547 - Help! My Partner is Dating My Best Friend: Listener Q&A

When your partner wants to date your best friend…

We’re back with another Q&A episode from one of our listeners. Today we’re discussing the following question:

My secondary partner, Hugo, started dating a very close friend, Claire. It was immediately clear to me that I didn't want to continue dating Hugo as long as he was dating Claire. I feel like I've failed at polyamory because this was such a hard boundary for me. I was heartbroken. 

I've never dated someone who has been in a relationship beyond their primary one before, so I wonder if I would have struggled with him being with anyone else or if it's the nature of this relationship in particular. My husband and I have a no friends rule as pretty much our only rule other than total transparency but with Hugo, we hadn't really discussed boundaries other than sexual health. Things were always so good. We'd always talked so openly about people we were interested in and potentially dating but none had manifested in relationships, since we'd been dating for about a year. 

I'm trying to figure out why I have such a problem with this and Hugo is also pushing me to question it, all while being respectful and sensitive to my feelings during this difficult moment for me. He believes that he would have space to stay in a relationship with me even if I dated a very close friend of his.

So I wonder: should I be cool with this? 

I want to accept their relationship if it does come to that but I'm worried that my friendship will suffer and I will hold onto feelings of hurt making it difficult to be with Hugo again as well. I'm sad and confused.

-First Poly Heartbreak

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Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're focusing on a listener question about what to do when your partner and a close friend start dating. We'll discuss why this scenario can feel so uniquely threatening and weird, and how to determine if it's a deal breaker that you need to honor. If you're interested in learning more about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show all the time, then check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships. It covers our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book or wherever you like to buy books or audiobooks.

Emily: A quick disclaimer before we get started. We've spent a lot of time studying healthy relationship communication, but we're not mind readers. Our advice is based solely on the limited information we have, so please take it with a grain of salt.

Dedeker: Everybody's situation is unique, and so we encourage you, if you're listening, to use your own judgment and of course, seek professional help if that is necessary. Ultimately, you're the only true expert on your life and your feelings, your decisions are your own. And remember that this question has been edited for time and clarity.

Jase: And now the question.

Jase: Am I bad at polyamory because I'm not cool with my secondary dating a close friend? For a little context on this question asker, Claire is a close friend of the question asker. And then Hugo is this secondary partner of the question asker. Okay. So my secondary partner, Hugo, started dating a very close friend, Claire. It was immediately clear to me that I didn't want to continue dating Hugo as long as he was dating Claire. I feel like I've failed at polyamory because this was such a hard boundary for me. I was heartbroken. I've never dated someone who has been in a relationship beyond their primary one before. So I wonder if I would have struggled with him being with anyone else, or if it's just the nature of this relationship in particular.

Jase: My husband and I have a no friends rule as pretty much our only rule other than total transparency, but with Hugo, we hadn't really discussed boundaries other than sexual health. Things were always so good. We'd always talked so openly about people we were interested in and potentially dating, but none had manifested in relationships since we'd been dating for about a year. I'm trying to figure out why I have such a problem with this, and Hugo is also pushing me to question it, all while being respectful and sensitive to my feelings during this difficult moment for me.

Jase: He believes that he would have space to stay in a relationship with me even if I dated a very close friend of his. So I wonder, should I be cool with this?

Jase: I want to accept their relationship if it does come to that, but I'm worried that my friendship will suffer, and I'll hold onto feelings of hurt, making it difficult to be with Hugo again as well. I'm sad and confused, and this is from First Poly Heartbreak.

Dedeker: Well, I just want to speak to the heartbreak part right out the gate that, man, this sounds really tough, and I feel for you.

Jase: Yeah, definitely.

Emily: I think whenever you have multiple important people in your life coming together, especially to potentially date and to build relationships with one another, there's always this potential of a little bit of fear of missing out. Of being like, wow, I know these two people really well, but then they're building connections with one another. How is that going to translate into their relationships with me? Is that going to change things between all three of us? Is that going to lead to potential heartbreak down the road? So I get the feelings of, I don't want to touch that. I don't want to have the potential for things to go awry there. And maybe it's just a lot easier to just sort of have a rule or an agreement. Let's not date each other's friends.

