Living in a throuple, quad, & more! with author Laura Boyle

Do you dream of living in a polyamorous pod? Do you have non-nesting partners? Kids? You might need to do your homework first. As part of our Polyamory In Depth season, author Laura Boyle (Monogamy? In this Economy?) talks through assumptions and expectations about polyam homelife.

 In this episode:

• Author and relationship coach Laura Boyle 
• Host, sex educator, and energy worker Karen Yates 
• Monogamy? In this Economy? – buy on Bookshop and support Wild & Sublime
• Six Recommended Books on Nonmonogamy - NY Times gift article

Get Say It Better in Bed, Karen’s free guide to upping your intimacy pleasure. Download here!

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Prefer to read the convo? Full episode transcripts are available on our website.

Transcript

Wild & Sublime Season 7, ep 2
Living in a throuple, quad or more!

Laura Boyle  0:02 
I think the most important takeaway I found from talking to so many people about their process of either integrating partners with their currently existing children, or things like this, or choosing to have children with additional partners, was the idea that you need to get on the same page with your partners about what actions and activities make someone apparent

Karen Yates  0:29 
Welcome to Wild & Sublime, a sexy spin on infotainment, no matter your preferences, orientation or relationship style. Based on the popular live Chicago show, I chat about sex and relationships with citizens from the world of sex positivity and comedy. You'll hear meaningful conversations, dialogs that go deeper, and information that can help you become more free in your sexual expression. I'm sex educator. Karen Yates, our monthly patreon supporters pay for a large part of our operating expenses, their contributions from $5 on up, help us big time plus members get discounts on show tickets and merch and receive wild and sublime news before anyone else and more interested in helping us spread the message of sex positivity, go to patreon.com/wildandsublime.

Karen Yates  1:26 
Hey folks, welcome to the second episode of our "polyamory in depth" season. Today, I'll be chatting with author and relationship coach Laura Boyle about her latest book, "Monogamy? in this economy? finances, child rearing and other practical concerns of polyamory" and folks who are not in open relationships might want to listen too, because we'll be talking about what happens when people move in together, specifically into multi partnered housing situations, but also how expectations and assumptions can really derail us monogamy in this economy, was named one of the six non monogamy books recommended by therapists in the New York Times. 2024 round up of clinician and researcher recommendations. And that is a great list, and we will link to it in the show notes. Laura Boyle has 20 years of experience in being in non monogamous relationships, and has surveyed hundreds of cohabitating polyam people to create her latest book today we touch on the legalities of living with multiple adults in a household, including buying a house, the practicalities of living polyamorously, like your mattress or mine, and what about those non nesting partners, plus parenting in a polyam household, and how to handle transitions? I think you're going to find this a fascinating episode. I recorded this while on the land of the Council of three fires, the Ojibwe, the Odawa and the Potawatomi nations, also known as Chicago. Laura resides on the land of the Quinnipiac, the pago set Pequot and Mohegan people, colonially known as New Haven Connecticut. To learn more about the lands you reside on, go to native hyphen lands.ca.

Karen Yates  3:18 
And now the episode. Enjoy.

Karen Yates  3:23 
Laura Boyle, welcome.

Laura Boyle  3:24 
Thank you so much for having me.

Karen Yates  3:27 
Oh, I'm excited to get into your book today. It was so detailed and so I mean, what can I say? This is a must buy for folks who are planning on having an extended polyamory family in a housing situation. So I first want to talk a little bit about the survey you put together or polyamorous families, and the survey that resulted in this book. Why did you decide to create a survey, and how did you go about getting folks to participate?

Laura Boyle  4:04 
Well, so I have lots of clients in coaching, and lots of people who reach out to me to talk about their polyamory, who have expressed to me that like they're worried about their future, or they're worried about the limits on how they can sort of live their lives, or what kind of lives they can live, because they have some kind of sense that in order to have a family or in order to explore certain kinds of life, they need to return to monogamy or their the values that they're currently espousing as polyamorous people won't align with that kind of communal or or non traditional life that they're trying to have based on the values that they're coming to understand as polyamorous people, and so I wanted to have something more to tell them than the sort of anec data that I had as someone who has been polyamorous for a very long time, who has raised my children with three parents, and as someone who's friends with people who are having these non traditional families. But I didn't, I didn't want to sort of just go, "Well, I and this handful of people I know are doing this fairly successfully, so I think you will too, right? All of our kids are doing well, and none of us have been chased out of town because of this, so I think you'll be fine." I wanted to have more to present them with than this. And while there's the one really excellent longitudinal study that's 20 years long by Eli Sheff, I wanted to give them something that maybe had a little more personal color than that. And so I put together this really simple, 10 question survey, and I made the last question of it, would you follow up with me about this?

Laura Boyle  5:57 
And I put this survey out, and I asked basically everyone I know in the polyamorous content creation space to share it. And I was really lucky, because not only did most of them share it, but also researchers like Eli chef and like Dr Heath session, Jer also shared it. And so I got a really large sample of responses back of complete responses that answered every question in a format that was intelligible. We did get a couple of like robot looking answers that were just like numbers that didn't make sense in the short answer fields. I excluded those of complete answers. We had 462 and so that's a really large sample,

Karen Yates  6:44 
yeah.

