353 - De-nesting Without De-escalating
De-nesting
While living together without being married (or perhaps before marriage) is becoming increasingly popular, some forget that living apart doesn’t always have the negativity that it is associated with. Some people may live apart for career reasons, but there are some benefits of not cohabitating, such as:
More independence, autonomy, personal freedom, or space.
Allowing women to subvert traditional gender roles.
Ability to prioritize familial relationships.
Living apart but being in a committed relationship is also somewhat common within the LGBT community, sometimes out of inability to be out as queer for one or both people.
There is a certain amount of financial privilege that comes with being able to live alone as well, and so some opt for the more financially secure option of living with others. This has caused a rise in co-housing communities as well in the past few years, or communities where there are private households with shared common areas.
We also discussed de-nesting with a panel of our patrons who have gone through the process themselves. They answer the following questions in the second half of this episode:
Please give us a little background into your decision to de-nest without de-escalating your relationship. Why did you decide to do this?
What were some of the emotional or practical/logistical things you had to navigate in making that transition?
What kinds of effects do you feel de-nesting had on your relationship?
Did one of you initiate the conversation into de-nesting? How did the other person initially react?
What are your plans for the future? Do you plan to always remain de-nested or would you be interested in nesting with this or another partner again in the future?
How has this impacted your relationship with your other partners or your metamours?
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're going to be talking about de-nesting without de-escalating a relationship. Often when a couple chooses not to live together anymore or de-nest as we're calling it, it's assumed that they're also breaking up. However, the decision to stay together but still live apart is becoming more prevalent in both monogamy and in non-monogamy in the US and Europe, especially this is becoming more and more common.
Today we're going to talk about some of the reasons why people choose to stay together while living apart. Then in the second half, we're going to have a very special panel discussion with some of our patrons of the show who have personal experience with de-nesting while still staying in an intimate, close relationship with their partner.
Emily: Yay. Well, welcome back, everyone. It is the first episode of the new year. We have all gone through the holidays. We are now in 2022. Oh, my goodness, what a concept.
Dedeker: What will all those twos bring?
Emily: I don't know. That's a great question. The Winter Olympics in a couple of months, which I can't wait for, but yes.
Dedeker: Yes, this is an interesting topic. I think that like Jase pointed out in the intro, this is still so relatively unheard of to so many people. I think that the idea of moving in together is so tied to the relationship escalator. It's so tied to, this is a definite marker of things are progressing in a particular direction. Things are getting serious. The idea of undoing that is just unfathomable for most people to think about still staying in a relationship even while unknitting some kind of intentional entanglement.
Emily: I always think of your brother, Jase, and what he said if you want to reiterate that again.
Jase: Well, yes, just some number of years ago, he moved in, or rather a girlfriend had moved in with him out of just practical necessity for financial reasons at the time. Then after they'd been doing that for a while and they were ready to find a new place, there was kind of this thing of like, well-- because I think I said something to him about, "Oh, well, you guys could each get your own place after that if you weren't sure that you wanted to live together or live together yet."
He's like, "No, if we don't keep living together, that means we break up." That was just very clear and I'm like, "Yes, of course." That's exactly how I would've thought. That's how most people would think. That's totally normal, I guess, but more and more, it's not. That's what we're discovering and that's what we're talking about in this episode.
Emily: We use the term "nest" because I think a lot of people in the non-monogamous community say like nesting partner, and so it's this idea of de-nesting. That nesting partner is the person that you live with or the people that you live with perhaps, but then to de-nest is to leave that arrangement that you may have with another person or with a few other people and maybe choose to live alone or choose to do some other sort of configuration. We're going to talk about that today. To start off with, it's the new year. Maybe that means that you just went through a breakup because there are a lot of statistics out there that people tend to break up in the new year or around the holidays.
Dedeker: I've been there. New year 2011, that was me.
Emily: Oh really?
Dedeker: Literally, January 1st, 2011.
Emily: There you go, that you broke up with someone or that you were--
Dedeker: Yes, I broke up with the person. It was the first person I ever cohabited with and the start of our romantic relationship.
Emily: I feel like, Jase, you said that you've had some January breakups too?
Jase: Yes, sometime within January, February, that's when I associate with breakup season. It's like the time between New Year's and Valentine's Day.
Emily: Yes, that definitely is a breakup season. However, there is a Cosmopolitan article that suggests that breakups tend to happen before big events. The reasoning behind that might be because somebody doesn't want to meet a family member. They don't want to bring this person to meet family because, "Oh, maybe they're not really someone that I want to associate my family with," or you may have to engage in things like gift-giving and that's sort of a really intimate thing.
They may not want to have a significant other be a part of that and they're like, "Oh, maybe that's telling maybe we should break up." There is a day statistically, which is the largest breakup day, the most prevalent, and it's December 11th. We've all gotten past that now. Good job, but perhaps you did get broken up with on that day. I don't know, dear listener out there. Yes, all of us have gone through something like this in the past, and then, yes, before Valentine's Day as well, that tends to be a big breakup day.
However, this episode is not about that. We're talking instead about staying together but choosing to live apart. The first part of this episode is going to be about some of the reasons why people want to do that, some of the benefits perhaps of that, and the prevalence that it's taken on in our society. Then like Jase and Dedeker said before, in Europe, this seems to be a really big trend that's happening over there.
Then after our ad break, we're going to be talking to some of our patrons about the non-monogamy side of this and the fact that they may have lived with a partner and then decided to move away from that partner and live on their own, which I think is something that's not particularly well-studied yet but perhaps will be eventually. Because like we've said, you don't necessarily need to break up with a partner if you decide to not cohabit with them anymore, which is cool. I think that's a great idea that you can choose to do whatever the heck you want, whatever's best for you in your relationship.
