Thriving Through “Solo Time” | Episode 15

PODCAST AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Megan: [00:00:00] Hi there. I’m excited for this podcast because it is, I think my second one where it’s just me and I want to fully set the scene right now because I think that’s kind of important. It’s about eleven o’clock at night. I’m in Sydney, Australia, actually with some really great friends. I spent the whole day with my kids downtown exploring. I’m pretty exhausted, actually, and I feel like I’m settling in for the night for a conversation with a really good friend. And that’s you right now. I also need to describe what’s going on, because Marty’s not here. Marty is in South America with his other significant other. And Kyle’s still in Chicago where he’s come off of a really intense week with a new partner. And that leaves me just hanging out here in Sydney with the kids. I couldn’t have imagined this moment a couple years ago. I don’t even think I could have imagined this moment about a year ago. And I definitely couldn’t have imagined actually how good I feel right now, which is my motivation in recording this right now for you and honestly for myself, because I love these podcasts just for a record keeping of these experiences. And I almost wish I had started earlier because this experience had I recorded it maybe the first time Marty was with another woman, I was going through a whole slew of different emotions, which I’ll try to share with you as I remember back on how did I get here in this moment? Don’t worry, we’ll get there. I think the important pieces to know and why I want to share this and why I feel like I’m sitting down here with you actually have my eyes closed so I can be really, really focused on just sharing from my heart and sharing because the journey of polyamory, when you think about it, it’s really about more love. And I think we can jump straight to thinking that that means more partners, which, yes, it does.

Megan: [00:02:01] And really though at the center is more loving relationship with ourselves. And that can be probably the hardest relationship, I think, because we are our own toughest critics. We judge ourselves the most and I think we withhold the experience of love for ourselves the most. At least that’s been my experience. So getting here to the point where I am actually so happy with who I am right now, I’m actually really enjoying the experience of myself with Marty and Kyle both on different continents and I’m hanging out with the kids and it just feels good. I think that’s the benefits of this journey have just gotten me to a point where I enjoy my own companionship and truly even with the amazing partners that I have. I love Marty. I love Kyle. I don’t know about future potential partners, but for right now, I think I’ve become my own best partner and that’s the best part of this.

