A World in Us Page 11

  It also stood for Louisa.

  And Lydia.

  I had known that Morten and Elena had come out of another polyamorous relationship with Rob and Lydia. I had known that it had ended badly. What had been admirably disguised from me until I had fallen firmly in love with Morten was that Morten was still in love with Lydia. His first poly-girlfriend. Or poly-ex-girlfriend, I reminded myself.

  I wanted Morten and me to start our relationship right. I didn’t want to lie to him about my music and film tastes as I had done to Gilles, nor, for that matter, about past relationships. I wanted Morten to know that he could confide in me about anything.

  “Do you want to talk about her?” I asked, wondering if I was just letting myself in for another roller coaster and at the same time admiring myself for being so magnanimous. Morten eyed me anxiously, and I could see his thoughts as plainly as if he had spoken them. Having been through one devastating breakup, he didn’t want to compromise a second relationship by tainting it so early with the sad memories of another.

  But as I saw tenderness and compassion for me in his face, I also saw sorrow. Heartbreak. Loss. Loss of Lydia. Clearly, my new boyfriend was aching for his last girlfriend. And as his new girlfriend, all I wanted to do was heal the hurt. And in order to help I had to know about it.

  “It’s obvious you still love her,” I continued gently, with strumming pangs in my heart. “And shouldn’t I be able to accept that you have love for many people? Isn’t that part of polyamory? Tell me why you broke up.”

  Somewhere, a dam broke. I was appalled at the apparent pain I had unleashed. His words gushed out in a torrent of a water leak and sprayed pain across the table into my chest.

  “Because we had to. Lydia and I couldn’t stay together once Rob and Elena had broken up. And Lydia broke her own moral code and started to fall for me. And then Elena found out how strongly she felt and told Rob. So Lydia felt forced to choose and demonstrate her loyalty to her husband.”

  “Why did Elena tell Rob?”

  “She believes in honesty at all times. No matter how much it hurts. And Rob had hurt her pretty badly. She wanted him to love her like she loved him, and it turns out what he wanted was something far more casual.”

  “I see,” I said. “So, in fact, you have never fallen out of love with Lydia. And your relationship didn’t end because either of you wanted it to, but because of other people.”

  As I said the words out loud, his eyes filled with tears and I fell just a little bit more in love. Accompanied by a hefty dollop of despair. I kissed him to comfort him, and he took my hand to go to the bedroom, where I filled the void temporarily but couldn’t replace her. Nor did I want to. I wanted to be The L. Not The Other L.

  Elena said, “Lydia was a really good friend of mine. But she kept pushing me away even though she promised that we would still be friends when she and Morten broke up.”

  “Maybe it’s too painful to see you because you remind her too much of Morten,” I suggested.

  I’m sure that’s true. But now I feel like she was just pretending to like me so she could sleep with my husband. I feel betrayed.”

  Her point of view was valid. Even if my point of view was that of Lydia. I loved Morten. And in order to be with him, I knew that I had to get along with Elena. I had to like her, whether or not I actually did. They were a team and had been for sixteen years.

  In polyamory, a relationship isn’t a one-to-one mapping. It is a many-to-many. And so no matter whether I would have singled her out as a friend or not, Elena and I were family-in-law. Luckily, that day we hadn’t encountered any conflict. Unlike yesterday and, as it would turn out, unlike the next day. Because “L” in Elena’s book stood for Loyalty.

  Lydia was everywhere in Morten and Elena’s Facebook photos. Blonde, petite and utterly charming. Laughing one minute, cheeky the next. She shone like an angel out from my screen and I could already see why he loved her.

  “Would you mind if I wrote to her?” I asked him. “You love her so much, and I would like to love her too.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for accepting and understanding the way I feel. It’s so difficult to be on top of the world with you one minute and then mourning Lydia the next.”

  And so I dropped her a line:

  Lydia,

  I guess one of us had to take the plunge and as I browse through Facebook and see my newest friends’ profiles, you keep popping up! I hope you don’t mind this unprompted email and I also hope it doesn’t upset you.

  Morten and Elena have talked about you (both) such a lot that I feel like I know you whilst actually I do not at all. I will try my best not to assume things...there are some things that I know for a fact though...such as...you like Justin Timberlake! I also know that Morten loved you and loves you still. I have felt weird about it at times, but almost immediately realise that this is due to my own insecurities...goodness, at least from a physical perspective, there is no way that one of us could replace the other (you are beautifully petite and I not at all!) and my honest belief is that Morten’s heart is big enough for Elena, you and me....let’s see when the fourth girlfriend comes along!

  I don’t know what the future will bring, but I already trust Morten’s good judgement and would love to be friends with the people he loves. As I think you know Gilles and I are planning to move over to the UK this year and I look forward to meeting you and Rob when the time is right....

  Lx

  Later that day, after I had nervously refreshed my inbox about forty times, she replied:

  Hi!

  What a nice surprise! Thank you for a really nice email and thank you for taking the plunge, I have thought about messaging you before but never knew what to say.

