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, fabulous Polypathways podcast listeners. Welcome to the latest episode. Today we are going to discuss professional. Polys, which is my way of saying people who are polyamorous and engaged in some type of career and professional life, which is pretty much most of us, right? We need a job to live. And how we navigate that job is a little bit different when we are polyamorous. So we're going to talk about career moves, their impact on relationships, decision making, work life balance. And basically, how does your work life impact your home and romantic life when you are polyamorous? I am going to be doing this episode solo today. As much as I would love to have Doc here on this conversation, he is going through some medical issues right now. So I'm just rolling with it on my own. So buckle in and we are going to have a great conversation. Are you enjoying this episode? Sure with your ploycule or anyone curious about ethical non-monogamy. Don't forget to tell us on social media with your thoughts. We're happy to welcome you to the conversation. Let me give me some numbers. So studies have shown. consistently that married men are approximately 11% more than they're never married counterparts. You get what's called the marriage premium. And this exists for both men and women, but the effect is more pronounced for men, right? Once you get that ring on your finger, you're considered more serious, more in touch with finances, and just generally more stable, I think, of a human being in the professional world. So this is very consistent across studies, going back decades, but there's just a higher average income compared to single people, right? So if you are married, you're making more money pretty much across the board. And that's at like 26.2%. So 26.2% of an increase comes when you are married versus single. Obviously, these are stats. They are based on a sample size of however many and studies over the last few years. And that's not sure of everybody. It depends on your career path. A little bit about me and my career path. I have jumped from traditional manufacturing to tech to different spaces, I've kind of pivoted several times in my career. I hold pretty high positions now, both financially and within the structure and hierarchy of the organizations I work with. So it gives me a unique lens on my history because I have been open about my polyamory in certain cultures and certain work spaces, and I have been close at others. And we're going to talk a little bit about why that is. And it comes back to this point that employers are looking for stability in their employees, right? They want to make sure they're not going to jump. They want to make sure that they're going to be a good return on investment of both time and money for those employees coming in. So if you are polyamorous, you might face some unique challenges in your career mobility due to your non-traditional relationship structures. I am currently in progress of writing a book about the impact of being. polyamorous publicly, not just in a career sense, but also in a social context as well. And some of the stories that I've heard specifically from the lens of career are being polyamorous, without a doubt, can impact your career positively or negatively. There's some on both sides of that spectrum. It can impact both your promotions, relocations, where you're working. It can cause major job shifts. And it can impact your relationships as well. So if there's a lot going on at work, of course, that comes home back home and sits with your relationships at home. So if you're a very forward-thinking, very aggressive career person, you bring work home with you, right? You're there 40 hours a week, 60 hours a week, whatever your career demands of you. And we always bring work home, right? We need to decompress for that experience, which will overlap into your home life as well. So we're going to talk a little bit about that in our next section. But first I really want to talk about what it means to be out at work. So like your water cooler talks and the risks associated with it and the realities of it. Number one reality, very important. We record this from the United States. So there's some commentary here that's currently relevant. But being polyamara is not a protected class in workplaces. If you go into the discrimination bracket that's been in hiring documents for years and years, It says applicants, employees, and former employees are protected from employment to discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity in some states. So my state currently recognizes that not all states do, especially with the ongoing debate around gender identity, which, let's just be clear, is absolute nonsense. National origin is also included there, so like immigration status. again, hot button topic right now. Age, age discrimination's on there, disability, and genetic information. So like medical history and things like that. Those are technically protected under the discrimination clause. What you did not see in there is marital status. So marital status, and even under the sex umbrella, like sexual orientation is covered, relationship orientation is not. Marital status is not on that list anywhere. So if you are polyamorous or you have multiple spouses or multiple partners or whatever you want, you having 10 boyfriends on the weekend is not a protected class or you having multiple partners is not something that you are supposedly protected from on the discrimination level. And I say supposedly because we all know that there's, you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you were discriminated against, which, is extremely difficult. As a woman in business who has had issues with a couple of