Mapping your relationship constellation

Mapping relationship constellations can be fun, crafty, technical or artistic. It is a way of representing your relationships in pictorial form. You can do it in whatever way is meaningful to you. My relationship maps include people that I consider family of choice, romantic or sexual partners, intimate friends and people I feel especially close to. Other people choose to only represent their romantic and sexual partners, or people that they spend more than a certain amount of time with. Whatever choices you make, it can be useful to think about which relationships have a place and why.

Some ways to do it:

• You can use mind mapping software or even some types of process flow software to map it online
• You can use post-its on a wall (or paper) so that you can move people around when you want to
• You can draw people or use the photographs
• You can use different colors to represent different kinds of connections (kink, sex, romance, family etc)
• You can highlight on your map the relationships that you would like to work on strengthening or find ways of indicating where you have space for new connections
• You can draw a constellation of the relationships that you would like to have.

However you do it, I hope you find it a useful exercise.

If you’d like to learn emotional & relationship skills to cope with difficult stuff that comes up in non-monogamous relationships you can sign up to my next course just for non monogamous people. Find out more here…