Well, that’s a relief

It’s been a long time, since I felt really good about where I stand with relationships. Nearly 7 months ago, my partner / wife of 32 years passed away after an extended struggle with a bunch of issues that snowballed and turned into a classic toxic coctail of “it’s only a matter of time”. I was her 24/7 caregiver for 2+ years (all 32 years, if I’m being exact), and to say we had our ups and downs would be an understatement.

And yeah, we had very specific issues with a whole lot of other women who were not officially part of our relationship, but who intruded plenty. And we both did our share of intruding in other women’s lives. When you’re with somebody for 32 years, and you’re both red-blooded women with an appreciation and an appetite for other red-blooded women, marriage doesn’t necessarily dampen your impulses. Plus, my partner and I both recognized that each of us had an extremely strong libido, and our mantra was, “I’m married, I’m not dead.“

But I have to say, over all those years, the presence of beautiful women in both of our lives (which we usually appreciated separately and developed connections with separately) really complicated things. Or rather, our inability to healthily incorporate our attractions for other women into our relationship agreements was the source of complication.

And it wasn’t just complication. There was also a lot of suffering. I’m not sure that I suffered that deeply from the times that my partner stepped out on me emotionally, was overly flirtatious and sexual with other women in public around our friends and family, or even had a full-blown affair with another woman. Rather, the suffering came from the broken agreements, the lying, the concealment, and just never being able to discuss openly the dynamics that were very clearly happening between us as a couple and individually between us and other women outside our marriage.

And for the longest time, I felt a heavy burden of guilt over how things transpired between me and other women over the years. There were some women who I was absolutely smitten with, and others with whom I had a deep, profound emotional and spiritual bond. There were a number of women I worked with who were proverbial “work wives“, as well as a number of women I openly flirted with and pursued while traveling. I knew at the time it was happening that it went against the agreements that my partner and I had, but none of those agreements actually seemed to matter, in the moment. And afterwards, the intense guilt was something I had to reckon with on a regular basis.

But now all of that has changed. And it’s pretty fucking incredible. A close confidant of mine had been exploring the polyamorous nature of a relationship she was in, trying to sort out exactly what was what in the dynamic between her and her former girlfriend. She told me about this book, Polysecure, which talked about attachment theory and polyamory.

At first I was pretty skeptical, because the whole attachment theory thing has always struck me as one of those designer conceptual frameworks that people with too many degrees and too much time on their hands come up with to explain away the mysterious intricacies of complex human life. I also didn’t much care for the concept of polyamory, because all the people that I’ve ever seen practicing it seemed kind of … skeevy to me. They weren’t at all the kind of people that I wanted to have anything to do with, mentally, emotionally, let alone sexually.

But for some reason, last week, I decided to look up the book and see what was actually in there. What I found was a very clear and fairly easy to grasp a breakdown of what attachment theory is, how it plays out in people’s lives, and also how polyamory plays out in relation to it. And seeing the descriptions of dynamics that I recognized all too well from 32 years of marriage, not to mention nearly 5 years of a committed relationship prior to that marriage, I stopped being such a dick about attachment theory.

Even more importantly, I realized that my bias against polyamory was based on a lack of information, not to mention a real lack of actual thought about what the fuck really goes on when you are ethically nonmonogamous.

In fact, the whole concept of consensual non-monogamy, or ethical non-monogamy, had never really occurred to me before. I always figured, people just cheat. People are just horndogs. People just want to get it on with a wide variety of people, whether out of boredom or out of some twisted sexual need it’s an itch that they have to constantly scratch. It never once occurred to me that there could be an ethical set of agreements and practices in place that are based on mutual trust, open communication, transparency, regular check-in’s, and prioritizing the well-being of others, that could form the basis for an actually healthy expression of loving more than one person at a time.

But reading Polysecure, a whole lot of shit cleared up for me real quick. And it became almost painfully obvious that for as long as I can remember, I have been a fundamentally, essentially, undeniably non-monogamous individual. It goes as far back as years when my age was a single digit. I’ve always been this way. I am no other way. And for all of the issues that my partner and I had for those 32 years, the real source of it was not that we were both non-monogamous. The problem was, we didn’t know how to be ethically non-monogamous.