companies where there was harassment and, in one case, assault, having to prove that actually happened is extremely difficult. You have to prove that you were discriminated against, which unless you keep receipts for your entirety of your career with a company, really, really difficult. I have had people fired from teams that I've worked with for age discrimination, and they could not prove that that was why they were fired, we were like, oh, their skill sets not in line with what we need anymore. But in reality, it was age discrimination. We were not providing them the tools they needed to learn the new skill sets that might have not been the norm 30 years ago when they took their job. So we know those discriminations happen, even with those protections in place. So it is worth calling out here that being polyamorous and having relationship orientations other the monogamy is not a protected class. Monogamy is not even a protected class, but it's the norm, so there are built-in protections there. So first thing to call out, right out of that. There are, however, potential rewards on top of those risks. So the risks are, of course, all the risks you would assume with, you know, being discriminating against. And those risks, I would say at this particular moment in time, I am currently recording this in February of 2025. in the United States, right? Those risks are higher right now. If you are other, if you are outside the norm with the current DEI protections going away and people not being as supportive of diversity equity and inclusion, it is important to comment that now might not be the best time to start waving your Pali flag proudly. I'm all for being authentic, but I'm also all about protecting yourself and your livelihood from discrimination. You want to protect your family. You want to protect your job and things like that. It is possible that you're going to see more negativity now than you probably ever have in the past. However, there are still rewards for being out at work. You can find workplace allies. You can find safe spaces. You can find community in places you would not consider. The first company I was ever publicly out in, I was shocked at the amount of support. It kind of came out by accident. And I was shocked at the amount of support that I had from my colleagues, from my boss. My boss actually cried when I told her because she felt like I trusted her. And I did. And she was very touched that I felt that she was a safe enough space to share something so personal with. So you might find allies and support in ways you did not think so. You might find inclusions in ways you didn't think so. One of my colleagues invited me to her wedding and offered me a plus two because she knew I had two partners. I don't think that would have happened if I had not been open with her about my relationships. Very interesting rewards can happen, but those risks are always there. So it's a balancing act. how do you balance the risk of being out at work with the rewards of getting that community and that support and feeling like you're being walked? How many of you have sat in an office? And I will say that remote work has made this. It's a little bit easier to kind of fly under the radar if you are working at a remote company. You're not forced into a lot of water cooler conversations. You're not all getting coffee or having your morning hit off together in a room. So you don't have to necessarily have those, like, chitter-chatter, small-talk conversations if you don't want to. On the flip side of that, however, being remote, if both your partners walk in the room while you're on a call, they might out you a little bit. So it's a little bit of give and take, but how do you handle those casual conversations? So Jenna's in the corner, and Jenna is throwing her bachelor at curry this weekend because she's getting married and she's really, really excited, right? Really excited to get married. You are also planning a commitment ceremony with your second partner. And how awkward is it to try to be excited, you know, for Jenna in the corner, but also be excited for yourself? And do you get the same level of excitement out of your coworkers as she would? Well, no. We tend to celebrate, you know, people getting married is like the pinnacle of, like, humanity in our culture right now. when somebody says, oh my God, I'm engaged, the outpouring of love and respect and, like, cheering and all that stuff is, it's huge. And we don't have that level of celebration for everything in life. It's, like, reserved for babies and for marriages. It's not necessarily reserved for promotions. It's not necessarily reserved for divorces. You know, buying a new house is sometimes up on that list. But if somebody is talking about their baby shower or their wedding shower or any type of social event, it can make that conversation a little awkward. If you are out at work, you can contribute to that conversation and talk about your partners. If you're not, then you're in that spot of how much do I share and what can I share with these people to create that sense of community? Because even though you might not like everybody you work with, you still have to work with them. So there's still a level of relationship there that needs to be maintained. And that's very difficult to navigate. we're going to talk a little bit about some of those navigation strategies in a little bit. It can be difficult, right? I'm just acknowledging that that's a really tough place to be in. And beyond the momentous occasions, there's also dating. When you date somebody new, you're excited, you're talking to your mom about them, or you're talking to your friends about them, you're talking to your other partners about them. You are all hyped up on your relationship