If I start dating someone and they never mention that they’re poly, I just assume they aren’t and keep the relationship monogamous. I don’t really like it when it’s opened up, either. It’s hard to tell if someone agrees just because they like me or if they actually want to open it up.

That being said, if someone cheats on me in a monogamous relationship, I’m mostly pissed because I would have said it was fine if I had known that’s what they wanted. That being said, it goes both ways so they would also have to understand that me being okay with them being with other people means I can be too. My first poly relationship was with an ex who only opened the relationship up for herself and got pissed off if I even jokingly kissed my friends.

I hang out with a lot of poly people despite not dating anyone at the moment, and I know of a relationship where one partner is either doing that intentionally or on accident. They’re the only monogamous person (and admitted to me they don’t want to date someone who is poly but don’t want to break up), and dating someone who has multiple serious partners that they’ve been with longer. I really can’t see it going well if this person doesn’t say something, even if it probably would lead to a breakup just due to being incompatible. I feel like it’s not my place to warn their partner about it, so I’m just burdened by this information that I don’t really want to know about.

I used to date my Dungeon Master (Dungeons and Dragons, not anything weird) and one of her friends she grew up with. The relationship was pretty brief, but she was really good at emphasizing communication between all of us. The breakup didn’t even really feel like a breakup.

A couple years ago, she died in a car wreck with one of the players in my group and even though we weren’t dating at the time, it made it harder for me to get back into the dating scene after the relationship I had around that time ended shortly after. I briefly got back with the other person I dated, but it wasn’t the same and they weren’t poly anymore.

If I was in a relationship right now and got over it better, I’d definitely be poly. It felt really normal.

Surprisingly better than I would have expected for a community about a state.

My first try at the Fediverse, I didn’t know how important it is to instance-hop so when mine was down a lot more often than it was up, I temporarily went back to Reddit.

I think in practice, most people who those terms would apply to don’t really use them on a day to day basis. I’m probably both demisexual and demiromantic, but I’ve never consistently identified that way even though nothing really changed since I found out about the terms as a teenager. I think they’re mostly useful if you’re getting back into the dating scene (why it’s more important to use them for me at the moment) or hanging out with people who end up also being on the aro/ace spectrums.

This is why I’m finding more and more that it’s easier to find local events the “old fashioned way” (word-of-mouth, flyers, local newspapers and zines, etc) rather than through social media. It used to be easier to see events local to me, but now the algorithm pushes events that I may like but aren’t local at all. Sometimes I do actually see something local, but it’s too late.