Adventures in Poly

Last year, on September 24, I wrote a long post about my insecurities in my marriage and then nervously made it private.

One week later, we got into a three-day argument. We worked it out. We had a plan for how to make things better. I felt tentatively optimistic, like we had hashed it out and unsettled all this uncomfortable stuff but now it was out in the open, we could do something about it, we could heal.

One week after that, he left and never came home.

We are getting divorced.

It’s been 8 months now. I live alone in the apartment we used to share. Our cat died. Our sweet baby Tater Tot got sick two months after M left and died. My life as I knew it was ripped away from me. I have a new cat, my Millie. I have new furniture. I turned the apartment into the place I wanted it to be. I am trying to do the same with my life.

I don’t know how to write in this blog because honesty has always underpinned everything I say, and I don’t know how to divulge my feelings without airing our dirty laundry. As Beyoncé said, “You know I’m not gonna diss you on the internet, ‘coz my mama taught me better than that.” Gotta listen to Beyoncé. I still want to be respectful to M, to a point. We are civil but we aren’t in each other’s lives anymore. We have a business relationship. Getting divorced is a business. Taking each other off the insurance. Dividing up our things. Delivering mail that’s been sent to the wrong place. It’s all cordial but there’s no love in it. I write friendlier emails to colleagues I know 1/10th as well.

And another reason, which is also the reason I hadn’t written for so long before, is that poly just isn’t a huge part of my life right now. It hasn’t been for a while. The problems between M and I were deeper than that. We split for much more foundational reasons than that. The things I want to write just aren’t really relevant here. Maybe I’ll keep it alive in case anybody cares. Maybe.

I’m still dating Crow. Our relationship hasn’t changed. There was a hot second there when I thought it would. After M left, and my body broke down, I left my house for two weeks, left Tater Tot with a sitter. Part of that time I went to go stay with Crow and his wife. They were there for me when I needed love. I had my birthday during that time. Yes, he left five days before my birthday. We had had plans to celebrate in the town where Crow lives. I guess I kept those plans. They took me to the place where M was supposed to buy me cake. I didn’t eat normally for about two weeks but I still bought a cupcake. Crow’s wife tried to buy it for me, but I said I wanted to buy it because my money was still technically M’s money, and I wanted to do it out of spite. That made her laugh. Spite won over her ingrained need to be a good hostess. That night Crow cooked a delicious salmon dinner for all of us. It was the first time I had eaten real food since M left. We watched Ratatouille. It was as good a celebration as I was going to have, given the circumstances. I felt loved but gutted.

A few months later and Crow and I were talking about changing the nature of our relationship. Exploring an attachment relationship. I wanted to get closer to him, to rely on him, and he wanted the same. He talked with his wife and she was into it. All the pieces were coming together. But that fell apart, too. Part of it was when Tater died. My world was shaken up again. Five days before Tater died, Crow and I were talking about marriage. He’d said that if he were allowed to have multiple spouses, he would have proposed to me years ago. But when Tater died we kind of stopped talking. He also had a lot going on. A close friend, like family, was in the hospital. Another friend’s mom died. All in the same week. Crow is caring and he doesn’t know how to set boundaries around his caring, so he burns himself out and then isn’t able to help others or himself. He’s a care worker by profession and I’ve seen him set those boundaries in his job, so I don’t know... anyway. The world was dead to me at that point anyway. I didn’t feel close to him anymore. We talked about moving in together, with his wife, and that fell apart. That’s when I realized that we aren’t going to get closer. It’s just not in the cards for us. And I’m okay with that. Really, I am. I always liked being his secondary, and him mine. And now I’m on my own, I need to be my own primary. I can’t jump out of one person’s life and into my own. Before M left, I’d only been single as an adult for a small handful of months. Now I’m not single, but unattached. I like that word. It describes what I am beautifully. I’m dating Crow, I love him, but I’m unattached. I would like to be attached to someone, some day. But not any time soon. Only myself. And Millie. I need to figure out what I want my own world to be.

Communities face a struggle between the good of the group vs. the good of the whole. In a typical two-partner household, the assumption is that the two partners will stay together as a unit, which crucially involves cohabitation. If one partner needs to move (due to a job offer, family needs, or any other reason), the understanding is that the couple will discuss their options and then choose the same one: either both partners move or both partners stay. Obviously that does not work out perfectly in every situation. For example, my parents have lived separately at least twice due to jobs vs. moving not lining up, and same with me and my husband. But the understanding in all of these cases was that the couple would reunite eventually. A friend of mine in grad school had to move across the country for her school, with her husband staying behind as he tried to get his shit together to move. He never did, and eventually they divorced. Same thing happened a friend of mine from work. (Note that I’m not describing what has to happen - long-distance marriages/partnerships without the understanding that the two will reunite can certainly work in the right circumstances - but I’m describing what the norm is.)

It’s hard enough to work out life circumstances with only two adults in the partnership. The more adults you add in, the harder it gets. For example, one of my best friends used to live a 5 minute drive from me. Then I moved to be closer to my husband and our work. Then she eventually moved even further to be closer to her husband’s work, which is in the opposite direction from where my work is. We now live an hour and a half away from each other because of decisions made so we could each be closer to our husbands. I’d love to start up a platonic partnership with her, but given our current living situations (she owns her house, and if M and I are ever lucky enough to afford a house, we’d be moving further away from my friend, not closer), it just isn’t feasible.

Let’s say, though, that M & I and my friend and her husband had been in a four-person platonic partnership back when we all used to live in the same town. Then friend’s husband gets a tenure track position and eventually tenure at his current job an hour away from where we all used to live, and M & I both get tech jobs an hour in the opposite direction. This was back before remote work was an option for anybody. We would have had to decide to either (a) all move together, likely forfeiting at least one of the job offers, (b) live together but have at least one person drive huge distances to get to their work, (c) live separately in a long-distance partnership, where we could not necessarily rely on each other for everyday things that require people to be physically together, or (d) dissolve our partnership in favor of individualism. None of these options seem great. It’s some absolute shit that teleportation doesn’t exist yet.

