I'm loving reading this @neeqi!

I feel that through life there isn’t ever going to be one single person who fulfills your needs and that you can really learn a lot about yourself and love through opening your heart to different people.

This statement here is what most attracts me about poly. I see the people around me as different flavors of experience. Whether that's platonic or more intimate, different people bring out different parts of me that I get to experience through my union with them. That union can be more serious, lengthy, and structured, or fun, quick and loose (and those words together make me laugh haha). For me, I realized that there was a lot more depth that I wasn't accessing with a few different relationships. I saw the potential there but lacked the social structure to go there. Poly has essentially provided that structure in a safe (yet challenging) way.

I would say that I’ve had emotional feelings for multiple people at a time and explored that whilst not actually dating them so that each party still had individual freedom and opportunities to experience other people if that was something to present.

Same here. Many of my experiences are like this. There's often an ongoing relationship but there's no real good label to really emphasize what that is. Sometimes I call them "glorified friendships" but that doesn't really feel good either, nor does "friends with benefits" as it just implies things that may/may not be true. I think we judge sexual experiences so heavily in modern culture that we forget that in the end, it's just an experience. Obviously this experience may have more heightened consequences but so do other experiences (for instance: having a business partner).

So I would imagine as long as your partner still supports you while you need to process whatever comes up, it just comes down to finding your balance amongst it?

Yes exactly. It's all about holding space and trusting the process. Communication is #1 and the moment you stop communicating, that's the moment when the relationship begins to die. If both parties are doing the personal work to understand and convey their needs (AKA taking responsibility for themselves as individuals), then it works. What often happens in relationships is that we fail to take responsibility for our own needs, expect those needs to be taken care of by others, and then we project the resulting shit onto others. This is a formula for failure, regardless of what kind of relationship dynamic you're in!

I remind myself why I think polyamory works and the freedom it gives the people involved and how it can create a deeper sense of love and connection without creating restrictions but still having foundation.

I've personally liberated myself in many ways through the practice of poly. It is ultimately a personal experience. I believe that every relationship you have has nothing to do with anyone else but yourself. That sounds kind of detached and maybe a bit of an odd thing to say, but ultimately, what you FEEL has nothing to do with anyone else but yourself. So essentially, poly invites in opportunities to experience more of who you are which inevitably invites a LOT of vulnerability, fear, and pain along the way. If you deal with that shit, then you will thrive. That's where true freedom lies.