A World in Us

by Louisa Leontiades

  The contemplation of leaving two men I loved was almost more than I could bear. I didn’t know whether I was strong enough to do it. But worse would be continuing to live in this situation with Gilles, Morten and Elena. Her character and conflicts clashed severely with my character and conflicts.

  When she felt rejected, she clung to whoever was rejecting her. More often than not it was me. The more she clung, the more I pushed her away and my dislike became tangible. If she felt insecure about Gilles, then she clung to him and I felt usurped and unloved. I was rejected, and so I withdrew from them both as much as I could. It meant that I couldn’t bear any contact with Elena. Nothing. Zip. Nada. And that my contact with Gilles was passive and biting, as we circled around each other like wary vultures under the same roof, trying to work things out.

  Rejecting Elena was necessary to save my sanity…but it meant losing Morten. And the pain of that was unbearable.

  The stone wheels didn’t grind slowly. And we hurtled towards our doom with the same speed with which we’d got together. My partners knew I was having problems. But they couldn’t comprehend just how big they were. Because for them my problems seemed inconsequential. Sparked off by the tiniest thing. Chaos brought about by a mere flap of a butterfly’s wing. But even if they couldn’t understand, they had to accept.

  So after a fortnight of little communication, Morten and I met for coffee on neutral ground. He said, “The thought of working on my marriage and making Elena and me find each other again makes me very happy.”

  He didn’t look happy. He looked the opposite of happy.

  “Well, I love you. And I support your right to make the decision that works for you. Even if it hurts.” My heart was breaking. “But do you not even want to see me?”

  “Of course I do. And not just for coffee. I love you. But then there’s another part of me that doesn’t want to see you at all. It just causes trouble. Elena can’t bear me seeing you. She feels betrayed.”

  “And the part that’s not for coffee. Is that about sex?” I asked.

  He looked over at me. His eyes red rimmed and worried. “Working on my marriage would be easier without you, but the fact that sex with you is so mind-blowing is difficult to give up.”

  I felt knots twisting in my stomach. I couldn’t deny that the prospect of living without his touch made me feel barren and cold. Sex was not just sex with us. It was sacred. Special. It felt like the kind of sex that needed to result in a child. Every single time. And I had never felt like that with anyone else. Ever.

  But as much as I felt the same, another side of me knew that I was worth more than that, and I said so.

  “Well then, forget about the sex. I don’t want us to be just that. You are not just that for me and have never been. If I would be a whole lot easier to ‘give up’ if there were no sex, then…I think you have the answer.”

  One minute passed, and it felt like a lifetime. My tears were starting to free-fall down my face. One of us had to say it. And it was me.

  “Are we breaking up?”

  He twisted his hands in despair and reached for a cigarette. The stress of those past few months had seen both our smoking escalate way out of the realms of party smoking. Then he said simply, “I cannot offer you what you want.”

  “And I cannot offer you what you want.”

  Grief and anger intermingled in my heart. We were in hell. And the wrench of the end was more painful than anything I had ever known. I was still in love with him. And he was still in love with me. But my relationship with Elena made a future together impossible…even though she was still with Gilles.

  “Have we decided? Is this it?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  Neither of us had wanted to say it. But we had. And it was over.

  28

  My thoughts turned to my marriage once again as I discussed with Gilles what we could possibly do to save our situation. We had reactivated date night in an effort to spend some quality time together. The problem was that I needed three glasses of wine to feel remotely sexual. A sad truth was that breaking up with Morten meant that I missed his touch. And no one else could replace it. Not even my husband. I was going through hell but thought it was unfair to burden Gilles with it.

  Gilles and Elena had had a conversation that would become known as “The Bombshell” and were yet again on a break. But they had done it so many times now that no one believed them when they said it was over.

  Gilles had broken up with Elena on five separate occasions before The Bombshell.

  The Bombshell, a.k.a. the sixth breakup, was different. Because this one had been initiated by Elena. There had been no warning of what I was to read in the email that Gilles had forwarded me. It was the transcript of a chat conversation that looked mundane and ordinary like every other. But as was Elena’s wont, it started bluntly:

  “Gilles darling. I just wanted to let you know that I asked Morten for a divorce.”

  Several seconds had passed, as denoted by the time-stamps on the chat messages. Then Gilles said, “Did you mean it?”

  “Morten and I are best friends,” replied Elena. “But my romantic relationship is with you and has been for a long time. Your relationship with Louisa is crumbling. Why don’t you just admit it like I have? Louisa and I don’t seem to be able to share the same men. She has a big problem.”

  “Louisa has a problem with you. But you’re the one who has a problem sharing your men. You can’t share your men with someone who has a problem with you. She has never asked me or Morten to choose even though she can’t get along with you.”

  To which she replied, “We all have to choose our futures because I for one can’t live like this anymore.”

  “Me either. But I still love Louisa and I am not willing to lose her just because we are having difficulties.”

  “OK…But if that’s your choice then you will lose me.”

