Enough

In A Pickle Again

I am not writing this blog to be provocative to a certain person. That person knows full well that in order to come to terms with everything that is happening to me at the moment, I just need to write it down, reflect and try and move on in a more positive frame of mind.

I could write this personally, to that special person, but I sincerely hope that if there are readers out there who are interested and who may even be going through some similar issues, then I hope that my writing may help them in their own decisions.

They may decide that having read between the lines about the mistakes that I have made, they may choose an alternative course of action. They may indeed decide that polyamory isn’t for them after all.

First and foremost, I need to give a brief background to the situation.

I am a woman who has been with her partner for twenty odd years and who has been having a relationship with another man for a substantial amount of years. In the first instance this man was in a committed relationship to another person. After three years, that relationship disintegrated in the main because the other person could not deal with my lover’s insistence on a non-exclusive relationship.

Since then, despite a few possibilities, I have been my lover’s only lover and he mine. There were occasional duty fucks that needed to happen but those have now stopped.

A few months ago, he met a couple of women that he was attracted to. He is a very attractive man, he is an extremely sexual man, despite the fact that he was under the impression that his libido was diminishing, and he had never ever promised me an exclusive relationship.

Complacency crept in on my part. I had begun to assume that whatever polyamorous relationship or friendship he had with another would be relatively fleeting; a passing admiration and bit of sexual stimulation, and he would continue with our relationship, not an exclusive one, but one that he knew enabled him to have this liberty as and when he needed and desired.

I was incredibly naive and stupid because I knew that despite his strong sexuality, he would not fuck anyone. He’s not like that.

So when he did fuck other women, I thought I would be okay with it, I could deal with it, and I suddenly realised that I wasn’t and I couldn’t. That is a nasty wake up call for someone who thought they were more enlightened than they actually were.
 I’d had my way too long.

He told me he needed to see other women, and I respected that. He told me that he wanted to fuck other women although initially he didn’t need to. I accepted that, admittedly reluctantly. Now, he is enjoying the company and the sexuality of another woman and it is not a fleeting thing. It is definitely a desire and maybe it is a need to, although this is clearly debatable.

We have talked to the point where we are both sick and tired of the conversation. He says I am accusatory and imply that he has done something wrong. I am feeling hurt despite the fact that I know he has done nothing wrong other than be the reluctant cause if my grief – and that is my fault not his – ergo he has done nothing wrong. He has been, at all times, totally honest.

But knowing the pain I was placing upon myself, at one point he said that it was possible for him to have a platonic relationship with these women.

I think we both knew that this was impossible. Firstly, there was no way I could ask for this and secondly it would have been an impossibly difficult thing for him to do.
He was attracted to them, he had made no commitment of exclusivity to me and in not having a sexual relationship with them this could easily have turned to resentment towards me.

However, in all of this, he continues to say that he is deeply committed to me and our relationship, that it is extremely significant in his life and he does not want there to be any difference to our relationship.

There is a very dark side of me that says if it was so perfect, if there was nothing missing in the intimacy, the sexuality, the togetherness, the commitment to one another, then why put all of that in jeopardy? But that is unreal. It is not what polyamory is about. And besides, there clearly were elements that were missing, like the mere fact of wanting to be with other people, like the fact that my availability is painfully limited – for both of us, amongst other things.

You could, we were, having the most perfect relationship and that will never be enough, under any sort of circumstance because the desire to do rather than to think or to look is too great.

That is the way it is.

My lover is not and never will be a one-woman man. However, that does not negate his commitment to me.
I am sure there are some people who are reading this who think that his commitment is drastically diminished by the fact that he is now having sex with another person. There is part of me in that place too but I know, in my heart of hearts, that this is not the case. Besides, the destruction and the fear is not around the sex. It is about the intimacy with another person. That is where all my fears tangle up and create havoc.

His commitment to me is more absolute than many who have taken vows to say so. I just have to believe in that and enable him to trust me once more to be able to manage myself and my destructive emotions.

