00:00:01
Speaker 1: So I don't know about you, but I've been hearing about a lot of thrupples lately, and I have one friend whose cousin just joined a thropple. Last week, an old coworker and I were talking and they were saying that he and his partner are experimenting with a woman.
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Speaker 2: They met online.
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Speaker 1: Anyway, there's another term that's been coming up a lot in relation to all of this, and that's ethical non monogamy. So all that got me very horny and also wondering, is non monogamy suddenly back in style? Did it ever really go away? Sex educator and author of the Non Monogamy playbook Ruby Rare has a lot to say about that.
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Speaker 3: Here's a tricky one because we don't say ethical monogamy. We don't have to clarify it going, oh, I'm monogamous, but it's consensual. Just so you know it's ethical, everyone's on board. I would hope that all relationships are built from an ethical positioning and making sure that everyone is comfortable.
00:00:54
Speaker 1: So Ruby Rare and I sit down and we're going to start with the history the roots of monogamy, and we'll also move to these these kind of current conversations around non monogamy. If you live in like Brooklyn or San Francisco or Vancouver, They're actually not something new, right. We're talking about a rediscovery of relationship models that have existed at different points throughout history and bump up on things like religion and patriarchy, capitalism and shame.
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Speaker 3: Here we go again again, again again.
00:01:29
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm cal Penn and this is Here we Go Again, a show that takes today's trends and headlines and.
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Speaker 2: Asks why does history keep repeating itself?
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Speaker 3: Here we go?
00:01:55
Speaker 2: Hi?
00:01:56
Speaker 3: Hey, Hey, can you hear me?
00:01:58
Speaker 2: Okay, I can, but I'll do. Today I'm speaking with Ruby Rare.
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Speaker 3: My name's Ruby Rare. I am a sex and relationships educator and author of the non Monogamy playbook and Sex Said, a guide for adults, and a general hit on the Internet and in my personal life.
00:02:13
Speaker 1: So Ruby, thank you for coming on the show. I am very excited to talk to you today, because the topic of what we're talking about comes up pretty frequently when you're having a relationship conversations with friends, at least in the heathenists moral free bubble of New York City. But really I wanted to chat with you because you've been in the sex education space for over a decade. You're the author of sex Ed, a guide for adults, which came out in twenty twenty.
00:02:42
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, that was my lockdown, baby.
00:02:45
Speaker 2: Ye amazing.
00:02:45
Speaker 1: We all needed a guide like that for a lockdown for sure. And the Non Monogamy Playbook which came out this year twenty five. And you yourself have practiced non monogamy. So is non monogamy a thing that's like back or did it? Did it never really go away?
00:03:03
Speaker 2: Because it's always been part of our biology, right.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny. I think in this conversation we're going to be talking from our own little bubbles, but across the pond. And I'm always whenever I'm in the States, it's fascinating talking to friends about how these topics sit similarly but really differently from the UK versus the States. So also, I I think us Brits are a little more worn down by life than you, maybe not now in your political climate. But this is biased from me, but sometimes there is a weighty earnestness that I can get from a lot of American non monogamy literature. So that being said, non monogamy is growing. There is no doubt about it in terms of awareness and also in terms of the people openly practicing it. I think that this has always been here. If we think about the history of non monogamy, we are talking about the history of human relationships. And I use the phrase non monogamy because I don't think we can talk about any of this without talking about monogamy. At the same time, we can't just kind of remove it, because we all are existing within the history of monogamy and all of it's wonderful and not so wonderful.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: Ways can you.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: Walk dummies like me through? There are like four definitions. I think that maybe just to kick off the basics, So what is monogamy? What is non monogamy? And specifically, I think we're hearing a lot about ethical non monogamy right now. So monogamy, non monogamy, polyamory, and polygamy. Okay, we pretend I'm the like eighty year old grandpa who's like, what are these four mean?
00:04:47
Speaker 3: I actually did this conversation with one of my great uncle's friends at a family gathering a couple months ago where he's sat next to me and went, oh, so it's you then to go, Okay, I'm not as scary as everyone things. So monogamy is a social understanding of being romantically and sexually paired with one person at a time. That is our current definition of monogamy. But in the past, the way that most people do monogamy now would have been seen as completely scandalous because what, You're having multiple relationships in your life, how dare you? So we kind of do serial monogamy nowadays, interesting where it's one person at one time and then you might break up and then there's another person. You know three hundred years ago. You're not getting that you're picking one person and that it's that until one of you dies. Then non monogamy, I would say, is what it says on the tin. It's not monogamy. So it's choosing to do something which isn't in a one person, one person, completely exclusive romantic and or sexual setup that can look like many, many different things. And a massive misconception that I come up against a lot of the time is that non monogamy is one specific thing. I like use non monogamy because it gives me some of that I like thinking about it in the same way that I will describe myself as queer because it gives you a ballpark. But it's ambiguous enough interesting. I have to spill the beans and tell you everything about my setup and overshare in a way that's going to make me feel uncomfortable. You just kind of know where I am.
00:06:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, quickly, what are polyamory and polygamy?
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Speaker 3: Polyamory is a strange term. It comes from a little bit of Latin and a little bit of Greek, which means many loves, and so it's the idea of holding multiple relationships but there being a real emphasis on a loving connection. And then what was the last one? Ethical non monogamy. Here's a tricky one because we don't say ethical monogamy. We don't have to clarify it. Oh yeah, going, Oh, I'm monogamous, but it's consensual. Just so you know it's ethical. Everyone's on board. So it's helpful because I guess a non ethical version of non monogamy is cheating and we want.
00:06:57
Speaker 2: To avoid that, and that's not non monogamy is not cool. You know, you're just being a piece of shit.
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Speaker 3: You can cheat in non monogamy, you can cheat in monogamy, and ideally I would love it if everyone could be caring, communicative human beings. I would hope that all relationships are built from an ethical positioning and making sure that everyone is comfortable, And I would actually argue I speak to lots of people who are in monogamous setups that aren't particularly consensual and ethical, where there's one person who's quite keen for it to look and feel different and the other person isn't. And this is one example of a real inherent double standard, where monogamy is so seen as the default way of doing things and the default way of performing a successful relationship that anyone who's doing something different has to prove themselves and jump through so many hoops, and so often when I get interviewed, it's I feel like I'm being challenged of going, well, how could this possibly work? You need to prove it to me, And until I believe it, I don't really believe that this is something that can work.
00:07:58
Speaker 2: What's polygamy?
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Speaker 3: So polygamy is one man and many wives, and that has religious origins. I think in the States you will know that a lot from Mormonism, but it spans across different religions as well. It's also not entirely tied to religion in other cultural practices. Also, people say polygamy when they mean polyamory all the time, and it's kind of annoying. So thank you for asking me to distinguish between the two. And polyandry is one woman many husbands, which we don't see as much of.
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Speaker 1: So can you in terms of your background, can you tell me a story of your first experience in a non monogamous relationship and how did you know that this was the best approach for you.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, if we cast our minds back to twenty sixteen, Ruby, I was just out of a long term relationship with a man who I thought I might marry and that's hilarious to me now, who is actually a real sweetheart and with friend now. But I was just starting to work in sexual health and teaching sex and relationships in schools, and so a lot of this was happening. At the same time I was doing a lot of professional development. I was also trying things for the first time as a youngish adult, and I went on at the time a very little known app called Field, which I now do a lot of work with, and I wrote a report with them about nominogamy earlier this year. But I went on there and I started meeting people who were just blowing my tiny mind and going on dates with people who have been doing this for a long time, and I felt like a puppy that was on its first walk. Just everything was new. I was getting thrown with so many different things, and a lot of that was linked to queerness and to kink and also to polyamory. And I started dating a couple of people right at the beginning in that first year, but a couple in particular who were both really wonderful, and I kind of dated one of them a little bit more than the other. But then we had some lovely, like thropoly times. It's kind of I imagine a far.
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Speaker 4: Right worst nightmare, just like us frolicking around fucking all summer. I had person I was really really like hitting all the beats of that stereotype. But it was incredible because I got to live vicariously through this couple who were much better versed at all of this than I.
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Speaker 3: Was, and be a fly on the wall when they moved in together, and it's all, you know, very very sweet. But when we parted ways, it was not for any bad reasons. It's just kind of had run its course, but that lingering desire really stayed with me of going, oh my gosh, I can I can do this in different ways. I am allowed to design my own relationships, and I had better than most, but not particularly good relationship and sex education growing up. I was starting to learn about the sex positive movement and developing a real practice around pleasure focused consent and all of this stuff, but just realizing that I was only taught one way of doing relationships. Yeah, and what a failing of the society around me that I was given so little options and I really had to go off and find them for myself. And then, you know, it's been a decade. There's been lots of trial and error. Some things have gone great, some things haven't. But I've had so much fun and I have built connections and relationships that are deep and meaningful and go so much further than kind of what any of the skeptics think this could be.
00:11:40
Speaker 1: Like, Yeah, I think that the you know, we're audio only, so our listeners can't see your wonderful smile in recounting that first story, but for folks who are not familiar, and I think you're right you know, the clickbait version of this is.
