How long have you been polyamorous?

polypie

New member
At what age did you first realistically identify that polyamory was for you?

In a fashion that you are comfortable, please let me know how you began introducing polyamory into your life style.

What were done trials and tribulations you faced?

Was it every ever confusing, or did it come naturally?

Do you think/believe that polyamory is something people are born being..or do think everyone is born being capable of polyamory?
 
Do you think/believe that polyamory is something people are born being..or do think everyone is born being capable of polyamory?

There's a distinction between being poly and being in a poly relationship. It's not so surprising, just because you're monogamous wired doesn't mean you know how to be in a relationship.

What's weird is that it never occurs to mono people that there's anything wrong with there being tons of relationship counselors and relationship advice columns for them, yet they expect poly people to naturally "get" it without any sort of support or outside help.
 
At what age did you first realistically identify that polyamory was for you?

In a fashion that you are comfortable, please let me know how you began introducing polyamory into your life style.

What were done trials and tribulations you faced?

Was it every ever confusing, or did it come naturally?

Do you think/believe that polyamory is something people are born being..or do think everyone is born being capable of polyamory?

Well I didn't know what the term for myself was until recently but I have been poly or at least known since young. Like young young. But I have been living on my own since late teens 1st apt at 16) in the 90's it wasn't weird.

Introducing?
Hmm I just did it. My first marriage we just lived that way. It wasn't odd or forced. We just meet people and formed friendships then relationships.

Trials?
Hmm that one is hard to answer. I have been judged a lot. So now I'm more secretive about my life. I have also lost a lot of friends along the way.

Confusing?
No and yes. It very much comes naturally to me. It would be a lot easier if I wasn't. But then again I wouldn't have dated my 2nd husband if it wasn't for my life style. Confusing only because people don't get it. I did used to wonder why I was the way I was. I would feel bad that my eyes wander,even if it was ok. Now I just live my life and fully except it.

Born with?
Yep!! I remember being a kid and playing with my barbies and they had more than one spouse. Thinking back I have no idea why I did that. I just figure I'm more into love and sexuality than some people.
 
I was sixteen years old when I really first heard of nonmonogamy as a concept and it really resonated with me. I tried an open relationship in high school that didn't work because my boyfriend at the time was very mono.

I always mentioned my polyamorous leanings to boyfriends after that, but at the time I thought I could be mono if that is what they wanted. When I met my current husband, he expressed interest in trying it out, but we closed our relationship for about a year before we thought about opening it up for any reason, and it was probably another year after that before either of us made any serious attempts at anything outside the relationship.

Most of the trials and tribulations I've faced have been with my husband and his desires to have a hierarchical relationship while I do not want to establish a strict hierarchy. With other partners, most of it has been typical relationship issues that led to their failures. My first ex since we opened up our relationship was just a grown child that didn't want to take responsibility for himself and I had been trying to be a hero. My second started lying to me and his other partner and I decided not to deal with that.

It feels like a lot of it comes naturally to me. What tends to be confusing is the amount of possessiveness that even some poly-identified people seem to hold on to. I get having twinges and feelings, but I struggle to understand people who identify as poly indulging those emotions and acting on them and expecting their partners to coddle them through it.

I feel like I'm probably just inclined that way, so maybe there is something to it being an orientation. I can't really speak for everyone else or know what everyone else is capable of.
 
Another "first read about it at 15 or 16" here. :)

I didn't end up actually being in a relationship until I was 32, because there just aren't all that many folks on this planet whom I'd be partner-compatible with... but the two relationships I've been in, of course both were/are nonmonogamous right from day one (one failed rather quickly, the other is hitting our sixth anniversary next week). I make it clear immediately the moment anything beyond strictly platonic friendship starts showing up on the radar between me and someone that closed/mono will not ever be a 'ship option I'd agree to.
 
I have been "open" for probably 4 years, and poly for 2 years. Was never looking to be poly, it was just something that happened
 
I read about it in my teens, and it made sense to me then. However, I never pursued it and was in a bad mono relationship for 24 years. Soon after I ended that, I entered a new relationship with a woman who was poly-oriented as well, and had someone she wanted to resume seeing as a secondary, while I had someone I'd been dating I wanted to continue seeing, also as a secondary. Those people were also fine with the poly idea - and with being secondary - so we had a very happy and functional N-arrangement for a couple of years until our secondaries moved on and found primaries at different times.

