Hi! I’m gonna tell you all about polyamory in The Sims today, but before we get into that, I’d like to humbly ask you to vote for my miniseries, Making Magic, in the Signal Listener’s Choice Awards, which are ending very soon. Voting is quick and easy, and will help more people discover the series. Thanks so much! 😘🪄
As I’ve told you on a few occasions before, the Sims franchise has always been ahead of the curve in terms of sexuality and gender representation. Your Sims can be queer, trans, nonbinary… and now, they can be polyamorous too.
Oh, don’t get me wrong; people have been making polyamorous Sims since the game’s inception (myself included). The trouble was, the game – like much of modern society – was created with monogamy in mind. I used to get around this by entering a cheat code to give my Sims the “Player” trait, which would supposedly make it so that they could flirt with/kiss other people in front of their partner(s) and no one would get jealous; however, The Sims is a notoriously buggy game, so this often didn’t work quite right, souring many a birthday party with sudden Simlish arguments when someone got too lovey-dovey in front of their metamour.
There were also third-party mods you could download, which let you mess with jealousy settings, among other things – but the game is already so overstuffed with CPU-intensive features that I hesitate to risk breaking my game with unofficial add-ons. I wanted a built-in way to do polyamory.
And now, there is one. Yay!
The latest expansion pack added to the series, Lovestruck, gives Sims new “relationship boundaries.” These are restrictive by default – just as monogamy is considered the default in the real world – but can be loosened, either by changing your Sim’s boundaries yourself in the Create-a-Sim editor, or by having your Sim ask their partner(s) to loosen their boundaries.
I’ve been testing out this expansion pack (including its numerous other, non-polyamory-focused features!) for weeks, and would like to share a few observations about them that I think are worth noting…
Observation 1: Change takes time
According to the Sims’ model of non-monogamy, there are 3 categories of action which might trigger jealousy if your partner does them with someone else while they’re near you:
1. WooHooing (the Sims universe’s euphemism for having sex)
2. Other physical romantic activities (e.g. kissing, cuddling)
3. Non-physical romantic activities (e.g. flirting)
Each of these 3 categories has a different boundary linked to it – so, for example, it’s possible for a Sim to be chill about their partner making out with someone else, as long as it never progresses to sex. This feels fairly accurate to my early experiences of non-monogamy, if not my more recent ones, because some people (myself included) find jealousy easier to process/handle if it’s parcelled out little by little, like exposure therapy, rather than all dumped on them at once.
However, here’s an interesting quirk in how The Sims went about this: You can only ask your partner to reconsider one boundary per day. So if, for instance, you ask your wife to be chill about you flirting with another woman in front of her, it’ll be a whole 24 in-game hours before you can ask her to be chill about you kissing another woman in front of her. And then you’ll have to wait another 24 hours before you can ask her to be chill about you having sex with another woman.
It might sound arbitrary – and the 24-hour figure certainly is – but this slow progression is indeed what many people need to feel safe when first wading into non-monogamy. As Jessica Fern wrote in Polywise, “Sometimes a request to pump the brakes comes from a legitimate need to give our nervous systems a chance to recalibrate and integrate all the new changes.” Part of embarking on a non-monogamy journey is learning to trust that your partner(s) will respect your boundaries, and won’t steamroll right over them in pursuit of their own gratification – and one way to establish that trust is to move slowly, step by step, continually checking in with each other to make sure everything’s feeling okay (or at least that you’re both staying more-or-less within your window of tolerance). I find it fascinating that the people making The Sims know enough about polyamory to know that this slow pace matters.
That being said, you can still edit your own Sims’ boundaries quickly in Create-a-Sim, and can use cheats to easily edit those of others, too (just shift-click any Sim and select “Modify in CAS”). So, players who want to fast-track their way to non-monogamy can still do so.
Observation 2: Teens can’t be poly
Okay, this one surprised me!
Naturally, The Sims has to walk a careful line when it comes to depicting teen sexuality, not only because of potential backlash/moral outrage, but also because they’re aiming for a “T for Teen” rating.
In The Sims 2, for instance, where teens were first introduced, they couldn’t “WooHoo” (have sex) at all until they aged up to the young adult stage. Now, in The Sims 4, teens can “Mess Around,” but they still can’t WooHoo. Which, like, whatever, I get it. Teens can and do have sex IRL, as we know, but I understand that the franchise is balancing a lot of factors here and I think this is a fine compromise.
