Her, The Circle, and the Meaning of Love

“That comment had 98,201 smiles and almost as many frowns, 80,198. But overall, as Mae scrolled through the messages, there was—as always when people were asked for their feelings—love.” –from The Circle, by Dave Eggers

I love a good dystopia. Her is not necessarily presented as such, it’s less judgmental than I am about the relationships people (including me) have with their devices and systems, but the when I saw it the month before last it made me see (but didn’t make me stop) the danger of disembodied love.

As everyone knows, Her is about a guy who falls in love with an operating system. You see him happily walking through the streets interacting with her, oblivious to the people present, many of whom are doing the same thing with their devices. We’ve all heard the lecture about technology making us too detached, but when it became a love story, I started to see the real horror in it. But the bad guy is not the technology; the bad guy is the void inside us that fuels the abstraction itself.

One of the saddest parts of Her to me was when the OS, feeling bad about not having a body, strikes up a relationship with a “surrogate,” a woman whose dream it is to help human/Os couples consummate their love. The scene is unicorn-familiar, especially when the plan backfires and the surrogate is rushed to a cab and dismissed, more human than the love interest but already irrelevant to the story, even as she professes to love both of them forever. That scene made me ashamed of every attachment I’ve formed to what is not and will never be mine just because I don’t feel good enough to just go ahead and have my own stuff.

Eventually, he finds out that the OS, being as expansive and superhuman as she is, has something like 693 other love relationships going. This has been praised elsewhere as a happy poly moment, but to me it was a real horror. This man was right to realize that he wasn’t special, that he wasn’t really loved. She was, as he and the audience had nearly forgotten, a machine, and it didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to him. It couldn’t have “meant” anything—he was loving a thing that couldn’t truly feel.

All of this takes place in an emotional landscape familiar to me: divorce grief. Like my own love-simulacra of late, I think he was making a way to find love in the midst of grief, a place that is (to me, at least) essentially isolating. To be able to be both in love and alone, to have a love we could turn off at night and who would be there every time we log on, would be such a gorgeous risk-free solution, but the proximity-craving realities of love just don’t allow it, and aloneness has to prevail, even if it feels horrible. Grief from a lost relationship feels a little like death, and death is necessarily a one-person affair.

When, at the end of a movie, the OS is gone and he finds himself on a rooftop with a real-life friend, we feel relieved for him. He may be lonely and sad, but he is embodied, and the opposite of embodied is dead.

The Circle is not so gentle and kind. It’s set in a not-too distant world where social networking has been taken to the most absurd degree. The main character works for some totalitarian version of Google and as her job progresses, she goes further and further away from authentic experience and her life is more consumed by an oppressive “sharing” that both fuels her and opens up a tear in her soul. She says that making her life “transparent” and letting her every moment be filmed, she is assuring herself that she is seen and therefore has proof that she exists, but who she is eroded and shaped by the ever-present audience.

In the end (SPOILER ALERT) she gives up her last chance at a real physical connection and really any kind of physical life at all, all to preserve the thread of comments that follows her everywhere she goes.

Though I’m still trying to understand the pain of being told I’m not “real life,” of being wanted but not wanted as a physical thing (and therefore really not wanted at all) what I’m writing about here is not the internet, but grief itself. Those two stories so perfectly mirrored my story, the way I used internet “love” and “support” to cope with the emptiness inside me and then was devastated to find that the love itself was empty. Though I am still very ashamed of what I went through with the Mystery Family, I can forgive myself—grief is very hard to face. Like the Valentine chocolate I’m still kicking, it sucks to be without those admittedly false prop-ups, the illusion of relationship I got from peering in at somebody else’s, the insincere stream of love-chemicals pulsing through me with no real release.

The worst part of facing grief is the feeling that I no longer have anything to offer. I’m not hot, or cute, or entertaining. Just as I couldn’t really serve the Mystery Man’s life in any meaningful or vital way, I worry that I no longer serve my readers.  I have nothing to offer you some weeks but pain and boredom, and I miss bringing you something fun and good. I want to have something to offer and share, and dealing with The Bad Thing feels supremely selfish, this project feels so far up its own ass sometimes I could scream. For so long I’ve found a sense of purpose and worth in being fun and sex-positive, and when I’m not I feel I’m not serving the world in the way I want to. Though it’s not the way I want to live my life, I want to only be something you’d want to read, and that’s really, really hard to let go of.

