I’ve Been Silent Long Enough

For the last two and half years, I’ve had an ex of mine post multiple times across multiple platforms about our relationship. For all of that time, I’ve read lie after lie that she’s written. I’ve mulled it all over every time I’ve heard about it or seen it and decided to just let it go and move on… and then another pops up, and then another, and then another. It’s time to set some things straight.

I did not cheat on her. She’s published this “fact” more times than I can count. I’ve cheated once in my life and that was in my early 20s. I was barely able to look at my then-girlfriend after I had kissed someone else and I ended things with her immediately after. And honestly, I still feel guilty about that over a decade later. It was a shitty thing to do and the person I was with didn’t deserve that in any way, shape, or form – nobody deserves to be cheated on. The interesting thing about this particular lie that my ex keeps posting though is that, if you know me and my boundaries around sex at all, it’s close to impossible for me to have cheated on her. Since my mid 20s, I’ve always required any potential partners to get tested for stds before doing anything that would potentially be risky. Have I strayed from that from time to time after waiting for a bit and getting impatient with someone I like who seems to have pretty low risk involved? Yes, I’ll totally admit to that… I’ve always thought twice about it and always asked the partner to still get tested after though. If it was a partner who was casually sleeping with people recently before me and hadn’t been tested since then, it was a hard no on anything that was even minimal risk. That was the case with the person my ex says that I cheated on her with and she 100% knew/knows that. I was polyamorous at the time. I had that one now-ex partner who was on a trip to Paris with another one of her partners. While she was on the trip, I kissed someone I’d been interested in. I had previously told my ex that I was interested in the person I kissed and she said that she was excited for me and to see where it went – and then four days after that first kiss, I broke up with my ex. Four days, in my experience, isn’t even long enough to get blood work for an std screening scheduled, taken, and get the results back and I wasn’t going to risk anything because those were not only my boundaries for myself but were also part of my ex’s and my agreements with each other. Can I see how she thought that I was cheating on her because my new interest actually stayed the night several times? Yes, totally. Did I cheat on her any of those nights according to our relationship agreements and my own personal boundaries? Absolutely not. I didn’t lie to her about anything that I did nor about any of the time that I spent with my new interest. I was completely transparent about my interest and my actions up until the point that my ex and I broke up.

This brings me to another lie she’s now recently (2.5 years after our less than three month relationship I feel like I should point out) posted about. She said that I was trying to get her to leave her poly dynamics for me. This one is a blatant lie that I don’t even understand how she’s come to the conclusion of in the last two and half years. I never once asked her to leave her dynamics. In fact, I loved that she had two other partners at the time. We were in a long distance relationship and she lived with one of her partners while she had another one up in the PNW I believe. I had met both of her partners – one in person and one via video – and I thought that they were both awesome people. I loved that her polycule seemed like it was full of awesome humans who I got along with well. It actually was an ideal relationship for me at the time because I wasn’t looking for a partner who wanted to live with me or even work up the relationship escalator (live together, get married, have kids, etc). I was pretty solidly set on staying solopoly and keeping my relationship with myself as my top priority. I loved that it was almost like a package deal of a partner and then metamours who I thought were awesome humans.

Now why did we break up? Was it because she thought I cheated on her? No, that wasn’t even something that she ever said to me – that’s only something that she’s repeatedly posted on her social media platforms since then. I broke up with her because as soon as I kissed the person I was interested in other than her (who was actually Nance, my current partner), she started to insult Nance without ever meeting her or knowing her. She insulted her sexuality (she’s been with men and women), she insulted her as person (she said that she didn’t like her energy or who she was despite never having met her), and she told me that me being interested in Nance after only dating her for three months made her feel like the ‘flavor of the week’. I was pissed at her insulting Nance’s sexuality and her as a human in general because I cared about Nance – we had been friends for months before anything ever even happened so we were already close. I was also pissed that she said that she felt like the flavor of the week when we’d never discussed me not dating anyone else in the first few months of us seeing each other and she had actually been supportive of it until I actually kissed Nance. Were my feelings for Nance stronger than I expected them to be once we kissed? Yes, but I still assumed for a couple weeks after that that our relationship wouldn’t ever go past anything casual or short term because neither of us were looking for anything more than that at the time – luckily that ended up not being the case and we’re still together now but that was neither of our intentions going into it. My ex told me that I needed to learn how to deal with conflict and not just run away at the first sign of it in a relationship. I told her that I wasn’t avoiding conflict, I just wasn’t willing to be in a relationship with someone who lashed out when they felt insecure. I wanted to be with people who had direct and honest communication and, in those moments, she showed me that she wasn’t going to do that so I was done. Despite those things that my ex did though, I still thought that she was a good human, who was just feeling hurt and insecure in those moments of insults, and I wanted to try to maintain a friendship with her. She expressed caution with being friends, understandably so because being friends with an ex can be hard work, but was open to it at first. That slowly/quickly became clear that it wasn’t going to happen because we had different expectations of what that friendship would look like because she wanted me to put more effort into the friendship initially than I was willing to.

