My Journey Into Polyamory
When I first started dating in 2015, I barely knew anything about relationships, let alone non-monogamous ones. Growing up in an Asian country meant that I had had a fairly sheltered upbringing, and had not been exposed to many non-traditional relationships at all.
I met my first partner through a school theatre production of Guys and Dolls, and fell hopelessly in love. We spent almost every day after school together, wore matching outfits on mufti day, and I got to know all of his friends. Everything was going well…or so I thought. Unfortunately, my belief that we had a picture-perfect relationship was quickly shattered when, nine months into this whirlwind romance, we had a big fight. The fight itself was not the issue (in fact, I literally cannot remember what brought it on in the first place), but it was when we were making up a week later that my boyfriend dropped a bomb. He admitted to me that he had been cheating on me for the past three months. Not only that, but the person he was cheating on me with was a boy in our year. And to top it all off, the first time he cheated on me was at a mutual friend’s birthday party, barely two weeks before he and I had sex for the first time.
As you can imagine, this was pretty hard-hitting news for an innocent 16-year-old girl in her first ever relationship. I remember being so stunned by this information that my body went completely numb. The idea that my loving boyfriend had been lying to me for months on end, and going behind my back to sleep with someone else, was simply unfathomable. I had known from the start that my partner was bisexual, so the fact that he’d slept with a boy was not the point I was stuck on, but rather the fact that he’d completely broken my trust in him and the relationship. I was confused, then distraught, then utterly devastated.
When I tearfully asked him why he did it, he listed a multitude of reasons, none of them particularly good. One of the reasons, however, was that he had always wanted to explore his bisexuality.
“Why didn’t you just ask me?” I said. “If you’d just come to me and asked me for permission to explore with boys, I would have said yes. You didn’t have to lie.”
He looked at me like I had two heads.
And that was the moment when I realised that I didn’t think like other people when it came to relationships.
Monogamy had never made sense to me as a concept. I had always had multiple concurrent crushes growing up, and even when I was in a relationship, I couldn’t just turn off my attraction to other people like a switch. Given the frequency of cheating in monogamous relationships I witnessed among my friends and on TV, I imagined that most people had similar experiences. Additionally, as a person with a relatively high sex drive, my past partners had always struggled to keep up with my voracious sexual appetite. This became a problem in my second relationship when, after dating for four months in person, we were forced to go long distance: he went to America to start university, and I to China for my gap year.
I reasoned with my partner that I didn’t want to hold him back from fully enjoying all that university life had to offer in terms of dating and sexual exploration. Additionally, both of us enjoyed sex too much to give it up for months at a time in between seeing each other. It made complete logical sense to the both of us, so we agreed to open up.
However, reality often does not match up to expectations. It went swimmingly at first: my partner fooled around with a few girls with my encouragement, and I greatly enjoyed hearing about the new people (and new bodies) he encountered. I felt satisfied, fulfilled, and secure, knowing that no matter how many people my partner explored with, that we’d always come back to each other to talk about how his experiences had enriched his life, and our relationship grew stronger in the process. However, the moment I went all the way with a random boy I met on Tinder a few months later, my partner completely lost it.
Turns out, unbeknownst to me, my partner had stopped short of having penetrative sex with all the girls he’d slept with, purely out of his own desire to “stay loyal” to me. His unspoken expectation was that I would have the decency to do the same, when in reality I had no such qualms or hesitations.
Realising how much I had upset him, I quickly agreed to close the relationship back up in order for his wounds to heal. However, the damage had been done: my partner spiralled out from insecurity, consumed by the terror that I would cheat and leave him at the first opportunity, as well as guilt that he was “holding me back” from “being my true self”. Over the next few months, he became increasingly possessive and jealous. It started with the small things: initially, he would get upset when I spent time with male friends, which then escalated to any friends at all. He kept tabs on me constantly to make up for the fact that we were on different continents, asking me to check in and call him every hour, and keeping me up way past my bedtime to ensure I wasn’t speaking to anyone else. I recall a night when, exhausted at 6am in the morning after having been on the phone for hours, I begged him to let me go to sleep. I remember his reply almost as if he had said it to me yesterday: “If you loved me, you’d stay up for me.”
The last straw was when he threw a fit at me not contacting him for two hours because I was spending time with my family. I realised things had gone too far, and broke up with him on the spot.
I started university in 2017, confident by this point that monogamy was not something I really wanted. I fully embraced dating on Tinder and, at any point in time, would have around 5 or 6 concurrent casual partners on a rotating schedule. I came out as bisexual, and had complete freedom to explore my sexuality. However, after a particularly horrendous breakup in my first year, where I dated someone who was using polyamory as a shield for some serious mental health and commitment issues, I resolved to not seriously date anyone again unless I knew for certain that they had the maturity and communication skills to do it properly. In the winter of 2018, I met someone who would eventually become my current partner – hilariously, we did not meet through Tinder, but through a mutual friend who wanted us to have a threesome with her.
In a way, I see my current partner as the perfect medium between my last two, much like Goldilocks’ perfect bowl of porridge: he isn’t anxious and insecure like my second ex, and not avoidant of commitment and attachment like my third. We never “opened up” as such, because we first met as friends with benefits who then fell for each other and never went exclusive, so we never had to make the (often awkward and painful) transition of renegotiating relationship boundaries and upending our entire relationship foundation. At one point in time, he had a second girlfriend for about half a year, while I maintained a rota of casual partners, knowing I didn’t have enough time to juggle more than one relationship alongside a law degree. Two years later, we moved in together during the pandemic as I finished my degree, and have been happily dating each other and others ever since.
Many people ask me why I chose polyamory, and I often answer by countering, “why not?”. Kathy Labriola, a polyamorous relationship counsellor, put it best in her book ‘Love in Abundance’ when she stated that most people go into polyamory to seek either more, or different, experiences. I definitely fall into the latter camp; to me, variety is the spice of life, and there are far too many wonderful and interesting people in the world to miss out on meeting and dating. I did not go into polyamory out of a desire to fulfill unmet needs, but rather to explore connections with different people to their fullest potential, and not live in denial of the fact that being in a relationship does not necessarily have to impede attraction and connection with others. Giving up on monogamy was the best choice I ever made.