Have you ever felt this? / Poly breakups
Hey everyone ❤️ hoping for some advice / personal experiences.
I’ve been poly ~4yrs, and am starting to reconsider it as I reflect on my mental health the last two yrs, where it feels like I’m always working through one breakup or another. In hindsight, going through a breakup as a poly person was not something I thought enough about. I didn’t fully appreciate how difficult it would feel to work through a breakup while still being in a relationship with others. Nor do I think I fully appreciated that having more than one relationship also means you may have to deal with breakups more often than you did as a monog person. In addition to my own issues, I worry that my grief has spread too much and too frequently into my other relationships and I’m not being a good partner.
How do you deal with breakups? Have you ever felt like you’re going through one right after another? As someone who always used to give myself 6 months single between relationships, I’ve struggled to feel like I have adequate time to recoup. I feel burned out, afraid to date because I just don’t know how soon I can handle another breakup. I haven’t felt the happiness I used to feel as a poly person for a while and wonder if this is an indicator that I should go back to monogamy. I’d love to hear from anyone who has had similar struggles. If you read all of this, thank you very much 🙏
(Edit: for context, I’ve been going through multiple breakups over the last 2 years - some more serious, some not, but it’s still started to feel like I’m almost always working through something)
Edit/Update: thank you everybody for all of the thoughtful replies, I’m reading all of them and it means a lot to know there’s other people that have gone through the same thing. Sending love to everybody who is similarly struggling as well right now!