QuaranTEAM: Lessons from the Poly Community

Art by @polycarenze

Are you ready for another year of social distancing? Do you have a plan for the next phase of quarantine? How will you increase your support and connection while staying safe?

The US just passed 4 million (dated: July 2020) known coronavirus cases, and case counts have risen in 37 states. We have been quarantining for over 130 days, with no end in sight. This reality has meant that everyone from business owners to parents to partners to those who live alone have had to strategize around how they will survive and thrive in the coming months.

To build my own “quaranteam” during quarantine, I sought wisdom from the poly, kink, and coliving communities who mastered these strategies long before the pandemic started. Here’s what I learned.

ZOOM CANNOT REPLACE PHYSICAL TOUCH

It’s hard to overstate how much relationships have changed since the beginning of the pandemic. As a dating coach and community builder, I’m constantly testing out the latest methods and spaces for virtual connection. Thus far, I’ve hosted events and tutorials around self-care, massage, dating at a distance, and virtual connection, and I’ve even signed up for things like Zoom slumber parties, naked yoga, and virtual sex clubs (a topic in my upcoming podcast season). But for those who need face to face social interaction to stay sane, all these virtual events can feel like a pale imitation of the real thing.

As countries attempt to flatten the curve worldwide, governments are exploring pathways toward ending quarantines and mitigating the impacts of months of social isolation. Some have even begun providing guidelines for how households can merge their households, a process known as “quaranteaming.” Most of their advice has been pretty generic and not particularly nuanced, so I thought this would be a fun opportunity to dive into my poly, kink, and coliving roots to explore the questions and risk calculations that I’d consider most important when merging households. After all, when it comes to things like merging families and contact tracing, polyamorous folx have been developing these skills for decades!

WE DON’T HAVE TO REINVENT THE WHEEL

As someone who’s spent over 8 years living nomadically, staying in dozens of coliving and polyamorous households, and navigating the nuances of disease risk across diverse, overlapping social and sexual communities, this whole “quaranteaming” concept feels deeply familiar and deeply intuitive. For generations, poly communities have been coming up with creative ways of handling household merging, partner visitations, and safety/communication practices for navigating any changes or challenges, from jealousy and joint finances to STIs and pregnancies. Put against the backdrop of polyamorous life, quaranteaming may actually be significantly less complex.

Poly, kink, coliving, and coronaviruses all come with risks. However, that doesn’t mean we stop everything and give up. Instead, we focus on understanding our risk factors and figuring out how to communicate — and mitigate — those risks. We develop best practices and safety protocols, and we invite science to be our ally in the quest. Apparently, we can also invite New York City health officials to be our allies as well, after their recent recommendation to mitigate risk by using glory holes.

Whether poly or pandemics, we mitigate risk first through preventative measures. Below are just a few commonplace measures I’ve encountered in poly and kink communities around the world:

• We get tested regularly. 

• We learn about our partners’ safety habits/practices before entering into a relationship with them. 

• We use barriers —masks in the case of pandemics; condoms, dental dams, and birth control in kink/poly. 

• We offer clear explanations and ask for verbal confirmation before escalating the intensity or risk profile of any of our interactions. 

• Hell, we’re even used to literally quarantining ourselves before sexual activity — “I just got tested today, so I need to wait ~5 days for my results before we can have sex.” 

THERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

What “economies of scale” could I achieve by quarantine , i.e., sudden savings and efficiencies that only arise from having more people in a household?

You might be surprised by how many benefits you can accrue by joining household forces! Here are just a few:

• Rent — This should be a no brainer. Join forces and you can instantly cut your collective rent in half or more by ditching your old apartment(s). Great for anyone whose lease is running out anyway. At the beginning of the quarantine, a friend of mine living with 3 roommates suddenly found herself completely alone, as all 3 moved out of state to quarantine with families. She ended up with a 4 bedroom apartment all to herself — a perfect opportunity for her to invite (or join) a quaranteam. 

