Falling Out of Love and Back In: A Polyamorous Marriage Story

This is a story about falling out of love with my husband and choosing to fall back in. It's about what happens when the fairy tale ends and the real work begins.

How We Got Here: An Unlikely Beginning

When I started dating my husband, he was my least serious partner. I had three other boyfriends, and two of them seemed more likely to escalate into husband material and the other one was married. My husband had a serious primary partner he'd been living with for over five years, and I just didn't see him that way. I had wanted someone with a PhD who preferably was into physical fitness and also very musical, among other things, and he didn't fit those checkboxes.

At the time, I started telling all of my partners and potential partners that I wanted to get married and have kids and wasn't going to get into new relationships that didn't have that as a possibility.

I was shocked when I was sitting in a private hot tub after some mind-blowing sex and my husband said, "Let's have a baby."

"But we're casual?????" I mumbled out.

"I'm ready, let's do it," he said.

We had never talked about that. Our dates were infrequent (once every two weeks) and were very focused on having lots of sex. I was completely flabbergasted. But he was serious. This much I knew. He didn't ever offer something he hadn't seriously considered.

So why did I say yes? I felt so happy and comfortable with him, and I trusted that feeling above any other thing. The sex was good and we loved spending hours talking together. He had taken me on business trips with him all over Asia, and I knew that we just worked together.

At the same time, I was a confused, immature 23-year-old, and my main reason to get married, if I dig deep, was some combination of checking off a box on my to-do list to prove I'm a successful adult and wanting someone to take care of me and choose me (since everyone else only wanted me as a secondary partner).

My husband is a wonderful, inspiring, supportive person and I love him very much. I'm grateful to have him. But I also feel shame over the knowledge that I think I got married for the wrong reasons. Marriage and kids seemed like good things to check off my to-do list along with ivy league education, graduate degree, and a 6-figure job, so I said sure, why not. I jumped into it without understanding what marriage really is about.

So why did he marry me? We were having great sex (the best of his life according to him) and he's very sex motivated. I was also his favorite partner, which may be controversial since he already was supposed to have a primary partner who wasn't me. He wanted to have kids while he was still in his mid-30s, and none of his other partners, including his primary one, were ready to do that with him at that point.

We had dated for about a year and a half and suddenly were engaged and moving swiftly into marriage and pregnancy. We did not know what we were getting into.

The Stress Test Begins

What followed was several of the most difficult years of my life, struggling with serious pregnancy complications, hospital visits, and so much new medical trauma. And then on top of that, the stress of taking care of a very sick newborn baby during COVID. We had to grow substantially as people, both physically (lift weights and build that muscle so you can carry the toddlers!) and emotionally, to take on the task of being good guides to these small humans who depended on us for both guidance and survival.

At this time, all of our other relationships fell away or de-escalated as we went into full survival mode. The polyamory that had defined our early relationship became a distant memory as we focused solely on keeping our family afloat.

Having kids and keeping a home together led to a huge amount of conflict. Why wouldn't he change the diapers? Why is he so messy? But also, I was over-focusing on the negatives and not seeing all of the things he was doing.

He built his life around me and the kids, slowly rewiring his entire personality. He became kinder and more empathetic and got practice at talking about his emotions. He learned to cook for me, taking dozens of hours of cooking classes and making me the most delicious dishes. He learned to make mai tais and gin martinis so he could be my personal bartender. He learned to love me more deeply than he had ever loved another person (in his words).

A decade after we got together, once the kids were old enough to walk and talk and we weren't in crisis mode, we looked up for air and realized that we had underinvested in building a solid foundation for our marriage.

He was still as in love with me as ever, but I had fallen out of love. The years of resentment and frustration had taken their toll and I felt mostly just emotionally empty? I felt deep shame about this, like I had failed at a crucial, important part of life.

The Weight of Shame

The shame was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I felt like I had failed at the most important thing in life. How do you tell someone who loves you completely that you don't feel the same way anymore? How do you admit that watching him try so hard to make you happy only makes you feel more distant?

I was scared of his reaction if I admitted it. I was scared of breaking up our family. I was scared of being alone. But mostly, I was scared of the judgment from him, from others, from myself. Good wives don't fall out of love. Good mothers don't want to leave. Good people don't hurt the ones who love them most.