And then I go and say stupid things like wanting to be the primary relationship in his life, and I don’t want to be the primary relationship by longevity. I want it because I have made certain commitments and taken certain risks because I believed in this relationship so much. I want it because I find it almost impossible to believe that he could be as close to another person as he is to me.

Is it stupid? Isn’t it a reasonable thing to ask considering everything we have been through and the value that both of us place upon our relationship?
He argues that there is no need to have a pecking order and a priority list because it is impossible to “grade” relationships that by default are so different. It is impossible to call ours the primary relationship in his life. It is so very different from anything else or the relationship he is having with another. I know he is right.

And yet this thing niggles at me and I know it shouldn’t.

It’s like one step forward and I push him again, and again, and again.

To the point that I asked him if he would consider telling his other lover/s about me.

Why did I want this so much? Partly because I wanted them to be informed about me, partly because of the last paragraph – I wanted them to know I was his woman and he was my man, partly because once they had made a decision whether to enter into a polyamorous relationship with him, I could then make a decision as to whether I really did want a polyamorous relationship, whether I was as enlightened as the other women/woman.

Of course, this all falls down because the ‘my man’ and ‘my woman’ is misinterpreted as possession. I genuinely do not want to possess another. I have been possessed (no pun intended) and it is not what I want ever, EVER again. But that does not mean I do not want commitment. It does not mean that I do not want a specific relationship in my life that I choose to prioritise over other relationships that I have now or in the future; platonic and sexual.

My polyamory is therefore somewhat different to that of my lovers.

At first, before all of this happened, I had a very flawed view of polyamory for me, for us. It was casual, having an occasional fuck with an attractive person. It was a possible fuck-buddy that was so occasional I would not be intimidated by it.
Now that has changed. The next thing I wanted was a polyamory that means that I am seen as the main relationship in his life. It works for many polyamorists, as previous blogs are testament to.

But the reality is that this is still nowhere near his view of polyamory, and that is another challenge for me to eventually come to terms with.

He is a total darling. He has been pushed and shoved by me. But I have too. I have had to accept a huge change in my life that does not need to be huge at all. It’s all in my head. The experience, the reality of polyamory does not need to change anything in our relationship.

If we are the soul-mates that I think we are, and still do, then nothing needs to change.

But irrespective of whether the change is in my mind or not, for now, it feels present, and I know it is up to me to do something about it. Yes, of course, he could help me along the way with some unprompted reassurance rather than the type I have been pleading for so far.

But ultimately it is down to me to manage, to be emotionally intelligent, to be more than accepting of this new phase in his life.

The Zen way is the present, not the future, and this is something that I need to do more than ever in my life before.

I cannot sit each evening wondering. I cannot think about how intense the sharing is becoming with another because ultimately that will damage our relationship completely.

I cannot sit there and think that by the time I am finally free then the other relationship may be so well established that whatever plans we have discussed will be unattainable.

If I am to think about the future, then I have to be more positive and see it exactly as we have always discussed; that we will live in the way that both of us choose; sharing huge amounts of time together whilst making sure that we do not smother one another with a hopeless exclusive relationship that stagnates with its conformity and restriction. For both of us.

As I have said before, polyamory would be so much easier if I was free to practice more of it myself.

So why am I writing this?
As I said, partly to clear my head from another arduous day that I have inflicted upon him and partly to try and help others from the errors of my ways.

I am committed to polyamory. Everything that I have written, I believe in when I am at my lightest. Today is not a light day. But they will come and go, and soon I hope they fuck off completely because I desperately want to embrace the theory that I think is the most sensible way of living. Honestly.

............................................

And now, enough. Enough, enough.

Time to move on, to get on with my life and to enjoy the fact that my lover is a sexy, gorgeous man who I want to spend considerable time with, getting to know even more, growing and learning together, trusting and sharing in our special committed way and just enjoying the most spectacular of relationships that anyone would be lucky enough to experience. Our relationship - unique. Ours.