Jessica Fern’s ‘Polysecure’ promised a world beyond monogamy. She didn’t say it would be easy.

The other part was timing. “Polysecure” was published right as relationship therapists like Esther Perel, Dan Savage, and Orna Guralnik — who worked with a polycule on the most recent season of her Showtime series “Couples Therapy” — were becoming household names. Attachment theory, in particular, had captured the zeitgeist; TikToks of people analyzing their attachment styles and categorizing pop-culture characters (Ross Geller: anxious; Mr. Big: avoidant) have racked up millions of views. Older texts like 1997’s “The Ethical Slut” — written by two radical kink-positive feminists who envisioned a “slut utopia” — were easy to dismiss as the purview of kooky lesbian bookstores. But “Polysecure” was approachable, speaking in the gentle self-help jargon that’s become this generation’s lingua franca. For readers who have spent years in therapy, Fern’s version of consensual nonmonogamy was less a radical reimagining than advanced dating for those who’d mastered Relationships 101.

Monogamy’s kind of the last thing to deconstruct
Jessica Fern

Becoming sexually or romantically involved with someone who isn’t your partner has long been viewed as the cardinal sin of relationships — it’s caused the dissolution of families, businesses, and empires. Yet, “most of us are not innately only drawn to one human forever,” Fern said. “Polysecure” put forward a simple and compelling idea: What if this is not only OK, but a better way of doing business?

In the past year, “Polysecure” has entered its meme era. In March, someone on X posted a photo of two copies of the book, with its distinctive yellow cover, dumped in a cardboard box labeled “free.” “I hope they’re doing okay,” read the caption. The post got 34,000 likes. “Reading polysecure in my local cat cafe to try to get the hot butch barista to notice me,” another X user wrote. “SPOTTED: bill deblasio at riis beach reading polysecure in a patrick church speedo” someone joked when the former mayor announced he was planning to separate from (but still cohabitate with) his wife, Chirlane McCray. In August, the singer and actor Suki Waterhouse posted a video of herself, scored to one of her breakup songs, captioned, “me when I see Jessica Fern on his Amazon wishlist.” My former coworker Allison P. Davis, who wrote a cover story on polyamory for New York Magazine, said she and a friend started keeping a tally of the number of copies they saw abandoned around Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. (They got up to around 10 this spring.) Davis ditched hers on her front stoop after her last poly relationship blew up, frustrated by how the book’s terminology was being “weaponized by straight heteronormative people who are doing ethical nonmonogamy badly.” Which she acknowledged isn’t Fern’s fault. But, she added, “I’m blaming the book.”

But brandishing “Polysecure” as a symbol of sexual enlightenment cheapens Fern’s message, which is that there are no shortcuts to a functional relationship — singular or plural. Fern says those hoping “Polysecure” will be a sexy romp that teaches them how to have it all are likely to be disappointed. During our interview, the author makes it clear that nonmonogamous relationships are just as pedantic and grueling as conventional relationships, if not more so. “I don’t feel like my mission is to be this advocate for polyamory or deconstruct monogamy itself,” Fern said. “It’s more just to say, you’re allowed to do either.”

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Fern lives 30 minutes outside Asheville, down a winding backcountry road. “This here is some ‘Hills Have Eyes’ shit,” my Uber driver says as we take a wrong turn onto a dead end full of rusted trailers. Pulling up to Fern’s four-bedroom yellow-clapboard house, the vibe is thankfully more pastoral-quaint than cannibal-murdery, but it still feels a world away from the Park Slope brownstones and San Francisco lofts where “Polysecure” has become required reading.

Fern is waiting outside to greet me in a purple spandex athleisure dress and a straw sunhat. Her bangs, round cheeks, and big blue eyes, ooze “Gilmore Girls” wholesomeness — but the gold spacers glinting in her ears and the steely resolve in her voice suggest otherwise. Fern gives me a tour around the expansive property, which includes a blue-shingled house for her mom across the driveway and a cluster of RVs, owned by her six tenants, in a forested glade beside a creek. Other residents include Cooley, Fern and Cooley’s 9-year-old son, Diego, two cats, and, the day I was there, a fat yellow labrador who’d showed up out of nowhere and would not go home.