Laura Boyle  6:45 
And so I collected all these samples, and there were more than 150 people who said they would do some kind of follow up with me, who either gave me their email or their phone number, some kind of contact information through which I could contact them for follow up, and who did some kind of follow up with me, whether it was that they answered that very first email from me or they texted me back and said, Actually, I'm going to answer these two questions, but then I don't want to do further follow up, whatever it was, but The vast majority of them were really excited to participate in this, and to give me more and more information, I ended up doing a whole bunch of like, Zoom calls and face times with people all over the US and Canada, including several face times where like, people's toddlers stole the iPad and like were running Around The House ahead of them trying to show me their whole house, which was very cute.

Laura Boyle  7:46 
And so I got this really rich picture of how people are living in polyamorous households, and then I turned that into this book, yeah. So it sounds like you were kind of astonished at the level of of, you know, next, next stage information that you got right, like, I mean, there are all kinds of really wonderful, valid studies that people are sharing the data from that have on the order of 25 to 30 participants.

Laura Boyle  8:20 
And I got over 450.

Karen Yates  8:24 
Yeah, what I really appreciated about your book was it's chock full of anecdotes. I mean, you you're really good in each chapter with each situation, including at least one story, if not two, of what you know various people in real, real situations were doing. And I certainly appreciated that. And then at some points, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is really complicated, you know, because you get into quads, or, you know, where four people are having relationships with each other, and then there's a de escalation in the relationship. So that was really great, because it's, it wasn't just this for me as I was reading it, it was not this real simplistic, like this is how you deal with deal with finances. It's like this is these are real people dealing with real situations, which I think readers will really like. Let's start with the way I want to do the interview is, I want to start about the nuts and bolts and practicalities of living together, and then, like, the emotions and the beliefs that sort of under underpin everything. But, you know, the the big theme I felt in your book, and I'd really like you to talk about this before we start, is assumptions that when people come together, generally, you know, even in monogamous relationships, co habitating, there's an assumption that this other person is going to clean their dishes the same way I like to clean the dishes. Or the person's going we're going to agree, of course, on these things we've never even talked about. And I mean, was that, am I correct in saying that is one of the major themes?

Laura Boyle  9:57 
I mean, I think in most Relationships, especially in most monogamous relationships. But in most relationships, we come to them assuming, because we love people, that everything else will fall into place, the things that we disagree upon will gradually disappear, you know, melt into the ether. And in fact, the Gottmans [marriage therapists] like to call it deciding which fights you can just keep having, right? which things are small enough that you can just say this is the eternal small thing. And one of my favorite bloggers, who is a knitting blogger, who I've been following since 2006 periodically mentions that she and her husband have been fighting about the wrong and right way to load the dishwasher. Oh, since I started reading her blog almost 20 years ago, right? So, like, these are the things that are really in everyone's lives, no matter what your relationship style is, forever. And so acknowledging that these are things that we don't think about until we're doing them, but are what our everyday lives are built out of. And so taking the minute to talk about it if we're in this relationship style that says that we're trying to be more conscious and more communicative. Add it to the list of things you're willing to talk about?

Karen Yates  11:23 
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's funny, because, you know the that's the other thing I kept thinking about as I was reading the book. Of like, yes, they always say polyamory is you have to have excellent communication skills and and reading the book. I'm like, Okay, if you thought polyamory needed communication, if you're you're extending your your family, inside a house that is serious communication. It's, it is it is not no joke. It is no joke. So let's talk a little bit. Let's start with just the housing zoning conundrum, because I don't think I knew some of the things you put out there about laws.

Laura Boyle  12:03 
So in some ways, this is a very American problem, because the United States is the home of single family zoning. It's the place where this is proliferated to the greatest degree. The Canadians have a small bit of a problem with it, but they've contained it to a greater degree than we have, and the Brits only suffer from it to a very small degree and in smaller towns, not in cities, but single family zoning. Is this policy that says decided either town by town or county by county, depending on whether you're in sort of what kind of state you're in, in the northeast, almost everything is town by town. In the rest of the country, it tends to be organized by counties, and it's laws that say this is how we define what a family is and what the humans that make up a family are. And if you have more than those people living in it, this house is no longer being used as a home for a family. It is now a boarding house or a hotel or a brothel or a whatever. And so that's how they passed these laws in the first place, they're all passed in, like the 1800s and then they get upheld because, well, single family zoning sounds like it makes sense, but what it is is it's racist and classist, and it's a way to say we don't want those kind of people who have to live in groups of six and Eight and whatever, to afford to live in this neighborhood, to be able to move into this neighborhood, and that's why they get upheld gradually. California, section by section, has been taking that apart at a faster rate than other states, and on a town by town level, some other places have been removing single family zoning, but most single family zoning is defined as two married adults and one additional adult can live in a space. Some of them have exemptions that related adults can stay there, but usually they list what a related adult counts as, and it'll be like the parents of the married couple, the siblings of the married couple, no more than this number of people, so that you can't move like all of your siblings and your mother and father and right or it'll be like, but no more than this, many per bedroom, things like that,

Karen Yates  14:48 
And so what..and also, there's, there's issues around buying a home. And so can you talk a little bit about the you do include some tips about getting a lease? Getting a loan?

