Your future needs.

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts will be found at www.polymeansmany.com from tomorrow. This month, our topic is "meeting your needs".

I've always been pretty certain that I wanted to have children, and luckily for me, so has my husband. It was one of the things we checked out about each other in the very early days, when we were giddy with the possibility of love.

What if he'd told me he never wanted to have children? If he didn't even like children? I'm pretty sure I would have walked away. Even if I'd managed to find another partner with whom I could co-parent whilst still being involved with him, the idea of having a passionate relationship with someone who doesn't want to be a part of my family life sounds painful, let alone unsustainable. And I don't think that I could have coped with keeping the distance between us necessary for me to be able to find that co-parent. Back then, I didn't love him, but I could see that I would fall for him, hard, if we kept seeing each other. Far better to break it off straight away, to prevent serious heartbreak.

I asked my husband what he'd have done had I told him that I never wanted to be a parent. He said he'd have kept our relationship going anyway, hoping that either he could change my mind or become satisfied without children, and it would have ended badly.

Which is honest.

In situations like this, it isn't one partner's needs vs. another's, it's your needs vs. your needs. It's about what you want *now* vs. what you will want later. Which is probably harder than my needs vs. your needs, because you can't have a conversation with your future self, and any compromises you make will only hurt you later on.

But now, I think that the stability of my marriage gives us an enormous privilege in making these kinds of decisions. We wouldn't pursue a relationship with anyone who didn't like children (and our child in particular), for example, but the fact that we both have our needs met by each other gives us the strength to say "no" to things that won't work for our family. If you're lonely, or in need of support, or just going through some tough times, I can see that it isn't so easy to turn down someone who can give you what you need right now because they will get in the way of what you need at some point in the future.

And sometimes the situation is reversed - when Small was tiny, my relationship with my boyfriend changed dramatically, and he had to cope with not getting some of the things he wanted from me for quite a while. I'm pretty sure I wasn't meeting his needs, or giving him anything like the attention he wanted from me (unless that attention was to talk about my baby and how tired I was, and to ask for food - he got plenty of that). His choice was to walk away because I wasn't meeting his needs, or to put his own needs aside for a while because he wanted our relationship to exist in the long term. And luckily for me, my boyfriend was in a position where he was happy and strong enough (not to mention happy to be a part of my daughter's life, and delighted to see me so happy) to wait for his needs to be met.

So I'm not saying that my answer to the hypothetical question above is the "right" one, because the position I was in at the time was pretty strong: I had a stable job, good health, and the emotional strength to take the a longer-term view. Plus, it's only a hypothetical, so I can't be sure that the real me would have been quite so pragmatic. Saying "no" to something that will hurt you down the line is hard, as is saying "yes" to something that is hurting you now. But whoever you are, you deserve to be happy, so if you can, don't give up on what you want. You future self will thank you.