Communication in Polyamorous Relationships Is Never a One-Time Event

You may have had one big conversation about opening your relationship and assumed that was enough. Or you haven't been able to have the first one yet because you don't know how to start without derailing it before it goes anywhere. Either way, communication in polyamorous relationships is where things most often break down, and it's rarely because people aren't willing to talk.

What feels okay to agree to in theory doesn't always hold once you're living it. Agreements that made sense six months ago stop fitting, and jealousy, when it shows up, needs its own conversation rather than being pushed through or explained away. If you're not in the habit of returning to these conversations, resentment starts building in the gap between what you said you were okay with and what you're actually experiencing.

In this episode of The RISE to Intimacy Podcast, I walk through what communication in a polyamorous relationship actually has to look like. I cover the specific conversations about structure, expectations, and jealousy that need to happen more than once, the fear that stops people before they even begin, and what I've seen in my practice when these conversations happen well and when they don't.

0:55 – Why this episode applies to monogamous couples too

2:57 – What effective communication in a polyamorous relationship actually requires

4:08 – What happens when couples assume they're on the same page and stop checking in

4:58 – Jealousy, compersion, and what to do when your nervous system signals a threat

6:08 – The fear that stops people before the first conversation begins

8:20 – What to get clear on before you try to have the conversation

8:53 – Two clinical examples of what it costs when these conversations don't happen

11:04 – What Valerie learned from her own time practicing polyamory

12:29 – Questions to work through with your partner when considering polyamory

16:20 – Why emotional regulation is the prerequisite for every hard conversation

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Transcript

Valerie McDonnell: Welcome to The Rise To Intimacy podcast. I'm your host, Valerie McDonnell. And for over a decade, I've worked as a sex and couples therapist, because intimacy used to feel really overwhelming for me. I felt a lot of pressure to perform, I was disconnected from my body and I often felt like desire was out of reach for me. But through my own trauma work, I stopped checking out of my body and started feeling connected to it again. I learned what it's like to experience intimacy without fear, without shutting down and without numbing out. Now I'm on a mission to help you do the same thing. 

This podcast exists because trauma doesn't get the last word. You can learn how to calm your body, change the story you've been carrying and rebuild real connection, first with yourself and then with the people you love. Let's begin. 

If you haven't listened to last week's episode yet, I'd encourage you to go back and start there. Because in that episode, I laid the foundation for understanding non-monogamy, more specifically polyamory, what it is, what it isn't and the two things I believe make or break these kinds of relationships. I also briefly discussed how critical it is to have a way to effectively communicate boundaries and expectations in these relationships. So this is not just making time to talk or not just being open and willing to have hard conversations, but I mean the kind of communication that is ongoing, that evolves and that is revisited, because the relationship is always evolving. And that's what I'm going to discuss in today's episode. 

So this episode isn't only for people who are in polyamorous relationships, or who are considering some form of non-monogamy, because the truth is that every relationship has to define itself at some point. Every couple, at some moment, made a decision about what kind of relationship they were going to have. Monogamous couples made that decision too. but they typically don't continue to revisit it the same way that people in non-monogamous relationships do, even though I believe that they should. So when you're in a monogamous relationship, there's a script that society hands to you. Most people know what the rules are, even if they've never explicitly sat down and talked about them. But in a polyamorous relationship, there is no pre-written script. You are essentially building the structure from scratch. And that means that communication isn't optional. It's the thing the entire relationship is built on, along with trust and consent. 

So if you're listening to this and you're in a monogamous relationship, stay tuned, because everything I'm about to say also applies to you. So let's talk about what effective communication looks like in a polyamorous relationship. This is more than just saying, hey, we need to talk about things. The first conversation and really this is a series of conversations, is about structure and expectations. For example, what does this relationship look like? Who can you date? What level of emotional connection is okay with other people? And what type of physical connection is? And are there people who are off limits? This might be co-workers or mutual friends. Very importantly, what does time allocation look like? And how do you handle things like holidays, shared finances and living situations, if other partners become more serious? And these questions don't just have neat universal answers. 

The answers have to come from the two or more people in the relationship. And they have to be agreed upon, not assumed. And they always have to be revisited, when life circumstances, or someone's wants or needs change. 

Here's what I see happen in my practice over and over again. Couples open up their relationship and they have one big conversation. They feel good about it. And then they assume they're on the same page going forward, but they may not be checking in and they may not feel the need to revisit the conversation on boundaries, expectations, and agreements. But here's the thing about agreements. What felt okay six months ago, might not feel okay today. Your nervous system might have been willing to say yes to something in theory that is not actually okay with in practice. And the gap between what you said you were okay with and what you're actually experiencing, is where resentment starts to build and also where trust may start to erode. 