Jase: To start out, let's just first talk about one other change that predates this one. That's the prevalence of couples who live together without being married. Just even one generation ago, that was this wild, very edgy thing to do. Now, just everybody I know, that's just totally normal. No one even thinks twice about it.
This comes from Pew Research in an article of theirs called Marriage and Cohabitation in the US and mentioned some things such as within adults 18 to 44, the percent who have ever lived with someone and not been married to them is 59%. Quite a lot. That is even greater than the share who has been married. More people have lived together with someone they're not married to than have been married at all, so that's really interesting.
Dedeker: Yes, really tip the needle there.
Jase: In the age range, 18 to 44, I imagine this would be very different in older age groups, of course.
Emily: Again, I think that's very different than how it used to be because a lot of people would choose to get married and live together and leave the house for the very first time, like leave the house in which they grew up when they get married and when they go to this other place in which to cohabit. Again, like you said, that's very, very different. People might have roommates now or people might live with their significant other well before they ever decide to get married.
Jase: Then another interesting part of that is that the motivations for why they would nest or why they would live together between married and unmarried couples were different. In this study, they found that most of the people who were married and living together when asked for the reasons why would say things like love and companionship as major reasons they decided to move in together. A small percentage of those who, again, were married and living together also cited finances or convenience.
Amongst the people who were not married to each other but living together, a much higher percentage, 38%, said moving in with their partner made sense financially and 37% said it was convenient. That seems to be that the finance and convenience seems to be a higher priority thing. That makes sense with what we've seen happen with housing prices and apartment prices and things like that, and with people getting married later that you add all those things together and it's like, "Well, it just makes sense."
Dedeker: Some of these trends might indicate that maybe more people are separating out the decision to get married versus the decision to nest, but it is still the case that about 66% of married adults who lived with their spouse before they were married and also who weren't even engaged to be married when they moved in together say that they saw specifically cohabitation as a step toward marriage when they first started living with the person who they ended up getting married to, which I suppose can make sense regardless.
It's the way that our human brains work. It's a little bit of an ad hoc situation, but also it makes sense that just from a social perspective, that's the escalator that we're all trained to be on currently that living together cohabiting and marriage either happen in close succession or sometimes simultaneously.
Jase: The escalator is going strong is what we're saying.
Emily: Yes, still there.
Dedeker: A strong, successful escalator. Maybe successful is going a little too far, but a strong escalator. Again, this confirms that most people who get married still view nesting specifically as part of that traditional relationship escalator. About half of you as adults say that couples who've lived together before marriage have a better chance of having a successful marriage than those who don't live together before marriage.
Jase: That makes sense.
Dedeker: Then 63% of adults who are younger than 30 say that couples who live together before marriage have a better chance of having a successful marriage compared with 52% of people ages 30 to 49, 42% of people ages 50 to 64, 37% of those 65 and older. There's definitely a generational difference here. Now, what is interesting is that when I was growing up in the Evangelical Christian Church, they often whipped out statistics, God knows from where.
Emily: They made them up.
Dedeker: They could very well have made them up. That said the opposite of this that we're like, "Oh, they studied people who lived together before marriage and they found that, 'Oh no, living together before marriage, it was real bad. It was real bad for their marriages. Their marriage didn't last as long.'"
Emily: Why it might not be the case?
Dedeker: I don't know. Maybe those were legitimate statistics. I'd have to follow up on that, but it was very much tied to, no, don't move in together before you get married, which is tied to don't date before you get married, which is ultimately tied to don't have sex before you get married.
Emily: Don't date before you get married? How do you ever find someone to get married to if you don't date then?
Dedeker: Oh, Emily, I'm glad you asked. Well, in my day in the Christian Church, it was very much about kissing dating goodbye as it were.
Emily: Oh yes. I forgot about that book. I was about to label that book a certain adjective, but I didn't.
Dedeker: Well, it's okay. We probably all know what that adjective might be. We can all imagine it together in our minds. No, it was much more a model that was supposed to be about going back to the old-timey model of courtship.
Emily: Cool.
Dedeker: It was real cool and didn't mess up anybody at all. It was a good, happy ending to the story.
Emily: Dedeker's lying, everyone, very much.
Jase: I did just want to say real quick, this isn't just coming from people's anecdotal evidence in the church or whatever. There have been a number of studies showing a link between living together before marriage and higher rates of divorce. There've also been a lot of other researchers contradicting those results or doing other studies showing that that's not true or that the opposite is true or that it's changed over time. It turns out as I've looked into this a little bit that it's very hotly debated as it turns out.
I could imagine there's a lot of motivations on either side for coming out with a particular outcome from this. Anyway, that wasn't based on nothing. However, it does seem like more and more researchers are saying, "Actually, we're not so sure that that's true." It's interesting that, in this study, it showed that people's perceptions of it is that it will make the marriage better. Of course, I do think it's worth mentioning the caveat that a good marriage doesn't just mean a marriage that doesn't get divorced. That's another thing to keep in mind here that-
Emily: Very good point.
Jase: -even if there is a correlation with divorce, that doesn't mean necessarily better relationships.
Emily: Yes, I think people just regardless of what kind of configuration they're in if they choose to be cohabiting partners before they get married or not, they may break up or maybe not.
Dedeker: Just connecting to human beings at all-
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Dedeker: -there's a chance you're going to not like them after a period of time.
Emily: Totally. All right, so that was discussing people choosing to cohabit without being married and that it is pretty prevalent in our society, but it's also pretty common for people in intimate relationships to choose not to nest with one another. This is a quote from, Why More Couples are Choosing to Live Apart, which was published in The Conversation in 2020 by Simon Duncan, professor emeritus of social policy at the University of Bradford.