The point here, I think, is not that social networking “love” is evil or bad, but that being embodied hurts and I see the appeal of trying to escape from it. As much as it’s been my quest to settle in to my own skin, to live as close to home as I can, sometimes the pain is too much. But always, at its core, disembodiedness feels very much like sneaking a peek at what the world would look like if I weren’t here, and that, because for all my depression I do love life, is terrifying.

I’ve given a lot of thought in the last month to the meaning of love, and here’s what I’ve got so far: it’s nothing if not a physical, holistic emotion, putting real arms around a flawed, broken, sometimes unavailable human being. Real love is about farts, and tears, and dirty dishes, about joy and mess, mistakes and shame, sparkling revelations and lazy Sundays. Right now, that kind of love may be too far away to contemplate without being knocked-senseless by what I’ve lost, but, as a friend or romantically, love is in the body, where, from now on, I would like all of my experiences (Even the typed and posted ones) to take place.

Checkmarks and March Goals: Loss and Recentering

I feel so much loss when I look at February's checkmarks. I started the month in the beginning of something new, with an admittedly illusory feeling of being surrounded and embraced, and I ended it more authentically but also with a bruised sense of reality and trust. I've learned so much and I wouldn't take back any of it, but I'm still so sad and lost about the Mystery Family's rejection, about how much they meant and how quickly it was erased. I can only hope that my real heart goals will prevail to take me forward into something real.

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.

Songs of the Week for Heartache

I still can't believe how much I can miss people I never met, so here are two pretty long-distance/breakup songs. I know we'll be fine, but jeez, I miss him.

Postscript to the Mystery Family, A Love Letter

In the end, I finally got to hear his voice, to tell him how much I love them all, how much I wish I could be with them. It didn’t make it any easier to break up, but it did take away the feelings of bitterness and helplessness that came from being confined to the internet. It did my heart and soul good to cry real tears to him, to tell his ears all the things I’d typed but never got to say.

As much as online relationships are still a mystery to me (The combination of seeing the movie Her, reading The Circle by Dave Eggers, and trying online love has convinced me that modern times are completely unfathomable.) I don’t know how I would have made it through these winter months without him, without the daily images of their gorgeous and complicated life, without his affection—it was all completely irresistible. But at the same time, it’s a relief to let go of my fantasy of them and accept what’s real—they don’t have room in their lives for everything I have to offer, they aren’t able to give me what I really need. It’s a relief to love them for what they are rather than try to wait or fight for things to change, to accept them and try to let the crush part go.

Dear Mystery Man,

The fact that I can even write you a love letter means you’ve taken me a long way forward. Thank you for keeping me company in such hard, cold months. Thank you for loving me in the ways that you could and for letting me love you too. Thank you for giving me a clearer picture of what I want someday, of why I have to pull my attentions close to home and be present here with my whole heart. I don’t know how to stop longing for you and the Ladies, I probably won’t. I hate that circumstances keep us apart and I will miss you very badly.

Until you, I hadn’t told a man I loved him in a romantic way and had it returned since 1995. I’ve always fought a very deep belief that it couldn’t happen, and now it has. Thank you for letting me say it, and hear it, and practice it, so that when the heartbreak heals I’ll believe a little more that being loved by a man is something I deserve. It’s such a blessing to meet someone whose heart is as eager and voracious and fragile as mine, to believe that such a thing is possible. I’ll look for it in future loves, and think of you.

I still wish I could give myself to you and the Ladies, every single part of me. I don’t really know how to let you go, so I’ll carry you around in my heart forever like all the other characters. I wish there were anything I could write that’s as beautiful as the sound of your voice.

My heart is broken but much better for having let myself love you. Thank you all the way to the stars.

Love,

Kitten

Heartbreak With the Mystery Family, But Two Wonderful Valentine-Guys

I deserve someone who wants to be in the same room with me. What a crazy thing to have to declare, but here we are.

