Nonmonogamy -> Monogamy. An orientation, or a choice?

If you've been keeping up with my ramblings on my relationship with J, you'll know that I've been going through some trouble figuring out if I could be happy in a closed monogamous relationship. I was concerned about this before we even got together, and initially thought that I should figure it out before starting a relationship with him, but clearly I ended up doing the opposite. I'm not going to say whether I was right or wrong on that count, I think in the long run it would have made little difference, and anyway that isn't the point.

What brought everything to a head and prompted me to finally resolve my feelings was Girl telling me that she was still attracted to me. She said that after we started hooking up, she wanted to start something deeper with me but decided to wait until after she had graduated and had gotten settled down at her new place. (We started sleeping together right before she graduated. Typical.) She knew I had started dating J, and didn't want to jeopardize what I had with him, but wanted to know how I felt about cybering/hooking up with her outside of my relationship with him. I told her I would think about it and talk to J.

All this made me finally pose the question to myself: do I want/need to be in an open/poly relationship? Or not?

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Why I was non-monogamous in the past:

- because everyone else was doing it. Ideally, I wanted to be in a committed relationship, but those were hard to come by. That's college for you.

- because the people I was interested in were already taken, or did not want to be in a relationship with me. So I took what I could get, and got as emotionally and sexually as close to them as I could without actually dating them. Basically, I settled.

- because I wanted sex. Just because I couldn't find someone to date didn't mean I was going to wait uselessly in the meantime. I had needs, people.

When I look at those reasons now, none of them seem like very good ones. I don't regret any of the relationships or trysts I had (well, maybe one or two one-night-stands that I really should not have let happen), and with some of my friends-with-benefits, I managed to have deeper, more fulfilling and more beneficial relationships than I did with people I actually dated.

Of course, people are influenced by their peers and their environment and want to be able to "fit in" with everyone else around them. But I basically trapped myself into a binary, as I often do: I could either find someone to date, or hook up. But there were many other things I could have done, which I actually started doing the few months before I started dating J. I got comfortable with being single. I got off with sex toys and erotica. (Which wasn't the same as the real thing, clearly, but I got off. And bad or emotionally messy or empty hookup v.s. sex toys and smut? The latter is the clear winner.) I could have upped my standards and been celibate until I found someone who wanted to commit to me instead of settling for people who wanted to fuck me and, in some cases, be friends with me. Before I met J, I was readying myself for that, because the one or two people I was hooking up with were just not fulfilling enough anymore, and sex with them just was not worth dealing with their fickleness and inconsistency, and all my negative emotions that went along with that.

Pros for being non-monogamous now:

- sexual diversity. J is very sexually open-minded, but doesn't really have a lot of kinks of his own, so I'd be able to satisfy my kinky side with other people.

- because I am still attracted to Girl (well, and the Optimist, and Sir, for that matter), even though I am in a relationship with J. I've always kind of wondered why I had to give up one intimate relationship for another. It just seems kind of a shame.

- because it's honest, and because I've had bad experiences with other people's dishonesty.

Example 1: I've known quite a few people in closed monogamous relationships who, IMHO, really should not have been. Because they couldn't do it. They loved their partner, sure, they were happy with them, but for whatever reason, be it distance or horniness or craving for sexual experiences, they still slept around, or cybered. Behind their partner's back. I'm ashamed to admit that I actually enabled a couple of those people. Since then, I promised myself to never become one of those assholes who were having their cake and eating it too, at the expense of someone else's happiness and trust. If you can't be exclusively monogamous, then don't fucking do it. Have casual sex, or be in an open relationship, or be poly.

Example 2: my first boyfriend, who I creatively dubbed the Boy, cheated on me right before our relationship ended. We went out in high school, from when I was 17 to about... 19? Our relationship was all in all a happy one, except that the Boy was a huge flirt. Right before high school ended, he told me that he made out with this Japanese girl with big tits he thought was really hot, because she was leaving for home (Japan) the next day and it would be the last time he'd see her. Shortly after that came an outpouring that he had been flirting with and being somewhat sexually intimate with various other girls in our school, too (cuddling, groping, etc).

