Nichole: I have an anecdote to start us off. Yeah? This morning I was at the grocery store, and I was in the grocery store parking lot, and there was a car that had a vanity plate that said V Chill. And it was right next to another car that had a vanity plate that said switch.

Nichole: It was like, I was walking through a field profile.

Nichole: Another one should have said happily married.

Talkin bout love and sex and power, All our polyamateur hour.

Laurel: I want to find a field profile. That's just like in a miserable marriage.

Nichole: Those exist. They're just, they're just. You don't see their face. It's just a torso. Yeah. And it says discreet all over it.

Daniel: Have you seen the ones where they, they put like an emoji over their face? That's the most. Yeah. Those are disturbing.

Daniel: That's the most terrifying.

Laurel: Yeah. I don't like them.

Daniel: I don't like vanity license plates.

Laurel: Really? I don't think I would ever have one, but I like, find them very fun.

Laurel: To the extent where sometimes I'm looking for messages in, in license plates that are definitely not vanity plates.

Nichole: I had a license plate, the first license plate that I was issued in Oregon. was 666 HAH. H A S, and I was like, it has 666 in it. Like, is this bad? Is this going to be bad?

Nichole: And my friend was like, maybe you'll have 666 laughs in the car.

Daniel: Well, that's how you conjure the devil. I think laughing 666 times. I mean, he's a laughing kind of guy. He's definitely a laughing kind of guy.

Daniel: Welcome to Polly Amateur Hour. The podcast where we all get together and talk about everything Polly. Answer questions, Tell Crazy Sexy Polly stories. I

Laurel: have a Crazy Sexy Polly story. Oh, do tell. For this week. Yeah.

Is it sexy? Call me!

Daniel: Only if

Daniel: it's dirty.

Laurel: It's very dirty.

Laurel: Yeah, it's very dirty.

Laurel: Uh, it involves you. Cause, yeah. Yeah. Cause. Sunday morning, you helped me clean my very dirty room.

Laurel: And then I came over here to your house.

Daniel: Oh yeah? So

Laurel: I actually didn't help you clean. That was the agreement though.

Daniel: Yeah.

Laurel: I would help clean here. But instead I put up soundproofing on the walls.

Daniel: You're always trying to silence me.

Nichole: You're

Laurel: just

Nichole: so loud. You're just like, so loud. You're just, yeah, just like, Whenever I lose you in a grocery store, I just wait ten seconds, and then I hear you.

Daniel: Hear me knocking down a pyramid of cans.

Laurel: No, you're probably like, You're probably like, Like, asking for help from somebody, but like, explaining too much of the backstory.

Nichole: Does do that. See, this is a benefit of polyamory is that you just get validated all over the place. You observe something in your partner and you go, is that, do they do that? And then somebody else validates it for you.

Daniel: I'm looking for muesli, but I looked in aisle six and there wasn't next to the granola. So I'm wondering, where you might keep an unsweetened muesli, but then would it be in proximity to some sweetener that I could then add? Yeah, this is accurate. Yes. And by the second or third muesli, I'm already gone.

Nichole: I'm like, I'm just going to go. Do you, yeah, do you, because I feel like I'm usually in the background, Like, you know, doing the like cut gesture, like they don't want to hear this, like, this is beside the point, but you just walk away. I just walk away. I just let him do what he's going to do. Laurel just moves me out of the way physically.

Daniel: Oh, I do that also. She scoots me like a, like she's a herding dog.

Nichole: Yeah.

Daniel: Yeah. No, I

Nichole: let you live your life, babe. Yeah, well. And honestly, quite honestly, You probably actually know the person that you're talking to because you and I have walked around Portland and you just get recognized all over the place.

Nichole: That's true. Because of people you've worked with, people you've lived with, people you've dated. I'm

Daniel: Portland grocery store famous.

Nichole: Yeah. I remember after getting my, um, IUD either out or in, I can't remember which one. Um, but I was drugged and we went to the, we went to the grocery store because I really wanted red vines and hippie Cheetos.

Nichole: And I think we stayed in there for an extra 15, 20 minutes because You were introducing me to people who you used to work with at that grocery store and I was not in a place to meet people. Coles was just like, get

Laurel: me my red vines and let's get the fuck out of here, please. I was,

Daniel: I was trying to like, you know, introduce you to, you know, people.

Daniel: Agents who could help you with your, your munchies, like this, this is, this is my partner, Nicole. She recently had her ID in or out. She's not sure.

Nichole: We're not sure. But we know she's high.

Daniel: What kind of food would you recommend?

Nichole: You're right, it was very sweet of you to

Daniel: Oh, I have no recollection of this, so I know you don't.

Daniel: I'm just What do you think? Should we answer some questions? Oh,

Laurel: yeah. Wait, let me pull up my question. Do do do do! Do we have do we have

Daniel: waiting music? Will I? You actually generate waiting music every time you look it up.

