As someone who has never experienced ENM and have no desire to, I have always had a question on my mind. My limited understanding is that you have a "main partner" and multiple lovers and i've always wondered how you both address the issue of developing feelings for other people. Has there been a case where you grew to love someone more than your current main partner or vice versa? If not, how would you navigate that? I'd love to hear about this in your future blog posts.
Hi Jung Ha Lim, I'm not the author of this post but I think you have asked an interesting question that I am currently dealing with myself. I never imagined to practice ENM, but life's circumstances have led me down this road and I've leaned into it by reading, exploring, and speaking with people in the polyamory community. In my case, I can tell you that the issue of developing feeling for other people never came out of the blue: in other words, this difficult conversation was prefaced by months of conversations of things that my "main partner" (as you have put it) and I had been grappling with for a while. The topic of opening the relationship and what that would look like and feel like followed after. That stewed for a while until one day someone cropped up and I spoke with my partner about the possibility of exploring something with that person with the understanding and constant affirmation that there was room to flat out say "no, I don't like that", which brings us to this post's section on Compassionate Communication. I don't think that ENM would be possible without compassionate communication. I'm not sure how "orthodox" or "unorthodox" the way I went about it is, but my understanding is that as long as the communication comes from a place of love, care, and respect for your partner as a complete and whole person with/without you, then there is no right or wrong way to go about it, but I could be wrong. I am also learning continuously. I hope this insight helps!
Thank you for your post, it was very insightful and I totally agree with the part on Compassionate Communication. There were so many sentences that I wanted to highlight and keep for myself and for that- thank you! I think the take home message for me was really that negotiations are an ongoing process and that rules/boundaries/agreements might be different for each couple and triad, etc, and that's okay. As far as Jonah Hill goes, I think his patronizing tone and wording were unfortunate. Had he stated that he had respect for her, her career, and her way of doing things, but that he would bow out because her way of doing things weren't things that he was comfortable with due to where he was in life, the conversation would have looked a lot different.
As someone who has never experienced ENM and have no desire to, I have always had a question on my mind. My limited understanding is that you have a "main partner" and multiple lovers and i've always wondered how you both address the issue of developing feelings for other people. Has there been a case where you grew to love someone more than your current main partner or vice versa? If not, how would you navigate that? I'd love to hear about this in your future blog posts.
Hi Jung Ha Lim, I'm not the author of this post but I think you have asked an interesting question that I am currently dealing with myself. I never imagined to practice ENM, but life's circumstances have led me down this road and I've leaned into it by reading, exploring, and speaking with people in the polyamory community. In my case, I can tell you that the issue of developing feeling for other people never came out of the blue: in other words, this difficult conversation was prefaced by months of conversations of things that my "main partner" (as you have put it) and I had been grappling with for a while. The topic of opening the relationship and what that would look like and feel like followed after. That stewed for a while until one day someone cropped up and I spoke with my partner about the possibility of exploring something with that person with the understanding and constant affirmation that there was room to flat out say "no, I don't like that", which brings us to this post's section on Compassionate Communication. I don't think that ENM would be possible without compassionate communication. I'm not sure how "orthodox" or "unorthodox" the way I went about it is, but my understanding is that as long as the communication comes from a place of love, care, and respect for your partner as a complete and whole person with/without you, then there is no right or wrong way to go about it, but I could be wrong. I am also learning continuously. I hope this insight helps!
Thank you for your post, it was very insightful and I totally agree with the part on Compassionate Communication. There were so many sentences that I wanted to highlight and keep for myself and for that- thank you! I think the take home message for me was really that negotiations are an ongoing process and that rules/boundaries/agreements might be different for each couple and triad, etc, and that's okay. As far as Jonah Hill goes, I think his patronizing tone and wording were unfortunate. Had he stated that he had respect for her, her career, and her way of doing things, but that he would bow out because her way of doing things weren't things that he was comfortable with due to where he was in life, the conversation would have looked a lot different.