Estimated reading time: 17 minutes
Hi Doc,
Reaching out with some questions about a poly dynamic I’m currently in. I’ll start with some context…it’s a long story but I’ll try to make it as quick as possible without leaving anything important out.
So, my current partner, let’s call her Haley, and I have been together for 3 years. When we first started dating, she was my boss and was in a poly relationship with another person, let’s call him Alex. Alex was married in addition to dating Haley. When I started dating Haley, we were on a work contract out of state and Haley was my boss. Alex wasn’t happy that Haley was dating someone other than him, and was not supportive of the relationship.
Flash forward a few months: the work contract has ended, Haley is back living out west in the same city as Alex, and I’m home in NY. I go to visit Haley, and Alex and I meet a couple times. He is cold to me and every time we’re in the same place he instigates a fight with Haley, causing them to vanish and fight it out somewhere while I’m left to my own devices. Alex was also mad any time Haley and I were together, even though we were long distance and would only see each other for maybe a week every couple months for the first year. Haley was constantly upset that Alex was being so unsupportive and I was feeling horrible about it. I felt like a home wrecker, even though Alex was married to someone else. I felt like the more I heard about Alex’s behaviour, the less I liked him. At a certain point I asked if we could pause on sharing details of our other relationships, not a full don’t ask don’t tell, but moreso just trying to create a boundary so I didn’t have to hear about how Alex was mad yet again. It felt like because Alex sat in the seat of power in almost every way (he was older, a man, the pre-existing relationship, lived in the same city as Haley, more integrated into her everyday life, married with another partner, etc.), that his (hypocritical) distaste for Haley dating put my relationship with her at risk. This created a lot of anxiety for me in our first year of dating.
Flash forward a year and Alex and Haley break up. Alex proceeds to date some other friends in proximal circles and it ends in drama and with mutual friends experiencing a bad taste about Alex’s behaviour.
Flash forward another 10 months and Haley and Alex start to talk again. I’m all for being friends with exes, I am friends with all of mine except one with a particularly bad temper. A couple months later Haley tells me Alex has proposed they start dating again and she is interested. Understandably, I am hesitant. There has been no attempt to rectify the poor experience between Alex and I and I feel that until he is able to apologize, acknowledge and show some signs of genuine change, it is not a dynamic I want to be a part of again.
Another year passes and during it, every couple of months, it comes up again in a check in that Haley and Alex still want to date. Eventually I reach out to Alex and ask to chat. The conversation does not go well. I try to pause it several times and he keeps escalating it, leading to me very directly say that I need an apology from him before them dating again is something I can give me genuine blessing to/stick around for. He refuses to apologize, saying that we all played a role in the previous mess. Though I don’t disagree, I also feel that it’s unfair to sit in a position of power, lash out, and blame the person hit by the volatility equally for the impact.
Now Haley and I are in a bind. Our relationship is amazing other than this. Though we had different sex drives (mine much lower) she has freedom to explore with anyone else and she does full service sex work. I am happy dating her and having the odd kiss or date here and there. We talk about living together, having kids, big dreams of the future and I love her dearly. But this situation with Alex feels like a huge mismatch in values between us. I am of the school of thought where it is ok to have boundaries in polyamory, and even a “messy list”. The messy list should not be excessively long, but more so a few people (siblings, close friends or co-workers, messy exes or people with proven questionable moral/ethical boundaries), who would likely and significantly affect the well-being of me, her and/or the relationship. She seems of the school where that is veto power and it is unreasonable to say no to anyone. To me, this is relationship anarchy, a dynamic I have communicated is not my preference and a dynamic I did not sign up for.
Where do we go from here? Is there a way that we can both compromise and meet in the middle on this? She and Alex are good friends and do things together which is no problem, but the same level of enmeshment as before with no apology or signal of genuine change is not something I want to be a part of. To be clear, I’m not saying she can’t do this, I’m saying that I will need to take a step back/out if she does. This is a boundary, sure, but is this not the same thing as vetoing someone?
Finally, even if a perfect apology is given by Alex, I don’t want to have to drag it out of him. And maybe most importantly, I don’t know if circumstantially it would feel genuine at this point because it would be motivated by him getting to date Haley more-so than genuine repair. He never reached out or attempted repair before it served his own interest.
What do you think is ethical and reasonable here? I would love to hear your perspective!
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Poly confused
This honestly seems like it was a mess before Alex ever even became a problem, PC, starting with the fact that Haley was your boss. That’s just a factor that doesn’t sit well with me.
However, that’s the really the least of things when it comes to your relationship with Haley. The whole thing sounds like it’s messy as hell to a point where I’m honestly wondering whether it’s worth staying. The conflicts – and the underlying issues that are ultimately the cause – seem like they’re outweighing the benefits of the relationship.