Megan: [00:02:59] Okay, so how did I get here? If you’re really sitting here and you’re like, what the fuck, Megan, seriously? You don’t feel ditched by your husband and you don’t feel any jealousy about either of your men being with other partners either now or recently. And the answer’s no. But I’ve got to probably take you back to the beginning and where we started this, because like I said, I couldn’t have imagined being here in this position. Just, you know, a year or two ago, the first question that we usually get when people find out that either I’m polyamorous or we’re polyamorous is actually not even a question. It’s a statement. I’m too jealous for that. And I agree. Yeah. Jealousy is usually the first response, and it’s definitely the most visceral response or emotion to work through in this polyamorous journey because we hold a lot of our insecurities and our fears in our body. So when we think about our partner being with someone else that can we get a physical response? And I remember having to work through that the first time that Marty was with another woman. But thankfully, I had already at that point, it was months into the relationship with Kyle. So I had already been on the receiving end of Marty creating this space for me to be with another man. So it was that was easier for me. Anybody going first and I will actually say that it’s usually nothing in the polyamorous world is like, okay, we’re gonna do this at the same time. Ready, set, go. We both fall in love with people exactly the same time at exactly the same pace. It’s probably not going to happen that way if it did for you. Fantastic. Wasn’t my experience. So being on the receiving end of it, having fallen in love with someone and actually knowing every time my heart opened to Kyle. It was actually directly tied back to Marty, and my love for Marty healed through my relationship with Kyle. So I knew that was huge benefit to Marty actually falling in love with another woman because I knew my process. I knew that I could see how dirty my love had gotten with Marty. All the resent, all the blame, all the anger that I had been building up over the years. I couldn’t see that, actually, until I had the contrast of a new relationship and that new relationship being Kyle. So actually, I was reading back through my journal because I’ve been journaling for now, I don’t know, a year and a half and I don’t know if I can find it right off hand. I’ll have to share it in a probably a patron post. I’ve got probably 200, 300 pages of journal. I won’t dump them all on you guys. But for any of the people that have become members and if you want to read more and learn more. If I’m not sharing enough from this podcast, if you actually want to know what emotions was I going through, how did I get through? I’ll share my journal entries for this time. These moments or these stories that I share in Patreon, so become a member. Yay! Ok. Now, they said that little bit there. There was a moment where I wrote in my journal that my love that I shared with Marty that actually was Kyle’s love, that healed our love. And Marty knew it as well. And so both of us knowing that loving another individual actually helped us, Marty and I love more was a huge benefit in me wanting to create space in my own self to give to Marty to say, hey, please, please go spend time with another woman, because I know that’s going to come back to me tenfold in a really beautiful way. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t easy. I remember the first time he went on a date with someone, and I couldn’t sleep that night. I just couldn’t sleep. And I remember being in bed and I could feel, you know, the feelings of jealousy. And I really had to work through actually asking myself questions. What’s happening right now, what’s happening in my body, where am I feeling this? Okay, I’m feeling tight in my chest and taking deep breaths and breathing through it. And I remember not even knowing exactly what I was doing. But I remember a mantra like, this is coming back to me tenfold. This is coming back to me tenfold. Everything that I can allow right now for Marty, I’m allowing for myself times 10. And for whatever reason, nobody told me anything like that was just what was coming up for me. And it was so true. So, so, so true. So maybe as I’m sharing this, if you’ve gone through the same experience, you kind of had a mantra for yourself or a way that you could imagine that the gift that you were giving to your partner, that you knew that there was a core belief that it is also a gift to yourself. I think that’s a major belief. Side note on beliefs. I think that our beliefs are so, so, so critical to the life that we lead. And Marty has talked a lot about how to dig down and get at our dragons, which are those insecurities but our insecurities are actually just false negative beliefs. So I think jealousy in itself is rooted. The feeling is rooted in a false negative belief about ourselves. For example, oh my gosh, what if she is more beautiful than I am? What if for me, I love that I immediately think about breasts? What if she has more beautiful breasts than I do? Because mine are pretty small. But I love my breasts, so I’m good with it now. But that was really something that came up for me then. What if she has a better body? What if what if he finds that he prefers making love to her and not me? All of these were major insecurities, and I just had to work through them, sit with them and go, okay, what if that was true? What’s the worst thing that could happen? And little by little, the death grip of these insecurities just loosened and loosened. And I remember that first night. I think by the time I could actually fall asleep, I felt like something had changed inside of me. That was the first night where Marty was with another woman. I don’t even know, probably just on their first date. And obviously, we’ve worked up to it. We created rules so that we didn’t stretch ourselves too far too fast. I think that is how that’s really helpful. Okay. So let’s go into rules here for a second.

Megan: [00:09:05] All right. So rules and consent. This is really, really important. The difference between a polyamorous life and a life of cheating on your partner is consent. That’s the difference. And consent by the other partner. And a confirmation in kind of even though the experience can be solo, let’s say you’re having a physical experience with a new partner. The difference is that your other partner knows about it and that you’ve agreed to it and that they are holding the space for you. By holding the space, I mean that they consent. They agree. And to do that, it’s actually really easy. It’s not easy, but it is so to do that. It’s really helpful to have rules to create rules for each other on physical interaction.At least this is how Marty and I did it. Again, everybody will create their own way of doing this. But for us and we did this actually when I was starting to become physical with Kyle by myself as well. We created rules. We would say, okay, you can kiss and we would describe what that means and then make sure that we’re both under the same understanding. And that would be it. Or at least I’d like to say that was it. Marty said that he prepared himself. What if I went beyond that? So he was mentally trying to prepare himself, which was good, because there are a couple of times where I kind of slipped up and I went a little bit too far and we had to work through those. But he had created the kind of the mental thought of what would it be like if she did this? So he was already starting to prepare himself. So that was our process. When I was physical with Kyle, I would talk to Marty. I’d be so excited and be like, hey, can I kiss him this time? And it was for us. I only saw Kyle once a week for a long stretch there for a couple of months. And so every time it was like a little bit more, I could do a little bit more. And it was a really good practice because I had to do the practice of requesting of saying, hey, I would like to be able to have some time with maybe shirts off. I would like some time to grab his butt, you know, whatever it was. And we eventually made our way up to actually making love and being intimate. But it went at the pace that I was comfortable with and that Marty was comfortable with, because at that point, I hadn’t been with another man for almost 20 years. And it was everything was new. I think back to those days, Marty didn’t really have a guide. He didn’t know anybody else that was going through this. And that man, he’s so incredible. He just held the space for me and allowed me to go through the experience.