After the Mystery Man officially entitled me a “Keeper of His Heart” and a member of his family, I’ll admit I was a little hopeful/vulnerable about wanting some Valentine’s Day attention, but what I got was him disappearing mid-conversation before we’d made our date. Earlier in the week I’d gone right out on a limb and asked them all if I could have some time with him during Valentine’s weekend, and though they all said yes, of course, had to ask three times before I even STARTED to get a time. Soon as I was supposedly officially a part of them, I saw myself slip through the cracks of their schedule, just like with the Steampunks. I have to make myself stop loving overbooked guys.

Lacking information or a goodbye before he disappeared for the weekend, I did maybe more Twitter-reading than I should have and found out they were having a party that night, which I hadn’t been told about and definitely hadn’t been invited to. I physically ACHED to be at that party, dancing and hugging and really seeing them. That yearning opened up the cognitive dissonance that made me take the blinders off and start to realize that their version of me being in their “Family” did not necessarily include me ever being in their presence.

So I was hurting but that hurt was ameliorated by a wonderful surprise—Mr. Shiny Eyes! After I called him Friday evening to touch base after our conference adventures, he decided on a whim to drive over (from, it must be said, the same VERY close city where the Mysteries live) and jump into bed with me for Valentines. I was so touched and turned on by the gesture and I loved the visit, especially our morning. We cuddled in bed talking so long before jumping on each other again, it was so intimate, such a time-luxury compared to the (also fantastic) festival sex we’ve enjoyed before.

There was no way, after a gesture and a morning like that, to pretend that I was okay with someone who claims to love me but doesn’t want to see me. After Mr. Shiny Eyes headed home, though I assumed the Mystery Man was busy with some kind of Valentine’s fun, I tried to ask him about the implications of me not having been invited to the party. I thought the problem might get bigger in my head if I waited until our not-really-set-yet date.

I tried to write it as a letter, but probably should have asked (through the cloud of interrupting-shame) for a real conversation—a real 10 –minute talk could have solved the problem, if the problem could in fact be solved at all.

Instead of reassurance, though, or an invite to some future party, (I mean, COME ON, even the most elusive of casual guys invited me to parties at his house!) I was told that the “online contingency” aren’t usually invited and that I would’ve run the risk of making people uncomfortable. This was followed by a litany of things that were higher priorities to them—that old bottom-of-the-pile feeling. I told him I was hurt by that, that I didn’t like being on the outside looking in, that I needed to know I could do normal things like be near the people who purported to love me.

The “online contingency,” fucking OOF.

I didn’t hear from him again and imagined that he had gone back to whatever lovey-dovey permutation of entanglements I was being left out of that day. It was only by chance that and secondhand I found out he’d melted down about what I’d said, and that made it even harder and guiltier to try and communicate.

I did try (on open Twitter, since I felt like I wasn’t being heard on the private channels) but all I got back was an “Are you leaving me?” and no further communication from him. I tried talking to the Lady whose time I’d unwittingly derailed, but it really was moot, since he’d rather break up than face the prospect of having me over.

I really do love him, and it was never just him. I loved the Ladies first and I always wanted to just arrange the whole family in a pile and dive in. More importantly than the sexy stuff, though, I wanted to be their friend, to feel their warmth around me in ordinary, everyday ways. The concept of “online friendship” makes absolutely no sense to me. My love and friendship are physical, even for people I’ve never met, and loving without face-to-face contact is unsafe and ungrounded.

I shouldn’t be in the position of feeling like crazy stalker girl for wanting to included by people who’ve used the word “family” or for wanting to be physically near someone I love. I shouldn’t have to convince anybody that my presence is awesome and should be welcome and encouraged. And (typing this for maybe the millionth time, maybe I’ll learn it) I shouldn’t have to feel like a burden or an interruption every single time I need something. I deserve to be a clear priority, even if my role is smaller than others’.

The ironic thing about this situation is that if somebody else were treating me this way, this family of readers would be the first to get up in arms about it, telling me to get out and that I’m amazing and strong and wonderful and deserve so much better. Without them to tell me that, I’m trying to tell myself.

This “online relationship” business is just complete nonsense, especially from someone who lives two hours away.

