Unicorn Stuff Part One: Less Than/Equal To

 

As I tiptoe back into playing/dating life, I have trouble getting my head around that one day. The day I thought I could have The Shy One for a boyfriend and Mrs. Shy One for at least a friend. I can’t overstate the fulfillment I felt in those 24 hours or so. Included. Appreciated. Was it over so quick because I wanted it so badly, because it scared me to death how badly I wanted it? Did I need to sabotage that happiness because it was too much to hope for?

Probably not. Probably what happened is what happened: Her overstep with the writing brought the truth out about my feelings, made the closet of it all more untenable, or made me see that it just was all along. I didn’t know how to make a boundary around my (broken, I hated to admit) heart, but I did know how to fiercely defend the writing. That part seemed clear—if it’s the writing or the cuties, it's got to be the writing.

But I did feel a DEEP fear around the happiness that was them, and only a fraction of that fear (maybe ¾? 5/8?) could be attributed to the present. I do have a unicorn chip on my shoulder. I “knew” I was going to be treated as less-than, vetoed, cast aside. I’m giving myself the assignment to read all my couple-trouble posts and see what exactly is wrong with me.

Confusingly, with The Shy Ones, my trouble wasn’t really with the hierarchy. I was more than ready to defer to the wife-and-kids of it all. I felt honored to put my desires on hold for Ramadan, to, in my own spiritual-not-religious way, submit to something higher. Even/especially since it wasn’t my something, even if the thing I was submitting to was just what time the sun set each day—that’s a lot. I liked letting myself be small, treating his life and his faith with honor and deference—it was one of the most meaningful relationship months of my storied life.

That lovely feeling of letting myself be small, the relief of bowing to him/them metaphorically if not literally, was possible because I felt equal as a human being. I was equally-but-differently valued, adored, and praised. When he momentarily balked at the idea of getting mail from me, that egalitarian feeling began to crack. When he told me I needed to pretend we were just friends if I posted pictures of him on my public feeds, the possibility of any kind of equal footing shattered.

Does that possibility of equal-not-the-same exist? I tried to make it clear to Mrs. Shy One that I knew the right role to occupy, but that I wanted to be seen as a whole person. I begged her not to see me as a threat (I should’ve been saying all this to him, I’m so sorry.) but I absolutely was a threat.

If I’d been allowed/allowed myself to love as much as I wanted to love him/them and if by some miracle he/they felt that big love back, all of our lives would have had to grow and change. They were years and years away from that kind of expansion, if ever.

In these lonely-then-less-so couple of weeks, I’ve asked myself over and over why I couldn’t fit, why being out of the closet with him was so important, why the deal broke when I really, REALLY didn’t want it to.

“I want my heart to be free.” I said, and I have compassion for myself about that, but what does it even MEAN? What good is a free heart when I’ve lost someone(s) so dear? I guess that’s what I aim to find out.

Goodbye to The Shy Ones

(art's a Rumi quote)
Time for me to take a little rest in the praise ocean.

My desire to love and be loved by them, whether it was the platonic love that I was just beginning to feel for her or someday being able to be loved by both of them, was so powerful as to be unmanageable. It was so big I couldn’t even see it until I’d started to let it go. I knew (Or was afraid I knew, it amounts to the same in the end) that it was too big a want, too feral a need to fit into their lives as they’re constructed. I was so scared of that big desire. It felt like Kaiju want, Godzilla love. If I was a movie, you’d have to pretend the buildings had been evacuated before they got smashed. This is a terrible way to see myself, I’d like to change it.

Maybe Mrs. Shy One felt that fear too, because when I, last Friday, the day after all the texting joy, asked her permission to blog about her, she decided I needed to check with her every time I thought of writing about her. From potential friend and metamour to editor, just like that. For the sake of “healthy boundaries,” for “honesty and transparency.” (LADY. You pretend your girlfriend is just a friend on your socials. Your husband asked me to do the same. Come ON.)

Mrs. Shy One reaching out to grab my writing process was, to me, the exact opposite of healthy boundaries. To put it in Downton speak, she was putting her oar in. It was clear to me that the only boundary she/they cared about was the one around me.

