Decolonizing Love
How to Know What Your Values Are in Polyamory
Before the saxophones start playing.
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Polyamory
Relationships
Identity & Equality
Decolonizing Love
This is How You Dismantle Couple Privilege
You'll hear the argument all over polyamory discourse: hierarchies in relationships are natural and inevitable, so anyone claiming to practice egalitarian polyamory is kidding themselves. This essay takes that apart by showing the word hierarchy is doing two entirely different jobs in it. Social hierarchy is structural, something the world does to you whether you consent or not. Relational hierarchy is a decision you make about how to treat your partners. Couple privilege is the structural kind. Legal marriage, tax breaks, employer benefits, automatic recognition at hospitals, holiday packages priced for two: society hands these to an established couple whether they ask for them or not, and additional partners in a polycule receive none of it. Relational hierarchy is the choice to take that unearned advantage and wield it as power over someone else's relationship. Veto power, a hinge defaulting to a spouse's wants over another partner's needs, agreements made about a relationship by someone who isn't even in it. The move that makes it click is the analogy to white privilege and male privilege. Having privilege doesn't make you an oppressor, but it does create responsibility. We have shelves of books on how white people can be allies and how men can build healthier masculinity, and almost nothing on how couples can dismantle the privilege they hold inside their own polycules. The fourteen concrete practices this essay offers sit behind the paywall, ranked from the easiest internal shifts to the hardest structural ones.
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Polyamory
Politics
Decolonization
Decolonizing Love
Polyamory Under the Law
It opens in an ICU. The people who actually hold your life together, a partner, a metamour who helped raise your child, a chosen sibling of twenty years, wait behind a locked hospital door while reception checks for the one credential the law respects: a marriage certificate or shared blood. From there the essay picks up its news hook, Portland's March 2026 ordinance protecting polyamorous people from discrimination in housing, jobs, and public accommodation, and asks why a law like that was ever necessary. The answer runs deeper than most coverage of the municipal wave. Marriage covers barely 1.5 percent of the human timeline; hunter-gatherers like the Hadza practiced serial monogamy and communal child-rearing with no paperwork at all. Marriage arrived with agriculture as a technology for securing inheritance, and empire exported it by force. The Spanish Laws of Burgos of 1512 banned multi-partner relationships, dictated how many adults could share a bed, and burned communal Taíno houses. What gets called traditional family values was, in many places, deliberate state engineering. That history reframes marriage equality as a double-edged victory: real protections, but the state kept its job as gatekeeper of which relationships count. The essay closes with what you can do without waiting for another ordinance to pass. Sign the healthcare proxy, write the will, name your people on paper, and trade rules borrowed from contract law for agreements built on mutuality. You are already a family. The work is making the world catch up.
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Polyamory
Relationships
Decolonizing Love
Your 5 Core Needs in a Polyamorous Relationship
The essay opens with a goodbye letter. A woman leaves polyamory after nine years, convinced the constant low-grade dread she lived with was simply the cost of the lifestyle. Decolonizing Love's response is that she was sold a lie. Polyamory changes how many people are in your relational network. It does not change what your nervous system needs to feel safe. There is a sharp distinction here between monogamy on autopilot and polyamory in manual mode. Monogamy pre-fills your needs through inherited scripts: who is home most nights, who is your emergency contact, who you spend holidays with. Polyamory hands you a blank page, and most people arrive without ever asking what they actually need in an attachment-based relationship. So they accept whatever they are offered and mistake low expectations for being evolved. The essay grounds this in attachment theory, the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, and insists your needs are non-negotiable rather than needy. From there it sets out five core questions to answer before your next relationship, or to audit the one you are in now. The full breakdown of those five lives on Substack.
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Polyamory
Relationships
Decolonizing Love
Before You Open Your Relationship, You Need to Become an Individual Again
Most people prep for polyamory like they're cramming for the bar exam. Polysecure, Polywise, the whole Jessica Fern shelf, hundreds of podcast episodes, a tidy agreement in a shared Google Doc. Then the first date actually happens, and by Sunday night the whole thing has caved in. The essay's point is that all that reading skips the step that does the real work. That step is differentiation: becoming a whole individual again before you try to love more than one person. The jealousy you were sure you understood from the safety of your own living room turns out to feel nothing like the real thing. And the panic underneath it is usually a codependency that monogamy culture trained into you in the first place. What we like is that it refuses the quick fix. You don't rescue an open relationship by queuing another podcast or tightening the rules. You do the slower, less flattering work on yourself first. The full practice sits behind the paywall, but the diagnosis on its own is worth the read.
