One of the biggest myths I see being promoted in the polyamory community is that people can control their feelings to the same extent that they can control their behavior. Couples who use “rules” will often include rules that aren’t just about behavior (i.e. “Ask me before you spend the night with someone else”) but also about feelings (i.e. “You can have sex with other people, but you can’t fall in love with them”; “We can’t love any other partners more than we love each other.”)

While you can, in theory, respond to unwanted feelings with behavior that neutralizes them (i.e. breaking up with a partner you’re developing feelings for), that will often be emotionally difficult and very painful, and also sets up a situation where people are very likely to break their promises in a very human and understandable way. 

But even leaving the issue of rules aside, poly people (myself included) often make decisions based on the fantasy that we can control our feelings.

How many of us have gotten involved with someone who has made it very clear that we will never be allowed to be as intimate with them as they are with their “primary,” that certain forms of intimacy–being publicly known as partners, spending holidays with each others’ families, sharing a home, raising children–are forever off the table, all because we assumed that we can just choose to never *want* those things?

It’s easy at the beginning. You have a first date with someone from OkC, or you hook up with a friend, and you’re thinking, Wow, this person is super cute, I’ll see them casually cuz they don’t want to/aren’t allowed to be serious with anyone else, it’ll be great. Maybe it will. Sometimes that’s how it’s been for me. Other times it’s led to massive heartbreak when I realized that I wanted her to be my girlfriend all official-like, or that I could see myself living with him someday, but that would never happen because that person had already decided before we’d ever even gone out or kissed or fucked that it wouldn’t.

That’s why, nowadays, if someone tells me that their preexisting relationship literally precludes certain forms of intimacy with others (except the ones I truly don’t care about, like children and marriage), I won’t even fuck with it. Even if right now, you’re just a random friend I think is cute. Because we don’t control our feelings and I have way too awesome a life to live without sitting around mired in heartbreak because we love each other but can’t hold that truth up in the light and really look at it.  

I like potential. I like being casual because that’s how the two of us have decided to do things, not because some third person I didn’t choose to be in relationship with has decided with you, for me.

The problem is, even rad consent-aware poly folks are rarely upfront with this. It’s usually only weeks or months into a dating situation that it comes up that, hey by the way, you’re always by default less important to me than this other person, sorry not sorry.

As far as I’m concerned, if I didn’t know from the beginning that that’s how your polyamory worked, then I didn’t enter into our relationship with informed consent.