One of the primary things that drew me to polyamory specifically — as opposed to other iterations of non-monogamy like swinging — was the potential for building a strong community from a network of polyamorous relationships.

With the social media trend du jour being a comparison of 2016 to 2026, let me tell you- looking back at my life in 2016 has been a stark reminder of why I abandoned “community” and “villaging”, and went on to revisit what I was doing in my polyamory.

In this moment, when so many are seeking community and village-building as a survival response to crumbling systems around them, it feels important to offer counterpoints and share the red flags I’ve stumbled upon in my own anarchist quest to build community through my polyamorous relationships.

TL;DR version: Once Upon A Time, I thought I had found a community. What I had actually found was a would-be cult populated with high-control personalities, none of whom seemed capable of engaging with one another (or anyone else) in a truly trauma-sensitive way, nor of relinquishing power — many of whom were somehow involved in my polycule at the time.

When I stepped away, I shifted my focus to personal healing, understanding why I had gotten so drawn in, and learning how to show up as a better friend.

So, here’s the long version.

As a solo polyamorist (and as someone who has been shouting from the rooftops about it for almost 14 years now), I will be the first person to say this. When you’re polyamorous (and especially when you are solo), you absolutely need community. You need peers (who you aren’t fucking or dating) to help you understand your experience, and you absolutely need friends you can talk to who aren’t going to balk about you dating multiple people.

I’ve always valued community. I grew up with a global sense of my community - I have a global sangham through my spiritual path, and through my years living in Kuwait, I made friends from all over the world. My cultural roots are communitarian (Greek and Romani), despite intergenerational wounds of loss of community through wars and genocides. This has always been in stark contrast to my father’s very British and stoic family (who tend to forget to let everyone know when someone passes away).

Moving to North America, I felt void of community. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know who Mr Dressup was, or had never watched a hockey game. People around me didn’t relate to me the way I wanted to relate to them. I was used to relating generously - feeding my friends and being fed by them, sharing the highs and lows. Canada was a culture shock to my system , and I struggled to find spaces that replicated the kind of friendship I had come to know.

When I was married, part of what I yearned for when we started talking about having threesomes was someone else to share with. I was painfully lonely in my marriage, and lacked friendships that had depth to them. The ‘third’ I sought was someone who I hoped could be a lover, but more importantly, a friend. A friend who might understand me far more than my husband. Someone who might join me in sharing not just a partner, but meals and adventures, and in creating warm, cozy social experiences for others and with others.

Even after my husband and I split, and I began exploring polyamory as a solo, single-ish person, that yearning for the closeness, the family-of-choice, remained strong.

Something I’ve seen happen far too often in polyamory is that we slide into relationships-by-proxy.

Oh, you’re polyamorous? So am I! We must have so much in common!

Oh, look, we’ve dated all the same people, surely we will get along!

I, too, have done this, most especially in the years after I divorced my husband and came out to my mother (in short, she was not supportive, and sought to have me institutionalized for my queerness). Ending one of my core life relationships and losing another left me with a huge void, one that I hoped to fill with loving, supportive polyamorous people (and hopefully, partners too).

There’s an undeniable delight when you find other people whose experiences are in any way similar to your own. The intoxication of this can be mutual, and the platonic new-relationship-energy can carry us just as romantic new-relationship-energy does — until we bump into our incompatibilities and conflicts.

Between 2012 and 2016, I threw myself into what I called “community”. I attended every polyamorous and sex-positive event I could, and even started organizing a few. I was a regular at the polyamory discussion group in Vancouver, took on organizing the polyamory float in the Vancouver Pride Parade (getting DJs and a dancing platform together!) and co-producing various dance events with different individuals and groups around the city. Being involved and having a visible role meant I didn’t have to look for people; they would come to me. My introvert self found it both a relief that I didn’t have to introduce myself to strangers, and simultaneously overwhelming AF when strangers introduced themselves to me. I was hungry to build connections, and through these connections, I thought I had found something that felt like safety.

Eventually, through all these events, I connected with a collection of people who seemed serious about building an intentional community. They talked about it as a village. But a sexy village. A community that would be sex positive and welcoming of everyone’s queerness and kinks. But what started in joyful moments on sexually-charged dance floors would go on to take a turn to the dark side, the culty side.

This is where things get complicated, and let me be forthright that I’m not going to go into details or name names because, quite frankly, I still don’t feel safe around the people who held power in this “village” space. The new-relationship-energy I felt with them crumbled in the face of high-control personalities, conflicting values, and emotional abuse directed at me when I spoke up. I have gone to great lengths to distance myself from any past association with them. So, despite drafting out three pages of the story, I’m not going to share it. Instead, I’m going to share with you my conclusions, and what I now do to grow community.

What makes a community a community, and not just a gathering of people doing the same thing, is the ability to navigate conflict and difference, and to stay connected through that process. To meet conflict without trying to control the people you’re in conflict with.

I think about how Colonialism teaches that relationship is acquired through power, while cults say you get to have relationship through conformity. Community, on the other hand, says relationships start with sharing power while celebrating diversity—and giving a fuck about the well-being, feelings, and inner workings of everyone in the ecosystem.

