How to Know What Your Values Are in Polyamory
Before the saxophones start playing.
Rather than trauma bond, Nick and I began dating by using our exes as excellent tutors.
On our fourth date, on a sunlit summer afternoon in Montréal, we, both 24, both freshly out of long relationships, strolled on the cobblestone past café patios spilling onto the sidewalks and slipped into an Indigo bookstore. We wandered the aisles until we found a book called 1,000 Questions to Ask Before You Marry Someone. We sat drinking coffee in the bookstore’s cafe and, for the next four hours, asked each other questions.
Money habits.
Views on gender roles.
Politics.
Career ambitions.
Where did we want to live?
What did a good life at sixty look like?
By the end of the afternoon, we’d decided we were about 80% compatible. This week, we’re celebrating our sixteenth anniversary.
I know how it sounds. Clinical. Unromantic. The stuff of engineers and lawyers, not artists and lovers. But we’d both come out of relationships that had shown us the same painful lesson:
Love isn’t enough when your values are different.
I had ended a four year engagement to a Russian-Persian man who wanted me to move to a dreary former Industrial town in England, live with his parents, and become a traditional wife. Instead, I left Europe for Canada to chase my dream of becoming a writer. Nick, around the same time, had ended the longest relationship of his life. His ex was deeply Catholic. Nick is adamantly atheist. Neither relationship failed because of lack of love or passion. They failed because our visions of how to live were fundamentally incompatible.
That bookstore afternoon became the foundation for every difficult conversation we’ve had since, including a year and a half later when we opened our relationship.
When Nick initially wanted hierarchical polyamory, I didn’t just tell him I preferred egalitarian polyamory. We returned to the values we had already articulated that afternoon in Montréal: that every person deserves self-determination, dignity, and equal moral consideration. Once we followed those values through to their conclusion, an egalitarian practice was the only one that aligned with our shared values.
We didn’t debate polyamory as a concept. We aligned on our values, and let them decide what kind of polyamory we practiced.
Most people don't look deeply at value compatibility when they're dating. Well, that is until, just like us at 24, they get deeply traumatized first.
Dating Polyamorously on Apps: The Art of Hearing the Saxophone Before It Gets Too Loud
Imagine someone who’s just opened their marriage. They match with someone open to polyamory, and the banter is effortless. They ask all the standard questions: What do you do for work? What are your hobbies? What’s your attachment style? They flirt, they have chemistry, they have passionate sex.
It’s a classic, hopeful beginning. But as I listen to people recount these exact first dates, I hear a soundtrack in my mind and it’s not romantic ballads. Instead, I hear internet slang’s new favorite harbinger of impending doom: the saxophone getting louder. It’s a survival horror gaming trope where the horn music swells the closer you get to a monster. As they list their textbook green flags, the brass in my head starts playing.
That’s because not one person went over values such as: