Poly Be Crazy

“There is but a fine line between losing your mind and discovering your greatest passion.”

When I first started down this path, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted.  Actually, that’s not quite right - deep down I knew how I wanted to feel and what I was searching for, but I hadn’t learned to articulate it yet, and I certainly didn’t know exactly how to achieve it.  I wanted an open relationship because I love connecting with people.  Throughout my life, I have had countless experiences of initial meetings where I felt an intense unexplained connection with someone.  I don’t mean just sexual tension - I mean when you meet someone and you immediately know that they are going to be (or are supposed to be) important in your life.  When I was married, there were so many times when I connected deeply with someone, but I was never allowed to explore what that connection was.  Again, this isn’t just about physical limitations.  True monogamy is about loyalty to your partner in every regard - physically, emotionally, spiritually.  To either be attracted to another person physically or to feel any significant connection with them emotionally is generally considered something to turn away from.  “Forsaking all others” I think the saying goes.

I didn’t want that.  I don’t think I ever wanted it, even as a girl dreaming of growing up and getting married.  Not only did I not want to abide by it, but I don’t think I ever really wanted or needed a partner to do that for me in return.  My whole life the only thing I wanted was to be free.  (Insert psychological analysis about me being homeschooled in a religious cult in total isolation.)  All I wanted was to connect with other people.  In each and every connection, I found that the natural expression of that connection was unique.  Sometimes it was an instantaneous spark with someone and an intense chemistry.  Usually that was a with a boy, but every now and then it was with a girl.  Sometimes it was meeting a new friend and knowing immediately that they were going to become someone very close to me.  Sometimes it was a connection that I’d had for years that unexpectedly grew into something I never thought it would.  Call me a hippie.  I don’t care.  I am a bit of a hippie, but my point is that my desire for openness in life wasn’t really solely about sex or romance.  It was about an approach to relationships that was free flowing.  It was about choosing to live life with an intention of embracing the unexpected.  It was about being open to constant change and flux.  It was about treasuring human connection in any form and soaking up every ounce of joy that comes from that.  It was about wanting that for my partner too.  

That all sounds nice and flowery on paper, but in real life I also wanted a partner by my side who I knew would stay by my side to go through this journey with me.  I wanted the new experiences and new connections, but I also wanted the consistency and support of a life partner and the joy of growing old together.  Also, eventually I want someone that I can get fat with.  I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. 

So, I set off on the path of trying to find the right person who wanted to go on this adventure with me.  Someone who would be willing to forge a non-traditional relationship path next to me as my partner.  Someone who would want to live with me, cook with me, share finances with me, go on vacation with me, promise me radical honesty, and maybe even buy a house and a dog with me, BUT also accept and embrace that neither of us has to be EVERYTHING to each other.  Someone who would approach our partnership much more like people approach friendships: not every friend I have meets every single one of my needs, so I have a circle of friends who together support me each in their own way.  If done the right way, knowing you can’t and don’t have to fulfill every need your partner has can be incredibly relieving.

Now, I know that romantic relationships can present deeper complications than friendships, and I don’t mean to ignore that, but it will be a topic for another chapter.  The only thing I’ll say here is that I inevitably had to confront the possibility of falling in love with more than one person (or harder yet, my partner falling in love with someone).  I said I wanted to explore these connections and have freedom to soak up what I think is the greatest joy life has to offer - human connection, laughter, love and unexpected twists and turns.  I couldn’t possibly say I wanted that, but then go into an open relationship with a rule that said “no falling in love.”  I mean, we can’t help who we fall in love with, right?  I certainly can’t.  Of course, we could have a rule that said, if you start to develop serious feelings for someone, cut it off.  But that would be the antithesis of the entire reason I wanted this experience.  I’m not looking to fall in love, but if that comes, I will not run away from one of the greatest experiences life has to offer.  It doesn’t scare me because it doesn’t threaten my idea of commitment to my primary partner.  My connection with and commitment to my primary partner is not built on a foundation of solely romantic love.  When talking about life partnership, there is one thing I know: love is not enough.  I had love.  I loved my husband deeply until the day we separated and for long after that, but that did not make him the right life partner for me.  My deep love for him is what made the decision to separate so incredibly hard, but I ultimately had to choose a different future for myself.  Who I was becoming as a person, how I would grow, and creating the life I wanted could not all be put on hold because it was emotionally difficult to part ways.  Despite being still very deeply in love with each other, we wanted such different things and were totally out of sync in our value judgments.  So, because I know that love is not enough, I also know that falling in love with someone does not mean that my life has to logistically change in any meaningful way.  Being madly in love with someone doesn’t mean that I have to buy a house with them or birth their child.  It can co-exist with the love I have for my primary partner, and the experience of that extra love has inherent value to me outside of the confines of the traditional relationship escalator.

Also, in my experience, big love, great love, love that lasts a lifetime, is rare as fuck. It’s not something you just stumble into on the street every day.  It’s also not something that you’re safe from encountering in a traditional monogamous relationship.  Me being open to falling in love with someone else puts me at some, but not much, additional danger of leaving my primary partner than if we were strictly monogamous.  I’m not his.  As Sadie Smythe would say, I’m simply on loan.  There are a million reasons a partner could leave me, and there is always a chance they’ll meet someone better.  People in monogamous relationships get divorced every day - it’s part of life.  Either of us can leave at any time, and that’s the risk we all take when falling in love and committing our lives fully to another human.   

(If my primary partner and I ever separate, no doubt people will look at us and say, “Well, what did you think was gonna happen? You’re in an open relationship.”  In our compulsorily monogamous society, no one thinks there’s anything wrong with marriage despite the fact that it is quite literally more likely to fail than not.  (Side note:  I don’t actually think divorce = failure, but the rest of the world does.  A topic for another chapter.)  I’ll take the pros of an open relationship along with the struggles any day, but I don’t walk around recommending that others do the same.  If you prefer the pros and cons of monogamy, celibacy or any other construct, you do you.  Isn’t that the point of life? It’s choose-your-own-adventure.)

But upon thinking all of this through, I froze dead in my tracks to realize - I’m polyamorous.  I didn’t necessarily want to identify as that, because it sounded CRAZY TO ME, but definitionally it fits me perfectly.  There’s no denying it.  I hate that many people don’t really know what it means to be poly outside of some documentary they watched about a commune full of triads, but that’s part of why I’m here.  I’m here to say that there are people all over the world in white collar jobs with a house and kids who have an entire separate universe of connections in their life and an open polyamorous relationship with their partner.  We live and we love, and we encounter difficulties and struggles the same way any married or partnered couples do, and we’d like to talk about it sometimes.  I certainly don’t need to run down the street advertising the details of my love life, but I do think there’s value in raising awareness of non-traditional relationship styles and helping people get more comfortable talking about them.  And maybe that’s all I’m trying to do here - come to terms with my own discovery about myself and help other people learn to talk about it in a productive and supportive way.  And along the way, I hope I get to share some hilarious stories of bad dates, how I found my life partner in the most unexpected of packages and how fun it is to have your cake and eat it too.