u/therapymademeworse

I’ve been thinking about a tension between queer theory’s critique of fixed or naturalized identity categories and the fact that those categories can still have real political and social functions.

Take “lesbian,” for example, queer theory gives us plenty of tools for questioning whether categories like lesbian, gay, woman, etc.. are internally coherent or historically stable. But lesbian also names a particular sexual orientation, history, community, and set of experiences.

So how does queer theory distinguish between destabilizing a category and making that category so porous that it stops describing anything in particular?

Is there a serious theoretical account of when boundaries are politically useful or necessary, even if we accept that the categories themselves are historically contingent?

I’m especially interested in writers who engage directly with this tension, or any work that explores it in depth.

Sometimes I genuinely wish I lived in a world where only lesbians existed. Just women loving women, lesbian bars everywhere, lesbian neighborhoods, lesbian bookstores, lesbian sports leagues, lesbian retirement communities, and absolutely no explaining ourselves to anybody.

Not because I actually want everyone else erased from existence, obviously, but because I would love to experience what it feels like for lesbian life to be the default instead of this tiny little island we’re constantly trying to carve out inside everybody else’s world.

Just once, I want to walk outside and feel like the entire culture was built with us in mind.

I don’t mean when you realized it wasn’t for you, I mean when you actually started questioning it beyond the usual “different strokes for different folks” kind of thing; was there a specific experience that made you look at it differently?

For me, it started with lesbian spaces. I kept noticing heterosexual men gaining access to LGBTQIA+ spaces because they were dating bisexual or pansexual women, and then some of those women would come into lesbian spaces looking for something they weren’t getting from the men they were with.

That bothered me, because at some point I started asking myself what the point of having lesbian spaces even was if heterosexual relationships were still finding their way into them through somebody’s poly arrangement. Not literally every time of course, but enough that I started noticing it as a pattern.

And to be clear, I’m not saying bisexual or pansexual women don’t belong in LGBTQIA+ spaces, they obviously do; I’m talking specifically about lesbian spaces, and the way those spaces can start feeling less lesbian-centered when women are entering them while still very much attached to heterosexual relationship dynamics outside of them.

That was probably the first crack for me. Once I noticed that, I started paying attention to other things too, like how often jealousy gets treated like some personal failing, how much emphasis there is on becoming more accommodating, more secure or more evolved, or how quickly somebody’s discomfort can get turned into “you just need to do more work on yourself.”

I also understand that this subreddit has people from all walks of life and across the political spectrum; conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, Democrats, progressives, liberals, and probably plenty of people who don’t fit neatly into any of those categories. I get that my sexuality itself may be something some people here don’t particularly like or agree with, and that’s okay with me. I’m not here to shove my sexuality in anybody’s face or demand that everyone see the world the way I do.

What I am here to do is analyze and critique polyamory, and I actually appreciate that I can have those conversations with people whose politics, backgrounds, and values may be completely different from mine, we don’t have to agree on everything else in order to recognize some of the same problems or ask some of the same questions about this particular relationship structure.

So I’m curious, when did it happen for you? Was there one thing that made you start questioning polyamory, or was it more of a slow accumulation of things that just stopped sitting right with you?

I have a question I’m genuinely interested in thinking through: why do transmasculine and transfeminine people continue to look specifically toward lesbian spaces for inclusion, rather than toward the many other queer, trans, LGBTQ+, or gender-expansive spaces that are explicitly organized to accommodate a much broader range of identities?

I’m not asking whether trans people should have community, support, safety, or belonging. Obviously they should. I’m asking something narrower: what is it about lesbian spaces in particular that makes their boundaries so frequently contested?

For transmasculine people, I’m especially curious about the tension between identifying away from womanhood while sometimes retaining a connection to lesbian identity or lesbian community.

How is that connection understood, and at what point does preserving historical or personal ties begin to conflict with the purpose of a space organized specifically around lesbians?

And from the other direction, how should lesbian spaces think about transfeminine people whose identities, sexualities, and relationships to womanhood may vary considerably?

Is identifying with womanhood sufficient for participation in every lesbian space, or can individual lesbian communities establish narrower purposes and boundaries without that automatically being interpreted as hostility?

