Just asked Carolyn, she wants to be monogamous with Nevermore, she doesn’t need me anymore, and doesn’t want to be with me.
God, this sucks.
I don’t know that all of them sharing a room would help at all, Why. He’s already said he’s going to feel shitty and excluded when Caro and nevermore want to be alone together (as it seems quite likely will happen fairly regularly)in another room. If that’s going on right next to him in his own bed, how much shittier is he going to feel?
And while the other two seem to be content as a monogamous triad (given the couple-y nature of most of their interaction, it doesn’t seem quite accurate to describe them as a threesome), he doesn’t seem happy with that arrangement. I guess what you’re saying is that maybe doing away with some of the we’re-a-couple, they’re-a-couple in favor of we’re-a-threesome stuff might make things better. And it might, if that were the fundamental nature of their relationships. Unfortunately, their emotions seem to lead them more towards inter-related coupledom, which leads us right back to the issue of them wanting to be alone together and how that makes him feel.
I don’t think there’s much anybody can do about them wanting to be alone together, or much anybody can do to make him not feel like five thousand kinds of hell when that happens. Trying to make your heart not want what it wants, not feel what it feels, is kind of like trying to make the dog stop licking its ass. It’s never going to really work.
FWIW, Finn, I don’t think Caro’s response to your proposal means she’s not poly. (Although I get the feeling you weren’t really referring to the overall opinions of the board.) Some people just aren’t comfortable with the idea of sex without love behind it, and they’re not comfortable with sleeping with people who are willing to have sex without love behind it. To their way of thinking, it casts doubt on how much love is behind the sex you have with them, and things can get really ugly from there. Of course, given the origins of your triad, Caro doesn’t quite seem to be one of those people. My understanding is that it was originally just a friends with benefits situation, with neither of you being in love with nevermore. At that point, she was fine with the whole “sex for the sake of sex” thing. Somewhere along the line, she fell in love with Raven and to some undetermined extent out of love with you, and now sex without being in love is verboten. Well, for you at least, we don’t know her stance on it for her or Raven.
That leaves me thinking she wants to have her cake and eat it, too, and shifts her parameters for what’s acceptable according to where the cake happens to be at the moment. She wants to be able to do whatever makes her happiest, and if that makes you miserable, then she wants you to just suck it up. And that’s not love. I’m not going to go into all the platitudes about what love is, but this is not a loving and healthy relationship.
Aw, shit, I’m the slowest typist in the world. I’m sorry, Finn.
Thanks…
Gods I feel empty and dead inside…
and I still want to make it work with her… but I guess I can’t…
still don’t want to give up hope…
I feel like dying.
I’m so sorry, Finn. Perhaps it is indeed time to move on. Carolyn started out her relationship with you mono, has returned to mono, and had an interesting whirlwind in between. I hope she can thank you for the growth opportunities and new insights you have given her and vice-versa and all three of you can get on with your lives.
You sound like one of the good guys - go find yourself a good girl or two who feels the same way you do. After you’ve let yourself grieve and heal, of course.
Never, ever regret what you have done. Only regret what you were too afraid to try.
Blessings and love to all of you.
Caro is going to ask Nevermore to be mono, and nevermore is going to leave me and say yes.
Jesus.
WhyNot, CrazyCatLady, thank you for your help.
I don’t know if I can deal with this.
I know that Caro had problems with this because of how I acted, because I had problems… but I’ve always been working on it… I just want to be with both of them… and Caro says that she wouldn’t even let me be Nevermore’s equal… that now she wants to have her as her Primary and me as a secondary, if at all… that she probably doesn’t even want me and then Nevermore will leave me whenever Caro asks… good gods… this is killing me…
Any suggestions?
What the hell do I do?
I know I’ve talked with you about this, Finn, but just to clarify for readers…
I love Caro, probably a little (or a lot) too much. I love her just like Finn loves her, and I always have, from the beginning… which basically translates to, she’s got me in the palm of her hand, and I couldn’t leave her if there was a gun to my head. I’m won’t just drop my relationship with Finn on a dime… I’ve already had to do some persuading to get her to even try to be ok with me continuing to be with him. I just wanted it to be clear that I do love him, and I do want to be with him, and if they can’t work this out, I won’t just be like “ah well” if she does tell me I have to choose between leaving him or leaving her… there would be a rather large hole in my life that would likely never again be filled, but because I’m an idiot who physically cannot walk away from this woman (much like Finn, who’d do the same if she asked it of him), I’d just have to deal with it.
