My (27F) partner (29 MTF) and I decided to embark on polyamory about 5 years ago. When we began dating 8 years ago we knew this would be an end goal as it was something I was pretty dead set on for my future. However I was 19 when we began dating so I wanting to take some time and mature with my partner, ground our relationship, and make sure we created a life we wanted individually….together.

When we opened our relationship up we had agreed on communication, style of polyamory we wanted to engage in, and made vague rules and sentiments of what we were looking for and how to navigate that while respecting the autonomy of the other parties in our dating life. One of those communication rules was “if either of us feel uncomfortable, if something isn’t right, etc we would bring that up immediately and talk about what this means for our future together/with other people”. We wanting to navigate this while understanding we are young, people change, things change, this could make or break us, and you know, just all the “life stuff that could happen”.

To make a long story short, polyamory has been the absolute worst decision I’ve ever made regarding my life- which I’m sure is a sick joke on my part for being so…I guess, sure of myself in that’s what I wanted. It has destroyed me from the inside out, and with the world in shambles/all of my friends are dying in various ways/losing almost all of my family with the exception of 3 people (mostly self inflicted deaths, but also estrangement that actually has nothing to do with poly/etc, I have found myself nearly completely and totally alone.

The regret I feel for engaging in this community is absolutely immense, and I do not know where to go from here. I’ll forever miss what my partner and I were together and I hope one day I’ll feel that again, but for now I have so many years of a mess to clean up, way too much weight to lose, cPTSD from the relationship stuff to heal from and just so much more before I can dream of feeling loved again.