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Like the other books in the series, this one unpacks dominant cultural ways of understanding relationships, and how those impact us, as well as the messages about relationships and ways of relating we learn growing up. It goes on to help readers locate their own ways of relating, exploring conscious, consensual relationship practices, and the kinds of support systems people might build around their relationships. Throughout the book, we also try to hold the non-binary bothness that relationships hold for pain and pleasure, trauma and healing, restriction and freedom.

Vitally, How to Understand Your Relationships is about all kinds of relationships. While it will hopefully be helpful for those focused on partnerships – of the monogamous or non-monogamous variety – it is equally applicable to friendships, family relationships and parenting, work relationships, and relationships with other humans, non-human beings, and beyond.

You can order the book via the publishers here, and it will soon also be available as an audio book. Watch this space for a video with Alex, discussing the book and what it means to us.

You might also like to check out Alex’s other book, Trans and Disabled, which also just came out, and which includes a chapter we wrote on plurality.

The post New book out now! How to Understand Your Relationships appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The zine suggests that we often locate any pain and difficulties that we experience in relationships as being something ‘wrong’ with that particular person, or with that particular way of doing relationships (e.g. monogamy or polyamory).

What if it wasn’t the what that was the problem, but the how? What if pain will keep showing up in our relationships (of all kinds and with any people) until/unless we attend to that pain, and address how we are relating?

This zine suggests that we all carry relationship trauma from the existential challenges of relating, from the toxic structures and messages about relationships in our wider culture, and from the development of our particular ways of relating in our family context. This trauma remains in our bodies and impacts how we relate now.

We then explore what diverse relationship styles might have to offer to a more trauma-sensitive way of doing relationships. We consider how learning how to love in a more conscious, consensual, mutual way could be seen as a lifelong journey through all types of relating.

You can download the zine here.

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It’s an amazing free online event covering a huge diversity of relationship-related topics, and including talks by some of the people I regularly mention here: Alex Iantaffi, Sophia Graham, and Justin Hancock, as well as Ruby B. Johnson, Kevin Patterson, and Liz Powell who I met at the Poly Dallas conference back in 2018.

In my interview I spoke about a number of topics that I’m hoping to cover in a new relationship diversity zine – coming soon!

• How we need to understand relationships – and relationship struggles – through the lens of cultural and developmental trauma.
• Relationship diversity, and why this model is more helpful than binaries when it comes to relationships.
• Why we need to focus more on how we relate, than who we relate with or what relationship style we subscribe to.
• How our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world are interconnected.

You can check out my talk on day 2 of the conference, May 17th.

Sign up to the event here. Download the free Relationship Superconference Guide here.

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In my interview I spoke about how we need to understand relationships – and relationship struggles – through the lens of cultural and developmental trauma. I covered relationship diversity, and why this model is more helpful than binaries when it comes to relationships. I spoke about why I think we need to focus more on how we relate, than who we relate with or what relationship style we subscribe to. I also explored how our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world are interconnected.

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The post Love isn’t binary appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

You can read the article here, and my full interview below.

Why are people calling this gay instead of sexually fluid or bisexual?

This story is being treated in a very similar way to ‘Brokeback Mountain’, which was almost unanimously hailed as a ‘gay cowboy story’ although it could more accurately be described as a ‘bisexual shepherd story’, given that both male characters had female partners and there was certainly some depiction of romantic and erotic attraction within those relationships too.

The reason for this is certainly that we’re culturally mired in the gay/straight binary. We see a similar thing when celebrities mention attraction to more than one gender, often mainstream media announces that they are ‘gay now’. Unfortunately the interconnected binary understanding of gender and sexuality is strongly embedded in Western culture. Until recently even the science of sexology insisted that humans could only be men or women, and could only be attracted to the ‘same’ or ‘opposite’ sex. 

