Laura: Most relationship advice is about how to strengthen your commitment. But what if the most ethical thing you can do for your relationship is to accept that it might not, and maybe shouldn't, last forever? Sophia: Whoa, that's a spicy take to start with. It sounds like you're telling people to plan for a breakup from the first date. Laura: That's the kind of uncomfortable truth we're tackling today. That provocative idea comes straight from a book that has become a cornerstone of the modern non-monogamy movement: More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert. Sophia: Right, this is a big one. It's got a fascinating history. It came out in 2014, with a foreword by Janet Hardy, the co-author of The Ethical Slut, which was really the first-wave bible for this stuff. So More Than Two is often seen as this next-generation, practical guide. Laura: Exactly. And it's had a huge cultural impact, though it's not without its own controversies, which we can get into. It's widely praised for shifting the focus from 'how to get what you want' to 'how to be an ethical, compassionate person in complex relationships.' Sophia: And it's a dense book. It covers everything from sexual health to parenting to coming out. Where do we even begin? Laura: Well, the book starts by dismantling one of the biggest safety nets people reach for when they first consider opening up a relationship: rules.

Sophia: Wait, hold on. No rules? That sounds like absolute chaos. If you're in a long-term partnership, with a mortgage and maybe even kids, isn't a veto the ultimate 'in case of emergency, break glass' safety feature? Laura: That's exactly what you'd think! It feels logical, right? A way to protect what you've built. But the book uses a powerful, and frankly devastating, personal story from one of the authors, Franklin Veaux, to show why it's a trap. Sophia: Okay, I'm listening. A story is always better than a theory. Laura: So, Franklin was in a long-term, hierarchical relationship with his primary partner, Celeste. They had a veto agreement. For three years, he was also in a deeply passionate relationship with another woman, Elaine. One day, Celeste, feeling threatened by the intensity of that connection, decided to use the veto. Sophia: Oh no. How did that go down? Laura: He was in the car with another one of his partners, Amber, driving to work. Celeste called him and demanded he end his relationship with Elaine. Immediately. And never speak to her again. Sophia: Just like that? A phone call? Laura: A phone call. And because he had agreed to the veto, he felt obligated to comply. He pulled over, broke up with Elaine, and then, as he describes it, broke down sobbing in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Sophia: Wow. That's brutal. So the 'safety feature' actually blew up the whole system. The book is arguing the veto isn't protecting the primary relationship; it's just a weapon that poisons it. Laura: Precisely. The use of that veto was a major factor in his relationship with Celeste ending less than two years later. It destroyed the trust. This is where the book introduces its core ethical axiom: 'the people in a relationship are more important than the relationship.' Sophia: I've heard that phrase before. It sounds good, but what does it mean in practice? Laura: It means you don't sacrifice a person's well-being, their agency, their feelings, for the sake of preserving a structure, a label, or even a marriage. A veto treats a person, Elaine in this case, as disposable for the sake of the 'primary relationship' structure. Sophia: Okay, so if you throw out rules and vetoes, what's left? Just a free-for-all? Laura: The book proposes an alternative: building trust and using boundaries, not rules. Sophia: Okay, 'boundaries vs. rules.' Let's break that down. A rule is 'You can't see anyone on a weeknight.' What's a boundary in that same situation? Laura: A boundary is about what you control—yourself. So a boundary would sound like, 'I need quality time with you to feel connected and secure. For me to feel that, I need us to have at least two evenings a week just for us. I'm not available for a relationship where that can't happen.' Sophia: I see the difference. One is a command to another person. The other is a statement about your own needs and what you will or won't accept. It’s about your own actions. Laura: Exactly. It's about agency. A rule is about controlling your partner. A boundary is about taking responsibility for your own feelings and choices.

