A World in Us Read online

  Polyamory is supposed to be about love at its core. To truly love requires a deep understanding of both yourself and your partners. Even the smartest of people can be remarkably stupid and willing to fool themselves when it comes to love and sex. We see that in this book, as it definitely describes a train wreck of a relationship.

  Louisa’s memoir made me relive my own group marriage, which we affectionately referred to as “OLQ” for “our little quad.” Ego, vanity, or lack of communication, appropriate boundaries, or maturity — you name it. Many of the incidents in this book could have been OLQ, and that hurt to read, because it meant owning that foolishness, blindness and lack of love.

  I kind of hate to put that kind of thing out there in the polyamory press. I want to be positive about polyamory.I want polyamory to carry the banner of good, mature and loving relationships. I want us to be experts in love. I also believe in the truth.

  The truth is that relationships work when the people involved are mature, have good self-knowledge, and are willing to put the work into being loving. To pretend that the train wrecks cannot happen would be irresponsible. Not to warn people of the possible pitfalls would be cruel.

  I do not know the author personally, but I get the sense from this memoir that she’s feeling like the parent of an older teenager begging the kids, “No, no, I’m not telling you this because it’s okay to be foolish. Learn from my mistakes! Please, see what I did wrong so you can avoid the holes I fell in!”

  You could, with some justification, point to these train wrecks as arguments against polyamory. That would be understandable.

  It would also be wrong.

  While open relationships are hardly new, the cultural narrative that allows us to have a benchmark about what’s acceptable in them and the social support to help us with reality checks when it is bad simply don’t exist yet. We see jealousy as an aberration rather than a signal that something might be wrong. Goodness knows poly people can be notoriously crap at boundaries until we’re burned a few times. I have to blame the monogamy narrative for that little gem of an idea, though. Ever seen a romantic movie or read a romance where the lovers had good boundaries? Nope, me neither.

  The reality is that a failed relationship is simply not proof a relationship form doesn’t work. If that were so, we’d be insane not to ban the bog-standard monogamous marriage, given our current divorce rate.

  Polyamorous or monogamous, we get into relationships for lots of reasons, and sometimes those reasons are the wrong ones. But more than that, sometimes there’s no reason to it. If you asked me why I am poly, I honestly couldn’t give you a reason. At least not one where Reason held sway. I am because I am, just as much as a person might be turned on by redheads, or want to swim the English Channel.

  When you get into polyamory when Reason is not involved, you’ll start looking for reasons. As sure as God made little green apples, you’ll find the wrong reason. You’ll justify to yourself, and you’ll make a mess.

  If you read this book with the idea “I could never do that!” or “No way would I permit that to happen in my life,” I invite you to do two things: develop a little more humility and work hard on your self-knowledge. That’s the best good that can ultimately come out of stories of relationships that didn’t work. Yes, pitfalls can be avoided, and yes, you might be able to learn from another’s mistake, but you can’t do it from arrogance. You can do it from learning to love genuinely and deeply.

  The love that will allow you to avoid these mistakes is a love that involves knowledge of yourself, deep understanding of your partners, a willingness to set appropriate boundaries and a huge helping of honesty — starting with yourself. Do you know what you want? Are you sure you know? I ask this as an introvert who has a desperate need for solitude and thought for sixteen years that a group marriage would be the apex of happiness for me.

  The polyamory community often hears that polyamory isn’t easy. That’s a bit disingenuous. The reality is that good relationships of any sort aren’t easy. It’s not necessarily that the relationships are work. It’s that good relationships require you to ruthlessly and tirelessly work on yourself.

  However, even if relationships in general are work, it is true that polyamory isn’t for sissies, nor is it for people who do not know how to have good relationships. Read this book carefully. There are excellent lessons in it, like a lovely coral reef below turbulent waves.

  Dive in and learn. You’ll be glad you did.

  — Noël Lynne Figart, 2015

  PROLOGUE

  I was at work, logged on to Gmail, reading yet another round robin email chain between:

  Me

  My husband

  His girlfriend

  My boyfriend

  And his wife

  Like a riddle, five people were able to be four because my boyfriend’s wife and my husband’s girlfriend were one and the same person. In the world of open marriage and polyamory they call it a quad: a four-person relationship.

  Our quad was multi-faceted and multilingual. We had Spanish, French, English and Swedish nationalities. We were introvert and extrovert, spiritual and mercenary. It made for a passionate schism and a ferocious fusion; sometimes thrilling and sometimes sickening. Conflict and misunderstanding led to tears and arguments. Several times I had stared into the abyss thinking that all our dreams of a higher “multiple” love were over, only to receive a last-minute reprieve.

  But the joy that was our reward for all our heartache was exponential.

  We were friends, squared.

  I was in love with two amazing men. My sisterwife was in love with the same two amazing men. And they were in love with us both. We laughed together, we cried together. If I was happy, both my husband and boyfriend were happy, my sisterwife was happy, and in being happy we all radiated happiness back to one another like shimmering glass, basking in the glow of how unique and incredible our relationship was and had the potential to be. We were the pinnacle of bliss, the very epitome of togetherness.