Part of what I’m trying to understand is why the expectation so often seems to be that lesbian spaces must continually broaden themselves, when the contemporary LGBTQ+ landscape already contains trans spaces, queer spaces, mixed sapphic spaces, nonbinary spaces, and general LGBTQ+ spaces.

I think the question is worth asking directly: why is the lesbian boundary, specifically, expected to remain uniquely permeable, and what, if anything, is a lesbian-specific space actually allowed to be?

EDIT: Don’t come in here if you’re overly sensitive and get offended if someone has a differing perspective than you do. If you want access to the perspectives and want to participate, please join us! If your skin is too thin, you can still read but please refrain from joining if discourse is challenging for you! Thank you!

And, if you’re going to participate please bear in mind, we can disagree and still be in community, in this space, we are all sisters. Keep that in mind and let’s treat each other with respect and kindness. I love you.

LASTLY, I want you guys to not be TOO reactive and use the downvote button. If you disagree, engage with the person whom you disagree with. But let’s not downvote for petty reasons, okay? If somebody comes in here with harmful and toxic opinions, by all means DOWNVOTE away. But let’s not downvote someone just for having a perspective, even if it’s different than yours.

If you can do that for me, we can have more conversations like these but we have to approach every single opinion on neutral ground unless it is absolutely egregious. Again, I love you so much. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t be here. Bring your intelligence, your snacks and your participation. See you soon, sisters!

Half of the Pan-African canon is Caribbean: Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Walter Rodney.

The Caribbean clearly formulated and exported Pan-Africanism to Africa, then received it back in altered political and intellectual forms.

However, from my own research, the framework doesn't seem to fit the region evenly; much of Anglophone Caribbean independence came through negotiated constitutional transfer rather than revolutionary rupture, and political sovereignty did little to dislodge foreign control over bauxite, sugar, banking, and other major industries.

In Guyana and Trinidad, Pan-Africanism as a governing framework also encountered societies in which Indo-Caribbean people constituted either a majority or a substantial near-majority.

So how well does Pan-Africanism still describe the Caribbean? Does it remain the region’s most useful political framework, or do Glissant and Brathwaite’s theories of creolization now explain more of its history, culture, and social formation?

In short, I'm looking for some literature (book and essay recommendations are very much welcome); I’m also interested in feminist thought from Indo-Caribbean and broader Caribbean perspectives, including foundational texts, useful starting points, and work that addresses race, gender, colonialism, migration, and creolization.

Half of the Pan-African canon is Caribbean: Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Walter Rodney.

The Caribbean clearly formulated and exported Pan-Africanism to Africa, then received it back in altered political and intellectual forms.

However, from my own research, the framework doesn't seem to fit the region evenly; much of Anglophone Caribbean independence came through negotiated constitutional transfer rather than revolutionary rupture, and political sovereignty did little to dislodge foreign control over bauxite, sugar, banking, and other major industries.

In Guyana and Trinidad, Pan-Africanism as a governing framework also encountered societies in which Indo-Caribbean people constituted either a majority or a substantial near-majority.

So how well does Pan-Africanism still describe the Caribbean? Does it remain the region’s most useful political framework, or do Glissant and Brathwaite’s theories of creolization now explain more of its history, culture, and social formation?

In short, I'm looking for some literature (book and essay recommendations are very much welcome); I’m also interested in feminist thought from Indo-Caribbean and broader Caribbean perspectives, including foundational texts, useful starting points, and work that addresses race, gender, colonialism, migration, and creolization.

The jokes write themselves; I've been working on this post since last night and I got banned from r/polyamory for attempting to post the following with citations! 🤣

Polyamory is often described as feminist because it allows women to reject sexual exclusivity, pursue multiple relationships, and define intimacy outside marriage or the heterosexual nuclear family.

