Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following. We break those rules and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier, and more satisfied in the second half of our lives. I'm your host, Erin Keating.
Thanks for joining us today, everyone. Hi again to the longtime Hotter Than Ever Hotties who tune in every week for some real talk and real feels and hopefully some wisdom that relates to what you're going through and thinking about as you invent this next miraculous chapter of your lives and welcome to the new listeners who are checking out the show for the very first time. Maybe a friend told you to check it out, or you were looking for a new podcast to obsess over. However you found us welcome, welcome, welcome, make yourself a warm drink and relax. I'm so happy to have you here.
If you are a regular listener, you know, I love to talk about sex and relationships on this show and how some people are doing these things in a different way than we were told to do them different than the conventional married monogamy. We were told to idealize and really that we were told was the only option for us as young women.
This works great for some people. God, I'm fucking jealous of those people for whom monogamy and long term committed marriage, conventional stuff, all of that has worked out well for you. God bless. But for others, there may be different ways of approaching love and sex that could work for you. Lots of listeners have gotten divorced in midlife.
Some are dating casually. Some are dating multiple people at the same time. That has been me for a lot of the past two and a half years since my ex moved out and since I got divorced. Some women are looking for long term relationships where they can write different rules. Maybe you don't live together. Maybe you spend most nights together, but. Maybe you alternate whose house you sleep at. Maybe you live separately, but you travel together. Maybe you're exploring your sexuality, but not focused on finding true love. Maybe you're looking for a same sex relationship for the first time.
You have so many choices and my guest today is Dr. Joli Hamilton, is a relationship coach for couples who color outside the lines. She's a research psychologist, a TEDx speaker, a bestselling author, an ASEC certified sex educator, and founder of the Year of Opening, which provides comprehensive relationship education for brilliant open relationships. That is what we're going to talk about here today. She also co-hosts the "Playing with Fire" podcast with her anchor partner, Ken, and we're going to learn what an anchor partner is in this conversation.
She's been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, Cosmo, NPR, all the places you've heard of. Her journey to becoming an expert in how to open your relationship is a fascinating one. This was an emotional conversation for me because of the amount of trust and communication open relationships require. Certainly in my marriage, there was not enough trust and communication to make the marriage itself work, let alone open it up and negotiate how a polyamorous dynamic might work. Joli's message that you can have whatever kind of relationship and relationship structure that works for you. is really inspiring. And while that is hard to believe based on my own personal history, I want to have that kind of faith. And so I'm going to hold on to her message as long as I possibly can. All right, let's get hot.
Dr. Joli Hamilton, welcome to Hotter Than Ever.
Dr. Joli: Thank you so much for having me, Erin.
Erin: It is my pleasure. And I think you know your area of expertise, which is opening up conventional relationships to become more of a relationship that looks like what you actually really want, if that is what you really want. It's very much in the zeitgeist these days. There was a moment last year where I felt like I couldn't open up any of the New York press, the New York Times, New York Magazine, without reading something about people being poly, people being in a polycule, people opening their marriages. Ethical non monogamy. It is amazing to me how much this conversation has sort of taken over the cultural conversation about marriage and relationships. And before we get into kind of who you are and how you came to this work, I'd love to understand what you think is the reason for this. Why are we in this moment where this is what is up in terms of what we talk about with regard to relationships?
Dr. Joli: Yeah. So open relating is not new. Like as a concept. It's not new. It's not new. It wasn't new in the 60s. It wasn't new. It wasn't new in the 80s.
Erin: The boomers didn't invent this.
Dr. Joli: They did not. I don't tell them, don't tell them.
Erin: They really need to know the invented everything.
Dr. Joli: There is a history of non monogamy that dates back throughout the millennia because I mean, we don't have to look any further than the Bible to see that monogamy is not the only way relationships have gone. Right. That's not where we conventionally think about when we think about unconventional. But I think we're talking about it now because we can, for one thing. But also, let's just be real simple about it, the Internet. When I came out as non monogamous 15 years ago, 2009, I mean, I was very fluent. I owned an Internet company, I understood how to use the Internet. And still as I was like, what the heck is going on? I'm having all these impulses.
I'm in a supposedly happy monogamous marriage. We've been married 13 years. We've been together 17. I'm trying to Google and figure out what's going on. Actually, I was probably using Yahoo or maybe Dogpile even. I mean, it's going back a minute, right? There was nothing like I would turn up a few references. Luckily there were a few bizarre like back chat rooms or there was the Loving More foundation had started. So if you knew how to find your way through a V8 bulletin, you could kind of find something like, it was not simple without language, without a place to turn to.
Just click in, like, hey, I think I love more than one person. And right now, if I go to Google and I just type in, I think, think I love more than one person. What's up with that? Google's going to say polyamory is. And they're going to explain it. Not consensual, non monogamy is. Even if I ask a chatbot, it's going to tell me something like this. Because now we're aggregating human wisdom through this machine. Right? We're doing that.
And so now as we think about this, as all of us individually off in our corners of the earth are thinking about this, if we have access to the Internet very quickly, we can share language, we can share a narrative, we can start talking about it. It used to be that, like, so I live in a relatively. It's a suburban right on the edge of rural area. I would probably feel like an island unto myself. Like, I'm weird, I'm different. That's just not required anymore. I have people, I have clients all over the world in very conservative areas as well as very, very liberal areas. People in, you know, the Bay Area, where we think about this happening, or New York City.
But I also have people in Alabama, deep in Florida, Texas people. We're not thinking about that. Right. We're not thinking about, oh, you know, the hotbed of non monogamy in Alabama, but there it is. And they can find their people. And therefore there's a cultural conversation happening that just didn't have a way to make its way to our eyes before. And the New York Times is going to capitalize on that, of course. Well, of course.
Erin: And they'll get to it six months after. It's really, you know, the popular thing. But I also, yeah, I love this. I love that this isn't a new idea. I think we think because we come up in this Judeo Christian kind of tradition where monogamy is the only thing and serial monogamy is probably your best option for having multiple partners across your life, that is the assumption of the underlying like, well, this is how it is. But I've talked to other people on this podcast who have said to me, actually, monogamy isn't what we do as a standard. What we do is monogamy and cheating.
