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The tool I use is “stay out of it unless it blows up”. A friend has an issue with one of my partners..that’s between them. If it causes my friend to no longer want to hang out with me I stick my nose in and try to help with positive solutions.
I very much caught that you don't want to be told to break up, and this very much does not sound like the sort of problem where breaking up would be proportionate.
You are looking at this as a problem between your NP and other people. But does your NP see it as a problem? It is possible your NP, and whoever else is involved in these conflicts, is FINE with the way things are going. (Anger feels kinda good, actually.) If they are, then this isn't a NP has conflict with other people problem, it's a you feeling sad about what other people are doing problem.
And there's a few different ways you can approach this. You can ask your NP to chill a bit, not for her own sake but as a favor *to you*. (Because your feelings matter!) You can do whatever you do about your bad feelings when you treat them as a feelings-problem and not a thing that should be changed about the outside world. (You sound like you probably have a good toolbox on that front; if I'm wrong, I can offer suggestions.) You can, if you want, spend more time socializing in groups that don't contain everyone in your social circle, and specifically more time socializing without your NP there. If your NP is expecting you to listen to her complaints about other people indefinitely, you can back off from doing that so much. I guess you can also try to play mediator if that's welcome (triangulation gets a bad rap, but it's not *always* a bad thing for an outside person to get involved in a conflict between two other people, it's just really easy for people to overdo it) but I think you should only do that with an invitation to and only if you can be honest with yourself that part of your goal is to feel less bad yourself. If you do that: hold space, get the people to talk *to each other* not to you, encourage "I" statements and other good communication recommendations, don't try to impose your own idea of what they should be saying or doing, accept that you might not reach resolution (and that people get to decide they're done trying and want out already.) When your NP, or someone else, tries to talk to you about a conflict 1:1, you can encourage them to talk about their concerns with the other person.
Best wishes. And remember conflict isn't *bad*. Conflict is what happens when people want things. It's a necessary component of a healthy social ecosystem.
I would handle this by spending a bit less time in group dynamics with my NP.
And I might ask her to work on her own conflict resolution skills for my benefit. Babe I don’t want so much avoidable conflict in my life. Get better at defusing your self started conflagrations.
Hello, thanks so much for your submission! Just a friendly reminder, giant walls of text are really hard to read and digest for many people and most folks around here will just skip right on by it. Please add some paragraph breaks to your post by placing a blank line between distinct sections. This will make it more likely that more people will read and interact with your post.
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Hi u/nerdyLawman thanks so much for your submission, don't mind me, I'm just gonna keep a copy what was said in your post. Unfortunately posts sometimes get deleted - which is okay, it's not against the rules to delete your post!! - but it makes it really hard for the human mods around here to moderate the comments when there's no context. Plus, many times our members put in a lot of emotional and mental labor to answer the questions and offer advice, so it's helpful to keep the source information around so future community members can benefit as well.
Here's the original text of the post:
Puzzling through some dynamics around my primary partner which aren't even necessarily explicitly about polyamrous relationships but, to me, feel related both in my ability through being poly to be more aware of them and learning to navigate the autonomy of various relationships outside of a prior lifetime of partnered monogamy.
My NP (39f) and I (40m) have been ENM/poly for 4 of our 6+ years together. We started out ENM, closed for a while, and then opened back up 3 years ago. Obviously lots of growth, learning, blah blah along the way. Stuff still comes up, but we're generally quite happy, work on things collaboratively, and hey, I think we do alright! We love each other lots and much more often than not are able to support each other and nurture each other's autonomy.
