What kind of relationship you have is your choice, and one choice isn’t better than another. What’s important is that you make a choice. That even if you’re you’re monogamous, vanilla, and heterosexual—you’re doing it because it’s what you want and because you and your partner have agreed to it, not because that’s what people do. What’s important isn’t what path you take, but that you know there are paths.

Paths? Fuck, there’s an entire open world out there once you get past “man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates. (Or rather, a world including “man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates,” because, hey, if that’s your thing.) There’s a million goddamn ways to love, a billion things “partner” or “lover” or “fuckbuddy” or “spouse” can mean to you, and you get to decide.

How fucking cool is that?

When there is no “normal,” there’s no reason to take pride in being “abnormal.” You just are. People who have heterosexual PIV sex for 3.5 minutes once a week just are. Poly/kinky/queer enlightenment wouldn’t mean anything at all if everyone were responsible for choice and communication in their relationships.

Who cares how many people you fuck or how you do it? The only thing worth being evangelical about is consciousamory.