Borderline Successful: Monogamy, Now?

Polyamory, For All the Wrong Reasons

I don’t hate polyamory. I think it can be a great way to explore needs and communication styles, and to find yourself in dynamics you might not encounter in a traditional monogamous relationship. Many hands make light work when you live with multiple partners. If you live alone and see partners often, it can offer a kind of freedom and autonomy that’s hard to recreate with a nesting partner.

Polyamory can also make relationships feel more special, because you have to be deliberate with your time and energy. You’re choosing one person in one moment, prioritizing them, then returning to recharge and make room for a different love. It can be beautiful and fulfilling, and I’ve done it before in several configurations.

It’s also very possible to be polyamorous for the wrong reasons: fear that a partner will leave if you don’t open the relationship; fear that you’re too boring to hold someone’s attention; fear of commitment, so you give many people small sections of yourself and no one ever really knows you. You can collect partners to prove how lovable you are. It can be boredom, sex addiction, or an inability to have platonic friendships. It can be an urge to cheat, dressed up as being such a dynamic and sexual being that you obviously needed to hide a girlfriend in another borough.

Like any relationship style, you can be really good at polyamory, or really bad at it. In practice, I was unenthused. It felt like regular 20-something dating, because no one in my extended constellation of interconnected people, all overlapping with each other, was ever building toward anything. It was too casual, too vague, unmoored.

I used to idolize the grown-up, mature polycules: planned pregnancies, bought houses, group trips, three or four of them smiling on Instagram on a beach. Those people seemed to have figured it out. They seemed to love each other in a way that compounded into more love. They had community in and out of the home. It’s always gorgeous to see people loving each other, and I’ve wanted that for so long. But my issue was that I was only poly because I never felt worthy enough to ask a partner to only want me.

Trying Not to Have Needs

I can’t always tell someone I love them, because then they can leave. I can’t always ask to be theirs, because some part of me still believes I am a burden too heavy to name out loud. I can’t always believe in a string of tomorrows, so I take refuge in yesterdays; we will always be together there, behind us.

I’m scared to request monogamy, or even to consider it, because what if I’m just too much? Is asking for monogamy allowed when you know you’re a lot? Is asking one person to be your person an act of selfish entitlement when you’re a lit match at the oil refinery of a human being?

I’m rarely worried I’m not enough, because I tend to date and sleep with people who are actively seeing others. If they wanted more, they would ask for it, right? When they want less, they tell me, so it’s not unheard of in my life. People have other partners and priorities, and they aren’t always focused on me. It’s hard to be jealous when I never expected to be picked in the end.

I feel like a delusional brat wishing for a family, and it’s such a strange feeling. I don’t think other people are delusional for wanting those things. I truly believe they deserve to have love look the way they want it to. Why can’t I extend that grace to myself?

So I do the thing where I tell myself that if I have fewer needs, if I am less needy, if I require zero nutrients and zero effort, I won’t wear people out so quickly. But that can read as not needing them at all, which makes it easier for them to drift toward someone who needs them in a way they can understand. I’ve tried to play it cool when I realized I wasn’t a priority to somebody. It’s fine that you’re busy, I’ll say, even when me asking for four hours in a week has created a rift between us. I’m fun and cool, just something to fuck on the side. Don’t worry.

But it’s not that I don’t need people. It’s that I need people so badly I get scared I’m going to break them. Like an invasive plant, I will keep growing and suffocating you if you give me too much light and attention. If you water my grass, I will become a forest, and if you’d prefer to live in the clearing, you should probably refrain from investing here.

I’ve always been too big for the flower pot. I’ve always had clumsy hands, spoken too loudly, wanted too much. I scare people off with questions like “what are we?” because when I ask them, it feels like I’m pulling a gun on them. I realize how this comes off. I’m not so far gone that I don’t know how ridiculous this all sounds. I know it’s irrational to tell someone to leave, then be surprised when they walk away. Still, that is what my fear can make me do.

Grin and Bear It

I’m not so afraid of rejection that I can’t survive it, but it still hurts. There are moments when I expect to be rejected, and those sting a little less because I’ve already prepared for them. I’ve lived through every stage of grief and fully mourned the end of a relationship that hasn’t even started, just out of fear that it will end anyway. Then, when they look at me and say, actually, I don’t want to be part of this anymore, I won’t get caught crying, because I already cried. I already said goodbye to them in my head. I already swallowed the pill of them leaving.

Maybe that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe people can tell when I’ve resigned myself to being told goodbye, when I’ve started waving them off before they even move. I have to take responsibility for the ways my fear of being left can make me act like leaving is inevitable, protecting myself from wanting protection. But I still wonder why people also leave when I’m eager and earnest and showing up. What scares them off then? Is it the idea of committing to me, or is it something else I’ll never understand because I’m outside of their head?

Sex Is Easy, Love Is Hard

Having friends with benefits and casual connections isn’t inherently bad if you’re respectful and you check in. Things change; people take on different roles in your life. People grow, and their needs shift. Casual relationships have their place, and they’ve given me real sweetness: new music, new jokes, new rooms to be soft in for a little while.

I love lots of people, and I say I love you to my friends. But being in love, emphasis on in, is a whole other thing. The brain chemistry of falling in love is baffling. We’re so sure we’re acting on pure free will, but sometimes your body chooses for you. I don’t feel out of control in my emotions when I say I like someone a lot anymore, but I still keep an eye on my own intensities.

