Ask Raederle: Emotional Safety in Polyamory

"How do you handle emotional safety and managing your two simultaneous relationships? Isn't it challenging? Why do you feel like you can handle a third relationship?"

Emotional safety is a subject of much personal interest and struggle for me, so I'll start there.

I find my two relationships highly complimentary.

I've been with Lytenian since December 2009, so our relationship has a lot of history. We're both introspective and committed to a non-fluff sort of relationship. We're actually better at crying together and tackling tough emotional conversations than we are at being light-hearted.

Hence, Greg coming into my life in 2015 being such a relief – we have fun together and do the fluffy things.

Greg has become Lyth's best friend, and the three of us living together has more advantages than disadvantages.

I practice something called conscious, material love. This means that, like most people today, I am subject to the pit-falls of material love – possessiveness, attachment, insecurity, jealousy, envy, and all the other manifestations of taṇhā (a chronic, underlying sense that one is lacking something causing a thirst that is unquenchable/insatiable) – but that I am also a conscious lover, and thereby communicative of my feelings, pitfalls, reasons, desires, needs, and willing to do what it takes to make the relationship feel rewarding to all parties involved.

I am fortunate that both Lyth and Greg are actually better at spiritual love than I am – the kind of love that is more about essence and less about possession. Yet both of them have learned (and continue to learn) from me how to be more conscious lovers – how to self-examine from both a left-brained/analytical/thinking state and a right-brained/feeling/intuitive state. The former being Greg's natural inclination and the later being Lytenian's natural inclination.

Non-conscious material-love relationships are the most common, and they thrive only when there is strict adherence to agreed upon roles in the relationship. Because of the deterioration of established gender roles, these kinds of relationships are becoming increasingly short-lived.

With this overview, you may find it fairly deducible that I find my two husbands add to my emotional safety rather than detracting from it. While they are both free to seek other women – emotionally, sexually, physically, intellectually, spiritually – and to create other commitments if they wish to, neither expresses much of an interest in doing so. Whenever they do find occasion to flirt with or kiss another woman, I do experience jealousy and I am challenged by it. We talk about it a lot after the fact, and have learned a lot about ourselves and each other through these experiences.

I've found that most of my jealousy stems from a belief that if I were to have a metamour (a partner of one of my partners), then she would not care adequately about my feelings and would trample my emotional security. I've yet to actually have the experience of having a metamour, so I suspect that once I do have the experience, it will dispel this fear.

How can it be safe for me to pursue a third relationship?

When polyamorous, and involved in existing, stable relationships absent of resentment, I believe adding new relationships is no more complicated or risky than adding a relationship when single.

I believe I'm coming from a place of genuinely wanting to give my husbands more alone time (which they both feel is beneficial – I've asked), which is a place of compassion, not resentment. And also from a place of wanting to grow my own perspective, which is a form of self-love. So it seems that my seeking of a third is coming from a healthy place. I say "seems" because I am always open to uncovering further subconscious motives as I continue my consciousness alchemy.

Another aspect of why it is safe for me to seek a third relationship is because both of my existing partners enjoy a lot of time to work on their own projects and introspect. I tend to be attracted to people who are intelligent, introspective and passionate – which leads me to workaholic, introverted geeks. A third such person in my life would also have limited available time for me, and thereby would fit nicely into my own available time.

This is something worth considering when venturing into polyamory. How much time do you want to spend with each partner? How much time does each partner want to spend with you?

In my case, I want to spend a lot of time with each partner, especially in the beginning as we're getting to know each other. And I keep my life flexible enough to actually spend that time with my partners. But the people I want to connect with tend to be specifically the sort of people who need a lot of time to themselves. This makes me a perfect fit for polyamory – so long as I continue to attract non-jealous, spiritually loving individuals.

Further reading that may interest you:

Monogamy versus Polyamory
Why I Almost Left My Husband
How We Became Polyamorous
How I Came To Have Two Husbands
Questions & Answers; "Help! My girlfriend was poly behind my back!"

— Raederle
The Consciousness Alchemist

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