A World in Us Page 5

  “Yes,” my friend agreed, “it’s all a bit tacky, really.”

  Later that day I replied to their email with a vague compliment about their appearance and a brush-off:

  “It would be a miracle if Gilles and I both fell for the both of you — although handy I suppose — not because you aren’t good-looking, but because we are looking for deeper relationships than swinging and it is tricky to predict love like that. I know that polyamory covers a multitude of configurations, but we are essentially looking to build boyfriend/girlfriend relationships (we are both hetero as far as we know) as opposed to dating or recreational fun.”

  I doubted I would ever hear back from them. But four hours later, I did. Gilles perked up when I forwarded him the email.

  “Aha!” he said. Not the band, but an interjection of interest.

  It presented him with the opportunity of building a relationship over the computer, a far easier proposition than in person.

  “Where can I find their photo?” he said.

  My judgement when I received the new couple’s first email was that swinging was a meat market. Swingers were no different from cattle. I, who considered myself liberated, passed the same unfair judgement on a couple I had never met. Swingers. Disgusting. But if the same judgement was passed on me with regards to my polyamorous lifestyle, I would cry over it for a week. In the wise words of Justin Timberlake, “What goes around, comes all the way back around.”

  Just then, their response appeared:

  “Dear Louisa

  Thanks for your reply. From what you are writing it sounds like we are looking for exactly the same thing. If we were to meet the right couple, we would also want it to be serious relationships calling each other boyfriend/girlfriend. We are not afraid of true love outside our marriage. In the long term we would like to live, if not in the same house, then at least as next-door neighbours with our poly partners.”

  I wasn’t convinced. But a few days later, a Facebook friend request came through from Morten. On the back of it, I received an email that shot a cannonball through my misconceptions and started a chain of events that would make my cup — and my email inbox — overflow for the next thirty days.

  In the early days of our courtship, Gilles had invited me to a Tuck & Patti concert. Finger-pickin’ good guitarists and all round musicians. I had been still at that stage where I was enamoured of all his tastes, even if ordinarily such a concert would necessitate my munching three packets of caffeine pills. Unfortunately, I did not have any with me, and so I fell fast asleep. For an hour.

  “So you don’t like acoustic guitar?” Gilles grinned at me later.

  I thought, Thank God he’s already enough in love with me not to dump me for the tiny white lie I told him.

  I said, “It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s beautiful.” Pause to gag. “I just prefer other types of music more.”

  “Like what? Maybe we could go and see some concerts we both like?”

  “Um. Bon Jovi? Def Leppard?”

  Gilles visibly blanched.

  Eventually we found one song that we had in common: “The Bad Touch” by Bloodhound Gang. And that only for its explicit lyrics, which we then learnt off by heart and sang to each other. Other than that, he listened to Joni Mitchell on headphones, and I went to Toto concerts with my best friend.

  Years later, but only two months before we met Morten and Elena, I displayed my cheesy music taste to the world on Facebook by posting a link to the ’80s parody tune “Pop! Goes My Heart” as a two fingers at any so-called intelligent music lovers out there.

  The next day I received an email from Morten:

  “You have ruined me young lady ;-) Since last night I’ve been constantly humming that gluey tune, which seems to be stuck in my head — ‘I wasn’t gonna fall in love again, but then Pop! Goes my Heart!’”

  Something warmed in me. That part of me that adored mainstream rock and pop for its comforting regularity in chor­us and rhythm. That part of me that had always been shamed by my mother because if it wasn’t BBC Radio 4, then it was not suitable. Morten and I didn’t know each other, but he loved what I loved. I wasn’t stupid because I didn’t understand jazz and didn’t have acoustic guitar on my playlists. In reading his reassurance, my love for cheesy music finally felt validated.

  That day I wrote him six emails. We were forming a relationship.

  In challenging my values, I had reached very few firm conclusions. To be honest, often I would change my mind as soon as I had reached a conclusion.

  But one thing was abundantly clear to me and remains steadfastly so: human beings are hard-wired to make relationships. We do so in many capacities, fleeting and long-lasting, between different sexes, both inside and outside of the confines of the almost universally accepted partnership we called marriage.

  Some form relationships in secret liaisons; others live unhappily and unwillingly through their triads like Princess Diana, Prince Charles and Camilla; and still more try to shoehorn themselves into an exclusive partnership, but fail, cheat and divorce, becoming serial monogamists. Believing that it was necessary to stop loving someone in order to start loving someone else.

  But our relationship was happening in parallel.

  By the end of twenty-nine emails, thirty-two pages of text and four days, Morten and Elena had booked tickets to come and see us in Paris. Or, rather, to visit Paris. Stay in a hotel, which happened to be in the vicinity of our home…and maybe pop by for a coffee if we happened to be around. No expectations.

  I was in love with Gilles all over again. I was on a beam of light from the prospect of meeting someone who liked Bryan Adams. I was also infatuated with the cleaner in our building, the tramp who sat outside the Blockbuster video store (who got a lot of money that week) and indeed anyone who crossed my path!

  My husband had been busy getting to know the female half of the couple, Elena, through his preferred seduction med­ium, instant messenger.

