I'm going to use this year’s V day as an excuse to tell you about one of my friends. I meet and make friends with many other poly people who have their own way of doing things. This new profiles series is about them.
Chapter 29 – Polyamory Post-Covid (+Recap)
I thought we’d emerge from lockdown victorious and thrumming with a desire for touch and connection. I had a glistening image of the nightclubs packed with thirsty, touch-starved people while a similar scene takes place online. Not quite.
POST-CHRISTMAS SPECIAL! This word “Family”
"To Julie and family." This word family—what does it mean? I am a twenty-something living in the city with no parents, children, or relatives within reach. To the local loved ones in my life, especially at Christmastime, this word is it’s either a hearty cry in support or a vague denial of the three of us as a unit.
Chapter 28 – Oscar: The Great Depression
Sometimes when we talk about polyamory it’s important to get perspective, how the different people and relationships relate to one another. But sometimes it’s important to reflect on the individuality of each, and how a single person can play a large role in the big picture. For me, Oz is one of these. This is how our story goes.
Chapter 27 – My Shifting Sexuality: The Sexuality Daemon (the Part that Matters)
I used to think there was nothing more natural than heterosexuality. Now, I remember the girl who believed that and shake my head in wonder. After all, we humans already tend towards the familiar. Things in common help us form an understanding, make us feel less alone. The shared experience is a home of its own. It’s a whole world I could live in and never leave. This is the essence of my shifting sexuality. I never thought I’d be seeing my Bi Days in the rearview mirror, but now I wonder where I actually stand? Do I want both like I once believed?
Chapter 26 – My Shifting Sexuality: Unsteady (the First Part)
Who’s to say what causes sexuality to shift? It’s not a science. It isn’t fixed, no matter how sure of it we feel. I’ve seen enough friends discover and re-discover themselves often enough when it comes to sexuality. But I had been losing my excitement over men for months. It was as though, when Lorin went, my whole attraction to men went with him. Meanwhile, I was extremely attentive to other women, even while my cooling attraction to men was slipping and breaking…
Chapter 25 – Coming Out (as Poly): Part 4 – To The Second Degree
I’ve written about coming out to friends and colleagues and I’ve written to coming out to close family, so I also wanted to include a short post on coming out to what I’ll call second-degree people. Apart from telling my mother, these people have been the hardest to navigate.
Chapter 24 – Coming Out (as Poly): Part 3 – To Her Family
Jules’ family dynamic was a complicated one, more complex even than mine, and was a web of who was and was not talking to whom—and who she felt could and could not handle the very significant details about the woman she was seeing. “I don’t really go gently,” she had said, indicating her previous relationships; uncomplicated relationships weren’t the kind that found her. But her priors didn’t make it much easier to be deviant, and neither of us ever expected telling them would be easy.
Chapter 23 – Who Do You Love More?: Valentine’s Day
Having two partners who are not romantically involved with one another can be a little like being a child of divorced parents in that you start feeling like you have two of everything: two houses, two beds, two birthdays, two Christmases, two sets of families. I’ve felt this way before, but never stronger than on Valentine’s Day. So How to choose who I spend the day with? Whichever one I love more? Whichever one satisfies me the most?
Chapter 22 – The “Abnormal” Explained
Alternative lifestyles in many ways take away our ability to conceptualize or imagine certain aspects of life by relating them to roles or situations we already know and recognize. When we lose the ability to conceptualize aspects of life by relating them to known or familiar aspects, we enter the realm of the unknown and have to regroup. While you are trying to recover and re-process the new situation, it is hard to know how to act or speak in a way that matches the tone of the situation—you are still trying to determine what that tone is. But what is normal? Right. Good question.
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