I’m sorry to intrude, Finn… I just don’t want there to be any mistake about how I feel and your importance to me.
Clarification is always good, fighting ignorance and all that.
No such thing as too much love.
Well, not quite the same, you didn’t plan on using your sperm to fertalize her ova.
Or would that be, you didn’t plan on inserting your genetic material into her eggs and clone yourself…
But yah.
Didn’t mean to give the impression that you’d drop me on a dime.
But let’s be frank, if ever you got an ultimatum “be with me alone or else…”
you might protest, you might ask her to reconsider, but in the end you’d do what she said.
On this note, I find it intersting that a couple of days ago the deal was “Each couple will be independant” and now it’s “whatever Caro says goes, for both couples.” Not bitter so much as… observant.
Let’s be frank here.
Physically doesn’t come into it.
Neither of us want to be without her, but neither of us would quit breathing without her. Yes, to a large degree our current-level-of-happiness is dependant on her, but you know what you’ve told me about the future, and the same applies to you.
It sounds more dramatic and is a nice lil’ rhetorical flourish, but in the end nobody ‘needs’ anything, we both just want it very badly.
And yes, if she’d asked me to leave you I would have.
I don’t know how she has so much control, other than that we give it to her.
It’s a public message board, and you are of course welcome to post in my thread. If I had anything againt y’all I would’ve posted this in the Pit.
And of course, if ever I should fail to tell the whole story you are invited to fill in the details.
I am responding some more because evidently there is some sort of ‘confusion’ at work… which is to say I have no idea which way is up and evidently, at least according to nevermore, carolyn isn’t totally cool with me not being involved. Whether that’s just out of momentum I don’t know…
That’s a very good point.
I don’t know if I could be okay with it.
I honestly do want them both to be able to express their love.
But being left alone ‘fairly regularly.’…
Just don’t know.
I could understand it some of the time… I mean… even wives go to the spa, hang out with their girlfriends, etc… but yeah, this is all an unknown to me, and caro is sick of even talking to me about it so it’s somewhat impossible to work it out.
I get the feeling that any deal would be “this is the way it is, accept it or leave.”
Quite possibly correct.
Things do change, I don’t know if they’d ever change that much.
Then again, once she wanted to be with me and me only… who the fuck knows.
Quite possibly.
I don’t even know if my best efforts would do a goddamn thing… I’d like to think so, I’d like to think that I coudl do anything necessary to be part of Carolyn’s life. But then again, I know the first time I felt lonely or abandoned she’d leave me.
See, this is what gets me.
It honestly seems to me that she’s not in love with me anymore, that she may love me, feel tender and warm towards me, but probably isn’t in love with me anymore.
Can you ever even get back what’s been lost, if all this is just because she’s frustrated with me having problems with this threesome, is there anything I can even do?
Well, yeah… I do get the sense that she’s done reassuring me, comforting me, trying to make me feel special. Admittedly it hasn’t worked all that well all the time before…
I do know that if it ever came down to nevermore or me, she’d choose nevermore.
I’m kinda in a daze, but it seems that many of the things I thought before were pretty accurate. Boyfriend vs threesome and all that… But I’m not sure if it’s a cart-horse kind of argument… did she fall out of love with me because I had a problem with the threesome, or did I have a problem with the threesome because I saw her getting farther away from me and closer to nevermore…
my intuition is generally pretty damn good, when I listen to it.
You may very well be right.
I’m not sure that’s exactly the deal, but I’m afraid she may just want me out of momentum, becuase it’s familiar, because I make her feel safe and warm and I’m totally devoted and would do anything for her.
I know she doesn’t ‘need’ me, or particularly want me… this is all very very confusing.
Perhaps it is time…
It does suck knowing that she chose someone over me…
I always tried, always did my best, always tried to make her happy.
Bought books for her that I knew she’d like, made sure I got her favorite candy for her when I visited her, a million other little things… I really did my best.
Maybe that is best, for the three of us to get on with things… the two of them can have a wonderful and long-lasting relatioship together. And with laws on gay marriage changing maybe they’ll have a normal future in the next decade. Maybe it’s wrong for me to even want to get in the way of their happiness.
Thank you very much for that… I don’t know why it’s so important to me, but I try to do right by those around me, I try to make them happy… I drive nevermore to and from work every night, picking her up at four in the morning because I don’t want her waiting alone, because she deserves it, because it gives me pleasure to make her happy, and the same with carolyn…
And it’s complicated, because I’m not even sure of the way I feel… I do know that I want someone who’ll look at me as if I’m an amazing and wonderful man, as if I’m a great boyfriend… someone who’ll never want to leave me…
if all that was the case, I’d be able to deal, I think, with them loving someone else.
