My partner and I just came up with the following draft of core values we find in poly relationships:

Are you poly?
How can you tell?

Why do some of us want POLY relationships, with “more than one conjugal partner” (beyondmarriage.org statement, August 2006)?

Why are some LBGTQ people torn by discomfort when people assume we are eager to get married?

What more could we possibly want?


Some of us want more than coupledom offers. Here are some CORE VALUES which polyamorous relationships are intended to embody:


1. Multiple facets to each person require multiple partners

Each of us has many varied aspects to who we are, what our personalities thrive on and how we can grow and mature; we differ in what turns us on erotically, musically, gastronomically, visually, etc. This wide range of aspects to each of us offers multiple sides for us to be close to living-partners: some who help discipline our impetuousness, some who whet our culinary appetites, some who cuddle amazingly and offer a deep trust we hunger for and some who are so playful our lives would be poor without regular intercourse with them.


2. Better feedback promotes self-actualiztion

By living with multiple partners, each of whom can support us or prod us, as appropriate in different ways, we are motivated to seek our own individual actualization rather than just fitting in with one partner with whom it is tempting to get into familiar ruts, familiar patterns of going out, staying in, stroking, arguing, ... With multiple eyes and ears to see any pair of us interacting, we get better feedback about how we behave which may improve our vision of ourselves. Giving and sharing feelings works more freely with multiple partners, partly because it MUST for shared multiple relations to work well and partly because one gets better feedback on oneself and one is less obdurate about what is “true” since one gets more sources of feedback.


3. More financial security

With more people pooling incomes and sharing expenses, temporary job-losses are more easily covered giving each of us more sense of security and less fear in leading our lives in job markets and in bureaucracies to which we are attached. Furthermore, rent per person falls as the size of the household rises.


4. Freedom to pursue new loves

Many humans seem open to constantly finding a new person erotically attractive. Indeed, this is an amazing gift of renewal, like a perpetual source of new muses for our creative spirits. For us who are open to this in our relationships, we have found that new lovers can actually enrich our relations with current lovers, whether by engaging in multipartner sex or by relieving us of the need to always be there for another partner or by making us more enjoyable to be around. This is another way poly promotes our individual self-actualization by freeing each of to take responsibility for recognizing and acting on our own erotic arousal.


5. Trust = Freedom from fears about our relationships

Many of us experience pangs of anxiety when someone we are very close to falls in love with or just interacts closely with someone else. By sticking with each other when this happens and even being each other’s cheerleaders, by getting pleasure from our partner’s deep pleasure and satisfaction, we are able to give up fears of abandonment and loss that seem to lie behind much jealousy. This commitment to each other is what it means to be faithful to our partners. We can also get past fears of exclusion, if our shared understanding of our poly relationship insists on inclusion of all in the household who desire to join in erotic play. We also share an understanding about how open with each other we are about all our erotic interactions. There might be some loss of a sense of specialness, of uniqueness, if we allow for more than one erotically intimate partner in our lives. For some people this can be a determining factor against poly. But for others of us, this is not a loss we perceive, since we gain from our partners’ keen erotic instincts and activities.

No movement thrives without the critical capacity to imagine what is possible.
beyondmarriage.org