We see this same thing in so many coming-of-age/hero’s-journey stories. Our hero comes from a small community where everyone is happy just doing the same thing all the time and doing what’s expected of them, but our hero needs more, so they break away and go on their own quest and eventually start their own life. I’ve seen so many of those stories, and few if any stories where the moral flows in the opposite direction, towards preservation of the community. I do come from a white western upper middle class society though, so that’s not a surprise, and I bet the situation is different in cultures where the good of the group is valued above individualism. Moana actually does this really well in my opinion: she has her hero’s journey, but at the end she is able to tie it back to her community so they can come with her, and they all grow and evolve together.

I just don’t see a way to form a multi-adult cohabitation partnership in my life, though, where everyone feels both supported and fulfilled. If one person wants to pick up and move to another state, do we really expect all the other adults to pick up and move with them? If folks are allowed to just pick up and move, given how difficult it is to build community, do we really expect the group to sustain itself, or will it dissolve over time the more people take opportunities that bring them further away? If the group comes to some agreement at its formation that all members are to stay in one location to preserve the group, do we really expect that all adults in the group will feel fulfilled for the rest of their lives and not stifled? Perhaps it can work, for example if everyone’s trade in the group had dependent upon where they live, if everyone’s can be done remotely, or if the group contains only a few high-paid members who provides the financial support and the rest work on the land or in the home, and everyone is happy staying where they are and don’t need to uproot. OR IF UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME WERE A THING. OR IF WEATHER PATTERNS WEREN’T SO COMPLETELY FUCKED THAT PEOPLE NEED TO MOVE BECAUSE THEIR TOWN BURNED DOWN OR THE SMOKE IS GIVING THEM BREATHING PROBLEMS. But that situation absolutely does not describe my group of friends, when everyone is moving further and further away and making more and more individualistic decisions each year.

TLDR, and this is by no means a novel statement: Community is stifled by capitalism and also by global warming, aka fuckery that most of us who want the commune lifestyle didn’t even choose.

Let’s see if I can recreate this.

Yesterday I drove 40 minutes away to help a friend buy a car. This friend has had their car totaled 3 times (each time not their fault), and has also had to move twice this year (each time because the landlord decided they wanted to move into the house the friend was renting), so it’s been... a time. The friend posted on Facebook that they needed help getting to the auto dealer, and I had nothing to do that day and it’s been a few months since I’d seen them, so I volunteered.

The friend is also practicing solo poly, although I think not by choice. They also have a swath of friends and several partners who are available to help out. I don’t remember if my friend considers themselves an extravert or an introvert, but if they’re an introvert, they’re damn well good at pretending otherwise.

This led me to the thought, “Can introverts really be solo poly?” Of course, yes they can (and I think my question could even have been rephrased as “Can introverts really be single?”, which, duh.) But as an introvert myself I can’t foresee it really working for me. I don’t have the same army of homies that my friend has. I have a few very, very emotionally close friends who I can rely on for any emotional needs. But let’s see. Let’s play count the friends. Sorry if I've forgotten anyone.

One lives 40 minutes away, has no car or driver's license, is a full time PhD student and teacher, and is caring for her dying father.

One lives an hour and a half away and is caring for her dying father.

One lives 2 and a half hours north and just had a baby.

One is that friend who lives 40 minutes away, and now that they have a car they might be able to actually help.

My boyfriend and his wife live an hour away; he works 6 days a week and she doesn't have a driver's license.

One lives an hour away.

One just moved to Seattle.

Two just moved to LA.

Two live in New York.

One lives only 20 minutes away, but has a child who is unvaccinated and is not meeting up face-to-face with anyone until he gets the vaccine.

One lives 40 minutes away and doesn't have a car, and I haven't relied on him for "I need help" things before so I don't know how that would work.

One lives 10 minutes away but doesn't reliably answer her phone.

3 live within 20 minutes of my house and have few complications. One of them travels a lot, and the other two are dating each other, so usually if one's away, they're both away.

And then there's Silver, my husband's partner, who actually could be a perfect person to rely on for help and seems completely willing to lend a hand, just I personally don't want to rely on them too much at this stage in our friendship because I don't want to feel like I'm using them.

So yeah, plenty of friends, maybe like 5 who I could ask for help if I am ever in a bind, so not nobody. But we've all got shit going on in our lives, and we've all got mental illnesses and what have you. So if I needed a lot of help pretty frequently, wearing out those 5 people who have no particular commitment to me would probably happen pretty fast.

The thing in my white-people-American-society is it's pretty much everyone for themselves, partners excepted. We're much more used to relying on partners when we need help. If I ever needed it, I'd just ask my husband (M). No question. And of course he can say no, at which point I'd turn to a friend, but the assumption with a partner is that they'll help you unless they can't. That assumption isn't there with friends, at least not in my configuration.

So I was musing on that and thinking, "But why do I always assume that M will be free? Why do we make that assumption with partners?" And I think that's sort of part of the unwritten contract with life partners. But then it doesn't necessarily make sense that one person and one person alone in your life will be able and willing to help you out at a moment's notice. Wouldn't it be better if I had a small handful of people to have that unwritten contract with? If my friends and I all lived closer and we all agreed to help each other out, or travel with each other, or hang out when one of us is bored? It could be as simple as a group text where someone puts out something they need, and the assumption is that someone in the group will meet it (not that somebody might be able to meet it if the asker is lucky).

That actually sounds lovely.

The thing about that contract is that there's no need for anyone to be romantically/sexually attached. Technically there's no need in our one-partner system either. It makes perfect sense to me that someone could marry their platonic friend, or even have that kind of contract with a family member. The legal and financial systems that are in place to privilege marriages should be opened up to accommodate any humans that want to dedicate their lives to each other, no matter what that configuration looks like.