00:11:55
Speaker 2: The oh, this is everybody's worst nightmare that somebody like this exists.
00:11:59
Speaker 1: But it sounds like that summer was so communicative and kind and wonderful and understanding, and those are things that, at least in the short form fear version of what we're talking about, never come up.
00:12:15
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: So I just appreciate that you articulated it so well.
00:12:18
Speaker 3: Thank you well. And I guess it was slightly different in that for most people thinking about bringing this into their lives, often it is within the framework of an existing monogamous relationship, and the first time round for me that wasn't it. I was the third coming into another relationship. I remember early on us all hooking up and there being a moment where the two of them were fucking. I don't know why I thought I should use a more romantic word, but I was looking at them, and this was a couple who were so in love and so connected, and I was a part of that. But also I very much wasn't a part of some of it as well. And rather than that feeling terrifying and isolating and bringing up all of my biggest insecurities, it genuinely felt like such an honor to witness that love and that intimacy, and you don't hear that very often as the way that you might respond to it.
00:13:19
Speaker 1: That's very well said. So, Ruby, what was your origin story for sex education? How did you get involved in it?
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Speaker 3: I had pretty terrible sex education growing up. I didn't hear the word consent in relation to sex until I was nineteen years old, and even though I came from quite a cushty, arty, left leaning family, just there were no conversations about pleasure and agency and consent. And so I became very interested in this in my early twenties. And then I went on to work for a wonderful charity in the UK, teaching sex and relationships in schools, doing professional trainings. I worked with the police on how they could get better at abortion care. That was obviously a very interesting time. And yeah, just realizing that we are so terrified of talking about this side of healthcare, but also the emotional side of how we exist within sex and relationships in our lives.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: You're, obviously your social media very very vocal in creating this sort of sex positive world which we all appreciate and why we wanted to talk to you through education. So the January twenty twenty five book, your second book, called the Non Monogamy Playbook Congratulations.
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Speaker 2: Again, by the way, Thanks.
00:14:36
Speaker 1: It opens with non monogamy's origin story and you talk about how non monogamy pre dates civilization. Can you can you walk us through the origin story and the historic turning points?
00:14:49
Speaker 3: Well, it's kind of it's just always been there. I wish I could give you something flashier than that, but it's Monogamy is something that was I think for lots of of people. It's widely understood that it really came in hand with the agricultural Would you call it a revolution? I guess you would. To the guy who wrote sapnsquels it in agricultural revolution. So once we as humans were no longer roaming a little bit more and ownership of land became really important, there was monogamy and keeping track of your offspring became much more important in terms of who got the land, who gets the property. Pair that with many religions kind of putting monogamous pair bonding as a really important spiritual cultural part of that practice, and you get this foundation that we've all sort of built on like grown on top of more and more and more from each generation since that has all existed at the same time as people have been doing relationships in weird and wonderful and monkey ways alongside it. So we have this real double standard when we talk about all of it, of assuming that everyone who says they are monogamous has always been monogamous, and I think most of the time that's not the case. Can I just want to tell you about someone who I'm obsessed with from the seventeenth century called Mary Combs, Please go on, okay, ah, I love that. This is from a guy called David Lay's book called Insatiable Wives. It's a brilliant book about cock holding, which is traditionally husband and wife and the wife fucking other men and the husband being quite into that. And there are loads of historical strange case studies of this being in records. So Mary Comebs was an innkeeper in the sixteen hundreds in this like the south of England, and she was a massive slag. She would parade around town naked. She would she would tell men who were in her inn to get on the floor and get the cocks out, and that she was about to sit on them. She would throw orgies for cockolds and their wives in the inn. And the main way that we know about this is through court records because she kept almost getting criminalized for it, and then her husband and the rest of the community would come along and kind of sort it out.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: Well, sure, of course they were all involved, they.
00:17:11
Speaker 3: All wanted to go to the party. But I love knowing that these figures have existed throughout history, and they're not always the most visible, but they're there, And I think, if you so, so much of this is trying to undercover really quiet histories. Even in the last few generations. I've had conversations with friends where they've gone, oh, yeah, I didn't. It wasn't until I was clearing out my grandparents' attic when both of them died that I found all of these love letters and realized that that's not my granddad's handwriting, and that actually there was something going on. I think World War two was a real time. A lot of men in the Air Force had kind of I think there was a lot of swinging going on back then, but also everyone thought they were about to die, and so it was going, Okay, well, if I go, will you look after my wife as well as yours. There's all of these little secret histories, and I love them. So I think I'm personally kind of tired of this trying to prove which is more biologically hardwired into ourselves. I think so often we've got that kind of Darwinian We're linked to chimpanzees, and chimps are monogamous and patriarchal, and you know that means that so are humans. And then in recent years there have been other people who made arguments that contrast that, and some of that has been debunked, so I'm not going to share too much of that. It's all just trying to find ways to prove things, and I'm much more interested in trying to prove them in real time and explore and experiment and not have to have things backed up by this is what our cavement ancestors were doing?
00:18:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? Is it mostly through Western civilization?
00:18:56
Speaker 1: Are the examples they've found outside of that, because I know a lot of a lot of older especially South Asian East Asian societies, have mentions of a lot of this kind of stuff throughout history, and it was only sort of colonial after that all these laws were explicitly passed to say this is not who you are.
00:19:15
Speaker 3: I'm trying to learn more and more about it now because I come from a British bulls so a Sri Lankan background. It's the winter time, so I look at nimic and you can't tell that I'm mixed racist, But trying to learn a little bit more about this covered up history, this idea of karma and pleasure being so rooted in dacy tradition, and yet when we as soon as we get to colonialism, just all of that is squashed out. And non monogamy shouldn't just be about sex and pleasure, but you can get a lot of sex and pleasure through this, And there is definitely an argument to be made of life's too short. Why not you know, one person's great, but what if you could have lots of other experiences out there? And I also want to say with that, the history of non monogamy is not you top. It's also often patriarchal in nature as well, and there's a lot of double standards in men being able to stray in far more easily accessible and less punishable ways than women and other marginalized people. I think historically it's easier for rich white people to do this versus global majority people. You know, it's I'm not trying to sugarcoat. I'm not trying to prove that this is more noble than monogamy, but I would like us to understand the history better.
00:20:30
Speaker 1: Are there specific examples that come to mind when you think about that, just that the idea of privilege within this.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: Historically, there was I can't remember what paper it is, maybe it was The Atlantic in the States. I only read half of it and then I got too grumpy and I stopped reading it. But earlier this year there was an article that came out going polyamory is just the middle class. It's like the latest bourgeois time pastime, and it kind of made an argument that I don't agree with that. A lot of the time these days, well, a lot of the visibility of non monogamy is people who hold quite a lot of privilege. Because you need a level of time and emotional intelligence that takes a lot of care and nurture, and there are, you know, resources that are required to enable you to have that time, to be able to nurture that. A lot of the time and privilege that you're not going to be completely overly shamed by your culture, and you know you're not going to be in too much of a difficult position in terms of your employment or your housing. So there is this misconception that non monogamy is for rich white people, and historically that has been the case, and maybe nowadays it kind of is a little bit now, but I disagree with that, and I would like it to be for everyone who wants to be able to.
00:21:58
Speaker 1: Monogamy emerges as a tool for ownership and inheritance and property and things like that. I'm curious about the addition of religion in codifying monogamy, because I feel like in the book you mentioned like there's a shift when monogamy becomes tied to religion. So how did religion take monogamy from a practical system and turn it into a moral rule, like good people do it this way only if you are virtuous.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: Well, I ran a workshop yesterday about like mind body dualism that kind of came up a lot in what we were talking about and all of this kind of I guess you would maybe call it early medieval, But I have to preface that I'm not a historian. I'm a history enthusiast. It was in lots of ways. Early Christianity was like the rules that were being mechanized. We're very much about conformity and control and giving people a very strict moral code to follow. And you have this at the same time that the mind and the body are being actively separated, and that kind of saying, Okay, the most important part of the brain of the person is the mind, and that is mostly where men come from. It's kind of high concepts and intellectualism, and the body is base. And so therefore we can put women down because they're more bodily than men. We can put laborers down and abuse laborers because we're only harming their bodies, we're not harming their minds. I think monogamy has some real interesting links to that as well, because it's shutting down exploration and pleasure in some ways, and it's really categorizing people in in quite a strict way. It's forming. Sorry, I'm putting all the buzzwords out right now, and I'm so aware of it, but it's You could also look at monogamy as a tool for capitalism, because it's two people staying together so that they can procreate, so that they can create the next generation of workers, and so that a kind of the middle and working classes are ordered and will morally keep themselves and their communities in check. It kind of feeds into so much of this shame of so much of our culture of shame comes from being hyper aware of what we're doing and what other people are doing and trying to be as normal as possible. And monogamy is such an inherent norm. I think a lot in my queer circles about heteronormativity, how being straight is the assumed default and you have to actively come out if that isn't you. And monogamy, I think has an even stronger hold on us than heteronormativity. They come hand in hand. But you know, we are assumed to be monogamous beings until we read the wrong book or go to the wrong nightclub and discover that you can do things in a different way.
