Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Doctor’s Note: I’ll be taking the remainder of the year off for the holidays. Regular publication will resume in the New Year.
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
My partner and I were broken up and then exploring getting back together while he was also dating a poly person. A few weeks in, he told me he’s poly and that’s non-negotiable. I told him I wasn’t sure if it would work for me to be in a poly relationship but I was interested to try and learn, as I’d been interested in it before.
Well, I’m a little shocked by my feelings. Now that I know for sure that he and the other person have had sex it feels like I’m having sex with this other person and I’ve realized I need to be more comfortable in my relationship with her in order to feel okay having that level of intimacy. It feels like it would be fine for them to have sex if this other person was okay having sex with me and/or if I had the level of trust and belonging I need with her. I have a high need for inclusion, which I knew but I didn’t know it was going to play out specifically in this way. She’s not interested in sex with me and I don’t know yet if she’s okay building trust and belonging with me. She’s been kind of warm/cold toward me. Now I’m feeling extremely uncomfortable and like it’s too intimate. I feel left out, betrayed and rejected (I realize I got myself into this situation by not knowing myself, so it’s not entirely their fault I feel this way). I’ve made a request that they not have sex until she and I feel the level of safety, belonging and trust that I need to feel that intimate with her while she also doesn’t want to be intimate with me. If they don’t want to do that then I may need to tap out.
The reason I don’t feel trust is she has told me that with every other poly situation she’s been in the “other woman” has left, so I’m not feeling very secure regarding her skills to make it work, and since I am also newly developing these skills, I don’t fully trust myself, either. She also told me she always wonders why everyone can’t just make out and be loving, but now that I’ve asked to be included, she’s said no, I just want him, so that’s why I feel misled and betrayed. There are other confusing things she’s said as well that lead me to not trust that she’s being honest. She’s told me I’m the warmest and most curious metamour she’s had so that’s a nice sign for me. I’ve worked hard to understand what she needs, while also communicating my needs as I discover them. I know she’s trying to learn and grow, too, but my alarm bells are up and I don’t know if it can work.
I’ve talked to my partner about all this and he’s being somewhat neutral. He thinks we’re triggering each other and we’re both working on doing better. I could see some of his point and I also felt annoyed hearing him say that because I need my partner to care about and respect my needs and boundaries. I told him that and I’m taking a day of space to process my feelings.
I still don’t know for sure how I’ll feel about them having sex if she and I have the safety, belonging and trust that I need, but my sense is of I do then I’ll be okay. I recognize my partner is taking a risk by being with me since I don’t know for sure how I’ll feel.
Do you have any advice for me? How do I know if I’m being reasonable? Am I poly? How do I decide if I should work through my discomfort, grow and change, or hold a boundary? Currently I’m using discomfort as my sign post that I need a boundary.
Sincerely,
Am I poly?
This one’s a bit of a tangle, AIP, some of which is from being new and inexperienced with poly, and some that’s more personal for you.
Let’s start with an easy one: “Am I polyamorous?” The answer to this one is “you tell me”, because I’m not the Grand High Adjudicator of All Things Poly.
That’s my cousin Steve. I love him, but he’s insufferable at family dinners.
More seriously, having weird or complicated feelings about your partner or your metamour (your partner’s other partner)’s relationship doesn’t disqualify you from being poly. Being poly doesn’t mean that you’re magically immune to jealousy or that you’ll be in a full poly triad (or quad or $INSERT_COMPLICATED_RELATIONSHIP_TANGLE_HERE). Nor does it even necessarily mean you’re going to have any relationship with your metas. Polyamory just means that you’re someone who is capable of having and pursuing romantic relationships with more than one person.
Granted, how you go about conducting those relationships is a matter of debate; ask five poly people and you’ll get six poly opinions. But at the end of the day, it’s just about whether you’re someone who can have romantic love for more than one person at a time. So, you’re going to have to tell me if that description fits or not.
The next question of “are you being reasonable” is more complicated. A lot is going to hinge on what aspects you think you are or aren’t being reasonable about. It’s one thing if there’s a type of poly relationship you prefer, and you want to make that a priority in who you partner with. It’s another thing entirely when you start making that demand of someone else – especially when you’re the one coming to an existing relationship. It’s not necessarily reasonable to come into an existing relationship and say “OK, so here’s how this is going to work”; trust me, I’ve seen this go down and it’s never a pretty picture.
