Recently, I came across this Reddit thread asking, “Polygamists/Polyamorous of Reddit, how did your relationship start? Is there any jealousy?” and was really fascinated by the responses.
Here are the most interesting ones:
1. “Mine started seven years ago. My best friend from high school and I were roommates in college. We were both dating guys at the time, and things were going great. Then I had a horrible breakup with my then-boyfriend, which left me spending a ton of time with my friend and her boyfriend. One thing led to another, and I really began to fall for her hard. I didn’t even know I was bisexual at the time. But I fell head over heels for my friend, and it kinda made sense, we were best friends anyway.”
“One drunken night we hooked up… Her boyfriend was there and was very happy to be a part of it, LOL. Over time, it became clear that she and I were not a one-time thing. We had a very open talk with him, and he was totally cool with it. She was still with him, and she and I were together.
Then, totally unexpectedly over the next year he and I became much closer. I fell hard for him too. We talked a lot and ended up trying all three of us together. It was amazing and our chemistry between all of us was off the charts.
We’re all madly in love now and very happy together. There really is almost no jealousy now. There were some issues for the first couple of years, but those were ironed out. We have a great time together and are deeply in love. Our sex lives are amazing.
We all three share a bed. We sometimes have sex with all three of us and sometimes just in pairs. Luckily, we’re all about equally interested in sex, so it works out easily.”
2. “In college, I was in a three-way relationship. Basically, my girlfriend informed me, early on, that she was bi and would want to have sex with women on occasion. I’m bi too, so I told her, so long as I could experiment with men, it was a deal. We had a lot of open-sexual encounters at first, threesomes and whatnot, but nothing that lasted longer than one night. We were at a party in her hometown, and she asked if it would be alright with me if she went down on an old friend at the party. I met the friend, and she seemed cool, and my girlfriend seemed to enjoy going down on her. Later that year, we went back, and she asked if I’d like to participate more, and I did, and we had a threesome.”
“I realized, after that interaction, that her friend was way more into me than she was my girlfriend. Soon after that, she came to stay with us for a weekend, then longer… pretty soon, the three of us were dating.
There wasn’t any jealousy. I think, ultimately, my girlfriend liked girls more than boys, her girlfriend liked boys more than girls, and I liked having two girlfriends quite a lot. We broke up for pretty standard reasons. Our girlfriend went to a different college and met someone else. I graduated and moved, and my other girlfriend wanted to go to school somewhere else. We tried the long-distance thing in both cases, but it just didn’t work out.
I hope that answers your question. Ultimately, I really miss having two people in a relationship. It was just like having two of something you really like. We were all cool with one another, and supportive, and shared an apartment and a car and pooled our money and helped one another out.”
3. “I’m a guy, and my best friend is too, and to put it in the most concise terms, we pretty much fell for this one girl at the same time. Only, instead of the rivalry that might be expected to build there between us…nothing happened. It just never occurred to us to compete with each other, and she didn’t see a problem dating both of us, either. The whole relationship is just about as mutual as you can get. I guess it helps that I basically love him as much as I do her, and it goes around like that.”
4. “Wasn’t that official, per se…We never really called it a relationship, but I had an ongoing threesome arrangement in college. It was pretty great for me, the two girls were bi and just exploring their newfound freedom, and I got caught up in the whirlwind of it. Whenever I told my friends, they were always impressed, but to be honest, it could have happened to any guy living in that hall.”
“It started with us all being drunk one night, and as silly as it sounds, we were playing truth or dare. Well, the night progressed, and it was just me and the two girls, and one of them dared the other to deep throat me. This escalated, and eventually the other joined in. From then on, it was just an assumed thing that if we were all alone at the end of the night, we would hook up.
This lasted for a month or so, until it inevitably crumbled to the weight of jealousy. I was very into one of the girls, and I asked her at one point if she was interested in having sex with just the two of us. I guess this somewhat weirded her out, and that was the last time the idea was mentioned. It was also the last time I ever had sex with either of them.”
