Decolonizing Love Blog: Explore Insights on Relationships

Decolonizing LoveMay 31, 2026

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.

Polyamory

Relationships

Decolonizing LoveMay 18, 2026

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.

Polyamory

Identity & Equality

Politics

Decolonizing LoveMay 10, 2026

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.

What's Worse Than a Codependent Partner? A Codependent Metamour

Polyamory

Relationships

Decolonizing LoveMay 5, 2026

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.

Polyamorous Boundaries in a Culture of Codependency

Polyamory

Relationships

Decolonization

Decolonizing LoveApril 26, 2026

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.

Politics

Identity & Equality

Decolonizing LoveApril 16, 2026

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.

Sneakyarchy: But Babe You Said You're Not Hierarchical!

Polyamory

Relationships

Decolonizing LoveMarch 22, 2026

Sneakyarchy: But Babe You Said You're Not Hierarchical!

Sneakyarchy 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. Knowing it is only half the work. The other half is how you actually behave when a new relationship starts destabilizing an established one, and that's where hierarchy sneaks back in. The essay is careful to separate the people under that one label. Some are quietly covering for a partner who never really agreed to egalitarian polyamory, what Dan Savage calls Polyamory Under Duress. Others are sincere but untested: their values have simply never been stress-tested by a partner who threatens the comfort of the primary bond, and when that moment arrives they act hierarchically and feel ashamed and lost, surprised by what was in them. The example it lands on is the emotional veto. A couple swears there's no veto in their agreement, and there isn't on paper. Then a partner makes plans with someone new and the other one vetoes anyway, just emotionally instead of formally. The behavior outran the belief, which is the whole point.

Polyamory

Decolonization

Decolonizing LoveMarch 19, 2026

A Dead French Anthropologist Is Why You Think Egalitarian Polyamory is Difficult

The objection this essay takes on isn't about loving more than one person, which people mostly accept. It's the egalitarian part. Critics call non-hierarchical polyamory naive because they assume every human relationship has to have a pecking order, that someone always comes first. The piece argues that assumption is cultural rather than natural, and turns to evolutionary anthropology to show it. The through-line comes from Christopher Boehm: somewhere around 1.8 million years ago our ancestors actively dismantled ape-style dominance hierarchies. Sleeping on the ground meant taking turns on watch, and unreliable hunting meant survival depended on sharing, so humans evolved a deep drive for fairness and ran on what Boehm calls reverse dominance hierarchies, where the group keeps would-be bullies in check. Hierarchy showed up later, with scale. Once farming put thousands of strangers in one place, shame and social pressure stopped working, so we delegated punishment to a new invention, the State. The ending is where it pays off. Rigid hierarchy got rebranded as the natural order, blessed by divine right, until Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island looked at European class society and questioned whether it was civilized at all. If hierarchy was learned, it can be unlearned, and egalitarian polyamory stops looking idealistic and starts looking like a return to form.

Radical Consciousness, Colonial Tools: How the Left Addresses Harm and How It Can Do Better

Politics

Decolonization

Identity & Equality

Decolonizing LoveMarch 15, 2026

Radical Consciousness, Colonial Tools: How the Left Addresses Harm and How It Can Do Better

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. As a survivor of sexual assault, her instinct is to believe survivors first. What shifted her was recognizing the accuser, someone she had watched attack Black organizers while using her own Blackness as cover, and noticing that a Black Lives Matter organizer was on the list just after BLM Toronto forced police out of Pride. From there the essay names the pattern. Calling it a psyop isn't paranoia so much as history: COINTELPRO planted informants inside the Black Panthers to manufacture distrust, and colonial administrations ran the same play as divide and rule, as when Belgium hardened Tutsi and Hutu divisions in Rwanda. The tools are old, and online callout culture has made them cheap. One public accusation can now do what used to take months of infiltration. It's a genuinely uncomfortable argument, because it asks the left to hold two things at once: take harm seriously, and notice when the machinery of accountability is being turned into a weapon. The title says it plainly. Radical consciousness, colonial tools.

Polyamory

Decolonization

Relationships

Decolonizing LoveMarch 8, 2026

What I’ve Learned From My Lifelong Journey In Polyamory

Originally published in Chatelaine, this is the most autobiographical entry, and a good doorway into the whole project. Millie traces her polyamory back to age ten in 1990s Kenya, where she watched her tribes practice polygamy and even self-marriage, and clocked early that monogamy was only one option among many. Today she lives between two partners and keeps more than twenty 'comet' relationships, people she sees once a year or less, scattered around the world. The reflections double as a tidy summary of Decolonizing Love's politics. Monogamy, she argues, has colonial roots: the 'love marriage' was globalized by Europeans between the 18th and 19th centuries, and none of her tribes were monogamous before British rule. Her one stint in monogamy, with a fiancé who insisted real love produces jealousy, taught her mostly about performance and possessiveness. The logistics keep it grounded. She and Nick wrote a five-page agreement covering everything from safer sex to end-of-life planning, and she structures her week deliberately: three days with one partner, three with another, one alone, because she has learned she needs three days to build secure attachment. The closing note is the reason the platform exists at all. There still aren't enough visible, positive polyamory role models.