But my relationship with Luke is vastly different from any of my other relationships. Relationships are collaborative chemistry; they’re always weirdly at odds with the sum of their parts. Luke, who is ever the pragmatist even in moments of extreme crisis, mellows out my dramatic tendencies. I, on the other hand, encourage him to be emotional and to talk about his feelings. He doesn’t want to grow up to be a writer or a stand-up comedian or a comic-book artist, and I don’t want to grow up to be a manager at a YMCA or a diner owner, so there’s nothing big for us to get competitive over. And Luke is so patient. It seems that this quality—inherent for him—is making me more patient, too.
The most significant difference between this relationship and every other relationship I’ve ever been in, of course, is that it’s functionally polyamorous. Over the course of our first year in Chicago, a lot happened inside our polyamorous partnership—Luke says we’ve “leveled up” in the polysphere. Luke started seeing Melissa, and I continued to date Bob until he decided he wanted to be physically monogamous with the girl he fell in love with in New Orleans. I went on a few Tinder dates with a small assortment of people and then decided that I was too busy to be on Tinder for the time being. Also, Tinder wasn’t resulting in the types of relationships I wanted to have; I was less interested in swiping right on a physical impulse and wanted instead to meet people who had already done a lot of thinking about polyamory before we went on dates.
The Ethical Slut and other polyamory primers often suggest setting up specific rules and guidelines to help map the anarchic world of open relationships. Luke and I forewent the map at first. I’d read a formative essay called “Loving Hard and Often” in the literary journal I edited. The anonymous writer advocated for romantic relationships without rules:
Whether or not we sign contracts there are rules in place for how we interact with our parents, children, partners, teachers, clients and even our pets. We don’t choose these rules. They are predetermined by powers that be in the interest of creating orderly, obedient citizens and consumers. Friendship operates at the edges of these regulated relationships. Playing out both in public and in private, friendships allow us to regularly embrace fluidity and change. What’s more romantic than that?3
After reading the essay, I vowed to let my love life exist without rules. This, however, had not been without its consequences. My brain made up its own rules (for example, “You won’t fall in love with someone else; not really” and “You can’t decide to stop sleeping with me”), and when the rules were violated, I was hurt without reasonable outward justification. After our five-hundredth discussion about jealousy, I realized that I probably needed some parameters for myself, but I couldn’t figure out what they would be.
Luckily, a few months into our life together in Chicago, I met a polyamorous woman who introduced me to the concept of “parallel polyamory.” The woman, Meg (remember Meg from the very beginning of this book?), was roughly my age but had been practicing polyamory since she was in college, and she was plugged into a whole network of polyamorous people who gathered regularly to schmooze and discuss theories about relationships and their many forms. Meg told me about dating someone who practiced parallel polyamory and that she hadn’t done that before and wasn’t necessarily into it. I had no idea what the term meant.
Of course, Meg was describing the only version of polyamory I really knew or understood. It was more closely connected to hookup culture than I realized, because it was primarily about having the explicit permission to engage in multiple relationships at once; in parallel polyamory, there is less emphasis on total transparency and honesty in love.
Parallel polyamory keeps a lot hidden. That was part of what had ultimately hurt my relationship with Jaedon; because Jaedon didn’t really see me interact much with Luke, and those relationships were so separate (even though Luke and Jaedon were coworkers), it was hard for him to believe I was telling him the whole truth. And to be fair, I wasn’t telling him the whole truth. I didn’t want to hurt him, and I didn’t want him to hurt me. And so, even though he knew I was dating Luke, he didn’t quite trust the integrity of our relationship.
After I talked to Meg, I spent some time thinking about the kind of polyamory I wanted to practice, and I decided I didn’t want to be in parallel polyamorous relationships anymore. I wanted to spend time with Melissa, and I wanted Luke to spend time with whomever I would date next. I wanted everything out in the open.
And I told him what Meg told me.
Luke was down to give this kind of relationship a try. Over a late Saturday brunch a few weeks later, he even upped the ante a little and said he was interested in dating another couple. Couples dating couples was a concept I’d read about in books about polyamory, and that the poly blogger Alan M. had talked to me about on the phone a little. (He and his wife are currently in a relationship with another couple. I didn’t ask him too much about it, because at the time the idea was so foreign to me that I didn’t even know where to begin.) In this relationship model, two people in a primary relationship go on a date with two other people in a primary relationship—and maybe they all get physical together. It’s not unlike the idea of swinging that took off in the early 1970s, when newly married couples of the Free Love movement wanted to break the rules in a new way. I told Luke that that sounded fun to me, too, but it also sounded like a lot of work. I told him we could stay open to it, but I didn’t know when we’d have the time to find another couple interested in going or even willing to go on a date with us.
And that was when the Magic of the Universe (or whatever you want to call it) stepped in, twisting the plot of our lives in a way that no self-respecting fiction novelist would ever write for fear of seeming too implausibly in sync. Just a few days after our brunch discussion, Luke and I were invited to a play party (read: a kink-friendly sex party) at Meg’s apartment. We’d never been to a party like that before, but it was just the kind of thing we’d been hoping to try, and so we went. Although, don’t get me wrong, we were nervous.