Laura Boyle  15:02 
Yeah I mean, a lot of it is very individual. It's about finding a loan officer who's a little bit more open minded, or about deciding who in your polycule has the appropriately high amount of like credit and income to do the purchase, and the rest of you being non owners or paying the rent and writing out leases or sub leases to the people who live in the home, right? But if you do all want to be on the same deed, all you have to do is find a mortgage officer who's a little bit open minded. It's possible. It's more possible in places that are a little bit more liberal, right? It's a little harder in states that aren't but the coasts, you can pretty much do it for the most part. I spoke to people who had done it in several other states, who had had varying degrees of difficulty, most of them were unwilling to term it as a form of discrimination, but they were willing to term it as we had had to ask several people in a row before somebody didn't laugh us out of the office kind of thing, right? They had to shop around significantly before they found someone who was willing to be helpful. Like, it's easier to find a realtor who's friendly than it is to find the lender who's friendly, because by the time you're looking for the realtor, you already have your loan lined up, usually.

Karen Yates  16:39 
And then later in the conversation, or in the book you talk about, and this is more around like planning trusts and what have you, once you get into the real nitty gritty of finances. But you also talk about, you know, some people start an LLC,

Laura Boyle  16:55 
Oh, yeah. I mean, in some states, what you can do is, if you set yourselves up as an LLC, you can have the LLC be who buys the house that doesn't work in every state. You can also have that all of you are trustees of a trust that purchases the house from say that like a married couple within your poly fuel originally owns the house, your LLC, can purchase it from them, or you can have it set up so that you're putting the home into trust if someone dies, right, and that the rest of you are beneficiaries of that trust. Having trusts be where you put things in the case of death of some of you, is something that a lot of the attorneys I spoke to, I spoke to several attorneys while doing research for this, and almost all of them mentioned talking to someone while doing your financial planning about where the best place to put assets in the case of someone's death is because trusts and irrevocable trusts, if you've been together a long time, is often the best way to hold assets if there are several of you who are going to be beneficiaries later, and also they're good in our sort of uncertain political climate currently in a Post Dobbs world, because there's some chance based on what's the word I want the decision that concurrence, the concurrence to Dobbs, that said like they're willing to look at a bunch of other decisions, including Obergefell [Obergefell v Hodges, ed] as things that they might want to potentially take away in the future. Keeping your assets in a trust is more protected in the case that somebody undermines gay marriage in the future. 

Laura Boyle  18:53  
So especially people where the marriages in question are not straight marriages, or where there was the possibility that upon the death of someone who's in a marriage in the polycule, you were thinking of getting married to your remaining partners, and it wouldn't be a straight marriage. Putting the assets into a trust just in case, is something that several of the attorneys I talked to mentioned, and mentioned that they're counseling their clients to do at this time, especially ones who are in the South. If this becomes a state by state issue. Sure, if you're in a state that's less friendly to queer issues, it's worth considering, but they said, see a local attorney and find out what makes the most sense for your state and for sort of the area that you're in, because if you're like where I am in Connecticut, you're a lot less likely to get undermined by any of these situations than if you're someone who's in, say, Texas or Louisiana.

Karen Yates  19:46  
So let's talk a little bit about actually the spaces in the living spaces themselves. At one point you say, you know, standard real estate advice doesn't always apply. And you talk a lot about bathrooms and how more modern bathrooms have the en suite bathroom off of the the largest bath bedroom, or, you know, there's the Jack and Jill, that's called the Jack and Jill with the two doors. And, like, talk a little bit about that... as well as just, I mean, this opens up the whole, you know, bedrooms and where do people sleep? So, yeah, I would love for you to chat a little bit about those issues.

Laura Boyle  20:31  
Well so I always find it because I am someone who has generally been a renter, I always think it's interesting to see what people did when they owned a home and which renovations they chose to do and what was important to them. I thought it was funny that more than once people mentioned knocking an extra door in from a hallway into a fancy en suite bathroom, because they were like, "No, this bathroom was too good and we needed to share it with all the adults in the polycule but we didn't need everyone walking through a bedroom to get to it." so that I thought that was great, both because it's clever and because it would never have occurred to me. But also, when I lived in a V, we happened to have the kind of hilarity of 80s architecture. That was we had a very nice hallway bathroom between the two larger bedrooms of the house, because no one was putting in like en suite bathrooms for every room in 1981 so we just had two bathrooms off of two different hallways in our house, and that was the setup of the house, and one of them was between the two big bedrooms. And we were like, Oh, great, we have accidentally created a master hallway that contains all of the adults, perfect. And so I thought that was a good example of you could sometimes luck into architecture that's really out of style but suits your needs really well, and all you need to do is modernize a tiny bit, and you're all set. Right? The people who bought our house after us, I'm sure, messed up a bunch of it in the name of, look how modern we can make this. And made it no longer great for polyamorous people, but probably great for their small family.

Karen Yates  22:25  
So yeah, you had a great hack for sound dampening. So when to when, when you know a non-nesting partner comes over, or when people are having sex and you you want some privacy, what? What were some of your sound dampening hacks? 