He said, "Surveys have previously suggested that around 10% of adults in Western Europe, the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia live apart together," which is L-A-T. You're going to hear that a lot in this episode. LAT, living apart together. "While up to a quarter of people in Britain statistically defined as 'single' actually have an intimate partner, they just live somewhere else." 10%, that's a lot.
Dedeker: That's a good chunk.
Emily: That's quite a lot of people.
Jase: This very same Simon Duncan, professor emeritus, was also part of an additional study with Miranda Phillips, Julia Carter, Sasha Roseneil, Mariya Stoilova called Practices and Perceptions of Living Apart Together, which was published in Family Science in 2014. For this particular study, they did a survey of people's LATs, how jacked they were. No, they did a survey of people in LAT relationships, living apart together, in great Britain, specifically England, Wales, and Scotland in 2011.
They supplemented this with 50 semi-structured, qualitative interviews that lasted about one hour that they did in that same year. Basically, what qualitative means is they just chatted with them, and then the actual analysis of it is looking at what did they say, trying to distill that down. It's a lot more labor-intensive because you're not just like checking one to five, "How much do you agree that your LATs are great?"
Dedeker: Five, very good.
Jase: Five, strongly agree. LATs are great.
Dedeker: Strongly agree. LATs are strong.
Jase: Basically, within this, of all the questions that they answered, the question that they used in this study to define people as a LAT person was asking those who are not married, cohabiting, or in a same-sex civil partnership, "Are you currently in a relationship with someone you're not living with?" Basically, if they had already said that they were not married or in a domestic partnership or something like that, they would say, "Are you in a relationship with someone you're not living with?" If the answer was, "Yes," they categorize them as someone who's part of a LAT.
Dedeker: These are the things that they found. They found that most LATs live near one another. However, it did include some people who were in long-distance relationships with about 17% living over 50 miles away. 68% of the respondent saw each other several times a week, 21% saw each other every day, only 16% saw their partner less than once a week. They found that the closer that partners lived to one another, the more frequently they saw each other, which just makes lots of sense.
Jase: Not surprising.
Dedeker: A third of couples preferred specifically to live apart, largely because of feeling obligations to family or their children or because of prior relationship baggage. Overall, the survey and the interview data suggest that the idea of monogamous and committed coupledom is usually just as strong for most LATs as assumed for co-residential couples. Most like to see their relationship in this way, even those particularly valuing autonomy early in their relationship or who are worried about cohabitation.
Essentially, making the case that I guess needs to be made still in 2022 that, yes, people who live apart but are still together are just as committed to each other. If we're talking about monogamy specifically, in theory, just as monogamous with each other that just because they're choosing not to cohabit doesn't mean the relationship is less serious, less entangled, less committed.
Then here's another quote, "Indeed, 20% of actual LATs would ideally like to be married and living with their potential spouse and another 12% in unmarried cohabitation. This presumably reflects the fact that many either are constrained from living together or see LAT as an early stage." That's kind of the opposite side of the coin that there's still a significant chunk of people who, even though they're living apart together, would prefer not to be. They would prefer to someday get married, move in together, or if not getting married to still move in together and they see this as just an early stage in the relationship.
Jase: That's a lower percentage than I would've expected.
Emily: That's true, but yes, I believe that some of the people that they talked to were in earlier stages of the relationship and they cited living apart just because, oh, they weren't ready to move in together essentially, which makes sense.
Jase: They weren't specifically looking at long-term living-apart-together relationships or anything in this one?
Emily: Not specifically, no. However, that does exist. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the benefits of living apart while in an intimate relationship choosing to do that, even though you also choose to not potentially live together. Why might some people not want to live together but still maintain a long-term relationship or marriage? This is from a New York Times 2020 article.
I also find it really interesting that a lot of these articles are so recent that they're all from 2020. I was like, "Wow." The world really, in so many ways, was shifting around that time and we know people who chose to live together just because of necessity or because, "Okay, we're not going to be able to see each other potentially because of the pandemic," stuff like that. Yes, they clearly were looking at people choosing to live apart during this time as well.
Dedeker: Well, clearly, with the pandemic and, suddenly, everyone's forced to be at home all the time, it really shakes up your sense of, "Who do I actually want in my home?" For some people, it was really driving home, "I want someone in my home with me." For some people, it was really driving home, "I don't want anybody around."
Emily: Exactly, yes. The byline of this is coronavirus. Some couples reconsider living apart. This is called married but living far apart. The article profiled a group of couples that choose to live apart largely because of their careers. Many of them talk about intentional intimacy they experience when they get the chance to see each other in person, but most of them still have the goal to eventually live together. I found this to be a really interesting quote and something to think about if you're potentially wanting to do this with a significant other.
The quote says, "Being together just a few days a month means they still act like newlyweds sitting on the same side of the table at a restaurant so they can hold hands. They would fly to each other's city for just one night if they can't spend the whole weekend. A fly-by, they call it. They lay Shabbat candles together on FaceTime and hide notes in each other's apartment. Such arrangements are a hall pass from constant companionship."
There was a sociologist who said that. One participant in her study explained you get the independence of being single and the benefits of marriage. That's really interesting. Just this idea that intimacy comes from the excitement of seeing this person that you're not always exposed to 24/7 because you've lived with them.
Dedeker: Yes, that's something that Esther Perel talks about quite a bit, that our sense of intimacy and excitement about someone is very much based on still being able to have space. That doesn't necessarily have to translate, "I need to live across town from you or on the other side of the country from you," but just finding ways to have that space to be able to have both individuals getting access to that sense of independence in some way or another.
Emily: Totally.
Jase: Yes, this is something that I think Dedeker and I, in the whole time that we've been together while we've had times of living together, also have longest periods of several months of living apart every year. It is interesting getting a little bit of a taste of that and a little bit of not, right? I can definitely attest that it does help to keep that, I guess, intention on this, or I'm not just seeing you because you happen to be on the couch or I want to watch TV.
