Having been polyamorous for over six years, your article, "I Fell For The Perfect Guy, But Not For His Open Relationship," piqued my interest. I wanted to be there along with you on this journey, and even felt a lot of hope in your claim that this relationship helped you to "better understand and accept the kind of relationship [you] really needed." After all, you seemed to treat each other fairly, and admit that this was a hard relationship for you. I appreciated that honesty.
But by the end, I felt ill at ease. It wasn't just because you called your relationship (even facetiously) a "social experiment" and gathered "evidence" (which made wonder if you had started dating 'Greg' in order to write an article in the first place). It wasn't even just because of what I thought were completely irrelevant comments about his "equipment."
It was that when I got to the end and you said that you grew to "understand the qualities that will make [you] a great girlfriend," I wasn't convinced.
The part that convinced me the most was when you admitted this:
It’s really difficult for me to talk about feelings in a relationship.This fact was shown to me so many times in this article that, had this been one of my students' essays, I would have suggested this be the thesis instead. You are absolutely correct that feelings are difficult to talk about. I learn this anew every day. But trying to get better at it is crucial, because you will not have the satisfying, healthy, loving, monogamous relationship you want if you don't work on communicating with yourself and with anyone you date in the future.
You started out your article by claiming you wanted no expectations in your relationships, but this is an impossible goal. Every relationship we have with every person we know comes with expectations, and the most healthy relationships are those in which expectations are managed realistically by all parties. We're sad when friends aren't there when we need them. We're disappointed when family members fail to call on our birthdays. And yes, we're devastated when a lover is unfaithful. We value things like "reliability" and "loyalty," and those values are based in meeting expectations. And you can't ask someone to meet your expectations if you don't tell them what they are.
For example, you were upset when, after sitting through Greg's art class, he didn't come home with you. You even said you had "thrown down the cash to attend," your vocabulary making it sound like you had not only expected it, but were owed it. If you had merely asked him what he planned after class, maybe you wouldn't have felt so cheated out of your money and time. Maybe you would have realized that yes, this was work, but he was probably also very happy to have you there, and it was nice to see him in his element. Or maybe you would have decided you'd rather meet on a different night, when he was more free to give you what you wanted.
You also seemed to have very specific expectations about the relationship label you wanted, and what that label meant to you; where you wanted a relationship to go, and how quickly you got confirmation it was going there; and the distance you wanted to keep from Greg's fiancée, Cassy. And although you do talk about learning all of these things by the end of the relationship, it seems very clear that you were not able to communicate them early enough (or maybe at all) to Greg himself.
I think you've already started doing the work - you're clearly reflecting on your feelings and assessing how different your expectations were. As you go forward, I hope that you will ditch the vague assertions in your dating profiles and really think about you want. And after that, tell them. Tell all your future boyfriends that to you, love means staying over after sex every time. Tell them that it means wanting the relationship to go somewhere committed. Tell them it means exclusivity. And after you tell them, listen to what love means to them. The expectations will not always match up. But I can guarantee that you will always be closer to your goal than you were before.
Best,
Kate
