I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while. Life, however, had other plans. The kind that pull you inward, make you slow down, and contemplate on life.
I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately. Thinking about my childhood in a remote village. Thinking about what it felt like coming to Singapore more than two decades ago, all excited, wide-eyed, and already somehow different from what the world seemed to expect. It makes me wonder how much has changed, and how much of who I am today was simply waiting inside me, long before I had the language to express it.
Being queer and polyamorous has never felt like a choice I made. I’ve written about this before here and here. I believe I came into this world wired this way. The way I love, the way I connect, the way I’ve always felt most alive when I’m deeply seen by someone and seeing them back the same way. That wasn’t something I discovered in my twenties.
It started much, much earlier. Looking back, the little baby me already understood something about love that took the adult me years to fully articulate.
The First Thing I Knew About Love
I vividly remember as a kid, whenever my mum cooked something I didn’t want to eat, I would just wander next door. And I would be fed delicious food by my neighbours, cooked warmly for whoever was at the table. There was no fuss, just an intuition that caring for a child in the neighbourhood was everyone’s business, not just my parents’.
Nobody called that radical. It was life, just the way we experienced it in the village. In that way, love was expansive. Rather than being carefully rationed, it moved freely between neighbours, between families, between people who had no obligation to each other except the simple human one.
That expansive kind of love, the kind that doesn’t keep score or guard itself carefully behind walls, is the only kind of love I’ve ever really known how to give.
I grew up in a Hindu household, and that shaped the way I understood the world. In Hinduism, nothing is singular. The divine has a thousand faces, a thousand expressions, a thousand ways of being. None of them cancel the others out. Truth isn’t one thing. Truth has never been linear. Similarly, love isn’t one thing. Sex and intimacy were never considered taboo. They were considered divine, spiritual, an expression of something sacred rather than something shameful. Everything coexists. I grew up believing this deeply, and genuinely thought the whole world felt the same way too.
I grew up reading Osho. No doubt, he has always been a controversial figure, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But that doesn’t diminish the profound things he shared throughout his life. (Sometimes we need to learn to take what is good for us and let go of everything else.) My dad loved his books, which is how I found them. Osho did something to my thinking that I’m still grateful for: he made me question everything, not in an anxious, destabilizing way, but in a way that felt like breathing more deeply.
He wrote that love is to the soul what food is to the body. That without love, the soul weakens. That the reason no institution, no tradition, no religion, no social structure has ever truly encouraged people to love freely, is because a person nourished by love becomes whole, and becomes difficult to control, and in the most beautiful sense, rebellious.
I felt that deep in my bones then, and I still do.
So when I finally found the word polyamory in my early twenties, it wasn’t really a new discovery. It was purely a recognition. That quiet internal moment of, oh wow, there’s actually a word for what I’ve always felt. Like finally having a name for something I had always been.
That expansive kind of love, the kind that doesn’t keep score or guard itself carefully behind walls, is the only kind of love I’ve ever really known how to give.
When the World Tried to Make Me Smaller
Moving to Singapore in my late teens was an eye-opener, and not always comfortably so.
I quickly learnt that I had arrived in a city that loved way too many labels and categories. People have this intense need to first find out which race you belong to, and if you are from a particular race, you don’t usually date people from another race. That if you are brown skinned, it could be because you don’t shower often enough (well, someone actually had asked me this). People automatically assume you to be a certain way, smell a certain way (the “Indian smell” they would say), and if you don’t, “you’re different.” And I was always “different”.
Sometimes labels are good, no doubt. They make it easier for others to connect and relate with you. But they can also imprison us in a little box, if we aren’t careful about what labels are truly meant for. I remember someone I knew from a queer forum way back in 2003 telling me: “Labels are like landmarks in our mindscape. They are reference points for us to meet kindred spirits. It’s like saying, let’s meet at Starbucks, because we both like their coffee. The problem is when we start to think that Starbucks defines who I am, and I can never leave this building. That’s when labels imprison you.”
And here I was, never fitting into any of those labels. Definitely not in the mainstream circles. Sometimes, not even in queer circles, which surprised me more than it probably should have.
Being gay was relatable to people. Some could stretch their thinking to bisexual, maybe. That was known territory. But pansexual? Genderfluid? Mostly male-presenting but dressing however I felt on any given day? That made people uncomfortable, and caused more than a few raised eyebrows. Sometimes I felt like they were confused on my behalf. It led to comments that weren’t always kind, and I was constantly asked to just “make up my mind,” even within queer circles. The same happened when it came to love. Loving more than one person was just as incomprehensible to most people as anything else about me. But if you think about it, it was all part of the same thing: choosing to live authentically and unapologetically, refusing to shrink into the version of “normal” that society has always tried to impose on us.
