Every so often, the cry goes up: “Fewer love triangles and more threesomes!” But what if you’re a writer who wants to write some polyamorous relationships, but you’re not sure where to start?

This article is here to help.

Please note that this is not a guide about how to be in a polyamorous relationship. That ground has been covered by other people in more depth and detail than I will ever be able to manage. (I have some good articles for you to read at the end of this piece, should you be looking for that.) This is a quick guide about writing polyamorous characters, how poly relationships work, and special concerns writers need to watch out for. This is not a comprehensive post, but it should give you a place to start.

Ready to go?  The good stuff is under the cut.

There are as many flavors of polyamorous relationship as there are people involved.

This one’s a big one. A lot of people, when they think of poly relationships, think of a big committed family (the polyfidelity model) or a primary couple who have other, less committed partners (the primary-secondary model). There are a lot more poly relationship configurations, though:

  • Non-hierarchical relationships (no relationship is considered more “primary” than any of the others; all partners are given equal weight in major decisions)
  • Solo polyamory (someone who does not want a primary-style relationship)
  • Relationship networks (a group of people who all have various flavors of relationship between them)
  • “V” relationships, where one person is involved with two or more others, but those others are not involved with each other.
  • Mixed polyamorous/monogamous relationships (most commonly, one partner in a primary relationship is polyamorous, and the other is monogamous)
  • Nonsexual poly relationships in any configuration (one or more people in the relationship are asexual or not having sex for a variety of reasons)
  • And many, many more. Basically, if you can imagine it, someone’s out there doing it.

It’s not just about who sleeps with who.

When you’re writing people who are polyamorous, there’s a lot more you need to think about than whose bits are rubbing together. Consider:

  • If there are major decisions to be made, who gets input? For example, if one of the people in the relationship is considering moving/making a major purchase/changing careers/going off to adventure, who will they talk to about it?
  • Who gets contacted in an emergency?
  • If there are kids, who’s involved in raising them?
  • How open are your characters about their relationships?
  • What is the cultural context for this relationship? Is this a culture in which this is common, or less common?
  • How are you going to handle metamour relationships (relationships between people who are not romantically involved, but are involved with the same person)?

There are differences in closedness/openness, depending on the relationship.

Different relationships have different boundaries. Are your characters free to see whoever they want? Do your character’s partners want to be consulted before someone new shows up in their lives? Or are your characters in relationships with multiple people, but there is an explicit boundary that they will be faithful to those people?

Relationship openness also changes over time. Sometimes, a relationship becomes more open over time as the people in the relationship become more comfortable. Sometimes, the relationship will close temporarily or permanently, usually after a life change of some sort. (Kids, a breakup, a death in the family, school/work becomes extremely demanding, etc.)

Difficult emotions come up—and have to be dealt with.

Yep, jealousy is a thing. And while it’s a common emotion, it’s not the only difficult emotion that can come up. Feelings of possessiveness, abandonment, unfairness, anger—all of these are really common, and all of them will cause problems if they’re not dealt with. These emotions are fantastic drivers of conflict, if you’re wanting to focus on them.

A note about jealousy: it’s a common emotion, but it is not experienced equally and universally by all people. Some people are not wired for jealousy. Others experience it only in certain specific contexts. The thing to remember about jealousy is that it is not a primal human emotion. Jealousy is most often a manifestation of some other emotion or is evidence of a need that is not being met. Removing the triggers for jealousy can offer temporary relief, but it will often rear its head in other contexts unexpectedly if the root cause is not dealt with. See http://www.morethantwo.com/jealousy-insecurity.html for a good primer on jealousy and how people go about dealing with it.

One of the common factors among people who are happy in polyamorous relationships is that they have learned to own their emotions and their own baggage. This is a skill that takes time to grow, and characters can be anywhere along that journey to own their emotions.

The dynamics between each of the characters in a relationship have to be established as well as the relationship as a whole.

This one is where writing people in polyamorous relationships can get tricky. As a simple example, let’s say you have a polyfidelitous triad of Alice, Esther, and Mina. There are three separate relationships, four if you want to get technical:

  • Alice and Esther
  • Alice and Mina
  • Esther and Mina
  • Alice and Esther and Mina (this overarching relationship is made up of the preceding ones, and will naturally be established if you establish those)

Each of these has its own dynamics and its own problems. Perhaps Alice and Esther love cooking together, while Esther and Mina butt heads about money a lot, and Mina and Alice tend to communicate by arguing about politics.