I can simulate a love affair for a few hours at a time and convince myself that loving me is easy, that people love me in doses. I’m a delight in doses. When I pull back and don’t talk to people as much, it buys me a little more rope before I’ve completely overstayed my welcome, before I stop being someone fun to fuck and start being another burden in their life.

I’m not so desperate for love that anyone who touches me is the one, and I’m not trying to turn some random person into my soulmate. I don’t love people because they fuck me, and I don’t fall in love with them while they’re fucking me. I fall in love with them when they remember things, when they ask, when they open up. I love people when I know what makes them laugh. I hear their favorite songs and smile. I love people when I listen to a full album they mentioned.

But when there’s a shift, when I realize I might be getting more invested than I thought I would, I want to tell them. I want to communicate that. I want to be honest that my feelings have changed, even if wanting more doesn’t mean I get more.

I Love You, Goodbye

Is dating people who are preoccupied in their lives an avoidant trait? Do I like grad students and PhD candidates, people talking about moving far away, people who want kids tomorrow, and people who are polyamorous but have committed nesting partners, because I know that, at the end of the day, I’m a temporary factor in their lives?

Dating people like that feels like accepting the ending before the story starts. The connection ripens too fast; oranges going rotten too quickly. Being the side-plot girlfriend isn’t so bad, actually. People tend to learn what they don’t want through dating me, but it also means I get new music, new jokes, new foods, and the pleasure of tagging along while they run errands.

I don’t even consider someone wanting to marry me. I’m a few-year girlfriend at best. Someone your kids will find a picture of one day, and you’ll blush and recall me in a mixed light. I’ll be a snippet of a previous life, a chapter but not the book. Not necessarily pertinent to the plot, but a fun experience.

Temporary can feel generous, romantic, or low-pressure, until it starts feeling like a contract I signed without reading. The role has benefits, but it also keeps me from asking. If I already know I’m temporary, I don’t have to risk finding out I was wrong to want more.

A Future I Can Picture

I know what I want my wedding to look like, but I don’t truly believe anyone would ever marry me. I know which engagement rings catch my eye, but I don’t truly believe someone would pick one out for me. I know what I would want my future home to look like, but I don’t truly believe someone would inhabit it with me.

It’s strange to know my own taste so clearly and still not trust that anyone else would choose me inside of it. I can picture the flowers, the ring, the couch, the rainy window, the shared grocery list. I just can’t always picture the other person looking back and saying, yes, this is ours.

I haven’t had someone want to place me in their future in years. When you’re young, it’s easy to say forever without really understanding what that means. In another life I would be a Muslim wife with four kids and a photographer husband who teaches our kids to skateboard in the driveway. In yet another life, I would bring sunflowers home to a woman who worked all day on Sunday sauce and called me angel as she poured lemonade. But those storylines ended, and now I don’t know if I can be someone’s forever.

I know I could ask for tomorrow and the week after. Forever is the fantasy, but six weeks is the real vulnerable ask: “Do you want to go to this show with me next month?” “Should we plan a weekend when our schedules calm down?” Someone holding a small piece of the future open and letting me stand in it.

The Small Life

Ideally? I want a Wednesday night, a slice of pizza, my head on their shoulder. I want to water their plants when they’re away. I want to call them from Trader Joe’s to ask if I should do pesto or red sauce. I want to make too much pasta and say, come over, and bring Tupperware. I want someone to grin and say, “yes, that’s my girlfriend” when asked about me. I want that to be enough.

So why does it feel like I’m Oliver Twist asking for more porridge? I’m not looking to change myself into the person someone wants to date, or to downplay other people so someone dates me instead. I do, however, want a direct and enthusiastic “I want to be with you” from someone. I genuinely do want to be picked, and that is not the same thing as begging to be tolerated.

Monogamy, Now?

I do want to be a girlfriend. I do. The last time I spent a few years with someone, I asked if they would ever live with me, and they gave an odd non-answer that amounted to a polite no. We never exchanged keys. We never talked about the future. I wasn’t their future. I wish I’d noticed that sooner.

I’ve asked partners what they saw with me. The answer was usually very little, if I got an answer at all. Thinking I’m more important in people’s lives than I am gets me into trouble. I’m saying I love you, and they’re ordering a car home in silence.

What would happen if I said to the person I’m most likely to lose my mind over, “hi, I want to date you exclusively and focus on that”? The reasonable part of me knows it would be clarifying. The scared part thinks they’d laugh at the idea of being with me in any serious capacity.

There would be that silence right after asking, the tiny eternity where the question is alive in the room, and neither of us can take it back.

I could bully myself all day about how much I don’t deserve love, but I want love. I want to make a little life around it. I want to be wanted without treating the want as evidence against me.

An honest no would hurt, but it would clarify the shape of the things. An honest yes would ask something of me too: not just wanting to be chosen, but practicing staying present once someone chooses me. I don’t need to pretend the fear disappears. I only need to let possibility enter the room alongside it.

I don’t know if monogamy is the answer, but I do know I want to stop treating the wanting like the embarrassing part.

Thank you for reading.

Atila

atilacore on Bluesky · atilacore.pckt.blog