Unraveling

I’d like to go back to why I wanted to be poly in the first place. There has been a lot going on inside my head and I need to straighten it out. Maybe this will help me.

I originally decided to pursue polyamory because I am bisexual, and I thought if I wanted to be sexual with women, I couldn’t be  with a male who said I wasn’t allowed to have sex with them, and vice versa. I was also watching Big Love, that TV show about fundamentalists Mormons, and thought the idea of raising a family with multiple people was a really nice one, not to mention “sister wives” who help you raise your kids in addition to their own. I’m not a Mormon and never will be, and I don’t think I could do polygamy. But the idea makes sense to me. Poly makes so much sense to me in theory, it’s the practice that is so frustrating.

The idea for me originally started with me wanting to be able to date women while dating a man. Or being able to date men while dating a woman. I always had the “primary” idea in my head it seems, with the option of it being open. I had thought about whether I would want to have a primary person in my life who was female, and whether I could have a serious relationship with a female for a long period of time, and I usually came to the conclusion that I really saw myself with a man, but that I’d like to have the option to date females because there’s a sexual component there that a man cannot fulfill. So I guess from the beginning that has been the thought in my mind.

Then I started thinking, “well, maybe I could have more than one partner on an equal level, none of that hierarchy crap, no primary or anything.” But that didn’t feel right for me either, because I don’t think I could truly get rid of all hierarchy. So it’s back to the primary but open relationship idea.

I started dating someone and we connected because of shared interests but also the idea that we would want to grow old with someone while keeping our options open. This was right in line with what I had been thinking all along and I was really glad to meet someone who had the same idea. So of course I started thinking that maybe this person could be that “primary” for me while keeping things open.

So we dated for a couple of months, then he started dating someone else, and I flipped out.

We broke up for a month because I just couldn’t handle it. For one thing, it had happened so soon after we started dating that I felt like I wasn’t being valued and that our relationship had had time to grow, which makes me think that he and I had had very different ideas of what we wanted our relationship to be from the beginning. I wasn’t really interested in pursuing other people, I was more interested in letting the relationship be open if someone else were to come along. Whereas he has always wanted to pursue other people pretty much constantly. He even said that he didn’t know who would be his primary, that he might date one person and meet someone else and find they’re more primary material for him. (And now I’m having a moment of clarity that from the beginning, we’ve always had different ideas of what our relationship was.)

When we got back together, he started dating someone else fairly soon afterwards, but it didn’t go anywhere. They had one date and then things ended, and I didn’t freak out like I had the first time.

Now he is dating someone else again and there’s the possibility of it going at least until the fall when she goes elsewhere for school. And the old feelings of resentment, jealousy, and anger have been coming up again. And maybe this all stems from the fact that we have had such different ideas of what we wanted our relationship to be. Maybe I always was just another person to date and screw. Someone  he has an emotional connection with, yes. But not someone who he could see himself being with for an indefinite amount of time and really committing to. Besides, he doesn’t know if he wants that anyway.

This has helped. I have a little more clarity on why this is feeling so rotten.