thoughts on being polyamorous

a friend asked me recently about my "poly" status with my wife, and i started to write a short thing which turned into a long thing. here it is as i sent it to her, to avoid editing and nitpicking it into not getting posted.

here's a bunch of pieces that all kind of commingle here, so it's a bit of a mess, but the short version is something like:

1. i am poly and can and do experience familial and romantic love for multiple people at the same time.
2. i am a human bound by causality and time, so i can only do one thing at a time at any given time.
3. conceptually "love" is infinite and i can care about many people without effort, but relationships require time and energy for them to have any depth.
4. given that, if i'm going to have a meaningfully deep relationship, i need to put in greater and greater efforts to both achieve and then maintain it.
5. at a certain point, i can love multiple people, but i find myself disappointed when i want to have a shared history with someone (my now-wife May) but my history is split across N people. Shared history is an important aspect of relationships, and personally, i find great joy in being able to say "remember when we did X?"
6. likewise, when i was single and ready to mingle in 2017, i had basically infinite time to meet people and to spread myself out. that extra time has shrunk bit by bit since and now i have roughly 1.5 free hours before bed every day. if i want more than that in a given day, i am necessarily depriving both my wife and kids of valuable time with me and forcing my wife to do stuff like "make dinner, entertain the kids, put them to bed" alone.

when i was younger, i liked playing piano and had dreams of doing it as a professional of some kind. my parents were like, "our friends' kid plays piano at CCM, we should get dinner." so we went over and had dinner and had a nice time! the daughter showed me some stuff on the piano and i was both intimidated and impassioned until the end of the night when my dad asked her how much she practiced.

and she was like "merely to keep up my skills, i play roughly 6 hours a day. to improve or really practice a given piece, i sometimes play for 8 hours a day.." i heard that and was like "okay, i'm gonna do something else with my life" lmao

that perspective tho was super important for me, cuz it's how i view my relationship with my wife. any effort i put into a different relationship is time i'm not putting it into her (ayyy lmao)