Hi there everyone, I'm new here and I'm hoping to get the advice and opinions of some of you regarding something which really has me quite flabbergasted.
To give you some background, I am a bi female who has identified as polyamorous for quite some time but hasn't really had an opportunity to put that into practice. I am currently in a relationship with a man who I fell very much in love with close to three years ago. I informed him as soon as I felt that romantic feelings were growing between us that I intended to live a polyamorous life and he immediately said that was OK with him (after I explained what polyamory is). However, as the relationship progressed he told me that he was starting to feel uncomfortable with the idea and wanted us to work on solidifying our relationship before engaging in other relationships. I told him that was fine with me and things went OK for a while but then started to go seriously downhill. He became very jealous of even platonic friendships with males, isolated me from my social circle, became extremely emotionally and verbally abusive, and started oscillating wildly about his opinions on polyamory but gravitated mostly to an extremely negative view of it to the degree that I became ashamed of my desires.
Over the past six months or so he has been progressing in taking responsibility for his abusive behaviour and has been making progress in diminishing its frequency and intensity although it has not altogether stopped. He has sought counseling on an occasional basis and has been trying to repair the damage done to the relationship. He has also declared that he has worked through his issues around polyamory and considers himself a born polyamorist who simply had severe difficulty accepting the concept because of cultural conditioning, insecurity, and hurts from the past. I have had a great deal of difficulty accepting that this new improved attitude to polyamory is real considering his vicious opposition to it in the past but he has been working for some months to try to convince me that he is sincere. At no point in the course of this relationship have either of us yet engaged in romantic or sexual relations with any other.
I'm sure at this point many of you are asking yourselves why I stayed and the answer to that is not entirely clear to me but at any rate, here I am now and why I stayed is not the question I wish to address at the moment, I just wanted to give everyone some background to help give a clearer picture.
My question is this: A few days ago my partner sent me an email to let me know that he had written an essay on "Commitment in a Primary Polyamorous Relationship" and posted it to his facebook profile, he said that writing it was a "fantastic", "solidifying", "growing" experience for him and expressed the hope that it would help me understand more of who he is. Upon reading it I got a funny feeling that things were not quite as they should be, and on impulse I copied and pasted a couple of sentences from it into Google. Lo and behold, they appeared in another essay from a poly website. I was so disturbed by this that I did it more and eventually ended up going through his entire essay line by line and marking off the sentences and phrases that appeared elsewhere in bold. By the time I was finished about 80% of what he had "written" was marked off in bold and the rest reads like someone simply parroting concepts that they have picked up off poly websites.
I am aware that when someone has been immersing themselves in a certain subject that they tend to pick up the lingo and sometimes unconsciously repeat what they have heard elsewhere or even deliberately steal a turn of phrase once in a while if it particularly appeals, this however, is a straight up cut and paste job mixing elements of about a half dozen poly essays and articles with whole sentences and even paragraphs repeated verbatim making up the vast majority of "his" text. The whole thing reads rather dryly, like an academic essay rather than someone trying to express his heart, in fact, I found that one of his major sources was someone's thesis. I am going to quote a section here to give you an idea of the tone, normally I would not quote someone extensively without their permission but as very few of these words are actually his and most were found in the public domain I think I feel OK about it. Google any of the phrases in bold in the following text and you will find them to be lifted directly from the works of others.
"The rules and guidelines are to preserve the form of the primary relationship as it exists before additional relationships are added. They are also present to show that the people in the primary relationship wish to remain special to each other in a tangible way. Also, they are to guarantee that, in the event of problems, the primary partnership gets the most attention. As well, they are to preserve the majority of the sexual, financial, companionship, and time resources are for the primary relationship.
In many cases, each person in the primary relationship has a different view of what the guidelines should be. They each have a different agenda, priorities, and insecurities. Sometimes the rules are different for each partner. No matter how different their views are, it is up to them to come up with a compromise that works for both of them, and present those guidlines and rules with a unified front.
Commitment means trust & honesty, and the expectation that what we do as individuals is woven into what we are together. It involves faith in ones ability to work things out. It means the relationship will still be there after the hard times have passed."
In three paragraphs there are only two sentences which cannot be googled pretty much word for word.
He is not someone who normally has difficulty finding words to express himself, he is naturally very verbose in person and in text. He does however, has a history of manipulation and emotional dishonesty, especially with himself.
I really don't know what to make of this. He told me this essay means a lot to him. He told me that his essay would help me understand him. What am I to understand from this? That he is totally insincere? That he is incapable of original thought? That he thinks I'm an idiot? Those are the conclusions that come to my mind. Please share yours with me.
