When you divorce in your mid-40s you feel insecure. You worry about not having a partner to navigate the later parts of life. You feel less attractive because certainly, physically, you are less attractive. As good as you feel about the mental and the emotional, you still feel insecure.
Still, you engage with people and you are open and you have a variety of relationships. There was the ex who returned to ask questions about how she got left by the side of the road. You enjoy each other's company for several weeks, even spend a couple of holidays together, because it was the holidays, and you feel nurtured and desirable and she feels closure. There was also the younger girl who loved to sing karaoke and had fakies. She was sweet but you could not have found someone more unlike yourself and you lost interest immediately, even if you did not admit that for several months. There was the age-old friend from high school. You weren't on the same page at the outset but you felt like it really could have been a good thing. There was the girl with whom you had an "age gap," relationship. You let her move in with you, even while your kids were with you half the time. What a crazy year. You became intimate with your insecurities. You learned and gained perspective in that one, and you lost a lot. Confidence. Time. The last three years you have been alone. You, and the kids of course, half the time. You are doing fine. You are not morose when you are circumspect. You find meaning and value in your life.
In the middle of all that you met a girl, also of another generation. You were at the bar explaining to a couple of high school friends, (the christian high school of a young republic,) who lived near you and so formed a cohort at the bar, how the human species is polygynous. They argued humans were meant to mate for life, it was God's plan they said, and you countered by saying, scientifically there is no way we could be considered monogamous. The girl was serving drinks in the bar and she eavesdropped conspicuously. She interjected and said she could not even imagine being with only one person for the rest of her life. Well, here is woman, you thought. You had seen signs of her rise. You understood that thing about a fish needing a bicycle. Mostly though, you had met very few revolutionaries. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was the dogma or the Air Force, all that stuff you renounced at 28. The women in your life, the partners you had chosen, had many good qualities but none of them were particularly original thinkers.
The girl laughed easily and seemed to enjoy shocking your friends. She was engaged to be married. They asked why she was bothering to get married. She said her marriage was not about monogamy. You thought the paradigm shift, for your friends, was tectonic. They asked if she had extracurricular partners even now, during engagement. She said she was interested in polyamory as a lifestyle. You were aroused by her spirit and her thoughtfulness and her ideas.
You continued to see her at the bar. You got to know her schedule and showed up regularly because the conversation was fire. She always made a point of acknowledging you right away and then spending any free time she could make talking to you. She transitioned from server to bartender and the relationship transitioned from budding emotional intimacy to one of physical intimacy.
In all, that relationship was as constructive and positive as any love oriented relationship you ever had. You developed a routine with her. You would go in and see her at the bar. You would go home and climb into bed. She would wake you a bit later after the bar closed. You would talk for an hour or two, sometimes have a drink or a snack, sometimes atop your bed, other times in the kitchen or the living room,
The discussions satisfied your need to evolve. The conversations were balanced. You came to know each other in a way that was patient, and kind. You nurtured an uncommon trust. You even came to know your metamor, through her. Jealousy and possession fell away from you like dry skin, unnecessary, unproductive, counterintuitive.
Polyamory was a regular topic of conversation. How were you doing? How was she doing? How was her partner doing? It was an exploration and an adventure. The intimacy was intoxicating. It was communion and as it typically followed a deep conversation, the point was to be and to grow close. You enjoyed her selflessly. She made you happy. You were full and you came to learn how not to seek your own.
That reationship was as unconventional as could be but you never doubted yourself about being open to it, open to her. You could feel the sincerity, the altruism, the courage, the importance of being earnest, the depth of empathy, the curiosity and the growth, the push and the pull, the rhythm and the surprise of the human condition.
Relatively early in the relationship you did feel some insecurity. She went home to her fiance every night. The relationship was compartmentalized to the nth degree and as good as your conversations were with her, insecurities did get to you. You were nearly 50 and she was 27. You felt like you had no business while she felt like she was open to the universe. When you expressed your insecurities about the age difference she said she found you very attractive in every way. She thought you were wise. She said your sexual appetite matched her own, the two of you were sexual creatures, she said. It became enough, plenty even. On the way there though, you felt like it was not enough. You broke it off even if you did not mean to do that and she brought a friend by your apartment when she knew you were away and threw eggs at your door.
You talked to her. She believed relationships were made better when they involved work, which was in stark contrast to your ex wife who refused to have serious conversations about the state of the relationship because she said they should be easy.
