Multiple partners, one of you, and a hundred small decisions a week that none of them watch you make. Being the hinge is less a position than a practice. You sit at the vertex of a V, linked to people who may never date each other, but whose lives run through you anyway, and how you move at that crossroads sets the tone for everyone. This session is about doing the job with care. We'll start with the part most people skip: the work you do on yourself. How much can you actually hold on a normal Tuesday? Where do jealousy, shame, and insecurity quietly curdle into the urge to manage other people? Honest capacity is where good hinging begins.

From there we get into where hinges actually get stuck. Fairness almost never means identical hours, so we'll talk about equity instead: scheduling that doesn't always leave the same person with the scraps, and pacing that keeps you off the road to burnout. And then there's distance. The partner you can see tonight gets seen; the one a flight away needs planning, and planning is the first thing that slips when you're tired or stretched. We'll talk about what it takes to hinge well across time zones and phone screens, and how to keep a far partner from sliding into an afterthought. We'll also look at metamours, and how to make room for your partners to connect without quietly pressuring them to bond for your convenience. And we'll sit with spillover, the way a rough week in one relationship seeps into another, and what it takes to stay steady when the ripples reach your other partners.

Then the harder ground. What the role asks of you after betrayal, when trust has torn across the whole web and rebuilding means renegotiating agreements. Under everything sits one question worth the hour: is the way you're holding all this actually working, for them and for you? I'll discuss practical tools and a fair number of my own mistakes, because the most useful things I know about hinging came from comparing notes with people living it.

Join us Thursday, July 9th, from 3:00 - 4:00 PM Pacific / 6:00 - 7:00 PM Eastern for a lively and challenging discussion with Nick Piperno (he/him) from Decolonizing Love and Jessa Davis.