The second layer of communication that has to happen is about emotions, specifically about jealousy and possibly anxiety. And sometimes there's an assumption that if you're really committed to this type of relationship, you should feel something called compersion, which is essentially the joy you feel when your partner is happy with someone else. And compersion is a very real emotion. I've seen it. But jealousy is also real and it doesn't make you a bad partner. Jealousy, like any other emotion, is a signal your body is sending you. It doesn't mean polyamory isn't right for you. It's a signal your nervous system is sending, saying, something feels threatening to me. So the question isn't how to eliminate jealousy. The question is, what do you do with it? And that starts with being able to name it out loud to your partner, without the conversation turning into an accusation, or a criticism, or an ultimatum. But that is genuinely hard. And it requires communication skills that most of us were never taught. 

Now, I want to talk about something that I don't hear discussed enough and that's what happens before the first conversation even begins. Because of my clinical experience, the person who wants to bring this to their partner is already carrying an enormous amount of fear, before they've said a single word. They may be sitting with it and sometimes for months, turning it over and wondering how to bring it up, wondering what it really means about them and what it will mean to their partner and their relationship. And one of the biggest fears that I hear almost consistently is this: if I bring this up, my partner is going to think I already have someone in mind that I want to have a relationship with. And sometimes that fear is so paralyzing that the conversation never happens at all. The partner with the desire to explore polyamory just quietly carries the desire and then it can turn into loneliness, or resentment, or distance that neither partner can fully explain. 

And sometimes the conversation does happen, but the person comes into it so defensive and possibly bracing for the worst that the conversation goes sideways, before it ever really starts. So they're not actually able to communicate effectively. Instead, they're managing their own anxiety so intensely that genuine connection and resolution in that conversation isn't possible. So if you are someone who has been wanting to have this conversation with your partner and you haven't been able to, what I want you to hear is that the fear you're feeling makes complete sense. It is not evidence that you shouldn't want what you want. It's your nervous system trying to protect you from potential rejection, from potential loss and from the possibility that this conversation changes everything about your current relationship. And it might. This conversation might change things, but carrying it alone is also changing things, but just more slowly and in ways that are harder to recognize and understand. If I can offer one thing before you have that first conversation, it's this. Get clear on what you actually want before you try to explain it to your partner. And what agreements and boundaries are important to you? And which ones are you unwilling to compromise on? Because if you go into that conversation already managing your partner's reaction, you're not having a conversation that will get you to your ultimate goal, which is to stay connected to your partner in the face of uncertainty and discomfort. 

So let me tell you what I see clinically when these conversations don't happen, or when they happen badly. I've worked with couples who opened their relationship and genuinely believed they were on the same page. One partner thought they had agreed to purely physical connections with other people, no emotional intimacy and the other partner understood it completely differently. They thought they had agreed to the freedom to develop real connections, including emotional ones. So neither of them was lying and neither of them was being intentionally careless. They just had never gotten specific enough to realize they were describing two completely different things. And by the time they got to my office, they weren't dealing with a communication problem anymore. They were dealing with a rupture of trust, because one partner had crossed a line that the other genuinely didn't know existed. And that's what it can cost to skip these conversations. 

But I've also seen couples who had all the right conversations in the beginning. They were thorough, thoughtful, and specific. And then life shifted. One partner fell harder for someone else than they expected to. This might have been a metamor, which is the term we use to describe your partner's other partners. And that turned out to be someone the other person was really uncomfortable with. And the agreements that had made sense before, suddenly didn't translate into the reality they were living in. And because they weren't in the habit of coming back to the conversation, or of treating it as ongoing rather than resolved, the whole structure started to crack. It's crucially important to treat communication in a polyamorous relationship as an ongoing event. It's not a single conversation you have once and then you're done. It is a practice. It's something you return to again and again, as you and your partner and your relationships evolve. Because when you stop returning to it and instead start assuming, instead of checking in, that's when things can quickly fall apart. 

