People With Multiple Significant Others Revealed How It All Came To Be, And It’s So Fascinating

8.

“I spent a lot of my life being not-quite-monogamous. I was never quite able to do the whole ‘exclusive monogamy’ thing, where love and sex and intimacy and attraction all zeroed in on the one person I was dating. Inevitably, I’d find myself attracted to other people — not because of any problem with my standing relationship, mind, just because there’s a world of attractive people out there.”

“This means for a good chunk of my dating life, I thought there was something wrong with me. After all, we have words for this stuff–I was someone who ‘couldn’t settle down,’ or had ‘commitment issues.’ I assumed that if I could only be better, I’d stop having feelings for other people.

Eventually, I learned that open relationships weren’t just a thing that long-haired hippies on organic-farm communes did, and that’s when I started thinking really seriously about actually making that a part of my next relationship. As luck would have it, soon afterward, a good friend and I started dating, and we agreed to be open with it. It originally started as a mostly sexual arrangement, where we could sleep with other people but not develop feelings for them, but as it turns out, setting limits on emotions is a difficult thing to do, and we eventually scrapped that idea, moving comfortably into what we call a polyamorous arrangement.

In poly communities, everyone has a different way of doing things, so here’s mine. I’m dating my girlfriend, and she and I live together. Each of us is free to develop other sexual, intimate, and/or loving relationships as we see fit, and we’ve done so. So far, we’ve each done so with separate people (her partners are not my partners), and though I’m not categorically opposed to the idea of both dating the same person, in practice, that’s not how it’s turned out.

Is there any jealousy? Well, yeah. Especially at the beginning of the relationship, I fought with jealousy a lot. No surprise — I was working on undoing decades of socialization that said exclusivity was the same thing as love, that the only way to be special was to be unparalleled. With time and practice, I mostly got over that, and although I do feel jealous occasionally these days, I don’t view it as a terrible crisis that spells doom for the relationship, just a signal that I feel insecure about something and need to further unpack and deal with those feelings.”

—SpencerDub