  Each time I meet Morten (which is only twice since you’ve been together) I always bombard him with questions, about you, about Gilles, about the four of you. I am so curious. I’m curious about the poly thing actually working. I’m curious about the differences. I’m curious about your outlooks and opinions especially as you didn’t come to this through swinging. Being this nosey usually gets me into trouble! I also think Morten and Elena are wonderful and I want them to be happy. He is so full of you and that makes me happy. They both deserved a couple that could give them what we couldn’t and you both seem perfect!

  I still miss Morten and in the beginning I was an emotional wreck but time heals and when we met yesterday it was just real­ly nice, no hurt, just great to see an old friend. I’ve said this to Morten a few times. You are soooo lucky to have him. He says you know that already but hey I wanted to remind you just in case :0)

  I felt weird in the beginning when I lost him and he found you, but I can safely say that I feel no jealousy. I agree, there’s room for us all in that big heart of his. Thank you for being so incredibly understanding about this. He adores you and from hearing about you, reading this email and checking out your photos (I couldn’t resist!) I can see why.

  PS. You are tiny too, what are you talking about?

  I do love Justin Timberlake. Now I’ve lost Morten I’m thinking of going out with him instead :0)

  I’ve thought about us meeting. You know I reckon we’d get on!

  We have one big thing in common anyway! If you ever come to London and want to meet up I’d like that. Who knows what the future brings. I know M&E were sent to us to enrich our lives and teach us things we didn’t know about ourselves. It was a funny old rollercoaster but I wouldn’t change it for the world. Rob and I are stronger for the experience and only look back and smile. I’m pretty confident we won’t go poly again, but never say never!

  With love

  The Other Lx

  How strange that both of us thought of ourselves as The Other L. I, because she had been first; I could not and would not replace her. And she, because she considered herself a mere memory from Morten’s past.

  S
everal more emails followed. We both feared the judgement of the outside world and had both attended the same university. As we delightfully reminisced about favourite student hangouts, she confided in me the torment she had felt about Morten and how insecure she had felt that he had found someone else so quickly.

  How her last night with Morten had been spent making love to music whilst both of them cried.

  How their relationship had ended to the lyrics of “The Blower’s Daughter.”

  “And so it is just like you said it should be,

  We’ll both forget the breeze,

  Most of the time.”

  We acknowledged the importance the other held in Morten’s heart, which dissolved any resentment. She could not have a relationship with a man she loved. I, who loved Morten so much, could only weep at the fact that someone else had lost him. I wanted to hold her in my arms and comfort her, because I couldn’t even begin to understand how she had been strong enough to survive it. And I wondered if it were at all possible that there would be some place for her in our future.

  But I had reckoned without Elena. And when she found out, there was hell to pay. She said, “I appreciate that you might want to get to know Lydia out of curiosity, but I find it weird and disloyal of you that you would go behind my back and make friends with her knowing how she hurt me. You’re hurting me by doing that.”

  “I didn’t go behind your back,” I retorted. “I didn’t know that I was supposed to ask your permission.”

  I had the uncanny feeling that jail bars were clanking in my head. Wasn’t this situation precisely what I had wanted to escape in monogamy?

  She said, “Well I suppose it’s only emails. You don’t hang out. I couldn’t cope with that.”

  “What do you mean? That I can’t be friends with someone that you aren’t friends with? Morten is my boyfriend and he loves Lydia.” I didn’t add that I could understand why he’d fallen in love with her in the first place. Someone kinder, softer and less brutally honest than Elena. Elena was shiny, like a diamond. Sometimes exhilarating. Sometimes cutting.

  “Besides,” I added. “It’s not only curiosity, I hope to have them make some kind of peace. There was no malicious intent on her part; she wasn’t nasty to you.”

  Elena said unashamedly, “I would have great difficulty with Morten being friends with Lydia if she can’t find it possible in her heart to be friends with me. I would ask him not to see her for my sake. And I know him well enough to know that he would do it. I’m more important to him than she is.”

  I was scandalised. “You can’t tell him who he can and cannot see! And my choice of friends will certainly not be dictated to me.”

  “Louisa, maybe you don’t understand. She rejected me and my offer of friendship. She hurt me.”

  “But you said it yourself a million times, Elena,” I replied coldly. “You are the only one responsible for your hurt. I’m not saying that she played things brilliantly. But no one does in a breakup. You precipitated the events that forced her to choose. Given the situation, I totally understand why she chose not to see you.”

  “But what I did was for the best,” protested Elena. “She was being dishonest — to herself as well as Rob. She created the threat by falling in love with Morten. Her fault. Not mine. I only exposed it. I know if it were me, I would prefer to know.”

  “But you aren’t her!” I countered. “Think about her. You only exposed it because you wanted to hurt him like he hurt you. Have some humanity. Besides, you have issues around rejection, like all of us. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “And why are you so much on her side when you don’t even know her?” She was shouting now, her Latin temper coming to the fore once again. “Am I that unimportant to you that you would choose an unknown girl over me?”

  “I’m not choosing her over you, Elena. It isn’t about choice. I’m going with my principles. I can be friends with both of you.”

  “I am your family, Louisa. I expect loyalty from my family and friends — otherwise it will never work,” she said ominously.