00:25:00
Speaker 1: Present day, is there an indicator you think of why non monogamy has become a more common it's, frankly, it's a curiosity for a lot of people that, you know, what is it about this specific moment that it has brought that around.
00:25:14
Speaker 3: It's been snowballing for a while, and I think a real catalyst was lockdowns in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. It was a real opportunity for lots of people who had to stay still and kind of hide themselves away, and also for lots of people whose work meant that they weren't out in the open and kind of had a bit more time to sit in solitude. The number of people that I know who discovered things about themselves, whether that's figuring out some weird and wonderful kinks of theirs and going, oh, it just needed enough spare time to realize I was really into this, or thinking about gender expression and gender identity politics, and then relationships and how you do them. For a lot of monogamous couples, I think that was a very unique time period that really put relationship to the test and allowed people to be a bit more curious than they maybe would have been in their day to day lives. And then people are fascinated by this because it's different and it's sallacious, and I as much as I've resent that, I also am not so completely mad about it because if I was monogamous, I want to know about this. It sounds kind of cool and weird and I don't. I love gossip. I want the gossip, whatever it is, So I don't don't blame anyone for that that year on year there just seems to be a bit more fascination with it. We're seeing it come up in pop culture more. It's also something, interestingly, I think for a lot of left leaning and even some more centrist people, we know that we can't punch down on queerness anymore. We never should like people never should have done. But it's kind of seen within the framework of other prejudices of going, don't do that, that's that's not okay. I think people can punch down on polyamory and non monogamy, and that's maybe why people are still so fascinating with because it's because you know, it's kind of it's easy to see it as flip until this, Yeah, it's not. You're not arguing with someone's core identity a lot of the time, you're arguing with their silly little ways. All of that is in air quotes, by the way, I don't believe that.
00:27:25
Speaker 1: But No, nine, you're spot on about the COVID thing. I now I'm thinking back, like you know, as the the gay best friend to a number of like my straight buddies, there was definitely an uptick in and I should say like gay sex positive, Like, you know, I tend to not have a lot of stigma around these conversations, which is one of the things I thought would be great about about having you on. So I got an optick in phone calls or facetimes from these friends that were like, hey, so it's locked down and I'm feeling like, how do you have a conversation with your partner? I like X, Y and Z, and I could never tell my wife or my girlfriend that I'm like even just the basics of like letting that FRED know, like, hey, man, guaranteed your wife or girlfriend has a list of ten things that she also feels like she can't talk to you about. She would love for you to know that you should be doing. And so even just like that basic level, there was definitely something about COVID that made either chattered relationships obviously or for good reason maybe or it brought people closer together and it seems like it increased their communication. So that's I hadn't thought about that in the context of also exploring something like non monogamy.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: Right, can I ask a personal question in relation to that, yeah, because would you describe yourself as a gay man, that's not the question.
00:28:50
Speaker 2: I think that's the quick No. I would say I'm a gay dude.
00:28:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, cool, I'm with a very loving dude for the last fifteen years.
00:28:57
Speaker 3: So I just think that that is the definition of Yeah, it's also allowed to be monuments than that, and I welcome that too. But well, someone who is very much perceived as a gay man, do you get assumptions that your relationship has a level of openness to it, Because a lot of the gay guy friends in my life, like openness is a completely different thing in queer worlds, and I come from the more sapphic dukey queer world where monogamy is not always monogamy is something that you opt into, I guess a lot of the time, rather than it being this assumed thing. But then my gay guy friends, it's like non monogamy is the assumption a lot of the time within their dating pools, but also within a lot of the straight people's assumptions that get thrown on them. And that's a kind of grim, hyper sexualized thing of oh, well, you're a guy, so obviously all of you are just fucking all the time.
00:29:48
Speaker 1: I haven't found it to be one way or the other, meaning I don't think anybody assumes that you are monogamous or are not monogamous. So I think it's a it's a question that is not that dissimilar to what toppings do you want on the pizza we're ordering. It's like it's a very it seems like it's always been a very straightforward question with gay friend groups. Okay, yeah, yeah, which I thought was But it seems healthy.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: That's really healthy, and I wish that more straight people had access points like that. I have got to say, I think it's much easier doing nom monogamy as a queer person if I was a straight woman, I don't know how much I would be enjoying non monogamy.
00:30:31
Speaker 2: Well, then here's a question.
00:30:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry, you can say it.
00:30:34
Speaker 1: Why would it be difficult to be in a hetero non monogamous relationship as a woman for you?
00:30:40
Speaker 3: Have you spoken to a straight man recently?
00:30:43
Speaker 2: I have.
00:30:45
Speaker 3: They're not They're not great at talking about the old feelings, are they.
00:30:49
Speaker 1: That's why my like my buddies need to communicate better.
00:30:53
Speaker 3: They totally do, And I really want that for them, and I want them to experience all of this and more on a very selfish personal level. I don't think I need to walk those men down this path. I need them to do that in their own time. It's a wild generalization. Obviously, there are some brilliant straight men in the world, and there are some terrible queer people in the world who can't communicate. But I have got used to a high level of emotional intelligence and I don't think I can go back from that.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: Do you do you want to take this opportunity to give those straight dudes like the top three things they need to do or are you so over at there You're like, nope, nobody.
00:31:33
Speaker 3: Else Professionally I can. Professionally, I would love to look after the straight men a little bit more, just as long as they promise not to be dicks to us. Okay, what are the three things? Men? Listen up, your feelings are not scary or emasculating, look at them, talk to your friends about them, go to therapy. Pleasure is so beautiful and wonderful. And don't be afraid of your own prostates. And it's the greatest honor in the world to help women come and that should be one of your primary goals in life. And last one, oh, just like stop trying to be so tough about everything. This idea that the world is out to get you and it is really threatening way and if your woman does something different that you don't like, it kind of emasculates yourself. Just like, that's fucking been that. Have I fixed it? Has Andrew takes stopped?
00:32:30
Speaker 2: Now done, it's finished. It's fixed.
00:32:33
Speaker 1: What's the difference between non monogamy and having a free pass?
00:32:42
Speaker 3: I would challenge that free passes are often spoken about but really acted on. Non Monogamy is creating all of the emotional resilience and robustness for things to happen and people to feel okay and secure in them. If it's a monogamous couple who has a free pass and then one day one of them acts on it, what and that's just and they are completely emotionally prepared for it and they've done all of this reading about how about unpacking jealousy and not trying to strive for perfection in how you perform your emotions and asking for what you need and setting boundaries. It's clunky sometimes and there is a warranted stereotype that polyamorous people just love talking about their emotions and actually don't get to the sex very often. I would say, I'm managing to do both fine, But it's not just sex, and it's also not just love and romantic connections, but it's really community building and doing that in a very intentional way.
00:33:45
Speaker 1: That's a great point that reminds me of your jealousy chapter. So you have a whole chapter on jealousy and you said it was the most important chapter of your book. Ay, but then also, how do you define jealousy and how is it different from what people assume?
00:34:00
Speaker 3: Dragged my heels writing that chapter because I've been so bored of talking about jealousy for years, because it's the first thing that people want to know about, and I was quite used to talking about it in quite a one o one way. And the chapter actually was really important for me because it helped me go a bit deeper and really kind of go, hey, this is what I believe, this is where I stand right now. Jealousy is very misunderstood by everyone, but particularly through more normative monogamous societies, because it's met with immediate fear and not seen as an opportunity, which I would like us to reframe it as if you are feeling jealousy insecurity of some kind, sometimes that is someone else's actions just being a dick, and you being treated badly and having a native reaction to that. I'm not trying to get mean that we all have to absorb other people's boat behavior in this, but oftentimes experiencing insecurity shows you a lot about what you're not giving to yourself and what you're not asking for, whether that be clarification, reassurance, actually being able to emotionally regulate yourself and reassure yourself rather than assuming that it has to come from other people in order for you to feel validated. In all the moments where I have felt real jealousy, I've managed to walk away having a much better understanding of myself and some of the ugly parts of myself I don't want to admit to, and I wish that we all got a bit better at looking at that. And it's hard because monogamy teaches us that love is a finite resource that we're going to run out of, and so if someone's eyes are straying, it means there's going to be less attention for us. And it's also tough when a lot of monogamous relationships are built on the assumption of ownership that I own my partner's time, commitment, attraction, and for that to be challenged really complicated. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to oversimplify it.
00:36:03
Speaker 1: That then reminds me of what you were saying about sort of the difference between hetero or queer relationships, and I'm just thinking about the difference between if if my fiance and I are walking down the street and there's like a handsome dude and we're both like, oh, that dude's so handsome, it just sort of is very matter of fact, as opposed to like, if one of my college buddies and his wife are walking down the street, he would just sort of like mumble to me like, oh shit, look at her. But they wouldn't share that moment, which makes sense because she is not finding that other woman attractive necessarily.
00:36:40
Speaker 2: But it's but what's.
