Last summer, before I headed to Iceland, I went on a lot of dates with a poly guy. Let’s call him P.
I have many poly friends, and I’ve been curious about it before–most notably, though, when certain important needs aren’t being met with a partner.
When I first went on OKC again, in early 2015, I decided to be open to the possiblity. I had three dates with one guy (not P) pretty early–but his wife didn’t like me–and something kept nagging at me about him. I realized, on that third date, what it was–I had never heard him actually laugh. Instead, he made another sound–that derisive snort about people he didn’t like.
So that wasn’t going to work, but I was still open to poly.
And, thus, I agreed to a date with P last summer. He was charismatic. He explained his situation: after his wife’s successful cancer treatment, her sex drive died. She refused to go to the doctor, and told him to get used to it. He proposed a compromise: that he could have a girlfriend or two. They spent a couple of years building trust that he wouldn’t leave her for one of them.
It was perfectly understandable. It also sounded functional.
It only took another couple of dates, however, for problems to arise. Our conversations were always about these relationships–and I didn’t like what was happening with the other girlfriend–she was younger, only dating him, wanting, desperately, to marry him and have children with him. He knew this. At one point, while he and I were dating (I think this was the catalyst–him trying to have a relationship with me proved he wasn’t going to leave his wife and become monogamous), she decided she wanted something more traditional. So she started an online profile. However, she posed as single while she was still in a relationship with P. And she could thus decide that each guy who messaged her was nothing compared to P. I told P she just wanted him to get jealous–to whisk her away to normality–that he was standing in her way. He agreed, but wouldn’t do what she couldn’t: end it.
The larger problem, though, was the almost immediate pressure to redefine myself.
After about a week, he thought I should change my status from single to “open relationship,” to announce to every other man I was talking to that I had a boyfriend.
I told him to slow down–that even if it were just the two of us, I wouldn’t want to stop everything and commit after a week.
And then I had to keep begging him to slow down, because that pressure never let up.
In additional to pushing me away, it made me think–fast–about what I wanted, and ultimately to decide that poly–at least his kind–isn’t for me, for several reasons.
- Time. In my last LTR, I spent three nights a week with my partner. It worked well, giving me a couple of nights a week with friends and a couple of nights a week on my own. If I were to spend two or three nights a week with one partner, when would I find the time for another partner?
- All this guy could talk about–after the first date–was his wife, his girlfriend, and the future he wanted with me. It didn’t seem like he had friends or hobbies other than us–and that scared me off.
- Relationship talking in general isn’t something I like to do. On our first day in Iceland, Melissa and I sat in a natural hot-tub and discussed whether I was going to stay in a relationship with P. I was explaining how difficult I found it, as he wanted to talk about relationships all the damn time. Melissa leaned in close and said, “Karma, I’ve known you for 15 years, and you don’t even like to talk about relationships with me. You don’t want this.”
- I need to be a primary. Most poly relationships seem to be set up in a hierarchy–you have a primary partner and then one or more secondaries (or a primary partner and one-offs). If I entered into a relationship as a secondary–but it was my main relationship–it wouldn’t be what I wanted or needed. Secondaries are–by definition–interchangeable. Most people will fight to maintain a relationship, but, if life goes wrong, the secondary relationship will be sacrificed for the primary one. I want a my person–and, while that’s possible in poly–it’s excessively difficult to find a primary relationship if you’re starting as someone else’s secondary.
The nail in the coffin, though, was a conversation P and I had before I left for Iceland.
Me: What if I meet a guy named Sven, and I want to fuck him?
P: You wouldn’t, would you?
Me: I’m not going to go looking for someone, but say I did.
P: But you can’t!
Me: Why not?
P: Because that’s not how this works–you can have boyfriends, but you can’t just fuck around!
Me: Why not?
[We argue about safety–he wants a “closed system,” which I argue is never really closed, because it counts too much on other people. He had once dated a woman who had 8 boyfriends–did he really think no one in the extended circle had one-offs?]
Me: So I’m supposed to tell a guy that I want to fuck that I’m not allowed to, because I’ve been dating another guy for two weeks? Even though I haven’t made a commitment to him? And even though that guy is probably fucking someone else in that moment?
Him: It has to be closed–that’s the kind of poly I am.
Me: Well, I’m not poly yet. And how do we know what kind of poly I would be?
