I’m going to break the ice here and seek y’all’s advice and input on a complicated-feeling dynamic. This post is long. I’ll explain brief background, some feelings I struggle with, and then a specific situation.

I have a partner of 1 year who is my first polyam relationship and it’s a very intense, strong mutual connection. I also have a lovely pre-existing nesting partner of 10 years who is just starting to date and is often traveling for months due to work (incl right now). Both are cis men. I am a bisexual cis woman (interested in all genders), though I’ve found it very easy to find men to date and much more challenging (to the point of frustration) to establish an intimate romantic connection with a not-cis-dude; I strongly crave the unique character of a queer relationship at this point in my life.

The newer guy – we’ll call him Ben – is wonderful. He’s sensitive, intelligent, interesting, patient, compassionate, adventurous, generous, attractive, sexually skilled, delightfully nerdy and has great values. A total catch! I love him *a lot.*

Like many folks who are new to polyamory, I struggle with jealousy sometimes, especially when Ben dates other people. My self-worth is very much under renovation right now, which is rewarding but very slow-going, and I am still building a sense of security.

But with Ben in particular there's kind of another unique layer to it, in that my experience of jealousy/envy can tend to go both ways with him, particularly when it comes to womxn. I have noticed that when we both have relationships with the same womxn (even platonically) I find myself battling fear that he’ll have a place that I don't with other people I value, and that it will negatively impact my ability to fulfill my need for intimate connection with womxn in particular. And we tend to have very similar taste in womxn, so if I really connect with someone, it’s likely that he will too. The short/un-nuanced way of putting it is that I think he’s so great that I reactively anticipate everyone preferring him over me and thus that I will get left out in the cold, so to speak, or feel persistently treated like a less important, secondary/bonus option. I’m well aware that this is problematic/ego-driven and I’m working on it. It’s partly based on a long-term pattern of experiences I’ve had being a sort of social “sidekick” to what have felt like more desirable personalities, and struggling to get my needs met as a result.

There is also a specific recent example of this in Ben’s and my history that has me a bit extra-sensitized and primed to see this dynamic everywhere. Most of my closest femme friends live in a neighborhood that’s not super easy for me to get to. As a result, they often do spontaneous locally-based hangouts that I can’t participate in. That sucks for me, but I accept it. Well, Ben recently bought a house, and it just happened to be right in that neighborhood. On the one hand, it’s great that I have more reason to be down there frequently and see my friends. On the other hand, he started getting invited to these local, spur-of-the-moment happy hours and stuff that I *don’t* get invited to because I’m too far away (it takes me about an hour to get there by transit, though 15 minutes on the occasions when I have access to a shared car) or because people assume that I’m busy. A number of these spontaneous events have evolved into the kind of raucous, memorable late-night scenarios that are deeply group-bonding and I have felt so left out and hurt and replaced. I have expressed this to my friends & advocated for my needs. I’ve felt supported by my friends as we’re navigating ways for me to feel more included without Ben being excluded. But, this has been within the last few months, and so it’s very fresh and really augments my existing insecurities.

Flash forward: Ben and I met somebody through our city’s polyam community who we both have a crush on. This person recently expressed that she is into each of us as well, and we ended up planning a sexy 3-person get together for this coming weekend. We are all interested in developing individual relationships with each other as opposed to Ben & I dating this newer person “as a couple” because of the unhealthy power imbalance that can result in that scenario. However, immediately in the wake of us making these 3-person plans, she then asked him independently for a one-on-one date (but not me). Oh, and it turns out that she lives right in Ben’s neighborhood. Unsurprisingly this immediately triggered my insecurities about feeling like a second option/side dish and caused me to extrapolate and feel rejected. I gently reached out to her to try to get an understanding of whether she might be much more interested in him, because I can imagine having a 3-way in that situation could be an ultimately bad experience for me, leaving me feeling like a spectator (disclosure: I’ve never participated in a threesome, so it would be a first, though I’ve had other group sex). She both validated my concerns and assuaged them by sharing that her sexual attraction to men is more immediate, where her attraction to women is a “slower burn” and having a man in the mix helps (of course that’s all valid and OK for her to feel, but also complicated for me), and by emphasizing that she is interested in me and wants to spend time getting to know me and she tried to problem-solve with me to keep our 3-person plans on the docket. I probably over-shared with her about my feelings/history a bit, but she seems generally into that and is an enthusiastic emotional communicator. She disclosed a bad recent experience that she had getting involved with a het couple in which the female partner behaved in some passive-aggressive/abusive ways, which my anxious brain interpreted as “’maybe she’s mostly interested in me as a well-behaved meta.” Sigh. I did tell her that, regardless of our current plans, I’m interested in getting to know her more too, person-to-person.

They had their date yesterday and I am told that it went well, which makes me happy for both of them. But, I still haven’t figured out whether or not it makes sense to move forward with our group plan, and I am still feeling pretty emotional and confused about all of it. I’m seeing them both tonight at a larger group event and I feel so uptight about it. I’m also nervous that if I cancel this one thing that will break what positive dynamic *has* developed/make her feel gun-shy, and that my chances for really connecting with her will be kaput. But I also don’t have a clue as to whether I’d be walking into a situation where I’m setting myself up to feel undesired, which would inevitably bring up a lot of shit and could get messy.

It also feels ridiculous to be feeling all of this because, frankly, I don’t know her that well. We might not even end up having chemistry at all, or it might be amazing and this will all seem funny one day. But right now, I am way wound up about it, and frankly it’s kind of embarrassing.

I’m also having trouble not imagining terrible scenarios where this goes badly and then every time I’m in our shared community space that I’ll have to see the two of them getting cozy, activating my sort of dual-direction jealousy and being too painful for me to enjoy the community spaces that have become so important to me and critical for my personal and emotional development.

I need to calm the fuck down and make some rational decisions about this. I need to manage my anxiety around it (I live with chronic generalized anxiety/depression, but most of the time it’s fairly well managed and doesn’t spike this badly). I’m just struggling to deal with this whole situation and feeling so, so uncomfortable.

I’m here for advice, validation, different perspectives… whatever you have to offer.

Thanks in advance, and thanks for reading this huge block of writing!