That’s what’s on this week’s episode of Non-Monogamy Help.

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Podcast Transcript

I'm struggling with a non-monogamous relationship where I experience persistent discomfort about my partner I's limited availability of time and affection. While he has been with his primary partner for 10 years (they recently transitioned to non-monogamy last year), they live together, travel together, and share significant life experiences.

With me, available time always feels like an afterthought—mere 30-minute slots in an entire week. This imbalance has caused me to cry after our meetings, feel anxious about when I'll see him next, and recently, when I was aware he was traveling with his other partner, I felt an overwhelming sense of injustice and inequality in our relationship. I left that encounter completely distressed.

The constant state of having unresolved issues while maintaining daily communication is causing me persistent anxiety. What makes this particularly difficult is that I is an incredible person with strong emotional intelligence, and we connect beautifully as friends and lovers. Our compatibility on an intellectual and friendship level is undeniable, which makes the relationship challenges even more frustrating.

I'm increasingly aware that I might be asking someone for something they simply cannot give me. Perhaps maintaining this relationship that continuously crosses my emotional boundaries isn't worth the toll it's taking. While I don't want to cut ties with him completely, I feel we're approaching an unsustainable situation. My therapist has helped me recognize that my primary commitment must be to myself and my wellbeing.

While I care for him deeply and value the connection we've built, I'm questioning if this relationship structure works for me. I don't see a positive resolution ahead without significant changes in how time, attention, and commitment are distributed. I already take a space from daily communication until we can have a proper conversation about these fundamental issues, as protecting my emotional health has become my priority. Can you give me some advice? Confess I am a little lost about how I could manage it.

Response

So the thing that I want to point out, and I want you to think about going forward, because this is something that I see a lot of people doing, and it's not a judgment or anything like that, but I see people talking about things that are crossing their emotional boundaries, or things that are crossing boundaries, and I see people saying things like, "What do I do if someone crosses my boundary?"

I really feel like that question should never really have to be asked. You should never have to ask, "What do I do if someone crosses my boundary?" Because the boundary, in and of itself, by definition, should include what you will do if it is crossed. That is the boundary. That is actually what it is.

Rules and boundaries get really used as interchangeable words, not just in polyamory, but all around. But they actually are functionally different things. And the reason why I think it's important to emphasize the difference between a rule and a boundary is because a rule, and I've said this before, but it bears repeating, a rule is a sort of dictate, in a way. It's about what somebody else is doing, right?

Rules vs. Boundaries: An Example

A rule is, and the example that I constantly give is if you don't want to be around drunk people, you don't like when your partner drinks, or you feel like your partner's drinking too much, or whatever, and you say, "You're not allowed to drink. You can't drink anymore, or you can't drink too much, or you can't come home drunk." That is a rule.

A boundary is: "Okay, I don't like when somebody is drunk around me. I don't think it's good for our relationship. So my boundary is that if you come home drunk, I am not going to sleep in the same bed with you. I'm going to sleep somewhere else. If you continue to drink and I feel like it's getting too much, this is what I'm going to do in response to that."

So when somebody says something like, "What do I do? This person's crossing my boundaries, and I don't know what to do," when you're making a boundary, you need to think about what you will do if it's crossed, because that's the point. A boundary isn't really about controlling what the other person is doing. A boundary is about what you're going to do, either in order to facilitate the relationship better or in order to create space and protect yourself.

Going forward, whenever you think about your boundaries, you need to think about what you're going to do in response.

The Three C's: Consent, Confront, or Cut

And that's another thing. When it comes to what other people, other grown adults, do, you can't control what other grown adults do. What you can do is… I think it's from Matthias Barker that I learned about the three C's: consent, confront, or cut.

Option 1: Consent

So you can either consent to the situation that's happening. Like, this is how you're going to get time with this partner. This is the way that their time is going to be allocated, and you can consent to that. And what consenting to that means is that you're not holding on to resentment about it. You're not sitting there being emotionally unhappy about the situation to the point that it's affecting your relationship. Consenting means consenting to that. It's what Dan Savage calls "the price of admission." You accept that this is the situation, and some people can do that.

There are little consents that we make all the time in relationships. Maybe we really hate that our partner likes jazz, that's not really a big concession, but you consent to a situation where you're like, "Okay, I don't really like this, but it's worth the price of admission for staying with this person."

And there are ways we do that around polyamory. We might date somebody who, maybe we don't enjoy having children, but we're not necessarily anti-child, and we date someone who has a child. You may not be super keen about being around children, but you might go, "You know what? For the purposes of being in this relationship, if this person has a child and they're actively involved in their child's life, and that may mean that their child is around us both, then I can consent to that situation."