Dr. Joli: Yeah. I mean, look at the numbers.
Erin: Right, Right. And so, like, it is a fundamental lie to say everybody's monogamous. That's the default. The default is actually monogamy with a side order of infidelity, which is fascinating to me. I also think a lot of the gatekeepers for these media outlets are us, like, you know, with professional women in midlife who maybe have been married for a while and are going, what's in this for me?
Dr. Joli: Yeah. Oh, at a certain point, yeah. It is. The, the cliche is this is about a CIS het man, usually white and, you know, middle class, upper middle class, who wants to have multiple female partners. That is, it's a cliche for a reason. I'm not saying that doesn't exist. It does. It is not what I see amongst my clientele.
It is just not, what I see are creative thinkers. What I see are powerful women who are realizing, wait a minute, I didn't actually select my life and I'm going to be intentional now. I tend to work with people especially who are, you know, between like 37 and 55. That's a really common time. They're doing their differentiation, they're coming into their individuation journey, they're starting to own themselves and they're like, hmm, well, maybe I, maybe I do still love my partner. And what if that's not all? So there is like, there is a national conversation happening because it isn't about just the cliche. It is also about what if we all get really conscious about what we want and not everybody's going to want non monogamy.
Many people thrive and love monogamy, but a lot of us never actually thought about it. And that's where my work really lies. It's about taking the time to think about it to really parse out what is a relationship, what's it for? What are we even doing here? And from there, deciding, does it have to have these elements that the culture tells me it has to be made out of? Or could I negotiate for a custom fit, bespoke relationship.
Erin: That brings up so much stuff for me. I can't even. I can't. I don't even know where to start. But maybe we start with you and your journey because you are a poly scholar. So how does one end up in this space?
Dr. Joli: I was a fitness trainer. I owned two CrossFit gyms in my distant past. And honestly, if you want to look at a hotbed of overlapping relationships, shall we say, working in the fitness industry is a place where people are often exposed to a lot of cheating. I was seeing a lot of cheating out there. A lot. People are changing their bodies.
Erin: Fascinating. Wait, can we Sit in this for one second.
Dr. Joli: Yeah.
Erin: So I'm looking to join a new gym. I've been doing Pilates, but I literally went to LA Fitness yesterday to see if I could join. And I had so many questions in my mind about the people who were there and what was actually going on. Of course, this is what I wonder about. What do you mean? It's a hotbed of non monogamy or a hotbed of.
Dr. Joli: Well, a hotbed, you know, that, you know, when they added to our Facebook status when we could put relationship status, it's complicated. That's how I described most of the relating that I was witnessing there, and my own too. So I started a gym. I was happily married, was. You know, we were running this gym. And so much was changing in our lives. You know, both of us were getting incredibly fit. That was really cool.
It also started empowering each of us. And one of the things that often wakes up when we empower ourselves physically is our sexuality. All the places where maybe things were a little dormant or dead or whatever, all of a sudden, maybe aren't feeling so dormant. So for me, a piece of this puzzle was being exposed to myself as a fully empowered woman who could do things and wanting to have a little bit more ownership. But also being in a room full of hot, sweaty bodies all the time was not bad for my libido.
Erin: How I'm choosing my gym, right?
Dr. Joli: It was not. And I didn't know anything about non monogamy then. I truly didn't. And then a friend of mine showed up in my living room. She's sitting there and she says, Joli, I have boy trouble. And you can imagine the consternation on my face. This is a person who was married, has a couple kids, we're all in playgroup together, and I'm like, I don't understand what you mean. And therein starts the journey where I'm listening to my friends talk about how they're exploring what I at the time thought of as key parties and swingers.
Like, I didn't even know what the language could be. I had no idea. But I gotta tell you, it plucked a cord because I had had a very unsatisfying sex life. My libido was always higher than my husband's and I unsatisfied that way. He knew it. We talked about it all the time. We'd been to therapy about it, but I didn't know that there was anything other than monogamy. So I thought it was always going to be about the two of us.
Figuring out how to address this, how I could titrate down and he could titrate up maybe, but we never got there. So when this word entered my lexicon, this open relationship thing, and it soon followed by the word polyamory, very soon after, I was like, multiple loves. I mean, I've been in love with multiple people my whole life. I, like, I fell in love with my girlfriends all the time. I didn't. We don't talk about. I was like, I thought that was like, Bruno. We just don't talk about Bruno.
Like, we. I thought that this was my cross to bear. I thought I was just gonna have to deal with it. And so when I saw people taking steps to redesign their relationship life, I was like, oh, I want. I'm interested in that. And from there, um, you know, things escalated very quickly. I. I found myself thoroughly entranced with the idea, but with no resources, I had no idea.
Um, 45 days after the day I told my husband so naively, I was so innocent. I was a sweet summer child. I hopped into the shower with him at like 1:00, 2:00 in the morning, and I was like, oh, my God, I have such a crush on. Insert the name of his best friend. Now, this sounds shocking, except I had had crushes that we had talked about pretty much every day of the entire 17 years we'd been together. It's just. They'd all been on women. They'd all been on women that didn't bother.
Erin: That's like non threatening and actually kind of maybe hot for him.
Dr. Joli: Exactly. And so I didn't, again, so naive. Did not realize that this was going to rattle him right to his core. The good news is 45 days from that day was he was like, okay, I see you, I hear you, I'm out. That is not for me. I don't want that. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Erin: Like, I'm out of the marriage altogether.
Dr. Joli: Out of the marriage. I'm done. I'm done. Because I. Because I. It was so fast. We had four kids. It was so fast. And a business that we had just opened. It was incredibly fast and hard. So. And I had no resources and no one was talking about this publicly.
Erin: And you weren't doing anything. You were just saying to him, so what happened? I'm contemplating this idea.
Dr. Joli: I was contemplating the idea. And we had all been out dancing with our friends, this group of friends. And so there was like, energy. There was energy. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm Kind of crushing on this person. And now there's this energy. But now I've. I've added the word polyamory to our lexicon.