This idea is not new. An issue that I have, though, is that when I see this kind of thing idealized about, it's pretty much always painted as a "poly utopia".

Even in my socialist, leftist, poly-friendly, queer, weirdo circles - who are totally sold on the ideas I've written about and, if asked, would absolutely argue for the decoupling of partnership and romantic/sexual feelings - seem to equate the two anyway. Why does a commune have to be poly? Why can't it be a cluster of friends who support each other and is poly-friendly? Here's the thing - it can, and not a single person I speak to would ever suggest that a member would have to be poly or romantically/sexually involved in order to be included. But we still talk as if that's a given. And that's what makes me uncomfortable.

Because I want a lot of the things that the poly community puts forward as an alternative to our mainstream society.

Nonmonogamy has not been one of the most salient themes in my life, but it’s not not present, so here’s a wee update on how things have been.

M and I are still married, still living together, going to couples' counseling. Shit's been hard and we're trying to work things out. Counseling is good. I think we might have originally gotten into counseling to talk about nonmonogamy stuff but we barely talk about that in our sessions anymore. Turns out nonmonogamous couples actually have more issues in their life than just that one thing. Who knew!

Crow and I are still dating. I rarely see him anymore though. He lives an hour away and works Saturdays and I don't have any dang spoons left. When I do see him it's chill. I pretty much just shoot the shit with him and his wife.

I think I've written about this before, but I'm some flavor of asexual. Which makes things a little weird in both of my partnerships. My relationship with Crow was so sexual for quite a while, and I don't think we really know what to do with each other now that I'm not really into it anymore. Not having sex just feels so normal and natural for me - this has happened in every single one of my adult relationships - but I haven't found a partner ever who really knew how to handle that.

M started seeing someone basically right after we became fully vaccinated in early May. They'd actually known each other for a while; I guess they met on OKCupid years ago, and then this person was also connected to the group that we partied with back when partying with a group was a thing that people did. And then they started chatting each other up during the pandemic, and now they're a thing. I'm going to refer to this person as Silver, which would make a lot of sense if you knew their real name.

I have some feelings about that I guess? I should write about how we met because it was a hell of a story. They've been really nice to me and really considerate of my feelings, which is like my number one fear when someone new comes into M's life, that they won't give two shits about me. I like that we know how to talk to each other even when M isn't in the room. We definitely would pass the Bechdel test except that Silver is non-binary.

Some themes that are coming up for me include:

Trying to reassure myself that I actually am Enough even though !! somebody new!! is in his life !! and that new person does things that M likes to do and I don't like to do and has qualities that M wants that I don't have and trying to reconcile that that doesn't mean that I'm being replaced even though my brain weasels are yelling me that it definitely does !!!

My brain is coming up with this nasty story where Silver is the shiny new fun partner who M definitely wants to spend all his time with and I'm the old ball and chain where all our relationship problems live and who is no fun. M has definitely not given me any reason to think that. It's all the stupid weasels.

But also it's like. M and I have been having problems, and I don't think M and Silver have because they're too new. So when M goes to Silver's house, in a sense he is getting to get away from the problems in the house.

Also one time Silver made him pancakes for breakfast and that kind of exacerbated my "I'm the no fun wife" because pancakes for breakfast is fun, and M sees Silver once or twice a week so it's like a little fun break, but M and I live in real life and real life is not always fun, and you can't always have pancakes for breakfast. But the weasels are telling me that when he visits Silver it's always fun and good, like there are no bad times when he's there, and there are bad times here, so why would he ever want to be here?

M is much more into routine than I am, so when he tells me that he likes the stability of living here with me, and that he likes that hanging out with me is relaxing, I can't really accept that as truth because it just sounds like the no-fun-wife thing, like Oh yay thank the blessed lord I get to be the STABLE one, everyone loves being the STABLE RELAXING ONE.

Silver is on the same ladder as me in the same company, but they're a whole-ass level ahead of me, and they've only been at the company a year longer than I have, so I've got some inferiority issues there.

I think I'm so convinced that new partner + they're so super fun + they're problem free + they make M pancakes for breakfast + they do art and always have paint on their clothes + they like to do swordfighting with M and I don't + right now they're able to be supportive of M in a way that I can't always be because I've been with M for almost 10 years and have kind of run out of spoons for the kind of support he asks from me and Silver has only known him for like 6 months and seems to have plenty of spoons left = I'm in the midst of being replaced, that sometimes I want to just make the replacement happen so that it doesn't happen to me. Like suggesting that he go live with Silver or go be primaries with them because obviously they offer things that I can't. Like it's better if I make this thing happen than if it happens to me. But the thing is that I don't want it to happen. So why would I make something happen that I don't want to happen, and that I don't think M wants to happen either?

fghl;kjfdg yeah

Why don’t I get jealous when my best friend, who lived an hour away, moves an hour further away to be closer to her husband’s job?

Right now I’m aching terribly to see her. I haven’t really missed people too much during the pandemic, but I miss her so much right now, and all I want to do is escape to her house and bitch and bake and watch TV and pet dogs. And it’s not even the pandemic that’s stopping me from doing that. It’s that I’d have to drive an hour south through a windy mountain road, and then an hour further south on a slow highway that’s backed up with traffic half the time, and then repeat to get home. Even if this weren’t quarantimes, I know myself, and I know I wouldn’t just pick up like that and disappear.

She moved solely for her husband’s job. So why am I not terribly jealous of him? Why am I not jealous of him at all? Why am I not angry that he took someone important away from me?

