<This is a very long post, so feel free to skip to around the two thirds mark for what relates to the title. The first bulk is the background. I didn't need to write it, but I wanted to get it off my chest because I have no one in person to say it to.>
In May of 2015 I got together with a girl who had been with another guy for about 7 months. At first we just made out a few times and hung out with our friends from college. Some of those friends had been saying it was obvious something would happen between me and my now girlfriend eventually, but we kept it secret from them at the time. I asked her what she wanted to do with regards to her current boyfriend, and she said “Leave it to me.” About two weeks after we first kissed, she went on her overseas placement to Europe. A week later, I left. We had ended up working about 90 mins from each other so were planning to continue seeing each other. For her first week, she brought her boyfriend with her, something I didn’t know until a week later. But only one day after I arrived, we slept together for the first time.
I confronted her about her boyfriend and asked her what she wanted to do. I said I didn’t want to force her to break up with him, but I was unsure about continuing our relationship under the circumstances. I had known her since a few months before she got together with him, and I didn’t want anyone involved to get hurt for no good reason. And especially not because of me.
During the conversation, she said that monogamous relationships had always felt incomplete to her, like she was limited. She maintained that she cared for her partner in all of her previous relationships, but felt limited to just what she could experience with one person. This was something I had felt for a long time, but not in such a clear way. After that, I started looking into polyamory properly, and I learned a lot about myself and decided to stay with her.
I expected her to ask her boyfriend about it or come to some decision about him, and for the next ten months she never did. She brought the topic up with him on numerous occasions in the first three months of our relationship, but after that, nothing. She told me she no longer felt the same for him and that the relationship had essentially smoked out. I asked her then to break it off at some point soon because it was hurting me to see that she was unwilling to make that decision and yet not ask him if he was willing to be polyamorous.
The part I feel terrible about now is that I realise I myself was not ready for polyamory; I had a gut feeling that he would never be willing, and thought she would break up with him soon anyway. Our placements lasted eight months, during which he visited three times and she went home once. They had sex during all of those visits, which made me more uncomfortable with the later visits. At first I was fine with it.
After we returned to college in January of this year, we realised our relationship would be under a lot of tension because of it. The first night back, I slept in my parent’s house away from college, but she slept in his bed. We had gotten a house together, living with the landlord and some others we didn’t know. We both wanted our relationship to remain, and it became more and more apparent to me that she didn’t want to break off her first relationship but was doing almost nothing with her boyfriend anymore. This continued for three months, in which they saw each other maybe three of four times. I was getting angry and impatient, but I felt too greatly for her to force her harder. So I told her to take the time she needed, but to just please do it. She had been through multiple abusive relationships previous to me, one of her exes killed himself shortly after their breakup so I knew I shouldn’t try to manipulate or force her to do something she was not ready for.
So, around the middle of April this year, she broke up with him. And he agreed completely with her about it, their relationship had flamed out a long time ago. I thanked her and supported her as best I could after that. She was not as emotionally… broken/flustered? As she thought she would be, so it was a simple enough transition to our “new” relationship after that. Our friends had expected us to get together at some point because we had been close for a while even before our placements.
Of course we were already together for eleven months at this stage so we had to pretend to be in a new relationship initially, which was fun for both of us. She was the first girl I’d ever kissed or slept with and my first girlfriend, so I said to her that after we became “exclusive”, I wanted some time to experience that properly before becoming polyamorous. I had never felt like it was a “just me and her” relationship, nor did it ever feel like it was a “thruple” either. So I told her I wanted her to myself for a short time to see what it was like for real. This was around the time of our end of year exams, and since our courses are very similar, but not identical, she has classes with multiple other people. Since we’re in engineering, most of them are guys.
I noticed that she was spending more and more time with a guy I knew from my first year, let’s call him E. I guessed that she liked him to some extent. She never mentioned it to me so I figured she didn’t want to be anything more than friends with him.
