Polyamory?

Its taken me some time, but I have felt ready to try to date again in the past month or so. I have been quietly emailing with some men. I’ve made a few new friends and one of the frequent questions is ‘Why Polyamory?’.

Frankly, that’s a question that alot of people have asked me since I began blogging. Especially if they ventured to this site from my spiritual blog….Recently, I realized that I haven’t written anything on this blog about that. I did on other incarnations of Green Rootsdown, but not here yet. So I thought I’d answer that question. I’m sure I’ll get asked this again and it will stand as a done on the check list of FAQ’s *smiles*

I like to listen to music when I read sometimes, so, if you like, press play. This one makes me juicy….*wicked grins*

When I first met my husband, he had about 4 or 5 women he was dating. Most of them knew about the others. Two or three of them were women he was very fond of and saw really regularly. He had an important relationship with each of them and now I write this, I realize I never asked him, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave at least one of them a good bye interlude. *winks*

Like many women, when I really like a man, I ask him about his past relationships. I asked my husband, then lover about this of course. When I learned that there a number of women that were current, I laid down the law. Monogamy with me or no me.

I wasn’t open to negotiation about this.

He was pretty smitten (still is), so he disappeared for five days while he hunted them all down and informed them in person of his new monogamous status.

He then began to talk to me about relationships and monogamy and other viewpoints.

I wasn’t willing to participate in these alternative ideals about relationships after a cheating first husband, but I listened to him with respect because he was telling me about his feelings. It wasn’t a one time conversation. It was one long conversation taken up again and again over years of marriage.

One of the points he made was during a period of time when I was feeling like sex was off the menu and wasn’t going to be on it again for awhile. I was once raped and back then there were time periods in my life that I needed some physical, as well as, emotional space for dealing with that. I didn’t want to be touched when I was dealing with some of that stuff. Unfortunately it meant that there were weeks, even months when sex was just not allowed to exist in my reality. Absolutely not gonna happen. My response to approach was not pretty. I hated that fact of my reality, but it was what it was. Its part of the healing process and it has to be honored or it will set the healing process back in a serious way.

That need for privacy and isolation I had, left my husband feeling really lonely, needy and sexually frustrated. He understood it all, but his own needs were going unmet. In his world, that’s not a reason to run out and find someone else for awhile, even in his polyamorous mind…but my rejection of time with him, despite the clear good reasons for it, did challenge his ability to feel good about himself as a man when I was flinching each time he touched me. It was really hard on him to be turned away like that.

When I came out of one of those periods of times and sex had resumed, he pointed out to me how lonely he felt…we discussed how it had been really hard for him to be patient with my isolation because he was so needy. We’d had some fights over it.

That was the first time that I began to see that there might be some valid reasons for a non-monogamous relationship…

But I still wasn’t having anything to do with non-monogamy.

Next, I got really sick. I was bedridden for years. It wasn’t a minor cold or something that put me off my game for a month. This was years of being unable to function to even hold good conversations, let alone give anyone some sex.

We frequently talked about his loneliness and needs. I did my best to summon the strength to give him some sex now and again. It usually set me back physically for a week or more, but I wanted the connection too.

I was too sick to process the situation through emotionally in terms of trying polyamory…and there’s certainly alot to process when moving from monogamy to non-monogamy. We both knew that. So he never went outside our marriage during that time period, despite how lonely he felt.

Later we were parenting his troubled teens. There was years when we were each a huge source of trouble and angst for the other in that situation. It was a situation where neither of us had much at all to give the other one too. We needed friendship. We needed sex. We needed comfort. We needed to laugh. We needed to not have any crap and history to wade through in order to get some of that nourishment.

In short, we both needed a fuck buddy so that we could regroup, drop some tension, get filled up and come back to the other one with something to give to each other and help each other through a very painful situation.

Obviously that sort of stress is no time at all to be trying to deal with the huge ramifications and insecurities that would naturally be stimulated by sexual encounters outside our marriage. We very wisely didn’t act on it then either.

We did come to a decision though, which was: Life happens and its really damned hard sometimes. And we could have been making it easier on each other and ourselves if we had some other sources of joy and fun besides each other. We decided that this was a very good reason to have time with others outside our marriage…

But it shouldn’t be the only solution we had so before we jumped in with screwing around somewhere else, we examined our needs and fears for a long while. I really needed to not feel like I was getting replaced every time he felt like life was too big to deal with me. That would have felt horrid. We also began to find more ways to socialize and have interests together and apart that we both found fulfilling….and we kept talking about the polyamory while the situations with his kids began to ease and resolve themselves.

Our talks revealed much. We both realized that we loved sex and that we desired more variety than we were getting.

It was still a facile reason to do it though and not enough for me to wish to risk the security of my marriage’s monogamy, despite trying out a little flirtation now and then to see what happened inside of Us emotionally.

One of the reasons my husband always wished for polyamory was because he needs to heal. He is a natural sexual healer. He’s very good at helping women reclaim their sexuality in the aftermath of sexual trauma. Very good at it….and he loves it. It a beautiful gift that he gave to me. I cannot thank him enough, but I don’t need him for that any more. It was bothering him that he had no outlet for that gift any more.

What made me actually embrace polyamory was a compelling need to learn about the nature of my heart. The years of my marriage, my illness, the horridly hard challenges of my step-parenting, my life circumstances had made me realize that there were some things that my husband just cannot teach me because its not his his current talent, his current need, or his skill to do so. Sure. I can learn about loving in certain ways without being sexual with someone.

I do learn about love without being sexual with others. I do that all the time.

