I’m writing this on the train to Media City to tell Channel 4 how open relationships are a functional and healthy way to conduct your emotional life. Handily, I am also having a little bit of a poly crisis.

Let me tell you why this is helpful.

It is so easy to focus on all the things that are fantastic about loving someone enough to challenge a lifetimes worth of societal expectations. To be proud that you were able to negotiate a relationship structure that works for you and not blindly conform to the mould we adopted from our sex-fearing, religious, great, great grandparents*. It’s all too easy, sometimes, to see people suffer hurt, heartache and infidelity and feel, yes I admit it, a little smug. Because you get to make a choice, we all get to make a choice – you can curb your love/lust or you can curb your jealousy, and that choice is mandatory.

So today, as the pangs of jealousy and insecurity began to wrap their cold little tendrils round my torso and attempted to squeeze the breath out of me – I remembered. I didn’t fall into this blindly. I made a choice and I chose to banish these demons in favour of the love, laughter, fun and freedom that comes from realizing sex and love are not only two discrete circles of a venn diagram which happen to overlap sometimes, but that each of those interactions are irreplaceable, and love and/or sex, is not, (really, really is not), a zero sum game :)

*Anyone who chose monogamy gets these points too. It’s the active decision which matters, not the answer :)