5. “I’m part of an MMF triad. We’ve all been together for about six years now. My wife and I met online about eight years ago, through playing the same online game. We started talking, and soon found ourselves typing, Skyping, and texting for sixish hours a day. Both the wife and I have histories of not really doing well with monogamy. I’m bisexual, she’s pansexual, and neither of us attributes significant importance to sex. We knew early in our relationship that sexual exclusivity was not wanted or welcome by either of us. Due to the long-distance nature of our relationship, we had nearly as much experience with third, fourth, or fifth parties in our bed as we did with just the two of us.”
“Emotional attachments outside our relationship were strictly verboten, however. This is where things got unpleasant about two years in. I had introduced my wife to an online friend of mine. He and I had always gotten along well, though it was strictly platonic at the time. I assumed he was straight, so I never really considered anything else. A few months pass, and he and my wife get to know each other, and rather intense romantic feelings develop. Once she realizes what’s going on, she and I have a very uncomfortable, downright painful talk that nearly ended us. Instead, I decided to try to work things out first before just giving up and wallowing in self-pity and anger.
The three of us arranged to meet up in person for the first time, and the chemistry was just there almost from the get-go. Once I let go of the fear of loss, our relationship just felt right. The wife and I got married about six months later, and my boyfriend moved in with us a few months after that. We’ve been together ever since, and plan to stay that way.
We all sleep in the same king-sized bed, and though we’ve tried group sex a few times, we find it’s easier to manage one-on-one. I haven’t felt jealousy in years now, other than a few twinges of envy when work schedules have prevented me from spending time with each of them as much as I’d like. I can’t even wrap my brain around the idea of being jealous of the two of them. They are the two people I love most in this world, and when the people I love most do things to make each other happy, I can only feel ecstatic.”
6. “My wife and I got married before we were really familiar with the concept. The idea of being polyamorous started after my wife came out to me as bisexual. I knew that she’d kinda missed out on the chance to experience that part of her sexuality, thanks to years of conservative Christian teaching, and wanted her to be fully herself. That developed, along with some reading on the subject, into a shared philosophy that love is infinite: just as a parent doesn’t love their first child any less by having a second, so lovers need not love each other any less by having other relationships.”
“So we both have OKCupid accounts, and currently I have a girlfriend, and my wife is seeing a new guy, and has a…relationship-on-hiatus (?) with a woman who’s quite important to both of us. We both know each other’s people (that’s important to us), and there has been some sexual interaction between her female partner and me, as well as her female partner’s male primary partner and my wife.
As for jealousy…there has been some, but it’s primarily about limited time available, rather than fearing that I’m losing her or vice versa. It’s been totally feasible to deal with, though. We’ve learned to communicate so much better than we could before, and we both feel quite fulfilled with our situation.”
7. “I was monogamous most of my life, but maybe two years ago, I dated a poly girl. I remained monogamous. She had several other boyfriends, at least a couple of whom I met. To my surprise, I was totally cool with it. Some time later, we broke up, and I moved on to a really bad monogamous relationship. When that ended horribly, I realized that that other person’s problem would have been no problem if we’d gone into the thing non-monogamously.”
“Anyway, my realization that this would have been a workable relationship if communication about other connections had been free and open really changed my perspective, and I began to see elements in my own personality that were in alignment with open, honest, ethical non-monogamy. That’s where all parties are fully informed, ideally have at least become acquainted, even if virtually. No secrets about relationships need to be kept.
I contacted her, told her I’d come around to her way of thinking. And just like that, I was non-monogamous. She and I (slowly) began dating, around the time I started also dating several other women, all of whom knew I dated others, and that I actually expected that they would (date others) too.
We go for loving, close, and supportive relationships, but we do it with several people (apart from one another). We don’t live together (any of us). But I have dated girls from married or committed couples, as long as I could (usually) meet their S.O. first, to assure they were on board.
So, at one point, I had four mostly regular girlfriends, two of whom were monogamous to me (but knew), one of whom was interested in non-monogamy, the other not, but neither ever did anything non-monogamous while we were together.”
8. “I spent a lot of my life being not-quite-monogamous. I was never quite able to do the whole ‘exclusive monogamy’ thing, where love and sex and intimacy and attraction all zeroed in on the one person I was dating. Inevitably, I’d find myself attracted to other people — not because of any problem with my standing relationship, mind, just because there’s a world of attractive people out there.”
