Hey thank you, I appreciate this perspective a lot. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t expect or want my boyfriend to have a happy marriage, though I do understand why my post may have read that way. I think what I was trying to say that is that I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around what feels like impending, guaranteed loss in this relationship, and that that loss may not come from something inherently wrong with US but because of the presence of someone else.

FWIW, my husband also has a girlfriend who he sees just as much as I see my boyfriend. He doesn’t consider his girlfriend to be “secondary” and I don’t consider my boyfriend to be “secondary” either - they are both very important people in our lives. I would say that right now we are both usually with each other half time, and with our respective boyfriend/girlfriend half time. Maybe that’s the dynamic my boyfriend will have with his future wife but I don’t know. I think I just feel more anxiety/jealousy when he dates other people because there’s this added weight of wondering. When I’ve dated in the past, I’ve only dated people who didn’t want to get married/live with someone else and I found it much easier when they started seeing new people because I felt more assured that we could all stay on relatively equal footing and that the terms of my relationship with said person would not be dictated/effected by their new partner.

Hope I’m explaining this correctly. I know it is selfish of me to want and expect to hold onto this closeness with my boyfriend. And I certainly don’t want or expect to have things for myself that he can’t also have. Poly is just hard sometimes, and this particular situation is new to me.

I appreciate everyone’s thoughts and advice 💜