Hello Again, Polyamory

dub1h

dub1h

New member
As you can see from my join date, I'm not exactly new here. I'm returning because my life has brought me back to this again.

I've been dating a girl for a few weeks and I caught feelings for her almost immediately. Unfortunately as our second date was winding down to drinks and cuddles, we began talking about what we were looking for as far as relationships. That's when she told me she was polyamorous. It kind of shocked me, and to be honest I felt crestfallen. My initial reaction was that we're incompatible. It would be too good to be true for her to fall neatly into my idea of a simple monogamous relationship.

I've had some experience exploring this in the past. I sometimes find myself wishing I could have more than one romantic partner. But I also find great value in devotion and monogamy. Both paths can teach you an incredible amount about yourself through direct experience.

I find myself asking questions like:

"Is monogamy just a way to avoid conquering jealousy and insecurity?"

or

"Is polyamory just a way to avoid the fear of devotion, through the periods that require a bit of willpower to not feel trapped?"

When I think about myself: "I can love more than one person. I know in my heart it's with pure intention and would never be to hurt my partner"
But when I imagine a potential loved partner being romantically or sexually involved with another, I think "I'm inadequate. They're better. My partner is choosing them over me. I want them for myself"

Obviously I have some insecurity and jealousy issues.... I'm not sure I want to face them.


When I discovered this about the girl I'm dating, this floodgate of thoughts opened back up which was closed for over 4 years when I was in a committed monogamous relationship.

I'm not sure where I stand. Am I facing a mono-poly challenge? I really like this girl so I'm not going to give up just because of this challenge.

Could I be truly monogamous in my heart of hearts? Is there a true alignment to my soul, or is it just from conditioning and life experience that has brought me to my current feelings?
 
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Almost five years for you too? Welcome back, dub1h.

As someone on the opposite end of a mono/poly relationship I understand how you feel. My wife asked me too "if you are poly, does that mean I'm not enough for you?" It's a hard question to answer--I'm not sure there is one. The only answer I can give, speaking for my own situation, is that I'll always love my partner enough. One day, I'll also have more love to give to someone else as well. I don't know if that will be an adequate answer for you, but maybe you will find a better answer here.
 
I think it comes back to that understanding that you can't take all humans and simply put them on some kind of measuring scale of bad to good...we're all marvelously different...it is so very possible to love more than one, while never comparing them or setting up a better/worse ranking in one's mind. And no one human being is perfect, has every possible good trait that a human being could possibly have. Not intellectually, emotionally, physically, sexually, etc.

I just wrote a post the other day in my life story blog thread about the various ways and reasons that I love the four people in my love life. I could no more ask any one of them to try and be all of those things, fill every one of my needs, than I could ask my cat to grow scales and a forked tongue merely because I also like snakes. And here's the kicker...what if he could? Then I'd miss my cat! I would so much rather add one more to fill an unfulfilled need, than expect any of my existing loves to change...because I love them just as they are.

And as for wanting your partner for yourself...you can never, NEVERNEVERNEVER, never own another human being in any way. You can play at it. You can happily think, "mine, mine, mine" in your head...but the reality is, they do and always will own themselves. That's an ultimate truth, and I don't really believe in ultimate truths much. Even if you give yourself to someone, ultimately you still own yourself. So I often think, when I'm having very immersive loving experiences with my partners, "In this moment, I am yours and/or you are mine" instead of simply "I am yours and/or you are mine." It helps me to be grateful for the time that we are sharing. There is no greater gift, in my mind, than to give someone some of the limited time you have on this earth.

At least...that is how I see it. My own 2 cents.

Anyhow best wishes, hope you find happiness whether mono or poly, in life and in love. :)
 
Spork said:
And as for wanting your partner for yourself...you can never, NEVERNEVERNEVER, never own another human being in any way. You can play at it. You can happily think, "mine, mine, mine" in your head...but the reality is, they do and always will own themselves. That's an ultimate truth
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I totally agree with this statement. I've gone through a lot of internal exploration to arrive at this fact as well. A lot (LOT) of reflection on a previous unhealthy dependent relationship.
This is totally true for both mono and poly relationships.

Spork said:
There is no greater gift, in my mind, than to give someone some of the limited time you have on this earth.
Click to expand...

To play devil's advocate, could a GREATER gift be to give ALL of your limited time to just one person, rather than giving just some to many?
 
dub1h said:
I totally agree with this statement. I've gone through a lot of internal exploration to arrive at this fact as well. A lot (LOT) of reflection on a previous unhealthy dependent relationship.
This is totally true for both mono and poly relationships.



To play devil's advocate, could a GREATER gift be to give ALL of your limited time to just one person, rather than giving just some to many?
Click to expand...


