A World in Us

by Louisa Leontiades

  So here is, at last, one of the real reasons why monogamy is not for you. You could, of course, live as monogamous and continue to be attracted to people with whom you could not connect without cheating. You could repress all those desires and live a lie. But that seems to be a very stressful way of life, doesn’t it?

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  Lying creates stress, which pushes you away from rationality and into destructive decisions. The truth might hurt, but lying will eventually kill you. Don’t do it if you want to live a full and happy life.

  13

  The Periodic Table of Polyamory

  There are many reasons why one person might be oblivious to another’s difficulties, from higher self-esteem, thoughtlessness or an innate inability to empathize, right up to narcissism and sociopathic tendencies. But sometimes it can be as simple as the fact that you have not communicated your needs and boundaries effectively to that other person. Are they expected to be a mind reader? It’s worse if you don’t even know your needs and boundaries. Which you didn’t then.

  So no matter what you thought of Elena or why she couldn’t understand your difficulties, you still had very poor communication skills. You might have lived in seven different countries, but you are, my dear, terribly British in many ways. You have been brought up to not communicate your needs directly. Those who do are usually compared unfavourably to Americans…and as you know, there’s nothing worse for a Brit!

  In a few years, there’ll be a program on BBC called Downton Abbey. The English-speaking world, Americans and Brits alike, will love it because it shows, among other things, how delightfully ridiculous and class-affected Britain was. And more importantly, how Brits never speak directly to one another. It’s a story about a tissue of unspoken truths, and how they can destroy. And it’s actually very funny. Maggie Smith plays the dowager countess Violet.

  Violet to Isobel: “You are quite wonderful the way you see improvement wherever you look. I never knew such reforming zeal.”

  Isobel: “I take that as a compliment.”

  Violet: “I must have said it wrong.”

  But she didn’t say it wrong. She used sarcasm: irony laced with insult. We Brits are wonderful at sarcasm, irony, double entendre and vague insinuation. And whilst all of it might make for a highly entertaining sitcom, in relationships it creates a situation fraught with misunderstanding, manipulation and hidden agendas. You will try to get what you want in any way other than by expressing yourself directly. That’s called passive communication.

  One of the reasons Elena found England very odd was that her way of communicating put people off. They became defensive, they felt attacked, they retaliated. And so did you.

  You won’t want to hear this, but nowadays you are much more American in your way of expressing yourself. Maybe if you had formed relationships with other British people you might have been able to hide behind your passive communication structure. But I doubt it. Because remember what we said about honesty? Direct communication is above all honest. And once you’d sampled direct communication through polyamory (and confronted your distaste at seeming “American”!) you realised that it was far less stressful. You’ve also learned compassion, because you learned the hard way that brutal honesty was far too painful. It alienated people.

  Yet it has also meant a radical change in your relationships with your family. Many of them cannot take your honesty. They think it’s sensational, attention-grabbing and, well, just downright rude. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Luckily your self-esteem has improved. You no longer fear rejection, and even when it happens, you know that honesty is your best policy. With it you have grown to realise the power of your own voice. Your messages cross cultures far more easily, you are empowered and, more importantly still, you empower others. Live to dream!

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  Passive communication might make you more acceptable to society, but it can damage your sense of self and destroy your relationships. Try wherever possible to say exactly what you mean, but always temper your words with compassion.

  14

  A New Life Together

  There’s a saying in the relationship world that goes something like:

  “The slower you go, the faster you’ll get there.”

  This is true especially in new polyamorous relationships. Yeah, you probably needed to go slower, like maybe not agreeing to move to a new country after two months. But what’s done is done.

  But this lesson is not about how fast you went, because to be quite frank with you, falling in love makes you do crazy stuff. It makes you believe in big dreams. And I never want you to stop falling in love, doing crazy stuff or believing in big dreams.

  What were you feeling at this point? They’d just asked you to move. Leave your job, leave your home, and effectively come out to your family, because you could never move to England without your family knowing what was going on. Morten, Elena and even Gilles didn’t yet know the demons you harboured from childhood experiences, which moving to England meant confronting.

  Darling girl! You were afraid of confronting all those old demons (something that would happen soon enough). But you were more afraid that everyone would force you to do it before you were ready.

  Your job, your finances, your home, your marriage. You’d built them all up, an impressive stack of achievements to which you’d tied your identity. Who were you, if not a financial analyst? If you didn’t have those material possessions, so carefully accumulated, that graced the walls and counters of your Parisian apartment? If you weren’t a “regular” married woman? You saw all those external symbols of the person you thought you were crumbling before your very eyes.

