A World in Us Read online

  But you also fell in love with someone who finally accepted you for you. You were so thankful you could have cried (and in those early days, you often did).

  Acceptance is a powerful ingredient in any relationship, but there is much confusion over what acceptance looks like. It was an especially sensitive and confusing area for you, because you were rarely accepted or truly loved as yourself during your childhood. What did you think acceptance looked like? When you met the man who would become your first husband, it meant “being able to do what you want at any given moment.” Your husband bought into that, too. But acceptance in a romantic relationship is not about loving someone else at the expense of your own or each other’s growth — if it were, we would all be in relationships where we accepted the unacceptable, where none of our needs were met and our own growth was stunted. Sadly, that is indeed the reality that many live in.

  So you both pushed the limits of acceptance on the premise that “if the other person really loves me, they will accommodate my needs even if it means sacrificing theirs.” In your particular case, that meant that you pursued your education and career across the world to dizzying heights, while he sacrificed his own professional path and goals to follow you — and you sacrificed your need for sexual compatibility to keep him by your side.

  Your unmet needs diminished both of you and made you unhappy. You had been taught that your needs should be met by the other — in the romantic, happily-ever-after paradigm so commonly taught. You became dissatisfied with each other but continued trying to maintain a relationship and masked your disappointment.

  There was little passion in your marriage, even in the beginning. And you learned later that passion was important to you, even though early on you liked to deny it.

  A long-term romantic relationship with a partner where there is little sexual compatibility is of course possible, but it’s difficult within a monogamous paradigm. If you opted now to be in a monogamous relationship where sexual fidelity was required, you might choose your partner more carefully, rather than succumbing to the first man who accepted you, warts and all. At the time, you didn’t know yourself well enough. All you knew was that you loved him.

  But love does not conquer all, and it sure as hell doesn’t ensure that you pick a compatible partner — especially if you intend on being monogamous — for the long term. Luckily, you don’t intend to be monogamous.

  Yet, dear one, don’t beat yourself up about it. Few people know what they seek or why they fall in love, or even indeed what love is. Relationships, all relationships, destructive or healthy, teach us many things. Your relationship made you and him happy for several years. For that alone, it was worthwhile. It might have been better not to spend all your savings on a wedding, however — but that was a fun night, wasn’t it?

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  Loving someone does not necessarily a long-term relationship make. Compatibility is made up of numerous elements that rarely stay the same.

  2

  Cheating on My Husband

  This lesson could be about cheating, and why it’s so destructive for you personally. Why lying and betrayal create more stress in you than they do in others who have potentially led less stressful lives. But no, we can talk about that later. This lesson is about denial.

  How little you knew. How much you shut off your own powers of deduction! How great was your power to deny, and deny again. Because listening to yourself when the truth hurts is painful (of course). If you had listened to yourself, how different would your actions have been? And yet I think that your cheating was the impulsive act of your secret self, who was stronger than your denial. An act that would push you finally to listen to yourself and hear the words that had been screaming in your unwilling ears for so long: There is something wrong!

  It’s terribly difficult to listen to yourself when nothing you have said over the years has been validated or considered worth hearing. I hear you. Women, especially, are taught as children that their role is to be “the good girl.” We are made up of sugar and spice and all things nice. Stray from the norm at your own risk!

  And yet you could not stay in your “good girl” state of arrested development any longer if you intended to be happy. So you cheated with your first boyfriend. The fact that he was also the first to give you sexual pleasure is no coincidence. You might have loved him, but lust was a strong component. Among your many fine examples of denial was this: you missed sex. You wanted better sex. But could you admit it? Not really. Because liking sex for its own sake was bestial and cheap (or so you were taught). But somehow, you thought, “love” made it better. Less like cheating. Less cheap than a random betrayal.

  Of course, the admissions you might have made would have forced you out of your relationship, right then and there. You would have had to admit that, really, you had rarely been sexually attracted to anyone, because the strength of attraction had to be very strong in order to overcome the sexual repression that ran deep in your veins, conditioned by the sex-negative society permeating your consciousness. To be fair, you didn’t have the language…and relationship education is not taught by schools, nor by those parents who have never been taught themselves.

  So you were afraid to lose the only stability you had ever known. I understand. But if you had been honest with yourself, you would have recognised that the stability you thought you had was very shaky indeed. You could have told your husband. You could have treated him with the respect he deserved and been honest, instead of hiding your true feelings — from him and from yourself. He could have had a choice to work on a different kind of future with you.

  “But hey!” I hear you say. “I wasn’t the only one in denial! He was too!”

  Sure. There’s no question about that. But you are not responsible for how anyone else chooses to live their life, the lies they tell or how they construct their own reality. You are responsible for your own life, your own emotions and your own reality. And the sooner you realise that, the happier you will be.

