Last week, I spent some time riffing on polyamory and finance and I ended with the idea that both polyamory and money stuff require us to set priorities, and which priorities we set affects the decisions we make. For polyamory, I mentioned three choices we make:
- to prioritize our need or desire for multiple relationships over society’s push for monogamy
- to prioritize the individual or the group in our relationships
- to prioritize entwinement or autonomy
Today we’re going to take a look at the first of those choices.
How choosing to be in polyamorous relationships impacts our money stuff.
Really, this is the simplest of the three. Being polyamorous in and of itself doesn’t impact your finances or the decisions you need to make about finances. Some approaches to polyamory can have big impacts on how you handle money. Some approaches won’t.
The main impact that being in any polyamorous relationship has on finances is you can’t entirely trust conventional money advice. All the “usual” advice on budgeting and handling money, etc, etc is written with monogamous people in mind. It’s actually pretty rare to find money advice written for single people instead of couples.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use conventional money advice–most of the time you can! But you do need to read it with a bit of side-eye, always asking “how well does this advice apply, given my polyamory.” It may apply perfectly well as is. It may need some adjustments but still be useable for you. It may be utterly useless because of inherent assumptions about the ability to get joint bank accounts for everyone involved.
The further away you move from advice on basic household budgeting, the more likely you are to run into assumptions about you being monogamous that can trip you up.
That’s it for this week.