I don’t have romantic feelings for my best friend, at all, even though we’re both queer. I do feel like, if we lived closer together, I’d want her and her husband to be like close chosen family. Not everyone draws strong boundaries between romantic and platonic feelings, but I do, and rarely do they blend into each other. And jealousy is something I tend to feel more often with romantic than platonic feelings. Although I do feel jealous when I get the sense that two of my closest friends are closer with each other than they are with me - a structure that I’ve experienced throughout my entire life and doesn’t help at all with the fear that I’m “okay but not quite good enough”. Okay enough to be in the friend group, not good enough to be the favorite.

You’d think that I’d have something Very Profound to say about the interactions between the pandemic and poly, but it turns out I haven’t wanted to write about that subject very much at all. I won’t say that the pandemic has sucked all the inspiration from my brain, just that it has shuffled inspiration around in unexpected ways and away from writing.

The pandemic has felt like it’s pressed the pause button on my poly life. My husband (M) can’t go out on dates because OTHER PEOPLE ARE DANGEROUS. I also can’t go out on dates for the same reason, but moreover, I choose not to go on dates because I’m just So Damn Exhausted. I’ve seen my boyfriend (Crow) only three times this year: once before the pandemic and twice since, and that’s only possible because his house has this large porch where we can do social distancing outside. I haven’t kissed him since January and I’ve only hugged him once, masks on and faces turned away, and I held my breath the whole time. I haven’t had sex with anyone in over a year, and I can’t even “blame” that on the pandemic. It’s a choice. Guess I’ve gone full asexual, and I say “guess” because, while asexual is an accurate descriptor, I still don’t feel really great about adopting that as a personal identity. I’m not even upset about the no sex part though. I’m happy about it. My Magic Wand knows exactly what I want and all the nuances of my body and it’s much less painful than skin on skin.

The pandemic is NOT a good thing. It is NOT a good thing that millions of people have died, and it is NOT a good thing that we as a community are touch-starved and relationship-starved and can’t seem to figure our shit out.

That said.

I’m going to be honest. It has felt nice not having to worry, poly-wise. I hate that that’s a thing that I feel, but this blog is and has always meant to be about honesty. It feels like a relief knowing that I am not going to be in a situation where I have to watch my husband drunkenly and sloppily hit on other women at parties that we are meant to both enjoy. It feels like a relief knowing that he isn’t going to tell me, “I’m going to meet someone that I’ve been talking to on Tinder”, that the bomb isn’t going to fall on me. Because that’s what it is. “I came in like a wrecking ball.” The fear that someone else will enter our lives - my life - and I’ll have no control over it, and I’ll hate it, and I’ll lose myself.

I have a lifelong fear of being replaced. Of being “not good enough”. I hesitate to call it a fear of being unlovable, because I’ve never doubted that people love me and like me. I think they do. But the fear is that, when my needs butt up against someone else’s, theirs will always win. As a child, my parents taught me all about caring for other people, being generous, being self sacrificing, being kind. They immigrated to the US from England a few years before I was born, and as a result, I was brought up with a European mindset (others before yourself) in an American environment (look out for number one). And, as a result -- even though my parents were extraordinarily caring, even though I was an only child, even though they were generous with their time and attention, even though I had a very happy childhood -- I somehow learned that I would always be second place. Always the one to sleep on the floor at sleepovers so the guest or the host could get the bed. Always the one to get a boring piece of cake so a louder and therefore more deserving child could get the piece with the flower. Petty shit like that that translated into real adult problems. Just two nights ago, on New Year’s Eve, I had told my husband I’d wanted us to change the sheets, and as I ascended the stairs to bed I forlornly reminded him that we hadn’t changed the sheets - terrified and fully preparing myself to be let down because he was having a good time at an online New Year’s Eve party and of course that meant that my needs would subside. (They didn’t. The world doesn’t work like that. My husband shows me over and over again that my needs are important to him, and yet I Still Never Learn.)

I can say with full honestly that I am no longer really jealous of my boyfriend and his wife anymore. I used to be, a little. I used to be jealous that he would want to visit her at her shift before he came over for dates, or that he’d want to bring her to casual outings with me, or that at any point the two of them could decide they’d want to move back to San Diego and that would be that. I don’t feel those things anymore. I haven’t for a long time. It’s some sort of consequence of she and I becoming legitimate good friends, plus me and my husband moving an hour away, plus just being too damn old and too damn tired to give shits anymore.

Then again, their relationship was never the kind that was going to prick my skin up and put me on guard. I was the new person, not her. I don’t have a complex about older, more established relationships.

But the idea of my husband finding somebody new, even though our relationship is solid? Sends me into chaos. Even now. I wish I could say that it’s changed in the 5 years since we opened things up, but it hasn’t. It hasn’t really at all.

I’d wanted this blog to document my journey from new to seasoned poly, from a jealous wreck to someone who had learned to love herself and meditate through the pain. That’s not what happened. I’m not sure if it’s ever going to happen. My husband hasn’t had enough actual relationships to give me practice experiencing the very discomfort that makes me want to scream until my insides explode out, and the few times it has happened, I felt like I was living in a shock chamber and turning into the kind of person I don’t want to be.

I wanted to evolve, for the sake of my readers, into someone who fully accepts a poly lifestyle. To show that it can be done. No -- to show, specifically, that I could do it, that I could logic and reason my way through all the shit and prove myself to be better than my jealousy. I don’t think that’s what’s going to end up happening. I think it’s no secret at this point that I don’t really love this whole poly thing. I am still actively choosing it, but not always for reasons that I endorse. What if I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore? Would I lose my husband? Would I lose my boyfriend? Could I ethically give up my relationship with my boyfriend to create monogamy with my husband? Could I ethically ask my husband not to go on dates while I still retain my relationship with my boyfriend? It’s all shit, really. None of it is a good outcome. And the pandemic has allowed me to stall my non-decisions for a year because it’s not like we can see other people anyway. And isn’t it great when some external force gives you a reprieve from the things you’re afraid of.