00:36:42
Speaker 1: Jarring to me is like, what you're not allowed to point out that somebody is attractive.
00:36:47
Speaker 3: We have to perform this absolute blinked purity.
00:36:50
Speaker 2: That yes, that you're dead on that side, I.
00:36:52
Speaker 3: Am such a sexual, romantic being, but exclusively for you. I do not feel anything towards anyone else ever again.
00:37:00
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, but it did so on that aspect of jealousy. You're I think you're right. I hadn't.
00:37:05
Speaker 1: I hadn't explicitly thought about anything beyond just the communication, but like, what's behind that and our own insecurities and all of that too, I guess, And.
00:37:15
Speaker 3: How we're hardwired to compare ourselves to other people. A real learning for me early on in partners of mine having other partners was really having to say, on a daily basis to myself that person is not better or worse than you, They are just different. Because it's so easy to go, oh, there's this shiny new person in their life, and so obviously they're going to be They're taller than me, and they're more conventionally attractive, and they're cooler and they have more interesting hobbies and they're funnier and all these things, and going, no, we that's that's really not how I want to meet any people in my life. And and we we get that so much through social media and beauty standards, and it filters in in these really insidious ways but everyone's a person.
00:38:01
Speaker 1: And I'm also guessing, so what you just described on those feelings, like I'm guessing in non monogamous scenarios, there are people who are not romantically available.
00:38:16
Speaker 2: Is that correct?
00:38:16
Speaker 1: So going back to the difference between that and something that might be more polyamorous, So there are people who you can have incredible conversations, physical sexual relationships with, but there may be not available romantically.
00:38:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would, and this is very much personal to me. I would argue that there is a real limit to how we can compartmentalize romance and sex. It's all forms of intimacy, and yes, you can separate them to a degree, and you can have some boundaries in place where that there's kind of limited romantic closeness potentially, But I know some people who very successfully separate to I am not one of those people. I love having even if it's even if it's a really casual hookup situation. I want there to be care and connection in there, and to me, that is a form of love. But that's different to saying, okay, you are now my girlfriend. But yeah, there's people, a lot of nominogamous people because it's societally convenient and still the default may have one primary partner and so the other relationships that they have in their lives. They're not just meeting all of those different connections as a solo person. They're meeting them saying, hey, this is the situation and the unit that I am a part of. So you're making decisions about your relationships with multiple people and contacts in mind, it's complicated.
00:39:47
Speaker 1: So for listeners who have listened so far and might be like interesting, I wonder how to even have the conversation with their significant other, or if they're single and are thinking about something like your origin story. How are these conversations usually raised in and outside of relationships.
00:40:07
Speaker 3: I'd say that normally raised badly. In relationships. It's normally one person who's been thinking about it for ages and the other person who's oblivious, and then at some point it gets blurted out and you're coming in with two very different expectations, and one person's kind of surprised in court of God, and the other person has imagined what this future is going to be like. Not all the time, but these are the stories that I often hear, So I would bring it up casually and early early in a relationship, or if you've been in a relationship for a long time and you're listening to this and you're curious, talk about it this evening, say hey, I listened to this thing like I listened to cal and I wonder what do you think about this. I'm not asking in a way because I want this, but I guess it made me feel a little bit curious. And for some people this is going to be a hard no, and that's okay. Here to recruit people. It's not my goal for more people to become non monogamous. It's my goal for more people to have agency and how they build their relationships. But I near a monogamy, it's great, like do your thing. I'm really bored of this idea of non monogamy being inherently cooler or more evolved. There's this performative angle of it that really really rills me up. So you don't have to do this. You might find yourself in a situation where one of you wants it and the other one doesn't, and that's obviously very tricky. If it's something that's really important for one of you, it kind of becomes a conversation about are we going to have kids or not, And maybe there are compromises to be made and for one person it's way more important, so they lead it, or maybe you figure out some other compromise, or maybe that's a reason why you decide to kindly part ways, because one of you wants something and the other doesn't and there's a fundamental incompatibility there. But all of this this is at the beginning and experiment, and yes it's scary and often quite messy. I think the first few years of non monogamy typically there's a lot of shit that goes down because it's all new, it's all it's just all happening at you all the time. But I'm here to tell you that after those first couple of years, things are really quiet and down for most people. And if you're curious about this, you owe it to yourself to give this a try, because I am one of the many people who are living proofs that this can be a really beautiful way of being.
00:42:28
Speaker 1: Can you talk folks through, let's say they want to move forward with that. What are the ways in which people generally take care of their sexual health when they have multiple partners?
00:42:38
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I love you. Thank you for letting me talk about sexual health. This is my origin sexual health roots right here. Well, you have to define what sex means to you, first of all, because I think for some people there's still this very sis hep monogamous idea that maybe not monogamous sis her idea that real sex is a penis going into agina. But there are many other ways to experience pleasure, and there are sexual health precautions for all of those different things. You've got to figure out your comfort levels. So a lot of the time sort of sleeping with other people, if you're in a couple, condoms or some other barrier method of protection is a requirement. Like if you are having sex in a way that there is a risk of conceiving, then there's a kind of contraception route that you've got to think about as well. And there was a study a few years ago. There's this misconception that non monogamous people get STIs at a higher rate than monogamous people, and that's not the case because we generally are way better at being communicative about this and being quite upfront, knowing what our boundaries are and testing regularly and if something goes wrong, and sometimes it happens, you've got to communicate it. I had last year in my lovely little cluster of beautiful sexy people had an STI scare and we had to all kind of pass it on, going, Hi, guys, sorry, we might all have gone aha. It turns out only one of us did. We were mitigating already. But you know we're not meeting that with shame. We're going, Oops, something's happened, let's be proactive about it.
00:44:17
Speaker 1: So, since this podcast is generally about about trends repeating themselves throughout history, do you.
00:44:24
Speaker 2: Think the.
00:44:27
Speaker 1: I hate calling it the rise in non monogamy because I just keep going back to that Atlantic article you cited, or like these memes that we talked about and shortage and Bushwick, But do you think something is coming back around? Are we circling back to like old ways of doing something? And then just like sort of basically, what do you think and hope the future looks like as people feel freer to design their relationships?
00:44:47
Speaker 3: Well, isn't that the loveliest question you could ever ask me. I'll come back for that one in a minute. I every time period there is a hyper conservative storyline, and there is a hyper progressive storyline going on at the same time, and we really deny ourselves that present nuance and that historic nuance. So, for example, in the UK, we think of the Victorian era as this kind of raining of puritanical values that spread across the Empire as well as being even further rooted in the UK at the same time. The most graphic pornography I have ever seen is from the Victorian era. It was absolutely filthy. London was the European capital of dominatrixes and kind of flagellation spanking, and people would come from all over Europe to be spanked by hot women in London with like birch leaves and branches, which can.
00:45:47
Speaker 1: I just can I just insert who smelled horrific? Like the bathing procedures at the time period were just not.
00:45:56
Speaker 2: Friendly.
00:45:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there are so many time periods I want to go back to and then go, oh no, the smell and the dentistry. Fuck, it's not going to work for me, is it. So we're living through a similar version of that right now. You know, we are living in a deep, panic inducing rise of fascism. It's happening in real time. Commiserations to all of you over there. I'm feeling it here in Europe, but it's so much wise where you are. And at the same time, all of this beautiful, incredible progressive stuff is happening in terms of the way what like how we can the healthcare side of it and how we can protect our bodies and nourish ourselves, but also the thinking around this and there being spaces where we can explore and do things differently and shed generational expectations and kind of create our own pathways. So yes, this is on the rise. It's also on the rise at the same time as an evangelical like trad wife, anti trans abortion hating fear is coming for us as well. So it's not looking great, but we exist, and we need to keep reminding ourselves that we exist and that there is a lot of respect and care in the world, even when it doesn't feel super visible all the time.
00:47:15
Speaker 2: Very well said.
00:47:16
Speaker 3: But I really enjoyed talking about this topic. I really really care about it. And if you want to listen to more of it, my book's in audiobook and I think lots of people are enjoying hearing it as well as reading it. It's also my voice, so if you want a little cheeky British voice telling you about non monogamy. Then there you go.
00:47:33
Speaker 1: Plug the title again so people can get the audiobook or the physical.
00:47:37
Speaker 3: Copy the Non Monogamy Playbook by me Ruby Rare. Thank you yay, that was really fun.
00:47:44
Speaker 2: Likewise, thank you, thank you for that was my guest.
00:47:47
Speaker 1: Ruby Rare, sex and relationship educator and author of the Non Monogamy Playbook and sex Ed, a guide for adults. You can follow Ruby at Ruby Rare One Word. Here we go again as a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffo Media in association with New Metric Media.
00:48:04
Speaker 2: Our executive producers.
00:48:06
Speaker 1: Are me Kal penn Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Alissa Martino, Andy Kim, pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Meghan tan is our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor. Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly, logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline Johnson and Megan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham Adam Horn, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour.
00:48:41
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. See you next week.
