how were you introduced to non-monogamy?

Well I met [the person I’m dating] through a dating app and before we first met up he told me about it. I knew open relationships were a thing because my parents used to have one before I was born, but I never really met someone who was in a relationship like that or wanted a relationship like that.

I have no idea! I just remember that after I broke up with my boyfriend that I was living with, I probably must have heard about it on the internet, and yeah… from then on I was just kind of like I don’t think monogamy is for me. Like my boyfriend and I fought a lot, the one that I lived with, and I wasn’t feeling it anymore [laughs]. But actually, I heard about it before I met him, so yeah, I’ve been settling to be monogamous with people for a while. Just knowing about polyamory and thinking like this is probably good for me, but not having the courage to implement it and put my foot down about the whole thing.

Non-monogamy is a concept I have been aware of for a number of years, I would say as far back as late childhood, but as a practice I’ve only really had a more detailed insight into it for around 18 months. I think I learned what bigamy was when I was around 8 years old and spotted a newspaper article with the word in the title and I asked my mother for a definition. Obviously there are huge differences between bigamy and the choice between members of a relationship to be non-monogamous, but I feel that this was probably the first instance in which I became aware of the active choice to expand a relationship beyond the ‘standard’ and nuclear 2-member structure.

I've been seeing non-monogamous relationships on the internet for quite some time now, probably about six years. My official introduction to non-monogamy was through my wonderful boyfriend! We met on Tinder and started as friends with benefits, and somewhere along the way it morphed into love and now we're in a wonderful poly relationship!

I found the online community and it made a lot of sense to me.

I was introduced to polyamory by my high school guidance counsellor. I saw him outside of school as a counsellor for mental health issues I was having, and often times met him at school. I frequently lamented to him how difficult it was to be involved in a relationship, with potential romantic connections slipped through my fingers, and despite my unwillingness to cheat, damage both my current and potential relationship in the process. He simply asked me why I couldn't consensually pursue both relationships. It was like something clicked for the first time in my life and everything finally made sense.

A good friend of mine introduced me to it. She was having non-monogamous relationships. I started to research it and found it very attractive.

I was introduced to non-monogamy around four years ago. I saw a documentary about it and did some more research into it myself, reading blogs and watching interviews. It was what I had been feeling for a long time but I never knew there was a name or people actually living life in a non-monogamist way. There was always a guilt that came for caring, lusting and even loving someone else while I was in a relationship. It's like a societal pressure to make one person you're everything, I don’t believe I can be enough for someone, forever. This really resonated with me. As there have been people I have loved in my life that I have let go of after feeling I couldn’t be everything they needed or feeling someone can’t be everything I need for myself at a particular time in my life. I think as I have moved and grown over the past seven years of my adult life, I have needed people to share experiences and grow with as a person. I find that exploring different people both physically and mental has given me and my partner room to grow and flourish. I think love is love, there is no detraction the more you give and receive.

I have seen stuff about polyamory online and on television, but the biggest thing for me was actually falling in love with multiple people at once and experiencing how it feels!

I’ve always kind of known about this sort of stuff just because I spent a lot of time on the internet when I was really young, and read a lot of novels. My house was full of books so I’d read random ones and they weren’t all age appropriate. Relationships are a weird thing to have rules about though, when you have separated parents who didn’t speak to each other cordially until I was like eighteen. The idea of a ‘traditional’ relationship has always felt alien, so it just didn’t feel like a leap to want something else, you know? The idea of one person forever seems impossible in my head, yet I’m a huge romantic. I thought about pursuing non-monogamy before the friends with benefits situation, but I had no game. I think I often convince myself that if I get what I want then I must be doing something wrong. I think due to my anxiety and just the state of mind I’ve been in for the past few years, I’m better suited to supportive friendship than casual hook-ups. I just feel like when there’s someone there I want to give them my whole self, and I can’t do that in just one evening and then walk away and feel fine anymore.

I’ve generally had a hard time with monogamy in all my past relationships. I thought something was ‘wrong’ with me for being into other people while in a relationship (because that’s what my past partners and every conversation about relationships told me). I grew into the concept a little bit as I started exploring my sexuality on its own terms, rather than the terms set for me by other people. Learning more about paganism/studying the occult later on further affirmed for me that polyamory is a concept a lot of people really connect with, that I wasn’t just broken.

I wasn't. It has always been my norm.

I'm not too sure. I've always been open and love learning things about other ways of life. I've got multiple non-monogamous friends, too.

I think it was in a video game, I didn’t know about stuff like that. In the video game, do you know Skyrim? The Orcs there are polygamists [laughs]. I think I watched Sister Wives on TLC, and that was about it. Then I read more about it, watched YouTube videos about it. When I broke up with my ex last year, I communicated with her about poly, but she wasn’t interested in it and it eventually broke us apart, but I didn’t really know much about it at the time either. I met this other polyamorous girl who showed me blogs and poly podcasts and stuff, and that’s where I really learnt about it.

I can’t actually remember. My dad died when I was three, and my mum came out as a lesbian. I guess I saw a different form of relationship outside of the heteronormative. I think when you’re queer there are no rules, because the rules are to be straight, so it allows you to shape your own relationships. I guess I spent a lot of time on Tumblr and probably heard about it through that. When I was younger I explained being poly to people like: you could have one brother and one sister and love them lots, and just because I have seven sisters doesn’t mean I love them any less - because you can’t run out of love, you can just run out of time and energy.

As far as being introduced into non-monogamy, it must have been when I was quite young, maybe around 16. I was in a long distance relationship and we were finding it hard to cope without physical intimacy, so decided to approach others to fix that.

I genuinely don't remember an exact moment. It was more of a gradual realization that even though it's treated as taboo in day to day discussions there's people that practice and strive in non-monogamy as much as monogamous people, if not more since it's not a construct that is often imposed upon people.

After jumping from one relationship to another for most of the time since I was 16. Without any time of being single more than few months, I was done. Last year I broke up with monogamy and romantic love, and I decided it was time to love myself and discover myself with other people. It all happened by not having the need of to get into a relationship with anybody. But still having someone special in another country. A long distance relationship wasn't the plan for any of us, and so we built this strong friendship to keep on being in each other's life and make it all easy.