My Latest Adventure, Part III

When I left off, my partner and I had just agreed to wait to talk again, as we had both been really angry the night before.  The next morning we were both feeling ready to talk again.  We created sacred space, and got to it.  I won’t bore you with the details, but we had another round of conversation, which in many ways was a repeat of the first one on this topic.  Again, not realizing that I was still feeling like a victim, making him the villain, I thought we could resolve some things.  Eventually, he told me that he felt he’d reached the limit of his ability to continue talking in a productive way, and we stopped.  There was no rejoicing and no make-up sex, and he was leaving to go on a brief trip later that week.

It felt to me at that the timing of his trip was unfortunate, but the truth was, it was just what we both needed. We each had a chance to process our feelings and to be clear and more able to speak consciously when he returned.

He was much more forthcoming about his feelings this time, including the fact that this was all starting to seem very complicated and almost not worth having sex with other women if he had to talk for hours about it each time.  And he was feeling judged by me due to my having pointed out repeatedly that I did not feel the need to have casual sex.  And admittedly, I was judging him as being less mature for that reason.  I explained how I perceived him as constantly meeting new women he wanted to sleep with and how unpredictable the whole arrangement seemed to me.  He told me how I hadn’t “signed up for this”, I’d signed up for being a secondary partner to a man that was married when I first met him. The truth was somewhere in the middle: we had changed that agreement to me being his primary partner when they’d decided to get divorced, and to be polyamorous only, then changed the agreement again to include what we termed “leeway sex” to accommodate his desire to do what I have called “have sex with a lot of people”.  By saying I hadn’t signed up for this, I was failing to take responsibility for the agreement I had made.

I think all this more conscious, honest communication is what finally got us somewhere. I was able to hear how downtrodden he was feeling, and how judged. He was able to hear how scared I was feeling and how I was perceiving him as being this out-of-control, hormonal teen who could be bopping anyone at any time without notice. He pointed out (quite accurately) that he could be getting laid a lot more than he had been if he’d really wanted to. (In fact, at the point of this conversation, he had only had intercourse with one other woman, besides his wife, during the entirety of our relationship.) Then he explained how there were a lot of things he’d “like” to do, but that was not the same as intending to do them. And that part of the fun for him was just knowing that he can negotiate sex with some of these women if he wants to, and knowing that he is desired by them. That was a light bulb moment for me!

I was able to see how my perception of my partner and the unpredictability of his actions was creating a lot of unnecessary angst for me.  And for the first time in a while, my compersion- my joy over thinking about his having enjoyable time, sexual or not, with other women- returned.  And also how letting go of some of the needing to know and predict every little detail about his other relationships may be just what I need to be able to relax a bit more. In the end, it was all about trust for me.  Trusting myself to keep myself safe in this relationship and trusting my partner enough to know that he really is the person he says he is.

I also (re)learned that I really need to wait until I’ve had time to process my feelings about things, to the point where I am no longer angry and blaming and feeling like a victim, before I am ready to talk with my partner(s) about something major. That competes a bit with my desire to be up front with my partner when something is not feeling quite right to me.  And, I realized that the two are not mutually exclusive.  I could have, for example, told him how I was feeling originally on that night when we were away for the weekend, and that I needed time to think about it and process it, and would get back to him once I had.  That would have given us both time to think things over, and probably would have avoided a lot of suffering. It might have still taken a week for me/us to get to where we wanted to be.  But skipping the angst would have felt a lot better!

You probably won’t be surprised to know that after that last (fourth!) discussion, described above, we went on to finally have our make-up S.E.X.,and lots more better-than-the-usual-mind-blowing-sex-we-have, again proving my theory that transparency is the sexiest thing going!