It's like I had to go out of my way, potentially even fly to another country to see you. There is something nice about that, even though there's also some frustrating things about truly long-distance, right? It's not just like a quick drive across town. To look back at that previous study that we were talking about, that one also looked into some of the reasons for why people may want to live apart.
This is a quote from that study and that's, "Nearly all interview respondents saw at least some benefit in living apart because of the greater personal autonomy, space, and freedom that afforded." I think that makes sense. I think we can all relate to the freedom and autonomy of having our own space. Then another quote says, "Many women interviewees described the advantages of increased personal autonomy and relationship to their male partners. Others felt that LAT allowed them to better prioritize commitments to children or elderly parents. In these ways, living apart could make a relationship possible that would be threatened by too much close contact." I feel like there's a lot to unpack all in that.
Emily: In that, yes.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely.
Jase: In terms of falling into gender roles even if you actively don't want to, I could see that certainly be a part of it, as well as caring for family and things. Isn't that funny too? Because I remember that when my mom got married after my parents got divorced, when she got remarried, talking to her later, one of her motivations was, "I wanted you and your brother to have someone else there to have a father figure in the house and for you to have that." It's interesting within this, though, they're pointing out that there's people who are exactly the opposite. It's like, "Well, no, actually, I'm better going to be able to commit to my children by not trying to live with this person."
Emily: That's really interesting.
Jase: Basically, one of the takeaways from this is that living-apart-together relationship is not always a stage in courtship or marriage or specifically, "Oh, well, we would if we could, but we can't because there's circumstances," right? There's also reasons people do it like that flexibility for individuals and how they want to conduct their relationships, and that they can use that autonomy that LAT offers to manage different needs and desires around emotional closeness and family commitments and things like we've been talking about and that living apart together can be a way to subvert traditional gender roles in the home.
I just love all of this. I wish that there were more studies looking at this more in-depth, but looking at this more intentionally, I think it is just a new enough thing and maybe still not quite common enough that people are jumping on to that. All of this is really, really interesting.
Dedeker: Yes, it is really intriguing. I think I've expressed this on the show a long time ago that I really do wish that I could magic-wand us a world where there were just enough resources for everyone so that everyone could have that experience of just really literally having their own space, whether that's their own apartment or house because I think I run into this so frequently.
I have so many people, especially in the polyamorous community, who express having some kind of essentially like a commune dream. Almost this idea that I buy a big plot of land and I bring along all my partners and their families and metamours and stuff like that, but the important part of the dream that everyone seems to hold in common is everyone has their own tiny house. It's not we buy a big house together.
Emily: Yes, which we will talk about a bit later.
Dedeker: Yes, there's definitely something at least anecdotally that I can see that people are craving that mix of, "I want to have control of my own space, but I also want to feel safe and secure and be close to my partners and my community at the same time." We're going to talk about, specifically, the prevalence of living-apart-together couples in LGBT communities.
This is all from the article When Living Apart Keeps You Together. That was published in Curbed, also in 2020. Again, LAT relationships have been long a feature of queer relationships specifically. Sociologist Joseph Harry set out in 1975 in Detroit to research how committed relationships between gay men worked in comparison to heterosexual married couples.
I'm going to read this quote, "Harry noted that gay partners who are able to live together did not seem to have relationships that lasted any longer than those who lived apart. In other words, living apart was not a barrier to the strength of these relationships and, in fact, may have been the reason they were able to last in spite of social oppression and the financial strain of maintaining two households."
Then I'm going to jump to this other quote, "It's hard to say how far back the practice of living apart together goes since LGBTQ people have existed forever, yet have historically been erased from formal studies. We do know, as Harry's study notes, that at least by the 1970s, separate-residence relationships were a workable adaptation to perceived pressures from the heterosexual community, which is a nice way of saying that when being a visibly together gay couple is, at best, not acceptable and, at worst, potentially life-threatening, building a stable relationship around separate homes is essential," which just, again, makes sense that when visually moving in together is just going to cause too much suspicion, you got to find ways to still have a stable relationship even though you don't have that option on the table.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. I, again, find it interesting that they said here and reiterated that the relationship is not necessarily going to last longer, or seemingly be better just because a couple chooses to live together versus living apart. It's reiterating that sentiment there. Just some additional things to consider here. The previous article that Dedeker just spoke of, it pointed out how financially privileged people must be in order to live apart, especially now when just the housing market is really nuts.
I live in Los Angeles. Getting a studio is probably even out of the question for me at this point. It's just a challenging thing to even be able to do that. I think a lot of people resort to living with roommates or even deciding because of those financial factors to live together with a significant other. I think if you are able to, then maybe this is something to consider, but there are financial issues that are in play when you're choosing to be two separate households as opposed to one.
Jase: Something that I've noticed, though, in terms of this, particularly in bigger cities, in more expensive cities like LA or Seattle or New York or whatever, is that people will live with roommates but not with their partner. I think that's something that these studies tend to not talk about or at least I haven't come across. Many looking specifically at what is your living situation, how much is this a privileged thing, how much is just because these people all want to live alone versus what I've witnessed a ton of, particularly in the non-monogamy world, but it's where I've finally found roommates that I get along well with and I can afford my place. I'm going to keep staying here- relationship with you, but you keep doing your thing. I'll keep doing mine.
Emily: Yes, you get to go home at the end of the night or whatever and I get to come back to my space.
Jase: Well, then also that sense of like, "I finally found a roommate situation that works for me. I don't want to lose that." For whatever reason, whether that's financially or just good people you get along with or, hopefully, both, but I've definitely noticed that to be a trend as well, which flies in the face of that assumption that living apart means you can afford your own place.
