I Brought Someone New to Our Home. My Partner Immediately Recognized Him, and Banned Me From Ever Seeing Him Again.
Slate · L · trust 32/100
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My nesting partner (a 45-year-old man) and I (a 43-year-old man) are poly. We’re kitchen-table, and I recently introduced a new partner (a 45-year-old man) into the mix. NP went pale when he saw him.
Turns out my new partner relentlessly bullied him all through middle and high school. He wants us to break up and has made it clear that he will never accept him as a metamour and wants nothing to do with him. When I tried to explain that he’s not that person anymore, NP doubled down and laid out an ultimatum: him or the new partner. I do not do ultimatums, and I feel it’s very controlling to place limits on who I can love. How can I convince my nesting partner to accept our new dynamic?
Ideals and the practical details of real life certainly make for interesting scenarios when they come into conflict. Let’s consider this from your nesting partner’s perspective. The two of you call each other partners, and, if we’re using the standard definition of nesting, your lives are pretty entwined, and you probably live together. You brought a new person into your shared life, whom he last saw at the end of high school after many years of being bullied by him. He had a strong reaction, which sounds like it was expressed in a less-than-ideal manner, and you responded by explaining to him why he shouldn’t be bothered by the past actions of this man, which clearly do still bother him—enough that his initial reaction was to turn visibly pale. While your nesting partner’s next move was immature, and he is absolutely trying to dictate who you can and cannot date while continuing to have what you have with him, I think there’s something a little more complex than placing limits on who you can love happening here.
You can’t convince your nesting partner to accept this new dynamic without either apologizing for your own insensitivity and slowing down enough to give him space to work through his own emotions (and probably doing some support labor for him during that process) and hoping he comes around, or being some amount of controlling yourself through manipulation and coercion or steamrolling him with a “my way on my timeline or nothing” stance of your own or a “we agreed to this set of guidelines and I refuse to deviate and renegotiate even when it is causing you unexpected suffering,” which, whether explicitly stated as such or not, would also be an ultimatum.
Depending on what route you pursue, you may need to renegotiate the boundaries of your relationship with your nesting partner and add specificity to some areas of those agreements. Do you want the right to bring whoever you please to the actual table in the kitchen of your literal shared nest, regardless of whether the person you’re bringing causes serious emotional discomfort in the other people who live in that nest? Your current nesting partner, and most other people, would not accept that deal, and it is therefore something to be bluntly up front about with future partners. Would you be open to some kind of mutual veto powers that are the right of anyone in the polycule, or anyone who lives in the shared home? That might be a dealbreaker for you or for any potential future partners, and would almost certainly mean saying goodbye to the former bully or your current nesting partner. Are you open to an agreement to sever contact with the former bully for now, in the hopes that your nesting partner can process the lingering effects of his high school experience and be genuinely OK with you dating him in the future (though this is by no means guaranteed)?
Decide how much you want to be the benevolent dictator of your life, how much hierarchical privilege you want to involve in your polyamory, and how much equality among equals you want, and be clear about that so everyone can make their own decisions about whether the dynamic works for them moving forward.
My husband recently left the porn he watches up on a shared computer—I suspect because I walked in on him one day and he got flustered, and then forgot to close the incognito window afterward. This is fine; I’m an adult and realize men (and I assume most women, though not me) watch porn…
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