“It’s not necessarily a commune,” said Cooley, who is wearing a hemp bracelet and a novelty Star Wars T-shirt that says “the Dadalorian.” It’s “living more communally,” Fern said, finishing his sentence.

In addition to being Fern’s ex-husband, Cooley is the father of her child, her roommate, and the coauthor of the “Polysecure” 2023 follow-up, “Polywise: A Deeper Dive into Navigating Open Relationships.” Cooley has his own bedroom downstairs with a kitchenette, but they usually have breakfast together upstairs and “just chat,” Fern said, mostly about work — they’re currently cowriting a new book on shame. Though Cooley and Fern disentangled from a “primary emotional attachment” when they divorced, what they have now is “no less meaningful,” Cooley said as the three of us sat down together on the front porch. “He calls us life partners,” Fern added. “I like that phrase.”

Part of Fern and Cooley’s journey to polyamory came from a desire to have kids outside the “disaster of a nuclear-family framework,” as Fern put it. (Fern defines polyamory as a subset of consensual nomonogamy that prioritizes emotional intimacy, though it’s often used as a catch-all term.) They both have primary partners with kids of their own. Cooley’s girlfriend, Julia, lives in an “intentional community” called Earth Haven Ecovillage, about an hour away, where residents live and tend the land communally. John, the boyfriend Fern met on Feeld, lives about 90 minutes away and shares custody of his two kids with his now ex-wife. Fern sees her partner two to three times a week, and she and Cooley alternate Fridays and Saturdays for date night. Everyone helps out with parenting: Julia recently brought her 12-year-old daughter over to do crafts with Fern’s mom.

The lesson in “Polysecure” is that every dynamic is different, and the important thing is finding what works for you. She sees it kind of like a sport “where some people just naturally have a talent,” but “that talent can also be cultivated.” She knows that not everyone can handle the emotional strain of multiple relationships or the immense amount of time and logistics they require. After tallying up the many daily stressors of life — work, childcare, self-care, financial obligations, and so on — she writes that she is “actually surprised anyone has time for even one securely attached relationship.” Reading “Polysecure,” it can be hard not to come away feeling like polysecurity is less an attainable goal than a fantasy for only the most annoyingly well-adjusted. I’m reminded of Tobias and Lindsay in “Arrested Development” deciding to open their marriage: “Did it work for those people?” Lindsay asks of Tobias’ clients. “No, it never does. I mean these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might,” he responds. “But it might work for us.”

One of the biggest questions levied by critics of consensual nonmonogamy is, basically, who has the time and energy for all this? Are the only people who can swing it rich white women like Molly Roden Winter, who can afford nannies and expensive therapy sessions? It’s true that the lifestyle seems to involve an awful lot of homework, not to mention an SAT’s worth of vocabulary: metamour, the lover of one’s lover; compersion, the happiness one feels seeing their partner happy with someone else; and NRE, intoxicating “new relationship energy.” There’s a superior tone to a lot of nonmonogamy discourse that understandably pisses people off; nobody wants to hear a lecture on the moral virtues of veganism while they’re eating a burger.

Yet Fern’s not saying that you’re a failure if you don’t have three boyfriends; she’s just trying to remind people that they have agency in how they structure their romantic, familial, and sexual lives. She also says that while stories like Winter’s tend to get more airtime, she has clients from all backgrounds who are making the nonmonogamy thing work. What’s more, “even in exclusive relationships it’s like, of course, you have to put in effort,” she said. For instance, you wouldn’t complain that you bought a car and have to put gas in, Fern said, before stopping to correct herself — she recently bought a new Tesla, a gift to herself, with the royalties from “Polysecure.” “Well,” she said, nodding to her new whip, “I don’t have to put gas in this car.”

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Fern has been psychoanalyzing people since signing up to be a class mediator in elementary school. In college at SUNY Purchase, “I always used to describe her as the Dear Abby of her friends,” Apryl added. “She literally moved out of the dorm because of the pressure of everybody wanting to come into her room and being like: I need your help!”

She spent much of her early 20s exploring various therapeutic techniques, including massage therapy and something called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, to try to unravel her childhood. “I was determined that though this always will be a part of me, it doesn’t have to control me,” she said.

Fern had dated women, fooled around with group stuff in college, and had multiple casual relationships simultaneously, but she’d never thought too much about it. She met Cooley in 2002 at massage school, and after years of friendship, they started dating exclusively in 2008 and got on what’s known in polyworld as “the relationship escalator”: moved in, got hitched, got pregnant.