Since then we haven't found anyone for whom we felt the same intensity and connection, but we've had some long term FWB type relationships that came close, and have also been into swinging together (where we also came close to developing a poly relationship with another couple, until they got into some kinks we didn't want to be part of).

Now, we're still open to finding a poly relationship, but the emphasis has changed somewhat, and my wife would prefer that if we do this at all that I find another woman and be the hinge of a V and see where that goes.
 
At what age did you first realistically identify that polyamory was for you?

21

In a fashion that you are comfortable, please let me know how you began introducing polyamory into your life style.

I had never heard of polyamory before I sought it out. I started out swinging with my hubby at age 18. I developed some feelings for a woman a few years later and decided I'd like to pursue it. I discovered the term polyamory, talked to my hubby, the woman, and her husband. She and I started spending more one-on-one time together and fell pretty hard. I also started dating a man I'd met in school a month or so later. It was a pretty easy step since I'd already been sexually open for 3 years.

What were done trials and tribulations you faced?

Transitioning from swinging to poly - figuring out new expectations and ways to handle group time versus one-on-one time.

Time management is still a tribulation, I think. :)

Incompatible partners (both mine and hubby's) created some distance in my relationships.

Was it every ever confusing, or did it come naturally?

My journey to polyamory was very natural for me.

Do you think/believe that polyamory is something people are born being..or do think everyone is born being capable of polyamory?

I think it depends on the person. Some people are undoubtedly born polyamorous - naturally loving more than one person romantically at a time. Other people choose it as a relationship structure. Others couldn't do either, I think. So... Yeah.
 
When I was in high school, I dated my husband and two other people. Once my husband and I got married, right after I graduated from high school, both of those people kind of broke it off with me, one was in the Marines so was away most of the time, the other one just couldn't handle that the somewhat sexual part of our relationship ended when I got married (we had a lot of phone sex and made out a lot, but never had actual intercourse). I had a few really close male friends at the beginning of our marriage, but nothing romantic.

Then we closed up our marriage for years. We opened it up again around our 17th wedding anniversary to some very light swinging, nothing below the belt. Then a few months later, my husband fell in love with the woman who is his girlfriend and we started down the road to polyamory. There's been trials (mostly on my side, dealing with envy and feeling inferior) but we're mostly doing well.

I haven't really dated anyone recently, because I was getting over a really bad break up, but I'm to the point I'd like to date other people again. Though, due to some emotional issues stemming from witnessing a really traumatic event a week and a half ago, that might be on the back burner for a little while longer as I heal from that. We'll see.
 
Re (from OP):
"At what age did you first realistically identify that polyamory was for you?"

39.

Re:
"In a fashion that you are comfortable, please let me know how you began introducing polyamory into your lifestyle."

I fell in love with a woman who was married to a man who wasn't me. She then did some web research and found out about polyamory. I mostly just waited, then, for the better part of a year, while she off-and-on asked her husband for his consent to a polyamorous arrangement. He did eventually (in 2006) give his consent, and the three of us have been a poly-fi V ever since.

Re:
"What were the trials and tribulations you faced?"

Jealousy, anger, bitterness, insecurity, fear, paranoia, disappointment, anguish, despair ... our first few years together were rough years. Luckily things eventually smoothed out for us.

Re:
"Was it ever confusing, or did it come naturally?"

It was often confusing in those first few years. Some of it came naturally. 99% of it comes naturally today.

Re:
"Do you think/believe that polyamory is something people are born being ... or do you think everyone is born being capable of polyamory?"

I tend to think that there is a slider with "must-have-monogamy" at one end and "must-have-polyamory" at the other end. Most people reside somewhere in the middle (not on the ends) of the slider and can therefore to some extent adapt themselves to polyamory or monogamy.
 
I'm in a polyamorous relationship but I don't classify myself as poly. I'm just not wired that way.
This.

Re (from OP):

I tend to think that there is a slider with "must-have-monogamy" at one end and "must-have-polyamory" at the other end. Most people reside somewhere in the middle (not on the ends) of the slider and can therefore to some extent adapt themselves to polyamory or monogamy.