However, when I saw that teen Sims don’t have access to the same polyamory features as adult Sims, it made me think. Can teens be polyamorous in real life? Yes, of course they can. Can they do it well and healthily? Sure. Not all of them, but some. But that’s true of adults too!
One of my best friends in high school grew up around polyamory; her mom had pretty much always been poly, and was queer and kinky as well, so this stuff was all very normalized in her household. My friend knew from early on that she was polyamorously inclined as well. I still chuckle when I remember the time that she asked her then-girlfriend if they could open up their relationship and the girlfriend said, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
It turned out that for my friend, it was necessary – it was genuinely a part of her romantic and sexual orientation, and became a crucial feature of all her future relationships (to my knowledge; we’re not in touch anymore). Her girlfriend hadn’t understood that, and hadn’t been good at communicating about it, but of course she wasn’t perfect at those things; she was a teenager, and many adults still struggle with this stuff, sometimes even after years of experience.
So, while I understand some of the reasons The Sims’ attitude toward teenage relationships is “monogamy or bust,” ultimately I disagree with their decision. Teens can be poly, and I think many people would be spared a lot of heartache and pain if they knew that from the beginning – not to mention, building non-monogamy skills in your youth would likely set you up for success in adult non-monogamy. It’s inaccurate and often counterproductive to think of sex as something adults do and teens don’t, and I see no reason we should think about polyamory that way, either.
Observation 3: The “clubs” feature works great for polycules
Sims superfans often extol the usefulness of The Sims’s “clubs” feature, wherein you can form a social group, select who’s in it, and invite all of its members to one location with the click of a button (as opposed to individually inviting them all over, every single time). This is super convenient for playing out scenarios involving polycules, throuples, quads, and so on.
Additionally, you can select which types of activities are encouraged at “club meetings” – including, for instance, flirting, kissing, or WooHooing. The more that your Sims participate in these club-sanctioned activities during meetings, the more “club points” you rack up, which can then be spent on perks like expanding your max number of members, establishing a club handshake, or even choosing club uniforms that all members will wear whenever they meet up.
Naturally, I’ve been doing this a lot. There is something so hilarious to me about seeing an entire Sim polycule show up on your doorstep in matching red suits, or whatever. I think if this happened to me IRL I would never stop laughing. And yet, in The Sims, it can be every bit as normal as a leisurely afternoon WooHoo.
Elsewhere:
• Once more, I’m gonna ask you to please vote for Making Magic in the Signal Awards, if you wouldn’t mind. Thanks, bb! 🥰
• Two new sex toy reviews on my blog: I tried the Womanizer Vibe, which is Womanizer’s first foray into the land of vibrators, as well as the new-and-improved We-Vibe Wand.
• Speaking of vibrators – if you’ve ever wondered what I sound like when having an orgasm with one, here’s a new audio file you can buy of the first time the We-Vibe Wand made me come. I recorded this for my partner and then decided, why not put it up for sale?!
• This week’s Dildorks episode was about the fear of rejection. (Stay tuned for the bloopers at the end to hear us discussing the Netflix show where a sex podcaster dates a hot rabbi.)
• Porn superstar Siri Dahl is hosting a 12-hour livestream this coming Tuesday called the Corn Telethon, to raise money for sex worker mutual aid funds. You’ll see me and a bunch of other cool cuties in it!
• This Hot Ones conversation between Patti LuPone and Aubrey Plaza is a hoot. Living legends, for real.
• This Daniel Thrasher video about being “diagnosed artistic” made me laugh a lot. Some of what he’s describing here is basically ADHD (which he’s been open about having), and while I’m pretty sure I don’t have it myself, I still related a lot to this…
• I’m currently obsessing over the Styne/Sondheim musical whose name is a Romani slur so I won’t say it, but, uh… here’s a video that I’ve watched approximately 8 times now, of Imelda Staunton performing “Some People.” (I want to eventually work my way up to being able to sing this one at karaoke, but damn, what a difficult piece!!) If you’ve got a free afternoon/evening coming up and you want to spend it watching a wonderfully classic piece of musical theatre, the whole production is rentable/streamable and it’s fantastic. I might try to watch Follies or Passion next…