I was raised in an extremely religious, conservative Christian environment. Our area is kind of a Bible-belt, and there are a lot of religious people here, and many of them know me.
Their views include no sex before marriage (obviously no moving in with a partner before being married etc), homosexuality is treated as worse than rape, abuse, murder etc. I grew up knowing exactly what their opinion was of the LGBT community. Lots of comments like 'the only good gay is a dead gay', and non-stop jokes about hunting down queer people for sport like they're some kind of pest to be eradicated, and what they would do if they they ever found out that people they knew turned out to be queer. The homophobia is strong, and the hate runs deep.
I realized I was bi (lean towards preferring men sexually) probably when I was about 13 years old. I suspressed my sexuality and my emotions very quickly afterwards because I was so afraid of what would happen to me if I was ever found out - both for fear of what kind of physical harm I could fall into, as well as the shaming and verbal abuse that would be guaranteed.
I met my partner(wife) about 10 years ago (she came from the same background I did.) We would have moved in together if we could have, but there is no way we could've done that without some extremely negative repercussions. We got married and moved in together. I absolutely don't regret it. She is my wife, but more than that she is my best friend, and my biggest supporter - when we disagree on things on the very odd occasion, we just talk it out, and have never had a fight with eachother. When we think of each other, we both view each other as our best friend, more-so then as our husband/wife.
We slowly removed ourselves from the church, and the religious community as a whole, and eventually we both came out to each other as bi at 26/27. We realized that because of our upbringing that we had never had an opportunity to explore ourselves and our sexuality and discover who we really were. Our relationship is rock-solid, and we talked a lot about all of this. We both realized that neither of us wanted to have the other never be able to explore themselves, or feel some regret for not being able to be themselves, so we agreed to explore the idea of being open / poly.
And it just clicked, it made sense and felt like a missing puzzle piece just fell into place. There's no other way to describe it than to say it's amazing. I found a phenomenally amazing boyfriend, as did my wife. She's friends with my boyfriend, they'll chat and meesage each other, we will hangout and go out together. I'm friends with her boyfriend (who is also bi) and we hang out together as well. There is amazing communication between all of us, and no jealousy because we're all just happy for each other, and find happiness and joy in each other's happiness. My relationship with my wife/best friend got even stronger because of it - we can both come home and just gush to each other lol
If you had asked me even a few years ago what I would have thought about being poly, I would have dismissed it outright and thought it was weird. Today I'll say it's amazing, and probably one of the best things we ever did for eachother and ourselves. We both have two amazing partners, two wonderful people to love, and two wonderful people to be loved by.