Balancing imbalances in polyamory

I am married and have been in a long term relationship with my nesting partner for a little less than a year (we dated for about 4 years off and on prior to that). We live together and are building a future together with house, kids, and all that. Recently, we got out of a very catastrophic situation with her ex-partner (with whom I lived with for a year and had a platonic, but very connected relationship), who engaged in some really toxic behavior including manipulation, gaslighting, and being really controlling of my nesting partner’s relationships and behavior.

The tone of our family dynamic was very much distrust and suspicion and taking out feelings on other people (rather than talking about them and being frank and honest about it). I witnessed a lot of really possessive and controlling behavior that was really unhealthy and went on for almost the entire past year of living together. It became kind of a culture or vacuum of unhealthy behavior because I would also engage in some of these behaviors that I had not engaged in previous relationships. There was a culture of BIG FEELINGS and allowing those feelings to take up a lot of space, all of the space sometimes.

My nesting partner and I have been slowly recovering from it all and she is doing some new dating with other people, a cishet man and a queer woman who are dating each other. She is dating them together and separately. I have a partner whom I have been dating for the last two-ish years. I came to non-monogamy in my late 20s when I dated someone who set out our relationship to be open. After we broke up I dated someone monogamously, but found the relationship dynamics were way too unhealthy for me and ended the relationship. My current partner is the longest I have dated anyone in my adult life and the first time I have been married.

I am having a lot of obsessive thoughts and hard feelings about my partner’s dating and sex stuff. I find myself split between rational thought (you see her more than anyone else does week to week, she restricts her dates to your non-date nights, she dates really infrequently, etc.) and having a lot of irrational thoughts and feelings. These are thoughts and feelings along the suspicion and big feelings spectrum that we have both suffered under in her ex’s toxic behavior.

I am scared that I am turning into another person that will attempt to control and manipulate her. I’m doing all that I can to keep it under control by doing meditation, going for walks, meeting up with friends, doing some of my own dating, etc., but I am so distracted and distraught by her dating/sex stuff that I just feel hostile and resentful. I want to snap at her when she makes sexual innuendos in my direction because it seems like our sex life has undergone some big changes since we started cohabitating.

My irrational brain is fixated on her having sex with her dating partners 100% of the time and with me about once a week. I feel like if I didn’t stay vigilant about it, that it could very easily fade away in importance. I’m caught between wanting to just give in and be flexible and let things be how they are (let the relationship become whatever it needs to be) and fighting for her attention and constantly working on our relationship. Nothing is in danger and she does go out of her way to remind me that I am loved and adored all the time. I just feel so afraid of things changing the way things changed in our previous family dynamic.

I also feel resentful of some of the culture of suspicion and big feelings that made dating on my end very scary and ended in me turning down dating I wanted to do or not pursuing anything because I was afraid of how it might impact my partner. We’ve addressed all of this and she has released her grip entirely, but I just feel resentful and exhausted by the previous family dynamic. I also feel like I am carrying it forward with my obsessing and ruminating on how she is going to trick me or fuck me over (that again, wasn’t there before this family dynamic).

There is an additional layer of myself being trans and she is a cisgender queer woman. I am having a hard time being preoccupied with the sexual dynamics in their relationship and feeling like that is “real” and “more legitimate” sex than what we have. Irrational thoughts and fears for sure and I know I offer something different and something more substantial and long term, but I fear I am going to be taken for granted as the partner who will always be there. There is also a layer of cishet privilege that is hard to swallow and sexual/erotic capital.

As a queer, trans/nonbinary person my dating prospects are significantly less and my sexual/erotic capital is harder to parse. I fall prey to wanting to play oppression olympics with her a lot and I know that doesn’t go anywhere, but I am having a hard time coping with partner having sex with a cishet dude and how much more significant that is than what I have to offer. But I also know if it was another queer I would feel jealous/envious/insecure too. I find myself deeply curious about what they do together and what she does with her other dating partners.

How do you recover from toxic family non-monogamy dynamics? How do you cope with your partner dating cishet men while in a queer relationship? How do you navigate social/sexual/erotic capital imbalances in relationships (specifically queer relationships where cisgender queer femmes dating cishet men)?

This column has been moved to the Non-Monogamy Help website.