I have in. He can see that my libido's up. He can see that I am even more ramped up. I'm contemplating, hey, is this like an identity for me? Is this, like, who I am? Like, that doesn't mean I have to act. Act on it, but, like, is this a thing? And then I tell him I have a crush on a man. Those three things together. I mean, we landed immediately in the therapist's office, of course, but the therapist didn't know what to do with us either. No, they're not trained for this.
You have to seek out very specific training if you want to know about non monogamy as a therapist. I am trained as a therapist now. And that's not. That's not on our books. It's not there. So nobody knew what to do with us. And when I say the best thing he could have done was say, I'm out, I really mean it. What it did was expose that, in fact, our values were not aligned.
We had actually grown apart a long time before. But because I didn't know there was any other possibility, I had been molding myself to try to fit into a life that didn't work. And I was going to hurt him if I tried to force him to change. It just did not work. He was not even interested in making that work.
Erin: So, wait, was he happy?
Dr. Joli: You know, how unhappy can somebody be when they're. They're like all of their background life and all the invisible labor is handled, and they are at liberty to quit their job and start a business whenever they want. And then you pour your own savings account and inheritance into their businesses. I'm not sure. How could you be unhappy?
Erin: Well, there's no intimacy or not enough intimacy.
Dr. Joli: Yeah, he didn't care about that.
Erin: He didn't care about that.
Dr. Joli: He didn't care about. We've been together since we were 16, so intimacy was also something that was very childlike for us. And I find this happens to many people without realizing it. Like, what is intimacy? Nobody taught us. We just. We just played out the patterns that we had seen in our houses of origin. Right. And we did the best we could. And I wouldn't say that we were unhappy all the time.
Erin: Right.
Dr. Joli: But nor would I say that we were meeting each other's intimacy needs. We were. We were friends. We supported each other. We supported each other's dreams, even but there was. Well, I am in an. Except in an exceptionally happy marriage now. It was not like this. It was not like this. And that actually has nothing to do with the polyamory that I experienced now. Yeah, that's about being with somebody who can really be with you.
Erin: That's the part of it that makes me feel really hopeful in talking to you because, yeah, I didn't. I don't think I even knew how to want what I actually wanted in the marriage that I was in because it felt like anything I asked for would be beyond what he was capable of giving me. And so I, you know, let alone leave polyamory off the table. Like, we didn't have sex for 10 years, you know, and. And I was like, okay, I guess that's what this is like. My acceptance of a certain level of misery and domestic labor and blah, blah, blah. You know, it took a crisis for me to get out of that. I wish it had been 45 days instead of five years of, you know, of trying to extract myself from it.
Dr. Joli: But we all have our paths.
Erin: But yeah, we have our paths. Exactly. And mine has led me here to have conversations with, you know, women who are thinking about things differently so that we can all be more conscious in this next chapter of our lives. Because this is it, you know, this is the life you get. And if you're not willing to look inside to think about what is it that's going to make me happiest, make me feel the most fulfilled, then you get what you get and you don't get upset. It's like, you know, yeah, you.
Dr. Joli: I mean, really, if you're not willing to do that work, to look in within, then you can't be surprised that life is mediocre. It will be mediocre. And, you know, my experience was that my partner couldn't give me more. Like he. He was actually operating at what he had. I don't blame him. We were. We had become a poor fit.
And if he was operating at his 100% and I was operating at mine and we were a poor fit, I. I'm grateful that we stopped modeling that for our kids. And also that. That he was so crystal clear. Because I could have spent a long time thinking that the polyamory, the non monogamy was the problem. And it wasn't. It just. That wasn't the problem. That was simply a good reason for us to say, oh, we don't fit anymore. So, bye, bye, we're done.
Erin: Right? Things get catalyzed by something. Yeah, yeah. When, when relationships are a misfit or have become not right, you know, things get catalyzed in all kinds of different ways. And this was the catalyst for you. So let's start out with language because I think the language can be really off putting for people. And when we talked in advance of this call, I was talking about the Venn diagram of like Dungeons and Dragons and Renaissance fairs and polyamory and ethical non monogamy. And I find that being a person who dates on the apps, especially in la, which is kind of a hotbed of this conversation, I have met a lot of guys who have a copy of the book the Ethical Slut on their bookshelves with a spine that has not been cracked. So they own it, but they haven't read it.
They want to show you that they have it. But very quickly I became aware of the fact that you can say I'm enm, ethically non monogamous on your profile and all you really mean is, I want to sleep with a bunch of people.
Dr. Joli: Right? And that's.
Erin: Where is that. How do you validate the ethical piece of it?
Dr. Joli: Yeah, that's just casual dating, people. And please have at it.
Erin: Right?
Dr. Joli: It's fun. You can be, you can be of any relational persuasion and just be like, I'm casually dating. Are you down for that? And if you're not, okay, cool. We're not a fit. I would love to see the reintroduction of the casual dating. Yeah, there's no vetting process. Remember, anybody can put anything they want on their app. And I am also on dating apps.
Dr. Joli: And whoo, it is a doozy out there right now. Especially post Covid. I used to date on the apps and it was, you know, I would sometimes meet people who really like, they had a lot of theory, but they didn't really know what they wanted or who they were and they didn't know. No ethical framework. They had no ethical framework. Now it's an enormity. And I have plenty of people who tell me they're monogamous and I still see them clicking on my profile. So they're also not operating in any ethical framework that I recognize either.
Dr. Joli: So I actually don't use the phrase ethical non monogamy. I would never describe myself as, I will sometimes use the term consensual non monogamy just to help people remember that if you are currently partnered to someone and they don't know that you're seeing me, you're not in a consensual nominal. Like that's very clear. Right. We're not. So therefore, what you're doing is not going to fit for my relationship style. And it's not for me to uphold other people's like, I don't know what they're doing.
Erin: No.
Dr. Joli: But I get very nervous when people throw the word ethical out there. It feels very like there's this sort of, ah, There's like, posturing with it. It's like. And there's a little righteousness, but without an actual ethical framework, it's empty. How do you do this? It's empty. And I see a lot of people use polyamory, unfortunately, the same way they'll say, I'm polyamorous, and then I'll ask them a bunch of questions, and they are say, not available for commitment. They're not available to say the words, I love you.
