ABOUT ME

About Me

 

My name is Natalie Loveleen, and as far back as I can remember, pretty much since kindergarten, I always had a crush on someone. Sometimes I had a crush on two people at once and felt conflicted and upset about having to choose only one. I grew up in a traditional family with law-abiding non-confrontational parents, watching romantic classics while adhering to societal norms.

 

Then I grew up and went all in on the "American dream":  got a job, a husband, a mortgage, a couple of kids, planted a few trees, and seemed to have riched this ultimate vision of what my parents and the society taught me what life should be all about. To my surprise, I still felt like I was missing something... I still had crushes on various people I met, just like when I was growing up, but I never acted on them because "I wasn't supposed to." However, after having my second child, I realized that the amount of love I had for my first child had not decreased. I realized that I have an infinite capacity to love.

 

I started thinking about non-monogamy and polyamory and consumed all the literature I could find about it (my favorite book on polyamory by far is "More Than Two"). All of that reading and thinking eventually led to conversations with my husband about opening up our marriage. We talked about what that could mean for us and what the implications could be and decided to go for it.

 

This Medium article I found describes pretty much how I feel about polyamory - it's the permission given to myself to explore relationships with the people I meet to take any shape they become. Polyamory, to me, is the freedom to explore deep connections with the people that appear in my life without following fake norms and restrictions created by society in an ethical way.

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