Polyamory literally translates to many loves. It’s a relationship format that means a couple is dating—not just having sex with—other people. “A major misconception is that polyamory (and other forms of openly non-monogamous relationships) are just an excuse for people to not commit romantically. While some people may indeed use the guise of polyamory in this way, research shows that polyamorous relationships are just as committed as monogamous ones,” says New York City-based sexuality and relationships scientist and consultant Dr. Zhana Vrangalova. Dr. Zhana also created Open Smarter, an online course that helps people make smarter decisions about their relationship choices using their unique relationship personality.

Relationship formats are couture, not off the rack.

Relationship formats are couture, not off the rack. There are many forms of ethical non-monogamy (ENM) for couples to choose from. Some only date other people together, or play at parties, or during times of long-distance. There’s a relationship format for every couple. Polyamory is often either hierarchical poly, in which a couple is one another’s “primaries” but also dates others, or non-hierarchical (solo) poly in which one does not place any partner above another. It can be fun, it can be the ideal solution for many, but it can also be hard. And some say cannabis can help.

“My primary and other partners all smoke cannabis, so it makes it a lot easier for us to connect,” says founder and chief conspirator of The New Society for Wellness (NSFW) a sex and cannabis-friendly private members club in New York City Daniel Saynt. “I recently introduced two partners for the first time and our shared love of weed definitely helped get everyone into a comfortable mental space to explore. I loved bringing over rolled jays to the two of them while they got to know each other better. It makes these sometimes difficult talks easier.” Studies show that cannabis can increase divergent thinking, which is the brain’s way of connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. This can help couples of all relationship formats come up with fun and kinky things to do in the bedroom, such as try new role-playing scenes. The same research also shows that overall creativity is enhanced, which can help you come up with novel solutions to unique issues (such as meeting your partner’s partner, also called a “metamour”).

Jealousy will naturally arise in a poly relationship, just like any other relationship. Contrary to popular belief, poly people are not immune to jealousy, they just tend to understand how to navigate it. “Jealousy is always a concern in open relations, but how we acknowledge and navigate jealousy determines if we can help mitigate it or make it fester,” says polyamorous educator, activist, and co-founder of The Sex Work Survival Guide Tiana GlittersaurusRex.

“Cannabis helps me think more logically than rationally or emotionally when I’m facing jealousy or experiencing it myself.”

While the green may not cure the green-eyed monster, research suggests that it can help reduce negative bias. Studies have shown that THC from weed attaches to our cannabinoid receptors and can interact with our emotional processing. This can help us see the glass half full. Translated to relationship, cannabis could help us assess a situation, and rather than focus on petty jealousies, appreciate our partner. “Cannabis helps me think more logically than rationally or emotionally when I’m facing jealousy or experiencing it myself. Each inhale I take of a vape or joint helps calm my nervous system and gives me a moment to pause then organize my thoughts so I can listen to my inner voice and express myself more clearly,” she adds.

Despite all our progress, polyamory is still taboo and can come with challenges regarding coming out to family or potential partners. “I frequently work with clients who are navigating their sexuality. This causes both cognitive and somatic (bodily) dissonance, which is incredibly anxiety-provoking for most,” says somatic psychologist and certified sex therapist Dr. Holly Richmond. “Anxious people have difficulty sleeping, eating (too much or too little), with cognitive focus, maintaining stable moods, and stable relationships. Using cannabis, in my clinical experience, most often has a positive impact on the anxiety that helps people more easily cultivate understanding and awareness of their sexuality.”

“Cannabis helps calm the parts of your brain that do a lot of shaming. It can help calm the anxiety down.”

Cannabis, both in the form of medical marijuana and for those who self-medicate, is used to treat and lower anxiety. “Cannabis helps calm the parts of your brain that do a lot of shaming. It can help calm the anxiety down,” says psychologist and author of Building Open Relationships Dr. Liz Powell. However, the evidence regarding cannabis for anxiety is conflicting. While it provides natural stress relief for some, depending on one’s disposition, in addition to dosage and method of intake, it could lead to paranoia in others. “Some people can get more anxious or paranoid when consuming cannabis, and it also negatively affects working memory, so unless you’re a regular user and have developed some hacks around it, it might not result in the most productive conversation,” Dr. Zhana says.