Dr. Joli: They're not available to actually, like, make a partnership with anyone else. I'm like, oh, so you're open. But that's, polyamory literally means many loves.
Erin: Right.
Dr. Joli: Maybe we should just make sure that when we're saying polyamory, we mean available for emotional relationships as well as perhaps physical relationships. Sexual relationships. Right. So this is where language is, to me, so important. We could solve a bunch of our cultural problems if we actually had shared language, and we often don't. And this actually leads a lot of people to be like, I don't like labels.
I don't want labels. Just like, please, no. And that's because they've been burned by people saying things like, yeah, I'm ENM. And yes, I mean, Hardy and Easton went to a lot of work to write that book and three versions of it now. Crack the spine, bros. Crack the spine. Read the book cover to cover. And then I got another reading list for you. You can get that.
Erin: Right. I was recently in a relationship with someone who was married but had consent from his wife to play outside the marriage. But the more I heard about what that consent actually looked like, the more I was like, this doesn't sound like she's going so willingly into this thing.
Dr. Joli: Yeah.
Erin: Like, it sounds like you have said, this is what I need. And she has said, in order to keep the marriage, I will let you do this. Coercion started to feel really yuck for me. And I, you know, a bunch of things happened, and I just was like, I don't think I can do this because I am not in the world to hurt other women. And there may be other women who are comfortable with that dynamic. But for me, I was just like, you know what? I don't like the way this makes me feel. And as much as I was getting so many things that I wanted out of that relationship, I just wasn't sitting right with me and like my selfishness just couldn't override the yuck feeling.
These things are complicated when you're out there in the world and in. And I, you know, I'm dating multiple people and, you know, ideally would like to have one main partner, but where we figure out together because we're both secure and happy and love each other, like what it will take for us to both be happy in a long term relationship, whether that means it's just us or whether that means there's other people involved and what are those terms? But I've never been in a relationship where I felt safe enough with my primary relationship, anchored enough, and felt that he was anchored enough in his own sort of ego strength and all the stuff that you need and ability to communicate openly and honestly, like in order to have any of these conversations, that feels really beyond the pale for me in my lived experience, but not in what I would like ideally. So how do you even find that first person, let alone, you know, the others who come to play?
Dr. Joli: Yeah, I mean, listen, at a time when we are, you know, I opened TikTok today and I see that like the entire feed is just men arguing rather than getting up and getting a cup of coffee for their wife. Because their wife just said, hey, can I have a cup of coffee? And they're arguing about this rather than saying, sure, sweetie, or yes, I can do it in five minutes. So at a time when that is just our norm and we're swimming in that, I see so many people who are saying, you know what, I'm just going to focus on finding a person who is that person who's going to be thrilled that like, yeah, I would absolutely love to get you a cup of coffee. A person who's going to clean up their own damn socks. A person who's going to do their own emotional labor and go to therapy. Right. And so I respect the hell out of the position of like, I don't, I don't want to take care of anybody, especially in a heterosexual relationship. I don't want to take care of anybody else's emotional work.
I don't want to do that. I want to be relating, like, I love emotional work with my partner because he does his own too. And when that's the case, I think it's legit to just say, you know what? I'm going to be in this dating phase as long as I need to. I'm going to hold out for a partner who is all the way there for me. And to be honest, if I could find a partner like that and they were not open to being polyamorous, I could genuinely, at this point, say, I can make that commitment. I could commit to behaving monogamously. My identity is still polyamorous. I am, but I could behave monogamously.
But what I would do is put, I would put expiration dates on that. I would say, I can commit to you for one year, three year, five year periods. But we're going to be talking about this. We have to have agreements that this relationship may not last for a lifetime because I have other needs and I actually have that in my marriage. I'm married to someone. And every year we have a full relationship overhaul meeting.
But every three years, we have a full exit plan. Like, every three years, our marriage is on the table. Are we both in? Are we out? What are we doing? So for me, that having that primary relationship means also understanding that we don't know. We don't know whether that lasts forever. So finding people, yeah, that's not easy.
Erin: I mean, even that notion of, like, renegotiating it feels so radical from what I know of marriage.
Dr. Joli: Yeah.
Erin: Like, because you go into it and then if you have kids, you're like, well, I'm in this. You know, this is. I guess this is what I signed up for. And even though it doesn't look anything like what I fantasized it would look like. And yeah, don't get me started on the domestic labor piece of it, which.
Dr. Joli: I think, yeah, we could just do a whole thing on that.
Erin: But God bless Eve Rodsky for the work she's doing with Fair Play and all of those things. Right. But, you know, I think we are all kind of waking up if you're. If you're engaged in this conversation in this day and age. For our demographics, demographic one, we are one Demographic. Anyway, there's so much to unpack about the things we expected in our adult relationship lives and then what we ended up sort of landing on where we've landed and then deciding whether we want to keep that, whether we want to renegotiate that. And for those of us who are divorced, how do we want to navigate relationships and dating and sex and monogamy or polyamory or non monogamy? And like, all of it. It's so much to think about. But I think at the end of the day, what it comes down to is knowing what you want, right?
Dr. Joli: Absolutely.
Erin: And how are you so clear when it's so hard to be so clear? Especially if you want something that's outside of the cultural norm?
Dr. Joli: Yeah, this was, this is actually why I have all of my degrees. This is why. So those 45 days go by and I jumped out of the frying pan into the proverbial fire because I immediately found myself ensconced in a triad. I was invited into an existing couple's relationship as a third. And I mean, I went hard. I went, I moved in. It was then we all moved in together.
Erin: And you went and you have kids. You now have seven kids.
Dr. Joli: Seven, yeah.
Erin: And you had four at the time.
Dr. Joli: Four at the time.
Erin: How does that work?
Dr. Joli: They're old now, they're grown. It was a lot. The baby was two when that all happened, it was incredibly intense. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I would never. The reason I do my work is because I literally did everything the most painful way I think a person could. It was awful. I loved these people.
Heck, I love, I still love. My ex husband is a person. I love him. Of course, like love doesn't go away. We just, we conclude things. We allow them to grow into something new. And so when I did that and I had no tools, you said you spent five years extricating yourself. So I jumped into the fire and then had to spend five years figuring out that.
