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Solo polyamory might be for you if:

If you’re interested in exploring solo polyamory, it’s a good idea to read more about it and connect with other solo poly people. This can help you figure out whether it’s a good fit for you.

There’s no “test” to determine whether you should be solo poly or not.

However, the following questions might help you reflect on whether it aligns with your current needs and desires:

There’s no right or wrong answer here, and your answers might change over time. That’s OK! Much like sexual orientation and gender identity, your feelings about your relationships with others can be fluid and evolve.

Setting boundaries and discussing expectations is important in any relationship, whether you’re solo poly or not. This includes discussing the future and how you’d like your relationship to change over time.

Many people have ideas about how a relationship “should” progress. Certain experiences are often seen as milestones that one should aspire to when it comes to committed relationships.

For example, a person might move from the first stage below to next until each stage has been completed:

Although many people might expect this relationship escalation to happen, not everybody wants their lives to become this intertwined. Many people, including solo poly people, don’t want to become married, for example.

It’s important to talk with your partner(s) about what you do and don’t want. Make your expectations clear. If a partner isn’t familiar with solo polyamory, perhaps send them resources so that they’ll be able to understand it better."

"A friend of mine used a word today that was beyond the scope of my vocabulary. I nodded as though I understood, and our dialogue flattened out into a monologue. I don't remember what the word was, and next time I hear it, I will have no idea what it means. I missed an opportunity to learn something, and maybe to teach something, because I am afraid of the vulnerability of ignorance. To admit ignorance is to relinquish control. But ignorance is a part of the human condition. I came hardwired with very little knowledge. To pretend that I am done learning, to act as though I have filled out the empty spaces in my understanding is to cement ignorance into stupidity. It is to avoid vulnerability at the expense of growth.

Unfortunately, this tendency to flee from ignorance is nowhere as common as it is in theology. Theological ignorance carries with it a tremendous vulnerability. Admitting it to oneself necessitates existential, moral, and relational openness. It demands the difficulty of dialogue. The obvious and safe defense against this vulnerability is feigned certainty. It is to nod as though we understand, and continue our monologues.

Jesus began his ministry with a call to metanoia, the Greek word commonly translated as "repentance" but which literally means change-thinking. To change one's thinking is to admit one's ignorance. It is to face one's vulnerability. But at some point along the way to modern theology, we bought into the idea that ignorance is a sign of weakness. The call to repent was replaced with a demand to consent and the honest questioning that is an integral part of metanoia came to be seen as a sign of bad faith. Agnosticism became conflated with indifference, or worse. And we became a society of gnostics.

Seven years ago, I began to study religion academically because I was certain that the Christian faith contained an exhaustive vocabulary for discussing the truth. But the more words I learned, the more highlighted the gaps between our language became. I wrote some brilliant papers (and some bad ones) which navigated the nuances of systematic theology. I constructed arguments with a rhetorical precision sufficient to rebut the most careful objections. I learned to read languages I've never heard spoken. I applied all my skill to filling out the gaps in my understanding. And the closest I ever came to answering the deep questions of life was when I sat in silence with an old man's suffering as he asked me why God had forsaken him. Under the desperate weight of his eyes, I knew that my answers were insufficient, so I read him the best non-answer I could find:

On the cross, Jesus was an agnostic. He was willing to face death with a why on his lips. Sometimes, in the comfort of a sunny afternoon, when much less is at stake, I have found the strength to entertain such questions myself. And when my belief is stirred by the gusts of doubt, and my knowledge is silhouetted against the beauty of mystery, I feel the uneasy presence of something beyond my capacity to speak, and I am grateful for all I don't know."

"A holistic, inclusive, compassionate, justice oriented Christian vision would be adopted by more Christians if more Christians more carefully understood and distinguished between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Christ. The appearance stories in the Gospels (probably a late developing tradition for they are absent from Mark, the first Gospel written) function to bridge the gap between the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the living, cosmic Christ, linking the two together. Christ, however, is not Jesus’ last name. Jesus is not the same as Christ, though Jesus is included in the cosmic reality of Christ.

In his excellent work, The Future of Faith, Harvey Cox describes it this way,

(p. 52).

