585 - The First Study on Relationship Anarchy with Dr. Nicole Thompson
Welcome, Dr. Nicole!
Dr. Nicole Thompson (she/her) is a queer Sex and Relationship Therapist, researcher, educator, and host of Modern Anarchy podcast. She is the founder of The Pleasure Practice, where she provides psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and leads global educational programs on non-monogamy and sexuality. Dr. Nicole published the first research study on Relationship Anarchy and is the author of The Psychedelic Jealousy Guide. Her work explores how pleasure, relationships, and community can support both personal and collective liberation.
We’re beyond excited to be able to speak with Dr. Nicole regarding her research into relationship anarchy! The discussion questions we get into on this episode are:
For listeners who don't read dissertations: what was this study actually trying to do, and how is phenomenological research — describing lived experience in depth — different from the kind of study that spits out statistics?
In your own words, what is relationship anarchy — and what's the most common thing people get wrong about it?
You're a practicing relationship anarchist and the researcher here. How did you hold that — asset, liability, or both?
Tell us about who you actually talked to — six participants, recruited through social media, all of whom happened to be white, college-educated, LGBTQIA+, and self-identified as neurodivergent. What does "data saturation at six" mean, and who isn't represented in this picture?
You argue RA isn't a symptom of avoidance or attachment injury; if anything, it demands more secure attachment, while being careful that that's not yet a measured finding. How do you hold that tension, and how has your own thinking on attachment shifted through this work?
Given that this is the first study, and a small qualitative one, what would the next study on RA need to look like, and what should people be careful not to over-read from yours?
One distinction from your data is descriptive vs. prescriptive hierarchy. Walk us through it, and where did that language come from for you?
A lot of your participants described the freedom of RA as exhilarating and exhausting — no script means designing everything from scratch. What did they say makes that sustainable rather than just overwhelming?
The Smorgasbord came up as "the counterpoint to the escalator." How are people actually using tools like that?
Your participants talked about jealousy as something to self-regulate rather than legislate against — which connects to your work on psychedelic-assisted therapy and The Psychedelic Jealousy Guide. How do those threads meet?
For someone who's curious but not ready to overhaul their life, what's a small first step to apply any of this to relationships they already have?
The privilege finding — that some people literally can't afford to opt out of conventional partnership — is rarely talked about in RA spaces. What was it like to put that into research that's otherwise sympathetic to RA, and what does the community owe people who can't access the practice?
Several participants admitted even committed RA practitioners still pedestal sex above platonic relationships. Why is that so sticky, and what would real progress look like?
The therapy findings are some of the most actionable parts of your dissertation. For a listener whose therapist isn't poly or RA — what's the minimum competency they should expect, and what are the red flags that mean it's time to find someone new?
So much of what you found is about navigating a world that doesn't understand you — the "alien" feeling, code-switching, losing family. What helps people not just survive that but find real community?
Did anything in the data genuinely surprise you, or contradict what you went in believing?
What's the finding you most wish more people would hear?
How have your views on RA changed since publishing the research?
This study is the very first one of its kind, and hopefully starts a new wave of research on the subject. Listeners can find more about Dr. Nicole, her book, and her podcast on her website!
Transcript
If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Nicole: If we're thinking about Relationship Anarchy being about community, you start to build a wide variety of connections that really stabilize you in many ways. You feel you're still working out maybe things with individual people and what you're doing, but you end up having a really nice net or a web or a constellation that holds you. And I think that provides a lot of stability to start shifting the focus from the conflicts that might be having interpersonally into how do we work together to actually change the systems that are really above us.
Nicole: And now I think this is a very common thing that I do see in anarchist communities and activist communities of, I actually think about how messed up this world is all the time. How do I actually get a break and not feel bad to take a break when the world is so broken?
Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase Lindgren.
Emily: I'm Emily Matlack.
Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker Winston.
Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.
Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here to help.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're discussing the first ever study on Relationship Anarchy. Most of what we talk about on this show when it comes to relationship anarchy is community wisdom. Things like Andie Nordgren's manifesto, Amy Gahran's Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator, the smorgasbord of relationships, and of course, our own conversations we've had over the years. And until recently, that was all there was. There wasn't actually any academic research on relationship anarchy. But that is finally starting to change thanks to our guest today, Dr. Nicole Thompson. In 2024, she started working on the first-ever qualitative study of Relationship Anarchy, interviewing relationship anarchists about how they practice this, what this means to them, and then putting that together into a dissertation. Here to help us digest all of this is Dr. Nicole Thompson, a queer sex and relationship therapist, researcher, and host of the Modern Anarchy podcast. She's the founder of The Pleasure Practice and the author of The Psychedelic Jealousy Guide. And she published that first study on relationship anarchy. So Nicole, welcome to Multiamory.
Nicole: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. And hello to everyone in the audience.
Dedeker: So Nicole, I'm assuming that when you tell people out in the wild about your research, the most common question that you must get from, let's call them affectionately, normies would be, what the heck is relationship anarchy? And we'll get to that. However, I wanted to start by asking, is there a question you wish people would ask you about your research?
Nicole: I think how it's changed since I first started and where I dove in.
Jase: So I think that was my question is what's changed since you started actually researching this compared to just doing it yourself?
Emily: And how long ago did you start?
Nicole: Yeah, I started in 2020, so it's been about four years now of looking at it, living, breathing, just every day of my life. And from the beginning, I think I came in with such a non-monogamy lens to it all. That was kind of how I came in. I started reading about non-monogamy and then was curious about the concepts of hierarchy and what that looked like. And so when you read my dissertation, you can really see me going through that sex and romance lens. And then when I had my participants come in and start talking about their kids and their family and other sorts of ways of relating, that's when I started to see a much bigger, wider lens to it. And then since then, I've had so many different guests on the podcast. I ran a series for about two years where I continued to ask the same questions of guests from around the world, which was really cool because I just opened up my calendar to anybody who would want to come in and talk about it. And so we had people talking about Relationship Anarchy, to gender, to climate change, to so many other things that when I first started from the non-monogamy lens, I didn't even have any frameworks yet to really see it in a wider frame.
Jase: Yeah, well, that's a great segue into talking a little bit about the research itself. So this is a dissertation. I would say most of our audience probably doesn't read dissertations for fun. I bet you actually there's a decent number that do, but could you give a little bit of a breakdown of what is the type of research that went into this particular dissertation?
