(Slight TW for anti-LGBT/poly sentiments remembered from my childhood in the end of the third paragraph. And for brief mentions of past sexual assault.)
I grew up in a religious household and nothing but monogamy was ever presented to me. My mom still believes that everyone has one soulmate and that’s the only person for you and if you don’t meet them well, sucks to be you because you won’t have THAT fulfilling of a love life. As a kid I grew up wanting to eventually find my one person that would basically make my life worth living. I grew up on love triangle tropes and the idea that part of my very identity as a human being would be tied into the one partner I ended up with. I was also raised to believe sex wasn’t talked about or something to be done until marriage.
Skip to college years and I’ve been through sexual assault and abusive relationships and the whole waiting-for-marriage thing isn’t an option anymore. And I’m getting out of a messy breakup and I meet this guy who is friends with one of my friends and is cute and seems sweet and we hit it off and decide to be friends with benefits. I’m still kind of in the “I’m having sex because I can CHOOSE TO this time” phase and I also fell into a “you never know what someone is REALLY like until you have sex with them and they can’t hide from you” mentality. Well, he was the first non-abusive physical lover I coupled with, and so of course my feelings grew fast and hard. After a little while, we started officially dating and eventually moved in together.
At this point, I was still completely monogamous. I used to feel guilty when I was dating someone and I’d see a new person and have that gut “oh, they’re attractive” reaction. I’d beat myself up for it and feel really bad. Add to that the fact that my parents’ marriage ended because they were both cheating on each other and well...not really the type you’d imagine becoming poly right? I certainly never saw it coming. I still remembered my mom talking about “polygamists” whenever talk of “the gays” came up. As in: “If we give the gays the right to marriage then the polygamists will be next”.
In any case, I began to get a crush on one of the guys in one of my college classes. He reminded me a lot of my boyfriend (let’s call the bf “Zane”). After I realized I was having a crush on this new guy, and a friend with benefit I knew before Zane came back into my life in the friend capacity and I realized I was still kind of interested in him, I had a talk with Zane. I brought up maybe making our relationship more open for the duration of my final year of college. To that point I had been having sex a couple years and none of my partners had ever brought me to orgasm, and I had seriously thought I was broken from the assault history. I just figured I’d be the only one able to get me off from now on.
Zane and I talked a couple times about this other guy in my class and why I think I liked him, and I said he reminded me a lot of Zane himself, and I couldn’t turn the feelings off. Eventually after a tearful discussion during which I explained college is the best place to explore and have wild experiences before settling down (marriage between Zane and myself had been discussed in ever-serious terms) and I finally came clean about feeling broken he relented and agreed to open the relationship.
Now, I don’t recommend opening a relationship the way we did. He forced himself to do it because I felt I needed it to figure out if I was broken or not. (And I truly did.) But he also forced himself, and so he ended up resenting me for it and guilt-tripping me whenever other men came up in conversation in general (whether I was anything more than friends with them or not). During our breakup, he even tried to accuse me of sabotaging our relationship by sleeping with others. Our relationship never would have worked anyway--he basically needed a mom in his life and I became her. What I didn’t know was that all of my friends hated him for his lack of maturity, but they knew I was happy and for once not being abused and they kept their feelings from me until I told them I felt like things were ending.
As to the feelings of being broken, I discovered that I could orgasm with other people very soon after our relationship was opened up. It just depended upon my partners’ skill level but ALSO their effort. That was something I had never really seen, even with Zane. After Zane and I broke up, I spent a summer with more fwbs than I could count on one hand and skipping past what I saw the fake formalities of making male friends by sleeping with them to know their true persona. The guys that pretended to be nice could be mean in bed, and I’d decided I’d rather skip right to knowing they were mean than investing months into becoming friends with them first. (Something I don’t recommend, but it helped me cope with things at the time.)
The real beginning of my poly lifestyle leanings came when I met two men who were friends with each other. One of them helped me get a date with the other, and through the process of becoming his friend and getting his help I discovered I rather liked both of them. So, being bolder than usual I asked them if either minded if I ended up sleeping with both of them. (None of us were looking for a “relationship” and that had been communicated at the beginning.)
Both of them responded, initially with surprise, that it was my life and I could do whatever I wanted as long as it made me happy. Content with this, I began a physical relationship with both of them. This was how I got my first practice being poly, because they were friends so I had to start learning early how to communicate wants like “Hey, I’ve gone home twice with you now, but I haven’t gone home at all with him yet--do you mind if I actually go to his place tonight?” Not only was this communication accepted, but even validated by one of them telling the other “have fun and take care of her tonight”.
We ended up at a Burger King once to grab some food after we had all gotten out of work at relatively the same time, and I ended up sitting between them at a booth with some other friends on the other side, and we were all joking and laughing and some of the joking was at the expense of our situation (my friends knew, and nothing is really off-limits for joking amongst ourselves). And I remember this feeling of such happiness and warmth just filling me up until I felt like I was glowing. I was out with friends who knew of my current situation and approved, and I was out with the guys whose friendship I had not only not come between but seemed to make a bit closer by my involvement as we all spent more time together now (for games and food and stuff--the sex was separate. I clarify because this is a common question haha), and both of them just wanted the best outcome for everyone involved in the situation. We were all laughing and happy and we wanted that type of future for all of us too.
I had never felt more at home in my life. Not at home, not with just friends, not in monogamous relationships--nothing else compared. I felt like this was where I belonged--maybe not with these exact people, but this situation. It was just like discovering a piece of myself I never knew existed but when I found it the discovery left me ecstatic. While my relationships with both these guys eventually faded away, they ended on a good note (one moved away, one became involved seriously and monogamously with someone else), and this opened me up to exploring what exactly polyamory was and started my journey with pursuing it in earnest.