So you can consent to the situation. It doesn't sound like you want to consent to the situation. It sounds like you've been trying to consent to the situation and it's not working. So you're not really consenting to that. It's not worth the price of admission for you.

Option 2: Confront

The second thing you can do is confront. So if there are situations that you're unhappy with, you need to confront the situations. You need to ask for them to change. People can't change if they don't know that they need to change, or if you just sit there and you never say anything about it, and you never outline this clearly. Then they can't actually make that change.

And I don't know… you don't talk about whether or not you've actually sat down with your partner and said, "I'm unhappy with the amount of time that I have with you. I don't feel like the time I have is valued." This isn't necessarily about what's going on with his other partner. It's just difficult not to feel that sense of injustice and inequality because you have that direct comparison, right?

What Do You Need From This Relationship?

So you need to figure out: What do you need from this relationship in order for it to be fulfilling for you? Because, as I've said multiple times, polyamory is not about finding multiple semi-sustaining relationships until you reach a level of permissible stasis. Every relationship should be fulfilling in some way. They don't have to be fulfilling in the same way, but they need to be fulfilling in some way.

So how much time do you need? What type of time do you need? Do you want to have, for example every Thursday night is your night, and that is, barring a deep sudden emergency, the time that you have together, and that is your set time? Is that something that would make you feel valued? Then ask for that.

And if they are in a relationship where they've been together for 10 years, I do think that it's understandable… Dan Savage has talked about this a little bit recently in some of the advice he's given, and I do somewhat agree with the idea that… and I'm very much also like a relationship anarchist… but I do think that if somebody has been with somebody for 10 years, just as if I made someone… if I were friends with someone who had a friend that they've been friends with since they were a child, I wouldn't necessarily expect our emotional closeness to be exactly identical, right?

But I would want to feel equal in the sense of being equally valued, or being given autonomy in the situation. And the problem is that you're not being given autonomy in the situation.

The Reality of Living Together vs. Quality Time

They have this relationship with this other person that they live with and that they share a lot of time with, but you don't feel like you have any control or even any input in the sort of time slots you get. You said it's always an afterthought. It's not an active decision that you feel like you have any control over, and they are truly not taking responsibility.

Now, the one thing that I would really encourage you to remember… because this was my opinion and feeling when I was a live-in partner with somebody… time spent in the same physical vicinity is not the same as quality time together. I don't know if they have children, and that will also impact their situation, but time spent together isn't automatically quality time. As much as I totally acknowledge, and I'm not saying you're wrong for feeling like they have all this time together, because they do live together, and there obviously are benefits of that… but there are also a lot of drawbacks.

It's not your responsibility to manage the emotions of his other partner. I'm not saying you shouldn't care, and that it's just like whatever, but I think it sometimes gets easily lost. From my perspective of being the live-in partner and being told that my situation is super privileged and we have all this time together, meanwhile, I felt very much like we had all of the negative stuff. We got to fight about laundry, we got to deal with bills together. It didn't feel like living together was a super positive thing, and we didn't have… and a lot of relationships that I have where I lived with people, it was actually quite challenging to carve out quality time together. Actually being around each other all the time doesn't necessarily always facilitate the best connection with each other.

So it's less to say that you have nothing to complain about, and more just to remind you a little bit that the grass is not always greener. That grass is probably not as green as you think it is. But you still should confront the situation immediately.

If you haven't already… maybe you have, it doesn't say that you have here… but definitely sit down. Think about what it is that you want. How much time do you want? Express that you want this to be his decision, and that you want it to be an active decision he's making. You don't want to be an afterthought. You don't want 30-minute slots. You want planned, intentional quality time. And that is a fair thing to ask for, and it's not surprising you feel injustice and inequality.

You may not have full equity because your situations are completely different and you don't live together. I don't know what kind of other obligations they may share together, but that doesn't mean that you don't get a say, and that doesn't mean that the time that he chooses to have with you can't be super intentional. So ask for that if you haven't already. That's the confront aspect, because people can't change if they don't know that there is a problem.

And sometimes, in certain situations… I'm not saying it's necessarily you… I think people get scared to ask for what they want. I know I definitely have in the past, so they don't, and then they try to hint at it, or whatnot, and then they end up frustrated and resentful, and that messes the relationship up.

Option 3: Cut

So yes, consent, confront, and then the final bit is cut. So if you have asked for what you want, if you are not getting it after a period of time… and whatever period of time is really personal and up to you… it may be difficult, especially if they've just opened and they've been together for 10 years and they haven't really done a lot of research into non-monogamy.