To give you some background, I am a bi female who has identified as polyamorous for quite some time but hasn't really had an opportunity to put that into practice. I am currently in a relationship with a man who I fell very much in love with close to three years ago. I informed him as soon as I felt that romantic feelings were growing between us that I intended to live a polyamorous life and he immediately said that was OK with him (after I explained what polyamory is). However, as the relationship progressed he told me that he was starting to feel uncomfortable with the idea and wanted us to work on solidifying our relationship before engaging in other relationships. I told him that was fine with me and things went OK for a while but then started to go seriously downhill. He became very jealous of even platonic friendships with males, isolated me from my social circle, became extremely emotionally and verbally abusive, and started oscillating wildly about his opinions on polyamory but gravitated mostly to an extremely negative view of it to the degree that I became ashamed of my desires.
Over the past six months or so he has been progressing in taking responsibility for his abusive behaviour and has been making progress in diminishing its frequency and intensity although it has not altogether stopped. He has sought counseling on an occasional basis and has been trying to repair the damage done to the relationship. He has also declared that he has worked through his issues around polyamory and considers himself a born polyamorist who simply had severe difficulty accepting the concept because of cultural conditioning, insecurity, and hurts from the past. I have had a great deal of difficulty accepting that this new improved attitude to polyamory is real considering his vicious opposition to it in the past but he has been working for some months to try to convince me that he is sincere. At no point in the course of this relationship have either of us yet engaged in romantic or sexual relations with any other.
I'm sure at this point many of you are asking yourselves why I stayed and the answer to that is not entirely clear to me but at any rate, here I am now and why I stayed is not the question I wish to address at the moment, I just wanted to give everyone some background to help give a clearer picture.
My question is this: A few days ago my partner sent me an email to let me know that he had written an essay on "Commitment in a Primary Polyamorous Relationship" and posted it to his facebook profile, he said that writing it was a "fantastic", "solidifying", "growing" experience for him and expressed the hope that it would help me understand more of who he is. Upon reading it I got a funny feeling that things were not quite as they should be, and on impulse I copied and pasted a couple of sentences from it into Google. Lo and behold, they appeared in another essay from a poly website. I was so disturbed by this that I did it more and eventually ended up going through his entire essay line by line and marking off the sentences and phrases that appeared elsewhere in bold. By the time I was finished about 80% of what he had "written" was marked off in bold and the rest reads like someone simply parroting concepts that they have picked up off poly websites.
I am aware that when someone has been immersing themselves in a certain subject that they tend to pick up the lingo and sometimes unconsciously repeat what they have heard elsewhere or even deliberately steal a turn of phrase once in a while if it particularly appeals, this however, is a straight up cut and paste job mixing elements of about a half dozen poly essays and articles with whole sentences and even paragraphs repeated verbatim making up the vast majority of "his" text. The whole thing reads rather dryly, like an academic essay rather than someone trying to express his heart, in fact, I found that one of his major sources was someone's thesis. I am going to quote a section here to give you an idea of the tone, normally I would not quote someone extensively without their permission but as very few of these words are actually his and most were found in the public domain I think I feel OK about it. Google any of the phrases in bold in the following text and you will find them to be lifted directly from the works of others.
"The rules and guidelines are to preserve the form of the primary relationship as it exists before additional relationships are added. They are also present to show that the people in the primary relationship wish to remain special to each other in a tangible way. Also, they are to guarantee that, in the event of problems, the primary partnership gets the most attention. As well, they are to preserve the majority of the sexual, financial, companionship, and time resources are for the primary relationship.
In many cases, each person in the primary relationship has a different view of what the guidelines should be. They each have a different agenda, priorities, and insecurities. Sometimes the rules are different for each partner. No matter how different their views are, it is up to them to come up with a compromise that works for both of them, and present those guidlines and rules with a unified front.
Commitment means trust & honesty, and the expectation that what we do as individuals is woven into what we are together. It involves faith in ones ability to work things out. It means the relationship will still be there after the hard times have passed."
In three paragraphs there are only two sentences which cannot be googled pretty much word for word.
He is not someone who normally has difficulty finding words to express himself, he is naturally very verbose in person and in text. He does however, has a history of manipulation and emotional dishonesty, especially with himself.
I really don't know what to make of this. He told me this essay means a lot to him. He told me that his essay would help me understand him. What am I to understand from this? That he is totally insincere? That he is incapable of original thought? That he thinks I'm an idiot? Those are the conclusions that come to my mind. Please share yours with me.