Nicole: The type of research, as you said, is qualitative. So like you said, there's nothing in the field on this at all. There was one political science paper that was on it from a researcher in Spain, but there wasn't anything in terms of psychology research. And so when you come into the field like that, and there's nothing laid out, one of the most important things to do is to define the variable itself. So what is it? How is it practiced? And so this kind of lays the groundwork for people to do more quantitative studies, because now the variable is actually defined. So now we can work with it in that way. So then, yeah, I came in and wanted to define, what is it and how do you practice it? And so when you look at that, you want to do a lot of qualitative studies where you bring in a smaller group of folks and you have these really long interviews with them. And then after you collect all of that data, you create a transcript and then you break it down into themes. And so you find the themes that are consistent across all those people, and then that becomes your findings. So I answered basically, what is Relationship Anarchy? How is it practiced? And then I had a couple of different sub-questions. One of my favorite ones of those was, how are other providers in the field really responding to you when you show up to practice this? And what are their views? Which I think is really enlightening as a provider myself. And so we really got into trying to hone the essence, and that's really what qualitative phenomenological research is, is getting into the essence of the phenomenon itself.
Emily: I would guess that probably about half our audience immediately knows what Relationship Anarchy is when they hear those two words together, but probably half doesn't really have a solid grasp of what it is. So I'm curious what your definition of Relationship Anarchy is, and also if that changed over the course of you going through this data and having all of these different discussions with the group of people that you did?
Nicole: Yeah, for sure. For the listeners who do know Relationship Anarchy, we could probably nerd out on why I spent hours thinking about removing the hierarchy or rewriting the hierarchy as my title. So we could get to that.
Dedeker: Sure.
Nicole: Why did I end up picking rewriting, not removing? But for the general person first who doesn't have any idea, Relationship Anarchy, in the most broad sense, is applying anarchist principles to relationships. Got it. Could have maybe pieced that together from the two words. What does that look like when you actually practice it? It's deconstructing the internalized power systems to design your own relationships. And often that internalized power system, it lives in the unconscious. And so this process of really learning how the systems of oppression have impacted our access to love and the boundaries that we create around relationships and the narratives of who we are. And so I'm sure we could nerd out on that for the full hour.
Dedeker: But when you started your research, were you already identifying as a relationship anarchist?
Nicole: Yes. And I think that's important, and that was part of the research bias, the research positioning, as I have this bias. I am someone who's practicing Relationship Anarchy. In my opinion, I don't think that the research would have gone as far with somebody who didn't practice that because I'd come in and my participants would start talking about, yes, the Relationship Escalator, the Smorgasbord, start using NRE in terms and ways that quite literally I was writing my dissertation and I had the word Compersion in my dissertation and my reader, she literally marked it as incorrect and said, do you mean compassion? And I was like, no, I mean Compersion. So I understand, yeah, there's a bit of bias here with me being a relationship anarchist. And also I don't know how far we could get with somebody who's so outside of this lens to actually study itself.
Jase: Yeah, it makes me think that in this kind of early phase of trying to define it, figure out what it is, it does make sense that you need to be able to speak that language for this more qualitative research, and that hopefully you're opening up the information that someone else would need to do more of a bigger picture quantitative study where they can actually come up with stats and numbers and things based on this. But I think that's a good point that we sometimes take for granted that everyone who studies monogamous marriage is probably monogamous. And so they get the language, they get the terms. I mean, granted, we all do because we just sort of grow up in it. But it's an interesting point there that it seems a little bit like you have to be careful about your biases being part of that group. But at the same time, that's the whole reason why you can understand it and engage with it.
Nicole: Exactly. And like you said, we don't usually call that out for other types of research, monogamy specifically.
Emily: I'd be really interested to know whether or not somebody who is just engaged in maybe more traditional non-monogamy, if the participants would be as maybe forthcoming as they were with you because they knew, okay, this is also somebody who practices this thing that I do in a very specific way. But yeah, I wonder if somebody would maybe not quite be as forthcoming if you were just like, yes, I practice more traditional types of non-monogamy where I have maybe a primary partner, for instance, right?
Nicole: Yeah, I imagine it does in many ways. I mean, they came into this virtual office, right? So they already seen my kink harness. There's a lot of out— I am not a neutral blank slate therapist, as you can clearly see, right? And so some of the people started talking about how Relationship Anarchy is linked to their kink practice and how they see the power dynamics in those sorts of spaces as well. So I imagine that if I wasn't also practicing this or having sort of signals that say, hey, this is a safe space to talk about these things, especially given my research and so many people that have had terrible experiences with people in the academy of Clinical Psychology. So I could understand why people might not want to disclose if I hadn't signaled that.
Jase: Yeah, it's a complicated, tricky thing to navigate.
Dedeker: I guess the thing that strikes me though is that I think that already within the non-monogamy space, people struggle with creating core definitions around anything as it is. People really struggle with attaching to labels. I know the thing that I've struggled with is that as soon as you try to nail down some kind of official definition for polyamory, even within a research context, there's going to be 1,600 people who are upset with that definition. And I would imagine that you run into the same with trying to come up with a core definition for Relationship Anarchy as well.
Nicole: Yeah, for me, usually what I will at least have a litmus test line for is the importance of community. We hear about those people that say they're a relationship anarchist but practice maybe more libertarianism values and say, you can't control me, no one's gonna stop me because I'm a relationship anarchist. I will draw the line there. And I would say that that litmus test, almost last piece there, is that anarchy is about community, just fundamentally. If you do not understand that your actions impact other people and you need to be aware of that, I don't think you're practicing Relationship Anarchy. And I know people might get mad at me for saying that, but I'll stand my line there and hold that.
Dedeker: Well, I appreciate you saying that because, yeah, I do think that when I first was introduced to the concept, maybe over a decade ago or so, I was very attracted to it. I think all three of us were very attracted to it. I still find that an attractive concept in practice. Then encountering the reality of, I think, a lot of those people attaching to that label practicing something much more hyper-independent, much more libertarian, much more, to me, seemingly attaching to the label out of a reaction, a harsh reaction against control or perceptions of control or expectations, let's say, that then left me a real sour taste in my mouth around it. That's a really interesting rubric to draw there, that you bring it back to the community piece. Can you talk more about that?