• Childcare — Some of us are super lonely right now and would love to be around more children. Others have just spent the past several months stuck at home with our children 24/7 and are rapidly losing our minds. If schools in the US fail to reopen or continue forward with a “blended” opening strategy, children may end up spending significantly more time at home in the coming months, which will be extremely taxing. Parents who need to leave for work each day will require childcare. Parents who previously relied on schools to provide their children with a safe environment and hot meals will be suddenly stuck without that vital resource. And parents who simply appreciated the peace of mind of having their children away for several hours a day may find their nerves utterly fried. All this to say, quaranteaming presents a compelling opportunity for easing the burdens of parents, cash-strapped renters, and those suffering from loneliness and depression for lack of regular social contact.

• Insurance — Dozens of states offer insurance coverage to domestic partners, so if you’re in one of those states, you can potentially qualify to obtain insurance under one of your quaranteammates’ employers’ plans. Here’s a list of which states offer domestic partner coverage (updated in 2019).

• Food & Cleanup— Cooking for just yourself is terrible because you still have basically the same amount of dishes as you would for two people, but half the cleanup help. Increasing your quaranteam, even just to include 1 more person, could unlock worlds of new possibilities! Also, think of how many new culinary influences and cooking styles you can incorporate into your life when you add more chefs to your convivial kitchen. My quaranteammates have already blown my mind with homemade Tiramisu, breakfast scramble bites, and handmade dumplings.

• Bulk Ordering — Consider the ability to suddenly meet online order minimums (and get free shipping) thanks to bulk ordering! My quaranteammate and I went halvers on a subscription to a local produce service that would have been way too much food for just one person. Then we opted into a subscription coffee service to reduce our coffee budget. We also split a percussive massage gun so that we could enjoy giving and receiving daily massages. These little bonuses really start to add up!

Should I merge households with my friend who has been avoiding all social contact, except for his partner, who has also been avoiding all social contact, except for her partner…etc.?

In short: how closed is your team? The more closed it is, the better. Experts have said that if everyone simply froze in place for 14 days, the pandemic would be over. But life in a dynamic, complex, individualist society is not that simple. And if our households can’t stay closed, then our best chances of staying safe involve knowing exactly who everyone else has been interacting with, and what their relative risk levels are. This is the essence of contact tracing! 

Almost every single country that has successfully combated the pandemic’s spread has done so through effective contact tracing. In the poly/kink world, contact tracing has been a standard practice for decades, and it’s typically practiced with deep sensitivity to partners’ privacy. Asking our partners questions about their sexual health, safety, and past experience can instill trust and peace of mind because it shows that we’re taking our health and safety seriously and that we’re diligently factoring in our partners’ health and safety as well. Leading with curiosity and coming up with thoughtful, empathetic questions together can be an excellent vehicle for creative collaboration, enabling us to generate new models of interaction and play.

Here is just a tiny sampling of questions that poly/kinky folx routinely ask one another before engaging in higher-risk behaviors:

• Are you on birth control [if so, which form(s)]?

• How many other partners do you have?

• How recently have you engaged with those partners?

• What are the safety practices of each of those partners?

• What activities did you do together that could have reached a threshold for disease risk?

• Have you been tested since the last time you engaged with those partners?

• Did you test positive for any STIs?

• Are there any other diseases you’re currently at risk of transmitting?

Questions like these are part of the day to day lexicon of kink and poly life, but they’re also essential for us to have if we want to feel safe seeing the people we want during this pandemic.

While it might be invasive for the government (or, let’s be honest, Facebook and Google) to know exactly who we’ve been with and when, we ourselves can handle this with more delicacy, and even creativity. I frame this exercise as an opportunity to create space for us to share the parts of our activities with other partners we may have enjoyed, or potentially found problematic — good inroads to vulnerability and deeper bonding! 

While it’s fully in your right to bring up any of your concerns, understand that your partners or friends might not want to tell you everything about their lives. They may want some of their partners’ identities to remain anonymous, which is perfectly fine, but it does mean that you’re within your right to decline engaging with them, if at any point you don’t feel you have enough information to make safe decisions. Always do your due diligence before committing to merging, whether merging households or merging fluids. Diligence is sexy.

How do I prioritize who to merge with? (A.K.A. “Who does Grandma love best?)

