The Relationship Trap I Fell into in Non-Monogamy

And Why I Sometimes Feel Like a Fraud

Krys Ghislaine
5 min readMar 24, 2023

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Sun Peaking over the Mountains (Photo by KGB)

I have spent a fair bit of time researching, reading, and actually living a non-monogamous lifestyle, and I am here to admit, I fell into a trap that I have struggled to admit that I was in. Deep breath… here I go. I thought that everything that was wrong with my partnership when I was non-monogamous could be fixed or at least supplemented by people outside of my primary relationship. Why you may ask is that so dreadful for me to write about, and admit to myself? Because, quite frankly it means admitting that I was in a mismatched relationship, and that I used non-monogamy to try and fix it. Which to me means, that I broke one of the primary tenants of living outside of monogamy: in that, I used non-monogamy to be the band-aid.

If I am being less hard on myself, and more rational, it wasn’t always like that. I did go into a solid portion of my non-monogamous exploration with eyes wide open, and completely doe eyed for then, my partner. I truly believed for a large portion of our time together that we were a solid, dream team, and that we were experiencing real non-monogamous success. And I do have some tantalizing tales with which to back such a sentiment up. But, and here is the big butt, it wasn’t like that the whole time. Especially towards the end.

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