Megan: [00:11:53] And honestly, you guys. Okay. This is like where I feel like I’m talking to a very good friend. It was super, super, super hot. It totally ramped up our own sexual energy. It was ridiculously crazy eyed. It was it like jumpstarted our sexual lives again. And sex was always good with Marty. But having the experience and this is why in some of the books they call  NRE, which is new relationship energy, having that energy infused back into the relationship with Marty and I was fantastic. So for months I would go and basically just kind of do a little warm up with Kyle and then I would come back and ravage Marty and all of that sexual energy was put back into that relationship. Yeah, it’s really, really fantastic. And now it kind of goes both ways. It depends on who I am with first or. Yeah. It’s using sexual energy. I could do a whole other podcast on just our energy and being comfortable with sexual energy as energy. And then it transfers and we can ramp it up and we can share it and give it to other people and even the idea. So for me, I found it. I didn’t know it was gonna be a turn on, but it actually ended up being a big turn on to hear what Marty was going through with, you know, with his first girlfriend. And I wanted details. I wanted to know what that experience was like it and I wanted Marty’s honesty. I think that actually was probably the biggest turn on was he would come back and then tell me honestly how that experience was. And I found it to be really, really sexy. It was kind of like we we were each other’s own graphic adult novel. Yeah, just super sexy. Maybe that’s who knows, maybe that’s just our kink. Maybe it doesn’t work for everyone. I know some people who are polyamorous just choose not to know about their partners and lovers. And hey, if that works for you, fantastic. I think in this process we all have to figure out what works for us. So again, no holds barred here I’m sharing a lot. That really works for me. I love hearing about Marty being with another woman. I love hearing about Kyle being with another woman, which he was recently. And I really, really enjoyed. I enjoy the details. I enjoy how close I feel to both Marty and Kyle as they share what they share, because I know that nothing has to be hidden. And I don’t feel insecure. And that’s probably the best part is I can and I can watch them enjoying not just kind of reliving the experience. And then watch them enjoying telling me about it and how open they can be. And I’m sure that’s what they enjoy with me when I share what’s going on in my world.

Megan: [00:14:45] I digress. I don’t even know I was going with that. OK.