It’s the whole being left alone thing that I don’t know about…
but it has struck me that perhaps if I don’t care as much, if I don’t expect caro and I to settle down, if I expect her and nevermore to end up together, maybe I won’t want anything else, maybe I’ll just be happy to get whatever it is I get.
And I do worry what a polyamorous relationship would do to kids, if ever they should come along.
Maybe children are wiser than I give them credit for, but I don’t know how it would be for them to be tucked in and read bed-time-stories by me a dozen nights a month because mommy was at her girlfriend’s house… if they had nightmares and ran to my bed wanting to have their mother hold them but she was gone…
maybe I’m just thinking too much.
Maybe I should just accept that I’d never get married or have children…
I don’t know.
but in this case…
wouldn’t that mean regretting not trying to be with both of them on a more equal footing?
Paradox and contradiction, I am so confused.
May you never thirst.
Sorry to keep posting to this thread… seriously, if any mods have a problem with me posting so much to this I"ll gladly stop.
It occurs to me that I’ve never really wanted ‘monogamy’, as such.
Even when I’ve been with women who I loved with all my heart, I never stopped wanting other women. It was always a matter of trying to be as good to them as possible, and often giving them what they needed to be happy.
Hell, even when Caro agreed to be alone with me, as she did several times, I couldn’t give nevermore up. And yes, it would have been easier if I didn’t live with nevermore, but it never would have been easy.
I think, in a (semi) final analysis, that I didn’t want caro to be monogamous with me as much as I wanted the “lion’s share” of her love… and yeah, I know, I know, that’s unfair and unreasonable and anti-reality and clinging and a host of other bad things… and I’m trying to find an appropriate paradigm now.
Because the fact of the matter is, I’ve never really felt totally fulfilled with only one woman. I’ve felt totally happy and content being in carolyn’s arms, and I never need anything else when I’m with her, but that doesn’t mean I don’t desire other things…
Even when I wanted to focus on her, and have her focus on me, it wasn’t about being alone with her. It was about stopping the stress and the fighting and the worrying about how this threesome would turn out… it was about trying to be happy with her without distractions rather than keeping her all to myself. (not that I’m not a greedy bastard who’d enjoy having a woman think I’m the bee’s knees and such…)
Did all you poly folk start out that way? Like… from puberty, or whenever you started dating? Or did it evolve? Was it a series of revelations, or one single epiphany? Did you work at it or did it come, as KellyM seems to suggest, totally naturally without any energy, conflict, or work?
~sighs~
Just rambling, posting thoughts as they come to me.
I don’t think this is in the category of ‘bumping’ a thread, but again, if any mods have a problem please just let me know.
Maybe you’ll learn to be content with whatever crumbs she decides to throw you, is that what you’re saying? Uh-huh. My personal opinions on that sort of arrangement aren’t really fit for this forum, so we’ll just say that I don’t think it’ll work out very well. Sure, you might be able to be happy, or at least content, with it for a while, but over the long-term the pain of not having your emotional needs met will outweigh everything else. Feeling like you’re only ever getting whatever scraps of time, attention, and energy are left over after everyone else gets theirs…well, that sucks the rancid sweat off a dead skunk’s ass in a lot of ways.
And you deserve better than that. Everybody deserves better than that. Like I told nevermore in her thread, you deserve not to feel like an afterthought in your own love life. You deserve to be a priority to someone, or to several someones.
My advice would be to leave it lie for a few days. Quit poking the bear with a stick, because it’s just pissing her off. Give her some time to work toward figuring out what the hell she wants, and see if she’s willing to talk to you about it then.
I suppose that you’re right.
And caro has been telling me that most likely never give me ‘what I want’… maybe that’s it…
True enough…
Still hurts that I’m no longer a priority to caro and nevermore is… but I guess there’s not much to do about that.
Good advice… I’ve been trying not to talk to her.
Sure looks as if she’s going to decide that she needs nevermore but not me, that she’d like me around becuse I make her feel good and I’m devoted but that she doesn’t need me…
I may still post in this thread, because my own thoughts are chaotic, but I’m not going to bug her about it.
This is where I came from; I don’t know how useful it will be to you, but I’ll write it out and maybe.
I never had any notion that everyone was monogamous or well-suited to monogamy. I figured I was one of them, but so long as people were straight with me about what they wanted and what they were offering, I was fine with whatever.
