Disclosure Afterthoughts
Libby answers her first listener question on the show, where a listener asks, does it always make sense to disclose potential dealbreakers before the first date?
Transcript
I have a special treat for you today. I am excited to present you all with my first listener question. I actually have the suspicion that this might not be the first question my listeners have had for me, but I recently found out that my website submission form has actually been broken for a few weeks. This is really embarrassing, and I am so sorry if you've submitted a question for the show in the past few weeks, I encourage you to go back to my website and submit it again because I would love to have your question and I'd love to answer it on the show. And I can confirm now that the form is working because I have this question for you, which I will get to in just a little bit,
So here is my listener question. I'm going to read it to you now. It says, hi Libby. I've been following your making polyamory work podcast. I am positively loving it. And I just listened to the latest episode, full disclosure, and I had a few comments and questions I wanted to share. I would love to hear your thoughts on this because I wonder if there are flaws in my thinking here. I was thinking about my own day dating app experiences. I never mentioned being Poly in a dating profile in part, because I am open to exploring a monogamous relationship. I thought that might be an interesting point to address if it wasn't already in your master plan of episodes, polyamorous people in monogamous relationships. In my case, I usually mention that I'm polyamorous on the first date because it is not a deal-breaker for me. It is, however, still something I feel is important for the other person to know about my mentality.
Going into a relationship because you were so adamantly against going into a first date without telling the other person about being poly. I wondered what your thoughts were on telling them during the first date, if it isn't the deal-breaker in the relationship, you also mentioned that putting your flaws out there from the start will attract people who are okay with those parts of yourself, which I entirely agree with. However, I think it can be a bit more complicated than that with some things there are times when someone is societally conditioned to not give something a chance, even though they are genuinely open to it. I have found a number of times that once I have met a person and present the idea of polyamory in a less societally taboo way, they suddenly see it as okay. Something they even are excited to explore someone who would've swiped left.
If they've known, I was poly from the start is suddenly more educated and far more open to the idea. I don't trust society to already have trained people to be open-minded. But I do believe even one conversation can begin changing someone's perception about a not heavily talked about topic. It won't work with everyone or about every topic, but there are people out there that just need one conversation. I don't wanna miss out on them just because society told them to swipe left on polyamory without even them realizing it was society. That said, so thank you so much for taking the time to read this. And I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts,.
Dear listener, thank you so much for sending me this message. And I love your thoughts here, and I am so grateful you shared them with me. I can completely see what you're saying and you're shining a light on a different side of the issue, which you are totally right. I wasn't acknowledging very well. I was definitely looking at the perspective, mostly of someone who has already got an existing partner and is worried that if they disclose upfront that they're non-monogamous and that they have this other partner, that they will never get a date. I tried to make what I had to say about it. Inclusive of people who are also solo or single and dating, because I have also talked to folks who are feeling worried that they'd narrow their dating pool by disclosing, but you showed me that I may have missed the mark there a little bit. As I thought about your question, I remembered that Paige Turner, the blogger who writes for poly.land, by the way, a blog, I absolutely love and recommend to everyone.
Well, she wrote a few posts about Ambi-Amory or being Ambi amorous. Ambi Amory is when you are okay with being polyamorous or monogamous, depending on the context and reflecting on it. I think this is pretty common. I think a lot of people fall into this category. I have a number of friends who have been polyamorous or non-monogamous in the past, but you either through choice or through circumstance are functionally monogamous right now. Other friends of mine are actively dating and seeking a partner. And I believe they would also consider being monogamous with the right person. If they showed up. I want to say to those of you who are in this situation, just like you can be bi or pansexual and be dating own only one gender at the moment. So too, can you be in a relationship that's functionally monogamous and still be polyamorous or open to polyamory?
I say this because I know some folks who have felt some shame or judgment come up for them if they're polyamorous, but aren't in lots of relationships or aren't interested in dating multiple people right now, there are so many reasons why this would happen. And I think it's so important just to be where you are and who you are, wherever you are. And with the people who are your people, whoever they are. And sometimes that can mean that you planned on having a big polyamorous family. And instead, you end up in a monogamous life partnership that looks to everyone like your following society scripts, even when you know that you're not, I see you and I hear you and no one can tell you who you are, but you, you know, there's been a question sort of floating around years now about whether or not being polyamorous is an orientation or behavior.
I think this debate is tied up in whether or not being polyamorous is a choice and thus whether or not those of us who are polyamorous are entitled to certain rights, equal treatment under the law. And while I think the answer can actually really be both. I also think this is the wrong question to ask, because I don't think anyone should have to justify their relationship style or sexual orientation or preference or anything by saying they didn't have a choice about it. And I mean, there are all kinds of things that people do that maybe they didn't get to choose, but that we're still willing to condemn the behavior because we've deemed it as a society as unacceptable. And then of course we can get into the whole thing about choice being an illusion anyhow, but for that, you can go over to Michael Mandy and Sarah's podcast called probably poly where they really are so great at diving those deep philosophical questions.