But besides protecting women’s sexual and relational agency, what makes polyamory feminist as a political practice? I ask because feminism has not traditionally treated every freely made choice by a woman as liberating. Feminist theories of relational autonomy argue that choices are formed within social relationships and institutions, rather than by completely independent individuals acting outside culture, dependency, and power. The relevant question is therefore not only whether a woman chose something, but what conditions shaped the choice and whether those conditions support genuine self-determination. (Source: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]⁠)

Nancy Hirschmann makes a similar argument in The Subject of Liberty. Her feminist account of freedom examines how preferences and available choices are socially constructed, particularly in relation to domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Freedom cannot be assessed only by asking whether a direct prohibition prevented an individual woman from acting. It also requires examining the social conditions within which her options and desires developed. (Source: The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom [University of Notre Dame]⁠)

bell hooks defined feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Under that definition, a practice does not become feminist simply because women are permitted to participate in it. We would also need to ask whether it reduces sexist domination or merely gives individual women more options within existing gender relations. (Source: Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks⁠)

So what forms of gendered power does polyamory actually challenge?

It may weaken the idea that a woman belongs exclusively to one man. It may create space for queer kinship, chosen family, collective care, and relationships that are not organized around marriage. It may also challenge the expectation that one woman should provide a partner with sex, domestic labor, emotional support, childcare, and permanent companionship. But are these outcomes characteristic of polyamory, or are they possibilities that depend entirely on how particular relationships are organized?

Polyamorous relationships can still contain economic dependence, domestic inequality, sexual double standards, unequal emotional labor, and hierarchies between established and newer partners; a relationship may be extensively negotiated while still being organized around the preferences of the person with the most money, housing security, social influence, or willingness to leave.

Women may also perform much of the emotional administration required to sustain multiple relationships: scheduling, reassurance, conflict mediation, remembering agreements, managing jealousy, and helping partners process their other relationships. Has polyamory produced a different distribution of this labor, or has it sometimes expanded the amount of relational work expected from women?

I'm also interested in how discomfort is interpreted within polyamorous communities. When does encouraging someone to examine jealousy increase her freedom, and when does it teach her to reinterpret a reasonable objection as insecurity, possessiveness, monogamous conditioning, or insufficient personal growth?

Catharine MacKinnon’s work raises a broader problem for sexual politics: sexuality and desire are themselves shaped by unequal social conditions. Her argument is not that women possess no agency, but that consent and preference cannot by themselves establish the absence of domination. A sexual arrangement can be chosen and still reproduce a hierarchy that feminism should examine. (Source: Toward A Feminist Theory of The State by Catharine MacKinnon⁠)

This does not mean that polyamorous women are incapable of deciding what they want, or that monogamy is naturally more egalitarian. Monogamous marriage has historically been one of the central institutions through which women’s sexuality, labor, reproduction, and economic dependence were controlled; however, rejecting monogamy does not necessarily resolve those problems, it may redistribute intimacy without redistributing power.

What evidence would show that polyamory is especially effective at reducing women’s domestic labor, economic vulnerability, sexual subordination, or responsibility for maintaining relationships? Are there feminist theories of polyamory that address these material questions rather than primarily emphasizing consent, communication, sexual freedom, and personal choice?

Perhaps polyamory is compatible with feminism without being inherently feminist. Adults should be free to form consensual relationships without stigma or legal punishment, but is that a feminist theory of liberation, or primarily a liberal theory of individual freedom?

​Update 08/05/26 @ 7:28 PM PDT:

I just want to share some final observations here as I think about my post; when disagreement starts being treated as harm, people become afraid to ask questions and as a result, communities begin policing acceptable thought, and certain ideas are protected from scrutiny altogether. This is how intellectual conformity takes hold, and we should absolutely be afraid of that, especially if you're reading this from the United States of America.

The first amendment restricts government censorship, not disagreement or moderation within a private online community, but thee principle behind free expression still matters culturally.

A society can't maintain a serious commitment to open inquiry if people increasingly treat criticism as violence or, asking challenging questions as hostile, as good enough reasons to shut down conversation.

Ever heard of the Thought Police? Yeah, this is just a small-scale version of the kind of conformity George Orwell warned us about in 1984 (people learning which questions are acceptable, policing language, and treating dissent as unacceptable, etc, etc..).

What happens when people become comfortable punishing inquiry outside of the confines of the Internet?

Polyamory is often described as feminist because it allows women to reject sexual exclusivity, pursue multiple relationships, and define intimacy outside marriage or the heterosexual nuclear family.

But besides protecting women’s sexual and relational agency, what makes polyamory feminist as a political practice?

