One winter, years later, I lay on the floor of the Portland airport trying to stretch out my back before my flight home to New Orleans. Leaving Portland after Christmas was always difficult. Ben didn’t go to Portland every Christmas like I did; he and Jen split their family time. There was no way to go to Portland and not think of Ben, and I was used to that: I drove past the twenty-four-hour pie shop across the street from the movie theater where we once spent most Friday nights, and wondered which kids sat in the booths now; did they play cards at the table like we did, and did they dip their french fries in ice cream? Ben and I called each other on birthdays and holidays, and occasionally on long drives. I visited them (Ben and Jen were a package deal now) in Austin sometimes, and they visited me in New Orleans sometimes. While I was on the floor of the airport, Ben returned my yearly holiday call. I had to shout over the monotonous blare of departure times.
I thought, “I have never felt happier for any person, ever—maybe not even myself.” I said, “Congratulations! Tell me everything!” And he told me everything, and two weeks later, under a quiet tree, she said yes.
It feels good to love someone enough to fully let go into the nature of a changing relationship. I felt—and continue to feel—proud of the friendship Ben and I share. I wish it hadn’t taken an unusually positive experience with an ex to teach me how great friendship can be, but it did. The love I feel for Ben is more than friendship but less than romantic. It occupies a weird middle space that I would have completely overlooked had it not been for his patience and willingness to explore a different kind of relationship with me. Learning to prioritize friendship with Ben was ultimately the catalyst that led me to understand how I could begin to love women. And understanding how to love women—physically and emotionally—is the single greatest gift I’ve received during my time on earth so far.
I feel a little queasy writing “understanding how to love women” here. It seems like it should be an obvious thing, something animal and natural to anyone with a working sensibility. But remember: I’d come to believe that boyfriends and husbands were all that mattered. Life was a search for The One, and he would be a man, and when you found him, you locked him down. Even though I sometimes felt attracted to women, I rejected those feelings because women couldn’t be husbands. Now, though, my entire relationship structure orbits around my love for women and the ways in which I’ve decided to prioritize my female friendships.
I need to mention here that the polyamory movement as it exists today owes a lot to queer culture. Where heterosexual couples have prioritized the so-called standard narrative (one man, one woman, one love, maybe a few kids), queer folks have experimented with relationship models for decades. As Susan Song puts it in a paper on polyamory and queer anarchism, “Queer theory resists heteronormativity and recognizes the limits of identity politics. The term ‘queer’ implies resistance to the ‘normal,’ where ‘normal’ is what seems natural and intrinsic.”8 An entire book could be written (and, actually, several have been written) on the connection between queer culture and polyamory. Polyamory is nothing new; it’s been in and out of favor (under different names) since—well, probably since humanity itself. But the most recent iteration, which this book is mostly about, is a concept sculpted and cemented by queer folks all over the world.
For instance, Robin Bauer, a female-to-male transsexual, coproduced the first international conference on polyamory in 2005. In Deborah Anapol’s words (she translated some of Bauer’s lecture from its original German), “gay men have been practicing nonmonogamy from the get-go and consider heterosexuals to be Johnny-come-latelies.”9 And then there’s Andie Nordgren, the gender-queer artist who invented the term “relationship anarchy” in 2006. In the first few lines of Nordgren’s pamphlet The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy, relationship anarchy sounds a lot like the version of polyamory I want to build my life around: “Relationship anarchy questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple. You have capacity to love more than one person, and one relationship and the love felt for that person does not diminish love felt for another.”10 Relationship anarchy embraces ideas around spontaneity, freedom, respect, values, and a rejection of possession and entitlement. The term is gaining traction.
A friend recently sent me a comic from the website Feministing called “5 Radical Ways People Do Non-Monogamy That You Need to Know About.” The comic features gender-queer people in three-way relationships, as well as people who are a-romantic (not interested in kissing or sex) but are in loving, lifelong relationships with multiple people. It’s a comic I wish I had seen ten years ago, when I started to feel confused about where women fit in my love life. My best friends—Jessica is a great example—are almost always women, and while I usually don’t have sex with them, our relationships are often even more intimate than my boyfriend-girlfriend relationships with men.