Megan: [00:14:48] The beginning of how he got here and rules. So if you’re new to this in your relationship, creating rules or agreements that you and your partner can set in place before something happens that’s super, super helpful and you can go at your own pace. I know we went at kind of a snail’s pace, but maybe it wasn’t like that when I was exploring Kyle because it was all new. And then when Marty started dating his first girlfriend, maybe second girlfriend at that point. I remember telling Marty was like. Go for it. Just have sex with her. And it was new in their relationship. And I think at that point, Kyle had been out of the country for two months in Europe. So I was kind of without another partner. Oh you guys, that moment, those moments, those weeks, those weeks were really, really intense, because I had to actually realize that during Marty’s first girlfriend, I had used Kyle as a crutch. So where I saw Marty going through experiences with his first girlfriend, Kyle was there and I was like, oh, good. You know, now I feel like it’s equal because I have somebody and now Marty has somebody and now we’re all good. I didn’t realize how much I was using Kyle as a crutch to lean on, to still feel secure because I noticed it when Kyle wasn’t there. We were still communicating. But I wasn’t sure about our relationship status after he had been out of the country for two months. And I had to really process and these were nights where I was home by myself. Actually, I was journaling. So all this is caught in my journal here that I’m happy to share. I had this sit with some sadness. I had to sit with those insecurities. I had to process them. I had to actually do the emotional work. And this is what I’ve been saying again. It again is the real work of life. It’s like processing the emotions that are coming up in real time and using them as a signpost to figure out what insecurities, what false beliefs lie below those insecurities or at the root and then letting them come up and then sitting with them. So when Marty was with his second girlfriend, I was really sad. I was like, wow. I was feeling, all of the emotions that I hadn’t fully processed because Kyle wasn’t there. And this is why I love alone time. I love that I’m alone right now because I can’t use one relationship as a crutch for the other. And I had been using Kyle as a crutch for Marty being able to explore and for me to actually feel like I was releasing him. It was kind of a false release. It wasn’t until I felt more alone that I had to work through all those feelings. And that’s why right now, I’m just so fucking happy with myself. Really. Because present day, I’m sitting here and Marty is spending 10 days with his partner in South America, and she’s beautiful. I wish I could talk about her and their relationship, but not at that point right now, because she’s not out because of a lot of things. And I totally respect that. There’s just a lot I wish I could share, but I guess I’ll just share that I feel really happy that I’m able to carve out this time and campaign for Marty’s happiness, which is a phrase that he came up with. I don’t know, a year or two ago when we realized that we weren’t even friends, like best friends. We had been married 15 years. No. At that point, 13 years. And I had to actually deal with the fact that I wasn’t nice to my husband. I didn’t treat him like a friend. I didn’t realize I wasn’t treating him well. But that phrase campaign for each other’s happiness actually hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, Oh my God, I haven’t even been campaigning for his happiness. Do I even want him to be happy? Am I actively campaigning for his unhappiness? These were massive questions that I had to go through and deal with. Wow. I was so resentful and angry at where we had gotten in our life and where I had gotten for myself that I had blamed him. So, yeah, I wasn’t campaigning for his happiness. I didn’t even like to see him happy. And that’s fucked up. That’s crazy. Now I’m like, I get these messages. And we talked this morning. And I ask him to send pictures because I realized that’s something that I need. I want to feel like I’m part of it. I’m in communication with his partner. I’m in communication with him. I like to see pictures, I like updates. And it makes me feel like I’m creating the space for that. That by me being here and being with the kids and having fully supported him exploring this relationship with her, that I’m actually at the root of that happiness. I could be easily not at the root of that happiness. But I am because I know is at the root of my happiness when I have my alone moments with Kyle. Kyle and I have been lucky enough to go off on our own kind of excursions for a couple days in South America, in a couple of days and in Europe. And those moments have been so incredible. And I remember having all these moments of gratitude for just thanking Marty. Thank you, Marty, for creating this possibility. Thank you for watching the kids. Thank you for being an amazing dad. Thank you for being an amazing partner. And I would share with him the moments that would go by. And then, of course, I’d come back and tell him all the stuff that I did with Kyle. And he’d be like, oh, good, I’m glad I wouldn’t want to do any of that. Like running in the rain. I don’t know all the crazy shit that Kyle and I like to do.

Megan: [00:20:34] And yeah, it’s just really fun. It’s really fun. Okay.

Megan: [00:20:39] So again, back to this moment of being alone and why I think it’s why I wanted to record this podcast with my energy right now, because I think it’s really important to know that I’m here by myself in Australia. I am with fantastic friends. So I have that and I’m so, so grateful. But I feel like I don’t have the crutch of a romantic partner here to lean on. I have just myself and I feel fucking great. I love the experience of myself. I love how strong I feel. I love the person that I’ve become that I can be fantastic with my partner across the world, with another woman and be so confident in the love that we share and in the future that we have together that I’m happy about it. And it’s been incredible to receive messages back from him as he’s been with her, to say that he feels the same, that he feels super confident in our future and he is so grateful and so thankful for the time. And yeah, it’s just a good feeling.