This is why one should ideally consult a doctor or pharmacist before starting a cannabis regime to find what’s best suited for them. Just like relationship formats, cannabis is not one-size-fits-all. These days, there are so many different strains, and terpenes, and cannabinoids, and methods of intake that one can tailor their cannabis use to their needs. Because as sex and dating is more fun when it’s done responsibly, so is using cannabis, and if one is to enjoy the combination of the two *chef’s kiss* they deserve nothing but the best.

The ability to enjoy sex, kink, and pleasure is your birthright, despite the narratives a sex-negative patriarchal society wants you to believe. “Sexuality is an integral part of ourselves,” said Dr. Holly Richmond, PhD, a somatic psychologist and certified sex therapist who works with patients to regain their kink life through using cannabis. But when you have a chronic illness, understanding that birthright can sometimes get lost.

Bre Ulrich, known as “Baby Fangs” in the kink scene, nearly lost that part of her due to chronic illness. Kink is an umbrella term that refers to any sexual play beyond the vanilla (not kinky) heteronorm. Think of bondage, adult diapers, nipple clamps, golden showers, and playing with knives. You know — the fun stuff. While all sex can get sweaty and emotional, sitting in a cage for hours waiting for your mistress to take you out tends to be more labor-intensive than casual missionary. For many, kink is a crucial part of their identity, so it sucks when all of a sudden you can’t wear a latex straitjacket like you used to due to chronic illness.

“Depression and anxiety are pretty common in lupus patients,” said Ulrich. “And those two mental behemoths have a funny way of not only making you feel like you’re undesirable, but also an absolute creep for having the kinks you have.”

The CDC loosely defines chronic diseases as “conditions that last one year or more and require ongoing medical attention or limit activities of daily living or both.” Under this definition, PTSD, anxiety, and depression are indeed chronic conditions. Diseases such as Crohn’s or lupus can also trigger anxiety, depression, or PTSD. Six in 10 US adults suffer from chronic illness, and four in 10 have at least two or more. Symptoms can affect your ability to engage in kinky play that’s intrinsic to your identity. However, cannabis is helping people reunite with their sex lives after facing the struggles of chronic disease.

Thankfully, medical marijuana helped Ulrich lasso the kink she thought lupus had destroyed.

It’s a Big Deal When Your Sex Life Changes

Lupus isn’t the only chronic illness that makes you feel like your sexuality’s been zapped from your soul. Mark* is kinky, nonbinary, and queer. He enjoys photography, marijuana, and kinky sex such as impact play, rope bondage, and degradation. Then, in 2014, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.

“Since Crohn’s is chronic and unpredictable, there have been times where I had to cancel dates due to flare-ups,” said Mark. “If I did make it, there was no guarantee I could perform.”

Crohn’s disease causes inflammation of the digestive tract. Symptoms include abdominal pain, severe diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss, and malnutrition. In addition to Crohn’s, Mark has depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Prior to the onset of these conditions, Mark says his kink life was substantially more active and his libido was predictable and consistent. He was sexually active two to three times a week, a figure which dropped to once every few months due to his illnesses. Not being able to express himself sexually due to illness created feelings of isolation.

“If your body has changed in some way, and doesn’t work like it did in the past, it is really alienating for a lot of people,” said Elizabeth Anne Wood, PhD, a sociologist, strategist, and author, to MERRY JANE.

After Mark began using medical marijuana, his libido returned to the point where now he is enjoying kink at least once a month, and he says it’s steadily rising.