The bottom dropped out from the whole plan then, and I saw the situation for what it was, for what I was. To keep playing with The Shy One, I needed to be controlled. Managed. Shrunk or at least stunted. Even, my now-panicking brain added, snuffed.

The box I’d agreed to, their affable and understandable closet, was not going to stop shrinking around me.

The part that was absolutely NOT her fault is that I felt completely submissive about the two of them. I knew that they probably didn’t mean to try and control me, but I felt helpless, without a voice to negotiate. I did have a voice. The so-big-I-couldn’t-even-see-it desire combined with the submissiveness I couldn’t talk through without crying, made it feel impossible to listen to them or advocate for myself. It shouldn’t have been impossible, I know. My body was telling me that the options were to fall at her feet or flee.

So I fled. More accurately, I blocked both of their numbers so I could stop crying long enough to get through my workday and get at least a little bit of the story into paragraphs.

The next day, seeing where the paragraphs were going and not wanting to break things off via blog post, I asked The Shy One to come over or call. He couldn’t do either, he said, so we broke up by text. I told him the closet feels bad, that I want them to be exactly them and exactly where they are, but that I just didn’t fit.

He was just as kind. He told me I deserve to love without guardrails or artificial limits. That made me feel appreciated for who I am, and not Godzillalike at all.

I know there’ll always be guardrails and limits because humans are involved and nobody needs to be falling off a cliff.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about him, and I know I’ve got lots of Unicorn Stuff to paragraph out, but for now I’m just sad, grateful and quiet. I don’t think it’s kind or helpful to compare myself to Godzilla, but for now I’m happy to be back in the sea, at rest.

 

An Absolutely Beautiful Mess, Part Two

 

After the snuggle-fog wore off a little, I started to wonder whether The Good Boy had ever been in a poly situation in the first place. Maybe I’ve just been bingeing Inventing Anna too hard, but I’m not sure which parts of this story are real, especially the shifting, slippery feelings. Is this just how young millennials cheat? Still, I’ll try to take him at face value for now, the story is fraught enough without anxiety-embellishments.

When we got home from the street art walk, we got into bed to warm up our frozen limbs and he…checked his phone. I want to be a Sweet Ma’am and not a scold, and this might be a generational thing. Except, it’s not. Most of my co-adventurers, partnered or not, have been able to stay present with me for all-or-most of a date. Even the ones with Apple Watches. (Which are handy (ha) if we need to change the music and it’s one of those rare occasions when his music is playing!) There are both some rotten and some sweet exceptions, and this one is kind of both.

First Poly Partner had asked him earlier to come over, since he’d ended up getting the night off. He’d said no, but without telling her we had a (rescheduled) date. He felt guilty for saying no and I felt hurt and kind of horrified he hadn’t told her where he was. (I HATE typing this part because it seems like the most dealbreakery part of the story, I don’t know where trust would come from again.) They had a few more text-back-and-forths before he coughed up the information.

Annoyed as I was, I felt tenderly toward them both, so I went into (gentle, I think) How to Poly 101 teaching mode.

To wildly paraphrase Rumi, somewhere between fuckboy and new-at-poly is a field, and we kind of got stuck there.

But also! He’s 29! Squarely in the prime fuckboy timeframe! Should I have let him go already, to run and play and figure out how to be a person with other twenty-somethings? Has he already made that choice for me? I feel naïve and a million years old, all at once.

If The Good Boy was supposed to be in a poly relationship, he was in a very pre-coming-out part of the process, and that was hard for me to take. As generous as he was being (SO GENEROUS) with the faceless pictures, he wouldn’t let me post regular pictures of us on my regular Instagram. He even made FPP hide pictures of her other boyfriend from his friends.

“I don’t know how to explain this.” He kept saying.

I know I shouldn’t take his learning curve or his shame personally. Most of the time I know that the hiding and obfuscating weren’t (necessarily) because I was too fat or too old or too kinky. I felt so sure that he liked me in a similar way to the way I liked him—under the skittishness I felt some kind of a…faith. A seedling of wholeheartedness just very tentatively approaching sunlight. Maybe it was just my own faith. Maybe it was the D/s vibes and a glitter-tornado of chemistry.

