Green Flags in Polyamory: Being Happy Being Alone
Polyamory isn’t about using people to hide from yourselF
When you embrace polyamory and are lucky enough to have multiple relationships in your life, you are going to find yourself with less time on your hands. It’s only natural. Then, add in all the other parts of your life. Friends. Family. Work. Hobbies. There is so much to do and so few hours in the day.
With all of this, it can be easy to find yourself in a place where enjoying alone time feels impossible. But alone time is important. It's good for our mental health, a necessary part of developing a healthy knowledge of who we are as individuals, and an understanding of our wants and needs.
And so, while polyamory often means having less free time, enjoying and seeking out alone time is a big Green Flag in polyamory.
Standard disclaimer when I write an article that touches on areas of actual mental health: I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist. I have no qualifications beyond my own layman's research on this topic, my own experiences with therapy, and my personal mental health journey. If you or someone you know has problems with or a fear of being alone, this website has some good advice on how to begin working on that issue. Also, if you consider anything in this article to be incorrect in a way that could be harmful, please contact me to let me know.
Alone Time is Important for Everyone’s Mental Health (No Matter Your Relationship Model)
Putting aside polyamory for a moment, being comfortable spending time with yourself is an essential part of your mental health routine because it’s part of the process of learning who you are.
Psychiatrist Abigail Brenner puts it like this:
Being alone allows you to drop your “social guard,” thus giving you the freedom to be introspective, to think for yourself. You may be able to make better choices and decisions about who you are and what you want without outside influence. Often, we are swayed by the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of those in our immediate sphere. Of course, you may ask others for their advice and opinions, but ultimately, consulting yourself and making up your own mind about what you want to do will lead you into the life that’s best for you. ("The Importance of Being Alone", Psychology Today, 2014)
Put simply, if you’re not prepared to spend time alone, you’re not giving yourself time to get to know yourself. We need alone time to escape the expectations and influences of other people.
his is something I know all too well. When I’m with people, I find my opinions shift towards what those people think. I’ll find I agree with them more often and craft my words in ways that I think will fit in better. It’s the standard craving to fit in and be part of the group that we all know all too well.
But by spending time on my own, I’m able to sit with my own thoughts and develop them without the subconscious influence of wanting to fit in. Without anyone else around to influence me, I can learn who I am and what I believe.
Which leads us on to…
The Foundation of Polyamory is Our Relationship with Ourself
Polyamory is about relationships, and healthy relationships begin at home. If we don’t know what we want from life or are hiding from difficult things that we don't want to address, the foundations of our other relationships will always be flawed.
Polyamory is hard. It involves stepping away from the standard social construct of a "relationship" and instead embracing what works for us as individuals. To do that, we need to know ourselves, who we are, what we want, and what we are able to give others. And so anything that shows someone is actively and enthusiastically working to learn more about themselves - what they need, what they want, and what they offer - is a Green Flag. They are protecting themselves and their partners from toxic traits that might slip into their lives.
Going back to Abigail Brenner for a moment:
…if you’re too afraid to be alone and function on your own you’ll be selling yourself out, settling for a relationship (often not the healthiest, and sometimes, downright bad) that ensures that you’re never alone. The bottom line is that you cannot possibly have a healthy relationship with others if you haven’t learned to have a healthy relationship with yourself. ("The Importance of Being Alone", Psychology Today, 2014)
Why is this a Green Flag, not a Red One?
I’ve written articles before highlighting and discussing Red Flags in polyamory. So why am I classifying active enjoyment of alone time as a Green Flag rather than the opposite, actively avoiding alone time, as a Red Flag?
It’s because not enjoying alone time might not be healthy, but it doesn’t automatically make you a bad or toxic person.
Some of us need more time alone than others. Some people are naturally more introverted, while others are more extroverted. (Although, don’t fall for the fallacy that people are one or the other. All of us are a mix of the two, and studies have shown that being an “introvert” or an “extrovert” makes no real difference on the benefits of alone time.) People who are neurodivergent often need more alone time than those who are considered neurotypical.
There are also many reasons people find it hard to find any spare time through no fault of their own. When you have young children or other family responsibilities, or a high-pressure job such as teaching or nursing, sometimes giving up your alone time is a sacrifice that has to be made.
Finally, some people have simply never been allowed alone time or find it difficult to tell the difference between “alone” and “lonely”. Going back to Abigail Brenner’s article:
There doesn’t have to be a pathological reason to explain your anxiety about being alone. Fear of being alone may be simply a function of never having learned to do it! It may never have been encouraged and so the idea of it may feel alien and uncomfortable. ("The Importance of Being Alone", Psychology Today, 2014)
So the reason someone being happy to spend time alone is a Green Flag, rather than the opposite being a Red Flag, is because sometimes, for practical, emotional, or psychological reasons, it’s just not an option. Someone who was actively against the very idea of being alone and who would do literally anything to avoid it would be at least a Yellow Flag (for other reasons). But someone not putting time aside to be alone with themselves is not automatically a sign to avoid dating them.
At the end of the day, putting aside all the mental health considerations, do you want your partners to spend time with you because they want to see you or because you are a useful distraction?
I know which one I would prefer.
But on top of that, I want to know my partners are happy and that they are coming into our relationship knowing what they want. And being prepared to put time aside to spend time alone means they are not only getting the benefits themselves but feeding those benefits back into our relationship.
Also, when I know they like being alone, I know that when they say they want to be with me, they mean it.
The most important relationship any of us will ever have is with ourselves. And while sometimes it can be hard, it’s important to like ourselves enough to be willing to be alone.
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