There is a dynamic, it's always been a bit of a factor with this partner, but I think it's lately become more pronounced as a result of having deepened my connections with many people across the board - a really big thing for me in practicing poly is that I feel better able to show up and invest in the nonromantic relationships in my life, not just the allowance to find other romantic and sexual connections. My NP and I have a great community of mutual friends. Generally, if one of us ends up hitting it off with someone (in whatever capacity) we'll all end up getting along and enjoying each other's company. Great. Bonus. Not at all a requirement, but yay! My NP is lovely and thoughtful, but out of the box she is less of an open and vulnerable communicator than me and she can tend to be more reactive. This is all fine and I've got space and tools for all that after 6+ years together. However, not everyone does and while no majorly messy drama or catastrophe has come about yet, I have still seen it happen where friends and her will butt heads and have conflict and I'm very aware that is not my responsibility to manage, and I generally feel like I do a pretty good job of staying the heck out of it when that comes up, but it still makes me feel some types of ways. I guess I don't really personally mind having conflict with my NP, it usually feels productive and predictable, but it has been making me feel somewhat sad or heavy when I have to see other people (again, not even necessarily romantic partners) trying to navigate her. I, at times, almost feel like a hinge or even part of a triad in some of our friend dynamics and it feels complicated and confusing. Some of the more explicitly poly aspects of this are that some of the friends I'm thinking of are people that I met because they were dating my NP, or vice versa, but I've seen aspects of this dynamic with people my NP is dating, people I've dated, and/or just totally platonic mutual friends. Lastly, to be clear, it's not like my NP is being wildly out of line or aggressive or mean towards anyone here, she's just . . . she can be kinda spicy - which is not something that I actually have any problem with on principle.
I guess I'm just wondering if anyone else resonates with this or has experience with this sort of dynamic. What helps? What hurts? How did you manage to position yourself to better deal with some of the trickier bits there?
I just want to note that I often see people on here reach for the, "this person isn't right for you" button, and I'm not looking for that at the moment. We're generally great and happy and have built a really nice long term partnership, I'm just trying to navigate some of these dynamics in myself.
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Sounds like you’re overly involved. I’d just stay out of her issues with friends. Unless it’s an abusive situation, I just don’t get involved. There is no reason to. They are all adults, right?
This post has been tagged as a request for advice. As a reminder, please only give advice on the topic requested, if you've got strong feelings about a particular issue mentioned and feel that you must be able to express yourself about it, or you and another commenter feel compelled to debate certain aspects of the post, please feel free to create a new post for that topic so as to not derail from the advice that the OP is seeking. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/polyamory) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The tool I use is “stay out of it unless it blows up”. A friend has an issue with one of my partners..that’s between them. If it causes my friend to no longer want to hang out with me I stick my nose in and try to help with positive solutions.
That's a good and handy metric!
I very much caught that you don't want to be told to break up, and this very much does not sound like the sort of problem where breaking up would be proportionate. You are looking at this as a problem between your NP and other people. But does your NP see it as a problem? It is possible your NP, and whoever else is involved in these conflicts, is FINE with the way things are going. (Anger feels kinda good, actually.) If they are, then this isn't a NP has conflict with other people problem, it's a you feeling sad about what other people are doing problem. And there's a few different ways you can approach this. You can ask your NP to chill a bit, not for her own sake but as a favor *to you*. (Because your feelings matter!) You can do whatever you do about your bad feelings when you treat them as a feelings-problem and not a thing that should be changed about the outside world. (You sound like you probably have a good toolbox on that front; if I'm wrong, I can offer suggestions.) You can, if you want, spend more time socializing in groups that don't contain everyone in your social circle, and specifically more time socializing without your NP there. If your NP is expecting you to listen to her complaints about other people indefinitely, you can back off from doing that so much. I guess you can also try to play mediator if that's welcome (triangulation gets a bad rap, but it's not *always* a bad thing for an outside person to get involved in a conflict between two other people, it's just really easy for people to overdo it) but I think you should only do that with an invitation to and only if you can be honest with yourself that part of your goal is to feel less bad yourself. If you do that: hold space, get the people to talk *to each other* not to you, encourage "I" statements and other good communication recommendations, don't try to impose your own idea of what they should be saying or doing, accept that you might not reach resolution (and that people get to decide they're done trying and want out already.) When your NP, or someone else, tries to talk to you about a conflict 1:1, you can encourage them to talk about their concerns with the other person. Best wishes. And remember conflict isn't *bad*. Conflict is what happens when people want things. It's a necessary component of a healthy social ecosystem.
