Playing With Fire

When your partner falls in love with someone else, becomes a parent, or moves through profound grief during a breakup, you witness a transformation that has nothing to do with you. Except, as a witness, it also has the potential to affect you, and your relationships, profoundly. This week, we're joined by Lunarosa Peralta, a Xhicana therapist and poet specializing in consensual non-monogamy, k...

Have you ever wondered what your partner looks like through someone else's eyes? It's a question that can bring up a swirl of emotions—curiosity, insecurity, excitement, maybe even panic. But what if that willingness to wonder is actually one of the keys to navigating jealousy and building deeper, more differentiated relationships? This episode dives into the beautiful, messy reality of wa...

What if the thing that’s really stopping you from changing your relationships isn’t a lack of motivation or willpower, but a frozen imagination ? We all hold internal representations of ourselves, our partners, and our relationships in our minds. This isn’t a bad thing. But when those images remain static, we stop seeing how things actually are and starting interacting with their outdated versions...

Ever feel like you're having the same conversation about the same hurt over and over again? Yeah, we’ve been there. And the surprising thing is… that's not necessarily a problem. We just did an episode on conflict and how it can actually deepen intimacy (wild, right?). But during that conversation, something came up that deserves its own deep dive: closure. What even is closure? When does...

When we see conflict as a red flag, we pave the way for dishonest ‘peace,’ people pleasing (where no one is actually pleased at all), and emotional walls that try to protect us but end up leaving us isolated and disconnected. The truth is that conflict is not inherently a sign that something is going wrong in the relationship. In fact, generative conflict is the pathway to deeper connection and gr...

Leaving high-demand religion isn't just about changing your Sunday morning schedule. It’s about deconstructing a belief system that touches everything in your life. And when you start pulling on this thread, you might find yourself questioning monogamous norms too. These processes can open you up to a wealth of opportunities, but they can also bring a whole lot of uncertainty online. That’s wh...

Here’s a question we get a lot – at what point in a new relationship should you start making agreements? The answer might surprise you: you already are . From the moment you decide where to meet for a first date, you're making agreements. But most of us are worried about being ‘too much’ or making a fuss, so we walk around with unspoken expectations, trying to be ‘cool’ and ‘chill,’ hoping eve...

Figuring out what your wants and needs might sound simple, but it’s often… really not . To help you navigate this question, we’re bringing you a super special episode in a never-before-seen (and possibly never to be seen again!) format . This episode is excerpted from a community call inside The Year Of Opening®, our private community for people who are on the path of individuation and de-centerin...

Compersion – feeling joy for another person’s joy – is a beautiful thing, especially when it comes to non-monogamy. But, like anything that’s bright and shiny, there’s a shadow side to compersion, and we’ve seen it become a stumbling block in non-monogamous relationships time and time again. When we elevate compersion as a virtue in polyamory, we accidentally create some real problems. Surprisingl...

Relationships are messy, and when you re-imagine life with three instead of two, well, let's just say the complexity multiplies in ways you might not expect, even if you've been practicing non-monogamy for decades. So what does it actually take to build a throuple that both honors each person's individuality and creates a beautiful togetherness? And how do you navigate that when each p...

When a couple opens their relationship, there’s almost always one partner who tends to take more initiative – to seek out information, read all the books, listen to podcasts, find a poly-aware therapist, initiate important conversations (the list goes on!). This is not necessarily a problem, but it is a dynamic we see all the time, and when it goes unrecognized, unnamed, and unacknowledged, resent...

To celebrate hitting 250 episodes of Playing With Fire, we’re diving deep into something we've been asked about constantly since our first episode on it over a year ago: Relationship Re-Imagination . We introduced this concept back in episode 194, and the response was immediate and intense; people wanted steps, phases, a roadmap—something they could follow to Re-Imagine their relationships. Bu...

