SourPennies
New member
Howdy. I might as well dive right into it. So, my boyfriend, who will be called "Greenie", showed me to this site as a means to field a community for very recent troubles we've been facing, and also because it's probably best to have some community to refer to in general.
JUMP TO THE BOTTOM FOR A SHORTENED BIO:
Not too long ago I was mono, and while Greenie was nominally poly at the time, we were living an effectively mono life for a couple of years after he broke up with his other partner whom he was with before and alongside me. Nobody said anything about shifting identities concerning relationships, but the long short of it is that things were going very, very well. Jump to a year and four months ago, I met someone online, who will be called "Apatheia", and we hit things off famously.
Over the course of about five, maybe six months, Apatheia and I got to know each other extremely well, she and I being the types of people to cut right through small talk to hit more important conversations. (I recall she was over the moon about the fact that one of my first messages to her was to tell her the qualities in a person that I was trying to avoid and that if she met any of them we shouldn't talk.) I knew she was poly, and near the end of that period, she told me she wanted to give me the option to either cut ties with her or let the relationship continue, as she was reaching a point where she would become fully dedicated if she did not leave. She explicitly stated that she had no intention of intruding on my relationship and that she wanted to do her best to encourage it, but that most people can't handle her level of emotional commitment, and that's why she usually leaves. I told her that I did care about our friendship and that I wasn't worried and wished to continue.
This is where things go awry. Greenie begins to suggest around this point that I might be able to stretch my definitions of relationships, and even that I might not be mono. I already knew I was capable of loving more than one person, but for me, monogamy was my attempt to put up a wall between myself and others that would keep things from being too complicated. I didn't think I could handle the complications and energies of more than one partner. Over the course of two months, however, my confidence in my structure was breaking down. The environment felt very positive and creative and both Greenie and, to a lesser extent, Apatheia were encouraging me to explore my inner sense of love and relationships. Come December, I go into full crisis mode and my entire concept of relationships crumbles. I was freaking out, I didn't want another grand revelation about myself (I already had atheism, pansexuality, and transgenderism for goodness' sake!), but it was impossible to not see my internal contradictions laid to waste in front of me. I had been asked if I really believed I couldn't manage more than one person's energy when I already did that with my dearest friends and family members. Certainly I don't worry about their intricacies on a daily basis, but I wouldn't with a partner near or far either. Greenie asked me at the end of December if I had strong feelings for Apatheia, and I was forced to admit I did. So finally, in January, I made my announcement over a group Skype call: I did indeed love Apatheia.
Then things promptly fell apart. Greenie didn't expect that it was real love, and he himself had become complacent to our mono life and even realized, without telling me, that he was probably mono and that while he believed in poly as legitimate, he may have only been experimenting with it until he had met someone who could satisfy him deeply: me. Through evidently unclear communication, he thought I was moving toward a casual play partner and I thought he was encouraging me to give up my rigid structures and accept poly as my mode of loving. Since then, things have been a mess of trying to fix his confidence in me and me trying to keep my optimism up about being able to make everything work in my new V-way.
Short version: I've discovered that I can most accurately be called a relationship anarchist; Greenie showed me the term and I read the manifesto and found it very compelling. I'm not married to the term, so before anyone gets on my case about this, I do use differentiating labels for my partners because that's part of our mutual agreements. I don't believe labels have any power over me or my relationships because I do not care how third parties see them: I care about how my relations see them. A lot of the frustration between Greenie and I seems to stem from our different views of love. He wants a kind of love that is exclusive, where he is the primary even, and I can't do that. For me, my deepest love relationships are of equal value to me. To ask me who I love more beyond a certain point becomes a moral question, not a quantifiable one.
However, I feel like I am literally living for others. After my first bouts with suicide, I only managed to find value in living by finding people who could help me realize the kind of love I want to express. It's deep, committed, and incomparably valuable to me. The point is that I cannot allow anyone to understate my love for my relations. Greenie has a hard time seeing himself as special in my eyes because he knows he is one among many, but for me, he is a unique and beautiful experience that I have been fighting as hard as I can to keep, and I have never and will never compare him to anyone else. I don't want to leave him and I don't want him to leave me, but we are both having an extremely hard time adjusting to a new landscape with completely new perspectives on love for both of us. I need to be able to help him to feel special without limiting my other relationship just to make him feel secure. I don't want my already long-distance partner to also have to deal with feeling like a secondary when that is not how I see things at all.