energy. And you just want to talk. You just want to talk about them because you went out on this amazing date over the weekend. But imagine talking to, you know, Barbara in accounting and being like, oh my God, I had this amazing date over the weekend. You know, we went out for drinks. We watched the sunset and then we went on a little boat cruise. And she's like, wait, how are you dating? You're married. Awkward. Imagine that conversation playing out from someone who does not understand what you are or what you do. I feel like there's a lot of self-editing that can occur when you're dating. when you're having casual conversations. And especially if you're dating polyamorous and not married, and you start telling people, well, I dated, but on Saturday, and then I dated Matt on Sunday. You're going to get that reputation around the office that you're, like, sleeping around. And that hurts you professionally, even if it's not a conscious effort. I will say a lot of times at work, the microaggressions, and the leaning away from people that happens is not always a conscious effort. it's not always a conscious decision. It's just something we do naturally. We pull away from people who make us uncomfortable. And if you are living your life in a way that is uncomfortable, and it might not even be that they disagree with it, it just might bring into their mind questions. They're not ready to answer about themselves. They tend to lean away from you. And you can find those, you'll see when you talk to people about polyamory in general, they either ruin away or they lean in with their energy, right? They're either interested in want to learn more for good or for bad, or they'll lean away, per good or for bad. That kind of brings us to when you want to share and how much to share. So here's a couple of kind of checkmarks that you can use to navigate conversation. The first one is determine the purpose of why you're sharing. Why are you sharing this information? Is it going to improve your work relationship? Or is it going to create an unnecessary challenge? Or are you trying to just stir the pot, right? If you're bored at work and your work life is really boring and you just want to spice it up because you have to spend 40 hours a week with these people, stir the pot a little bit. And you're just trying to create something interesting. Be honest with yourself if that's what you're doing. That happens. We're human. These shows on reality TV where we're looking at people's absolute disaster of life exists for a reason. Some people just like drama. But ask yourself, is this necessary? Is this timely? Like, do I need to be sharing this information? Why am I sharing this? am I trying to get closer with my colleagues or am I trying to kind of upset the apple cart and prove that I'm different? Sometimes it really is about weighing more authenticity against potential bias or misunderstanding. Is it more important to you to be authentic and be out loud about this and to normalize it than it is to be misunderstood? For me, it's often a conversation I have with myself of I want to be authentic and I want to normalize this. So I pretend like it's normal and because for me it is normal, right? I've been living my life this way for a while now and I forget that it's not normal or I will intentionally ignore the fact that it's not normal because if I don't make a big deal about it, I'd like to think that other people won't either. Kind of weigh that with yourself. You know, are you more interested in being authentic or are you more on the side of being cautious because you don't want to hurt yourself? And that's a valid choice whichever way you decide to go. Point number two, identify your trusted colleagues. They've probably got a few of them. If you have nobody you can trust at work at all whatsoever, you probably need a new job. And that's easy to say and hard to do, but that should come first to mind. So find some coworkers that you think are more open-minded than others. Maybe they're working on a DEI committee. Maybe they are actively involved in the pride community or the pride grade. Maybe they are in some ways signaling to you that they are more safe than others. Maybe you've just gotten really close to someone and you're just getting that vibe like, yeah, this person would understand. If you do feel safe with them, start with one trusted person before discussing it in a broader workplace setting. So if, you know, Claire over in accounting, oh, it's check on me accounting people because I love numbers and accounting people love Newback. If Claire in accounting is like your new BF at work, like that's your work wife and you are always with that person. Telling her in a one-on-one situation, probably a great way to go. Announcing it at the weekly accounting update or being like, oh yeah, I spent all weekend with my girlfriend and my boyfriend out of a yacht in the Poconos. Maybe not. I don't even know if they have yachts in the Poconos. Don't call me on that one. But start with one person before you start dropping it into your weekly all hands, right? Try to drip out that information and see what the reaction is. And if you start to get the vibe like that's not going to work, move on to step number three. Consider those personal boundaries. It is completely okay and acceptable to completely separate your personal and your professional life. I have a very close friend and mentor who one of the first things she ever said to me, which is kind of ironic because now we're friends. We work together. And she goes, I don't frattenize at work. I don't do lunches. I don't want to go for drinks. I don't want to hang out. And I don't want to be friends. And I respected her a lot for being upfront about that. Like just drawing that line in the