  People like you were then, with low self-esteem, are not proud of who they are, even if they can and do feel grateful and happy for what they have. That’s because you have only ever regarded yourself as your accomplishments, your successes (or lack of them). This is not your fault: society measures you in terms of your car, your money and your position in life.

  From the cradle to the grave, you are identified. Your name, your sex, your skin colour, your race, your religion, your opinions, your judgements. I’m not saying you don’t have that stuff in your life. I am saying simply that you are not your stuff.

  Let’s imagine you are suspended in a timeless place: It’s you. And a big bucket. In this bucket, put your physical body (like a rag doll). Then put in your name, your profession, your clothes, your house, your kids and your memories. Everything that makes up your life.

  Let’s look at the bucket and everything in it. Observe it. All that stuff. Are you looking at it? Good. Now tell me. If everything that you think makes up you is in that bucket, then who is looking at the bucket? Why…you are. The nameless, placeless observer of the bucket is You. You are not the contents of your bucket. Period. But in the words of one modern philosopher…

  You are not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

  ~ Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

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  Learn to disassociate yourself from the stuff that you think is your identity. You are worthy not because of what you have, but simply because you are.

  15

  Telling the Parents

  Thanks, Dad.

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  As long as you have been open with each other and you accept responsibility for the risks…it is your risk and your life.

  16

  The Other “L”

  It’s called the veto: where one partner, through coercion, emotional blackmail or other, more direct methods, forbids their partner from seeing another — usually due to their own insecurity, entitlement or possessiveness. In this case it involved Morten’s ex-girlfriend, but the implications were clear: if you weren’t able to get along wit
h Elena, then your relationship with Morten was at risk. Monogamous people do it all the time with friends. It’s normal (if not to my mind acceptable). But in polyamorous relationships, it has bigger repercussions. In polyamory, asking someone to end a romantic relationship is akin to asking a monogamous person to end a relationship with a parent or sibling, and it can be just as devastating.

  The veto is used to shift emotional risk onto a third party to make another person feel more secure. Elena’s insecurity where Lydia was concerned prompted her to protect herself and her relationship with Morten through veto.

  There is great divide in the polyamorous community about the “fairness” of a formal veto agreement, as many feel that it is unethical to shift vulnerability and risk in this way, and that its use destroys trust between partners. But the veto is such a norm in monogamous arrangements that you can’t dispute the fact that it is designed to protect relationships. You could call it the avoidance strategy, and it works much of the time. After all, ending a friendship tends to cause less emotional wreckage than ending a romantic or familial relationship. But it’s also part of what we saw earlier as “couple privilege.”

  If you want responsibility for your life, if you want to be secure without shifting emotional risk onto someone else, and if you believe that people should place individual well-being over the longevity of a relationship, then you will not exercise a veto. But this requires trusting that your partner wants to be with you and that someone else cannot “manipulate” your partner away from you. And that’s not always true.

  So ultimately it comes down to a single question:

  Are you willing to restrict someone else’s freedom to choose in order to feel protected from the risk that your relationship might change form or that you might even lose it altogether?

  No, that’s not really you, is it?

  And you don’t want to be with someone who might rather be with someone else, anyway. You — and he — are worth much more.

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  If you truly want freedom of choice, that freedom must apply to everyone you are involved with. And that means that each individual also has the freedom to leave.

  17

  Swinging

  You knew it. Or at least you said you did: polyamory was a lifestyle change. But what does that really mean? Lifestyle changes usually refer to eradicating cholesterol or taking up exercise. The phrase doesn’t really capture what is involved in a switch to polyamory. People refer to swinging as “The Lifestyle,” too, but polyamory isn’t just something you do on a Thursday night. Polyamory is a change you initially made only to accommodate your desire to love many, but it ended up shifting the way you thought about the world and your very sense of self. It’s given you a clearer idea of consent, abuse, privilege, feminism, ethical food choices, what you want for your children, whom you choose as your friends and what you want to do for a living. In short, there is no area in your life that has not been affected in some way by polyamory.

  But you, like many others, fear change. Many of the difficulties you faced were of your own making. Not because you were responsible for the acts of others, but because you were resistant to change and terrified of what lay ahead. Fortunately for you, once you’d started down the path to polyamory, there was no going back…even though you sometimes desperately wanted to.