Nicole: Yeah, I mean, on the most global sense, we all share one nervous system. We can start with that, in the sense that when you see someone screaming at another person on the street, you feel that in your own body. And so thinking about that on the global scale, I think any relationship anarchist is thinking about the systems of oppression and how they impact all of us. And so the word anarchy has so much more to it than just this practice of, you can't tell me what to do. And you're right, that's a huge experience that people have in the community, as we're humans failing to do this sort of practice in many ways, or not living up to the actual word itself. That's why I like to call it a practice in and of itself. I think it's something that you continue to do and work towards. It's not a moment where you just say, I've achieved complete enlightenment in all the systems of oppression, and then they're no longer impacting me. And if someone says that, that's almost like the biggest red flag I could run away from. So I think it's a big learning, okay, I'm always gonna be digesting more and more and more understanding of how systemic these problems are. And so yeah, if someone comes in, Dedeker, and is like, you can't control me, I'm like, this is very antithetical to the whole understanding of community and that our liberation is braided together and that we all impact each other. I think there are ways to build relationships and communities and agreements where we have more mutuality, to come into some of the concepts of Andie Nordgren, right? We can build mutual relationships, but how we do that always has to have that key piece of community, that you're not an island. No one in this world is an island, right? And so if you're missing that sort of piece of it, I don't think you're really practicing to the historical roots of what anarchy as a philosophy is.
Jase: Well, and I find that that's part of the complication, is that I feel like there's not people don't tend to agree very readily on exactly what anarchy means either, or at least not what it looks like in practice, even if they might spout some of the same words. That in terms of what's your obligation to tear down a system in a very proactive way versus not practicing that or deconstructing it in a more internal way? There's a lot of different approaches there, and I see that show up in Relationship Anarchy as well, where there's not always agreement about how much is this being anti the existing establishments and trying to actively destroy those versus just trying to eliminate their influence in my own life and in the way that I prioritize my own relationships. Did you run into that at all with your group? I know that your study was a pretty small sample size to sort of build this initial definition. I'm curious if you've run into any of that in addition to the community thing.
Nicole: Yeah, yeah. And I've definitely seen people speak to that experience quite literally of, yeah, a lot of people having the word and then not living to it in the full values, right? So I think you're so right to be picking up on that imbalance. And a lot of the literature on anarchy outside of the concepts of Relationship Anarchy usually speak to anarchy as being defined by what it's not, which is a tricky starting place to be like, it's not that, it's not this or that, right?
Emily: Right.
Jase: I mean, non-monogamy runs into the same problem of being defined by what it's not.
Nicole: But yeah, I think that as human beings, there's a lot of unlearning for us to do under these systems, and the ways that they impact us. And one of my favorite questions to ask of Relationship Anarchists is, when you look at your community, do you have a wide diversity of different ages, abilities, race, gender identity, sexuality, religious orientations? And if not, why not? Why does it feel harder to connect to those folks? And what does that say?
Jase: Yeah, I mean, I think that's often a challenge that communities face too, of— I've seen many times when people then will identify that, and out of their feeling of guilt about their community not being as diverse, will then do some kind of weird gymnastics to try to make their community look more diverse without really making it a great space for anyone. I know I'm being a little bit negative here, but I just feel like we've spent so many years thinking about Relationship Anarchy and the way that different communities show up within non-monogamy. And we've seen so many different extremes of it, of the ones that claim a lot of things but then it's not actually that healthy in practice, and other ones that kind of fly under the radar and actually have these really nice inclusive communities, and then a whole range in between there.
Nicole: Yeah, it sounds like you're talking a little bit about tokenism, how we start to tokenize different minority groups, or yeah, even in the podcast, I had different people, like I said, coming on to answer these questions. And one person in an episode with Juno, they were talking about how they had some regret for their Relationship Anarchy community and their ecosystem, how they used to have people come in and then they would force them to separate their pair bonds so that they would force themselves to connect with other people. But they have some regret on the ways that that really wasn't the most nervous system attuning way. It kind of forced the community aspect onto folks. So even in the extremes of tokenism into forcing people straight into anarchist principles of more community building. Yeah, I think there's a softer way to meet people where they are at.
Jase: Yeah, yeah. And just realizing that there's humans there, right? Because it also reminds me of, in Dedeker's book, her first book, The Smart Girl's Guide to Polyamory, talking about polyamory history and some of the communes where there was that kind of intentional breaking of those pair-bonds and kind of assigning you into groups and intentional forcing of different pair bonds.
Dedeker: It's never worked. It's never worked.
Jase: Turns out it's not actually a great way to do this.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Nicole: And it's okay to have pair bonds and do Relationship Anarchy. I think we got to talk about that too. That's a really important piece.
Jase: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So in the second section of this episode, I want to get into more of what you learned, right? How do people practice this? What does this look like? But one thing I wanted to hit before we get to that is just a quick note on attachment theory. Because I thought that was interesting that you mentioned this in your dissertation about how I feel like people, at least in the mainstream, can kind of have this association with, oh, a non-monogamous person or a relationship anarchist person must have some kind of attachment issue. Maybe they're avoidant, and so that's why they're drawn to this thing that's less traditionally attached, I guess, than we would think of a monogamous marriage being. But that you found it seems to be the opposite.
