I’m in the mountains this week. It’s green and lovely, and I can hear myself think.
My main thought last week: Poly is hard, y’all.
This week?
Relationships are hard.
Special Man and I broke up. Nothing is ever all good, or all bad. No person, no relationship. But poly is especially hard. Especially when we are taught that good poly means that all your needs do not need to be met by a single relationship, and that it’s okay to take the good from a relationship and look elsewhere for your other needs.
But I wasn’t doing that.
I made a huge space in my life for SMF. And he tried to fill it, within the parameters of the smaller space he had for me in his life. But I found myself always settling. Adjusting. Making due.
It was painful for me. And painful for him. I thought that we were working towards a similar vision of poly, but I realized about a month ago that I was wrong. He is a good man. I love him, madly. But we want different things.
The question now is, can we maintain any kind of relationship, any level of contact, where I can make space for another person, or people, and still remain involved with this man who has taught me so much about myself and about the world?
I’m honestly not sure. How do you make a relationship … less? You can allocate less time. You can mandate less contact. But emotional and mental space? That’s the tricky bitch. He wants to find a way that we can stay in each other’s lives. And I’m not so sure.
I’m not dating anyone else. I’m not involved with anyone else. I’m choosing to be alone, rather than make SMF a default partner. I want to be healthy, and happy, and open to possibilities. Open to new connections. And I didn’t allow myself that, three years into this poly relationship. I made him my priority, instead of myself. And our dynamic developed to the point where he expected to be my priority, and I don’t think it was healthy for either one of us. There was a lot of hurt, a lot of expectation that went unmet.
It’s nobody’s fault, and it’s both of our faults.