sand being like, I don't hang. That's okay. People will bristle at that because they think it's about them. But it's really about you. If you're not the kind of person who likes to mix work and professional, you can do that. At some of the companies I've been at that were, not exactly accepting environments. I found myself self-editing quite a bit. There was one company in particular I worked for that was very old school, global company, lots of people, very old school, just old school vibes. So if you think old school vibes, lots of old white dudes, that's pretty much this company. What I realized was they were very unaccepting of women. They were very of women in management positions, and if you had children or were married, you were considered less serious about your career than the male counterparts. And the interesting part about this job is this was before I was polyamorous or out about being polyamorous. I was married. I had children. I was completely nuclear family driven. But I found myself editing with colleagues and clients and things like that where it got to the point where people did not know I was married and people did not know I had children. The odd part that I started to notice that I didn't like that started overlapping into my casual personal life. So when I was meeting people, I would talk about my hobbies, I would talk about my interests, I would talk about my projects I was working on. And I would completely omit anything related to my family or my husband or anything like that. So it's interesting how you're a work life and kind of morph over into your personal life. If you start to do that self-editing, it is okay to say, oh, I don't talk about personal stuff at work. Like, that's just my policy. People have plenty of policies that they don't date at work or they don't make friends at work. This is especially true if you're in a leadership role. I have a leadership role. I've been in leadership roles for the past several years in that career. If you're in a leadership role, employees might perceive openness differently. and you need to be careful with that. A lot of people who are in leadership roles have that rule, right? I don't become friends with my subordinates. I don't have that rule personally. Some of my greatest friends are people that used to work for me. But some people have that rule where I don't fraternity. There are some people below me. But as a leader, and I found this to be true, if you're a good leader in some capacity, you have a lot of empathy, and you are sometimes a therapist for your team. One of my clients right now, I feel like I'm a therapist for the team because they're going through a lot of really big changes. So they call me. They verbally offload on me. And they expect the same in return. They want to be validated. They want to feel heard. But they also don't want to feel like they're alone. So if you have that back and forth communication from a top-down level, you have to be doubly careful with what you're saying about your personal life. So you don't want to overshare and then they don't trust you anymore. as a leader and as a trusted popin. Right. So be aware of that that you can change the dynamics within your team as a leader by disclosing some of that information. And I've had that happen for good and for back. I've had people trust me more because that was open and honest and authentic. And I've had people lean out because they're like, oh, my boss is a weirdo, right? So again, personal judgment is a lot of what's going on here. But I want to kind of highlight both sides of where this could be good or this can be that, especially if you are setting up some of those professional boundaries and some of those other boundaries. The next tip I would say is use neutral language. Instead of explicitly saying, like, I have multiple partners, you can face things in ways that leave room for interpretation. I do this a lot. So example, you can say, I spend the wake up my partners instead of my husband and my girlfriend. This thing kind of help you test the waters before you're disclosing. more. One example that I had is I went to go pick up a birthday cake or I was ordering a birthday cake. That's what it was. I was ordering a birthday cake for myself. And I remember saying in the phone to the woman, oh, one of my partners will pick it up. And she didn't say anything. Like, she's like, okay, great, thanks. But then I ended up picking up the cake. It was not one of my partners. And she's like, hey, you know, I picked up on the phone that you said, one of my partners, are you polyamorous? And it turns out she was a member of the community. She was also exploring but she was also heavily involved in the pink community and we had a lot of overlapping circles. So it was really cool, like, come to a moment. But it was a way to test the large. In my effort to normalize, I will sometimes drop things like that. Like, my partners are whatever, or I will go hang out with my partners this weekend. And I love the word partner. Love, love, love the word partner. Because I love the joke about being a partner. Like, you don't know if we're partners in a science project. You don't know if we're life partners. You don't know if we're detectives solving a crime. The word partner can literally mean anything. So if you get a really bad knee-jerk reaction from saying, like, my partners and I are hanging out, you can say my business partners. Or you can back track in a way, find your way back to safety. Like, that is really a cool way to kind of test the waters before disclosing more. Use that neutral language. And especially if you are pansexual, bisexual, whatever it may be, try not to gender your terms. Keep it neutral so that somebody is okay with you being polyamers, but