[Replay] The Holiday Minefield
Libby reviews some of the biggest challenges that can show up around the holiday season when you're non-monogamous and how to navigate them without exploding an already stressful season.
Transcript
I feel like today I need to have a party. Do you know why it is as of today? As of this release, November 22nd, 2022 is the three year anniversary of making polyamory work. I released my very first episode, which was kind of a teaser episode called, Shitty First Drafts, and, it was November 22nd, 2019, before the Pandemic. The whole world is different now and, so is making polyamory work. I remember when I first released the very, very first episode, I was like, oh my God, oh my god, people are listening to it.
Oh my God, it's got like 10 downloads this week. Oh my God, there are 50. Oh my God. There are people, not just who are my friends, who are clearly from like looking at the analytics from the part of DC or Maryland that I'm from, but there's someone in California, there's someone in Canada, there's someone in Sri Lanka, there's someone in the UK. What? And the audience just grew and grew. Now we're approaching 500,000 downloads total, and my episodes are averaging, like seven, 8,000 listens. And some of my episodes have had, you know, more than 10,000, more than 15,000 people listening to them. And that's just amazing. And, you know, I'm not one to brag about numbers, honestly, in general, but like, this is just a moment where I wanna reflect on how successful this show is. And it's because of you listening to it.
And, I am so grateful. And I wanna tell you too, like, just in case you're wondering like if there's some magical way that I'm monetizing this show, there's not. Apart from that, when you get to get to know me through the show, then you're gonna possibly maybe wanna sign up for one of the things that I offer, like I'll be transparent about that. But otherwise, this show is free. It is my gift to you and my intention is that it always will be that it will never have ads, that I will never have some kind of subscription where you have to pay in order to listen to it. This is for you, from me to you, and
I'm just so happy to be here, honestly. And so I'm just, I'm excited for three years and I'm looking forward to many more years together. And so thank you, thank you everyone for being here and for staying with me through the ups and downs of the show. And, also wanna take this moment to thank, Finn from normalizing non-monogamy and my assistant van for all of their help in keeping this show going as well. And all of the folks who've written in and said thank you for the show, it that is also keeps me going. And for those of you who have been like the amazing superstars and have gone to the Making Polyamory work website and have donated to the show, that's amazing to you don't have to, but it is, a wonderful gift to give back to me if you wanna do that. Speaking of gifts, what we're gonna get to do now is, this today's episode is actually a replay. That's my first replay episode release that I've ever done. And it's on, the holiday minefield because I think, for those of you who might have missed this episode, I think it's a really important one. if you're non-monogamous, the holidays can be very confusing and very fraught. And, I wanted to offer you the wisdom that I have taken away from having navigated many poly holidays in my life. So,
Without further ado, re-release of the holiday minefield in case you missed it. And if you already listened to it, I hope you listen to it again. And for those of you who are celebrating, the American Thanksgiving this year, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving and otherwise, I wish you a happy three years with making polyamory work. Thanks for being with me.
So before I start this episode and diving too deep into it, I wanna make sure that I do some cultural competency stuff because it's important to note that this episode is probably going to be pretty narrow in its cultural context because of my cultural context. So that's a fancy way of saying I am from the United States, I am white, I am middle class, I am cisgender, able bodied married and still in relationship with my family of origin. And all of that together is probably a narrow slice of the broadness that is my listening audience because I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you may be from somewhere else in the world, somewhere where nobody celebrates Christmas or certainly not Thanksgiving. And so I just wanna acknowledge that where I'm coming from is from a very specific demographic and I'm still gonna speak from that specific demographic because that's the demographic that I know anything about.
And my hope is that as I go through this episode and talk over some thoughts and ideas and suggestions that I have on how to navigate holidays when you're polyamorous, that it's still useful to you even if your cultural context is nothing like mine. Okay? But I just wanna start out by acknowledging that my cultural context is certainly not everybody's. So when I am talking about the holidays, I am talking about the period of time in the United States from about late fall until early winter in which several major holidays in the United States and other parts of the world occur. First of all, we have Thanksgiving, which I know nobody but the United States celebrates, and it is a problematic holiday in and of itself, but I know that even though it is a problematic holiday, a lot of people still celebrate it and that includes me.