I was in a long-distance relationship for a while when I was sixteen (we’d met at summer camp). He made it clear that he didn’t mind the continuing involvement but that he wasn’t going to be exclusive about it, and I said, “Okay,” and that was that. I knew where we stood, and that was what mattered.
Then I found myself attracted to someone else, and sort of tilted my head and said, “Hm. I thought I was monogamous. I guess I was wrong.” And that was all the angst about that. I didn’t feel any motivation or drive to do anything specific about, it was just a “Previous theory invalid; adopting new theory that suits expanded data.”
Teine and I discussed whether our relationship was open or closed a bit the summer before I went away to college. There were two factors involved in the discussion (that I recall): first, that we were seriously considering making a long-term relationship, and we thought that finding out if we’d meet someone who inclined us to want to end our relationship before we formalised our commitment would be a good idea, and second, that long-distance monogamy just seemed dumb to us.
We each met other people, for various sorts of relationships, and none of them inclined us to want to end our partnership.
Somewhere along here I realised that I am effectively duogamous, and that when I have two primary relationships I’m significantly psychologically healthier than when I don’t. This caused a fair amount of angst, as I developed a tendency to rebound-relationship issues when I lost one relationship and didn’t always make good decisions about how to handle things. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my longest-term second partnership came about when there’d been a significant gap since the last breakup; my mate and I are still together after four years.)
I also learned that I can do primary/secondary stuff. I had some issues with one relationship because I only knew how to do the heavy-commitment life-entanglement sort of relationship, and that wasn’t what worked for us. I finally managed to salvage some of the relationship, and the friendship, by pulling back and figuring out how to let the relationship find its own level rather than to wodge it into a different role.
At this point, the non-negotiable I have in relationship structure is that I must have two primary relationships. Some pretty firm stuff after that is that if someone asks me to choose between people, that’s the person who loses out – I don’t appreciate blackmail – and that I do not do veto. Also, I need to know where I stand in a relationship, what the relationship is; if I don’t have that I get a bad case of existential angst. Teine’s switch, and doesn’t care about mono/poly, but if the system’s poly it has to be open for him to be comfortable. So we’re starting from poly/open.
My mate was in a monogamous relationship and came to me as a friend for advice about dealing with a weird semi-poly situation (after discussing things with his wife). Which sort of threw a monkey wrench into my intent to not mention my attraction to him out of respect for his relationship agremeents, since I felt I couldn’t ethically give him advice without him being aware of that sort of big effect on the sort of things I’d be saying. 
Getting to where we are had its moments of drama and its very careful agreement negotiation, but I think we’re pretty much okay now as a family.
Me, I get jealous; I know that jealousy either means that I’m being an asshole (and expecting more than has been agreed to, and thus violating consent) or getting screwed over. I go to the work of sorting out which is which, and then I deal with the problem appropriately. I think the jealousy-means-you-can’t-do-poly party line is complete bunkum; I can’t do any sort of relationship if I don’t get a warning sense of when I’m being screwed over or, for that matter, without having the reality check of when I’m trying to claim something as mine when that just isn’t so. But I can drop territorial claims when I realise that I’m trying to annex without consent, and I will do so; I get the impression that not everyone can do that as easily.
I’ve never had any problem with the concept of sharing a partner with someone else (although I’ve certainly had problems with certain people as partners). I don’t have to struggle to deal with the idea of lee spending time with her husband instead of me, for example. Even during the period where my ex and I were sharing the same boyfriend, I didn’t have difficulty managing the desire to spend time with him or with her. The idea that I have might have a right to require my partner to not spend time with someone else is simply foreign to me.
Sure, there is conflict and there is work, but there is conflict in any relationship and, as far as I can tell, you work through the conflicts in a poly relationship the same way you do in a mono relationship.
I didn’t start out being poly. Right in the middle of one of my relationships, I fell in love with someone else too. That didn’t work out (I did everything wrong, but even if I’d done everything right it wouldn’t have turned in to a poly relationship), but the one I’m in now is moving toward poly, and things seem to be going well, if very very slowly.
First of all, FinnAgin, you need to go back, several times, at least, and re-read WhyNot’s first reply. I don’t think I’ve seen so much poly wisdom in one place before.
Second of all, you need to learn what love is.
The pain you are feeling does not come from loving, it comes from a desire to possess. You don’t love Caro. OK, you may be “in love” with her, but the difference is that this means you want to possess and control her or that you are just infatuated with her.
