Hi all

[notreallyvanilla]

My name is Tee (seriously) and I live in Colorado with my primary, PL. While I have had one experience outside this primary relationship, she has recently started seeing a mutual friend (MC) who is also interested in seeing me. This is not a bad thing, but it was very unexpected to everyone involved (since PL had always maintained that this one relationship was enough for her). In addition, I have lost a significant amount of weight in the last two years and have a very distorted body image and extreme discomfort with my body at the moment. I find myself feeling very very very very insecure right now which leads to a lot of crying jags and some seriously bad behavior on my part. Cognitively and rationally I believe in poly. It would probably be accurate to say that emotionally I believe in poly as well although I feel an emotional mess. However, since many of my previous assumptions have been shattered, I find it very difficult to pick up the pieces to reassemble them in their new configuration. I'm reading a lot and trying to be nice to myself. Additionally I get the joy of now *having* to deal with my personal hang ups. The good news is that I can now see that I have and what my personal hang ups are. The bad news is I'm fairly certain I am going to have to do a lot of personal work. So, there's my story in a nutshell.

[River]

Originally Posted by notreallyvanilla

I find myself feeling very very very very insecure right now which leads to a lot of crying jags and some seriously bad behavior on my part.

Tee,

Here's what I think: Polyamory is just one approach to loving intimate relationship, as is monogamy. Some are better suited for one or the other of these two basic approaches, of which there are others. It just happens that poly is a little known option, and very often people are off-put by the suggestion that it is a valid option. But these are different issues--all of them, from what all who wish to love others, and be loved by them, must face. What we all must face, regardless of our differences, is the question or matter of self-love.

It is practially a cliche that we cannot love and be loved by special partners of any kind unless we first have self-love, or at least enough of it to get a foothold and to grow into the sort of sufficiency which allows us to avoid turning our "love" relationships into battle grounds or bizzare circuses complete with distorting mirrors. In any case, all love relationships are opportunities to refine our capacity to love, at whatever stage we're at along the way. We never arrive at completion in that process, I feel -- or we shouldn't ever pretend to ourselves that we've arrived.

It seems to me from what you have said that you should be focussing the bulk of your attention on your true primary relationship: the one you are having with yourself. It's the same with all of us--all of us have this same primary relationship, with ourselves.

It took me a long time to learn and to accept that I can only receive as much love from any other as I can give to myself. Oh, and how confusing it all was those years ago when I had so little self love! I would hear people say, "James, first you must learn to love yourself" -- and that prospect was so strange to me, as was the very thought. "How, I wondered, can I love myself -- must I be two people, the one who loves and the one who receives this love? Must I then divide myself into lover and beloved in order to give and receive this love I hear about?"

You see, my image of "love" was a matter of someone or something which has it and someone or something which hasn't, or which has less of it..., like a container... and the one with more of this precious substance could fill the containers of those with less.... What a confusion it was!

The only solution to all of this is to see deeply into the truth of the reality of what love is, beyond all of the nonsense ideas about love people are peddling. You can only know what love ultimately is, and give and receive the real thing, by looking very deeply into your own nature as a person and a human being--as a being, as being. That's generally not an easy thing for people to do, for it is as much a matter of stripping back as anything. Who wants to strip back, remove, discard..., when where this process ends is so uncertain? But before you can know yourself as the ultimate source of all love you have to see through all of your own masks and disguises--many of which are images of yourself as unlovable, unloving, unworthy.... Do you see what courage such a journey takes? Can you love yourself for having such courage?