Many Love

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

  I couldn’t live in a house like this. That was the first thing I thought when I went inside. It wasn’t because of the holes in the walls, or because I didn’t believe I could stay alive without a properly working air conditioner; it was that the house was too big, and the people who lived there didn’t have any real control over it. It was too big to collaboratively clean or decorate. I didn’t see how anyone could ever bring themselves to scrub the stovetop, for example, because the stovetop was such a tiny corner of such a gargantuan kitchen that scrubbing it seemed futile; it would make no real difference in the way the kitchen looked. People in that house stayed up late and went out a lot and did bright, colorful, all-night projects. (In New Orleans, “doing colorful projects” is a typical pastime and may include but is not limited to: creating a Mardi Gras float out of papier-mâché, sewing a sequined costume by hand, or spray painting a bunch of plants neon colors.) The house was cooler than I was, and I had no real interest in being the kind of cool that was required by the house. I liked my immaculate refrigerator and my roommates Hannah and Derek, who got frustrated if you didn’t clean the cast iron skillet enough.

  Inside Bob’s house, all my fears about a relationship with Bob somehow ruining my relationship with Luke dissipated. Bob was a free spirit, and he wasn’t going to lock me into a monogamous or primary sort of partnership. Something about his house articulated this better than his words ever could. We made out on his bed, on top of the superfluous comforter.

  At the end of the summer, lying on the ground in Bob’s video classroom at camp, he told me he loved me. It was one of the most lovely “I love you”s I had ever heard. It reminded me a lot of the Jesse “I love you”: an “I love you” without strings; an “I love you” that carried no real implication or baggage. The words meant exactly what they meant: he loved me. There was no reason not to say it, because there was nothing more beautiful than the capacity one human being has to love another human being. I said, “I love you, too.”

  Sometimes, in movies, when people say “I love you,” they act kind of sad. They act like using this phrase is a sort of tragic concession, as if underneath is, “I’ve tried not to love you, because I’m aware that I’m not supposed to, and that for some reason my loving you is going to damage our livelihoods, but damn it, I can’t help it, I can’t fight it, and now that I’ve said it, I know that everything will be totally different.” Bob’s and my “I love you” exchange was the opposite of that. Nothing changed at all, except that there was now a new addition to our vernacular. It was like he had cut up strawberries to put in my cereal.

  Saying “I love you” to Bob did not change the way I felt when I said “I love you” to Luke. This confirmed for me something that I had always suspected: love is not the same as waffles. A person does not possess a finite amount of love that they must divide among the people in their lives. When a person gives love to another person, it doesn’t mean that there’s less to give to yet another person down the line. With waffles, if you have six, you can either give one person all six or you can give one person three and another person three, but you can’t give both people six. That waffle scenario would suck either way, because at the end of the day you’ve given all your waffles away, and what are you supposed to eat for breakfast?

  As the summer wound down and Luke and I prepared to move across the country together, Bob told me he was sad I was leaving. I was sad to leave him, too.

  Bob and I stayed together on a long-distance basis for a long time, talking on the phone every few weeks and sending each other long emails. Our conversation began to shift a bit; we stopped talking so much about strange and private sexual fantasies or deep and dark secrets from our past and started talking more about video games from the 1990s that we both still liked to play or the logistics of scheduling. It wasn’t that the conversation was any less engaging or enjoyable; it was just more familial. That happens over time. It’s nothing to mourn.

  Recently, Bob told me he’d fallen in love with someone else. My initial reaction to that news was strange for me: I felt really, genuinely happy for him. This was what the polyamorous community calls “compersion,” and they talk about it like it’s buried treasure or a secret elixir hidden in a forbidden temple.

  “Compersion” is a term that’s used to mean the emotion opposite of jealousy; it’s a feeling of joy or pleasure that comes from a lover experiencing happiness in a new relationship.

  Now that I’ve experienced it wholeheartedly, I understand the appeal. Compersion feels great. It feels like getting a free root-beer float.