Megan: [00:21:40] So I’ll kind of flip the focus to Kyle. Kyle and I are still new to this relationship and actually to him exploring other relationships with other women. And he’s coming off of last week having, I think, one of the most intense experiences with a new partner. And again, they’re not part of Amory here. Everything is anonymous. But I do want to say that those moments were also very, very important for him. He came off of that experience. It was like a catalyst for him and to see him be in the creative mode that he’s in, in writing and sharing and lit up again and having found this energy inside of him for the change in his purpose. I’m just so thankful. I’m so thankful for the other woman for having created these experiences for him, because he’s lit up. And I remember in the beginning of this experience journaling that with Marty, I could be jealous that I wasn’t the one to create those experiences for him. And again, I could sit here saying I wasn’t the one to be the catalyst for this particular creative explosion for him. But I don’t need to be just kind of a gratitude feeling. Thank you for other people and other energy and other loves, because we love each other all so differently. No, man, I want to digress here for a second. We have one word for this thing called love. That is so huge. We need more words, you guys. What words do you have? Marty and I started using descriptive words to our love years ago. So we call our love, ambitious love. And that’s the type of love that Marty and I share. We don’t necessarily have like a cuddly, but sometimes it’s lovey dove love, but it’s like we have an ambitious love, obviously, because we’ve sold our house or we’re traveling around the world with our kids. That’s quite ambitious, but that’s kind of the feeling of our love. And I know with Kyle, I’ve got this very deep, profound connection. That’s very purpose. It’s like a purposeful love. We support each other in our life’s purpose. And it’s also a carebear. I call him my carebear. I don’t know. Kyle, I’ll have to ask you if I can keep that in. He’s such a carebear. He’s just so, so loving, so tender. And so we’ve got more like a tender love. So if you’re listening to this with your partner or if you have a partner, would you message them or lean over to them to tell them what type of love you feel like you share? I feel like that’s a really fun practice and you might have 50 or 100 or more different types of love that you share with each other, which is incredible. The one thing I want to realize. The whole tangent that I went on here is that we have different types of love with different people, we’re like different atoms that fit together differently and we’re going to experience that flow of love differently within us for every person in our life. And that goes for obviously non-sexual relationships, that goes for friendships, that goes for when you’re a parent, the love you have for your child. Or you can only imagine when you’re a grandparent, the love you have for your grandchildren, just the different love that we have for everybody is so fantastic.

[00:24:59] Okay. Yeah. I love love. That’s why I’m doing this. Obviously, I’m so cheesy. Okay, guys, are you still with me? If you are, I thank you I’ll just give you a big hug in this crazy cyberspace world that we are in together in this moment. Thank you for keeping me company on this evening, your incredible company. And I’m so thankful that you exist because I have the opportunity to sit here and talk into a microphone in a bedroom in Sydney when I’m by myself and I have the chance. And what I feel like is purposefully reflect on my experiences that have gotten me here thus far. And that’s really amazing. So thank you. I do love you, all of you and all of your different amazing ways for listening to this, for letting it hopefully touch you in a way and support you in your journey. Okay.

[00:25:50] Back to if you’re new in the world of polyamory and you’re still like Megan, I don’t get how how you’re not jealous. Okay, here’s the thing. You’re not going to get it until you actually experience it for yourself. And you’re not actually going to experience what the word that’s created is compersion. Compersion is the love that you experience when you see your loved one, love another. Was that kind of confusing? I could say it again. It is the feeling of joy associated with seeing a loved one love another. It’s basically the opposite of jealousy. And parents you’ll know this because when you see your kids lit up and happy and experiencing joy and you look at them and their smiles, infectious and it creates joy in you. That’s basically the same thing for your partner. So when you feel when you see your partner loving another person, it actually you love that feeling. You get like it’s just energy. You get energy from that experience and from kind of my words, from creating the space for that experience for your partner because you’re intricately connected to their love of another person. If you’re the one that’s in a relationship with them and you’re the one that’s open and saying, I trust you and I love you so much that I will not hold on to this death grip illusion, that is control, I will let go of that. And I will allow and I will allow for you to be who you are. And it will allow for you love who you love. And I will love you while you’re loving that person. It is amazing. The world, the world. If we have more people experiencing polyamorous relationships. I can only imagine.

