Apologies if this isn’t the right subreddit to post this. But, I’ve been on this subreddit for the past week seeking advice on this situation and would love some at this time. For the past two weeks, my bf and I have been going through problems (that I’m still not entirely sure what to make of) so things have been rather tense between us. Last weekend, he sprung on me that he thinks there’s something missing in this relationship and that he misses and craves the excitement of getting to meet new people, go on first dates, and build new connections. In thinking about this, he believes he may no longer want to be monogamous, and may benefit more from enm/poly relationships. I was completely blindsided and honestly hurt by it as we’ve had many conversations in the past that contradicted what he is now suggesting. The closest thing he’s ever mentioned in regard to non-monogamy has simply been that he doesn’t subscribe to traditional monogamous views of relationships. Specifically, that he doesn’t like the idea of “owning someone” (he’s mine/I’m his). But that he wasn’t ever interested in being in an open or poly relationship. Having always been monogamous myself and also being led to believe that he was as well up until this point, I’m struggling to cope with him having confessed this to me. He knows my trauma of having dealt with a previously bad experience of being open in my last relationship. The person I was dating at that time wanted to open the relationship solely to see a coworker he had feelings for after I explicitly told him we should only date people we have no ties to and proceeded to not only do it behind my back (when one of our rules was to tell each other when we’re going on dates) but to continue speaking to this person behind my back after we both chose to close the relationship. This had obviously caused a lot of relationship-based anxieties that have been hard to heal from, and my bf was aware of this and had said he always knew he didn’t want to be monogamous with anyone but was scared to tell me after I opened up to him about my last relationship. Of course this made me angry, seeing as he had no reason to not tell me his intentions of entering this relationship when it first started. His excuse to that was that any time he had tried bringing this up in past relationships, his partners would get angry and write it off as him just being a “straight horny guy”. Admittedly, I don’t want to treat him that way. We both have talked a lot about “exploring ourselves” and he mentioned this being something he feels may be a part of himself he wasn’t previously aware of and wants to do research/ explore what this all means to him before officially changing our current monogamous dynamic. He wants me to join him in this journey, and I want to also see where this goes (especially being a queer person who’s never been with anyone other than a cishet man), but I currently have no interest in seeing anyone else other than him and am struggling to move past the negative thoughts and feelings I’ve been having about this. We’ve only been together for 9 months and would love advice from those who have experience in being in enm relationships and/or have been in my shoes before. (Apologies for the weird layout of this too as I’m typing all of this on my phone)