I ask because feminism has not traditionally treated every freely made choice by a woman as liberating. Feminist theories of relational autonomy argue that choices are formed within social relationships and institutions, rather than by completely independent individuals acting outside culture, dependency, and power. The relevant question is therefore not only whether a woman chose something, but what conditions shaped the choice and whether those conditions support genuine self-determination. (Source: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]⁠)

Nancy Hirschmann makes a similar argument in The Subject of Liberty. Her feminist account of freedom examines how preferences and available choices are socially constructed, particularly in relation to domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Freedom cannot be assessed only by asking whether a direct prohibition prevented an individual woman from acting. It also requires examining the social conditions within which her options and desires developed. (Source: The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom [University of Notre Dame]⁠)

bell hooks defined feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Under that definition, a practice does not become feminist simply because women are permitted to participate in it. We would also need to ask whether it reduces sexist domination or merely gives individual women more options within existing gender relations. (Source: Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks⁠)

So what forms of gendered power does polyamory actually challenge?

It may weaken the idea that a woman belongs exclusively to one man. It may create space for queer kinship, chosen family, collective care, and relationships that are not organized around marriage. It may also challenge the expectation that one woman should provide a partner with sex, domestic labor, emotional support, childcare, and permanent companionship. But are these outcomes characteristic of polyamory, or are they possibilities that depend entirely on how particular relationships are organized?

Polyamorous relationships can still contain economic dependence, domestic inequality, sexual double standards, unequal emotional labor, and hierarchies between established and newer partners; a relationship may be extensively negotiated while still being organized around the preferences of the person with the most money, housing security, social influence, or willingness to leave.

Women may also perform much of the emotional administration required to sustain multiple relationships: scheduling, reassurance, conflict mediation, remembering agreements, managing jealousy, and helping partners process their other relationships. Has polyamory produced a different distribution of this labor, or has it sometimes expanded the amount of relational work expected from women?

I'm also interested in how discomfort is interpreted within polyamorous communities. When does encouraging someone to examine jealousy increase her freedom, and when does it teach her to reinterpret a reasonable objection as insecurity, possessiveness, monogamous conditioning, or insufficient personal growth?

Catharine MacKinnon’s work raises a broader problem for sexual politics: sexuality and desire are themselves shaped by unequal social conditions. Her argument is not that women possess no agency, but that consent and preference cannot by themselves establish the absence of domination. A sexual arrangement can be chosen and still reproduce a hierarchy that feminism should examine. (Source: Feminism In New Terms by Catharine MacKinnon⁠)

This does not mean that polyamorous women are incapable of deciding what they want, or that monogamy is naturally more egalitarian. Monogamous marriage has historically been one of the central institutions through which women’s sexuality, labor, reproduction, and economic dependence were controlled; however, rejecting monogamy does not necessarily resolve those problems, it may redistribute intimacy without redistributing power.

What evidence would show that polyamory is especially effective at reducing women’s domestic labor, economic vulnerability, sexual subordination, or responsibility for maintaining relationships? Are there feminist theories of polyamory that address these material questions rather than primarily emphasizing consent, communication, sexual freedom, and personal choice?

Perhaps polyamory is compatible with feminism without being inherently feminist. Adults should be free to form consensual relationships without stigma or legal punishment, but is that a feminist theory of liberation, or primarily a liberal theory of individual freedom?

Polyamory is often described as feminist because it allows women to reject sexual exclusivity, pursue multiple relationships, and define intimacy outside marriage or the heterosexual nuclear family.

But besides protecting women’s sexual and relational agency, what makes polyamory feminist as a political practice?

I ask because feminism has not traditionally treated every freely made choice by a woman as liberating. Feminist theories of relational autonomy argue that choices are formed within social relationships and institutions, rather than by completely independent individuals acting outside culture, dependency, and power. The relevant question is therefore not only whether a woman chose something, but what conditions shaped the choice and whether those conditions support genuine self-determination. (Source: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]⁠)

Nancy Hirschmann makes a similar argument in The Subject of Liberty. Her feminist account of freedom examines how preferences and available choices are socially constructed, particularly in relation to domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Freedom cannot be assessed only by asking whether a direct prohibition prevented an individual woman from acting. It also requires examining the social conditions within which her options and desires developed. (Source: The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom [University of Notre Dame]⁠)

bell hooks defined feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Under that definition, a practice does not become feminist simply because women are permitted to participate in it. We would also need to ask whether it reduces sexist domination or merely gives individual women more options within existing gender relations. (Source: Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks⁠)

So what forms of gendered power does polyamory actually challenge?