[00:27:36] Okay. So back to some fears that I’ve confronted over the last two years. I think I’m probably not alone if I say there are some fears around ending up alone. I know some people asked me that. Megan, your husband’s in a country, another country for 10 days with another woman. How can you not be afraid of ending up alone? The short answer is I’m just not. But I guess it’s that I’m not afraid of ending up alone because there’s nothing bad there. I actually enjoy my own company and I feel like Marty and I will stay together. But every other married couple says that. And then that doesn’t happen. So if I let go of the that idea and if I could extrapolate as far as to say if he finds that he ends up being more in love with another woman and decides that our love doesn’t fit for him anymore, then our love doesn’t fit anymore. And I would assume that I would end up at that same place. That hasn’t been my experience, though. It’s the more we let each other go or the more love we have for each other. So that’s again, been my experience. But I think if either of us ever realized or had this feeling that our love wasn’t right together, our relationship wasn’t right together anymore, that we would be able to work through parting ways in a really healthy way and stay amazing friends and close with each other and parents. So that’s that’s like my worst quote unquote fear extrapolated is that through this experience, Marty and I wouldn’t end up together, but  that doesn’t even seem bad because the future. I think that we would have had if we hadn’t gone down this path, I think with the amount of resentment and blame and with the person that I was, I think divorce would have been inevitable. That’s probably a big statement and wouldn’t project that on anyone else to say, oh you’re inevitably going to end up in divorce if you don’t open your relationship. Not the case at all but for me and for where Marty and I were at and how much unprocessed stuff I had building up over the years. I don’t even want to imagine that future. That would’ve been a really shitty train wreck of a future. So I feel like my worst fear is already not even possible. My worst fear being a messy divorce. So back to feeling like I would end up alone. I don’t feel like that would even be a problem because I love my own company and I’ve been alone before and I’m alone right now. And I feel really good. Yes, I have. I know I have the love of my partner, Marty, and the love of my partner, Kyle. And so I’m not really alone, but I just feel like I would be okay. I would be okay. And that confidence of I would be okay if I didn’t have Marty’s love or if I didn’t have Kyle’s love, I would still be okay because I’ve got me. And that’s a really fantastic place to end up or to be, it’s a really secure place which I think is where everything grows from. Its my capability or possibility of sitting here recording this and sharing it with you. Yeah. I’m good here, at least for the moment in this current state of being. Until I confront my next big insecurity and don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll record a podcast of it. But you guys have heard enough of those. Enough of those shit shows.

[00:31:15] Okay. I want to also share my beliefs around where I think a lot of people may be fooling themselves and not on purpose, but a lot of people might have the fear of ending up alone. I don’t want to end up alone in my life and be old and gray and by myself. I think if that’s your fear and if you’re marrying someone or with someone in a relationship from that fear, if that fear is at the base of your being with that other person, it’s probably not a fantastic relationship to begin with. And I think it’s just as likely that relationship could go down the road of becoming a non-communicative relationship or a resentful relationship where you’re still technically together, but you’re not communicating and you don’t feel close so actually feel alone in that relationship. That seems possible as well. So it’s funny that we can sometimes end up creating our own worst fears, which is why that’s our work. That’s the work to look at. There’s fear in the face and go, OK, what do I have to do to get through this? Because otherwise, by avoiding the fear, I think we can sometimes create the circumstances that create the fear from actually manifesting or to manifest. So I do think it’s kind of funny. On the other flipside of that fear is that it’s a paradox that I feel closer to my husband in that he’s on the other side of the world with another woman than I did actually when we were physically together under the same roof a couple of years ago before we opened up our relationship, because we weren’t communicating this openly and clearly, which is really crazy. Yeah, it’s a paradox. I love paradoxes.