cinnamonswing
New member
writing has always been very important for me, not only for sorting out my thoughts and releasing tension but also to help me remember what has happened before - i have a really bad memory...so i thought i would describe my poly journey here and anyone who has questions or comments is more than welcome to chime in! english is not my first language so i apologize for any spelling mistakes or wrong use of words. i also feel most comfortable using only lower-case letters when i write which may annoy some people but hey...
to start off: i'm a woman in her early thirties, no children (and no desire to have any, at this point). i was quite religious in my youth and didn't date at all. i was always interested in love and sex but as a teen i put most of that energy into church and school. i'm still working through some issues of shame connected to sex from what i was told in church...church taught me many great things as well though and i still see myself as a spiritual person.
i met my first boyfriend when i was 20 and since then i've been in three other long-term relationships with some dating fun inbetween. i've never really been in a relationship where i saw us "old and grey" together, always just saw it as "as long as we still love each other and are having fun, let's keep going". it may come from my parents divorcing when i was very young but i guess i haven't had any role models of couples in a life time commitment and i haven't really seen the need for it. i have always felt that just because a relationship turns from romance to friendship (i am friendly with all my exes) it does not mean it was a failure, it still has its own value. i think this view has served me well in opening up my mind to poly.
if someone had told me six months ago that this would be the situation i am in today i don't know if i would have believed them. on the other hand, i see myself as an open-minded accepting person so maybe this is not so suprising after all...
about 2,5 years ago, i met the guy who i was later going to explore an open relationship with. i had then just gotten out of a two year long relationship with someone where it had been a struggle all the way. we are very good friends now and very compatible as friends, but romantically i found it so difficult to communicate with him. when i first told him i was in love with him he did not respond, merely grunted...?? i did not really feel that he accepted me as i was. also, the sex was terrible, and we could not communicate about that either...
when that relationship ended, i was not really in the mood to "find someone new". i wanted to try out the feeling of being single though, so i joined an online dating site. it was fun to flirt a little and to talk to people but i didn't expect to find a gorgeous guy who seemed to be a great match for me! but i did, and within just a few weeks from my breakup i was dating this guy. total NRE mayhem, drugged with sex (imagine after two years of bad sex falling in love with someone where it just w.o.r.k.s!) and the joy of meeting someone who was kind and sensitive. we were crazy in love, and i found myself more jealous than i had ever been. i was like gollum in lord of the rings, thinking everyone was after "my precious". only he was not a magical ring, just an ordinary guy. but not to me. i really felt that what we had was special, and i was so afraid of losing it. my biggest fear was that, since he is a musician, he would want to be with a girl who was also a musician. that was a world i could never share with him. through some discussions i realized that he found it more difficult than me to "push down" feelings of attraction towards other people. that was difficult for me to hear, but i felt that as long as he did not act on it he did not have to tell me about it, it was "only natural" to have some of those feelings. and he never gave me any reasons to doubt his fidelity.
after a year he moved in with me. it was his suggestion that we would move in together, see how it felt and then maybe get a place of our own. i had lived with a boyfriend before (it did not end well) and had not come to that thought myself yet, but was happy he asked since that must mean he really loved me. almost immediately when he moved in, trouble started. we are both people in need of a lot of personal space, which was ok since we worked very different hours and had time to ourselves. but working different hours also meant that often one person was asleep when we were at home together, and we did not make enough time to really hang out. we were just...there.
since it was my home i ended up taking most of the responsibility for buying food, cleaning etc. it took me quite some time before i talked to him about wanting him to contribute more because i didn't want to be the "nagging girlfriend". i am the type of person who absolutely does not want to force or manipulate someone to give me something, either you give it to me freely or not at all (again, maybe a good trait for exploring poly...). it does however help if you ASK for what you want, right? it took me a while to learn this. after a while if almost felt like his landlady. i would tell him how much to pay me for bills each month, he would rarely make enough food for me when cooking for himself (since we had different hours) and there was a ditsance between us which really saddened me, but i did not know what to do. i think we both, but especially him, have a tendency to put up a polite facade instead of spitting out what we have a problem with. he was struggling to deal with feeling less than positive feelings for me and our relationship. he wanted everything to be perfect and when it wasn't, he felt panic and shut down. how did we end up this way?
