How to Get Your Communication and Emotional Needs Met in Polyamory

Jun 19, 6:21 PM | By Chris

Polyamory makes it a bit more tricky to fulfill the communication and emotional needs of each partner since more people are involved. Yet, with openness and honesty, clear boundaries, active listening, and compersion you can make sure that every partner’s needs are met and that everybody feels comfortable in your relationship. Find out more!

Meeting Communication and Emotional Needs in Polyamory: Openness and Honesty

The first step towards ensuring that your and your partners’ emotional needs are fulfilled is being open and honest with each other. Like in monogamous relationships, this builds trust, so important when more than one partner is involved.

Don’t conceal your feelings; be open about them, but also listen to what your partners say, and don’t take their words for granted. Even if their emotions might seem unreasonable for you, you cannot change how someone else feels, so being honest and finding solutions together is the only way to ensure that you all feel comfortable in your relationship.

Boundaries – The Cornerstone of Any Relationship

Whether you have one partner, two partners, or even ten, you need to set clear boundaries in your relationship. Why does it matter?

Boundaries in polyamory help build trust but also ensure that everybody feels comfortable. If you and all your partners state what works for each of you and what does not, it will be easier to meet every person’s emotional needs in your poly relationship, thus making everybody happier.

Boundaries are also an opportunity to compromise. When setting them, it might occur to you that your partner’s and your needs are slightly contrary to each other. As a result, you can come up with the middle ground right away.

Active Listening and Its Impact on Meeting Communication Needs in Polyamory

Good communication and meeting one’s emotional needs in polyamory requires active listening. But what does it mean in practice?

This term refers to listening attentively, understanding what your partner is saying, responding to them and reflecting on their thoughts and feelings, and finally remembering the information for longer. Some good practices regarding it involve:

• paying full attention to your partner (e.g., by putting your phone away),

• maintaining eye contact,

• noticing body language and facial expressions,

• paraphrasing what your partner said and reflecting on it,

• focusing on understanding what your partner is saying rather than responding to them.

Compersion – A Way to Battle Jealousy and Improve Communication

Jealousy is one of the main blockers in relationships. At the same time, it’s natural that we feel it from time to time. Therefore, you need to put conscious effort into getting rid of this emotion, as doing so is crucial to meeting communicating needs in polyamory. How to do this?

You should embrace compersion in polyamory. In a nutshell, this means deriving joy from your partners’ happiness. It helps you turn situations that would naturally cause negative feelings into positive ones. This might be a bit difficult at the beginning since it requires you to look into yourself, understand your emotions, reason through them, and work on your empathy. But in the end, it’ll pay off in a much healthier relationship, with you being more sensitive to other partners’ emotional needs and meeting them.

The Takeaway

Follow our tips, and you’ll find it easier to meet everyone’s needs in your polyamorous relationship. And if you’re looking to grow your network, be sure to check our poly dating app – a great place to meet more like-minded people.

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