  But the reverse was also true. Ugly and self-destructive cruelty backfired in a vicious circle through frustration, misplaced loyalty and jealousy. And that day I had reached crisis point. It was the end of the line.

  “Louisa, have you got the figures for the eight-month budget reforecast? We need to recalculate our spend for the Asia Pacific fund and upload it in Oracle tonight.”

  “Sanders is trying to cut Opex. Heads are going to roll — inflate the forecast by twenty percent and maybe we’ll escape the brunt of it.”

  I was dealing with love and conflict that raged so hard I wondered how no one else could hear the howling. But because they didn’t, instead I had to discuss whether to artificially inflate my budget forecast, which would necessitate three hours’ “last-minute” work to meet the deadline for an upload into our company systems. So whilst my colleagues in my very ordinary workplace discussed the very ordinary impact of a delay uploading some figures in our very ordinary resource management system, my mind was struggling to stay on the bearable side of sanity in my very unordinary world.

  I no longer trusted myself to make any judgements, because everything that I once judged true had been turned upside down. I had sought to support what I thought was a higher ideal, the ability to love without limits, in defiance of my family and my society. But in doing so, I was in danger of losing myself. My psyche was breaking down.

  My father had always told me “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” And that day I asked myself, “How do you know at what point it will kill you?”

  And is it possible to stop in time?

  1

  My name is Louisa.

  I was once like you. A monogamous speck inside the normal distribution curve. I expected a faithful marriage, two point four kids and a home with no distinguishing features. Maybe a dog or two and a well-paid job in a corporate company.


  Then I met a boy. We followed my predefined script. We went out for a while, and we got married.

  But what happened after…well, that wasn’t written anywhere.

  In 2002, my favourite haunt was a grotty, rundown Irish pub just off Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris. The once-green awning was grey and torn and its name was… Le Galway. This had afforded me and my friends a few giggles since the quotable “le Big Mac” line from Pulp Fiction. It had also afforded me many raucous drunken nights and was as comfortable to slip into as a pair of old slippers. My home was split into two parts: my bedroom and bathroom, which were five minutes away, and this, my living room, which I shared with about twenty other regulars. We regarded it as ours and jealously evaluated every fresh face that slouched through the door to see whether they were worthy of paying for a pint in our dump.

  One afternoon I had slipped into my second home for a yarn about the night before. I was sipping the black coffee for which I never paid and was bantering with the barman, discussing the exploits of some of our mutual friends. A man with long curly hair was also at the bar, and he was gazing at me with open admiration.

  I turned to him and blossomed. He asked me out. I said yes.

  We shared. We were emotionally intimate. We connected. He got inside my head. And then refused to get inside my pants. It was a first for me. When I said jump, they jumped. Usually I didn’t say anything at all, but they still jumped!

  Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to Gilles. My French Not-Quite-Lover.

  My French Not-Quite-Lover was erudite. A philosopher. A poet. He smoked cigarettes and said “bof!” at correctly timed intervals. He played chess at my local pub and beat most of his opponents. He studied aikido and explained Kant to me. And in a surprising twist of personality, he introduced me to the sitcom Friends by dropping quotes from it into our conversation at brilliantly timed comic intervals.

  Gilles was the first one to love me…for me.

  On our first proper date, after several hours of emails and instant messages, I got to our arranged rendezvous and had downed two apple martinis in the twenty minutes or so that I spent waiting for him, in an effort to calm my nerves.

  “You took long enough,” I said as he strolled in.

  “And you took less time to get here than Lindsay Wagner.” I was soon to learn about his love of the English language, gleaned predominantly from American television.

  “What are you drinking?” he asked, sliding onto the bar stool next to me.

  “Apple martinis,” I said. “I’ve already had two.” I dared him to frown in disapproval. Instead, he ordered me another.

  “How come you managed to leave work so early?” he said. “You can’t have got much work done. We were messaging all day.”

  “My company’s going bankrupt and has been for the last six months. You know what French administration is like,” I said. “It’s a company run by Americans, so you can imagine how the team feels about that.”

  Anti-Americanism was so prevalent following 9/11 that I had seriously considered tattooing a Union Jack on my body to demonstrate my nationality before someone put a fist in my face from hearing my franglais.

  “It’s the second company I’ve worked at that’s gone bankrupt. My friends are calling me ‘The Liquidator!’” I giggled at the name and tossed back another mouthful of apple martini.

  He gazed at me speculatively. “And yet you look less manic than you did before. You don’t have that caged, hunted look that I remember.”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “Um…last Christmas maybe.”

  “You’ve been stalking me for a while, then,” I said. “How come you didn’t ask me out before?”

  “You haven’t been around,” he said, ordering a Guinness.

  “I used to go out with that bouncer at Polly Maggoo. We split up four months ago. I’ve been avoiding my usual haunts ever since because he spies on me. I’ve been trying to leave him for two years. That’s probably why I looked like that.”

  “But if you were trying to leave him for two years, how long were you with him altogether?” he asked incredulously.

