Am I Polyamorous?

The title isn’t clickbait, y’all. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while; hear me out!

If you know me, you’ll know that I’ve pretty much always been an open minded person. I’m shady by nature, so I will honestly side-eye some people’s life choices, but as a whole, I genuinely don’t care about much. A phrase that I often say is, “it’s not that deep,” because truly, nothing is ever that deep. Think about the one situation that bothered you the most 5 years ago…how much do you care about it now? Probably not much (and if it’s still something that greatly bothers you, no offense, but you may want to seek a therapist). All in all, the point I’m trying to make is that most of the things that get us riled up at any given moment, don’t really matter at all in the grand scheme of life.

Speaking of life, in the current stage of life I find myself in, my priority is not only happiness—because happiness is fickle, right?—but contentment. According to whoever writes Wikipedia articles, “Contentment is an emotional state of satisfaction that can be seen as a mental state drawn from being at ease in one's situation, body and mind. Colloquially speaking, contentment could be a state of having accepted one's situation and is a milder and more tentative form of happiness.” There is not a single thing in life right now that is more important to me than my journey towards contentment. Why? Because life is too f*****g short. I don’t want to waste my precious time on earth worrying, being angry, being upset, or being anything other than content.

With that being said, let me get into the real reason y’all clicked on this post. As I approached the fine age of 30, of course the realization that I’m not even CLOSE to getting married and having children, hit me semi-hard (because again, I don’t care about anything that much). For me, it was more about knowing that it was something that was expected of me, and I was, in so many words, failing terribly at meeting that expectation.

When I reached age 28, maybe 29, I became serious about finding “the one." One by one, my friends were getting engaged, married, having children, and wow, the pressha was getting wessa. From previous posts, y’all know I keep a long list of what I want in a man. Don’t get me wrong, that list is still very much so important to me, but at that point, I wasn't even giving a man a chance if he didn't meet a good percentage of the attributes on that list. So it became this thing where I was rejecting very nice and serious men because they weren’t what I considered husband material. I had a goal that I was determined to accomplish, but the journey towards that goal was lonely as hell.

Then one day, it hit me. Every man that I was turning down had one major quality I loved; they just didn’t have the whole package. I thought to myself, I said, “Self, why shouldn’t I simultaneously enjoy each man for the one great quality he possesses until I find the one man who has every quality I’m looking for?” The math finally started mathing, and I immediately began reaching out to my friends and family to discuss this revelation. Below is an excerpt from one of those conversations:

My past monogamous situations didn’t end because me and the guys had issues. In fact, things suddenly ended when we were at our happiest, when things were going great between us. Why? Because they were harboring pain and/or lingering feelings for women from their past and decided it was better to leave me and pursue those women instead.

And you know, the pain I felt from those situations weren’t due to their love for another woman, it was a result of me not understanding why they had to leave me because they loved another woman. What did their feelings for someone else have to do with me? Like, you and I are good; why are you ruining what we have? I genuinely couldn’t comprehend why I had to suffer because of feelings that existed outside of me.

So, I’ve been exploring polyamory (we’ll get into the different types of ethical non-monogamy in my next post). I wanted to explore this lifestyle because of the three things I value more than anything in a relationship—openness, honesty, and transparency.

I wanted to try polyamory because it’s my assumption that men in this lifestyle are accustomed to being vulnerable. I’ve never had an issue with my men wanting to be with other women; my issue was them feeling like it was more appropriate to lie about their desires than to keep it real with me. I feel safe with 100% truthfulness, even when the truth hurts.

Men who are, for the lack of a better word, conditioned to only practice monogamy despite their true desires, have made a habit of lying in order to keep the peace within their relationships. I, personally, am no longer interested in that type of relationship. The idea is to be married for the rest of my life. Call me cynical, but I refuse to fool myself into thinking that within 50+ years of marriage, my partner and I won’t, at the very least, face temptation. Am I to pretend it’s not happening, or should I accept the fact, and promote open discussions and transparency within my relationship? I don’t know about y’all, but I choose the latter.

Now, me being the impulsive person I am, I’ve already started dating within the polyamorous space and I LOVE it. I’ve never be happier. I’m sure y'all are dying for the tea, of which there is a lot to spill, but you’ll just have to wait for my next series of posts!!

I’ll end this post with a question I’ve been asking a lot of people lately: if we were exposed to different lifestyles from childhood, would we all have chosen monogamy? DM me your response.