The big shift happened once she had her son, during what she called her “first mommy meltdown.” She remembers one day when Cooley had gone back to work and she was running on no sleep, rocking a screaming Diego, and feeling profoundly isolated and adrift. “I was like, I can’t do this. I have to be his mother and his food and his entertainment and his playmate, and I can’t be everything,” she said. “One partner is now what we used to get from a whole village. I’m like, how is one human supposed to be the whole thing this child’s nervous system needs?”

Polyamory may still be fringe, but mainstream mental-health and relationship experts are increasingly making the argument that monogamy isn’t our default state. The 2010 bestseller “Sex at Dawn” argues that monogamous coupledom is a relatively recent evolution and that we used to raise kids much more communally. And while the book’s methodology and conclusions have been heavily criticized for relying on flimsy historical evidence, its ideas have stuck around. The CEO of the poly-dating app Feeld told Axios they’d seen a 500% increase in users identifying as polyamorous or ethically nonmonogamous over the past three years, while a 2016 study from the Kinsey Institute suggested that one in five Americans have been in some sort of consensually nonmonogamous dynamic.

One partner is now what we used to get from a whole village. I’m like, how is one human supposed to be the whole thing this child’s nervous system needs?
Jessica Fern

There are a number of explanations for why that is the case. One is the pandemic, when people trapped indoors for months started to rethink pretty much everything, including sex and relationships. Christopher Gleason, the author of 2023’s “American Poly,” thinks another huge factor is the increased acceptance of bisexuality as queer culture becomes more mainstream. (National survey data shows LGBTQ+ relationships are much more likely to be nonmonogamous than straight ones.) For many people, the gateway into ethical nonmonogamy is a hetero relationship where one partner says they’d “like to explore” sexually with a different gender. “That’s how I did it,” Gleason said.

Fern sees her work as part of a larger progressive struggle. We’ve had “the civil-rights movement, then the sexual revolution, and then we sort of had queer rights, and now we have the gender binary being deconstructed,” said Fern. “Monogamy’s kind of the last thing to deconstruct.”

After Diego’s birth in 2014, Fern was questioning concepts around motherhood and the nuclear family. She had completed her master’s degree in conflict resolution at George Mason University and started working as a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado, the following year. She was also hearing more and more of her clients talk about their open relationships. Some were seeking sexual exploration because their erotic needs weren’t aligned with those of a spouse; others saw it as a tool of personal growth and discovery. Fern herself always had immense bandwidth for talking and thinking about people and relationships the way others might be drawn to politics or playing the cello. She goes deep with people; she doesn’t do casual friendships, and she doesn’t do one-night stands. “I think there probably is something to the idea that polyamorous people are more drawn to this revelational psychological realm” where managing complex interpersonal dynamics “doesn’t feel like too much, even if it is too much,” she said. “Whereas if I walked into my mom’s craft shop, I get overwhelmed, like, what the fuck is all this shit?” In the next few months, she devoured every book she could find on the topic, and she and Cooley decided to give it a go.

But as Fern and Cooley found, no books could have prepared them for how hard it actually was. The first few weeks after opening up, Cooley felt what he describes in “Polywise” as “searing anguish.” As soon as sex came into play, “I became a fucking lunatic,” he wrote. “My identity as a more ‘evolved’ or ‘conscious’ man started to unravel as I found myself measuring my own self-worth in terms of how often she and I were having sex” and wondering if her other partners had a “bigger cock.” Mostly, it just felt like the walls were caving in. In 2019, they filed for divorce.

For most couples, that would have been it: a two-decade-long relationship reduced to curt nods at school drop-offs. But if typical relationships are an escalator, Fern and Cooley were on something closer to an M.C. Escher staircase. After they split, Cooley went on his own journey, which included ayahuasca- and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, EMDR, somatic therapy, talk therapy, men’s groups, and some kink, to try to figure out why opening their relationship had triggered so much anxiety and fear of abandonment. Gradually, the pair began to reconnect, albeit non-romantically, to find a way to raise their son together. And Fern set about turning her failed marriage into a book.