Next is Hanukkah comes after Thanksgiving this year, very shortly after Thanksgiving, and then after that we have Solstice, and then Christmas and then Kwanza, and then New Year's Eve, and then New Year's Day. And it's different for everybody what they choose to celebrate and how they celebrate it. Those are the big holidays that tend to come up in this corner of the world that I'm in. I also wanna say that these holidays, this time of year can be fraught even if you are not a person who has multiple romantic partners. It can be fraud even if you don't have any romantic partners. In fact, it can sometimes be pretty intense for different reasons when you're in that situation. I come from a family where my parents are divorced and my father got remarried. Just that alone, when I was navigating that as a solo person, navigating who I'm gonna spend family holidays with on each given holiday was still something I had to kind of divide up and navigate and deal with people's feelings about it.
Then when I got married but was in a monogamous relationship that adds yet another family who has a stake in where we go and what we do for the holidays, then of course that just compounds with. Now I have my partner Kyrr, whose family also celebrates the holidays, and my partner Tom, who celebrates various holidays around this time of year, and he has a wife who also has a family of origin and his wife has a boyfriend. They're fairly serious and consider each other family and he's very involved in their family. And so on top of that, that's another person who has a family of origin who has a stake in the holidays. So if we were gonna bring all of those people together, that would be a lot of people. So it definitely gets really complicated really fast, but it can be complicated no matter who you are.
And of course it can be, like I said, really complicated if there's no one that is a explicit stakeholder for your holiday time, because holidays can also remind you of a loss of family or how you don't have a partner and you would like to have one. There's all kinds of ways that holidays can be really emotional and fraught and stressful. And what I'm hoping to offer you is specifically how you can confront some complications that come up specifically when you are non-monogamous or polyamorous. So I have five complications that I want to raise to you and then talk to you a little bit about how you can confront and maneuver around each one so that maybe you at least can see the landmines that are there and maybe not step on them or figure out how to dig them up and deactivate them. So the first complication is that holidays can have a lot of meaning in terms of who you are to your person.
There's sort of an assumption I think that when there is a spousal relationship between two people, that they're just gonna spend the holidays together and that their families, whether it's their family of origin or their chosen family or their adoptive family or what have you, that that's the priority. I think that's generally the assumption, just assuming that can really leave out any other partners that you might have who also might have a stake in wanting to spend the holidays together or have the relationship just acknowledged as important and valuable. My offer there is first and foremost to make sure that you talk about this with everyone in your relational ecosystem. And don't just assume because that's actually where I think things can be the most hurtful, is to just do assume who's included in things and who's not included in things. And this can go both ways.
I've definitely seen and heard stories of quote unquote secondary or tertiary partners just being left out of the holiday conversation and then them just feeling sort of cast aside or not considered. And that feels really. And I've seen relationships end around big fights around the holidays. So if you don't want that to happen, it's important that you check in with your people and you know, at least show care around what their needs and wants might be around this time. But another thing that I've seen that's been hurtful is just assuming that someone's included when maybe other people in your relational ecosystem don't feel comfortable with that. And again, it's not necessarily that the people in your life might not be willing to include your other partners, but more that they want to be asked. But sort of like if you're throwing a party and you invite your beloved and then they just invite other people without asking you, that can feel really crummy and it can feel like you're being forced to incorporate people that maybe you weren't ready to or you know, maybe that feels like an escalation to you that you're not ready for, or maybe you're still getting to know your partners, other partners, and having them be there in the holiday period when things are already stressful would just add more stress to you.
If you're in the position of wanting to include more people, it's really important that you just check in with everybody about what they're expecting and what they need and what they want. Because if you're forcing people to include people that they are not ready for, then that can feel very boundary violating. And it's important to know as you're checking in with people, not just who, but also what do you want to have happen? Because a lot of people have their own ideas, rituals, desires, stressors and triggers that might be surrounding the holidays for them. And if you don't check on that and also share about what yours are, then you might accidentally not make room for something that's very cherished and important to someone else, or you could possibly railroad somebody else out of feeling like their thing is prioritized. Another thing that I want to invite you into, if you are a person who's feeling a little inclined to close things off and keep things small or just between you and your partner or just for your little nuclear family, is I want you to consider what the purpose is in excluding certain people from holiday things.