Thankfully the work of sex historians, queer theorists, bisexuality researchers, and scientists have challenged this view, pointing out that this is a relatively recent way of understanding human experience, which is a poor fit for many people, and which isn’t supported by either biological or psychological research. Not only is sexual attraction not a same/opposite binary, but sexuality is fluid (our attractions, desires, and identities can change over time), and multidimensional (not just about gender of attraction). 

Is bisexuality still being erased or considered non-existent? Do we need more fiction like this that envisions desire as unmoored from gender and sexual identities?

Sadly bisexuality is still erased. Until recently most mainstream depictions of characters with attraction to more than one gender were almost always depicted as going from straight to gay or gay to straight. If they were depicted, bisexual characters were confused, going through a phase, or otherwise suspicious. Still bisexual characters are often represented as evil, greedy, or manipulative, think of Frank Underwood in House of Cards, for example (check out the media section of The Bisexuality Report for more examples).

It would be great to see more fiction that unmoors desire from gender and sexual identities. We know that around 40% of young people experience their attraction as somewhere between ‘exclusively heterosexual’ and ‘exclusively homosexual’. Many identify as bisexual (attracted to more than one gender), pansexual (gender not being the key feature of their sexual attraction), or queer (challenging the whole gay/straight binary). 

Going back to multiple dimensions of sexuality, many find that their extent of sexual attraction is equally – or more – important than gender of attraction (people on the asexual spectrum). Many define themselves more in terms of the kind of people they’re into (e.g. sapiosexual), the kind of desires they have (e.g. people in the kink or BDSM community), the positions they take (e.g. top, bottom, switch), or the kind of relationships they form (e.g. solo-poly, monogamish). People can be in different places in relation to their erotic attractions and their nurturing attractions (the people they want to form more romantic or close bonds with), and in relation to what they enjoy in solo sex or fantasy, and in sex with other people. Sari van Anders is one key researcher who is teasing apart these dimensions in scientific research (basic overview here).

Is there something political or profound about imagining non-normative desire/ love that is unhindered by the usual obstacles, and not sensationalized or othered?

In a world which is still mired in an outdated understanding of sexuality as fixed, defined by gender of attraction, and only acceptable within a monogamous context, I would say that this kind of fiction is indeed political. It’s worth remembering that the dominant cultural understanding of sexuality – where heterosexuality is normal, homosexuality is less than normal (still requiring of explanations and people ‘coming out’) and anything else is invisible – is grounded in a historical approach to science and psychiatry which saw its purpose as delineating ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ behaviour. This, itself, was related to the early 20th century scientific projects of delineating different races as inferior/superior (in order to justify colonialism), and the eugenics movement (trying to prevent supposedly inferior classes and races, as well as disabled people, from reproducing). 

Producing depictions of non-normative desire are a step in the direction of challenging all sense that there is a normative (white, middle class, male, heterosexual) way of being that everyone should be judged against, and questioning the related view that some bodies and lives are inherently more valuable than others. Follow this thread and it leads to some far more obviously political questions about the way we relate to other humans, other species, and the planet. 

Are portrayals of desire as sexually fluid/ bisexual becoming more common? Are there any examples in contemporary culture that you feel are getting it right?

The majority of depictions do still fit the monogamous gay/straight binary model sadly. However, we do now have some excellent stereotype-busting bi characters now in the form of Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn 99 and Callie Torres in Grey’s Anatomy. Bisexuality is also well represented in Issa Rae’s TV show Insecure, and will be centred in her follow-up Him or Her. Relatedly, we’ve seen some good depictions of non-binary gender in shows like Billions and Grey’s Anatomy.

Very few mainstream depictions ever truly acknowledge that a person can be attracted to – or love – more than one person without that being a problem. So much drama revolves around the love triangle.

Sense8 is an example of a nice recent exception. The movies Shortbus and Kinsey from a while back, and more recently Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, are pretty positive. The TV shows You, Me, Her and She’s Gotta Have It deal with this topic, but fall into some more stereotypical and problematic portrayals of open non-monogamy. Queer fans enjoy the depictions of gender, sexuality, and relationships in the cartoon series Steven Universe for being far less normative, and sci-fi and fantasy in general can be better places to turn for non-normative depictions. 