  As neither Gilles nor Elena had daytime jobs, their chat conversations bounced back and forth between them, and the speed at which their new relationship developed was ten times that of mine and Morten’s — which by any normal standards was a whirlwind. Having befriended her as well on Facebook, I scoured the photos of the two of them. Elena had flowing dark hair. High cheekbones. Eyes with zing. And she was a model.

  Some were professional shots, on set or at launch parties, and others were more casual. But even in the “morning after” ones she looked perky and stylish. In comparison to me, who after any kind of party looked terribly in pain, with hair that could grease several cake tins and circles under my eyes, which looked like they’d been bitten by a few mosquitoes.

  Jealousy was not a green-eyed monster. It was a blue-eyed English girl. And her name was Louisa.

  6

  Depth of affection is very difficult to judge. It is intangible.

  So humans often measure depth of affection by units of time. The amount of time spent with one person may be used to prove how much love is felt. We are programmed by society to rank our love and apportion time accordingly. As soon as we realise the equation time = love, we demand that our best friends in the playground swear eternal friendship forever and forsake all others: “You are only my second-best friend, but you can be my best friend for two weeks until Helen comes back from having her appendix out.”

  Of course, it rarely lasts.

  But as we get older, we recognise that we can have several best friends and a few more with whom we enjoy specialised interests. And an even larger circle of mates. And the balance for adults changes as people grow at different rates and their priorities change with them.

  This thinking, though, never applies to romantic relationships. If partners are very lucky or very skilled, then they grow together within a couple, by pruning the parts of themselves that do not fit into the relationship. Mai
ntaining any type of long-term relationship means modifying oneself and necessitates compromise. But the choices are often limited to a binary decision. His way or her way. In more advanced relationships, a third solution may be found: in business lingo, the “win-win” solution. But why limit the choice to three solutions?

  I was not the same person at twenty that I was at thirty. I would not be the same person at forty. And hopefully, that was only the halfway point of my life. And yet there was still a stigma attached to divorce, because one was supposed to marry for life, whether that life lasts five, twenty or sixty more years.

  Any marriage ending in divorce was designated a failure. Society told me I should continue to prune myself to fit with the same person year upon year upon year. Sometimes pruning would be healthy, and I would flourish. Sometimes I would be forced to squash parts of myself that were fundamentally me — the sacrifice of myself to make my marriage work.

  “She’s very pretty,” I said, trying to be the polyamorist that I had declared myself to be. I ignored some gnawing discomfort that had started to bounce off my diaphragm. Rather like acid reflux.

  “Tu m’étonnes,” he said enthusiastically. “Lovely looking. Her photos are hot, hot, hot.”

  Hot. That word told me a lot. Because from previous discussions I knew what he really meant.

  “You mean she wore high-heeled boots in several photos? I know you like boots. But just because she wears them out doesn’t mean she’ll wear them in bed.”

  I was the look-into-my-eyes-and-tell-me-you-love-me type. And trampling on someone with boots during sex was not my way to say I love you. I’d done it a little back in the beginning. You know, in that part of the relationship where you try stuff out to please your new boyfriend. But it wasn’t my thing. Our so-called win-win solution in this case had been an effort on my part to wear my high heels in bed on our anniversary. Wild.

  “Well, I know it’ll suit you if she likes that stuff,” said the mature adult.

  That stuff! repeated my puritan upbringing. Not prejudiced at all.

  Slut! screamed the blued-eyed monster in my head.

  You are a failure as a wife! boomed my conscience. It reverberated around my mind, echoing in the caverns of my body.

  FAILURE, FAILURE, FAILURE!

  Elena and I had long chats on instant messenger. I didn’t mention that I had doubts. After all, that wasn’t polyamory.

  But, almost against my will, I found myself getting to like her. She was passionate and outspoken where I was reserved and stubborn. Along with my pot of admiration, however, I also felt perverse resentment. She grabbed life with both hands. How come she could speak out on her views and I could not? I was British. Polite to a fault. I minded my Ps and Qs. Stayed out of other people’s business. And said sorry when other people stepped on my toes. Elena had been involved in green politics, demanded organic food (and knew a lot about it), asked for and received the best service in restaurants, and kindly lectured one drunken girl in the street about all the dangers of binge drinking as she accompanied her home, two miles in the opposite direction of where she lived. That was Elena all over. She had an opinion about everything. And, most annoyingly, could almost always back it up with a ton of research. And went out of her way to help people who couldn’t or didn’t want to help themselves. That my husband fancied the pants off her had nothing to do with it. Yeah, right!

  I found myself spending a lot of time in my bath. A surrogate amniotic sac, it comforted me when I was feeling insecure: a warm haven where I felt safe and suspended from reality. Whatever that was.

  Because I was falling in love with Morten. I loved Gilles with a fury, but Morten was scattering fairy dust on my days. Everywhere I looked, I saw tinsel and beauty. Mid-November saw the first frosts and made crystals that hung off cobwebs. Achingly resplendent and all tempered with poignancy at its fleeting duration. I was on top of the world, but at that height, it was very scary. I asked myself again and again, Do you still love Gilles? Are you just kidding yourself?

