Poly Mindset Part 1 — Control

We can’t control who or how we need to love

As I seek to get away from monogamy and embrace my understanding of polyamory, I have started to recognize the specific monogamous mindsets that grip my experience with non-monogamy and am in the process of changing my thinking so that my experience can be closer to my goal.

Neither I, nor my partners, can control who or how the other needs to love.

The expectation in monogamy is that each partner controls their own attraction and attention to others in favor of their one monogamous romantic partner. Anything that threatens the sustainability of the relationship structure must be banished from the individual’s experience.

However, in nonmonogamy, we’re allowing each other to invite various kinds of love and sex with others into our individual experiences. We are allowing each other to not have to banish that experience while remaining together. There then can sometimes arise a desire to control your partner’s experience out of fear and insecurity.

I am not poo pooing the various forms of non-monogamy, but I’m recognizing how anything other than full autonomy over one’s connections is really just sitting on the fence between monogamy and polyamory, dangling our feet on either side.

Partnered non-monogamy is just sexually free monogamy.

Swinging is just having sex-together-with-your-friends monogamy.

My husband is an amazing man. We started partnered non-monogamy, then I fell into a rather intense romantic love with my boyfriend. My husband adapted and let me have full autonomy over my relationship with the boyfriend while he continued to stay with and love me.

My husband’s current ‘friend’ is a woman who does not want any more secure attachment relationships, but she’s not coming at — what is effectively — her solo polyamory from a non-monogamous mindset. So, she is really struggling to understand why my husband stays married to me. Because she’s a private person, she’s asked that my husband not share any details about their time together.

That stings a bit, because my husband and I are best friends and have, for a quarter century now, been the one the other goes to with…