Nicole: So yeah, I think a lot of the attachment lens on clinical psych and all of this is really that if you don't live together in a nuclear family with one other person, you're pretty messed up, right? And so I really appreciate that Jessica Fern has been mentoring me and for us to kind of come together on our two different perspectives, a little bit of more my Relationship Anarchy lens and her Polyamory lens, as we talk about a lot of this because yeah, I think when you're really running deep in relationship anarchy, you actually have multiple attachments that are all really deep. People often make the assumption, and very often clinicians make the assumption, that relationship anarchy is actually a lack of availability to attach. I certainly felt that way when I first met my first partner, who was a relationship anarchist and refused completely to enmesh with me, my little buddy. Psychologist self, I was like, well, he must have some attachment issues. Yeah, it's just not seeing the whole picture. And I think it's important to call in the history of psychology. It's been created by white men 200 years ago, and that has a very unique frame. It wasn't too long ago that homosexuality was in the DSM. Okay, so we still got to call out a lot of the stuff that's in there. And that sort of literature for a long time on attachment, also particularly criticized women as having the only impact on children. And there were a lot of researchers that had to work to kind of expand much more frames to understand that both parents in the heteronormative frame that they were working in can impact the child and attachment, right? And so here's another space, particularly non-monogamy, even at all, where you start to understand that multiple attachments actually is a sign of healthy attachment because you're forming multiple of them and you're holding the complexity of multiple. And then Relationship Anarchy, though, often has this unique bend on it, where you can pair bond, you can live together, but you might not. I like to talk about riding the escalator versus walking the stairs. So if you want to walk the stairs and consciously make every choice of that, and that feels aligned to you, that's really beautiful. It's very different than the metaphor of unconsciously getting onto the escalator and it just moves you up because those are the social and the cultural norms, right? But I will say, in my research and most of my living in this community and working with Relationship Anarchists, many of them don't want to live with one person. Many of them don't want to have kids and the picket fence. And so anytime you start to deviate from the norm, Clinical Psychology has a real tough time with that. And then they start to say, okay, well, you don't want to do this or this. You don't want to get married. You definitely have some attachment issues. You want to hang out in this community. That's not really how we do this sort of relationship thing, right? And so, many of my participants had had pretty difficult times with therapists who really try to critique them. I've had clients come in my room who say that therapists tell them this never works, right? I've experienced that as a student. I had professors who told me this never works, Nicole. And so we're kind of pushing up against the norm that the academy has created for what it means to be a human being. And now I could just start riffing out on that for so far, even like prolonged grief disorder. In this world, that's Relationship Anarchy for me as a therapist, to start talking shit about that disorder under capitalism when you're supposed to just show up on Monday and go to work. Absolutely not, right? So that's Relationship Anarchy. It's not just about the sexuality, it's also talking shit about the DSM.
Jase: That's a great segue for us to get into actually looking at some of the findings, and I'm curious to see how this lines up with stuff we've talked about on the show before, and then also how this has grown for you after this initial group of the six participants to then interviewing people on your show for two years after that. So first, we're gonna take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show.
Jase: Ad break.
Jase: All right, we are back. And we're going to get into how Relationship Anarchy is practiced. So to start off, how is it practiced? I guess when we get into this whole, as you said, rewriting the hierarchy, not disentangling— what, sorry, what was the word you ended up using?
Nicole: Rewriting the hierarchy.
Jase: Rewriting, right?
Dedeker: Yeah.
Jase: Not erasing. Tell us why you made that decision. What's that coming from in the research?
Nicole: Oh yeah, I hope my Relationship Anarchists don't get mad at me. But here I go. I think it's impossible to step away from hierarchy. I think that it's inevitable in an 8 billion person world, there's going to be a stratification of how many people are close to me. I cannot be close to all 8 billion. Now, what I think is unique, and some anarchists talk about, is hierarchy that is permeable and adaptable and able to be fixed for a period of time and change in another state. When we think about the hierarchies even between parent and child, that isn't a hierarchy for a reason. Between teacher and student, there are hierarchies of knowledge that are passed down. So I think we can really get into what hierarchy means and where it's applicable, where it's problematic, and where it gets dangerous. Things like veto powers and where all this criticism towards hierarchy comes. But if we get into the concepts itself, I think it's much wider than people usually sit with. So in many ways— and I understand some people are gonna get mad at me for saying that— I think hierarchy is inevitable because of just finiteness of human time. I can't connect to all those 8 billion people. Okay, heartbreaking.
Jase: Wow.
Nicole: But when I sit with that, that means, okay, so there's going to be a stratification of people who are close to me. And I am really passionate about understanding the power dynamics in that, especially as a therapist. I charge people to spend time with me. Talk about the power dynamics. Getting close to me is something that is full of power. Okay, how do I feel about that as a Relationship Anarchist? There's a lot of complex feelings about all of that, the student debt, all the things that I have to do this, right? And so what I would much rather do is be very, very aware of that. Like I said, who's in your community? Let's think about our actual time and energy as resources of power under these systems and be much more intentional about how we're sharing that. I'm gonna die. We're all gonna die. All the listeners, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die. You've got finite resources, okay? And that is power. So how do you want to spend that? Hence where I said, how do we rewrite the hierarchy in that versus remove it? I just don't think you can get out of the finiteness of our existence and our time and our energy.
Jase: To bring this to your research that you did, how did that show up in terms of the answers that people gave? Like, how did you actually see that in terms of what you began to pull apart and define and themes that you identified?
Nicole: Yeah, I mean, people talked about not necessarily feeling the obligation to relate with their bio family as much as society deems, right?
Jase: I feel like that's one that comes up often in non-monogamy in general, but yeah, definitely in Relationship Anarchy.
Nicole: Yeah, there's a lot of stress, pressure. I've heard different parents talk about trying to give more power to their children to make choices than these more controlling models of parenting. What does it mean to actually allow your child to kind of fall into— with reason, of course— the consequences of making choices that they kind of learn from on their own? Obviously parental guidance, right? But there's that edge there of what does it mean to give more power to your child than to create that sort of dynamic? When I first came into this, I really thought that it was going to be like you would have your lovers and you'd break it down 25, 25, 25, 25% of your time, which is so silly, but that's what I came in thinking that this would mean? And then once you start to realize that Relationship Anarchy is about all of your relationships, you quickly realize that you cannot take all the people in your community in that way. And so I really saw people being intentional. Part of that comes into the communication they would have with people about what they're available for in terms of connection, right? And so I think there's much more communication about availability. There's also a lot of ongoing consent. I think that was one of the biggest findings, is how much the relationships change themselves. Consent is ongoing. These relationships are ongoing. And so if we want to have that key value of mutuality, you have to keep having that conversation, right? You guys created RADAR, all these different tools of conversations to come together and say, is this still aligned for us? And if not, where else do we pivot to? And that's where the Smorgasbord was also a really big finding. I mean, we know that, right? But that's a tool so many people use to have these sort of discussions of what's on the table. What's no longer on the table, and knowing that that can change and evolve over time. And just because I have sex with somebody, that doesn't mean that they're at the top of the list. Maybe it's actually at the bottom of the list. Maybe I spent a lot of time in creative partnerships making beautiful art, really loving my life, and occasionally enjoy sexual play partners in a kink sense. That's a very different hierarchical world than your typical norm of what you might meet in the world, right?