But while the pandemic has put my poly life on pause, it’s put my healing and growth around poly stuff on pause as well. Sure, it feels fucking great on the surface, but it’s not actual growth. I’m not forever in a place where I will feel secure. It’s going to end eventually (vaccinate me, babyyyyyyyy!!!), and the parties will start again, and the dates will start again, and my terrified introvert ass is afraid that everything collectively will swing in the opposite direction super hard. Free love! Casual sex everywhere! Everyone wants to hang out all the time! How could you possibly want to be alone at a time like this! And that fear extends beyond poly stuff and beyond just me and my husband - I’m not ready for the world to become a giant party. I don’t want that world. I don’t want to live in that world but I also don’t want to miss out on the collective bonding experience that is almost sure to come from the end of Covid. So the reprieve I’m feeling now is only surface level great because it’s a pause, not an end, and I don’t feel any more equipped to deal with my jealousy and my social anxiety and my feelings of not being good enough than I did at the beginning of this damn pandemic.

Part of me wishes I could “get over my shit”, and part of me wants to cling onto my shit and defend it. Like why am I the one who has to change, why am I the one who has to evolve, what’s wrong with feeling the way I feel? Why is this a “my shit” thing, like I’m alone and all my problems are caused by my own feelings? Why do other people NeEeEeEeEd to go on dates and have sex. Why does my husband need that. Why am I not good enough. Why is the problem that I feel jealousy and insecurity; why is the problem not that he feels [insert whatever he feels here. unsatisfied? no, that’s not it. incapable of being fully satisfied by a single person? that seems extreme. incapable of surrounding himself with platonic friendships in the way that comes so naturally to me and many of my women friends, and much more able to connect with people he is in a romantic/sexual relationship with, and so needs to create many romantic/sexual relationships to fill that void that otherwise would be filled with friendships - which is not actually something I believe about him, I think he could make really great friendships with the right tools, but is something he’s expressed to me and is also something that’s pretty common around people raised as men? is that too harsh?]

You have just learned that you have generalized anxiety disorder. You have just learned that the obsessive thoughts you have are not “how everyone thinks”, and that all those times you spent shaking in the bathroom on the verge of throwing up are actually anxiety attacks that you did not know how to name or deal with appropriately. You have undiagnosed depression and are not yet on medication, and will not be on medication for quite some time. You will need to learn patience with yourself.

You have an alcohol problem right now. You will get over that.

Right now you don’t know where you’re headed after college. You are not going to move to Italy next year. You will decide at the last moment that it isn’t what you want, and drop out of your Master’s program. You decide to apply to PhD programs in Linguistics because you don’t know what skills you have and you are really good at school. You get in, and you’re relieved that you have your life figured out because you finally have a career aspiration.

You will move across the country for graduate school. You will never really intend to go to those schools when you apply, but you will get into one of them and fall in love with it. You will decide to leave your city and your partner and your parents and move thousands of miles away. It will be the right decision.

You will marry someone you haven’t met yet. You will meet him in just over two years. When you meet, you will both be relatively fresh out of bad relationships. On your second date, you will kiss him on a whim, and you will bring beers to the beach at midnight and look up the stars talking about the pains of your bad relationships. It will be one of the most refreshingly honest conversations you have ever had. You are astounded by how much you can tell him without him taking it personally. He will teach you about honesty and openness in a way that you have never encountered before. He will propose to you years later in the most incredible and authentically you(plural) way. You will be in bed wearing your softball shirt from high school and no pants, and the first thing you will say is, “Seriously? ...I’m not wearing any pants!” After ten minutes of questioning him about whether he really means it or whether he just feels pressured, whether his feelings about marriage and the arbitrariness of traditions and signalling have changed, you say “Yes, of course!”, because you realize you’ve forgotten to answer him. You’ve never had any doubt in your mind, though, that you want to marry him.

You will learn about this thing called polyamory and remember your late night AIM chats when you were sixteen with your best friend, lamenting about why you’re not allowed to have multiple boyfriends or have a crush on one guy without it meaning that you’ve stopped caring for another. You’ve unfortunately lost that inclination a little bit, and you’ll have to relearn how to deal with jealousy and the nasty brain weasels. You’re only able to do it because your future husband will be patient with you, and you two will talk about the principles of polyamory for years before trying it out. You won’t be sure what relationship style suits you best outside of the context of him. One thing you know for sure is that you can never return to the hidden feelings and the sweeping assumptions of unchecked monogamy.

You won’t go to the hospital again, but you will break your foot by falling off your bike at 2 mph.

You will be abused by three separate people. One is a partner; you will forgive them eventually. Two are superiors at work. You are still actively experiencing that trauma. You’re in therapy now, after going on-and-off-but-mostly-off for years.

You still won’t be sure where your life is “going”, but you will be a lot more certain than you are now. That isn’t hard to do when the bar is as low as it is for you now. You will graduate with your PhD and with a new heap of resentment for academia. You will decide halfway through that you actually don’t want to become a professor after all, but you aren’t going to let them chase you out of your program without your degree. You actually get a really really good job soon after you graduate at a big company that you’ve heard of now, and if you knew what it was you probably wouldn’t be able to comprehend that. The job isn’t going to be everything that it sounds like to you now. You’ll have to learn resilience all over again. You will go on a three month medical leave, and when you come back, everything will have changed.

You’re not exactly happy, but you will be happier than you are now.

You will be richer than you are now.

You will be fatter than you are now.

Somehow it’s been 10 months since the last time I wrote here. I’m alive, although sometimes it feels like that is barely true.

I don’t write here anymore because poly problems are not as big of a thing in my life anymore. They’ve been replaced with... depression, anxiety, physical health issues, problems at work... Real hard-hitting stuff that makes the poly problems, however infrequently they do arise, pale in comparison

I’m alive, but I don’t write anywhere else either. I sometimes wonder how many of my readers would give a shit if I started writing about other things; if I started putting my unrelated personal problems on my poly blog. Would they leave? Would they be angry that I’m no longer writing about the thing they come here looking for?