There’s a page in a diary I kept in 2000 (this was pre-Ben) that attempts to chart the people I’d loved and the degree to which they broke my heart. The picture looks like this:
At that point, I’d never been physically intimate with a girl (unless you count Kate from my theater troupe, whom I kissed on the lips à la Katy Perry on a dare), but I had definitely loved girls. I remember drawing this chart and thinking, “Should the girls go in a different category?” And then, “No, all these people hurt me in the same kind of way.” I was fourteen and had never dated anyone before, but I had had romantic crushes only on male-bodied people. The girls who had broken my heart had been my friends. This was the moment I should have realized that the one-man-one-woman-two-kids-together-forever relationship model wasn’t quite right for me.
Long after Ben and I had dated and broken up, I followed a girl to Chicago. Beatrice had been my first friend in college, and we’d had a sort of slow, quiet falling out over the course of sophomore year. She’d moved into an on-campus house for community service, and I’d moved into one for global awareness. The Community Service House had house dinners together most nights and participated in a ton of service projects—volunteering at local elementary schools, painting fences, that kind of thing—that I was way too self-interested and egotistical to participate in. Beatrice and I saw less and less of each other until our time together dwindled to one Friday-afternoon lunch date in the campus center every month and a half or so.
I missed Beatrice. When we’d met freshman year, we thrift-shopped and primped for the ’80s-themed dance together. On Halloween, we wore matching Newsies costumes and took hundreds of pictures in every pose we could think of with the digital camera my grandfather had given me as a graduation present. We lay on Beatrice’s roommate’s loft bed and talked about the boys we had crushes on and made plans to seduce them.
Once we began actually seducing the boys—and getting into long-term relationships with them—there was (surprise!) considerably less time to spend with each other. I’ll bear the brunt of the responsibility for the drop-off in our friendship; my feelings about Finding The One had not matured much since high school.
Months after we stopped hanging out regularly, Beatrice told me that she had decided to spend her first semester of junior year in Chicago. The school we went to was renowned for its rich study-abroad program. Studying abroad had never appealed to me, because I liked to be able to order Pizza Hut and get Taco Bell whenever I wanted. It would probably be okay for a week or so, but what would I do a week in when I got a craving for something made entirely out of chemicals and everyone around me spoke only Japanese? Plus, what about Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving was reserved for American overeaters and football watchers. If I was in another country, I would miss Thanksgiving, and I worried that would give me a panic attack.
I hadn’t considered studying in another city in the United States, though. Beatrice told me there were two programs that allowed you to study domestically at our school—one in Chicago and one in Philadelphia. They were “urban studies” programs—a term Bea
trice knew all about because she was a sociology major. I didn’t know what sociology was, and I had never heard the word “urban” next to a word that wasn’t “outfitters.” But as an English major, I knew quite a lot about Geoffrey Chaucer. I rationalized that at least Chaucer and Chicago both started with the same digraph, so it wasn’t unreasonable to think that a semester in the Windy City might be good for me, too. Plus, I really missed Beatrice.
I wanted to see if I could salvage my friendship with her. At the time, I was in a pretty unhealthy relationship with a man (he’s one of the few in my pictorial timeline with a fake name and an invisible face, because we’re not on good terms); I secretly wanted some time away from him. And so, without consulting her (or my boyfriend) about it first, I followed Beatrice to Chicago.
The term started in the fall; there was a long, sticky summer to read packets of papers and spiral-bound primers about the city and the potential neighborhoods you could live in. I was placed in Hyde Park, which houses the University of Chicago, a gigantic and prestigious university that’s hard to get into and produces famous people like Philip Glass, Roger Ebert, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Rockefeller. The only real way to get from Hyde Park to anywhere else in the city is to take the no. 6 bus, which follows an express route along the highway past the Field Museum and into the Loop. From there you can ride trains to places like Logan Square or Ravenswood, but you’d be talking about commutes of over an hour—longer if it’s rush hour, and it’s rush hour 50 percent of the time in Chicago. The students in my urban studies program who were headquartered in Hyde Park mostly stayed in Hyde Park, and I was no exception.
I mention this because Beatrice was not placed in Hyde Park—she was much farther north, and I saw her only once a week or so when the whole cohort gathered for classes. I spent my time with my Hyde Park roommates—Lia, Bruno, and Trent. There were other groups of roommates in the program who lived in Hyde Park, too, and I slowly got to know them. There was Kitten, a runner who insisted everyone call her Kitten and never Kit; and there was Jasmine, who wouldn’t eat anything made with corn syrup. There were also three girls who all went to Villanova and had blond hair and refused to do anything without one another. And then there was Kim.