Emily: I have absolutely found in past relationships that having more of this maybe egalitarian viewpoint of the relationships in my life, like for instance how much time I spend on a weekly basis doing this podcast or just hanging out with Jase and Dedeker, how that was really challenging to some past relationships that I had, just because maybe it's scary to see friends mean that much to a partner when the norm would be we put this person first and that's it, and everyone else comes second, third, fourth, etc. So I completely get that. And I also think that it maybe can be exhausting trying to write these scripts from scratch because we don't have a lot of models out there for this at this point. Is that something that you heard from your participants? Is that something that they spoke about that they are trying to deal with just the exhausting nature of being in this type of relationship configuration.
Nicole: Yeah, I mean, if we're trying to not make assumptions, then do I have to outline, hey, please tell me happy birthday?
Jase: Yeah, like, what things can we assume here?
Emily: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nicole: Like, I want to be able to assume that you'll, you know, like— so yeah, that is something I heard both in my research and in my own personal life with my lovers. If we tried to figure this out, I would hit that almost exhaustion point where it's like, there's so many assumptions in human relationships. We cannot all put it just neatly on one smorgasbord. Like, that just will not work. So you're right. I think the communication, when there's this ongoing consent model, absolutely. And so many of the participants, even my clients, sometimes I'm talking to them about how much time do we spend processing the relationship versus just living it. Okay, we also need to live it. What are the things that you actually enjoy doing with this person? And maybe that is processing, and I'm all there for that too. But, in taking some breaks to actually live in the relationship itself. And so many of my participants talked about how isolating this is. Like you said, when you're doing all this, when you're thinking about all these things, and then you go to somebody who doesn't, you just feel like you're on two different planets of connecting. They almost ask, why do we have to have so many conversations? So yeah, a lot of folks talked about the isolation of this experience.
Jase: Yeah, I guess that's making me wonder about how people who've been doing it longer have adapted to make that feel more manageable. So they're spending more time doing their relationships and not just talking about them. I know for us, we talked for a long time on the show about when you first start opening up a previously closed monogamous relationship, it can feel the same. Like, all we do is process for like a year. Or whatever, right? That because there's so much you're having to unlearn, so much you're having to reevaluate, renegotiate, all those things. But then eventually you can get to a point where you don't have to do that all the time. And I'm wondering if you've seen basically the same kind of thing, or if this shows up very differently in the people that you've interviewed about Relationship Anarchy.
Nicole: Yeah, I think the more you build an established community, the more the focus changes from how do we interrelate to how do we take down the systems? It reminds me a lot of Dean Spade's work with Love and a fucked up world. In terms of getting out of the process and living, kind of like you talked about with non-monogamy, there are some baseline skills and paradigm shifting. And once you get kind of through that— I mean, I do psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, so I like to talk about it as a come up. Once you get through the come up and you're kind of right in your space, I think you can start to shift towards different things. Again, if we're thinking about Relationship Anarchy being about community, you start to build a wide variety of connections that really stabilize you in many ways. You feel, you're still working out maybe things with individual people and what you're doing, but you end up having like a really nice net or a web or a constellation that holds you. And I think that provides a lot of stability to start shifting the focus from the conflicts that might be having interpersonally into how do we work together to actually change the systems that are really above us. And now I think this is a very common thing that I do see in anarchist communities and activist communities of, I actually think about how messed up this world is all the time. How do I actually get a break and not feel bad to take a break when the world is so broken? So you're right. So I'm still personally walking that line every day of what does it mean to not feel bad to take a break when there are so many systemic inequities happening at every single second of our existence, and that we're now more aware to as a collective with the internet and access to information. And so I think that's a collective thing most people are feeling right now.
Jase: Yeah, yeah, some version of that struggle of what's mine to deal with and what's not, because now we're exposed to everything instead of only being exposed to what affects our more immediate community like we would have been 50 years ago or less.
Dedeker: Well, I'm curious about anyone who's listening to this and they feel curious, but maybe they're not in a position to want to completely overhaul their life or their relationships. They don't feel like they can etch a sketch things and run off and join an anarchist commune. What would you identify as a small first step to apply this to any of their existing relationships that may already be existing in some maybe intensely socially prescribed hierarchies?
Nicole: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think one of my biggest career goals is to work towards the end of rape culture, one, but my second is to invite the world to realize that we all already have multiple relationships. I think we'd be fundamentally in a different world if we held that as the baseline. Not whether we're having sex with people or not, but just that we all have multiple relationships and to care for those. So the person who thinks that we have to just completely etch a sketch and take it all away, I just want to take a deep breath and say that's not what I'm saying right now at all. Actually, I'm saying look at the people you already have in your life. Look at how valuable they are. And if right now you're only looking at one or two or three or four in your quad, whatever it is, take a second to think about all the people that you interact with. The person at the store, the person on the corner, the flowers, the bees. All of those pieces are a part of what Relationship Anarchy is. And so I know that can start to feel a little bit overwhelming. So in the here and the now, what can you do? How can you show up for the person in front of you wherever you're at? How can you be present? How can you take that deep breath so you can regulate yourself a little bit and be more grounded to hear that friend who just had a horrible day and is really, really hurting, right? Like, there's so many little things. I think often I see so many of my clients and my people in my community, and we feel like many of the trauma reactions to this current world, which is fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I think I've felt all of those at different points, maybe some all at the same time, right? And then, whoo, okay, so how can we try to take care of my nervous system so I can care for your nervous systems, the other people, our planet, right? And so I guess my invitation for the person who's feeling overwhelmed by this is just, who can you share a little bit more love with today? And how can you see that the love already exists in so many of your places that we kind of put off as, oh, it's just a friend?
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Jase: So coming back in, I feel like we're hitting on this interesting thing that comes up with Relationship Anarchy. And I like that you called it a practice. It makes me think about mindfulness as a practice, and that I think people who don't do any kind of meditation or mindfulness often assume it's like, oh, once you know how to meditate, you just bam, you're in this like outer space zone. And that's just a skill you have that other people don't. But it's very much not that, right? That any Buddhist monk's going to tell you, no, this is a practice because you don't always get it. It's hard, right? It takes work. It's a skill you develop and challenges come up. So I think it's interesting looking at Relationship Anarchy in a similar way where it's tied to some values and things of ways that you want to live your life. But there's also challenges that come up and that has to confront your own human being desire to prioritize certain people over others, sometimes in a bad way, sometimes in a good way. Right, as well as just your own fears. And then living in a society that is, treats people as like your label equals how important you are, whether that's a spouse or that's a partner or that's a friend or that's a co-worker or whatever it is. So, looking at all that, I want to get into this last piece, digging in a little bit more into some of those. And one of those that came up in your research that you mentioned in the dissertation is about privilege, and that sometimes there was this feeling of like, I want to be a relationship anarchist, but I feel like it requires a certain amount of privilege for me to even be able to practice this, and that that can cause some complicated feelings for people. Can you tell us a little more about how that showed up?
