Show Notes fern (they/them/?) and Myco (it/its) chat about relationship anarchy and love. Image Description: The words "On love and anarchy" pop out in a bright white against a soft, dreamy yellow and red gradient background. Transcript: transcript doc Fern (they/them): Hello and welcome to another episode of Liberatory Naysayers!   Myco (it/its): Hello!   F: I’m fern. I use they/them pronouns.   M: I’m Myco. I use it/its pronouns.    F: Today we wanted to talk about…   M: Relationships?   F: Relationships?   M: Yeah.    F: Specifically relationship anarchy and our thoughts on that.    M: Yeah! I identify as a relationship anarchist and polyamorous. I believe you do too?   F: I do now, but I’m really new to these concepts and new to living my life with those values in mind. If that makes sense? I feel like you’re more experienced with that. I’m kinda the baby polyamorous relationship anarchist.   M: I’ve been calling myself a relationship anarchist for at least eleven or twelve years I wanna say. Polyamorous as well. Not that my beginning experiences in any of this were any good. It’s a learning curve. Especially out in the world where hierarchies are really really normalized.    F: My experience with polyamory specifically is fraught with misconceptions and abuse. So the understanding that I have now is radically different from the understanding I had when I started to realize how I felt about people in my life. My friends, my lovers, my partners. I was cheated on, then told that person cheated on me because they could love more than one person.    M: Yucky.   F: That’s a really shitty way to come across that concept and idea.   M: yes it is.   F: For a long time that kept me from being more open to that idea. There was a lot of pain tied up. A lot of personal hurt. The ironic thing about that is that I also feel like I love deeply and intensely more than just one person in a romantic way at the same time! It kinda sucks that I never got to explore that earlier, but here I am now.   M: The truth is he was just using polyamory as an excuse because just because you can love multiple people doesn’t mean you should be goin around acting on that without discussing it with your partners.   F: One hundred percent yes.   M: That’s not how anything works.   F: It was very what you would call “unethical” nonmonogamy.   M: You can have that arrangement. A don’t ask, don’t tell thing. But you talk about that ahead of time! You consent to that!    F: Right, sure. And that didn’t happen.   M: You don’t just go “this is what I’m doing!”   F: No, it was more used as an excuse to try to get me to not be angry and leave and to keep me in their life.   M: Yucky. That’s manipulative.   F: Very manipulative, yeah.   M: I don’t like that. I’m sorry you experienced that.   F: It’s very ironic. I say ironic because I probably would have been open to having an “open relationship” with this person that I was married to at one point. But they kinda ruined that for me I feel like in a lot of ways. So there’s that. Anyway.   Speaking of loving more than one person. I think it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this idea of there being a line between different types of love or kinds of love we have for the people in our lives. I wanted to hear your thoughts on that because I find that really fascinating.    M: Yeah. I am the sort of person where I don’t fully understand the difference between what people call friendship and romance. Right? Outside of specific scenarios you know. Power dynamics. Think of a power dynamic, those make lines a lot clearer. But between equals, the difference between friendship, like deeply loving your friends, and loving a romantic partner are not super clear to me. Even the difference between friend dates and date dates. What is the line here?   Part of me feels like it’s because it’s a hierarchy thing. It’s an artificial hierarchy.   F: Yup. It does feel like that. Especially when I thought I was monoam