It sounds to me like there’re a few issues at play here, starting with the nature of boundaries and the difference between having a boundary and “veto power”. As I’ve said before: boundaries are about what you will put up with and accept, and what you will do if someone ignores those boundaries. Asking, for example, that Haley not tell you all about what’s going on with Alex is a boundary; you’re saying “hearing about everything going on with this person is making it hard for me to be present and enjoy my time with you, so I’d appreciate if you could dial it back.” So too is “look, I don’t want to be intimately tied to this person, even at a distance; his presence causes me enough stress and anxiety that I’d rather step away than have him be an ongoing factor in our relationship.” This isn’t a veto; it’s simply you laying out that you’re not comfortable with the way his behavior ends up interfering with your relationship. Yes, you are saying that you’d back off if Haley chooses to enter a relationship with him, but being in a poly relationship doesn’t mean that you’re required to stick around if your partner is also dating someone who you can’t stand. Especially if that person is causing you active distress or affects the dynamic of your relationship with your partner.
But that also leads to another issue: I’m wondering how much of the problem you were having was actually a problem, and how much of it was the way you were feeling. While the situation with Alex certainly seems to have escalated over time, but I think the idea of Alex having the “seat of power” was more about your perception of him, rather than the reality. I realize you were still in the beginning stages with Haley, but part of making a poly relationship work is trusting your partner enough to be their own person and to have and enforce their own boundaries. Alex only has as much power as Haley allows him to have, after all.
This is important, because power is often more a matter of perception, rather than reality, and people often mistake who has it and who doesn’t. As a sneaky son of a bitch once said: “power resides where people think it resides. It is a trick, a shadow on the wall.” You bring up the idea that Alex has more “power” or “influence” because of the length of his relationship with Haley and the fact that he lived in closer proximity to Haley. While the time in a relationship and their relative enmeshment does mean that there are often more ties and responsibilities, that doesn’t automatically translate into “a seat of power”. It’s not the same as control and it certainly isn’t the same as “authority”.
That’s not to say that this can’t become a problem, especially if Alex’s dislike of you translates to more than sulking or throwing tantrums about you, but that requires that there’s action, not just words. Alex can say what he wants, but his ability to affect your relationship requires Haley’s buy in too. If Haley isn’t changing plans because of Alex’s disapproval or allowing him to have a say on whether she dates you or what sort of relationship you and she can have, then his influence is very limited.
I do think that some of Alex’s ability to fuck with you is self-inflicted. You were engaging with him when you were in town. This gave Alex opportunities to steal from your time with Haley by throwing a tantrum that had to be resolved right away while you’re left twiddling your thumbs. Doing so once is understandable; you were trying to be a gentleman by meeting him and hoping that everyone could at least be adults about things. The fact that he decided to be so pissy that he and Haley had to go sort shit out wasn’t something you could plan on. However, if it’s something that’s going to happen every time you see each other, it seems pretty clear to me that the answer is quit seeing each other. If you’re in town to see Haley, but don’t go say “hey” to Alex, his ability to actively interfere is reduced significantly.
And if I’m being perfectly honest, I think Haley ended up contributing to the mess. It takes two to have a fight, and she allowed Alex to drag her off to resolve it rather than telling him she’ll deal with him later. As I said before, I could see this being an understandable occurrence once… but when it happens every time you and he are in the same place, then the pattern should be glaringly obvious. As the saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
This is why I think this is at least partially a self-sustaining problem; there’s really not any reason that you had to have a confrontation with Alex every time you went to see Haley. While I think it’s good to at least be on nodding terms with your metas, but it’s not absolutely required. Plenty of people prefer garden-party style polyamory (where you see your metas on occasion, but otherwise don’t have much contact with them) or parallel poly (where a person’s partners don’t interact or come into contact with one another at all). If you don’t want to be besties with the other people your partners are seeing, that is absolutely allowed.
If that’s something that’s important for you or Haley… well, then the problem is also in the nature of your relationship rather than exclusively in Alex’s dislike of you.
(Incidentally, relationship anarchy doesn’t mean not having boundaries or rules; that’s just relationship libertarianism.
Relationship anarchy means that the rules of a relationship don’t automatically presume default hierarchies or levels of importance, significance or intimacy, particularly based on whether the relationship is romantic, sexual or platonic. The rules of each relationship defined by the individuals for their relationship with mutual consent.)
But that gets to the heart of the problem: this is a messy situation and Alex and Haley seem to be particularly messy people. Alex seems like someone who thinks that maturity and emotional intelligence are things that happen to other people and Haley seems to be willing to accept it and thinks that it’s not a problem. If she were more willing to keep some firm walls between her relationship with Alex and her relationship with you, that would be one thing. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, and that leaves you in the lurch.
And not to put too fine a point on it: it seems like having a relationship with Alex is a high priority for Haley, even with the drama that happened before. And to be perfectly frank, I kind of question the judgement of someone who can look at Alex’s behavior, see how it bothers you and see that it hasn’t really changed and still want to date him again. And if she doesn’t see that it’s no different than before… well, that lowers my opinion further.
Haley and Alex don’t need your blessing or approval to date, any more than you needed Alex’s blessing or approval to date Haley. You don’t have to like it, but the choice is ultimately Haley’s to make. Your choice is whether you want to stay in a relationship with someone who would also have a relationship with someone like Alex. That’s the nature of boundaries; it’s what you are willing to do to maintain them.
