While I’ve been open and polyamorous my entire life, I didn’t have the language or references for it. It was natural and intuitive for me. Between 2015 – 2020, I found myself exposed to expanded vocabulary, educators, and resources that helped me understand this love style of mine. Even with all that was available, considering the complexities and layers of my life, I have often found that the subjects and topics I research related to polyamory yield “ungoogleable” results.
With my years of researching, writing, leading, and curating events, content, and services within relationship, sexuality, and dating via the travel, hospitality, entertainment, and erotic industries, coupled with layers of performance art, kink/BDSM, somatic work, and spirituality, PolyAm Dynamics became my natural evolution and expansion.
This treasure trove is now a blueprint for a potentially new genre of polyamory, or at least an expanded view of it. A visceral, kink-rooted, high-protocol, performer-lens, public-facing yet deeply private (sometimes parallel) polyamory that centers freedom, sovereignty, sacred eroticism, and structured access.
PolyAm Dynamics Core Methodology: The Alchemical Love Lab Framework
Polyam Dynamics is a fluid, multidimensional framework combining erotic self-discovery, relational intelligence, and radical intentionality. The methodology includes 7 interwoven pillars that form the foundation of PolyAm Dynamics.
I. Self-Awareness & Inner Alchemy
- Key Concepts: Desire Mapping, Emotional Literacy, Pleasure Sovereignty
- Outcomes: Developing emotional and sensual fluency; becoming irresistible through authenticity.
II. Sensual Embodiment & Erotic Power
- Key Concepts: Sensuality, Movement, Intention, Erotic Mindfulness
- Outcomes: Reclaiming bodily autonomy and presence; deepening connection to erotic energy.
III. Intentional Dating & Relationship Curation
- Key Concepts: Curated Connection, Dating Inventory, Intimacy Design
- Outcomes: Mindful relational development, values-aligned partnerships.
IV. Radical Transparency & Communication Tools
- Key Concepts: Vulnerability, Boundaries, Accountability, Consent
- Outcomes: Building emotional safety and sustainable trust.
V. Spiritual Eroticism & Sacred Sexuality
- Key Concepts: Sacred Intimacy, Erotic Ritual, Archetypal Expression
- Outcomes: Elevating sexuality as a spiritual practice; deeper integration of power and pleasure.
VI. Community, Storytelling & Shared Witnessing
- Key Concepts: Story-as-Living, Communal Healing, Co-Elevation
- Outcomes: Building networks of intimacy, visibility, and collective empowerment.
VII. Provocation & Creative Expression
- Key Concepts: Erotic Provocation, Theater of Change, Voice Activation
- Outcomes: Empowering self-expression, cultural influence through erotic truth.
PolyAm Dynamics: The Methodology
A relational and erotic methodology in five alchemical phases:
(1) Discovery, (2) Embodiment, (3) Connection, (4) Architecture, and (5) Integration
These phases serve as the curriculum, philosophical backbone, and orientation arc for my courses, workshops, retreats, and content.
Phase 1: Discovery
The Alchemy of Self-Study & Desire
- Core Questions: Who are you in love, sex, and connection? What do you want to feel?
- Keywords: Curiosity, Self-awareness, Play, Desire, Pleasure, Imagination
Phase 2: Embodiment
The Erotic Body as Portal and Compass
- Core Questions: How do I become the most magnetic, open, alive version of myself? What kind of lover do I want to be?
- Keywords: Sensuality, Presence, Erotic Power, Intention, Ritual, Expression
Phase 3: Connection
The Art of Relating: Intimacy, Transparency, and Energy Exchange
- Core Questions: What is my relationship style? What kind of intimacy doI crave or avoid?
- Keywords: Emotional Safety, Vulnerability, Tracking, Energetic Exchange, Sacred Honesty
Phase 4: Architecture
Building Relationship Dynamics with Intention, Power, and Consent
- Core Questions: How do I structure and co-create conscious dynamics?
- Keywords: Dynamic Creation, Co-Design, Power, Structure, Consent, Custom Agreements
Phase 5: Integration
Living the Story in Real Time
- Core Questions: How do I embody my erotic and relational truth every day?