It may weaken the idea that a woman belongs exclusively to one man. It may create space for queer kinship, chosen family, collective care, and relationships that are not organized around marriage. It may also challenge the expectation that one woman should provide a partner with sex, domestic labor, emotional support, childcare, and permanent companionship. But are these outcomes characteristic of polyamory, or are they possibilities that depend entirely on how particular relationships are organized?

Polyamorous relationships can still contain economic dependence, domestic inequality, sexual double standards, unequal emotional labor, and hierarchies between established and newer partners; a relationship may be extensively negotiated while still being organized around the preferences of the person with the most money, housing security, social influence, or willingness to leave.

Women may also perform much of the emotional administration required to sustain multiple relationships: scheduling, reassurance, conflict mediation, remembering agreements, managing jealousy, and helping partners process their other relationships. Has polyamory produced a different distribution of this labor, or has it sometimes expanded the amount of relational work expected from women?

I'm also interested in how discomfort is interpreted within polyamorous communities. When does encouraging someone to examine jealousy increase her freedom, and when does it teach her to reinterpret a reasonable objection as insecurity, possessiveness, monogamous conditioning, or insufficient personal growth?

Catharine MacKinnon’s work raises a broader problem for sexual politics: sexuality and desire are themselves shaped by unequal social conditions. Her argument is not that women possess no agency, but that consent and preference cannot by themselves establish the absence of domination. A sexual arrangement can be chosen and still reproduce a hierarchy that feminism should examine. (Source: Feminism In New Terms by Catharine MacKinnon⁠)

This does not mean that polyamorous women are incapable of deciding what they want, or that monogamy is naturally more egalitarian. Monogamous marriage has historically been one of the central institutions through which women’s sexuality, labor, reproduction, and economic dependence were controlled; however, rejecting monogamy does not necessarily resolve those problems, it may redistribute intimacy without redistributing power.

What evidence would show that polyamory is especially effective at reducing women’s domestic labor, economic vulnerability, sexual subordination, or responsibility for maintaining relationships? Are there feminist theories of polyamory that address these material questions rather than primarily emphasizing consent, communication, sexual freedom, and personal choice?

Perhaps polyamory is compatible with feminism without being inherently feminist. Adults should be free to form consensual relationships without stigma or legal punishment, but is that a feminist theory of liberation, or primarily a liberal theory of individual freedom?

I ask because “women of color” often gets used as though non-white women share one political and cultural position, when Asian, Indigenous, Latina, Middle Eastern, mixed-race, diasporic, and other non-Black women may experience patriarchy, colonialism, religion, race, caste, migration, and family structures very differently.

So which feminist traditions are most useful for women who are neither white nor Black? Should we be looking more closely at postcolonial feminism, decolonial feminism, Indigenous feminism, transnational feminism, Chicana feminism, Islamic feminism, Dalit feminism, or other culturally specific traditions rather than trying to place every non-white woman under womanism?

The twentieth century produced many new feminist schools, including multicultural, postcolonial, and more recently gender-critical approaches. Which frameworks offer the strongest analysis of women’s lives outside a predominantly white, Western, liberal model?

I'm especially interested in theories that do not treat Western individualism, secularism, sexual liberalism, or personal choice as universally liberating. What should I be reading?

I keep seeing the same books cited, especially The Ethical Slut, along with vague references to animals, pre-literate societies, or cultures described as “primitive.” Those examples get used as communal proof that monogamy lacks any natural or universal basis, but where is the serious feminist, womanist, anthropological, epistemological, or postcolonial analysis?

When a community rewards one relational orientation as more developed, liberated, evolved, or enlightened, how freely are members choosing it? Or, when polyamory gets interpreted as liberation because some of its participants belong to marginalized groups, which internal power differences become harder to name?

Who gets to define ethical non-monogamy, and which cultural assumptions shape that definition?

