I Tripped on the (Polyamorous) Missing Stair

“And it was the way he looked to me in the eye and told me, ‘You don’t know what I’m capable of doing.”‘

“Something he told me unsolicited—that if he had met me first he wasn’t sure that he would have been poly.”

“For me, it was a shitty, disrespectful and neglectful relationship with a lot of trauma that I have never really processed, and [have] mostly been trying to outrun for years.”

“I would also frequently be upset to find out he was dating someone intensely that I had no idea about.”

“I remember sitting on the top of a parking deck and thinking, ‘I could just be done with this if I drove my car off the side of the parking deck.’”

“I remember having that awkward, like, ‘I’m turning someone down. And they’re not giving up.”

“There’s this whole concept of, you need to be ‘advanced’ to be in a relationship with me… Which is actually, no, you need to have thick skin to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t actually know how to empathize with you.”

“He always said that it was him making the decision, and not because of his partners’ discomfort. But he always made a point of letting me know how uncomfortable his partners were.”

“He put me in a group chat with him and ‘April’ where they were being very overtly flirtatious in front of me and teasing each other sexually in ways that I never consented to. And I’m not really into group stuff.”