I can see the future again
If you meet someone and hit it off, why should I expect you to tell them you're poly? Why should I expect you to tell them no to anything? And then why should I expect you to tell me before you decide to move in with them or commit all your time and energy to them? You can go at least three months without even alluding to the existence of your other partners. I will not be kept in the loop.
I wouldn't even know I was replaced until afterwards. Life would be a series of terrifying and hurtful discoveries, not a sense of being cherished and that my input was important and that maybe hard choices have to be made sometimes. My inner life and desires are painful and inconvenient, something to be warded off as much as possible and viewed as forcible demands otherwise.
He was able to access such openness and reciprocity and unscriptedness during sex and sometimes during touch, enough that my body believed the relationship was like that. But the rest of the relationship was not like that.
He projected his insecurities onto me and then got upset at me for judging him about things idgaf about. He tried to perpetuate his traumas and judgements on me, the ones that were imposed on him, but I don't take those onboard from anyone. He bent himself out of shape to do things I didn't ask for in service to me, got resentful for doing those things, but couldn't do the things I really needed or asked for.
If he pulled the trigger on moving without talking to me first because he was afraid he couldn't stand up to me, and has had similar dynamics around partners and barriered sex etc, why would I ever expect him to behave honestly in a distance relationship? Why would he say no to anyone other poly partners who wanted something from him? Why would he follow up with anything he told me he'd do?
It's hard because I've been there inside that fundamentally dishonest dynamic where I was unable to advocate for what I needed because I thought it didn't exist and I couldn't have it. But it leads to breaking trust, to fundamentally dishonest behavior, and to super erratic behaviour when one does the thing anyhow. And from that place of should/ shouldn't there's also a lack of ability to set down self-flagellation long enough to have curiosity and get to real empathy with what those impacts are on me. I don't think he can flip this situation in his head to put himself in my shoes. Instead he just beats himself up because he thinks that's how you solve this, or wants me to shut up because hearing about the impacts of his actions is 'judging him'. My reality isn't a full, living, breathing other person to him. My pain exists as a rebuke and my joy as a reward father than me being an entity in my own right. It's so... Christian, that idea that everyone is a tool designed to reward or punish instead of a mess of folks inside their own realities.
I'm hurt. I'm not sleeping well. This is all awful.
It'll be better in a year or two. Just gotta get through this part and find ways to stay present within my own life in the meantime.