Laura Boyle  22:44  
So I'm trying to think of which ones I included in the book. I know my personal thing is just throwing on headphones, because that's what I've always done. Like when I was younger, I lived in a one bedroom apartment with my ex husband, and that was always what my personal thing has been, is like, Oh no, it is. This is the time I am putting on my big headphones, I'm listening to a podcast, or I am listening to some music, and I'm gonna just go to bed here on the couch, but I worked a second shift job at that point. So if I'm coming home and they're still at the end of a date, it's 12:30 I'm going to bed, right? But anyway,

Karen Yates  23:29  
You talked a little bit about the bookshelves.

Laura Boyle  23:32  
Oh yeah, if you set up bookshelves on the wall, that's the same wall as a closet. Between those two things, you can create so much sound barrier that's so good, but like things like that, people talked about making sure that you had wall hangings on both sides of a wall. Or those tiles. I don't know if you guys have seen them on the internet. They were really popular on Tiktok for a while. The like studio sound tiles. Everyone was trying to sell them to us during the pandemic. They actually do work. But yeah, those are the sorts of things that I've seen people do. Some of them are more effective than others. For some people, you still sort of need the emotional distance of being willing to go out or being on a different floor than people or whatever. But it really is partly just about what distance do you need from this information? And for a lot of us, not being able to hear is enough distance.

Karen Yates  24:30  
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, some time in the book is spent around really negotiating, and some of the the complications come from folks that aren't, that don't, don't have polyfidelity within the group that they're living in. It's so it's a lot of the issues start coming up around non nesting partners that are coming into the space and like, how do you have a private date? How do you have privacy? Or, if you're an introvert, you know, how much.... How much space do you need? There's there were situations in your book where you talk about folks who basically, say, are living in their bedrooms, and then there's a common area. So people are inventive, but it does seem like a fair amount of conversation is needed about all of these scenarios. 

Laura Boyle  25:21  
Well, right? And I think the folks who I spoke to who had been together the longest had had the largest number of transitions and then hit equilibrium, right? And whether that equilibrium was just that they'd gotten used to whoever the non nesting partner was and now they had routines, or whether the equilibrium was that they had settled into a state of polyfidelity with the folks in the home, or what the changes were that they'd settled into. People come to states of sort of long term equilibrium over time, and then they get more comfortable. But every new set of changes brings a new set of adjustments and conversations, and how do we get through these transitions? 

Laura Boyle  26:08  
And those are the times when I end up seeing people in coaching, whether it's that they're moving into a new home, whether it's, oh, we've been here for a year and a half, and we got really comfortable in the house, but now that we're really comfortable, those of us who only have the one partner have started dating again, or we have been in the same setup where each of us has two partners for a long time, and the person who has, you know, the hinge, who's had the two partners who live here decided that they have enough free time because work has calmed down that they can go on some dates, and the two of us who are spoke partners, have some feelings about that. "Let's talk about the feelings and about what we're going to do for space, because they don't really have a separate bedroom. We don't have a guest room." So who's getting bumped out to a couch the night that they have someone over, or are they only dating people who can host? And most of the time it's that they're only dating people who can host. But the one time that they don't, that's a whole series of adventures. Are we figuring out the finances so that they can go to hotels every time in this economy, usually not unless someone works in hotels. But like...

Karen Yates  27:24  
it seems that, yeah, there's this, I the other, yeah, you bring up, especially around finances, it's like very real things like hotels and, I mean, that's, that's where this also is reminding me of this, this side conversation about polyamory for affluent people, you know, it's like, well, who can, who can afford taking their partners, their non-nesting partners, to hotels? And that's where you get into that, where you know this idea of polyamory is, you know, a very old idea and a way to ensure survival, right, in cultures ...I got lost. I got lost--

Laura Boyle  28:03  
And like I spoke to folks who have been polyfidelitous and living together for 40 years in the greater Seattle area, while I was doing the follow ups for this. And like, they've been polyfidelitous as for about 15 years now, but before that, they were seeing folks outside the home, and they were like, Oh, the biggest challenge for us when we were still seeing people wasn't figuring out how to manage seeing other people. It was figuring out how we all felt about it, right? Because every time there was a new person, there were new feelings about how that went, or about how holidays would go, when there were more places to potentially be. And I recognized all of those feelings from them talking about it, and I could see why it became more stable for them to go well, for the last few years, we haven't, and maybe it's calmer this way. We'll see if anybody falls in love with someone, we'll worry about it. Then we have community and comfort.

Karen Yates  29:16  
Well, you do. ...There's this great section when you when you say, is it really? Is it really a metamour problem? And you you actually talk about --metamour being the partner of of your partner--and it's easy to lob anger at the metamour because they're not really part of the scene. But can you talk? Can you dig into these areas that you brought up

Laura Boyle  29:43  
well, so this is one of my soap boxes. Is this idea that it is so much easier to forgive someone who you have these like nice, warm, bubbly feelings that we have for our partners who we love very much, and that doesn't mean that we always forgive people we love overnight, or anything like this or that. We can't be nice and mad at people that we love. But when there's a problem that we're having that both our partner and our metamour are involved in, we forgive our partners first, and we give an extra dose of the blame to our metamour. And if we live with our partner and our metamour, there's a little extra friction and a little extra resentment of that meta. And so a little extra care has to be taken with that relationship. You have to really build up that friendship, that personal relationship, that good roommate care with that person, and if it's a non nesting meta, you have to take some care to make sure that you're placing the blame appropriately and that you're not letting your partner dodge responsibility for choices that they are making, right and that he's not going, Oh, well, she really wants to do this, and she made me this, that the other No, you wanted to stay out extra late. You wanted to not get home until 3am when you said you'd be home by 12:30 and then you were too tired this morning to get up and do the thing with the kids that you said you'd do right?

