Giantmutantcrab ---Again I want to thank you for sharing your story. I think it’s easy for the poly person to get so caught up in having their needs met that they can easily forget their monogamous partner has needs to. I also believe a number of things that fit your situation: that some of us are hard-wired poly or monogamous and simply can’t be happy ‘being’ one or the other, that if we are unhappy we cannot function to create happiness for others, and that we must ensure that our own needs are met. Self-sacrifice for someone else at the expense of our needs might work in the short term, but eventually bitterness creeps in and that -need- for the needs to be met overcomes.
And there isn’t anything wrong with needing our needs. It isn’t selfish at all, as much as people might feel their needs are selfish, most of the time they are not. In your case, in your SOs, in mine, we all had times we were sacrificing our own deeper needs for someone else and in the end it leads us to make choices that don’t benefit anyone at all.
I did want to go through these, because I’m certain my husband went through them again, and maybe talk about them from the poly side. I’m addressing these things for the monogamous community in general, not to you specifically, and not assuming that you do/don’t know these things already or that you need to know them. I’m addressing them because there may be other monogamous readers out there who are in one of these stages and I want to provide some understanding of the poly side of those feelings.
First came the self-blame. What did I do wrong? How did I mess up? Maybe I wasn't attentive enough, or maybe I didn't make her feel cared for correctly. So I tried different approaches. Being more careful, more kind, sweeter, more understanding. Saying yes more often, saying sorry more often, trying to be "better". That didn't work.
Most definitely the monogamous partner needs to know they didn’t mess up. They didn’t do anything wrong. That it’s no different that if your partner ends up bisexual and you cannot suddenly become the other sex. You can’t be multiple people. You can’t provide that need to form new relationships, build new bonds, share the self with more than one person because you can’t be more than one person.
I feel like because monogamous people struggle to understand what a poly person is thinking/feeling/needing, because it’s so foreign to them, there is a misconception that if they do a better job at the relationship, the poly person will ‘come back to being monogamous’. There is a thought that it’s a phase because the partner isn’t meeting their needs, and if they met needs better things will ‘return’ to their ‘normal’ state.
Except that for the poly person, they are finally experience their ‘normal’ state and once experienced, poly people finally suddenly feel complete and happy and able to express themselves and there is no ‘going back.’ I could say that if a gay person finally felt free to express that need and be with a same sex partner they wouldn’t ‘get over that phase and go back to being straight.’ They weren’t ever straight. It’s the same with poly people. We weren’t ever monogamous. We were ‘acting’ in a monogamous fashion because we either didn’t understand or didn’t feel free to openly express our true nature. We hide in our closet as well, burying our needs and feigning our outward happiness because we are supposed to be happy in monogamy.
Second came the paranoia. The creeping, needle-in-the-back-of-your-skull sensation of what is she doing... right now. Where is she? With who is she? What are they doing right now? Is she safe? Is she happy? Is she... making love to him? Or her? ...Is she even thinking about you in any way, shape or form?
I think even poly people go through this. Insecurity in a relationship is common for everyone when things are changing, whether monogamous or poly. Change is difficult for people because the future is unknown and we dwell on all the things that could happen - usually the bad. It’s like we’re programmed to think about all the horrors in order to plan out our self preservation.
Was she thinking of you? Do you think of your SO when you’re at work? When you’re gaming? When you’re eating? They come in and out of your thoughts throughout the day as time passes and your focus changes and conversations and actions and events spark memories. When poly people are with other partners it’s no different. We think of our work, children, friends and other partners the same way we always do. And we want our partners to be thinking of us too, even when we’re not with them and they are with others or working, eating, gaming, driving, etc.
If your partner is out with her BFF or at work you think about them, hope they are safe and maybe wonder if they are happy or having fun, but because we assume that we know the outcome of going to work or hanging out with friends isn’t going to
change our partner’s relationship with us, we aren’t insecure about and we don’t worry about how it will affect our future, even if everything will affect our future.
So here is the thing. Will a new relationship affect your current one? Yes. It will. Because everything new affects the current. If your partner gets a new job, joins a new club, picks up a new hobby (Mint plays Wow now… and that’s a time sink I swear!), that’s going to affect the time they have spend with you. That doesn’t mean it changes how they
feel about you. Just because I play Wow now and have less time to focus on other activities doesn’t mean I love my husband any
less. Or my children. And just because I have a boyfriend and girlfriend who take up my time, doesn’t mean I love my husband or children any
less either.
