I shared my ten reasons yesterday on IG (@itsangelahan) and I am obsessed with them, so I need to elaborate and tell you more.
1. I get to chat and hang with delicious men while my husband is working or sleeping or otherwise occupied.
I used to feel so much shame around asking Dan to pay attention to me. I had such a strong need to be loved in a billion different ways, and under the paradigm of compulsory monogamy, I was requiring Dan to be there for me all the time.
Can you imagine how it could have felt suffocating for Dan? Even if you love someone to pieces, you need your own space.
I used to feel resentment around Dan needing his own space because I made it mean that he didn’t love me enough. It was usually about proving how much he loved me. That’s like, the opposite of any kind of love.
Y’all. I tried to fill my time with other stuff. I dunno, I even fucking tried knitting. And someone actually recommended that I fill my needs with God.
As I was saying on Threads the other day, I love God. But as far as I know, he doesn’t have the capability of eating me out. I am doing God’s work by supporting more men to use their God-given ability to please women.
One thing I will not available for is to apologize for wanting what I want.
2. I have no problem initiating conversation with these delicious men because this is about freedom of expression, not trying to have what is not mine. (Because humans are not possessions.)
It is quite disturbing how forward I am. I mean, people would say I am being forward, but this is just how I interact with people. My body is very clear when she sees people she wants to spend more time with. And when I pick that up, whether it’s platonic or romantic or somewhere in between, I communicate that to them.
It just doesn’t make much sense at all to me to suppress the truth of my body when I might die tomorrow and turn into ash.
3. I get to practice honoring people as they are because I am not requiring them to be anything for me. It’s just like, ooh your amazingness fits a space in my heart perfectly.
The reason I am able to be so forward is that I don’t require anything in return. Maybe I’ll have moments of like, I wish they were able to give this to me. But the beauty of it all is that, if I cannot get something from someone, there are many others who can give it to me. In fact, other people can give me things I had not even entertained before. The possibilities know no end.
Whenever I interact with someone, I come from a place of possibility rather than limitation. Rejection is rarely a problem for me because I am already skilled at rejecting my own self and having my own back through it. (Which is why I am very much okay with feeling shame and guilt and all the nasty feelings because it allows me to practice care for myself.)
And I identify as a demisexual, which means that I don’t really find attraction until I have an emotional connection with someone. I can still make the assessment that someone is drop dead gorgeous, but the attraction is something that happens separately at the pace of trust and connection. So this is all about connecting with humans and practicing care for each other as humans while letting things happen organically. Because there is nowhere I need to be. No achievement or benchmark I need to meet when I am actively decolonizing myself from the need to be “good” in anyone’s eyes.
4. I get so many fun juicy things I can talk about with my husband and really, all my poly friends and partners and candidates.
I feel like I’m in middle school again, except this time I’m not entirely clueless about how humans work. And I’m not dealing with slimy and annoying boys who also did not know what they were doing.
What I noticed about men and humans generally is that we all want to be loved. And I am fairly good at loving. I am good at this because I also don’t require anything on my end to be “better” at loving. I trust my ability to love the way that it feels true to me, and if it ends up being what they are looking for, what a bonus.
I don’t require anyone to love themselves first before loving others because that is not how humans work, but I will say that it certainly helps when we practice being so comfortable in our own body that we create so much space to witness others feel belonging in their own bodies.
5. It makes our marriage stronger because you can’t fuck around outside the home when you don’t have your shit together inside the home.
Dan and I are redefining what love really is for us. My personal hot take is that the typical way we see love is so boring and fucked up. You’re supposed to be happy and partnered and perfect all the time, and I’m like, really? That really all there is to life? I would hate to be any and all of those things all the time.
I would not be able to stand myself if I am “happy” all the time. I would hate being “partnered” at all times because I would not know how to be alone. Don’t even get me started on “perfect,” the most insidious of an illusion that keeps us so small and linear.
Listen, as I always say, my truth doesn’t have to be your truth. If you love being any and all of the above, don’t let my voice get in the way.
Anyway, the way Dan and I are revising love is by honoring and practicing the following statements (these are primarily my words, subject to Dan’s additional thoughts):
There is no right wrong way to love.
We are always learning how to love more skillfully by being willing to relate to the human being at the pace of our own body. (That means, not rushing, not forcing, and being willing to be disappointed along the way because we know who we are.)
The way we are strengthening our marriage is how we lay the foundation for freedom and courage to be more accessible to our kids.
6. I feel less resentment around filling a role as a mom and a wife. Because I get to do what I want, I find my time with my family more of a privilege than an obligation.
I think we are right in the middle of dismantling oppressive beliefs that squeeze women into the paradigm that we need to fit any particular role. That doesn’t mean that we still feel it in our bodies because we have still inherited those beliefs, no matter how latent they may be, from previous generations.
