Check In With Your Partners this Holiday Season

Written By Leanne Yau

If you're spending time with family with one/some of your partners but not others (which sucks, but can happen for a wide variety of reasons), how are you showing up for the partners who are impacted by this situation? What are other ways you can make them feel loved and appreciated this holiday season?

Don't make assumptions about how someone feels - actively check in with everyone important to you about their expectations and needs, and hold space for any difficult emotions.

This year is the first time I am spending Christmas together as a polycule with my partner, metamour, and my partner's family. My boyfriend's other girlfriend is joining us for Christmas this year, and she will be meeting my partner's family for the first time. I'm really excited for this, and I really hope they like her, but we did have to do a couple of things to make sure that she felt comfortable.

Firstly, we set up a meeting in November for his parents to meet the three of us alone. This was so all the awkward questions could happen before Christmas, and we could just focus on the festivities when the time came. And also deal with more questions from my partner's siblings.

We also discussed bedroom logistics of who would be sleeping where, and we decided to extend our stay from one night to two nights, so that she would get one night with our partner and I would get the other night. The three of us are not sharing a bed, I will overheat.

Overall, we're going to be approaching this as a united front. Because polyamory is a very difficult concept to understand for a lot of people and a lot of people assume that we're a throuple when we're not. Because, apparently, if my metamour and I aren't making out, then we must hate each other, right? But no, we're actually very good friends!

I'm in the very fortunate position of having a partner whose family are like literally the coolest people ever, and so I imagine there won't be many issues. They've got an accepting spirit, and that's the most important thing.

But this isn’t the first Christmas I’ve had in a polyamorous relationship, of course - and it made me reflect on the previous years I've spent Christmases as a polyamorous person. For example, the complicated feelings I felt when I was dating someone who was married, and it was just assumed that we'd be spending Christmas separately because we both had conservative family and nesting partners who we were each "out" about, and there wasn't much space to talk about what that meant emotionally. I knew there wasn't much we could do about the situation, but it didn't mean that feelings didn't arise about it, and that those feelings deserved to be expressed.

So this holiday season, be proactive about checking in with your connections about your plans - don't make assumptions and hold space for feelings even if you can't do anything to fix them. How are you spending the holidays with your partners?

If you found this article helpful, consider the following:

Leanne Yau
Previous

Polyamory Haters Are Just Telling On Themselves
Next

Polyamorous Single People Don’t Get Taken Seriously