This blog was never supposed to be for other people. I never thought I would get any followers. I’m so thrilled that I did. But sometimes, my desire to please everybody stops me from creating altogether, because what if I create the wrong thing? What if they stop caring about what I have to say?

I think I might understand what Allie Brosh might have been going through when she stopped writing Hyperbole and a Half. When the depression episodes launched, several months in between them and with barely any posts after that, we were all wondering, “What the hell happened? Is she okay? Is she alive?” And then I read somewhere that she is okay, and she is surviving, but Hyperbole and a Half wasn’t bringing her joy anymore, and I wondered... how is that possible? How could a blog/comic (blomic?) that brought joy to thousands and thousands of people just stop being a source of inspiration for its creator? I get it now though. I think.

Depression has knocked me upside the head like a ton of bricks. It’s really. really. really. fucking hard. I’m kind of “new” to depression because I didn’t even know I had it until last year, and now I’m in my 30s and my body isn’t working right and I keep meeting abusive people (like what is that all about though, seriously??) and I’m realizing that I never really got the skills to stand up for myself, and it’s hard to develop those skills when you’re also trying to heal from trauma.

So yeah. Poly stuff is kind of the last thing on my mind. I have no interest in dating. I’m still happily married and living with my husband. I’m still dating Crow, but I rarely see or talk to him anymore. When poly problems do arise, it’s “me feeling shitty about my husband seeing his [new-ish] ladyfriend”, similar to the flavor of problems I was writing about years ago, only they burn less hard, and they happen less often.

I actually came here to write about a bad poly night that turned into a good poly night, but I started typing and that is not what came out.

I’m becoming convinced that the only way to live and age with any confidence is in a community setting.

Now that I’m ~no longer in my twenties~, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I’d ever like to become a parent. And the thing is... no, not really. Not right now anyway. But the viable years of making that decision are dwindling. Everyone I’ve talked to who has raised children has said it’s the best thing they’ve ever done, but also that you shouldn’t do it if you don’t want to, or aren’t sold on it. And I’m not sold on it. The thought of changing my life in that significant of a way is terrifying, and not in the terrifying good way.

But so is the thought of living without any children in my vicinity, or any future generations. My husband and I are both only children, so we’re never going to become an aunt & uncle by blood. We have cousins, and some of my cousins have kids, but all the cousins live far away. Our closest friends do not have kids and, as far as I know, are not going to raise kids ever. So while I’m completely happy not having any kids in my life right now, or even in the next ten years, I’m a little afraid that I’ll want that to change, and then I won’t have set up the foundation early on for me to get what I want later on.

And then there’s the question of who takes care of the elderly. It is not a good idea to have children just so someone can take care of you when you’re old. I know that. But I do wonder. What the actual hell is going to happen. Again, no children, and no siblings, and cousins living far away, doesn’t right now leave us with many good options. And sometimes even when there are options -- even when there is someone in the family who can take care of the elderly -- it’s one person, or one couple, or maybe two couples at most. The way I’ve seen it, in my family and in my husband’s, it’s been like a chore. A chore that the family are happy and willing to do because they love the family grandmas (it’s always been grandmas?), but a chore that is painful and time consuming and scary all the same. I watched my uncle take care of my grandma for 10 years while she had dementia, until it became too much for him and he flocked off to Australia and put the responsibility on my other uncle. It was a terrible time, honestly, watching her health and her memory deteriorate, watching my dad and his brothers trade off who takes care of her when all three of them lived very far away from her and from each other, watching the animosity creep slowly between them, until we were finally able to put her in a home where she could receive actual care until she passed. Now I’m watching the same thing start to happen to my husband’s grandma, who thankfully made it to age 90 before the dementia started settling in, but still.

Which brings me back to the community setting. When I think about a group of people who support each other, who raise children and care for the elderly together, where there are many more people age 20-50 than any other age group, who are not necessarily related but who are intertwined in the way that typically only blood relatives in white America are, it makes me quiet envious. I want to scream: Why is this not the way that the social circles I ascribe to actually live? Why do we not consider this normal? Why do we consider this weird? Plenty of other societies across the globe and across time have lived this way, and I suppose then the 50s came and kicked us in the ass. But it just makes more sense. A 2:1 parent:child ratio isn’t enough. Especially when the parents are meant to be in a pairbond monogamous relationship, and also need to spend time nurturing their own relationship (separate from the child). A child needs multiple caretakers, multiple adult role models, multiple people who can pick them up from school or take them to after school activities, bring them round museums, show them a multitude of different political and spiritual opportunities. And parents need more than one other person to help raise the child, so that they can continue living their own life, furthering their career, caring for other people in the family they need to take care of, caring for themselves.

[Mostly safe for work, but cw for sex mention]

I somehow have made it to my 30s still carrying way too much shame around sex. It feels very strange to be relatively more of a prude in my very-not-prudish community. I have desires like hell, but I can’t voice them. I can type them, sometimes. I often need to be drunk. They live very much inside my head and they are very real, but even when I have people who I trust asking me what they are, I can’t get them out. I think I’m ashamed that they’ll sound stupid, or weird, or too weird, even though I actually know that in the grand scheme of kinks they’re not weird at all.

Nonetheless, I just got back from London, and when I travel I get outrageously horny, and that hasn’t really stopped. I had a day walking around Camden Town making eyes at all the punks and the goths, and I had myself a lil goth dress up with a nice Italian shopkeeper lady and I even bought a corset, and I swear if I had the courage to talk to people or if some attractive stranger had approached me, I would have had a very fun and adventurous time indeed. (Except that I’ve never had a one night stand, and I don’t think I actually ever will, because I want to protect myself much more than I want to do that.)