Speaker 1: So I don't know about you, but I've been hearing about a lot of thrupples lately, and I have one friend whose cousin just joined a thropple. Last week, an old coworker and I were talking and they were saying that he and his partner are experimenting with a woman.
00:00:14
Speaker 2: They met online.
00:00:16
Speaker 1: Anyway, there's another term that's been coming up a lot in relation to all of this, and that's ethical non monogamy. So all that got me very horny and also wondering, is non monogamy suddenly back in style? Did it ever really go away? Sex educator and author of the Non Monogamy playbook Ruby Rare has a lot to say about that.
00:00:38
Speaker 3: Here's a tricky one because we don't say ethical monogamy. We don't have to clarify it going, oh, I'm monogamous, but it's consensual. Just so you know it's ethical, everyone's on board. I would hope that all relationships are built from an ethical positioning and making sure that everyone is comfortable.
00:00:54
Speaker 1: So Ruby Rare and I sit down and we're going to start with the history the roots of monogamy, and we'll also move to these these kind of current conversations around non monogamy. If you live in like Brooklyn or San Francisco or Vancouver, They're actually not something new, right. We're talking about a rediscovery of relationship models that have existed at different points throughout history and bump up on things like religion and patriarchy, capitalism and shame.
00:01:23
Speaker 3: Here we go again again, again again.
00:01:29
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm cal Penn and this is Here we Go Again, a show that takes today's trends and headlines and.
00:01:35
Speaker 2: Asks why does history keep repeating itself?
00:01:38
Speaker 3: Here we go?
00:01:55
Speaker 2: Hi?
00:01:56
Speaker 3: Hey, Hey, can you hear me?
00:01:58
Speaker 2: Okay, I can, but I'll do. Today I'm speaking with Ruby Rare.
00:02:01
Speaker 3: My name's Ruby Rare. I am a sex and relationships educator and author of the non Monogamy playbook and Sex Said, a guide for adults, and a general hit on the Internet and in my personal life.
00:02:13
Speaker 1: So Ruby, thank you for coming on the show. I am very excited to talk to you today, because the topic of what we're talking about comes up pretty frequently when you're having a relationship conversations with friends, at least in the heathenists moral free bubble of New York City. But really I wanted to chat with you because you've been in the sex education space for over a decade. You're the author of sex Ed, a guide for adults, which came out in twenty twenty.
00:02:42
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, that was my lockdown, baby.
00:02:45
Speaker 2: Ye amazing.
00:02:45
Speaker 1: We all needed a guide like that for a lockdown for sure. And the Non Monogamy Playbook which came out this year twenty five. And you yourself have practiced non monogamy. So is non monogamy a thing that's like back or did it? Did it never really go away?
00:03:03
Speaker 2: Because it's always been part of our biology, right.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny. I think in this conversation we're going to be talking from our own little bubbles, but across the pond. And I'm always whenever I'm in the States, it's fascinating talking to friends about how these topics sit similarly but really differently from the UK versus the States. So also, I I think us Brits are a little more worn down by life than you, maybe not now in your political climate. But this is biased from me, but sometimes there is a weighty earnestness that I can get from a lot of American non monogamy literature. So that being said, non monogamy is growing. There is no doubt about it in terms of awareness and also in terms of the people openly practicing it. I think that this has always been here. If we think about the history of non monogamy, we are talking about the history of human relationships. And I use the phrase non monogamy because I don't think we can talk about any of this without talking about monogamy. At the same time, we can't just kind of remove it, because we all are existing within the history of monogamy and all of it's wonderful and not so wonderful.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: Ways can you.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: Walk dummies like me through? There are like four definitions. I think that maybe just to kick off the basics, So what is monogamy? What is non monogamy? And specifically, I think we're hearing a lot about ethical non monogamy right now. So monogamy, non monogamy, polyamory, and polygamy. Okay, we pretend I'm the like eighty year old grandpa who's like, what are these four mean?
00:04:47
Speaker 3: I actually did this conversation with one of my great uncle's friends at a family gathering a couple months ago where he's sat next to me and went, oh, so it's you then to go, Okay, I'm not as scary as everyone things. So monogamy is a social understanding of being romantically and sexually paired with one person at a time. That is our current definition of monogamy. But in the past, the way that most people do monogamy now would have been seen as completely scandalous because what, You're having multiple relationships in your life, how dare you? So we kind of do serial monogamy nowadays, interesting where it's one person at one time and then you might break up and then there's another person. You know three hundred years ago. You're not getting that you're picking one person and that it's that until one of you dies. Then non monogamy, I would say, is what it says on the tin. It's not monogamy. So it's choosing to do something which isn't in a one person, one person, completely exclusive romantic and or sexual setup that can look like many, many different things. And a massive misconception that I come up against a lot of the time is that non monogamy is one specific thing. I like use non monogamy because it gives me some of that I like thinking about it in the same way that I will describe myself as queer because it gives you a ballpark. But it's ambiguous enough interesting. I have to spill the beans and tell you everything about my setup and overshare in a way that's going to make me feel uncomfortable. You just kind of know where I am.
00:06:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, quickly, what are polyamory and polygamy?
00:06:20
Speaker 3: Polyamory is a strange term. It comes from a little bit of Latin and a little bit of Greek, which means many loves, and so it's the idea of holding multiple relationships but there being a real emphasis on a loving connection. And then what was the last one? Ethical non monogamy. Here's a tricky one because we don't say ethical monogamy. We don't have to clarify it. Oh yeah, going, Oh, I'm monogamous, but it's consensual. Just so you know it's ethical. Everyone's on board. So it's helpful because I guess a non ethical version of non monogamy is cheating and we want.
00:06:57
Speaker 2: To avoid that, and that's not non monogamy is not cool. You know, you're just being a piece of shit.
00:07:02
Speaker 3: You can cheat in non monogamy, you can cheat in monogamy, and ideally I would love it if everyone could be caring, communicative human beings. I would hope that all relationships are built from an ethical positioning and making sure that everyone is comfortable, And I would actually argue I speak to lots of people who are in monogamous setups that aren't particularly consensual and ethical, where there's one person who's quite keen for it to look and feel different and the other person isn't. And this is one example of a real inherent double standard, where monogamy is so seen as the default way of doing things and the default way of performing a successful relationship that anyone who's doing something different has to prove themselves and jump through so many hoops, and so often when I get interviewed, it's I feel like I'm being challenged of going, well, how could this possibly work? You need to prove it to me, And until I believe it, I don't really believe that this is something that can work.
00:07:58
Speaker 2: What's polygamy?
00:08:00
Speaker 3: So polygamy is one man and many wives, and that has religious origins. I think in the States you will know that a lot from Mormonism, but it spans across different religions as well. It's also not entirely tied to religion in other cultural practices. Also, people say polygamy when they mean polyamory all the time, and it's kind of annoying. So thank you for asking me to distinguish between the two. And polyandry is one woman many husbands, which we don't see as much of.
00:08:29
Speaker 1: So can you in terms of your background, can you tell me a story of your first experience in a non monogamous relationship and how did you know that this was the best approach for you.
00:08:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, if we cast our minds back to twenty sixteen, Ruby, I was just out of a long term relationship with a man who I thought I might marry and that's hilarious to me now, who is actually a real sweetheart and with friend now. But I was just starting to work in sexual health and teaching sex and relationships in schools, and so a lot of this was happening. At the same time I was doing a lot of professional development. I was also trying things for the first time as a youngish adult, and I went on at the time a very little known app called Field, which I now do a lot of work with, and I wrote a report with them about nominogamy earlier this year. But I went on there and I started meeting people who were just blowing my tiny mind and going on dates with people who have been doing this for a long time, and I felt like a puppy that was on its first walk. Just everything was new. I was getting thrown with so many different things, and a lot of that was linked to queerness and to kink and also to polyamory. And I started dating a couple of people right at the beginning in that first year, but a couple in particular who were both really wonderful, and I kind of dated one of them a little bit more than the other. But then we had some lovely, like thropoly times. It's kind of I imagine a far.
00:10:10
Speaker 4: Right worst nightmare, just like us frolicking around fucking all summer. I had person I was really really like hitting all the beats of that stereotype. But it was incredible because I got to live vicariously through this couple who were much better versed at all of this than I.
00:10:29
Speaker 3: Was, and be a fly on the wall when they moved in together, and it's all, you know, very very sweet. But when we parted ways, it was not for any bad reasons. It's just kind of had run its course, but that lingering desire really stayed with me of going, oh my gosh, I can I can do this in different ways. I am allowed to design my own relationships, and I had better than most, but not particularly good relationship and sex education growing up. I was starting to learn about the sex positive movement and developing a real practice around pleasure focused consent and all of this stuff, but just realizing that I was only taught one way of doing relationships. Yeah, and what a failing of the society around me that I was given so little options and I really had to go off and find them for myself. And then, you know, it's been a decade. There's been lots of trial and error. Some things have gone great, some things haven't. But I've had so much fun and I have built connections and relationships that are deep and meaningful and go so much further than kind of what any of the skeptics think this could be.