What I think a lot of people do when they open as a couple is that they kind of go, "Okay, we're non-monogamous now." But then they don't think about the time that they spend with each other and the time they want to spend with other people. They are super focused on preventing all of the negative emotions that they might feel, and they kind of continue to behave just exactly the same way they were when they were monogamous, without really… and then it becomes difficult for them to actually have to adjust their schedule because they haven't put any thought into that.

And I don't think it's necessarily an intentional thing. I just think people don't have models for this kind of stuff. People don't know. There's no social models for how this is supposed to happen. So they're just doing what it is they've done before because they really don't know any better. So I want to give them some grace in that this may not be intentional at all. It may just be like they've been together for 10 years, this is how they've done things, and they're going to have to shift the time that they spend.

The Reality of Polyamory

And the difficulty may be for them and for a lot of people who open their relationship… fundamentally, if you're choosing polyamory and you decide to open your relationship, regardless of what kind of polyamory you want to practice, you are going to choose a situation where you get less time with your partner than you would typically get in a monogamous situation. And they will have to adjust to that less time. They will both have to mourn that. They both have to accept that that is part of the situation.

It's not just like monogamy plus. It's not just monogamy with the permission to cheat every once in a while. If what they want is actually polyamory, it might also be good to sit down and have a discussion about what kind of polyamory they want to practice. Have they thought about the time that they want to spend with other people versus themselves? Have they allocated their schedules? Have they thought about how new people fit into their lives?

And I don't think that every single couple that hasn't thought about this is trying to hurt anybody, but I think sometimes they get kind of caught up in the freedom aspect of it, or they get caught up in the idea of it, and they don't really think about the practicalities of it.

Having the Conversation

So I would have that discussion. I would outline that like, "Look, I really need this time. I need to know what kind of polyamory you're interested in. I need to know how I fit into your life. I need scheduled, intentional, dedicated time." And you can come to an agreement about what that is. You may want three days a week. Maybe he can’t do three days a week. Maybe you get two days. You can negotiate about that and you can see if that works for you, because this may also be a process of seeing what works for you.

What is your ideal polyamory situation? Are you hoping that this will be—are you actually looking for an anchor style of relationship? And this isn't something that this person can offer for you. How do other relationships, if you get into another relationship on top of this, how does that fit in with your life? You need to also come to the table with an understanding of what it is that you want, other than just "this is making me unhappy."

It's also difficult for you to know how to negotiate time if you don't know what time you want, or you don't have the faintest idea. All you have is kind of monogamy as a blueprint, and obviously he can't give you as much time as he gives his other partner. He can't just physically, because he's living with that other person. Now, obviously scheduled, intentional time, as I said, is different, but there are going to be some discrepancies there. Unless you decide to move in with him, which I would not recommend, you are going to have some type of inequality in a way.

It's just a matter of: How can you ask for what it is that you actually want and see if he's able to meet that? And it may be that the consent aspect of it is sometimes about negotiation. It may be that ideally you would have three or four nights a week with him, or I don't know if you get online time, or how this is divvied up, but basically, ideally you might want a lot more time, but you're okay with two nights, you're okay with three nights. Figure that out together and see if it changes.

Red Flags to Watch For

And if he is unable to have that, if he blames his partner for it, if he's like, "Oh, I want to give you three nights a week, but my wife is just too unhappy and I don't think I can". I have very little patience for people who can't stand in their own decisions. Understandably, a lot of people in couple relationships end up in the situation where they're trying to behove their anchor partner, or the person that they've been with for 10 years, and they don't want to ask for what it is that they want. They don't want to say no to their partner. So then they just end up blaming their partner, and they can't stand in the decision of their inability to say no.

Because if he wants to behove his other partner, if he wants to make decisions based on his other partner's emotional reactions, that is still his decision, and he needs to own that. So I personally would not put up with anyone trying to offload their emotional decisions or their own personal decisions on the emotions of their partner. So I would be on the lookout for that.

Final Recommendations

But otherwise, yeah, just ask. Come to the table. Have a little bit of a sit-down moment. Think about what you want, come to the table with an ask. See if he's willing to meet that, and if he's not willing to meet that, then that might be time for you to choose the cut option and step away and find some other relationship that actually does fulfil you.

You don't have to stay with somebody just because there is no reason to break up. Just because it's polyamory doesn't mean there isn't a reason to break up. Sometimes, when a relationship doesn't fit your needs, you can step away from it and go, "You know what? This is not fitting my needs." And even if you're not married or living with someone, I don't know if that's something that you want… but even if it's not, you still have needs, and those are still valid.

So yeah, I hope that helps, and good luck.