Polyamory means learning what love is really all about. It means loving someone enough that you put their happiness before your own. You are not doing that.
Mono people can love each other, too; we polys have no monopoly on love (no pun intended).
If you want to save this relationship, this family, you have to get out of your neediness and at least love Caro. And love her enough to let her go if your presence will cause her pain. You have to stop being selfish. Your pain is self-inflicted, and you can stop it any time you want, just by choosing to love.
And love is a choice, it doesn’t “happen” to you. Infatuation “happens” to you, but infatuation is triggered by possesiveness, insecurity and greed. If you continue to try and possess Caro, you will get what you deserve, which is nothing.
I don’t think you have got it in you, to decide to learn how to love. I think you are too selfish. I hope, however, that you will prove me wrong, cause you had a good thing that’s worth saving.
Love these two, Caro and Nevermore. Give them what will make them happy, no matter what it is, no matter whether you get anything out of it or not. Then you will deserve their love, in turn, and you may just get it.
Love means giving of yourself without expecting anything in return.
Love is a good thing. Learn it. Just DO it!
I really wish people wouldn’t make statements like this.
Least of all because they have only a passing isomorphism with reality.
I’ve put her happiness before mine before, a great many times.
And the fact of that matter is, before about a week ago, she never told me how much nevermore meant to her.
In fact, she always told me that if I was unhappy with the threesome I should tell her and she and I would be alone together.
Even now it hurts that she doesn’t want to be with me, but I honestly wish her and nevermore all the best.
Neediness does not eliminate love.
It is quite possible to have emotional scars that require a lot of love and attention and still love someone.
I’m afraid that you may be arguing from an incorrect paradigm.
Someone deciding that they don’t want you will hurt, even if you love the person.
Yes, I want what’s best for her, no, I don’t want to hurt her. And if she really doesn’t want to work with me, if she really doesn’t want to be with me, I do want what’s best for her. I just hope and pray that she thinks I’d be best for her. And no, I don’t know if I could do it the way a deal might be, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love her.
I’ve never known anybody, poly or not, to whom love came as a ‘choice’.
I will also note that I have already pointed out that this wasn’t me hanging on to her without it being her desire and without reciprocity.
It wasn’t like I said “you must be mine!” and she never felt anywhere near the same.
She demanded that I left a woman who I was in love with when I was with her.
She demanded that I not finish sex inside of nevermore because it was too intimate.
She demanded that I could never have children with anybody but her.
I’d wonder what other Dopers would think about your definition of love.
I know I don’t agree with it.
I mean no offense, but this is the wackiest idea I’ve seen in this thread yet.
I should love them both, no matter if I get anything out of it or not?
Why, pray tell, are you not giving that advice to either of them?
Or is it my job to sacrifice everything that I want in the name of ‘love’?
Yes, and many a time I have done for Caro or nevermore because they needed it, because I like making them happy.
But the idea that you should be devoted to someone and ‘love’ them at the expense of your own happiness… I just can’t get behind that.
Don’t get me wrong, I am fascinated by your definition of love, and although I take offense at your suggestion that I don’t love either of them and I’m just clinging, I’m not really angry or anything.
I love both of them.
I want what’s best for both of them.
But I still have things that make me happy and feel safe.
If I’m not compatible with Carolyn, I want her to be happy.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to find a way to work it out with her.
To elaboreate SnakeSpirit:
Carolyn was the one who asked me to be her one-and-only. (as a point of fact, I even asked her to share the woman I was in love with at the time, to make a triad out of that, she told me she could never share me)
Carolyn was the one who made me promise to have ‘faith’ that she would want to be with me and me only for the rest of time, told me that otherwise she’d leave me if I didn’t have that faith.
Carolyn was the one who told me at the beginning that either I wasn’t going to love anybody else, either I was going to give myself totally to her, or I could never be with her.
Carolyn was the one who was my equal partner in determining our future, I never sat her down, Clockwork Orange style and forced her to be with me. It was her decision from the begginning, and now she’s just changed her mind.
Hope this clears some stuff up.
SnakeSpirit:
Some more stuff (sorry, but these thoughts come to me in fits and starts)
Nevermore points out that perhaps I mis-read some parts of your post.
Did you mean that if something someone does makes you miserable you should sacrifice your own happiness, or that you’re “allowed” to talk to them and try to fix thigns?
Is there a difference in your schema between putting someone before you and making sure that they’re happy and still getting what you need?
Can you ever truly be totally ‘un-selfish’, I mean… isn’t it supposed to make you feel like a million dollars when you make your lover happy?