About the Authors

Hanna and Lizzie (herefore after "we") embarked on this journey with three goals in mind.

1. To support each other by exploring and making sense of our world together.

2. To create something that helps normalize Consensual Nonmonogamy (CNM).

3. To create something that empowers people to explore and make sense of CNM so that they may make Intentional Choices regarding their own relationship structures.

Hanna is a queer therapist who is dedicated to specializing in polyamory and Consensual Nonmonogamy. Beyond her professional role, she has lived a polyamorous lifestyle for several enriching years, mostly within the embrace of triad dynamics.

Passionate about safety, security, and open communication, her non-traditional approach to relationships centers around the belief that love knows no boundaries. She values growth and Choice, seeing relationships as a journey that demands Intentional effort and self-discovery.

This work is born from both her professional expertise and personal odyssey, aiming to share insights into the world of healthy, consensual connections. She hopes you join her as we explore the diverse ways we can love and be loved, embracing the freedom of Choice and the beauty of unconventional relationships.

Lizzie is a queer data scientist/actuary who has been practicing Consensual Nonmonogamy since preschool. No really, she was engaged to triplets at 5 years old, and everybody was cool with it. See Poly Since Preschool for more. Lizzie is consistently saturated with adventures, and she enjoys acroyoga, shibari, pickle ball, Latin dancing, Lindy Hop, board games, hosting clothing swaps, and taking her cats on hikes in their backpack. Right now, she’s working on embracing and feeling safe through negative emotions and experiences rather than structuring her life to avoid negativity entirely. She welcomes critical feedback on this website and will not take it personally :)

Hanna & Lizzie are both currently around that quarter-life crisis age and not quite ready to embark on the journey of parenthood. Instead of creating human life, we decided this website could be our practice-baby. Both of us have personally experienced so much growth and fulfillment from exploring CNM, and we deeply wish to share our experiences with the world and empower others to go on their own journies.

Neither of us individually contains the stories to illustrate the wonders of CNM and achieve our three goals, but through our community and the internet, we diversify the perspectives we may share with the world. Thus, with enthusiastic Consent, we share stories from our lives and those of our friends, partners, lovers, and complete strangers that illustrate the adventures we have experienced as we made the Intentional Agreement of Consensual Nonmonogamy in our lives. Pseudonyms are used upon request to protect the identities of those who do not wish to share their unique relationship structures with the world.

We believe the stories in this work are interesting and potentially useful for people in all kinds of relationship structures, Monogamy included. However, all examples provided are consensually nonmonogamous to normalize that particular structure and empower people to explore it well. We hope to normalize CNM and empower people to choose it through hearing these stories, but we also recognize that the empowerment step cannot be done through stories alone. More work is needed in legal spaces to provide safe environments for people to explore non-normative relationship structures.

We want to close this section by acknowledging the limitations of our perspective and scope of this creation. Hanna and Lizzie are both white and financially stable. We were educated within the public school system of the United States of America and received further formal education through private universities, which is not a life path accessible to many people. We are both queer and have the privilege of passing as straight and monogamous in many public spaces. Many of our friends whose stories we share here also share similar identities to us: young, white, educated, straight-passing in many spaces, currently child-free, and living in Colorado, which affords many privileges of its own due to a liberal legal environment.

At the time of this writing, we are both in our late twenties and hope to have a lot of life to live and lessons to learn ahead of us. We may look back at this creation in only a few years and cringe at how little we knew, and even with that, we still feel a calling to create anyway.