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In the late 2010s, the poly publishing world was experiencing a drought. It had been two decades since “The Ethical Slut” was published; Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert’s “More Than Two,” which came out in 2014, had an asterisk beside it after multiple women, including Rickert, accused Veaux of manipulative and controlling behavior (Veaux dismissed it as a “smear campaign“). In 2019, Rickert heard Fern give a talk on consensual nonmonogamy. By that point, Rickert was running her own publishing company focused on sex and relationships. She had long been looking for a book that reimagined attachment theory for nonmonogamy in an accessible way and convinced Fern to turn her talk into a book.

When “Polysecure” came out mid-pandemic, it was a “phenomenon” beyond anything Rickert’s small Vancouver Island publishing house had ever experienced, Rickert said.

Fern said she now has hundreds of people on the waiting list for her psychotherapy practice. She currently sees more than 60 clients, almost all of them queer or in “nontraditional” relationships. Hearing her talk about her clients is like hearing a chemist describe molecular formulas: a lot of triads, a V (one woman and her two partners who aren’t together), and a polycule of almost a dozen people. A lot of clients are couples trying to open up; a few are navigating cheating. “It’s really hard if the person’s still dating the person they cheated on,” Fern said. Fern has little patience for the growing number of people (usually straight, cisgender men) on dating apps calling themselves “ethically nonmonogamous” to avoid commitment. “Anything can be misused,” she said.

While some say the book has been transformative, for others, applying Fern’s teachings in the real world has been more fraught. One Brooklyn contractor in his 40s said he started experiencing panic attacks and suicidal thoughts after opening up his marriage in 2020. Dating felt like an exhausting, hedonic treadmill, in which he was constantly hunting for a new dopamine rush. Eventually, he and his wife decided to return to monogamy, though they still haven’t fully unpacked what they went through. “It’s kind of like we traumatized each other,” he said. After that, they took all the polyamory books they’d read, including “Polysecure,” and threw them in a bonfire at their Catskills cabin. “It’s just the blind leading the blind,” he said. “They talk about things and concepts that make sense, but none of these people have successful relationships.”

Davis, the New York Magazine writer, started exploring polyamory during COVID and eventually found herself in a “nonhierarchical” relationship with a man who also had another partner. In so-called hierarchical polyamory, some partners take priority, the way a couple in an open marriage might put each other’s needs before those of their secondary partners. A less-hierarchical “relationship anarchy” approach puts everyone on a more even playing field. Yet Davis grew frustrated by the way her partner used his attachment style as an excuse, such as when he neglected to tell her he’d planned a trip to the Bahamas with his other partner on their anniversary. “He was like, I just can’t help it because I’m avoidant!” She also found that Fern’s perspective as a white woman in a long-term relationship didn’t gel with her experience as a woman of color practicing polyamory on her own. “From now on, I’m just going to have a partner and then be like, ‘Hey, guess what? I’m going to cheat on you this month. Is that cool?'”

There are definitely people out there doing open relationships well — they just might not be the people reading, writing, or Redditing about it the most. The two people I know in the most successful, relaxed nonmonogamous situations are bisexual women in long-term hetero relationships (which might not be a coincidence — as one put it, “the bis do it better”). They both date women on the side. Neither has ever read anything about the subject. “No, we’re just that good. Lol,” the other texted me.

The Brooklyn writer Daniel Lavery, who has spoken extensively about living and parenting as a throuple, shared a similar sentiment. “I don’t think any of us have read any books on polyamory,” he said, though it’s not that their household is “anti-book.” Lavery said they really liked “The Happiest Baby on the Block.”

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As the day started to cool, Fern and I said goodbye to Diego, Apryl, Cooley, their cats, and someone else’s dog, and drove into Asheville for a stroll. After pointing out some local landmarks — the French Broad River winding through the city and Gray Eagle concert hall, where she was a panelist at an event called “Vino and Vulvas” — we stopped at her favorite gift shop. She picked up a “Kinky Truth or Dare” game, and we read a few questions before it became clear we weren’t the target demographic. “‘Have you ever experimented with the same sex?’ Lame question,” Fern said, returning it to the shelf.

Something else caught Fern’s eye: a brown candle shaped like a girthy penis with a label saying “burn the patriarchy.” When Cooley’s girlfriend, Julia, got her divorce papers, “I got her this,” Fern said, brandishing it excitedly.