I find that mainstream polyamory discourse often treats white, Western, secular non-monogamy as ethical by default, while interpreting non-Western plural relationships mainly through coercion, patriarchy, religion, or backwardness. A serious womanist or postcolonial analysis would interrogate that double standard instead of assuming Western polyamory represents freedom while everyone else needs rescuing.

Feminist scholarship has spent decades questioning whether choice automatically equals liberation, especially when communities reward certain choices with status, belonging, and moral approval; it appears to me that polyamory discourse rarely seems interested in applying that same scrutiny to itself.

Why have I yet to see polyamorous communities engage meaningfully with these questions beyond dropping certain buzzwords at convenient intervals, without actually using them to deepen or change the analysis?

As the post title states, I sent a message saw one tick, waiting for the second and my account immediately got b4nned, did the message get delivered subsequently after? Has anyone else had this sort of issue before and what happened when the account got restored?

Hey r/polycritical family, yesterday I wrote about how easy it would be to manufacture a convincing polyamory-coaching brand online. Today I want to explain why I am turning that observation into a series.

Polyamory coaching isn’t one uniform industry. At one end, there are licensed clinicians completing structured training, receiving case consultation and earning continuing-education credits, while at the other, there are self-appointed coaches whose main qualifications appear to be personal experience, social-media fluency and familiarity with the right terminology. Between those two ends, there’s a growing and largely unexamined marketplace of courses, Substacks, memberships, workshops, private communities and paid advice, which is exactly what I want to look at more closely.

I’m going to spend time inside various polyamory and ENM coaching spaces, including paid communities where I'll be spending ~$10 a moth on a Substack subscription, so I can document what’s actually being taught rather than relying only on public-facing marketing. As the series develops, I’ll also be joining Zoom calls and, in some cases, attending in-person meetups in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.

Although the series is still developing, I’ve already accumulated months of material, and I want to use it to understand how these groups are structured, what members are paying for, which ideas appear repeatedly, how coaches establish authority and how ordinary relationship distress gets interpreted once it enters this framework.

I’ll be paying close attention to the language used around jealousy, attachment, insecurity, boundaries, “compersion” (lol), nervous-system regulation and “doing the work,” while also looking at whether participants are genuinely encouraged to conclude that non-monogamy may not suit them or whether every negative reaction gets treated as another internal problem they need to overcome.

The business side matters too, because many of these programs aren’t only selling relationship advice; they’re also selling community, belonging, professional identity, referrals, ongoing consultation and access to someone positioned as an expert. Some even teach participants how to build coaching practices of their own, which doesn’t automatically make the work illegitimate, but it does create a self-reinforcing financial ecosystem where distress generates demand and the proposed solution can easily become another course, another session or another subscription.

I’m not starting this series by assuming every coach is a fraud or every participant is foolish. I want to distinguish between licensed clinicians, trained educators, peer-support figures and people who’ve simply branded themselves as experts, while assessing licensed clinicians and unlicensed coaches differently because the level of responsibility, professional obligation and potential risk genuinely isn’t the same. More broadly, I want to identify where legitimate support ends and ideological reinforcement begins.

Client perspectives will be included because they help explain what’s happening inside these coaching environments, but screenshots will always be redacted to remove names, usernames, avatars, locations, occupations, partners’ names and any other details that could reasonably identify someone. The clients aren’t the subject of the series; their perspectives are included because they show how the coaching is received, interpreted and applied.

Coach names, public claims and resources will remain available because the coaches and their work are what I’m examining, although names will be placed behind spoiler tags where possible. I’m not pretending that spoiler tags make anything private or hide names from Google, but they may make it harder for people inside the wider polyamory or coaching communities to search this subreddit for a specific coach and immediately locate every discussion about them.

Every factual claim about a public program, resource or coach will include a link (also behind a spoiler tag) so readers can review the original material themselves, and I want to be clear that the purpose of the series is to understand this industry, not to run anyone off the internet. I’m not interested in harassment, contacting coaches, interfering with their businesses or turning ordinary members into targets; the focus will remain on the teachings, sales language, recurring frameworks, professional claims and business models.

