Polyamory Helped Me To Become Less Co-dependent

I learned a healthier way to interact in love by having more than one relationship

Maybe it’s because I grew up being taught by my culture that finding a mate was one of the most important things that could happen to me. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t adopted until I was nearly 7 months old and I have attachment wounds around that. Perhaps it’s just the way that I am naturally predisposed — but in any case, I’ve always been a little bit co-dependent in my relationships, relying heavily on them for my sense of self — that is, until my husband James and I decided to open up our marriage and I started to have more than one relationship at a time. Delving into polyamory is the thing that helped me learn to go about love in a healthier way.

James and I didn’t have a truly unhealthy relationship to start with. We both adored and respected each other and although there were the inevitable challenges of living with someone else long term, we were in a very solid and deeply connected relationship at the time that we chose to open it up. We weren’t unhappy with each other at all — quite the opposite in fact. We’d been going through this sexual exploration phase together and just got to wondering what it might be like to add in other people. The original intent was for that just to be on a sexual level, but I ended up meeting someone with whom the emotional component was powerful and undeniable and so we ended up embracing full on polyamory. That other man is now my other life partner, Nat.

It took a little bit of adjustment to shift gears and learn a new relationship style — one that is built around abundance and not around exclusivity — but once we did, we found a way of life that felt really good to us both. Polyamory is about intimate connections of various types with more than one person at a time. Sex is generally a part of these connections, but not always, and it wouldn’t be any more accurate to say that polyamory is about sex than it would be to say that monogamy is about sex. While that is typically an important aspect of either relationship style, it’s not the only aspect. Deep feelings, respect, companionship — those are all important components as well.

As I said, James and I had a pretty good and fairly egalitarian monogamous marriage for over 20 years before we decided to open things up. But what we learned as we made the transition to a different way of thinking about intimate connections is that we had unconsciously bought into a lot of gender roles and relationship dynamics that we were previously unaware were in play until we started to co-create our relationship more intentionally.

There are no inherent rules or structures in polyamory. Partners must negotiate the parameters of each relationship in order to meet their needs and preferences as well as those of the others involved. This is a lot of work and it requires a certain amount of vulnerability, honesty and good communication. The pay-off however, is that you get a bespoke relationship, rather than one that was designed by other people thousands of years ago. If you do this work, you’ll also get a stronger relationship as well because you’ll be forced to talk about things that you probably never considered voicing out loud before.

Growing up, my father was very much the head of our family, and the same was true for James. Although we had more of an equal partnership than either of our sets of parents, there were still places where that dynamic was in play in our marriage, although in a much more subtle way. I hadn’t dated a whole lot before I met James, and had never had a relationship last more than about 4 or 5 months until I met him. When it became clear to us that we were serious about each other, I couldn’t help feeling as though my life was finally beginning.

Now that I’d found my mate, I was fulfilling my destiny — two become one and all of that traditional rhetoric. I continued to work for a while after we were married, but once our son was born, I quit to stay home and care for him. Our gender roles intensified because now James really was the provider and I was the homemaker. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, and it was a division of labor that worked out well for us for a long time. But as our son got older and I began to work part time again, our needs were shifting but our relationship paradigm wasn’t.

Although I had started doing work that I truly loved and that was very meaningful to me, my family was still the priority in my life and I often felt torn between the two, as though I shouldn’t focus on growing my life coaching practice or other aspects of my life unless all of my other responsibilities to my family had already been taken care of. That messaging wasn’t really coming from James — it was more internalized cultural conditioning. Relationships have always been very important to me and I wanted to be the best wife and mother that I could be even if it meant that my own dreams and desires had to take a back seat. I felt very torn, and sometimes resented that.

I loved James and wanted to be good to him, but there was a part of me that also thought I owed that to him as part of our social contract. I got a lot of my validation from taking care of him and in turn having him take care of me. What I learned when I experienced being in love with more than one person at a time is that relationships don’t need to be that transactional (for lack of a better term). Of course James and I were taking care of each other because we wanted to, and because we loved each other, but there was also an element of should in there that wasn’t necessarily all that healthy. We leaned on each other emotionally in ways that perhaps make sense by monogamy metrics, but having moved away from those I can see how it sometimes fostered insecurity, immaturity, and dependence that went beyond just having a strong bond.