Nicole: Yeah, yeah. Everyone in my dissertation had at least an undergraduate degree or higher, right?
Dedeker: It's not surprising.
Nicole: Right. And so yeah, maybe let's talk about why it's not surprising, because even from the Maslow's hierarchy of needs sort of thing, which is a very individualistic way of looking at life, so I got critiques on that. But even if we're looking at that, when you are spending your days searching for enough resources to have food and water and a safe shelter, you're not really sitting back reading Andie Nordgren or on any of the Reddit threads or reading Getting Off the Relationship Escalator and thinking about all these level of things. Right? And so, yeah, if you have more privilege to have studied, to have more conscious time to think about these things, of course, yeah, you're going to be much deeper in this. Like you said, anarchist thought is hard to read. I start to read some of the people from back in the day, Emma Goldman, I'm like, what is she saying? It's not as digestible as you think. And so, yeah, there's a bit of privilege here to have the time and the space to do that. I think the concepts itself, though, these have existed for many, many years about being in right relationship. We could go back even to like even queer culture for many, many years of like, how do we create chosen family? That was one of the pieces that my dissertation reader Dr. Berkey had brought in, right, in terms of like, hey, a lot of this— because he wasn't familiar with Relationship Anarchy, he was like, this sounds like a lot of the queer movement of family building that I was a part of.
Emily: And I'm like, you were like, yeah, yes, yes.
Nicole: So in many ways, yeah, we can kind of get into how privilege allows you to create more space to think about these concepts and kind of get into the language. I think there are many people that are practicing this without the term Relationship Anarchy as a guidepost.
Jase: I wondered about that, that I would just think, again, from my impression of people out there, that yeah, there's probably a large number of people practicing something that we might think of more like Relationship Anarchy, but that the only people that are going to call it that are going to be the people with college degrees and higher who have been exposed to enough thinking of, or at least other people influenced by, anarchy to even want to identify with that label.
Nicole: Yeah. And let's also talk about, like, why is it that higher education often goes towards more, like, blue voting? Let's talk about that. Like, what is that?
Dedeker: What is—
Nicole: what is happening?
Jase: That's a good question.
Nicole: What is happening? Almost like more awareness of more cultures and people. It makes you go, wow, I'm not the only one in here. Maybe I should think about some other people have been here in the most ideal ways, right? And I know blue is not ideal either. There's a lot, you know, we could get into it. But like, just the more you educate yourself to see how cross-cultural understandings of life have existed, I think you have a little bit of humility where you sit the fuck down and you say, okay, how do we make this a better place for everybody in that way, ideally, right? That's the ideal space. So I think that's like the heart of Relationship Anarchy, is not shying away from that politics conversation around education and how that impacts this as well. So I think someone could critique and say that Relationship Anarchy is about privilege in that way because you have the time, the space, and the energy to process.
Dedeker: But what's interesting, in your research you found that there were several participants, and even participants who were committed Relationship Anarchy practitioners, that they still admitted to pedestaling sexual relationships above platonic relationships. And that's intriguing for me to think about do you feel like we chalk that up to socialization and our culture, or do we chalk that up to a human biology thing?
Nicole: I mean, I'm not going to live in any binaries, so I'll say yes and, right? Yes, and good Relationship Anarchist, no binary. Why is sex such an important thing? Yeah, I mean, Dr. Kim Tolbert says that we've really fetishized sex, and I think that's an important place to land too.
Dedeker: Right.
Nicole: And I also don't want to take away the beauty that it is. Yes, this world has made it increasingly complex, and you're right, this is why I focus a lot of my work on sexuality. I've gotten that sort of critique from some of my listeners of like, hey, your podcast talks about Relationship Anarchy, but why are we talking so much about sex? And I'll tell you why, because it's one of the most complicated things out of all of those buckets. People got lots of feelings and complexity about it, so I'm focusing on one piece of the big equation. Again, we could have a Relationship Anarchy podcast on climate change and just our relationship to ecosystem, plastics, the bugs, and the power systems that control the legislation. Like, that is actually an applicable frame. I'm focusing on sex, right? So I'm falling into what you're saying, Dedeker, of like really focusing on that because I find it to be one of the places where there's the most harm, trauma, complexity, misery, and also joy. Pleasure, connection, right? And so I don't want to take away from the reality that having sex, whether it's with yourself, with other people, it feels good. It's one of the most powerful ways for us to work with stress in the body, to metabolize, to have all those good endogenous hormones, and to play. I mean, it's a beautiful thing. So I think the answer is yes to both, right? Like, we have placed so much of a pedestal on this and fetishized it and made it so complicated and all these other things, And I dream, I dream of the world where we have less complexity with it. And what would our fantasies look like in that space? I don't know. I dream of the society getting there and what sort of play and things would be intriguing for us there. And I also don't want to take away from the fact that sex is beautiful. It's a beautiful bonding experience with yourself, with other people, with a lover, and it feels really great. So I think it's that yes and to both. And I would really love to see a world where it wasn't so complex and what kind of play we'd be doing there.
Jase: Something I think could be interesting for future research on that within Relationship Anarchy would be trying to get at the cause and effect there a little bit of— is it that we have this tendency to put our relationships where sex is involved as a higher priority than others? Like, we're kind of de facto putting them higher up on this hierarchy? Or is it that we're more likely to have sex with people that we've already put it higher up there or closer to that in general? And I don't know, and I'm sure there's a whole range of things, but it just makes me curious about how that would go. And then also, like you said, how that would change with how society as a whole treated sex. If we grew up feeling different about sex, would we then not have that same dynamic of, oh, if I'm having sex with this person, they're kind of more important? Or like, I'm gonna save sex for only the more important people in my life? Like, whichever way you come at it. And I'm just— I know we don't have the data for that, so this would all be just anecdotal, but I'm wondering if that came up at all in what people talked about.
