[January Jumpstart 2023] – Changing relationship views

The Revelations prompt is dates and dating and with this I want to explore how I currently see myself in regards to this.
The things I am leearning and who I feel like I am becoming in the world of dating.

I’ve never been one to date much, I’ve had a grand total of maybe 2 relationships in my life.
The first was a teenage relationship where I became friends with a girl who I eventually fell for and we dated for about 7 months before I ended it.

The 2nd was someone I became friends with online and we sort of had something that I call dating/relationship. I don’t know how long it was thing but after a while we sort of just drifted apart and things ended.
We are still friends even if we don’t talk all that often, and I still have a love and appreciation for her in life.

From these 2 relationships and through life in general monogamous was who I was. I liked the idea of dating the one person and one person only, putting my time and effort into them and enjoying the relationship we have. I’ve always fallen for someone hard so being with them was all I wabted
Over the years though, particularly more recently, I’ve begun to see a lot more outside of monogamy and it has started to change how I think about dating and relationships.

Whether it’s people at work, people online or just people I see on my commute a lot, I’m finding so many beautiful people out there. Not just beautiful in the physical sense but in how nice they can be around me and others, how they spread joy to me and how they can make me smile.

Through these people I’m seeing so many different dynamics to each one, and while not all are people I want to date for many reasons, I am finding the act of having “The One” to be less important to me.
Yes I still would gladly fall in love with someone who I spend the rest of my life with, but I’ve opened my eyes to that not being the case, to not only having one partner but more than that, or having my partner have their own partner.

I love to love, and I love to see other people love, I love to see other people happy as much as I love being happy myself.
This could be in a relationship where we have a mutal understand that we both have other partners for different reasons. I understand it may be that I can only provide so much to someone and so they have another someone for what I can’t give, it might be that I love what they can give me but I have someone else who offers what they can’t.

I am still new to non-monogamy, still to learn a lot about it and yet to be in a relationship that is non-monogamous.
But from this I am beginning to realise that no everyone is monogamous, that may not fit them and so they seek alternative dating options, the fact that monogamy is not the standard of relationship that we should all be doing.
On the other hand not everyone wants to be non-monogamous, they may want to have a singular partner and that’s totally fine, it’s whatever works for them at the end of the day and makes them happy.

So when it comes to dating I can’t say i’m 100% monogamous nor that I’m non-monogamous but I’ll take each dating sceanrio as it comes and do what’s best for two people together.
Maybe in several years I’ll be able to say for certain where I fit in, or maybe like at this moment in time I will be open to both monogamy and non-monogamy.