Last night, while my nerves were still jangled and my heart was definitely breaking, Mr. Sweetface made it over for our long-awaited play date. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to pay him the proper attention, but it’s amazing what bodies can take care of all on their own. The smell of him, his big pretty eyes, his beautiful naked self across my knee all subby and soft—how lucky am I? When it was his turn to spank me, I cried a little at the end and he gathered me up and told me I was beautiful, told me I’d be okay. The generosity of that easy gesture, the sound of his heartbeat, his strong arms as he wrapped me in the blanket, that’s what I need. That’s what I am.

A few months ago when I was panicking to the Lady of the House about the Steampunks, she said, not unkindly, that I seem to find myself in one crazy story after another, that it might be beneficial to look at the pattern and figure out what attracts me to unavailable people. Since then, I’ve tried to be mindful of only making choices that wouldn’t lead me back to loneliness and panic, so I’m sheepish and sad to have chosen a constellation that, however loveable, has infinitely more barriers up than the Steampunks did. I love them so much and sometimes they’re all I want in this world, but I ignored a million red flags and broke my own very good rules to love them. I don’t know what makes me do this, except that I needed the words “love” and “family” so badly that I would’ve given anything. That’s where I am right now and I’ll keep trying to be careful with it.

Awwww, Thanks Mystery Family! And Thanks, Polyamory!

You wouldn’t think that getting added to a Twitter list would be momentous, but it is if those lists happen to be named “the keepers of my heart” (Just two wives, two girlfriends, and…ME!) and “Family” (a whole bunch of really adorable people.) One of the Mystery Man’s wives (the hot Dominatrix) added me to her “family” list first and when he followed suit, I was so turned on that I had to take myself right to bed. And then tell them about it. And then they took themselves to bed about THAT, because we are all awesome.

I’ve been reading and admiring this particular family for…a year, maybe? They seemed like a dream come true and have always been kind friends. One of the Mystery Wives pulled me out of a panic attack last fall was I was in the depths of shame about Steampunk Guy, and they’ve all cheered me on through every challenge of such a sad year.

Watching them love each other has been hot and healing, a balm for a heart that once thought polyamory couldn’t be real for me. They’ve changed me just by being so generous and sharing all of the different ways they take care of each other.

And now I can’t believe that I’ve sidled my way in. It’s a similar feeling to meeting somebody famous, if that somebody famous were making sure that you got time to chat-snuggle. Yesterday when all those metamours were adding me to their family lists, I felt loved and accepted in a fancy new way, and ready to climb all over all of them.

The Mystery Man is a very special character, and I’m so grateful to him for the generosity and joy he brings to my daily life. I love wishing them a happy day before they go in the commute-tunnels in the mornings and saying goodnight when it’s time for him to go read his daughter bedtime stories. I love plotting against him with the Ladies. I love the light that shines over to me with every silly interaction.

So on this Valentine’s snow day I’m feeling very happy and grateful to be polyamorous. I love the way that my relationships have taken their own shapes, how I’ve grown into someone who can accept all different kinds of love and let it evolve on its own terms. At the beginning of the year, I decided that we never know what magic we’re making, and that was exactly right. I love this new life of letting everybody be near wherever they are, accepting magic when it comes, and generally just being the luckiest girl in the world.

About “I Love You”

It will come as a surprise to exactly no one that I regularly exchange “I love yous” with the Mystery Man and his Family, none of whom I’ve seen in person. At first I wondered if maybe this wasn’t going a little overboard, but as a reader and a writer I’m quite used to adoring people I’ve never physically met. The stakes are a little higher, but it feels natural nonetheless.

Back when my best friend Angel Face and I were almost a thing for five seconds, he admitted to feeling overwhelmed at the amount of affection I sent (Those who balk at “Call Me Maybe” may be glad you missed my Ke$ha-ful “Your Love is My Drug” phase…) but as friends we talk like that all the time. Getting to say it romantically to a guy, though,  is new, and every time I read it or say it, it’s like a little more of me gets repaired, like I’m a little closer to getting to express my true self.

In the movies, (and in last week’s New Girl episode) the trope is that the “I love you” should be withheld until the big reveal, some big dramatic moment, but that isn’t how it feels to me at all. I love easily, instantly, and thoroughly, and that’s always made me feel a little bit out of sync. But what if there’s actually a place in the world for people who see life that way, for whom love is like breathing, like weather?