Daniel: You

Nichole: generate waiting music. wherever you go and whatever you do. That is true. And it's almost always that fucking cafe song. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do

Laurel: What is that tom steiner? Yeah, i'm gonna have to gonna have to change it up. I've been found out

Daniel: I always mix that up with the song about the abused child, which is her other hit Right.

Daniel: Suzanne Vega. Oh. Um, There's not an abused child in the, the

Nichole: upstairs, downstairs one.

Daniel: Yeah. There's not an abused child in the cafe. Right.

Nichole: No, I don't remember her singing about that.

Daniel: She doesn't get a cup of coffee and then a child comes up, a haunted child comes up to her.

Nichole: There's a kid with some bags under his eyes.

Nichole: He hasn't been sleeping.

Nichole: He's scared, he's lonely, I just want to eat my bagel. Oh my god. Well, now that is the version I will be humming. This is why we're not professionals because I can't tell a joke without laughing halfway through it. Oh, fuck. Overrated. Oh, that mean that was a good one though. That was, that was like, that was, that was one of those living jokes that you can't really uh, ignore.

Daniel: It just like takes over. You couldn't get, there's no hope of you getting through that joke. It's like, it's like uh, it's like Mr. Jiggleson, the first puppy president.

Nichole: I mean, quick digression, Daniel and I were, I don't know how it came up, Mr. Jiggleson, the first puppy president, but we decided it was the funniest thing we had ever heard.

Daniel: Was this just something you made up, or like? It was a crossword. We were trying to get the answer to a crossword, and I I think, And it was like, Jiggleson fit, and I was like, Oh, it's Mr. Jiggleson. The first puppy president. And then

Nichole: we imagined, at his inauguration, they have to hold him up and just place his paw on the Bible.

Nichole: And they repeat after me, and it's just totally silent. Everyone in the country is just accepting that this is president. Well, there's like, there's those towns that have, you know, dogs for mayors. It's exactly like that. Yeah. But on a national scale. I'm now, I'm just imagining the recent, like the democratic national convention,

Laurel: and it's in one of those, after Kamala's speech, it's like, and now introducing,

Nichole: Alright, okay. What's our question? Oh this segment is called

Laurel: And ask the amateurs

Song: If you got questions, don't demur, it's time to ask the amateurs.

Laurel: this question comes to us from loyal listener.

Laurel: How do you handle dating someone new to polyamory or someone who is trying it for the first time? What boundaries and expectations keep you slash the relationship slash your other relationships healthy?

Nichole: Okay. Just like, I've never done this before.

Laurel: I, I do this all the time.

Daniel: I did it with Nicole.

Laurel: Aw, that's

Daniel: true. Yeah.

Nichole: Yeah.

Daniel: I can tell you what I did first. Should we do that?

Laurel: Yeah.

Daniel: Let's see. First of all, since everybody meets on the internets, you know, usually, I think that you want to be really upfront with what kind of relationship you want from the beginning. So it starts before you even meet someone. If you are somebody who is dedicated to living polyamorously, you should have that first and foremost on your profile if the platform that you're on doesn't allow you to actually put it as a kind of a status as a, I don't know, some of them have a relationship style field.

Daniel: And put that you are partnered. If you're partnered as well,

Daniel: And I think related to this, related to like being really upfront with your status in any type of public facing way when you meet someone I think it starts with you being really aware of what kind of relationship you want.

Laurel: Yeah.

Daniel: So if you can like do the.

Daniel: poly self help reading and stuff to kind of understand, you know you know, really the nuances of different relationship styles and what it takes to, to keep them running. Coming into the relationship with a really good idea of what you want is going to help you communicate with another person who may not have as much experience .

Laurel: Do you feel like, like in Your guys's relationship, because I always have this, like, I have this anxiety about being the, like, quote unquote, experienced person. And then this might be a total, you know, crazy person anxiety, but then, then my partner who is new to it, defaulting to my ideas and wants about polyamory rather than forming their own.

Laurel: And like, I don't know, from your perspective, especially like when you two started dating and like you had been non monogamous for some time, or at least already like had this idea in your head of like, right? Because when you started dating, you were like, Daniel, you're like, I'm non monogamous. This is what it is.

Laurel: I

Daniel: wasn't following my own advice though just now, of, of being like well read in, you know vernacular relationship styles. Like, I actually didn't do that. I was a pretty much a self taught polyamorist. And I think when we, when we started, too, I don't know that I, I don't know that I had the tools to express Exactly what I wanted to, and I wish that I had, Nicole, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for, for what good. Oh, I don't think that I had that clear of an idea of that. I was truly polyamorous when we got together. I knew I was wanted a non monogamous relationship that was front and center. This was something, it was something that we talked about. Right off the bat, but I don't know that I was as forthright as I could or should have been about wanting love relationships with others.

