~ IF YOU HAVE ASKS, please be patient! I don't check this blog as obsessively as I could, so it may take me a couple days to respond. ~ Doing my best to learn about poly and help others do the same.
Man... I still have days when I get worked up about the end of my relationship with M, can't believe he's out of my life now, etc.
But then there are the days like today when I remember that, after my family dog died last year, it took three months before M finally asked, "Oh yeah, how's Pippin doing?" Three months. My puppy had been sick at Christmas and here I was in March saying, "I thought I had told you? Pippin didn't make it."
That guy did not actually give a shit about me. So it goes.
...but that doesn’t mean poly can’t be good for you
What I don't want to do, and have never wanted to do, is cast doubt on whether M might have been happier in a poly relationship. He probably would be -- he probably is. I haven't heard much, or anything, about his poly life since I left him. There were times when he tried to backpedal and say he wasn't even sure it was right for him, and maybe it was, or maybe it wasn't. I don't doubt that he needed the chance to find out, though.
The problem I have is with thinking that poly can fix an existing relationship. It can't. If there is a problem with your relationship, you gotta address that problem. You just gotta. Poly will only exacerbate it otherwise.
Poly will not fix your relationship problems: a PSA
One year ago, I was in the happiest, most successful relationship of my life. We'd been dating for not quite a year and a half, and I thought we were both madly, head-over-heels in love with each other. We were absolute weirdos together, we fought sometimes but not too often, we had this cute habit of buying Magic: the Gathering packs for each other whenever one of us went to the store. It was a giddy time of late-night dinner outings, amazing sex, and truly terrible puns.
I'd been cynical about him at the start, but around this time last year, I started daring to hope: could this one last? I’d do a verbal knock-on-wood every time it came up. I avoided moving in with him, not daring to push it too soon, but hoping maybe next year we’d be ready. I didn’t want to get a shared phone plan with him, because that felt too committing, but I did go in on a Spotify Family Plan and joked that now we were at least Spotify committed. Knock on wood.
Five years was my dream. I wanted a relationship to last five years. I was hopeful this one would last three, and then we'd see.
I guess not everything was as rosy from his side.
I spent most of 2016 trying to figure out how exactly things went wrong, and this is where I finally landed. He must have gotten sick of our relationship, or bored, or restless, or whatever. It doesn’t matter a whole lot, except that I can finally stop obsessing about it now that I have some kind of answer that makes sense.
So, put yourself in his shoes for a sec. You’re in a relationship with someone you like, maybe even love, but it’s not perfect, for whatever reason. Maybe you just need a change of pace. Maybe you’ve been spending too much time together and she’s getting on your nerves. Maybe you thought she was cool because she was willing to go to your friends’ naked / orgy parties at the start, but then she lost interest and now you feel like you got stuck with a prude. Maybe the time she had a panic attack at your friends’ house showed you she was a little emotionally unstable, and you weren’t prepared to deal with that. Hard to say.
The point is, you’ve gotten emotionally invested in someone who now doesn’t seem entirely right for you. What do you do?
It’s tempting to look for an answer that doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings. I do it too. I’m huge on avoiding conflict. Better to try to change the situation so the problem just goes away, rather than bring it into the light. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work.
When M told me he wanted to try poly -- or rather, when I directly asked him about it after seeing a lot of passive clues -- I had the hardest time getting any sense of *why*. He wouldn’t talk about it. He didn’t have any answers. He’d just say it was hard to explain, or that he didn’t know. It drove me crazy, because I hate not understanding things. I knew there had to be a good reason for it, and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just come out and say it.
It didn’t occur to me until waaaaaaay later that he might have been trying to avoid a problem with me.
The rest of 2016 saw me going slowly insane while I tried to match myself to a standard I couldn’t even describe. Did he just want to be closer with his friends? Sure, cool -- but there weren’t any particular friends he said he wanted to be closer with.
Did he just feel like he could be happier if there were more people around him? I saw an opportunity to bring an old flame of his back into his life, and pushed for him to do that. That swiftly became miserable for everyone concerned.
Okay, was this all a sex thing? I didn’t have as high a libido as him, so did he just want the opportunity to have more sex? Well, if that was the case, he refused to ever directly ask for more sex, saying he'd managed so far and could keep managing if he needed to. (This answer is a great way to accomplish absolutely nothing while making your partner feel shitty.)
During this whole affair, I was still working on the basic assumption that we were a happy couple. And yet, nothing I tried founded on that assumption went the way I expected. It was vexing.
I tried to talk to him about how unhappy I was with the K situation, and he just said, “We’ll figure it out,” and walked out of the room.
