My partner and I met about 2 years ago being non monogamous. Shortly after, both our lives got pretty wild. She was diagnosed with epilepsy and could no longer drive and I was in the process of divorce and selling my home. We didn’t officially close our relationship but decided that it wasn’t a good time for either of us to be dating. Things eventually settled down and we decided to start dating again and have been at it for a couple months now.

So far, I am having a really hard time with it. I want to make connections, whether that’s platonic or romantic doesn’t really matter to me. It’s extremely difficult as I feel like I’m trying to find community somewhere that’s making me feel like I don’t belong.

I identified as heterosexual most of my life but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized gender and sexuality don’t mean much to me anymore. I do tend to have a preference for feminine presenting individuals when it comes to intimacy but I have found attraction all across the gender spectrum. It really does come down mostly to how me and the other person click. Because of this, I label myself as heteroflexible/pansexual when it’s asked. I feel like it’s the closest representation to who I really am. Unfortunately, this seems to be a turn off or red flag in the LGBTQ community. I’m not going to sit here and try to claim that’s my community because it simply is not a community I’ve actively been involved in most of my life. It does make it harder when dating though as I feel like I’m not quite queer enough to be a part of that community or even date someone in that community even though my values align with all of it. And that’s a lot of the folks in non monogamy.

The biggest kicker though is the fact that I also feel like I’m just not non monogamous enough. My partner and I have only been active in it for a couple months now. Again, we didn’t close our relationship and we met being non monogamous, we just didn’t date for a while because it wasn’t something that was fitting into our lives at the time. I think we both had very valid reasons. I’m an honest person and when people ask about my situation, I tell them exactly how it is. I have had people straight up tell me that they don’t want to proceed because I am “new” but more often than not, that’s where I get ghosted. And for a community that so heavily focuses on communication, I find it baffling how often people just ghost me.

So what do I do? Any advice? I want to find my people. Friends, partners, whatever it may be. I just truly feel like I don’t belong and that makes this an unenjoyable experience.