Daniel: Although I think I said that. I was like,

Nichole: I want

Daniel: love relationships with others.

Nichole: I mean, it's very interesting because one, I don't know that you had it in your profile that you were not monogamous.

Daniel: Oh, I think I did. I think I did. I

Nichole: don't know that you did. I know that we talked about it. For whatever reason, we exchanged email addresses, and so we were on Gchat.

Nichole: This was eight years ago. I mean, times are different now. And,

Daniel: It was really hard to find her Gchat.

Nichole: You found it eventually, baby. With some careful guidance. So I remember you telling me this over Gchat, I believe, and I was like, It was incredibly traumatic.

Daniel: Yeah.

Nichole: I was like, I don't want to

Daniel: hear about this via Gchat.

Nichole: Well, I was like, yeah, cool. Okay.

Daniel: This is the advice that I have shared is learned from

Laurel: Learning from your own mistakes

Daniel: learned from repeated error And so I think that yeah, where we were I to do it again, and I think Having had that experience. This is how I operate now, right like, poly on the first line of the profile I I think that you have to be I think you have to turn on your people picker You you know, it can be kind of just a vibe check, but even if the person, if the person doesn't have an experience, that doesn't necessarily mean that they won't be able to, to find their way in it.

Daniel: But there's kind of a, like a vibe that you can kind of pick up on about their. Generosity of spirit, their self awareness, their ability to deal with jealousy or insecurity and all these things can kind of become apparent quicker than you might imagine if you look at someone closely.

Nichole: So I guess the advice really is come to the table with what you want.

Nichole: Be secure in what it is that you want, right? Which, if you're going into any dating, Scenario, regardless of how experienced the other person is, you should probably already have an idea of that. And then have conversations, ask questions, have that person ask questions of you. But Laurel, I'm wondering for you.

Nichole: So I've been very explicit that I do not want to date anybody who doesn't have polyamorous experience. And that's not to say that I never will But right now, my fear is that it would be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl situation where I would be like the quirky, you know, representation of like what this person wants in polyamory and it might not be exactly what you were saying before.

Nichole: Like maybe they're following like my flavor of polyamory and it's not necessarily like the one that's going to work for them. Yeah. Definitely.

Laurel: Definitely. I think that there's. Two things I want to touch on, because one, the like, know what you want piece of it is like, I definitely think in terms of like, yeah, like know what you want and how you structure your relationships generally.

Laurel: But I think the big thing that for me at least makes it more accessible to date people who don't have experience with polyamory is to have no expectations about what my relationship with that person will look like or be like. And not that I don't form with them. Like hopes or expectations over time.

Laurel: But like, that is definitely like when, when it's apparent to me that like, yeah, this person does not have experience with polyamory or they're new to it in some way or another. It is a little bit of like self protection in a sense, but like, yeah, it's like, okay, I'm going to like, Seriously, and I try to do it in general, but specifically with people who are new to poly, like, seriously let go of the expectations for What that relationship can be.

Daniel: But you do come with parameters around what the person can expect of you. Absolutely. Yeah. Like I, like straight up, I will never be monogamous for you. And like, I'm very clear that I'm like multi partnered. And I'm not super, I'm not very prescriptive about my time. And you've probably noticed, like, I don't like to have like days reserved for people.

Laurel: I like, I don't know, that kind of thing. It squicks me out. I don't know why. I agree. And it just puts so much pressure on it. Although.

Nichole: It is nice because I know generally maybe around a Tuesday or a Wednesday, you two will get together. And so I plan, what meal am I going to make myself that night?

Laurel: There's something, yeah, there's something like, like, like it's nice having the sort of like comfort of like, like a routine without being beholden to a prescription. .

Nichole: Yeah.

Laurel: I also think a big part of it is talking about what kind of polyamory you practice and Yeah, because I think you talked about this on the other episode, Nicole, but like, yeah, if it's the difference between like parallel poly and you're not really talking about your other partners with your other partners, they're not really seeing or meeting each other versus like kitchen table, like what we practice, like, like I tell people pretty upfront, like, yeah, I kind of like expect you to meet my other partners.

Laurel: Yeah. Like I wouldn't feel good if like you refused to do that. And we never got to that point in our relationship. Like I talk about my other partners. And like,

Nichole: well, that's part of setting expectations, right? It's like coming to the table with knowing what it is that you want, which honestly, like, You should probably do in monogamous relationships too.

Nichole: It's just monogamous relationships are much easier to define, right? You can come to the table knowing that you want kids and a house and a marriage and all of that other stuff with Polly. You have to come to the table with like, here's all these words you may not have heard of. And here are some places, here's a glossary.

Nichole: Here is A podcast that you can listen to. Here's a YouTube channel. Here's a book that you can read. Here's the polyamory Reddit. Like there's a million different resources that you can share with somebody. I find myself more in situations of like friends who want to be polyamorous or non monogamous and asking me for advice rather than like a person who wants to date me mostly because I don't, I just don't date a lot of people.