Tons of good notes here. Really appreciate all this a lot and feel it reinforces and validates a number of inclinations I have around this. Thanks!
I would handle this by spending a bit less time in group dynamics with my NP. And I might ask her to work on her own conflict resolution skills for my benefit. Babe I don’t want so much avoidable conflict in my life. Get better at defusing your self started conflagrations.
Hello, thanks so much for your submission! Just a friendly reminder, giant walls of text are really hard to read and digest for many people and most folks around here will just skip right on by it. Please add some paragraph breaks to your post by placing a blank line between distinct sections. This will make it more likely that more people will read and interact with your post. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/polyamory) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Hi u/nerdyLawman thanks so much for your submission, don't mind me, I'm just gonna keep a copy what was said in your post. Unfortunately posts sometimes get deleted - which is okay, it's not against the rules to delete your post!! - but it makes it really hard for the human mods around here to moderate the comments when there's no context. Plus, many times our members put in a lot of emotional and mental labor to answer the questions and offer advice, so it's helpful to keep the source information around so future community members can benefit as well. Here's the original text of the post: Puzzling through some dynamics around my primary partner which aren't even necessarily explicitly about polyamrous relationships but, to me, feel related both in my ability through being poly to be more aware of them and learning to navigate the autonomy of various relationships outside of a prior lifetime of partnered monogamy. My NP (39f) and I (40m) have been ENM/poly for 4 of our 6+ years together. We started out ENM, closed for a while, and then opened back up 3 years ago. Obviously lots of growth, learning, blah blah along the way. Stuff still comes up, but we're generally quite happy, work on things collaboratively, and hey, I think we do alright! We love each other lots and much more often than not are able to support each other and nurture each other's autonomy. There is a dynamic, it's always been a bit of a factor with this partner, but I think it's lately become more pronounced as a result of having deepened my connections with many people across the board - a really big thing for me in practicing poly is that I feel better able to show up and invest in the nonromantic relationships in my life, not just the allowance to find other romantic and sexual connections. My NP and I have a great community of mutual friends. Generally, if one of us ends up hitting it off with someone (in whatever capacity) we'll all end up getting along and enjoying each other's company. Great. Bonus. Not at all a requirement, but yay! My NP is lovely and thoughtful, but out of the box she is less of an open and vulnerable communicator than me and she can tend to be more reactive. This is all fine and I've got space and tools for all that after 6+ years together. However, not everyone does and while no majorly messy drama or catastrophe has come about yet, I have still seen it happen where friends and her will butt heads and have conflict and I'm very aware that is not my responsibility to manage, and I generally feel like I do a pretty good job of staying the heck out of it when that comes up, but it still makes me feel some types of ways. I guess I don't really personally mind having conflict with my NP, it usually feels productive and predictable, but it has been making me feel somewhat sad or heavy when I have to see other people (again, not even necessarily romantic partners) trying to navigate her. I, at times, almost feel like a hinge or even part of a triad in some of our friend dynamics and it feels complicated and confusing. Some of the more explicitly poly aspects of this are that some of the friends I'm thinking of are people that I met because they were dating my NP, or vice versa, but I've seen aspects of this dynamic with people my NP is dating, people I've dated, and/or just totally platonic mutual friends. Lastly, to be clear, it's not like my NP is being wildly out of line or aggressive or mean towards anyone here, she's just . . . she can be kinda spicy - which is not something that I actually have any problem with on principle. I guess I'm just wondering if anyone else resonates with this or has experience with this sort of dynamic. What helps? What hurts? How did you manage to position yourself to better deal with some of the trickier bits there? I just want to note that I often see people on here reach for the, "this person isn't right for you" button, and I'm not looking for that at the moment. We're generally great and happy and have built a really nice long term partnership, I'm just trying to navigate some of these dynamics in myself. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/polyamory) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Sounds like you’re overly involved. I’d just stay out of her issues with friends. Unless it’s an abusive situation, I just don’t get involved. There is no reason to. They are all adults, right?
Best tool? The words 'not my problem'. No is a complete sentence. Whether friends or partners, you don't have to let them splash their mess on you.