KC Slack of Bad Fat Broads
1. How long have you been polyamorous or been practicing polyamory?
I made my first attempts at an āopen relationshipā in about 2009, but I was doing it all wrong for myself back then and it didnāt work out particularly well. After that relationship ended I wound up taking a few years off from being really involved with anyone or looking for anything āseriousā, I wanted to give myself some time to really reconsider what it would look like to be happy and fulfilled in whatever relationship configuration I wound up in. Somewhere in there I realized that monogamy just wasnāt going to work for me and started dating with that knowledge in mind in about 2014.
2. What does your relationship dynamic look like?
You could call my relationship dynamic ārelationship anarch-ish.ā Iām pretty resistant to hierarchy and I want to let each of my connections be exactly what it is without jamming everything into āprimaryā vs āsecondaryā vs ātertiary.ā That said, Iām realistic about that while I have infinite amounts of love, Iām stuck with limited time and I try to be honest about that. In practice it currently looks like 3 partners, a couple long-distance connections, something more casual, and the possibility for whatever else shows up. I like for the people I date to know each other - one of my favorite things is when all 3 of my partners and I get to hang out together - and I like to know about the people my people are dating. For me this is about some combination of my own love of knowing/sharing, and my desire for the possibility of community within my relationships (I still feel deeply goofy whenever I say the word āpolyculeā, but I hear myself saying it a lot these days).
3. What aspect of polyamory do you excel at?
Iām really good at letting people know that I care about them and talking about feelings in general. My super-impulsive Aries-ness blends with my Feelings Professional status into my being someone who is happy to articulate interest and really competent at discussing and caring for the more complicated feelings that show up along the way. Being really well processed and generally very self-aware helps a lot because Iām able to identify and name my own stuff in ways that allow me to either work through it in my own space, or in the space of the relationship. Iām also a really proficient scheduler, which honestly is a surprise to me given my own habitual disorganization. I am good at building rhythms and figuring out when dates can happen - all without a unified google calendar!
4. What aspect of polyamory do you struggle with?
I have some jealousy stuff that shows up a lot more often than I would like.
5. How do you address and/or overcome those struggles?
I try to be gentle with myself and to give myself a minute to really look at what Iām feeling. My jealousy is often about something other than my partnerās behavior - my trauma, societal expectations, etc - so depending on which thing itās actually about I try to figure out how to move through those feelings in ways that are respectful to me, my partners, their partners, and to the sort of world I want to live in. This can involves both self-reflection and discussion with partners, friends, and my therapist. In events where upon reflection I find that it is about how my partner is behaving, I attempt to initiate a conversation about their specific behaviors to see if it is something that can be addressed/changed.
There is sort of a habit of viewing jealousy as something the individual - especially if the individual is a woman or femme - needs to just sort through on their own as to ānot botherā their partner(s), and I donāt agree with that. Even when my jealousy is wholly about my own stuff, I find it really valuable to discuss with my partners, and I feel the same way when working through a partnerās emotional stuff. Relationships are mutual exchanges, so while I donāt want to put blame on my partners for things they havenāt actually done, I also donāt understand myself as having to be isolated in my emotional processing and development.
6. In terms of risk-aware/safer sex, what do you and your partners do to protect one another?
Generally speaking, we use barriers for most types of sex with anyone at all, including each other, we sterilize toys where possible and use condoms or different toys in other situations. We also all have regular STI screening schedules, and any barrier-free sex that happens doesnāt happen until after all involved parties have had STI screenings. Personally, I have an IUD and a strong clarity about what I would do were I to become pregnant accidentally. More importantly to me, weāre in dialogue about our safety and are committed to being people who can be trusted to not take risks with each otherās health.
7. What is the worst mistake youāve ever made in your polyamorous history and how did you rebound from that?
Oh wow. Uh. I think my whole first venture into non-monogamy was a mistake and honestly my first rebound from it was to think that maybe that just meant that non-monogamy didnāt work. Ultimately, I realized that the problems were about communication and compatibility, and did an awful lot of work to understand myself in ways I had not previously so that I could communicate and find compatibility in ways that are healthy and satisfying for me.
8. What self-identities are important to you? How do you feel like being polyamorous intersects with or affects these identities?
My identities as queer and fat are really significant to my experience of the world in general, and to my experience of polyamory in specific. I think queer and queered polyamory encourage a type of creativity in relationship form that more heteronormative polyamory misses and suffers from the lack of, I also think my status as always already a sexual outsider has made my whole experience of polyamorous community and life different than it is for straight or more heteronormative folks. As a fat person, specifically a fat bisexual, I get hit with the āgluttonyā shame directed at polyamorous folks more intensely than do folks at some other intersections. I am also, notably, a religious professional which causes me to have what I will only describe as odd experiences in both my non-monogamy worlds and my faith worlds.
(Bonus: Do you have any groups, projects, websites, blogs, etc. that you are involved with that you would like to promote?)
I co-run an intersectional fat liberation podcast, Bad Fat Broads, which I am really proud of. You can also always find me yelling on twitter as @femmina.
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