Interestingly, it wasn't the groping or the kissing that upset me. He told me he loved me and I believed him. So he thought a few girls were hot, so he kissed someone else, so what? It's not like he was going to leave me for one of them. What upset me the most was that he only told me after the fact (though I'm relieved enough that he told me at all). His doing that behind my back made me feel humiliated and stupid. Honestly, if he had approached me about it and said he wanted to mess around with other people? I probably would have been fine with it. Heck, I had crushes on a couple other people at that point, but quashed them because I was already in a happy relationship with him. Maybe I could have done some messing around of my own.

But he didn't say anything.

One of the reasons I broke up with him was because I knew that it was his nature to be a flirt. I didn't want to be in a relationship with him and force him to suppress who he was. I didn't want him to hide himself from me, I wanted to be able to talk to him about his crushes and about what kinds of girls he thought was hot, instead of him hiding that from me. If I couldn't do that with him as a girlfriend, I thought it was probably better that we just be friends.

- because people are naturally non-monogamous. A more cynical rephrasing would be: because people are incapable of being monogamous, which sounds unnecessarily extreme, but it is something I believed for a while. Even if people are in relationships, it doesn't stop them from finding other people attractive or lusting after them. Being monogamous may have its benefits, but ultimately it's an enforced behavior, not a natural one. If it's not in our nature to be monogamous, then why pretend?

Pros for being monogamous now:

- because at this point in my life I need someone who only wants me, who will be devoted to me, and nobody else. When I was sleeping around, I would frequently complain about how inconsistent they were, how fickle. Maybe it's overly idealistic to feel this way, and it's an established belief in poly communities that this isn't possible, but I do want to be somebody else's "one."

- because I'm not emotionally equipped for non-monogamy. At least not now. That may change. But right now, the idea of J sleeping with other people when I'm not involved is very upsetting to me. I'm very insecure, possessive, and jealous. I also don't have good personal boundaries, and I'm not very good at expressing my wants and needs due to fear of disapproval. Yeah, it basically sounds like a cocktail that guarantees poly would not work for me.

- because I don't have the time or the resources. Me and J spend so much time together as it is, how would I be able to sustain another relationship, or several casual sexual relationships, and still have a life? I just want to focus on J right now.

- because it would change the way that J would view me/our relationship. When I spoke to him about it, he told me that I shouldn't look for his approval or his permission but do what I thought was best. I know that if I did sleep around outside of our relationship, it would make him trust me less and think of this relationship in less serious terms. I really don't want that.

- because I don't want to hurt J. Thinking about sleeping with other people just makes me feel guilty and awful. I could go behind his back very easily, considering that most of the people I'm interested in aren't at my college. It would be easy for me to cyber without his knowledge. But I can't bring myself to do that when I know that it would hurt him so much if he ever found out.

- because I don't even really want to sleep with other people in the first place. Besides not wanting to hurt J, when I think about the possibility of sleeping with other people, it just seems weird now. I just have a feeling in my gut that says "no." I can't explain it any better than that, but I've learnt from experience that if I have a gut feeling about something, I should probably follow it.

I think it's pretty obvious what my choice was. But even though the timing wasn't right, I'm glad that Girl told me how she felt.

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So for now, a poly/open relationship is not for me. I can't tell how much of my wanting to do non-monogamy in the first place was just out of habit. Will that always be the case? I don't know. I don't know if I'll feel the same way in the future. I definitely haven't written it off completely, and I still support it as a possible relationship style.

J thinks that I should decide if I could do poly or not, now. I have decided for right now, and for the near future. But for the rest of my life?

I know some people consider poly part of their identity, and don't think they could be any other way. And I know others who approach it as a fluid thing, shifting depending on what relationship they are in and what they need at the time.

So is poly an orientation, or is it a choice someone makes depending on the circumstances? It can probably be both.

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