Nichole: Yeah.

Daniel: I'm coming back around to like the people picker thing. So, like, what are you looking for in someone that is not experienced in non monogamy or polyamory, right? Like, when you meet that person, okay, they don't have any experience in polyamory. Maybe that gives you pause because you don't know whether they'll be able to work dynamically in the situation, to deal with their own emotions.

Daniel: You don't know what they might want, I think in lieu of that experience, you have to look for soft skills as they call them uh, in the, in the office life. Like things that are going to allow them to move forward. And you kind of have to figure out upfront, you know, they may not have the experience. Do they have the skills?

Daniel: the interpersonal skills

Laurel: to

Daniel: gain that experience. And when you're deciding whether or not you want to start that relationship, like, are they in therapy? Have they ever done therapy? Do they work on themselves in any way? Do they have any kind of mindfulness practice? How is their mental health?

Daniel: Are they caring for their mental health? And if a lot of these, are also in the negative, right? If they don't have any experience in poly, they've never done therapy. They've, you know, they don't have any of these kind of supporting skills, which are going to enable them to try something new and find this path forward.

Daniel: Then you have to ask yourself whether or not you want to start at all.

Nichole: Yeah, absolutely. And those kinds of things are, I look for with people, even with experience with polyamory.

Laurel: Yeah, I feel like curiosity is like the big green flag and that department Cuz so I'm trying to think of like my recent partners that are new to polyamory which like almost all my recent partners are and and many of them I met in the wild, like not on dating apps.

Laurel: Like one, one of whom I met at work, like we would like flirt in the break room a lot and have a lot of conversations. And I'm, I'm one of those people, like, I don't come out. I just like talk about my partners. And if you pick up that I'm talking about several different people or I'm mentioning multitudes at times, like, you'll, you'll, you'll kind of get it.

Laurel: And yeah, when there's like curiosity expressed about that, not like you know, not like weird, like voyeuristic, like what? Oh my God, that's so crazy. But like, like asking more, like, Intentional and like caring questions about like, Oh, what does that look like? Or or like, Oh, how did you like navigate that situation?

Laurel: Or like, wait, but then who do you bring to the company party? Like, like that kind of thing goes a long way. Cause it shows like, at least some like. You know, like, Oh, I don't have the knowledge here, but I'm in, I'm interested in exploring and like understanding this world.

Nichole: I also want to make explicit the point, like dating somebody who might be new to polyamory and coming into it for the first time, not necessarily having the vocabulary or having experience or skills and they're able to work on themselves, I get, this might just be my own experience or.

Nichole: fears coming up, but their ability to take, to take care of themselves is incredibly important to me because I cannot be the person who is like saving them from themselves, right? Like I can't be the person who's telling them that like, who's assuaging their jealousy or building them up or building up their confidence.

Nichole: They have to be able to do that on their own. And I think just as this kind of goes back to my manic pixie dream girl point, right? In that I think as women, we tend to be the caretaker. Yeah. Yep. And my fear with dating somebody who is new to polyamory who maybe doesn't have those soft skills, if I were to date somebody who is new to polyamory, I would be that caretaker.

Laurel: Yeah. Yep. A hundred percent. And it's funny that you said that about the manic pixie dream girl. 'cause that is, have I, I feel like I expressed that to Daniel at some point, or. Somebody recently, that like a recent relationship I was in was like, Oh, I feel like I'm just the manic pixie dream girl. Like, I feel like I am the, like, Oh, you're foray into that, that time that you practice Polly.

Laurel: And and yeah, there's this, you know cause I'm also like, I can also be very chill girl. Like I'm not often incredibly jealous. Like I'm Very like down for the ride on things. I don't have a ton of like expectations of people, but that easily gets like morphed into like Laurel is down for anything and, and thus I can like treat Laurel any which way and like definitely something I'm like working on more because there is this weird thing of like, like, I like that about myself.

Laurel: Like, I like that, like, I'm like along for the ride and can adapt to new situations pretty easily. But I also, like, realized, like, even in some of like my longer term relationships where I like never like set the boundaries or the precedent of like, like, actually, I'm not sure with everything in creation.

Laurel: And like, sometimes my feelings do get hurt and like and realizing how much. How much trouble you can save yourself if you establish that up front, rather than waiting five years. Oops. And that's like, I don't know, I do feel like that is like a it is a funny weird thing in dating people who are new to poly.

Laurel: Who also had still have a lot of like guilt wrapped up and having multiple relationships, aren't really sure what they should or shouldn't talk about. And there's also like, I, when people are new to poly, I feel like there's like the, the kid in the candy shop effect. And I think I definitely had this a little bit too, where I was just like, Oh fuck, I can, I can date everybody and never asked myself, should I date everybody?

Laurel: And the answer is, you know, you shouldn't you really shouldn't.