Jase: I'm curious, have either of you had that situation come up where a partner is dating a friend of yours or starts dating someone who is kind of more in your circle than theirs?

Dedeker: I've had a situation. I don't know why I make this distinction. I might be figuring this out in real time. I've not had a partner date a close friend, but I've had a partner date a friend that I felt close to.

Emily: Now, what?

Dedeker: Okay, when I hear close friend, I think maybe like my best friend, like maybe someone who's a confidant, someone that I'm talking to every single day or close to every single day. And I've never had that situation where a partner has dated or tried to date someone who is that close to me on a day-to-day basis. I have had a situation where a partner came to me because he was like noticing some feelings of attraction or interest in a friend of mine who he also kind of had a connection to as well separately.

Jase: So it wasn't-- It wasn't just your friend.

Dedeker: Just my friend. And he had at least the, let's say, the intelligence to, before making any kind of move on it, that he came to me and was like, Hey, I'm noticing this. I'm kind of interested in this. But first I want to talk to you about this. Of, how do you feel about this? Is that weird? Should I not? Right? And I was actually for this particular situation, I was actually super jazzed. I was like, oh my God, yes, you should totally go and date this friend.

Jase: Okay.

Dedeker: She's amazing. I think the two of you could be good together. Wow, I'm excited. And also felt really happy that this person had also had the wherewithal to be like, Let me talk to you first. I can see ahead, have the foresight to know this could be messy, this could be complicated, so let me talk to you. And so I know that some people could look at that and see it as, oh, that was an asking permission situation, that's weird, but I don't know, it didn't seem like that. I very much got the sense from the conversation that if I had said, oof, I don't know about that. I think that could get messy that I think my partner would have been like totally right. Like that makes sense and probably would have not pursued it. So, so in that situation, I think I do have certain friends where the idea of a partner dating them does excite me. I'm like, hell yes, you know, it's kind of like when you have again, multiple loved ones, you're like, oh my God, I want my loved ones to also get along and become friends or whatever it is. But then I also have other situations for my past partners or friends where that idea, I'm like, oh, God, no, please, please do not. Please, whatever you do, do not. So I don't know. In my personal lived experience, it's been sort of 50/50.

Jase: Have you had that happen, Emily?

Emily: So I'm trying to think back, and I think that the only time where it was a little bit similar or tangential to this is when I started dating a woman who my partner had dated before.

Jase: But in the past.

Emily: Correct. In the past. And then I started sort of hanging out with her and going on dates with her and being very flirtatious. And that proved to be a big problem for him.

Dedeker: Sure. I guess I can understand that.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah.

Jase: Loaded there.

Emily: I guess. Yeah.

Emily: They were kind of trying to be friendly and trying to be close again to a degree. Or at the time, like they lived in the same house together. It was a bunch of roommate situation. And so they lived together in that way. And that was, yeah, it definitely proved to be fairly challenging. And ultimately, I kind of stepped back from the relationship just because I felt like, okay, my partner's pretty upset about this, and I need to just cool it and not end up seeing this person anymore, even though I wanted to. And so, yeah, I think initially it was a thing where he was like, this will be fun and cool and go for it, and you both are attractive and smart, and, I think that it would be okay if the two of you got together. But then as time went on, as we started to get a little closer, he started to get, I think, a little jealous and uncomfortable with the situation. So that's the only time that I can really recall that happening. It's so interesting, too, right? Because you become sometimes really close with your metamours, and then they become your friends.

Dedeker: And so therefore, all of you are-- Because now you've become friends, maybe.

Emily: Exactly. But then it's an after-the-fact thing. It's not like you were friends before and then they came into your life. But that differentiation is kind of interesting to me. Like, why is it potentially harder for somebody to start dating an already established friend, as opposed to just two metamours getting to know each other and then becoming really friendly with one another? Like, why is one more challenging than the other?