The play party was, importantly, a highly consent-driven and primarily sober affair. I mention sobriety here because, in my experience, wanting to experiment around sex is too often conflated with drinking alcohol and doing drugs. Luke and I are both currently nondrinkers, and we don’t do drugs. We’ve talked a lot about it, because for both of us, sobriety is personally necessary to really engage in sexual experimentation. I want to be completely cognizant of my choices, and I want to make sure that I can both honestly give consent and understand when it is being given to me. I’m a little afraid of sounding too much like A Preteen’s Guide to Safe and Responsible Sex Parties, but the correlation between rape and alcohol—roughly half of all incidents of sexual assault involve alcohol consumption—is too strong to be ignored or left out of a conversation like this.4 I’m a survivor of sexual assault, and to be honest, the idea of a party like this had always terrified me. What if something someone did triggered me somehow? What if I failed to say no to something I didn’t want to do and ended up regretting it? What if I said no too forcefully and made everyone in the room feel like I was overly sensitive? But Meg set up firm rules: every single physical transaction required explicit verbal consent; everyone who attended had to be personally vetted; and no late arrivals were permitted. We played a sexy game of truth or dare (“Kiss everyone in the room”; “What is one fantasy you’d like to live out tonight?”), and then everyone dispersed in pairs or more to, uh, play.
I started the night making out with Meg’s live-in partner. He asked if he could kiss me; he asked if he could touch my waist; he asked if he could take off my glasses. After a while, I saw Luke across the room and asked him to join us. All my fear melted away right then. All night, everyone I interacted with asked about doing any and everything, and with each question I felt more self-assured. I also started to feel like my body was strong and beautiful and powerful. With all these people asking me if they could touch me or kiss me or hold me, I truly felt, for the f
irst time in my entire life, that my body was desirable, and that it belonged only to me. There may have been times when I came close to feeling like that before, but they were nothing like this. I felt like a goddess.
After the party, Meg texted that she and her partner were interested in going on a date with Luke and me. It was as though she had been sitting at the table behind us that day at brunch and knew that we were interested in the idea of dating a couple. I asked Luke what he thought. Luke said he thought that a date with Meg and her partner sounded great; we were both attracted to both of them. And so it happened that Luke and I, as a couple, went on a romantic date with another couple—he and I, in some ways a single entity, united in our nervousness and excitement.
Our first date with Meg and Tony took place at their apartment. They made us broccoli and rice, and we sat on their big couches and talked and laughed for a few hours; then we went into their bedroom and made out with each other for a while. Everyone made out with everyone else. Everyone touched everyone else. Everyone kissed everyone else good-bye, and then Luke and I went home. We both thought it was really fun.
The party and the text message and the newfound sense of polyamorous coupledom all took place the day before Hannah arrived for her visit. I felt happy and new; I had a fresh understanding of what love and sex could mean. It was the first time in a long time that my personal practice of polyamory had not involved even a shred of jealousy. I felt evangelized. And, I felt, it was a great time to talk to Hannah about my feelings for her.
On the train to the Garfield Park Conservatory, I told Hannah all about the sexy party, and about Meg, and about how I felt like I’d broken through something significant in my personal exploration of love and self. Hannah’s eyes widened as I told the story; she nodded and made little affirmative sounds. I remembered what a pleasure it was to tell Hannah a story like this in person. She was always so on board with whatever revelations I might have; she seemed so genuinely happy for me. It was the same way when I was sad about something—my job or a relationship or the state of the world; she seemed to carry some of my sadness. She had this gift for making me feel like she always shared my load.
So it felt like the most natural thing in the world to finish the story about the party and to lay my palm on Hannah’s arm and say:
By the time I finished talking, we’d made it to the conservatory. Hannah suggested we go around the back to the labyrinth and sit by the bamboo behind it. It was the exact place Luke had suggested we sit the first time we visited. It was cold that day with Luke; we’d been wearing layers of coats and knit hats and gloves, but we liked the quiet of the outside, and we sat in silence and looked for winter birds. This time, with Hannah, the weather was warm. There was still kale sprouting up in the edible garden, and kids were running across the labyrinth, scream-laughing and tagging one another’s shoulders. We lay in the grass, half-shaded by a gingko tree. Hannah held my hand.
And that was really all there was to say.
I don’t know what love is. My love for Hannah and my love for Luke can both feel like they take up my whole body sometimes, more than hunger or thirst or pain or loneliness ever can. The way I love my sister, Alexis, and the way I love my mother are so similar and so different—and so similar and so different, too, from the way I still love Bob in New Orleans, or Kim from my first time in Chicago. When Jesse, who I still talk to on the phone, says “I love you” to me, the words carry something that seems bigger than life itself, but I couldn’t possibly put my thumb on it. At Ben’s wedding in October, I gave a speech and told dozens of people how the best person I knew had found the best person he knew, and the fact that they were so happy made me believe in something I thought I had grown too skeptical to believe in: the undeniable power of a single love.