they have a weird thing about trans people or gay people or whatever. You know, you can also test the waters in that way and just say, like, my partners, my partners. There are still people in my life who accept me as being polyamorous, but they do not necessarily accept the fact that I dated women. And that's shitty, but, you know, that's the thing. The last piece and probably the most important piece is to assess the workplace culture. Now I'm going to go deep here. So we talked a little bit about how people respond, but the company itself can kind of dictate that. You kind of have to observe how colleagues discuss their personal lives. If conversations around relationships and family are common, are there other people in non-traditional dynamics? Are there a lot of step parents, adopted families, LGBTQ, plus anything like that, like try to gauge those waters. If you're interviewing for Google, try to get that information as early as possible. talk to people, look at their history publicly. Yes, people do virtue signal or companies, I should say companies will like greenwash or throw their flag flags up for the year, but try to gauge whether those communities are supported there. Obviously, there's no polyamory flag that's being flown on LinkedIn every few months or something like that. But you can see how they respond to other groups and kind of use that as a gauge. But these are some areas. There's five kind of, kind of, indicators that I've noticed impact company culture a lot. The first one being corporate versus creative fields. So corporate environments, finance, law, tech, manufacturing tend to be more traditional and have a lot of arbitration, I've written rules about professionalism that really discourage sharing non-traditional personal details. I've worked in those fields. You know, aerospace, I would say, is also one. A lot of the heavy sciences at the top tend to be. be more traditional. Banking, for sure. Banking law. And I would say older sectors of tech. Older sectors of tech are really in that area. So depending on which environment you're on at a corporate level, might indicate how much cultural acceptance you're going to receive within that particular job and within that particular role. On the flip side of that, creative industries often embrace individuality, making easier to be open. We love, I used to work in creative, but I was like, we love, love the weirdos, right? Like, we love the people that are different and thinking outside the box because they're creating outside the box. So if you're in theater, if you're in media, if you're marketing, if you're in the arts, if you're in design, a lot of those fields have a lot more new way for accepting people outside the norm because those are the people that make the most creative impact in a lot of ways. So that's usually a place where it's easier to be open. Going beyond the industry lens, the second lens is, is it a legacy company? or is it like a tech startup? Startups really pride themselves on inclusivity and innovation, meaning like sometimes they might even have policies or specific cultures that embrace diverse identities. I did work with a startup who had a complete council dedicated to DEI that was not mandated at all, but it was ways we could actively engage and bring more people forward. Like they wanted their C-Suite to be as diverse as possible. They wanted, when we were, were hiring even. They wanted us to make sure that we were including at least 50-fifty split women to men and at least 25 to 30 percent could not be white. Like you could not be white. We had to look at everybody and we had to really fill that bucket. And I loved that because it forced you to really look for those people that were going to be different. And I will say in those environments, I know this, the jury is out like does DEI do anything? But the conversations you have with people who have very, varying backgrounds and experience are so much richer and more enlightening than if you're in an echo chamber. If you're in a tech startup or something like that, there's a good chance you're going to find more allies and more community than you would at a legacy company. So if your company's been around 400 years, and it's a family-owned business that's been passed down and passed down and passed down or sold a couple of times, and it's based on a lot of those traditional stuff where you just have a lot of legacy to overcome. If they've been doing something the same way for a long time, it is really hard to get that change made. And getting them to really see the value of equity and inclusion and anything beyond their little box is difficult. Not to say that there aren't people doing good at those organizations, but you might have to take a second look at how out you want to be if you work for an old legacy company like that. That's not making strides to be different. I kind of mentioned this a little in the last one, but the third point is geographical. versus cultural differences. So a company's location absolutely matters about workplace culture. I mentioned the Pacific Northwest, but like San Francisco is a completely different experience than Seattle. So I worked for companies out of both places, completely different types of people. And even San Francisco versus New York, like if you're a New York person working from California company, you felt this before, the geographical differences based on where you're from. If you are living down in the deep bread state, you might have a completely different experience in someone else. So pay attention to where your company is located or does most of their business. This is also true with international companies. You're working very heavily with people in China. The conversation and the openness is going to be