  “Well, two years,” I said. “I guess I never really wanted to go out with him in the first place. But I never plucked up the courage to leave him until this summer. He hit me.”

  I reached for my drink with an unsteady hand, and Gilles took both of my hands so I couldn’t.

  “I don’t mind if you drink. But let’s stop that association. You should only drink when you think about happy things.”

  “But why? Why don’t you mind?” My drinking was something I hid from myself and others. Something shameful. Something that would make others reject me.

  “I have my own pain,” he replied. “I know why you do it.”

  In his eyes I saw a mirror of hurt and knew that here was a man who would understand. So I told him about the roller coaster that had been my emotionally controlling and abusive ex-boyfriend.

  In return, he told me about his mother’s depression and his escape to Ireland, his love for his best friend’s girl, and his betrayal of their friendship. I told him about my disastrous history of relationships, my one-night stands in search of love. He told me about tunes he had composed in his melancholy and sang them to me whilst he played the guitar. His voice was smooth, deep and gentle. It made me cry. And when I cried, so did he.

  That night we slept face to face in the small single bed in his dead grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment. Two fuck-ups…together at last.

  Gilles, mindful of my past and my emotional state of mind where men were concerned, decided that our relationship wasn’t going to be based on sex. It was going to be based on love. He didn’t sleep with me that night. Nor the night after, nor the night after that. And with every night that passed where he didn’t have sex with me, I fell in love with him a little bit more. He was an angel. A curly haired, blue-eyed angel.

  In the days that followed, I met Gilles’s mother, his aunt and his sister. When I spoke on the phone to my mother that week, I told her that I was in love. And even though it had only been two weeks since we’d met, I told her that he was coming to our family reunion that year, and the year after that, and for the rest of my life. Months passed, and we spent every night in each other’s company until we eventually decided to save the money I paid for an apartment I was never in, and moved in together.

  We dug up all his dead grandmother’s crockery and threw huge disorganised fondue parties at her apartment in the 5th arrondissement. We wrote ridiculous dialogue for spoof porn movies and then filmed them fully dressed in silly wigs with our friends. We learnt to rollerblade and spent hours careening round Paris risking our lives ducking around fiercely driven Citroëns. We played multi-player Tetris stoned off our faces on his old Nintendo 64. And oh, how we laughed together.

  Two and a half years later, I married him in the caves underneath the Bastille as our friends read passages from Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. Afterwards, we dined at a Michelin-starred restaurant and pocketed the candies they gave us with coffee. It was unbelievably idyllic, and I thought my future was set.

  2

  I cheated on my husband three years after we were married with an ex-boyfriend. If ever there was a lover from my past who could seduce me, it was Stefanos. And I let myself be seduced…willingly.

  Stefanos had been my first love…and my first orgasm. I was in high school, and he was home for Christmas from university. He was a grown-up. He wanted sex. And I never wanted to refuse it, let alone for someone I loved. I gazed up at him in the bedroom of the tumbledown house we used for parties. His friend was crashed out drunk on the bed opposite. I didn’t care, because at eighteen, you’re as horny as hell. We made love in that room and took long soapy baths afterwards. As I lay back in the bathtub against him, cracked tiles had never seemed so romantic.

&nb
sp; Two weeks of loving, and then he was gone.

  Then, over ten years later, I joined Facebook. Suddenly, he was there again. And my teenage self awoke, glistening with lazy lust.

  In the weeks before we’d exchanged emails. There wasn’t much innuendo in them. But their regularity and pace had increased as we wrote more. I fooled myself into thinking that an innocent flirtation was harmless as long as we didn’t meet. But after six weeks of virtual yearning, bonding and joking, an opportune business trip to London washed away my remaining fortitude, and I recklessly headed off in denial towards my destiny.

  When we met that night I’d brought a mutual friend…just in case I was tempted. My first love and his flatmate heated up the barbecue and toasted the air with Kansas City rib sauce. The wine flowed. Our fingers were sticky, and the conversation danced in the summer air as our laughter drifted over the walls of his back garden. Halfway through the even­ing my friend took me to the bathroom and asked me, “Are you going to fuck him or what?”

  “No!” I said feebly. “I’m married.”

  But it was no use. I wanted to. So much that I stayed late even though I knew what would happen. I was a victim of my own circumstance and uncomfortable in my monogamy. I was playing at being a grown-up but didn’t even know what a grown-up was.

  It was not the first time in our relationship that I had got drunk and amorous — that brief kiss with a classmate when I graduated from business school, that fumbling under the bridge with my boss as he walked me home from a conference — but this, I decided, must be the last.

  Because I could no longer deny it. This was neither brief nor fumbling. This was sex. And also love. I still loved Stefanos.

  I was forced to confront the fact that something was very wrong in my current state of affairs. And with me. For this encounter had been engineered with purpose. I had ignored all warning signs and followed our connection to its conclusion even at the risk of destroying everything I loved. I had pursued past love at the expense of current love. A moment of passion versus a lifetime of love and stability.