'I Destroyed My Poly Relationship and I Feel So Guilty About It!'

Stop trying to fix everything and feel the blunt impact of what you've endured.

Further Chaos (1988), Dorothea Tanning

Hi Polly.

Two years ago, I purposely destroyed a relationship with my ex-partner of 7 years.

She wanted a polyamorous relationship and no matter how much I tried to do research and deal with my feelings of insecurity, I couldn’t do it. This lead to me being either willing to try it one day or completely against it the next day and I felt like such a terrible person for going back and forth on it. I told my ex about my insecure feelings countless times, but these conversations just resulted in me feeling like I wasn’t doing enough or that I was a bad person for being insecure.

The last few months of our relationship, my ex was friends with a couple who was polyamorous and my partner admitted to being attracted to the wife, so I started things with the husband because I felt like I needed to be more sexually liberated or something. I felt like I needed to actually try out polyamory. I liked hanging out with him as friends, but I regret starting anything sexual with him.

Typing this all out right now seems absolutely absurd, but at the time I think I just wanted some relief from my partner’s want / need of being in a poly relationship. I felt so anxious about it CONSTANTLY.

In the end, I just couldn’t keep up with everything and ended up being apathetic about the entire situation. My partner broke things off with me (understandably) because I just didn’t care anymore about my partner’s feelings. I didn’t communicate anymore, I didn’t value her opinion anymore, and honestly I just didn’t care what happened with my life.

I’m in a way better place now (especially since I stopped talking to my ex and the couple), but I’m still feeling so much guilt inside about the whole situation. I have never felt that apathetic towards anyone and I just don’t know how to forgive myself for acting like that. I was the absolute worst person.

This is such a messy situation with many feelings involved and I don’t even know where to start to unpack it.

Ghost of Relationships Past

Dear GORP,

GORP is also a name for a mix of granola, nuts, dried fruit, and chocolate that hikers eat to keep their energy up. GORP works well if you’re hiking straight up a mountain. But if you’re sitting around your house pounding GORP, you’re just going to feel sick and jittery.

That’s what you’re doing right now when you sit around blaming yourself for being shitty and callous and reckless and stupid. You’re living inside your head about this and it’s making you obsessed, neurotic, upset, and furious at yourself. You’re stuffing yourself full of self-hatred and guilt and shame. Some part of you believes that you can resolve everything, write the final chapter, or find closure just by thinking about it around the clock. That’s like believing that you can climb a mountain just by eating 15 pounds of GORP.

Climbing this emotional mountain must begin at a base camp where you reckon with the feelings that started you down the path toward taking dismissive, punitive, impulsive actions: You loved your partner and you felt secure. She started talking about polyamory. You started feeling sad, vulnerable, needy, and scared.

You tried to do research. You decided to try polyamory. You decided you didn’t want to try it. You went back and forth every day. This is all intellectual effort. You thought you could think your way out of your body, but your body DID NOT WANT TO TRY POLYAMORY.

What was that like for you? I’m guessing that the stakes felt very, very high. What other times in your life have you felt that fearful? Who in your life has shown you how to deal with vulnerability and fear? Has anyone talked you through these things, gently and carefully, until you could come to grips with your anguish?

My guess is that no one talked you through sadness or fear when you were growing up. If you were given a model of how to handle fear, it was a model of toughness, callous indifference, dismissiveness, or anger. Feelings were not part of any solutions. You found solutions by thinking your way into a new, mostly invented reality where you were ‘in charge’ of your negative circumstances.

So, in the face of this extremely difficult emotional challenge – seven years with someone you love, and suddenly they seem to be slipping away – you did what you were taught to do. You devised an intellectual plan and took action without consulting your feelings first. “This husband seems okay,” you thought. “I’ll have an affair with him and it will make me feel less weak and vulnerable and everything will be even, equal, balanced, normal, and I will still have my partner and we will still love each other, and the problem will be solved.”

This is the kind of fucked up solution that we devise when you don’t consult your feelings at all. Now, of course there are ways to come up with stupid solutions by using ONLY your feelings, too. But in this case, you were looking for some way to escape feeling powerless.

As ridiculous as your puzzle-solving mind’s solution looks now, we’re going to stop right here and proclaim you blameless for choosing it. You were in a very compromised position and you made a casual-seeming, cavalier choice that was actually completely angst-ridden and desperate underneath the surface. You appeared punitive at the time but you were probably in an enormous amount of pain at your core.

Here at emotional base camp, I want you to acknowledge the pain you felt at that moment in your life. I want you to really feel how afraid you were, and I want you to remember how high the stakes felt for you.

Many, many people react to trauma in surprising ways. When I was diagnosed with cancer five years ago, I was eerily cheerful. I very much enjoyed discussing my reconstructive surgery. I found it all fascinating, and I was very proud of myself for approaching each operation with a good attitude. I liked to marvel at how painful each recovery process was. I enjoyed writing dark prose about blood and rearranged bodies and sex and death. Overall, a great year, A+, no notes.

The next year was hard. A lot of the fear and existential dread and concern about my appearance caught up to me. I escaped into my head and my imagination in order to scrape up some kind of belief in myself that would pull me out of a self-hating, anxious place. You could say that I acted out in small-scale ways. But two things saw me through that processing phase: 1) I tried very hard to acknowledge pain without attaching humiliation to it. This means that I actively and forcefully pushed back on every urge to feel ashamed of myself – past, present, or future. 2) I insisted on feeling everything, even the scary stuff. And 3) I told the truth about what I was going through.

