Starting at the beginning.

I have been a polyamorous person my entire adult life. That said, I have also been in multiple monogamous relationships, as well as, open and multi-sexual (only one main person) relationships that worked or didn’t work to varying degrees.

Five years ago I met a person and felt real love for the first time in 40+ years. I was with my ex still and J joined our relationship. My partner and I were at the end of our 13 year relationship by the time I met J. I was dating because of behaviors from my partner that had led me to wanting to find someone that could love me for myself instead of trying to change me to fit their idea of who I should be.

I told my partner either I was dating and we were working on it or I was dating and we weren’t working on it.  So I was dating and we were working on it.

From the very start J treated me better than my partner ever had… In turn I was happy and and felt loved and reflected that back to J. For the first time I felt like someone wanted to be around me, liked me for who I was, didn’t want to change me, and loved me without asking for anything in return.

My partner realized that he had been treating me poorly and that everything I had been telling him about fixing our relationship was true. He started to become jealous and he would always ask J why I liked them more and how they could treat me better. J told him every time that he needed to listen and to stop trying to change who I was. In the end though my partner decided that he was going to move on and let me be happy.

Honestly, I have never been more happy! J and I spent all our time together for the last 5 years. If we weren’t working we were together. We travelled more than 80k miles together up and down the west coast where we live, work and play. We both had never been so happy and honestly we were monogamous together until last year, 2022.

In September we met Bo… He quickly became a fixture in our lives. He lived in another city and would visit us a couple times a month. We were online playing games or chatting with him every day from when we met until he moved in with us around March of this year. The 3 of us were happy and just hung out with each other and lived life with each other. These were the best of times.

In May of 2023 myself and J got sick… He got pneumonia and 11 days later he died.

Bo and myself were taking him to the hospital again and he had a seizure and drowned from the fluid in his lungs. I was doing CPR on him in the back of the vehicle when he passed and Bo was with me.

Since then it has been a real struggle to maintain my suddenly monogamous relationship with Bo since the amount of grief that I have been going through is immense. I have never suffered grief in this manner and all of this is very new to me. Had I met Bo after J passed I would never have started a new relationship with someone while in this mental state.

Here we are though and J and I both truly love Bo, it is why he moved in with us. It was so soon after he moved in that J died and we experienced this trauma together. I cry all the time, anything can cause me to break down. I miss J so incredibly much and everything he gave me on a  daily basis. I feel lonely without him all the time and I feel guilty for feeling all of the things I feel because I still have Bo here with me.

Most people would just tell me I am lucky to have Bo (which there is no denying that I am) but it does not replace the incredible love that I had with J or the fact that only he gave me himself and no one else can ever replace that. I really want to be able to give all of myself to Bo… but I feel so lost and empty with the loss of J.

I have always had the capacity to love many people in many different ways. How do I get that back?  I feel like I have lost the ability to be myself and to persevere through the turmoil that living on this planet brings. I keep getting told that all of this is normal and that I will feel better eventually and that I have to be patient…

I understand that all of those things exist and that they do happen to people. How do I get over this looming feeling that I will never be the same again and that I will not ever get over the grief that I feel at the loss of the person that gave me unconditional love for the first time in my life. How do I find happiness with the people that are still here with me? How can I go through my days without hurting anyone else or making them feel like they are less to me than the love we lost?

Bereaved