Ulrich essentially experienced the same extreme libido deflation as Mark. Lupus, however, is an autoimmune disease that causes your body’s immune system to attack your tissues and organs. It’s difficult to diagnose, and symptoms — like rash, fatigue, joint pain, and more — vary from person to person. She also has depression and anxiety, which are common, comorbid conditions in lupus patients.

“I could play out really rough scenes with a partner one day, and then be in tears the next because they slid their hand the wrong way across my very tender face,” she said. “It was constantly a guessing game. Will I get to enjoy this, or will there be a moment where I am fighting through unpleasurable pain?”

Ulrich also dealt with risks such as excessive bleeding from kink scenes, which previously were fine; too much motion made her sick to her stomach and dizzy to the point of nearly passing out.

“Pulling hair could mean a bald spot, any kind of roughness could cause extreme bruising, and if my muscles were tired, it could mean non-stop shaking or collapsing under my own weight,” she said. “It was scary. I felt like I no longer had control over my body. It’s disheartening to crave but fear sex.”

Reclaiming Kinks with Cannabis

The kink scene is a marginalized sexual community. BDSM, which stands for “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism” is more societally-approved, in part thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey, which is a poor depiction but undeniably brought BDSM to the mainstream.

BDSM is a form of kink, but not all kink is BDSM. BDSM involves a power exchange between a dominant and submissive party. So, although having a thing for garden hoses is kinky (for example), it doesn’t involve a power exchange. Simply put: America is still a largely puritanical place where people are only supposed to have sex to make babies. Other sexual expressions are considered strange and perverted.

It takes resilience and strength to embrace and safely engage in your desires, which are still frowned upon by mainstream society. Often hypocritically, politicians don’t want us having queer orgies, they want straight and silent wedding-night sex to conceive a child.

That’s why an underground community exists around kink, much like the cannabis movement. Both taboo, kink and cannabis are misunderstood, judged, and policed. That makes talking with a professional about your unique health and sexual preferences extremely difficult. In terms of pleasure, most doctors usually lack the openness to handle sex questions from straight, vanilla folks — let alone kinksters who want to know how lupus will impact their ability to engage in knife play without excessive bleeding.

“There are concrete problems people face, like pain or fatigue, that makes the sexual expression they were engaging in [before] difficult to do,” said Wood, PhD. “Lots of patients may not feel comfortable asking for help.”

But more and more patients report re-embodying their kink through the power of cannabis.

“Cannabis has allowed me to relax my mind and body in order to be more comfortable in kink and sex,” Mark said. In addition to treating anxiety and depression, cannabis relieves symptoms of Crohn’s disease.

Just as cannabis helps patients attend events that might normally be overwhelming and taxing (like attending a picnic in the park or a work dinner party) it also helps people bend over a bed so their partner can smack their butt with a flogger.

“My skin handles latex, leather, rope and steel like I’m made of diamond, now. Any pain inflicted is pleasurable and not torturous,” Ulrich said. Cannabis provides anti-inflammation and pain relief, too, which helps her lupus. “I lost the parts of sex and kink that I loved for a long time. I was finally able to find that again because cannabis healed my body in ways western medicine could not. Lupus no longer gets a say in whether or not a safeword is called, thanks to good old Mary Jane.”

The Kink Community is Inherently a Community of Healing

Negotiations are part of kink. Before a scene — the period in which the kinky play goes down — the dominant, submissive, and everyone else involved, goes over what’s okay and what’s off-limits. This is when people disclose if they’re using cannabis to treat a condition. While marijuana is extremely safe, it’s always a good idea to spend extra time reviewing consent when a mind-altering substance is involved. Negotiations also create a natural framework for folks to find creative ways to work around chronic illnesses.

Like many marginalized communities, kinksters create a safe space to fill the void of mainstream education and support surrounding the lifestyle. “The kink community is supportive and consent-driven,” Dr. Richmond says. “Kink is all about diversity and sex positivity. It’s accepting of different abilities.”

