Opening Up – My Experience With Lesbian Polyamory

My journey with polyamory started around my 30th birthday, although it would be several more months before I acted on those feelings. Like many people, turning 30 felt like a huge milestone in a way I couldn’t quite make sense of. I loved my life, I was happy, and it wasn’t necessarily that I felt something was missing, but, 30 felt like a line in the sand. It was saying goodbye to my 20s, but it was more than that. It forced me to reflect on whether my 20s played out how I wanted them to, and what I wanted for the next decade of my life.

At the time, my partner and I, an AFAB non-binary person I’ll call Casey, had been together 6 years. In that time we’d moved in together in an area of the country where neither of us had any roots. We’d then bought a house, and later got engaged. We were very much on the relationship escalator and very aware that the next step was probably having kids.

Sex was, and still is, very important to us. We’d always had a very active and explorative sex life, where kink played a major role. So, when I turned 30, I started to think about my goals more in terms of what fun I felt like I missed out on in my 20s, and that led me to the one sex thing we’d planned on doing but hadn’t done – have a threesome. Casey had had threesomes in prior relationships, and we’d always said if the opportunity presented itself, we’d take it. But that’s the thing, these opportunities don’t tend to just come up – at least not with how we were living our lives. Don’t get me wrong, we had active social lives, but not the type where we were routinely meeting new people we might want that kind of fun with.

So I proposed that instead of waiting for it to happen, we make it happen. Casey was initially a bit hesitant about this. Not because they didn’t want a threesome, but because they were worried about being recognised on dating apps due to their public-facing job. We thought on it a bit and decided to take the plunge anyway around three months later.

Starting out with ENM was a steep learning curve. We didn’t even know what ethical non-monogamy was, and seeing abbreviations like “ENM”, and “ONS”, required a bit of Googling. We hadn’t properly discussed boundaries or how ENM typically works in queer love dynamics or sought any polyamory advice. We were just going in blind.

What started as looking for a threesome quickly became active dating. The dynamics we held with different people varied significantly. Some were much more firmly friends with benefits, that later became just friends. While a few were more romantic.

It ended up being a wonderful, and sometimes trying experience, that shaped our relationship for the better and has ultimately expanded and extended our relationship to another. We’ve met some (hopefully) lifelong friends, learned a lot about ourselves, been tested in ways we never thought possible, and come out stronger. And met someone we now both love – we’re a throuple, or triad, since I know many people take issue with the world throuple.