How Do I Know if I am Monogamous or Poly?
Cathy: How do I know if I’m monogamous or poly? This is Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com/Cathy: How do I know if I’m monogamous or poly? This is Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com/
Reid: This is Cathy Vartuli from http://www.IntimacyDojo.com/
Cathy: And someone wrote in and said, how do I know, and I thought that that was a great question.
Reid: How do you know? Hang on. Well I’m Poly. What are you? That looks poly too.
Cathy: So you find someone who’s poly and have them look at your shirt.
Reid: [Inaudible 00:00:30] I don’t know, what do you think the answer is?
Cathy: I think it’s kind of, when I first so I’m using the analogy of being gay, when I first kissed a woman like I thought I had to be, had to be a lesbian. I didn’t realize that there’s a whole of different shades in there so I think that there’s
Reid: Lesbian-like.
Cathy: Yes, exactly. We can have different needs in different times in our lives too, but for me I really enjoy having multiple people in my life I have a good friend who is very romantically Poly like he has a lot of people he loves deeply as friends or really dear to him and if his partners aren’t okay with that that’s a problem but he’s not he’s not actually dating like sexually dating people or looking to have more people move in with him so I think we have all different ways of expressing Poly and we get to decide what what’s right for us and what do we define ourselves as what’s monogamous.
Reid: Yeah, yeah. I mean I have I have friends you know that have friends and they loved them deeply but they wouldn’t identify as poly.
Cathy: Right.
Reid: And I have friends who are poly who love their friends deeply who identify as poly.
Cathy: Right.
Reid: I guess by like standard cultural definitions if you want to be able to fall in love and like live and and and have multiple people as lovers you’re probably not monogamous.
Cathy: Yeah.
Reid: You can be monogamish, a term that Dan Savage helped coin where, you know you’re a monogamous couple who occasionally has birthday threesome or you know vacation sex or you know whatever arrangement is and maybe you know I think you’re you still can identify as monogamous I don’t think that makes you automatically poly or swinger or anything like that.
Cathy: I think you get to define for yourself too. But I think part of the question it sounds like they’re trying to figure out if this person is trying to figure out if they should explore poly and for me it’s something, if you’re in a relationship you should definitely talk about with your partner and figure out what your relationship agreements are and if you need to change them if this is something that drives you and also just figure out what feels good to you and sometimes people try it, the good cool thing is you get to change your mink like wow I kind of like it but it was a lot of work or it doesn’t feel like it fulfills me I don’t want to do that you get to try that out, I don’t know that what you’re daydream about is a good way to identify necessarily because we’re so acculturated for that one person that’s prince charming and princess charming but if you do fantasize about multiple people.
Reid: That might be a clue.
Cathy: And again there are erotic versus
Reid: Sure, and if you fantasize about being a space adventurer who leaves a band of space pirates, to conquer you know evil places and make them good and well I mean I don’t know if you identify space part that means to be what you daydream about.
Cathy: Right, but if you daydream that you’re in a relationship with all the space pirates that you’re leading and that feels yummy to you.
Reid: Now we’re talking. Yeah.
Cathy: That might be a sign.
Reid: Yeah, maybe you’re polyamorous space part, what do you think. Wow that one.
Cathy: You know, I don’t know if this is helpful at all.
Reid: We’re probably we’re probably being unhelpful. What are you getting how how do you figure out how you identify. Leave a comment.
Cathy: Yeah.
Reid: Space pirates.