I think part of the problem is that you’re new to this and there’s often growing pains involved. One common thing that comes up with newcomers to varying forms of non-monogamy is that they want some mechanism to protect themselves from uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings – whether that’s jealousy, feeling neglected or the worry that their partner is going to be so twitterpated with The New Hotness that they’re going to end up closing the relationship and icing the other partner(s) out. These often come in the form of trying to establish rules – “no sex in our shared bed”, “only sleep with people who don’t live in our city”, “nobody I know socially”, “only on days that don’t end in Y and also with people who vanish back to their own dimension when you trick them into saying their name backwards” and so on.
The thing is: these are fig-leafs at best. At worst, it’s a way of trying to technically do non-monogamy, but in such a way that makes actual non-monogamy impossible. It’s understandable that folks want to protect their hearts and their place in the relationship and feel like easing their way in is safer, but it rarely works out as intended.
It also gets in the way of one of the core tenets of polyamory: that these are actual, significant and separate relationships, not just people fucking around. And as, such a third-party dictating rules on what two other consenting adults are “allowed” to do is seen as trying to dictate someone else’s relationship. This is why saying “I don’t want you having sex with your other partner until I feel safe and secure with her” isn’t reasonable. You’re dictating terms to two people whose relationship is separate from yours.
It’s one thing to say that you won’t be in a poly relationship unless you feel a level of security and trust with everyone involved; that’s you deciding under what conditions you will stay or go. That’s a boundary. So too is “I would prefer not to hear about your relationship with you partner” or “I don’t want to know when the two of you are having sex”. Saying “you can’t do X with someone else until I say so” isn’t. You’re free to request it if you really want to, but it’s unlikely to have the result you’re hoping for. Especially since it involves a third person who doesn’t seem all that interested in playing along. It’s entirely possible that you’d be functionally asking them to not have sex until such a time that you either give up on trying to build a relationship with your meta, you leave your partner or he dumps you.
How long will that be? Who knows! But I’m sure you can see that you would find this unreasonable if someone asked it of you… especially someone who was a newcomer to your arrangement.
I think one of the complicating factors is that you’ve got history with your partner. That may be leading a sense of… call it “seniority”, for lack of a better term, that you may feel carries over from your past relationship with him. The problem is that this isn’t a continuation of your previous relationship; the credits don’t transfer. This is a new relationship and a new relationship model, and there’s going to be an adjustment period for everyone. The fact that you’re his ex doesn’t automatically give your wishes greater metaphorical weight coming into this.
One thing I think that you may want to do is dig into precisely what you’re hoping to get out of asking your meta for a closer relationship. I know you said that you have a high need for inclusion, but is this about feeling like being excluded, or is it about feeling like you’re actually important? That is: that you feel valued to a point where you don’t feel like you could be easily excised from this relationship or that your partner would fight to keep you? Is it that you feel threatened by his having sex with other people in general or is it about his relationship with your meta, specifically?
I suspect that, if you dig into it, this is about FOMO.
FOMO, more often than not, isn’t just about “there’s a cool thing happening that I’m not part of”; it’s the fear that because people are doing the cool thing that you’re not part of, their connection will grow closer and you’ll be excluded because your connection isn’t as strong. It sounds to me that this is precisely what you’re worried about; the relationship that your partner is having with his meta will ultimately eclipse the one you have with him. There’s a sort of logic (if you squint); developing a strong (or at least, sexually intimate) connection with your meta would give you an additional tie to both of them, which would theoretically make it harder for you to be squeezed out. This is understandable… but that doesn’t necessarily make it reasonable.
While it’s important for our partners to support us when we’re having feelings of jealousy or insecurity, it’s ultimately up to us to manage and deal with those feelings ourselves. You can ask for reassurance, you can say “can we talk about how I’m feeling right now?” or address if there’s an actual need that is going unmet… but the bulk of dealing with those feelings has to come from you. Much of it is going to be about how much you trust your partner.
Which actually brings me to the question of your feelings about his other partner. I will admit, her saying “every ‘other woman’ has left” makes me cock a skeptical eyebrow. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen too many polycules where one partner seemed to think the right model to follow were the court intrigues between favored courtesans in the Tang dynasty, but that struck me as an odd thing to say. I could see how that could both be someone not necessarily taking responsibility for her actions and a warning of “I’ve seen them come, and I’ve seen them go, but I’m still here.” But then, I’m not there and you’re not necessarily the most unbiased person in this mix.