Because sometimes that action can be used as a way of trying to protect yourself or control the relationship. And while that might make you feel secure or comfortable in the short term, it might not ultimately serve you in the long term. And it's just worth checking in with yourself and seeing if this was a friend that we were including in the holiday celebration, would I be okay with that? Is there something about the person being a romantic partner that's making me feel resistant to that? And again, I will just go back and say again, if you have a romantic partner who you want to include in holiday celebrations that are part of an existing tradition that you have with other people that you're in relationship with, it's important not to feel entitled to include this person just because they're a romantic partner. If you are not the type of person who would include friends, but you would include a romantic partner, just consider why that.
Like why is the sex and romance the thing that's gonna make that person get a ticket into your intimate family gatherings, whereas a friend wouldn't get that ticket into intimate family gatherings? Holidays can be a way of signifying who's important to you in your life and who isn't. And sharing these important moments together can be something that is really treasured by some people and some people don't care. And so, you know, it's important to really check in about that stuff. And this is just my own personal bias speaking here, but if you haven't thought about it at all, consider that a lot of these holidays sort of the spirit of them is generosity and giving and gratitude and inclusion. And we all deserve love and care and help and support. Just consider making room at the table if that is possible for you with the understanding that sometimes, it's an issue of as it would be with my boyfriend if he wants to make room at the table for me for a holiday event, oftentimes that's gonna come with five people, not one, because I'm gonna wanna spend that holiday time also with my husband and my other partner and my three kids and possibly my mom.
And so really like six people. So anyway, sometimes you can't expand the table to include everybody and all of their people in all of their people, et cetera, et cetera. Which, which brings me to complication number two, which is that holidays are one of those very finite resources. Holidays only happen over a limited period of time. There are only certain days that it happens and a lot of people have a stake in it. Again, even if you want to be inclusive, not everyone will go with everyone else. Blending every single family member into one day may be too much. And again, people have this difficulty even with multiple sets of parents. I don't think I've ever had a holiday celebration that includes both of my sets of parents and my husband's sets of parents. Because of that, you might have to slice and dice a little bit.
It might mean that certain things that you might really want to be able to do with certain people, you might have to pick and choose. This is can be really tricky, especially for certain things like work parties or organizations that you're a part of, et cetera, where you're the member or the employee and you're allowed to have a plus one and not necessarily a plus three. And that can suck to have to figure out who to choose. And I know some people who don't choose anybody, or I know some people who choose a different person every year so that it's not the same person every year. And again, it's just worth tuning into what your assumptions are and what ways you could make room. Another strategy that I have used is actually just expanding the celebration beyond those certain days and create other holidays to celebrate.
So an example of this, there's Christmas day, which is kind of an important day, but my partner, Tom, his family really likes to spend Christmas morning just with the people that live in his house. And for me, I've kind of traditionally done that too, although I've included my best friend into Christmas morning as well. She used to live down the street from me and so she would be there when the kids would wake up and we'd all do presents together in the morning, but you know, a gift exchange with my immediate household and Tom's immediate household would get quite large. And so we, you know, we haven't historically done that together and it's been important that that be something that we do in our homes. And then on top of that, Tom also spends Christmas Eve with his parents, with his household family unit. Again, it's one of those things that he might have liked to be able to include me in that, but for me that would mean I would need to include my kids, my partners, and my mom in all of that.
And so his parents weren't really up for having an additional six people in on that celebration. So that just wasn't accessible to us. So what we did to deal with that, because it was, you know, that was also sad that we couldn't do that and that it wasn't available to us. So what I've done is I've hosted a Christmas Eve Eve cookie decorating and gift exchange at my house where Tom and his kids can come and we all celebrate together. And last year, because of the pandemic mostly we did get to celebrate all of us, like my entire household and Tom's entire household. We went over to Tom's house and celebrated on Christmas evening and had a dinner together and that was really lovely and special. So another thing to note there is that I've been with Tom for four and a half years and that was the first time that we ever did that together.
So it's worth also thinking about how you can do something this year that might expand next year. Building holiday traditions with unconventional relationships is more of maybe a marathon than a sprint. So another thing that I think is a good just tip here is everyone try to be compassionate around everybody's big feelings around this and try to be gracious where you can. Because the tricky thing about holidays is sometimes they're important to us as individuals, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're more about obligation or even a performance that you feel like you have to do every year for your family. And if you're feeling left out of something, understand that even though it might be important to you, it might not be important or a big signifier to the other person. So try to be just compassionate with where they are and also understand that sometimes it's just easier to keep the peace and not rock the boat at this particular time of year.
