I woke up this morning feeling very resentful of this parade of men (including Franklin) in my life who have come to me at various points to confirm that they are not ‘a bad guy,’ and that something a woman said to them can’t be right, because I didn’t experience that, right? And it occurs to me that, to them, the only story is their story.

And if a woman (because let’s face it, this is a thing that happens mostly to women) tells a story and they are in it, but it is not *their* story, the knee jerk response is that she is either being manipulative or crazy. But never does it occur to them, or has it occurred to me for most of my life, that there is a whole different story running parallel to theirs with a woman who is centered at it, and that she might have a different experience!

I think Franklin must have had a very different experience—which seems in retrospect to be a hero’s journey where he bravely stopped letting Celeste control him, and then apologized to me for Celeste controlling him, and was a *good guy,* and I forgave him and everything was ok. And I feel like he has put a lot of effort into reinforcing that story. But it’s not *my* story.

For me, it was a shitty, disrespectful and neglectful relationship with a lot of trauma that I have never really processed, and [have] mostly been trying to outrun for years. Like, if you really center me in my relationship with Franklin, it was just… a shitty relationship that set my growth as a person back.

Like, if you really take him out of it, if it’s really not about him, then that’s all it was to me. It has taken me a long time to even consider or experience or remember that relationship from my perspective, and not just as some catalyst for Franklin’s story.

 

Franklin has an unhealthy ‘tolerance’ for emotional pain in his partners. When someone you care about is deeply in pain, it is the very nature of intimacy that you will also experience empathic pain and you will be driven to act to stop that pain. If that pain is directly related to you and your actions -or- if it is somehow within your power to otherwise ease that pain and you cannot or will not (which are both reasonable choices) make the changes or take the action that you need to alleviate that pain, then I really believe for any healthy person that this mutual pain must at some point drive you to leave the relationship. I think this is the natural and healthy course.

Franklin will essentially stay forever with a partner who is suicidally miserable. How is that? Why is that? And how do his partners bend around that reality?

Well, for me, the solution was to attempt to build a skillset that would allow me to manage and take responsibility for the pain and stress that I was experiencing as a direct result of my relationship with him. Of course my history with depression confused the issue greatly about where my experience was coming from, but I understand now that it was straight up coming from the relationship.

Franklin has or had a very misplaced admiration for my ability to try to transform, tolerate, or otherwise grow from the pain that I was experiencing. However it was this habit that I developed with him, of internalizing and managing neglect, disappointment, instability, and confusion that made me ripe and tolerant for the gaslighting and control that I experienced in another relationship.

I believe that the way that Franklin is able to tolerate his partner’s pain over long periods of time is that he never, fundamentally believes it is coming from him. No matter how bad it is, actually, especially when it is so bad that you, as his partner become hysterical, ‘irrational’ or otherwise crazy, he will continue to see it as essentially something that is coming from you. And, this being the case, he will be a kind and calm and loving friend, helping you through this thing that you alone are experiencing.

In this way, do you see how the very construct of the relationship will gaslight anyone who is emotionally invested in him and then suffers for it? Because you will always be steered towards believing that the pain is ultimately coming from you, when you know, you *know* that it wasn’t there until he did that thing, or didn’t do that thing, or did that series of things. But because he is now being the kind and loving friend that is helping you through this, it is very difficult to stand strong enough to call him on his actions.

I know he tries to recognize the pain that he has caused. In particular, he did a lot of work around how the relationship between he and Celeste and I put me into a very difficult situation. But the thing that he has never ever understood, that I can tell, is that the situation with the three of us, was just a manifestation of the thing that caused pain in our relationship after he left Celeste, and also the thing that seems to cause pain in every relationship he has with someone who is emotionally invested in him.

Franklin will not take responsibility for himself, his life and his relationships. The thing that caused me pain when he was with Celeste was not actually the rules he had with Celeste. Those sucked, sure. But it was the fact that he would not take responsibility for his agreement to those rules, and so he was constantly pulling me in and then it became my responsibility to figure out what the emotional effect was going to be on Celeste, and so *I* became the manager of those rules.

The first time I was ‘with’ Franklin in any capacity, I remember asking him ‘is Celeste OK with this?’ and he said ‘I don’t know,’ and I remember this just inner screaming, but I didn’t have good context at the time to know how incredibly incredibly shitty a thing that was to do to me, like it was the beginning of me internalizing responsibility for shit that wasn’t my responsibility. And then it just became par for the course.

After he left Celeste, and it was pretty much the two of us, we were living on my credit cards because he would.not.get.a.job. I was working full time and trying with all my heart to go to school and every morning I looked on Craigslist for jobs for him, and I sent them to him, and he did.not.apply. And he would deflect when I asked him about it. His business was faltering, and the company he was associated with was waiting for investment money, and we waited for months, and he would not take action to make our situation better. I felt like I was holding both of our lives together, and I would sit and cry in my car over my lunch break. And he just would not share that burden with me. We were not a team, I was just holding all the stress and misery over our future by myself. And that’s what killed it. That’s what extinguished that little light inside. It just went out and smoked a little bit, and I just didn’t care anymore. It had nothing to do with poly, and actually very little to do with the situation with Celeste. It’s because he wouldn’t just be a grown up with me, and I couldn’t feel like a parent to him anymore.