So there are pockets of society where moms still feel the need to present themselves in a certain way in order to be perceived “good” instead of being who they are and expressing their truth.
A couple persistent things that the predominant mom culture pushes for is for moms to prove just how much their love their children and how they can do it all. I find this culture incongruent because loving our children unconditionally when they literally keep us trapped almost every moment we are with them emotionally and physically is…inhumane. And on top of that, we need to do other things like, have a great job, be a great wife, be a great daughter, etc.?
Why we are not questioning this ridiculous paradigm even more is beyond me. At least I am doing my part in not requiring myself to be anything in particular for the sake of proving my motherhood or wifehood. As I like to say, proving is for geometric theorems and bread dough.
7. It weeds out all the people that I need to perform around. Being the most unacceptable version of myself brings my real community closer to me, and I get to be closer to them.
(CAUTION - BARBIE MOVIE SPOILER ALERT)
It’s almost like a measure of success anytime someone is at a loss for words when they encounter my work. Because it means that their wheels are turning and transitioning to a new place. I feel like Gloria (played by America Ferrera) telling all the Barbies the truth so that they can live their truth. My message is like, “This is the kind of freedom that is available to you!”
(Sometimes I give myself too much credit, but whatever. 😂)
There are some Barbies who just don’t want to listen, and I don’t need them to listen. To require them to listen to me is to dishonor their sovereignty.
And then there are people who have already been living that life. And others who want to live that life. And others who want to walk with me by living that life. And others who want to walk with me while still living their own lives.
Everybody is at different places, and I trust that my expression brings us closer together and allows us to have space to walk together in an incredibly lonely world. We are increasingly at a loss for words to describe the kinds of complex experiences we are having as humans in an ever-evolving and an ever-decaying world. We need each other.
8. Along similar lines, I don’t think I ever had “real” friends until now. All the people who are as unacceptable as I am have entered into my life and now I have like a dozen besties on speed dial for emergency crush-related problem solving board meetings 😂
You know one thing that’s floored me is just how many people who are already polyamorous (and have been for a while) want to hear what I have to say when they know that I am a newbie. It goes to show that experience in a particular area is an entirely different set of skills from the ability to express yourself and show your work wherever you are at on your path.
This is such an excellent example of decolonizing human interaction because we are building relationships not based on experience or achievement as the capitalistic system would like us to do. Instead, we are building relationships based on shared truths and engaging in a non-hierarchical and mutual exchange of information and skills that complement each other.
That is why the clients I have had around for the longest time are the ones I have learned from as much as they may have learned from me. Together, we are dramatically raising the standards of human interaction by telling any form of hierarchy to fuck off.
9. Also along similar lines, some people who were friends with me before I became poly also love me even more, so they have been promoted from friend to “real” friend 😂
Yo. There are friends that I have been with for a while, and when I tell them about polyamory, they’re like, holy shit. That actually makes sense. That actually sounds like a very natural thing to do.
And we suddenly start having so much to talk about, and we’re talking about sex and relationships non-stop. It’s just so lovely. It’s like creating my own speakeasy, talking about things we’re not supposed to talk about and conspiring to create a world that we’re not supposed to build.
Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong time because this journey can be incredibly lonely. Sometimes I feel like it’s the perfect time to be alive because I am building something new and necessary from my own little corner of the world.
10. Decolonizing my heart allows so much space to decolonize everything else in my life, which means I find others’ approval less and less appealing.
(Can’t believe the Christian patriarchy has been keeping us from this freedom. Fucking bullshit 😂)
This may be pretty obvious by now. Decolonizing my heart has allowed me to become more skillful at challenging my own assumptions and ideas of how things are ought to be. How people should be talking to me. How I should be talking to people. How I make things my responsibility when it never was mine to begin with. Same for others.
It allows me to take more ownership of my own shit because whatever is going on in other people’s minds is none of my business. Even if someone thinks that I am so and so, it just doesn’t mean anything about me. I knew this intellectually, but the way I know I am embodying this at a deeper level is that I am actually living my identity even if it is wildly more unsafe than it was before to be me. Even if it comes with heartbreak, abandoned relationships, and risks to our family.
But because I have ownership of my own shit, I am able to expand trust in myself to be able to handle the most acutely uncomfortable situations. I am capable of being unhappy, wrong, upset, and angry. I am capable of both rupture and repair.
I am taking ownership of my own aliveness. Which means I give myself full permission to stop following any rules that don’t feel like home.
That is how I build my own home. Where I feel belonging in my own body. That is one thing no one can take away from me. The one thing I refuse to let others colonize is my own sense of belonging.
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You can find more of me at angela-han.com.