Also within a few weeks of us breaking up, I had a friend/metamour of hers reach out to me on Instagram and send me a nasty message basically accusing me of being a fuckboy, telling me that I wasn’t demisexual, telling me that I needed to work on my internalized homophobia, telling me that I needed to work on my abandonment and rejection issues, and telling me to do better. That same friend also commented on Nance’s Instagram saying “She’s gonna break your heart enjoy”. At that point, I got really angry because I didn’t know what the ex was saying to her friends to make a message like that happen, especially the internalized homophobia part because that seemed beyond off topic from anything related to a breakup and it was something that I don’t deal with so I never had any conversations with my ex about it. I reached out and basically told my ex and her friends to fuck off and that I hoped that she didn’t become a poly coach one day since she wasn’t capable of handling a breakup maturely or, in the very least, I hoped that she didn’t coach her clients to act how she did. I told her that if she wondered why I didn’t want to be poly anymore then she should think about all of the shit I was putting up with from her and her polycule in that breakup. It wasn’t my greatest moment, I’ll 100% admit that. I don’t regret what I said to her but I do regret how I said it to her and that I did it in a moment of anger. She responded to that message a few days later calmly, trying to explain her friend’s response, that she’d talked to her, that her polycule didn’t hate me, and that she was trying to keep energy neutral and peaceful in the future. She also said that there was zero pressure to respond – so I didn’t respond.

Now onto something else that she’s posted about me multiple times as fact that she doesn’t actually know to be a fact or not. She has posted how I gave polyamory a shot and that I’m monogamous now. From my last message to her, I could see why she thinks that and it is somewhat true but it’s not entirely true. Nance and I have had conversations regularly about how nothing is off limits to talk about in our relationship. We’ve talked about how if one of us becomes interested in someone else or is interested in a different dynamic, then we can talk about it openly. Is that something that I actually want or will want? Probably not. Is that something that she’ll actually want or will want? Again, probably not. But that doesn’t mean that I identify as monogamous now. I know that my heart can love multiple people and that will always be a part of me and an important thing for me to discuss in my relationships. I also know that my emotional capacity for the type of relationships that I enjoy and want in my life now isn’t very conducive to polyamory anymore. When I was actively polyamorous, I didn’t want a partner living with me, I didn’t want to get married again, I didn’t want to coparent and all of those things were really important to me then. Since then, I’ve met someone who I was surprised that I didn’t mind sharing a living space with all the time, that I ended up daydreaming about marrying one day (and that I plan to marry), and that I want to raise our five furkids with – no human children though thanks. But even without those things before, managing multiple emotional relationships – and I require emotional relationships because I am demisexual (despite what my ex’s friend/metamour said) and need those feelings to even want to engage in anything else physical with someone – was hard work and I know that I made mistakes along the way. But with living with someone and being in a relationship that is more fulfilling than I thought was possible for me again, I don’t think that I’d have the capacity for something like that again. Plus, my experience in polyamory was a bit of a wild ride – this breakup included – that I don’t particularly want to get back on because I know the emotional toll it takes on me. I also don’t trust people’s word when it comes to polyamorous dynamics anymore with me because of my experiences that I had but I do know that that’s not everyone’s experience. That’s something that I would need to work on if that was ever to come up in my life again, but I don’t particularly feel a need to at this time since it’s not something that I’m interested in for the foreseeable future. I do absolutely love to see healthy, successful polyamorous people though and support those people 100% because it is completely valid and can be such a beautiful dynamic for some people. Moral of this part of the story though is don’t post shitty things about someone as fact unless you know that it’s true – and even then, it’s probably best not to post unless you’re calling out abusive behavior.

