Franklin Veaux’s polyamory blog

Spotlight on Can Women be Abusers?

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Can Women be Abusers? page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! “Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnectedfrom it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.”― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon I’m back from a conference in California, where I debuted a new book and participated in a writers’ panel, and now it’s time to look at the new content on the More Than Two site again! I hadn’t intended to spotlight this particular page now. I’d wanted to spotlight the updated Communication page, because I’ve been reading a lot about communication lately and run into some new ideas I want to talk about that I don’t see in a lot of conversations about polyamory and communication. Then I logged onto Threads, which is Facebook’s answer to Twitter1, and saw Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on women as people

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Women as People page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Image: Yay Images The new More Than Two site adds entire new wings to the information and resources for polyamorous people, but the existing sections got some love, too. I gave the Principles for Good Relationships section of the site a pretty thorough overhaul, including a new Treating Women as People page. I’ve said “treat women as people” a lot, but what does that really mean? Most folks know how to treat people as individuals, as long as it’s on any axis other than sex or race. If someone asked you “what do right-handed people want in a boyfriend?” or “what do people with blue eyes think of anal sex?”, you’d probably think he was a bit daft. We all (I hope) know that right-handed people aren’t Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on “fairness” in polyamory

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Polyamory and Fairness page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Image: karpik-hoi “It’s not fair!” We all have an inner five-year-old that stamps its feet when we don’t get our way, or we see someone getting something we think we should have. This can happen a lot in relationships, and polyamorous relationships offer a ton of opportunities for people to feel uthings are unfair…especially when one person finds it easier to attract new lovers than another. The idea of “fairness” is part of our wiring. Part of most social mammalian wiring, really. Dogs have a concept of fairness—if you train a dog to do a trick to get a reward, then show it another dog getting the same reward for nothing, the first dog may refuse to do that trick any more. Why should I work for Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on the Relationship Bill of Rights

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Relationship Bill of Rights page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Way way back in the early 2000s, I published a “Secondary’s Bill of Rights” on the More Than Two polyamory site. Overnight, it became the most-visited page on the sight by far, and also generated the most email of anything I’d ever put on the Web. Image: grechka33 It can be hard to remember this, in 2024, as we look back on the way things once were in the Before Times. An entire generation has passed since I put up the Secondary’s Bill of Rights. A lot of folks today won’t remember this, but it once was the case that “primary/secondary”—the idea that polyamory was something a (usually married) couple did, opening their relationships to new partners under the strict condition that the couple came Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on relationships without restriction

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Love Without Restrictions page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks! Since I flipped the switch on the new version of the More Than Two polyamory site, I’ve started doing a deeper dive into some of the new and updated sections. (I first started writing what would become the More Than Two site back in 1997, meaning it is now, I believe, the oldest continually-updated polyamory site on the Web.) A lot of folks have an idea of polyamory as a zero-commitment free-for-all, where people whod on’t understand love run about having sex with all who will have them. This notion grows from the idea that love, commitment, and exclusivity are all the same thing—that you prove commitment only by being exclusive, rather than, you know, by investing in the person you’re committed to, helping them succeed, Read more

By Franklin, ago

Spotlight on polyamory and abuse

There was a time—a time not too long ago, in fact—I believed that polyamorous relationships were less prone to abuse than monogamous relationships. I think I can be forgiven a certain degree of nativity here. When you read books or papers about abuse, or you talk to abuse survivors, or you take courses about domestic partner abuse, or you look at any of the clinical literature on abuse, one theme emerges over and over again: Abusers isolate their victims. Abusers control the social connections of those they abuse. This is such a common and central part of abuse that it’s almost a defining element of the abuse dynamic: if you want to find an abuser, look to the person who tries to control who their partners see, who they make friends with, who they spend time with. Control over a person’s social connections, friendships, and other relationships is so central to the abuse dynamic that it alone can often cut Read more

By Franklin, ago

Launching new content on More Than Two!

Woohoo! I’ve been working for months on a complete overhaul of the More Than Two site, and at last it’s finally live! This is the biggest content revamp since I first started writing about polyamory on the Internet back in 1997. (Good Lord, has it really been that long?) Every part of the site’s been looked over and revised. I’ve revisited pages that have languished untouched for years, bringing fresh eyes and new experiences to what I’ve written. And I’ve added whole new wings to the site, including a new (and still quite small) section on sex and polyamory and a new (and quite large) section on intimate partner abuse in polyamorous relationships. As part of the latter, I’ve put together an infographic on polyamory and abuse, drawing on personal experience and on months of reading and research about the way abuse manifests in polyamorous relationships. (A big thank you to those of you who’ve talked to me about your Read more

By Franklin, ago

Stalking, harassment, and the North American polyamory scene

Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff. Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my name to harass other people, and sent explicit, violent rape and death threats to me, my family, my friends, and those who follow me on social media. This person, or these people, have made repeated rape and death threats directed at me, my wife, my father, and people who have expressed support for me or been rumored to be connected somehow with me online. They’ve sent death threats containing photographs of my partners. They’ve doxxed my family and partners. The harassment has escalated over the past three years, as the rape and death threats have become more frequent, more violent, and more graphic. Read more

By Franklin, ago

Some thoughts on being self-entertaining

Last time I visited my Talespinner, she said something really interesting, something that has stuck with me. I’d never heard it framed that way before, but the minute she said it, it clicked: not only what I am, but what all my lovers in all my best relationships have been. Kitty, wearing the very top hat that you’ll see on the cover of the re-release of my novel Black Iron, due out June 2024. We are in a long-distance relationship. I occasionally fly out to see her, something that’s complicated by her unusual work schedule. She’s basically gone two days out of the week—she works full-time in two 20-hour shifts. On the occasions when I visit her, there are a couple days of each week where she’s just not there at all. On one of those visits, she told me, “I don’t worry when I go to work, because you’re self-entertaining.” There are a lot of other ways to frame Read more

By Franklin, ago

Calling out toxic normalized behavior

[Note: I originally wrote this essay as an answer on Quora.] We swim, every day, in an environment made up of a toxic stew of unhealthy relationship ideas, many gifted to us from an age when women were literal property, seen as unfit for anything besides baby factories for male heirs. Social attitudes toward relationships teach us us so many, many things that are not only counterproductive, but actively destructive. And many of these toxic ideas serve no function except to make us miserable. Image: Danilo Alvesd Much as I’d love to list them all, I doubt there’s space here for that. I mean, where to start? How much time you got? If I were to hit the highlights, they might include: Mate-guarding behavior. This takes a lot of forms, but it’s always, always rooted in paralyzing insecurity. The headwaters from which mate-guarding flow look like “I am worthless. I am garbage. As soon as my partner wakes up and figures Read more

By Franklin, ago