Looking for Polyamory Advice Online

Looking for Love (Advice) Online 

With a bounty of advice about relationships and sex available online, it can be hard to know who to trust. Learn how to recognize the bright red flags of self-proclaimed gurus, deal with trolls, and ignore the hateful input from your local 

 Facebook group. Most importantly, find the great advice that will help you successfully navigate all your relational challenges. 

Go online right now, I guarantee it’ll take less than a minute before you come across some jaw-droppingly terrible advice promising to fix your life… for a fee, of course. Giving advice has always been a favorite pastime, but nowadays advice-giving has become a lucrative market that’s accessible to anyone with a phone. With the addition of profit incentives come bad actors.

Some people are simply unqualified to give advice on specific topics, while others have made a fortune from intentionally manipulating people (looking at you Teal Swan), and still others are just trolling. As you look for folks who can genuinely help you, it’s important to know what constitutes good advice and know how to avoid crap takes.

While some advice may be laughable; other advice is nefarious and designed to prey on people’s deepest insecurities. Since people who seek advice are often in a place of confusion, it may not always be easy to discern what advice should be discarded immediately. As a professional advice-giver, let me fill you in on what to look for!

"Because these topics are both wildly personal and universal, many people think that they are qualified to give their input."

Relationship and sex advice can leave you especially vulnerable.

Relationships and sexuality are complex topics to navigate, so it’s totally normal for folks to seek outside help or feedback. As a result, there is an overabundance of relationship and sex advice… and a lot of it is total shit. Because these topics are both wildly personal and universal, many people think that they are qualified to give their input.

Yet relationship and sexual advice can have enormous impacts on people’s lives so it’s extra important to ensure you’re getting good quality help from people who have your best intention in mind. It probably won’t be the end of the world if you take cleaning advice from a random TikToker. Worse comes to worst, you might be out a couple of bucks for a bottle of apple cider vinegar. However, listening to that same TikToker tell you to dump your boyfriend based on completely arbitrary “

” can have enormous consequences. We need to be extra cautious when looking for advice about personal matters.

As a peer mentor, I’ve spent thousands of hours talking with individuals and couples about their relationship and sexual struggles. People disclose incredibly personal information to me, sometimes things they’ve never told anyone else before. This vulnerability places a tremendous amount of responsibility in my hands because my clients are extending their trust and it’s my job to not abuse it. I work primarily with people who are new to ethical non-monogamy or first exploring their queerness.

: Dogmatic, gatekeeping, or framed as ethically pure.

: Meets YOU where you’re at and tailors advice according to your specific needs.

Both polyam and queer communities are full of folks who wish to gatekeep. Don’t get hung up on advice that is inflexible or framed as “rules.”The most important part of giving good advice is listening. Any advice that fails to first understand the person’s needs or goals, will fall short. There’s a huge difference between preaching and advice, yet most people do the former under the guise of the latter.

Telling people how they should live their lives according to you isn’t helpful. Giving good advice comes from the process of being curious about someone’s situation and brainstorming methods to move toward the goals THEY wish to reach. Advice isn’t about the giver, it’s about the receiver, and that dynamic needs to be explicit. Additionally, pay attention to emotionally charged language that is intended to stir a reaction to influence a certain outcome. If the advice-giver is overly attached to the outcome, find someone who is able to be more neutral.

“Let me know if this suggestion works for you, if not we can come up with another idea.”

"Advice that only looks at the positive isn’t fully honest."

 Clearly explains some of the potential consequences

The reason sex and relationships are hard to navigate is because there isn’t one right answer. Even great advice comes with consequences. Anytime you are attempting to shift a relational or sexual dynamic, there will be some friction. In the long run, the dynamic might improve but it’s absolutely necessary to address some of the short-term issues you may encounter. When I talk to folks about setting 

, for example, we explore both the positive and negative outcomes. Advice that only looks at the positive isn’t fully honest.

Similarly, great advice is specific, actionable, and iterative. For example, if you want to change a sexual dynamic, you first have to focus on the specific behavior or situation that you wish to address, come up with clean alternative behavior patterning, and then make necessary adjustments to address any hiccups. Advice that is too broad or vague is nothing more than pontification. 