But there is something about the loving sexual relationship that goes straight to the core of a person…straight to the core of a heart. It is a joining that cannot be duplicated and it creates a mirror into the Self that is reflected in the Other Self, which is reflected back. It teaches about security, self esteem, self worth, self image, beauty, happiness, gratitude, divinity, trust, purity of intention, accuracy of viewpoint…the list goes on and on. It is long and complex because it serves up input simultaneously through your psychological filters and yet the very act of engaging on such a primal loving level has the filters stripped out of the way…even as your partner views you through his own psychological filter and yet doesn’t.

I have loved this way. Both from within my marriage and with another. The relationship I recently had with M was deep. It offered all the lessons about loving that a marriage does. Yes. It complicates life to have two such deep relationships…

It can also be isolating to me. Lots of people in my life don’t want to know about this choice and my life is simpler and harder if they don’t know. I don’t have to deal with any drama from those who don’t know…but I’ve also been pretty alone with my grief about M the last six months…and I couldn’t share my deep abiding joy in him either. Lots of people in my life look at me askance and can only shake their heads and wonder how this fits with any thing else I do in my life. Many people see polyamory as selfishness, immaturity and immoral….so those that see it that way, cannot understand why such an ethical person would engage another so deeply.

Still, I did not make the choice lightly or quickly. The discussion began 16 years ago after all. I also have no regrets about my choice, even though I’ve been hurt and disappointed by love since I made this choice.

I think the part that affirms that I’ve made a right choice is that many prayers have been answered through these relationships that I’ve had. Loving more has made me a stronger, more mature, and compassionate person. I have more courage and more awareness than I did before. I am more patient and more savvy about relationships than I was before this.

I have learned some very difficult lessons though.

I learned that it takes lots of energy to live this way. I learned that I’m very capable of loving this way and keeping my marriage healthy…

I learned that I had some growing and healing to do and that this way of having a relationship in combination with that healing process is a huge challenge that is stressful to my health. I’ve had relapses because of it…It was helpful though, because I’m learning to manage it differently.

My husband realized that he can only have one big main focus and one smaller main focus. He doesn’t have the energy for any more either. That has meant that there’s no lover in his life and so far in our marriage, never has been. Its his son and me and that’s it. Having a lover will not come for him soon as his son will very soon be independent.

As time has passed, I’ve learned that I’m different now than I used to be. My needs as a person in relationship are complex. When I first met my husband, he was eager to be All for me. As we’ve grown and changed as individuals, he’s realized that he just doesn’t want to be All for me anymore. There are some things he’d just rather not deal with in the realm of me’ness. Yet I still very much need and desire those things he once eagerly provided me. As far as my husband is concerned, I ought to be looking to another guy to get that. Yup. I’d rather have my husband give me that, but that’s not what I’m gonna get, so I try to find a really neat person who’d like to give me loving in those ways. It works out for us. We don’t expect each other to be All for each other, nor do we expect each other to do without because we can’t deal with the idea of non-monogamy for some reason. We learned a long while ago that those reasons aren’t really valid. They are insecurities.

We aren’t going to stop loving each other.

We can’t replace each other in each other’s hearts.

We can’t loose each other because of falling in love somewhere else.

When we realized that….really, really knew it in the depths of our being, there was suddenly no more to fear. If there was any threat to our marriage it wasn’t because of any extramarital relationship. It was intrinsic to some factor in our own relating styles with each other. We learned that beyond a shadow of a doubt when I split with someone and we were still on a roller coaster about some issue or other. No. Our relationship would stand or fail regardless of who else we might or might not choose to intimacy with.

If we want our bond to be healthy, we have to love on it and feed it. Simple as that.

So that’s what we do. We are a happier couple now than we’ve ever been before.

Would I recommend polyamory?

No. Its too damned hard a thing to do to go around selling it like its candy. It takes alot of maturity, way more than monogamy does in many ways. Its alot of hard work. It looks like all sorts of raunchy fun…and well… it certainly is at times. *smiles* But its also much harder than it looks. I would say it can be incredibly painful too. That last is an understatement on my part.

I say this in all seriousness. I fell in love. I adore my husband, but in some ways I love M more than I love my husband. That’s essentially because I have changed in ways that allowed me to respond more deeply to M…ways that my husband does not wish to engage me. Loosing M has been a crushing experience in more ways than I’d care to count.

Frankly, my responses to M have motivated my husband to make more of an effort in some areas he’s seeing I was able to engage M. Yup. We did pass through some times in the past few years where I thought about giving up on my marriage. That had to do with us though. The fact that M or any other lover was in the picture wasn’t detracting from things with my husband. It actually gave me some strength and renewal when I was feeling frustrated at home. I know in my heart that I would no longer be married if my marriage style was monogamous right now.

That would have happened because I wouldn’t have had the energy to rebuild all the damage to our marriage that occurred during that period of time with helping my husband’s kids. Falling in love gave me profound joy and nourishment. I needed to love and be loved unconditionally without any life draining, mind numbing emotional history in order to heal from that time period.

I didn’t have any history with M. I could just sink in and rest there and go home with some jubilant energy to give….and that was true of the relationships that came before M. The one I had with M was the most notable for helping me get strong and whole again though.

Yup. I loved and lost.

That’s the risk of polyamory….but then, this isn’t about screwing (ah…that’s called swinging by the way…) it is about loving.

Would I make the decision to become polyamorous if I had it to do all over again? Yup. In a heart beat. Earlier in life too.

But I wouldn’t encourage anyone else to become polyamorous. That’s a very personal choice to make. I can only share the pitfalls and the joys of it with those with the bravery to embark.

If you want to read a little more about polyamory, here’s a couple links:

What is Commitment? An article specifically on various types of commitments within poly relationship style.

Tell Me What Another Is? Adrienne has some wonderful posts and links to others bloggers who write good articles on this topic. Besides that, its just a great blog to read.