And honestly, as far as I can tell, those two fundamental core problems, which is really just the one problem of not taking responsibility, have not changed. I have watched the women in his life do so.much.labor for him. And I have seen him experience these amazing things, and realize many of his dreams, and have all of these exciting and intense romantic experiences, and what I see is a bunch of women just bearing the labor of the neglect, and disappointment, and the processing, and the scheduling, and all of the domestic world building you have to do so that Franklin can just be Franklin. And so for me, that child like wonder and glee that he has, well, it’s just not that beautiful thing that I thought it was. It’s a way of being that comes at the cost of the time and energy of the women in his life, time and energy that could be used for literally anything else. And I don’t like it.

One more realization that I have had, is that there is a difference between intense love and intense relief. I never had a chance with Franklin to really find out what love with him would look like, because I was too busy riding the roller coaster of pain-attachment and relief-attachment. I understand much better now what secure love feels like, and it just… it just never feels like that. With secure love, sometimes you hurt, and you have to work all the time, but it doesn’t feel like almost dying and then being resuscitated over and over again. That’s something else.

 

[Franklin] is 12 years my senior. I started dating him when I was 24-ish, in a period of incredible instability…so the type of bond I formed with him, was very child like and worship-y, and this was reinforced by the intermittent nature of our relationship while he was with Celeste (the sense of ‘safety/security’ I had with him was never quite reachable, and this kept the illusion alive), but then it kind of dissolved once it was (for all intents and purposes) just he and I. I was freshly divorced (actually, I was about a month away from the legal divorce at that point). I felt at the time that the marriage was pretty OK, pretty solid in a lot of ways, but I was leaving it because I wanted to be poly and he didn’t. And so, I was basically in the position where I was leaving what seemed like a perfectly fine relationship, for poly, which I had no experience with, nor did I have any experience of what it might look like if it were healthy. So, as miserable as it was, I kind of felt like that’s what I had signed up for, and it was important enough to me to be poly, that I had to find a way to try to push through and make it work.

Until I moved in with he and Celeste, I moved approximately 10 times. I moved to be closer to him (from Orlando to Tampa), and then I moved to be farther away because of the pain of being closer (from Tampa back to Orlando), and there were a couple of moves that only lasted a few days due to nightmare roommates. So I remember that time as not being a time when Franklin and I dated, but a time when I felt very strongly about him, but I felt completely and utterly miserable, and trapped somehow. I tried to leave the relationship multiple times, but it felt like *dying*. I don’t fully understand what was at work for me internally during that time.

Living with he and Celeste was just more of that same trapped misery for me. Not a relationship to me—honestly my mind has mapped that time to something closer to ’emotional hostage situation,’ and I just don’t think about it much. Then I did feel like we were in relationship, and I can confirm we had 2 different apartment leases, so that was either 2 or 3 years (the first lease may have been 2 years). Again, this was NOT a happy time at all, thought I no longer felt emotionally trapped.

As soon as I got my AA degree, and I would be transferring to a university and he would be moving to Atlanta, I remember feeling a very distinct sense of relief.

I lost a lot of money with Franklin when I was supporting us with credit cards and student loans, and paying all of the transportation costs when I visited him, and I’m still paying off debt from that time. We never really figured it out because he was just perpetually broke after that, so I just decided to forget about it. He didn’t specifically say that it was my responsibility, but he also never fully took responsibility for helping me to deal with that money I’d spent.

After we were living in different cities, and I was dating Oliver, I stopped really thinking of myself as being in relationship with Franklin. I even remember times when I would refer to Oliver and Sue and I as being a poly-fi V around Franklin, and there would be this dissonance in my brain. I suppose I was ’emotionally ghosting’ Franklin during these 3 years. He was still an important friend, and I visited him a lot in Atlanta, but I did not at all operate internally like we were in a relationship.

I don’t remember what the motivation was for the rings, but it certainly didn’t imply any kind of specific relationship thing or specific commitment to me (except maybe ‘important person’). I would say I thought of it as a ‘friendship ring’. I enjoy rings, but they only mean what is specifically negotiated…I don’t remember when I stopped wearing my ring…I did wear it for a while when I did not consider us in a relationship, but it was more like a ‘friendship ring’. At some point it stopped feeling right and I stopped wearing it.

I think actually the first time I felt that we were broken up was when I told him I didn’t want to be sexual any more. Like in my head, that was a really really clear point where we weren’t in a relationship, but I had been very clearly drifting away from thinking about it as a relationship for maybe almost a year before that. I actually remember when Franklin moved to Portland from Atlanta, and I felt this huge burden was lifted, because Vera was taking over the caregiver role, and because I was always worried about him while he was in Atlanta—like his life would just fall apart if I wasn’t watching it. Like I was still somehow responsible for it. It’s weird that I still felt like a mom long after I stopped feeling like a lover. It’s really not ok.

I have spent all most no time processing the relationship with Franklin. Like, I have a few key memories that I base my assessment of the whole situation on. But *7* years. What? When I dig in at all, it was an absolutely horribly miserable time in my life. When I look at my relationship with Oliver or K or J it’s fine—there’s good and bad—but it’s not *traumatic*. When I think back, as a real witness, to the relationship with Franklin and [another guy]…it’s just a black hole of awfulness.

 

I believed until recently that it was always external forces, and never his behavior, that fundamentally had damaged us and me. We can call it the ‘poly magic trick.’ Previously, my understanding of what happened was that Franklin was in a difficult situation and then he did the right thing, without really thinking a lot about how crappy things were after he ‘did the right thing.’