I don’t, however, think that her saying “why can’t everyone just make out and be loving” being incompatible with her not necessarily wanting to have a more intimate relationship with you. Leaving aside that we often aspire to goals that we personally may not be able to reach, the “why can’t everyone just make out” carries an implicit, if unspoken assumption that everyone involved is actually attracted to one another. It’s nice in the theoretical, but hard to achieve in the real world. You can’t ensure that any two people are going to be mutually into one another, even if they have a lot in common (including taste in dick). So while she may wish that this was how her relationships work, that runs headlong into the possibility that maybe you’re just not her type. That doesn’t make her a hypocrite or a liar, it’s just that, well, she’s just not that into you.
Or maybe there’s some complete lack of self-awareness going on and she’s the sort of person who talks a great game but never lives up to her own purported values and doesn’t see the issue there. Who knows.
I don’t think your partner is necessarily covering himself in glory here either. I can understand his not wanting to get involved, especially since he can’t exactly tell his other partner “look, you gotta make out with AIP for the good of our relationship,” but it also doesn’t sound like he’s doing much to reassure you that his relationship with her doesn’t take away from his relationship with you. Your relationship with your meta is ultimately your business, but he should be able to at least reassure you that his relationship with you and his relationship with her are separate, distinct and aren’t in competition.
Now, I don’t think any of this means that you’re not poly. I do, however, think this may mean that you may not be able to be poly with them. I stress may; you don’t mention how long you’ve been in this relationship or working on being poly. If it’s only been a handful of weeks and you’re not seeing everyone more than once a week, that’s not a lot of time to adjust. You also don’t mention how much experience your partner or his meta have with being poly or what their history is like. Considering the comment your meta made, I suspect it may not be the smoothest or most congenial. That gives me pause, and makes me wonder about the dynamics of his relationship with her.
The other thing you don’t mention is whether you’ve done any homework on poly and ENM relationships. Now granted, I have a pet peeve over how we basically teach people how to do relationships by expecting them to dive into the deep end and figure it out before they drown, but going into a poly or ENM relationship with no prep work is that but cubed. There’re a lot of skills, complications and conflicts that are very hard to figure out through trial and error, especially if you don’t have an experienced partner or meta who’re helping guide you through it.
Yeah, there’s a skill set overlap with monogamous relationships, but the more people who are involved makes everything exponentially more complicated. Doing your homework in advance can be helpful, because it can help make you more aware of things you didn’t know you didn’t know – such as the various forms that non-monogamous and poly relationships can take. It can also help you anticipate issues that you’re likely to encounter, give you the vocabulary to talk about them with your partner(s) and the skills to help navigate them, especially if you realize that some aspect of your relationship isn’t working for you.
While it’s often the case that you won’t know what you really want until you get some experience under your belt, having an idea of the model you want to follow when you’re getting started is helpful. For example: you seem to want a full poly triad, where you’re dating both your partner and his partner; that can be hard to find and make work, especially as a newbie. But even if we leave your feelings about your meta aside, you may find that this doesn’t work for you, period, and no amount of leveling up will change that. Fortunately, there’re many, many different ways to be poly; this is just one.
Whether you stay in this relationship, or if you choose to explore polyamory with someone else, I recommend you hit the books. I recommend that you check out are Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up, Dr. Liz Powell’s Building Open Relationships and Dossie Easton and Janet Hardey’s The Ethical Slut; I’ve found these to be among the most helpful for getting started. You might also get some insight and value out of Esther Perel’s Mating In Captivity and The State of The Affair, which aren’t about polyamory, but are relevant to some of your fears and worries.
(Full disclosure: Dr. Powell is a friend of mine and we’ve worked together on multiple projects before, including some that are coming soon…)
As I said: I don’t know if this is the relationship you should be in, if you want to explore polyamory. The fact that you dated your partner before doesn’t guarantee that he’s a good match for you in a poly relationship. That doesn’t mean that you’re not poly; it just means that maybe you shouldn’t be dating him… or his meta.
But again: I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask them to stop having sex until you’re cool with everything. If that’s a hurdle you can’t get over… well, it’s probably time to bounce, poly or not.
Good luck
