I (M42) live in a rural conservative area and there isn’t much I can do to leave, it’ll be a good 8 years more before I can even think about it (children’s needs). My partner and I got into the swinging lifestyle 6 years ago but over time we’ve seen how we aren’t so much a fit for that. We’ve recently decided to have poly relationships. We’ve always been familiar with poly (reading about poly together is what opened our minds and then opened our marriage) but we didn’t go the poly route at first as it was a lot on us at the time with small children. Swinging was useful for adjusting to being open.

Since I’m in a rural conservative area I’ll need to rely on dating apps and drive 1 to 2 hours to larger cities to date a secondary person. Is this normal and acceptable in the poly world or do I have unrealistic expectations of a secondary person to put up with the distance issue when they have plenty of other possible partners nearby? I’d guess people in more populated areas don’t want to date someone far away (2 hours max) so it makes me feel like I’m kidding myself that this could work for a married poly man in my situation. Am I being unreasonable in my thinking? I could use some advice on how to approach this and if you have any encouragement I’ll take that too.

Edit: used the wrong lingo. NP doesn’t mean non-primary. I get that now.