Jase: I think that part of it here is that it's a close friend too, right? So we don't know exactly what that means. Like Dedeker said, to her that made her feel like best friend type, you know, this is a really important, like, support type relationship. And so that can complicate things. But I think this is a lot of what we're going to need to get into because I'm thinking about some of my experiences as well where I've started dating someone that a friend was dating, and I've also had a friend start dating someone that I was dating. Right. So like, I've been on both sides of that. And how did it go? In those cases, it was fine. But in those, the dating relationship was, I don't want to say casual, like, it was an emotional relationship, but it wasn't, like, a super intense one. It wasn't a super. Entangled one. It was still in that, yeah, we see each other occasionally, and it's fun sometimes. And so I think in that situation, there was kind of this sense that if any one of these different relationships doesn't work out, I'm not really worried about my friend relationship. Like, that'll be fine. And I think that was true in both of those cases. But I could see in a different situation where it's like, I'm much more invested in this partner. And the question asker here did say they've been together for a year. So I'm like, okay, yeah, maybe this is a fairly serious relationship at that point, and that maybe it does feel like more of a threat. Like, if this doesn't go well, is this going to affect my relationship with my friend? Or even if it goes well, is that going to affect my relationship with my friend? Like, I can't talk to them about this as much anymore. We don't have a ton of context about that, but it seems like the fact that the question asker had such a strong reaction that there's something there that it's bringing up a sense of, like, fear about something.

Emily: Yeah, for sure.

Jase: That's what my guess says. And before we dive into that further, we're gonna take a quick break to talk about some sponsors for this show. Please do give them a listen. Having sponsors helps us keep this show going. And we would also love your direct support if you would rather not listen to ads and just become one of our community members. You can go to multiamory.com/join. And we would love to have you part of our Discord group, part of our Facebook community, get ad-free episodes, join our video discussion groups, all of that at multiamory.com/join. But in the meantime, please check out these sponsors and use our promo codes in our show description if any of them seem interesting to you. And now I'm gonna bring us back to that question I brought up, I guess, is like, what's the fear here? Or what could it be, right? 'Cause we don't know, we don't have all the inside information. We can't ask this person clarifying questions right now. But thinking about some of those different situations, what do you think might be going on there?

Dedeker: I mean, I think that already, when you're non-monogamous, there can be this built-in sense of sometimes an insecurity, right? It's like, you know, is my partner gonna get swept up in a new person? And then the idea that if it's your close friend, I think I would be afraid of, is my friend now also gonna get swept up in my partner, and both of them are gonna get taken away from me. In some way, or both of them are going to be further away from me. That rather than it feeling like, oh, it enhances the connections all around, that it feels more like a double loss.

Jase: Like it raises the stakes significantly of things going wrong. Yeah, that makes sense.

Emily: I think somebody brought up the fact that being able to be like kind of a confidant to either of you, I mean, all of a sudden, are you going to need to be able to speak about this relationship that both of you are having with this person. Is that fair? I think that if there's a sense of being removed from the partnership to a degree, you're able to be like, can we talk about this objectively? If you're having an issue, for instance, with a partner, say I had an issue with my partner, I'm able to speak to Dedeker about it, and she's able to kind of look at the situation in the bigger picture and speak about it in a more objective way. Whereas if the two of you are in relationship with the same person, that element kind of gets removed potentially just because you're always going to be bringing your own sets of cognitive biases to the situation or the way that you feel about that person or whatever it might be.

Emily: And so it's difficult to be, I think, very objective there. And also, is that even fair to bring any issue about what might be happening in the relationship to a friend then? Is that fair? Is that ethical? I don't know. I think that's a whole other can of worms potentially. How much should you divulge to a friend about what's happening with a partner? And especially how much should you divulge about what's happening with a partner to a metamour, for instance? Is that okay or not? Always a debate. Yeah, always a debate.