Emily: Another article that we looked at, it talked about just the ideas that when you come into a home together, it tends to be set up in such a way that you have to or are supposed to live with your partner in one room together as opposed to you having your own room because there's this master bedroom and it's usually the biggest in the house. That is the place in which you and your partner have to share and have to cohabit, not only in the same house together but in the same room together because I know that I've lived with partners and roommates.
Jase, you and I did this, that we were in the master bedroom and it was huge. However, our roommates got their own room and we were in the same room. I think that that's something also to maybe consider and flip on its head that, again, if you have the means or are maybe in a situation where you can afford cheaper housing or something to be able to have your own space that is personal and separate from one another, that even makes a big difference as opposed to just like, "Okay, we get one room and that's it and we have to share it and that sucks."
Because you don't have to do that unless you're like a kid, right? You share your room with your sibling or whatever. When you grow up, you're supposed to get your own room. Then we come back into this situation where that's not the case anymore. Something we are going to talk about in the bonus is this slightly different approach, which Dedeker spoke about, is this communal living thing, this co-housing community, which has become fairly prevalent now, which is basically made up of little private households with shared common spaces.
That's becoming a bigger thing now. There are some pros and cons to that and we're going to talk about that more in the bonus. Before that, we are going to dive into the second part of this episode, which I'm really excited about. We're going to talk to some of our patrons about their relationships, about being nested for a while, and then choosing to leave that situation and become de-nested but still stay in an intimate partnership with the people that they were involved with. That's really cool, so I'm excited to get to talk to three of our patrons about that. We are going to see you after the break to do that.
Welcome back, everyone. We are so excited to have three of our wonderful patrons here to discuss de-nesting without de-escalating. We thought that, perhaps, it would be great to actually talk to people about this as opposed to just speaking about it theoretically because none of us have actually done this, but we do have people in our patron group who have done this.
Again, in the first half of the episode, we just discussed, what does nesting mean within the context of romantic partnerships? We had a lot of different studies and most of those studies are related to monogamous people. Now, we want to go to the non-monogamous side of things and that's what we're hoping to do with this panel discussion. I would love it if our patrons would introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what the de-nesting process looked like within the context of your relationship. Let's start with Keyanah.
Keyanah: Hi, everyone out there. My name is Keyanah. I am also one of the research assistants for the podcast. I am so glad that Emily, Jase, and Dedeker are really open to doing this topic. I de-nested in mid-October of this year, so it's still pretty fresh, although I've been having conversations about de-nesting with my former nesting partner since March. It was a pretty long process of negotiating and explaining that my desire to not live with him was not about wanting to break up. It was simply a matter of really trying to reclaim a lot of the independence and self-sufficiency that I felt that I had lost over the course of the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, I had a lot of strategies around just taking care of myself as I'm sure we all do. Actually, quite a bit of those centered around just doing things on my own. I felt always pretty independent and autonomous in terms of how I was able to navigate my life, navigate my polyamory even while living with a partner. I have been with this partner for nine years. We just celebrated our nine-year anniversary.
With the pandemic being home all of the time, and then also in my case, I finished my doctorate in May of 2020, and so the entire trajectory of my life transformed very dramatically in a way that I didn't quite anticipate. I felt just professionally lost, personally lost, which I'm sure a lot of people went through as well. Once I got my bearings professionally and was able to get a job after I finished school, I realized that I was still really grappling with how to restructure my life concretely, to reclaim some of that independence.
Then the other thing that I just realized and my former nesting partner, I do think he's one of the greatest people in the world. He was really compassionate around a lot of the gendered complaints and critiques that I brought up in terms of our nesting situation. He's in tech. He's always made a lot more money than I have. I'm in the humanities and academia, so I make pennies.
Keyanah: I always felt the need to compensate for that difference by taking on more of the domestic work. I think that feeling just was exacerbated over the course of the pandemic because we were both home all the time. I realized that I just had a lot of resentment around the way that society values different kinds of labor. For a while, I was afraid to bring this up to my partner because I didn't know how to express that my resentment wasn't towards him, but it was towards all of this whole setup.
Once we were able to have conversations about that, he was open to it. Now, it's been great. I live down the street, quite literally down the street from him, which works because we also have a dog that we co-parent, so we rotate the dog between apartments. Now that I've moved out, he stayed in our apartment that we were living in for five years and his other partner moved in with him.
Now, they have the experience to figure out what nesting looks like for them. It's odd because I think in terms of my polyamory nesting, de-nesting has really highlighted how I always feel like I live at this weird intersection of being formally married but having various solo poly leanings. Nesting has just given me the space to live in that contradiction and be okay with that because I feel a little embarrassed saying, "Oh, I feel solo poly, but I'm married," and not stay in my lane, so to speak. That's my story in a nutshell.
Emily: Yes, that sounds very intentional and you took a lot of time to get to this place that you're at now, which is really cool. I'm interested to hear more about the logistical stuff behind all of that, but I do want to move on to our other two panelists. Jesse, how about you go next?
Jesse: Sure. Just discussing with my anchor partner recently how I very strongly identify as polyamorous and he's more of the like Dr. Kim Tallbear type of like, "I just see relations differently. I just see relationships and dynamics differently." He's the person that I de-nested from. We've known each other for almost four years at this point and we're apart for a little while.
March of 2020, we had just gotten back together right before the pandemic started. I packed for a week and was wearing the same clothes for five months and end up going. He was in Upstate New York and so I was four, five hours away. I went up and ended up just like a little bit of living with him for a little bit and then, ultimately, the end of last year, decided to quit my job and nest with him more permanently.
It was partially because of the pandemic and transition, so we ended up nesting together for a little bit over a year total. I moved out in June of this year. Part of it was that we didn't intentionally move in together, and so I didn't want that to be how we nested. I was like, "This was great." It was like a micro. It was like, we got to see what this was like. We see what works, we see what doesn't work.