The shame made me retreat further. I started avoiding eye contact, making excuses to stay busy. I would watch him make my favorite dinner or play with the kids and feel waves of guilt. How could I not love someone who loved me so completely?

I tried to manufacture feelings by planning date nights, buying lingerie, and reading relationship books. Nothing worked. The more I tried to force it, the more distant I felt. I started to wonder if this was just what marriage became after kids, if everyone was walking around pretending.

The Breaking Point

The path from falling out of love to finding our way back wasn't linear or pretty. I wish I could say that we immediately had an honest conversation and worked together with a couples therapist to rebuild our bond. It mostly did happen that way, but I'm not perfect. The dark side of this story is that we didn't have that honest conversation until after I finally started dating again and fell in love with someone else.

Being in polyamorous relationships has taught me that love isn't finite, that you can love multiple people in different ways. But what I didn't understand was how devastating it would be for my husband to watch me come alive with someone else while feeling invisible in our own relationship.

Suddenly he saw what it was that he had been missing: my eyes lighting up with joy as I thought about someone I was excited to see. He couldn't handle my weekend trips to see this new partner, and I was dismissive of this, thinking that he was being unpleasantly jealous. I thought he just needed to deal with that on his end instead of trying to approach with curiosity and understand what he was trying to tell me.

I feel very guilty about this. I hurt him badly by not listening. The problem wasn't having sex with other people. I've had sex with many people since then and he's been genuinely happy for me. But seeing me fall in love with someone else while he desperately wanted to feel that with me and didn't was highly emotionally damaging and broke him a little bit. I feel horrible for not seeing what I was doing while I was in an NRE (new relationship energy) bubble.

He later told me that watching me fall for someone else while he was invisible to me was like "watching your wife have the life you wanted with her through a window." That image haunts me still.

Finally, with this new information we were able to talk to each other. He was able to express his fears and ask me for romance and intimacy, and I'm happy to say I was able to hear it - not at first, but before it was too late.

The Intentional Work of Falling Back in Love

And so we took on the monumental task of figuring out how to fall back in love with each other. Deeply and truly. With the right solid emotional foundations this time.

We did work with a couples therapist, but on top of that, we made lists of our hopes and dreams and looked at the overlap but also the deltas. We discovered that while we both wanted adventure and growth, I craved intellectual stimulation and sexual variety and he needed physical affection and consistency. I wanted to feel heard and understood; he wanted to feel appreciated and desired. Some of our dreams aligned perfectly. We both wanted to travel more with the kids, to build a creative life together. Others required negotiation and compromise.

Daily Practices

The daily work looked different than I expected. Some mornings, we would sit with coffee before the kids woke up and practice what our therapist called "emotional check-ins" - just five minutes of sharing what we were actually feeling without trying to fix anything. He would say he felt anxious about a work deadline. I would say I felt disconnected and didn't know why. Just naming these things out loud, without judgment, started to create space between us that felt alive instead of empty.

We started talking openly about our different communication styles. For example, after I talk about feelings I want a pause and a moment to be heard, whereas he wants someone to immediately restate what he said and build on it. We had been talking past each other for years by not understanding what the other needed to feel heard and giving them what we wanted, instead of what they needed.

We developed rituals. We started explicitly planning connected time - not date nights, but connection time. Sometimes we'd cook together. Sometimes we'd sit on opposite ends of the couch reading, feet touching. The point wasn't activity but presence. We learned that connection could be built in tiny moments: a hand on the shoulder while passing in the kitchen, a text in the middle of the day just to say "thinking of you."

The Vulnerability Work

The vulnerability exercises were terrifying and transformative. We hired extra childcare so we could focus on each other. We went on a weekend retreat to a nudist hot spring and spent hours in mineral water talking about our biggest fears and letting ourselves be seen.

We took turns sharing our deepest insecurities (i.e. his fear that he wasn't enough for me, my fear that I was too much for anyone to handle long-term.) We practiced asking for what we needed instead of hoping the other person would guess. We learned to sit with discomfort instead of immediately trying to fix it.