completely different than what you would have with people that you work with in the United States. I've had some amazing conversations with some of my Chinese colleagues that I know. never thought I was going to have. And it never killed that like one of them would be super progressive and super open, super like want to be learning about everything and everything like that. But the rest of them were a little more reserved. And I was like, okay, this is great to know and helps me navigate better. In general, businesses in major metropolitan areas just because of the concentration and variety of people tend to be more progressive. While smaller, more conservative regions, companies that are like they're moving to North Carolina for tax preservation purposes or something like that, it might be signaling that they're not going to be as accepting. Like if they're homegrown in Kansas or whatever, no offense to Kansas. I don't know if that hurts true. But if they're like homegrown in a small town that's known for being like not really accepting of outsiders, that might be a signal to you that you might not be a singer. Number four is HR policies and protections. read over these. Read over these before you get started. Get your hands on these before you sign on that dotted line. But if you're already in a company, take a look at what's actually there. Like, do they have explicit DEI policies? Do they support different identities? Do they support different relationships structures? Do they have paid parental and maternal leave? I find that to be a really good indicator on how they think about relationships and family, right? Like, if they're trying to take care of their people, then that's a better sign that you're going to find more support there. And Pollyannery, again, is not a legally protected class. Like anywhere. I could not find a single state that it is a protective class. I'm willing to be wrong on that. If I'm wrong on that, please let me know in the DMs. But yeah, the level of risk varies based on the company stance on inclusivity. So try to be as aware as you can about HR departments. The last part about company culture is client-facing versus internal role. So if you are Jenna in accounting and the only person you have to work with, is Bob from accounting. That is a different conversation than if you are client-facing. So employees in sales, consulting, or client-teaching rules definitely face more scrutiny than those in internal and back office positions. One of the stories I heard during my research project is from someone who worked in sales. So they had multiple partners. They were in an idea of consent to share his story, but I'm not going to name drop him because he asked me not to. but basically he was a sales guy and he had a partner on the west coast and he had a partner on the east coast and he was very successful always meeting his quotas always you know on the up and up he was not stepping out on his partners he had two long-term partners on the opposite coast and one of his sales guy co-workers he had mentioned oh i'm going to go see my girlfriend when he was on the west coast and this other sales goes like wait a minute i thought you I thought you had a girlfriend on the East Coast. He's like, well, I have two girlfriends because I'm polyamorous. Like, and just straight up told him. Within three months, he lost his job. So it matters because from a company perception, the optics are important. And they want to know, you know, are you going to be messing around clients and stuff like that? And they can't ask those questions so they make a lot of assumptions on your rehab. Whereas if you are in accounting and no one really has to know about your products of life, I don't know why I keep calling out the accountants. Accountants are amazing. I love you guys. But like if you are in a profession that requires you to be more behind the screen, doing the numbers, doing the spreadsheets, data analysts, stuff like that, it's less of a risk to the company that your public perception is going to come back to you. That's definitely something you should take into consideration. All of these things together, however you decide to take this information, there are a lot of good things about being out and open with people you work with, being able to be your authentic self at work, to show up as you need to, to get excited when, you know, what's your boyfriend's birthday, or to get excited that you're going on vacation with your entire polypule, like the things that matter in your personal life, being able to bring those to work and share those with people that you interact with on a daily basis can be a really great experience. But on the flip side of that, since your work is your livelihood, you need to work to live. Unfortunately, we're in a capitalist society. You have to work to live, right? You have to have a job. You have to have income. And it is a balancing app to be able to prioritize being true to yourself while also getting that paycheck. The entire part of this first part is to just kind of illuminate some of the things to think about on both sides of the aisle, where you can find assistance, where you can find help. Some of the bonds that I have created through being open and honest in my network with people about my relationship status, it brought us so much closer together that I think I would have lost those contacts. when I left the company. So sometimes you lose contacts when you lose a company. I think I maintain some of those relationships that I have today simply because I was open and honest with those people. And that is value that I can never relocate. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to step out of the boardroom and back into the bedroom to talk about how our partners get to stay in our career and how our career is impacting our homebacks. Enjoying today's episode, be sure to share it with your molecule or anyone curious about ethical non-monogne. And if you're juggling a busy, polyamorous life and could use a little help with day-to-day tasks, check out Magic AI. Magic AI connects you with virtual assistance to make your life easier. Visit our referral link in the show notes and get up to $2,000 in free support. See how they can help you create more time for what matters. Who hits a stay in your career changes? We all know that career impacts her home life, which impacts her, relationships, our dating capabilities, all that kind of stuff. What does it look like when you're at home? Anybody who has any type of career that changes a lot, you're going to change jobs, you're going to change careers, you're going to go back and get your master's, you're going to go for your doctorate, you're going to do something different in your career. That's not a decision you can make in a bottle, especially if you have partners, long-term partners, families, kids, all that kind of stuff. Major career shifts are hugely stressful for you as an individual, but also for your molecule. It can be essential to include all your partners in those conversations. If you're going from a part-time job doing whatever to a full-time job that's going to take up a lot of your time, that's going to impact how much time you have to spend on your relationship. If you're going from being an office worker to a remote worker, do you have the space in your home for a remote work? Are you going to now be underfoot from your partner entertaining their partners? Those impacts that you're going to have and those waves that you're going to feel are a little bit beyond what you would normally expect from a career change. And how do you balance your career goals and aspirations and what you want to accomplish with the needs of your partners? I want to share a personal story in this part that is really interesting to me. So I am Kitchen Table Polly. My partners know each other. At the time of this story, I had a girlfriend who was not known to my partner. She was parallel. I was going through a decision on whether or not I wanted to change positions. And changing positions would have forced me to co-locate in a second city. So I have a very high-level job. So I'm in demand in my field. I am an expert in my field. And I had an opportunity to go work for a company that was in a different state than I live in. And because of the visibility and high level of the job, I would have had to be there half of the month, basically. I would have had to completely take an apartment, set myself up to live there, and basically live in two states. And I have two partners here in my hometown. I have two kids and I have animals and a house and all that stuff. But I would have had to take this apartment elsewhere. You can imagine how difficult the conversation had to be in my palpile. My boyfriend who does not get, you know, a lot of time with me, he does not live with us. But he is kitchen table. His concern was when am I going to see you? I, you know, I don't see you all that often now. We struggle to spend time together, all that kind of stuff. My husband, of course, is like, I'm going to have to be with the kids all the time. How are we going to support this? And a lot of the conversation about navigating the logistics, the emotional impact, the relationship dynamics, the child care aspect, the financial aspect. There are so many variables that went into that. Ultimately, I did not take that position. But in just figuring out how I was going to split my time and how I was going to do all of that, it meant a substantial financial impact. Of course, you were reading that against the impact at home. But all of those things came together. And we even got so far as to make like a schedule for how my boyfriend was going to come and support my husband, how they were going to work together as a unit to be there for the kids and to run the logistics of the household when I was not here. as the career climber in my pollicle. It was not a surprising conversation. I've always been an aspirational career woman. But for them, it was just kind of an aha moment of, okay, she's really going to go and break the world with doing amazing things, and we're going to have a support from the home side. That's just kind of an illustration of how career conversations can really come home in a big way. This also happens a lot when people become unemployed. So if you, lost your job and you're in a pollicule and you have been equally contributing to the household financially and all of a sudden you don't have a job. It's a really sticky situation because it goes back to working moms and a lot of that stuff like stay-at-home moms, are they actually doing work and things like that? If you're staying home and you're contributing in a meaningful way, that's great. But what I often hear is people losing their jobs, not getting another one, not contributing more to the household in other ways that are not, you know, financial. And it ruins the relationships. It basically, everything falls apart because it begins to feel really unequal. So those major career changes, even if it's not you making the change, if your partner's making a change or something like that, it can really upset the apple cart. So I heard this in ways of people losing their job and they're losing their housing and then they move in with partners. and then it's not, it wasn't the right time or it was too soon or, you know, the other partner that's already living there is taking offense to it because they didn't necessarily agree to it. Those major career changes can be super impactful on the nesting