Nicole: Well, yeah, it's kind of like a chicken and an egg situation. What came first? And then you're also asking really deep questions about human nature. Like, at the end of the day, are we more evolutionary driven in this? I think queer sex has a long lineage of saying there's a lot more to it than that. I think the asexual movement has a lot to say that there's more than just this, right? So I think that my biggest hope is that the world can feel a little bit less stressed about sex, whether you want to have a lot of it or none of it. I really just want the world to take a big deep breath and say, this is what I want to do and this is what feels good to me. Because the amount of people that really get locked into just so many boxes of like, yeah, is this our evolutionary drive? Should I be here? What feels good for you right now? And that might change in a week, in 2 years, in a month.
Jase: It's just funny you describing that. It reminds me a lot of how I tend to talk to other men about gender identity.
Nicole: Sure.
Jase: Of just— it's like, I don't want to— I don't want you to change anything about, not just gender identity but also your sexuality, of whether you identify as straight. But then what happens if I'm attracted to another man or whatever? And I just kind of want to be like, just take a breath, man. No one cares. It doesn't matter that much. Let yourself figure it out. The labels don't matter so much.
Nicole: Mm-hmm.
Dedeker: Mm-hmm.
Jase: But that's a hard thing to let go of, because it's really drilled into us.
Nicole: Right. And I'm a little baby student trying to train, and I have a case vignette where my professor gives me a queer client who's debating whether they fit into a box or not. And then my professor is saying, "How do we diagnose this client?" And I'm burning in my body to think any queer person who has walked that lineage of thought knows it's really confusing. And you're right, I like to say just let go of all the labels. But in that moment where you're just trying to find some existential grounding of who the hell am I and what am I doing, you're searching. And then that professor came back to me and said, no, we're going to put OCD as a label.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Nicole: And I was just fuming inside of me.
Emily: Kind of going along those lines, speaking to therapy in general and how I think a lot of us out there, a lot of our listeners have talked about about how they're trying to find therapists who understand these concepts at all, or even have like a, I'm not going to pathologize you or say that your problems are because you are doing this thing. For our listeners out there, what should they be looking out for in a therapist? And what are red flags also if they're trying to find someone who's okay with this?
Nicole: Yeah, I mean, I think if they don't put it on their website as a specialty that they have, or an area of expertise that they have some knowledge in. And when you do those info calls, those free info calls with your therapist, ask them, how do you feel about non-monogamous relationships? And if that therapist says, why are you asking, what would it mean if you were to know what it— fuck off. That is absolutely not—
Emily: yeah.
Nicole: And that's what you get sometimes. I appreciate at least the therapist who can say, hey, I have an issue with this and I don't support this, and I think this is always a problem to do non-monogamy. Great. At least you just saved me and whoever's walking through that office a lot of time and energy. I get a little bit scared about the people who take a client and don't actually show the client that they actually have so many biases and they're about to spend years kind of playing these games of just asking these kind of interesting questions that are trying to poke and prod and are really sneaky about it. So if that therapist comes in and at least says, hey, I've worked with non-monogamous clients before, I think it's this, this, this, great. But if they're really evading that question, which is a question about your safety? Absolutely not.
Nicole: No, there are many more. And even some of the bigger players in the game, like Psychology Today, you can click an non-monogamous ENM box for folks who mark that as one of their types of orientation. So I think trying to really, really vet your therapist and ask them— and in my ideal world, I think you should be able to know if your therapist practices non-monogamy, because I think it makes a really big difference to have a person who has practiced this. I personally wouldn't want a psychedelic therapist who has never done a psychedelic. I wouldn't want a swimming coach who has never swam, and I would not want a therapist helping me with non-monogamy who has never done non-monogamy. And that is my belief.
Jase: Yeah, yeah, I know. And I think that that insight is an interesting one that people probably don't think of right away about the evasive answer, that kind of like, well, what would that mean to you? If they kind of avoid the question, that in itself being a red flag, I think I think people would not assume that right away. So I think that's definitely a helpful insight for people to take as they're doing those kind of introductory calls or whatever.
Nicole: Yeah, let's come back to power dynamics again, right? Relationship Anarchy, about power dynamics. So they're evading that question to maintain the tabula rasa, blank slate, when you're coming in asking about a safety question. I was once going to join a group process therapy, and I asked, I was like, what are the racial demographics of this group? And the provider was like, is that an important thing to you?
Emily: And I was like, yes, because I asked.
Nicole: And then he broke it down. He's like, well, we have one biracial, the rest's all white. And I'm like, okay, well, interesting you responded that way to me. And yeah, it's an important question. So the field of psychology and the blank slate— I mean, it's a lot of it is upholding white supremacy, right? Is a lot of it is upholding that. And I could rant and rave on that, and I do on my podcast in so many ways. But to be a blank slate means you fit into the system. And anything else is gonna be self-disclosing. If I have a bunch of tattoos, if I shave my head and I've got visibly queer, that's not a blank slate.
Emily: Yeah.
Dedeker: Mm-hmm.
Jase: I mean, that's— I feel like that's a whole other conversation that's fascinating to have is about signaling, right?
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: Like, you were talking about the things that you intentionally put in your video background so that people have a sense of what's kind of, I guess, on the table to talk about, or what things you might understand. And I think at the same time, we can see that where someone might not outwardly present as queer or as non-monogamous or something, and in other situations could be then, oh, assumed you don't get it, or oh, you're not really welcome here, just because they don't outwardly show it as much. And then, you know, you can obviously see the opposite in other places where, because someone does put all of these indicators on about their queerness or something, that then in certain more normie situations, they might feel ostracized. I think that happens quite often, but the flip side can happen as well. And it is interesting to just look at all the ways that we can present ourselves through our— not just what we wear and our hair and tattoos and piercings or whatever, but also just how we choose to talk, the expressions we use. Yeah, body language. Like, there's all these little subtle signals that we do there, for good or for bad. But I just think it's really interesting to be aware of it, right? Like, if someone drops a term in a normal conversation where you're like, oh, I see you, I get you, right? Like, if someone drops NRE in a conversation, you're kind of like, oh, okay, all right, okay, I see.