Sophia: That makes sense. But to set those kinds of healthy boundaries, you'd have to know yourself really, really well. It feels like the focus is shifting from managing partners to managing... yourself. Laura: You've hit on the second core idea of the book. They call it 'Tending Your Self.' The authors argue that all the communication skills and ethical frameworks in the world don't matter if you haven't done the internal work first. Sophia: What does that 'work' actually look like? Is it just years of therapy? Laura: Therapy can be part of it, for sure. But the book focuses on building two key things: self-worth and self-efficacy. And co-author Eve Rickert shares a powerful story about this, what she calls her 'dark night of the soul.' Sophia: Let's hear it. Laura: She and her husband, Peter, had opened their relationship. But things got rocky, and one day Peter told her he wasn't sure he wanted to be with her anymore. Her first impulse was pure panic. She offered to cancel a trip to see her other partner, Ray, to give up everything just to keep him. Sophia: I think anyone who's been in a long-term relationship can relate to that fear. The feeling that your world is about to end. Laura: Absolutely. But Peter insisted she still go on the trip. So she goes, and while she's with Ray, she's torn apart by this fear of losing Peter. But then, she forces herself to confront her absolute worst-case scenario: what if Peter leaves me? What if Ray leaves me? What if I'm completely alone? Sophia: That's a terrifying place to be. Laura: It is. But in that moment of confronting the fear, she has an epiphany. She realizes that it would be painful, it would be devastating, but she would be okay. She would survive. She describes it as feeling like she was in free-fall, and then suddenly looking behind her and realizing, 'Oh. I have wings.' Sophia: Oh, I know that feeling. The free-fall, and then the sudden realization that you can actually fly. It's terrifying but also incredibly empowering. So the book is saying you can't ethically be in these kinds of relationships until you know you'll be okay if they end? Laura: Exactly. That's self-efficacy. It's the belief that you can handle what life throws at you. It's not about being cold or detached; it's about not making your partner responsible for your entire sense of self-worth. That's where true security comes from, not from rules or vetoes. It comes from knowing you have your own wings.

Sophia: Okay, so you have your ethical compass, and you've done the self-work to grow your wings. But then your partner comes home, giddy and glowing from a fantastic date with someone else. The 'green-eyed monster' still shows up. What then? Laura: This is where the book gets really interesting, because it reframes jealousy completely. And it starts, of all things, with a story about an iguana. Sophia: An iguana? Okay, you have my attention. This I have to hear. Laura: Franklin tells this story about a friend who owned a large, usually docile iguana. But whenever she reached into its cage, the iguana would instinctively lash out with its long, whip-like tail. It never actually hit her, but she was terrified of it. She told Franklin, "I just wish it would hit me once, so I wouldn't have to be afraid of it anymore." Sophia: Huh. The fear of the tail-whip was worse than the actual whip would have been. Laura: Exactly. And he connects this to jealousy. He realized after his disastrous breakup with Ruby that he had been so afraid of feeling jealous that he couldn't handle it when the emotion actually arose. The fear of the feeling was the real monster. Sophia: Right, so jealousy is the tail-whip. We spend so much energy being afraid of feeling it, that the fear itself becomes the real problem. We build all these rules and vetoes to avoid the feeling, but we're just building a cage around ourselves. Laura: That's the perfect analogy. And the book goes deeper. It says jealousy isn't a single, monolithic emotion. It's a cluster of what they call 'imposter emotions'—it's often fear of loss, or insecurity, or envy, or a feeling of inadequacy, all masquerading as 'jealousy.' Sophia: So the work isn't to not feel jealous. It's to ask, 'Okay, what is this feeling really? What is this jealousy trying to tell me?' Laura: Precisely. Is it pointing to a genuine problem, like your partner is being thoughtless or breaking agreements? Or is it pointing to one of your own insecurities, a fear that you're not good enough or that you're going to be replaced? Sophia: That's a huge amount of emotional labor to put on the person who's already feeling bad. It's interesting because some critics of the book, and of Veaux in particular, have pointed to a pattern of expecting partners to do immense amounts of self-work, sometimes in a way that can excuse poor behavior from the other person. How does the book balance 'do your own work' with 'your partner might actually be acting like a jerk'? Laura: That's a crucial point, and it's a valid criticism to be aware of. The book does try to address this by providing what it calls a 'Relationship Bill of Rights.' It stresses that you have the right to feel safe, to be treated with respect, and to have your boundaries honored. If your partner consistently disregards your feelings or violates those boundaries, that's a genuine relationship problem, not just 'your jealousy to deal with.' The goal is to give you the tools to distinguish between your own internal stuff and legitimate external problems.

Laura: When you put it all together, the book's message is that ethical polyamory isn't a relationship hack or a lifestyle choice for the commitment-phobic. It’s a practice of radical self-responsibility. Sophia: It really is. It seems to argue that this relationship style forces you to confront your deepest fears about worthiness, abandonment, and loss—fears that traditional monogamy often allows us to conveniently ignore or, worse, outsource to our partner. Laura: That's it exactly. You can't make your partner responsible for your security or your happiness. You have to build it from within. The book is less a guide to managing multiple partners and more a guide to mastering yourself so you can show up as a compassionate, ethical partner for anyone. Sophia: It really reframes the whole conversation. It's not about 'how many people can I love?' but 'how well can I love, starting with myself?' It makes you wonder what parts of this 'toolkit'—the self-awareness, the boundary setting, the decoding of jealousy—are actually essential for any healthy relationship, monogamous or not. Laura: That's the big question, isn't it? The skills it teaches are universal. We'd love to hear what our listeners think. Does this idea of radical self-responsibility resonate with your own experiences in relationships? Let us know on our socials. Sophia: This is Aibrary, signing off.