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  Strive to be as honest with yourself as you possibly can be, because the consequence of remaining in denial means your life is a lie. And living in lies will make you unhappy.

  3

  A Life-Changing Discovery

  It was like a marble settling into a hole, you said at the time. Polyamory sounded right. Many loves felt right. If ever there was a proof that we are “born” and not “made,” this was it, you thought.

  You were wrong.

  What felt right for you was freedom — for reasons we’ll look at later. It was also the ability to connect with many (which you are really good at, by the way).

  Love, if it can be reduced to anything, is connectedness. Love does not stem from another person. It happens in those timeless moments when we see, know and understand that we are the same. It happens in those moments when we are vulnerable, when we see each other’s nakedness (and no, I’m not talking nudity, you prude).

  Why did that conversation leave you gasping and newly in love with your partner of seven years? Because you were honest with each other, and honesty begets vulnerability. Vulnerability begets connection. And deep connection, in the moment, is one form of love.

  You see, polyamory was a paradigm and a belief that forced you outside of your comfort zone. To a place where you (at least initially) had no lies to tell. The terrain was unfamiliar, and you were vulnerable. This fact alone means you often speak from the heart.

  So it was in part because polyamory was so “out of this world” and unfamiliar that you started finally to speak the truth, because it was the only option open to you. But soon, if you are not careful (and as you will see), the lies will start to creep back in again.

  If polyamory were the accepted way to conduct relationships, I suspect that there would be a great deal many more myths surrounding it, perhaps as many as for monogamy. These myths may be the truth for some, but once they b
ecome norms and enter into the consciousness as the accepted stan­dard, they become expectations that don’t fit all realities. This is the way it happens.

  The danger of trying to educate others in habits that only work for you is that you are asking others to adopt precepts that may be lies for them. If the precepts do not fit, they will cause unhappiness. The goal of relationship education should be to try to convey the importance of underlying principles. For you and me, this means freedom, responsibility and integrity. But only we know what works for us, for we are unique. Just like everyone else.

  You and I have the habit of searching for the truth outside of ourselves. We look for that hole into which we can settle, like marbles. Don’t. Have the courage to build your own vision, always.

  You do have courage, you know.

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  Seek to be vulnerable and authentic. That means building your own reality, with or without societal support, brick by honest brick. Your truth is inside you.

  4

  Redefining the Rules

  Humans seek rules out of a need for security, and we need security as a matter of survival. There’s no reason to expect that we should live in a land without rules. Rules are all around us, in the laws we follow, and in the social etiquette we learn. It’s only natural to assume that where there are none, we should make up a few. The few rules you and your husband made, though — in truth, only three explicitly, although expectations can be considered as internalized implicit rules — eventually served to restrict you.

  You thought it was normal and right to expect rule number 2: always to use protection with another partner. You had attributed priority and hierarchy to being “fluid bonded,” believing it to be a sign of intimacy — something exclusive to you and your husband. You believed your marriage needed certain elements to preserve its “specialness.”

  Still, you thought, there are consequences! What about sexually transmitted disease? What about a baby? But the reasons you gave, disease and babies, were not the real reasons, were they? Everyone had a clean bill of health, and there was little risk of pregnancy. The real reason was that you wanted to protect the hierarchy you had imagined and created.

  And when your husband finally decided the rules were too restrictive and broke your agreement, whom did you blame for that? Not your husband — you weren’t yet in a place to believe that he was responsible for anything. You blamed Elena. It was easier than believing that your husband didn’t care about your carefully discussed agreements.

  Nowadays, you assume your own risk. If one of your partners doesn’t use protection with someone, you use it with him until the time that you can all sit down and have a conversation about it. You communicate. If his choice is to continue to have unprotected sex, you have to decide whether it crosses a boundary you cannot live with in the relationship. You have to own your shit (but no one else’s).

  You strive, above all, not to dictate your partners’ actions in order to assuage your own insecurity. Because the choices they make are theirs to make. Yes, there are acts, and consequences to those acts. If your partner continues to cross a boundary that is important to you, maybe it’s time to look at whether your relationship still contains respect and love, and whether this is the platform for you to be the best person you can be.

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  Be careful that the rules you make around your relationship aren’t an effort to push the emotional risk onto other people. You do not have the right to control others’ actions, only your own. You can and must express your own needs. But it is up to you to seek partners who choose to do the things that help you feel loved, rather than making rules that they must do so.

  5

  The New Couple

  As a society, we create division in order to access power and diminish others. Disgust, judgement and expectation — especially where others don’t match to our expectations — are the cornerstones of such barriers. I don’t blame you for feeling those things when you got that email. But since then, we have reconsidered our belief system. We’ve learned that caving to this knee-jerk response will cause us and others nothing but pain.

