Dear Anna,

I’ve been happily married for 12 years, and my husband and I have been poly for eight of them. Overall, it’s been a really positive part of our relationship. We’ve had our trials, of course, but we communicate much better than we once did, we both date other people occasionally, and I genuinely experience compersion much of the time. But every now and then, something catches me completely off guard. Sometimes after he spends the night with another woman, I’ll find myself crying alone in the bathroom. It’s not every time, and it doesn’t even seem to correlate with how serious the other relationship is. Sometimes I’ll be thrilled for him one day and then, after another date, feel this wave of sadness I can’t explain. The confusing part is that I don’t actually want him to stop dating other people. I don’t want to close our marriage. I don’t resent his partners. Once the feeling passes, I still believe polyamory is right for us. So why am I crying? — Serious Or Baffling?

Dear SOB,

One of my favorite things about being human is that we can hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

You can be deeply happy in your marriage and occasionally lonely. You can adore your children and miss the life you had before them. You can love your dream job and still have days when you fantasize about quitting and selling shave ice out of a van on some dreamy beach.

None of those invalidate the bigger truth that life is always complicated, and relationships are especially so.

One of the myths — both inside and outside poly communities — is that if you’re “doing it right,” you’ll either feel compersion (that is, genuine pleasure when your partner experiences pleasure) or jealousy, security or insecurity, joy or grief. But life is never tidy and part of being a fully fledged human means you can’t just opt out of “unpleasant” emotions. Even the happiest among us still experience rage, fear, sadness, irritation, boredom and so on. It’s part of the package of being alive.

TLDR: It’s great that you feel compersion (not everyone does), but that doesn’t mean other, harder feelings won’t show up too. In fact, there’s a word for exactly what you’re describing in poly circles: a “wibble” (sometimes also called a “wobble,” after the toy you can knock over and it rights itself) — a brief moment of fear, insecurity or grief that can coexist with genuine intellectual and emotional buy-in to your relationship structure. Knowing it has a name doesn’t fix it, but it might help you stop treating it as proof something’s wrong.

So first and foremost, cut yourself some slack. Recognize that feelings are a natural expression of your humanity. Then, once you’ve done that, it’s time to get curious about the bathroom tears. You said they seem to occur randomly (i.e., they aren’t connected to the seriousness of your husband’s relationships), but I’m wondering if you’ve been tracking what else is going on in your life.

Do they occur after weeks when you haven’t had much one-on-one time together? When you’re stressed about work or other life responsibilities? When you’re feeling disconnected from your body? When his date highlights something you’re quietly longing for in your own life? Or are they simply the emotional exhale that comes after spending all evening being supportive?

(You didn’t say your age, but I’d be remiss not to mention that the crying might be at least in part due to perimenopause, which can sometimes cause wildly unpredictable mood swings, rage or irritation, sleeplessness, bouts of depression and a host of other unfun symptoms. Just something to keep in mind if you’re in your late 30s or 40s.)

Also, what’s the accompanying feeling that the tears bring about? (There might be more than one.) Is it loneliness? FOMO? An existential dread that life is finite and we’re all going to die one day and why am I watching yet another episode of "Too Hot to Handle"?

Once you dig a little deeper into what’s underneath, the tears might be telling you that you miss your husband. That you need reassurance. That you want more novelty in your own dating life. That you’re grieving the reality that every relationship involves sharing the people we love with other commitments, whether that’s work, children, friends, hobbies — or, in your case, other partners.

But not every cry is a message. Sometimes it’s just release — the body’s way of resetting after a day spent holding a lot at once. Not every tear needs decoding.

Practically speaking, I’d stop treating these moments like evidence that something is wrong and start treating them like information. After one happens, jot down a few notes. What happened that day? How connected did you feel beforehand? What story was your brain telling you? What helped the feeling pass? Over time, patterns often emerge that are invisible in the moment. (And of course, a poly-informed therapist can do wonders in helping you suss things out, if you need extra support.)

It might also help to build in a small reconnection ritual (either before or after, or both) for the nights he’s with someone else — a check-in call/text, 10 minutes of just lying together before sleep, an orgasm — whatever gives your nervous system a concrete signal that you two are still you two. Some couples find this does more in the moment than any amount of after-the-fact analysis.

I’d also tell your husband, if you haven’t already. Not because he needs to fix it or cancel dates, but because intimacy grows when we stop hiding the parts of ourselves we think are inconvenient. Something like: “Sometimes I cry after you’re with someone else, and I don’t think it means we’re doing anything wrong. I’m trying to understand it, and I’d love your support while I do.”

The fact that these feelings exist doesn’t automatically mean your relationship structure isn’t working for you. It could simply mean you’re a person having a normal human emotional response to loving someone whose life extends beyond you.

There’s a tendency to treat difficult emotions as verdicts: If I’m not happy 100% of the time, I must be doing something wrong. But spoiler: No one is happy 100% of the time. Not even those monks who are always smiling on remote mountain tops.

Experiencing emotions means you’re alive, and you’re paying attention, and you’re reckoning with a life that’s big and messy and joyful and infuriating and short, and yes, occasionally sad.

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