00:11:40
Speaker 1: Like, Yeah, I think that the you know, we're audio only, so our listeners can't see your wonderful smile in recounting that first story, but for folks who are not familiar, and I think you're right you know, the clickbait version of this is.
00:11:55
Speaker 2: The oh, this is everybody's worst nightmare that somebody like this exists.
00:11:59
Speaker 1: But it sounds like that summer was so communicative and kind and wonderful and understanding, and those are things that, at least in the short form fear version of what we're talking about, never come up.
00:12:15
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: So I just appreciate that you articulated it so well.
00:12:18
Speaker 3: Thank you well. And I guess it was slightly different in that for most people thinking about bringing this into their lives, often it is within the framework of an existing monogamous relationship, and the first time round for me that wasn't it. I was the third coming into another relationship. I remember early on us all hooking up and there being a moment where the two of them were fucking. I don't know why I thought I should use a more romantic word, but I was looking at them, and this was a couple who were so in love and so connected, and I was a part of that. But also I very much wasn't a part of some of it as well. And rather than that feeling terrifying and isolating and bringing up all of my biggest insecurities, it genuinely felt like such an honor to witness that love and that intimacy, and you don't hear that very often as the way that you might respond to it.
00:13:19
Speaker 1: That's very well said. So, Ruby, what was your origin story for sex education? How did you get involved in it?
00:13:25
Speaker 3: I had pretty terrible sex education growing up. I didn't hear the word consent in relation to sex until I was nineteen years old, and even though I came from quite a cushty, arty, left leaning family, just there were no conversations about pleasure and agency and consent. And so I became very interested in this in my early twenties. And then I went on to work for a wonderful charity in the UK, teaching sex and relationships in schools, doing professional trainings. I worked with the police on how they could get better at abortion care. That was obviously a very interesting time. And yeah, just realizing that we are so terrified of talking about this side of healthcare, but also the emotional side of how we exist within sex and relationships in our lives.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: You're, obviously your social media very very vocal in creating this sort of sex positive world which we all appreciate and why we wanted to talk to you through education. So the January twenty twenty five book, your second book, called the Non Monogamy Playbook Congratulations.
00:14:34
Speaker 2: Again, by the way, Thanks.
00:14:36
Speaker 1: It opens with non monogamy's origin story and you talk about how non monogamy pre dates civilization. Can you can you walk us through the origin story and the historic turning points?
00:14:49
Speaker 3: Well, it's kind of it's just always been there. I wish I could give you something flashier than that, but it's Monogamy is something that was I think for lots of of people. It's widely understood that it really came in hand with the agricultural Would you call it a revolution? I guess you would. To the guy who wrote sapnsquels it in agricultural revolution. So once we as humans were no longer roaming a little bit more and ownership of land became really important, there was monogamy and keeping track of your offspring became much more important in terms of who got the land, who gets the property. Pair that with many religions kind of putting monogamous pair bonding as a really important spiritual cultural part of that practice, and you get this foundation that we've all sort of built on like grown on top of more and more and more from each generation since that has all existed at the same time as people have been doing relationships in weird and wonderful and monkey ways alongside it. So we have this real double standard when we talk about all of it, of assuming that everyone who says they are monogamous has always been monogamous, and I think most of the time that's not the case. Can I just want to tell you about someone who I'm obsessed with from the seventeenth century called Mary Combs, Please go on, okay, ah, I love that. This is from a guy called David Lay's book called Insatiable Wives. It's a brilliant book about cock holding, which is traditionally husband and wife and the wife fucking other men and the husband being quite into that. And there are loads of historical strange case studies of this being in records. So Mary Comebs was an innkeeper in the sixteen hundreds in this like the south of England, and she was a massive slag. She would parade around town naked. She would she would tell men who were in her inn to get on the floor and get the cocks out, and that she was about to sit on them. She would throw orgies for cockolds and their wives in the inn. And the main way that we know about this is through court records because she kept almost getting criminalized for it, and then her husband and the rest of the community would come along and kind of sort it out.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: Well, sure, of course they were all involved, they.
00:17:11
Speaker 3: All wanted to go to the party. But I love knowing that these figures have existed throughout history, and they're not always the most visible, but they're there, And I think, if you so, so much of this is trying to undercover really quiet histories. Even in the last few generations. I've had conversations with friends where they've gone, oh, yeah, I didn't. It wasn't until I was clearing out my grandparents' attic when both of them died that I found all of these love letters and realized that that's not my granddad's handwriting, and that actually there was something going on. I think World War two was a real time. A lot of men in the Air Force had kind of I think there was a lot of swinging going on back then, but also everyone thought they were about to die, and so it was going, Okay, well, if I go, will you look after my wife as well as yours. There's all of these little secret histories, and I love them. So I think I'm personally kind of tired of this trying to prove which is more biologically hardwired into ourselves. I think so often we've got that kind of Darwinian We're linked to chimpanzees, and chimps are monogamous and patriarchal, and you know that means that so are humans. And then in recent years there have been other people who made arguments that contrast that, and some of that has been debunked, so I'm not going to share too much of that. It's all just trying to find ways to prove things, and I'm much more interested in trying to prove them in real time and explore and experiment and not have to have things backed up by this is what our cavement ancestors were doing?
00:18:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? Is it mostly through Western civilization?
00:18:56
Speaker 1: Are the examples they've found outside of that, because I know a lot of a lot of older especially South Asian East Asian societies, have mentions of a lot of this kind of stuff throughout history, and it was only sort of colonial after that all these laws were explicitly passed to say this is not who you are.
00:19:15
Speaker 3: I'm trying to learn more and more about it now because I come from a British bulls so a Sri Lankan background. It's the winter time, so I look at nimic and you can't tell that I'm mixed racist, But trying to learn a little bit more about this covered up history, this idea of karma and pleasure being so rooted in dacy tradition, and yet when we as soon as we get to colonialism, just all of that is squashed out. And non monogamy shouldn't just be about sex and pleasure, but you can get a lot of sex and pleasure through this, And there is definitely an argument to be made of life's too short. Why not you know, one person's great, but what if you could have lots of other experiences out there? And I also want to say with that, the history of non monogamy is not you top. It's also often patriarchal in nature as well, and there's a lot of double standards in men being able to stray in far more easily accessible and less punishable ways than women and other marginalized people. I think historically it's easier for rich white people to do this versus global majority people. You know, it's I'm not trying to sugarcoat. I'm not trying to prove that this is more noble than monogamy, but I would like us to understand the history better.
00:20:30
Speaker 1: Are there specific examples that come to mind when you think about that, just that the idea of privilege within this.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: Historically, there was I can't remember what paper it is, maybe it was The Atlantic in the States. I only read half of it and then I got too grumpy and I stopped reading it. But earlier this year there was an article that came out going polyamory is just the middle class. It's like the latest bourgeois time pastime, and it kind of made an argument that I don't agree with that. A lot of the time these days, well, a lot of the visibility of non monogamy is people who hold quite a lot of privilege. Because you need a level of time and emotional intelligence that takes a lot of care and nurture, and there are, you know, resources that are required to enable you to have that time, to be able to nurture that. A lot of the time and privilege that you're not going to be completely overly shamed by your culture, and you know you're not going to be in too much of a difficult position in terms of your employment or your housing. So there is this misconception that non monogamy is for rich white people, and historically that has been the case, and maybe nowadays it kind of is a little bit now, but I disagree with that, and I would like it to be for everyone who wants to be able to.
00:21:58
Speaker 1: Monogamy emerges as a tool for ownership and inheritance and property and things like that. I'm curious about the addition of religion in codifying monogamy, because I feel like in the book you mentioned like there's a shift when monogamy becomes tied to religion. So how did religion take monogamy from a practical system and turn it into a moral rule, like good people do it this way only if you are virtuous.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: Well, I ran a workshop yesterday about like mind body dualism that kind of came up a lot in what we were talking about and all of this kind of I guess you would maybe call it early medieval, But I have to preface that I'm not a historian. I'm a history enthusiast. It was in lots of ways. Early Christianity was like the rules that were being mechanized. We're very much about conformity and control and giving people a very strict moral code to follow. And you have this at the same time that the mind and the body are being actively separated, and that kind of saying, Okay, the most important part of the brain of the person is the mind, and that is mostly where men come from. It's kind of high concepts and intellectualism, and the body is base. And so therefore we can put women down because they're more bodily than men. We can put laborers down and abuse laborers because we're only harming their bodies, we're not harming their minds. I think monogamy has some real interesting links to that as well, because it's shutting down exploration and pleasure in some ways, and it's really categorizing people in in quite a strict way. It's forming. Sorry, I'm putting all the buzzwords out right now, and I'm so aware of it, but it's You could also look at monogamy as a tool for capitalism, because it's two people staying together so that they can procreate, so that they can create the next generation of workers, and so that a kind of the middle and working classes are ordered and will morally keep themselves and their communities in check. It kind of feeds into so much of this shame of so much of our culture of shame comes from being hyper aware of what we're doing and what other people are doing and trying to be as normal as possible. And monogamy is such an inherent norm. I think a lot in my queer circles about heteronormativity, how being straight is the assumed default and you have to actively come out if that isn't you. And monogamy, I think has an even stronger hold on us than heteronormativity. They come hand in hand. But you know, we are assumed to be monogamous beings until we read the wrong book or go to the wrong nightclub and discover that you can do things in a different way.