And you know, I'm generally a fan of rocking the boat, but around something that is already got a lot of stuff piled on it. I don't always think it's a good idea to choose this battle of all the battles that you might choose. Also, I think it's really important to be aware if you are in a score keeping mindset around the holidays. Like, oh you know, this partner's getting this and I'm getting this and this other partner's getting this and how much am I getting versus what someone else is getting Because I generally think score keeping is never a root to happiness and you know, positive feelings, I think it's always going to cause you more pain and strife then is necessary. It's just not a good way to approach things. But especially around the holidays, people are just doing the best that they can in that vein as well.
Don't use the holidays as some kind of test. This is some advice I got from Kathy Labriola. She wrote a really great article several years ago about tips for the holidays for polyamorous folks and this was her. One of her big tips was don't use holidays as a test for whether your partner can really come through for you and read your mind and figure out what you need. Be really explicit about what matters to you and what doesn't. They may just not get the hint if it's really important to you that you get to spend Christmas this way, or if it's really important to you that if you're gonna skip out on something, that you get something else in return. Really let the person know how they can succeed with you. That's just so important. Complication three is that you may not be out about your non-monogamy, your family of origin that you tend to spend the holidays with may not know about your other partners and thus you might not be able to include them in the holiday celebrations that you have with those family members.
So I'm gonna echo Eli Sheff advice here, which is now is not the time to come out. It is not the time to come out on Christmas Day or around planning for the holidays. That is just, again, piling more stress onto a stressful situation and demanding people be at their best when they may not actually have the capacity to do that. Oftentimes a coming out process is a process, not a one and done conversation. And people really need to have a lot of room to feel what they feel and react how they're going to react and ask questions and come around and work through things. And there's just not the available bandwidth to do that around the holidays. So if you haven't come out by now or you're not planning to come out in the next week or two, this may not be the year that this is all gonna work out the way that you would like with the people that you love.
And you know, you may need to just make room to grieve that you will not get to share the holidays with the people that matter to you in the way that you would deeply like to. Again, this is where expanding the holiday time can be useful. Finding a special day, that's not the day to spend time together. I haven't generally been able to spend Thanksgiving with Tom's family because of the forementioned nuclear family way of operating. So we just got together the day after Thanksgiving and had a lovely leftover dinner where we shared stuff from each of our Thanksgiving dinners with each other. And that was really nice. But also if building a holiday tradition that is more inclusive with everybody that you care about, start at the beginning or maybe the middle of next year, having those conversations about what went well this past year, what didn't go well, what you'd like to be different, who needs to be included, and start bringing family members into the conversation, creating space and planning better to honor all of the people that matter to you.
So complication four is that you may not have a family that is supportive even if you are out to them that could look like that. You have to make some tough choices that you have to choose whether you're gonna spend time with your partners or whether you're gonna spend time with your family of origin. And that may not be an easy choice to make because both people may feel betrayed if you choose the other one. And this is where I think having some psychological boundaries up can be really helpful cuz you're just not gonna be able to please everybody. And so you're gonna have to let somebody down. You're probably gonna have to disappoint somebody and it's not even you're gonna disappoint somebody based on who's most important, right? That's a classic hinge mistake. And in this situation, you kind of are a hinge between these different groups of people.
So understanding that you're gonna make the best decision that is the best decision for you and your wellbeing and your enjoyment. And that may be that you're gonna temporarily not enjoy going and spending the holidays with your family of origin because you don't wanna break with them over this. But over the long term, that's gonna be better for you, even though in the short term it might be painful because you know you wanna maintain those looser tie connections or your family and you wanna continue to build goodwill with them. And if you're on the left out side of that, it's important to understand that your partner doing what's best for them, for their whole ecosystem, for their whole life, is also in your interest to support because you care about them and their wellbeing. And if investing in their family of origin is part of their wellbeing, even if it doesn't include you, try to be compassionate and empathetic about that.
But also maybe you are allowed to include your partners, your family's just kind of maybe unpleasant about it, and or maybe just they're not culturally on the same page with you. And so they might say things that they think are being supportive, but are actually sort of demeaning or inappropriate, et cetera. So my advice there is if you know that's what you're walking into, make sure everyone else knows who is walking into that as well. So if this is the first time your partners are being included with your family of origin and you are like, you know, and that's probably gonna ask us some inappropriate questions about sex, or Bobby Jo is gonna be really uncomfortable with you and is probably not gonna, you know, probably gonna give you the cold shoulder, et cetera. Just kind of clueing people into where they're walking into.
