oh, i was all in. i loved them so much, so hard. we had a ton of fun at teh beginning, and then enough fun, and tbh enough super intense really good sex to keep me in it when i should have left. that 1% was emotional maturity. they are about a decade younger than me, almost, and idk, just - they take advantage of people, use 'em and leave 'em. and i do my damndest to live my life with full integrity and if i say something, i do it (or explain why i can't at least), and i couldn't handle being used & left and ultimately that was what was happening. and. also. i couldn't show up for M in a big way at a time when they needed me, because we had all this baggage about me getting involved with a mutual friend and M didn't want me to date this person X, and it was drama all the way down and i had all this resentment because M was telling me who i could and couldn't kiss, basically. and damnit, nobody gets to tell me that. and then some shit happened to M, and they reached out to me, and we were in the middle of all this baggage around autonomy and polyamory and i couldn't reach back the way they needed. i think that is one of the things that really broke it. but at the same time, M was taking advantage of all these things about me/my financial stability/car-ownership/home-ownership that they didn't otherwise have access to, and it wasn't feeling like an energy exchange so much as that i was being mooched from a lot. so it was tanking around those inequities also. this was all about a decade ago. all these years later i still don't regret getting involved with X, though i do regret that it blew up my relationship with M like that. i learned a lot. the breakup went from "i need to not talk to you for a couple weeks" to "i need us to take a break for the rest of the summer" to "i am showing up at your house unexpectedly and saying i want to talk right this second so now that is what is happening" to amazing break-up/make-up sex that probably really complicated the issue for us both, to taking another communications break. the whole thing dragged on for months. i didn't have the willpower to stop it. i don't think i would tolerate that much drama and chaos now. but at the time i just wanted M and wanted to make it right/ make it work so much i put up with all of it.