Relationship trauma & ENM
I’m in a new, long distance relationship with someone I’ve been seeing for 7 months. We’re both divorced and old enough to have had our fair share of experience in relationships. We discussed ENM since the beginning, but now things are becoming real, and this is where I feel that I need perspective.
I have experience with ENM, he doesn’t. My past experiences with ENM haven’t been good though. I’ve had male partners who were fine with ENM if it meant they got to do whatever they wanted, but flipped out once they realized this meant I also got to date other people. Situations where a metamour got to dictate even the sexual acts I was allowed to engage in, without any prior conversation or agreement. Partners who were actually cheating and straight up lied that their primaries knew about me. Situations where a partner said he wanted a committed relationship, only to dump me the next day for the person he told me he wasn’t serious about. I was told that I was impossible to love. I’m also a survivor of CSA & SA, and these experiences have heavily compounded a lifelong feeling of worthlessness. All of this created a significant amount of emotional scar tissue, and made me feel like love is something that just wasn’t meant for me. It took me a long time to recover, and now I finally met someone who seems actually interested and committed.
Now that we’ve been together for a few months, he brought up ENM. Someone he was seeing prior to us meeting wants to visit him in his hometown, and stay for two weeks. In the way he described their connection to me, she thinks of him as her boyfriend, but he doesn’t consider her his girlfriend, just a friend with benefits. He says I’m his girlfriend, and that he’s committed to me. They exchange a few messages daily. He says it’s nothing like what we have, but this whole thing has been unbelievably triggering. He says that she knows implicitly that he dates other people, but she doesn’t want to know anything about it—kinda don’t ask don’t tell I guess. They live literally in opposite sides of the world, so coming to visit him is a big deal.
This is setting off all kinds of alarm bells for me. I literally feel sick, like all the accumulated trauma of my past relationships is coming back. I’ve never had problems with my partners in established relationships having their own hookups, but this is something else entirely. It feels like too much, too soon. I feel embarrassed, numb, and like I just want to run away, clam up, and never dare to open up to anyone again.
When he first brought this up, I suggested that we read up on ENM together, since this would be his first experience with it. He’s been very proactive, and we’ve been working through our attachment styles and traumas with a lot more depth. It’s helped us actively discuss a lot of things in our relationship and how we want to shape it; we’ve gotten to know each other a lot better in the process, and it has definitely deepened our feelings for each other. But at this point I feel like we’re also dancing around the real topic, which is her visit. She hasn’t bought the ticket yet, he says he’s been stalling her to give us time to discuss this. I fear that if I put my foot down and say that this is not ok for me, I’ll be acting like a jealous and insecure fool. But if I don’t, I fear I won’t be able to get over it, and will distance myself from him.