“I love you” is both momentous and ordinary. Or COURSE I love you, why wouldn’t I? My time on this planet is limited and I’m choosing to spend some of it with you. It’s obvious, it’s easy, it’s who I am. If I wasn’t loving everyone wholeheartedly, my job would eat me alive, divorce would have kicked my ass, and nothing would ever get done. All of it is running on love, all of the time.

It wasn’t until that really terrible casual sex with a random OKC guy right after Christmas that I realized I hadn’t really been having any casual sex these past two years. In some way, I’ve loved every person I played with, and every person whose person I’ve played with. I loved Cute Master and Pretty Slave from the moment they walked into that Kinky Karaoke party glowing with good sex (and probably good weed.) I loved the Cutest Boy at the Party as soon as he sat down and started chatting me out of my party tears. I loved Old-Timey Guy from the moment he smacked my behind with that godawful hurty ceramic star. (As a side note, I think it’s the romance that attracted me to BDSM in the first place—all the outfits, special names, and secret whispers, how lucky are we that that’s real to us?)  I loved the Steampunks from the moment I sat down at their table, would have done absolutely anything for them. Fireguy’s paternal gaze, The Man’s first bus stop kiss, the rope-compersion I felt for the Boss of Me and Her Boy before I even met them—all of it, love.

Most of those folks wouldn’t say they’re in it for love, or they had enough love already when I came along, and that’s easier to accept now that I can just go ahead and admit to loving them. I did, and I always will, no matter how the story ended.

And the ones who’ll take the “I love yous” and give them back, too? You’re changing the way I see the world, the way I see my place in it. You’re helping me to settle into my real self and guess what? I love you for it.

All in One Saturday: A Valentine Car, a New Therapy Goal, and an Excellent Date

Most Saturdays I do little more than read and maybe wash the dishes, but last weekend, a lot of moving forward happened.

A few weeks ago I decided that I couldn’t live with the sadness and shame that came over me every time I drove Sweetie’s car, so I started looking for one of my own. Being capable of having my own car doesn’t really fit with my lingering self-image of being broke and just kind of incompetent, but I made myself absorb the realities of a salary and (!) a good credit score. Somewhere along the line, I became able to take care of myself, and honestly I owe some of that to Sweetie’s support.

It only took a couple of Googlings to find the car I wanted, a bright shiny red compact with, sweet merciful wonder, an automatic transmission. I put off driving it until I knew I wanted to buy it, because I knew once I drove it I’d be attached. I was right. I tried to be cool in the dealership until the bargaining was done, but my insides were just bursting with joy. It was a triumph of self-control that I didn’t do the Snoopy dance right there in the dealership. The divorce is over. I’m free.

I had to go back and pick up the blue car from the dealership, (I almost mistyped “healership”) which gave me some nice impromptu catch-up time with my favorite neighbor, Gold Star Winggirl, but felt like a complete nightmare to be behind that wheel again. All of the anger and frustration and fear of the Sweetie relationship is in that car, and if I could reasonably push it off a cliff, I would. Will settle for having dropped it off.

As I think I’ve bragged about before, my lovely therapist makes housecalls and we had an appointment soon after I finished the car-errands. After telling her all of the things that were making me happy and moving me forward, I admitted that I was still concerned about how big my anger gets sometimes, how personal and consuming. She very, very rarely gives advice or directives, but she said that it’s time to confront The Big Thing, the real scary party from high school, that it put bad things in me that aren’t me and it’s time to start making those repairs.

I’m ready. Lord knows I’ve had enough practice confronting it. We’ll start talking about it on Sunday the 16^th at 11:00 AM, on a three day weekend so there’s a margin from the school week. (Hey, that reminds me of something…) She said to give myself as much love and kindness as I can until then, in every single way I can think of—luckily that was my plan anyway.

Even though I know she’s right and that nothing bad is going to happen, when she left I felt like I’d gotten caught, like she’d discovered after all that understanding that I really am a bad person. I’ve felt so many variations on that feeling over the years; I wonder what it’ll be like after it loses its power?