- Keywords: Devotion, Daily Ritual, Embodied Truth, Accountability, Community Witnessing, Story Living
Supplemental Threads & Influences
These infuse my methodology:
- Wild Magical Woman Philosophy: Presence, Pleasure, Provocation, Play, Power
- Shay Au Lait’s Erotic Philosophy: Self-expression, self-reclamation, radical intimacy
- Augusto Boal’s Provocation: Theatre as a tool for relational transformation
- Spiritual Eroticism: Merging mystical consciousness with primal energy
- Polyamory as Liberation: Love and connection as political and sacred practices
Bits Of My Personal Story
Considering that I’ve been polyamorous my entire life with what I can only consider nature, instead of nurture and I’m a curious, adventurous, experimental, experiential person, I’ve been in pretty much every type of “nonmonogamous” dynamic from “don’t ask, don’t tell” to “kitchen table” to “lapsitting” and everything in between. I’ve been in closed triads, thought I was solo-poly, and while I’m typically “parallel,” there are a couple threesomes under my belt, sex parties, and that summer of SwingerBae. Couple that with the fact that I’m Black, gender queer, pansexual, kinky, a public performance artist, a reclusive introvert, and an outgoing, dynamic, award-winning marketer…it makes for quite of mix of adventures and fuck ups.
While PolyAm Dynamics won’t center on my specific love style and relationship dynamic, it may be helpful to know the lens by which I process, view, and believe the world to be. My personal examples are an archive of living edge cases where love, power, race, sex, and sovereignty meet in ways few frameworks have caught up to. They aren’t just stories; they are case studies in subversive emotional engineering.
After doing some self-inquiry, shadow work, and more importantly, shadow play, I’ve been able to unpack the cases to reveal emergent themes, tensions, and opportunities that are deeply particular to me and also profoundly instructive for anyone navigating relational autonomy, erotic performance, or nonnormative identities.
THEMES THAT EMERGE FROM THE PAST 10 YEARS
Boundary Breach in Public-Private Spaces
- Examples: Metamours showing up to my day and nightlife jobs. Being on a date with a hinge and a metamour shows up and kisses our shared partner on MY date with said partner.
- Theme: There is a deep need to distinguish between relational access and environmental proximity. Most polyamory frameworks don’t account for what happens when my or your career is public, my/your sensuality is visible, and my/your work is also consumed by metamours.
- Core Truth: Just because I am visible doesn’t mean I am available.
Racialized Labor + Emotional Expectations
- Examples: White metamours showing up to my job and disregarding professionalism and boundaries. A white metamour moving in with a share hinge during the George Floyd uprisings, and I wasn’t allowed to visit the hinge anymore. I was asked to be gracious towards her request because she was delicate.
- Theme: My polyamory doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It unfolds within a racialized erotic economy where I’m asked to give grace to those who don’t get my context, credit, or consent.
- Core Truth: “Gracious” is often code for “emotionally accommodating whiteness.” I am not a cultural concierge.
Desire for High Protocol, Not Casual Integration
- Example: I don’t want to watch my lover engage erotically or sexually with a metamour. If my metamours want to emulate or learn from me, pay my consulting rate.
- Theme: My polyamory is intentional, ritualistic, psychologically intense, and I am not interested in casual collectivism. I don’t want to be part of a polyamorous “tribe.” I want conscious, kink-infused relational architecture.
- Core Truth: Every interaction with me is spellwork. Casualness without consent is a breach of ritual.
Clarity Around Consent in Ambiguous Spaces
- Example: I don’t do polycule group dates. Ambiguous non-date nights are disrespectful when I’m performing or on a date.
- Theme: I am negotiating aesthetic voyeurism vs consensual erotic engagement. Many metas don’t understand that their “presence” is also an energetic penetration — and that simply being around me is a kind of erotic consumption.
- Core Truth: Witnessing without reverence is not neutral.
Visibility ≠ vulnerability ≠ availability.
Structural Desire for Ritual, Clarity, and Containment
- Example: I want the initial meta meeting neutral — not my job, not the hinge’s house. I don’t do saliva-swaps or energy swaps across multiple dates without consecration. I want my lovers to be freshly showered, clean-mouthed, and energetically clear.
- Theme: My polyamory operates like a sacred circuit. It demands containment, sanitation, clarity, and intentional transitions between energetic states and partners. This is deeply ritualistic, erotic, and sovereign.