While it can feel incredibly unfair to have one sibling get all of mom’s love and fresh cooking, it’s important to keep in mind that moving in with someone right now is about dealing with physical and psychological health and safety — not about who loves who more.

With that in mind, think about practicalities — who has more space? Who’s close to each other so we can avoid public transit and increasing exposure? Who has family members who would benefit from additional support (bringing families with children together, for example, can either be amazing or terrible)? And, in the case of grandma, should we even double up to begin with? After all, that might result in increasing her chances of exposure.

Alas, despite our best rational reasons for why things are the way they are, jealousy can still crop up. This is where the poly community can chime in with some advice.

In poly life, it’s pretty common to ask yourself which of your partners to invite to any given gathering — and how will the rest feel? Certain “problems” like jealousy are so commonplace when transitioning into poly life that they’re literally a recurring fixture of “poly 101” discussions within polyamorous communities in different cities around the world.

In addressing the question of which poly partner to invite to a party, there are a few obvious ways to whittle down the list: who’s actually in the area and free on that day? Who might want to go with a different partner anyway, and we’ll just see them there? Who doesn’t enjoy people, let alone sex parties? This may not narrow down your list very much, but these questions nevertheless also serve as a good starting point for thinking through who you may want to quaranteam with. 

To start these dialogues with your prospective teammate contenders, start by setting up a space that makes you feel comfortable being vulnerable, because jealousy is often fueled by anxiety. Next, communicate your feelings and intentions, and invite your prospective partners to do the same. Invite honesty and take pains to describe specific positive or negative scenarios that might arise and how you’d each like to see them handled/resolved. Oftentimes you’ll find that there is no reason for you to feel jealous, and the thoughts that had been terrorizing you didn’t even drift across their minds. Lastly, model out future scenarios that might lead to one or both of you to feel jealousy again. Come up with ways to easily communicate this when it happens.

Each time that you practice being vulnerable and sharing your jealousy, you teach yourself and your communities that it’s okay to feel jealous —that jealousy is simply the “ouch” feeling you get when your feelings of deep connection to someone else are momentarily challenged. In unpacking your jealousy, you learn to better communicate your feelings and intentions; you can model out possible future scenarios that could prove challenging, and invite others to share their perspectives; perhaps you even decide to lean into some of those scenarios, to test your predictions and strengthen the resolve you’re building into your relationship(s). Congratulations, you’re doing relationshipping right!

Is there an optimal quaranteam configuration?

Interestingly, just as polyamory/non-monogamy introduces us to many dozens of new relationship configurations, this pandemic has inadvertently been causing us to generate new and beautiful styles and structures for our quaranteams! 

Below is a fun glimpse of how love can play out across various styles of relationships. Your ideal quaranteam may not be based in love, sex, or romance, but it can certainly derive some wisdom from the plethora of relationship dynamics pioneered by our fellow humans over the ages.

Here’s a quick list of quaranteam structures I’ve seen recently:

• We live together in one home, whether as friends, family, or lovers.

• We live separately across multiple homes, but with the commitment to only visit one another (a closed quaranteam) and to use the safest available methods of transportation.

• We commit to quarantining separately for two weeks, then travel together to a vacation home/rental where we plan to spend the next several weeks/months.

• We move to a remote campground/property where a small, exclusive community already lives, but we first commit to spending two weeks fully quarantined before being welcomed into the community.

Okay, we’re moved in. Now what?

How do we handle mail & Amazon deliveries? Who goes out — and when? What if someone needs alone time? Or the kids need time out? What agreements and processes do we need to have in place?!

The questions are endless, and it’s unlikely you will be able to anticipate them all. That being said, there are a few steps you can take to plan ahead and set up the structures needed to deal with any future conflicts.

One thing I would recommend is playtesting your quaranteam experiment in excel. In fact, I once made a guide for how to map out romantic relationships using spreadsheets! You can make provisional property/expense/chore sharing sheets, as well as delineate your boundaries/expectations across any categories of life that are important to you. Before my college assigned roommates, all students had to first fill out a 30+ question survey about their habits, inclinations, preferences, lifestyle, etc. Finding a quaranteammate is even more complex a consideration than finding a college roommate, so set your expectations accordingly and put in the work so that your future team is set up to succeed. 

You can also playtest your quaranteam in a virtual platform. People are already using Club Penguin and Animal Crossing as dating apps, and Minecraft is an oldie but goodie. Merging households virtually helps with anticipating obvious conflicts, as well as modeling conflict resolution. 

Every household and person has their own way of dealing with conflict, of course, but here are a few helpful guiding principles:

• Communicate early, frequently, and constantly — Talk about things before they become a big deal. Find ways of bringing up even the smallest things, but in a good natured, solution-oriented way. Small annoyances quickly build up into big ones when one person feels that the other is ignoring an issue, when in fact, no issue has been communicated at all. For instance, instead of bottling up your frustration over always reheating old leftovers, you could try suggesting, “Hey, I’ve noticed that I’m feeling a bit tired of eating the same thing multiple days in a row. Could we try cooking with smaller portion sizes so we don’t always have leftovers? Maybe we could even do a themed cooking week where we make a new, delightful dish each day?”

• Stay solution-focused — Conflict is inevitable. People are different, and under a lot of stress. To keep pots from boiling over, try to focus on the future, and how to mitigate future conflict. It’ll keep everyone on board, instead of feeling attacked or accused of being inconsiderate. Keeping a running “roses and thorns” list can be helpful for understanding the things for which you and your quaranteammates feel deep gratitude, but also deep frustration. A simple weekly or monthly review of those lists can lead to creative solutions. 

• Model out your resolutions — Once you’ve come up with a solution, act it out. This is especially important if there are children in the house who will take their cues from the adults. Set the culture for the home by showing how it works. Don’t just say, “I promise I’ll do better.” Instead, ask what doing better actually looks like. Say, “If I do [xyz thing] this week, do you think that would have a meaningful impact? What specific action(s) can I take to move the needle?”

• Focus on smart, safe decisions — All of life comes with risks. Sex, extreme sports, driving, and household merging all come with risks, but we are capable of both calculating and mitigating those risks. When in doubt, consult trusted scientific sources, doctors, and other trained professionals. Collect multiple perspectives, particularly from folx who’ve been through this before. You’re not alone. We are not alone. 

• Learn together — Study and practice critical methods and modalities around empathy, nonviolent communication, and mindful speech. We may never have such a pivotal opportunity to put these deeply human values and virtues into practice, and for them to have such an immediate, heartfelt impact in our lives. 

THE FUTURE OF QUARANTEAMING AND COLIVING

We don’t know when this pandemic will subside or when the next one may begin. We live in a world in flux, and we’re doing our best to stay afloat. But we’re certainly not alone in our desire to take action. We as humans have survived for millennia on this planet through our cooperation and our (mostly) successful efforts at bridging our differences, developing shared customs, and, yes, living together. Coliving and existing within communities is a fundamental part of who we are. We had a global loneliness crisis long before this current pandemic, and organizations around the world were already stepping up to help us address it. Some names of current or recent communities may even be familiar to you, like Campus (newly reimagined as The United Cities of California), The Embassy Network, Lightning Society, NomadX, Tamera, Common, Quarters, Sandbox, Ollie, and WeLive.

I recently learned that the coliving community Sandbox is taking its pandemic prep to the next level, enforcing the most up to date CDC and WHO guidelines for its communities, creating documents and workflows for transparency and collective accountability, and even leveraging their community members’ expertise to develop their own high-accuracy COVID-19 testing for use in all their community spaces. They’re also making their testing kits available to other spaces — contact founder Bryan Talebi for more. 

The Lightning Society community, too, is making big waves in coliving and quaranteaming. Under the leadership of founder Timothy Alexander Phillips, their community came together to invent new forms of PPE during the pandemic’s initial peak in NYC, and now they’re working to enshrine coliving as a constitutionally-protected right. 

Whether you’re ready to begin your personal quaranteaming journey or not, take solace in the fact that you won’t be doing it alone. Communities around the world have been actively pioneering new ways of coliving for thousands of years, and their work continues even in the face of pandemics.

Steve Dean, an NYC-based dating industry consultant, relationship coach, and community builder. You can find our more about Steve via: Dateworking | Patreon | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

Artwork by polycarenze

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