I talked about how to screw yourself up in a relationship. But let’s make it even more complex — you’re not monogamous. One relationship ended, but you have others. Uh oh… Now you’re struggling to undo a bunch of weird shit that accumulated over the years with one partner, especially if they were a long-term partner and/or a nesting partner. Your other partners, if they’re lucky, didn’t find this stuff to be problematic. If they’re unlucky, they’ve been struggling along with it.
Or we start to get centered and realize what sort of an ass we’ve been to them. Or we start acting differently, so they do too. Or we realize that, as we find ourselves again, they’re not what we want. Or we’re not what they want anymore. Oof. Maybe it would have been a good idea to catch that codependency shit early and nip it in the bud.
Problem is, most of us think that’s how relationships are supposed to work. It’s the societal presentation of how relationships work. “We” this and “we” that. “Our” life. The whole relationship escalator thing. It’s so ingrained that people will tell you that your perfectly functional, non-codependent relationship is weird, or you’re doing it wrong. Or they harass you indefinitely – “when are you going to move in together?” “You’ll start doing things differently now.”
Dysfunctional power exchange is a norm in societal presentation of relationships – “They let you do that?”
It’s not possible to successfully run multiple relationships when you treat them like that. This is part of why many non-monogamous people won’t date someone that has a long-term entangled relationship, or will do so cautiously.