I don't know. Does my time become more valuable because it is in demand? Does it become less valuable when one person gets all of it? How does one define the economics of time?

I personally prefer quality over quantity. Really the value of anything at all is dependent upon the value we place on it in our minds. So when you are with one person only, and your lives are completely entwined, for a long time, if you come to take one another for granted, then you're not really valuing one another's time anymore. It is always there, doesn't have to be earned, scheduled, or any effort or thought into simply having it.

So I would argue that it's possible that the gift of time becomes LESS of a gift when given to only one.
 
dub1h said:
...To play devil's advocate, could a GREATER gift be to give ALL of your limited time to just one person, rather than giving just some to many?
Click to expand...

Naw, I'm awesome. More for everyone! :D

Look, I did the giving of most of my time to one person. Deciding to do that left me without many friends, fostered an unwillingness to face the reality of my marriage until it was too late to save, divorced and having to rebuild my life.

There are ways to focus time on one person that are not co-dependent, and there are ways to spend time with multiple people that meet everyone's needs. Neither are easy and both require self-reflection and taking responsibility for managing one's emotions.

However, you may just be monogamous. Nothing wrong with that. Not wanting to do the work of addressing insecurity and fears is a legitimate reason not to try and make a relationship work with a polyamorous person. (Although I also suggest that those insecurities and fears will make themselves known somehow. Perhaps work on them anyway? Much of the advice and suggestions here apply to most relationships.) Sometimes we are not just compatible no matter how much we like each other.
 
@Spork

Interesting point and it's bringing up a lot of thoughts about my long term mono relationship (about 5 years). We got engaged last year and that marked the turning point leading to its destruction. I definitely took her for granted, as did she with me. We both fell into a rut where we wanted the other to put in the effort to fix things or revive our love. We felt that we ourselves didn't need to change... it was up to the other to fix it. It was a stalemate.

I'm beginning to think my ideas of "devotion" have been clouded by "depression". When we were both depressed, we had barely anything else going on, so nothing that would give us separation or scheduling problems. Therefore not having anything to look forward to. Just constant exposure and emotional fatigue from our stagnation. Sure, we devoted all of our time to one another but it was of little or no value.
 
opalescent said:
There are ways to focus time on one person that are not co-dependent, and there are ways to spend time with multiple people that meet everyone's needs. Neither are easy and both require self-reflection and taking responsibility for managing one's emotions.

However, you may just be monogamous. Nothing wrong with that. Not wanting to do the work of addressing insecurity and fears is a legitimate reason not to try and make a relationship work with a polyamorous person. (Although I also suggest that those insecurities and fears will make themselves known somehow. Perhaps work on them anyway? Much of the advice and suggestions here apply to most relationships.) Sometimes we are not just compatible no matter how much we like each other.
Click to expand...

Very realistic, very true.

And thank you for validating my potential monogamy haha. I think as soon as I heard the word "polyamory" from the girl I'm dating, I immediately thought I'd need to change, or she'd need to change. Perhaps we're just in different paths, and that's okay.

What I'm learning is monogamy really isn't inherently any easier. It's just a way of life.

Unique challenges and experiences accompany both monogamy and polyamory. They might have completely mutually exclusive experiences, pains, and joys, but they also share the same fundamental core... love is challenging, and ultimately exposes us to our true natures.
 
dub1h said:
What I'm learning is monogamy really isn't inherently any easier. It's just a way of life.

Unique challenges and experiences accompany both monogamy and polyamory. They might have completely mutually exclusive experiences, pains, and joys, but they also share the same fundamental core... love is challenging, and ultimately exposes us to our true natures.
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You've got that right! If monogamy was easy, there wouldn't be an entire section of the bookstore devoted to solving relationship problems.

Monogamy and polyamory aren't as different from each other as people want to believe. For any relationship to be healthy and fulfilling, whether poly or mono, there needs to be mutual respect, caring, honesty, affection, good communication, a willingness to learn from the experience, and the ability to feel safe to be who you are. All the other stuff polyfolk deal with is just logistics.
 
dub1h said:
Very realistic, very true.

And thank you for validating my potential monogamy haha. I think as soon as I heard the word "polyamory" from the girl I'm dating, I immediately thought I'd need to change, or she'd need to change. Perhaps we're just in different paths, and that's okay.

What I'm learning is monogamy really isn't inherently any easier. It's just a way of life.

Unique challenges and experiences accompany both monogamy and polyamory. They might have completely mutually exclusive experiences, pains, and joys, but they also share the same fundamental core... love is challenging, and ultimately exposes us to our true natures.
Click to expand...

