One Relationship. Two Truths.

0:00Hi, Esther. I'm calling because I'm struggling to make sense of an asteroid of a heartbreak that's just left me really at sea. and holding two opposing truths that I just don't know how to fit them into my head at the same time. I was in a two-year relationship with a man where the connection was like unlike anything I'd ever felt before. I'd never been loved like that. It was just magic. He made me feel alive in a way I hadn't known before, just so special and cherished. And we were poly and both had primary partners. I've been with my husband for 11 years and probably for almost five. And my relationship with this boyfriend was amazing, but it wasn't perfect.

0:45So he told me he and his partner weren't out to their friends and had a don't ask, don't tell arrangement, both of which were things that previously had been hard-nosed for me and made me super uneasy. And I raised concerns about them all the time. And he always reassured me and convinced me it was OK. And I loved him. So I believed him, but almost two years in, he got backed into a corner by his friends, and they forced him to admit that he'd been lying to me and cheating on his other partner the entire time. She had no idea who I was to him, and he was never Polly. It was a mind-bending, world-shattering rupture.

1:27it completely upended my sense of reality and there had been just so much lying and emotional manipulation and I was just in shock but I couldn't walk away I couldn't bear the thought of losing that love and I was just so confounded and I clung to my boyfriend and also held him at an arm's length and you know he tried to break down the walls and delusional thinking that led him to do this and there was growth, there was healing, but the shadow of what he'd done never truly left for me. And eventually I caught him in another lie and finally ended the relationship. And that was two months ago. And I still feel so at sea.

2:17I experienced this deep, life-affirming love with the same person that lied to and manipulated me for a very, very long time. And I just can't seem to make those things live in the same story. I feel like I'm flipping between realities. So my question is, how do I integrate these two truths? How do I relate to this experience that was meaningful in ways I can't describe and also just so earth shattering? They seem to cancel each other out. Thanks for listening.

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4:37We can start with what comes flooding out, or we can start with you giving me just a little bit of background on your relationship with this man, your marriage your yeah decisions around polyamory and your choices around polyamory I think that if I have a little bit more context it'll help me help you yeah of course okay so my husband and I have been together for 11 years married for eight and poly for for almost five we started polyamory you know I feel like as many people did kind of coming out of the pandemic kind of looking around at the world and being like oh my god there's we were so shut off from the world for so long now I want to be even more opened up to it and started the process as like a casual experiment.

5:39Mutual? Mutual. Me leading the charge. And we started the process right away with a relationship therapist to kind of, because we had a good relationship. Everything was going well. We didn't want to blow it up. So we started by finding a relationship therapist who specializes in non-monogamy and reading some of the books and things like that, and did it very slowly and gradually. And then eventually it did get to a point of polyamory more than just an open relationship or non-monogamy. You said we had a good relationship. Is it had or is it also have? Have. Yeah, it's definitely have. My husband is my rock, my home person, complete sense of stability and security.

6:31And through the breakup process with my boyfriend after this betrayal, that definitely was difficult for my husband and I as well. That was a huge upheaval as far as like what he thought I should do versus what I did and how, you know, different, you know better than anyone, how intensely people react to infidelity and the strong feelings that people have about it. And so, yeah, that was extremely complicated. It's extremely complicated to deal with an infidelity within the relationship, even more complicated to deal with it with multiple intensely attached relationships. But we managed to work our way through that.

7:15And he, even through his struggling with it, supported me the whole time. And I'm deeply grateful for how he pushed through what was, he was fighting his instincts to let me move through this in the way that he saw that I had to. You know all the characters and you know all the details of the plot. But I don't want to make any false assumptions. So when you say the infidelity, is it the infidelity of your boyfriend with his wife of which you became a lover that you didn't know you were? Yes. A secret lover, a secret lover that you didn't know you were. Yes, that is the infidelity that I'm referring to.

