When Your Partner Is On A Date With Someone Else

What fourteen years of open relating has actually taught me, written from inside the experience.

I am writing this tonight while my nesting partner is at a sexuality festival with no phone reception.

No contact.

No quick reassuring text.

Just trusting, and being with me.

I want to be honest with you: I had a little tear last night. I long for his cuddles. I bought myself a bunch of self-care things, made some art, called a friend, caught up on things around the house, rested. I have moved through this day the way I have learned to move through these days.

Here is the other thing: I didn't go to the festival because I didn't want to. Not because I couldn't handle it. Simply because it wasn't mine to attend. My nesting partner is in a beautiful season of exploring his sexuality, making new connections, opening into something. That is his to have.

I have my own life to explore in the directions I actually want to go, and am clear on where I spend my energy.

That distinction has taken me years to live inside comfortably. I would find a way to make myself go or make sense of why I was there too, inserting myself for security. I know all the ways, trust me.

So if you are reading this because your partner is out tonight, or sleeping somewhere else, or at something that asks a particular kind of trust from you, know that I've been there. I know the tugs, the struggles, the aches and the fear.

I am here tonight, writing to you.

And holding the hand of the me that has struggled through this many times.

Here goes...

Before anything else, know where you actually at...

The most undervalued skill in ethical non-monogamy is knowing your own edge and speaking it clearly before you have already gone over it.

I didn't always have that. In the early days I didn't have the language, the nervous system awareness, or feel as though I had the ability or permission to say what I needed. So I just didn't ask. I jumped. And the landing was rough, and harm happened.

There is something I come back to again and again, with clients and with myself.

Your healthy stretch.

Know where you are growing toward, and know what it feels like to move there from a grounded place. The healthy stretch is the edge of your comfort, met slowly, met with care, titrated so your nervous system can actually be with the experience rather than brace against it.

Small steps. Slow ones. That is not weakness. That is listening. That is wisdom.

Learning to recognise that edge, and stay inside it rather than leap past it, is one of the most loving things you can do for yourself and your relationship.

Jumping in with no agreements, no slowness, no smallest steps is not brave. It can crash your nervous system. And a crashed nervous system takes real time and real repair.

So before you ask what do I do tonight, ask the more foundational question: are we moving at a pace my nervous system can actually meet?

If the answer is no, say so.

Out loud.

To your partner.

With kindness and with firmness.

Knowing your limit and naming it is not failure.

It is the foundation everything else gets built on.

Anchoring into that will build trust.

With you, with your body, and within your relational field.

What to actually do when the night arrives...

Here are a few options.

Be occupied. Especially in the early stages, plan something. Go see a friend. Go to an event. Go somewhere that holds you so you are not alone with the full weight of your imagination. Our minds love to fill silence with stories when in these unknown new relational places. Find somewhere or someone to be with and occupy yourself.

Stay home and feel it. Sometimes the most honest thing is to stay in. Make art. Write. Cry if you need to. Tend to your body, bath, massage, eat well, and rest. Feel your feelings, listen to the stories, and care for yourself. The point is not to distract yourself from your feelings but to give them somewhere to go. And when you feel them, get curious. Feelings are information. They are pointing at something worth understanding, not just something to survive.

Have your supports lined up. A therapy session the day of or after. A massage. A friend that knows and you can call on if you need. Know your supports, and support yourself. Do it.

A note on booking a date at the same time. Sometimes this really works. Life is busy, calendars align, and it just feels right. But if you are going on a date primarily as a distraction, pause and ask yourself: how would that person feel if they knew they were a distraction? You deserve to be fully present for someone. So do they. Also, a common shadow of open relating can be competitive dating, one upping each other. It's not a nice game to play, and this can feed into that a little, just be aware.

And to be really honest, this is the deconditioning work...

Open relating is not just a relationship structure. I really see it as a personal development path.

Every time something rises in you, every pang of longing, every story your mind starts to write, every contraction in your chest, that is the deconditioning process doing its work. Old beliefs about love and ownership and worth asking to be looked at.

Old conditioning about what love and security is supposed to look like being quietly dismantled.

You don't push through those feelings. You feel them, understand them, bring compassion to them, and slowly align more and more to who you actually are and what you actually want from love.

Tonight I sit with the knowledge that my partner is somewhere in the Northern Rivers, fully free to connect with whoever he connects with. And I sit cosy at home, having eaten well all day, rested, enjoyed my peace and quiet with my sweet dog.

Yes, I miss him. But I'm also stoked that he's there, and I don't have to be, and he's hopefully having a great time, and I rad that I get to have extended solo time, it's so nice.

The ease, even enjoyment I'm experiencing certainly didn't happen overnight. It is the result of years of feeling the harder feelings, doing the inner work, and learning that his joy does not diminish mine. That two people can move in different directions and still choose each other when they return.

I want you to know...

My body has freaked the fuck out, many times. Cried, wailed, shaken, I have done a lot of therapy, I've talked and read and talked and cried some more. I've questioned what the fuck am I doing, cried again, and I showed up, again and again and again, because I believed in my path.

But I do know that through it all, through the learning, the realigning of my security to within me, and learning my own philosophy on love and relating, it is now truly mine.

Not what society has told me.

I believe in big love. Big, wild, free, glorious love. The kind that moves through you and changes the shape of everything. Deconditioning myself has given me the ability to create relationships and experiences that are entirely unique to my way of loving. Not structured by the limitations society handed us. Not built from someone else's blueprint.

Love is possible in so many shapes and forms. I know that now. I live that now.

And that is so cool.

That is the work. And it is worth every single bit of it.

And....... I also now know the structures I need for all of those new pathways that to flourish.

That is the work. And yes it is absolutely worth it.

Something more... a ritual: putting love on the altar.

Make the ritual a devotion to Love itself or to Eros.

Create something intentional out of the feeling, the deconditioning, the compersion, or the ache of your heart.

I do love a ritual.

This may be one is for you, and maybe it is not, and that is okay. But I believe it to be a beautiful and intentional way to interact with life's experiences

Light a candle.

Write something down.

Hold in your body, love or eros, or whatever feeling comes through. Sit and breathe into it all.

You are choosing something expansive and honest.

Tend to that.

What it comes down to...

Know your capacity.

Know your green, orange and red.

Speak about it all with your partner or partners.

Know how to regulate your nervous system.

Regulate it in whatever way it needs.

Feel what is there to be felt.

Try and get some rest and sleep.

And meet yourself with the same compassion and grace.

And if you are in it tonight, doing your best, feeling what is there to be felt, I want you to know something.

That is enough.

You are doing great.

And, if you would like support navigating all of this, the capacity work, the nervous system awareness, the agreements, or the undercurrents that open relating stirs up, this is exactly the work I do.

Come find me at narladean.com

With love,

Narla.