When (Awesome) Sluttiness Feels Like Armor

Possibly wine is stronger that it used to be pre-pando? My first going-for-a-drink since before quarantine was a really fun fiasco that kinda helped me get around to at least sort of knowing what my deal is.

When Poly Friends’ Partner asked if I wanted to hang out a few weeks ago there was no indication that it was other than friendly, but an OH MY GOD CAN I PLEASE JUMP ON HIM bolt of excitement came out of basically nowhere and made everything distracting and prolific and fun for a little while. I guess I could have asked him the above all-caps question in advance but I really did want to be there as a friend—we hadn’t talked in at least ten years, and it seemed like a friend-match that made a lot of sense.

So while he was telling me all about his various connections and I was feeling both covetous and compersiony, I did SUCH a good job of being Ms. Cheerleader of Other People’s Snuggling while he used the word “friend” like a BILLION times but was also pretty flirty so it was pleasantly confusing, but not too much so. He talked about music and domming and writing enough for me to wish we could be a thing, and the amount I was hitting on him was, in the words of Jack Donaghy, a lot to very.

Poly Friends’ Partner’s life is so glowy and connected, so warm and open, that I felt bowled over with longing to be a part of it, or rather, to be the kind of person who’d be a part of it. It wasn’t disingenuous when I brazened my way through stories about my slutty bunch of years or nudged him for more details of his own adventures, but I was trying to be brave, to be tough, to hide the all-caps sexy feelings behind gameness so I wouldn’t have to face rejection or seem like a threat to his lovely bubble of a world.

I found myself in a pinkly drunken haze sitting on a stranger’s stoop waiting for a Lyft that didn’t come and then finding coffee and my favorite busline. I ended the night yammering loopily on the phone to Sweetie about how I was 40% SO EMBARRASSED and 60% ELATED and how I LOVE wine and I LOVE my busline and how everything was very confusing but not really.

I knew all I had to do about PFP was..NOT.

This morning, when I got a text that read like “Hear ye, hear ye, this is your official notice that I don’t want to snuggle” followed by a winky face (How am I almost forty-seven years old and vexed by a winky face?!) (I know it was meant as a kindness but honestly poly people it’s too much with the communication sometimes. I can figure out you don’t wanna without the Magna Carta).I was hurt and sad and disappointed, but I also understood that I was trying to get back to a place where I definitely don’t belong.

All the adorable poly stuff feels like a (SO CUTE) should statement, as a therapist might say. It sometimes feels like a world I have to get back to in order to be seen at all, like in order to be good enough for men, that I have to find a place in the puzzle of poly. Like I have to figure out how to want both less and more than I do.

I want someone who just wants me. I want to be someone’s favorite. I can’t make myself be any less than the full Call Me Maybe, as frustrating as it is sometimes and as terrifying as men seem to find it. In a few days or weeks this crush will simmer down and I’ll find things to do with all this pent up energy. I’ll try to keep admitting that I want the rom-com even if it seems SO DUMB of a thing to hope for.