So I was in that monogamous container. And. Yeah. Did I know what I needed? No. Did I know what I wanted? I had maybe two things. I was like, I want sex and I want. I don't know. I didn't know anything. I had no idea what a relationship bottom line was. Not a clue.
Erin: What is that?
Dr. Joli: A relationship bottom line? This is something that is a requirement. Dan Savage talks about the price of admission. Like this is the price of admission. If you want to relate to me, this, this is a non negotiable for me. Everybody should have those, if you don't have your bottom line.
Erin: You don't know who you are.
Dr. Joli: So for me right now, it would be somebody accepting the fact that my motherhood is an essential part of my being. Accepting that I am committed to my business. And I will not fault that. That will not falter. It also is about someone who wants to engage in an ongoing sexual relationship. Like I wouldn't have a primary partnership right now. That was just a default of like, well, you know what? We'll get bored with each other after a while. If we get bored with each other, everything would have to be on the table again.
I'm not doing that again. No, those are my bottom lines. Which doesn't mean that we can't change. My partner, my partner, my anchor partner has MS, he could lose his sexual functioning at some time. We don't know at which point, but I'm not going to divorce him. But we have to go back to the drawing board and say, does this relationship work as it is? Does it need adjustments in order for it to work? Do we have to arrange things? Luckily, we're polyamorous. That arrangement is pretty easy.
But a bottom line is, knowing what your bottom lines are is incredibly threatening. If we feel like there are no people for us to partner with. If we feel like there's this scarcity mindset of like, no one will want me if I am hard. So then we start molding ourselves into nothing. We are just cotton candy ready to be pressed into some dude's mold. Don't do, it's not going to work. And this is true for men too. Like I watch these men who are like, I don't know, I just want like what people want. Like, what does that mean? It's right up there with saying, you know, I just want the regular amount of sex. What? There is no such thing. There is no normal amount of every day, right? Like, I'm like, okay, three times a day or never? Like, yeah, all of these things are normal for some people, everything's normal.
Erin: Most things are normal.
Dr. Joli: Exactly. Are they happening? If they're happen. If they're happening, they're normal for someone. So if I don't know what my bottom lines are, I've got a problem because. So when people are exploring non monogamy and especially if you're leaving the monogamous paradigm. So the monogamous paradigm is the mono-normative world you grew up in, watching your parents, your aunts, your uncles, your grandparents, everybody went to school with doing relationships basically the same way. At least as far as you could tell. Basically the same way then having 1,138 statutes, laws and privileges on our US law books that privilege or take into account your marital status.
Erin: Is that right?
Dr. Joli: Yeah.
Erin: And 1,138. It's not just taxes.
Dr. Joli: It's not just taxes. It's so many little things. So many little things. Hospital visitation, inheritance and all so many things.
Erin: Oh, my God.
Dr. Joli: Parentage. Yes. So all of these things, and then on top of it, your unexamined self. Right? Like, we grow up and we don't. Nobody says, sweetie, are you dating now? Are you more monogamous, more polyamorous? What are you? I mean, my kids hear that, but most kids don't get asked that question. My kid, I assume my kids are queer until they tell me different. They have to come out as straight to me.
Erin: My daughter came out as straight to me.
Dr. Joli: It freaks me out a little bit, honestly.
Erin: She told me she was bi. And then in sixth grade, we were in the hot tub, and she was like, mom, I have something to tell you. And I was like, bring it. Okay. And she's like, well, I went to camp this summer, and there were so many boys that I had crushes on, and I think I'm straight.
Dr. Joli: Yeah.
Erin: And I was like, this is the greatest conversation.
Dr. Joli: It's a great conversation.
Erin: This is the greatest.
Dr. Joli: God.
Erin: This is how far the conversation about sexuality, identity, all of this stuff has. Has evolved from when I was young. And I was just like, what do you think the difference is? And she was like. I said, do you think you had sexual feelings for the first time? And she was like, yeah, I think that's what it was.
Dr. Joli: Yeah.
Erin: And I was like, yeah. You experience attraction, of course, before you experience that. Love is the only thing that makes sense.
Dr. Joli: Right. And as a bisexual woman myself, I wake up every day and I'm like, how do you just know that you're not attracted to, like, almost half of the population? I, like, I don't know how that would work.
Erin: Right.
Dr. Joli: So I have to ask people, like, how does that work for you? I love that we are having these conversations with our children.
Erin: Huge.
Dr. Joli: But how many of us, I'm Gen X, we were not asked these questions. We were not. Nobody was asking this question. And I was bi, I knew I was bi as a teenager, but nobody was asking these questions. And so when we're trying to make this paradigm shift from this mononormative world, our unexamined self, all of the things that we don't even know, we don't know as we're shifting. And we get language, we get that first trickle of language. Maybe you're hearing Joli talk on a podcast, and you're like, wait, what? And now you have language and you start describing this. And now we are really in, we're in the muddle. Because that doesn't mean that you're polyamorous. Considering it means you're considering it.
It means that you're figuring out what you want. And so doing this paradigm shift requires an immense capacity to be in the liminal space, to be in the betwixt and between, to not necessarily know what's going to happen. But as we're doing that, we're going to have to make agreements along the way. If we're going to experiment, we're going to find out what we want. All of a sudden it becomes obvious, like, oh, if I'm monogamous, do I actually have a fidelity agreement? Like, do, do we actually know what we mean when we say we're monogamous? Like, do we know? Maybe we have to start defining our terms. Maybe we have to get real clear so we don't just do monogamy plus a little bit. Maybe we have to get clearer. And that means we have to know our needs, wants and bottom lines.
Most people don't know their needs, wants and bottom lines. And so they're trying to make agreements without knowing that, which means they're now making agreements based on what exactly. They're making them based on what they think they can get or what society has told them they should want. So this is all about a self awareness journey. That's. That is my work. My work is how are you going to get to know you? And from there we'll design your relationships.