I got the ropes ready and tried to help him shift gears, tried to keep myself from emotionally (and maybe also physically) fleeing. Maybe I should have sent him on his way but this was my night, dammit. I hadn’t done anything to wreck it, I didn’t deserve to lose him to his own mess.

I tied a square knot between the dear, dear magenta ropes and placed them around his neck like a scarf. I took a deep breath and started to tie. As I wound the ropes around his jittery, half-here frame, the ropes wound us back together, at least for a little while.

The Most Nothing I’ve Ever Been: The Last, Uh, Conversation? With the Mystery Family

On Thursday I woke up missing the Mystery Man a lot and feeling really sad about the choices I’d made with the Mystery Family, about having done the same self-erasing thing I’ve done so many times before. I felt like all of my efforts to take myself forward must be false if I keep doing this and maybe I would never be capable of loving people who actually want me. Though my Twitter account didn’t really feel like mine anymore, just a way to keep futile-ly reaching out to those unreachables, I wrote some sad Tweets before I went to work and I admit to hoping they’d get their attention.

It was a hard hard day at work. The kids were winter-frustrated and fighty and it was the second time I’ve felt so panicked there that it felt like my soul had actually left. A day in a classroom with 23 riled-up children when I’m feeling like I’m not really there was a very hard thing to get through. Credit our Gangnam Style Emergency Dance Party with the fact that we were able to (mostly) retain our sanity and make it to 3:09.

I know the panic was mostly an after-effect of processing the assault stuff and the Twitter-claustrophobia—I wouldn’t have made it a day in my job if riled-up kids were that upsetting. My therapist had warned me that there might be a delayed reaction to Sunday’s appointment, and I wasn’t giving myself the space to be kind to myself about it.

When I got home, the Mystery Lady I felt closest to (and the one who instigated my “relationship” with the Mystery Man) had said a bunch of nice things in response to my sadness, but she also said this:

“You’ve got a lot of people pulling for you, both here and IRL.”

She was still claiming to love me, and yet she was reiterating that we aren’t in the same life. They were real life loves to me and nothing I could do or say could convince them that we all live in the same world. She also told me to stop feeling sorry for myself, which is a bonkers thing to say to somebody whose heart you just broke over the weekend. Seriously, Lady, (I did not say) YOU get rejected by eight to twelve people at once and see how it feels! (Not that I would wish that on her or anybody. I wouldn’t.)

I very much wanted to go back to being friends, to them being comforting confidantes, people whose messages always propped me up during hard times, but I didn’t know how to do that since they were part of the Bad Thing now. I told them I missed them (the last message I got from the Mystery Man was an “I miss you too” tweet, which would prove by the end of the night to have been the worst, creepiest, most vile lie.) and then told her how I didn’t understand loving somebody she wouldn’t have over. I told her I felt betrayed because after all the paragraphs she’d read about my struggle with personhood, in the end she’d asked me to be a fragment of a person. (Less than a fragment, you’ll see at the end of the story.)

After I tweeted her all the things (Jesus, may I never use the verb “tweet” again after this.) Gold Star Winggirl picked me up to go over to her house for a beer and then to the neighborhood music night hosted by the Cute Church Couple. (By now they’re much more friends than crush.)

GSW was the perfect antidote to the online mess: “Oh, you dyed your hair,” she said, “Because you’re real!” When I told her she seemed to be really stocked up on soap, she said “See, these are the things we’re supposed to be able to learn about each other. This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

My soul was still hiding, though, so I couldn’t quite connect with the nice music night, but it was the best possible place to be. All of the songs seemed to be about real, in person love, starting with my good old talismans, The Beatles.

When I got home, the Mystery Lady had said more things, mostly making me feel like she heard and understood me, so although my still-panicking guts were telling me to flee, I started to write back. While I was doing that, though, she wrote a post thanking another girl for playing online with him “just when he needed it most. #Compersion #Poly”

#Gross.