Daniel: Model good. Time management skills to your newbie poly partner.

Laurel: There is a huge piece of it because you realize like, Oh yeah, you can't actually juggle like 18 people in this week.

Laurel: And you like, it's actually a really bad idea to like stack dates. And but it's also like not great for the people you start seeing and dating. Of course not. Because then it's just like, yeah, it's like, Your eyes were bigger than your stomach. You take on a lot at once. And then suddenly you're like, Oh, frack, I got to get rid of half of this.

Laurel: And like, yeah.

Daniel: I keep getting answers that are also questions that you need to ask yourself about the other person. Yeah, because I'm, because I'm what, because I'm,

Laurel: because you're the, the son of a, a Jewish priestess.

Daniel: I'm, uh, I was raised by a cult of therapists. That's only a slight exaggeration. They never really found a cult, which they thought

Daniel: could live up to their standards

Nichole: I feel like I'm coming to the table with, I don't date people who don't have experience because.

Nichole: They might not have soft skills or they might not or because I'm going to be the person who will be Leading and guiding them and I'm not comfortable doing that or because it triggers any kind of codependency that I might have there's also something to Like exactly what you were saying before with like not having expectations and not having a checklist that people understand Meet these standards that you have.

Laurel: So funny. Cause the other day I was listening to two monogamous people, friends of mine, like talk to each other about dating and like having this realization, like in the process of, you know, dating a bunch of people from apps and whatnot of like, Oh, if they put the checklist down and actually just tried to enjoy being with another human being that they didn't have bad dates anymore.

Laurel: And I like, I've never had like, a bad date. I've never had, like, that tragic, like, Tinder date that people Oh,

Nichole: you haven't? No!

Laurel: And I think that's why, is cause I'm never, like, when I go out, I don't expect anybody to be anything.

Nichole: I mean, yes. I didn't expect that one guy from Tinder to be a flat earth truther.

Nichole: And yet But was that fun? Like, that would be fun. I got some free mac and cheese out of

Daniel: it.

Nichole: That's important.

Daniel: Did I ever tell you about the woman that I went on a date with who was a, like a 2012 obsessive? And she had a little book in her pocket called The Little Book of Coincidences and she brought it out and it was just a diagram of how all the planets, like, each page was like a little diagram of how the planets are gonna all line up like billiard balls in 2012 and just go right into the sun.

Nichole: When was this? I guess before 2012. Yeah. For some reason I thought it was like 2014. That's what I thought at the beginning of the story before we got to the part where the planets get sucked into the sun, but oh man. Wait, there was something that Nicole, you said earlier. That was like so salient and smart and I was like, oh we really need to expand on that.

Nichole: You really wanted to applaud, but you were like, it's probably not going to sound good on a mic. But Daniel started talking. I was like, you have to ask them where the muesli is. No.

Laurel: I was trying to think about, I was trying to think about things that like you could do for it because a lot of this is like oh like Me in the context of that's what I'm saying

Nichole: Is that like, you know I feel like other like people coming to the table are still people even if they don't have experience it is very easy like you were saying before Daniel with people pickers of just like Figuring out what the vibe is, right?

Nichole: So they could have a good vibe, but not necessarily the experience, but they are open to learning and being curious and curiosity is a good thing and at the same time, like maybe don't have a checklist and don't have expectations and so really like the answer to this question is just like, I don't know, date people, date,

Laurel: you know, feel it out, man.

Laurel: Just like feel out the vibes, feel out the

Nichole: vibes.

Daniel: This has got me thinking about a lot of the reasons why people are uncomfortable with non monogamy, you know, and what might be things that could be really easily worked through versus things that are kind of intrinsic to them having a hard time with non monogamy.

Laurel: Yeah.

Daniel: Or animal. Then you think about this aspect of our relationship, which, Who's

Laurel: relationship?

Daniel: Uh, me and Nicole. You guys can't see the eye contact until we start doing the YouTube version of this. Um, I think the main thing that you were uncomfortable with, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm sure you will a lot of it, a lot of it had to do with, like, kind of, world perception about how you, how, how we presented in the world.

Daniel: At least like the things that you were, you know, that you kind of bring up in those kind of those entry turbulence times when we were kind of moving from when we were kind of moving from non monogamy to polyamory. I think it had to, a lot of it had to do with, What it looked like to the outside world.

Daniel: How are you going to explain it to your friends? Like that they were going to think that you were a fool. Like that there was, there was, there was this, this, there was the membrane of like the gaze of the world on it. And I don't know. I don't know that I have any advice about how to deal with that, but I think it's a really salient thing for anybody who is new to polyamory is going to have some of that.

Laurel: It's like

Daniel: this, this, it's, I wouldn't necessarily call it shame, but it's, It has some, it has some, some things in common with shame. It's just about a real discomfort with being perceived as non mononomous, perceived as polyamorous from the, from the outside. And, and I don't know exactly really how to help somebody work through that except with how did I do it?