Erin: It's very parallel to my experience of dating in midlife, period. And also the experience of midlife is very liminal. It's very much like, okay, I was these things. What am I now? What do I want? Oh my God, I've got 30, 40 more years. What the fuck? How am I going to figure out who to be, how to be, what to do for work, what. What I want out of relationships? Like, it is very especially, I think, for this generation of women who are more successful than any generation of women who's ever lived, who has experienced more agency, and yet we are still smacking up against all the walls of the patriarchy that have like almost become ironclad at this point where. Because there's so much fear around how capable we are. And yeah, I think it's.
I feel like if midlife is a time when everything is up for grabs, then why wouldn't this be up for grabs too? What do I want? Who am I? How do I want to live? How do I want love to exist in my life? How do I want sex to exist in my life? Like, what does that look like for me as an individual? I feel like it's such a period of soul searching if you're willing to go there. I think a lot of people are not. Don't want to. It's too scary. Or they're like, status quo is fine. Yeah, but they're probably not listening to this podcast, right?
So Jung actually spoke to this 120 years ago. He was talking about individuation, right? Individuation being the psychological process that we go through throughout our life, but specifically the one where we're intentionally differentiating ourself, our capital "S" self from the masses, from the collective, so that we understand where we align, where we don't, we understand ourselves as an individual. This is not individualism. It is not individualistic. This is about understanding yourself. When Jung would talk about this, he had this phrase and many people found it to be incredibly elitist.
Because you know what I think it is? Not everybody is going to individuate. Not everybody wants to be on an individuation path. Many people feel very held by the status quo. They feel ensconced in their current religion, society, school setting, whatever they feel like. Yep, this, the rules, the mores, all of that. It feels like a good enough fit for me. So I am not going to question how I am individual from this. And for a lot of people, for first adulthood, that works fine.
And then we hit second adulthood. Second adulthood comes banging on the door. And when it does, that's when we're in that period of, oh, I am neither this nor that. And some of us don't answer that call. Some of us are like, you know what? I don't care that it's banging on the door. I am going to put my blinders on and I am going to keep on moving forward. This marriage is staying intact. This career is good enough. I want my Land's End catalog. And I'm just going to get my vacation house. I'm good. I'm just going to go, right?
Erin: And I think, look, those who have chosen the inquiry path, like, might come to that with a little bit of judgment, but I fucking get it. Because I was a person who did everything to maintain the status quo and to pretend to myself that it was good enough, that I was happy enough, that it was, that I had all the cash and prizes and I had all the things that I had set out to get in my 20s, a marriage and children and a, A home and a career and an identity in the world, you know, and status. Like I'd work my fucking ass off for all that stuff. And it is terrifying to be out there without a net. And yet I like this person more.
Dr. Joli: When that call comes. When the knock comes at the door and it's coming from inside the house.
Erin: You are the house.
Dr. Joli: In this metaphor, you are the house. When the call comes, not everyone answers. And that is their right. That is their right. It's not even a privilege, it's just, you just get to, you get to say, no, I feel well held enough, this is fine.
So when I said it's elitist, it can leave people in a place where they feel like, oh, if I'm on my individuation path, like I'm in the cool kids club, I mean, I'm a Jungian, for God's sakes. Like, oh, we, it sounds like cool kids club stuff, but really what it is is you ready to be uncomfortable for, I don't know, the next 20, 30, 40 years? Because if you aren't, don't answer the door personally. When that, when that knock came, I was like, hell yeah, I'm opening. I'm going. And it spiraled my life out of control for a long time before I got enough legs under me to be like, okay, now I can walk my individuation path. And I'm actually walking. Before I was hitting a lot of quicksand, a lot of rodents of unusual size. It was not pretty.
Erin: Is that a reference to something?
Dr. Joli: Yeah, that's a reference to Princess Bride. Speaking of geeks and nerds. Yes, here we are.
Erin: That sounds like it's coming from that world.
Dr. Joli: It is fire swamp too.
Erin: Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's not the well trod path. Right. It's not supposed to be right.
Dr. Joli: If you can see the path in front of you, it's not yours, and it may work just fine for you. Somebody else cut that path. And if you want to walk on that path, go right ahead. But if you want to cut your own path, you're going to be out there cutting it. The path will not be there already in existence. That's one of the hardest things I think about, having our relationships touch them. Right. It's hard enough when we're just doing the inner work and then when we realize, oh, this calls my relationships into question. This calls my family structure into question.
Erin: Yeah.
Dr. Joli: And this is where people often find me, because they're like, I want to. I want to leave the monogamous paradigm. I want to move to what I call either a polyamorous paradigm or a paradigm of multiplicity, because not everybody's going for polyamory. So a paradigm of multiplicity where we. Where we're open to a multiplicity of options for how life could look. If I want to do that paradigm shift, I have to understand that I can keep some of what was in place, but not everything will be the same. So people usually seek me out because they want to, not at least just like scorched earth. They don't want to scorched earth it. And my podcast is called Playing with Fire for a Reason.
Erin: Yep.
Dr. Joli: Because we are like, I can't lie. We're going to explore. We're going to experiment. We're going to bump up against your complexes, and we're going to bump up against where you and a current partner may just not align, or you and the version of you who you thought existed. Nope. No longer in alignment. So you've got grief work to do.
You got stuff to reimagine, reinvent. It is effortful, I won't lie. I literally went and studied all the way through my PhD and then went back and got another master's just on top of it, because I still wasn't done answering the questions of how can this go most smoothly? How could we facilitate this?
Erin: So why do people think they want to open their marriages? And then why do they really want to open their marriages?
Dr. Joli: That is an excellent question, Erin. So I actually recently asked people why they want to open their marriage, what their motivation was, and the responses came back. So this was an informal study of, I got about 400 responses, and many people came back saying they wanted sexual variety. They wanted relationships that had emotional intimacy. And this is how I worded it. Emotional intimacy that seemed beyond what monogamy would allow.
It's a tricky thing. Like, they couldn't quite. It's that depth of intimacy that, like, oh, monogamy says I'm not supposed to do that, but sexual intimacy. Yep. It's right up there, wanting a variety. Also sexual variety, as in, I want different types of sex, not even necessarily more partners, but my partner isn't into what I'm into, so I want variety in that way. Also, some people are sick and tired of the nuclear family structure.