It’s certainly possible to try and make this work if Haley is determined to have Alex as a partner again – and it seems like she is. But to do so means being able to trust Haley to respect your boundaries regarding Alex and her ability to keep Alex’s bullshit from interfering with your relationship. If she isn’t able to or is unwilling… well, that says a lot about her. And then you have to decide if you have a boundary regarding Alex, or just a strongly worded suggestion.
I get that you have strong feelings for Haley and you want to make this relationship work. But love and the desire to make things work doesn’t mean that the person you have those feelings for is someone who’s compatible with you. You can love someone to distraction, but still not be able to be in a relationship with them. I think you need to have a long and hard think about whether this is the kind of poly relationship you want to have, and if Haley really is the right person to have it with.
Good luck.
If a 32-year-old man is morbidly obese short ugly poor has a small penis and has only had sex once should he give up on the hope of a fit good looking attractive woman ever picking him and loving him if he’s so unattractive even at his best and he refuses to date obese unattractive women because of the comparison how he’s with someone so unattractive and his friends and enemies all have attractive wives and immensely better lives than him? And even if he loses 130 pounds he’s still not going to attract attractive women only average woman? It’s not fair for me to accept being a loser when I’ve had it as bad as I’ve had it. Or bust my ass just to still not be good enough. Everyone tells me to lower expectations but I don’t want to, I hate dieting and exercising and if I put myself through misery and I’m still too ugly for women I want then that means I suffered for nothing. I hate being fat and short and never getting a 8, 9, and 10. What am I supposed to do?
Fat Short Lonely and Doomed
Look, FSLD, I’m going to be blunt here and ask you a very simple question: what are you willing to do in order to stop being a loser?
If you want things to change, then you’re going to have to change them. You’re going to have to decide if you hate your situation more than you hate what you have to do to change and improve it.
The thing is, you have laid out what you feel are your problems. That implies pretty strongly that you know what you can do about them. You just don’t want to. That’s not even tough-love-self-help-that-isn’t-actually-help bullshit, yousay this in your letter.
Case in point: you hate being fat. Well, your options are very clear: diet and exercise, GLP-1 or similar medication, surgery, learning to love your body regardless of size – whether individually, in combination with other options or all of the above. Which is it going to be?
You want to be with 8s, 9s and 10s? Ok… leaving aside the inherent side-eye I have for ranking people like that, what steps will you take to become someone who 8s, 9s and 10s want to date? What are you willing to change about yourself and how will you go about doing it?
Of course, you don’t have to do those things. You could stay the same size and shape you are. You can accept that you’re not someone who dates 8s – 10s. You can learn to be cool with yourself, to actually love yourself and find the people who love you as you are now.
You could stop being a loser by deciding you’re not a loser. You can change the terms of what being a loser means to you.
Of course, that may mean that the people who come to love you aren’t models or aren’t going to be the sort of person who would make your friends jealous, and you’ve already stated that this would be “lowering your expectations” and you don’t want that either.
But consider, why should women – not just women you deem to be attractive but women overall – be willing to give you grace that you aren’t willing to give them? Why should they be willing to accept you, with all of your supposed flaws, when you would find someone similar to be an insult?
And why should someone want to pick you when even you wouldn’t pick you? It’s ok to not be your own type, but there’s a difference between that and thinking that you and everyone like you is hideous and unacceptable.
So again, I ask: what are you willing to do to stop being a loser?
The answer seems to be “nothing”, because nothing you do will be a guarantee that you’ll do so much work and get rewarded with a girlfriend that will make you not a loser. But then again, that’s the same as it is for everyone. We all do things in the name of achieving a goal – all sorts of goals – that ultimately doesn’t end with us reaching that goal. That’s just life. Nobody is guaranteed anything in life except that life eventually ends. That’s the only place where life is fair: we all get a lifetime – a start and an ending.
What we do with it is ultimately up to us.
What you’re asking for is a magic solution and there isn’t one. Nobody is going to wave a wand and make things different. Nobody will sell you a magic formula that will change everything for you. Oh, they’ll sell you promises that never pay out and then offer to sell you more promises to fix the ones that they broke. They’ll sell you anger. They’ll sell you fear. They’ll sell you bitterness, resentment, despair and entitlement and tell you that if you pay a little more, they can make it all go away.
But they’ll never sell you a fix. They’ll never sell you change. They’ll just sell you the opportunity to sell you more bullshit, until you don’t have anything left.
So I ask you a third time and the third time pays for all: what are you willing to do to stop being a loser?
Which is more important to you: complaining or things being different? If the only outcome that’s acceptable to you is to get exactly what you want, with no risk and minimal discomfort, then this is what you get.
Are you willing to invest in yourself? Are you willing to do hard work, grueling work, work that is going to require you to climb emotional mountains and test your resolve? Are you willing to do things that aren’t going to bring permanent changes and recognize that what needs to change is your relationship to yourself? Are you willing to change your idea of who you are, of who you “should” be? Are you willing to take risks, to make investments that won’t pay off in ways that you expect, but may very well pay off in ways you never dreamed?
Because that’s how things will be different. Whether that’s better or worse is going to depend on how you feel about how things are now.
Good luck.