It’s taken too many paragraphs to get to the BEST part of Saturday—the Mystery Man. On Friday, one of the Mystery Ladies had let me know he’d be available all weekend for my attentions, so I asked him if he’d be my reward after I turned in my report card grades. Since I was awesome and did interim reports last month, work didn’t take long at all.

Another of the Ladies sent a few tweets handing him over to me and sending compersion, and then I invited him over to the direct messages to negotiate a little. Since I was fragile the last time from not being able to physically snuggle after, I proposed some Twitter aftercare: after we were done playing, in addition to cute chatting, we would lavish each other with praise, since we’re awesome at that anyway. And it worked! The next day, I felt healthy, horny, and warm, like I’d just been to the nude beach.

It didn’t feel out-of-body this time. For the first 45 minutes, I mostly didn’t touch myself at all, just sat here drawing him a Valentine in my cute bra and lace undies, letting the warmth of his words move through me and put me at ease. It really did feel like sitting in the sun, my hair soft on my back, my shoulders warm, my cheeks flushed.

By the time I started getting handsy with myself, (around when he told me he was pulling me onto his lap and I said we’d have to stay there and make out like teenagers for a while…) everything was turned up and tingly and my pretty lavender lace panties (which would soon end up on the floor) were soaking wet.

I think that I need more practice with blowjob-describing. Though I got no complaints, I did get a little writer’s block about it. But maybe that’s because it was at the end and it was very hard to think or type.

After we came (together, how cuuuute) we did indeed heap on the praise. I have definitely met my match in terms of verbal lovey-doveyness—a few times, I was like, whoa, I definitely can’t top that. I’ve never felt more happy or accepted.

I was sad to say goodnight but glad I was sending him into the arms of his wife, my friend who’d instigated the date in the first place. I’m so grateful to have them in my life, that they’re willing to share their time and hearts and world with me. As I told the Mystery Man while we were celebrating aftercare by listing off the things that make us nerdy, he’s like those little gold cell-fixer things on Doctor Who, changing me with love and helping me regenerate until I’m strong enough again to save planets. I can’t thank you enough, Dear.

Single Life Week Eight: Some Good Closure and a Brand New Sex Adventure

It was a hard week but full of good progress and nice surprises. First, the hard part: during the big snowstorm of Tuesday night, right at the moment I was writing that post about self-love, Sweetie was getting onto a city bus and slipped, cutting her leg open badly. She has a condition called venous stasis that keeps the blood in her legs from circulating and makes her skin there very thin and hard to repair. She called me from the ambulance and I was scared to death, both for the normal still-care-about-her reasons and the bone chilling fear that this would be she’d have to move back in with me.

I know that might seem selfish, but I felt like the universe (caution, magical thinking ahead) was going to take away all of the good steps we’d taken, and that seemed so unfair to both of us, especially to her. She finally has a good job close to home, we’ve been working so hard to get ourselves apart, and it felt like fate was forcing us back together. (Sheesh, sometimes I sound like a character on Lost)

I knew without a doubt that I shouldn’t drive through a blizzard to go to the hospital and see her. It wasn’t safe physically or emotionally, so I did what I try and do whenever I’m panicky and overwhelmed: I went to bed early.

When I woke up the next morning, there were a whole bunch of texts from her dad on my phone and a nasty facebook message from her sister, sniping at me for abandoning Sweetie in her time of need. I freaked but wrote and backed her off, saying that I hoped someone was on their way because Sweetie’s family needed to be the ones to take care of her. “I thought y’all were still family,” she said. Funny how I hadn’t heard from them in the last six months and now all of a sudden they’re family.

I felt like such a bitch, but I knew I was doing the right thing. The sister had unfriended me but I went ahead and blocked her anyway, just for the relief of it. I blocked her aunt’s number when she called, and when Sweetie’s roommate emailed me for updates, I told her to please update people herself.

It all felt really harsh, but I really love the hard-won progress we’ve made and I feel very protective of it. I’ve been calling to check on her, I’m not a monster, but it was an enormous relief when it finally sunk in that nobody was gonna make us move back in together, that her dad was on the way to look after her and she and I could keep choosing to go forward.