  “Just to be clear — are you telling me that if I still want to be with you I have to leave Louisa?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are asking for an impossible choice.”

  “But don’t you realise that this has been an impossible choice for me too? I love Morten as well as you. I wish we had never met. I can’t be with you anymore and I can’t be with my husband. My heart is doubly broken. Louisa has both of you and I have no one.”

  “Louisa doesn’t have both of us. She gets to work on her relationship with me. She and Morten have broken up.”

  “They’ll get back together if I leave though. He obviously loves me more than you do.”

  “Well, I love you. I don’t know what you mean by ‘more.’”

  “I mean that he is willing to leave her. But you are not. So this is goodbye.”

  29

  The Bombshell was a prime example of brutal honesty. Elena didn’t sugar-coat her words. There was no kindness in her truthful communication. And it was part of what I couldn’t stomach about her. Because I felt the approach she justified under the banner of honesty hurt others unnecessarily. I believed in telling the truth, but trying to find the kindest way to do it. But whatever I thought, The Bombshell had done its job. Its honesty had blown us all wide open. She had told the truth.

  For one thing, my suspicions that Elena had wanted Gilles as her primary partner were justified. My insecurities about her taking my husband were reinforced. Had it always been this way? And had I simply been going crazy because my body recognised what I had refused to…that I was losing my husband under my very nose?

  Gilles had said, “You’re not losing me, just as I am not losing you. You are sharing me, but it doesn’t mean you have any less of me.”

  Morten had said, “His choice is to be with you and with Elena. You’re not questioning Gilles now, you’re questioning polyamory again.”

  My therapist’s room was filled with angel cards, crystals
and books with titles like Compelled to Control and The Drama of Being a Child. It was a positive room…full of beanie cushions and hope. Everywhere I looked there were constructive therapeutic building blocks, and at that precise moment I wanted to destroy them all.

  Happiness and mealy-mouthed goodness infuriated me. Fat lot of good it had done in the six months I had been coming here.

  “You look angry,” said my therapist.

  I paid him seventy quid an hour to have brilliant insights like these.

  “Yes, I am,” I said through my teeth. “Because all this time I have been sitting here paying you money and doubting myself, trying to overcome my so-called issues with jealousy. And all this time my gut instinct was right. I knew she was a threat to my marriage. I knew she wanted Gilles for herself. No wonder I felt so bad. I don’t have an issue with polyamory. I do have an issue with someone stealing my husband. The utopia I saw that was polyamory was about sharing, not about stealing.”

  “So if you knew it, why didn’t you trust yourself enough to believe you were right?”

  “Because the concept of polyamory threw monogamy out of the window. And monogamy is an institution that is unquestioned. I thought, ‘If I’m wrong about monogamy, then maybe I’m wrong about everything else.’ When the others told me that I was the one in the wrong, I believed them — even though every bone in my body was telling me otherwise. I’ve been fighting my own beliefs this whole year.”

  “Sit with your anger,” suggested my therapist. “Feel it. Allow yourself to experience it. You’ve suppressed it for too long. Only when you suppress it does it become a negative force that controls you. Now express it. Describe what you’re feeling calmly. Remembering that it takes more than one person to create a relationship.”

  As I sat inflated with self-righteous anger, his last sentence pricked it flat.

  I said miserably, “We let this happen. Me, Gilles, Elena and Morten. We were blind and naïve. Well, I was naïve. Morten was blind. Gilles was just the way he always is. He took the path of least resistance. And Elena, well she’s dazzling. And difficult. And now we are here. In a place where both primary relationships are shells. Elena abandoned hers and redirected her energies to Gilles. And I abandoned mine too. No wonder he turned to Elena.”

  As I walked out of therapy that morning, my anger at Elena subsided. Only to be replaced surprisingly by compassion. Compassion for Elena.

  I saw that Gilles and she had created a partnership where they were more romantically compatible than he and I. But she had driven herself into a corner. Even if our continued interaction was poisonous, she would never get Gilles to leave me by coercion. By forcing his hand she was left with the relationship she didn’t want. And I was relieved that Gilles and I could at last have some space to save our future, if at all possible.

  Every Thursday Gilles and I dutifully traipsed along to the Italian restaurant around the corner after a couples therapy session to see if we couldn’t rootle through our emotions and recapture the romance. And by romance, I meant a bottle of red wine to lower my inhibitions.

  Our therapy session that day had been a wearing one, and in it we had only discovered how much more we had to unravel before we could sort out where our relationship could go. And after I drained the last sip of wine I said, “I’m tired.”

  “Do you want to go back home?” Gilles asked.

  “No, I mean I’m tired of not knowing the future. I feel like I’ve been in limbo for the past few years. Waiting for our relationship to get settled, waiting for you to start your career. I thought when we got married our future was set. But I’m still waiting for it to start. Waiting…always waiting.”

  “You English are good at that, though. Waiting. Queuing,” said Gilles. I could see him about to launch into an anecdote and hurriedly cut him off.

  “Gilles, I want to have children. And I want them soon. Will it be with you?”

