Why complicate a relationship? It should be pretty simple!
Monogamous relationships are the most traditional way of relating when you want to establish a stable and lasting commitment. However, due to the variety of personalities, needs, desires and expectations of each person, this type of arrangement gets short to adapting to the complexities and dynamics that a relationship can go through. The first signs of wear and tear start to become apparent after the chemical overdose stage of the initial months or years. It is here where a relationship can take three paths, or start a stage of conscious and consensual commitment, or enter into a dynamic of recurring conflict without addressing its origins from the root or separating. Factors such as the lack of surprise or the lack of effort to fall in love, essential for us to maintain the emotion and the fire, run out and fade. But this is not bad, it is a necessary stage in the evolution of the relationship. It can be used in infinite ways.
If you want to enjoy a lasting and full relationship, you must be willing to study it, investigate it and discuss its weak points and its points to improve. Time and money must be invested in its maintenance and a good reading of the circumstances in which it is transformed. This reading is a mutual (or collective, depending on how many people are involved in the relationship) construction. In a world that is by nature changeable with dynamic people, discourses, beliefs and narratives, there is nothing more naive than believing that the initial conditions of our relationship will never change. What resists change or adaptation is bound to disappear or be excluded. For this reason, you must be willing to change, because there is a premise on which you must start, and it is "a different relationship style for each different couple." Only we know what suits us best.
Open relationships can involve hierarchies or not, confidentiality or not, open sexuality or not, open love or not, etc. They are elastic, they are thought so that you build your love and emotional life in your own way and not in the way of your parents, your church or the creeds of others. They are for you to complement what you do not have in your relationship due to different circumstances, such as going out dancing, flirting sporadically or going on a trip, or repeating that stage of falling in love that you miss so much. Maybe your partner doesn't know how to dance or doesn't like to go out, or doesn't want to give you that massage that you would love. You don't have to be a repressed unfortunate, find a way to complement that lack. Discuss that with your partner, no one has to live dissatisfied because that's life. By talking, people understand each other and by talking they find points in common. There is nothing more frustrating than living in permanent conflict with oneself, than wanting to do and not allowing it, than having to live the life we don't want. The difference between choosing for yourself and letting others choose for us is abysmal and costs us the only thing we have in this life, time. Making a decision about how we want to live our relationships or endure them is comparable to the difference between buying a 100 m2 apartment designed by a strange architect in a complex of 1000 identical apartments or buying an empty lot and building as many rooms as you want, a large bathroom and an open kitchen. With the first you must be satisfied, the conditions do not allow reforming it. With the second, you are the owner of your space and remodel it to your liking as many times as you want.
But I want to be everything for my partner
In a relationship it is essential that the other person can develop and feel fully in the company of their partner. Loving should allow the other person to feel happy and have the freedom to be who they want to be, above what others want or expect of them. Each person has their version of love and therefore their own needs and priorities, many of which do not exist in us, since we are far from perfection. If a relationship is built on the foundations of love, we can assume that there is a desire for the other person to be as happy as possible, and this means doing it without conditions.
You are not the one who fucks the best, nor the most intelligent, nor the most interesting in the world. We cannot be so arrogant to think that we are the most complete human beings and that we are going to satisfy all the intellectual, affective, emotional, sexual needs, etc. of our partner. We are not the center of anyone's universe as we want it even if dreaming it possible is beautiful. But we must not let our fantasies cloud our reality. Love is about living it fully and consciously, not idealizing it in the mind and suffering it in the flesh. Humans are incomplete and have different needs throughout our lives. At one stage we can be very passionate about intellectual or professional development, while at another stage we may want to develop our sexuality more vigorously. And those times may not always fit with our partner's.
Therefore, the frustration of wanting to exploit or take advantage of one of these dimensions and not receive feedback can appear at any time and create conflicts. At that time, you have to be intelligent, humble and flexible to be able to push our partner so that they can feel fully developed. Understanding that our partner can function more on a specific plane with another person than with us makes us aware of our own limitations and focuses us on honesty. This understanding can transform the shortcomings into a transforming force in which each one can grow individually and therefore build the relationship as a joint project.
And what do I do with this jealousy?
Jealousy, so demonized in society. It is natural to feel them, but you have to learn to rationalize them, discuss them and find a constructive way out instead of an aggressive one. When we limit our partner's freedom, we are assigning him the quality of an object. Only objects can be owned, people are born free and belong to themselves. The choice of who to share time and love with must lie solely on the individual. Your jealousy reflects your own insecurities which can be built on cultural pillars where exclusivity is the norm and other people pose a threat. Your feelings, although conditioned by the situations that frame the relationship, are not your partner's problem but your way of projecting the fear of losing. Work them on you, not on your partner. If you want to be happy, don't put the burden on the other person. Do not create expectations, expectations disappoint.
If you are jealous because your partner is dating a "more attractive" person than you. So reflect, do you think that your partner is with you only for your beauty that would leave you for a more handsome person? If the answer is yes, well, then the relationship is not built on solid foundations of love and agreement but on trivialities. The moment you stop feeling jealous even when your partner is with other people is liberating. It feels sublime. That is loving without conditions, without expecting anything in return.
You need to get rid of those fears and those individual burdens, with personal work, with reflection, with self-knowledge and awareness. You don't need to be alone for that, your partner can help you. Above all, talk about it, with your friends, with your partner, with whom you feel good and who allows you to express yourself from understanding and not from censorship or fear. Exteriorizing is the best validation and empowerment exercise.