But I’m not a person who’s of a single love. I have many. And this, I think, is my great gift. It’s my small—but mighty—reason for being. Everyone needs one, after all.
PART 8
Bird-Watching
There’s a subtle distinction between birding and bird-watching (even if the dictionary doesn’t recognize it). In a piece for The New Yorker, bird enthusiast Jonathan Rosen simplifies it thusly: “Crudely put, bird-watchers look at birds; birders look for them.”1 If this is true, then my mother and I are bird-watchers, and not birders. Luke is, too.
Luke got serious about bird-watching right after we started dating. The bird feeder I’d kept for years had broken, and I didn’t feel like financially committing to a new one right then. I was about to donate a Costco-sized bag of birdseed to Goodwill when Luke saw it in the trunk of my car. He asked what it was. “It’s birdseed, for bird watching,” I said. He asked if he could have it, and I tried to gently break it to him that you couldn’t bird watch without a ton of gear. He would need to invest in a big bird feeder, and he didn’t even really have a good yard for it. He would probably want to get a suet feeder, too, because otherwise he’d be stuck with nothing but sparrows. But Luke wouldn’t listen. He wanted the birdseed. One morning, after he’d made coffee, he opened the front doors of his house and threw a handful of birdseed onto the sidewalk. “That’s not how you do it!” I protested. But in ten minutes, the birds came. Soon we spent every Sunday sitting on his front steps, throwing handfuls of birdseed at the common sparrows and wondering about how and why and where they would move.
The April after we met, Luke took me to the Grand Isle Migratory Bird Celebration. Grand Isle is pretty much the southernmost point of Louisiana—it’s the end of the road for Louisiana Highway 1 and is the state’s only inhabited island. Birds at the end of their tedious trek across the Gulf of Mexico love to hang out on Grand Isle for a few days in April; they rest and rejuvenate before dispersing farther north.
Luke and I decided to camp on the beach the night before we set out to see the birds. This was a bad idea, as there was a massive thunderstorm overnight and everything we brought with us was soaked. I could complain about that, but the fact that we weren’t killed by a bolt of lightning (even though the metal poles on our tent were the tallest things around) was, by definition, a saving grace. The thunderstorm and subsequent flood kept us from really sleeping, but we had to get to the Bird Celebration headquarters at 6:00 a.m. to see the really good birds. When we arrived, we were not amused.
The thunderstorm hadn’t passed overnight; it sagged across the island all day. We trudged through knee-deep water that splashed from every direction and got inside our raincoats. I put on a bathing suit. We continued to be extremely not amused.
But then we saw something that I will not be able to describe to you accurately, because it was more beautiful and magical than words have the capacity to tell. We saw a flock of maybe a hundred indigo buntings. An indigo bunting is a bird so all-over blue that you think it must have fallen into a bucket of paint when you see it. They rose up out of a bristly shrub in airy unison, as though they were all just one bird emitting a great sigh.
Birds flocking is really something special to watch. Magnificent waves of starlings tornadoing around city buildings or blankets of sparrows rising up out of the grass—there’s just something about it that stuns you and makes you believe—even if just for a moment—in a Bigger Thing.
When I try to think about that ridiculous cloud of blue buntings flying together across the gigantic Gulf of Mexico, I can’t wrap my brain around it. How do they know when to leave? Who decides? How do they map the route without Siri? How do they know where to stop? How can all those individual birds stay together for all that time? Of course they have to stay together in order to survive as a species; but how do they do it? If there was only one indigo bunting left in the entire world, would she know how to make the journey all by herself?
It’s ultimately just as difficult to wrap my mind around the concept of polyamory. Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart’s definition of polyamory is the one that ended up in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The practice, state, or ability of having more than one sexual, loving rel
ationship at the same time, with the full knowledge and consent of all partners involved.” One Urban Dictionary user, however, outwardly rejects that definition, explaining that “In reality, polyamory is more often used as nothing more than a way of attempting to make ‘open’ relationships appear more mature by selfish individuals who use the idea of polyamory as a means to have multiple sexual partners while keeping the relationships themselves in an overly complicated and childish attrition.”2 People today define the word “polyamory” differently. It hasn’t always been that way.
The universe of dating, love, family, and sex is evolving so quickly that our shared vernacular hasn’t been able to keep up. As people form relationships that increasingly fall (in utterly disparate ways) into the “It’s Complicated” box, we’ve struggled for a simple way to describe them. If Rory is seriously dating Sir Rory, but Sir Rory is allowed to sleep with three other girls, what is that? And if Rory is sleeping with Rory 2 but not having sex with her, and Sir Rory is having sex with both Rory and Rory 2 but neither of them knows about the other’s affair with Sir Rory, what is that? As everyone flounders in redefining the word “relationship,” “polyamory” has been forced to be the one-size-fits-all garment. And as with any single article of clothing, if something is worn too much and by too many, it gets stretched out.
Many Love Page 16