If Alice is your protagonist, it can be really tempting to focus on her relationships with Esther and Mina. If you do this, don’t forget that there’s that third relationship there between Esther and Mina, and work to establish the relationship.

 

Even when members of a relationship group aren’t involved with each other, they have a relationship with each other, and sometimes they may need to discuss things.

Let’s say Alice is in a V with Esther and Mina. (She’s involved with both of them, they’re not involved with each other.) Esther and Mina aren’t close, but they do talk. Esther’s in grad school, and comps are coming up—so she drops Mina and Alice a note saying “hey, we should talk about scheduling, since my exams are going to conflict with my regular date night. Would you be willing to shuffle things around for a few weeks?” In this case, the point of the V (Alice) is not acting as a go-between for communication between Esther and Mina.

Basically, don’t forget about metamour relationships! Those are important too.

There are countless ways to mess up.

There’s an adage that as you add complexity to relationships, you add potential for joy—but you also add potential to screw up. Below is a partial list of things your characters might mess up:

  • Not communicating, or only communicating some information
  • Cheating (yes, it happens!) or other destructive behavior—if it happens in monogamous relationships, it happens in poly ones
  • Not addressing resentment, jealousy, or other difficult emotions in a timely fashion (leads to explosions)
  • Boundary issues: not setting them, stepping over them, assuming they’re in place (and not talking about them), using them as blunt instruments, etc. This is a really big source of conflict. It is also possible to discover a boundary that no one knew was there—and discussions of the new boundary are incredibly easy to mess up (and may result in hurt feelings no matter how well it’s handled).
  • In primary-secondary models, or any model where one relationship is more committed than the others, sometimes the members of the less-committed relationships are not treated respectfully. Seehttp://solopoly.net/2012/11/27/non-primary-partners-tell-how-to-treat-us-well/for details.
  • And many more. Assume, when you’re writing a poly relationship, that every single pitfall of a monogamous relationship is present, plus a few more.

The major thing to remember is that, as with other relationships, messing up isn’t necessarily a relationship-ender, or evidence that the people involved are Doing It Wrong or not poly. Sometimes stuff just needs to be worked through.

There are opportunities for plot-driving conflict both within and outside of the relationships—and the conflict doesn’t have to involve the relationships at all.

Just like with monogamous relationships, polyamorous relationships can be plot drivers—but they can also simply be a part of how the world of your work functions. I love reading fiction that has poly relationships in it where the relationships are simply presented as part of the full experience of being human.

Your characters don’t have to be in multiple relationships, or any relationships at all, to be polyamorous.

Having the capacity or preference for multiple relationships does not go away if the character is:

  • Single
  • Only in one relationship
  • In a monogamous relationship

The flip side is also true: someone being in or having been in a poly relationship does not mean they are going to be forever, or that they will not be happy with a different style of relationship in the future. Some people are wired to be polyamorous and will be unhappy if they’re in a monogamous relationship. Some people can be happy in either. Some people are wired for monogamy and will not be happy in a poly relationship. Some people try a polyamorous relationship and decide it doesn’t work for them.

Also, please try to avoid suggesting that by changing their relationship style your characters have somehow “seen the light”. Yes, they may be making a change that means their relationships will work better for them, but polyamorous characters don’t go into monogamous relationships because they’ve suddenly become a better person, or vice versa.

The language and relationship skills your characters are going to have are context and culture-dependent.

When I was writing a long piece of fiction that had at its core a set of relationships that eventually turned into a triad, I was writing in a world where none of the modern language of polyamory applied. My characters negotiated, set boundaries, worked through problems, and defended their relationship against people who didn’t approve—but they used their own language and context to do so.

Everything above is a guide to how you as a writer can think about what your characters are up to. Let your worldbuilding be your guide as to how it manifests.

I hope that this has been helpful for some of you! If you want to learn more, hit the links below.

Further Reading

Articles about specific issues

General polyamory resources

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