Trying to process the loss of a deeply meaningful ENM connection
I’m struggling with grief over someone who is still alive, and I don’t really know how to process it.
I’m engaged, in an ENM relationship, and over the past year I developed a very deep connection with another woman. It started as casual, but somewhere along the way it became emotionally intense in a way I wasn’t prepared for. We became close friends, lovers, confidants — the kind of connection where you speak every day and become part of each other’s emotional world.
I genuinely fell in love with her.
Recently things started changing after I got engaged. Around the same time, she entered a relationship with someone else who, from what she told me, raised a lot of red flags for me. I tried to be supportive, but I also struggled watching someone I loved move toward a dynamic that seemed unhealthy while simultaneously pulling away from me.
The whole thing became emotionally unsustainable. I felt increasingly sidelined, anxious, jealous, heartbroken, resentful, protective, guilty — sometimes all at once. Eventually I set a boundary and stepped away because staying “just friends” while carrying those feelings was destroying me.
Now she’s blocked me.
And I honestly feel like I’m grieving a death.
What’s messing with my head is that I am deeply in love with my fiancée. I don’t regret getting engaged. But this experience has forced me to confront the reality that loving multiple people doesn’t make the loss hurt any less. If anything, it’s complicated the grief because there’s no socially recognised framework for mourning a relationship like this. Most people in my life probably wouldn’t even understand why I’m this devastated.
Part of me still hopes she’ll come back someday. Another part of me knows I may never speak to her again.
I guess I’m posting because I want to know if anyone else here has experienced this kind of heartbreak in nonmonogamy — where the relationship wasn’t “primary”, wasn’t officially recognised in the traditional sense, but still completely shattered you when it ended.
How did you let go? How did you stop idealising the connection? And how do you carry grief for someone who is still out there living their life without you?