Daniel: How did I do it? I can't remember.

Nichole: You didn't. That was the point. Is that. I had to work through that on my own. So my perceptions or my fears of how I would be perceived or fears of judgment,

Nichole: I had to work through those on my own. You couldn't do that for me.

Nichole: So I don't think that you do help somebody with that. Yeah, I think you recognize it when it's happening in the moment, potentially. Like, I think it's an observation that you made to me of like, Hey, it seems like you're having some like hangups about how other people are perceiving this, or you have fears of judgments or what have you, but that's as far as you were able to go, I think.

Daniel: Yeah, before you slapped my hand.

Nichole: Yeah, that's probably as far as I would allow you to go, quite honestly, because I am very much like, I cannot and do not want other people to like, fix things for me.

Daniel: Yeah.

Laurel: I think actually one of the things that helps me a lot in that department is being so out myself that like, you know, like when I met one of my partners at work, like it was, people could easily ignore it or create their own narratives to sort of like reconcile the weird things that I say or do. But being able, being able to witness me in all of my fucking joy, like, like, you know, it's one of those things where representation matters, but like, like realizing, like, I'm not going to keep this a secret and that actually I live in a world where people can accept me and I can do my job.

Laurel: And like, Honestly, most people aren't paying that much attention. Like at least like setting that precedent and like space in which my partners can see that I think is helpful. It doesn't like go beyond all barriers. Cause I think like you know, I have definitely have had partners who have had trouble Opening to their families about it or like concerns about, yeah, like co workers.

Laurel: I'm, I'm pretty clear on my end that like, like I'm not gonna be in the closet with you. And don't, don't ask me to lie for you. Especially if you're not gonna make up a lie. Like, don't expect me to like, be on the spot. Like, I was at my, this was like years ago, I was at my girlfriend's like, like, graduation party, like PhD, like, graduation thing.

Laurel: And her sister came up to me and asked me how I knew her. And that was like, that was the moment where I froze and I looked at our mutual boyfriend. And he swooped in and was like, Oh no, it's okay to like be out to sis. But like, like one, like, fuck you. You never told your sister about me. But also like, I didn't know what to do or say. And I didn't need, like, up until that point, I was also, like, pretty new at poly at that time.

Laurel: Up until that point, I didn't know that I had that boundary. I'm not going to be like a, a hidden figure for you.

Nichole: And that's a boundary that you have.

Laurel: Yeah.

Nichole: Right. And. I think the journey that somebody is going to take to get to the place where they can introduce you or they can talk to their friends and family about it. It has to be theirs. Yeah. Yeah. You get to model being open and they get to pick and choose like how much they're willing to invest in that.

Nichole: I don't know that it's necessarily like a, it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. If somebody was not super out because I'm not super out and that's not necessarily because of shame. It's because nobody at work has my personal information at all. Right. Yeah. Like nobody has my phone number. Nobody has my Instagram handle.

Nichole: I do not share personal stuff at work because I have done it before and I don't like it. Fair. Even when they asked me how my wedding was. At a team meeting, I said, fine. Because I did not want to get into it. And people kept asking like, can we see pictures? And I was like, yeah, maybe.

Laurel: Fine. It's like a parent asking their teenager how school was that day.

Nichole: It's none of their fucking business. That's fair. It's none of their business. Yeah.

Daniel: I'm really out to some people at work. Actually, most people at work. Um, I told my boss when he came to our wedding uh, me and Nicole's wedding. And I was like, well, now you're going to know uh, here's my partner, Laurel.

Daniel: Here's her partner, James. Their partners Ziggy, Otto Wendy. No, I'm just making up fictional names now. So, my experience with him has been that he's just curious about it not in a prurient kind of way, but in a way that's just like, like he's like Guy on Mushroom's mind blown. Like Whoa, like how, how do you, so

Nichole: I feel like, I feel like he's a good audience,

Daniel: Chris, I know you're going to be listening to this.

Daniel: I

Nichole: feel like this is an entire digression that we could go down though. Like how out we are or how like,

Daniel: all right.

Daniel: Shall we move on? We shall, cause we've been recording for a while. I know this is, this is going to be a bitch to edit. We could just have an episode that's just. You always want to cut it early and I'm going to say, All right, go on. I say no. Okay, go. No. Let's go. Hey, muesli. Um, For our hit segment

Laurel: our

Daniel: hit segment is this Polly.

Song: Is this Polly or not?

Daniel: We're going to be um, answering the question of a piece of media. Is this Polly? We didn't really find out much until like, like uh, until about like five minutes before we started recording. We're like going through all sorts of stuff.

Laurel: Remember that Wonder Woman movie?

Daniel: Yeah.

Daniel: Which is supposed to show how very little Representation of any kind of vaguely polyamorous anything there is. Oh, yeah

Nichole: It has been seven years since we watched this movie and we didn't watch it together.