I've been both - monogamous and polyamorous - and I like to think I was 'good' at both. I don't experience them as all that fundamentally different. Doing relationships well requires pretty the same skills regardless of how many partners one wants. I also don't consider them mutually exclusive, which I realize may sound odd as they can appear to be opposites. In my own experience, this 'opposite-ness' is is something of a mirage. People can and do move from one to the other and back again. Of course, this is not to say that some folks may find this a more rigid line than I do. I tend to smudge most lines I come across anyway!
 
opalescent said:
I also don't consider them mutually exclusive
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To make a simple analogy, maybe you can agree or disagree:

Through life experience someone discovers they really love apples, so much so they never try an orange. They can learn about the apple, taste every type of apple, and gain a deep appreciation for apples. But if they never try an orange they'll never experience the joys of citrus.

Even if they learn about seeds, sweetness, tartness, vitamins, minerals, etc.. it just won't ever be exactly the same.

The lessons you learn from mono/poly relationships might share a fundamental commonality (like feeling a sense of security when your partner has to choose something else over you), but the context will be different (whether they are choosing to go golfing with their friend vs. choosing to go on a date with someone else they like/love. Both require acceptance)
 
I'll mention again something I've mentioned before...

Some of the issues that you describe as potential concerns or pitfalls, and that others have experienced, I feel I'm avoiding altogether because everyone I am poly with is at least friendly with everyone else. I can't imagine feeling competitive with Fire, because we are so close. There aren't feelings of social friction, people kind of not liking one another, and it's easy. If my lover were with someone that I got the sense they actually did not like me, wanted me out of the picture, something like that...I would not be happy, at all.

Personally I think that, if metas cannot also be partners intimately with one another (on account of being strictly straight for instance) if there is at least a genuine friendship there, it helps a lot. For one thing, you then see the things that you have and the other does not, and vice versa, and it's easier to understand how your partner isn't placing one above the other but rather valuing both for different reasons.
 
I think my view of poly is completely tarnished by my past experience... I actually tried to bridge some sort of friendship and wanted everyone to meet, but I was faced with animosity by guy#2, and no support from the girl I was dating... I see that it was just a bad situation, plain and simple!!

Would it be out of line to be like, "Hey, I want to know about other partners and maybe eventually even meet. When I don't really know who they are they become this kind of threatening phantom to me...and based on past experience it's difficult for me to resolve this feeling on my own..."

We've only been dating a couple weeks so I feel like I have no right to these questions/concerns...
 
Greetings dub1h,
Welcome back. :D Please feel free to lurk, browse, etc.

It's not easy to know whether polyamory is right for you. Sometimes it helps to build a friendship with your metamours ... not always. Every person is unique, and every relationship is unique.

I hope Polyamory.com supplies some of the tools you need to decide whether polyamory is right for you.

Sincerely,
Kevin T., "official greeter" :)

Notes:

There's a *lot* of good info in Golden Nuggets. Have a look!

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If you have any questions about the board itself, please private-message a mod and they'll do their best to help.

Glad you're here!
 
dub1h said:
I think my view of poly is completely tarnished by my past experience... I actually tried to bridge some sort of friendship and wanted everyone to meet, but I was faced with animosity by guy#2, and no support from the girl I was dating... I see that it was just a bad situation, plain and simple!!

Would it be out of line to be like, "Hey, I want to know about other partners and maybe eventually even meet. When I don't really know who they are they become this kind of threatening phantom to me...and based on past experience it's difficult for me to resolve this feeling on my own..."

We've only been dating a couple weeks so I feel like I have no right to these questions/concerns...
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Hm. Well, MY answer would be you've got a right to any question or concern that is valid to you! Not to make demands but to express that you feel you might be able to be comfortable in a poly configuration if you had an opportunity to befriend your metamour, and do they (partner) think that would be possible, or what are their thoughts on the matter...?

However! I must be careful to throw down with the disclaimer that I have been guilty of "too much, too soon" in relationships. I have difficulty playing the coy, "who's chasing whom" of early courtship...I usually want to throw all of my cards right down on the table and just be like "This is where I stand! What's up??" Some people do NOT respond well to that! lol

One thing though, I have refused to be involved with people before who said that they had previously established relationships but refused to allow me to meet the meta even once. Usually this is a married couple, and the guy is like, "yeah, my wife is cool with me being poly but she doesn't want to know her metas or know any details." I'm like dude, how do I know you're not just a cheater? Um...no.

LOTS of those in the online dating world.
 
This all reminds me of a late night dorm conversation between a friend and his gay roomate complaining of their love lives. They came to the conclusion that it is not men who are messed up nor women who are messed up but relationships that are messed up. Same goes for polyamory and monogamy I think.

Leetah
 
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