Navigating Open Relationships

I haven’t been sleeping well for a few weeks. I’ve also had a dry cough – messed up throat chakra – and have been meeting a new person off of Tinder every day.

Last night’s terrible under-washed date finally tipped it for me. Something in my open relationship wasn’t doing it, or I wouldn’t be Tindering the same way I did before we got together.

I spent three hours fighting internally – knowing exactly how the script would play out if I texted him. Knowing he wouldn’t have anything new to say – knowing that I would feel needy and bewildered at my own seeming tendency to fight imaginary dragons.

Lots of chocolate and freak out dancing later – I got to work and Googled open relationships. A colleague who is in one shared with me a few weeks ago that open relationships aren’t all fun and games, and come with their unique challenges. This didn’t resonate much at the time – and as is typical with resistance,* I found that it suddenly made sense to me when I was ready for it, i.e. last night.

This hugely useful article helped me make sense of what was going on with me and my baby. I was looking for emotional commitment and space to experiment physically – he was looking for emotional singledom and some amount of physical and emotional intimacy to the extent that physical proximity allowed it.

I’ve tried many models of relationships. Purely platonic; purely platonic and emotionally wedded; super casual; casual and physically intimate; emotionally and physically intimate both; a full blown committed relationship and now two kinds of open relationships.

I’m happy to keep trying, and to see what works for me, because the bottomline is that I want emotional and physical intimacy. I need one person in my life who knows my bodymindsoul and who I can trust with my life.

I’ll wait.

Meanwhile, there’s art, music, work, coffee, food, Juno (my bike) and half loves 🙂

*resistance is a concept we use in psychodynamic theory and unsurprisingly, in theta healing as well. It refers to the unconscious lack of readiness to accept an ‘external’ manifestation of ‘internal’ reality. It basically means you aren’t ready to hear a harsh truth about yourself

Image by Lexi (Leonie) Konrad. Find some of her work featured elsewhere on this site