I remember in those early days, I used to wear eyeliner sometimes, and someone asked me if I liked cross-dressing. I wasn’t cross-dressing. I never had a need to. Cross-dressing only makes sense if you believe gender has two fixed points with a line drawn between them. I’ve never seen it that way, not even as a child. I dress how I feel. There is no line to cross in my head because there are no sides.
But people need their boxes. And when you don’t fit into one, they often try to force one upon you, or tell you that the problem is you.
I was called a weirdo more times than I can count. By strangers. By acquaintances. Sometimes by people who were supposed to be my community. For a while, I let it land, and even wore it as a badge of honor. But when these became pretty common occurrences, I started to wonder if something was genuinely wrong with me, and it led me to some dark periods of my life. Deep within me, though, there was always a silent voice that kept reminding me: there was nothing wrong with me. I just hadn’t found my people yet.
What Loving More Than One Actually Gave Me
In a single sentence: a lot of personal growth, heartbreaks, incredible friendships, and love in so many forms and shapes.
I’ve written more about my depressive episodes in The Ache to Belong. For context, here is a short version: there were periods, especially in my younger years, when the weight of not fitting in anywhere became truly unbearable. Days I couldn’t get out of bed. Darkness that came unannounced and wrapped me within its grip, pushing me to multiple suicidal attempts and thoughts. During some of those hardest times, it was not one person who supported me. It was several.
A partner who sat with me in the silence when words felt impossible. A close friend who used to check on me regularly without knowing exactly why, sensing something was off. Someone I briefly dated who showed up at my door because I had gone quiet for too long. All of them giving something different, and each of them incredibly meaningful.
No single person could have been all of those things at once. Not because they weren’t enough, but because being held through something that heavy sometimes takes a whole village. It always has. We’ve just somehow convinced ourselves otherwise. Human beings aren’t meant to navigate life alone. We are communal by nature. And when people who care for each other come together, each bringing something the other doesn’t have, something quite extraordinary happens. I’ve seen it unfolding in my own life numerous times.
And it isn’t only in the hard times. Polyamory, for me, has been just as much about joy as it has been about survival. Different people bring different textures to your life. One person might challenge the way you think. Another might make you laugh in a way nobody else does. Someone else might introduce you to a part of yourself you didn’t know existed: a new curiosity, a dormant passion that may have been suppressed for a long time, a softer or bolder way of moving through the world. When you allow yourself to love and be loved by more than one person, you don’t just multiply the support. You multiply the aliveness. There is more to learn, more to experience, more to give and receive. And for people who navigate this with honesty and care, it can be an incredibly wholesome way to live.
I’ve grown more through my relationships than through almost anything else in my life. Each person I have loved has held up a different mirror. Not always comfortable, and sometimes even confronting. But they were all always illuminating in one way or the other.
Osho wrote something I return to often: love yourself so totally that the love overflows and reaches others. That is the closest thing I have to a philosophy of how I love. Not from the lack, or because something is missing. But from fullness. From a cup that spills over.
That is the quiet opposite of everything most of us were taught about love.
We were taught that love is finite. That to love one person fully, you must close yourself off to everyone else. That the heart has a fixed capacity, and to share it widely is to thin it out. I have never found that to be true, not even once. Loving one person has never made me love another less. If anything, every person I have loved deeply has added something meaningful to me. Shown me a part of myself I hadn’t yet met, and helped me grow in ways I hadn’t imagined possible.
What Intimacy Actually Means to Me
We’ve been taught, by culture, by movies, by pretty much every story we grew up with, that intimacy is something we share with that “one”, the special one person. Think about how many stories we heard as children: countless fairy tales, films, all of them telling us the same thing. That the deepest love, the most meaningful connection, lives only between two people in a particular kind of relationship.
And if you’re not fully committed to just that one person, something is wrong with you. Even friendships are expected to take a backseat once you have a partner. Having a close friend of the opposite gender when you’re married is considered a red flag by many. So our whole life starts revolving around just that one person. And when it isn’t, there’s apparently something wrong in your relationship, and only one way out: the exit.
When love isn’t built on possession, it doesn’t end when the form changes. It just becomes something else. Most often, something that lasts.
I can’t remember a time I ever experienced intimacy that way. Even as a kid, intimacy was something expansive, shared freely with people I deeply connected with, and for the longest time, I thought the whole world was like me.