So there was a brief time when I practiced polyamory and I did not navigate all of it perfectly. I had been in situations where I went into something, a relationship, a conversation, maybe a decision and I was carrying unresolved stuff. It might have been old wounds, old patterns of behavior and some unresolved trauma that I thought I had fully processed. And what I know from both, personal and clinical experience is this: you cannot have a clear conversation about what you want, when you haven't dealt with what you're afraid of. Those two things just get tangled together. And what comes out isn’t honesty, it is typically anxiety wearing the mask of honesty. So I didn't have to have it all figured out to learn something important. And one of the things I've learned is that the quality of any relationship conversation, whether it's about monogamy, polyamory, maybe about boundaries or desire, just any of it, is directly tied to how regulated you are going into it. Because when your nervous system is in survival mode, you're not actually communicating. You're defending. You're surviving the conversation, rather than talking in a way that will lead to resolution instead of resentment. And that's what we're going to discuss more in next week's episode.

But right now, I'm going to give you some examples of things that you can discuss, when having a conversation about polyamory, with your partner. But this is not an exhaustive list either. These are questions that I believe will help you navigate this process in a more effective way, which will hopefully help you remain connected to your partner and also help you learn valuable information about your partner and better understand your relationship's capacity to try out and practice polyamory. 

So why do you want to open the relationship? 

Or why does your partner? 

And what do you each find valuable about exploring this relationship dynamic? 

What fears do you have when thinking about exploring polyamory? 

Also, are we coming to this from a place of strength in our relationship? 

Or are we hoping that opening up the relationship will fix something that's already broken? 

How will we handle situations that are not easy to predict ahead of time, but may cause discomfort? How do we uphold consent? 

And how do we remain respectful and transparent with each other, if one of us experiences anxiety or fear around a new partnership? 

How do we discuss feelings we may develop for other partners? 

And what is our comfort level when communicating them to our existing partner? 

What are our boundaries around safe sex practices? 

Also, are there certain people who are off limits, like I discussed before, that we might want to form partnerships with? Again, this might be co-workers, mutual friends, exes, even family members. 

What feels most comfortable for us in terms of time spent together and time spent with other partners? 

How much do we want to know about each other's other relationships? 

Do we want to meet other partners? 

Or would we rather keep things more separate? 

What would it mean if after trying this, one or both of us decides it isn't working? 

And how often will we check in with each other about how this is going?

And what will that look like? 

What happens if one of us breaks an agreement? 

How will we handle that together? 

And if we were to form a relationship with someone new, can we make agreements all together? 

Or must one person simply accept the agreements already in place? 

What does cheating mean inside a polyamorous relationship, for us specifically? 

And also, what does your partner need from you when they're feeling insecure or triggered? 

Do we want to be open about this publicly? 

Or are there people like family or friends that we want to keep this from? 

Also, are we both okay with that level of privacy? 

And do we want hierarchy in our polyamorous relationships, meaning our relationship comes first? 

Or are we open to non-hierarchy, where no relationship takes automatic priority? 

Are there specific sexual activities that are okay with others and things we want to keep just between us? 

And how often will we both get tested for STIs? 

And what happens if there's an exposure? 

What does success look like for us? 

And how will we know it's working? 

And then finally, what would make us decide to close the relationship again? 

And is that a conversation we're both allowed to bring up without it being seen as a failure? 

And you should really discuss that these agreements may need to be amended in the future, if and when someone's needs or wants change. 

Today I talked about what type of communication is important to prioritize in a polyamorous relationship. These specific conversations that have to happen, the ones that have to keep happening and the fear that gets in the way before any of it can start. But even with this knowledge and even if you have a framework, or a tool, or a guide to rely on, if you can't stay regulated, meaning if your nervous system is consistently in fight, flight, or freeze mode, none of it lands. You won't be hearing your partner and your partner isn't hearing you. The words are happening, but the connection isn't. 

So that's where I'm going to pick up next week, because I believe that emotional regulation isn't just a therapeutic concept. It is the prerequisite for every hard conversation you will ever try to have, in your relationships. And I think it might just be the most underrated relationship skill that nobody talks about enough. 

So please join me next week, on Tuesday, for the third episode in this series on non-monogamy and polyamorous relationships. 

And in the meantime, if you're sitting with a conversation you haven't been able to have, or you're in the middle of navigating something that feels bigger than you expected, you don't have to do it alone. You can find me at risetointimacy.com, where you can learn more about working with me. And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. 

I'd also be so grateful if you left a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform, because it genuinely helps other people find the podcast and hopefully learn something valuable from it. 

Thanks for listening to The Rise To Intimacy podcast. If today's episode resonated with you know that healing is possible and you don't have to do it alone. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a rating and review for us at ratethispodcast.com/rise. It really helps others find us and I'm so grateful for all your support. You can learn more about my coaching packages for individuals and couples at risetointimacy.com. 

And remember, sex therapy isn't for people who are broken. It's for people brave enough to look beneath the surface.