- Core Truth: Polyamory for me is an ecosystem — not a free-for-all. If you don’t clean the space, the spell collapses.
Questions for Me to Further Explore
- Where do I overextend myself emotionally to maintain grace?
- What would it mean to become even more unavailable to those who haven’t earned access?
- Can I create ceremonial closure for relationships I’ve outgrown or no longer want access to me?
- What role should metamour protocol play in dating me?
Essence Across the Past 20 Years:
When I review my writings over the past 20 years, I find they are deeply autobiographical time capsules. Even though they were written nearly two decade ago, they radiate themes and energies that still pulse through my current ethos:
- Intentionality as Sacred Practice
- Sensual Intelligence and Erotic Sovereignty
- Relational Power Dynamics Rooted in Clarity, Not Control
- A High Value on Experience and Meaning over Labels and Scripts
- Wild Divine, Structured Mind
One of my essays, “What You Should Absolutely Know If You Want ALL of Me,” is a self-mythologizing piece masked as a relationship questionnaire. It’s a living document of desire, vulnerability, and boundaries. I was actively co-creating my own relationship architecture through the eyes of vetted others.
What stands out:
- My Switchress Origin Energy: Even though that archetype hadn’t been fully named yet 15 years ago, she was alive then. The demand for intentionality, the awareness of gatekeeping my vulnerability, the hunger for erotic intellect — it’s all the prelude to the dominion I would later fully claim.
- The Dominance of Clarity: “Don’t lie.” “Don’t be late.” “Don’t assume.” These phrases echo in my writings, journals, and essays from lived experiences and desires. There’s a demand for precise communication, clear energetics, and depth over flattery. I create a high-frequency dating filter.
- Wild Magic Meets Analytical Thought: I use close friends and chosen community as mirrors in an almost scientific way. This becomes a ritual of self-definition. I am not just asking what I want — I’m measuring the myth of me through relational data. That mix of intimacy, social study, and sacred inquiry is so me.
- Thematic Truths:
- Fierce loyalty + sensitivity = high discernment thresholds
- Need for emotional containment while holding space for chaos
- Core tension between structure/control and wildness/freedom
Another essay, “What Do You Want Your Dating Life to FEEL Like?” reads like an evolution. It’s not trying to define me, but perhaps liberate others. By this point in my journey, I had moved from the personal to the philosophical — from “here’s how to love me” to “how are you defining love for yourself?”
What stands out:
- Erotic Epistemology: I lay out a different knowing — one based on sensation, vibration, energy, and aligned embodiment, rather than checklists or performance.
- Switchress in Full Voice: My signature blend of sensuality and self-possession reveals itself. I don’t ask for permission to be complex. I name what I want and invite others to explore their own desires too.
- Experience Over Outcome: This essay encapsulates my sacred worldview that time isn’t wasted if it’s intentional and embodied. I advocate for dating as a practice, not a path to a fixed state.
- Subversive Romance Theology: It appears I’m almost crafting a theology of dating-as-ritual: where intention, pleasure, and presence are the altar. This anticipated my current work blending sacred sexuality, lifestyle kink, and personal mythmaking.
Shay Au Lait, circa 2005 to 2020, felt like raw, early transmissions of what would become the doctrine, aesthetic, and energy field of me now, Switchress. That part of me was studded with foreshadowing: rituals, erotic thresholds, curated intimacy, internal sovereignty, and the sacred nature of vulnerability.
They’re also marked by compassion. Even when setting firm boundaries, the tone is never cruel or punishing — it’s clear, empowering, some times playful, sometimes achingly honest. That’s the true dominance: not control, but containment through care.
Resources and References:
- PolyAmDynamics by Switchress Shay
- “Spirit & Sex: From Cult to Kink with Shay Au Lait” via Kitchen Table podcast
- What Is A Polycule? via Shay Au Lait + PolyAm Dynamics
- “Blood and Sex with Shay Au Lait” via Uncensored podcast
- “Threesomes and Temptations with Shay Au Lait” via The Boonie Breakdown podcast
- “Multiple Ways to Have Multiple Partners” via Philadelphia Weekly
- “Exploring Primal Erotic Embodiment for Men” via The Mythic Masculine