are dangerous nonsense, if misapplied, because both of these ideas can trap you. There’s a subtle danger in these thoughts, as there usually is in any Profound Truth™ that’s small enough to fit on a bumper sticker. Polyamorous folks (well, not just polyamorous folks, but polyamorous folks are particularly bad about it) like to believe that love conquers all, and communication solves any problem. Hell, I used to believe the bit about communication myself. You’ll probably find words to that effect buried somewhere in Read more

By Franklin, ago

More Than Two under hack attack

Two nights ago, one of my other sites at franklinveaux.com came under a persistent, aggressive SQL injection hack attack. I firewalled off the addresses where the hack came from, went to bed, then woke the next morning to an inbox full of automated notifications thiat this site was under attack from the same IP addresses. These notifications went on for about six more screens, so if you’ve noticed that the More than Two site has been acting weird or been slow to load, you’re not imagining it. These attacks do seem deliberately targeted. Any site on the Web, no matter how obscure or unknown, is likely to get a certain amount of automated probing and hack attempts; that’s simply part of the background noise of the Internet. But this isn’t that. I host sites for friends as well as my own, sites which have no obvious connection to me at all, and monitor those sites for intrusion and hack attempts Read more

By Franklin, ago

Thirty years later: Kayfabe, history, and low-trust societies

Image: Chris Liepelt As 2025 draws to a close, the twenty-eighth anniversary of my first online writings on polyamory draw near. 28 years years. Nearly thirty years of recording my musings, thoughts, and natterings about this way of living that flies in the face of traditional ideas about relationships. What does that have to do with professional wrestling? Hang on a minute, I’ll get to that. Looking back, it seems a bit unreal. I would never have guessed, back in 1997 when my first writings on polyamory went live, that it would still be on the net nearly three decades later, nor that these pages would form the seed of the oldest continuously-updated website about polyamory on the internet. I didn’t, back then, expect that anyone would really notice or care. I wasn’t writing for an audience; I was writing for the version of me back in 1988, the version of me trying to figure out this non-monogamy thing with Read more

By Franklin, ago

Today in Horrifying Relationship Ideas…

This morning, as I started my day with a cup of tea and a scroll through Facebook to see what condition the world’s condition was in, I encountered this fresh new cuppa what-the-fuck in a Wall Street Journal ad: The first thing I thought when I saw this was “holy fuck.” The second thing I thought when I saw this was “are the monogamists okay?” That’s not really fair, of course. Plenty of polyamorous people are in toxic, abusive relationships. And make no mistake about it, demanding to know your partner’s whereabouts at all time is 100% abuse. I’ve been thinking about this all day, and it’s got me to wondering something: Are the rise of populist autocratic demagoguery and the social tropism toward toxic relationship standards related? I think they are. When we think of totalitarian dictatorships, we tend to imagine Soviet Brutalist architectures: row after row of slablike concrete State apartment buildings, as festive and joyous as wasp’s Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on “Is Veto Abuse?”

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Veto as a Form of Abuse page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Social isolation is a tool of abuse. If you read any books or articles or research papers on intimate partner abuse, this idea pops up over and over again. In fact, some people consider social isolation—control over who you’re allowed to see, to spend time with, to be friends with, to communicate with, to associate with—one of the defining elements of abuse. What does this mean for the practice of veto in polyamorous relationships? I will admit I’ve struggled for decades with the idea of veto. Veto, which is becoming less and less common but is still a relationship dynamic that’s prevalent in polyamory, is the idea that if Alice is dating Bob, and Bob starts dating Cindy, and Alice doesn’t like Cindy, Alice Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on Poly Breakups

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Poly Breakups page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Image: serezniy Every now and then, when I talk to people who aren’t polyamorous by nature, someone will say something that leaves my jaw on the floor. No, no, I don’t mean something like “you can only be in love with one person at a time” (which, to be fair, is true…for the people who say that; the only odd part is the number of folks who imagine that if they can’t be in love with more than one person at once, that means nobody can. Hey, I can’t swim, but I don’t go around saying nobody can swim!), I mean something really head-spinning. Like “if you’re polyamorous, that must mean breakups are no big deal, not like they are for us monogamous folks, because you still have Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on the Glossary of Polyamorous Terms

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Glossary page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Image: Devon I first started working on the polyamory glossary page of what was then the Xeromag site and eventually became the More Than Two site back in…oh, somewhere around 1997 or thereabouts. I believe it’s now the oldest and largest continuously-updated polyamory glossary in the world. Any new subculture tends to evolve its own specialized language, and the polyamory scene is no different. In fact, the poly scene tends to prize communication (or at least, polyamorous people often talk about prizing communication, though they don’t always walk the talk—there’s a difference, as Morpheus says in The Matrix, between knowing the path and walking the path, and the world is filled with people who don’t live up to their ideals), so it’s not surprising there‘s a lot of specialized Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on Communication in Relationships

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Communication page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Image: ots-photo Another day in the wasteland that is the politically polarized hellscape of US politics. You know what this country needs? More genuine communication.1 The Communication page has long been one of the longest pages on the More Than Two site, and now…it’s even longer! Because more words means more communication, right? The new Communication page is crammed full of tips, tricks, and techniques for open communication, some of them in brand-new handy-dandy lists, because everyone says people love lists, and who am I to disagree? I traveled the world and the seven seas overhauling this page, but in this essay I’d like to zoom in on something that doesn’t get enough attention in How To Communicate essays: when communication isn’t (necessarily) communication. Which is why there’s a cute Read more

By Franklin, ago