And I'm not gonna get into it here. I think the more important thing to be present to is that you are who you are and that might not always be obvious to others based on what you're doing, which is why I think it's so good to disclose when and where you can. But also I, again and listener, I really see your point about maybe waiting until you're a human being to the person that you're meeting so that you can have that conversation with them. I mean, I'm a little bit mixed on it. On the one hand, if I were gonna flip the script and imagine that someone were to reach out to me on a dating app about meeting up and I had declared prominently on profile that I'm polyamorous and they didn't declare their relationship style. So it's unclear to me, but I'm gonna assume, cause they're reaching out to me that they're cool with polyamory.
And then I meet up with them and they say, well, actually I'm monogamous, but I'm open to polyamory for the right person. I might feel a little misled and annoyed that I made time to meet with them because I know for sure that I'm not interested in dating monogamous people, but I can also see what you're saying about societal stigma and how it can be impactful to have the conversation with someone. And to me, I mean that can seem a little evangelical. Like you want people to be able to see these other possibilities that they haven't considered. I think though that you have to weigh that against taking up someone's time because not everyone wants to be seen as somebody that you're trying to convert. They may know what they want and they don't wanna spend time on what they know they don't want. But on the flip side, I think a lot of people who are dating don't actually know it all, what they want, even if they think they do, they're really still just perusing the menu.
They don't really know themselves well yet. And they are figuring that out by trying on different people and seeing what fits. And if they've never been to a certain like section of the store, AKA, they've never like wandered into the polyamory section or the kinky section, or, you know, I've got more examples that I'm gonna go into later because they just had never even considered those as possibilities, letting them take a peek to see what's possible and available could be a real gift and an eye-opener for them. And indeed I think that that is how many people become polyamorous in the first place. Someone exposes them to the idea and then they realize, oh my gosh, this fits me. And it really did take a real person rather than some random person on a poly podcast. For instance, telling them that this was a real possibility before they could try it.
And this part, oh, I'm so glad that you asked this question because it really connects to another perspective on disclosing potential deal-breakers that I realized after I finished my episode this week that I wanted to go into deeper. So I'm gonna get at this chance I touched on it, but I didn't really address it thoroughly. And some current events made me feel like it was really important that I not missed the opportunity. There are some things about a person that might be big deal-breakers, things that they should absolutely disclose to potential partners before the relationship gets to a certain point, but where there are huge safety issues around disclosure. Again, I touched on this by saying, don't disclose certain deal-breakers until it's safe to do so, but I wanna call out specifically three important situations that deserve special attention. The first one is HIV status.
I separate out HIV status because people who are positive for HIV are hugely stigmatized in lots of places. It's a very scary thing to admit to a potential partner and for plenty of people, even though drugs like Truvada exist, that can prevent Ann's mission of HIV being HIV positive is so stigmatized that many folks just consider it a deal-breaker out of hand. So I can understand why someone who is in that situation, who would want to possibly be very careful about who they choose and when they choose to disclose that information, they might not wanna put it in their dating profile and possibly might not even wanna tell someone on the first date, they might wanna spend a little time assessing whether the person is worth investing in and taking the risk of sharing that. So as to protect themselves from interactions that would deepen their feelings of being stigmatized.
Of course, I don't think it's ethical to engage in certain kinds of sexual activity without disclosing that information. But if someone throws up red flags in the first date about whether or not they will be receptive to that information, I think it's totally legit to not take things further and never disclose. And I really respect that choice. Similarly, in the United States, as it stands now, it's pretty unsafe to be transgender. It makes me really sad to say this, but it's especially also true if you're a transgender person of color, especially if you're a trans woman of color. So again, I can see why you might not wanna be out about being trans on your dating profile in part, just to avoid people who would fetishize you and in part to protect yourself from people who might wanna do violence to you, you might wanna meet a potential partner a few times to assess whether or not they are safe to disclose that information to them.
The third category is if someone is a sex worker, which is yet another group of people that are highly stigmatized and are vulnerable, not just to partner violence, but also to state violence. So it makes a lot of sense to me that you might want to suss out a potential romantic partner for how they feel about sex before disclosing that information. And it might take more than one date to get a feel for whether or not you can trust someone with that. And this ties so nicely back into what my listener had to say here about not wanting to disclose their polyamory because they wanted to give people a chance to meet them and potentially let go of some societal bias and stigma. When you are part of a stigmatized minority, people have a lot of assumptions about what that means. And many of them aren't really that accurate.
And sometimes what it takes to break that stigma is to actually meet and interact with someone from that stigmatized group. And so here, I need to say that if you're thinking to yourself that a potential partner being a sex worker or transgender or HIV positive would certainly be a deal-breaker for you. I want you to consider taking another look at that. I am not saying that you're wrong. If that's a deal-breaker necessarily, but I'd ask yourself where that is coming from, because it might be coming from the same sort of societal stigma that my listener is talking about. For those of you who are interested in looking deeper at this, I'm gonna put in the show links, some articles about dating someone who is in those groups. I wanna wrap up by saying thank you so much to this listener for sharing their perspective and making this conversation so much deeper and richer.
