Haven’t been able to wrap my mind around emotional cheating. It’s one of those things you wonder when on earth it’ll be something that stops simply happening to you—when it’ll finally become something you can do something about. You know, have a say in it.

I’ve certainly been involved in any and every conceivable angle.

I’ve inadvertently cheated, not realizing it until it’s been going on for a while, been cheated on and simply sucked it up and tolerated it, been the person one cheats with and not pick up on the signs until it’s gotten so out of hand that it’s causing trouble for my partner’s other partner, etc.

It’s quite the tricky business.

It’s probably easier for me to guarantee sexual exclusivity, to emotional exclusivity. And that’s really saying something, considering that the common denominator to all integral parts of my orientation have a binary component that cannot be met by one person alone.

I tried looking up a definition for emotional cheating, but it’s all pretty gray-area material, but for me, it means satisfying the key majority of one’s emotional needs with someone other than one’s primary partner.

One of the vague descriptions I found, and the one that got closest, was:

“All human beings have a need for emotional support and communication. This leads us to seek out relation­ships that will satisfy these needs. What makes emotional cheating a problem is that a person gets their need to be emotionally close to someone satisfied by a person other than their partner. These emotionally unfaith­ful relationships often begin as strictly nonphysical; with time though, they can easily develop into romantic relationships.”

There’s no problem with the potential for anything turning into another romantic relationship, given my proclivity to non-monogamy. That’s not the issue. I’m perfectly capable of maintaining two, simultaneous, romantic relationships in a primary-secondary dynamic, no problem.

The problem is when my emotional needs are not being met by my primary, and feeling neglected, and backed against a wall, my secondary begins to take care of those needs replacing the ‘role’ of my primary, though not necessarily affecting either the title, nor the level of commitment I have to my primary.

Then I begin to feel used, because in my primary relationship it’s all give, give, give, and it affects my secondary relationship in a negative way.

In a way, that is a contributing reason to why things ended with the first girl. In a non-romantic context, though deeply-committed, long-term, emotionally intimate relationship, at some point, we just couldn’t meet each other’s emotional needs anymore.

We were growing into very different people, after having grown together for around 6 years.

And this was, in a way, my second introduction to poly. The first one had been through Jules, as I tried to somehow describe her inexplicably non-monogamous behavior in a positive light (read: a conscious, responsible choice).

This girl began to feed her emotional needs through both a mutual friend of ours, and myself (mostly her) and mine went impossibly neglected, making me turn to another close friend who ended up being my first semi-acknowledged girlfriend/submissive.

I began to resent our mutual friend, but at some point, I reached a point of compersion— this friend was obviously fulfilling needs I could not, she was a lovely girl, and she made this girl I cared so much about very happy, so why not?

Then this girl grew jealous of my not-then-girlfriend/submissive because I spent so much time with her, and she felt the neglect.

Eventually, it was just too much. Things began to be demanded of me I could only give a lover, and given the strict non-romantic involvement between the two of us, I began to feel impossibly smothered, to the point where the toxic relationship had to end.

I was also barely realizing/coming to terms with all the other integral parts of my orientation, which were incompatible with her to the point of making her uncomfortable, so things ended, and I finally began to develop communication skills and how to have a healthy relationship.

The girl who became my girlfriend/submissive went from secondary to primary, where I was set on not falling into the same errors as with the first girl, and after some time, I fell for Prince Charming.

The problem there, was that my relationship with my submissive was based on me taking, and her giving. And though I made a point of giving, and really taking care of her because I genuinely loved her, she was far too undemanding, wanting only to please, neglecting her own needs, and putting me in a position where I didn’t really know what to do, because of her ‘I only want to make you happy’ mentality.

I couldn’t read her mind and know what she needed, so I couldn’t give it to her, so I just ran under the assumption that she was emotionally satisfied in simply serving, and satisfied whatever emotional needs I could.

With Prince Charming, it was all give, give, give on my end. It balanced out things with my submissive, and we were all pretty damn happy for a while. There was the jealousy from my submissive towards Prince Charming, simply because the way I fall in love with men is different from the way I fall for women, and in a way, it’s understandably annoying, given the NRE.

But then Prince Charming fell into inadvertently emotionally cheating on his primary with me, and I didn’t catch on to the signs of the intense emotional affair going on until plenty of drama ensued, and regardless of how in love I was with him, I just had to back the fuck out, and drill it in my head it was not my job to fix Prince Charming’s relationship with his primary.

Then my submissive began to feel what I felt with the first girl, where she felt too much was being demanded of her, when she was getting very little. The thing being, they were all a set of imaginary demands she felt compelled to fulfill. I never asked them from her.

I had a prolonged bout of depression, where I wasn’t my cheery, communicative self, and she drilled it in her head that it was her job to fix it. So when I insisted a million times that I was fine, and just needed to deal with it, and that it wasn’t her fault, she would just try harder, really taking it into herself that because all she wanted to do was make me happy, that she had to get me out of this depressive episode.

Eventually, the relationship turned toxic, and I had to end it for her own good, as well as mine.

Promoting intimacy is pretty much the one way to avoid emotional cheating, I suppose, which is done through communication.

To an extent, I’ve found women are better at this than men. No one will ever fully satisfy your emotional needs to the fullest. Different people in your life feed different emotional needs and different sides of you. One person can’t take care of all of that, and they shouldn’t be expected to.

I’m used to discussing the most menial details of people’s days with the intention of nurturing that sense of intimacy and overall closeness.

Women are infinitely better at this, to the point where we’ll randomly text each other a thousand times a day with the random things, and tell each other the most pointless anecdotes in the form of a metacognitive play-by-play, as if it’s the most serious thing in the world, when it’s just going to the groceries or something.

And we crave that. We crave that illusion of intimacy, even at a distance.

Then there’s previous male partners I’ve had who when asked ‘How was your day?’, they reply with ‘Pretty good.’

End of conversation.

Friends and acquaintances can get away with that, but people I’m romantically involved with are not. It got to the point where I was starved for some sort of connection, that said something like “Just humor me. I don’t care if you lie, or make stuff up, just tell me a story.”, in that ‘it’s the principle of the thing, damnit!” sort of way.

If I were straight, it would be no problem. I would just have a best female friend and confidant, which is what my friends do. But that doesn’t work with the whole bi thing— that sense of intimacy does develop into romantic attraction.

So, I’m bound to emotionally cheat on a guy with a girl, without even realizing the way I did with my first boyfriend, and if I make a point of taking care of it from the beginning, I seem too naggy and clingy, and just make my male partner uncomfortable by asking something of them it’s just not in them to provide.

Then I’m bound to emotionally cheat on a girl with a guy, because the way I fall for men and women is very different. With women, there seldom ever is an infatuation. It skips over to love, in the sense of stable, long-term, romantic attachment. With men, that never happens. It’s always a long infatuation, and after much consideration, I might decide to let myself fall, then much later, the genuine long-term part comes along.

So it’s New Relationship Energy on a constant basis, which does feel as an emotional threat to other partners. And it happens constantly between best female straight friends, when one of them gets a boyfriend, and the other one feels emotionally replaced, and is irritated by the overwhelming NRE.

It’s one of those things in my list of goals— to keep an emotionally balanced relationship. Practice does make perfect!