“I found, at least for me, there’s probably no limit to the amount of people I could love.”

Open, a new memoir from Rachel Krantz, is not simply the documentation of a period of intense self-discovery for the author. It’s the story of a journalist who, while coming into her queerness, spent half a decade researching and reporting on nonmonogamy.

Relationship styles, much like sexuality, exist on a spectrum. Some of us are extremely oriented toward open relationships, some are not. Many are somewhere in the middle, leaning toward one end or the other. But as Krantz points out, how are you supposed to parse out where you fit on that spectrum when all of the external messages that we receive from birth point to relationships, successful or not, as being between two people only?

“What is the discomfort of growing beyond paradigms that I’ve been socialized to think are acceptable and normal, and what is the discomfort of extreme jealousy and anxiety in a relationship that’s maybe not healthy?” Krantz asks on this week’s LGBTQ&A podcast.

“I found, at least for me, there’s probably no limit to the amount of people I could love.”

With the publication of Open, Krantz is challenging both readers and journalists to engage with her book as they would any other work of immersion journalism, moving beyond expected tropes of “confessional erotica” with which a woman writing about her sex life is often classified. “I am an investigative journalist and a sexual being, and those two identities shouldn’t negate each other,” Krantz says. “Why is this something that’s potentially considered untouchable or risking ruining my career by admitting these things about my sexual psychology on the record when I have serious journalism to back it up?”

Krantz joins the LGBTQ&A podcast to talk about how to best deal with jealousy in open relationships, the internalized biphobia that remains pervasive in our culture, and her new book, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy (out now).

You can listen to the full LGBTQ&A podcast interview here.

“It was like, ‘What is the discomfort of growing beyond paradigms that I’ve been socialized to think are acceptable and normal, and what is the discomfort of extreme jealousy and anxiety in a relationship that’s maybe not healthy?’

A lot of people find themselves in that situation when they’re exploring nonmonogamy or kink or maybe even when they’re coming into their queerness, which are all also things that were happening to me during the time period of the book, and it can get very confusing because you’re like, ‘Am I uncomfortable because this isn’t right for me and because this is an unhealthy dynamic or maybe we’re not practicing these things in an ethical way, or is it because I’m just experiencing a totally new way of being that society often still shames?’”

LGBTQ&A is a weekly LGBTQ+ interview podcast hosted by Jeffrey Masters. Past guests include Pete Buttigieg, Laverne Cox, Roxane Gay, and Miss Major Griffin Gracy.

New episodes come out every Tuesday.