Karen Yates  31:27  
One's, one's, one's, uh, partner is not the victim of the metamour,

Laura Boyle  31:31  
exactly. And so you have to make sure you're placing the blame where it appropriately goes and when things are patterns, especially, it's important to go, okay, but are you taking responsibility for your own actions, partner? And can you sit down with me and make some agreements with me about how you will behave for the things that affect me? And if you won't, can we have some serious conversations about that before I make any decisions about how I feel about this metamore of mine, especially when it's a non nesting metamour.

Karen Yates  32:11  
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Karen Yates  32:29  
[To Laura] and then you go on to say, there's nothing wrong with not liking your metamour, which I thought was great, because I think in in polyamory circles, it's always about, you know, go out and become friends with your metamour and like, sometimes maybe that's not gonna happen.

Laura Boyle  32:49  
So my unpopular hot take is... 

Karen Yates  32:53  
Lay it on me baby! 

Laura Boyle  32:55  
When, when it's not, when it's someone you live with, it's different. You have to when you're moving in with someone, do all the due diligence to make sure that you're actually compatible enough to move in with them in the first place. And you have to have an exit strategy for if you're not, and you discover that you're not once they move in, right? But for all these non nesting metamours, and for all of your you're just dating, they're just dating. You're out in the world being polyamorous, and we're not talking about cohabiting for a minute. I think that being some degree of garden party or parallel or a kind of soft, flexible you figure out whether or not you like people, and then you build a relationship from there is healthier than going being kitchen table is the goal.

Karen Yates  33:49  
And just so, a lot of terms got thrown out just now. 

Laura Boyle  33:52  
Sorry, I know that's all of them. Let's start because, 

Karen Yates  33:55  
yeah, because I, I'm not going to presume the the awareness of the listener. 

Laura Boyle  34:01  
Yeah, so there's a Kimchi Cuddles comic from like 2011 that started the creation of all this terminology of types of polyamory with our metamorphs. Yes, 

Karen Yates  34:13  
oh my gosh. 

Karen Yates  34:14  
And it created "kitchen table" and "parallel polyamory" with this metaphor that if you can sit down and enjoy a meal and a cup of coffee with your metamour sitting at the kitchen table, that is having a kitchen table relationship with your metamours. And then parallel polyamory is if the two relationships are just running next to each other and you don't interact. And so these are the two big buckets. They've existed for more than 10 years, because I've been teaching a class about these two terms for 10 years, and in the interim, all these other terms have appeared. One of the terms for. The middle ground, which got popularized in a Multiamory podcast episode in 2020.Is Garden Party polyamory. It means all the kind of messy stuff in the middle where you figure out, how does your metamorph feel? How do you feel? Do you just see each other at parties that the hinge is throwing? Do you see each other for three events a year. Do you go out for a coffee every once in a while? But maybe it's not that comfortable, so you don't hang out one on one too much, but you see each other in passing, and it's fine. No one feels bad about it, but nobody's calling each other. garden party. I think being in that kind of flexible flu fee, you have each other's phone number, you could be emergency contacts for the hinge. You're willing to figure it out, but nobody's going we need to be besties. We need to be besties, or this won't work, because as soon as you do that, and you're trying to control someone else's relationship in order to make their relationship with the hinge bigger, smaller, whatever it gets, coercive, and you're both putting pressure on each other, and it's not nice. And the people who love kitchen table and think it's the best thing in the world always look at me like, I've got six heads when I say this. But as somebody who has had too many people be like, No, bestie, you need to be over two nights a week. I make family dinner all 12 people connected to our extended polycule "Come over. It's the best thing in the world!" And then within six months, everything is going down in flames as this relationship that has not had time to mature yet is like pushed into this crucible of too many people's opinions, more than once by different people. I I have a lot of feelings about it. I would much rather give things time to grow on their own timing. Get to know people a little loosely, if we really get along, if things are really good, if we're legitimately friends on our own, then yes, I will get deeply close to my metamours. I have an ex metamour who I care about a lot, who neither of us is with that hinge anymore, for years now, but I'm gonna go stay with her for a week when I'm in London for the book tour. And you know, like we're close friends, and neither of us are at all connected to this person anymore, right? Some of these connections and friendships can be very real, but they've got to be legitimate, real close friendships. They can't be we're going to be besties, because this person who we're both seeing wants us to be exactly and so in terms of escalating, or de escalating, a connection to a metamor that you're already trying to build, if someone needs access to space that you have some control over, because you live in it, and they don't thinking about where the power is, that you're The person who has ownership, which I'm putting in quotes, because you may not actually be the owner of the space, over that space and that time, and keeping sort of being mindful of the power dynamic, but remembering that you do have a right to be comfortable in your own Home, and trying to balance that, and coming into conversations mindful of that power dynamic. So if you've been a partner for a longer period of time, and you're the cohabiting partner, you have a higher power dynamic and probably a more public persona of the real partner, again, in giant scare quotes. So going into the conversation like, Hey, I'm not trying to control this or make it hard for you guys to see each other, but I'm trying to not have us spend that much time in each other's faces. We're not getting along that well, would it be okay if we tried to do the schedule so that you're only at the house when I'm out, I have date nights with other partners, on X, Y, Z nights. I have events for work or hobby nights. On night a that gives you guys three options. Pick one, please.