What are the possible benefits of seeing examples of openly non-monogamous desire in fiction and film?

The benefits are potentially huge. Monogamous relationships are currently under huge pressure to meet all of a person’s needs, with partners expected to provide sexual passion, best-friendship, caring support, co-habiting, co-parenting, and more, for life. Therapists like Esther Perel point out that it’s incredibly hard to get both ‘warm love’ and ‘hot love‘ within the same relationship, and this may explain why over fifty percent of people see themselves as having one or more sexual dysfunctions, and rates of infidelity are similarly high.

The pressure on monogamy keeps many people in unhappy and damaging relationships, while others go from break-up to break-up because nobody can match up to these high ideals, collecting more emotional bruises along the way.

We need depictions of people doing relationships in all kinds of other ways in order to know that these are available and to have some model for how to navigate them. Open non-monogamy is just one example. It would be great to also see positive depictions of soloness and singledom, people who prioritise friendship over love when it comes to close relationships or cohabiting, aromantic people, relationship anarchists, people whose relationship style is based around friends-with-benefits, fuckbuddy, or hook-up arrangements. People are living their lives in these ways but struggling to see themselves represented.

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Why this means the world to me

Hi. Thank-you so much for having me here today. When Ruby approached me last year saying she would like to subtitle the conference this time after my book Rewriting the Rules I was blown away.

Partly this was because that book has been such a labour of love for me. It was the first self-help style book I wrote and I spent a decade longing to write it but unable to believe in myself enough to do so. When I finally did manage to battle through my inner critic I had to distill years of painfully finding my own way with relationships onto the page. The second edition – which just came out – was no less difficult. It felt like I was co-authoring it with an older version of myself and that was not an easy collaboration by any means.

Also it is a huge deal – as a European writer – to be welcomed to a US conference. A bunch of us have been studying and writing about polyamory in Europe for some decades now, but it often feels like the – often more recent – work coming out of US academia and activism eclipses what we’ve done, and are still doing. Of course this is even more the case for Europeans who sometimes or always write in languages other than English.

This is particularly challenging for me now that I’m working towards making my living as a writer. It’s extraordinarily hard to make any money from that line of work, and it can feel tough knowing that I am – I think – saying something new and important, but that few folk on this side of the pond will know about it. This recognition – and potential to speak to an American audience – means the world to me.

So it was already a huge deal to be invited to speak at this conference. And then I checked out the event online. It quickly became clear that here, finally, was an intersectional non-monogamy conference. For years I’ve been frustrated by the lack of coverage of power dynamics and social structures, privilege and oppression, in polyamory communities, and now I was being invited to an event where these were foregrounded.

It also felt intensely vulnerable. The main reason by far that I wanted to write a second edition of Rewriting the Rules was because when I wrote the first edition back in 2010 I had barely engaged with intersectional feminism. This has been something I’ve done my absolute best to address since then to the point that the vast majority of the thinkers I now engage with come from this approach, but I realise I still have a hell of a lot to catch up on. As a white British author to be invited to speak at a conference alongside the likes of Kevin Patterson, Dalychia Saah, J Mase and Feminista Jones is a huge honour and one I really hope I can do justice to.

This is why I haven’t taken the easy road with this presentation. I could’ve given you my standard hot take on non-monogamy talk that I’ve been giving the last couple of years, but you deserve more than that. So I’m going to heed the words of one of my heroes – Mollena Williams-Haas – from the incredible talk she gave at the Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies conference in Vienna last year (available here if you haven’t seen it – please do check it out). She said that the gift we need to give to the world is to go into the places we are most vulnerable and to work – whatever our work is – from that place.