The next day, on July 2, exactly one month before our two-year anniversary, I tried in a fit of frustration to ask my questions again. He still couldn’t give me a straight answer.
So I left.
Following that were half a year of therapy, doctor’s visits, unhelpful prescriptions, regular breakdowns, anxiety attacks, lost friends, and at least two suicidal episodes, depending on how you count it.
The moral of this story is simply that poly will not fix your relationship problems. Talking to your goddamn partner might fix your relationship problems. It also might lead to a breakup, but at least in that case you won’t have dragged someone you sort of love through several months of their own personal hell before breaking up.
@ooomingmak said:
Im really sad.. i dont know if i can think straight. Im just so sad thinking that going poly wont save me from feeling so dissappointed of love
I'm sorry to hear you are in a low spot. It sounds like there's a much bigger story behind this particular message, and whatever it is, I feel for you. I don't know if poly will get you on the track that you want your life to be on, but all you can do is try it and stay hopeful! I'm always happy to chat if you need someone to talk to.
Anonymous said:
Can I ask for some help? My long term partner, C, and I are planning a hang out with our mutual friends. I would like to invite my other partner, A, as well. C is okay with the idea but we don't know how to navigate? All of our friends know we are poly - but what if C or A become uncomfortable? It's our first time having a get together like this.
So just to clarify -- this is the first time you’ll be exposing some of your (presumably non-poly) friends to your newer partner? First of all, yay! Sounds exciting. I feel like introducing people you like to each other is a huge part of the joy of poly.
There are so many variables at play here -- for instance, have C and A met before, and are they comfortable around each other? Have your friends been around poly partners before? How close are you with these friends, with C, and with A? Do C or A have any insecurities you should keep in mind? There's a lot!
But at the end of the day, you're hanging out with a bunch of people you care about, and that's fun!
It may help to make sure you guys all have something to DO together -- YMMV, but if you're board game geeks at all, I can highly recommend the structured environment of interacting via games. I've been participating in a World of Darkness RPG campaign with a girl I'm seeing and a bunch of her friends. Her long-term partner is always about, although he's not in that particular campaign. So far, so good! (partially because they are both pretty chill people!)
Speaking as an incredibly awkward human being, it helps SO MUCH in ANY social situation to have a specific script for how to interact with everyone around you, where you are always guaranteed a turn to speak and act. And especially when relationships are kind of the central focus, games gives everyone a chance to test the waters with each other, form play-friendships and play-rivalries, and generally just get to know each other.
Does anyone else see the other woman in your primaries life like competition? If so, how did you work through it?
Hi anon! I’m not quite sure what this is a reference to, but I’m guessing it was an older post because I am no longer in a situation where I have a primary partner. (Pretty happily dating two girls who are also seeing other people.)
I don’t really care to think a whole lot about my last relationship because it was a Hecking Mess (TM) and should only be referenced as an example of Every Way That Everyone In a Polycule Can Screw Everything Up For Everyone Else (c).
I feel like you’re looking for advice on a particular situation, though. Would you care to offer a little more detail and I’ll see if I have anything relevant to offer?
Some of these are from my personal life, and some are from this shitstorm of a year in general. Some are from both.
1. White lies are pernicious because you may not even realize you’re telling them. Sometimes, “I’m fine, I don’t want to hurt you,” is the absolute cruelest thing you can say.
2. People are irrational. There is no logic behind some actions. Looking for it will just drive you crazy.
3. Some people have less than noble motivations. Some people are just careless. I used to assume nobody could REALLY be motivated by sex, or money, or other shallow things, not REALLY, not in a way that could hurt anyone. Holy crap was I naïve.
4. Being positive is not about pretending everything is okay when it’s not. Being positive is about knowing full well that some things are not okay and choosing to believe that you can make them better.
I’m talking to my GF about my metamour and it actually feels kind of amazing to be supportive and to see her in love like ???
Wow it’s almost like when everyone involved isn’t being a complete TOOL polyamory actually works kind of great? what a concept? love begets more love? huh weird
I have been having issues with my triad. We love each other but it’s still new to all of us and because of my past monogamous marriage I have some jealousy and anger issues to work through. I want my hubby and our girlfriend to be happy but I feel like I’m ruining their time together because I have this thought in my mind that he is gonna leave me and our unborn child even though I know he won’t. I have talked to him about this and he reassures me but that fear is still there and idk what to do about it. Any advice?
