I was a serial cheater.

There was a palpable sense of shame and self-hate that came with it too, which weighed heavier and heavier over time. I was in a spiral of lies, unchecked desires, and deep depression. Until I came across the video that changed my life. 

I chanced upon a 2006 TED Talk clip by American anthropologist Helen Fisher, titled Why we love, why we cheat. Fisher, together with her colleagues at The Kinsey Institute, put people who were madly in love into an MRI brain scanner. Based on their findings, Fisher proposed that humanity has developed three core brain systems when it comes to reproduction and mating that can act independently of each other:

“These three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren’t always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we’re capable of loving more than one person at a time.”

I sat there with my mouth open. It’s science. It’s in our brainwork to have feelings and/or sex drives for multiple people, and it doesn’t dilute my love for my partner. It’s in our biology–right down to the hormones we produce–and that makes it perfectly human. 

And so if it was perfectly normal to have feelings and sexual urges outside my relationships, why then did I feel so guilty for acting on them, and why did it hurt my partners so much?

It’s because infidelity is not about love or sex; it’s about the unethical pursuit of desire.

If you lie, you cheat. And it is so tempting to lie because our socially programmed understanding of relationships pushes us to believe that looking at other people shatters the very fabric of love. 

But how do I not lie about wanting more than one person, without the confrontational gut-punch of disappointing those I love? 

This is what venturing into ethical non-monogamy (ENM) or polyamory is all about. Psychology Today defines consensual non-monogamy and polyamory as: 

“An umbrella category that covers a range of relationship styles that describe openly conducted multiple partner relationships. In polyamory—at least ideally—all of the partners are all aware of and consenting to be in their web of multiple partner relationships.” 

In my years of practicing ENM, I have developed what I call my five pillars of polyamory: humility, transparency, communication, compassion, and self-love.

Humility

You have to be humble enough to admit and understand that you cannot fulfill all the needs your partner can possibly have. In her 2015 TED Talk, Rethinking Infidelity, Belgian-American psychotherapist Esther Perel said:

“We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidante, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal.”

Although I admit this isn’t inherently bad, this isn’t the only way we can look at things, either. We don’t need to put unnecessary pressure on our lovers, nor do we have to sacrifice our unmet needs just to amplify those that are met.

And even if all these needs are met, having the freedom to explore other people—as friends, as sexual partners, as emotional support—without the fear of hurting your partner is a wholly rewarding experience in and of itself.

Journeying through ENM and polyamory means a lot of trial and error; there will be trials and you will most likely commit errors. Here lies the importance of having the humility to accept that you don’t know everything. 

Transparency

This is more than just being honest towards our partners; it’s about being honest with ourselves. A great deal of this is having that inner conversation about how we truly feel. 

How do you really feel about your partner going out on a date with another man? If there’s feelings of jealousy, from which part of yourself do you think that feeling is emanating? Is it that you don’t want him to do those things with other people, or that you want him to do it with you? 

Without the cultural veil of monogamy, we are forced to look deeper into our emotions and truly understand what motivates them. It could be from our deep-seeded wounds of insecurity, fear of abandonment, self-hate, sense of competitiveness, or a myriad of different childhood traumas. 

Growing up, disappointing my parental figures meant getting a black eye—or something worse. And so I developed a response to completely avoid conflict through lying, and it trickled down to my adult relationships. 

Through polyamory and ENM, I dealt with my toxic behavior by going through worlds of trial and error, of reflection and self-healing, just to have the capacity to let go of my attachment to lying.

Once you’re honest with yourself, only then will you be able to effectively work through your boundaries and agreements to move the relationship forward.

Communication

Communication is the beating heart that pumps life into any consensual non-monogamous relationship. You will feel a full spectrum of emotions—loneliness, anger, joy, sexual curiosity, etc—and you need to have the ability to clearly articulate them into words that your partners will understand and appreciate. 

You have to be vulnerable for your partner to clearly grasp the intricacies of what you feel, with the hopes that they will do the same. May it be words of frustration, anger, sadness, or confusion, it always has to be said within a space built with empathy and kindness. 

It will be much easier to hear “Can we talk about how I felt about what happened?,” than to just flat-out say “You hurt me, you’re wrong.” 

You will be surprised at how well you can create a safe zone for you and your lovers to discuss difficult subjects and create assurances if you just put a little bit of empathy in your words.

Compassion

This is where communication and compassion go hand-in-glove. Trust will have to work both ways here, as you will have to work through the difficult spots in order to come out with a more iron-clad sense of inner resilience as a couple.

In the words of Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, authors of The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, & Other Adventures: “Nothing breeds intimacy like shared vulnerability.”

You and your partners will have to trust each other to get through flying bullets of conflict, jealousy, confusion, insecurities, and generational scars. Once you come out on the other side, however, you will find your bond more intimate, more earned, and with certainly more weight. 

Polyamory, at the end of the day, is what you make it. You bespoke your relationships through long conversations on boundaries and agreements that can be negotiated and re-negotiated over time. So be honest and learn to communicate with compassion.

Tying everything together with self-love

All the emotional explorations, trauma healing, sexual pursuits, and self-reflection involved with ENM led me to this: self-love. You will be closer to yourself more than ever before. You will have to cultivate and nurture the first and most important relationship in your life—the one with yourself.

A good friend of mine,  ENM advocate Drew O’Bannon, has had battles with codependency in his past relationships, and admitted that ENM taught him to rely on himself more, because he understands deeply now that he is, first and foremost, important to him. 

“[Polyamory] has really laid bare all the patterns I have, both healthy and otherwise. And so it’s really a lot of introspection that I wouldn’t have [had] otherwise, you know, if I were in a monogamous relationship”, he said.

Shibari rope bondage artist Rai chose the lifestyle to address her tendencies to feel envy towards others. Those feelings came from when she started looking at others who received the kind of love that she wanted for herself.

“The envy eventually diminished because I realized how much I can provide for myself. The kindness, the gentleness that I want, I can provide them from within”, she said.

These days, there is a conflation between polyamory and promiscuity, where sex is free-for-all and we can just sleep with everybody willy-nilly. This is not the same with those who subscribe to a careful and ethical approach to seeing multiple individuals. In fact, ever since becoming non-monogamous, I became a lot more picky with the people I get involved with.

Being an ethical slut made it okay to look at other people outside my relationships without the guilt or shame of hurting the people I love. It’s because all the work I had to go through in order to live this lifestyle with pride and joy has given me an assured sense of self-worth. 

This way, I know where my boundaries lie, and how I can compromise some in order to have relations with people that are grounded on maturity and growth.

Feature illustration by Duane Lucas Pascua.