8:03When I found out about it, obviously my world was completely shattered. but I was just, I feel like I froze in time. I did not know how to react. It was like looking into a mirror and moving my hand. And in the mirror, my hand was not moving. That was the level of dissonance that it created in my head. I did not know how to move forward at all. And of course, my husband was like, so you're never going to talk to him again, obviously. And I was like, oh, I don't know what I'm going to do. I can barely breathe. How did you find out? So my boyfriend and his girlfriend, midway through last summer, broke up.

8:54And it was told to me that the primary reason why they were in secret about being poly was because of her wishes. And then so when they broke up a few weeks later, I started asking, okay, now that you're no longer together, can we please be out? I would love to meet your friends. I'd love to meet your community. Any struggle that we had had throughout our relationship was based around the secrecy. I was uncomfortable with it the entire time. And so now that the girlfriend was no longer in the picture, I started asking if we could open up. And so he told me, yes, I want to do that. I want to be open to my friends.

9:32I want to be out. I want people to know about this. I want you to meet my community. I'll start telling them. So he started to tell his friends that he had been poly the whole time and hadn't told them and they didn't know. And in the process of having these discussions, it started to go on for a long time, longer than I thought made sense. So I started to ask questions and be confused, which was a theme throughout our relationship. And what ended up happening was that while he was telling the friends this, that he had been Polly the whole time, they went to the ex-girlfriend and basically said to her, hey, we know about Polly.

10:14We know that you don't have really anyone to talk to about this. So we'd love to be able to support you. And so anything you want to talk about, we're here for you. And her response to this was, what are you talking about? I'm not Polly. I have no idea what you're talking about. And so the friends found out that he had been lying to his girlfriend the whole time and forced him to come tell me the truth. Okay. And what did he actually reveal? He told me, I lied to you. She doesn't know. She hasn't known the whole time. we were never poly. I was cheating on her. And I'm so sorry. At least that was clear.

11:05That was very clear. Yeah. He was backed into a corner and had no choice. And he never tried to deny it or make it less than it was to me. He did deny it and make it less than it was to people in his community. because when I was put in touch with the girlfriend and I was put in touch with many of the friends and we had long discussions, he had told them we had only been together, oh, we'd only been together one month, we'd only been together two months, all of these like minimizing things. But of course, now that I was in touch with them, I was gonna answer any question that any of them had. And I did meet up with the girlfriend the next day.

11:46She reached out to me and was like, I would really love an opportunity to talk with you. Like, I don't blame you at all. I know that it was not. You didn't know. And you've been deceived just as I've been deceived. But I find it would be really helpful for me to be able to talk with you and understand timing and understand the truth because I don't believe anything he says. And I said, of course, of course, I will meet with you and tell you anything you want to know. I am so sorry. I can't believe that this happened. And so we spent four hours together and I answered all of her questions and had to tell her so many things she didn't know.

12:19Had to tell her it was two years. There were vacations together. There were like it was it was a full, intense, loving relationship. There was also apparently this entire charade happening. And that's where I am having the biggest difficulty. because... But there may be another story. There may be actually not just there is the truth of what he told me and the lies of what he told me, but there is also potentially a third story, which is, and he too had real feelings for you, and he lied. That's what I believe to be true. Meaning that the relationship that you had you know, may not have been, the charade is all the lies that made this thing possible, and the deception and the duplicity and the violation of trust and the betrayal.

13:23Yes. And then there is, did what we've lived together, what we said to each other, what we felt together, is there any truth to that? Was I deceived just around the poly and the arrangement that he had with his girlfriend and the fact that I was illicit and secret? Or was I deceived also in the feelings that I thought he had for me? Yeah. This one, Esther, I never doubted. Okay. I never doubt the intensity of his feeling and mine and the reality, the intense unmatched reality of the love that was there. I never doubted that part. Good. The part that is impossible for me to fit in my head at the same time is the other parts of him, the other things he was doing at the same time, the ways that he was manipulating me, the ways that he had so little self-awareness afterward in how people would react to him.