Ultimately, I want to understand the system from the inside by asking what people are being taught to call harm, what they’re being taught to call growth, what qualifies someone to advise others, what happens when coaching doesn’t work and whether leaving is treated as a valid outcome or continued participation becomes the unspoken measure of success.

As always, feedback is absolutely welcome, whether it’s good, bad or ugly. Let me know what you’re most interested in, what you think I’m missing or whether there’s a specific coach, certification, framework or topic you’d like to see covered at some point in the series.

This post is the introduction, the first full entry in the series will go up tomorrow.

I think the rise of polyamory coaching says two things. First, a lot of people are struggling inside these relationships and need constant help reframing jealousy, neglect and insecurity as “growth.” The structure is rarely blamed. The person in pain is told to regulate their nervous system, unpack mononormativity and do more work.

Second, coaching is extremely easy to monetize. You do not need credentials. Your qualification is basically that you claim to be polyamorous and know the terminology. You do not have to disclose how long you have practiced, how stable your relationships are or whether your private life resembles what you post online.

With the right branding, anyone could create a convincing polyamory-coach persona. Take photos with friends and imply they are partners, repost quotes about compersion and attachment, make polished Instagram slides, start a Substack, sell Zoom workshops and speak confidently about “intentional relating.” Within a year or two, you could probably be making thousands a month.

Who would know the difference? There is no licensing board, no standardized qualification and no reliable way to verify the life being sold. That is what makes the industry so appealing. The clients are distressed, the barriers to entry are almost nonexistent and the product is not proof that your relationships work. The product is the appearance that you have figured them out.

Honestly, I may have just given Reddit a business idea. haha

What makes this NOT fraud? Bill it as entertainment.

I'll expand on why: fraud generally needs a false statement of verifiable fact that someone relied on to their financial detriment, "I'll help you relate more intentionally" isn't a fact; there's no fiduciary duty, no defined standard of care, and the deliverable is a Zoom call that did in fact occur. You can also add "for educational and entertainment purposes only, not a substitute for therapy" and you have the same legal architecture as astrology, tarot and even stock-picking news letters.

With that being said, I'm thinking about starting a Polyamory Coaching series right here in r/polycritical where I'll go inside various coaching communities on Substack, peruse their communities, provide redacted screenshots and explore how these communities are formed, what participation entails, what they learn, and more. Would anyone be interested in this? I plan on spending $10 a month on a subscription (this would be $10 a month per coach) and it's a small investment in order to provide you with insight on what happens inside of these groups.

I'm not trying to market or promote anything. I believe that like-minded people, such as ourselves, owe it to ourselves to learn more in order to spot the signs, understand what frameworks these coaches use and understand what specific thing about their coaching is a revenue-generating asset to their business.

I plan to publish my first post of the series on Sunday.

EDIT: Expanded my thoughts.

I'm currently on a UK jungle and drum and bass kick. I listen to a lot of UK garage and all the genres that have spanned out of that country's world renowned electronic music ecosystem, which has been generative and aspirational for DJs, producers, electronic music enthusiasts, club goers, radio DJs, groupies, fangirls (and boys), career festival goers, etc. The UK is the best in the world at this. And EBTG has stood the test of time in ways that other groups from the UK haven't.

Walking Wounded is my main piece of evidence.

The sophisti-pop is still there lyrics wise. Same adult, quiet writing they were doing in the 80s. But the beats are trip hop, electronic, a bit more bass-y, and in some aspects light jungle.

"Wrong" is the one I'd point at. Sub-heavy, slow, murky, tons of space in the beat, and Tracey singing over it exactly the way she'd sing over a saxophone or a jazz quartet.

They just re-orient, reinvent, reimagine while staying true to themselves, and I appreciate that EBTG is like a friend I can look to not just when I'm in longing or mourning, but when I'm exploring other genres. EBTG can seamlessly fit into whichever era I find myself cataloguing and journeying through.

I want to keep the story short, I’m sure it’s relatable for some but not for others. I want to fast forward through the nuances of “finding out” because that matters much less than the meat and potatoes of what I’m asking.

In short, I’ve been in on and off contact with my birth family for about a little over 15 years now. I’m in my 30s, so contact and the development of a relationship with them (siblings and birth mom) began at around the age of 13-14 for me.