  I think Luke has started to feel it, too. For instance, I recently went to visit Bob. In the lead-up to my trip, Luke asked me how I felt about it:

  This conversation was very cool. We congratulated ourselves for having it. In the back of my mind, I wondered how truthful any of this was. Was it really likely that my partner of two years was actually excited for me to go have sex with my other boyfriend? If you’d posed the question to me a decade ago, I would have laughed at you. But I decided to believe that Luke was happy for me in that moment. Luke is not a dishonest person; there really wasn’t any reason for him to lie.

  The Bob visit was great. We saw movies and had sex and ate floppy pizza slices and had sex and had sex and swam in a private pool. And we had really, seriously wonderful sex. That was the main thing. The sex.

  Then I came back from the Bob visit, and I told Luke some of the details of the visit, and guess what: he wasn’t that happy to hear them. He even used the J-word, and my faith in compersion was shaken. But at least I was happy for Bob and his other new girlfriend, right? (I didn’t meet Bob’s girlfriend when I visited; she happened to be out of town that weekend. From what Bob tells me, though, they spend almost every night together and go on trips and play with puppies together. It seems like a very serious, very healthy relationship from here.)

  Then Bob stopped calling and stopped responding to my emails, and I recognized this as hard-core falling-in-love behavior—but this time he wasn’t falling in love with me. I’d been relegated to a backup activity, an item on a to-do list. I wanted to be happy that Bob was happy. I could logic myself into something that seemed sort of like happiness. I could text Bob “I’m happy for you” and mean it—but when he didn’t respond for four days, I found myself crying about it in a bathroom on an Amtrak train.

  Once, while I was at a conference in Los Angeles, Luke went on a date with someone he matched with on Tinder. When he left to go on the date, I felt shitty about it. The anthropological thing to do, I decided, was to write about this date and my feelings around it as it was happening. (In other words, I needed an excuse to obsessively think about my boyfriend while he was on a date and frame it in a productive way; I was going to think about it anyway.) Here’s what I wrote (and subsequently illustrated, for effect):

  I’m writing this while my boyfriend, Luke, is on a date with another woman. I know the other woman’s name, but I don’t know much else about her—except that she’s the kind of woman who would consider going on a date to a zoo.

  Going on a date to a zoo is a thing I would never do, because I feel depressed looking at the lethargic animals eating dead fish next to fake rocks. When I was nine, on the day I decided I hated zoos, I saw a turtle swimming in a glass box no bigger than a loaf of bread, with no rocks or anything to sit on if he got tired. Almost nothing is more gruesome than the reality of a confused and innocent animal forced into a life of evident torture for the supposed pleasure of cotton candy–eating children.

  Luke has wanted to go on dates with new people lately. He told me this last week over a small basil pizza we were sharing in a crowded bar. It was our first date in a long time, because we’re both busy and have inverse schedules. When we have time off together, we usually bike five minutes to the bird sanctuary near our apartment to walk in silence (or sometimes I try to sing silly songs to make the birds feel more comfortable). Luke likes to fill his hands with birdseed and stand stock-sti
ll, because he can get chickadees to land on his fingers that way. We chose our apartment in part because of its proximity to this bird sanctuary, which is located on an abandoned army base that’s now known, wonderfully, as the Magic Hedge. We like to go at all times of year, because the landscape has a tendency to change in ways you don’t expect. Once we went when it was six degrees outside. I opened up a milkweed pod in my hand and watched the seeds flow out and blend into the snow.

  Those don’t count as dates, though, because I can wear sweatpants and no eyeliner, and we’re together but we’re also alone, meditating on the space and feeling the perfect freedom one feels when there are no walls and no one around to entertain. Sometimes we go get tacos, but that’s almost always because we only have peanut butter in the fridge.

  So if you don’t count the trips to the bird sanctuary or the times we got tacos, this was our first date in three weeks. We had ice cream first, and then this fancy brick-oven pizza. I even ordered a drink with gin in it, which is unusual for me, because if I’m going to spend money to consume a lot of calories, I’m going to do it on something made of bread. Later, we were going to go see Zootopia at the expensive, trendy movie theater across the street. I was so pleased to be on this date; it felt like the kind of outing I assumed marriage counselors would urge their clients to go on. I was not pleased, however, when Luke said he’d been wanting to go on dates with new people.

