Thanks for looping me in Joe Duncan, and I concur with what you’ve said. People shouldn’t force themselves to like relationship styles that they just don’t, although I do think that a lot of what you are experiencing Anna is your own conditioning and insecurities. Poly brings those all to the surface so that you can get really self-responsible and deal with them — or not if that isn’t really where you want to go.

Recent science indicates that women get bored with monogamy before men do and that women have sex drives just as high, given the right conditions (basically where they aren’t being slut-shamed for it). Up until about 10 thousand years ago, no-one was monogamous and men only became nominally monogamous in the last 100 years. It’s totally a societal construct. That doesn’t mean you can’t choose that for yourself if it meets your needs better, but it’s not a given that because you are female, that it’s the most likely fit for you.

Polyamory has helped me to discover who I really am as an individual outside of the ways that I have attached myself to a man for most of my life (including 20+ years with my husband). When we decided to open up our relationship (my idea) we discovered a way to be partners and not all of the baggage of husband and wife. It took a lot of hard work, but we are now happier, less co-dependent individuals as well as having a healthier relationship. But that’s not a given in poly unless you really dig deep, and more importantly unless it’s something that you really actually want deep down. If you are doing it primarily to make your partners happy, that’s a big red flag right there.

Even though I’ve only been poly for 5 years, I’ve started to realize that I always was, but just didn’t know it because it was buried under years of conditioning.