  “What will never work?” I questioned, suddenly suspicious. “Do you mean to say that you would ask Morten not to see me either?”

  “I think he would choose not to see you if you hurt me like that. He loves me,” she said coolly.

  “Well I think that’s rotten. I would never ask Gilles to give you up because we can’t get along.” Little did I imagine that I would ever meet that scenario.

  The fact was that I understood Lydia’s position and sympathised with her a lot more than Elena. Because I felt the same way as Lydia did. As Lydia had. Because I had started to feel that Elena was intrusively judgemental on the world around her and that it created drama to feed her ego. And with every argument we had, my distrust of her became increasingly certain.

  Following Elena’s and my bust-up about Lydia, a flurry of emails abounded among the four of us. Morten and Gilles, whether they liked it or not, would be forced to take sides in this debate.

  After some weeks and a lot of analysis had passed, we mutinously acknowledged that we were allowed to have our separate opinions. But everyone said it was a pity that such fundamental ingrained beliefs clashed. Elena above all had to be right as a matter of survival. And I didn’t trust her not to force her beliefs on my choices. By being the friend she wanted me to be, I risked being controlled...and what’s more, if I didn’t meet her criteria, rejected.

  Nevertheless, I often came to Elena for advice, and she loved being asked. She knew things I didn’t. All about organic living, for one. And all about swinging, for another.

  17

  Yes, one of my newest discoveries about the world we lived in was that swingers were also normal people.

  And that most of them were really nice. It was just that I didn’t understand them.

  A long time ago in years past, I had been no stranger to miscellaneous sex. But my self-esteem had been at rock bottom, and sex had been my method of trying to be loved. It was the soul-bond I sought, and the physical act without the mental and spiritual connection meant very little to me. I simply didn’t understand why people would go out of their way to get it unless they were being self-destructive. But I had to find out.

  Almost every other weekend, Morten and I saw each other. If I didn’t have business in England, he would take the Ryanair flight over to Paris. When we weren’t together, we were on the phone or MSN. We often talked about our vision of a world free of jealousy. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there yet. On one of our evening phone calls I asked, “Did you have a good time last night? Did you meet anyone?”

  Elena and he had gone to a swinging “social” party in London. They didn’t “play” anymore, but many of their friends did, and, as Morten commented, how much more could you want from a party? Great friends, good music, liberated people and the pretty firm prospect of a snog. A “social” party was one where full sex didn’t happen, but possibilities were definitely open for an “after” party. I had learnt a lot of new vocabulary in the previous five months.

  “Yeah, I kissed a lovely girl called Celine. She was very pretty. Not as pretty as you, though.”

  I started to cry down the phone. It hurt. My emotions crunched around my windpipe and I felt sick. My whimpers reached Morten from Paris.

  “Oh darling, don’t cry. We said it was OK, didn’t we? I love you, nothing’s changed between us.”

  I cried harder. The thought of him kissing someone the way he kissed me made my gut twist and my stomach heave.

  He said, “I won’t do it again if it hurts you this much. I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?” I snapped. “I said it was OK, didn’t I? This is what we all wanted.”

  “It’s OK, baby. Calm down. Why do you think you’re crying? What is it that hurts? Are you jealous?”

  Clearly. I rolled my eyes down the phone at h
im, thankful that he couldn’t see what I was doing.

  “I don’t understand what I’m feeling. Jealousy is the flip side of insecurity right?” I said.

  “Right.”

  “So if I’m not losing you and you are not betraying our agreement, then why am I upset?”

  It was against my principles to be upset. It upset me. But being upset about my being upset only made things worse.

  “Well, obviously what you want to feel and what you do feel are two different things. That’s OK. You shouldn’t push yourself,” he said gently.

  “No. I won’t have it,” I said, stamping my feet.

  My father had called me “Mistress Mary, quite contrary” when I was little. I continued to prove him right at the age of thirty-three, almost every day.

  “I should push myself,” I said grumpily. “How do I know I am over it if we don’t test it?”

  “But why hurt yourself unnecessarily?”

  “Because pain brings growth. I will not be jealous. I will be secure in myself and we will be free to live and love. Will you see her again?”

  “Probably not,” he replied. “It was just a bit of fun.”

  Thankfully, the annoyance I felt at not being able to under­stand why he could have fun kissing a girl and not want to see her again immediately blotted out any hurt. If I had kissed someone, I would want at least to keep them as a friend. And hopefully my kissing them would be the manifestation of the first tentative blossoming of something deeper.

  As usual, I decided to read up about it on the great god of our age: Wikipedia. And I found a great theory called “The Triangular Theory of Love”…I liked theories; they gave me some kind of precedent to hang my issues on.

  Love was a combination of three ingredients: intimacy, passion and commitment. But not all love was sustainable. For example, a holiday romance where I had had intimacy and passion but, as it turned out, very little commitment. Other people called them flings. Did this mean that the burn and desperation I had felt for my holiday fling was not love? Maybe what others called “lust” was passion without the other two; but surely it was still an expression of love. A third of it, anyway. And many friendships had commitment and some in­tim­acy with no passion at all. This was also love.