Karen Yates  39:38  
You know one of the things you're saying here reminds me of, you know, butting up against this idea of the utopian polyamory idea that there's this utopia and we all got to get in line with it. And that's simply not the way it works, because we're all human beings, and so we're not going to be living in this pack loving each other. it's, I mean, that might happen like, like, it might happen at at points, but it's not going to happen 24/7.

Laura Boyle  40:08  
well, right? And thing about, if we're all cohabiting, we should have figured out that we're compatible enough to cohabit before we try to do that. So if it's a meta who you're going to move in with, you need to do more vetting of one another before you do that. And so my saying that you don't need to get along with your metamour doesn't apply to whom you're going to cohabit with, right? In that case, you do need to be closer. That's sort of the number one thing that indicates whether or not that's successful cohabitation, but also the idea of everybody should be contributing a little to a rainy day fund that includes a move out fund, right? If something goes wrong, you need to be able to get out of this rented apartment and into two separate ones or three separate ones, depending on what configuration you were living in before. Well, that's expensive, but real, and does that lead us into finances? Yes,

Karen Yates  41:15  
I like, Oh my gosh. I actually got a little sweaty, really.

Laura Boyle  41:19  
I tried really hard to simplify, but there's no way to simplify. So it

Karen Yates  41:23  
It wasn't, it wasn't sweaty from the details. It was more like, Oh my God, there's so many conversations that needed. Yes, yeah. So you put it so well. At one point, you say, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with this. You say, in conversations about finances, it can either be death by 1000 cuts or the balm for anxiety around money. And I thought, like, yeah, like, So, hmm. First I appreciate at the beginning of the chapter that you talked about how how finances in general, are handled differently by couples, you know, monogamous couples, like they used to be years ago. And then you start talking about the most common scenarios. So can you paint some broad strokes here, both for monogamy in modern times and what you see happening in larger... 

Laura Boyle  42:09  
So part of the reason I painted this picture of what's changing in monogamy is that polyamorous trends are following some of these trends that monogamous folks are following, but the biggest changes are that, as we all know, women have finally been able to have our own credit cards and independent money since the mid 70s. But one of the things that has followed this is that more and more women have more and more of our money independently, and we are not merging finances to such a degree as we used to so it's now not just that, like maybe we have one credit card separately. It's now that a pretty substantial set of couples keep all of their finances independent. And it's not just the richest couples who have a few of these funds independent of each other, or the very poorest, although that middle ground is still where everything is merged, I think it's kind of interesting that that middle range of folks, the remaining shrinking middle class, is where people are most likely to sort of cling to traditionalism and go we merge everything, but the percentage of people who do that is shrinking, and folks at the sort of bottom end of finances are the most likely to keep absolutely everything separate, to sort of Venmo each other for bills and be figuring things out on the back of napkins. And folks in higher income are, yes, sending each other money for bills, but also have separate retirements, separate, you know, both joint and separate sort of inheritances, retirements, rainy day funds, things like this. People, generally speaking, disagree about what a joint expense is in ways that I would not have foreseen. Yeah, this was a household expense, and what's not a household expense, and maybe it's just that, like I'm naive about who does and doesn't agree with me about things, but the level at which people stop agreeing about things is so soon everyone agrees that rent or the mortgage is a shared expense. That's about the only thing.

Karen Yates  44:53  
So food? No,

Laura Boyle  44:55  
I mean, there are some people who really think that food isn't a shared expense. You. If you also have kids in the house, and so like only parents are covering the kids food, and then adults who aren't parenting aren't covering that. That's what I mean by you start breaking it down really soon. Pretty much everybody agreed that also the utilities are joint. Mostly. every once in a while you had somebody disagreeing about some utility.

Karen Yates  45:25  
I'm sure it's like someone has an air conditioning unit in their bedroom, and

Laura Boyle  45:30  
like someone wanted a higher speed internet, or, like somebody's mining Bitcoin, and so they're the one covering the electric things like that.

Karen Yates  45:43  
I found it interesting.People wanted gym memberships as a, as an, as an essential. 

Laura Boyle  45:49  
Yeah, there were some. Some people thought gym memberships were really essential. Some people thought that. People thought cars were separate expenses, even if some members of the household were sharing the car.

Karen Yates  46:10  
And then the vacations got interesting, because, and this gets a little complicated, but what I took away was, you know, if, and let's go back to monogamy. You know, there's a vacation fund, right? A couple has a vacation fund. But then let's say you add kids, and you add another, another, you know, other people living in the house, then it's like, all right, is there a fund for the bio, parents and the kids going on big vacations? Does everyone share a fund? Which means they can't, oops, which means they can't take their non nesting partners on vacations. That got super complicated.

