How Do I Meet People?

Okay, either you’re single or you’ve got your primary relationship solid.  You’re centered in loving each other, you’re communicating great.  Now, you’d like to meet poly people and form some more fantastic relationships.

SCREECH!

How?

That’s going to depend on a lot of things.   Where you do you live?  Off the top of my head, if you live in Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, or Tampa, you’re in luck.  All of these places have well-established polyamory communities, and I can vouch at least one or two of  the people in each city are moderately sane and have been poly long enough to have grown a grain of sense ¹.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in any of those cities.   In fact, I live in a little town that has considerably fewer than 15,000 people.    Believe it or not, one can still meet poly people in such circumstances. I can, do and have.

The Internet is a big boon here.  Sure, there are dating sites.  I’m not even going to discourage them.  OkCupid and PolyMatchmaker are both poly friendly and in the interests of disclosure, I’ve met someone on a dating site before. It worked out nicely.

Even so, don’t be so damn goal-oriented all the bloody time!  I understand being goal oriented.  You want to try this new and wonderful lifestyle, and let’s be frank, some hot sex would be just awfully cool.  Not running it down.  Sex is great.  New partners are all kinds of shiny and relationships are fun, goodness knows.

But, mostly you’re not going to find good relationships playing the numbers game on poly online boards with a relationship scattershot.   You’ll probably get laid with this strategy, but if that’s mostly what you’re looking for, a sex club might be better.  Again, not running that down!   I’m not of the “Swinger is superior to poly” school of thought by any means.  I am concerned with making sure you know what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for sex, yeah, a sex club is a dandy idea.  Go for it, enjoy.

If you’re looking for relationships, then you’re looking for things in addition to the sex.  That means you’re looking, I hope, for people to do stuff with.   I think what really works better in the long run is the most banal and obvious advice you’ll ever hear.  Go outside and make friends.  Oh sure, use the Internet as a tool to meet people of similar interests!  But after that, go out to lunch with people, host parties, go to parties, organize discussions groups, get involved with stuff you like to do.  Yeah, you’ll have to take some initiative and get your butt away from the computer and facing the scawwy outside, but trust me, it can be fun!

Yahoogroups has many local polyamory discussion groups where people meet up in real life.  Meetup is another option.  If no local poly group exists in your area, you might want to consider starting one.  There are a lot of groups and resources that exist today because someone was looking for one, but didn’t find anything.

In addition to this, if you’re going to go to online discussion groups to look for partners, be careful.  Many of them are communities  where people know each other, share expereinces and hang out (virtually and otherwise).  Going in and announcing who you are and what sort of partner(s) you’re looking for would be about as well-received and effective as going to a neighborhood party and doing the same thing in meatspace.  You’ll look uncouth and probably are not going to find what you’re looking for.   A good way to find out the timbre of a group is to read through the archieve for awhile if the group has them or to lurk for a week or two to see what you’re dealing with.

But, when it comes down to it, the way to find partners is to meet people.  So, quit reading this and go meet people!

Be good until next week,

Mama Java

¹ And in most cases, saner than me, too.