  The threads that run through our lives create a tapestry; if one thread is pulled out, we have little way of knowing how it will affect the final picture. If you had known about every tear you would shed, how sick you would feel…that you would lose your professional life, your beliefs in what was wrong or right in the world, and eventually your relationship, would you still have done it? Probably not. Such enormity is difficult for us to embrace in advance.

  How could I help you, my past you, when you were crying and at the bottom of your reserves? I cannot and would not change what you went through. But if there were any way to make it easier and prepare you for everything that was to come, I would have told you this:

  What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

  ~ Richard Bach

  Change happens, and it is not the end of the world (even if you might sometimes prefer it was). It is just the beginning of a new one. Remember this in future, because you’ll need this lesson a lot.

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  Everything changes, and change is easier when you embrace it. You will get through it, and you might even fly like you never have before.

  18

  Whose House Is It Anyway?

  I’d like to introduce you to a new word: co-dependency. You’ll learn it in about eight months when Elena uses it to describe your relationship with Gilles. You will deny it hotly, or at least as hotly as you can, being English. But she was right, you know (and I know you will hate that).

  Co-dependency is where you enable each other to play a role in what psychologists call “The Drama Triangle.” You could play the victim, the rescuer or the persecutor. The victim seeks to blame others for her own experience of life in order to avoid responsibility and stay closeted inside her insecurity, the persecutor seeks to bully others in order to feed into the power needed to bolster his self-esteem, and the rescuer seeks to rescue the victim from the clutches of the persecutor in order to once more, you guessed it, feel good about herself. None of these roles allow you to take responsibility for your own life.

  Learning to recognize these games for what they are will take you the better part of thirty-seven years. But don’t blame yourself. Everyone plays them. Many of us are children in adults’ clothing, walking around having relationships with one another and acting out our protection mechanisms because that’s what we think we have to do in order to survive.

  I’d like to say that you don’t play those games now. But I can’t. You are certainly more conscious of them when you do play them. But they are subtle. Insidious…and written out in every relationship around you. I’d also like to say that co-dependent relationships are not a bad thing per se…co-dependent relationships happen simply because we are wounded, and healing those wounds is a lifelong work. If we were to wait until we’d healed our wounds to have a relationship…why, we might never love at all.

  Relationships are often the medium via which people get to know themselves. But the thing about co-dependent relationships is that they don’t help you grow emotionally. They only enable your existing weaknesses, and they often even make them worse. You choose nowadays not to get involved in relationships that have a strong element of co-dependency. It’s just not for you, even if it seems easier in the short term. Emotional growth is painful, but you like it.

  “You mean I welcome pain?” you ask. “Sounds like the future me has lost a few marbles.”

  “Do you remember doing your MBA?” I say. “Twelve-hour days, five hours studying at night. For thirteen months. Doesn’t it sound awful?”

  You laugh. “No! It was one of the best experiences of my life. Because the sacrifice I made for that year expanded my mind beyond all I thought possible. In fact,” you say thoughtfully, “if sacrifice is forgoing something I value for the sake of something I value more, it wasn’t even a sacrifice. It was an investment. In me.”

  Exactly.

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  Emotional growth is never a sacrifice. It is always an investment, and one that pays untold dividends.

  19

  Moving out of Denial

  Today, you keep a lock of each of your children’s hair in a little wooden box. The first lock ever cut from their heads. You felt bereft cutting their curls. It was a sign that they were growing up…and naturally, away from you.

  Cutting hair in Asia symbolises leaving the past behind and starting anew. That’s what your husband was doing. If there was one clear demonstration of the co-dependency of your relationship, it was this: you were left bereft, not as a wife might be by her husband, but as a mother
would be by her son.

  I find it hilarious that you’ve named this chapter “Moving out of Denial.” My dear, you were just as firmly in denial then as you ever had been. But yes, in a sense, things had started to shift.

  In this chapter, you started to lose it because you already knew where this was headed. Could you have stopped it now? Could you have told Gilles that you loved him not like a lover, but like a son? Could you have started to be honest with each other and worked on your marriage? That’s another story.

  For if nothing else, you needed the slow and painful decline of your marriage. To understand, step by painful step, that you both needed to change. That time allowed you to develop a relationship with Morten. It allowed Gilles to grow closer to Elena. It made sure you all developed the dynamics that allowed you eventually to switch partners.

  Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

  ~ Khalil Gibran

  Giving birth is painful. But birth and its pain also mean new life. Your new life was stretching and bursting its way out. Your suffering was a result of your resistance to it. It’s over now. Not only because you have a new life, but because you don’t resist change when it comes…even when it causes pain. Don’t wish away the pain, because without it there will be no new life.