Laura Boyle  46:47  
Right. It went really fast from Oh, well, okay, so the vacation fund is a joint expense when the people in our house are the ones going on vacation, or the vacation fund is a joint expense if it's the vacation we take the kids on. But then if any of the adults want to go on a vacation alone, that comes out of their independent money, okay, I guess that makes sense if you have enough independent money to be doing that. Yes. And then a lot of the households I talked to had budgeted to the point where there wasn't a lot of independent money. And so you get into that sort of in this economy, kind of question of like, but so does that just mean that no one actually goes on any of these additional trips, even though you told me two sentences ago that those are an important milestone for you, for your non nesting partners, and those sort of, for lack of a better word, secondary relationships, right, right? For those non escalator relationships. If this trip is a big milestone, and you're telling me you don't really have much budget for it, so then this is like a three year savings to get to it. It leaves me a little bit tilting my head about it, but also that seems very true to life, from what I see in coaching and from things that I've experienced as someone who is often that non escalator, like outside the household partner, unless someone is really well off, that is often the thing that's really put off a long time, right? And you can't blame someone.

Karen Yates  48:30  
But you know the title of your book is Monogamy? in this economy? and isn't one of the isn't one of the seeming benefits of living with multiple partners, the fact that you're saving money, you're you're you're being communal, yeah, what talk to me, yes. But also the way housing prices have exploded for a lot of people, it's just keeping their heads above water.

Laura Boyle  48:59  
So it sort of depends. Did someone move into a space that the other people could already afford? And so then it's a savings, and then the household is better off, and they have these extra funds to do things with, whereas for other people, if everyone was renting, it just went from everybody could barely afford their thing to everyone is affording at the rate they could have afforded things in 2018 Right, right?

Laura Boyle  49:27  
So everyone's maintaining a standard of living as the costs go up. So I actually found that almost no one is better off than they were, but several people are maintaining their standard of living. I Yeah,

Karen Yates  49:43  
interesting, yeah, let's talk about kids, because this was Wow, intense. It's intense. Well,

Laura Boyle  49:51  
so I think the most important takeaway I found from talking to so many people about their process of you are either integrating partners with their currently existing children, or things like this, or choosing to have children with additional partners, was the idea that you need to get on the same page with your partners about what actions and activities make someone a parent.

Karen Yates  50:18  
Yes, I thought this was so interesting, 

Laura Boyle  50:20  
Because people have dramatically different ideas about what activities are parenting? Is it parenting to enforce the rules that parents have already made? Is it parenting to create your own rules and discipline children, right? Is it parenting to pay for things for children. Is it parenting to be a voice in discussions about children's medical needs? Is it parenting to be a voice in conversations about where they're going to go to school? Right? Which of those things feel like parenting? If all of them feel like parenting, and your partner is not going to be allowed to do any of those things, but they're going to live in your house, how do you manage that?

Karen Yates  51:14  
Yeah, I --go on.  

Laura Boyle  51:16  
Most people, once they're moving in together, are allowing at least some of that right there, at least having someone enforce the rules that parents make. And so for some people, that's not a parental role. That's a like caregiving adult who is a sort of special person to the children, and they figure out what the name of that role is among their family. But for some people, that's not a parent, because parents also get decision making power for their children.

Karen Yates  51:55  
It's complicated, yeah, and then you talk a little bit about what a scope creep, someone that is really not, does not want to take on parental duties, but then it gets complicated, because you, you, you bring up situations where someone, someone who is not a bio parent, says, when they're moving in, "I do not want to be a parent. I don't want to be in this role," yet they're, they're okay with, you know, picking the kids up from school, helping with homework, taking them to the doctor, offering some some decision making support, cleaning wounds, cleaning diapers, and then now they are really doing a lot of the parenting, and that can sometimes lead to resentment. This is very subtle and and and complex, as I see it, right?

Laura Boyle  53:02  
It's one of those things where I can't give generalized advice for any of those situations, but I can tell people these are conversations that are going to come up. If you're going to have people do five of the things on this 10 item list, you're gonna need to have conversations about whether they're actually still comfortable three months in and six months in, and if they are great. But if they're not, how are you going to scale it back? Do you actually have capacity to allow them to scale it back? Because often people are taking on those roles because they love us and we don't have the capacity to do it ourselves, right,

Karen Yates  53:48  
right? I mean, one of the things you talk about in the book, that I really appreciated is what what kids need in these transitions of someone entering the household to live and you talk about consistency, no big surprises or sudden shifts, have the adults get on the same page about what is the rule structure around kids and activities and decision making, and then, you know, the kids are still learning to emotionally regulate, and so the adults need to reflect emotional regulation. But I would love for you to talk a little bit about how this all changes depending on the kids age. The kids ages when someone is coming into the household.

Laura Boyle  54:32  
So I spoke with people who had kids of basically all ages up through the teenage years. And I also spoke to people who had adult children when they moved in with partners, which isn't what we're talking about here, but had a separate set of reactions to their parents moving in, and got different reactions. Actions, because people didn't mirror adult mirror emotional regulation for their adult children, because they get a different set of expectations, which I thought was funny, but for kids of different ages, teenagers and sort of tween and teen kids, almost all, if you come out to them in the first place, react by going, I know that these people are here all the time, of a course,

Laura Boyle  55:33  
and so in a sort of mirror of that, when you tell them that there's A big change happening and that people are moving in, or that you're moving or whatever their reactions are about their public standing, and about the social structure of what's happening and about well, how Does this affect me? And is that cool or not? And I'm sorry that I'm dropping into my teenage Valley Girl voice, but every teenager I know is kind of like at me, including my partners teenagers and my friends teenagers. So you'll have to forgive me about it, and so all the people who I spoke to with teens, when they did their move ins, the teens adjusted really well, but maybe we're a little bit upset at why do we have to move? Can't they move? Or if the people were moving in with them were like, do I have to tell my friends? My friends are not going to think this is cool, or we're like, well, they're here all the time anyway, so I guess they can live here.