“This means for a good chunk of my dating life, I thought there was something wrong with me. After all, we have words for this stuff–I was someone who ‘couldn’t settle down,’ or had ‘commitment issues.’ I assumed that if I could only be better, I’d stop having feelings for other people.
Eventually, I learned that open relationships weren’t just a thing that long-haired hippies on organic-farm communes did, and that’s when I started thinking really seriously about actually making that a part of my next relationship. As luck would have it, soon afterward, a good friend and I started dating, and we agreed to be open with it. It originally started as a mostly sexual arrangement, where we could sleep with other people but not develop feelings for them, but as it turns out, setting limits on emotions is a difficult thing to do, and we eventually scrapped that idea, moving comfortably into what we call a polyamorous arrangement.
In poly communities, everyone has a different way of doing things, so here’s mine. I’m dating my girlfriend, and she and I live together. Each of us is free to develop other sexual, intimate, and/or loving relationships as we see fit, and we’ve done so. So far, we’ve each done so with separate people (her partners are not my partners), and though I’m not categorically opposed to the idea of both dating the same person, in practice, that’s not how it’s turned out.
Is there any jealousy? Well, yeah. Especially at the beginning of the relationship, I fought with jealousy a lot. No surprise — I was working on undoing decades of socialization that said exclusivity was the same thing as love, that the only way to be special was to be unparalleled. With time and practice, I mostly got over that, and although I do feel jealous occasionally these days, I don’t view it as a terrible crisis that spells doom for the relationship, just a signal that I feel insecure about something and need to further unpack and deal with those feelings.”
9. “I live with my wife, our partner, and our three children. My wife has been poly since she was a teen. When she met me, I wasn’t comfortable with that, so we negotiated a monogamous relationship and got married. We had a fairly conventional mono marriage for about 10 years until I realized I had fallen in love with a good friend of mine, whom I had met very shortly after meeting my wife. My friend and I were exceedingly correct and conscientious with each other (she was poly but really respected my marriage and life I had made), I don’t think we even so much as hugged each other in all that time. Eventually, things just came to a head, and I told my friend how I felt about her. She said the feeling was mutual, and then I had a talk with my wife about what to do about it. Her response was that I should go for it, that she and I were solid, and she was delighted that my friend was also interested in me. She had seen it coming for a long while.
“Well, we dated for about six months before we broke up. It wasn’t really anybody’s fault, and we remained friends and in love with each other. We were in very different stages of our lives, and her life goals don’t really mesh well with mine. BUT, the world didn’t end… my marriage was, if anything, stronger than ever, and after the hurt died down, we dated here and there. We met our partner almost three years ago. She’s the first person we’ve mutually been attracted to, and we dated as a triad from the very beginning. We’ve been living together for two years now and are committed to each other in every way. My wife and I have two children with each other, and we help co-parent our partner’s adopted daughter.
We don’t share a bed for sleeping purposes, for practical reasons (my wife and partner are terrible sleep partners for each other), they each have a bed, and I alternate between the two. Our relationships are quite intertwined, not separate in any way.”
10. “I didn’t start out polyamorous. I was about as monogamous as they come. I have done things in past monogamous relationships out of petty, jealous revenge that I am not proud of. When I met my partner, who has been poly at least in theory since before she first began her romantic endeavors, I was monogamous but curious. That began my research on the lifestyle. Eventually, I realized that this was a healthier way for me to live, and that I should embrace this lifestyle openly.”
“In terms of jealousy, it took a lot of processing before I became fully comfortable with the whole thing. I started by examining the philosophy without being confronted with the reality of sharing ‘my’ partner with someone else. It made sense to me in theory. Love is never depleted. There is no finite amount to be subtracted from. The more love you experience and share, the more love you have and the better your perspective. To think that someone else is taking up your partner’s love is kind of childish, to be honest, since no two partners can love someone in the same way. Your partner will derive satisfaction in different ways from each of their partners, and you fulfill a specific desire of theirs that can never be replaced.
When she first started her second relationship, the thing that got to me was the excitement. In any new relationship, there’s this honeymoon phase that lasts for some weeks. They think about them, discuss plans for hanging with them, make playlists for them, and it’s this frenzy that gets you feeling sort of left out. This is bound to happen. It’s key to realize that this is not them replacing you. Your childish ‘who is this new youngest child threat’ line of questioning needs examining in a mature light. You must realize that it is just a phase. They do not intend to leave you. You just have to be patient and be ready. It will even out and become an even sharing of her time and attention between you and your metamour.
