The Lovely Lydia's Blog for May 2020

Lydia, what's it like to be polyamourous?

I think a lot of people don't understand polyamoury. I didn't for quite some time. Some appear to be under the impression that it's the same as swinging or an open relationship. Others think it's a nonstop orgy.

In my case, the sex is abundant, because I wouldn't be with anyone who didn't have a voracious sexual appetite! But not all polyamourous relationships are like that. Just as in some ordinary two-person relationships, partners might be highly sexual or might have very little sex at all. 

But polyamoury is also not just swinging, because that implies you're doing nothing but swapping sex partners. The key to understanding what makes polyamoury different is the "amoury" part -- the love. To me, and I think to many others who are polyamourous, we find people to give our hearts to; we simply happen to find that our hearts have room for more than one person. We aren't just looking for people to fuck -- although there's nothing necessarily wrong with that if all parties agree to it!

Polyamoury is like a network of personal, romantic, and sexual relationships. If it sounds complicated, it is. It takes tremendous effort on everyone's part to make polyamoury work. You also have to be open and honest about what you're doing at all times. Having a relationship behind someone's back is most definitely not okay. Polyamoury is not at all about cheating. It's about having more than one relationship at a time, telling everyone in your network about it, and getting everyone's consent to it. It puts everything out in the open so as to avoid hurt feelings or betrayals. 

You also have to work through feelings of jealousy. For me, when I came to terms with the idea that I didn't have an exclusive claim on my partner, I found myself much better able to manage those feelings.

Polyamoury is good for people like me who struggle with monogamy! On several occasions, I've attempted to settle down with one person. And in most cases, things fell apart because I found myself attracted to other people and got restless being tied down, so to speak. It's not that I didn't love my partners; I just needed more. 

When I learnt the ropes of polyamoury from Gina, my late love, it blew my mind that such a thing could work harmoniously. And yet I still ended up deciding later on that the best thing for me was to try to settle down with one person. 

But marriage was not the solution. When my wife and I began to struggle with our relationship, I was the one who suggested we open our marriage up to some trusted friends. My wife got involved with a male-female couple we knew, and then I added Cathy, my current girlfriend, to the mix. I'd previously had sexual encounters with both the women. Cathy and I got more sexually involved with each other as time went on, whilst my wife developed something not unlike a ménage à trois with the male-female couple. 

To make a long story short, this was not a solution to our marital problems. We were spending more time with our secondary partners than we were with each other. That told us both that our relationship wasn't working, and ending our involvements with our secondary partners wasn't going to make things any better. If we just went back to the way we were, we'd both be unhappy again. It was a hard way to come to the realisation that we just weren't compatible with each other, and the marriage ended sadly but amicably.

Now I'm still with Cathy, who's the "V," or the hinge, in a three-way relationship, involving her boyfriend on one end of the hinge, and me on the other. We're all free to have outside relationships, and I currently do with one other woman. But Cathy is my primary partner, and I absolutely adore her. She came hard after me for a long, long time before I got married, but I always had my eye on other women. But she finally got me, and I'm so happy she did. And with no expectation of monogamy on anyone's behalf, we're all the happier for it. We have each other, and we also have other people to love in our life. 

Polyamoury is not for everybody. But for others -- like me! -- it offers the potential for a tremendous amount of happiness.