I asked him if I could be messy, emotionally messy, imperfect, still figuring things out, and he told me I already had been and he still wanted to be with me forever.

Parenting Through the Repair

Even while doing this intensive couples work, we had to navigate parenting. The kids couldn't wait for us to figure ourselves out. We learned to have quiet, coded conversations in the kitchen while making sandwiches. We discovered that modeling repair (letting them see us disagree respectfully and come back together) was more valuable than pretending everything was always fine.

Strength Through Flexibility

I'm glad that with work and many vulnerable conversations, I'm falling back in love with him. I'm so relieved and so grateful for this.

But more importantly, I think that if some horrible stressor happened and we fell out of love again, we would be able to intentionally work at it and fall in love again. This realization has transformed how I think about relationships entirely.

There's something fellow substack writer Sasha Chapin captured about the see-saw balance between togetherness and separation - how relationships need that push and pull to stay dynamic. He writes, "If you completely nullify these reactions, there is no excitement, none of the friction or distance that keeps people interesting. You have destroyed the natural cycle of intimacy. So there have to be moments of longing and distance, and also moments of overexposure."

We had lost that tension. We were like a suspension bridge that had become too rigid, unable to flex with the winds of change. When we fell out of love, it felt like failure, but it was actually the bridge swaying, testing its flexibility.

In resilience engineering, robust systems need flexibility or they can become brittle. The same is true for relationships. Our bond is now more robust and resilient than if we had never fallen out of love, because we know how to tend to it intentionally. We know the difference between strength and rigidity.

How Polyamory Shaped Our Repair

Our polyamorous framework actually helped us in ways I didn't expect. I don’t think we would have realized our issues if I hadn’t fallen in love with someone else. But it has also been helpful in other ways.

Because we were already practiced at processing jealousy and communicating about complex emotions, we had some of the tools needed for this deeper work. We understood that love isn't finite, that my falling out of love with him didn't mean I loved him less than I was capable of. It meant our connection needed tending.

Being poly also meant we had experience with the idea that relationships can transform and evolve. When we started dating again (separately), we approached it with the knowledge that our marriage was the priority, and that other relationships could enhance rather than threaten our bond.

Our marriage now exists within our polyamorous life in a way that feels integrated and authentic. Other partners have come and gone, but we've learned how to hold space for new relationship energy while maintaining our commitment to each other. We've learned that jealousy often points to unmet needs, and that those needs can be addressed directly rather than through control or restriction.

I've stopped believing that polyamory requires a "perfect" foundation, and I feel relief at this idea. Real relationships aren't perfect. They're living, breathing things that grow and change. What we need isn't perfection but transparency: knowing where we stand, what we're working on, and how new connections fit into that ongoing process. As long as everyone is on the same page and openly communicating, I don’t feel like my marriage needs to be “perfect” to invite new people into my life.

What I Watch for Now

These days, I pay attention to different signals in our relationship. When I notice myself feeling disconnected, instead of panicking or pretending everything is fine, I can say, "I'm feeling distant and I'm not sure why. Can we talk about this?" When he seems to need more affection or appreciation, I can ask directly, "What do you need from me right now?"

We do monthly relationship check-ins now, where we talk about what's working and what isn't. We schedule them like any other important appointment, because we've learned that our relationship deserves the same intentional attention we give to our careers and our children.

I've also learned to recognize the difference between temporary disconnection and deeper problems. Sometimes we just need a good night's sleep or a weekend away. Sometimes we need to have a harder conversation about unmet needs or changing desires. The key is not being afraid to name what's happening and work through it together.

The Kind of Love Worth Building

People don't usually share these narratives. It's not the perfect "fell in love and stayed that way until happy ending" story. But I think there's something powerful about choosing someone with intention after living through so many challenges and knowing how to fall back in love together.

I'm skeptical of people who try to give relationship advice without having had this sort of stress test. I feel more confident in making long-term plans knowing what the intentional process of building the bond back up feels like.

Sometimes I think back to that moment in the hot tub, when he surprised me with "Let's have a baby." We were so young, so unprepared for what would follow. But maybe that's the point. You can never really be prepared for the transformation that deep partnership requires. You can only choose to meet it with as much honesty and courage as you can find.

That feels like the kind of love worth building a life on.