Recently my wife (26NB) and I (26M) have experimented with a poly relationship. We’ve been monogamous for 8 years and after some self discovery and realizing we are non-monogamous people, we experienced a polyamorous relationship with a friend of mine that grew up in a poly household. For that person, polyamory was their normal growing up so they were a good first experience as it left my wife and I being the only ones learning this new lifestyle and not needing that extra factor adding to things.
As the relationship progressed, my wife and our third had a better relationship than me and the third person and eventually the dynamic changed from a brief thruple to a vee/hinge dynamic with my wife being the hinge. Eventually my wife and the third started having incompatibility issues and that relationship is on its way out slowly giving my wife and I a chance to reassess and learn from this experience. But in this lies an issue I can’t seem to overcome.
During the early stages of the poly relationship, I never was given the space to have one on one bonding with our third partner and I had to become radically accepting of the fact that my wife and the third would have their own individual intimate relationships that did not always include me, as that’s what I expected a throuple dynamic to have aspects of. My issue being that while my wife got to enjoy (and carry the weight of) 2 relationships I never got my own relationship with anyone outside of my wife for the entire 8 years we’ve been together, even in this poly relationship. So now that we are regrouping and healing after a lot of new experiences and some hurt, I have a feeling of inequity and I don’t know how to feel equal again with anything other than a hall pass/individual relationship of my own.
I feel like we made this discovery of being NM and as my wife got to experience it more or less fully, I still haven’t gotten the full experience they had and as we take a break and focus on each other I don’t know how to be patient and not want a chance for “my turn” at experimentation.