“You’re in a relationship with them too? Wow, small world!” It’s basically inevitable. Almost no matter what city or country you live in, if you spend a committed amount of time in the circles of polyamory, you are GUARANTEED to start finding the pleasures and possible pains of overlap and interconnection in the community, and find friends that are lovers and lovers who are friends, and people who are with you who you’ve been with, and people who you want to be with that have been with other people you’ve been with… hell, it’s like one day you are almost guaranteed to meet yourself and wonder if you would date yourself too!
Ha ha, that probably won’t happen, but after a while, it might start to feel rather familiar when you start talking to potential lovers and partners, and you see who they are with. And the best way to reach peace of mind with this situation, is to TRUST that healthy maturity will guide everyone to the most evolved actions and respectful behaviour possible. It doesn’t have to be a war of conquered territory and insecurity and mistrust and fear! It doesn’t mean that you should be automatically suspicious and insecure because the new person you just met and have all this NRE for has revealed that they were with your ex-partner before you were, or that they are with them now. This can be the foundation for a totally new paradigm of connection, actually!
If you have ever been in a room with a variety of lovers from your present and past, and known the beautiful bliss that comes from such a revelation, you can see the joy that comes from knowing that others who are also in the same situation are more like loving family members than competitive acquaintances of animosity and opposition. Polyamory does not function well under such insecurity.
I’ve been with a lovely, heavenly yoga teacher for the last few months, and it’s been nothing but joy and fun and lessons in love. A few weeks ago, it came to light that, for a long time, she had been intimately involved with a beautiful man that I was in a 5-person orgy with last September, and done some erotic photography with. In a monogamous relationship, this revelation might be the straw that broke the camel’s back for either one of us, whether she didn’t like the idea that I was with him and a bunch of other ladies, or that I didn’t like the idea that she was with a guy I knew from such an advanced sexual situation.
But there’s been LOTS of interconnectedness between new lovers and old friends in my polyamorous journey, and it ALWAYS is a source of happiness to me! I’m like, “Oh, you were with them too? You have great taste in lovers, ha ha!” And even if they are not friends or lovers anymore, and you still are, it doesn’t mean there should be problems. Making peace and establishing respect is another amazing by-product of healthy polyamory. If one of my lovers is with a person that I have made some distance from, I trust their relationship and trust their reasons for being in such a bond. Only if it’s extremely unhealthy for me to be around that other person would I say something about needing to keep my circles separate from touching the other person’s circle. Otherwise, trust and truth should be enough protection for people to proceed in learning the lovely levels of coincidence and connection that can be created in Love!
I have a bunch of lovers who have been with a bunch of my lovers and friends, and it’s the foundation for a wonderful web of unity and joy, not the catalyst for control and justification for jealousy in a disgustingly dramatic display of dysfunction and depressing disasters of duality. I’ve had lovers kiss me, then go home with a best friend of mine to make love to them… after that best friend also tells me about a date they have in a few days with ANOTHER lover that I’m with!! And I smile and think of the amazing benefits of having lovers and friends that are so close to my heart.
Polyamory is not for the faint of heart… it’s for the faith of hearts!! It’s a beautiful world to be a part of. It’s tiny and it’s full of lovers loving lovers. Welcome to paradise!
Love,
Addi Stewart
P.S. It’s not going to happen with EVERY polyamorous relationship. Some of them will be totally separate from the others. This wonderfully diverse mix of closer-than-close and farther-than-far relationships is a little something I like to call HEAVEN ON EARTH.
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