PaidA heterosexual couple with a young child open their relationship. Nothing is wrong between them. The communication is strong, the sex is good, and both spent months reading and reflecting before deciding together.
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PaidEvery time Millie posts about hierarchical polyamory being unethical, some version of the same comment arrives: my children will of course take priority, which is why egalitarian polyamory could never work for me.
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This starts as a small annoyance and turns into an argument.
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PaidSixteen years ago, on a fourth date in Montréal, two 24-year-olds wandered into an Indigo bookstore, found a copy of 1,000 Questions to Ask Before You Marry Someone, and spent four hours in the cafe working through it. Money habits.
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PaidYou'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.
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It opens in an ICU.
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PaidThe 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.
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PaidMost 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.
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PaidIn 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.
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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.
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PaidThis 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.
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PaidThe 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.
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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.
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PaidSneakyarchy is a sharp coinage for a real problem. You can fully understand, intellectually, why hierarchical polyamory is unethical and why it isn't inevitable, a myth the piece pins on anthropologist Louis Dumont.
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PaidThe objection this essay takes on isn't about loving more than one person, which people mostly accept. It's the egalitarian part.
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This is the heaviest piece in the batch, and the most personal. It opens in 2016, when a list of Black activists accused of harm circulated in Toronto social justice circles and one of the names was the author's close friend.
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Originally published in Chatelaine, this is the most autobiographical entry, and a good doorway into the whole project.
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PaidThis picks up where Millie's four boundary frameworks left off. Transparency-prioritizing polyamorists want to know before a partner sleeps with someone new, because disclosure is how they feel safe in their own body.
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Millie went on a panel about dating after 40 while Black, there to offer the polyamorous view through a decolonizing and African lens. What happened instead was a rupture.
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PaidThere is a particular exhaustion in living a life pre-edited for other people's approval, running every choice past an imaginary panel before you make it.
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PaidPolyamory sells possibility, the sense that life can hold more than you were taught. This essay is about the other half of the deal. Grief arrives when exclusivity ends even though you chose it.
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This essay carries a trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence, including a personal reference to sexual assault.
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PaidFor a lot of polyamorists the holidays are not the most wonderful time of the year.
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A short memoir piece, set at a private British boarding school outside Nakuru in Kenya's Rift Valley, where Millie satisfied a desire she did not yet have words for. At night the older girls led the way into Eden.
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Decolonizing Love was never meant to be a brand. This essay explains how it became a movement anyway, and it does that mostly by explaining where Millie comes from. She is a rebel descended from rebels.
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PaidThe question Decolonizing Love gets more than almost any other is how to build safer sex agreements inside a polycule. What should the agreement cover. How do you manage herpes risk.
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Some people insist cheating cannot exist in polyamory. Millie has always found the claim suspicious, and she notices it comes from two very different places, each of which reveals more about the speaker than about polyamory.
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A Ghanaian hairstylist on a film set asked Millie who coined the word polyamory. The honest answer is Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, an American white woman, in a libertarian magazine called Green Egg in the late 1980s.
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A client came to Millie for coaching after a therapist refused to take her on, which she suspected happened because she said at intake that she wanted to work on her polyamory. Sometimes the discrimination is that blunt.
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Millie's argument here is about how empire treats the people who serve it.
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A French follower put a theory to Millie: the confusion in Anglophone polyamory might be a language problem.
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The modern polyamory movement spent its early years tiptoeing around couple fragility. Mainstream advice normalized hierarchy, vetoes and probationary secondaries, and it stripped power from anyone outside the primary relationship.
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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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