We know what our growing pains are, what we need to work on, but we're in pretty different life stages overall too. He's a little bit more established in what he's doing. I'm still trying to figure out my own stuff. To me, it felt like I needed space to be elsewhere and figure more things out for myself. I do hope we do live together again at some point in the future but wanted to go into nesting together more intentionally than pandemic-wise.
Then also I live with someone who I call my primary platonic and she calls me her friend. It's a consensual and she knows it's a joke. She's just has been my best friend for 20 years. Part of my poly has always been prioritizing platonic dynamics and that's always been a critical part of decentering romantic relationships. She was coming here for grad school and I had like, "Yes, I'd love to move out there with you." For me, it was also partially like I was loving living with him. We could have had conversations to continue it, but I was like, "I'm going to go with my platonic relationship that I committed to being with." That's sort of how my process went.
Emily: I love that. I think so many people don't tend to prioritize their friends on the same trajectory that they do their romantic relationships and to be able to do that with a friend and choose to live with them as opposed to "Oh, I'm romantically with someone so that means I have to live with them." That's really cool and that excellent that you're doing that. Very fun. Ketevan, you're next?
Ketevan: Hi. Yes, I'm Ketevan. I also feel like an imposter to a poly person because I am also married, but don't act like any polyamorous married person I know. My husband and I have been together for over 10 years and yes, initially, I won't lie, we opened up a year or two into our relationship and it was very hierarchical, but over the years we just let go of a lot of expectations and just naturally changed our dynamic as needed. Basically, that's what led to our de-nesting, which actually happened accidentally.
In the middle of the pandemic, he had been working from a co-working space across our street, but then that shut down so he was working from home like everyone else had been and he realized how horrible that was. At the similar timing, his other partner who lives 10 minutes away, her partner had moved out and she had an office in her apartment. He had been struggling with lots of different things. I just said, "Why don't you just go stay with her? Use her office, be able to close the door. Make it easier on yourself. It won't be a big deal."
That was about a year and a half ago and he basically has been living there pretty much full time ever since. I'm not going to lie, when I first suggested it, I genuinely imagined it as a three-month thing but then pretty much immediately, we were like, "Oh, this is nice. We each have our space, you have your office." Of course in the first part of the pandemic, they hadn't been able to spend much time together so it was really nice for them to be able to reconnect and they were really enjoying it and enjoying their nesting process.
We sort of just kept it as is and then basically my partner, we got into this joke argument where I just said like, "Won't it be fun to pick out sheets when we're living together?" Genuinely thinking two years from now and he freaked out and was like, "Oh, I'm not ready to live together." I'm like, "No, it's fine. Neither am I. No worries." Then he was like, "I think I want to try living together for short periods to see if I'll be ready."
Then basically that was in July and in November he said, "I'm ready to move in full time with you." Then I just sat with that and was like, "Yes. That feels right." I had had my year of soleness in my apartment and I don't actually like it that much. It's nice. I enjoy my alone time, but I definitely like nesting with someone. He was someone I had already envisioned nesting with. Maybe not as quickly as this particular timeline worked out, but here we are.
Emily: I feel like I see the pandemic as a common theme and thread through everyone that just spoke which is really interesting. It has obviously created this huge upheaval in all of our lives and perhaps prompted all of us to reassess where we are in terms of living with someone or not living with someone or choosing to live with other people perhaps, and trying something out different. I really love that idea. That's very, very cool.
Just in terms of the de-nesting and in terms of choosing to live your life, maybe with someone else or alone, what were some of the emotional or the logistical and practical challenges that you faced, and what were some of the things that you had to navigate through? How did that all work out?
Keyanah: I think in terms of the emotional challenges for me, it was finding the language to express to my partner that I don't want to break up and I still love you and love our relationship. I just don't want to live with you and I don't want to live with anybody. Another partner of mine who is very wise and good with words, and actually also went through de-nesting as well with one of his partners, he explained to me to say that it's not that you don't want to live with this part person specifically, it's just that you don't want to live with anyone at all.
Framing that was really helpful. I think at this point in my life, one of the things that I've come to really appreciate about being able to live alone is that my apartment has become a concrete manifestation of the emotional project of trying to become my own home base, like emotional secure base for myself. I've noticed now that even when I'm home just chilling sometimes with my dog when I feel a little anxious about things happening in my polycule, I look around and that anxiety is quelled because it's just confirmation that I've set up a safe place for myself and I'm all right.
That's been something that has been really transformative for me in my polyamory. Then I think in terms of the practical logistics, I was ranting about this on Twitter, but I actually got denied for my first apartment that I applied for because I didn't apply with my husband, but we are listed on our taxes together. Although I met all of the income requirements and the credit requirements, I still didn't get the apartment.
I asked the realtor or the broker, why that was, and he said, "I think it's because they have some confusion around why you are not moving in with your partner and just maybe some negative associations with if you're separating." Because that's what he asked me. I just thought that that was a really potent example of just a lot of the gender politics that go into women wanting to live alone and how there are so many barriers that you have to supersede in order to do that. Then, like I said, we have a dog, so just figuring that out has been relatively easy, but now I don't have anyone to take care of plants anymore. My partner used to do that. I do miss that a little bit.
Jesse: I love how different all three of our stories are because I feel like they add so much. I'm someone who's very cognizant of the intellectual emotional disconnect of like, "Okay, I know I just can't get my emotions to meet up here." I definitely struggled. Especially, I feel like the pandemic for so many people was a time to be processing traumas and so I had deeply been processing things was in that time when I was nesting. Then as I was moving towards leaving, I found that I was very emotional about the process and needed a lot more reassurance than I previously had ever needed.