  Why did you hate swinging so? Primarily because the culture you were raised in gave you a set of opinions around sex that condoned it within a very restricted set of conditions. Only if there was love, your mother said. Only if it is for procreation, your church said. Only if you “shut your eyes and think of England,” Queen Victoria said.

  Did you, as an adopted, illegitimate child, grow up with the stigma of being a bastard? I know that you have suffered because of that stigma. But you are not required to adhere to ridiculous standards that others, seeking to justify their own superiority, have dictated. It is your choice to believe or reject those standards, and we know that now.

  So despite all your misconceptions against swingers, and all your beliefs that falling in love with another couple was “impossible”…you fell in love. Could that have been because both couples were challenging societal norms, putting you all in a very small minority? Maybe. Could it have been because you were all trying to be honest about what you wanted out of life? Probably. Could it have been because your true self was stronger than all the judgements that had been foisted upon you? Definitely. Give yourself some credit here.

  And yet the judgements and inherited values that you perpetuated harmed your partners in numerous ways. If you are honest with yourself, you’ll know you looked down on them — at least in this respect — before you met them. You were proud of the fact that you had come to polyamory through cheating and not swinging. Can you now see how screwed up that is?

  I remember how you told others that you cheated out of a desire to reconnect with your first love. I remember how that rang true for you…but only because you wanted it to. Later, when you told everyone about polyamory, you were careful to emphasize “love.” Not sex. Love. While this is what many believe is the true definition of polyamory, the consequence of using “love” as a justification, as opposed to a simple descriptor, couching it in a system of judgement to set it apart from any other non-monogamous practice, is grounded in opposition and conflict. But you’ll find that out.

  You have children now. Two of them! And you have found that one of the best ways of resolving your own divisive judgements is to look at your children and ask yourself this: Would you think any less of them if they chose to express themselves through swinging?

  You wouldn’t. You’ve come to a place where you do not think less of them for the people they are choosing to become, even if there are personal consequences to all of those choices. Not all of their choices make you happy (that paint on the wall, those sleepless nights), but that doesn’t make your children any less worthy.

  You know now that we all play out our human condition in a multitude of ways, especially within our relationships. Swinging was not your choice of self-expression, but so what? Neither is rock climbing.

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  Judgement in personal relationships serves only one purpose: to make you feel superior to others. It gives you a false sense of power and results in unnecessary ego conflict.

  6

  The Blue-Eyed Monster

  If there’s one issue that comes up time and time again in polyamory, it’s jealousy. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

  Jealousy is a feeling that stems from the idea that you are incomplete without another person, that you “need” the other person to survive. It is driven by your own insecurity, a fear of not being able to survive without the source of love as you have defined it. But no one is the “source” of love. As we’ve already identified, love can occur in the connectedness of the moment and lingers in our mental models of another person. This can become expectation. Beware expectation! When you define someone as the source of your “good feeling,” it is easy to turn them into an object and a possession.

  But what you defined as jealousy here…was not really. Or
at least, not only. Many other feelings are wrongly defined as jealousy. Envy. Fear of abandonment. Entitlement. And yet when you wrote this chapter, you didn’t know any of that stuff. A lot of what you felt here was envy: that Elena lived the life you wanted, and that you were “not allowed.” But who didn’t allow you to live the life you wanted? Was it your adoptive mother? Was it society? Or was it that you were too afraid of the consequences to dare to grab life with both hands, as Elena did?

  Who is responsible for your life? You are. Because if not you, then who? You don’t live in a society where you cannot survive without approval. We do not live in the pages of Vanity Fair. As you have now found out, living your authentic life polarizes. There is hate for your way of life, there is rejection, but it doesn’t kill you (only makes you stronger!). If this were all there was, I agree it would be a tough life. But as the petals of your personality have unfolded, people have seen into your heart. Some people — fewer people, but those people whom you now choose to surround yourself with — love you. Strongly and unerringly. For all that you are. Take heart. You are in a good place.

  But Elena awoke in you a burning envy to be all that you could be, all that you had denied yourself. She was an actress, and you had chosen financial analysis, in line with your father’s wishes, instead of that degree in film and drama that you (much to his dismay) wanted. And instead of admitting this to yourself, you resented her. It wasn’t the best way to start a metamour relationship, was it?

  But you know what? There’s a lot to feel compassion for here. Her way of being clashed directly with your issues, and sometimes people simply aren’t compatible with one another. There are a million reasons why this happened between you. You grew up with a narcissistic mother, and it made you hypersensitive to criticism. And Elena’s active involvement in her own life, and eventually yours, served only to remind you of the inadequacy you felt, which had been ingrained in you over and over again. When I remember how much pain you felt, even before meeting her, I am surprised and proud that you had the courage to pursue the path you did. I’m even prouder that you have chosen to live your own life now. And in those cases where you find you cannot, you no longer resent others, only put the desires they spark in you on your bucket list and try actively to make them happen.