  I tried to appear pleased, though. After all, I was the one who’d insisted on a polyamorous relationship when we met a little over a year ago, and though Luke proved to be very into the idea of polyamory, I was the one who had another boyfriend in New Orleans, and Luke did not. In other words, Luke had quite a bit of credit in his dating-other-women account. He absolutely deserved to want to do it.

  At the pizza place, I thought hard about the corners of my lips and forcibly willed them upward; I took a casual sip of my gin thing in a way that implied I was doing great. But in truth, I was irrationally angry that Luke would bring such a thing up on our date—or that he would bring such a thing up at all—or that such a thing could ever, in any universe, be what he wanted. “Oh, yeah?” I said. “That’s great!” I always say “that’s great” when I’m feeling jealous. It’s what I said when my best friend told me she’d lost a lot of weight, and it’s what I said when my coworker was going to have her short story published in Tin House.

  “I just think that if we’re going to be polyamorous, we should really be polyamorous. The longer we go not being functionally polyamorous, the less I believe it.” I told him that I understood. I’ll reiterate: I did understand. But that didn’t lessen my impulse to throw my ice water at him.

  We talked a little more about it. Was he talking to anyone? Yes, he’d found someone he liked on Tinder recently, and they’d been negotiating a date. (My brain said, “WHAT?! You’ve been talking to her FOR LONG ENOUGH to ALREADY BE NEGOTIATING A DATE?!?!?! WHEN WERE YOU GOING TO TELL ME?!?!?!?!?! WERE YOU GOING TO WAIT UNTIL YOU WERE ON THE DATE AND THEN TEXT ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, AFTER I’D STARTED WORRYING THAT YOU HAD DIED?!?!?!?!?”) I said that was great.

  He said yes, he was excited about it. I started wondering whether I wanted to know more about this girl. Did I want to see her picture or know what she did for a living? I wasn’t sure. I stayed quiet. Then I launched into an argument about how I didn’t want to see anyone else because I was afraid it would compromise our relationship, because I wasn’t feeling like our relationship had been particularly strong lately, and I didn’t want to ruin that by getting all excited about someone new. Luke said that that made sense. He was supposed to tell me that he felt the same way, and never mind, he would cancel with this girl; but instead he said, “That makes sense.”

  The horrible sick feeling lingered, even after we changed the subject. I thought about the whole Luke-dating-someone-else thing when we crossed the street to go to the movie theater, and when we were getting the tickets. It faded somewhere in the opening sequence of Zootopia. (It’s a good movie.)

  Later, I considered something I’d heard on a Buddhist podcast once. The person on the podcast said that every choice you make in your life and everything you’re feeling ultimately comes from a place of love or from a place of fear. This is obviously a gross oversimplification. But whatever, let’s go with it. (Oh, like your podcast choices are so much better.)

  If we’re thinking in terms of love and fear, I’m afraid not because I love Luke so much but because I’m afraid of losing something. I’m afraid because

  Then I might lose him. There is nothing I want less in the world than to lose him. (Read: fear jealousy type.)

  But, on the other hand, I’m always at risk of losing the things I love. That’s part of what makes love so valuable: it’s vulnerable. We all must know this, because there’s nothing but evidence that it’s true; but we also know, in some deeper part of ourselves, that the risk is worth the payoff.

  Luke would not be going on a date with another girl if he didn’t feel like the foundation of our relationship was pretty healthy. I mentally took stock of all Luke would lose if he dumped me. We lived together, so if he left, he would need to separate all his records from my records. Plus, we both had a copy of this obscure New Orleans record by a band called Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship. How would we know whose was whose? That in and of itself would be a logistical nightmare.

  Luke watched me meet and date and fall in love with Bob, and he told me that the jealousy, which was at first unbearable, faded into real, bona fide compersion. Luke promised me that he would never, in any circumstance that he could imagine, break up with me because he met some other girl. Boys have made promises like that to me before, and they’ve broken them. But other boys (and girls!) have made promises like that to me and kept them.