Jase: Something else that just occurred to me here is the question asker mentioned I wonder if I would have struggled the same if he'd started dating anybody new since the question asker has never dated someone. So they have a primary partner, a husband. They've never dated someone who's their secondary partner who's had another partner besides an already existing primary partner. So like someone who's dated somebody new while they're together. Right, and we've talked about that before is that when someone starts dating someone new after they start dating you, it can be more challenging. It can bring up more feelings.

Jase: I think they're only a year in, so they're still in some NRE, and that could be factoring into a little bit more of this fear of loss just because of the brain chemical stuff going on at the time. But then also the thing I realized was, we always have this fear that our partner's going to date someone who's just so cool that they're not going to want to date us. And if this is your really good friend, you probably think they're very cool and attractive and smart and all those things. So that could add to that feeling of threat there. Interesting. Yeah. No, I buy that. I buy that.

Emily: I think threat is an interesting word, though, just because I've always found, meeting a metamour, it kind of takes the threat away to a degree, or it at least creates a little bit more humanity and allows you to see that person as a fully fleshed out human being and somebody who maybe is not so, I see this person as this aspirational amazing human being that, yeah, that's kind of taken away in essence when you already know a lot about that person.

Dedeker: But maybe what you're saying, Dedeker, is that it can also be cause for a little bit more like, oh shit, I know how awesome this person is and my partner might want to leave me because of that. But I could not for the life of you tell you when I think about like the one time I had to encounter this, this was years ago. That, yeah, the person my partner wanted to date, I did think was really cool, and I really admired her, but I didn't have this, that same gut punch sense of, oh, God, like, this person might be so cool that it's threatening to me. But I have had friends sometimes like that. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I have a hard time being able to split the hairs and figure out what the difference is.

Dedeker: I just wanted to bring up another concern that I think that I would have heading into this situation. And, like, this is the very cynical bummer of a statistic, but most relationships do not make it past one year. The majority of relationships don't. That's not because everybody sucks at relationships. It's just kind of like there has to be actually a lot of things that go right for a relationship to last. Sometimes those are things outside of our control. Sometimes a lot of them are things in our control, but it's a mix, right? And I think that that would be my concern is, oh, if my partner starts dating someone who's very close to me, and there's a high chance it may not work out, even if I have faith in both of them as human beings, how is that going to play out?

Emily: Yeah, then what?

Dedeker: Then what?

Jase: So since I picked out this question from our submissions for this episode, I've gone back and forth, not back and forth, but I've gone to many different places in terms of what the main concern might be. Is it that? Because my brain kind of went there at first of, I worry that if my partner starts dating this close friend of mine and their relationship goes badly or it ends as it probably will, that-

Dedeker: Statistically, say statistically. Probably makes it sound like you're just being too negative.

Jase: You're right, and I'm being a jerk. Yeah, okay.

Dedeker: Be scientific about it.

Jase: Statistically speaking, there's a good chance that it'll end around that year or two, and that I worry that it will damage my relationship with my friend. And that in that case, I thought, okay, well, if my priority relationship here is my friend, then it sounds like they already said, well, okay, if you're doing that, I cannot date you. Like they did very clearly have a boundary about it and remove themself from the situation. It wasn't like, hey, you have to stop dating them or I'll stop dating you like a threat. It was just, I won't. I mean, we don't know how it actually went down, but it sounds like they executed it like a boundary of just, I don't want to do that. And in this case, if that's the concern, I feel like it kind of makes sense to say, yeah, this friendship is more important to me than you, Hugo. Sorry, but it just is. Like, this has been close to me for a long time and this is really important to me. So like, I'm just going to do that relationship. Then I thought about all these other things we've been talking about of, well, is it really that? Is that actually what it is? The fear of losing the friend, or is there something else going on here?

