[CW: Threats of harm/self-harm]

I belong to a few different polyamory groups on various social media. A few weeks ago I noticed that someone on one of these groups was having an issue with her relationship. She was new to both the group and to polyamory itself, so I thought I’d offer her my admittedly limited perspective, or at the very least a sounding board against which to throw her current dilemma.

I enjoy helping others; it’s something that truly makes me feel valued. Additionally it was a local group, and we have no polyamorous friends in the area, no one we can hang out with and talk about the trials and tribulations of non-monogamy. I trust it goes without saying that the fact she lived nearby and was apparently okay with non-monogamy held additional appeal for obvious reasons, but that wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I reached out.

She appreciated my getting in touch, and laid out the basics of the situation. I answered some questions and offered advice; we even had a brief video chat because it was too much for her to type out. At the end of the conversation, she said she was feeling better about everything, she expressed her appreciation, and I felt good for having helped.

We talked more the next day, and have continued since; from our subsequent chat it was clear that while our initial talk gave her peace of mind, it didn’t actually fix the issues affecting her relationship.

To give you some background, she and her boyfriend have been together two years, and he recently proposed opening their relationship. What he wanted was to find another woman in the hopes of entering into a closed triad, i.e. a relationship wherein each of three partners are romantically and sexually involved with each other, but not with anybody else. They quickly found a suitable woman, and the three of them hit it off well.

However, the person I’ve been talking to – I’ll refer to her as “L” – reported that it wasn’t long before her boyfriend and the other woman began spending more and more time together, alone, at the other woman’s place. While this was happening, L stayed at their apartment, looking after her boyfriend’s teenage daughter. Picking her up from school. Cooking her meals. Making sure she went to bed on time.

Although the boyfriend and the other woman have been wanting to spend the night together, L isn’t okay with that. She didn’t rule out being okay with it in the future, but for now she has insisted that he return home at midnight. However, in every single case her boyfriend has called at the last minute letting her know they needed more time together, and returning home a few hours later.

A couple weekends ago, L had the brilliant idea of dropping him off at the other woman’s place and picking him up at midnight, thus ensuring he would respect the agreed-upon time. Of course, he called before she left and asked her to pick him up later, around 2:00 AM. Now, I’m no mind-reader, but I’m thinking the boyfriend and his new partner hoped she’d just acquiesce to them spending the night together.

Remember, this guy has a daughter; she’s fifteen and clearly not stupid. Given her father’s constant absence she knows something is going on, and she can almost certainly tell that whatever it is is affecting L in a major way. I asked her if she felt her boyfriend was modeling suitable behavior for his daughter, and she admitted that he was not, even going so far as to say that his daughter had stopped respecting her curfew and other established rules.

In other words, without knowing or needing to know any details about her sexual orientation, if the guy’s daughter ends up dating men, she has been shown that a man in a relationship will frequently be absent, and will also pressure her to adjust her boundaries to better suit his needs.

Anyway, L ended up picking up her boyfriend hours later than originally planned, and while one might roll their eyes at her failure to insist that her rules be respected, she deserves kudos for not giving in to her boyfriend’s manipulation and letting them spend the night together after repeatedly voicing her objection to such a thing.

For now I’ll ignore his lack of concern about how his not returning home at all might have been viewed by his daughter. And let’s not spend time dwelling on the fact that, over time she will lose respect for him for obviously carrying on with another woman, and for L herself for not demanding better of him. It’s worth mentioning that I suggested they simply tell his daughter the truth, that they’re attempting an open relationship, but apparently the stigma would be greater.

One night last week, he brought the other woman to their apartment to stay the night, under some flimsy pretense that L and apparently his daughter both saw through. It was clear that once his daughter had gone to bed he was hoping for a threesome, although L told me the following morning that the other woman balked when he brought it up.

L has admitted to thinking about leaving, which I initially thought was her boyfriend’s objective: Freedom to be with this newer, younger, and presumably more exciting* woman without the guilt of dumping his domestic partner. But when she told me that he begged her to stay when she once threatened to leave him, that made sense too. If I was able to fuck someone new and got free live-in childcare so I could stay out all night, I’d do whatever I could to maintain that arrangement.

