Poly Pathways

Welcome to the Poly Pathways podcast, helping you create paths for practical polyamory.

Your hosts are Kat and Doc.

We're glad you're here.

Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of Poly Pathways.

This is a new poly resource for individuals, couples, and poly people who are new to this

life or exploring or just trying to be better communicators with all the people.

My name is Kat, my pronouns are she/her, and I am honored to be here with my longtime friend

and podcast host, Doc.

Well, hello everybody.

I'm also thrilled to be here with just the best person ever, Kat.

And so I'm Doc.

I am one of your co-hosts.

I am poly, I'm partnered.

My pronouns are he/him, and I'm just really excited to start this podcast journey with

you Kat and provide a resource for folks who are curious or trying to figure out poly in

just the regular life.

That's a really good intro to why we're even talking about this topic to begin with, right?

So I know for both of us, recent years have kind of allowed us to question our relationships,

our communities, our society, and even ourselves and kind of found a way of wanting more emotional

connections.

As a society, we're definitely opening up a little bit more on what our expectations

are for relationships.

So there's so much more representation, social media, media in general, for different types

of connections and different types of love, as well as what that might look like.

There's also a growing group of people who are outside of even the way you might traditionally

see poly represented in the media.

So like triads and triangles and like throuples, you know, are all the rage to talk about,

but there's lots of different configurations.

So I think we both felt kind of a growing urge to share what we've learned through our

own journeys and bring that to everybody else that as we challenge these traditional norms,

how can we do this safely, respectfully, and kind of grow with the community as a whole

and give back kind of what we learned to other people.

I think this is really unique, especially for Daka and myself, because all of our resources

that we've seen are from a very particular lens.

And we have a different lens that we're bringing to you because we are not actually partnered

to each other.

We have partners outside of this.

But this is also a very relevant topic for where we are as a society in this moment.

And there's no one way to poly.

And I think that's part of what's interesting about this is that what we've come through

to our with our own journeys through poly is that everything's made up anyway.

And while we may have accepted how things were made up for a millennia, the truth is

it is just made up.

And all of the poly resources out there are valid and real and helpful and valuable in

all these different ways.

And again, Kat and I just bring a different perspective because we are two poly people

who are partnered but not partnered with each other.

And so we can help kind of help you to create your own loving relationships and your relationship

world in the way that you want to in a way that's safe and respectful and that isn't

going to hurt anybody.

Part of the real reason why we're doing this podcast now, apart from the fact that you

and I talk about this a lot, Kat, is, and we also talk to people who are curious about

poly and help provide them a little bit of guidance, lessons learned, mistakes made,

successes and cute poly moments that they can look forward to.

I think the last bunch of years have really allowed for us to look at what makes us happy

as individuals, as couples, as more than couples, as families, and to develop, to really question

that in our emotional connections with other people.

I think the world at large being in turmoil in post pandemic where we're all in a crucible

and everything was just pressurizing us, we really started to focus on what's going to

make me happy and really discover that in making ourselves happy, we in fact make all

of those around us also happy.

And so we can all have that.

It's not a finite resource.

And so the reason we're doing this now is because a lot of people are looking for ways

to open their relationships or explore their polyamorous direction and need some additional

support, need some additional community.

And that's why we're here is to form this community, to learn from you, to learn with

you, to hopefully provide something that helps you learn to do poly better.

Yeah.

And I think it's important to why we're doing this.

Like why us?

Why are we doing this?

And I think it's because both of us have our own bucket of labels and things that we assign

to ourselves.

So we're going to get into our origin stories a little bit more in the next episode about

our path to get here.

But just as a disclaimer, I have probably been poly my whole life and spent a lot of

years denying that.

My roommate was poly in college and explained to me what that was for the first time.

And I was like, no, that's not really for me.

But I found myself throughout my life seeking new and what I would call confusing connections.

Those connections you can't quite put a label on.

Are we friends?

Are we more than friends?

Are we special to each other?

But I've really only claimed the poly label for myself in probably the past four years.

But I also claim the label of being a dummy sexual or bisexual or pansexual, depending

on which one you want.

I have ADHD.

I have a family.