Fast forwarding to now, I don’t talk to all of my birth siblings and I have somewhat of a relationship with one. My relationship with my birth mother is sort of underwhelming, I don’t feel like connecting with her yields to anything meaningful. Maybe she’s really traumatized and checked out; I find myself resenting how frivolous she can be. For instance, one time I called to talk and connect (I don’t call very often) but she wanted to get off of the phone to continue watching Bridgerton instead of pausing it for maybe, 45 minutes to an hour of her time?

In any case, over the years we’ve met and we’ve seen each other a few times. We’ve never spent major holidays or birthdays together, not because we haven’t discussed our desire to but because it just hasn’t materialized for lack of effort and prioritization.

I have an okay relationship with what remains of my adoptive family. My adoptive father passed away nearly 3 years ago (we were extremely close) and my adoptive mother and I have had a relatively not-so-close relationship over the years but I’ve been making an effort to bridge the gap through many unhealthy coping mechanisms (she’s in her 70s and she’s a narcissist so a lot of managing her emotions entails kissing her ass and just performing anything that positions her as all-knowing and perfect, etc.. the rest is really irrelevant to be fair, but in short, my childhood was largely organized around her moods and her demands; everyone in the household learned to make sure she was happy at all times otherwise, shit would be relatively miserable for all of us, standard childhood trauma BS and so on and so forth, etc..).

In saying that, I don’t really have a strong relationship with my birth mother and I’m old enough where I don’t need another adult human to answer to me for any traumas I may have accrued from being associated with them willfully or not, at this point, I have all the answers I need to make sense of my adoption. I don’t need her to account for anything, I know why she made the decisions that she made and I don’t resent her for anything she did 30+ years ago as a woman of color and single mother in America.

I don’t feel like she has the capacity for more depth than she’s given me and I don’t require it; I don’t feel motivated to nurture this connection further but I don’t resent her. I think I’m at a point where I’d like to move beyond this performative maintenance of a relationship and just move forward with my life. I don’t need to remain tethered to her as some penance she must pay for giving me up for adoption; I don’t want her to feel like she has to send me annual birthday texts or perform the routine check-ins, etc..

Frankly, I’d like to end this connection. I don’t resent her. I don’t dislike her. It’s possible that subconsciously she represents the fact that I’ll never “feel” chosen but that’s not something that I’m holding her responsible for as a grown adult, that’s on me to resolve in therapy and not project onto her, and yet, I want to move away from this relationship so entirely that I no longer want to keep in touch.

Blocking feels cruel and announcing it feels like a cry for attention which is not what I’m seeking, I just want to end the tie that seems to bind us in this seemingly obligatory contact, I want to move forward from adoption and accept it as a facet of my life without being tethered to this person who gave me life. I don’t hate them, they’re just not substantial to the questions that I have of myself anymore. I want to move on from this without this being some ceremonial thing; I would like to be strangers from my biological family and get on with my life as best as I can, and I’m unsure of how to do this without this turning into a thing.

I don’t want to turn it into a thing, I just would like for them to forget me and for me to look at them as figments of a past I was once curious about but no longer am.

No other group has captured the disappointment of lost time, wasted potential and energy in a lover quite like Everything But the Girl.

Among all the themes they sing about, if I ever needed a soundtrack for my own existential angst, especially the disappointment of running behind a mirage of potential, most of it would be ballads sung by Tracey Thorn.

She captures that entire range of feeling in such a quintessentially sophisti-pop way lol, especially the group’s earliest work. Heartbreak, but yuppie. Forlorn, but composed. Longing not as something romantic, but as the endless feeling of never quite arriving.

No one has ever fully captured the humiliation of wanting connection from the same person who hurts you, and still managing to make that wanting sound elegant.

The hope, self-consciousness, private embarrassment of knowing better and still waiting.

Their music understands how love can become less about the person in front of you and more about the future you kept imagining with them, even as the years passed and nothing ever really changed.

Everything but the girl (more specifically the self-titled North American release or Eden) really takes it there for me; I’ve been listening to it heavily this summer while quietly enduring on the inside and externally performing my way through life. I’m gutted and yet, this group has become my daily companion in the background of my waking hours.