And that is the uncertainty - the insecurity - that as poly people we have to ensure we let our monogamous partner know. That’s the part they have to understand. That meeting and being with someone new doesn’t change the fact that we love them. And I can openly say that when my partner talks about flirting with someone new that it does shake that same paranoia tree, and those fears fall like apples and I have to pick them up and deal with them. And that’s ok because that’s normal because change is uncertain. But change is also a part of life. Everything changes. And we are adaptable creatures who can face that change head on, pickup our apples, keep the ones that have purpose and toss the ones that don’t.
Third came the anger, which is often in the passenger's seat of the paranoia. She dosen't care. She's just using this "polyamorous" bullshit as an excuse to go cheat on me. To go fuck around with whoever she wants, however she wants, and get away with it. And I'm sitting here, on the couch, stupid weak little cuckhold that I am, while she's out wining and dining and doing whatever she damn well pleases.
I definitely think my husband went through this and it wasn’t a fun time for either of us. And I’ve mentioned before the stigma to poly that people give it, “It’s just an excuse to cheat.”
Poly isn’t cheating. Poly people
can cheat, but poly itself isn’t cheating. Cheating is being with someone else without your partner(s) knowing about it. Cheating is hiding things because you don’t want to tell your partner. Cheating isn’t the act of being with someone else, it’s the act of
lying about it. It’s the omission of information that could change your partner’s decisions about being with you. That’s what cheating is.
If you have been given all the information and still choose to remain with your partner while they are out with others, you’ve made that choice and your partner isn’t cheating. I want that emphasize that strongly, because the poly person most definitely felt like they were honest with you about what they were doing (and trust me, that isn’t
easy for us at all. In fact I’m going to talk about that in the future, that fear of opening up and what’s that like for us.)
For the poly person, we don’t understand your anger. We don’t understand why you’re mad at us when we told you what we needed and what we were doing and you accepted it. I highlight that here because:
She immediately countered herself, trying to defend herself. She told me that I had accepted this, and that I had accepted her all that time ago. That this was a part of her as much as all the other parts of her that I had accepted and chosen to love. In mid-sentence she choked up and stopped speaking, moved to sit down next to me and told me she was sorry, that she didn't mean to hurt me. But that this was who she was, deep down inside. That she loved me but that she loved him. And her, too.
When we’re told we’re accepted and then we have anger thrown at us, we don’t feel accepted anymore and we don’t react well too it. That isn’t to say that the monogamous person shouldn’t/can’t get angry, because feelings are feelings and we must acknowledge our feelings, but this stage ends up feeling like a betrayal to the poly person. “I was told you accepted me and loved me for who I am and… basically you don’t.” And it can hurt the poly person to feel unaccepted for who they are. It’s not an easy time for poly/mono relationships and I can promise you I both said those words and felt those betrayals many times.
We end up feeling like you love us for who you want us to be and not who we really are.
And I understand you feel betrayed because
I told her that when we met and began to be together, there had been a tacit understanding between the two of us. That it was the two of us. Her and me. No third party or fourth party involved. That we were together and this was our relationship
And the sudden need for others in the relationship feels like a betrayal of that understanding.
The problem for poly people is that we often enter monogamous relationships because we don’t know/understand we’re poly, we don’t even know the option is out there, society tells us we
must find our one true love and marry them and live happily ever after and that we aren’t good people if we don’t commit ourselves to that one person. We enter these relationships denying who we are from the start. We betray ourselves first and foremost, often unintentionally, placing ourselves into a situation where we are doomed to never be happy. Some point we are ‘enlightened’ - someone talks to us about poly, we see it on the internet, we figure it out - and we start to understand our needs better.
But we’re already in a monogamous relationship. With someone we love. With someone we don’t want to not be with. We don’t want to replace them. We don’t want to end and start over. We’ve put time, feelings, blood, sweat and tears into building this castle and making it beautiful, and we don’t want to tear it down. We want to build ANOTHER castle right next to it, as wonderful and amazing and the castle we already have. And the maybe a third or a fourth, or maybe our second castle will just really expand and be a multi-queen-king castle! The possibilities are endless to our castle expansion.
But our first castle is still special.
I once told her that she spent so much time with him and with her that she barely spent any time with me.
New castles take a lot of effort in the beginning to build. Just like any new monogamous relationship, people often dive in and have that ‘honeymoon’ period, where they are really getting to know each other and spend time with each other and build that foundation. I think new poly relationships end up being the same. We have new people, and it’s new and exciting and we also have a LOT of foundation to build and a lot of growth to work out and the original relationship does get sidelined a bit. For a monogamous person this probably feels like abandonment and for the poly person we have to focus ourselves to maintain our original castle as well. Can’t let it fall into disrepair while we’re building.