I’m not painting myself as a hero here, I’m just telling you what made it possible for me to move through some pretty dramatic and jarring times in my life that included my own versions of recklessness, callousness, and borderline questionable decision-making. I forgave myself for being a regular fucking human being who is not and will never be perfect, and in so doing, I learned how to forgive other people for being regular humans, too.

Back to base camp: You were in excruciating pain. I would guess that you have abandonment issues and are insecurely attached overall. You bounce between anxious and dismissive attachment depending on the circumstances. You were needy and you couldn’t handle it. You were sure you’d get left behind, your worst nightmare. And you found a way out:

FEELING NOTHING.

I don’t really understand why your partner and the other couple couldn’t piece together that this was a pretty normal way to react. Did they have compassion for you and make space for the obvious trauma you were experiencing?

I love the idea of polyamory a lot, and I believe that there are people on the planet who can 100% pull it off. I wish I were them. I would vastly prefer to have five husbands instead of one, and I would like husband #2 to look a little bit like Aquaman, the blonde cartoon version, and I want husband #3 to look like the Dothraki/ Jason Momoa version. When you really think about it, doesn’t every straight woman deserve one blonde cartoon husband, one Khal Drogo, and three or four other whatever husbands who mostly walk dogs, keep lint off sweaters, and fix exciting and unusual salads? You can do the math for me, but I’m pretty sure that means that bisexuals deserve five husbands and three wives, one of whom looks like Betty Draper from ‘Mad Men.’

We all deserve a lot, is my point. I have compassion for your partner wanting more, and I also have compassion for you wanting life to stay exactly the same with zero changes. I have compassion for you trying to DECIDE that could simply DO POLY LIFE by willing yourself into it with the husband guy, who meant nothing at all to you. I understand living inside your head like that and treating the whole thing like it was just a mind-over-matter puzzle to solve.

I suspect that you seem tough and capable on the outside but you actually have some trauma in your past that made this situation feel excruciating. You wanted to handle it. You tried to handle it. You wanted to be heroically cool about it. And as it fell apart, I suspect that you were gaslit into believing that you were the MAIN PERSON who was causing harm.

I don’t fucking buy it. I don’t like that, instead of recognizing that you were having a callous trauma response to the whole thing, your ex and the poly couple, all of whom were driving this Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride-style groovy fuckmobile forward at full speed, couldn’t slow the fuck down and see that you were starting to flip out and act out and freak out, probably for some very clear and obvious reasons having to do with your deep dark past and their callousness in manipulating you into boarding the fuckmobile.

So I think your story about this whole situation is unfair to you. No matter how nasty you got, I’m sorry, this picture was not invented by you alone. You were not the only bad actor in the mix.

I’m not trying to absolve you of all responsibility. But right now, you’re talking like you’re some rigid normie nightmare who couldn’t chill and then had a malevolent affair when actually, you’re just a person who landed in an emotionally devastating situation and it kicked up prehistoric trauma and coping strategies that you had no way of understanding in the moment. And I suspect that you’ve been conveniently assigned this role by people who habitually pursue their own desires without remorse and off-load all fallout from their recklessness onto others who are distinct from them mostly for having a moral compass to begin with.

You’re not a bad person. You were flipping out every hour of every day, and finally you turned your emotions off completely. You were just trying to survive.

Do you feel how awful it was? Do you remember how you couldn’t move or think, because you were so fucking sad and afraid? You didn’t feel like you had choices. You were paralyzed by fear, and what’s worse, you BLAMED YOURSELF FOR IT. Do you remember? Forgive yourself.

Refusing to blame yourself, forgiving yourself, rejecting the idea that raw pain is humiliating, refusing to accept the notion that your callousness was some horrendous crime: these are the steps up your emotional mountain. You need to climb this motherfucker slowly, reflecting and feeling more, step by step. You need to climb until your legs ache, and then sit in the shade of a big tree and say to yourself:

I DID MY BEST.

I tried my best and I failed. I wanted to give the one person I loved more than any other person on the planet, the one person who had always made me feel safe, made me feel adored, made me feel balanced, made me feel good inside – I wanted to give her what she wanted. I was trying to give her what she needed. I was trying to fit into a new shape just to make everything right.

I bet you changed shape to keep people happy when you were younger. You did it without even noticing it. It was your superpower. You did it without even thinking about it, without caring about it, without worrying about it. You were simply good at it.

Forgive yourself for being what you are. Love what you are. You are doing your best. The more you love who you are right now, today — awkward, sad, in pain, lost — the more love will rush towards you. You will be loved again, and better than before. Trust that because it’s true. You’re going to feel so good, so joyful, so light, and sooner than you think. Stay open, stay vulnerable, relish this low moment, and trust the beauty that lives here. Savor every excruciating step, up and up and up, closer and closer to the clouds, full of grief, full of determination, full of more love than you can handle.

Love,

Polly

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Staying in a callous position indefinitely will make you depressed and alienated. Move out of your head and into your heart instead. When you embrace and celebrate your dreams, however unrealized/ unfinished/ unformed they are, it ignites the core optimism inside you. Dreams feel excruciating at times, but believing in who you are and what you have to offer this world is crucial — more crucial now than ever. Last week, Molly wrote about swimming in the rain. Thanks for reading Ask Polly!

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