00:25:00
Speaker 1: Present day, is there an indicator you think of why non monogamy has become a more common it's, frankly, it's a curiosity for a lot of people that, you know, what is it about this specific moment that it has brought that around.
00:25:14
Speaker 3: It's been snowballing for a while, and I think a real catalyst was lockdowns in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. It was a real opportunity for lots of people who had to stay still and kind of hide themselves away, and also for lots of people whose work meant that they weren't out in the open and kind of had a bit more time to sit in solitude. The number of people that I know who discovered things about themselves, whether that's figuring out some weird and wonderful kinks of theirs and going, oh, it just needed enough spare time to realize I was really into this, or thinking about gender expression and gender identity politics, and then relationships and how you do them. For a lot of monogamous couples, I think that was a very unique time period that really put relationship to the test and allowed people to be a bit more curious than they maybe would have been in their day to day lives. And then people are fascinated by this because it's different and it's sallacious, and I as much as I've resent that, I also am not so completely mad about it because if I was monogamous, I want to know about this. It sounds kind of cool and weird and I don't. I love gossip. I want the gossip, whatever it is, So I don't don't blame anyone for that that year on year there just seems to be a bit more fascination with it. We're seeing it come up in pop culture more. It's also something, interestingly, I think for a lot of left leaning and even some more centrist people, we know that we can't punch down on queerness anymore. We never should like people never should have done. But it's kind of seen within the framework of other prejudices of going, don't do that, that's that's not okay. I think people can punch down on polyamory and non monogamy, and that's maybe why people are still so fascinating with because it's because you know, it's kind of it's easy to see it as flip until this, Yeah, it's not. You're not arguing with someone's core identity a lot of the time, you're arguing with their silly little ways. All of that is in air quotes, by the way, I don't believe that.
00:27:25
Speaker 1: But No, nine, you're spot on about the COVID thing. I now I'm thinking back, like you know, as the the gay best friend to a number of like my straight buddies, there was definitely an uptick in and I should say like gay sex positive, Like, you know, I tend to not have a lot of stigma around these conversations, which is one of the things I thought would be great about about having you on. So I got an optick in phone calls or facetimes from these friends that were like, hey, so it's locked down and I'm feeling like, how do you have a conversation with your partner? I like X, Y and Z, and I could never tell my wife or my girlfriend that I'm like even just the basics of like letting that FRED know, like, hey, man, guaranteed your wife or girlfriend has a list of ten things that she also feels like she can't talk to you about. She would love for you to know that you should be doing. And so even just like that basic level, there was definitely something about COVID that made either chattered relationships obviously or for good reason maybe or it brought people closer together and it seems like it increased their communication. So that's I hadn't thought about that in the context of also exploring something like non monogamy.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: Right, can I ask a personal question in relation to that, yeah, because would you describe yourself as a gay man, that's not the question.
00:28:50
Speaker 2: I think that's the quick No. I would say I'm a gay dude.
00:28:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, cool, I'm with a very loving dude for the last fifteen years.
00:28:57
Speaker 3: So I just think that that is the definition of Yeah, it's also allowed to be monuments than that, and I welcome that too. But well, someone who is very much perceived as a gay man, do you get assumptions that your relationship has a level of openness to it, Because a lot of the gay guy friends in my life, like openness is a completely different thing in queer worlds, and I come from the more sapphic dukey queer world where monogamy is not always monogamy is something that you opt into, I guess a lot of the time, rather than it being this assumed thing. But then my gay guy friends, it's like non monogamy is the assumption a lot of the time within their dating pools, but also within a lot of the straight people's assumptions that get thrown on them. And that's a kind of grim, hyper sexualized thing of oh, well, you're a guy, so obviously all of you are just fucking all the time.
00:29:48
Speaker 1: I haven't found it to be one way or the other, meaning I don't think anybody assumes that you are monogamous or are not monogamous. So I think it's a it's a question that is not that dissimilar to what toppings do you want on the pizza we're ordering. It's like it's a very it seems like it's always been a very straightforward question with gay friend groups. Okay, yeah, yeah, which I thought was But it seems healthy.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: That's really healthy, and I wish that more straight people had access points like that. I have got to say, I think it's much easier doing nom monogamy as a queer person if I was a straight woman, I don't know how much I would be enjoying non monogamy.
00:30:31
Speaker 2: Well, then here's a question.
00:30:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry, you can say it.
00:30:34
Speaker 1: Why would it be difficult to be in a hetero non monogamous relationship as a woman for you?
00:30:40
Speaker 3: Have you spoken to a straight man recently?
00:30:43
Speaker 2: I have.
00:30:45
Speaker 3: They're not They're not great at talking about the old feelings, are they.
00:30:49
Speaker 1: That's why my like my buddies need to communicate better.
00:30:53
Speaker 3: They totally do, And I really want that for them, and I want them to experience all of this and more on a very selfish personal level. I don't think I need to walk those men down this path. I need them to do that in their own time. It's a wild generalization. Obviously, there are some brilliant straight men in the world, and there are some terrible queer people in the world who can't communicate. But I have got used to a high level of emotional intelligence and I don't think I can go back from that.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: Do you do you want to take this opportunity to give those straight dudes like the top three things they need to do or are you so over at there You're like, nope, nobody.
00:31:33
Speaker 3: Else Professionally I can. Professionally, I would love to look after the straight men a little bit more, just as long as they promise not to be dicks to us. Okay, what are the three things? Men? Listen up, your feelings are not scary or emasculating, look at them, talk to your friends about them, go to therapy. Pleasure is so beautiful and wonderful. And don't be afraid of your own prostates. And it's the greatest honor in the world to help women come and that should be one of your primary goals in life. And last one, oh, just like stop trying to be so tough about everything. This idea that the world is out to get you and it is really threatening way and if your woman does something different that you don't like, it kind of emasculates yourself. Just like, that's fucking been that. Have I fixed it? Has Andrew takes stopped?
00:32:30
Speaker 2: Now done, it's finished. It's fixed.
00:32:33
Speaker 1: What's the difference between non monogamy and having a free pass?
00:32:42
Speaker 3: I would challenge that free passes are often spoken about but really acted on. Non Monogamy is creating all of the emotional resilience and robustness for things to happen and people to feel okay and secure in them. If it's a monogamous couple who has a free pass and then one day one of them acts on it, what and that's just and they are completely emotionally prepared for it and they've done all of this reading about how about unpacking jealousy and not trying to strive for perfection in how you perform your emotions and asking for what you need and setting boundaries. It's clunky sometimes and there is a warranted stereotype that polyamorous people just love talking about their emotions and actually don't get to the sex very often. I would say, I'm managing to do both fine, But it's not just sex, and it's also not just love and romantic connections, but it's really community building and doing that in a very intentional way.
00:33:45
Speaker 1: That's a great point that reminds me of your jealousy chapter. So you have a whole chapter on jealousy and you said it was the most important chapter of your book. Ay, but then also, how do you define jealousy and how is it different from what people assume?
00:34:00
Speaker 3: Dragged my heels writing that chapter because I've been so bored of talking about jealousy for years, because it's the first thing that people want to know about, and I was quite used to talking about it in quite a one o one way. And the chapter actually was really important for me because it helped me go a bit deeper and really kind of go, hey, this is what I believe, this is where I stand right now. Jealousy is very misunderstood by everyone, but particularly through more normative monogamous societies, because it's met with immediate fear and not seen as an opportunity, which I would like us to reframe it as if you are feeling jealousy insecurity of some kind, sometimes that is someone else's actions just being a dick, and you being treated badly and having a native reaction to that. I'm not trying to get mean that we all have to absorb other people's boat behavior in this, but oftentimes experiencing insecurity shows you a lot about what you're not giving to yourself and what you're not asking for, whether that be clarification, reassurance, actually being able to emotionally regulate yourself and reassure yourself rather than assuming that it has to come from other people in order for you to feel validated. In all the moments where I have felt real jealousy, I've managed to walk away having a much better understanding of myself and some of the ugly parts of myself I don't want to admit to, and I wish that we all got a bit better at looking at that. And it's hard because monogamy teaches us that love is a finite resource that we're going to run out of, and so if someone's eyes are straying, it means there's going to be less attention for us. And it's also tough when a lot of monogamous relationships are built on the assumption of ownership that I own my partner's time, commitment, attraction, and for that to be challenged really complicated. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to oversimplify it.
00:36:03
Speaker 1: That then reminds me of what you were saying about sort of the difference between hetero or queer relationships, and I'm just thinking about the difference between if if my fiance and I are walking down the street and there's like a handsome dude and we're both like, oh, that dude's so handsome, it just sort of is very matter of fact, as opposed to like, if one of my college buddies and his wife are walking down the street, he would just sort of like mumble to me like, oh shit, look at her. But they wouldn't share that moment, which makes sense because she is not finding that other woman attractive necessarily.