For an experienced poly person this is probably second nature. But most people in poly/mono relationships are building their new castles for the first time and have relatively little experience in managing multiple relationships. Its’ new for them too. We don’t come into this as pros and there isn’t a rulebook to follow Equally, there isn’t some guideline on how much time you spend with each partner, just like we don’t have rules around how much time you have to spend with all your different friends and if you spend more time with one friend than another you’re doing the other a disservice.
Because life isn’t like that way. Life isn’t about ‘keeping it even.’ And what and who you need now isn’t always going to be the same. And typically, people first discovering poly really
need those new relationships. And the monogamous person really
needs the security from the poly person. That balancing act ends up landing on the poly person’s shoulders most of the time, and they do end up very torn about it. In addition, when the monogamous person is angry, insecure or unaccepting in their stance, the poly person is likely to run
away from them toward the new partner who is open and accepting of who they are, which exacerbates the issue - the monogamous person becomes more angry and feels more betrayed.
It’s not a good cycle. I know because I was definitely in this one as well. And finally I was blunt - when you are like that I don’t want to be around you. I am not attracted to you. I can understand your emotions, but when you fling them at me I’m going to retreat.
I think I tangented enough with this one…. so
Fourth came the sadness. She saw this more than the other aspects. She was so happy and free, like a beautiful little butterfly fluttering about freely. Free to do whatever she wanted, free to truly be herself.
This one makes the poly person feel guilty. As your SO said, we don’t want to hurt you. We aren’t trying to hurt you. We aren’t out doing these things thinking I hope this hurts my SO, because I want them to suffer while I’m with someone else.
At least for me, as I said, I had hoped my husband was poly. I had hoped he dreamed of other women. I had hoped he wanted other relationships too. Hell, I would have even been ok if he’d cheated on me so that I could forgive him and hug him and tell him I stilled loved him and it was ok and we could talk about it and work it out and the see other people. I felt this way even before I really understood I was polyamorous. And we feel that way because hey - if they want other people too, then I don’t have to feel guilty about it. And it will be easy. And I don’t have to hurt them. And they will accept me and understand me.
She seemed saddened by this and asked, innocently, if I would like to spend time with him, or with her.
I said that no, I did not care to meet these two other people. I knew of them. She did not hide their identities from me. But I did not want to know who they were or where they lived or what she did with one, or the other.
We would love to know that our monogamous partners - all our partners - accept the other people we are with. And while, I don’t expect that every partner ever like, spend time with, or get along with every other partner, there is a hope in a poly person’s eyes that they will. That we could all chill in a room as one big happy family where everyone got along and sang kumbaya. #pipedream
That being said, our other partners are part of who we are too. When you are out in life, you talk about your SO - boyfriend or husband or wife or life partner - to others. They come up in casual conversation. “Oh you like hiking? My boyfriend does to!” But when our partner(s) doesn’t want to hear about our other partners we have to clip our conversations, watch our words, walk on those eggshells, be careful how we bring things up, and conversations become a source of stress because of this added tension.
I was once that person that the polyamourous person opened up to. I was once that individual who tried to be the understanding one, the open-minded one, the one that loved this other person and wanted that person to be happy... But who ended up unhappy in the process.
I suppose one of the things I take from your story, is that just like I feel there are poly people who are hard-wired poly and cannot be happy any other way, there are also monogamous people are so hardwired they cannot be happy unless their relationship is monogamous. Throughout your story, you never mentioned trying to date other people or forming your own new relationships, which leads me to believe in the theory that for some people, monogamy is a
must. That they themselves cannot form multiple romantic relationships. From that, there are people who likely could accept their partner being poly, even if they themselves cannot do it. And there are people who
need their partner to be monogamous as well, and they cannot be happy in a relationship where their partner is not monogamous.
And from that I’ll throw the axiom from
More Than Two out.
“The people in the relationship are more important than the relationship.” Keeping the relationship at the expense or sacrifice of one person or the other is not worth it. If you’re unhappy, you can’t make others happy. You can try. You can fake it. But over time you’ll resent that they are happy and you are not. And when you resent, you make bad choices and do things that ultimately hurt everyone involved. I say that from experience. I did that.
“Forcing” the poly person to be monogamous is equally as hurtful as forcing the monogamous person to be poly. In the end, someone will suffer and the relationship will suffer. I don’t think you should ever feel bad for ending a relationship if you cannot be happy in it, because we must always as people ensure our needs are met and having our needs met is
not selfish.
I hope this commentary was not seen as negative, because it was not the goal.
It wasn’t! I enjoyed everything you wrote, am honored your shared your experience with me, and hope that my replies will help shed light for the monogamous people (and plenty of poly as well) as yours shed light to me on what my monogamous partner was going through.
Thank you <3