Hi! Let me start by saying that going poly from a previously closed, established relationship is a TOTALLY different animal from starting out in a new poly relationship, especially if none of you have practiced poly before. Not only are you at the bottom of your learning curve, but (in my experience) you also feel like you're giving something up that you had gotten used to, something that was incredibly precious to you.
And I'm not here to tell you that's wrong, that everything balances out, that you're gaining something more in exchange for giving up exclusivity. The fact is that you are giving something up, and I'm not going to pretend it's easy. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done -- and for some relationships, my own included, it genuinely doesn't work.
You may love each other to the moon and back, but the little things will start to build up and one day you may find yourself in a situation where you just can't stand to have your life the way it is. Those are the harsh, cold facts.
NOW.
Here’s what I learned from that.
Focus on individual relationships. While it is important to have a good whole-triad relationship, you don’t all have to hang out together all the time (if that is what you are doing), or even ever, if you find that the jealousy is easier to manage when things aren’t right in your face. If you have good individual relationships with each person in your triad, you’ll be much better able to talk things out when they need talking. (This is not to say that you shouldn’t also try to build a good three-way relationship, but consider it a next level on top of the two-way foundations.)
Give yourselves enough distance. If things start getting tense, if you find yourself snipping at each other, you need to walk away. Otherwise, if you’re anything like me, it will get nasty, someone might yell, there might be hurt feelings, and you can’t ever undo that. Walk away, let yourself cool down, come back to it when you are ready to talk. You will thank yourself later.
Be really fucking brave. Poly takes a lot of guts - it takes guts to push through the jealousy, and it takes even more guts to tell your partners, in a loving way, when something is bothering you, or when you need something from them.
Your husband loves you. Never forget that. But at the same time, don't let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that that's enough, because it isn't -- you are in for a lot of work, and so is he, and so is your girlfriend.
Make it loving, compassionate work, and someday it will be worth it.
I haven’t posted here in ages and I wasn’t sure I was going to again. However, I felt some of you might enjoy hearing where my poly story has gone.
At the end of my last relationship/debacle, I was so full of jealousy and frustration that I was convinced I couldn’t be poly. I must not be capable of it, I thought. It’s just not a model that works for me.
And that was a shame, I thought, because the principles of polyamory were *very much* my kind of thing! Infinite love? Letting things be what they want to be without restriction? Learning to build a relationship based on trust and communication, where I acknowledge that my partners live their own lives and whatever we have together is something to celebrate in its own right? That sounds awesome!
It was too hard in practice, though, so I must be mono.
It’s funny, but every time I tell the story of my first poly relationship to someone who wasn’t there for it, I try *not* to make my ex-partner sound like an asshole. I loved him, and I don’t want to just rant about what happened. And yet... people cringe. “That sounds *awful*.” “He *did* that?” “I’m getting claustrophobic just thinking about it.”
Hm.
Poly was, and is, such an interesting challenge to me. I am far from being a perfect poly partner, perhaps not even a good one. I am sure that when my ex-partner and metamour tell the story from their perspectives, they get a lot of the same cringes as I do. It was a debacle all around.
But poly points me in a direction that I believe is a good one. I believe it is healthy to be bad at something so long as I am striving to improve -- so long as I am learning. My online dating profile now proudly states ‘non-monogamous’, and I’ve had so many good conversations with other people who have chosen the poly lifestyle. Each one of them has brought a little joy to my life by meeting them. I don’t fear their partners.
Poly, I believe, is about celebrating love. It is about finding allies who love the same people as I do, who want to make someone’s life happier together. I’m here for that. I really am. And I desperately hope, as I start down the poly path again with someone new, that I won’t let her down.
I’m not going to let one rotten experience spoil what poly could be for me.
I think I just had a revelation? About what poly might mean for someone who experiences an intrinsic need? Maybe? Is it something like... you have various sets of needs, and different people fill different needs for you? For instance, say one of your favorite ways to express romance is through cooking meals together. And you have a partner you love dearly, but they just don't get much of a kick out of the kitchen. So, whereas the mono person would either just accept that they can't cook meals with their partner, or work out some kind of halfway point, the poly person just *finds someone who likes to cook meals.* In no way does this diminish the love for the first partner. It's just a different kind of solution. Anyway this is all me guessing about things I don't understand, and it's late and I'm tired, and I don't know why I'm not asleep yet. I'm pretty much done posting on this blog; not a lot of reason left to it. But, hey, answers maybe for the people out there like me of six months ago, hm? Stay strong out there. Stay in love.
Thank you. ❤❤❤❤ And I will! I know I’ll do a great many things, love many wonderful people. But right now I’m in mourning for the loves lost here. All of them.