  Trust is a hard thing to rebuild. I cannot count the times that some wonderful person I know has said something like, “I find it very difficult to trust people ever since [person X] did [thing Y].” My own weakness is that I have trouble believing that anyone can love me when I’m sad. I have a lot of evidence that my sadness is a problem, that it should be hidden or buried. In elementary school, I got sent to the school counselor because my teacher was concerned that I showed “a disproportionate amount of sadness given my age.” A year later I happened to find a note that I assumed someone in my class had passed to someone else; I noticed it in the recycling bin because it had my name on it. It was just one line: “Don’t tell Sophie she always just cries about everything.” When I found the note, I went and sat in the big bathroom on the fifth-grade end of the hallway and cried about everything.

  I’ve cried in bed and at the dinner table; I’ve cried on the phone and while staring at the phone wishing it would ring; I’ve cried under every desk in our apartment; I’ve cried in the bathtub and on the bathroom floor and with my head collapsed on the closed toilet. I’ve cried about things I know how to talk about, but mostly I’ve cried about things I don’t understand at all. Sometimes I scream when I cry. Sometimes I even punch Luke on the arm. I’m trying to tell you that I’ve done some next-level crying around this guy. And here’s what Luke does, every time: he holds me as close as I will let him hold me and says “It’s okay” or “I love you.”

  When I really think about it, I’m not worried about Luke. When the worry is gone, so is the jealousy.

  When I gave this piece to my graduate school advisor to read over, she tried to be gentle, but eventually she came right out and said it:

  “Well, it’s true. I just don’t feel jealous anymore. The jealousy is over,” I told her.

  “Okay. I believe you believe that. But I don’t believe it, and no one else is going to believe it, because that’s not how jealousy works.”

  I really wish that the version of myself who wrote about my jealousy drifting away into nothingness had been right. It would have made my life—and writing this book—a lot easier. But I didn’t actually stop being jealous after writing a drawn-out, glori
fied journal entry about it in Los Angeles. Things with the zoo girl didn’t go anywhere, but things with the next girl did. It was months later when Luke met her, and I’d been on dates with other people since the zoo girl, too. The next girl—I’ll call her Melissa, because she’s become too important a figure in our lives to be boiled down to a single quirk—is a person Luke really likes, and he shared with me a text he sent her in which he told her she was beautiful and amazing and funny. The jealousy came back, and the processing, and the conversations, and the pain, and all the rest of it.

  To be fair, it was a little easier this time. But “a little easier” does not a utopic relationship make.

  When I get really honest about polyamory with people, they aren’t convinced that it’s a really viable relationship model. A friend in my graduate program asked me over tea recently, “Is it really worth it? I mean, couldn’t it be maybe better to just give up dating other people in order to feel more secure in the idea of your relationship lasting? Don’t you think it’s possible that monogamy is just less painful?”

  And yes, it absolutely is possible. Like I said in the beginning of this book, I don’t think polyamory is for everyone. I used that very line on my friend, actually.

  “Yes,” she said. “But do you really think it’s right for you?”

  I couldn’t answer her at the time—which was terrifying, because I’d spent a lot of time building an identity around my polyamory. The thing that had to happen in order to change things for me—forever, I hope—was that I had to hit bottom with Melissa.

  As Luke continued to date Melissa, I continued to feel terrible. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know about the relationship, and the happier Luke seemed to be, the worse I seemed to feel. And there was a double arrow here—I didn’t want to tell Luke how bad I was feeling because I was afraid it would make him annoyed with me, and then he wouldn’t be attracted to me anymore, and then he would leave me for Melissa. Once, as we were walking home from the grocery store, he told me that he wanted to maybe go spend the night at Melissa’s house. (She lived in a suburb of Chicago, so it was hard for them to visit each other; there was a superlong train ride involved.) I was so jealous and had so little compersion that I was almost incapable of lying about it. I spent all my free time alone stewing in my jealousy.