I have relationships.

I have a career.

I have a lot of those things that sometimes poly podcasters have a different lens because

they are very adamant about your uniqueness and things like that.

And I think for both Doc and myself, we're a little bit different in the way that we

can still be polyamorous and still in some ways fit within the lens of societal norms.

I don't want to say normal because I don't think any of us are normal.

Even the people that claim to be normal are not normal.

But we have a different lens on it because we're not making this our entire personality.

It is just something that is part of who we are and navigating that is slightly different

than people who are very loud and proud and out there, which is a perfectly valid path.

But it's not the only way of being polyamorous.

And I think that's why I am back for an unique perspective.

That's right, because you can be poly and still present into the world as your average

neighbor next door or coworker or friend or whatever it is.

And my story coming to poly is very similar to Kat's.

When I kind of took on the poly label for myself, it was after a lot of reflection where

I realized I probably was polyamorous my whole life because I also had confusing connections

with people and different ways of connecting with people.

I really got to know people on different levels and different emotional connections.

And I started to realize that the truth was that I really did love these people in our

own connective way.

And coming to poly, and again, we'll talk more about our poly journeys in the next episode,

but I came to this through a lot of mistakes.

I came through a lot of confusion and fortunately had people like Kat in my life and other people

in my life that started seeing more polyamory algorithms, as it were, and started to get

a language and started to say, "Hey, that is me.

I feel represented by this."

And that's kind of how I came to polyamory, but it also reinvigorated my passion for understanding

relationships and emotions and emotional connections.

I've read everything from Leo Biscaglia's early work on love in the '70s and '80s to

Jessica Fern's stuff and all of these books in between.

I have my own labels.

I'm polyamorous.

I'm also demisexual, but polyamory is just the way that I found myself being my true

authentic self.

And it opened up my world into this place that was so much more loving and so much more

possible for me to be able to be happy and share that with the people in my life and

my family and even my colleagues and friends in that way.

So that's kind of how I came to poly.

And we started this podcast because the truth is that we get asked a lot by people who are

thinking about their relationships and wanting advice and wanting to understand a little

bit more about poly from our perspective.

And we thought we would share that with you as well.

And so what you can expect is biweekly episodes on different kinds of poly topics like dating

or trust, family issues, finance issues, how to rupture and repair in a relationship and

all sorts of different types of topics.

And if there's something specific that you want to talk about or that you're curious

about, let us know.

We may already have an episode planned for that, but we also can benefit from your curiosity

and maybe have some perspective to share with you there.

Yeah, we definitely, as much as poly has brought a lot of joy to our lives, it's also brought

a lot of learning opportunities.

And that's the beauty of having a platform like this to offer you some of our learnings

so that you don't have to make our mistakes.

You can make new ones all on your own.

But we can take you through the good times.

It can take you through the bad times.

We can take you through a lot of those learnings on all those different facets that you might

not be able to get a perspective from Google on, right?

Even if you chat at GPT, how do I navigate my poly relationship?

That might not give you a real world experience that is applicable to your life.

So it's really taking those topics and those concerns and breaking them down in a way that

we have learned is successful, but that may also apply to you.

Right.

So absolutely subscribe to the, subscribe to the podcast.

So you're getting the episodes as they come out and engage with us on all of the different

socials, Instagram and TikTok and YouTube.

And you can find us at the handle in the show notes, but it's polypathwayspodcast is our

handle on it, on all of the social medias.

And you can engage there.

You can DM us there.

We do want to hear from you.

We do want to have a dialogue and form a community of people who are curious about poly or poly,

whether you're new to poly or you're very experienced in poly and just looking for a

different perspective.

This is that this is the connection for us to create that that knowledge base, that language

model that we can all use and hopefully help each other through some of those good times

and bad times and the little wobbles that we have in between those two.

Thank you for being here.

You always hear everybody say it takes a village and you get to be part of our village and

we get to be part of yours through this journey.

We hope you subscribe.

We'll see you in the next episode.

Thank you for listening.

If you enjoyed this episode, consider subscribing and follow us at polypathwayspodcast on all

the social medias that you enjoy.

Bye.