New Relationship Energy Is Intoxicating. But What Are You Actually Chasing?

There’s a pattern I see a lot in non-monogamy, and I’ve lived it myself, so I’m allowed to say this.

It’s the pattern of using new connections (the excitement of them, the attention of them, the way someone new looks at you like you’re the most interesting person they’ve ever met) as a way of feeling good about yourself. Of outsourcing your sense of worth to whoever is currently making you feel wanted.

It doesn’t look like that from the inside, at first. From the inside, it looks like confidence. Like abundance. Like proof that you’re someone worth loving. And in the early stages of non-monogamy, especially when everything is new and charged, and you’re suddenly swimming in a level of attention you maybe haven’t felt in years, it’s very easy to mistake that feeling for something it isn’t. It took me a while to understand what was actually happening. And when I did, it changed everything.

The thing about using people for validation is that it works (at least for a little while). That’s what makes it so easy not to notice how it can actually be harmful.

When someone new is pursuing you and the connection is fresh, and everything feels electric, you feel amazing! Brand new, even. Maybe the low hum of anxiety or lack of self-worth that lives somewhere underneath your daily life has finally gone quiet. You feel like enough. You feel like yourself, the best version, the one you always hoped you were.

And then the connection cools, or the person gets busy, or something shifts the way things always eventually shift, and that feeling drains away quickly. You find yourself reaching for the next thing that will bring it back, often without fully realising that’s what you’re doing. That cycle, the high of being wanted, the drop when it fades, the reaching, is the shape of outsourced self-worth. Non-monogamy, with its revolving cast of new connections and fresh attention, can make it very easy to stay in that cycle without ever having to sit with what’s underneath it.

Most of us come to relationships carrying some version of the same question: am I enough? It’s one of the oldest human fears. And for a lot of us, somewhere along the way, we learned to answer that question by looking outward, by measuring our worth in how much we’re wanted, chosen, desired.

Monogamy can mask this for a long time. You have one person who loves you, who tells you you’re enough, and that becomes a kind of answer you stop questioning. Non-monogamy removes the mask. Suddenly, you have more input, more people, more data points, more moments of being chosen or not chosen. This makes the underlying question get louder, not quieter. If you’re someone who has never really answered am I enough? from the inside, non-monogamy will force you to. Not cruelly. Just inevitably.

I want to be careful here because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with feeling good when someone desires you. That’s human. That’s lovely, actually. Being wanted by people you care about is one of the genuinely beautiful things about this way of living.

The distinction I’m drawing is subtler than that. It’s the difference between a connection adding to a life that already feels full and a connection being the thing that makes your life feel full. Between enjoying the way someone sees you and needing them to see you in order to feel okay. One is abundance. The other is hunger dressed up as abundance.

When I started paying attention to this in myself, I noticed it in small ways first. The slight anxiety when a new connection went quiet for a few days. The way my mood tracked too closely with whether someone had texted back. The disproportionate drop I felt when something promising fizzled before it began. None of these things were catastrophic on their own. But they were information, telling me that I was leaning on external things to hold up something that needed to be held up from the inside.

The honest answer is that it’s less about a technique and more about a commitment to keep asking yourself the uncomfortable question: why does this matter so much to me? Not in a harsh way. In a genuinely curious one.

When you notice you’re refreshing your messages more than you’d like, when a connection cooling leaves you feeling more unmoored than the situation warrants, when you’re dating at a pace that’s really about outrunning something rather than moving toward it, those are the moments worth pausing in. Not to judge yourself, but to get curious about what’s underneath.

The other thing that helped me, more than anything else, was building a life that felt genuinely full outside of romantic connection. Not as a strategy for attracting people (that’s its own trap) but because a life with real friendships, work that matters, and things you do purely because you love them is a life that doesn’t need to be rescued by a new connection.

You stop reaching for people to fill a gap because the gap isn’t there in the way it used to be. That’s the foundation that makes non-monogamy feel like freedom rather than a slightly frantic search for enough.

One of my biggest learnings has been that non-monogamy has a way of handing you back yourself, the real version, not the one you’d curated. It showed me parts of myself I was proud of and parts I had to sit with and work on. The validation pattern was one of the harder ones to see clearly, because it looked so much like confidence from the outside.

What I’ve come to understand is that the connections that actually sustain you are the ones you enter already feeling whole. Not perfect, not without needs, but whole. Grounded enough in your own sense of self that another person’s attention is a gift rather than a lifeline.

That kind of groundedness isn’t something you arrive at once and then have forever. It’s something you tend to, something you check in on, something non-monogamy will keep asking you about, whether you’re ready or not.

This one sat with me for a while before I wrote it. If it resonated, or if you’re somewhere in the middle of recognising this pattern in yourself, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

xx, Luna Rose