From a woman who said NA to membership to a local EA community:
I’m a poly woman in the community. I’ve been poly for quite a while now (including before I was an EA), and feel quite deeply poly, like it’s a sexual orientation; being monogamous feels somewhat suffocating and dysphoric to me, like I’ve given up agency and control of my body and choices in a way that’s important to me. I feel pretty disrespected and patronized by some of the anti-poly comments I’ve seen recently; I think it’s really invasive and inappropriate for strangers on the internet to criticize me and other people for making unconventional choices about our sex lives just because we share some values. People talk about work-life balance in EA and for me an important part of that is feeling like there are parts of my life that I don’t have to justify on EA grounds.
I’ve had relationships with ~7 EAs over the years, and, though some of the relationships ended in a way that made one or both of us sad (as is common for relationship in general), I think they’ve overall been great; enriching, supportive, beautiful parts of my life that I’m deeply grateful for. I’m glad I’ve gotten to intimately share my life with different cool people that share some of my values, and I hope to do so more in the future.
Only indirectly related to poly, but when I was younger, I was hit on a lot by a lot of EAs. They were generally very polite and respectful in that, but it still got to be a bummer; I felt anxious whenever hanging out with a guy that he was just waiting for the moment to make a move, and was only interested in me sexually/romantically. That happens to me less now, for a variety of reasons. And, I didn’t consider it a big deal to begin with. But it is a bad dynamic that can emerge pretty easily.
From a woman who said NA to membership to a local EA community: