"You Are My World"...Not!

A great deal of anxiety can be traced back to popular conceptions of coupledom.

Some myths perpetuated by popular culture:

• All people want to get married. Those who say they do not are deluded or damaged in some way.
• Marriage or any dating relationship is always sexually and emotionally exclusive. 
• Cheating is the worst thing a partner can do and always spells the end of the relationship.
• A relationship in which partners cannot be everything to each other is not good enough and will not last. Nor is it what people really want.

Being poly flies in the face of these ideas. We don't necessarily want to get married, or if we do we are not exclusive sexually or emotionally. Cheating is still possible, but more difficult given that being poly gives space for other sexual connections. We assume that partners cannot be everything to each other and may seek out other partners to address needs not fulfilled in our existing relationship(s). 

The above myths are pervasive, and I didn't realize how much I believed them before researching polyamory and getting into a poly relationship. I'm still parsing out how much of my feelings and ideas are based on them, and how much are things I really feel/believe. Perhaps they are not separable. 

However, I think breaking down these beliefs is a key to resolving some of my anxiety. 

• I know it's not true that everyone wants to get married. I don't want to get married, though sometimes I wonder if I am deluding myself because of the above cultural idea. 
• I don't want to be exclusive with one person. This is easy for me. The harder thing is handling other people not being exclusive to me. 
• One nice thing about what I'm doing now is that I cannot cheat. My poly partner and I have no rules about when and how we can have sex with others, except around condom use, and I'd do that anyway. 
• Sometimes I do wonder if I want to be in a relationship where the partner are everything to each other and don't need/want other connections. However, I realize that such a person would be extremely difficult or impossible to find, and when I think hard about it, relationships like that seem rather creepy to me.

There, anxiety solved! Okay, that's an exaggeration, but it does look nice all spelled out like that.