Poly breakups are different. It’s not like monogamy where your lives are essentially houses where your emotions, dreams and genitals live as private property for your boyfriend or girlfriend or partner.
If they or you feel like breaking up, you just throw their emotions out of your heart house and voila! You clean and give your guts a fresh coat of paint before you let someone in again to mess up the joint with their emotional cutlery mixing with your emotional cutlery in the kitchen and all that good sharing shit.
In polyamory, you break up with someone, and you find out that you can’t just move your emotions out of the house and feel free of their appetite’s existence in your emotional refrigerator.
Your heart is like a buffet, not a two-seater restaurant, so the patron just might come back for seconds and thirds after they said they were done eating… or you find out one or two of your partners is also eating at the heart buffet of the person YOU are trying not to get served emotional soul food from anymore. It really happens, and you know it does.
People grow apart, and it’s really not a bad thing if you’re graceful about it with those involved. I have someone I’ve enjoyed a deep and meaningful relationship for well over two years, but the boundaries we agreed upon are being tested quite heavily. I am changing parts of my life from my porn career that causes issues in the relationship, and it’s not helping our happy foundation hold on to the future.
The difference between polyamory and monogamy, or maybe not really but we’ll see, is that the space we made is not artificial or unnecessary, and we really may get back together after a little break, because we don’t really have any internal issues… the problems are external. If there’s some way we can negotiate this, I don’t see why we won’t continue.
I just know that, no matter what, even if we drift apart because of growing in different directions, she has lovers that intertwine with me, and I have lovers that intertwine with hers… so there’s that. Thank goodness we are respectful of each other, but it’s not perfect. Feelings have been hurt before, so we’ll see what happens.
Keep faith alive, even if the relationship isn’t.
Love,
Addi Stewart
Tell us what you think