How can I tell the difference between wanting a poly relationship or falling out of love with someone while falling in love with another person but not wanting to let the first one go? I want to be 100% sure if I do decided to every try polyamory and I would honestly love your advice.
It’s relatively common for people in monogamous relationships to use a new relationship as a way or a reason to leave a current relationship. (Taylor Swift documented this phenomenon the 2018 sociological study “Getaway Car.”) This, while common, is neither healthy nor wise. So you’re smart to be wary of that impulse in your own life.
Unfortunately, something that’s also not healthy or wise is waiting to be “100% sure” before you make any decision. Very few things in life come with 100% certainty, and usually things that have to do with love and human relationships have a lot of uncertainty. You can never truly predict how something will work out; you will never know for sure whether something is the right call. I like to believe that this is largely because in most situations there is no objective 'right call; your life and your universe will align around whatever choice you make and things will proceed from that point.
Check my page on figuring out whether you are polyamorous, and do a lot of daydreaming and thinking about your best-case-scenario and worst-case-scenario. What do you think, and hope, it would be like to date both people? What thoughts and feelings come up when you ask yourself whether you’re falling out of love with your current partner? What does “falling in love” or “falling out of love” mean to you?
Remember also that even if you were 100% sure that you wanted to polyamorously date both people, that wouldn’t guarantee that you could. You’d still need buy-in from two other people. If your current partner wasn’t okay with you polyamorously dating both people, would you stay in that relationship? If the other person didn’t want to date you, would you still be interested in polyamory in general, or are you mostly just wanting to date this other person?