At Capacity
Expanding the definition of "polysaturation". Or do we need another word?
Confession up top, because I think you deserve to know the conditions under which this was written: I am, as of this morning but also pretty persistently in recent weeks, saturated. The specific kind of full where the engine's been running hot long enough that it needs the metaphorical equivalent of a human oil change. We haven't stalled out yet, but it's time to pull over.
I’m processing a significant moment of reckoning in the LA play community. I’m having more conversations (sometimes processing, sometimes just friendly) with my partners and partner’s partners than I am with my other friends. I’ve had a lot of wonderful if draining personal and professional travel this summer. My work life feels overfull in a good way but I still can’t afford the several, major, unforeseen expenses that have popped up recently. Some close family members are navigating huge personal challenges and tragedies…as are my partners, friends, you as you read this… All while the world burns in a not-so-metaphorical way. Wildfires in Colorado. Industrial fire not far from me in California. Tornado warnings in New York?!
I am writing an essay about capacity while operating on little to none, which either undermines my authority on the subject or makes me a very qualified person to write about it. I’ve decided to go with the second one. I contain multitudes, or I just contain everyone else’s crises, which is a different kind of multitude and considerably harder to digest.
Here’s the thing that cracked open for me, though, even through the haze: I think we talk about “saturation” in nonmonogamy like it’s a purely relational math problem. The word already exists and it’s a good one - it’s the answer to “how much relationship can I actually hold,” and for some people that ceiling is maybe one or two consistent partners and an occasional dalliance. For others it’s less, or it’s a little or a lot more. None of those numbers are “wrong”. How many relationships you choose to hold down is your choice.
But that math only accounts for one column of the ledger. It doesn’t account for the rest of what any given person is carrying at any given moment - the work stress, the money stress, the climate stress, the friend group or polycule’s collective nervous system - not to mention the complicated feelings and conversations we might be processing at any given moment relevant to what our existing partner(s) are up to. All of this shares the same finite Capacity Tank as what we allot for our relationships. In a conventional, monogamous marriage - think jobs and kids and mutually full plates - it’s hard enough for each partner to spare a little bandwidth for romantic connection at the end of the day. And for nonmonogamous folks, we’ve figured out that while “love is infinite, time and energy are not” - we still tend to fill our dance cards by counting partners. We don’t always account for overall capacity when we look around, wondering why we’re struggling.
We don’t have a term for what happens when our partners are active with others and that starts to feel like a lot or even too much. That’s its own category of labor and it is not small. It’s hearing about a new crush and feeling the very normal, very inconvenient hot flash of jealousy. It’s a processing conversation that starts as logistics and turns into you quietly wondering whether you’re still the exciting one. It’s holding someone else’s tenderness toward a person who isn’t you, with genuine warmth, while some smaller and less generous part of you keeps a private, humiliating scoreboard. You're doing a specific kind of emotional weightlifting that doesn't have a name, and doing it doesn't necessarily mean anything has gone wrong in your relationship(s). Note: it’s especially challenging because it’s an arena where we feel especially out of control.
And when all this leads to burnout, we might go looking for the load-bearing source of the problem. You go hunting for the structural flaw - is it this partner, is it this agreement, is it nonmonogamy itself.
Sometimes the hunt does turn something up. If a partner is moving fast or is extra busy with others - new connections accelerating in a way that's reshaping your schedule, your disclosures, or agreements you thought were settled for the moment - that's worth raising directly as a structural conversation, rather than something you quietly absorb on your own.
Notable 19th-Century French actress, Sarah Bernhardt, probably caught here in her career-defining role as a polyunsaturated woman.
In other cases, you might simply be overfull otherwise, filled from six different directions at once, some of them romantic and some of them not romantic at all.
This is its own special flavor of exhausting, being tired and then being tired about being tired for insufficient reason (as you might judge it). Because surely if nothing’s actually wrong you shouldn’t feel this depleted. A meta-tiredness. The tiredness equivalent of interest compounding, except the interest is guilt. And if jealousy or grief or fear about the state of the world show up anywhere in that tiredness, the guilt gets a whole second mortgage, because now you’re not just tired, you’re tired and ashamed of feeling the very human things you felt.
Not that new terminology is the solve all, but we do need better language for total capacity, as well as relational capacity for our own partnerships and our partners’. Elements that account for the whole tank - that shared resource. Rather than pretending our romantic bandwidth exists in a separate, unaffected room from the rest of our lives. The words matter less than the habits they might create - checking the whole tank before we fill the dance card further. And being willing to say out loud, to a current or prospective partner, “I’m excited about and have room for you, but here’s what my capacity actually looks like.”
That's the lesson underneath all of this. Because one of the worst things you can do in the face of burnout is to invalidate your own experience. Burnout does not respond well to being ignored or pushed through. Failing to hold a boundary, denying yourself a need because it feels inconvenient or untimely, refusing to actually slow down when your body is asking you to - none of that makes the depletion go away, it just defers it, usually at compound interest. The version of you who pushes through without boundaries doesn't come out the other side fine.
Being responsible in nonmonogamy - or in any relationship - includes being rigorous about your real capacity and offering that information to the people counting on you, instead of finding out together, mid-collapse, that you’d quietly run out three weeks ago. It means naming jealousy while it’s small, to the person it’s about, instead of letting it compost into resentment. It means telling a partner “I need a container for these conversations about your other partner” without treating that as a referendum on the relationship. It also means remembering that nonmonogamy was never a mandate to fill every open slot. You're not required to date up to your theoretical maximum just because the structure technically allows it - dating for its own sake is a fairly hollow reason to add anyone to an already-full dance card. It’s a hollow reason to date anyone in general.
And it means figuring out where your actual line is. Not the line you think a sufficiently evolved person is supposed to have, but yours, today, in your actual body and your actual bank account and your actual news feed. And state that shit plainly, as a boundary rather than an apology. If nonmonogamy has taught me anything worth teaching, it's that holding a boundary - clearly, without overexplaining it into an apology - might be the single greatest skill I’ve learned. More useful than any amount of processing vocabulary, including whatever new words someone eventually coins for all this.
I am going to go take my own advice now, which mostly means closing Feeld, putting my phone in another room, and maybe taking a bubble bath in the middle of the day. I’m just full enough. And I’m fine. Those are, it turns out, allowed to both be true at once, and figuring that out might be the most useful thing this particular overfull season has taught me. Delivered to you today by someone who cracked it open a few hours ago, mid-frenzy, mid-epiphany, still a little pruney about the whole thing.
If you’re interested in deeper support, you can learn more about my services at intimacywithlaura.com.