#the site called it lai jiu but I can’t find anywhere else calling it that

[ah17hh]

I'm in love with someone my partner vetoed via /r/polyamory

I'm in love with someone my partner vetoed

First some background. I'm a 31 year old cis guy with a young son (8) who up until about a year and a half ago was living in a really shitty situation. I was working a dead-end job 7 days a week and living with my son in a studio apartment not much bigger than most people's living rooms (300 sq ft). While it was by no means as bad as what other folks have to deal with, it was rough. The only things that really kept me going were my son, my partner who I saw once a week (they had a nesting partner at the time, and worked a high-pressure job out of state), and my weekly tabletop game with a bunch of close friends.

My partner encouraged me to start dating again, because while we have a loving, nurturing relationship she wanted me to have someone in my life who could be there for me the way that her nesting partner was for her. I got on a few dating sites, and after a lot of weird non-starters (there was one person on there who I'm pretty sure was just looking for recruits for her Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dojo) I went out for coffee with a person I'll call K.

K was gorgeous, intelligent, and in touch with their emotions. On our first date, we grabbed coffee and talked about our damage. I kissed them outside, and I knew that there would be chemistry. That there was something there. I was right. A bit over a year later and I'm living with them, their husband, and their two children. We've weathered COVID 19 together, developed a healthy and rewarding kink dynamic, and are raising our children communally as siblings. I could take up an entire post laying out all of the way that they've improved my life, but that's not the point of this post so I'll save you all some time.

About 6-7 months ago, my partner expressed that they had a crush on a friend of mine in my gaming group, who was newly polyamorous and in an open triad with two of my best friends. Let's call them J. I've had a crush on J since I first met them, when they were introduced to me via another member of the group as his partner. But I had always found reasons to shrug off my affection for J. First it was that they were with one of my best friends, the guy who introduced them to the group. When he moved away, and it became apparent that he had been a big old sack of shit to J, it was because I knew they were in a bad place and needed a friend without worrying about anything else. Occasionally it was simple insecurity ("they'll never be into you, why the hell are you fooling yourself"). Then finally it was not wanting to mess up the relationship J had made with two other members of my gaming group, who are also two of my closest friends. They were all new to polyamory and I didn't want to muddle things. As you folks can probably guess, I have an exceptional talent for second-guessing myself. I didn't bring my crush up to K for the same reason I hadn't brought it up to J themselves: I thought it wasn't ever going to be a thing, or else that it would mess up my friendship with them.

It was about a day after that conversation that J flirted with me. Were were talking via facebook messenger and they sent me a emoji kissy-face. I came out and told them that I was into them, and that I understood if they didn't reciprocate and that I didn't want to make them feel uncomfortable and that I'm sorry if I had. It was one of their partners, one of my best friends who answered after a long silence that J had been running around the room shouting happily. They had felt the exact same way about me this entire fucking time, but like me had always come up with reasons not to express it. In their own words "I'm a huge weenie, and never tell anyone that I have a crush on them, no matter what."

Over the course of my time in living with K, it had become apparent that they had issues with feeling inadequate as a result of hearing/interacting with other partners. They would get anxious before I went to go see my partner out of state, didn't want to hear about things I got up to with them, and didn't really experience compersion. I have historically been understanding about that, and we worked out safeguards and boundaries to help mitigate the impact: scheduling dates between me and my partner well in advance, setting aside time after dates with my other partner for reassurance/reconnecting, and not sharing stuff about my other relationship with K. So I knew that I needed to be careful in expressing how I felt.

I said "Hey, so something really weird happened to me today that I didn't expect. J has a crush on me, and has for a really long time."

"How do you feel about that?"

"Really good. When I told them about how I felt, which I had always thought was silly and impossible they told me that they had felt the same way."

What followed was a giant shit storm. They were pissed because they had expressed an interest in J first, and that I hadn't expressed that I had a crush on J at that time and suggested that I had gotten the idea to express it because of what they had said. I explained that I had always put it on the backburner, and hadn't talked to them about it like I often do about other crushes because I thought it would never happen. In the end, K didn't talk to me for 2 days and called a veto, to protect themselves. I was devastated and angry, because I had made it very clear from the beginning of our relationship that I disliked hierarchy and putting people into categories like primary/secondary. K said in no uncertain terms that if I ever got into a relationship with J, that our relationship would end immediately. So I did what I needed to do to preserve my relationship with the person who had turned my entire life around, and who I love and want to spend the rest of my life with. I told J that it would be best if we stayed friends and expressed that while I didn't like the idea of Veto rights that I would respect her wishes because I respect K and want them to be safe emotionally.

It's been about another 4-5 months since the shit-storm, and K is still sometimes hostile about it in little ways. They get tense whenever I mention J, unfriended my friends on facebook, and here and there make comments about my friends that make me feel as if bringing them up is unwelcome. When we started couples therapy to work on our communication issues, when I brought up my friends as a source of support, she got angry that I spoke about my friend group in glowing terms as "the sort of people who if you're in the midst of a disaster will drop everything and show up 45 minutes later with the tools to fix it". Over the course of these past few months, my depression has been acting up, and I would find myself sitting in bed and pining for J. I've kept this to myself, and expressed it as just everyday depression (which is true, I've been chronically depressed since childhood), but don't feel as if I can lay out the full extent of it to K without hurting them. K has checked in with me multiple times, asking where I'm at with my feelings about J and I've expressed that they haven't changed. Every time I do so, they act saddened and I end up feeling like my feelings are a betrayal of our bond.

It has been only in the past couple of weeks that I've realized that I'm in love with J, and that these feelings aren't going away. I've tried throwing myself into my work, distracting myself with house/yard work, focusing on our kids (I'm home 5 days a week now, taking care of them), I even attempted a magical ritual to sever my attraction to J. All I ended up with were persistent nightmares and a feeling of emptiness. I still love K. I can't imagine my life without them. They're someone I want to raise a family, build a household, and grow old with. The fact that my life has gotten far better materially as a result of my relationship with them isn't the point, it's that loving K in and of itself has changed my life for the better. But I can't spend my life choking on feelings that make me feel like I'm betraying them, and betraying my own values in the process.

TLDR: A crush I never thought would go anywhere for a bunch of different reasons has turned into love and I'm terrified of expressing it to my nesting partner because they threw down a veto on it and I don't want to lose them. What should I do?

Submitted August 18, 2020 at 10:38PM by OkSoMarkExperience via reddit https://ift.tt/3aDB8rK

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