I’ve been holding those words close ever since then. It is why I’m finally dropping my academic and therapy work to focus on writing. It is why my writing now includes memoir and erotic fiction as well as self-help: so that I can be transparent about where these ideas come from and why they mean so much to me. I guess it’s about showing my workings instead of just the polished advice that comes out of all that painful experience.

Because if I hide that part of it away I can be just another shitty self-help author holding themselves as a point of comparison to the rest of the world as somebody who has it all together and is going to lecture you on how to get it right just like them. This is one of the things I hate most about self-help and I’m committed to doing something different. A major theme through all my work is that relationships are extremely fucking hard and we all struggle in our relationships with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world. I’ve heard it said that your mess is your message. Perhaps the message is stronger if you also share the mess.

So I’m going to give you a short introduction to the key ideas of Rewriting the Rules, and then spend the rest of the talk telling you about what I’ve learnt about relationships since the first edition: by going into the mess.

Rewriting the Rules

Most relationship self-help books make a lot of assumptions about what a ‘successful’ relationship looks like, and how you go about having one. They sell the reader the dream of happy-ever-after, and put the blame on them if they can’t achieve it. That’s why I called Rewriting the Rules an anti-self-help book. Instead of locating blame in the individual it starts with the shitty cultural messages we all receive about relationships, suggesting that they are primarily responsible for the difficulties we come across. Messages like the idea that you have to find The One perfect person who will complete you, that you must hide any relationship conflicts from the rest of the world and pretend like everything is awesome all of the time, that you should have hot sex with this person for the rest of time, and that that must be in a monogamous relationship.

For each theme in the book – love, sex, gender, conflict, etc. – I asked four questions:

• What are the rules that we learn about this aspect of relationships?
• Why might we question them?
• If they don’t work for us, what might we put in their place? and
• What if we went beyond rules to embrace the uncertainty of this thing?

So, for example, in the monogamy chapter I look at the rules that suggest monogamy is the one true way of doing relationships, and how we can question that by looking at the statistics on non-monogamy globally, and on secret non-monogamy in countries like the UK and US. I explore the pressures that the monogamy ideal puts on relationships, and the diversity of monogamish and non-monogamous relationship styles that now offer alternatives to this. However, I also explore the tendency we have – when stepping away from mainstream cultural rules – to put new rules in their place and hold onto them just as rigidly. I suspect we’re all very familiar with varieties of poly-normativity and polier-than-thou tendencies to put forward the one true way of polyamory – or the poly grail, as I call it. Unicorn hunting, treating ‘secondaries’ as lesser human beings, and becoming so poly-saturated that you have no time for friends or self-care are three examples that spring to mind (not that me or anyone else in this room would ever do anything like that I’m sure!)

In Rewriting the Rules I try to steer clear of suggesting that any way of doing relationships is inherently better, more normal, or morally superior. It’s more about appreciating that different things work for different people, and in different relationships. We need to start by unpacking all the cultural rules that impact us all – whether we’re inside them or outside of them.

What I’ve learn about relationships since Rewriting the Rules

So that’s where I got to in the first edition of Rewriting the Rules, and I am still proud of that book because that cultural piece is missing from so much self-help around relationships – even polyamorous relationships.

However it could be argued that I went too far the other way. Focusing on wider cultural messages is also a good way of avoiding looking too carefully at closer-to-home reasons for your own relationship struggles.

Also, while I wrote a lot about the need to look at wider culture to inform our close relationships, I didn’t make enough connections in the other direction. How can going into the mess and vulnerability of our relationships help us make a better contribution to wider society? In the last five years this seems to me the most urgent question as we all try to make sense of a world of Trump and Brexit, to deal with the vital questions raised by – for example – #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and the current moral panic around trans.

Here are four key ideas that I’ve woven into the new edition of Rewriting the Rules which I want to share. Obviously there’s only time to touch on them here – what they are and the implications they have for our relationships with our close people and the wider world. Hopefully they might be a jumping off point for more conversations and reflections though. There are free zines on my website covering most of these themes in a lot more detail if you find them useful.

