Franklin Veaux - The Game Changer: A Memoir of Disruptive Love

A quiet story of trial, error and triumph that fundamentally questions everything we think we know about relationships in general, and polyamory in particular.

A V FLO X , se x , s cience and tech journalist, editor-in -chief at Slantist

Franklins powerful memoir isnt just a love storyits a story about redefining love and developing the self-awareness to treat the people we love with trust and compassion. Many of us are taught from an early age that its impossible to love someone without wanting to control them, but this book shows that this need to control often says more about our own insecurities than about the people we love. Even if youre not polyamorous, read this book: itll make you question your own assumptions in th e best way.

M I R I M O GILEVSK Y , blogger at Brute Reason and T h e Daily Dot

A simple tale of love and heartbreak and pretends to be nothing more; it needs to be nothing more. But there are also beautiful passages to take away, inspiring quotes and tender moments packaged between glimpses of the Franklin few of us know, the one whose favourite high school video game was Atari Star Wars, the one who was a dropout from college, the one who loves deeply and pa ssionately.

LOUIS A LEONTIADE S , author of Th e Husband Swap

This book tells the story of how Franklin came to the much-needed conclusion that secondary partners matterand winds up being an eloquent, full-throated defense of how everyones needs in poly relationships must be met, not just primaries. An excellent summary of the bad early days of poly, and a reminder of how far weve come.

FERRET T STEI N M ETZ , kink educator and Nebula-nominated author of Flex

This is a great read for anyone who has questioned the status quo or wondered what intriguing adventures wait on the road less traveled. Daring souls will appreciate Veaux's frank wit and searing self-critique in this fascinating memoir of u nruly love."

DR. ELISABETH SHEFF , author of The Polyamorists Next Door and editor of Stories From the Polycule

I found peace in The Game Changer because it let me know that I was not alone in my dynamic. It let me know that I was allowed to love in whatever way I needed, and that sometimes families are unco nventional.

REBECCA HILE S , blogger at The Frisky Fairy

While More Than Two inspired me to think about relationships differently and to approach those around me with a new level of compassion and honesty, The Game Changer instead serves as a source of hope, assuring you that those efforts are worth it. Veaux is someone who I have often held up as a sort of alternative relationships guru, but in this book, he shows that he has, for much of his life, been just as lost and confused as I have often felt.

ISAAC CROSS , blogger at XCBDSM

THE GAME CHANGER

ALSO BY FRANKLIN VEAUX

More Th an Two: A practical guide to ethical polyamory

co-authored with Eve Rickert

Th orntree Press, 2014

THE

GAME CHANGER

A MEMOIR OF DISRUPTIVE LOVE

FRANKLIN VEAUX

Th e Game Changer

A memoir of disruptive love

Text 2015 by Franklin Veaux

Foreword 2015 by A V Flox

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Th orntree Press, LLC

PO Box 301231

Portland, OR 97294

press@thorntreepress.com

Cover photo adapted from Untitled (nude) by Karl Struss, 1919, Th e Museum of Photographic Arts.

eBook design by Franklin Veaux

GlitchR typeface (title page) by Zach M.A. Smith

Substantive editing by Eve Rickert

Copy-editing by Amy Haagsma

Proofreading by Roma Ilnyckyj

Publishers Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by Th e Donohue Group, Inc.)

Veaux, Franklin.

Th e game changer : a memoir of disruptive love / Franklin Veaux.

1 electronic resource

Issued also in print.

ISBN: 978-0-9913997-6-5

1. Veaux, Franklin--Relations with women. 2. HusbandsBiography. 3. Open marriage. 4. Non-monogamous relationships. 5. Man-woman relationships. 6. Autobiography. I. Title.

HQ980 .V432 2015eb

306.84/23092

To my giraffe

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything its cracked up to be. Thats why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you dont risk anything, you risk even more.

ERIC A JON G , Fe a r o f Flying

FOREWORD

On journeys into ourselves, most of us know better than to harbor any hope for a map. But a mapthe Map of the Lands of Human Sexuality , to be more specificis exactly how I found Franklin Veaux. Its difficult to explain how much his work exploring the ethics of interpersonal relationships has influenced my own trajectory. If I have seen further, it has been by standing on his sh oulders.

Franklin has been sharing his thoughts on polyamory for 18 years online, but the man himself has remained a thing apart from his readers. As a writer, I intimately understand this: you give of yourself to the ideas you express and to the words that frame them, and you grant these words to the readerbut neither the words nor the ideas they convey mean the reader is entitled to you.

But I also know that, as writers, our conclusions, our biases and our insights are by-products of how we process our experiences. To give the reader both the ideas and the experiences is an act of incredible trust. Th at trust is what you now hold in you r hand.

Th e Game Changer is more than a personal narrative about a mans quest to find love: it is an explorers notebook. Alongside Franklin, we begin to unravel societys expectations of relationships and to question its fundamental assumption: that love is a thing for two. But if two isnt loves only configuration, what are the others? And how does a person shape relationships differently while remaining accountable to his or her p artners?

When Franklin began this journey, polyamory was not an established concept. His website, where he delineated good practices based on his experiences, would eventually become a resource for many others, but for him, there were no guidelines. Here, he poignantly describes the lovers he drove away as he struggled to find a balance between safeguarding the relationship hed established with his wife, Celeste, and the other connections he forged along t he way.

He would discover that to make this journey to a place of fulfillment, to a place where the relationships he had were as satisfying to others as they were to him, he would have to retrace his steps, go to the place where hed first weighed his primary relationship against the possibility of secondary relationships, and dismantle that scale. In so doing, he challenged relationship hierarchiesa convention of polyamory that endures to this dayarguing that a hierarchy denies the agency of lovers and would-be lovers outside the primary relati onship.

No exploration into unknown lands is without hardship, and no love story without pain. If such journeys came with maps, they would be marked with the telltale label of unknown lands: HIC SVNT LEONES . It takes great courage to admit that sometimes it is we who are the lions. It is we who maul those who take a chance on the road not taken.

But this is not a redemption story. Th is is a story about people trying to do good by one another, without knowing how. It gets messy. And it stands before us, messy, as if to show the author s work.

Th is is a story of love, yes. But more than anything else, its a story of learning to become a safe place where love can grow. Th e lessons contained within it apply to anyone who has dared to love, whether that love occurs within a monogamous relationship, a polyamorous relationship, or some other relationship configu ration.