14:37and the ways in which he was just so blind to how deeply he'd hurt so many people and how much in the right every single one of those people were to pull away or recoil or react however they wanted to react. The person that I knew was this emotionally intelligent, deeply empathetic person who saw me in a way that I've never been seen. And I think I saw him in a way that he's never been seen. And it's so difficult for me to think about how many other sides of him were behind the window that I was looking into. I don't understand if they're two separate people living in the same head or if it was one person that I just don't understand.

15:43And it's so hard for me to think about now. And I think just, what if I see him? What will I do? Who will that person be? Will it be my person? Or will it be the person who lied and manipulated? And is there not just to the point of what he did? There's one story that gives the scale to it that I think is helpful to understand the level of manipulation that happened. He let me meet her while we were together. and he was telling me that she knew who I was and that I was meeting my metamor. And she had no idea who I was and we met each other and hugged and I told her, oh, I'm so grateful to finally meet you.

16:38This is amazing. It's so nice to finally meet you. And so I met her and she met me and she had no idea who I was and we both walked away. She walked away thinking she was meeting a work friend and I walked away thinking that, oh, my relationship has so much more stability and security now. Now that just the level of deception and multiple truths layering on top of each other was just very difficult, very difficult to comprehend.

17:17We have to take a brief break. So stay with us and let's see where this goes.

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20:20first of all your kindness your respect and your ethical striving is really remarkable just want to put that out there because that it highlights it highlights the responsibility that we take when we make certain life choices and exactly as you say when the cast of characters is expanded and there's the hearts and bodies and minds of a number of people that one has to hold at the same time. Did you discuss this with him? Was that part of the truth-telling session? What was it for him? Why did he need you to meet her? Why did he set up that scene? What was that scene about? he wanted to give me what i wanted he wanted our poly relationship to be true and he wanted to give it as much truth as he could and he found a way to make that happen and after i found out i went into our text history i exported the whole thing and put it into chat gpt and wrote a prompt to extract every single time that one of the keywords that would say he was talking about poly or relationships or anything, I wrote a whole list of keywords that would pull out every single time that he had lied.

21:49And there were 63 pages of lies and 63 pages of him convincing me whenever I raised a doubt or a concern or a question, does your girlfriend know that I'm here? Does your girlfriend know that we are in your family's special cabin together for a whole weekend? Does your girlfriend know that you love me? Does your girlfriend know that the eggs that I gave you from my chickens are from me? So many things like this. And I read them all out loud to him and made him listen to the whole thing. And it was so hard. I have such difficulty accessing my righteous anger. I need to dig so deep to pull it out, to pull out the anger and the resentment and the disgust and I have to pull it out because the feeling of grief and heartbreak and loss is so much bigger and it overshadows those.

23:05And I know those are what I'm expected to feel and expected to express and focus on. And I have such a hard time. And I try really hard to make sure that those things stay. I hold those things because those are also true. There's just so many things to hold at the same time. And I don't know how to look at him in my head now. When you look at the 63 pages of truth that Chagipiti delivered to you or of lies, I'm imagining it could make you really mad. But I'm also imagining that it gives you a sense that you were on to something. You were never totally fooled. you were in a blur but you kept your finger on the pulse for the entire two years something was off yes both because sometimes we get angry at the person who deceived us and sometimes we get angry at ourselves for having allowed ourselves to be deceived and to be able to go back in the archive in the digital archive like you did and pull out all the questions which showed that your intentions never wavered, that you wanted to be responsible, ethical, open, transparent, all of that, and that you were misled.

24:44But it's not that you forgot your North Star. You kept your compass. Yes, I did. Okay. I think that that observation needs to be highlighted too. But then the next thing is, and then does that make you mad? or does it, you know, you may be grieving now and I'll talk to you in six months and I'll hear a completely different tone and a different emotion. It's okay. It's, this is the first one and this is the one you're in. When you say I'm expected, no, you're not expected. You know, some people enter through the gate of grief and some people enter to the gate of rage, but they meet each other somewhere because one needs the other.