Part of it was even me asking for terminology. I knew he didn't like the term primary partner and hierarchy so we were trying to figure out like, "How do we show that we're not de-escalating our relationship, but that we are choosing to not live together anymore." We figured out methods of checking in with each other and time. I asked for making sure we know like the next time we're going to each other. Then I've also been just trying to find times to be with friends and support myself through those ways. I think being with myself in my room, I just very much resonate with that. Having my own space has been so huge and if I do nest again, I realize I definitely would want two bedrooms.
Ketevan: For me, the emotional impact was pretty minimal, but I ascribe that to the fact that we'd been talking about some form of non-nesting for at least five years. My husband works remotely and I kind of have a career that might force me to live in different countries. We had been discussing me living somewhere for a year or two on a contract and him coming for three months at a time and then staying with his other partner for three months at a time.
These kinds of ideas had always been in our relational conversations. We had already emotionally prepared ourselves for the idea that living apart wouldn't be anything other than a practical logistical thing. That helped a lot, but then even as things were changing, we definitely still had feelings and I definitely miss seeing him every day and things like that. He definitely felt like he was abandoning me. He would say that and I'm like, "You didn't abandon me. I told you to go literally. I'm like, "Of course, your feelings are valid and everything," but once I framed it like that, he was like "Yes, I guess you are right. I'm not abandoning you." Yes, we definitely had some feelings but I think the literal years of conversations we've had about this and imagining it all sorts of different ways and for all sorts of different reasons and all sorts of different configurations of partners just made it so easy to transition once the right situation presented itself and that helped a lot. That's true of literally anything I've ever done in polyamory. I talk things to death before doing them and then I'm like, "Oh, that was easy."
Then practically speaking, since I'm still in the middle of it, things I'm thinking about right now are literally, like we're still not actually switched all the stuff out of each apartment. We're still in the literally moving phase but then even beyond that long, my new nesting partner and I have to find a two-bedroom apartment and that's going to be a whole process. Then at the same time, my husband and I still want to buy not a home in our city because that's incredibly unrealistically financially but an apartment that a friend of ours told us about and we fell in love with it six months ago and we really want to buy it.
That on top of all the moving and everything is a very big logistical challenge. Since we're talking about buying property and things like that, we've been talking more and more about finances because essentially our whole relationship, my husband's and I finances have been 100% intertwined. I've learned it's very rare for more egalitarian married couples. We've just always found it very easy. We're very generous. Like, "Oh, you want to go on vacation with your partner? That's fine."
There's never been this need to separate so you can't say anything. We've always just felt very comfortable doing it that way. I have a very similar dynamic as Keyanah is with her partner like husband's in tech and I'm in the helping profession. I'm the one that doesn't make a lot of money and managing. We're never going to be able to long term continue to be 100% entangled. That's just not practical anymore. Trying to reimagine that, while also owning property together and maintaining three separate households between five, four people, it's just a lot. I have not found any great examples out there of our exact situation. That's a huge thing to continually discuss about but that's been the most intimidating challenge, I think.
Keyanah: We should swap notes, Ketevan, because I'm also trying to buy a building with my partner and his partner as well.
Ketevan: That's exciting.
Keyanah: I said, I'm fine to be under the same roof. I just don't want to share a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom.
Keyanah: I'm like, as long as I could theoretically go 24 hours without seeing anybody, I'm fine to be under the same roof. We're trying to buy a multi-family home that has multiple apartments.
Ketevan: That's the dream, man. Wow. That's so cool.
Emily: Wow. Yes, you all answered this question in some ways but it seems as though you're potentially interested in living again with people or moving back in with a partner or maybe moving in with a different partner, or maybe in the case of Keyanah, not. Can you talk a little bit about that possibility?
Ketevan: The home that I was talking about with my husband, it's two and a half hours out of our city. It's close enough where you could live there full time and still commute and stuff, but it's definitely we're buying it with the intention of it being a rest pit, like a vacation home. We're both able to work him remotely 100% and me remotely, a large portion of my work week can be remote. We're just planning on having that be our space that's like for us and then, of course, anyone in the polycule that wants to stay but that's our chance to still have a place that's ours.
Yes, the idea is that I don't think we're going to be living full time together probably for a while. That can change just as easily but the idea is that we definitely still want a space that's ours because we didn't dislike nesting together. We just nest better with other people
Jesse: I am definitely interested in renesting with this same person. I think that the experience of being with him for a year has helped us be like, "Oh, this would work. This wouldn't." Because of COVID, we weren't seeing as many of our other partners. I think thinking about extra space, I'm with Keyanah. I would love to not see someone for 24 hours. I want my own kitchen. I want my own bedroom. I want a little like dome home for myself. That's just people can come in. I can see people, maybe there's a garden. That kind of vibe.
Keyanah: I think for me, I'm not opposed to a very flexible definition of nesting, but what's central to what I need is always the ability to opt-in and to opt-out of everything. Whether that be just having people in my space. Sometimes I don't want to see people, sometimes I don't want to see metamour. I just don't want to, I just want to be alone. Being very kind but firm about that. That's why I suggested the multifamily option but the other part of it is that I just think even with the best of male masculine partners, there's this gender division of labor I feel that happens when you're living together. That I am just have become a lot more aware of because of the pandemic. I've been thinking about my own role in that too.
I will sometimes go to one of my other partners' apartments and be cleaning things up. and then I stop myself and I'm like, "I don't live here. Why am I doing this?"
In some ways, the living apart is really me trying to set my life up structurally to intervene into my own socialization too but also just to make sure that in the event, I decide to have kids with partners, there is more of an equitable division of labor that's baked into the structure. I'm also very open to co-parenting but not nesting and just figuring that out. I think it might seem daunting to a lot of people but people do it all the time. I grew up in a house with just my mom and I would visit my dad on the weekends.