It did for us, anyway. In a matter of several weeks, the frenzy died down, and it became a very regular thing. Though we were not involved in any way romantically, I had no problem hanging out with her new partner, and even found that we got along quite well. There was no animosity, no passive-aggression.”
11. “I’ve identified as poly most of my life, but generally had mono relationships. My current relationship turned into a poly one when my partner decided she was running out of time to have kids (a thing that I don’t have plans to do). So, she’s started a distance thing with one of her friends, with a view to marriage and babies. There’s no jealousy here. It might be different if he lived closer. I’ve had other poly relationships in the past without having jealousy issues — but I like (and trust) this girl a lot more than I have anyone else.”
12. “My relationships started two years ago and one year ago. For the sake of discretion, my two-year girlfriend is named ‘Mouse’ and my one-year girlfriend is named ‘Birdie.’ Mouse and I met online and spent a few weeks chatting. Eventually, we wanted to meet in person, so we set up a date at a burger place downtown. I went back to Mouse’s place, we had a little fun, and I ended up spending about a week over at her apartment, gaming and doing the dirty. She joked that I had ‘moved in a little early, even for a lesbian,’ and I laughed it off and went home the next day.”
“We basically started dating after that. The week after that, I ended up moving in for real. About eight months into that relationship, she started dating Birdie. I actually introduced them and convinced them both to start dating each other. (At this point, we were all sleeping together pretty regularly anyway, also my then-current-now-ex ‘Rabbit’ was in the poly-love-pile too.)
I wasn’t really romantically interested in Birdie and just wanted to fool around with her, but I saw the way she was around Mouse and how well they worked together, and I just kinda went for it.
I don’t get to see Birdie as much as I’d like, as she lives on the other side of town (with Rabbit).
And yeah, there’s jealousy. There’s always going to be jealousy. I’m jealous of people’s hair, their clothes, the way they sing, lots of stuff. Everyone is. It’s how you deal with the jealousy that matters.”
13. “A bit over a year ago, I was in a V-shaped polyamorous relationship with two other guys (i.e., two of us were dating the other one, but not each other) for about four and a half months. The other two (let’s call them X and Y, respectively, for simplicity’s sake) had been in an open relationship for almost a year before I started going out with X. It started when X and I were out clubbing with a group of people from uni, we ended up hooking up, and then X asked me out. After that, it kind of gradually changed from semi-serious to serious.”
“Was there jealousy? Oh yes. Even though at the time I knew it was ridiculous, I couldn’t help but feel jealous when X went and did stuff with Y and without me — even though I’d come along second, and so if anything I’d be the interloper, not him. But I made myself get over it. And when I got to know Y it turned out we were both really really attracted to each other, and I would’ve eagerly changed the V into a triangle but X didn’t want us to get together (I think because he was afraid of being excluded).
Did we share a bed? Well, we all lived in separate houses. We shared beds when staying over, of course, but never all three of us.”
14. “One boyfriend has been with me for three years. He and I have had an open relationship for most of this time. We agreed that poly would work for us. He’s had hookups and girlfriends in this time, but nothing serious besides me. Boyfriend 2 has been with me for one year now. We met at a D&D game, and I fell pretty hard at the first meeting. He isn’t the jealous type whatsoever. He’s now dating a girl I set him up with. Boyfriend 3 has been with me for about three months. He’s a bit more needy emotionally, but I love to feel needed. I think he might be hooking up with a girl local to him (we are long-distance), but I’m not sure. As long as he’s safe, I don’t mind.”
—MsLT
15. And finally, “My wife and I have been together for seven years now. Starting about five years ago, we started to play with other women. It started with a close friend who had a crush on us and my high school sweetheart. We just clicked with those people. Over time, we came to trust each other more and more, and we went from threesomes to actual relationships. We’ve had three relationships with women that I think went somewhat successfully, and another that did not. I can say that it is exceptionally rewarding. We haven’t told our family that we date women together, and it can also be a lot of work.”