partners that are nesting together, but also everybody else around them. When you're going through these major changes, set some strategies in your head, how is this impacting our social standing? Is this going to impact my ability to go have friends? Is this going to impact my ability to take on more partners? This is going to impact my ability to even date? Is this going to impact or create long-term partners? Is it going to eliminate some long-term partners? Is it going to open the door to more long-term partners? One of the things that came up during my discovery process with this revocation was it was around the time that my relationship with my girlfriend was ending. It was one of those things. It was like, we only saw each other once a month, and I had to tell her very clearly, like, look, I'm going to be moving and I just don't want to waste your time and have you continually tied to me emotionally if we cannot spend time together. So that led to a greater conversation about time spentiture. But then there's that additional layer. Like if you're co-locating somewhere else, are you going to find somebody new in that location? Are you going to have another partner? If you're moving to a different state, if you're moving to a different house, if you're moving to a different location for your role, or even if you're just taking a different job. You're going to meet new people in that job that introduces all of the things we already talked about earlier in this episode about how to be out at work, how to talk about it, all that kind of stuff. Like all that's going to come into play. But you might also meet new people that change your perception of your relationship or introduce new potential relationships. All of those factors come into play that social part. How you're going to navigate as a family unit. And we're going to have to change their dating schedule. Are they going to have to change the way they spend time with their other partners? Is this a conversation that needs to involve your metas if you are parallel? Is this a conversation that needs to involve everybody? Like, do you need to discuss and find out if you need new boundaries around time and about how you spend that time? A lot of that can come out of this and it can change the dynamics of your relationship and your family dynamic that you have about that other person, but also their relationships with their other partner. If your partner suddenly has to spend more time at home to take care of your sick dog because you previously worked remotely and now you have to go back to the office, that's going to limit the amount of time they can spend with their other partners. That's going to limit the amount of time they can spend doing what they want. And it's not your responsibility. If you're the one changing role, it's not your responsibility to manage all this, right? It's team sport. Like, we're in this together. We're going to talk through it and we're going to work through these new boundaries, these conversations. can be uncomfortable, right? They can be uncomfortable if they involve unemployment. They can be uncomfortable if they involve a return-to-word mandate. They can be uncomfortable. But the underlying piece of it is you this plan for the future together. So consider the implications. If a new long-term partner is going to join a pollicule, consider the implications. Balance if this is the right time to make this career move. If it's a voluntary shift in your career is now the, the right time. I think that was the biggest key in my decision I didn't need was, is this okay right now? Is this something that I need to do right now? Is this something that needs to happen right now? Is this an opportunity I'm never going to get again? It's always easy to think that, right? I'm never going to get this opportunity again. But is this something that needs to happen right now? Is there a band-aid or a delay we can put on this to not make it have to happen right now? Often Sometimes we feel the time crunch and we make decisions that we would not otherwise make because of the fear that we're not going to get that opportunity again. We're afraid to not make a decision. If you lose your job and you freak out that you're not going to have a place to live, that everything's going to go off the rails and everything's going to happen, see if there's something you can do in the meantime until you can come together with your partners and make informed decisions together. Remember, it is a team's point. You should be making these decisions together. You should be having these hard conversations together. You need to work together to find solutions, even when it comes to your professional life, because decisions that you can make together are even better. And that might even extend to how open you are at work about your life, especially if you work together or you work in adjacent industries. Think about being out at work and how it might impact your other partners. Bring them along on this journey. It's not just about you. you, it's about your poli-chule. Thank you for walking this lovely path of what it's like to be a polyprofessional or a professional of polyamorous nature. The challenge is being out the collaborative decision meeting and the polychule regarding career changes and the implications of career at home. And then, of course, how you can be your best self and stay true to yourself while also being a professional and being very successful because we all deserve success and there's enough pie for everybody. Thank you for listening and hopefully we'll see you back here for the next time. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, consider subscribing and follow us at Poly Pathways podcast on all the social medias that you enjoy.