JUMP TO THE BOTTOM FOR A SHORTENED BIO:
Not too long ago I was mono, and while Greenie was nominally poly at the time, we were living an effectively mono life for a couple of years after he broke up with his other partner whom he was with before and alongside me. Nobody said anything about shifting identities concerning relationships, but the long short of it is that things were going very, very well. Jump to a year and four months ago, I met someone online, who will be called "Apatheia", and we hit things off famously.
Over the course of about five, maybe six months, Apatheia and I got to know each other extremely well, she and I being the types of people to cut right through small talk to hit more important conversations. (I recall she was over the moon about the fact that one of my first messages to her was to tell her the qualities in a person that I was trying to avoid and that if she met any of them we shouldn't talk.) I knew she was poly, and near the end of that period, she told me she wanted to give me the option to either cut ties with her or let the relationship continue, as she was reaching a point where she would become fully dedicated if she did not leave. She explicitly stated that she had no intention of intruding on my relationship and that she wanted to do her best to encourage it, but that most people can't handle her level of emotional commitment, and that's why she usually leaves. I told her that I did care about our friendship and that I wasn't worried and wished to continue.
This is where things go awry. Greenie begins to suggest around this point that I might be able to stretch my definitions of relationships, and even that I might not be mono. I already knew I was capable of loving more than one person, but for me, monogamy was my attempt to put up a wall between myself and others that would keep things from being too complicated. I didn't think I could handle the complications and energies of more than one partner. Over the course of two months, however, my confidence in my structure was breaking down. The environment felt very positive and creative and both Greenie and, to a lesser extent, Apatheia were encouraging me to explore my inner sense of love and relationships. Come December, I go into full crisis mode and my entire concept of relationships crumbles. I was freaking out, I didn't want another grand revelation about myself (I already had atheism, pansexuality, and transgenderism for goodness' sake!), but it was impossible to not see my internal contradictions laid to waste in front of me. I had been asked if I really believed I couldn't manage more than one person's energy when I already did that with my dearest friends and family members. Certainly I don't worry about their intricacies on a daily basis, but I wouldn't with a partner near or far either. Greenie asked me at the end of December if I had strong feelings for Apatheia, and I was forced to admit I did. So finally, in January, I made my announcement over a group Skype call: I did indeed love Apatheia.
Then things promptly fell apart. Greenie didn't expect that it was real love, and he himself had become complacent to our mono life and even realized, without telling me, that he was probably mono and that while he believed in poly as legitimate, he may have only been experimenting with it until he had met someone who could satisfy him deeply: me. Through evidently unclear communication, he thought I was moving toward a casual play partner and I thought he was encouraging me to give up my rigid structures and accept poly as my mode of loving. Since then, things have been a mess of trying to fix his confidence in me and me trying to keep my optimism up about being able to make everything work in my new V-way.
Short version: I've discovered that I can most accurately be called a relationship anarchist; Greenie showed me the term and I read the manifesto and found it very compelling. I'm not married to the term, so before anyone gets on my case about this, I do use differentiating labels for my partners because that's part of our mutual agreements. I don't believe labels have any power over me or my relationships because I do not care how third parties see them: I care about how my relations see them. A lot of the frustration between Greenie and I seems to stem from our different views of love. He wants a kind of love that is exclusive, where he is the primary even, and I can't do that. For me, my deepest love relationships are of equal value to me. To ask me who I love more beyond a certain point becomes a moral question, not a quantifiable one.
However, I feel like I am literally living for others. After my first bouts with suicide, I only managed to find value in living by finding people who could help me realize the kind of love I want to express. It's deep, committed, and incomparably valuable to me. The point is that I cannot allow anyone to understate my love for my relations. Greenie has a hard time seeing himself as special in my eyes because he knows he is one among many, but for me, he is a unique and beautiful experience that I have been fighting as hard as I can to keep, and I have never and will never compare him to anyone else. I don't want to leave him and I don't want him to leave me, but we are both having an extremely hard time adjusting to a new landscape with completely new perspectives on love for both of us. I need to be able to help him to feel special without limiting my other relationship just to make him feel secure. I don't want my already long-distance partner to also have to deal with feeling like a secondary when that is not how I see things at all.
