Polyamory Community Group
A place to discuss living a polyamorous lifestyle - the joys, the challenges and everything in between. Polyamory (a hybrid word -poly is Greek for many and amor is Latin for love - coined by among others Neopagan poet, author, lecturer, and priestess Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart) means "The practice, state or ability of having more than one sexual loving relationship at...
I will try to make this brief as I can. In my life I have struggled with remaining monogamous in my relationships for an extended amount of time. So much so that I've kept secrets from my partners and hurt so many people. And not because I wanted to hurt them. In fact, it hurt me when I hurt them. And during that time, I have never known about polyamory nor have ever heard of it. Now currently in my life, I have been in a 6 six year relationship and have cheated several times. My partner has stayed with me through it all and of course it has cause MANY trust and other issues. But that's another story for another day. This is my first time reaching out about something like this as I don't have any support for something like this. Right now I am starting to believe that I am a poly person in a monogamous relationship. And I am extremely unhappy. Yet I don't want to hurt my partner and at the same time live a double life. I've been told time and time again that I need to be happy. And part of my happiness is with my partner. But I know that I have a capacity to love many people in the way I love my partner. Now I find myself stuck, trying to please my partner and burying feelings within myself. At times it's hard to recognize myself. So to anyone out there who may read this. I just need someone out there to shed some insight of some sort. Anything at this point will do. The last thing I want is it to hurt someone I love and lose myself living someone else's truth.
Honesty
Appreciation
Respect
Communication
It doesn't matter what sort of relationship you have, those four principles will give you a solid foundation. By the same token, if any one of the four principles is compromised, the relationship is equally compromised.
You don't need to lose yourself or live someone else's truth to make use of the four basic principles. But you do need to be persistent, and that can take courage in addition to practice. In fact they frame the guidelines for how not to lose yourself, because honesty begins by being honest with oneself. By being honest with oneself, one can only find themself, they cannot not lose themself.
The truth is another issue. Everyone thinks they know what the word "truth" means, but fewer actually have an accurate understanding of it. If we're talking about the kind of truth where what is being claimed is actually the case, then the whole point of truth is that it's not something different from person to person. It remains the same whether anyone believes it or not. If it changes from person to person to suit their biases, then it's opinion, faith, conjecture, theory, subjective experience, fiction, error, or something else.
Anyway, enough philosophy for now. I hope something in this rant helps.