This cosmic, collective, corporate divine reality known as Christ is not limited to Christians (we who are followers of the historical Jesus). Christians know and experience the character (love, compassion, goodness, etc.) of the cosmic Christ through the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, but the Spirit of Christ is not limited to Christians. According to Cox “one of the most devastating blunders made by the church . . . was to insist that the Spirit is present only in believers.”

The Apostle Paul rarely references the historical Jesus. He speaks mostly of the cosmic Christ to whom we are united and in whom and through whom we live. We are in Christ and Christ is in us (Gal. 2:20).

In the Christ hymns/litanies of Philippians 2:6-11 and Colossians 1:15-20, the cosmic Christ precedes the historical Jesus. In Colossians the ancient Jewish wisdom tradition, which was personified as a woman (Sophia) in some texts, is applied to Christ. Christ here is creator and sustainer of everything and the reality in whom all things will be gathered up and reconciled to God (“through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”). The language here is poetic, mythic, metaphorical, and symbolic as all religious language must be.

What a big picture, grand story, universal, inclusive, kingdom of God kind of Christianity we would have if more Christians understood and made these distinctions! It is the cosmic Christ in whom we all “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Christ is the light that enlightens every person (John 1:9) and is the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate that enlightens the whole world to spiritual reality (John 16:7-11). Christ is the fullness of God who will ultimately gather up everything in himself/herself (Eph. 1:10) and draw all people into conscious oneness in God (John 12:32)."

"Lately, I’ve been identifying as a Christian Agnostic. For many people, these two words seem to be a contradiction. But for me, the tension created between the two seems to perfectly summarize where I stand spiritually. For most of my life, I’ve identified as a passionate follower of Jesus. I’ve been so devoted to the Christian Faith that I’ve even become a pastor, teaching others about the good news of Jesus as my vocation. But the more I’ve grown, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experience, the clearer it has become to me that the doctrines and dogmas that I’ve been trained to teach are either untrue or unknowable .

People look to religious leaders for answers about the big questions of life: Why are we here? Where are we going? Is there a God? Why is there suffering? Since the dawn of consciousness, shamans, gurus, and priests have emerged claiming to have superior insight into the answers to these questions and people have flocked to learn from them. I believe that most of these spiritual leaders were genuine in their belief that they had discovered the answers to these big questions. In fact, most of the founders of the great religions of the world offered their answers with humility, asking their disciples to do their own work to discover the truthfulness of their claims. It is only later on, when theologies were formed based on the teachings of the founders, that these humble perspectives were transformed into essential doctrine and dogma.

None the less, doctrine and dogma is what religion has become. At the highest levels, the worlds religions offer a systematized understanding of the world that we’re told we must believe wholeheartedly or else there will be some terrible consequence- usually some sort of eternal torment. Fear motivates many people to submit to these beliefs without much thought, and to internalize them as absolute truth.  The more they are repeated in religious settings, the deeper the belief becomes, until eventually a marginal believer becomes the most devout.

I saw this happening around me as a Christian and as a religious leader and I grew concerned. Certainty about the big questions is clearly impossible- we’re finite beings trying to comprehend the infinite. Yet I was preaching and teaching with certainty. Sometimes, people pushed back on me, pointing out that the claims of the Christian Faith that I was making were easily disprovable based on modern science, history, and logic."

My special rule that I live by: Don't lie to yourself and others sexuality. Be your true sexual personality. Don't do and say what you're sexually not! Always grow and develop and mature as a lover! Healthy compromises are good as long as genuineness is in place. Be sexually authentic and sexually transparent in appropriate ways!

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"4. Jesus had a trial before Pontius Pilate.

The Gospels portray Pontius Pilate as an honest but weak-willed governor who was strong-armed by the Jewish authorities into sending a man he knew was innocent to the cross. The Pilate of history, however, was renowned for sending his troops onto the streets of Jerusalem to slaughter Jews whenever they disagreed with even the slightest of his decisions. In his 10 years as governor of Jerusalem, Pilate eagerly, and without trial, sent thousands to the cross, and the Jews lodged a complaint against him with the Roman emperor. Jews generally did not receive Roman trials, let alone Jews accused of rebellion. So the notion that Pilate would spend a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser, let alone grant him a personal audience, beggars the imagination.

