Many Love

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

  Sometimes I don’t need a solution nearly as much as I need to be told that whatever crazy thing I’m feeling—terrified of going to sleep at night; palpably angry at the bagel guy for working at an establishment that has run out of poppy-seed bagels; in love, unconditionally, with people who can’t love me back—is an okay thing to feel. I’m constantly amazed at the ways in which our world seems to believe that uncomfortable feelings are abnormal and should be avoided or fixed at all costs. I’ve worked with counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, and spiritual mentors throughout my life. I’ve been on antidepressants and antianxiety medications for my particular brand of crazy. Hannah never tries to fix my problems; she sits with me in their shadows, engaging with the darkness until it passes.

  At Bogue Chitto, as we floated in the river holding on to the tree branch, the water transformed into a gigantic, obvious metaphor, and both of us could feel it. Rivers—and the bits of detritus and schools of fish and hunks of rocks they carry—are inexorable. I mean, they all really go only one way: forward. Rivers don’t make decisions, but they carve the earth like thoughtful sculptors; whether a tributary that swells over millions of years will curve to the west or to the east is anybody’s guess, but rivers allow themselves to be carried forward inside the great mystery of time and space. Life is just like that: You have to allow yourself to be carried forward by its great mysteries, because they’re going to come whether you want them to or not. All the pain and fear and love and struggle can be behind us only if we’re brave enough to go through them.

  And the only thing any of us really wants is to not have to go through it alone. We want the kind of love we can come back to after there’s some turbulence and the current gets out of control. We want to look over and see that people are still there, were there all along, and will be there for the foreseeable future. Do you really need this love to look the way you thought it was going to look? Does it have to be a man, two kids, and a golden retriever?

  Hannah was wise in bringing up our trip to the river in the memory circle, because really, it reflected our entire complicated relationship in as a succinct a way as was possible.

  I should mention that things had changed in New Orleans when I visited just after my thirtieth birthday. Perhaps most relevant to my life (and to a book about polyamory), Hannah and Derek had dissolved their partnership a few months earlier. “Dissolved their partnership” sounds like a euphemism for “broke up,” but they didn’t break up. Derek moved out of the house, and they stopped planning their lives around each other. They still had the same long conversations they always did, just with less frequency. (Note how Derek was central to the Hannah-coordinated surprise birthday party thrown for me in the backyard.)

  A little while into Hannah’s foray into the single life, she started dating a woman. The woman, Ada, was a brilliant, soft-spoken filmmaker who went to Harvard but never told anyone she went to Harvard. Ada wore rectangular plastic glasses and long cotton shirts over baggy jeans, and kept her hair cut short. This is the kind of uniform a person wears when he or she or they is so confident about themselves that they don’t need to dress up their personality at all. Ada embodied everything I wished I was but felt too weak to be. I was terrified of her.

  When Hannah told me over the phone that she had fallen in love with Ada, there was a butterfly migration inside my body—not literally, but I can’t describe the way it felt more accurately than to say that millions of butterflies that had been cocooned in my organs suddenly burst free. Deborah Anapol describes the feeling slightly better (and less horrifically): “love, sexual arousal, fear, and anger . . . blended together into one gigantic ball of energy that threatens to overwhelm the rational mind.”16 The other word Anapol uses for this kind of feeling is “jealousy.”

  It seemed impossible that I would feel so jealous in the face of my best friend’s happiness. Didn’t I want Hannah to have love in her life? Didn’t I want her to experience all the woozy feelings that come during the honeymoon stage of a new relationship? I did. I wanted Hannah to win the lottery and roll around in a pit full of money before being named the empress of the universe. (Actually, Hannah would hate rolling around in money because she hates capitalism, and she wouldn’t want to be the empress of the universe because she hates traditional power structures; so maybe I should say that I wanted Hannah to have unlimited raspberries and mangoes all the time until she died, and for her to have a three-way with her yoga instructor and bell hooks.)