It was the most nothing I’ve ever been. While I’d been missing him and longing for all of them and feeling guilty for wrecking the friendships, he’d moved right on ahead to the next thing and replaced me. That was truly one of the most humiliating moments in all of my adventures, maybe THE most because of its non-corporeal quality. I blocked them all, but that wasn’t safe enough. I deleted the entire account. I took comfort in the idea of all of my messages disappearing from their Interactions, all at once. It was the only way I could take back some of what I’d so foolishly given.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what prompted them to reach out to me, what I could possibly have ever been to them, what need I could have possibly served. Maybe it’s just pure addictive behavior on all of our parts. Since I was the third time something like this had happened, GSW suggested that they need to “love” and then other other people, break hearts and get sad and band together over and over so that they can draw together against the outsider and keep telling themselves this story about getting stronger when they really are a house of cards. I used to do this to try and be close to Sweetie, choosing guys who would break me partly so she and I could bond against a common enemy. Whatever the Mystery Family’s motive was, I’m so ashamed that I got sucked into whatever ugly drama they needed to have, that I let myself get (even momentarily) flattened by it.

But the real ugly drama here is my own. In the interest of learning how to stop being one crazy story after another, I need to understand what draws me to situations that make me into nothing. Clearly, there is part of me that wants to keep experiencing that. It feels so good when I am not nothing again, when my feet are solidly under me and I can hear the birds singing and be all the way in the room with the crazy students I love so much. Maybe erasing and unerasing is a way to prove to myself that I’m still alive, but really, by now, that should be assumed.

As much as I’m grateful to be polyamorous, the way some people practice it makes me feel unethical for being part of it. Polyamory is toxic when it’s used as a way to avoid actual intimacy. When it’s used as a way to treat people as if they’re interchangeable, it takes away their agency and sexualizes them. And of course I continue to be disgusted and dismayed at the way that outside partners are routinely treated with casual cruelty and neglect.

Since I can’t and don’t want to un-poly myself, the best I can do is be mindful of those possibilities and be more careful about choosing partners who fit my standards of egalitarianism, openheartedness, and genuine face-to-face communication. Those who remain on my dance card do, so I’m off to a good start.

Once I deactivated my Twitter account, I felt back on track. The next steps are to refocus on self-love and the Big Therapy Project, keep treating myself kindly about the griefs, and keep in mind the year’s goal of close-to-home connections. I wish the Mystery Family have come along with me, but in the end it’s a blessing to let go of any love that isn’t real.

My Dinner With Jealousy

Even though it’s a moot point after he turned out to be such a jerk, the dinner where I met The Man’s wife still haunts me, like a test I didn’t pass. Sweetie called it self-sabotage then, and I’m still not 100% sure that it wasn’t.

The Man and The Wife asked us to dinner after my first (very happy) scene with him, and I was delighted. Here was a guy on the up-and-up, inviting me into his life. We exchanged our spouses’ phone numbers and it really felt like we were all on the way to a real something.

But as the time neared, I felt dread and sadness. As we got ready for the dinner, I chose a dress, blew out my hair, put on lipstick, all the while saying to Sweetie “I don’t want to do this.” We let them know we were on our way and he did his nice manly thing of telling us where the parking was good near the restaurant they’d chosen.

Now, I knew The Wife wasn’t easygoing, just from the way that he’d characterized her—nearly every time he picked me up for something, they were in the middle of a phone-snit of some kind. So that could have been a reason I was feeling dread. There was also the fact that she did have veto power, so if I failed to impress her, that would be it for me and him. I was thisclose to my dreams coming true, as long as I didn’t fuck up this dinner. In retrospect, there was no way that I could have fucked it up—all I had to do was be myself. Which is, I guess, what happened.

When Sweetie and I got to the restaurant, only The Man was waiting for us. “(The Wife) is off pouting somewhere, I’ll go get her.” he said and inside I was like Whaaaaaaat? How do I deal with this? I went to the restroom and breathed and fixed my face and hoped for the best. When I came out, they were all seated at the table together waiting for me. I wanted to ask her what the pouting had been about—that really threw me off.

When I saw them together, my dread got so, so much worse. He looked at her and smiled, put her arm around her, rubbed her leg the way he’d lovingly rubbed mine the week before. Here’s where I feel like I failed every poly test, because instead of enjoying the love he clearly felt for her, I felt stabbed in the stomach. I couldn’t feel my connection to him and everything in me said RUN. I made a very good try at disappearing into the wall, and when it turned out someone had run to the store for wine, I literally jumped at the chance.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me mid-relationship! I’ve only ever felt jealousy like that when I knew something was already over. I’ve adored many a partner’s spouse and happily played with wives upstairs. Before we got to the day of this dinner, I’d been so excited about having The Wife as a new friend. I was so, so disappointed in my feelings at that moment.