00:36:40
Speaker 2: But it's but what's.
00:36:42
Speaker 1: Jarring to me is like, what you're not allowed to point out that somebody is attractive.
00:36:47
Speaker 3: We have to perform this absolute blinked purity.
00:36:50
Speaker 2: That yes, that you're dead on that side, I.
00:36:52
Speaker 3: Am such a sexual, romantic being, but exclusively for you. I do not feel anything towards anyone else ever again.
00:37:00
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, but it did so on that aspect of jealousy. You're I think you're right. I hadn't.
00:37:05
Speaker 1: I hadn't explicitly thought about anything beyond just the communication, but like, what's behind that and our own insecurities and all of that too, I guess, And.
00:37:15
Speaker 3: How we're hardwired to compare ourselves to other people. A real learning for me early on in partners of mine having other partners was really having to say, on a daily basis to myself that person is not better or worse than you, They are just different. Because it's so easy to go, oh, there's this shiny new person in their life, and so obviously they're going to be They're taller than me, and they're more conventionally attractive, and they're cooler and they have more interesting hobbies and they're funnier and all these things, and going, no, we that's that's really not how I want to meet any people in my life. And and we we get that so much through social media and beauty standards, and it filters in in these really insidious ways but everyone's a person.
00:38:01
Speaker 1: And I'm also guessing, so what you just described on those feelings, like I'm guessing in non monogamous scenarios, there are people who are not romantically available.
00:38:16
Speaker 2: Is that correct?
00:38:16
Speaker 1: So going back to the difference between that and something that might be more polyamorous, So there are people who you can have incredible conversations, physical sexual relationships with, but there may be not available romantically.
00:38:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would, and this is very much personal to me. I would argue that there is a real limit to how we can compartmentalize romance and sex. It's all forms of intimacy, and yes, you can separate them to a degree, and you can have some boundaries in place where that there's kind of limited romantic closeness potentially, But I know some people who very successfully separate to I am not one of those people. I love having even if it's even if it's a really casual hookup situation. I want there to be care and connection in there, and to me, that is a form of love. But that's different to saying, okay, you are now my girlfriend. But yeah, there's people, a lot of nominogamous people because it's societally convenient and still the default may have one primary partner and so the other relationships that they have in their lives. They're not just meeting all of those different connections as a solo person. They're meeting them saying, hey, this is the situation and the unit that I am a part of. So you're making decisions about your relationships with multiple people and contacts in mind, it's complicated.
00:39:47
Speaker 1: So for listeners who have listened so far and might be like interesting, I wonder how to even have the conversation with their significant other, or if they're single and are thinking about something like your origin story. How are these conversations usually raised in and outside of relationships.
00:40:07
Speaker 3: I'd say that normally raised badly. In relationships. It's normally one person who's been thinking about it for ages and the other person who's oblivious, and then at some point it gets blurted out and you're coming in with two very different expectations, and one person's kind of surprised in court of God, and the other person has imagined what this future is going to be like. Not all the time, but these are the stories that I often hear, So I would bring it up casually and early early in a relationship, or if you've been in a relationship for a long time and you're listening to this and you're curious, talk about it this evening, say hey, I listened to this thing like I listened to cal and I wonder what do you think about this. I'm not asking in a way because I want this, but I guess it made me feel a little bit curious. And for some people this is going to be a hard no, and that's okay. Here to recruit people. It's not my goal for more people to become non monogamous. It's my goal for more people to have agency and how they build their relationships. But I near a monogamy, it's great, like do your thing. I'm really bored of this idea of non monogamy being inherently cooler or more evolved. There's this performative angle of it that really really rills me up. So you don't have to do this. You might find yourself in a situation where one of you wants it and the other one doesn't, and that's obviously very tricky. If it's something that's really important for one of you, it kind of becomes a conversation about are we going to have kids or not, And maybe there are compromises to be made and for one person it's way more important, so they lead it, or maybe you figure out some other compromise, or maybe that's a reason why you decide to kindly part ways, because one of you wants something and the other doesn't and there's a fundamental incompatibility there. But all of this this is at the beginning and experiment, and yes it's scary and often quite messy. I think the first few years of non monogamy typically there's a lot of shit that goes down because it's all new, it's all it's just all happening at you all the time. But I'm here to tell you that after those first couple of years, things are really quiet and down for most people. And if you're curious about this, you owe it to yourself to give this a try, because I am one of the many people who are living proofs that this can be a really beautiful way of being.
00:42:28
Speaker 1: Can you talk folks through, let's say they want to move forward with that. What are the ways in which people generally take care of their sexual health when they have multiple partners?
00:42:38
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I love you. Thank you for letting me talk about sexual health. This is my origin sexual health roots right here. Well, you have to define what sex means to you, first of all, because I think for some people there's still this very sis hep monogamous idea that maybe not monogamous sis her idea that real sex is a penis going into agina. But there are many other ways to experience pleasure, and there are sexual health precautions for all of those different things. You've got to figure out your comfort levels. So a lot of the time sort of sleeping with other people, if you're in a couple, condoms or some other barrier method of protection is a requirement. Like if you are having sex in a way that there is a risk of conceiving, then there's a kind of contraception route that you've got to think about as well. And there was a study a few years ago. There's this misconception that non monogamous people get STIs at a higher rate than monogamous people, and that's not the case because we generally are way better at being communicative about this and being quite upfront, knowing what our boundaries are and testing regularly and if something goes wrong, and sometimes it happens, you've got to communicate it. I had last year in my lovely little cluster of beautiful sexy people had an STI scare and we had to all kind of pass it on, going, Hi, guys, sorry, we might all have gone aha. It turns out only one of us did. We were mitigating already. But you know we're not meeting that with shame. We're going, Oops, something's happened, let's be proactive about it.
00:44:17
Speaker 1: So, since this podcast is generally about about trends repeating themselves throughout history, do you.
00:44:24
Speaker 2: Think the.
00:44:27
Speaker 1: I hate calling it the rise in non monogamy because I just keep going back to that Atlantic article you cited, or like these memes that we talked about and shortage and Bushwick, But do you think something is coming back around? Are we circling back to like old ways of doing something? And then just like sort of basically, what do you think and hope the future looks like as people feel freer to design their relationships?
00:44:47
Speaker 3: Well, isn't that the loveliest question you could ever ask me. I'll come back for that one in a minute. I every time period there is a hyper conservative storyline, and there is a hyper progressive storyline going on at the same time, and we really deny ourselves that present nuance and that historic nuance. So, for example, in the UK, we think of the Victorian era as this kind of raining of puritanical values that spread across the Empire as well as being even further rooted in the UK at the same time. The most graphic pornography I have ever seen is from the Victorian era. It was absolutely filthy. London was the European capital of dominatrixes and kind of flagellation spanking, and people would come from all over Europe to be spanked by hot women in London with like birch leaves and branches, which can.
00:45:47
Speaker 1: I just can I just insert who smelled horrific? Like the bathing procedures at the time period were just not.
00:45:56
Speaker 2: Friendly.
00:45:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there are so many time periods I want to go back to and then go, oh no, the smell and the dentistry. Fuck, it's not going to work for me, is it. So we're living through a similar version of that right now. You know, we are living in a deep, panic inducing rise of fascism. It's happening in real time. Commiserations to all of you over there. I'm feeling it here in Europe, but it's so much wise where you are. And at the same time, all of this beautiful, incredible progressive stuff is happening in terms of the way what like how we can the healthcare side of it and how we can protect our bodies and nourish ourselves, but also the thinking around this and there being spaces where we can explore and do things differently and shed generational expectations and kind of create our own pathways. So yes, this is on the rise. It's also on the rise at the same time as an evangelical like trad wife, anti trans abortion hating fear is coming for us as well. So it's not looking great, but we exist, and we need to keep reminding ourselves that we exist and that there is a lot of respect and care in the world, even when it doesn't feel super visible all the time.
00:47:15
Speaker 2: Very well said.
00:47:16
Speaker 3: But I really enjoyed talking about this topic. I really really care about it. And if you want to listen to more of it, my book's in audiobook and I think lots of people are enjoying hearing it as well as reading it. It's also my voice, so if you want a little cheeky British voice telling you about non monogamy. Then there you go.
00:47:33
Speaker 1: Plug the title again so people can get the audiobook or the physical.
00:47:37
Speaker 3: Copy the Non Monogamy Playbook by me Ruby Rare. Thank you yay, that was really fun.
00:47:44
Speaker 2: Likewise, thank you, thank you for that was my guest.
00:47:47
Speaker 1: Ruby Rare, sex and relationship educator and author of the Non Monogamy Playbook and sex Ed, a guide for adults. You can follow Ruby at Ruby Rare One Word. Here we go again as a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffo Media in association with New Metric Media.
00:48:04
Speaker 2: Our executive producers.
00:48:06
Speaker 1: Are me Kal penn Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Alissa Martino, Andy Kim, pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Meghan tan is our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor. Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly, logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline Johnson and Megan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham Adam Horn, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour.
00:48:41
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. See you next week.