Nichole: Yeah But you also watched Couple to Thruple without us. So like, I guess we're able to consume media without each other. Jury is out. So Daniel read us the Wikipedia entry for the plot and that was a good refresher.

Laurel: Professor, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. The Wonder Women. Thank

Nichole: you. I can't even remember the name of it.

Nichole: So you have two professors who are husband and wife. One works at Harvard, one works at Radcliffe. They are doing research. The husband hires a student aide named Olive, and he starts to fall in love with her. The wife also starts to fall in love with her. This becomes apparent when they are testing their new invention called the lie detector.

Daniel: And they can't ignore their feelings. Do you love me? No. Wee oo wee oo wee oo wee oo wee oo wee oo! You're fucking lying. Ha ha ha ha ha! Which was the inspiration for the the Lasso of Truth? Oh, for Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth? Lasso of Truth.

Nichole: We're not there yet, so The professor gets

Daniel: I'm gonna make her back up and do the whole thing again.

Daniel: This is why I didn't want to do this because

Nichole: we haven't

Daniel: watched it. You hate having all the details about the muesli until you really need them. So

Nichole: the professor gets fired. The wife is the main breadwinner. They are raising children together. The professor wanders into some shop and becomes obsessed and inspired by S& M.

Nichole: Cartoonery. Cartoonery! But explicit, sexually explicit drawings of an S& M fashion.

Daniel: Yeah, like proto Betty Page stuff.

Nichole: Yes. Yeah. And he is inspired to make an Amazonian superhero. And eventually they land on the name Wonder Woman. And so he starts to make this comic strip about Wonder Woman. And there are definitely like S& M themes within it and lesbian themes within it.

Nichole: At the same time, they are all raising their family and they're, you know, living their happy lives. They tell the neighbors that Olive is a widow and, Has to live with them because classic, she is unmarried classical, A neighbor walks in to all of them having sex

Daniel: And this is the other thing that we can get on the sample pad is laurel's, sex snicker,

Daniel: And it'll, it'll be both in, in reaction. Like, like I'll say something dirty and Laurel and we'll do, and Oh God, God . So then. Start from the beginning. I

Nichole: hate you.

Nichole: so then the professor has a heart attack, and after the success of Wonder Woman has been happening for many years, and Olive, um Did you skip the part where they kicked

Daniel: all, where you kicked Olive out of the house? Oh yeah,

Nichole: they kick her out. This is the fucking, I wish, like, they should have just, like, watched the movie or something.

Nichole: I don't know that I can talk about it.

Daniel: So right, let me um, I'll pick up from here. When they're discovered. Inflagrante. Is that the word?

Nichole: I don't know that this is interesting to listen to. This is what I'm talking about.

Daniel: Well, we'll see when the numbers come back. Oh my god. So they had to kick Olive out or they didn't have to, you know, like and years later, he gets cancer and they bring Olive back when he's kind of on his deathbed, and he asks his wife to submit to Olive, as she's never done before because she is, has to be in control of everything, but now she submits to Olive, and they beg, and they all admit that they can't live without Olive, and they invite Olive back into their life, Marston dies, and then Olive and Elizabeth, who is the wife I don't know if we introduced her they live together for like 40 more years until one of them dies and they live happily ever after.

Daniel: Yeah, they're just

Laurel: roommates. I

Daniel: don't know if that's

Nichole: the truth. But it's all based on a true story, basically, and we have no idea how true it is. I would like to do some, some more of the story. Research, actually, which is also why I wish

Daniel: we were doing this. I went down a lot of internet rabbit holes when the movie came out.

Daniel: It's pretty much all true.

Laurel: That

Daniel: entire story is pretty much all true.

Laurel: My favorite part is like the therapeutic quality of BDSM. Yeah,

Daniel: that was very compelling. Mm hmm.

Laurel: Like, like, yeah.

Daniel: I liked the the parallel of like the lie detector as the crux for this entire relationship and like a lot of the influence in the comics because it's like all about bringing to the surface like things that people might not be willing to say outright like it's I don't know.

Daniel: It's an interesting, it's an interesting metaphor for intimacy, right?

Nichole: Mm hmm.

Laurel: It's also in tandem with him, like, developing his, like, disc theory, which is, like, basically, like, personality theory. test kind of stuff. I actually have done one for work.

Laurel: This is that?! Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

Nichole: I had to do that for work too! Yes. I would have totally brought to the table, like, Hey guys, do you know that this is based on professor Marsden? Did you know that he was in a closed triad?

Daniel: All right. So this personality test tells you whether you're an olive or an Elizabethan. I want t shirts. I'm an olive,

Nichole: that is really interesting with disc theory though, or the disc like assessor, because it plots you on a pie chart basically. And there are only so many people who exactly line up with one type of personality. You're likely on a gradient, right? You're likely on the spectrum somewhere in between a couple of them.