Obviously, that's not an equitable division of labor but I think the idea of co-parenting without living with people, people do that all the time. Just trying to pick and choose from different models that I've seen what I think might work for me and what might not. Like I said, I'm very open to being under the same roof with people as long as there are subsequent roofs separating us.
Emily: It sounds like all of you are making it up as you go along and picking and choosing the things that you want to, and then leaving the rest which is really cool and awesome that we live in a day and age where that's becoming more acceptable and people are okay with that. Hopefully, moving towards brokers not denying you because you want to live alone and things like that. Also, we touched briefly on metamours, that how have your metamours and other partners seen this transition, and have there been challenges with that, or have they been like, "This is awesome." Or how has that gone?
Keyanah: Well, since I live down the street, sometimes my metamour will come by for a drink and we just have some time together. That's nice. He's the one that I'm closest to out of my metamours. I think he is enjoying the experience of living with our hinge partner. Also, I just appreciate how he feels more comfortable having our relationship be a resource for him as he's navigating that change in his relationship. That's really nice. My other metamours are women who also live alone and have de-nested and so they're very much enthusiastic about it.
Emily: Cool. How about you two?
Ketevan: Well, for me, I'm pretty sure my metamour is loving it. I think this is what she wanted but my new nesting partner is obviously happy as well. I have another actual, very long-term partner who's staunchly solo and never wants to live with a partner. I was like, "Look, I know he doesn't want to live with someone but it still might be a bit of a shock to hear this." I was just all cool and calm and checking in with him, be like, "Hey, I just want to tell you something. I've been talking about potentially moving in with my partner and I just wanted to let you know." He's just like, "Wait, you haven't been doing that for a year already?"
I was like, "No." He was, "Oh, I thought you were." I'm like, "You thought we were planning to move in an entire year before we were actually planning on moving in?" He's like, "Yes. It seemed like that's where you guys were at." I'm like, "Well, I guess you predicted that one." He was weirdly very calm and predictive of that as well.
Jesse: Almost All of our metamours are all long-distance, I haven't really interacted with it very much. I've more had like my other partners be like, "Oh, does this mean we could maybe nest with you someday?" I'm like, "I don't know, the world is who knows. COVID could happen. We could live together. You never know."
Emily: That's cool.
Jesse: There's so much power in this conversation specifically and that is that we got to create the relationships that we want. All three of us are expressing like, "We're going to figure it out, we're doing this, we're doing that." I think that that's where the power is of this thing that seemingly means you're de-prioritizing a relationship or it's ending or it's not as good, doesn't have to be the case and there's always room for communication about what the agreements are.
Emily: If anyone out there is interested in maybe de-nesting without de-escalating the relationship, what advice would you give to them? Because it sounds like all three of you are kind of pros at this point.
Jesse: I think that the biggest advice I would give would be to spend some time with yourself writing down what your fears would be both in asking for it or in receiving the information about it, and trying to write down what the actual wants are and where you see it going because if writing is a useful process I think that can be a really helpful way to go into the conversation.
To be patient with yourself if it feels overwhelming at first. I’ve cried a lot. The first few months, it was really hard not to sleep next to him. I also feel so grateful for this experience and I think it's re-established my own sense of autonomy and strength my own ability to be poly. I think it can be really worth it if it's the right choice.
Emily: It's excellent.
Ketevan: Yes, being gentle with yourself at all stages of the process like even before you are officially thinking about it, and even after you’re de-nested, it's a big change. I went into it thinking it would love having the apartment to myself and then realizing, "Oh, this isn't actually my ideal scenario." That was a surprise to me. Once you've done the thing you think you want it after all the journaling and all the talking, it's okay if that's not actually ideal.
Just my advice would be to set up your life to allow for as many changes as possible in the beginning because you might not have gotten the exact right fit the first time and that's okay. Just keep making the little adjustments until you're in a place that works, enjoy, and then in 5 to 10 years make your tweaks as needed.
Keyanah: Yes. I would say lots of conversations that really pull apart the nuts and bolts of nesting, what it means to you, what's working, what's not working? Also as just a thought experiment and do this a lot, try to imagine the ways that de-nesting can actually improve your relationship even if nothing is wrong. Just think about, how could this actually make my relationship better?
I've discovered that now that I don't have the domestic interference in the relationship with my nesting partner, that sense of deep infatuation has returned, there's more of an eroticism now. My favorite thing now is when he comes over, we have a drink, we have sexy time, and then he leaves and I swoon when he leaves, and it's so great. I think really just thinking about the ways that this can strengthen your bond can allow for a little bit more courage and doing this really, really difficult thing that doesn't have a cultural script.
Now maybe I'm in my own NRE with de-nesting at the moment, but I feel very much just even more committed to my former nesting partner because it almost feels like our relationship is capable of transforming and adapting in these ways and so it feels like invincible at this point. Just imagine for yourself the positives of what this could mean for your relationship rather than succumbing to the cultural narrative that when you move out that means you're breaking up.
Emily: That’s all such great advice.
Ketevan: Yes, definitely. You get to date the person that you had been doing dishes with for like 10 years. That's the thing nesting partner is usually jealous of. You get to go out and have fun with all your new partners and then you talk about the bills with me and it's like, "Well now they're not the person you talking about the bills with so it's just all fun and games, right?
Keyanah: Yes.
Emily: Yes, awesome. Well, thank you all so much. This was a really, really compelling conversation and I'm hoping that everyone out there who is thinking about this, who is interested in it found something to take away from this conversation so we really appreciate it. Thank you so much. That was such an amazing conversation.
I really appreciate all of our Patreons for helping us out with this part of the episode because I know we were talking a lot about monogamous couples in the first part and most of the research out there that has been done is on monogamous couples. We got to hear the other side of that when non-monogamy and learn a lot of great things about de-nesting without de-escalating. Our bonus this week is going to be on cohousing communities.