When something isn't working, even if you’ve been practicing non-monogamy for a long time, it’s really easy to default into the monogamous paradigm, which offers only a few set options. But what if there was another way? Reimagining a relationship means creating something new. It's different from de-escalation (which implies undoing a path you've taken) or uncoupling (which implies ending). Instea...

So you made the transition to non-monogamy… but you ended up feeling like you’re living two separate parallel lives in different relationships. This might not seem like that big a deal from the outside, but in many cases, having a siloed relational life can cause profound suffering. This isn’t just about having different relationships with different people (that’s normal and healthy, whether you’r...

People pleasing is not an effective strategy on the path to healthy, conscious relating. But adopting an approach towards autonomy that amounts to ‘I don’t owe anyone anything’ is…not it either. These extremes were adaptive patterns; they helped us survive difficult childhoods, but they don’t help us much as adults. True autonomy, when you really understand it and put it into practice, will streng...

Chances are, if you know one thing about conscious relating, it’s that communication is key . And if you’re good at communicating in monogamous relationships, you might think that those skills will easily transfer to polyamory. But even when you’re doing non-monogamy, there’s often a set of invisible monogamous scripts making things a lot harder without you even realizing it. This isn’t easy to sp...

The phrase "we opened up too fast" comes up a lot in the conversations we have with people who are transitioning from monogamy to non-monogamy. But what does "too fast" even mean? And more importantly—too fast for whom? Here's the thing: once you've crossed certain thresholds in opening up, there's no going back to a state of unknowing. You can't unsee what you've seen or unknow what you've learne...

Regular relationship check-ins might sound boring (maybe even like homework), but here's the thing: they're not just maintenance, they're the architecture that holds everything together. Most people either skip them entirely, do them inconsistently, or turn them into overwhelming marathon sessions that feel more like crisis management than connection. And if you’re only having check-in...

You decided to practice conscious non-monogamous relating, so you made well-thought-out, enthusiastic relationship agreements that reflect your values. And THEN, your partner actually goes on that date. Panic sets in, and those agreements are no match for what feels like a threat to your very survival . We call this attachment panic , and it’s what happens when jealousy activates our pre-verbal, s...

Ever wonder why you and your partner keep having the same frustrating conversations about decisions, even after you've gone through the agreement-making process? Us too! We've discovered that the real issue often isn't what you're deciding, it's that you've never actually talked about how you make decisions together. When we're crafting relationship agreements, most of us jump straight into the co...

Betrayal in non-monogamy can feel uniquely isolating. When you've already moved away from the traditional guardrails of monogamy—where exclusivity = safety and infidelity is the clear line of betrayal—what happens when trust is shattered? How do you even know what counts as betrayal when you don't have those conventional frameworks to lean on? This episode picks up where our (amazing!) con...

Betrayal isn’t a fun topic for anyone. But when it comes to non-monogamy, betrayal can actually be really hard to identify , because we often don’t have clear cultural scripts and shared assumptions about what’s okay and what’s not. This can open us up to profound experiences of betrayal that make you question not just your partner, but yourself and reality . Eve Rickert (co-author of the second e...

Have you ever felt totally torn between two seemingly incompatible desires? Like part of you wants the freedom of non-monogamy while another part longs for that "one and only" Disney story? You're not alone, and this inner conflict isn't something to rush past—it might actually be your greatest opportunity for growth. In this episode, we’re exploring the Jungian concept of "...

If you’ve ever been turned on by feelings of jealousy, you are so not alone. Dr. Marie Thouin wrote the book on compersion, so she’s the perfect person to join us to get real about erotic jealousy, humiliation, being “the unchosen one,” and why some of us get hot exactly where we’ve been hurt. In this reverse interview, Joli shares candid stories from early non-monogamy and triad life, using mastu...

Secrets, privacy, and the journey to authentic relationships can be a complex terrain to navigate. When one partner keeps secrets—whether consciously or unconsciously—it creates ripples that affect trust, consent, and the very foundation of connection. But what happens when those secrets aren't just kept from partners, but from oneself? This episode dives deep into the challenging work of movi...