Sweetie was a really, really hard person to take care of—stubborn, volatile, fragile, self-neglecting, and dependent on me for nearly every single social and emotional need (I think this is part of why lately I’m attracted to people who have a million partners—I like knowing they’re taken care of when I’m not fawning over them.) I felt horrible that I couldn’t love her in the exclusive, consuming way that she loved me, but I could never make myself have enough patience and compassion to give her what she needed. I hadn’t felt that guilt in a while, but last week there was a blizzard of it. And then I woke up the next day and the knots in my stomach were gone. I was set back a little, but I knew we’d separately be okay.

Partly because my Mystery Man said the wisest, most comforting things on that hard snow day, my break went back to “mostly.” I resumed lavishing him with attention and receiving lovey-dovey notes in return—so much of his appeal is that he lets me be my ridiculous, doting self instead of expecting me to try and be cool, which would be a futile effort anyway.

I cheerfully re-started sex-brainstorming with the Recurring Character for when I see him at the Big Poly Conference in a couple of weeks, and I reached out to Mr. Sweetface, too.  I’d been wondering if maybe he didn’t have enough attention for me, but he told me he thinks about me all the time, so I thought it’d be worth another date, especially one for which I could stay in my pajamas. But the weather got all dramatic again so I wasn’t sure if he would make it.

Know who’s good to have in a snowstorm? A Twitter guy. I’d already decided that we should consummate our relationship, and what better way get some company while I was waiting for Mr. Sweetface to make up his mind.

The Mystery Man is beyond chivalrous and polite (probably I’m the only girl ever to learn how to be treated chivalrously via the internet…) so I’d kind of wondered how I was going to get smutty with him. After about two tweets, though (you can read my side of the exchange here if you promise to forgive me the sex-typos) the special underpants I’d put on for both of them (blue sheer with tiny multicolored stars) were COMPLETELY soaked and I was swooning into the desk between interactions. (Guys. How old-timey am I? Why do I not have a smartphone or even a laptop? These are weirdly intimate moments to be having at the same desk where I type in my grades.)

I LOVED the fact that we were loving each other up on the public feed, and even though I got a little stage fright whenever somebody (especially a stranger!) favorited or replied, it appealed to the showoffy part of me that’s been kind of under wraps lately. One of the best parts was when I @mentioned one of his wives midscene (she’s his Mistress, and so I felt a little self-conscious about writing the spanky part) and she sent me some encouragement. “Well, as long as you believe in me Ma’am,” I typed with an enormous grin on my face.

When Mr. Sweetface texted to say he wasn’t coming, he may have found me surprisingly magnanimous about it. I do miss him and I was sad about it later, but I loved being absorbed in my Mystery Man and I was enjoying the challenge of trying to write something good and hot when all of the blood had rushed south from my brain.

One of the Mystery Ladies had been in the room watching him and she sent her applause as he finished. I took a bow and felt very adorable indeed. Aftercare took the form of chatting sweetly about other things until I felt sleepy and typed him a chaste kiss goodnight.

There are things that everybody kind of thinks of as normal that just completely fucking blow my mind. Internet sex has been around for two decades, but that was the first time I tried it, and I’m still trying to get my head around it. Being here in my body but also out in the ether with him felt natural at the time but was really quite a shock to the system—the next day I had a hangover from it, similar to ones I’ve gotten after happy-but-harsh nights at the dungeon.

I spent Sunday feeling surprisingly vulnerable about him, afraid the friendship would change, afraid that he wouldn’t like me anymore or that I wasn’t special or that he and the ladies would somehow be gone now. I’m so proud of what I did about that feeling: I told him. Even though I’m pretty sure I was interrupting some other fun, we got to talk about it. It didn’t make the fears go away, but it feels really important that I showed him my insecurities and had them met with kindness, reassurance, and love. I’m doing my best to take that to heart.

It feels very scary to let myself like someone, even just online, but I’m glad to be letting myself feel it, letting myself play a little part of his cute poly life that is so much of what I aspire to someday when I’m ready. But sheesh, everybody, there need to be some real-life spanks in my life pretty soon. Dear heart and soul, please keep healing, so I can get the heck back out there.