  But if there was one thing steady in my world, it was my husband and my love for him. It was certain that I loved him. Even if nothing else was. And really, nothing else was.

  This one thought kept me sane. If he felt about me the same way that I felt about him, then it must have been possible to love and fall in love at the same time.

  But Elena was not only a model. She was also highly likely to satisfy him more in bed than I was. Should I have made more of an effort to adopt his more kinky preferences? Why didn’t it please me to please my husband that way? Was this something I could overcome? If he was getting his needs satisfied elsewhere, would he continue to love me? Want me?

  They were due to arrive in three weeks’ time. Borrowed time. Gilles and I reassured each other verbally, emotionally and physically. The sex had never been so good. We said we were polyamorous…but it didn’t feel that way.

  “How will you feel if I kiss her in front of you?” he asked.

  “How will you feel if I kiss him in front of you?” I replied.

  “You can’t answer a question with a question!”

  “OK. Well I guess I’ll feel better if I’m kissing him,” I replied, kissing Gilles.

  And for three weeks we played the hare and the tortoise. First one of us would whiz ahead in our respective relationships, and then the other. Not that it was a competition. No way.

  One day I arrived home from work to be greeted by Gilles hopping excitedly by the drinks cabinet. It looked like a cele­bra­tion was in order. But I didn’t know about what.

  “I’ve heard her voice,” he said, barely able to contain himself. “She sounds so cute. We talked for three hours.”

  “Tell me more,” I said, dumping my bags and slamming the door in an effort to stop the hammering in my heart. “What did you speak about?”

  “We discussed music. She played me some Imogen Heap down the phone. I really love it. And she cried when I played her ‘Blue’ by Joni.”

  The coup de grâce. The way to Gilles’s heart was not through his stomach. It was through Joni Mitchell. And I felt punched once more in mine.

  Despite the fact that this very day Morten and I had sloppily declared our slogan to be the line “It’s no better to be safe than sorry” from “Take on Me,” I started to be nasty about her. And it. And them. We were building fragile, delicate overtures in a new world, and I set about systematically destroying them with a few well-chosen words.

  “You should take her to one of your brilliantly stimulating Tuck & Patti concerts,” I said sarcastically. Gilles started to smile and then realised I was being mean. And blinked in surprise. His wife was never mean.

  “Maybe she wouldn’t fall asleep like I did. Or you can cry together at Radiohead. Thank God I won’t be subjected to it anymore.”

  Gilles looked at me. He was confused. And I was glad. At least I hadn’t lost my power to hit him where it hurt.

  “You seem to get along with her very well. I guess if this is divorce then it’s the nicest way to do it,” I started twitching my mouth from side to side in an effort not to cry. It got faster and faster until I looked like Samantha from Bewitched on coke.

  “Why would you say ‘if this is divorce’?” he said gently.

  “Because you have more in common with her than you do with me,” I said. “You spent hours on the phone talking with her and when I get home all we do is watch Friends. Or House. Or Cheers. Despite the fact we’ve seen them all at least fifty times.”

  “But this is a different phase of the relationship. We read about this, don’t you remember? Polyamorists call it NRE, new relationship energy. You and I had this at the beginning of our relationship. We couldn’t tear ourselves away from each other for six months.”

  It was true. But then…was not now.

  “Yes,” I said, “but even then I was the one who learnt chess
and started rollerblading to be a part of your activities. I couldn’t tear myself away from you. I made all the effort to be a part of your life. I even looked up quotes from Monty Python to be with you.”

  “No one forced you to do that. But I thought it was very sweet,” he said.

  “It wasn’t sweet. It was desperate. I’ve always made all the effort. We wouldn’t even be married if it wasn’t for me. You started having panic attacks at getting the paperwork together and suggested we postpone it. I was the one who suggested we get married when I got that well-paid job.”

  “I would have asked you eventually. It was part of the plan,” he said.

  “Yes, but you didn’t.”

  “But I would’ve.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said, spitting the “d” of “didn’t.”

  “You just got in first, as usual!” he said, shaking his head.

  My pile of resentment was starting to smoulder, and it took very little for it to burst into flame.

  “Well, that says a lot about us. Maybe you don’t want to be polyamorous. Maybe you just want to be with Elena. Maybe you just don’t love me anymore. So if I am always first, here it is on the table. Let’s talk divorce!”

  The dreaded d-word. Gilles’s crime had been to share music tastes with a woman, with whose husband I was having an emotional affair.

  “I’ve done this. I have brought us to the point of divorce because of polyamory,” I said in total despair.

  “No, you haven’t,” he said, exhausted at my histrionics, but I couldn’t stop.

  “How can you say that?” I demanded. “I cheated on you and then encouraged you to find another woman. Not even that, I actually found her for you from the forum!”

  “I don’t want to replace you,” he insisted, “but it’s great to share some passions with Elena. You are both very different. Polyamory is complementary. Come on, you know that.”

  I knew all the theory. And supported it wholeheartedly. I also wanted Gilles to be happy. But I didn’t want to make myself unhappy in order for that to happen.