Please Hold

Hey, thanks to everyone who gave their advice after reading my last post. I decided to disable comments for now, because it was all just a little too overwhelming. I’ve taken the existing comments down for the moment, as well; no offense to anyone, it’s just that I don’t really want to engage in an argument with anyone over this right now, and, well, pretty much every comment contained something that I would feel the need to argue with were I to leave it up on my blog.

I needed to write what I did — catharsis and all that — but I think I misrepresented the situation, my feelings and opinions, and the depth of the discussions I’ve been having with my partner about this issue over the past year. It perhaps didn’t come across in the last post, but we’ve been having long, detailed conversations about what we’d each want and need in an open relationship for quite a while now, including boundary-setting, what things we’d want to keep to ourselves and what we could share with others, BDSM-specific issues, safety issues, trust issues, and all the rest of it. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve ever thought about non-monogamy; it’s just that over the past few days, as it has become more of a reality to me than at any time in the past, the emotional vulnerability I’ve felt has taken precedence in my head over all of those hours of discussion, writing things down, reading books, etc. All of the negotiation, all of the boundaries we’d discussed, the ways to make me feel safe, seemed meaningless in the face of what I was feeling. Now that those immediate feelings have passed, I can get back to work on that.

For the record, I misspoke when addressing some of the “politically correct” polyamory ideas I’ve heard; I don’t actually agree with any of that as written. I began writing it as a list of the more common rhetoric I’ve heard coming from radical folks about polyamory, and got some things confused in my editing process. I’ve rewritten to be more accurate.

…I think, in some ways, I’ve been thinking of this blog as a private journal that’s simply left open for others to read if they’d like, and I’m not sure that’s how I should be treating it. There’s a reason that privacy is sometimes needed while thinking important issues through, especially ones that are so emotionally gut-wrenching. I realize now that I can’t really hope to post anything on here without people wanting to give me helpful advice, and in the future will keep posts like this private until I’m ready to receive it.

Choices

A few nights ago, my partner again brought up the subject of non-monogamy, a conversation we’ve been meaning to have for ages. It’s something we started seriously talking about a year ago, but the discussion stopped abruptly when it became clear that it was something that I just wasn’t ready for, yet. We renewed the conversation about four months ago, but never really got very far — still, I felt optimistic that it was something we could eventually move into. Since then, he’s mentioned several times that he’d like to start talking about it again, but I’ve kept pushing it aside because of some other stressful things going on in my life. A few nights ago, he pressed the issue, and I agreed to talk.

As soon as we started talking, I realized that this is something that has been eating at him for a long time now and has been making him extremely anxious. He told me that after having thought about it for the last year, he’s completely sure that he not only wants to be non-monogamous but can’t imagine continuing a monogamous relationship for very much longer. He didn’t exactly give an ultimatum — in fact, he specifically made it clear that that’s not what he was trying to do — but in a practical sense, it does sort of force out a choice that I need to make. Either I need to at least really try this whole non-monogamy thing — as in right now, not six months or a year from now — or I need to end our relationship.

It’s not like non-monogamy is something that I’m not interested in; I am. But especially now that my partner is so clear that this is what he wants, now that I’m faced with such a huge choice to make, everything seems blurry. What do I want, really, out of our relationship? What would it mean to me if he were to start dating other people? How would that feel? Would I actually be able to carry on other relationships of my own, or would I just feel miserable and keep wishing that the person I was with was actually my partner? And, most importantly, is it worth taking the chance that I won’t be able to deal, that it isn’t the sort of relationship I want? Reluctantly — for I am an extremely cautious person and am generally not inclined to take big chances — I have to agree that it is worth it, for the simple reason that ending things with my partner now just seems absurd: we’re both still very much in love with each other, have no major ongoing disagreements or fights, continue to enjoy each others’ company. It would be a terrible mistake to throw something like this away because I was too afraid to try something different.

…right?

The thought of ending our relationship makes me feel sick. But so does the idea of him being with other people. I’m at a complete loss right now, and this problem, this choice, doesn’t even seem real. I realize now that part of the reason I’ve been pushing off our discussions about non-monogamy has been that I simply haven’t been able to see it as a real issue, as an actual need my partner has that needs to be addressed if he’s going to be happy. And now that it’s clear to me…I don’t know. Even though we’ve been talking about it for a year, I still feel a little in shock. I simply hadn’t fully grasped what the consequences of this would be, that eventually, it would come down to a choice like this.

Last night, I told him that either way, I felt like I would be losing a huge part of my life. Either we become “friends,” losing our intimacy and partnership, or we become non-monogamous, which to me, right now, also feels like a loss of intimacy, security, and time together. At the moment, I don’t actually feel inclined to be with anyone else, so I don’t feel like I would be gaining anything by opening the relationship. Honestly, I think I might feel worse were I to start seeing someone else (in the context of an open relationship), because it would just feel like something that I needed to tide me over until the next time I could be with my partner.

I also admitted to him that I feel somewhat ashamed that I’m not excited and supportive of the idea of an open relationship. In many ways, in the social circles I’m a part of, I feel like non-monogamy is sort of idealized, that it’s a more politically correct form of relationship. That is, I should recognize myself as an individual free to form relationships with other individuals to meet my needs and desires, and that I shouldn’t expect anything different from anyone else. Jealousy is an emotion to recognize and accept, but essentially one that is negative and needs to just be overcome. None of us can fulfill all of another’s needs, so we should be happy to allow our partners to go out and get needs filled elsewhere that we ourselves can’t provide.

All of this, of course, is simply rhetoric, and most people experienced in non-monogamy would probably strongly disagree with this as articulated here. But then, there are elements of it that resonate with me. I don’t like the idea of traditional monogamy, of people coupling up and focusing nearly exclusively on each other; I like having my own time and space, doing things on my own, feeling free to build (non-sexual) relationships with people that I don’t necessarily share with my partner. I like the fact that he does the same. I like the fact that neither of us expects the other to be everything for each other; I like knowing that he has other people with whom he can share those things in his life that are important to him but that I have no interest in, and that he’s happy for me when I spend time with people doing things that he’d never want to do with me. The idea that we could have the same thing, but also include sex and romantic love as an aspect of those outside relationships, is appealing and makes a lot of sense — it just sort of seems to be a logical extension of what I already believe.

But none of it matters when he tells me that he might want to sleep with some girl when he’s traveling this fall, and my insides knot up and I feel so alone, so isolated, so distant from him and his world. None of it matters when I think about him flirting with someone at a show, going home with her, fucking her. I want to simply feel happy, glad that he’s happy — but instead I feel hollow, unable to keep from wondering why on earth he would want to go fuck someone else when I’m at home, waiting, wishing he’d come home and fuck me. Every time he’d choose to be with someone else, I can’t imagine that I would be able to think anything but “why her, and not me?” These are all things I’ve thought about; I know that it isn’t about “instead of” but “in addition to,” I know this and yet it does absolutely nothing to make me feel any better.

Now that I’m thinking about this as something that might be happening within a matter of weeks or months, I feel destroyed and powerless, all of my theoretical excitement about non-monogamy shattered. Will this change, over time? Can I trust that it will change? Or is agreeing to non-monogamy simply choosing to be miserable in a different way than I’d be feeling were we to break up completely?