Or maybe this.

I don't consider myself to be hardwired polyamorous. It is not easy for me to love this way because of jealousy and frustration, insecurities and misunderstandings and the like but alas, I am in love with two men so therefore I am polyamourous by definition sake.
 
At what age did you first realistically identify that polyamory was for you? 39, after meeting my current husband.

In a fashion that you are comfortable, please let me know how you began introducing polyamory into your life style? Hubby brought it up and it sounded like something I would enjoy.

What were done trials and tribulations you faced? Other than time management, none really.

Was it every ever confusing, or did it come naturally? It came pretty natural to me.

Do you think/believe that polyamory is something people are born being..or do think everyone is born being capable of polyamory? I think everyone is capable of polyamory, but few are willing to take the plunge for many reasons.
 
At what age did you first realistically identify that polyamory was for you?

23

In a fashion that you are comfortable, please let me know how you began introducing polyamory into your life style.

I told my husband how I felt about it. He wasn't comfortable with it so we decided to take things slowly. A year to a year and a half later we decided to give it a go and I pursued a man I man interested in.

What were done trials and tribulations you faced?

My husband wasn't polyamorous. He was hurt by my being poly and so I didn't pursue anyone for a while. Later, he met someone he was interested in so we brought it back to the table (it was always in the background, but I wanted to wait until he was comfortable). However he wasn't polyamorous, although he thought he was for a while and so did I until a couple of months after we broke up (that's when he told me he wasn't).
It was difficult because, not realising he wasn't poly and compersive, I made decisions I would have made differently if I had known.
The relationship also wasn't at its best and while my new partner and I went through a lot of effort to channel our new relationship and improve my dying one, in the end it seems it couldn't be saved.

Was it every ever confusing, or did it come naturally?

Polyamorous itself came very naturally. I enjoyed the relationship with my second husband, and I enjoyed supporting my first husband in pursuing the woman he was interested in.

Do you think/believe that polyamory is something people are born being..or do think everyone is born being capable of polyamory?

I think it's a relationship orientation, but I think people can be ambiamorous, fine with both poly relationships or mono ones. In the case of those people, it can be a conscious decision whether to explore polyamory or not.
 
I have always, always, since the age of about ten years old, liked more than one person at the same time. I used to wonder, when I wrote on the back of my notebooks "I <3 Dave & I <3 Ken" if when writing two people's names, each somehow negated the other. It didn't FEEL like it, but no one else seemed to do it. I made my way through my teens in tumultuous relationships, often in love with more than one guy, and I used to (accidentally) torture them by breaking up with one to be with the other, then breaking up with that one to be with the first one. In my mind, it was the only ethical solution to avoid cheating but still get to be with them both. When I realized the pain I was causing, I later switched to just cheating. I didn't know there was another way.

I don't think I actually knew anything about alternative relationship formats until I was about 22 and dating a much older guy (37) who was really into group sex. He had all sorts of friends who were various in forms of open relationships, from just into threesomes, to into full swinging, to a couple that ended up taking on a long-term girlfriend. At the time, I harbored a lot of resentment, because his obsession with group sex (and having his head up his ass) led him to push me very hard to do things that I wasn't ready for. In the end, he let me date around while still with him, and when I fell for someone else, who was nicer to me, and stopped putting him first, we broke up.

After that, I kind of underwent a backlash for a few years, and—much the way a lot of closeted and in-denial gay people will pretend to be homophobic—I detested the idea of non-monogamy. When my ex-husband, Moss, casually dropped in an early conversation the idea that he's not sure that humans are meant to be monogamous, I flipped out on him and we had a huge fight. Later, when I was 27 and we were moving out of town and I cheated on him in a drunken moment of wanting to be so close just one more time to a really good friend, I suddenly had to revise my viewpoint. I've been musing over poly ever since, with about 10 months' total experience in actual poly relationships.

The funny part is that, in hindsight, I think my late father, who was pagan, may also have been poly and closeted to us kids. I have a half-brother who was raised in another state, who is the child of my parents' "roommate" when I was a baby. He's less than a year younger than me, and family-like pictures exist of my father in the middle with the "roommate" on one side and my mother on the other, while I am a baby and the "roommate" would have been pregnant (though not visibly) at the time.