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Polyamory
Relationships
Decolonizing Love
10 Practices for Healthy Hinge Relationships
In polyamory, the hinge is the person who connects two partners who aren't dating each other. This piece argues the role carries far more weight than it gets credit for. The hinge isn't just a link in a chain; they set the emotional culture for the whole polycule, and their daily choices either reproduce monogamous habits or quietly dismantle them. The hard part is that most of us arrive at polyamory carrying baggage: possessiveness, the assumption that the couple comes first, the scarcity myth that love is finite and one partner's gain is another's loss. A good hinge has to catch those reflexes in real time and choose differently, which is a skill rather than a personality trait. From there the post lays out ten concrete practices for doing it well. The list itself sits behind the paywall, but the framing is the useful part: treat hinging as something you practice and get better at, not a position you simply occupy.
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Polyamory
Identity & Equality
Politics
Decolonizing Love
Polyamory is Not for Boys
The fear that opens this essay is a familiar one: that patriarchy will co-opt polyamory the way it hollowed out yoga, streetwear, and nearly every other countercultural thing it noticed. Then a celebrity breakup, Megan Thee Stallion leaving Klay Thompson after he tried to reframe cheating as non-monogamy, becomes the hook for the opposite argument. Patriarchy can't actually colonize polyamory, because the two are built on incompatible relationships to consent. The case is clean. Polyamory needs emotional vulnerability and genuine respect for women's autonomy, since informed consent is impossible without treating women as full people whose choices matter. Patriarchy trains men to avoid exactly that, to read vulnerability as weakness and sex as conquest rather than mutual connection. So the patriarchal man isn't being a bad polyamorist; he's structurally unable to do it. The piece then traces compulsory monogamy back to the agricultural shift, when lineage and inheritance turned women's sexuality into something to be managed. It's a sharp reframe: the thing patriarchy wants from polyamory is the one thing polyamory won't give it.
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Polyamory
Relationships
Decolonizing Love
What's Worse Than a Codependent Partner? A Codependent Metamour
This one is half book review, half rewrite. The book is Page Turner's Dealing With Difficult Metamours, which sorts troublesome metamours into ten recognizable archetypes: people pleasers, drama llamas, control freaks, and so on. The review is fair about its strengths, since Turner leads with empathy and treats most difficult behavior as existing on a spectrum rather than as pure villainy. But the verdict is a qualified 3 out of 5. The archetypes are drawn too thinly, and the accountability section falls apart right where it's needed most, with no real mediation frameworks or hinge-specific tools for protecting yourself between metamours. As the saying goes, every metamour problem is a hinge problem, and the book doesn't equip the hinge. So the author writes the chapter she felt was missing: the codependent metamour. The full version, including a personal story about her worst metamour and how she stayed differentiated under pressure, is for paid subscribers. The diagnosis is clear enough on its own. The hardest polycule conflicts often trace back to someone trying, knowingly or not, to pull everyone into their orbit of control.
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Polyamory
Relationships
Decolonization
Decolonizing Love
Polyamorous Boundaries in a Culture of Codependency
The starting observation here is that our culture sells codependency as romance. 'You complete me,' 'I have nothing without you,' the brooding bad boy with no boundaries. The essay points out that these lines are marketed as devotion but actually describe mutual erasure, and that media leans on them because safety and regulation don't generate the same charge as mystery and a little fear. The problem is that this leaves most people genuinely confused about boundaries, conflating them with walls, control, or coldness. The author notes that boundaries only became a mainstream relational tool in the 1980s, so the culture is still catching up. In polyamory the stakes are higher, because responsible autonomy is central to the ethics: partners need agency, privacy, and fair decision-making while staying connected to several people at once. Writing as a Kenyan in Toronto who has never been monogamous, the author frames the full guide as her most complete answer to every boundary question she gets asked, from new-to-polyamory priorities to unlearning enmeshment in cultures where it's the norm. That guide is paywalled, but the core point stands alone. You can't do non-hierarchical polyamory without a real grasp of where you end and someone else begins.
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Politics
Identity & Equality
Decolonizing Love
Is Anyone on the Left Pure Enough?
This is a frustrated, thinking-out-loud piece about purity testing on the left, which the author calls one of its most self-destructive habits. It breeds infighting and callout culture, makes existing members afraid to speak honestly, and quietly turns away people who might otherwise join. Her diagnosis pulls in a few threads: a lingering inheritance of Puritan moral policing, and a colonial domination culture that many leftists reject in theory without ever unlearning how it taught them to treat each other. The sharper argument is about definitions. For her, leftism is a political project, anti-capitalism and opposition to social hierarchy. For a lot of people, though, it has quietly become a moral identity, a shorthand for being a good person. Once left equals good, you then have to define good, which is hopelessly subjective. That's how veganism, constant masking, or being anti-AI get treated as litmus tests, and how disagreement collapses into labeling someone a centrist or a lib instead of engaging what they said. It reads less like a tidy thesis than an honest reckoning, and it's stronger for that. The point isn't that standards are bad. It's that a movement built on policing each other's goodness keeps losing.
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Polyamory
Relationships
Decolonization
Millie Boella
Polyamory Boundary Frameworks: When varying needs of freedom and transparency collide
There are two camps in polyamory: those who prioritize transparency and those who prioritize autonomy. Why their boundary frameworks clash, and how trauma shapes them.
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