At the same time, I introduced her to some of my online friends who I game with. I’ve never met most of them in person, but she said that whenever I was online with them, she felt left out, which is why I introduced them. One of them, R, took a liking to her straight away and proposed jokingly, it’s something he does with every girl he meets online, but she was the first one to say yes, again jokingly. This turned into a very common chat night between the two of them. She ended up knowing R better than I did within the space of a week. I met him through some of my friends from college who had known him for years, yet had never met him in person, despite several attempts. Shortly after this, we moved into a three-bedroom house with a friend of ours. We each have a room but we sleep together. She then asked me if it would be OK for him to come over to visit all of us for the first time. I said of course it would, and then she asked me if I would be fine if she and R saw what it would be like if they were to get together. I was surprised and angry at this at first because to me it seemed completely out of the blue and I had told her I was not ready for it yet.
She got upset with me over that for a short time but was content to just have him visit. I said I was fine if it was just flirting, but I didn’t want her to kiss/sleep with him. So while R was here, he stayed in our house. There was flirting here and there, but as the week progressed, it got a bit more physical, which I didn’t like and asked her to stop, but she didn’t. I felt like she was trying to get to something more, but kept insisting that she wasn’t. After he left, she said she wasn’t interested in a relationship with him at all.
Meanwhile, E had moved into a house near where we live, about 2 mins on foot. So I knew they were going to hang out a lot more over the summer. She hangs out with him and his friends a couple of times a week, which is good, because most of our other friends are either out of the country or too far away to visit easily. But she would go over to their house earlier each time and stay later. So I started to get jealous, started wondering if she was doing the same thing with him as she did with me. I was not completely trusting of her over that, but I know I am as much to blame for it as her.
I confronted her one night about it, told her I knew she liked him and that he liked her. I said I was suspicious of what they were doing together. I genuinely considered breaking up with her at that point. But I didn’t. She said that she didn’t deny the mutual feelings between E and her, said that E would be interested in a poly relationship of some kind for the final year of college but nothing long-term.
I read an article recently, linked below for those who want to read it, that compares a poly relationship to a refrigerator. What I took away from it was that the things inside the fridge, are the contents of a relationship, everything between me and my partner. Most of it is great, but it all needs the fridge. If there’s a problem with the refrigerator, it means there’s a problem with the relationship, and you have multiple options to deal with the food so it doesn’t go bad. You can fix it, replace it or ignore it. In addition, if it is broken, you shouldn’t put more food in that needs a working fridge, i.e. add another person to the relationship. You also shouldn’t put more food in if I don’t want it there, because we both have to agree on what food goes in or out.
We both read this article and I told her it was like she was trying desperately to put someone else’s food in our fridge without my consent. She has told me she had never kissed/slept with E and I believe her. I am getting over my trust problem. But the problem remains to me that I cannot enjoy our exclusive time because from the very moment we became exclusive, she has seemed to want another lover in her life, and has been seeking them out. I know that my feelings about this are my problem, and not hers. It is my jealousy and suspicion that is leading me to not want polyamory with her. But it’s difficult to make room in a fridge while someone is trying to add more food to it at the same time. I am sure polyamory IS what I want, because I feel the same as her that I don’t want to feel limited in a relationship. I love her, truly and deeply, and I believe she does me as well. But I do not have a type; she has her quirks, likes, dislikes, but no one can be everything I want, and I cannot be everything she wants. I don’t resent her for that, but of course I do wish I could be everything because I have an awfully big ego. I’m wondering if the reason I’m not ready to delve into polyamory is because I’m not ready for either of us to have another relationship. I’m not sure I’m ready for anyone other than her, not because of insecurity or anything, but because I don’t feel I need anyone else right now. She is everything I need, at the moment. And I think all the insecurity that lies in this relationship is mine regarding the fact that she seems ready at every moment for another lover, and I don’t know how to deal with that.
Can any of you shed some light on how I should move forward? Any horrid comments on my person for cheating with her would not be dismissed, if that’s what you want to do. Thanks for reading. Refrigerator relationship: http://ift.tt/1LEzHHS
Submitted July 24, 2016 at 03:49AM by Bluwolf96 http://ift.tt/2ahb089 polyamory
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