I do know that throughout my childhood, my father had a very hard time being faithful (eventually he and my mother divorced, and he married the woman he was having an affair with), and in my late teens, he and my stepmother had a female couple over allllllll the time, even present at all holiday family dinners, and he made a point of our getting to know them, and they took a great interest in us kids. At the time, I assumed they were just really close friends with a lesbian couple, but looking back, I wonder if the four of them weren't all in a relationship together.

I can never ask him about it, though, because he died in 2005. I know such questions would be unwelcome to my mother (she's a born-again Christian now and disapproves of EVERYTHING) and probably to my stepmother too (she and I were never close, and she remarried less than a year after my father's death). It's all just speculation. Maybe I'm looking at the whole thing through too poly a lens. I will say that, if he was, it would have saved me a universe of hurt and mis-steps if I'd known such things were possible from an early age, and had had open role models to follow, rather than trying to cram myself into the box of monogamy, since it's the only thing I knew existed.
 
In junior high school (ages 12-13), I read "teen romance" novels where the girl had to choose between two boys. Every single time, I sat there thinking, "Why should she choose? Why can't she just have both of them? What's wrong with that?"

I've always *been* polyamorous. It just makes sense to me, way more than serial monogamy or cheating.

However, until last year, I *lived* monoamorously/monogamously, because that's what I was taught was "right." Apparently in society's eyes, or at least the eyes of those I was around, it's more acceptable to cheat or to leave one partner for another over and over than to have more than one partner at a time with everyone in agreement.

In March 2013, Hubby, in response to concerns I raised about our sex life and about my perception that my sexuality/sexual interests were by default becoming solely defined by his, suggested we try an open marriage. Initially, this was to be purely for sexual purposes. We could be *friends* with the people we slept with, but if feelings stronger than friendship arose, we had to cut all ties with that person.

And that was how it went until we met Guy, about a month into the arrangement. I realized pretty quickly that Guy and I were developing feelings for each other. After only three weeks, I called a hiatus from seeing each other, because things were just plain getting too intense. The hiatus lasted a month and a half, and when we started seeing each other again, we both fought like hell to keep things on a purely friendship/sexual level.

He left our area at the end of July 2013, and we continued our connection by phone and messaging. Obviously there was no sex involved then. And clearly, our feelings were beyond friendship. I tried to deny it to myself until I couldn't anymore. In September, I came clean to Hubby, and told him I would cut ties with Guy if necessary.

Hubby said, "You love both of your kids, and that doesn't take away from how much you love either of them or how much you love me. As far as I can tell, you loving Guy doesn't take away from how much you love me either. You're bringing more love into the world, and I can't see that as a bad thing." He gave me and Guy his blessing to pursue our relationship.

Hubby is monoamorous/monogamous. He slept with another woman in the early stages of the open marriage, but it just wasn't for him, and he quickly got bored with trying to find women who were interested and willing to hook up with a married man. He's very open *minded* about sex, but personally, he's pretty conservative, and he's happy with what he and I have together. Guy, as my signature says, doesn't do labels, but although he's dated and slept with other women since he and I officially moved to a relationship, he says it's mostly because he's several hundred miles away from me and doesn't want to be celibate, but he has no interest in loving or being in a relationship with anyone other than me. So I guess in our triad, I'm the only one who's actually polyamorous. And I'm fortunate to have two men in my life who get it. (Well.. four if you count my new FWB and my best friend.)
 
I think I always was poly even if it was never explored it in a sexual way when I was young. I was 28 when I understood what poly was and that it was a real possibility and not just something I could feel in my heart.

We adjusted amazingly when just adding a third into the relationship. We had a few different partners over the years but always together within our own relationship. The beginning of last year my primary partner and I both found partners that had no interest in the poly home idea or being involved with other members of the family sexually. His partner being straight and mine being a lesbian. That is where things got complicated. It was hard on me when he started spending nights at her house and not with me. After 16 years of being together every night it took some adjustments. But now we are all a family, no we do not all live in the same house but we hang out, have big family dinners, all our kids get along(as well as kids do,lol). Work together to avoid hard feeling, we plan out and communicate with each other. But trust me there was a hard road to us all to this point.
 
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