Speaking of abusive behavior, one more thing that my ex has inserted in several of her posts about me is that I was emotionally manipulative and/or emotionally abusive and/or toxic. Any time someone told me that she wrote that or I saw it myself, my skin crawled. The first few times it happened, I spiraled and went through every single message she and I had ever exchanged to see what would’ve given her that impression. I talked through it in therapy for multiple sessions, wanting to identify that part of me and work on it. The thing is, the only message or interaction that I found that could’ve fallen under emotionally abusive or manipulative was my last message to her that I explained above. And I’ll say again, that was not my best moment. I should’ve said those things in a more calm and nicer way than I did. I also could have actually answered her last message, although I still don’t know what I would have said other than thank you for talking to your metamour and I wish you well. Other than that last interaction though, I found abso-fuckin-lutely nothing that could be perceived as that. In fact, I found several things that she said that she has contradicted now or that could be seen as her being manipulative. Examples: 1 her saying that she would never “be low vibrational enough” to ‘hex’ someone and then sometime in the last couple years actually post something about how to hex your ex and in it saying that she had hexed me. On top of that, she had convinced me that an ex that she is now friends with or at least a friend of my ex had hexed me and tried to hex her also while we were together. She told me to block them on social media to ‘protect myself’ from them which then led to that ex that she’s now friends with being hurt or confused by my blocking her and her friends and leading to the last conversation that she and I ever had; 2 as a follow up to that – her becoming friends with several of my exes on Instagram after we broke up (I believe it was after but I could be wrong on this one and it could have been before we broke up or it could have been my other exes reaching out to her so I admit this could be false but it sure seemed like that) and interacting with at least one of them – the one mentioned right before this – regularly because I’ve seen that they comment back and forth on each others posts, and even have posted a photo together despite the fact that they live in two different states; 3 her scheduling and doing a photoshoot with a photographer within six-ish months of us breaking up who I had talked with her extensively about how that particular person/photographer felt like soul family to me and was a super important person to me. Could that have been a coincidence and just been because that photographer is an absolute badass of a human and photographer? Yes, did it feel that way because of the timing? No. Can she schedule a photoshoot with whoever she wants? Absolutely. But again, the timing of it all felt all kinds of gross and manipulative. At this point, I’m sure there are other things that have happened that I don’t know about or have forgotten about but those three have stuck in my head.

Now why am I writing all of this? Shouldn’t I not care and just accept that she’s going to post whatever she wants about me? Sure, and that’s why I’ve waited two and half years to do this. I assumed she would eventually stop posting about a person she dated for three months years ago by now but she hasn’t and I also assume she won’t stop posting these things even if this post does happen to come across her. I know that I shouldn’t care about what someone says about me on the internet, but I’m human and I do. Is this giving her some kind of power knowing that what she’s written about me over the years did get to me and upset me? Sure but at this point, she can take the power of that. It’s messed up if that’s something she even wanted and that’s her shit to deal with just like how I have my own shit to deal with. I’m someone who does care what at least some people think of me and some of the people who are our mutuals on social media are people I care how they think of me even if we don’t talk or don’t talk often. When I got divorced years ago, I lost or pushed away most of my friends at that time. I didn’t tell many of my friends that I was struggling in my marriage. I didn’t tell them about the things that were happening from my perspective that led us to getting divorced. And I didn’t talk to them about how I was feeling or why I was doing what I was doing after my separation or divorce happened. So whether people stepped away from me because I wasn’t opening up or they stepped away from me because my ex wife was opening up about her side of things or a combination of the two, I felt powerless and alone. I realized that I was having some of those similar feelings with this current situation and I decided to do something about it this time. Could I have directly confronted my ex about it? Yes, but she’s shown me over these last couple years through posting lies about me that she’s not someone who is going to be able to have a healthy, constructive conversation and that she’s isn’t a safe person for me to be vulnerable with in that way. Sometimes the conversations we wish we could have just aren’t going to happen and aren’t with someone who can be trusted so we have to take our power back on our own and in our own ways. This is my way. The relief I felt even just writing this post without knowing if I was going to actually publish it or not was immense. I started it thinking that I just needed to get this all written out but now that it is, I realized that publishing it is also part of healing of the wounds that this has reopened for me. Feeling like my voice actually matters has always been a struggle for me so this is a step I’m taking to show myself that my voice does matter. Even if only a few people read this, at least someone listened to me and heard me explain all of this. At this point, that’s all I’m looking for. So thank you if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this fairly dramatic but healing rant of mine. I appreciate you reading and helping heal a little part of me.

Until next time,

CKB