reeling one's story

I am a gay woman and have been with a loving partner for more than twenty years. We have teenage kids together. But after many years and some growing frustrations I guess I had started to notice other people. Other friends had spoken to me about their open marriages and when I met R I thought I'd bounced through the door of heaven. We seemed to click. She seemed to understand me and her beauty, friendliness and charm were captivating. She told me she was looking to be polyamorous after having affairs in previous relationships. She said nothing could happen unless I'd got the ok from my partner. I bit the bullet and raised the opening of our relationship with my dear partner. She was accepting (within certain limits of discretion and so on) and I started a relationship with R. I thought that this person was being honest and trying to find a way to live her life without deceit and pain for others...

Very quickly I felt the world shift somehow. The intensity was incredible and all the limits I'd thought I'd be able to impose in my head just fell away. I have to take responsibility for what I did. I responded to the messages that came many times a day. I let my thoughts be consumed by the flattery - beautiful flattery. I felt seen, valued, wanted in a way that I hadn't in years. I knew, and I tried to say on several occasions, that this was having too intense an impact on our individual lives. But somehow she would just smile and I'd forget my anxiety. We had some idyllic times - I thought. And if she did seem to get a little pushy at times then I guessed it was to be expected in difficulty territory. But, over just a few weeks, I had her at the centre of my days - messaging all the time, snatching times to be together.

I knew she intended polyamory and after we'd been involved for a couple of months, she met another woman. I dealt with the shift - telling myself it was a learning process. I was still getting lots of messages and she'd told me she loved me. Meanwhile, I was working on my relationship at home - making sure I kept to agreements about time and communicating all I could. Then R started to see a third woman. She told me this by text when I was away from home taking the first independent trip I had in more than a decade. It seemed like tricky timing but I thought I owed it to everyone to keep adjusting and coping. R then went away for a few weeks. While she was away I was still getting regular messages and I thought all would be ok. But then something happened that felt like a sudden, devastating, change in the weather.

R returned and ended one of the relationships. She was cleary throwing herself into the other with all of the vigour with which she had courted me. She disappeared from the online space where we'd always chatted. She went away for the weekend with the other woman. On her return I asked if we could meet but she 'needed space'. From that moment I no longer received any message that indicated love or desire. I contacted her and she said that strong feelings come and go for her and she was sure she'd feel those things for me again. She said to give her time. I was devastated. It was like she'd just thrown a switch - taken all the loving feelings, all the desire, all the attention and just transferred them to another person. The idea of sharing and expanding, limitless love that is supposed to be at the heart of polyamory, seemed to have vanished. I realised that there was only ever one chosen person at a time and now it wasn't me... But she said I should wait and see what happened when things changed, which she assured me they would!

I tried to stop seeing her but she sent me a message that 'the door was always open' and I ended up responding and being drawn back to a meeting and then a day trip. But she seemed oblivious to the agony I was in. After another online discussion she said she'd decided that it wasn't fair to keep me waiting so we were 'just friends for now' but 'who knows about the future.'

At that moment I stopped and looked at myself and my life. I'd lost about 20lbs in weight. I hadn't slept a whole night in months. My relationship with my partner was hanging by a thread - not because of the fact that I'd been seeing another person but because I was now waking in tears, anxious beyond belief, unable to think about anything other than R and how she could change so utterly.

I realised, like a cold wash flooding my brain, that the whole 'polyamory' thing for her was just a label she could use to carry on with her established ways of relating to people - intense seduction on a serial basis and then keeping people around her who were hooked by the resulting love in their hearts. I realised she had no concept of what love meant to me or, if she did, she just knew that it would keep me there - in hope and at her beck and call. She was effectively dictating her terms and I was so desperate that I almost agreed them.

I didn't. I ended things and tried to start no contact - four weeks ago. I wavered once - sending her an online message, quickly followed by another saying it had been a mistake and I wouldn't be in touch again. She has contacted me several times since - in spite of my stating clearly that I didn't want her to get in touch. I ignored those messages. Then, this week, I asked a mutual friend to ask her to return some of my stuff she has. I realise I should have let that go because it prompted two angry messages. I haven't responded to them either. Her behaviour is showing me that I was right - it was a classic idealize, de-value, discard pattern. And now I'm being hoovered.

I am reeling. I realise I have to take responsibility for the choices I made. I opened up my relationship (I'd never been unfaithful in more than twenty years, btw) and maybe some of you reading will think that I was asking for trouble. Maybe I was greedy, selfish, pursuing my own mid-life dreams at the risk of my home. But I thought R meant what she said about polyamory. I certainly believed that she loved me. Then I look back at her sitting beside me as I shook all over with grief and fear and remember I had to ask to be held. She shut down like a machine. It has scared me half to death to experience that. I have never met it before.

So here I am, with my life in a mess. I felt desperate with grief and self-destructive thoughts for a few days but, luckily, I have friends who have been wonderful to me. Now, a few weeks in, I'm fighting through the dark times and starting the process of working out where I go from here.