Do we have limited romantic energy?

Advice #43

Welcome to the 43rd advice column. This week, one person believes that it’s impossible to date multiple people and still have the same amount of emotional energy for your original partner.

Even though this is a quite “standard” polyamory question, it made me reflect honestly on my own experience, which is a little more complex than I’d realized.

Another asker wants to move out from their shared home with their polycule (group of connected partners and friends) and feels torn about it.

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I want to move out. Help!

I moved in with my polycule and now I long for a place by myself and don’t know how to navigate my feelings about this anymore because I feel like I failed “my people”

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Take a deep breath. Now how does it feel to just say that out loud?

Good?

Well it’s going to feel even better when you finally tell your polycule.

You didn’t fail anyone.

It totally makes sense you want to live alone. A lot of people want this. As a free spirit, I love being able to do my own thing, bounce around, feel like a free agent ready to connect with anyone or do anything. I could 100% understand why living among the people you are closest to and see anyway all the time could feel suffocating.

The good news is if anyone should be understanding of not wanting to live immersed with the group, it’s polyamorous people.

In the mainstream dating world, saying you don’t want to live together anymore is like saying, you don’t like someone “enough.” It means you don’t want to advance together on the relationship escalator towards marriage and kids and being together forever.

Saying you want to move out is essentially a death sentence for the relationship.

But in non-monogamy — or in any relationship that has exited that paradigm and doesn’t subscribe to the “normal rules” of relationships — it doesn’t have to mean that.

It just means you want something different. Which all poly people do already.

As a polyamorous person, you’ve stepped out of the paradigm, which means you can finally design a relationship that serves you and your needs.

That’s the whole point of this!

So if you find that after having been brave enough to leave the paradigm, you’re getting sucked into someone else’s version of a “perfect relationship,” then really you might as well just go back to monogamy because you’ve totally missed the point.

You have the power to have any type of relationship or living situation or family dynamic that you chose.

You could live alone or with others, declare yourself solo poly or not, get married or stay unmarried, not have kids or have kids with two different people who all live together. You have a choice.

Now I understand you’re afraid to disappoint the group by telling them this. And you probably will.

Just because theoretically poly people should be more open to you not wanting to live together, doesn’t mean they will be.

But trust me, you’ll set yourself up for more pain and trouble and conflict if you just grin and bear it, pretend it’s all good, when it’s not.

You don’t want this. And guess what? It’s amazing that you were able to figure that out. You tried something new and different and brave and it wasn’t for you. Now you know.

So don’t wait. Tell them.

And a tip for decreasing the disappointment level.

Speak to each person individually about this, explaining your choice and also what you appreciate about them, reassuring them you still want to remain in the polycule (if that’s the case).

Also discuss in more detail, probably with each individual separately as well as with the whole group, what this means for your relationship(s).

The main risk here is that your polycule will see this as a sign that you don’t want to be part of their lives at all anymore. So your job is to show them that’s not true.

Make sure they know you still care about them or love them if that’s the case.

This is an opportunity to build a stronger bond by being vulnerable and showing them who you are and still being loved for it.

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Will I run out of romantic energy by being CNM?

To me it feels like we only have a finite amount of emotional capacity to be deeply romantically involved with people. I don’t think I would be a particularly “good“ and attentive partner if I was seeing 7 people.

I think even seeing 1 person outside the relationship seems to change the amount of emotional energy you’re able to offer your partner.

I just wondered what you would say to that?

Because that’s my main concern with polyamory, is that emotional investment and availability decreases when seeing other people. Assuming you want to also otherwise live a full life with hobbies and friends and family and other responsibilities.

To me it feels like a threat to building a meaningful relationship if you’re dispersing your emotional/romantic energy too thin.

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In general, I agree with you. We do only have a finite amount of energy and time. So at a certain point, if we’re dating too many people, we get to a point of what the polyamorous community calls poly-saturation.

We have enough partners, and we simply do not have more time or energy for anyone else.

For some people, poly-saturations happens when they are dating just one person. For others poly-saturation happens with four partners.

(Side note: You use the example of seven partners but personally I’ve never met anyone with more than three and most poly people I’ve met only have one other partner if any. I’m certain there’s someone out there with seven partners but that’s not what’s going on 99.99% of the time.)

So back to your question: Does your ability to have meaningful relationships fall with every new person you add?

First, I’ll give you the official polyamory answer and then I’ll give you my own real take.