u/Low-Effort-5746

i’ve been in a relationship with a lovely secure guy who has been everything i’ve dreamed of. supportive, patient, understanding, communicative. he sat through my early relationship anxiety, my jealousy, a few times i’ve withdrawn and eventually come back… and now we’re hitting my magic 1,5 year mark where all of my previous relationships have ended. and i can sense the avoidant freakout creeping in when nothing truly is wrong. i realised i’ve never before made past the honeymoon and i really want to this time. i’ve finally found someone i want to do this right for. but the urges to run, the grief over the lost spark, the growing irritation, all of it is just making things very hazy in my head right now and i feel so damn guilty. i feel like he deserves much better than this.

we’ve come to the conclusion with my boyfriend/dom that we need to pause the dynamic until both of our life situations have settled enough for us to be able to build structure around the dynamic which both of us can commit to. our relationship started as a dynamic and my romantic and sexual attraction to him is heavily tied to him as a dominant, and the love i feel for him outside of the dynamic is more platonic in nature. we agreed to still keep the collar on for as long as that feels like it fits what we have. i’m struggling with this emotionally a lot, i know it’s better to take a complete break instead of trying to half ass it in the middle of life struggles since that has brought even more emotional struggle for me. i’d like to still view him as my dom through this and we discussed the collar to represent that i’m still under his protection. i just don’t know yet what else is left, so i’d like to hear how others in a similar situation have navigated this.

we basically stumbled into our core trauma last year which was followed by months of heavy flashbacks and damn intense trauma processing. we experienced two major integration events during those months, when around 8 alters became a team and started experiencing enough fluidity between each other that we stopped tracking who is fronting. it didn’t really matter anymore.

now that that whole thing got stabilized we started to experience a shift in the system, a couple alters that haven’t really fronted for years are starting to replace the previous team. it’s not as much of a blank slate situation as my host changes before starting trauma work, and there’s no big noticeable gaps in my memory. i still very much see what went down in the last few months, i’m just new and have a bit more distance to all that. but it does still feel quite destabilizing and it worries me how i will adjust to the change… i don’t wanna uproot my life again, we’ve worked on stabilizing for a long time. but there are some chaotic urges surfacing…

so, a man is discussing polyamory with his long term monogamous partner after developing feelings for me… and to add to the mess i’m a gay man and he’s thought he’s straight up until this point... i’ve been polyamorous for 6 years and openly queer since i was a pre-teen.

bring it on, tell me i’m dumb and irresponsible and this will go down in flames. he’s so dreamy tho 🥺

i would say my partner is mostly securely attached, he has some unpacked childhood stuff but our relationship has felt mostly secure. he does have people pleasing tendencies and struggles with emotional boundaries and has intense general anxiety which has spiked big time recently because of his own life struggles. and it shows in our relationship as him worrying way too much about me and my feelings. like if he’s feeling anxious himself, he’s asking me over and over and over again if i am okay and that has started to give me a major ick and wanting to run away. also he can see from my face really quickly if something is bothering me and he checks on me repeatedly like ”are you sure you’re okay?” and man i haven’t even realised myself what’s going on yet and i really need the privacy and space to work out my own feelings before communicating them. he is happy to give me space whenever i communicate i need it, but i still can’t shake the ick when i sense he is anxious even if it has nothing to do with me.