Emily: I think if they do break up with Hugo and then remain friends with Claire, that also is probably going to be difficult. It's like, how do you speak about this ex person in your life without it creating some challenge there? I don't know. I think the whole situation has the potential to be pretty messy. I do understand where they're coming from. If initially you feel good about it and excited about it, maybe more like how Dedeker, you felt about, yeah, I think this person is great. Go for it. You have my blessing. Enjoy. If you're not already coming from that space, I think that the whole thing has the potential to be pretty challenging just because, yeah, because of all the reasons that we're talking about. So I don't know how you move past that necessarily. I think that it might behoove you to have some distance from both parties for a little while if they do decide to date and you decide to break up with the mutual partner, just because if you don't, then you're still going to have a lot of feelings come up around that person. And then how do you speak to your friend about that?

Dedeker: Yeah, still potential for it to be complicated either way.

Emily: For sure.

Dedeker: To back up, again, if it were me, I think I would be feeling, and maybe this is being dramatic, but I think it'd be feeling maybe a little bit double betrayed in this situation where both-

Jase: -was just gonna bring that up.

Dedeker: I'd be both my partner again didn't have the foresight to be like, oh, I see this as a developing situation and I can predict that it will have impact of some kind, positive or negative. And so I'm gonna open up a conversation or open up a channel of communication sooner rather than later. That neither my partner did that, nor my friend did that. You know, I would want my friend to also have that same, maybe it's painting with too broad of a brush to say, oh, that's just common sense. Like, maybe I know that that can be an oversimplification, but I think that would be my stance of, and I know that some people can quibble about this and be like, well, they shouldn't have to ask permission. autonomous, autonomy. I know, we're polyamorous. We all get off on autonomy. I get it, but I still think this is a situation where it just behooves you to, if you truly are in a situation where you desperately need to date your partner's friend. So first of all, maybe that's the first rubric is examine how desperate is this for you, right? That you have to pursue this. You have to. You're going to die if you can't.

Jase: Jesus.

Emily: Dedeker is very intense.

Jase: Feeling very hyperbolic today.

Dedeker: Well, I think it is important to examine, is the juice worth the squeeze, man?

Emily: Right?

Dedeker: Like, is it, is the risk worth it? And I know that's difficult to know.

Emily: Yeah, it's not that it's difficult to know, but often it's difficult to do that when feelings are involved.

Dedeker: Sure. Yes. when feelings, sexual arousal, I try, I get it.

Emily: Exactly. It's just that people, I'm sorry, but people get a little silly. I don't want to say stupid, but they get a little silly when emotions and the possibility of sex and the possibility of something exciting, all of those things come into play and they don't think rationally about a situation. Now, do I agree that that's a good thing? No, I think that they should. Ideally, we all could see things with more objectivity, but it's just in reality that often doesn't happen. And we make silly decisions because we are horny creatures who want to get laid, et cetera. And so I just, I don't know. I hear what you're saying, and I agree with you, but I also think that in reality, that doesn't always happen in the way that we perhaps wish that it would.

Jase: Yeah, I do think it's worth acknowledging the fact that so far this has all been focused on Hugo's actions and not Claire's. I do think that is worth bringing up, like Dedeker did, of did Claire talk to you about this? Did this just happen and they both informed you? Did he just inform you? Like, what's the deal there? I think that does impact how I would feel about this relationship. In the one that I shared about before, both my friend and the person I was dating both mentioned it to me separately of like, hey, so there have been some flirtation. I was thinking about dating this person. How do you feel about that? Again, not from a, we're not allowed to if you don't like it, but you're involved in this situation, so we're going to include you. And I do think that's important. This raises a few questions for me, though, is the fact that the friend didn't say anything to you about it, if if that's a fact, we don't know. Might mean that your friend is new to non-monogamy. Sure. That feels like a newbie sort of thing to do, to not check in and just kind of get swept up in the moment. And then the same thing with Hugo, I'm like, Is he also new to this? And that's why he, one, comes across as maybe a little desperate for like, oh, someone's interested in me, I better do it, damn the consequences. Or just not thinking like, oh, let's talk about this. Let's try to understand it. Let's have some, sympathy for how my partner might feel about that instead of just saying, well, I'd be fine with it if you dated my friend.