  But Hannah, the love of my adult life, was a person I’d known as always being coupled with a man. She and I shared a private sisterhood in which we knew all about periods and growing boobs and having childhood crushes on Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and Derek would never be able to fully enter that world. Now Hannah was with a woman. The tiny, selfish whisper inside my brain said, “That could have been you. Or maybe you’re not good enough for her, anyway.” Meanwhile, the tinier, altruistic whisper inside my brain said, “Hannah is happy, and if anyone can hold many different kinds of important relationships, it’s her. This is great news. Celebrate!”

  I will return to the subject of jealousy later (in some ways, I’ve found polyamory to be just as much about the personal exploration of jealousy as it is about exploring love or intimacy or friendship), but in this case, I realized that my relationship with Hannah was even more complicated than I had so far imagined.

  Ada was at my surprise birthday party. During the memory circle, she said she didn’t know that much about me, but she loved me for how much I loved Hannah. I wanted to hold her hands. I wanted to look her in the eyes and say, “The feeling is mutual.”

  PART 3

  Casual Love

  It’s possible that you’re thinking to yourself, “This is all very well and good, and I’m glad to be thinking about my friends and everything, but I thought I was going to read about polyamory. Which, I thought, had at least something to do with dating.” Very astute, reader! Yes—to most people, the word “polyamory” stretches beyond finding a healthy balance between your friends and the people you’re sleeping with.

  Let’s pause to consider a few terms that describe relationship models that tend to get tangled up in conversations about “modern love.” The purpose of the chart on the next page is to differentiate these terms for the duration of this book, and to provide a framework that you might build your own definitions on.

  These differences took me a long time to understand. When I started to think about trying nonmonogamy, it was because I was in my early twenties and thought I should “date around.” I’d dated Eli and Ben (both long-term relationships that lasted a year and a half), and then an artist named Mac (for a year and a half), a vegan named Rory (for a year and a half), an improv comedian named Sean (for a year and change), a teacher named Rory (for the six months before he had to move), and a comic-book artist named Sam (for more than two years). I’d hopped from one long, dramatic, monogamous relationship to the next—usually without more than a week or so in the single lane. I was with Sam the longest, and that was the breakup that broke me.

  Sam was, as I said, a comic-book artist. We met after I sent him a fan letter; his drawings of swampy forests and people sitting on buses were so beautiful that I replaced my desktop wallpaper immediately upon seeing them. It turned out that Sam and I had a mutual friend (thanks, Facebook!), and one New Year’s Eve we ended up at the same party. I was moody (new years make me feel existential in the worst way) and he had a girlfriend at the time, but we hit it off nevertheless. That summer we were both in Portland and single, and after a week of dillydallying and saying a lot of variations of “I like you, but you live sooooo far away,” we finally kissed while lying in the grassy shade of a public park. We both took off our glasses; I thought it was so cute to see them stacked one on top of the other.

  We decided to give long distance a try, and it actually worked pretty well for us. Sam lived in Washington State, where he was finishing college; I taught first grade in New Orleans. We sent
each other long emails every single night. (Yes, every single night—no exceptions. At one point, about a year in, I had our email correspondence printed and bound because I didn’t trust the Internet to hold on to the lovely footprints of our early love.) Sam spent a summer with me in New Orleans; one year he worked at a sno-ball shop plopping sweetened condensed milk on syrupy ice before meeting me for dinner on our porch. We rendezvoused in Portland regularly, because our parents all lived there. We were able to see each other for a few days approximately once a month, and since we spent so much time outside of those days on the phone and composing our modern epistolary, that was enough.

  Sam was younger than I was by four years, which is a lot when one is in one’s early twenties. But I thought—no, I knew; I was constantly writing in my diary from that time that “I know that this is the real thing” and “In twenty years, once we’ve been married for a while . . .”—that our love was unique and permanent.