Laurel: They say like, cause like Myers Briggs, you're like, Oh, you're a whatever. But this one, it's like, you're a, I feel like, I don't remember it super well. I remember getting in an argument with the woman leading the workshop because I didn't actually test into anything. It was like, we can't define you.

Nichole: Laurel.

Nichole: That doesn't surprise me at all.

Daniel: The same thing happened to me. Me and Laurel had this whole weird, like, like moment of recognition where we'd both been in these office settings, given the test. And. Did not end up in any of the categories and were criticized for it. Like, Oh, you must have been answering dishonestly

Laurel: in order.

Daniel: You just have to do it again because you know, obviously obviously you're broken, not our

Laurel: test. That's supposed to define someone's personality. It was wild. Yeah.

Nichole: Anyways. This would be a different thing, I guess, if you would actually test it and, and landed somewhere. Because I was thinking about this because it is like a spectrum and their relationship was fluid.

Nichole: It's like he came to the, they came to the table with the understanding that like people are not one thing and their relationship was not one thing. It was not like. The man and wife kind of thing. It was very fluid.

Laurel: This, the movie got a lot of flack from the polysphere when it came out. Yeah. I don't remember this.

Laurel: Yeah. Cause like, cause they treat all of poorly. I mean, they do. She's the one that has to move out. Yeah. But I thought I really liked that aspect of it because like one, okay. I get it. Like there's so little representation of. Polly in pop culture. So it really sucks when it's like negative portrayal, but like, I was like, this is really honest.

Laurel: Like, these are people that don't know what the fuck they're doing, they're making it up as they go along, they get serious backlash and repercussions, like, there are still people who behave this way now, when like, the backlash and repercussions aren't that bad, that will, yeah, kick out the third.

Nichole: But that's also what happened.

Nichole: Yeah. Like, that's historically what happened, so I don't know how people could be mad about it.

Daniel: It's a difference between a story and a self help book, like they're mad. Like poly community is mad because it's not a perfect, like

Nichole: representation

Daniel: of idyllic poly life.

Daniel: Yeah. Not only would that be dishonest, but it would be boring.

Laurel: Oh yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Daniel: So I guess this brings us to the question, is this Polly?

Laurel: Yes, I think it's like very honestly Polly. I don't really, I'm not like into like closed relationships in general. But like, it's definitely polyamorous.

Nichole: I guess we never got to explore whether or not they were open or closed because it was enough that they were just with each other, you know? And it was, and he died in 1947, so didn't have a ton of time. But it is a triad in that they are all in relation with each other.

Nichole: Whereas we are not that. So. I would say by standard definition, it is poly. They meet the markers of like what a type of polyamorous relationship is. One of those types being a closed triad.

Daniel: Yeah. And I think we got to take what we can get. Like, like it's like It's like when I see representation of Jews, like, well, you know, Mrs.

Daniel: Maisel, the actor isn't Jewish, but you know, it's nice to see a, it's nice to see a show. That's just, you know, a bunch of Jews going around doing Jewish things. A bunch of Jews, Jewin about. Jewin Jewin it up, Jewin the cud. So I'm just happy to see something that is, for the most part, a really positive representation of polyamory.

Daniel: Sure. They treat their partner. It's got a happy ending. And then they uh, two out of three of the closed triad lived throughout the rest of their life together. Like,

Nichole: yeah,

Daniel: it's a, it was the 40s. Yeah.

Nichole: Yeah. I would be very curious to see how well it did in the box office, what the critics response was to it.

Daniel: That actor was terrible. Mr. Marsden was terrible. That is the Not the one thing, but it was one of the things that I remember walking away from the movie with was he was not the first choice to play that part. Elizabeth, whomever that actress was, was definitely the first choice. Olive, quite honestly, They could have rotated in and out any blonde.

Nichole: I would not have noticed, but professor Marsden, I think was supposed to be another actor. And then they ended up with him. That's how Nicole also describes your love life. You just rotate any blonde in and out or whatever. I won't notice the difference. That is not true. We've, we've, we've established that I rotate out a.

Daniel: A curvy queer woman with a pixie cut. We have talked, that could be, that will be a rabbit hole that we go down. One of these times is our types. Ooh. Yeah. We'll save it though. Yeah. Yeah. Save it. Zip it. Can it. Bop it. Squeeze it.

Song: This has been Polyamateur Hour, a production of Risa Records. If you have a question for Ask the Amateurs, or a recommendation for Is This Poly, please email us at polyamateurhour at gmail dot com. If you enjoyed the show, and you know you did, you perv, please subscribe to us on your podcatcher of choice, leave us a five star review, and most importantly, tell at least one person in your life to check us out.

Song: But we hope you tell three. Remember, the advice given by the amateurs should not be followed, unless you are prepared to be ecstatically happy, successful, and strange. Until next time!