Friday, April 14, 2006

moving towards the truth, part I

it's taken me a long time to admit this publicly, but after years of struggling with a very annoying internal dialogue surrounding this topic, i'm pretty sure that i am a polyamorous person. and by that i mean:

for most of my adult life, whenever i have been involved with person A, at the same time - or soon thereafter - i am usually interested in a person B or C as well. it has nothing to do with person A, although i can see the 'that person just wasn't right for you' argument. no, at each time when i was with person A, i've been minding my own business, feeling like everything's just peachy, and then BAM. person B or C knock me upside the head with their absolute charmingness. maybe they're just funny, maybe they're smart, maybe they're just hot, who knows. but whatever - i want them. AND i want person A, have no interest in letting them go either. i want both of them, separately.

so what do you do with that? well, when you're monogamous, you fight with yourself about it. you start doing your best to avoid person B. surround yourself with person A. suddenly find yourself daydreaming about person B. beat yourself up about it and start the whole cycle over again. with discipline, time and some luck, eventually the craving for person B goes away enough that you can actually feel ok around them without wanting to kill yourself.

when i first met min in our little lesbian feminist poetry usenet group (i love the internet) back in 1995, one of the things we ended up talking about was polyamory. at first, we were both involved with other people, so we just chatted as friends, but min had been in poly relationships before. as time went by and i grew more attracted to min, i became very interested in this poly concept. because even though things weren't perfect, i didn't want to leave laura (at the time, but she's now my ex, of course), and i wanted min as well.

the way i remember, min was ok with this. so i had the bright idea to talk to laura about being nonmonogamous. yeah that shit didn't fly so well. we went back and forth on the phone/email about it, and i even went to maryland (i was in tennessee) to visit once so we could spend some time talking about it and me reassuring her. instead we fought a bunch, had some awesome breakup sex, and decided the relationship was probably over. after i got home we talked more, but it really did end a few weeks later.

i wasn't really that happy about losing laura, but i understood where she was coming from. this whole concept was rather new to me as well. but my eyes were open to this new way of being, of harmoniously integrating this tendency to love more than one person at a time, and i didn't want to let it go. so when i trekked out to montana to visit min for the first time, the plan still was to be poly.

what happened instead was i fell harder and faster for min than i ever anticipated. and so did she, for me. and because of that, we decided to be monogamous. i mean hey, i proposed to her on the 3rd day! i know us dykes like to move fast, but that was fast even for me. anyway, i was so incredibly in love with her, that even though i had been VERY into the idea of nonmonogamy, i thought, well, i love her SO MUCH, maybe this time it will really work. maybe all those other times i just wasn't with a person that could fulfill me enough. yeah, it's not me, it's them!

and yet, about 6 months later, i was right back in the same boat as always. person B driving me batshit with desire. and person A (min) was still setting my mind, body and soul on fire in all the right ways.

…and that's where i'll stop for today, because this post is long enough. :-)

1 comment:

wen said...

we have a lot in common.

i think poly can be done, and be done well. it doesn't always happen, though, and that depends on the people and the circumstances...

i just got an e-mail from my two oldest (in terms of years known, not geriatricness) friends. both are guys, both are in poly relationships, families actually, that are the "v" formation (as opposed to a triad, which is what i was initially in w/t and ki). mlp has two male partners who are mostly "shopping buddies" to each other. he lives with one and the other lives upstairs. they have remarkably normal family dinners and such. g. just moved in with his female lover and her male partner. he said in his e-mail he wasn't surprised we all turned out queer, but the poly...lol.