Renegotiating in Polyamory

My fluid bonded partner wants to stop using condoms with his other partner, who is fluid bonded to their other partner. I don't feel safe with that and am resentful of my partner and metamour. How do people manage?

There are two aspects to this question that need to be addressed: the emotional aspect and the sexual health aspect.

In terms of the sexual health aspect, it's understandable that you may feel frustrated by this but ultimately, our own personal sexual health risk can only extend so far. As someone who is immunocompromised and who has been more on the paranoid side when it comes to sexual health, I absolutely understand how you feel.

I have been with partners who have a different risk level than I do and it was very emotionally trying because I felt scared about something happening to me. But it felt equally difficult to try and control what my partner felt comfortable with doing with other people. We ended up coming up with a mutual agreement between us. I stopped any unprotected sex with that partner and instead we had as much protection between us as possible.

Part of me had to come to terms with the fact that if I was going to have sex, there was always going to be an element of risk I could not prevent and that because of the background I had grown up with, I put all of the responsibility on my shoulders to prevent it from ever happening which wasn't fair to me. We put a lot of shame on STIs in a way we don't in other types of risky activities, like driving. While I'm okay with accepting a certain amount of risk, I have a much different concept of risk than other people are going to have.

Which brings me to the second aspect of this that might need a bit of time to get addressed, which is the emotional aspect of it. You're allowed to be a little bit frustrated by the fact that your partner wants to renegotiate terms of your arrangement because of essentially another relationship. If I could go back in time and give you advice in the past, I would have encouraged you to consider how you might handle sexual health when it comes to other partners and to discuss what would happen if you or your partner wanted to stop using condoms because I believe a lot of people place emotional significance on being "fluid-bonded" that doesn't really need to be there or should be discussed when it comes to other partners.

It's unclear from your question if you have any emotional connections to your and your partner being fluid bonded and whether or not you discussed this previously with one another. Did this have a significance in your relationship that wasn't previously discussed? If your metamour was not fluid bonded with their partner would you feel the same? I wonder about the emotional aspects of this because there is some level of risk involved in all sexual activity even with typical protection methods. Is it the elevated risk of pregnancy (I assume) that is causing the issue here?

If there was an emotional significance to not using protection between the two of you that was something that made your relationship "special" over others? Is there something that you can discuss that you can replace this with? It might have been an oversight, if this was something that made your relationship "special", to use that specifically especially since there are a lot of cases where people may want to stop using protection with other partners, not because their emotional feelings have changed for one partner, but for a lot of other physical reasons.

Have a discussion with your partner and consider increasing protection between the two of you if it's the physical risk that is causing you concern. If it's an issue of renegotiating previous terms of your relationship, it might be worth thinking about both of your polyamory "ideals" and seeing if you both are sharing the same ideas of how other partners will be involved in your life.

Consider going through things you both assume are unique to you both and thinking about how they might apply to other relationships. Work with a therapist if you need on some of the understandable feelings that you will have about things changing.

I had an issue with a partner where I thought we had an agreement on what "safe sex" was. We agreed we'd have "safe sex" with other partners and in my mind that meant that any sex was done with protection, including oral sex. My partner believed "safe sex" was just using protection for penetrative sex. When I found out he'd had unprotected oral sex with a new partner, I was really upset but it was difficult to really blame either of us.

We simply didn't communicate about it well enough and it was one of those situations where no one is really to blame and you just have to learn the hard way. It doesn't sound like your partner is intentionally trying to upset the balance in your relationship but that a renegotiation of these terms needs to happen.

I hope this helps and good luck!