They're just done with it. So they want to bust that up. It's not the most common answer, but there are some people and they are like, I am done with a two parent household. I want a more complicated world. And this is actually what I was really driven by. I was like, yeah, let's have a multi parent household. That sounds amazing. So those are some of the things that they think they want, what they really want.
It depends. Some people really do find out that what they want is sexual variety. That's the core of it for them. I actually encourage people who realize that what their core principle is, is sexual variety is to consider that, in fact you're staying with monogamy, most of your relationship is still going to be based on monogamy. I would call that a version of creative monogamy where almost everything's going to follow the monogamous paradigm. If you want to maintain your household structure, your finances, your business, your career, if you want your co parenting and your creative projects and all of these things, to be with this one person you've always had them with, that's far closer to monogamy. With an added benefit, with benefits of maybe we go to sex clubs together or maybe we can have sex partners, but we're not interested in developing deep relationships. Maybe we actually do that swinger thing.
It's still a thing. You can still do that. There are lots of people doing it. Maybe we go to desire resorts and go to events. Maybe we have a policy where we do date, but we only date when we're traveling. I actually still see plenty of people who are like, yep, we have affairs. We call them affairs, but we both know about them.
And they only happen when we're away at professional conferences. That's what we do. All of those versions still exist. You can do those, but if you're maintaining those, then I like to think about how are we going to actually understand our monogamy better and have a really conscious monogamy because you're still doing monogamy by and large.
Erin: And is that also the same as monogamish?
Dr. Joli: Yeah, I would say that's close to monogamish. And monogamish, it can be a little tricky for me just because some people will say monogamish. And what they mean is, well, if it happens, it happens. I'm not going to leave them. And I think of creative monogamy as a very intentional, like we know exactly what our agreements are, we know what the availability for expansivity is. And here's the thing, we tell the people that we are having sex with that, we are not available for more. We are clear. We are conscious.
We are not going into the polyamorous community and acting as though we are available for deep romantic relationships and then being like, oh, sorry, no, not actually. I can only date you for six months. I have to break up with you after that. Or I'm only allowed to have sex with people once. Or like, what?
Erin: Whatever the rules, are you--
Dr. Joli: Whatever the rules, your primary partner?
Erin: Yeah.
Dr. Joli: Now we're talking about ethical frameworks. This is when we get into the actual ethics of it. So this is where monogamous might be the word someone uses. But when I heard, originally talk about it, he was like, oh, you know, like, we're monogamous, but like, you know, stuff happens and, you know, I'm not going to kick him out of bed for eating crackers sort of thing.
Erin: Yeah.
Dr. Joli: And that can work for people, too. And then we have people who are like, no, I actually want to reconfigure how I think about relationships. I want to base my relationships. Perhaps I center autonomy. Perhaps I'm centering multiparent household. Perhaps I'm centering community care, responsibility across a household. There's so many ways we can think about that, but if we're doing that, there are a lot of cultural norms to question, to set down. Right.
And this is where we also have to call into question, like, what does it mean to have a primary partnership? Because so much of the conversation is about people who are either already coupled or looking for that primary partner and then having other things. Except those other things are human who deserve full treatment as humans. And so we have to really grapple with what is it that I'm available for. So just as much as, what do I need? What do I want? What are my bottom lines? I need people to be able to articulate what are you available for with new partners who can do this?
Erin: This seems so hard.
Dr. Joli: That's why it takes a year, Erin. That's why.
Erin: Okay, so explain that. Explain that.
Dr. Joli: So when people come to work with me, whether that's my private work or my group work, the number one question I get is like, okay, can, like, do you just do a few sessions? Can we just book with you for a few sessions? I'm like, no, I don't do that. You can do a one time breakthrough session so that we can just get clear on, like, what the hell is going on. Do you want help or not? Like what's going on? No, the work starts at a year, a year. You need a year of very dedicated effort into understanding and articulating.
I teach from a custom built 500 page curriculum and I teach people, I am an educator first. I am not a therapist first. I'm an educator first. I teach people how to use tools. We cannot use the tools of monogamy to leave the monogamous paradigm and question it. We actually need new tools. We need new self reflections.
We need to be asked questions like this. Like one of the questions. Fourth week I'm going to ask you to tell me what is the purpose of your relationship, Your current relationship, what is it? What's the purpose of it? Most people scratch their heads and like, what do you mean? So I give them examples. There are lots of things, lots of purposes your relationship could choose, could to fulfill. But most of us can't actually articulate it. And so I'm moving people from the implicit, this sense that like, I don't know, I'm not in, I'm not doing my relationship, I'm just in it, it's just happening. No, we're going to do it, we're going to do it. So we spend a year and then after that year people have the option to do a second year.
We call that deep. So you can do the year of opening, you can do the deep, and the deep can actually go on as long as people want. That is the experience of being in an individuation oriented relationship or in a solo relationship with yourself where you prioritize your individuation as you relate to people and you want to really question like, what are we building here? What's going on? What are we actually doing?
Erin: Ah, it's so, it's so incredible that you do this work. And I have such a deep admiration for people who are therapists who deal in the muck of other people's relationships. Because it's so complicated and there's so much dissembling that happens in order to maintain a household, a relationship inside a set of families, inside a community, inside a culture, inside a religion, inside. You know, the relationship is sort of the unit of currency out in the world for so many people.
Dr. Joli: Welcome to patriarchy.
Erin: Right?
Dr. Joli: Like the patriarchy installed the couple as the unit of currency and control. So if we're going to question that, we are going to run up against our biggest unspoken truths.
Erin: I can imagine women being able to do this. I have a really hard time imagining almost any man that I've known in my life being able, not willing. I think there are men who I've known who would be willing to open the door to this conversation. But whether they could actually do the follow through deep work, I maybe it's just the men I've known, but like, holy shit. It seems like if that's the man in your life, like you are fucking lucky.
Dr. Joli: Oh yeah. Oh, so lucky. So, so, so lucky. It is. It is a non-zero number of men who are ready, willing, able, capable. And on top of that investing, they're investing the--when people ask me what, like what it costs to be in the year of opening, I'm like, it costs you a year of concerted effort, spending time every week in our group, having your meeting and then having a sit down with yourself and then having a sit down with any partner that you currently have. That's what it costs you.
