Two single guys, two couples, zero monogamy. Emily Mai breaks down her polyamorous lifestyle and why she’s not going back.
Between the situationships, the talking stages, and the “what are we now” conversations, modern dating is a lot. And somewhere between swiping right and sharing locations, a growing number of people are starting to wonder if the whole one-person-forever thing was ever really the move.
Emily Mai is one of them. The Australian OnlyFans creator isn’t just questioning monogamy, though. She ditched it entirely. “At one point, I was seeing six people,” Mai revealed. “Two single guys and two couples, so technically six.”
She says the pull toward multiple partners started long before she had the vocabulary for it. “From when I started dating, I would be with someone but still feel drawn to other people,” the mom of two explained. “I thought something was wrong with me, like, does this mean I just want to cheat?”
It wasn’t until her early 20s that she stumbled into polyamory through meetups, workshops, and yes, sex parties. “That’s when it clicked. This is what I’ve been wanting,” she said. “People are just too scared to have those conversations.”
Scared or not, the curiosity is there. Research shows roughly 1 in 9 Americans have tried polyamory, and a YouGov survey found that 43% of millennials say their ideal relationship isn’t fully monogamous. That growing interest is showing up online too, with Google searches for “polyamory” more than doubling over the past decade.
But growing interest doesn’t necessarily mean growing understanding. “People think it’s like, ‘I’m going to sleep with everyone,’ but it’s not,” Mai said. “Sometimes it’s just having the freedom to connect with people without being judged.”
If anything, she says the lifestyle demands more honesty than monogamy, not less. “If you want a healthy poly relationship, you have to communicate,” the former dancer pointed out. “You’re having conversations most couples avoid.”
That includes jealousy, which she says still shows up. “Jealousy is normal and usually comes from insecurity,” she explained. “When something happens I don’t like, I’ll say, ‘I felt a little bit jealous when you left me mid conversation at a party to go make out with someone else.’ You explain what you will and won’t accept and go from there.”
These days, Mai says the setup that works best for her is one where nobody expects to be attached at the hip. “I genuinely prefer to date couples because they are busy, just like me,” she said. “There’s no expectation to have each other’s attention all day, every day, and I get the best of both worlds with a man and a woman.”
As for the actual day-to-day? It’s shockingly mundane. “We had a group chat where we would talk, flirt, and send each other memes,” the social media star shared. “It was like a normal relationship, you just wouldn’t talk as frequently.”
There are rules though. She recalled one couple where she was especially careful: “I was really mindful that I didn’t talk to the husband one-on-one. I was dating both of them. I never wanted the wife to feel like she was being left out.”
Monogamous partners, however, are permanently off the roster. “I won’t date monogamous people anymore,” she said. “It always ends the same way. They think they’re open to it, then say, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I just want you all to myself.'”
For Mai, all of this ties back to a much bigger view on relationships: “Polyamory is natural. Monogamy isn’t. Historically, humans weren’t monogamous — it came from people wanting control, wanting to know who their children were and passing things down.”
At the end of the day, she’s not here to convince anyone to go poly, but she does think many of us are starting to realize relationships aren’t nearly as one-size-fits-all as we were taught. “A lot of people are probably poly and don’t realize it,” she added. “There’s just so many other different ways of life.”
