Bad fantasies are normal.
Why your brain rehearses the worst case, and what that has to do with wanting messier stories about people like us.
I thought this would be a great way to kick start the Substack version of Non-Monogamy Help. I’ve been doing the Non-Monogamy Help column and podcast since 2016, built for quick, practical answers to your questions. This is where I want to put the slower stuff instead, the pieces that need more room than a column gives them. Stick around if that’s your kind of thing.
This week I saw a question from Multiamory, asking how you’d feel if your partner’s other partner broke up with them and I’ve been speaking with Leanne Yau about our upcoming Mastering Metamours workshop about metamour relationships. It got me thinking about something I don’t think we realy discuss. Have you ever actually imagined that happening? Pictured your partner heartbroken over someone else, and pictured yourself being the one who shows up for them afterwards?
I have had all manner of “bad” fantasies rolling around in my head about romantic relationships and sometimes friendships. For a long time I assumed that meant something was wrong with me.
It felt like the kind of thing you’re not supposed to admit to. Because it almost sounds like I wanted my partners to be in pain. I wanted to be some kind of weird soft landing for something horrible. I was worried this meant something about my own stability. After all, isn’t compersion what we should be aiming for? Imagining your your partner’s heartbreak, even a version where you’re the comforting one, doesn’t fit that picture. So you file it away and don’t mention it. Or maybe you pull it out now and then to worry abou tit.
This isn’t a polyamory problem, though. It isn’t even really a relationships problem. It’s just what minds do.
How the brain works with imagination
There’s a strand of psychology research on what’s called involuntary cognition, which is the catch-all term for the stuff your mind throws at you without being asked: daydreams, imagined worst-case scenarios, hypothetical futures, the reruns of arguments you never had.
In one study, when researchers compared people’s actual memories against these invented, never-happened scenarios, the two were strikingly similar in how they were experienced, both in terms of content and emotional weight. Your brain isn’t running a clearly labelled “this is fake” subroutine when it hands you an imagined scene. It just gives you the scene, and the feeling arrives right alongside it, real or not.
I wanted to find actual science to understand why this happens and this study explains a lot about why these fantasies can feel so oddly convincing, and why the shame afterwards can feel so specific, almost like you did something rather than simply thought something.
There’s also decent evidence for why the negative version shows up as often as it does. Psychologists have long documented something called negativity bias, the finding that negative information reliably grabs more attention, sticks harder and carries more emotional weight than positive information of the same size. It’s one of the more replicated patterns in the field, and the standard explanation is that it evolved to help us catch hazards fast.
What I can’t tell you is that science has confirmed the specific comforting idea I want to believe, that running the bad scenario through to a resolution is your brain deliberately rehearsing so the real thing hurts less. There’s a related concept called anticipatory grief, but it’s studied around real, already-unfolding losses, a parent’s terminal diagnosis, someone waiting on a transplant list, not hypothetical futures that haven’t started happening.
Even there, whether the rehearsal actually softens the eventual blow is genuinely unsettled, some early work suggests it might help, some finds no clear benefit. My fantasy doesn’t stop at the bad part, it runs through to me being steady, and that structure feels different from catastrophising, which loops on the disaster and never moves past it. Whether that’s my mind doing deliberate protective work or just a story I tell myself about my own coping, I honestly don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t need a mechanism to be worth taking seriously.
What this means out loud
None of this stays neatly inside your own head, though. If you live an identity, sexuality or relationship structure that already gets treated as suspect, there’s an added layer sitting on top of the ordinary human habit of imagining conflict. You’re not just managing your own private shame about the fantasy, you’re managing the sense that any admission of mess, any hint that your inner life includes jealousy or grief or a slightly complicated desire, will be read as proof that the whole structure was unstable to begin with.
Straight monogamous people get to have messy, contradictory inner lives and therefore messy, contradictory external stories as a given. The rest of us are often expected to perform stability as a kind of tax for being allowed to exist publicly at all.
That expectation doesn’t just come from outside either. It gets internalised fast. You start editing your own thoughts before anyone else even gets the chance to judge them, because you’ve absorbed the idea that your job, as someone polyamorous or queer or kinky, is to be a good ambassador, educational and reassuring, and never the thing that makes someone go “see, I told you it doesn’t work.”
Which is a genuinely exhausting standard to hold yourself to, because it asks you to suppress the exact mental processes that are keeping you steady. The fantasy where I imagine my partner’s heartbreak and imagine myself showing up for it isn’t proof I’m insecure, or that non-monogamy is fragile.
It’s just my mind doing ordinary maintenance on a real fear, that someone I love could be hurting and I might get it wrong somehow. Everyone who loves anyone carries some version of that fear. Mine just isn’t allowed to be spoken about casually.
Refusing to be perfect
This is part of why I found myself thinking about Pillion while working all this out.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s Harry Lighton’s film about Colin, a shy, ordinary gay man who gets drawn into a BDSM relationship with Ray, an older, more confident biker. It would have been easy for a film like that, especially one arriving into a culture still nervous about kink and queerness both, to sand off the edges. Make Ray secretly tender underneath it all. Make the dynamic clearly, visibly good for Colin from the first scene. Wrap the whole thing up as a lesson in self-acceptance with a bow on top.
It doesn’t do that. Critics kept landing on the same observation, that the film is nonjudgmental without being an advocacy piece, that it refuses to patronise its audience by explaining or justifying what it’s showing. Ray withholds things from Colin that Colin clearly wants and needs. The relationship has real friction in it (that I think some fairly classify as abuse), real asymmetry that never resolves into anything clean or reassuring. I don’t think it is a “good” representation, but I’m not sure if I agree with that goal. Can we allow for a story that is just complicated? Can we allow ourselves to desire someone like Ray without wanting that in real life? Can we be messy— and publicly so?
I don’t blame people for wanting flawless, well presented demonstrations of alternative lifestyles. But I’m not sure if I want only that. I want messy stories. I want bad fantasies. Because mess is what makes something feel true rather than like homework. It’s what I identify with. I don’t identify with people who don’t make mistakes, who don’t do things wrong. The same part of me that wants Pillion to let Ray be withholding and difficult is the part of me that runs the metamour heartbreak fantasy through to its end instead of stopping at “that would never happen because everything is fine.”
Fiction being allowed to hold conflict without redeeming it isn’t separate from my private fantasy life being allowed to hold conflict without me having to justify it. They’re the same appetite. One just happens to be visible on a screen and the other happens inside my own head.
One appetite, two rooms
I say this because I want people to know bad fantasies exist. Most of my writing is about encouraging people to feel things because so many people try to stop themselves, and that only hurts in the long run.
You’re allowed an internal life that includes the bad version of things. Imagining a partner’s grief, a breakup, a fight, a metamour’s heartbreak, and imagining yourself inside that scene, whether you come out of it steady or shaken, is just your mind doing what minds have always done, taking the fear out for a walk so it doesn’t corner you later.
You don’t owe anyone, inside your relationships or outside them, a version of yourself that only fantasises about the good outcomes. You’re allowed to want stories about people like you that don’t resolve neatly either. The two things are the same permission, just granted in different rooms.
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