But in a nice, simple world without judgment and guilt, I’d say, I just didn’t like her. I didn’t like THEM. They were nasty to each other, George-and-Marthaing their way through dinner. She said that she doesn’t play with women because she respects them too much, she can only look down on men that way. (Um, huh?) He complained about her asshole ex and his huge schlong. (I do believe that is the first time I’ve ever typed that word.)

Conversationally, The Wife was like a pitbull, especially on the topic of the horror-themed play party she was planning. I said I thought that really wouldn’t be for me, but she really, REALLY wanted to convince me, to the point where I yes, almost started to cry.

When everyone was all “WHAT’S WRONG?” I admitted to being really nervous that she wouldn’t like me, and said that I really couldn’t figure out how to be. (It’s worth noting that I was a bottom sitting at a table trying to figure out how to please three tops. At the time Sweetie joked that she would just have to be in charge of me next time.) The Man reached across the table and held my hand, but I still couldn’t feel anything of the connection we’d had before. Sweetie tried to soothe me too, but I knew it was over, I knew I’d been this close to my dream and wrecked it.

Toward the end of the dinner, I asked if I could take a little walk with The Man, just to touch base, and it was a whole awkward mess convincing The Wife not to come along. (Sweetie, of course, was ready to give us the five minutes of space that I felt like we needed.)

We did go for a little walk. He said he knew that the jealousy just meant I liked him, and I thanked him for being one of the few guys I’d been with who were okay with emotion. That’s when he made the first of a series of weird references to stalking: “Well, as long as you don’t show up at my work, or (The Wife’s) work.” (WTF? How did it go from nervous-at-dinner to stalkertime? I never so much as overtexted the dude.)

Nonetheless, he said that what was between us was still real, that it wasn’t just scene chemistry, and I wanted to believe him. He kissed me goodnight and everything, but I couldn’t shake the idea that it was over. I stayed up all night feeling really, really lost, but Sweetie convinced me that it was okay, that I should keep giving him a chance.

A couple of days later, we had a date at my house—I couldn’t wait to put on my cute cupcake apron and make him dinner. He was an hour late, but I wasn’t upset about that because the busses around here can be glacial sometimes. But as he sat at the table texting with The Wife for about 20 minutes, eating the dinner I’d cooked for him, I started to feel hurt and I said so.

“Well, do you just want me to leave? Because I won’t be talked to this way.” (Doms always say they’ll keep that kind of nonsense to scenes, but I’ve noticed it tends to creep in.)

Of course I didn’t want him to leave; I just thought it was something we could talk about.

“I’m helping her with something. I would do the same for you as long as I wasn’t with (The Wife) or friends.”

I failed to see the hierarchy in that statement and we went to the couch to snuggle. About an hour in, his wife texted to say this “I’m bored, tell me what you’re doing.” By then I was too happily riled up to mind the boundary-breaking, so I was like sure, tell her! He sent her a picture of our happy faces with the caption “Naked stuff.”

By the end of the night, I’d let him downplay my concerns about ignoring me during dinner with “Oh, I know you’re bratty sometimes.” Ugh. The things I’ll apparently put up with when someone smells good!

So I wonder still if the jealousy at the dinner was my intuition telling me it just wouldn’t work, that he only really did have eyes for her, or at least that he and I were not on the same page. I still don’t know. It felt like once he knew I was jealous once, I never had a chance to carve out any space for myself—any objection to her constant presence was characterized as possessiveness. The last day, he made a reference to Fatal Attraction! Why bring me into your marriage if you were so afraid I’d destroy it, if you were so afraid of ME?

I honestly don’t know what comes next. Probably a lot of time and paragraphs, maybe some casual scenes and a lot of healing rope time with Sweetie. For all that he let me down, I do miss him so much, and I’m sad about losing the chance to know her too—I still keep thinking that if I’d just been stronger, more openhearted…

When he blamed my “emotional problems” for the trouble between us, I knew it was bullshit, just a story he was telling himself for when the venue owners called, but I still want to be a better, stronger me the next time a chance for connection comes along.