wow, this is turning into a novel! i think i will leave it at this for my first post!
to start off: i'm a woman in her early thirties, no children (and no desire to have any, at this point). i was quite religious in my youth and didn't date at all. i was always interested in love and sex but as a teen i put most of that energy into church and school. i'm still working through some issues of shame connected to sex from what i was told in church...church taught me many great things as well though and i still see myself as a spiritual person.
i met my first boyfriend when i was 20 and since then i've been in three other long-term relationships with some dating fun inbetween. i've never really been in a relationship where i saw us "old and grey" together, always just saw it as "as long as we still love each other and are having fun, let's keep going". it may come from my parents divorcing when i was very young but i guess i haven't had any role models of couples in a life time commitment and i haven't really seen the need for it. i have always felt that just because a relationship turns from romance to friendship (i am friendly with all my exes) it does not mean it was a failure, it still has its own value. i think this view has served me well in opening up my mind to poly.
if someone had told me six months ago that this would be the situation i am in today i don't know if i would have believed them. on the other hand, i see myself as an open-minded accepting person so maybe this is not so suprising after all...
about 2,5 years ago, i met the guy who i was later going to explore an open relationship with. i had then just gotten out of a two year long relationship with someone where it had been a struggle all the way. we are very good friends now and very compatible as friends, but romantically i found it so difficult to communicate with him. when i first told him i was in love with him he did not respond, merely grunted...?? i did not really feel that he accepted me as i was. also, the sex was terrible, and we could not communicate about that either...
when that relationship ended, i was not really in the mood to "find someone new". i wanted to try out the feeling of being single though, so i joined an online dating site. it was fun to flirt a little and to talk to people but i didn't expect to find a gorgeous guy who seemed to be a great match for me! but i did, and within just a few weeks from my breakup i was dating this guy. total NRE mayhem, drugged with sex (imagine after two years of bad sex falling in love with someone where it just w.o.r.k.s!) and the joy of meeting someone who was kind and sensitive. we were crazy in love, and i found myself more jealous than i had ever been. i was like gollum in lord of the rings, thinking everyone was after "my precious". only he was not a magical ring, just an ordinary guy. but not to me. i really felt that what we had was special, and i was so afraid of losing it. my biggest fear was that, since he is a musician, he would want to be with a girl who was also a musician. that was a world i could never share with him. through some discussions i realized that he found it more difficult than me to "push down" feelings of attraction towards other people. that was difficult for me to hear, but i felt that as long as he did not act on it he did not have to tell me about it, it was "only natural" to have some of those feelings. and he never gave me any reasons to doubt his fidelity.
after a year he moved in with me. it was his suggestion that we would move in together, see how it felt and then maybe get a place of our own. i had lived with a boyfriend before (it did not end well) and had not come to that thought myself yet, but was happy he asked since that must mean he really loved me. almost immediately when he moved in, trouble started. we are both people in need of a lot of personal space, which was ok since we worked very different hours and had time to ourselves. but working different hours also meant that often one person was asleep when we were at home together, and we did not make enough time to really hang out. we were just...there.
since it was my home i ended up taking most of the responsibility for buying food, cleaning etc. it took me quite some time before i talked to him about wanting him to contribute more because i didn't want to be the "nagging girlfriend". i am the type of person who absolutely does not want to force or manipulate someone to give me something, either you give it to me freely or not at all (again, maybe a good trait for exploring poly...). it does however help if you ASK for what you want, right? it took me a while to learn this. after a while if almost felt like his landlady. i would tell him how much to pay me for bills each month, he would rarely make enough food for me when cooking for himself (since we had different hours) and there was a ditsance between us which really saddened me, but i did not know what to do. i think we both, but especially him, have a tendency to put up a polite facade instead of spitting out what we have a problem with. he was struggling to deal with feeling less than positive feelings for me and our relationship. he wanted everything to be perfect and when it wasn't, he felt panic and shut down. how did we end up this way?
wow, this is turning into a novel! i think i will leave it at this for my first post!