it hurts :(
EDIT: it feels like I'm doing something wrong and I shouldn't love a poly person as much as I do but I love them so much and them being poly is so really hard for me. am i not good enough? do they love me as much as i love them? they say they do but wouldn't i be your only one if you did?
I am 50, monogamous by orientation, ten days into no contact after a three year long distance relationship with a poly-identified woman I'll call Jen. We lived about 500 miles apart in different states. The arrangement we had was monogamy by mutual agreement, but she identified as polyamorous underneath the agreement. I am posting because that configuration is one this sub knows well.
Quick arc.
Year one, I had been operating under a monogamous frame. Six months in Jen came home from a festival and disclosed an outside connection to me in bed, after the fact. I did not leave.
December 2023. After extended conversation we agreed to be monogamous. Mutual agreement, explicit, both sides on record.
2024 through late 2025. Monogamous, by mutual agreement. I had what I thought was a primary monogamous partnership.
Late 2025 onward. Jen secretly broke the agreement. A musician local to her city, who I'll call Mike, became a five month sustained concurrent connection at weekly cadence, emotional and sexual and undisclosed, which continues today. Mike is married to Lily, in a poly arrangement; Lily negotiated explicit terms about how Jen entered Mike's polycule, including no overnights with Jen. Jen honored those rules toward Lily. Mike also had a previous girlfriend (Maggie, who leans monogamous herself). From a text Jen accidentally sent me the day after our ending, intended for Mike, it became clear that Mike had ended his relationship with Maggie as the affair with Jen intensified. Mike kept his marriage. He just swapped which woman occupied his secondary girlfriend slot.
A man I'll call Pete entered the configuration alongside. Others.
March 2026. I wrote a relational guardrails document to protect the primacy of our relationship, knowing the additional pressures her local sex and dating would do to our LDR, not knowing she had already been cheating for months. The document was too late.
The pattern through the discovery phase: trickle truth, names withheld until I pressed, retroactive philosophy as the warrant. The poly identity she had not invoked for two years suddenly returned as the cover story.
In April I made a structured ask. Stop seeing Mike for 90 days. Repair our relationship. Both of us in individual therapy. Negotiate written guardrails before any resumption of nonmonogamy. I was not requiring permanent monogamy. I was requiring repair and rebuild before resumption.
She declined the entire ask. She preserved her new relationship with Mike, and what she wanted with me instead of either repair or a clean ending was to demote me into a lower-intensity ongoing role — keep me available at lesser intensity while she pursued Mike and the others. I declined to be demoted into a safety net. That declining is what forced the actual ending. The actual ending was a May 7 video call where I asked her directly when she next planned to see Pete. She gave me two specific date windows in May and June, on her calendar. She had been rotating for months and entertaining new connections while telling me she loved me and concealing her infidelity.
My read now is that the affair was not NRE-driven. NRE responds to pause-and-repair. She declined because the affair was functioning as an exit. The asymmetry is the part I am still sitting with. She gave up our three year primary partnership under a monogamy agreement, to enter Mike's existing polycule as the new secondary, with Mike keeping his marriage intact. Maggie, the woman she displaced from Mike's life, leans monogamous herself.
Full no contact since May 10.
What I am asking this sub specifically:
For mono partners who dated a poly-identified person who had agreed to monogamy, what should I have been watching for? Is the resurfacing of a previously-set-aside poly identity a known failure mode of these arrangements?
For mono partners who exited this exact configuration — where your partner gave up the primary partnership with you to become a secondary in someone else's existing polycule, while your structured repair offer was declined and the alternative offered was to be demoted into a downgraded ongoing role — what did the first six months of grief and reconstruction look like? Does this asymmetry change the integration timeline?
Anything you would tell me at Day 10 that I am unlikely to hear from people outside this experience.
Thank you.
Does your poly dangle monogamy as a possibility to you? If so, what are respectful ways to question it as real or a form of breadcrumbing?
I (31NB) have been seeing a guy (61M) that I met on Grindr back in November ‘24. He is married to a woman, and says it’s DADT. I have my grievances with that but for the most part I believe it genuinely is that, and it’s not cheating. For context I have BPD and I am mono. I am unsure if he would describe himself as poly, but he says he has the capacity to love multiple people so I guess so? He’s not really into hook ups, more building a bond with someone. The first time we met up we hit it off right away and began texting 24/7. At first he called it FWB+ which I had never heard of, then said it was a relationship but I didn’t really want to call it that. It made it seem so real, when it wasn’t.
I was in love him but I was scared to tell him, eventually I did. He said it back a few months later. He became my favourite person way too quickly, but he wasn’t put off by that unless I was having a splitting episode.
We meet on average once every 3/4 weeks, sometimes more often and sometimes less. Texting can be frequent and then we have dry spells. I’m slowly learning to make peace with that fact that if he doesn’t message daily, it doesn’t change things. He has a very busy life with three jobs, so sometimes it is hard to fit anything else in and I understand that.
However I have had several meltdowns, breakdowns whatever you want to call it because of this ‘relationship’. When it’s good it’s really good and when it’s bad it’s really bad. He understands my feelings are complicated because essentially I am in love with someone I cannot fully be with, but I also do not want to lose him completely. It’s like a vicious circle of emotions. Part of me knows I need to end it, but I don’t want to never see him again. But at the same time it hurts so much, and I need to put myself first.
I recently told him I have a crush on an older guy I sometimes see at my job, and he says I should go for it. Once I started talking about it more, he genuinely teared up and said he hopes it goes well. Initially I took this as he just wants rid of me, but I realised he just wants to see me happy and with someone who has more time for me. He’s a great guy, it’s just an unfortunate situation. I used to sit for hours thinking about what it would be like if we were married etc, but I stopped doing that because I made me insanely depressed lmao.
Can anyone else relate at all? Has anyone been in a similar mono/polo situation? Advice is always welcome but this is mainly for a discussion.