25:22At some point, the grief needs to also have its resentment expressed and at some point behind the rage is a sob you're two months you know it's not long yeah it is not long I think I am afraid that if I really tap in to the rage and the anger because I have multiple times I've dipped in there I have gone into that zone and let it fill me and written pages and pages about it and said these things to him as well before we went no contact. But every time, there's a very fast rebound to love and forgiveness because I think I am afraid that if I let the anger and the disgust and the recoil exist for too long, if I leave the door to that room open for too long, that it will erase everything else.

26:29It will erase all of the life-changing, magical experience of being loved in that way. And I don't want to erase that either. I get it. I get it. if I allow myself to only focus on the wrongdoings, on the betrayals, on the lies, on the manipulations, I don't know how to hold the fact that the love, the intimacy, the specialness that we both felt was equally true. And what does it mean when a beautiful, supposedly honest, transparent intimacy lives in the same bed as a packet of lies? Yes. And your question is, is there one I should believe more than the other? Or does one automatically erase the other?

27:38It's how do they coexist? But they are. they do they do you go I imagine that some moments during the day you're focused on one of the 63 pages and then another moment of the day you're remembering a conversation a moment a touch a whisper and you go back and forth and you think how can I go back and forth so it's like there's two questions can they coexist but in fact often they do coexist and people say, what does that mean that they coexist? Yes. How can they be so seamlessly coexisting? How can they be such bedfellows? You know, how can these two so different feelings live inside of me? But they do.

28:30What do I do with it? How do I relate to this? Which one do I listen to? How do I jump from one to the other? It's a different set of questions because they are coexisting. I hear it. You're telling it to me. Am I hearing that accurately? Yeah, you are. And I think you're right. The question is a completely different one. Right now, it feels like they do coexist. And they're like two animals in my head fighting for space. And maybe the question is not, can they coexist? They do, as you said. But the question is, how do I get them to quietly lie next to each other? Beautiful. Yeah. And when you imagine them lying quietly next to each other, what do you see?

29:31Imagine that I met you a year from now. and I just say oh wow I've always wondered what was happening to you after one conversation that we had and I remember you talking to me about these two forces that lived inside of you your deep hurt and anger at having been so deceived and misled by this man who you had loved like never before and you said to me I so would like for them to continue live inside of me but to lay next to each other quietly and it looks like this is what happened and I just got curious how did you do it? what were the steps? how did it unfold? how did it happen? mm-hmm I think the way that I got them to lie gently together

30:42is to not be a third animal entering the ring and trying to wrangle them with the same violence that they were using against each other, but instead just soothing them both and letting them both exist. I try not to let the existence of both of them rile me up. I try to accept that they both exist. and then they exist together and understand that they can lie down. I don't think I knew that they could. I don't think I knew that it was possible. I think I thought one had to win or there was some magic to be done to integrate them into one animal, but two animals cannot be one animal. And I stopped fighting that.

31:53I stopped fighting that. I stopped trying to force them. How? And just let them settle on their own. How? How did I stop forcing them? I stopped trying to tell a clean story of a story that was such a mess. I just let it be a mess because that's what it was. and stopped trying to cram it into something tidy or something easily swallowed by people who ask questions or raise their eyebrows and just let it be what it was and just keep walking. Was there a lot of judgment around you? There was, yeah. Did you have the feeling that people wondered why you allowed for this to go on so long? Why didn't you see?

32:52Why did you not? Yeah, not about people thinking that I should have known or anything like this, but it was more about like I, it took me a very long time to leave my boyfriend after this because I was so turned upside down and inside out and confused and terrified of losing the love and just unable to process reality. It took me almost five months to properly end the relationship after this happened. You said that you finally left because you found there was another revelation. Yes. I don't think, and to this day, I'm so grateful that he did it again because I don't know that I would have been able to walk away without a clear.

33:43my feeling was maybe there is a way that we can save this maybe there is a way that he has changed and evolved and figured out the ways in which he was wrong and he is going to basically reject everything that he ever did and was be this new person this new evolved person who learned from his mistakes and there's something admirable and interesting in that and And so what ended up happening was our agreement at the time was that if either of us wanted to date another person, we would let the other person know. And his part of the agreement was that he was not going to be dating anyone else because he was very not ready for that.