Dedeker: Well, I want to cut to the chase of, you know, the question asker says, I'm trying to figure out why I have such a problem with this. And then Hugo's also pushing me to question it while still being respectful and sensitive to my feelings during this moment. And I suppose I want to question, do you need to figure out why you have such a problem with this? Because on the one hand, sure, maybe you're like, You know what? Okay, I'm willing to sit down, examine this, maybe even like take it to a therapist or take it to a panel of my support network for the purpose of, I do wanna make this whole situation more workable. Help me figure out what's going on with me so that I can ask for what I need here and I can collaborate with these two people that I care about. That's one pathway that you might go down. However, that's not the only correct pathway, in my opinion. I think that you might also say, this just isn't workable. And I don't think even if I figure out what it is that the problem is, this isn't something that I can fix necessarily. Okay, the metaphor that I trot out all the time for so many life situations, that it's like food poisoning, right? That like you get food poisoning and like while you're miserable on the couch, you might be thinking to yourself, okay, can I figure out what caused the food poisoning? Was it the burrito? Was it because I went to the drive-thru? Was it because I had that old yogurt in the back of the fridge? Oh, it was probably the old yogurt. I'll bet it was that. That even if you realized, yes, it was definitely the old yogurt, you still have freaking food poisoning and that didn't solve anything for you, right? It's like you still need to do the things that are going to fix the food poisoning problem, like rest and hydrate, go to the doctor if you have to, right? And this could be a situation where you're just like, Nope, my system rejects this, doesn't want it, and that's fine. I don't think that this person needs to put so much pressure on themselves to figure out exactly why it is. This is just really uncomfortable for you, right? This is the kind of thing where I think that if the question asker was right, yeah, I have a partner who suddenly started dating my sister. I think a lot more people in a general audience would be like, Ooh, that's weird. I don't know about that. And maybe we wouldn't put pressure on that person. We'll figure out why you're uncomfortable with this partner. You need to give us a good answer why this is a problem for you. I think there's more people who are like, Yeah, that's weird. That sounds uncomfortable, right? Totally makes sense why you wouldn't want that. So I'm just, just trying to offer that up that like, yes, if you think that this is something where if you do the work to examine and deconstruct that maybe that might result in the whole situation feeling more workable, great. But if you know in your gut, like, I just don't think this is workable for me, and it sounds like that's how it is for this person, if they're very clear right away, oh, no, I cannot participate in this. Like, that's fine too. And you don't need to come up with a brilliant reason to convince anybody.

Jase: Something I'm also kind of hoping as we've discussed this, that the question asker, while we've thrown out our hypotheticals and various things we think may or may not have happened, that it might become clear of like, oh, it was definitely not that. But yeah, I think it's that. Like, you might already know the answer by now.

Dedeker: What's the yogurt?

Jase: You know, it's the yogurt. Right, yeah. You might have a sense of what the answer is. And I think then it goes to this other question of, am I bad at polyamory because I'm not okay with this?

Emily: Right.

Jase: And I think that what we've been circling around here is that this isn't just a cut and dry, oh, well, friends are okay. That's the rule if you're not okay with that. You know, that's absurd, right? There's all these other pieces of circumstance around it of, what it is that makes you feel this way? Why do you feel weird about it? And regardless of what that reason is, that's okay for you to have that reason. And I think that the thing that we would tend to come down on this show of saying, like, the not okay thing to do would be to stay in the relationship and keep complaining about it and want them to change. Because, you know, then you're just kind of perpetuating this shitty problem and maybe trying to make it their problem instead of owning your own problem. Maybe. Versus in this case, it does feel like they're having some conversations about it. I'm still curious, have you talked to Claire? What's been going on in that communication? And also with all of this, like breakups are hard, but they're also okay. And I think that a breakup, especially one that's on a relatively amicable terms of like, Hey, I just can't do this, is much better than trying to force through something that's uncomfortable and maybe doing more damage long term than if you were just kind of clear and said, I need some space from this. Now, unfortunately, if they do end up dating and stay together, you are going to have to deal with this one way or another because they're going to be each other's plus ones to events and they'll be around, assuming Claire is someone that you see and hang out with.