So she worked. The two of you decided to stay together, such as it was, because you loved her and she loved you. She made concessions. When her fiance went away for a few days to visit family she stayed the night, which gave you a certain peace. It felt more real seeing her first thing in the morning. Otherwise, she made some time for you outside of the normal late night. When you got tickets to see Neutral Milk Hotel and Daniel Johnston at the Holloywood Bowl she said of course she would go. When you picked her up you could tell something was off and she explained that her fiance had been bothered. She said it was not because she was going out with you but rather that it seemed wrong in some way as he liked those artists and she did not even know them. Later, back at your place you had a bit of a disagreement about something and she accused you of holding out on having sex, which was crazy as you never did not want to have sex with her and at the same time it was so strangely new to experience that role reversal. You talked it out and spent that time being as close as two people can be after which you walked her home, two short blocks down the street, as you did on so many nights around 2 or 3 in the morning. The walk back was always good too. Monrovia, so dark and cool and quiet. 3 or 4 more hours of sleep and you would get up and get ready for work, and work the other compartments of your life.
You realize her life was hectic. She lived with her fiance. She worked five nights a week. She was involved with her family and his. She had her friends, including a couple who lived with them until some months before the wedding, when they moved to the beach. She read. You turned her on to Anais Nin and she could not get enough. Between that and learning everything she could about polyamory and the many experiences she could find documented, she was busy and involved and alive. And then there was you.
The Saturday night you did five minutes on the seocndary stage at the Ice House in Pasadena, she was there, sitting next to your brother in the front row laughing at the whole routine you had run by her the night before.
She called you the Saturday morning she got married, crying. She said she understood but she was upset you would not be there for the ceremony, which took place on her front porch. You talked through it. She was not trying to convince you to change your mind. She respected you. The option to change it was real however but you could not quite get there. It was weird for you. You were okay with her husband. A few times you had even found yourselves at the bar at the same time and even exchanged a few words. You could not however, get over the mores of your time. It felt unnatural or maybe even disrespectful, though when you really thought deeply about it there was no disrespect at all. You loved her. So much in a way you loved him too, because you knew he took care of her, supported her emotionally, loved her. How could you not love him? Later she told you the wedding was perfect. She told you all about it, how she missed you but the morning talk had been enough for her and the rest of the day she was mindful and intentional and she lived in the moment and bathed in the love all around her.
You know you're challenged when it comes to intimacy and relationships. Until around 28 you had almost no power of woo. You don't know the dynamics of how these things work, (or don't work,) but you know that growing up without ever meeting or knowing your father, and without your mother who you visited in prison affected you. You know how lucky you were to have your Aunt and Uncle take you in when you were 12 but you were keenly aware of the difference in intimacy between your relationship with them and the relationship they had with their biological daughter, your cousin who became your sister.
From 28 on you had many relationships. Some of them lasted several years, if interrupted years, and sometimes they overlapped. You felt earnest in seeking a lasting, loving relationship. However, you sabotaged the ones with the most potential and engaged in some that were destined to fail. Why did they all end? Most likely because you had no idea how to have a fulfilling, balanced, loving relationship. The women with whom you had the best possibility of having that tried. They tried to engage with you in all the right ways but you were so inexperienced you craved more and more and you had no idea when to stop all that. By the time you decided to have children and get married it was partly because no bolt of lightning had struck you to tell you it was time for all that settling down and also because you never figured out what a good relationship looked like nor how it worked. You never sought counseling. You did not pick a partner who had much of an idea either.
Your conversations with the girl, (who bristled at being referred to as a girl-she preferred woman,) often involved talk of work, working on your relationship, working on how to have a polyamorous lifestyle, working on ourselves. At first it seemed like much ado about nothing but in time it started to make sense to you. You came to realize she was attuned to everything external and sort of constantly modulating the internal. As much as the generational distance colored her heroic, you were impressed with the workman-like humility with which she conducted her life on the daily. She cried to you about her mother. She told you how she longed for the day her partner would have an intimate relatiosnhip outside of the two of them, how she looked forward to the challenge and all the things she would feel, and how certain she was it would ultimately increase her joy through him and for him. The perspective was so honest and real and if to be human is to be flawed then it was that too, but you could not find where.
It ended with a whimper. You wanted more. You wanted an every day partner. More, you just knew the center could not hold. A feint sense of doom eased into your psyche like a foil just off stage but clearly in your sightline. You met someone and you let her know you were interested in this person. She was excited for you, genuinely, but she was clear that you had to talk to her about polyamory and about her, which you were not willing to do. It ended with a whimper. She was getting more adventurous. She wanted to add lovers. You wanted to scale back. You agreed to continue to love each other. You scaled back. Two years later you saw each other twice a year, texted every few weeks. Five years later you talked twice a year by whichever mode.
Still, that relationship nurtured you in ways previously unimagined. You grew. You too felt like an adventurer on the high seas living rather than observing, participating instead of spectating, engaging instead of avoiding. When others talk about polyamory your first thought is, I know about that first hand because I am alive and because I experience.