What if my partner falls more in love with the other person?
Love and its precursor, attraction, are inherent to the human being. Love for one person is not exclusive of love for another.
It's not like money that you can only give once to one person and it's gone. Love is renewable. Just as you fell in love at 15, you can fall in love at 60. Love multiplies, the more you give, the more you receive, the more you receive, the more you want to give, it is an endless generator. It is limited only by our time, our space, and even our own cultural biases. When we receive love from other people, we come home with more love to give, love that nourishes us, that recharges us. Falling in love is a risk, it can happen at any time in life and anywhere, but it can generate conflict if it starts from the premise that there are hierarchies and priorities in different relationships, which should not be a problem as long as all the parties agree.
If the objective is to maintain love within a single relationship and towards a single person without eliminating the possibility of enjoying the love of other people, one must learn to appreciate feelings, observe them and analyze them objectively. Patience is a necessary quality to achieve this, because it invites us to stop before the emotion, let it decant and abstract from it without making decisions in the midst of the overdose of hormones. Feelings are often confusing, and drawing a line between them is always complex. But trying to separate the different states of love, between its ephemerality and what is persistent, will prevent us from making hasty decisions.
This stage of confusion must be navigated and reflected upon to understand the implications of starting to build something new with someone different. It is necessary to balance what is required of you and what helps you to fall in love again and know what you can lose and what you can gain. Above all, you have to discuss it with your partner, between the two of you a solution can be found. That excitement can be used as a catapult in the relationship itself. The emotion that our partner imports from the outside, can be used for our own benefit. If that energy creates conflict, well, embrace and talk to reshape some aspects. The important thing is to feel calm and with the confidence to be able to dialogue and build the path with our partners. If, as a consequence of this reflective process, one of the couples decides to give themselves up to live a new love, it must be assumed that way, no one belongs to anyone, each person goes through life in that search for fulfillment, we are only bridges to achieve that goal, means that it can also be temporary. Finally, only empowering ourselves with our own decisions, including how and when to fall in love, can make us find our way towards a satisfying life of freedom, autonomy and harmony.
What if my partner decides to leave me?
Your partner does not belong to you, no one belongs to anyone. That is the person we chose and who decided to choose us to share a path for a while, sometimes a lifetime. Although it is ideally conceived as a long-term agreement or sometimes until death, people stop liking each other, they stop loving each other, they get bored and relationships end. It doesn't matter if they swore before God, before a judge or before the universe. All relationships are capable of coming to an end. And if someone promises to be with you all your life, then what an empty promise. No one knows what we will feel tomorrow. Your partner may decide to leave even if you are not in an open relationship. In fact, in a monogamous relationship, they are more likely to leave you because they want to experiment with someone else and not be able to do so freely than if they are free to do so without consequences. How nice to see that despite finding an infinite number of possibilities out there, your partner is going to choose you after all.
A strong relationship has to be able to overcome the threats of the ephemerality of another sporadic relationship or to discuss the terms of each new relationship. Because if the construction of a stable commitment is being planned, each person must be aware of their own limits outside of the "main" relationship.
And if at the end of it all, your partner decides to leave or break those established agreements, the exercise of dialogue carried out during the construction of your own type of relationship, should allow you to find honest and constructive solutions, even if they go their separate ways. Finally, if you love your partner so much, shouldn't it fill you with happiness that he/she finds another person who makes him/her feel fulfilled? And if they leave you for that reason? Well, what else can we do? Let them leave happy, or do you want them to stay with you because they are afraid to leave or express their true feelings?
In this sense, I am going to paraphrase a reflection that I once heard on the subject and that adjusts to the desire to maintain the relationship on the level of honesty:
“I want you to be with me because you want to be with me, not because you are my girlfriend, not because we have been together for 10 years and you feel sorry or afraid of being alone, or because I play a role in your life or because we have to maintain the home and the children. Even more important, if you don't want to be with me, if it doesn't come from love, you're doing me a favor if you leave. How sad that someone is with me out of loyalty, pity or not to hurt me. In that case, I prefer that you go, so you do us both good. Staying with me when you don't want to be with me doesn't help me."
How do I start a tailor-made relationship?
Make a thorough assessment of your needs, your desires, your expectations. Speak them clearly, honestly, without fear. Fear and guilt are limiting. Love and trust empower and drive.
A relationship should allow you to talk from trust and security, as many times as you want. If you can't talk about something freely, or you feel censored, you won't be able to build something honest. Reach agreements on sexual health, distribution of time, dialogue, distancing, separate vacations, periodic reassessment, whatever you think is necessary. Breaking monogamy must be done from the desire to build and advance as a couple or triage, for the good, not to destroy it, it is done to grow. Begin with the question: what would I do if I were alone, without a partner? Shouldn't your relationship allow you to continue the development of your dreams, your passions, your only life, the enjoyment of the only thing you have? Make a list.
As a final message, we must understand that choosing to have a relationship other than monogamy implies a challenge to a way of relating that has been rooted in the way of life of the human being for more than 10,000 years. A primitive way of "loving" that was never questioned but rather consolidated. Monogamy is part of one of the qualities most inherent to the social, economic and religious organization established since before pre-history (see entry in the link). Going through it implies challenging a monolithic institution and going against many preconceptions. Guilt and fear can be part of those barriers that must be broken, but once mastered, they take us to a level of self-knowledge and empowerment that we have never experienced before.
Jena (Germany), February 2023
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