Poly and kink and the poly and kink communities give me space to address and explore these desires, even if I never act on them. Just naming them is challenging for me. Just naming them to myself, and then naming them to other people. I’ve known I was a sub ever since I first heard of D/s. It always spoke to me, even before I was ready to have sex. I have this energy that comes out very infrequently these days, and I suppose it’s my sub energy, and it comes out when I’m traveling or drunk or wearing bouncy skirts or getting kissed on or cooking or baking. I want that more. I need it. It’s one of those times when I feel the most alive.

And then I’ve been thinking, all too much recently, about two men* from my past who escaped me. One, I know, grew up to be A Very Good Man. He’s a teacher, and a photographer, and a husband, and a father of two girls, including one baby girl who was born just this year. We met on vacation when we were 16, and he turned me on before I understood what the concept of being “turned on” was, and even now as I write these words I find my skin going hot and uncomfortable with shame, because I’m Not Supposed To Use Those Words. Anyway. He and I were friends, and he was quiet and larger than me in that way that I like, and he did magic, and I don’t even remember us talking much, and I would have been with him if I believed I could be in control of my sexual life, but instead sex was something that “happened to” me, and he never made a move, and I instead hooked up with the hot popular guy who stopped talking to me two weeks later. This other guy, he and I became friends. After the vacation, when I was depressed and discovering emo for the first time and was delving into a dark Christmas season confused about sex and love, he was one of the most important people to me. We would stay up til 2 in the morning chatting on AOL Instant Messenger because it was 2003, and we would chat about how depressed we were and how we wanted to find love and how we wished we could be with each other, how I wanted him to be my first, what we would do with each other if we could only be in the same state. It never happened. We only met up once in person after that, and it was a fun vanilla non-romantic non-sexual friendly time. But I always wondered “What if”. I was living in New York later, I could have very easily gone to see him if I believed I could be in control of my sexual life.

But he’s happy now. And I am so happy for him. Reading how much his family and his job completes him just makes me swell with joy. I’m so happy that he’s found peace. Before, in my dark days of monogamy and shame, I used to fantasize about taking him away from the life he had, or being his secret. Now, I fantasize more ethically. About finding out that he and his wife are non-monogamous and that he still has feelings for me, and flying across the country to see him, meeting his wife for the first time, looking after the kids and giving the two of them some alone time, establishing with his wife that I respect her and that I am not here to take her husband away from her, and that I too am very happily married and have no plans to ever leave my husband, cooking them all a nice meal -- and then driving out to a hotel and fucking the living daylights out of him.

And that, indeed, is a happier alternative. Thank you, poly!

I sure as shit hope Tumblr doesn’t delete my blog.

More comments later, maybe

You will be awkward when you teach this class.

You will be awkward when you make this joke.

You will be awkward when you lead this meeting.

You will be awkward when you present on this project.

You will be awkward when you wear short skirts and giggle and feed off the joy in the air.

You will be awkward when you project confidence and collectedness.

You will be awkward when you ask others to be vulnerable.

You will be awkward when you express the particulars of your sexual desire.

The Sludge conjures up the memories of what it was like to be a 12 year old girl who was too big for her body, whose hair was long and greasy and unstyled, whose makeup was poorly applied if present at all, who looked like an ugly teenager instead of a normal kid going through puberty, who wore her hair in pigtails with giant orange scrunchies and oversized band t-shirts and baggy jeans and still thought that perhaps she might be worthy of love and attraction until she saw a photo of how she actually looked that day when she wore the orange pigtails and the oversized band t-shirt and baggy jeans in front of someone she supposedly loved and realized that love and attraction was just a pipe dream for someone who looked like that.

The Sludge tells me that this girl is what others see when I try the thing, and this girl is preciously sad and adorably terrible, “aw honey you’re trying”, “that’s cute but no”, and this girl cannot truly achieve the thing she is trying to achieve, so it’s better not to try.

The Sludge tells me that I can get by -- might even be okay or even good -- when I am alone. When I teach the class alone with no other teaching assistants. When I am the only leader of the meeting. When I am not flirting at a bar in the accompaniment of a cuter, smaller, thinner friend. But as soon as I am in comparison with someone else, I am automatically second. Not the worst. But never the best.

The world tells me that I need to be confident to succeed in school or at my job. The world tells me that I need to be confident in my sexuality in order to be fully whole and an autonomous feminist woman. The Sludge tells me that I can only get so far until the orange pigtails come back into view.

The murky swamp air has covered my eyes for long enough to block me from recognizing needs when they come up. The Sludge tells me that it is morally wrong to ask for my needs when they come up. The people who support me work to train this out of me. The Sludge tells me that they will only put up with this labor for so long until they decide it is no longer worth it and quit.

I recognize this and I name it and I attempt to embrace it in the hopes that someday we might reconcile.

Passionate About Bitcoin ♔ CEO and Cofounder of start’r

Hikeybikey McSurfvegan

“Psychadelics open up my mind and give me a better understanding of myself, also I’m a dom”

D&D Greg

Literally Jason from The Good Place

[I’m gonna talk about sex in this post. It might not be appropriate for all readers.]

So I’m asexual.

I think.

I think??

See, I don’t really know how to tell. But I think that what I am is probably that.

I’m not a no-sex-ever asexual. I still have sex. Sometimes. I guess. Infrequently. I haven’t had sex in literally months and I’m not even the least bit upset about it. In small part because I know I could have it if I wanted it. But I don’t want it. But I do have sex sometimes, very infrequently. And I do enjoy it when I have it. It’s not like I’m lying there hating it.

It’s just that I don’t understand what wanting sex even means. I think I’m missing that feeling. I understand what wanting to flirt means, or wanting to make out, but as soon as genitals become involved my mind is all “nope”.