Nicole: Absolutely. And like you said, the risk of that too then can be is assuming just because you have these symbols that you're kind of on the same page, both for the client or the therapist, to assume that you're kind of just so connected in that way when there's actually such an umbrella of people, right? Just because you're polyamorous doesn't mean you're kinky, and just because you're kinky doesn't mean you're polyamorous, or any of these other Just because you're polyamorous doesn't mean you like board games, right?
Emily: Or D&D. Yes.
Jase: Yeah, right. All of that, right?
Dedeker: All of it. Yeah, right.
Nicole: And just because I say hierarchy means something to me, it can mean something totally different to you. And I think that's, that's my favorite part of human relationships, right? I really love the existential world-building that we all have. Like, all of us, everyone tuning in, we all have a universe of thoughts and meaning-making. And even in the most monogamous of one person, if I spent my entire life trying to understand and learn and be with that person, we would always be separated from our isolation of our own head and our existential isolation there. And so like, when you start to extrapolate that out to see that everyone is a full universe, I think, yeah, we want to slow down a little bit with the language and the meaning-making. And when you call me your partner, what does that mean? Because it might mean very different things to me. And I love nerding out on that. That's some of the processing I love of, like, what does partner mean to you? What does it mean to me? What do we want it to mean together?
Dedeker: So I'm curious about what you believed and knew about your own Relationship Anarchy practice when you were heading into doing this research, and if the process of collecting this data itself changed what you knew and believed about your own Relationship Anarchy practice.
Nicole: Just imagine me, like, writing it, practicing it, and then also training in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy all at the same time. I was like, "Ooh, ooh, where are we?" I think the— one of the biggest things that I'm grateful for was my training in relational cultural theory, which is the feminist lineage of psychology that started in the '70s when women started being able to go to college and all the other things. And what I really love about that is they were very adamant in saying that there is no self. And I have tripped out on this concept for many times and could nerd about it for a lifetime. They would say there is no self, there is always the self-in-relation. Very strict about that.
Dedeker: Whoa, what does—
Nicole: what does this mean? So I think in terms of your question, Dedeker, I came in with such an individualistic mindset, like, here's me, here's my partner, here's me. And through my training in Clinical Psychology, really studying that theory and understanding how much of me is an influence of every relationship that I have ever had in my entire life? And I usually ground that theory into the very present moment of this language that I'm speaking to you called English. I didn't create this, nor did I teach myself this. Other people taught me it. And so I'm living, breathing all of that, right? And so when we really think about how interconnected we are, I think that was the biggest thing that really shifted my reality. I mean, we talk about it too, during the holidays when people go back to see their parents and they quote unquote regress. Sure, you're regressing because your mirrors have changed, right? Your mirrors and relationships are mirrors and windows. So we do get to see into other people and we get to be mirrors for them. But just, if you want to change your reality, change your relationships. It will fundamentally change everything.. And I just don't think I had that frame going into it. I felt so individualistic, like, I'm Nicole, these are my cravings, these are my sexual desires, this is what I want to do for my relationships. And just a big dose of humility to realize how much of this is impacted by the society. And so whenever I'm teaching my students in my groups, it's like, I want them to have this understanding of that, that's balanced, like, the self and the influence of the society, and just kind of be curious about it. Where is it coming from? Does it feel aligned? Who is it serving? Who's benefiting, right? Because you can't spend your whole life going, oh God, do I have any free will? And I spent a good couple of years on the podcast at that one of like, do I have free will?
Jase: Yeah.
Nicole: And I don't know how helpful it is to go down that line of thought. But in the here and the now, just be curious. Be curious. Is it aligned? And I guess I also want to leave your listeners with an invitation to something that we haven't talked a lot about, which is the body. The field of psychology talks a lot about the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, and it does not spend enough time talking about the body. And if we talk about privilege, there are many bodies, especially in America, who don't feel safe walking down the streets for all different intersectional identities. And you're right, when you're walking every day with that kind of tension in your body, that impacts how you love other people, the kind of space you have to do these things. And so just a big invitation for anyone who's listening in the here and the now just to take a nice, deep breath and know that the more that you are with your own body and can provide the grounding, the safety, the regulation, even through just deep breathing, it's going to create more space for you to, one, feel pleasure— amazing— but also to show up for those other nervous systems that are in your ecosystem. And that the personal is the political. Every little piece does ripple out. And that's kind of what I try to ground in when it feels way too overwhelming and all of the trauma reactions are just swirling.
Jase: I love that. Thank you. So for our listeners who want to get more of you, read more of your stuff, check out your dissertation, all of that, where can they find more of you?
Nicole: Yeah, so everything is located at modernanarchypodcast.com. My dissertation is for free there. I also paid for it to be free on ProQuest, which is a wild concept that I had to pay $100 just to have my dissertation research be free. Talk about systems. We could keep going.
Emily: That's academia for you.
Nicole: No, I hate it.
Jase: Yeah.
Nicole: So yes, I have my own website where you don't even have to go through any of that route. You can find my dissertation there. You can also find my ebook, The Psychedelic Jealousy Guide, which is applying all the frameworks of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which we didn't get to today, but like applying that to your non-monogamy and your experience with jealousy. And then yeah, Modern Anarchy is also wherever you want to listen to podcasts. It's been a journey. I've been very public in that space of the growth edges, the crying, the tears, the mistakes, I always remember Dedeker, the toothbrush of your Metamour.
Emily: Oh yes.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Nicole: I just want to say thank you for being vulnerable about that. That impacted me as a listener.
Dedeker: I'm so glad to know.
Nicole: I was like, oh right, we're messy humans. And I think it's important that we can do that and we can share that because it makes people who are tuning in know that they're not alone in that, not alone in that process at all. So we're all on the journey. We're all in the practice together.
Jase: Yeah, thank you. And to everyone at home, we have a Question of the Week for you, which we're going to put on our Instagram stories the day this episode comes out, which is: Is there a friendship in your life that deserves the kind of intentional time and care that you usually save just for romantic partners? Love to hear from everybody about that. I know that's been a big one for me in the last few years of really prioritizing those, and it's been really rewarding and really cool. So I'm excited to hear people's answers to chat on our Instagram @multiamory_podcast. And if you want to discuss this episode more, the best place to do that is with other listeners in the episode discussion channel on our Discord server, or you can post in our private Facebook group. And you can get access to both of those groups and join our community by going to multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast.
Jase: Multiamory is created and produced by Emily Matlack, Dedeker Winston, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is "Forms I Know I Did" by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on Multiamory.com.