There is a monetary fee, but that is not your problem. I promise that. Like the, it's the time investment, it's the commitment to looking at your. People talk about shadow work all the time these days. I'm like, what do you mean by that? Okay, I'll tell you what shadow work really is, is bringing material that is in your unconscious. Literally what you do not know about yourself doing the work. And there are lots of ways to do this. I teach a million different ways to do this.
Of hauling that unconscious material out into your periphery and then into vision. Holding it there long enough to actually contemplate it, really be with it before it slips right out of your hand and slithers back into the shadows. It's hard. It takes dedication. It takes a willingness to sit with holy shit, that's me. That like, oh, that's me. It is about facing where you hold privilege and power. It is about facing where you have no compassion, no kindness.
It is about facing jealousy and anger. It is also about facing all of the things that you can't own about yourself that are freaking awesome. We project things like intelligence, beauty, humor onto other people and act like we don't have them. So it's also a reclaiming of those golden shadow properties. The work we're doing when we're moving through paradigms, at least the way I do it, it is individuation work. It is shadow work because we're actually with that squishy icky muck. I mean, I say every single day, I'm like, it's a good thing. I like messes. I mean, I wouldn't have seven children if I didn't like messes I was.
Erin: Gonna say, yeah, you wouldn't have gotten a kid. Extreme tolerance for complexity.
Dr. Joli: I did my bachelor's, my two masters, and a PhD while I was homeschooling them. So clearly I like messes. But what I witness of people who are willing to prioritize in their life several hours a week, say somewhere between two and seven hours a week in contemplation, in conversation, in self reflection, is that we can move the ball a long way. You know that liminal space we were talking about being in, that betwixt, in between? Most of the time we get into the liminal space, and we're just like, okay, I guess I'm here. Well, this is kind. This is hard. This is confusing. I don't know what's here.
We can do things. We can move that forward, but it takes action. It takes a mentor. Right? If you're going through a passage, we want a mentor and we want some tools, and we absolutely want some ritual to help us move through. And I use all of those things to help us actually move forward.
Erin: Well, God bless, because that shit is hard. That, to me, is, like, the absolute hardest stuff of life. And also, my therapist recently said to me, well, you don't like feelings. And I was like, wait, what? It's been nine years.
Dr. Joli: She's, like, keeping a secret from you, Erin.
Erin: And you're telling me now I don't like feelings? I'm like, it probably took her five.
Dr. Joli: Or six minutes to figure it out. Erin.
Erin: Jesus, stop knowing that and not telling me.
Dr. Joli: Yeah, okay. I'm an ENTJ, which is an extroverted thinking type, right? So, Myers Briggs. I'm an ENTJ woman, like, we're a pain in the ass. I don't belong in the depth psychology world. I don't fit with my feeler therapist friends. So I stand in the space in between and I say, you know what? This is really hard. So let's operationalize it.
Let's put some structure to it that can soothe our nervous system in a different way. So, because I do love feelings, but it was a hard one, love of them. Like, I didn't come to it naturally. I love feelings now, but, I mean, I love feelings like jealousy. I love feelings that light me on fire and remind me that I'm alive. And being with other people who are having big feelings takes an immense amount of. Of willingness to face your own, to like, to be with your own feelings the way that you want to reject those. And not everybody needs to do that all the time.
Dr. Joli: That's you get to do your job, I get to do mine. Luckily, we like different messes.
Erin: For sure. For sure. But I'm very grateful that for the people who want to go on this journey that you exist. Because I cannot imagine being able to do it without facilitation, without support, without someone to sort of say, hey, have you thought of this? Hey, what about that? What. Let's go through, like, your foundational beliefs and what are the repercussions of making these changes? Because it isn't just like, you know, my partner doesn't turn me on. It's so much more than that. So I think I could talk to you for like four more hours.
Dr. Joli: I can come back anytime for all.
Erin: The stuff it's bringing up. But what do you want the Hotter Than Ever listeners to know about how they can set themselves up for the kind of relationships that they really want in this phase of their lives over 40?
Dr. Joli: Yeah, I want you to release yourself from the idea that your relationship needs to fit into anybody's box. It does not. There is no relationship model you need to fit into. Polyamory is not better than monogamy. Release those ideas. Allow yourself to enter that liminal space. Like if you have the bandwidth, answer that knock at the door with an open mind to what happens next.
Get yourself a mentor, someone who has already been down the path you see yourself heading down. Find them, follow them. There are so many people out there who are saying, hey, I was already in that big hole. I can tell you about it. And you know one more thing. I can't not say this. Don't imagine that you can't have the relational life you want. There are so many people out there who also want non conventional lives.
There are so many people out there who are willing to be in the mystery of how do we deal with jealousy? How could we ever deal with that? Doesn't monogamy protect us? There are people out there who do want to do that work. And if you happen to be of the, if you happen to be a woman who is attracted to men, start believing that there are men out there who will do this work and do not settle for less.
Erin: Okay. Yeah. You're speaking to my soul.
Dr. Joli: One of these days I'll start a dating app and it'll just be people who've already gone through my program. It'll just be that they're like, pre-vetted.
Erin: Please. Somebody needs to do some vetting, right? Somebody needs to do some vetting. Everyone is out there in the wild just doing it on their own. Braving it, just feeling it out.
Joli, it's so great to meet you. Thank you for this wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you.
Dr. Joli: Thank you so much for having me, Erin.
Erin: Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about different ways to look at love and relationships. Maybe you found it inspiring. Maybe you were a little confronted by it. I think I was a little of both. Maybe you just enjoyed thinking about how other people do things in unconventional ways. I want to hear what you think about all of it. So please come over to @hotterthaneverpod on Instagram and drop me a comment on the clips from this interview.
And if you leave a comment, I promise to respond to it directly within a week. That's how much I want to hear from you. I don't care if it sounds thirsty. I'm speaking my truth. I need your feedback to make this the best show I can possibly make it for you Hottie.
Hotter than ever is produced by Erica Gerard and PodKit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez.
Have a fantastic week. Enjoy this home stretch before your kids, if you have them, are out of school for the holiday break in Los Angeles, that break is three weeks long. Oh my God. I love them, but that is too long. It's okay. We'll get through this together.
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