1. Relationship patterns and intergenerational trauma

The first thing I wanted to include way more of in the second edition was relationship patterns: how they get formed, how they impact us and the people around us, and how we might be able to shift them. That involved taking a long, hard look at my own relationship patterns which have been something like this…

Did you see this show? It was one of my favs growing up. Every week this dog finds a new person and home, he helps them with whatever they’re struggling with, but once things are sorted he can’t stay and he has to head off down the road again. He’s basically a manic-pixie dream dog.

This was what I was doing in relationships of all kinds my whole life. I tried to figure out what people wanted me to be, and then I gave it to them. Initially that resulted in huge validation – I was good, and I was good for people. Once I was polyamorous I could be good for many people. What a good Littlest Hobo! But it’s unsustainable. And it hurt people and it hurt me, a lot. I’ve lost so many homes, people, companion animals. Too much loss. While I definitely don’t think the only relationships of value are the ones that last, I wouldn’t mind the chance at a relationship, home, family, or community that lasted longer than five years.

The cultural piece was part of this of course. The promise of being – and getting – The One definitely had a role to play in my struggles, as did the Hollywood promise that true love is the path to lasting happiness – whether in its monogamous or polyamorous form.

But – as with all of us I suspect – my history was also a big part of the picture. Perhaps the major piece of work I’ve been doing the last couple of years has been on this. Interestingly #MeToo was a huge part of it. My sisters and I started by sharing our experiences of sexual assault – growing up and in more recent years, including in polyamory communities. This opening up led us to sharing stories of our upbringing and identifying the impact of intergenerational trauma and how it had left all of us feeling that we were unacceptable unless we covered over our emotions and pretended to be something we were not. We now talk on Google hangouts between San Francisco, LA, and London every few weeks, committed to building a different way of relating, at least between the three of us.

2. Self and other consent

How can I challenge this pattern – which I suspect many others share – of trying to be what others want me to be? Self-consent is the key here. One of the main books that I drew on in the second edition of Rewriting the Rules was bell hooks’s All About Love.

My main takeaway from this was that love can’t happen – isn’t even love – unless we value ourselves and each other equally. That’s where you get to if you apply the same thought processes to social justice and to interpersonal relationships.

Learning self-consent is every bit as hard as learning how to – really – treat others consensually in a world of massive power imbalances and insidious social scripts, as Zach Budd highlighted at the Poly Dallas conference. It’s still a work in progress for me: a lifelong process I suspect. But it includes noticing when I let desire for approval, fear of failure, or a deep-down belief of my unacceptability override what I really feel. It requires cultivating kindness and practicing self-care: not the neoliberal capitalist bubble-bath kind of self-care but the Audre Lorde long-hard-look-at-yourself self-care that we all need to make a daily practice if we want to stop harming ourselves and others on an interpersonal – and a global – level.

3. The drama triangle

The other idea I brought into the new edition was Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle. If you’re not familiar with it it looks like this.

The idea is that, in relationships, we often get drawn into stuck dynamics where we go round and round this triangle. For example my Littlest Hobo dynamic easily puts me in the role of rescuer – coming in and making somebody’s life all better so that maybe – in the immortal words of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – they will ‘rescue me right back’. The problem is if you get invested in the role of rescuer you easily put the other person in a double-bind. They must get better so that you can feel you’ve been a good rescuer. Also they mustn’t get better because then you’ll be out of a job. It’s easy then to shift from rescuer to persecutor because you’re actually treating somebody pretty badly. And easy to shift again into victim because rescuers really don’t like people pointing out that they’re actually being persecutors.

Sound familiar? I think that this triangle has so much to offer what we’re grappling with in our wider communities. When #MeToo 2.0 hit some of the polyamory communities in the UK it took a familiar form. One individual abuser was highlighted, survivors shared their stories of his behaviour, and others aligned themselves with two different forms of rescuing: either becoming saviours for the ‘victims’, or bystander-apologists for the persecutor.

