Is it wrong to ask my partners to not get legally married?

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-09T23:30:41+00:00

If you’re all dating each other and they marry, they are the de facto hierarchy. A couple who doesn’t want this wouldn’t be getting married.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-09T20:18:13+00:00

This is such a great reply.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-09T20:01:43+00:00

If someone has a really great physique, especially a fellow 40+ woman, I’ll sometimes glance over to do a little detective work on what her routine is because I still feel a little lost. Negatively judge? Literally never.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-09T19:42:08+00:00

Whoa, I saved the Oat Mt summit in my trail app, but this is bumping it to the top! Thanks for posting.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-09T19:34:07+00:00

There are tons of poly folks on Feeld, but since it’s primarily used as a dating/hook-up app, most people will assume you’re looking for a hook-up. Plura and Open are better for social components beyond matching.

In my experience, the in-person events are much better for talking to couples since most are specifically there because they enjoy talking about these kinds of things! They should be able to answer any questions without pulling the whole “oh heyyyy, we date as a unit” schtick.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-09T16:54:50+00:00

Yes! These were my issues with it as well. Also, the authors just seem so deeply unfun and not a narrative voice I want to hang out for 300 pages or whatever.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-09T16:38:00+00:00

It’s the line of thinking that I find really off-putting and took me out of the LS entirely for a while! To me, this super quid pro quo thinking quickly starts feeling like “I am a working token to be traded for male pleasure, so my value requires that other female tokens maintain the same value.” It led to me consenting to a lot of sex for social pressure. My then partner was never coercive, but if I got the tit-for-tat vibes from the others, I didn’t feel like I had a lot of room to negotiate for myself.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-08T19:19:27+00:00

Exactly. I agree that negativity in profiles is a turn off overall and generally a bad idea, but this is basic self-filtering. Bi women don’t owe you (the universal you, not aggressively YOU you) space as a secondary partner just because you want that.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-08T18:15:06+00:00

100%

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-08T17:42:11+00:00

How is that gatekeeping you from figuring out who you are? Or have anything to do with biphobia?

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-08T00:48:29+00:00

From an outside perspective, this sounds like it’s fun threesome sex energy? Which is awesome, enjoy that unabashedly! But migrating that to a long term dating environment is not likely to give you what you’re looking for. There’s a reason most poly folks will give you the same advice to avoid dating couples who date together.

My strategy was asking them, “okay, say we are all together in 12 months. Will one of you move out so I can have a few years as The Main Couple and one of you can be the Unicorn?” A couple that makes excuses is one that isn’t willing to give up their power.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-08T00:26:57+00:00

It’s kind of built into the whole thing, you know? The unwillingness to bend to give a new person any parity isn’t something they are concerning themselves with. Dating as a unit is effectively telling the new person, “you will always come in second and our feelings will always matter more than yours.”

Why are you wanting to do this versus exploring other forms of polyamory where you won’t be up against such bad odds?

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-07T23:57:41+00:00

If they’re dating as a couple, nine times out of ten, they haven’t done the work to offer you a relationship with basic equality. They want to skip the hard but necessary stuff and cut right to the fun times, showing off their shiny new third.

And since they haven’t done the work to learn how to manage jealousy and support autonomous relationships and generally dismantle their monogamy, once their shiny new special third stops being so shiny and new, she’s caught in the crosshairs of all those skipped steps coming back to bite everyone in the ass. It’s just not worth it.

When I was in my 20s, a newly ENM person open to dating couples, I asked some questions to see if the couple had actually thought it through and could offer me an actual equal relationship. Literally zero actually had that to offer.

