Polyamory Wasn't My Liberation, It Was My Initiation

This isn’t a story about how I mastered polyamory. It’s not about perfection, success, or a flawless open relationship. It’s about the raw, messy, beautiful truth of being human, and the path that cracked me open. I really thought I had love figured out. I spent eight years in a monogamous relationship. Safe. Steady. Familiar. And then I blew it up and I torched it all for a chance at love.

What emerged from that chaos was magical at first! A V Triad with my long-term partner and my new girlfriend! We all lived together. It felt like a dream! And it kind of worked. Until it didn’t.

My girlfriend and I became inseparable. Entangled. We only wanted to date people together. Throuple or nothing. We were convinced we were the fantasy! Two young, beautiful, high sex drive women with open hearts and open minds who wanted to date the same guy. Every man's dream, right?! And for a moment, we were.

We found our “third,” and it felt like springtime in our souls. We lay in the grass, whispered about how we were doing it, like really doing polyamory right. It was intoxicating. So much so, that I left my long-term boyfriend. He just didn’t fit anymore.

But what we didn’t know was that our new partner had been secretly in love with my girlfriend for years. She was his muse, his fantasy and I was a vehicle to get to her.

One night, he looked me and told me that being with me felt like he was being raped. That’s the word he used: “raped.”

I froze. My nervous system shut down. I was devastated. And when I told my girlfriend, I expected her to run from him like I had. But she didn’t. She stayed. She was already in love.

That moment cracked me open. Polyamory didn’t just challenge me, it annihilated me. It wasn’t the cute Instagram poly life with brunches with metamours and color-coded Google calendars. It was raw grief. A spiritual death. The first night she slept at his place without me, I lay in bed and felt like I was dying. Not just from heartbreak, but from a bone-deep abandonment I didn’t have words for.

And that’s when I realized: Polyamory wasn’t the problem. It was the mirror.

It didn’t cause my jealousy, codependency, or fear. It revealed what was already inside me. Every wound. Every shadow. Every belief I thought I had healed. It was all there, exposed in the fire.

Because here’s the truth: Polyamory isn’t an escape. It’s an initiation. If you’re here thinking this path will be easier, more enlightened, or full of endless freedom... you’re in for a humbling awakening. Polyamory is the Olympics of shadow work. It drags your deepest fears to the surface. It burns away your ego and demands your truth. And the truth? It's where real love begins.

My girlfriend and I weren’t just wildly in love, we were trauma bonded. We had never been in queer relationships, never tried polyamory before. We were two women escaping the straight monogamy matrix, gasping for air, and clinging to each other for life. So, we made rules: always date together, never separate. But fear doesn’t make good rules. And when they broke, I broke.

That devastation sent me on a healing journey, not one of theory or talk therapy alone, but of whole body healing. Because I realized: my mind understood everything, but my body was stuck in a loop from decades ago. My nervous system was still frozen in childhood, still terrified of abandonment, still trying to earn love through performance and sex.

That’s when I found somatic healing, not as a trend, but as a lifeline. As a way to return to my body as my home. To feel. To regenerate. To be my own anchor. Because polyamory without self-awareness? Chaos. But polyamory with self-devotion? Liberation! Somatics showed me that healing isn’t a mindset, it’s a full body remembering. It’s how I learned to meet my jealousy, my fear, my ache, not as problems to fix, but as emotions to welcome.

And from there, I found Tantra and Neo Tantra. The kind that tells you not to believe anything until you feel it. The kind that honors your body as sacred, your pleasure as holy, your wounds as gateways. Because loving others deeply means loving yourself even deeper.

And loving yourself? It’s not bubble baths and affirmations. It’s sitting with your inner child, your demons, your grief, your fire and letting it burn you, and not running away. It’s doing the real work.

So now, when people ask me if I still believe in polyamory, I say this: Yes, but not as an identity. As a path. Polyamory is not about collecting partners or proving your evolution. It’s about expanding your capacity to hold complexity, discomfort, and truth. It’s about transforming every part of yourself that still believes love has to hurt or be earned.

And you don’t have to be poly to do that work. Monogamy can be a crucible too.

But whichever path you walk—walk it honestly. With your heart wide open and your body fully present.

Because liberation doesn’t come from the structure of your relationship.

It comes from the depth of your self-intimacy.

And from the courage to meet yourself in the fire, again and again, until the love you’ve been looking for lives inside you and bursts open to share with others.

INSPIRED ACTION: Journal about how you let your relationships be your crutch. They were for me. Monogamy was a way for me to blame someone else for my own issues. But Poly liberated me to take full responsibility for my stuff and show up in completeness.