If we’re going to get to grips with the abusive dynamics that inevitably show up in our relationships and communities – in a culture founded on oppression and unequal valuing of different bodies and lives – then I think we have to stay with our capacity to occupy all three positions on this triangle. We need to get to know our inner victim, our inner persecutor, and our inner rescuer. That involves a whole heap of self-kindness, as well as the intensely vulnerable self-care work of staying with feelings.

4. Staying with all the feels in all the relationships

Learning our part in drama triangles – interpersonal and social – involves staying with how it feels to be in all of those places. For example, the work that my sisters and I are doing involves going back into our intensely vulnerable victim/survivor places: recognising that the various kinds of experiences we went through at young ages was not okay, and that the strategies that we developed to survive them made all kind of sense. It also involves recognising how much of that intergenerational trauma came out of us being on the receiving end of other people’s survival strategies, and how our own survival strategies have also now hurt other people.

Staying with our persecutor potential is hard as hell of course. It involves being with the guilt and shame and fear of our potential to harm others and to harm again. It involves going beyond the temptation to focus on obvious forms of abuse and non-consent – that we may not have engaged in – to the micro level emotional gaslighting, manipulation, and non-consensual pressure that we all take part in our day-to-day relationships, and the macro level dynamics of oppression that we all benefit from and are implicated in whether we like it or not.

Staying with our rescuer involves recognising our tendency to focus on obvious abusers and villains to avoid looking at the damage we do – for example by setting ourselves up as saviours, by not addressing our privilege and power, or by failing to acknowledge our limits and taking on too much only to let people down.

It’s hard fucking work, but we have to do it. And it involves developing our capacity to stay with all of the feelings in all of our relationships. So many of our survival strategies, relationship patterns, and non-consensual tendencies comes from endeavouring to avoid feeling the feelings that scare us: shame, anger, fear, sadness, loss. And of course, like a hamster on a wheel, most of these tendencies will fetch us right back where we most wanted to avoid. As Anita Cassidy puts it: ‘Feeling shit doesn’t kill you, but the shit you do to stop feeling shit might.’

An important caveat to this is, of course, with all these things (being present, staying with feelings, being vulnerable) they have to be done in a container of huge self-kindness, self-compassion, and self-care. Those things always have to come first and foremost. It’s easy to do these things because you think you  should, and for them to end up being far too much. So taking it slowly, prioritising kindness over all else, and getting support with it, are all vital.

I think we all have to do this work, and I think that doing this work will look different for all of us. For me it has included a combination of journaling about the hard stuff, sitting with my feelings by the Thames, reading people who challenge me on social media, deliberately practising showing close people my vulnerability bit-by-painful-bit, and – perhaps unexpectedly – tuning into my erotic fantasies and writing erotic fiction.

Right now it involves the painful messy work of acknowledging my relationship patterns with existing – and new – partners, and how far I may – or may not – be able to shift them given how strongly entrenched and sneaky they are. I’m convinced though that this can be a joyful process as much as it is an excruciating one – often both of those things simultaneously. And if it’s going to make any difference it’s one we have to do together in our relationships, in our families, and in our communities.

Further Resources

• Rewriting the Rules.
• My zine on self-care.
• My zine on staying with feelings.
• Meg-John and Justin podcast on staying with other people’s feelings.
• Love Uncommon posts on how to do self-consent.

The post Four things I’ve learnt about relationships for Poly Dallas Millenium appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

We talk about how to figure out what relationship style works for you, as well as meta-communication, time-management, and dealing with difficult feelings like jealousy.

You can listen to the Sex Spoken Here podcast here.

If you fancy exploring these things more for yourself, check out our Make You Own Relationship User Guide zine over at megjohnandjustin.com.

The post Is non-monogamy for you? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

We chatted about the spectrum from monogamies to non-monogamies, non-monogamy as an orientation or identity, and how to figure out what relationship style works best for you.

Check out the podcast here if you’re interested.

The post What is non-monogamy? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.