Community relationship is rooted in conflict intimacy, and that’s a skill we have to cultivate individually. It’s a somatic skill, one that asks us to hold the energies of mobilization within our systems, whilst also staying relational.

This is counter to the way dominant culture has taught us to navigate conflict, which is to adhere to being right. “Being Right” is a power move, where we position ourselves in superiority — and take any challenge to our rightness, or invitation to humility, as an attack on our power and by extension, our selfhood.

As a very slight tangent, I see this is a dynamic that is reinforced by a lot of new age spirituality, neo-tantra, and fascist appropriations of yoga. The root teachings of yogic and tantric traditions that address polarity, especially the shaivite and shakta traditions, present it from a non-dual perspective. That is, the whole point is to transcend the polarity and to experience instead the unity of seemingly different and ‘opposite’ energies. Instead, those who are committed to “being right” and using systems of supremacy to control and coerce, use polarity work to accentuate differences between genders, sex, etc, because that then upholds the power over/under systems that supremacy culture thrives on.

I say this as someone who spent years working on growing a village with whom to survive and thrive:

A village of lovers may not be the solution you hoped for.

Leaning on your polycule alone may be just as precarious as relying on a single romantic partnership through apocalyptic times.

My experience of this attempt to forge a village via polyamory changed the way I engaged with the whole idea of ‘community’. It opened my eyes to the fallacy of trying to build something new while still entrenched in the ways of the old. After years of describing myself as desiring kitchen-table polyamory, I let go of being attached to that and started to embrace my dating and sexual relationships existing seperate from my friendships and social connections.

I now feel about many so-called ‘community’ projects and the colonial systems they attempt to replace the same way I feel about many ‘men’s circles’ and internalized patriarchy: brand new packaging, same old taste. So, what do I do instead?

I focus on friendship.

Specifically, I focus on being a good friend to the people whose actions show me they are safe to be friends with.

In the wake of expulsion from the fledgling, proto-cult, polyamorous ‘village’ experiment I fell into a decade ago, I became more discerning about whom I connected with socially. I spent months, years in therapy reflecting on what had led me to surrender so much agency to high-control personalities I mistook to be friends. What attachment wounds did I hold around community and extended family that had primed me for the experience of mistaking the dysfunction for safety?

I decided I needed more people around me with emotional maturity, people who could hold nuance, express conflict while keeping love in their hearts, and who are willing to go deep with me. We may have different ways of living our life, various spiritual practices or approaches to intimate relationships, but the common factor is that we give a fuck about one another — and that doesn’t change when we confront a difference.

I write in my dating profiles that my polyamory is about quality, not quantity, and that my relational ecosystem is focused on friendship. The people I have sex with are not a default priority, and I have found myself with a desire not to push or force relationships with the extended polycule of anyone I date. This practice has not only brought relief to my heart but clarity to my thoughts and given me the spaciousness to move more authentically towards an actual community of authentic relationships — not a de facto assumed community-by-proxy. That isn’t to say that I don’t give a fuck about the people in my extended network of polyamorous connections: I know that we are in a shared ecosystem together. Instead, I practice recognizing where we are, rather than projecting expectations of where I want (or don’t want) us to be. Where relationships (romantic and platonic) used to be a source of stress, they are now a source of expansion, possibility, and liberation.

Today, I have a plethora of friends who understand me far more than my partners or lovers. People who join me in sharing meals, adventures, and with whom I create warm, cozy social experiences for others and with others.

I could write a short essay on each one of the people I consider close friends. I feel blessed to have these close friendships, and I recognize that none of them happened by accident. They’re the result of mutual investments of time, energy, love, and a desire to understand and support one another.

The biggest teacher for me about what really makes a community has come from my spiritual sangham. Many of the people in this sangham have known each other for over 20 years, some for over 40, and they still engage with one another with joy and enthusiasm. There may be debates about who makes the best chai or whose dal was the right amount of spicy, but there is always an overwhelming feeling that we are all there in support of one another’s greatness. There’s no competition for control. No one’s trying to be in charge of everyone else. There’s respect for each person’s gifts, and a desire to support one another when we’re bumping against our personal edges. The collaboration among everyone, from minor tasks like rearranging the cafe seating to major ones like planning a new program, blows me away. A new idea or suggestion from an individual isn’t seen as a challenge; it is welcomed as a gift. Feedback is embraced with love and humility. And even in the midst of experiences of rupture, there’s a desire for connection and understanding.

If you’re someone whose motivation for polyamory has included the desire to find village, I hope that you are not deterred by what I share. Rather, I hope this invites you to reflect on potential red flags and to consider how to identify and navigate the arc of each individual connection, rather than assuming community-by-proxy.

I still believe that the relational skills that support us in our non-monogamy are the same ones that support us to build community. I just suggest that maybe these don’t overlap or intertwine as much as some might like them to — and that there’s nothing wrong with this.

So, consider this an invitation to make 2026 a year where you don’t focus on “building community”, but rather, focus on being a good friend, being a good neighbour, and being someone who is safe to be in community with.

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