“Try this suggestion out for a bit, then we can talk about what worked and address any issues that came up”

Goes outside the giver’s scope of expertise and/or is coercive

Anyone who positions themselves as an advice-giver needs to thoroughly examine their motivation as well as limitations. As someone seeking advice, you should be able to discern with relative ease why someone is giving you feedback and how they gained the expertise to do so. If an advice-giver isn’t transparent about their motives, look elsewhere.

Similarly, good advice comes from people who know the scope of their expertise and stay in their lane. While there is some truth to being able to speak on issues you’ve personally experienced, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in a place to counsel others. Don’t be afraid to challenge folks who are giving you advice, any good advice-giver will be open about what they do and don’t know. Good advice-givers won’t be defensive or evasive when asked about their expertise or motives.

 “I’m not qualified to help you with this topic, but here are a few people you can reach out to who might be able to answer those questions instead.”

"... Advice should never force you to accept a single perspective as the ultimate and only option."

 Cites sources and provides alternative perspectives 

Watch out for gurus. Anyone who positions themselves as the person with all the answers doesn’t have the level of self-awareness to offer meaningful help. As I mentioned above, it’s hugely important to only give advice on topics you have expertise in, and gaining expertise means doing research. If you ask me where a specific communication framework that I mentioned comes from, I’m able to cite my sources. In fact, I will most likely give you the title of a book I’m pulling information from before you even have to ask.

When you solicit advice, you want someone who has the capacity to explain how they reached the ideas they are suggesting. Advice that has never been tested before, is only good if you want to be a guinea pig. But most people who are looking for genuine help in their relationships or sex lives want to know they can rely on information that has worked for others in the past. People are very capable of reaching their own conclusions, advice should never force you to accept a single perspective as the ultimate and only option.

 “I’m texting you the link to the book I just mentioned so you can check it out after our session.”

Unfortunately, there’s a proliferation of judgmental self-appointed preachers disguised as well-intentioned advice-givers in online spaces. I completely understand that accessing therapists, peer mentors, or other trained facilitators can be challenging and expensive. Sometimes it might seem easier and cheaper to type a question into Google, peruse Reddit, or solicit feedback from a Facebook group. You may get some perfectly useful and frank answers, however, don’t put too much weight on the outcome.

I asked her how she felt about the profile, independent of these strangers’ comments. She told me that it was a true representation of her current desires, she was looking to hook up with a couple, that had been a huge turn-on for her recently. Further, she explained that part of her confusion was that she’d been getting a lot of interesting matches on the app. Without probing too hard, I asked her why she had asked for feedback from the Facebook group in the first place. She rsponded, “I’m just scared that I’m not doing THIS [being a unicorn] right.” Fair!

It’s completely normal to need reassurance when we’re putting ourselves out there. It’s totally valid to want advice about our relationships or sexual dynamics. Especially for folks who are new to ENM, it makes sense to want to chat with other polyamorous people who have more experience or who are going through similar things.

But at the end of the day, only you can decide what’s right for you, and talking to people who are unable to decenter themselves isn’t productive. This Facebook group was obviously not for unicorns, and none of these strangers realized they weren’t qualified to be giving feedback for that very reason. By the time we wrapped up the conversation, she’d come to the same conclusion I had: the advice she received about her profile wasn’t helping her figure out how to be a unicorn because not a single person had bothered to ask her what she wanted from polyamory.

By failing to clarify what type of advice and from whom, she ended up getting the wrong people’s personal opinions framed as advice. What she really needed were other unicorns to tell her about their experiences. Instead, she found a handful of strangers who weren’t into that dynamic projecting their own aversion onto her, that’s not advice. Unfortunately, this type of misunderstanding is all too common when we solicit advice from the wrong online sources.

My advice to her was, “Let’s make a list of people who you can reach out to next time you need to talk about this. Also, let me send you a link to a blog written by a unicorn” Luckily, she told me I was pretty high on her support list, and that Facebook group wasn’t anymore. 