17 Polyamorous Relationship Misconceptions

1.

“Many people think it’s all orgies and threesomes. It’s actually mostly scheduling and debriefing.”

—u/They_them-ing

“As far as planning, it kind of depends on the type of relationship. Loosely, you can break polyamory down into ‘hierarchical’ and ‘nonhierarchical.’ ‘Hierarchical’ polyamory is where certain relationships are the main ones and others aren’t. Like, if a married couple decided to start dating outside the marriage, this almost always ends up being ‘hierarchical.’ The marriage gets priority over everything else. In these cases, scheduling isn’t as much of a headache because when something comes up for the main relationship, there’s no question that it’s the one going on the schedule.

“Conversely, in ‘nonhierarchical’ polyamory (which can include marriages, for the record), no relationship is supposed to be ‘the main one.’ This means you need to balance the needs of everyone involved with the schedules, and that definitely can get messy. It doesn’t necessarily mean dividing the hours in the week up into equal portions, either, because different people need different amounts of time and different types of attention. So part of the complexity comes in everyone being honest about their needs.

“So skill at planning may or may not be essential, but communication is always essential. But then, that’s true of any successful relationship, no matter how many people are involved.”

—u/tenehemia