Hello, I would love to hear thoughts from anyone with similar experiences on either side of the issue.

I (33F, bi) and my partner (34M, mostly straight) have been together 10 years with some flavour of nonmonogamy for the last 9 years. He was always adamant he wanted no man involved (no issue with penises/transwomen it was and is about a profound distrust of cis men, abandonment issues and fear of being replaced), and had many qualms about starting the journey at all, but we did take it step by step and very slowly. I thought I was fine with no men at first but as the story goes... I wasn't really. Our therapist wasn't really poly friendly and didn't help at all pushing to either break up or for me to accept his limit. I ended up accepting it for the time being, but years passed and we went from ENM to actual poly, which changed the situation a lot. He started dating another girl very seriously and we both did a ton of work to adjust, me and my meta knew each other already and became friends, we mostly practice KTP and we're very happy together.

But this issue of gender limits comes back and rears its head and everytime it's a little better, but it also leads to accusations of me being manipulative (as in, accepting his dating and stuff just so I could say it's unfair for me to have limits) and for now the best I get is "you try it and if I can't handle it I'll leave". Which of course is not enough for me to actually try it because it makes me too scared he won't be able to handle it. He'll be starting therapy again (hopefully with someone less mononormative) in September and he does want to work on it.

I realize even if unknowningly I WAS manipulative in someway by starting with being ok with only girls being involved and then changing my mind, and I even understand this could look like a partial PUD in a way, because he was very clear about his boundaries from day 1. But aren't certain boundaries inherently unfair? I see it as just another way to learn and get better at deconstructing our issues. Just like for example I learned to let go of my own hierarchical boundaries in so many ways to make space for another relationship.

This is a vent on a sensitive topic which exposes some ugly parts of this relationship but of course there are a million beautiful parts, I have grown as a person and my career, hobbies and indipendence would never look like they do now if I had been with someone else. Just a disclaimer to make it clear why I don't want to hear to break up. It would help so much to hear if anyone had similar struggles in any way, and how that ended up for them.

Of course they wouldn't let me post it in the poliamory subreddit because this is too messy :) I hope I can get some non-judgemental discussione here at least, I feel really lonely not being able to talk about this with anyone IRL (because I don't want it to reflect poorly on my BF)