I want to be in a polyamory relationship with my best friend and my current boyfriend who I love, but he is so against it he won’t even allow me to explain the different types of poly relationships there are… I really want to be with the both of them and I just don’t know how to deal with this. I haven’t engaged in anything with my best friend but I have talked to her about my issues and she even told me she wants it too, what should I do?

If your boyfriend is so against the idea of polyamory that he doesn’t even want to learn about it in the abstract, it doesn’t seem likely that he’ll come around to the idea of being in a poly relationship himself. There is no magic set of words or actions that you can take to change another person’s way of thinking or feeling.

If you really want an opportunity to date polyamorously and/or to date your best friend, it sounds like you may need to leave your current boyfriend. If you want to stay with your current boyfriend, you may need to let go of the poly dream, at least for now.

Note: Every time I give this kind of advice, I get a flood of comments, reblogs, and messages telling me not to be so fatalistic - that people can change, that I shouldn’t tell people to give up, etc. - but I think that can dangerously deny the agency of the other party and is unfair to both the letter writer and the s/o in question.

If someone messaged me saying “my girlfriend is VERY against anal sex, and doesn’t even want to talk about it or read erotica depicting it, but I think she’d enjoy it if she just tried it, and I really want to,” I don’t think it would be fair to that person’s girlfriend to dismiss her opinion as something that can be changed with enough gentle communication and information. I would not advise that letter writer to just keep bringing it up or make the false promise that they should hold out for their girlfriend to eventually come around. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t have to. It doesn’t matter whether someone else thinks her reasons for not wanting to are flimsy, or that she’d love it if she gave it a chance.

We cannot assume or expect that every monogamous person is secretly a repressed polyamorous person who could and would be happy being polyamorous if they were just exposed enough to it, if they were communicated with in just the right ways. Even if you believe polyamory is a choice anyone can make, not everyone is obligated to make that choice, and not everyone is going to.