the language of how we love.

understandings people reach together about how they'll relate, arrived at by conversation rather than handed down.

a partner who feels like a steady, grounding presence in your life, someone you rely on and experience as central or enduring.

your right to run your own life and relationships and to have real say in what happens to you, without needing permission.

bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

the lines you draw around your own body, time, energy, and heart, what you will and won't do, what you need to feel okay.

the people you treat as family by choice rather than by blood or marriage, the ones you show up for and who show up for you.

a partner or lover who comes back around now and then, present when your paths cross and farther away again for a while, like a comet on its own orbit.

the warmth, happiness, or pleasure you might feel when someone you love finds joy or connection with someone else.

another name for ethical non-monogamy, used interchangeably.

an ongoing yes, freely given, informed, and revocable.

the built-in advantages an established couple carries into non-monogamy: shared home, finances, history, social recognition, and the quiet assumption their bond comes first.

someone who dates a polyamorous person while hoping or trying to pull them away from their other relationships and into monogamy.

Cuffing season is the stretch of colder months, roughly late fall through winter, when people tend to pair off for warmth and steady company, then often loosen those ties come spring.

an arrangement where partners agree to be non-monogamous but not to share the details, or sometimes not to know about outside relationships at all.

when two people's lives become so intertwined that maintaining separate boundaries, needs, decisions, or a sense of self becomes difficult.

the default cultural script that a relationship should move through a familiar series of steps: dating, exclusivity, greater life entanglement, living together, marriage, often children, with each step treated as evidence that the relationship is becoming more serious.

the broad family of relationship practices where everyone involved knows about and agrees to non-monogamy.

a strong, recurring link between arousal and a particular object, material, body part, sensation, or scenario.

a term commonly used when partners agree not to use barriers for particular kinds of sex.

a style that sits between kitchen table and parallel.

an arrangement where some relationships carry more structural weight or precedence than others by design, not just circumstance, often in the language of primary and secondary.

the person at the center of a v, in a relationship with two people who aren't romantically involved with each other.

the people you keep close and choose to tend.

an erotic interest that lives outside the conventional script.

a style where the people in a polycule are close enough to sit around one table together, comfortable and familiar.

an involuntary, consuming preoccupation with another person, often fueled by uncertainty about whether they feel the same way.

your partner's partner, someone you're connected to through a shared partner rather than through a romantic relationship of your own.

a relationship where one person practices or prefers monogamy for themselves while the other practices polyamory and may have other partners.

mostly monogamous, with a small and agreed opening: a specific kind of outside connection that both people are comfortable with.

the rush of a new connection, the giddy, absorbing, can't-stop-thinking-about-them feeling of the early days.

a partner you share a home or household with.

a way of practicing polyamory where no relationship is given structural authority over another, no built-in primary that can limit the rest.

any relationship arrangement that is not sexually or romantically exclusive.

a rule in some mixed-gender relationships that a woman may have other partners as long as they aren't men, keeping the male partner the only man involved.

a relationship, usually a couple, that agrees to sexual or sometimes romantic connections outside the pair, with the original relationship understood as the anchor.

a style where your relationships run side by side with little contact between them.

an older word for a lover, often historically carrying the suggestion of a relationship outside marriage.

loving or having intimate relationships with more than one person at the same time, openly and with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

one woman married to more than one man at once.

the whole web of people connected through a set of polyamorous relationships, a polyamory-and-molecule word for the shape the network makes.

a closed circle who've agreed they're complete.

one man married to more than one woman at once.

having as many relationships as you have room for right now, so you're not looking to add another.

a partner or relationship treated as central, often the one you live with, share finances or decisions with, or build the rest of your life around.

who or what you choose to attend to in a given moment, a tuesday night, a hard week, a crisis.

four people connected by a set of relationships, often two couples who've become involved with each other, though it can form in other ways.

an approach that doesn't rank relationships by default or assume romance outranks everything else.

specific do's and don'ts a relationship agrees to, often meant to manage risk or reassure someone through change.

a relationship held as less central than a primary one, usually with less shared daily life, entanglement, or decision-making.

practicing polyamory with your own life as the center of gravity.

a form of ethical non-monogamy centered on shared sexual experience, often between committed couples and often in social settings.

a common name, used inside swinging communities, for swinging itself: the social and sexual world of couples and singles who play together with everyone's knowledge and consent.

three people, each in a relationship with the other two.

when an established couple looks for a third to date both of them, mostly on terms the couple has set in advance.

a shape where one person is connected to two others who aren't connected to each other, the point of the v being the shared partner, or hinge.

an agreement that one partner can call for another of your relationships to end or change.