So, it’s been a big week. Every time I turn the page in that book, I figure something else out about myself. Every chapter that goes by, I come to terms with a whole raft of issues that never really needed to be issues, to begin with, if I just had a way to work with them in right relation.

The net result is that I am a whole lot more relaxed, I am a whole lot less on edge, and I don’t have the same level of pressure and anxiety about my relational future that I had just one week ago. Additionally, I have the added perk of some of my developing relationships being… well… depressurized. There are a handful of women who I am in relationship with, in one way or another, who I’ve really been sweating over, because I didn’t know how to “prioritize” them properly. That, of course, is coming from the place of me thinking I have to be monogamous, that I have to choose just one, and I have to mold my relationship with each of them relative to my relationships with the others.

But in my brand spanking new ethically non-monogamous world, that pressure is completely off. I don’t have to choose just one. I don’t have to worry about the timing. I don’t have to think that I have to focus all my attention on one and develop that connection, even if the other woman isn’t really ready to do it, yet, because the other women are waiting in the wings and I need to figure out if this thing is going anywhere, for fear I might lose out on That One Relationship I can’t seem to live without.

I also don’t have to put off the one woman who is obviously interested in pursuing a relationship with me, and has been for months. I’ve felt like I needed to put her off, because I didn’t want to run the risk of developing something with her… and then feel like I had to dump her because the other woman (who isn’t ready yet) suddenly IS ready, and well, she’s hot as hell, and she’d probably be an amazing partner in her own right.

What’s more, I can continue to develop the friendship that I have with the friend who is essentially celibate and not looking for any sort of domestic relationship whatsoever, but does want more spiritual and emotional intimacy in her life. I can actually be in relationship with her, without that being threatened by the developing dynamics with the other two women in my life (or more who could also drift onto my radar).

And on top of it all, because I know that I am not monogamous, and I have no intention of ever behaving in a monogamous way ever again, it frees me up to interact with other people in completely new and more open ways. I don’t have to be constantly looking over my shoulder, in case somebody might see me behaving “wrong” when I’m supposed to be married to so-and-so. I don’t have to constantly calculate how friendly I should be, how much I should smile, how much eye contact I should make, whether I should reach out and make physical contact, so on and so forth, because supposedly I am in a committed monogamous relationship that’s exclusive in all aspects of relationship.

I don’t have to worry about that shit anymore. I can just be with people. I can give them my full attention, in the moment that we are relating to one another. I can give them the smile I want to give them. I can respond to them the way I feel I should respond. I don’t have to do anything around other people that doesn’t feel normal and natural and effortless to me. I can just be myself. And I can spread the love, in whatever form that takes. Nobody has any right to tell me what to do or not to do, nobody has the power to shut me down or force me to act like I’m lit up by something they want me to be lit up by. I’m not part of any hierarchy where I report to a primary influencer. And I don’t have to live my life under the burden of serving the imagined needs of a future relationship which commands my every resource to eventually come into being.

What a fucking relief. I mean, seriously. I can’t even begin to say how much better I feel after the reading I’ve been doing. Granted, not everything in the book makes sense to me, and I’ve been reading some other materials as well that are helpful to different degrees. But by and large, fitting the polyamorous piece into the puzzle has produced the kind of shift in my life that I’ve been needing literally for half a century.

In fact, it’s like realizing that the entire puzzle IS polyamory. And now I know how to fit.

I’ve been on this planet 58 years. I’ve spent most of that time living my life like somebody I wasn’t, trying to fit myself into guidelines and restrictions that somebody else came up with to serve their purposes, not mine. For more than half my life, I was married to a woman who was every bit as polyamorous as I was/am, and who suffered even more than I under the burden of all those bogus assumptions and false narratives around the necessity of monogamy.

It’s too late for my partner, but it’s not too late for me. And with the benefit of all those years of living as an essentially polyamorous person, albeit unethically – because I didn’t have the understanding, the vocabulary, or the resources to do it ethically – I’m in an excellent position to make some significant changes in my life that bode well for me, as well as for everyone else I relate to.

What a relief. What an unfuckingbelievable relief.