  We had been together for two years when it was time to start thinking about where we would move after Sam graduated from college. I composed a fun list of multiple-choice questions for our future. I loved daydreaming about my future with Sam, who would be my husband, and with whom I would share a stupidly photogenic dog.

  But, looking back, I realize that Sam never had the same enthusiasm about our future. It simply did not occur to me that I wasn’t in his long-term plan; he told me every once in a while that he thought we’d probably get married, and that was enough for me: I began designing wedding invitations in my mind. (I pictured a letterpress drawing of glasses adorably stacked on top of each other. Once I put it on Pinterest, it would surely get pinned like a million times.) But in hindsight, I remember him saying other things, too: once over sweet-potato tacos he mentioned that we were at different stages in our lives. Another time he said he wanted to do a fellowship in Japan after college. I brushed all this off. When he broke up with me over the phone, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I felt like he was speaking another language, like he was carrying on in Swahili, even though I kept interrupting to implore him to speak in English. On and on in a language I couldn’t understand, and then, “I’m sorry,” and that was the end.

  After the phone call, I walked to a Halloween party at a coworker’s house, because that’s what I had been planning to do and I couldn’t think of an alternative. I had abstained from alcohol for three years because Sam didn’t drink and I didn’t find drinking enjoyable, but on this particular night, I gave that up—because what was the point?—and decided to drink an unmentionable number of vodka cranberries at the party. At first this went well, and everyone at the party thought I was a lot of fun. (“Everyone come in the living room! Sophie’s doing impressions of Republican senators!”) Then it was terrible, and I was sobbing uncontrollably, as though someone had uncorked a barrel inside me. And then my memory gets foggy. The things I remember are (1) the woman whose party it was let me lie in her bed and watch Spice World, which was miraculously on TBS that night; (2) I vomited on her comforter; and (3) someone at the party thought I should go to the hospital, and I kept repeating the same thing:

  When I finally got through to them, Derek and Hannah drove across town to take me home. At this point, Derek and Hannah and I had been living together for a few years. Hannah had helped me to construct the Rainbow Fish Halloween costume I’d worn to the party. (We’d hot-glued broken CDs all over a felt fish suit so that it looked like it was covered in metallic scales. I took this costume off sometime between vodka number four and breaking a lawn chair in the backyard.) I looked forward to our family dinners every week, when we would sit around complicated salads and hold hands before dinner without irony. When Derek and Hannah got to the party, they lifted me into the front seat of Derek’s Subaru, stopped frequently so I could throw up on the side of the street, and then climbed into my bed with me once we were home. I fell asleep sandwiched between two people who took turns rubbing my shoulders and cooing into my ears.

  And in the back of my mind, I knew that it was okay, because I lived with people who loved me, and I loved them back. But it was also difficult to understand that it was okay right then. I had been so sure about Sam. We never really fought; we had terrific sex. I loved his mom and she loved me; she sent me once as a birthday present a meticulously homemade miniature mouse dressed to look like me. Sam and I could talk for hours and never run out of things to say. Sam loved to draw, and I loved his drawings. We had similar aesthetic sensibilities. We were both vegan, and neither of us drank. Everything worked. My bedroom wall was covered in Sam’s art. His letters were littered around my room, because I liked finding them unexpectedly while looking for a T-shirt. I liked being reminded that I had all that really mattered in my life: true love.

  The letters I’d hidden in my sock drawer and wedged between volumes on my bookshelf became the literal pieces of a broken relationship that needed to be picked up and dealt with. De-Samming my bedroom was emotional and painful. I cried all the time and didn’t want to see anyone at all. I dressed in sweatpants and abstained from eye makeup. I listened to Alanis Morissette. When I wasn’t rewatching Gilmore Girls for the nine-trillionth time, I wrote messy breakup songs and put them on the Internet, hoping Sam would find them. I wrote some pretty damning lyrics, let me tell you. Here’s a taste: “All I want to do / is hate you. / It would probably be good for my health / to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

  This went on for months and months, and ultimately I decided that I was never going to go through a breakup like this one ever again. And so, naturally, I would need to never again be in a relationship like that. But at some point, once I’d started wearing jeans and eyeliner again, I felt like I badly needed to get laid. So I decided to try online dating.