In theory I’m still interested in kink stuff. In theory that could be something I could still be excited about. But in practice I’m exhausted and depressed, and I get home and I don’t want to be sexy and edgy, I want to wear my panda kigurumi and watch TV and snuggle. All the time.

I’m repulsed by bodily fluids. Which doesn’t help much either. I’m not comfortable with oral, giving or receiving. I don’t particularly enjoy being touched, because it hurts (finger skin is more painful than penis skin or condoms), and because fingers can never ever come close to what my vibrator can do, but I can tell that they’re trying, and then I just get frustrated. When I do have sex, I vastly prefer your ole standard penis-in-vagina sex. I like knowing that I can receive pleasure at the exact same time as my partner as a direct result of something we are doing to each other. When I dated a person with a vagina before, after a while I started to feel sexually disconnected because I couldn’t recreate that mutual giving feeling that I wanted. Which makes my sexuality even more confusing, because I do consider myself queer, and if I have to specify I consider myself bisexual, but in reality my probable asexuality stands in the way of me having sex with many women. And it’s been hard to express to people, or to myself, that I can still be bisexual and not desire sex with women, because really I don’t desire sex with men either, even though I do desire that more, but this nebulous feeling of attraction doesn’t have to be linked to sex, and I do get turned on by women and men, and I do imagine scenes of sex, but I don’t want the imagining to culminate in actual sex.

I’m not demisexual either, if your definition of demisexual is “only feeling sexual attraction to people you’ve made a strong emotional connection with”. If anything, I’m the opposite. Every relationship of mine has started out with a fairly “normal” sex life, where I have sex and I want sex. And then the more our relationship develops, the less I desire sex. The closer I get to the kind of emotional romantic relationship I want, the further I get from a sexual relationship. And that’s been a problem. Every single time. Being poly helps, because my partners are no longer required to only get sex from me, but it doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t fix this issue that I don’t want it.

I’m definitely romantic though. As in, not aromantic. It’s like everything I’m lacking in sexual desire, I make up for in romantic desire. I understand completely what romantic attraction is for me and how to distinguish it from other kinds of attraction like platonic attraction. And I love snuggling, and physical affection, and I even love doing that naked with partners, just not involving any sexual stimulation.

I don’t understand.

I don’t understand what that’s like, and I don’t understand why I don’t understand.

It makes me frustrated and makes me almost want to cry, except what’s the point.

It’s like I’m missing out on this huge thing that’s such a massive part of many peoples’ lives and drives our entire society and our politics and our consumerism, and I’m just... missing something. I don’t like missing things.

It’s the same old story again. Not much of my life lately has been explicitly “about” poly. I’ve had lots of challenges this summer, and poly just isn’t really one of them. And not even because I’ve “overcome all my concerns” or anything like that -- far from it. I’m sort of at a stalemate. But there hasn’t been any new partners or dates in my ‘cule, so... not much going on there.

At the same time, I find myself prevented from writing about anything else. A part of me would like to believe people would still read my posts if they weren’t connected to poly, but let’s be real. Most of y’all are here for that one reason, for how my experiences with poly connect to your own. Perhaps I’ve dug myself into a hole here by making a single-topic blog. And then if I were to write on any other blog, there’s always the chance that the topic of poly could come up, and without that prefacing, I might feel uncomfortable bringing it up. Like how I require that therapists I see be poly-friendly, even if I never talk about poly in any of our sessions. It could always come up, and it’s so out of the ordinary that I don’t want to give myself any reason to feel uncomfortable, or any reason to hold back.

Last time I wrote was in May. Since then, I’ve started on antidepressants. And let me tell you: getting over that initial hump was hard. Possibly one of the harder things I’ve had to do ever. I was in complete fatigue and brain fog for about two months. I didn’t really care about anything and didn’t have much of the ability to stay awake. I’ve known about my generalized anxiety disorder for 9 years, but I only just connected the dots that I have depression as well, and getting used to a new mental illness + a new overhaul of symptoms when trying to combat the two made me more depressed. (But hey, at least I wasn’t anxious!) I’m over that part now, thank god. I’m not sure if the meds are helping, but they aren’t hurting anymore.

During that time, Pokeboy ended things with me. I mean. It kind of sucked, but I got over it. He said we didn’t have chemistry, and he wasn’t exactly wrong. I wanted it to work. On paper everything about our potential relationship was great. But it’s like some dots were not connected. We haven’t talked since then, but we didn’t really talk before we got together, so nothing super lost there. Just kind of bittersweet I guess. Back to normal life.

I’m still with Crow, and with my husband M of course. Things with both of them are still amazing. It’s really great to know that with all the bullshit about health and work and stuff, at least my romantic relationships are solid. I don’t get to see Crow very often, but I don’t feel like that’s threatening our relationship, and that’s a huge weight off my shoulders. I’ve lost friends that way. I’m just not good at keeping up contact, but I never stop caring about people. Just a lot of the time my non-contact gets perceived as non-caring, and things turn hostile, and I turn icy-slash-anxious, and the whole thing falls apart. Crow is chill enough to know that’s not the case, and lights just enough of a metaphorical fire under my ass to get up and see him sometimes. And M is of course wonderful as always, still so supportive and snuggly. We live together so I see him all the time every day, and that’s the way I like it.

I’ve been with Crow for almost 3 years, and with M for over 6 years. It’s weird to think that the two relationships I’m currently in are the longest I’ve ever been in. How the hell did that happen.

Work has been... challenging. I don’t like to talk about work here, so let’s just leave it at that.

Aside from all that, I’ve been trying to do something with my weekend every weekend, even if that something is to get in the car and buy shoes or buy plants or even go to the park. Just something to get me off my ass. I’ve watched an obscene amount of America’s Next Top Model this summer (thanks, Hulu), but I’ve also held true to my “do something with every weekend” plan.

This weekend, it was... shoes.

Oh well. Can’t win ‘em all.