Third Date Flag, Fourth Date Tears, Part One

Possibly, for the fourth date with The Shy One, I shouldn’t have chosen a date that mirrored my ill-fated Valentines date with The Good Boy. But it’s a good date! I was superexcited to see The Shy One and antsy to get some street art up, so that’s what I asked for. He even helped me staple some silk flowers to a watercolor that said “Forced Pregnancy: The Cruelty Is The Point.” The grimness of the message seemed extra grim, juxtaposed with his gentleness and the sweetness of his smile.

I was happy to see him, but I also felt removed, a few steps away from there being a me-shaped hole in the wall. There was a question I had to ask, and I wanted to force myself to accept the answer no matter what. On our third date, the one with all the presents, near the falling asleep time, after hours of slow, voluptuous cuddling and deeply affectionate sex I might write about someday, I mentioned wanting his address for a thank-you note.

“Just a thank-you note, nothing else.” That threw some cold water on the hours of intimacy and warmth of the night and the seemingly open-hearted month-long epistolary romance of our Ramadan routine. (Can a romance be epistolary if it’s comprised mostly of cute Bitmoji and flower pictures? I say yes.) Rightly or wrongly, it felt like he was protecting his safe little marital-paternal bubble from whatever unexpectedness I might mail. Of course, the kids wouldn’t know about me. I couldn’t expect that.

(I did have a painting I could send him from our second date, when we painted together, but he kept forgetting to take it home and I couldn’t picture it ending up anywhere other than a closet. I kinda want to make it street art, just so it could live.)

He did give me his address, and I did send the thank you note, but I felt constrained and worried that I might be giving too much information away, in case the note somehow fell into little hands. That would be his responsibility, not mine, but I still felt like too much.

(It should also be noted that I’ve been watching a lot of Downton Abbey lately, so my etiquette sensitivities may be a little haywire.)

So. While I was standing on a bench securing a long-up canvas (a list of names of mass-shooting victims, #stopaapihate edition) to a fence, I asked him the question: Could I post pictures of him and me on Instagram?

“Oh sure,” he said, “If you show us just as friends.”

His conservative background, where he and his wife are in their outness journey, those things are valid and important. They aren’t responsible for the rest of the conservatism barreling down upon all of us. Closeted poly isn’t banning books, I know that. It’s not The Shy One’s fault that, in 1998, my mom asked for that same “friends” dissembling as I introduced First Girlfriend into the family. It’s not his fault that on the last not-him date I went on, the suitor dropped my hand as soon as other people saw him with me.

But I wasn’t going to dissemble online, so there weren’t going to be any public pictures of us, not in the regular feeds. Not with faces. We kept walking, talking about other things, but I was a little bit broken, and I wanted to run.