  There it was. Out on the table with the empty bread-basket, the dregs of Chianti and the saucer of high-quality extra virgin olive oil scattered with Parmesan.

  Gilles sucked in his bottom lip and looked at me. Blue eyes met blue eyes. And I could feel a quiet spark of desperation flint off between them. I was forcing his hand.

  “I thought you weren’t sure about having children,” he replied.

  “I wasn’t. I thought I didn’t. But actually I always did, I just…wasn’t sure about having them with you.”

  “So what’s changed?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve realised how much I love you. It took almost losing you to make me realise how precious our relationship is to me.”

  “Are you drunk?” He laughed to ease the tension, and I did too. Because it was a pretty sure bet that I was, for words like this to come out of my mouth.

  “Yes,” I said, “but it doesn’t mean that I don’t mean it, if you see what I mean. I mean, I do mean it.”

  “But I still don’t have a job,” Gilles said, holding my hand. “You know what having children with me means.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “But it doesn’t seem important anymore. I don’t want to wait for you to become something you can’t. We’re married. We love each other. I can provide for us both. Surely that should be enough.”

  “OK!”

  “OK, what? OK, we can try?” I said.

  “Yes!”

  “Are you drunk?” I asked, laughing to ease the tension.

  “Yes!”

  “Do you mean it?” I said. Suddenly uncertain.

  “I do!” he said.

  I walked out under a different sky from the one earlier in the evening. That night we were going to try to make a baby.

  So remote and yet so familiar. My husband and his body, my love. I touched him tentatively, willing warmth to spread through our touch. But somehow things were different. Our bodies didn’t fit together anymore. Our sex was, well, just sex. Not sacred, not magical. It was…going through the motions and superficial.

  I loved him. But he was a stranger. When I reached up to his face, it was wet with tears. And mine was too. We had lost each other.

  When the time came to test, I wasn’t pregnant. And although I cried in Gilles’s arms about it, I also felt a little glad. I wanted the sex that created a baby to be special, and we had a long way to go to repair that. But a few days later, I was doubly glad. Because after six weeks and the sixth separation, Gilles and Elena were back together.

  “After everything that’s been said, Gilles, how can you be back together? You said you would never get back with her. Those were your very words! I thought you had had it up to here with her!” I touched my nose, then changed my mind and raised my hand high above my head.

  “Yes, but she didn’t mean what she said. She was overwrought.”

  “Can I remind you that she wants you for herself? That hasn’t changed. Am I supposed to sit back and ignore that?” I had hardly been able to live with Elena before. Knowing what I knew now, I didn’t think it would be possible.

  “She told me she was sorry for trying to force the choice,” he said.

  “In my world sorry doesn’t make everything better,” I replied coldly. “Especially as it wasn’t even said to me.”

  Gilles slammed his fist on the table. We were back in a situation we both despised. “There is so much to love about Elena that even though I forget it when we argue, it’s still there deep inside of me.”

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “I don’t see it. And you know why I don’t see it? Because you only bring me the shit.”

  “Well, they say that you never know what goes on behind closed doors. We’ve worked out how to manage it next time we start arguing,” he said complacently.

  I started crying with anger.

  “Why don’t you care about what it’s doing to me too? We’re trying for a baby. A poly relationship isn�
�t only between you and your partner. I am involved too. You can’t just act like it only impacts you. You aren’t single.”

  “Stop it! Stop it now!” said Gilles, suddenly furious. “I thought you would be happy that I am happy. I was happy that you and Morten were happy together.”

  “Yes, but we’re not together, are we? And you wouldn’t have been happy if you saw that our relationship caused me enormous pain the way I see that yours does for you. You and she cause me and Morten pain as well. You’re so selfish. I can’t bring a baby into this dynamic. And I can’t take this anymore.”

  Their relationship was out of my control. And even my relationships were out of my control. My therapist had said to unleash my anger, and now its full fury descended on Gilles and Elena. In one fell swoop, my chance to repair my relationship — slim as it might have been — or start a family with Gilles had been eradicated.

  And as I looked at him, I knew. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t even them. This was about me. And I had to leave.

  The next day, I travelled to my father’s house in Cyprus. It gave me perspective and objectivity. And in that space it became obvious to me.

  Far from not choosing, Gilles had made a very definite choice. His choice — albeit passively stubborn — was to be with Elena. Over the last months, our discussions had centred on how I was finding it increasingly difficult to live with all the issues she provoked in me. He loved her. And would not — could not — leave her, even if it was destroying me. And I would never ask him to.

  30

  I was jobless. Almost mindless. It was easy to book a ticket home and make my great escape. Arriving in Cyprus, the country that had seen my teenage rebellion, had been warm and comforting. Peace finally pervaded my mind, and the relief I experienced from being away from the anxiety and stress of our relationship liberated me. In Cyprus’ cicada-thrummed atmosphere, amid the support of my family and friends, it had been very easy to make the decision. And even easier after six local beers to write the email as the drunken tears dripped on my keyboard.