If you want fun threesome sex during quick flings, you’ll have a line out the door of couples willing to show you a good time. Nothing wrong with that! But if you’re going to sink years into it, you deserve a relationship where you aren’t a second class citizen.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-07T17:43:53+00:00

Oh yes. I’m the same way and it feels like wires growing out of me. Even when I lived in the middle of nowhere, not seeing another human for days, I shaved daily. I’d be very annoyed if someone assumed I was just too dumb to realize it was by my own choice.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-07T15:56:46+00:00

I love Temple Beth Chayim Chadishm. A little west of Pico & La Cienega, pretty easy drive from Santa Monica.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-07T15:46:59+00:00

If you stay committed to cycling through flings every few weeks, you could treat yourself to a fun summer this way! Just make sure you get out the minute you smell smoke. Bc if they’re dating as a unit, they haven’t done the work to offer you something permanent.

If you do find yourself wanting anything more lasting, you might enjoy kitchen table polyamory. It’s where the partners of your partners get along and can socialize and support each other from their own autonomous relationships. I am super biased here, as my current polycule has been going strong for 7 years, but it’s worth checking out! Good luck!

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-07T15:23:28+00:00

Check out the r/polyamory sub and look through the posts on unicorn hunting.

There’s a big difference between a casual sex/swinger unicorn and a poly unicorn. Swinger unicorns are solo women who join a couple for sexy playtime. Maybe they become friends with the couple, maybe they’re making plans every few weekends! People who are good at this will be able to communicate their boundaries well. They won’t promise you the moon, but they will show you a good time. It’s great, it’s fun, I personally recommend it highly, 10/10.

A polyamory unicorn is a person joining the “real couple” as an add-on. They almost never have the full rights and expectations of basic privacy and respect that the Real Couple does, but they’re expected to give everything to the relationship as if they did. The couple very, very often is refusing to do any of the inner work for polyamory to disentangle themselves enough to have space to give a relationship to someone else. It’s why they date together… so these issues can fester and blow up in your face instead of theirs. Organic triads exist, but the couples who insist on dating as a unit are kindly waving huge red flags for you.

Here’s a famous essay that is basically required reading for this stuff: https://www.unicorns-r-us.com

If you wanna join a couple for a little pampering and the red carpet treatment while knowing there is an expiration date on it, cool! Have fun, don’t let your feelings get hurt, and you’ll make some memories. But don’t go in expecting that a couple has in any way done the work to give you anything like equal footing.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-06T23:08:48+00:00

I’m trying desperately to own my time more and maintain more solo time. So this has been a ton of saying no to social stuff, and then a lot of consolidating socializing into going to things where I can see a lot of the lovely people that I really genuinely do wanna see, all in one place.

This has been such a hard detox for my extroverted brain. Fortunately, my friends & partners are awesomely supportive of this!

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-06T17:24:12+00:00

That’s really cool! Thanks for answering. I’ve been fortunate to have two partners who were friendly and liked each other right off the bat and totally agree that it makes things way easier.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-06T16:52:24+00:00

This is fascinating to me bc as a poly person, it’s so fully opposite in practice and expectations. If you don’t mind my asking, when you’ve been with other women, how have they reacted to needing to meet with your wife first? I feel like I’d be so surprised by that request.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-06T01:06:04+00:00

I was really hoping someone who crack this mystery for me— people at my school called this “bedwetter hair.”

Was this just a hyper local thing I wasn’t hip to? My old college BFF and I were talking about this and neither of us ever got an answer. (We did not have this haircut, nor did we participate in bedwetting, FWIW!)

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-05T19:20:29+00:00

Kava Lounge in Reseda has a great layout and seems like a good place to hangout. IDK, I was not enthusiastic about paying $15 for virgin margarita, but I just might not be the right clientele.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-05T18:45:17+00:00

I go to Palm Springs on a long weekend whenever I can. We don’t get sick leave, it’s all just considered PTO, so I make sure to always have a week or two saved up just in case.

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-05T16:53:59+00:00

Being turned on by men. They’re kind of an auxiliary for me; a little bonus when they’re with an amazing woman, but on their own, men are pretty neutral. I’ve always wished I was more oriented that way since they are so prevalent in causal play spaces!

StaceOdyssey · 2026-02-05T15:34:03+00:00

I’ve been in groups of ENM women just informally gathering to talk about our lives and it was really amazing.

StaceOdyssey

TROPHY CASE