The Game Changer: A Memoir of Disruptive Love

By Franklin Veaux

To make an open marriage work, Franklin and Celeste knew they needed to make sure no one else ever came between them. That meant there had to be rules. No overnights, no falling in love, and either one of them could ask the other to end an outside relationship if it became too much to deal with. It worked for nearly two decades—and their relentless focus on their own relationship let them turn a blind eye to the emotional wreckage they were leaving behind them.

The rules did not prepare them for Amber.

“I have a question,” Amber would say. And whatever came next would send a wrecking ball through Franklin and Celeste's comforting illusions. Amber was the first of Franklin’s polyamorous secondary partners to insist on being treated like a person, and the first to peel back the layers of insecurity and fear that surrounded their relationship. Amber was a game changer.

A game-changing relationship is one that uproots and redirects your life. It overthrows your assumptions about who you are and why. It awakens you to possibilities you’d never conceived of. It disrupts. And it is the unspoken elephant in the attractive showroom of polyamorous relationships.

This book is the true story of a game-changing relationship that changed not only Franklin and Celeste’s lives, but the face of the modern polyamory movement.

A game-changing relationship can happen to anyone. How will you handle it when it happens to you?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thorntree Press
• Release date: Sep 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780991399765

Reviews for The Game Changer

[atreic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an autobiography of one person's experience with polyamory. It's an interesting read for the stories it thinks it's telling, and a fascinating read for the stories between the lines as well. The story it mostly thinks it's telling is about how one man grew in his understanding of relationships, until he decided to stop trying to tie himself up with rules and put his relationships in boxes where they woud fit., even though that meant leaving his wife who he loved. Other things I found in here:- some adorable stories of 'when I was a young slightly gormless computer geek who hadn't worked out how to flirt yet', and similar 'look, this point of view is really obvious to me, why don't others feel the same way?' and 'I have no idea why what I did hurt this person' stories.- some remarkably frank and honest relationship stories that aren't trying too hard to make people look good and just look quite real and random. And some really good pen portraits of a huge pile of random people- Some great stories of ye olde days of computing, BBS communities, giant hardware- Discussion of when polyamory isn't fair on secondaries, and what a secondary's bill of rights would look like.

[MaryBeth Lauro · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An emotionally raw and honest journey of love and self discovery