Mono or Poly, Breaking Up Sucks the Big One

Open Your Heart to Love and You Open Your Heart to Pain.

I once went to see a Freudian psychologist and, after having me create a deeply meaningful representation of myself in a sand tray, concluded that she had no issues with my interest in BDSM, but she sure wanted to know why I couldn’t make a relationship commitment. Mind you, this diagnosis came when I sought treatment after a breakup that had elements of both kink and commitment in it and because of its abrupt ending, I suffered great emotional pain.

This does not mean that there aren’t good Freudian psychologists out there, but it also doesn’t mean that being polyamorous negates your ability to make a commitment to another person and mean it. It does, however, mean that you are probably more willing to acknowledge that love has a strange habit of morphing over time, especially if personality differences and outside forces collaborate and issues that arise as a result are not addressed.

Further, unless the previous relationship was toxic, most poly folk I know want to maintain some kind of loving connection with their former partners. That’s not always possible, but it’s more often a goal than among monogamous couples, who see such a thing as a sign one isn’t “over” the ex, and therefore contact with them is a threat. The variation from this is divorced couples with children, although their continued connections can sometimes be unhealthy in the extreme.

Not every consensual relationship structure is perfect for every person, regardless of whether it is “open” to multiple people or focused exclusively on two people. And what works well when one is young may prove less functional with time and its invariable crafting influence on our reality. For me, the issue is more about finding healthy and supportive relationships of various sorts, each with a strong ribbon of love flowing through it.

Alas, English is such a ham-fisted sandwich of a language with weird priorities that we have lots of words for intercourse but only one for love. As though there is only one kind of love, and we all understand what we mean when we use the word. We spend our lifetimes seeking others who love in mutually compatible ways. Chances are good that most of us compromise because surviving, in reality, involves a lot of compromises. The question is whether we compromise on things that undermine our core values.

In some ways, it’s easier to leave a relationship that’s turned dangerously dysfunctional than it is to transform a loving bond that’s changed too much into a more functional and mutually healthy kind of relationship, such as friends or members of a common extended family. The myth of scarcity insists that there just isn’t enough love to go around, so we have to clutch what we find to our chests like a life vest everyone wants to steal. Sometimes that’s true.

That’s where the whole “feel the fear and do it anyway” comes in. Love is not a spectator sport. It’s a blood sport and we’re all somewhere in the ring trying to figure out how any of this works. So, let’s go easy on each other and try to use our hearts and brains instead of venom and resentment when things don't go as we'd hoped.

Love is a risk even for the monogamous. Love is one of the riskiest extreme sports I know about and certainly the riskiest I’ve ever participated in. I still prefer it to base jumping, parkour, or venomous snake handling, though, even if my history with Valentine’s Day and marriage is checkered. For poly folk, there are useful guides like The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, Redefining Our Relationships, and even More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory, a good book that resulted from an unfortunate and not particularly ethical collaboration.

But useful guides aren’t scriptures from the gods packed with magical cures for our emotional aches. Whether our love connections remain the same throughout our lives, they change, or they separate we will have experienced not just the highs of being in love and hot for one another’s bodies, but the lows of insecurity and its related pantheon of miseries. In an ideal heart, that breeds compassion and empathy, which makes transitioning a loving connection into a more functional, healthy, and satisfying structure easier. In theory.

Emotions are funny things, often in not ha-ha-funny ways. Some people keep theirs locked away from public view while others wear them on their metaphorical sleeves. I, for instance, can barely have a thought or feeling without needing to express it. Both can play hell on love if the right balance doesn’t exist. Feeling love isn’t enough, although our hormones sure try to convince us of that in the beginning.

We need to not only feel love for another within ourselves but be able to demonstrate it in ways that are both comfortable to us and can be felt by those on the receiving end. I don’t know if that means we all need to read The Five Love Languages, but it does mean we need to be aware of how we affect and influence those close to us.

It’s also not a bad idea to figure out if we love the security of a relationship, any relationship, more than we love the relationship we specifically have with our beloved. Too often we go down fighting for a marriage or other committed relationship not because it satisfies our needs or gives us relief from the world’s woes but because it has become a habit, familiar like a pair of worn but poorly fitting slippers. For some, that is enough. For others, the heart needs more.

The tragedy is not that each exists, but that they sometimes fall in love with one another. That’s where the fine art of being kind and willing to feel emotional discomfort and even pain to make things better comes in. Love doesn’t have to end. It can be transformed. But first, it has to be transformational.