Hi all :)

Hoping to gain some insight from people who have more experience navigating this than me: How do you know for certain being poly is for you?

For context: I went through a breakup in December 2023. Sometime in I want to say February, after being on my own those couple of months and exploring things like dating apps, I came to the conclusion that I was nonmonogamous. I have always been someone who loves really hard and knows how to give a lot of people attention, and the concept of being free to explore connections was really appealing to me. I did a ton of research and felt really solid in my position, and over time I found a really stable hold on my confidence and my worth as a person. In June, I started talking to the ex that I went through the breakup with again, I'll call her A. She, at this point, had two other partners, and we very quickly determined that with the new relationship structure, we wanted to pursue a relationship again; her and I as anchor partners, and her other two partners were each other's anchor. For the first couple months, I worked through a lot of my own individual jealousy, and I thought I had become fairly stable and comfortable. Eventually in September I began dating her other two partners myself as well. Outside of the usual relationship shuffles, it's honestly been a really fulfilling dynamic, or at least I thought.

Now it's January, and the longer I'm here, the more of a shell I feel I am of the stable person I once was. The thought of A engaging in new connections, particularly when it comes to sex, makes me sick, because I worry about what it says about me. I find myself questioning why I'm not enough, why she even wants other people when she has me, why she can't be happy with just me. I'm terrified that eventually she'll sleep with someone new and realize that she never actually wanted to be with me, and leave me behind. I have a long history of...deeply hating myself and struggling with my inner worth as a person, due to a lot of trauma and childhood struggles, so me being an insecure person is not something new and something I am actively in therapy to be working on. But me being this insecure has had her questioning if polyamory is actually for me, or if I'm just forcing it so I can be with her. And I think it's worth noting, I don't have these kinds of insecurities with other people, and I always chalked that up to 1. unhealed trauma from the breakup, and 2. our relationship structure being different than any other I hold, so the stakes feeling higher.

If I think about going back to monogamy, I don't want to. Just the thought of having so many rules to follow and having to make myself smaller makes me feel like an animal trapped in a cage. Being nonmonogamous has allowed me to start undoing so much shame I have surrounding my sex life and my relationship with myself and how I approach the world. I love connecting with people, and there are things I want to experience over my life that I wouldn't be able to in a monogamous relationship. But the thought of A doing the same just really scares me and makes me feel bad about myself. I'm scared she's going to leave me again, despite her pouring so much time and energy into rebuilding trust with me and showing her love for me.

Is this something that can be worked through, if I focus more energy in healing my relationship with myself again and taking care of myself, being secure in my own worth, or does it sound like I'm forcing something I'm not actually okay with just to keep her?