*Nothing against L; I’m sure she’s very exciting. But new relationship energy, or NRE, is a thing. Even if you’re not polyamorous, you’ve undoubtedly felt that swell of excitement and other emotions at the start of a relationship. When you’ve been with someone for two years, your eye is bound to wander. It happens. And when you get the go-ahead to be with someone else, you run the risk of getting sidetracked. As someone who has felt that pull, I can attest that it sometimes requires much effort to find the right balance between the familiar existing partner and the allure of what’s new.

So why does she stay? I can admit I haven’t talked to her about that. She’s got her reasons and if she wanted to share them, she would have. In addition to half a dozen other reasons that have occurred to me, I suspect she truly loves her boyfriend despite the fact that he’s obviously a shithead. Which begs the question: Why do we love people who are harmful?

I’ve dated people who were harmful to me. (I’m sure I’ve probably been the harmful person in the relationship, too.) So why did I stay? In some cases it was emotional manipulation: “If you leave me I will [do some horrible thing up to and including suicide and/or murder].” That’s something I unfortunately heard on occasion when I was a much younger man.

But sometimes it’s nothing so dramatic or traumatic. Sometimes we stay out of obligation, or familiarity, or the unwillingness to be alone. Certainly society posits the notion that our worth comes from our relationship status, i.e. whether we are loved by someone else. This is especially true for women, and while I’m not certain it’s true in the case of L, I have more than a couple women friends for whom it absolutely is true.

The problem is that staying for any of these reasons often leads to large-scale compromise. Over time, we’re not the same person we were before we entered into the relationship, and I don’t just mean that in the subtle ways we all change when we’re dating. I’m talking about the kind of devolution that prevents our friends and loved ones from even recognizing us. Gloom. Bitterness. Envy. Anxiety. Rage.

Compromise is a natural part of being in a relationship. Has anyone reading this not compromised for their partner in some way? I’m pretty sure we all have, though the degree of compromise varies. Some people convert to their partner’s religion. Others deign to accompany their partner to a marathon showing of all the Twilight movies. Some people begrudgingly attend Sunday dinners with their partner’s family. Others steal plutonium for that thing their partner is making in the basement. Wait – that might be an extreme example. Let’s go with exhuming corpses for necrophilia purposes instead.

“Exhuming corpses to fulfill Jeremy’s favorite sexual fantasy is illegal and morally wrong. I should break up with him, but if I do I’ll have to find somebody else. And there’s no guarantee they’ll like the same shows I like.”

Learning Spanish in order to converse with your partner’s mother is a reasonable compromise. Having sex less often than you’d like to in order to accommodate your partner’s limited sex drive is a reasonable compromise. Sharing financial expenses is a reasonable compromise. Allowing your children to be raised in a certain religion, or no religion whatsoever, is a reasonable compromise.

Handling all the household chores, as well as providing childcare for a child who isn’t even your responsibility while your partner, the child’s parent, has sex with someone else under the guise of ethical polyamory, and who ignores your emotional needs completely when you actually do spend time together, is an unreasonable compromise.

Likewise, putting up with constant boundary-pushing despite your having explicitly made your opposition clear – whether to being tied up and flogged, letting your significant other spend the night with someone else, opening your relationship in the first place, or even to something relatively innocuous like eating a food you dislike – is an unreasonable compromise.

Of paramount importance is the ability to differentiate between a reasonable compromise and an unreasonable one, or to find the strength to leave a situation that requires unreasonable compromises. Maybe someday L will acquire these abilities, but I don’t see it happening soon.

Case in point: Earlier this week she told me she feels like completely giving in, letting her boyfriend and his new partner just have whatever they request. It takes too much out of her to keep arguing about it only to have her boundaries pushed and her wishes disregarded. I’m unclear as to whether she thinks continuing to live with this arrangement will somehow take less.