And then make sure that you are resourced enough to be self-regulated, to not get reactive. This is not a great time where you're gonna get into a big conflict and have a fight. You don't wanna do that. Make sure also that you exercise your boundaries. You know, if someone is out of line or inappropriate or you're just tired and done, be ready to take space, take a break, go for a walk around the block, whatever you might need so that you don't feel stuck when it doesn't feel good anymore. Make room for your people, your partners, family members, whomever to bow out of things that might not feel good to them. And really respect that everybody needs to be allowed to take care of themselves. And also if needed, if something is really just not cool or somebody's being really difficult or unkind, it's okay to stick up for yourself.
But I would invite you to stick up for yourself with love instead of with harshness or righteousness. Because again, this is a time where we ultimately wanna build bridges and grow closer. So if somebody's just really being out of line, what I could see is, you know, you could say, Hey, that's outta line, that's not cool, don't do that. And a way that you could say that, making the message clear that what they've done or said is not okay. But saying it in a way that also is empowering and loving is, hey, expressing that to me really makes me feel marginalized and like you don't really respect my relationships and that really just isn't okay with me. And I wanna give you the chance to take that back so that we can continue to enjoy this holiday together. And again, you know, you don't have to threaten anybody, but if somebody really is just out of line, you can either ask them to leave or you can choose to leave yourself.
And that that takes me into complication five, which is, you may hate all of this. The thought of trying to navigate all of the things that you have to navigate with the holidays may just feel like anxiety producing, miserable, inauthentic, unloving, just a bunch of blah blah, blah. And this can especially come up with gift exchange, which I haven't touched on yet, but which I wanna touch on now. Lordy, who to buy things for, how much to spend, what's expected of you? Are you gonna be receiving a gift? What will it be like if you receive a gift but you don't have one for that person, et cetera, et cetera. That can be a huge stressor. And it's one thing that I actually truly hate about the holidays is the obligatory gift exchange. Whether you hate it or you don't, I think it's important to, again, have those conversations about what the expectations are around gift exchange and really do your best to dial in and get really clear, are you expecting a gift from me?
Are you going to get a gift from my partner? Do they need to know that, et cetera, because that's just gonna really save you a lot of headaches. And one of the strategies that I have used and that my other partners have used in their families to take a lot of the gift giving burden away when there's just so many people to buy for, is to do a secret Santa where you're not expected to buy for everybody. You're just supposed to buy for one person and everybody gets put in a hat and get to draw a name and get a gift for that person and that can be good. Another thing that we've done is Christmas is just for the kids. And adults don't need to give each other gifts because we all have paying jobs and we can take care of ourselves. And if you are in a position like me where the holidays are, not always a thing that you really feel like is in alignment with your authentic best self.
And again, do what you can to shape the holiday into things that are meaningful to you and maybe try to move out of or move away from the things that feel more contrived or obligatory opt out of whatever you feel like you can opt out of it is ultimately serving you and everybody else. If you take yourself out of something that ultimately is going to cost you so much that nobody would actually have wanted to have you pay that and simplify where you can too. Wherever you can streamline things and make it easy, give yourself permission to do that. One of Kathy Labreola’s other pieces of advice is, for all of the things you think you can do and squeeze in into the holiday season, try to maybe do less than that because you don't wanna end the holiday season burnt out, right?, finally, this one's probably gonna seem really obvious and silly, but I'm gonna say it anyway because I'm a mom and I'm all about self care.
Take time to rest. Take time for you. Take time to resource yourself physically, emotionally. You know, there's a lot of junk food that goes around the holidays and that can make us feel physically unwell, make sure you're taking good care of yourself so that you can make this experience as loving and caring as you can. So that's my advice for the holidays. Mostly what that boils down to is talk about everything. Create what you can. Let go of what just isn't possible. Don't force anybody to do anything that they don't wanna do. Don't force yourself to do anything that feels too out of alignment with what you want. And try to be as loving and compassionate and empathetic as you can as you navigate this time. I hope that you all listening have the most wonderful poly holiday that you can or not poly holiday if that's not your jam. And my love to you, love and light, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