Things are in a good place now, but Fern’s journey to polysecurity hasn’t been all sunshine and roses and novelty dick candles. She’s been in about six serious relationships since opening up, and while she’s learned something from all of them, her most recent breakup was by far the ugliest. In early 2020, two years before she met John on Feeld, Fern was in a relationship with a man she thought she’d be with forever (she asked me not to include his name). Fern and Cooley were in a comfortable co-parenting groove and when the pandemic hit, the three of them made the “radical decision,” as Cooley put it, to move to an eco-village in Costa Rica together.

For a while, things were copacetic. They lived in a bamboo house, and Diego attended school outdoors. Surprisingly, the hardest thing to explain to their community of ex-pats was that they weren’t all fucking. “Almost everyone had some idea that the three of us were in some kind of polysexual triad,” Cooley said. In 2021, the trio decided to move back to the States. Fern and Cooley wanted to raise their son in a progressive city close to nature but insulated from natural disasters — “hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and tornados” — and Asheville fit the bill. Fern, Cooley, and Fern’s partner bought the property together and settled in, planning to live there long term.

But then a different kind of natural disaster hit: Fern’s partner was increasingly struggling to manage his temper and erupting into angry outbursts around the house. He “just couldn’t get out of his own defensiveness,” Fern said. “Sometimes we have a partner who isn’t willing to do the work. And at some point it’s like, OK, I can’t do all of it.”

As the relationship disintegrated, things were heating up with John from Feeld. “I could feel it shifting where he was becoming my primary,” said Fern, whose ex moved out in early 2023.

While Fern thinks abolishing relationship hierarchy is the ideal, and has seen some clients in triads who can genuinely have their heart in two places at once, she admitted it hasn’t always worked for her. “I probably function more in a way where my heart has the primary,” she said.

What that looks like in practice is this: Right now, the queen of polysecurity is as happy as she’s ever been in a pretty conventional, heterosexual, monogamous relationship. Though she hasn’t quite solved the perennial poly problem of juggling multiple straight, cis male egos — “if I dated a woman, it would be easier” than dating “another masculine man,” she noted — Fern isn’t trying to add anyone else into the mix right now. “There’s no time,” Fern said. “Or if there is a desire, wiser parts of me are like, that’s just a desire.” Cooley is on the same page, albeit for different reasons. “I’ve found my bandwidth is very, very limited,” he said. “Partly that’s circumstantial, but partly it’s just my nervous system.”

Walking around Asheville with Fern, it’s clear that she’s as susceptible as anyone to the spine-tingling power of new relationship energy. You can practically see heart emojis forming in her eyes when she talks about John. “We’re still in love, and yeah, it’s super sweet,” she said. She wears a gold “open lock” necklace that he gave her to symbolize their relationship.

The feeling is mutual. “I don’t want to put her on a pedestal or anything,” but she’s like “a higher being,” said John, who has no idea what his attachment style is. “Uh, you’d have to ask her. She usually keeps track of all of my INFP, whatever, those kind of things,” he said (INFP is a subtype on the Myers-Briggs personality test). “I always think it’s just normal. I just need the normal things.”

Occasionally, elements of Fern’s disorganized childhood-attachment style still bubble up in new relationships. Early on, she and John were seeing each other just once or twice a week, which made her “get really wobbly” and lean into avoidance. So in December, they switched to three times a week, “and that has literally solved it.” It was that simple. And, yes, though it’s a polyamory cliché, a shared Google calendar helped, too.

Yet for the most part, while John had never been to therapy or read any books about it, he seemed to know instinctively how to meet Fern’s needs. (He tried to listen to “Polysecure” and “Polywise” on audiobook after they started dating, but it was “somewhat over my head,” he said.) “There’s a simplicity and straightforwardness” where he can “say what he needs and he doesn’t make it anything more,” Fern said.

Which gets to the problem with self-help books in general: Ultimately, there’s only so much you can teach. Sometimes, all a person needs is a reformed bull who shows up in their life when they least expect it, is great at listening, and fucks them just how they want to be fucked. Fern dragged John to some mostly “preventative” couples therapy sessions, she said, but they only lasted a few months before their counselor sent them packing.

“She’s like, you all are good,” Fern said, blushing. “Just reach out when you have a problem.”