Franklin Veaux’s polyamory blog

[Note: This essay originally started out as an answer on Quora.] Image: Brooke Campbell One of the enduring evergreen questions I hear time after time about polyamory is “how on earth do polyamorous people find the time and energy for multiple relationships?” And when I hear it, for a long time I’ve had to suppress a little voice inside saying “Wait, what?” Why would it necessarily require more time and energy than monogamy. I mean, monogamous people presumably have multiple relationships too—friends, family, gaming groups, co-workers—they simply aren’t romantic and/or sexual relationships. So surely people are already familiar with making the time to maintain multiple relationships? Why would you have time and attention to maintain many relationships that aren’t romantic, but be unable to understand how you do the same thing with romantic relationships? I mean, you already know how to manage multiple relationships, right? Just…do the same thing with your romantic relationships! And I’d get blank looks when I Read more

A while back, a question floated through my Quora feed, about what to do if one‘’’s friends all object to one’s dating partner. It wasn’t a question about polyamory per se, but it did cut to the heart of something I’ve been struggling with for a very long time. I’ve written countless times about “veto,” I’ve had partners veto my lovers and been on the receiving end of veto, I’ve seen direct and indirect vetoes, vetoes where veto was part of the relationship and vetoes where it wasn’t, vetoes from lovers and vetoes from friends… After due consideration, I have come to the conclusion there simply is no right answer. When someone in oyur life objects to someone else in your life, in any capacity for any reason, thee is nothing you can do that does not make you to someone, a villain. At this point in my life, I firmly, 100% believe that the moment you find yourself in Read more

I suck at cooking. I’ve always sucked at cooking. I never learned to cook growing up, then at 19 I started a relationship with a woman for whom cooking was her love language, her way of feeling needed, and her sense of identity all rolled into one, so I was forbidden—in a literal, not a metaphorical sense—from cooking. For the eighteen years we were together, the kitchen was her domain. She would frequently tell me, in a ha-ha-only-serious way, that I was not allowed foot in the kitchen except by special travel dispensation. I didn’t come here to talk about cooking, except that I totally came here to talk about cooking. Let’s back up. I’ve spent the last week in Florida helping to care for my mom, who is in the last stages of terminal cancer. My sister flew into town earlier this week. It’s a bit jarring, the four of us being back in the house we lived in Read more

So, some of you likely know I’ve been stalked over the past few years by an online stalker who has, among other things, created fake social media profiles in my name and used them to send rape and death threats to folks who follow me on social media. (Please, no speculation about who the stalker is.) A week ago yesterday, the stalking escalated. I’ve been documenting the stalking, both publicly and privately, so I want to record the latest escalation here where everyone can see it. I had an unexpected conversation with Portland PD a week ago last Tuesday, as I prepared to fly down to Ft. Myers to help care for my mom, who is in end-stage terminal cancer. It seems my stalker created a fake email account in my name, which he or she used to send an email to Portland police saying I was hearing voices commanding me to kill my wife. (They contacted her as well.) Read more

Or, How to stop worrying and embrace your quirky self. Image: Africa Studios I get a lot of emails. And Facebook messages. And Quora PMs. Most of them from strangers, a great many of them asking me what they should do in their romantic lives. And I kinda get it, I do. Relationships are hard. Relationship that don’t fit the socially sanctioned template—kinky relationships, polyamorous relationships, that sort of thing—are especially hard. We don’t have a lot of institutional knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. It’s tough to figure this stuff out on your own, especially if you don’t have a community of like-minded folks nearby (and sometimes even then; there are more than a few little subcommunities around alternative relationships that’re deeply, deeply dysfunctional). But here’s the thing: There is not, and never has been, anyone exactly like you in all the world. There is not, and never has been, anyone like your beloved (or beloveds!) in all Read more

Today is November 30, the International Day of Consent. I’m on my way to Florida to help care for my mom, who is in the last stages of terminal cancer. As I type these words, I’m sitting in an airport terminal, trying to wrap my head around the fact this might be the last time I ever see her. I can’t say I’m dealing with this very well. Given that today is the International Day of Consent, I’d like to say a few words about consent. And given that I’m not in the best of moods, the words I have to say aren’t fluffy-bunny “consent is wonderful, you should get consent, see what a virtuous person I am telling people to get consent.” Instead, I’m going to say something meaningful about consent, namely that way too many people who talk the talk about consent are spouting empty words, and I suspect a lot of folks aren’t going to like to Read more

[Note: this entry is part of a series of essays I’m currently writing about solo poly. They will likely end up as part of a new wing on this site soon.] Over the past few years, I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that for most of my life, I was wrong about the kind of relationship I wanted. I always believed that I preferred a live-in, commune style of polyamory, but having grabbed that brass ring a few times through my life, I’ve come to realize that I’m really, at my core, solo poly. I didn’t have the language “solo poly” until relatively recently. It didn’t really exist as a concept until polyamory had already become a fairly well-established subculture, and for a long time after I started hearing the term I didn’t really understand what it was. Solo polyamory doesn’t mean you aren’t committed or closely bonded to your lovers. Nor does it mean your relationships aren’t Read more

Last month, I spent some time in Springfield with a long-distance lover. I was returning from a trip to Florida to help care for my mom, who was diagnosed with cancer last November, and had an opportunity to spend some time with my lover on the way back. While I was there, I ended up hospitalized for three days, which is not, Gentle Reader, generally the best use of one’s time when one is seeing someone one does not often get a chance to see. What at first seemed like bad heartburn escalated over three hours or so until I was spewing blood from both ends. Three days in the hospital and an endoscopy later, it turned out I had a tear in my esophagus and a hole in the lining of my stomach, both of which were fixed. I went on my way, though now I am apparently forever barred from taking ibuprofen. While I was in the hospital, Read more

[Note: This entry originally started out as an answer on Quora] I, um…hmm. I opened a window to answer this question and realized, it’s deceptively complicated. How do you describe how not to feel a thing? There are ways to describe what a feeling is like, and how you can process a feeling, and tools you can use to manage feelings, and where feelings come from, but…how do you describe the technique for not feeling an emotion? I don’t feel jealous when someone I fancy is with someone else. I have felt jealousy in the past, so I’m not saying I’m, like, magically immune to this basic emotion or anything like that, but I haven’t experienced jealousy in a donkey’s age. Why not? Okay, let me try to take that apart and unpack it a bit. I mean, the shallow, superficial answer is “you’re polyamorous, Franklin, of course you don’t feel jealous.” And on the one hand that’s kind of absurd, because poly folks Read more

[Note: This entry originally started out as an answer on Quora] The answer may depend on what you mean by “a poly relationship with 6 people.” Dooes this mean “one person is dating six partners,” or “there are six people total in the polycule”? In other words, are you talking about this (a poly relationship where one person is dating six other people): or this (a polycule with a total of six people in it, but no one person has six partners): Those are two very different things. A polycule of size 6 is not at all uncommon. In fact, it’s a bit on the small side; I’ve been part of polycules with more than 40 people. Large polycules tend to follow the same model we see on social media networks and business contact lists and pretty much anywhere else human beings form interconnected networks: a large number of people with a small number of connections (one or two partners), joined together by “metapeers”—small Read more