For those of you who are in a committed marriage but are also in a poly relationship (or your spouse is), do you think that polyamory is BENEFICIAL to your marriage? Why or why not?
I'm especially interested in knowing in what ways you find it to be beneficial, assuming you think it is.
Or, do the poly relationships have no beneficial impact on your marriage? Or, do you think they are harmful in some way?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts on these questions.
So first, some background - and I'm totally sorry for the novel!
My metamour is married. I'm not sure if it's that poly isn't right for them, or that one or both she and her partner are bad at this, but I am not seeing much benefit for them in poly.
My metamour opened up her marriage to be with my partner, K, and they were together before my partner and I became an item. It's been over 8 months now since my partner and I started seeing one another and our relationship (K's and mine) has progressed quite a lot while his relationship with my metamour (let's call her L) has not. Part of this is due to being married.
Her relationship with her husband, T, has also gone south. He's pretty much shitting on his wife. T and his girlfriend, A, are now in the process of trying to conceive (that's an entirely different drama on its own... from what I know, L hasn't been able to conceive). He's horrible at this and she, L, is not so poly herself. L is very possessive over our shared partner. While K insists that she doesn't hate me, she absolutely does not respect me. He has requested that I reach out to her, but after a while of feeling that this is not my problem to fix (her lack of respect for me), I declined and said that I will not be reaching out to her and she can reach out to me if she feels like she needs to open lines of communication.
Anyhow, I see a lot of problems with their situation that sometimes K brushes off because apparently I don't understand well enough. One the one hand, yes, I'm not married myself nor have I been; I've been engaged but broken it off, so really not even close. But on the other hand, I'm on the outside; I can see more than he can, being further from the situation, and my bias isn't too significant (when it comes to her marriage with her husband, there's no side for me to be on really; in fact, the better her marriage is with her husband, the better it is for me).
From what I know, L & T opened up their marriage because L was interested in K. L introduced A to T. K then met me, and while for a while it looked like we weren't going to make it - we turned a 180 and now we're stronger than ever. More than that, he considers me his girlfriend. I am not a temporary part in his life, despite L's almost blatant opposition (pretty much everything short of telling him she wants him to end it with me, which A has actually advised him to do in the past when things were rocky).
Shallowness alert: I do not understand the attraction to L. I think she's unattractive, needy, and more than shallowness, a Queen Bee type. I hate those types. I cannot stand people who must control everything, and whose closest friends and family must work to make happy. Straight out of A's mouth: "we work a lot to make L happy." Not a good sign, and definitely not the kind of personality that can handle many of the realities of poly.
I kind of wonder, with L & T, if maybe they didn't know that they are potentially compensating for issues that poly cannot solve. I cannot look inside their marriage, but knowing that they have had (and continue to have) issues with conceiving, that maybe they had some stresses in their marriage that were not being addressed. I don't think anyone intentionally tries to fix their marriage with poly - which is why you'll see a lot of people denying it - but I think a lot of people seem to mistake their choice for poly as a desire rather than a comfort that they're seeking that would better be found making sure their marriage is 100%.
I really think L isn't so much poly as she wanted K in her life at whatever expense, and now she's facing the consequences. K has told me that she does not seem to fathom that he could love anyone else. Holy friggen hypocritical.
L & T's marriage is apparently falling apart, and part of me feels very much that it's as much because of poly as it is their failings to work on a marriage. L has demonstrated to me that she's 1) not very competent at polyamory in the sense that she only wants to rules to apply in her benefit, 2) she finds little to no satisfaction that her secondary partner has found love in me despite having a husband of her own, and 3) she might not be very good in most relationship situations as her interpersonal skills are lackluster and she does less direct communication and more acting out to prove a point. I can't speak on what part T may have in destroying his marriage (besides obviously making some poor decisions with A), but from what poisonous attitude and actions have seeped into my relationship with K, I doubt he's any better than L.
What people also fail to see about marriages doing poorly in poly contexts is that it can also have a really big effect on the secondary partners and *their* partners. K feels like he needs to be there to support her a lot, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself; however, it sometimes seems like the default excuse for her getting a certain day prioritized ("well she really needs my support... I can see you a different day...") type of thing, and becomes a slippery slope from there. To some degree, because K is part of what's a strain on the marriage, L's reliance on K to get through her marriage problems is NOT very healthy. I think it causes more resentment from her husband and she either doesn't care or doesn't see it. He shouldn't be her crutch; it's one thing to be a supportive partner, but another thing to be a crutch AND be interfering with his other (and situationally primary) relationship.
anyways... sorry for the novel... but those are my thoughts at this point...