  Actually, at that point, online dating wasn’t entirely new to me. When I’d first moved to New Orleans, I decided to post an ad on Craigslist—even though I was technically still dating Sean. I wanted to make friends in my new city; I figured my new BFF might very well be out there in the Internet’s classifieds section. I posted my ad in the Platonic Only section, but Craigslist still makes you say you’re either a W4M or a W4W (there was no W4Either One). I justified my posting in the W4M section by telling myself that I technically already had a number of female friends, if you counted my roommates (whom I had barely met and who I knew actively disliked me based on the number of times they said “I was just leaving” when I came into the kitchen). The truth was that I wanted someone to fall in love with me. Because of Sean, it felt wrong to fall in love with someone myself, but hey, what was the harm in getting a little attention from a good-looking single man? It didn’t feel like cheating if I was only looking for some harmless attention.

  I spent an hour crafting the kind of ad that I knew would bring an onslaught of horny boys. I titled my post “Seeking Partner in Crime. Must Love Pie.” Here it is in its entirety:

  I’m really, really lonely. I also suck at meeting people because I think I come on a little strong. I’m seeking a partner in crime. Past crimes have included: planting flowers where they don’t belong (not a euphemism), making baked goods in dirty shapes, writing letters to strangers, sidewalk chalk murals. I understand that it may seem like I’m not a very dangerous criminal. I’m not. I like: Nintendo over PS, the Hornets (I have hella tickets for this season), Scott Pilgrim and kin, things related to birds, eating out, Charlie Parker, pie, catching lizards and/or frogs. I dislike: sloppy drunks (I kind of am one, though, so I’m a hypocrite), super-lowbrow humor, crime drama shows, plain Hershey’s chocolate, people who chew too loudly. Note the pie. I really like pie, and I like to make it for my friends. Lately I have had very few friends because I just (read: five months ago) moved here from Portland, Oregon, and things swing differently down south. But maybe you’ll be one?

  Because it’s the future, I now have the rare opportunity to go back through this post, editing for full disclosure.

  I’m really, really lonely.

  This wa
sn’t untrue, but it wasn’t really true, either. I was afraid my on-again-off-again boyfriend was going to go off-again. I hoped for innocent male attention just in case.

  I also suck at meeting people because I think I come on a little strong.

  I suck at meeting people because I don’t actively try to do it very much. I also come on a little strong. That part is true.

  I’m seeking a partner in crime.

  Boys love that kind of thing.

  Past crimes have included: planting flowers where they don’t belong (not a euphemism),

  I’ve never done this, but I’ve always wanted to. Once in high school I went as far as buying a potted zinnia and leaving it near a park. Looking back, I’m not sure what I meant, exactly, by “not a euphemism.” Obviously, this was supposed to be sexual, but I don’t know what “planting flowers where they don’t belong” would mean in the sex world.

  making baked goods in dirty shapes,

  This isn’t true either, unless you count Santa cookies. Some people have kinks like that, I guess.

  mailing letters to strangers,

  How would a person even do this? With a phone book? Who had a phone book in 2008?

  sidewalk chalk murals.

  I did that once, but I was seven.

  I understand that it may seem like I’m not a very dangerous criminal. I’m not. I like: Nintendo over PS,

  I have no interest in video games at all. I mean, I’ll casually come in thirteenth in Mario Kart over the holidays with my sister, but that is it. I had no idea that people shortened PlayStation to PS—I think I just assumed that that must be the case. I have literally zero preference on the subject of gaming platforms. It’s amazing to me that I can even use the words “gaming platform” correctly.