And part of the bargain of that transaction was that we got to exert control over each other in certain respects. At first it was somewhat difficult for James to accept that I loved another man as well as him. His cultural programming was that I owed that to him and him alone, in part because of all of the things that he had done to demonstrate his love for me all of those years.

“But how can you love him as much as me? I’ve spent years taking care of you and trying to make you happy and you’ve only known him for a couple of months” he once said.

Without even thinking too much about it I replied, “But that isn’t how love works.” I don’t even know exactly how I knew that so definitively, except that I was experiencing it in ways that I had never expected to. James was still as important to me as ever, and my very deep love for him was not diminished in the least, but suddenly there was this other man whom I loved just as much, with whom I had a very different kind of relationship.

“It’s not fair.” James said one time. “You don’t have to pay bills with him, or have any of the stresses of everyday life. You just get to have the fun stuff.” To some extent, James was right, but as I pointed out to him, I also didn’t get to have the bonding that comes from having to navigate ordinary mundane life together. I didn’t get to wake up with him every morning. My newer partner, Nat, is also a very independent kind of guy. He’s very loving and committed to what we have but doesn’t feel the need to show that by over the top reaffirmations of affection (at least not very often) or by being in constant communication.

It took me some time to get used to this very different way of being in a relationship with Nat. James and I say “I love you” pretty much daily, and we are very much a part of the minutia of each other’s lives. But that’s not really how Nat rolls, and even if we lived together, I’m not sure it would be all that different — maybe a little, but it wouldn’t change who he fundamentally is.

And what I’ve learned is that this doesn’t mean he cares about me any less or that he is any less invested in our relationship. He trusts in what we have, and he doesn’t need to talk about all the time, although sometimes we do discuss how we feel and what this relationship means to us. We don’t talk every day, although it’s often every second or third day, but sometimes if life is particularly busy, even less often than that. I used to hate that and really chafe at it, but now I feel fine about it. I’ve relaxed my grip all around, not just with Nat.

Nat’s more independent relationship style as well as having to divide my focus between two life partners, in addition to my connection with my lover Tamara, means that I don’t have all of my relationship energy in one basket. Through that, I’ve come to see myself as not just one half of a relationship whole, but as an independent person who has deep connections and interdependency with several people.

The life I share with James is still in many ways the anchor in my life. After all, we share a home and have a son together. We sleep together every night, and spend a lot of time together every day. But what I discovered as I realized that I also loved someone else very deeply is that it really was OK for me to do that. Perhaps polyamory isn’t for everyone, but through it I found something that felt very natural. I could actually access more of me because I didn’t feel the need to subsume myself in just one other person — something I didn’t even truly realize I was doing until I stopped doing it.

It was a little bit bumpy at first as James and I deprogrammed from more territorial and controlling ways of interacting with each other, but as I found more of myself, this meant that I had more of me to give — to James, to Nat, and to Tamara, but also to my son, and to my friends. My relationship with James is still incredible important to me and central to my life, but it’s not the center tent pole of it any longer and that’s been good for everyone involved.

Because I actually feel like our relationship is stronger now that we are a lot less co-dependent. We’re highly interdependent, and definitely a relationship unit, and that’s a good thing, but we also both love and are connected to others as well. We are two people who have chosen to spend their lives together, and have decided for ourselves how that goes and what that looks like. I’ve also chosen to spend my life with Nat, and although that looks quite different from how I spend my life with James, it really helps to diffuse any inclinations towards control or co-dependency.

You can’t own a bunch of other people in the way that it can be easy to fall into in monogamy, in part because society says that this is actually something that you are supposed to do because it indicates real love. But the actual issue isn’t one love relationship vs. several; it’s the mindsets that tend to go along with those. Monogamy isn’t an inherently toxic relationship style just as polyamory isn’t an inherently healthy one, but there are aspects of the core beliefs of each that can lead to relationship trends.

James and I had fallen into some of those trends without even realizing we were doing it. Having the opportunity to step back a bit and see what had been going on while we worked to build a different relationship that we had designed together meant that we created something that worked better for us both.

We’re very important to each other but now we don’t expect or need to be each other’s everything. We rely on each other and support each other, but no longer in a clingy way. For a while there I lost myself in my roles as wife and mother, but through polyamory I found myself once again. I think James found more of himself as well. And that’s a good thing for us all.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2021 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.

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