Laura Boyle  56:53  
There's a certain amount of that that you get out of older children that is just not that big a deal. I mean, it's a big deal because it's always a big deal when it's our children, and we want to make sure they're not hurting, but it's less of a big deal when they're a little older and better at coping with it, and it's harder if they're having other issues with school, with bullies, with emotional regulation that this exacerbates. And so it's up to us as parents to decide if it's an appropriate time for us to make a big change that benefits us, if they're at a time when it's hard for them, with kids who are younger, sort of school age, the age around my kids At this time, I think for the most part, those kids have big emotional reactions. They are not good at their emotional regulation. They don't always have their big reactions at first, they often sort of fill up with them, and then have their big reactions when they're overwhelmed a week or two later, and so it's our job as parents to do what one psychologist I read calls being the pilot of the plane. We have to sort of show them that we are still in the air, that this turbulence is not actually a big problem that we're going to land safely, then all they need to do is buckle their seat belts that they have a little card in front of them that will instruct them as to what to do if there's a Real emergency, it will be fine. And being the calming presence is sometimes really hard, because in the middle of these transitions, we are often overwhelmed.

Karen Yates  58:50  
So for you, what was, you know, what were the more challenging aspects on, on bringing your households together around kids? Me,

Karen Yates  59:00  
my challenges were when we de nested, not when we nested, because my kids were infants when we nested, when we de nested, they were in this school age, age, and so it was all about we're still a team. For you guys, your school is staying the same. Your activities are staying the same. You know, all of your relatives are still here. You know everybody is here for you. Here is all your stuff. Like, I know it's not all in exactly the same place, but you still have it all right, right? And so sort of stabilizing them through that. When we nested in the first place, the kids were infants. My kids, the nice thing about having very small children, they don't know otherwise. And you get to just give them this whole semiology. My son in pre K. Three came home from an all about family's day, and was like, did you know some people only have one mom? How do they do it?

Laura Boyle  1:00:11  
Right? So we might have too many friends who are gay or polyamorous.

Karen Yates  1:00:16  
So you talk in the book at the end, about de escalating and coming out of these housing situations, and what is like, the one piece of advice you can give folks around that.

Laura Boyle  1:00:31  
So I end up spending two chapters on this, because it is really complex to figure out which part of which parts of your relationships are the ones that need focusing on and salvaging, and which parts are the ones that you need to let go in order to move forward. And there are two things that I'd like folks to think on the first is if you can do some forward planning while things are still good in your relationship, right, as depressing as that is doing a little bit of forward planning and either setting up a rainy day fund or setting up custody paperwork and things like that, while things are still good in the relationship, so that there's less fighting when things fall apart, is absolutely worth it. The second thing I'd suggest is considering what the greatest strengths of your relationship are while things are good, and making notes for yourself in a journal, so that someday, if things are falling apart, you can go back and see what was beautiful about things. Oh, I love that, because it will help you later to see if that still matches what's working. Because if it doesn't, there's no harm, no foul. But if it does, it can help you really reflect on what you want to keep whole in those relationships as you de escalate.

Karen Yates  1:02:09  
And the one thing I want to make sure people understand is that when Laura is talking about de escalation, she's not exactly talking about ending completely the relationship. That might mean it, but it, it's simply creating a different status.

Laura Boyle  1:02:24  
Right. So it can mean any kind of transition in the relationship. It can mean choosing to be co parents who live in separate spaces. It can mean choosing to no longer be romantically involved. It can mean remaining romantically involved but no longer being sexually involved, whatever the appropriate shift that feels right to honor where you are at the time that you need to de escalate.

Karen Yates  1:02:50  
Laura, I wanted to thank you for this conversation. I have to say that we barely scratched the surface. your book, your book has so much information and so much food for thought that I highly recommend folks go out and buy it monogamy in this economy by Laura Boyle. So thank you. Thank you for this wonderful conversation.

Laura Boyle  1:03:12  
Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Karen Yates  1:03:14  
To find out more about Laura Boyle and to order Monogamy? in this economy? on bookshop.org. to help independent booksellers and Wild & Sublime go to the show notes. 

Karen Yates  1:03:27  
Well, that's it. Folks. Have a very pleasurable week. Thank you for listening. Wild & sublime is supported in part by our sublime supporter, Full Color Life therapy, therapy for all of you at full color lifetherapy.com know someone who'd like this episode, send it to them, and we'd love a review or a rating on your podcast app. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram. At wild and sublime, got feedback or an inquiry. Contact us at info@ wild and sublime.com I'd like to thank our design guru, Jean Francois Gervais and editor Christine Ferrara. Our music is by David Ben Porat. This episode is part of the Lincoln lodge Podcast Network. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai