Radical Relating: A Queer and Polyamory-Informed Guide to Love Beyond the Myth of Monogamy

A provocative, trauma-informed guide to post-monogamy—how to build liberated relationships rooted in empowerment, equity, and authenticity

With practical somatic exercises, reflection prompts and a relational toolkit—also includes a glossary of polyamory, non-monogamy, and alternative relationship terms

This book is for polyamorists who want to practice their non-monogamy with more feminism, more queerness, and more community building. It’s for monogamists who don’t want to do relationships on autopilot. It’s for everyone who dearly believes a better way to love and live exists. It’s for change makers who aspire to re-wild the ways we love.

An empowering guide to imagining (and living) better relationships, Radical Relating pushes back on the monogamy mandate. Author, somatic educator, and relationship coach Mel Cassidy explodes the often-unquestioned mainstream myths about the nuclear family structure: those that tell us your soulmate must be your sole mate. That sex is the only yardstick of relational success. That self-sacrifice and self-denial are necessary trade-offs for security and partnership. That we need to ride the relationship escalator all the way up, or we’ll die alone.

In four sections, Cassidy explains the why, what, how, and where of the Radical Relating model. They:

• Lay out clear-eyed analysis about why monogamy isn’t working and explain the harms of unquestioned internalized mono-normativity
  
• Offer Reflective Journaling prompts, Somatic Pauses, and practical wisdom for assembling your Relational Toolkit
  
• Explain the trauma-informed pillars of Radical Relating: Orientation, Resilience, Resolution, and Engagement
  
• Help you reorient to a new map for relating that’s queer, anarchist, and somatically integrated
  
• Help you build skills to understand and navigate your relationship landscape
  
• Explore the intersections of monogamy, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism and illuminate how monogamous relationship structures emerged with one goal in mind: to consolidate capital
  

Most books on non-monogamy focus on top-level logistics and play into beliefs that can inadvertently replicate oppressive structures. Radical Relating is different: it speaks to readers who want not only to open up their relationships or expand their sexual experiences, but claim a new and liberating ways to relate to each other, fulfill our authentic needs, and build true communities of care beyond monogamy.

Mel Cassidy is a queer multi-disciplinary somatic practitioner and relationship coach who works with queer and questioning people (and those who love them) seeking liberating relationship experiences, with a focus on honest and consensual non-monogamy. In addition to their coaching work, Mel is a visual and performing artist, movement teacher, semi-retired facilitator of ecstatic dance events, and a life-long student of Kashmir Shaivism. A genderqueer, second generation, ‘third culture kid’ of mixed Irish, Greek, and Khorokhane Romani heritage, born in the UK, and raised in Kuwait, Mel currently lives on the traditional territories of the K’omoks Nation in British Columbia, Canada.