Dedeker: Or when they break up, then you can be the one they both complain to.

Emily: Right.

Jase: Maybe they both start dating you after that. I don't know.

Dedeker: It all comes back full circle.

Emily: Oh boy.

Emily: Non-monogamy and I think just any type of relationship, whether that's friendship, whether that is romantic relationships, so many of them are just about, are the two of you aligned in your goals and values? And I do think at least this might be a good opportunity for you to examine and try to parse out what exactly are those goals and values. Do I feel like I want to have relationships where it is completely open and people around me and myself can date whoever we want, whenever we want, no questions asked. Or do I want a little bit more intentionality in who it is that I date and a little bit more understanding from my partner if I have a challenge with their decision to date somebody like a friend and that it's not met with, Hey, you need to be better about this, but rather like, I get it and I want to be with you. And so I'm not going to do that, for instance. It's just a constant evaluation of alignment. And maybe at the very least, this is an opportunity to examine that and to figure that out more clearly for yourself as you continue to move along in this non monogamous journey. Should you be okay with it? That's really only a question that you can answer for yourself because it's going to be different for you. It's going to be different for me. It's going to be different for Dedeker or Jase or anyone else.

Jase: And that it's going to be different for each friend you have potentially.

Emily: Maybe. I mean, it doesn't have to be. It's really getting granular, but sure.

Jase: Yeah, no, but I mean seriously, Dedeker mentioned, she thought her friend was super cool and attractive and wanted her partner to date them, but has other friends where it might feel a little bit like yikes. I don't know how I feel about that. And so I think maybe that's a big thing here is like move away from trying to find the definition of like what's in bounds or out of bounds and your feelings are okay. Like yes, question them, examine them, try to understand them, but that doesn't mean you have to ignore them or just go around them as long as you're doing your best to be, I'll say, a good citizen or, you know, be as clear and honest and not hurtful in your communication about it, relying on your own boundaries rather than trying to force that on someone else. Yeah.

Jase: Well, thank you so much, First Poly Heartbreak, for writing in with your question. I think there's a lot here, and I hope that this question ends up being really useful for other people in a variety of similar-ish related-ish situations. Clearly, all three of us have been through some version of this at least once, where it's either been cool or not cool on different sides of it. Like there's a whole variety here. And so I bet a lot of other listeners will have some pieces that they can relate to in this as well. And of course, if anyone wants to discuss this further, we have our discussion threads in our Discord server. So you can definitely go check that out and talk about this some more there. We are gonna post a question of the week this week on our Instagram stories, and that is who is on your messy list of people not to date?

Jase: This is a term that I came across recently for that thing of like, we don't date each other's friends, like they talked about having with their husband, that, you know, who's on your messy list? This could be your own personal messy list, or this could be one that you've agreed on with a partner. But who's on your messy list of people not to date? We don't need names. We don't need specifically, like, you know, Bob Odenkirk is not allowed.

Dedeker: Bob Odenkirk is not allowed?

Emily: Jase.

Jase: I'm saying it's-

Emily: You should have told me this years ago.

Dedeker: But I love him.

Jase: I know. That's why it's too messy. I'm too threatened, you know?

Dedeker: That's- I mean- okay, we're gonna have to sit and process this. I need to know who else is on this secret messy list that I'm not allowed to date.

Jase: Anyway, we would love to hear from you in our Instagram stories. And then, as I mentioned, discuss it with everyone in the episode discussion channel on our Discord server, which you can get to by going to multiamory.com/join and becoming part of our community there. And then, in addition, you can share with us publicly on our Instagram and answer our question on our stories at multiamory_podcast.