A polycule is a network of people connected through romantic and/or sexual relationships that are openly non-monogamous. The word is a portmanteau of "polyamorous" and "molecule," reflecting the molecular diagram structure that people in these networks sometimes use to map the connections between members. The friendships that develop within polycules — between metamours (partners' partners), between partners' partners' partners, between people who are connected through the network but not romantically to each other — constitute a distinct and underexamined social form.
The interesting thing about polycule friendships, from the perspective of this manual, is not the sexual structure that generates them. It is what happens to friendship when the conventional firewall between friendship and romance is dissolved. In mainstream culture, romantic partnership is assumed to be the exclusive primary relationship, and friendship is assumed to be categorically secondary. The architecture of polycules removes this assumption. Within a polycule, the friend and the partner may be distinct roles, overlapping roles, or roles that shift over time as romantic relationships change form. Friendship in these networks is not organized around the assumption of exclusivity, either romantic or social.
What polycule friendships reveal, when examined as a collective social form, is a set of features that many people actually want in their social lives but have not had the framework or vocabulary to pursue: explicit negotiation of relationship terms, acknowledged interdependence between people who did not choose each other directly, management of jealousy and comparison as relational skills rather than failures, and a conception of intimacy that is not organized around the scarcity assumption — the idea that emotional resources are finite and that giving more to one person necessarily means having less for another.
The challenges of polycule friendships are equally instructive. Relationship dissolution in a polycule creates complex ruptures that affect people who did not make the rupturing decision. Conflict between members can cascade through the network. The emotional labor of maintaining multiple deep relationships simultaneously is substantial. The lack of cultural scripts and institutional recognition creates constant navigation work.
Both the possibilities and the challenges of polycule friendships contain information that applies beyond the specific context of polyamory. They are case studies in what happens when the conventional architecture of intimacy is deliberately redesigned.