For me, intimacy is what happens when two people truly see each other. When you know someone’s deepest fears and they know yours, and you’re both still there. When a conversation cracks something open, and when someone holds space for the parts of you that don’t have words yet, and you do the same for them. That kind of vulnerability doesn’t just belong exclusively with a single person, it never has. It can happen with a partner. It can happen with a friend. It can happen in a fluid friendship that doesn’t fit any traditional relationship model we’ve been handed.
And yet, the world keeps insisting otherwise. I was in a taxi recently, and something came on the radio that made me stop and think. The RJ was telling her audience that it’s perfectly fine to stay friends with an ex, but only as long as both of you are single. The moment either of you finds a new partner, you must cut the ex out completely from your life, no exceptions. If you stay in touch after that, it’s weird, and it’s not acceptable. The assumption underneath that advice is that love is inherently possessive. That the moment someone else enters the picture, the bond you built with another person must be erased, as if it never existed. It made me wonder how differently the world might look if we stopped treating love like a limited resource that needs to be guarded, and rationed. Something that must be possessed, like an object.
None of those connections are less real because they resist a label. Some of the most sustaining relationships in my life are ones most people wouldn’t know how to name.
Most of my former partners are still in my life, as friends, as chosen family, in forms that have shifted and softened over the years but never disappeared. They took different shapes, different forms, but the love and care remained. Of course, the toxic ones exited. That’s the way of the universe. Because when love isn’t built on possession, it doesn’t end when the form changes. It just becomes something else. Most often, something that lasts.
You Don’t Need the Whole World, Just Your People
I won’t pretend that being polyamorous in this part of the world is without its complications. Our society isn’t always comfortable with what doesn’t fit their view of what is “normal”.
And if I’m being really honest, the dating pool when you’re poly, queer, and particularly brown is something else entirely. There’s a lot of racism deeply rooted into the dating spaces here, even among people who loudly advocate against it online. The preference for partners from certain races or regions is real, and quietly pervasive. I’ve encountered it more times than I can count. And then there are the heartbreaks that the world around you doesn’t quite understand when you’re poly. When you lose someone, whether a partner, a fluid friendship, or something in between, people don’t always know how to show up for that grief and offer support. “But you already have a partner,” they would say, as if love is interchangeable, as if one connection can simply replace another. It can’t. Every relationship is its own thing, irreplaceable in its own way. That particular loneliness, of grieving something real that the world doesn’t fully validate, is something many poly people carry quietly and mostly alone.
But I’ve also stopped waiting for the whole world to catch up. That felt idealistic when I was in my teens, and feels exhausting now. What I’ve found instead is my chosen family. My partner, and my closest friends, are people who get it. People who don’t flinch when I share my stories, including the heartbreaks, the complicated feelings, the grief that can come with loving more than one. They don’t need me to simplify myself for their comfort, but love me for who I truly am.
People outside that circle sometimes struggle to comprehend what I’m going through. The assumption that being in an open relationship must mean you’re waiting to leave, or that my openness is an invitation to be claimed by someone else, or a sign of something wrong in my existing relationships. It isn’t. Having an open heart is not the same as being someone who can’t commit, or someone without boundaries even.
Sometimes that’s genuinely all you need. Not universal acceptance. Just enough people around you who already speak your language, who care for you and love you just the way you are. People who don’t try to change you or convince you that their version of life is the only valid one. Who see you, fully and wholeheartedly. Your little tribe.
In a way, it reminds me of my village growing up. Maybe this one is a lot smaller. But it holds the same thing that village did: the quiet, unspoken understanding that you belong here, exactly as you are, and the world around you nurtures you, just the way you nurture them.
The More You Love, The More You Become
I’ve come to believe from experience that love is not a resource that runs out. The more you love, genuinely and openly, the more of yourself you discover. The more you become.
The neighbor who fed me as a child wasn’t calculating whether she had enough left over. She just opened her kitchen, because that was simply how she understood the world: that there is always enough, that love is not diminished by sharing it.
I spent years in a world that tried to convince me the opposite. That love had to be contained, and rationed to be real. That choosing one person meant closing the door on everyone else. That platonic friendships somehow hold less value and importance than romantic relationships. That once you find “the one”, everyone else who helped shape you into who you are gets quietly shut out. That my way of being in the world was too much, too strange, too everything.
I still get it wrong sometimes. I still have days when the old doubts creep back in. But I know now, in a way I couldn’t have known in my teens, that abundance was never the problem.
It was always the point.
Being truly and authentically yourself is not something you should ever be shamed for. And you don’t have to shrink who you are to make it easier for others to understand you.
Some things are bigger than the boxes we’re given. That’s not a flaw. That’s the gift.
