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Society has ingrained in us that once you find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, they will be able to fulfill all your needs. Every need you ever have. Throughout your entire life. To me, that's a scary thought. Being a realist, I admit that I have limitations. I can't be everything to someone. Nor do I want to be. If one person could be all another could ever want, why do we need friends? It's simply that our partners aren't capable of meeting all our needs, nor should they be expected to. Why should my partner be forced to be or take part in something they don't enjoy just because I do? It makes much more sense to me to accept that my partner doesn't like to go watch horseshows, and find someone else to go watch them with me.
Sometimes this doesn't work out. Sometimes society has done too good a job in convincing us that one person can be everything to us, and when the person you think should look to you for everything doesn't, it makes you feel inadequate. Having spent most of my life feeling emotionally inadequate, having my partner look to someone else to meet needs I couldn't was a relief. It meant that there was one less thing I'd have to try to do that I couldn't. It meant I didn't have to fear that I couldn't fulfill all of someone else's needs.
I embraced polyamory wholeheartedly. Now, after the breakup of my ten-year relationship, I'm wondering if I embraced it for all the wrong reasons. Having spent almost all of the past two years being monogamous in practice, a thought hit me out of the blue. I wanted to open our relationship at a time when I felt my ex-SO didn't like me very much. I knew he loved me, but there were problems between us that I didn't know how to solve. And along came a friend, who made me feel wonderful, and attractive, and worth knowing and liking, and it was pretty heady stuff. And I've begun to wonder if the times I'm interested in pursuing other relationships have only been the times when something was wrong with my primary one.
Did I just want the attention I felt I should have been getting from my ex-SO? I think I might have. Because after things got better between he and I, I stopped looking for someone else to bring into my life. Sometimes I played with the idea, but it was more the urge for a new toy than really wanting a new partner. Kind of like fantasizing about a movie star. Something that's fun to think about, but you don't really want. And since these urges only occurred when my SO was out of town, or working long hours, or cutting me out of his life, I think it may have been more a yearning for someone to pay attention to me than my wanting another relationship or someone else in my life full-time. Possibly I was just looking for permission from my ex-SO to have close friends without him having to feel that I didn't need him.
So now I'm digging through the ugly little nooks and crannies in my mind to try to figure out if this is all true. To find out if I was using polyamory as an escape instead of facing the problems in my primary relationship and fixing them. Except I was blithely unaware of the ones that ultimately destroyed the relationship. I would have been willing to work on them if I had known about them. I probably would have even gone back to monogamy. I wouldn't have been willing to give up spending time with my close friends, but I'm not sleeping with them, and I know that was the problem my ex-SO had with non-monogamy.
Before I actively try polyamory again, I have a lot of thinking to do. I need to make sure I'm being poly for the right reasons, and not just out of pique or boredom. That wouldn't be fair to anyone I might get involved with. I did enjoy being poly, but I'm not sure that I didn't enjoy it more for the sense of freedom it gave me than for any real wish to have multiple relationships. I don't think I'd have minded multiple relationships, but they were not my priority. Possibly the right person didn't come along, or maybe I'm not really poly. And being poly for the wrong reasons won't work any more than trying to be monogamous for the wrong reasons did.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not I'm being poly for the right reasons. Upon reflection, I think that at certain times I may have wanted to get involved with someone for reasons that were not truly poly. On the whole, however, my wish to be poly is not based on boredom or lack of attention. It is based on the wish to be able to share my life with more than one other person. Life is short enough without limiting who can and can't be in your life, and exactly what role they can play once they are in it. It doesn't feel right to put limits on how I can love someone. So for now I'll go on being polyamorous, and enjoy the benefits and riches it will bring into my life. I know there will be heartaches, but I do agree it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