Kink, in addition to some good cannabis, can be healing for those with chronic conditions and even offer battle fuel. “If illness is alienating us from our bodies, then anything that can help us connect with our bodies and feel whole is helpful,” said Wood, PhD. “The ability to experience pleasure and intimacy is healing. Kink can help a person experience intimacy, and that intimacy can become a fuel for healing and a source of resilience.”

People who smoke marijuana reported having more sexual intercourse than non-users, according to a new study conducted by urologists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The results were modest but statistically significant: Non-users said they had engaged in sexual intercourse between five and six times in the previous month. Daily pot smokers reported having intercourse around seven times over that same period. The frequency was in-between for people who smoked marijuana less often, on a weekly or monthly basis: they reported having sex more than abstainers, but less than daily users.

“I was surprised,” said Dr. Michael Eisenberg, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of urology at Stanford University Medical Center.

“The daily users for example, compared to the never users, reported about 20 more sexual encounters a year. So I think that is a significant difference,” he said.

It’s the first study to look at the connection between pot smoking and sex at the population level. To tease out the association, Eisenberg and his co-author Dr. Andrew Sun used survey data drawn from more than 50,000 Americans between the ages of 25 and 45.

The data comes from the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC. Since that survey does not ask about homosexual encounters, the results only apply to straight men and women.

Eisenberg decided to do the study because more of his patients had been asking him if smoking marijuana could be contributing to their sexual difficulties. He had previously told them it might, and to abstain just in case. He was basing his assumptions on research about the negative vascular effects of cigarette smoking. In addition, some past studies and case reports have indicated heavy marijuana use may be associated with erectile dysfunction or depressed sperm count.

But now Eisenberg is rethinking his advice, at least for some patients.

“If somebody is using marijuana to help them for chronic back pain or something like that, there may be other interventions that we can think about targeting,” he said. “Rather than telling them they have to stop, otherwise their sex life is doomed.”

For Dr. Holly Richmond, a sex therapist, the study results are “pretty remarkable.”

In her offices in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, Richmond has seen mixed results when her clients use marijuana. Some couples tell her that they have more sex when they use pot, but others have less sex.

She said those differences are probably attributable to how much pot someone smokes, instead of how often.

“Too much can lead to lethargy and really checking out, which does not facilitate [emotional] connection at all, and definitely doesn’t encourage sexual activity.”

Eisenberg cautioned against drawing unwarranted conclusions from the study, and cited the old statistical adage “correlation does not equal causation.”

“This doesn’t mean that if you want to have more sex you should start smoking marijuana,” he said. “That’s definitely not what this data supports.”

The study can’t explain what factors are driving the association between pot use and sex, said Dr. Igor Grant, chair of psychiatry and director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California San Diego.

He said one explanation is that people who use marijuana —or are willing to admit marijuana use in a survey —are more likely to report their sexual encounters, or remember more of them. Grant said marijuana users are also sensation seekers, and may be more driven to have sex.

“Drug use is one type of sensation-seeking behavior, and obviously sex is another,” Grant said.

Eisenberg agreed that personality and other behaviors could be a factor, but if that was the case, he would expect to see different results from different demographic groups. For example, young and single respondents might be more willing and able to engage in risky or sensation-seeking behavior, when compared to married people with children. But the results held across all categories, including race and ethnicity, educational level, income level, religious affiliation, and family status.

“For every group, the more marijuana use that they reported, the more sex they reported as well. So that was really interesting to me, and also made me think that there could potentially be some biologic explanation here,” Eisenberg said.

Richmond, the sex therapist, says she wouldn’t advise any client who doesn’t already smoke to start smoking marijuana as a sexual aid. But she said it could be reassuring to her pot-using clients to learn from the study that smoking pot doesn’t appear to decrease sexual activity.

“Individuals and couples look for additional ways to create novelty in the relationship and have fun, and that’s now a legal and accessible way to do it,” she said.

Medicinal marijuana is now legal in 29 states, and eight of them allow recreational use as well. (The District of Columbia allows both).

Dr. Eisenberg said that’s why learning more about the potential side effects of marijuana use is so critical.