It is, of course, conceivable that Jesus would have received an audience with the Roman governor if the magnitude of His crime warranted special attention. But any “trial” Jesus got would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges for which He was being executed.

5. Jesus was buried in a tomb.

The Gospels say that after the crucifixion, Jesus’s body was brought down from the cross and placed in a tomb. If that were true, it would have been because of an extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented, act of benevolence on the part of the Romans.

Crucifixion was not just a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, some criminals were first executed and then nailed to a cross. The primary purpose of crucifixion was to deter rebellion; that’s why it was always carried out in public. It was also why the criminal was always left hanging long after he died; the crucified were almost never buried. Because the point of crucifixion was to humiliate the victim and frighten witnesses, the corpse would be left to be eaten by dogs and picked clean by birds of prey. The bones would then be thrown onto a trash heap, which is how Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, earned its name: the place of skulls.

It is possible that, unlike practically every other criminal crucified by Rome, Jesus was brought down from the cross and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest men in Judea. But it is not very likely."

"RNS: Some people say they believe in the doctrine of original sin because of the Bible. But the doctrine developed hundreds of years into the common era. Tell us about the origin of this doctrine.

DS: It’s fair to say Augustine popularized the idea, and by the time of the Reformation it had become widespread in the West. While the early church talked about sin as an action or an illness, Augustine and others shifted language to an inborn sin nature. Once that happened, all the theological focus went toward trying to fix the problem of sin. The cross was seen differently, and salvation became primarily about sin management, and human bodies became suspect, and on and on. So I call original sin the red sock in our theological laundry, because it has the potential to discolor everything.

RNS: Why is this doctrine so important that you felt you needed to write a book about it?

DS: As a pastor and now a writer, I want to help people grow into a mature relationship with God. I just don’t think original sin is helpful in doing that; in fact I think it’s very often harmful. The most faithful and centered people I know have a healthy sense of dignity and an honest view of their own shortcomings, and that’s exactly what original blessing gives us. If you want short-term obedience, scare or shame people. If you want transformation, anchor them to God’s unconditional love.

Here’s the thing: people know they sin. What they don’t know is what to do about it. I don’t think the best answer is admitting you are irrevocably bad. I think it’s realizing your home has been in God all along, and it’s time you head that direction, because abundant life is waiting.

RNS: But what is the scriptural basis for the doctrine of original sin?

DS: Scripture certainly talks about the universal reach of sin. But no passage or verse in scripture speaks definitively to the concept of an inborn sin nature. We can take sin seriously without going there. After all, Jesus didn’t believe in original sin, and the disciples and the early church didn’t either. What we see in scripture is a story of people sometimes behaving terribly and people sometimes behaving righteously. It’s often the same people. Some call that a sin nature. I think we simply call it human nature.

RNS: How do you think this doctrine affects the perspectives of most Christians?

DS: Original sin hinders us from seeing the world as created for connection—to God, to each other, to all created things. It forces us instead to begin with the notion that humans are separate from God.  It forces us to be at odds with our bodies and desires and gives no solvable way to integrate them. And it can make our view of salvation small: mostly self-focused, and mostly about the afterlife. So Jesus becomes the solution to a sin problem, not the life of the world. I think it’s an incredibly limiting perspective, at odds with the cosmic scope of the gospel."

        "Emotional ways:

        Physical ways:

Here are some tips for dating people with each type of love language:

"Human civilizations have used the death penalty in their set of laws for over 4,000 years. There have been times when only a few crimes receive this consequence, while some societies, such as the seventh century B.C.’s Code of Athens required the punishment for all crimes to be death.

The death penalty in the United States came about because of the influences of the colonial era. The first recorded execution in the colonies occurred in 1608 in Jamestown. Captain George Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain. It only took four more years for Virginia to institute the death penalty for minor offenses such as stealing grapes or trading with Native Americans.

Today, capital punishment is reserved for brutal and heinous crimes, such as first-degree murder. Some countries use the death penalty for repetitive violent crime, such as rape and sexual assault, or for specific drug offenses."