Kim wore her hair in a chin-length bob; she had a thick fringe of bangs along her forehead, and the day we met she wore a lime-green pencil skirt. Her eyes were enormous and brown and impossible to look away from. She had a car, and she volunteered to drive me downtown once when the Hyde Park kids all went to the Pancake House for breakfast on a school day. I sat in the front seat of her car, and she popped a Belle and Sebastian CD into the player. She kept a stack of silver mix CDs in her console, and I thumbed through them as we drove—some had Sharpie hearts drawn on them, or little messages that suggested nothing about what songs they might hold (“I Believe in You”). I thought Belle and Sebastian was a fairly basic band, and my immediate reaction to being in a car with The Boy with the Arab Strap blasting out of the tinny speakers was to feel hubristic about how unique and alternative my own taste in music was.
Neither of us immediately recognized our compatibility; I’m not great at judging people, and I also don’t make that good a first impression, so I guess that was no surprise. But Kim almost instantly caught the attention of my roommate Trent, who was a traditionally good-looking guy with stupid-bright eyes. (I’m talking about the kind of eyes that another person might describe as “piercing.”) Kim and Trent hit it off right away.
This was lucky, because Kim started to hang out at my apartment to spend time with Trent. (I maybe should have emphasized more that Kim looks like a supermodel. She’s Chilean, with a creamy butterscotch complexion; she’s also a dancer, and she moves like one. People fall in love with her at first sight a lot.) When she wasn’t around, Trent talked to me about how enamored with Kim he was, and how irritating it was that she had a long-distance boyfriend. Then, one Friday night, there was a party in Logan Square. I hated parties (I guess I’d never been to one, really, but I assumed that I hated them, because I wanted to be the kind of person who hated parties), and I’d seen in the Chicago Reader that M. Ward was playing that night at the Metro, a club uptown. (See how alternative my musical taste was? M. Ward! Who my age had even heard of M. Ward at that point? None of my roommates, that’s for sure.) I decided to go to the concert; my roommates went to the party.
That Saturday, Kim was in our apartment lounging on the couch and thumbing through one of Trent’s magazines and she asked me why I hadn’t been at the party.
This was when I realized that I’d sold Kim short. Not only did she know who (the very alternative) M. Ward was, she had known that he was playing last night. I considered the lime-green pencil skirt she had had on when we met. It was a pretty bold skirt; a cool move for a person who could wear a pair of sweatpants and look like she had stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
Kim and I started hanging out in our classes. We collaborated on a video project about the assets of Hyde Park. We decided to write a dark, moody rap song and layer it on top of video footage of the neighborhood. (It’s still on YouTube—it’s called “Hyde Park Assets.” That video contains several hallmarks: the first time either of us used a digital video camera; the first time we ever uploaded anything to YouTube; and the first time we played with Garage Band—hence the cringe-worthy overuse of drum kit samples.) I went to her house, and we made epic dance-party playlists on iTunes and then danced to them in her living room. We stayed home from parties to have sleepovers and order Domino’s. It wasn’t long before Kim had completely stopped coming to our apartment to visit Trent; now she came to see me.
Things only intensified. We both had long-distance boyfriends, but we found ourselves talking to them less so we could spend more time with each other. We were together most nights. When we walked around Chicago, we held hands. Once, we went to Andersonville and decided to pretend like we were on our first date. We leaned in toward each other over a Mediterranean dinner and asked each other first-date questions as though we were ourselves from the future.
And then I thought about how she wore her hair with bangs. I hadn’t thought about it much until that moment, but I decided that bangs were definitely trendy, and that, in fact, I would have to cut bangs for my hair, too. I noticed, also, that she had a little heart tattooed on her ankle. She was the first person I knew in real life with a tattoo. It was suddenly undeniable: Kim was cool. I’d been so focused on winning back Beatrice’s affection that I hadn’t really been paying attention to the other people in the program.
I thought about Kim a lot. It wasn’t the kind of pelvic, Hustler sort of thinking that I often engaged in when I had boy crushes, but it was just as consistent and vibrant. I imagined living with Kim in a dusty house on the periphery of Chicago. I pictured having fat cats with her. In my fantasy, our boyfriends lived with us, too, but they were sort of on the sidelines, going to work constantly and staying out late with the guys. In real life, we said “I love you”—we even wrote poetry for each other—but I don’t think either of us recognized the love as romantic.
Eventually, the program ended, and we both moved back to our respective college towns. We spoke on the phone every Sunday afternoon for a while; I visited Kim at her school, and she visited me at mine; during a joint vacation in Portland we got matching tattoos of pigeon silhouettes. It was an accidentally serious long-distance relationship. And then, as is common in long-distance relationships, our separate lives got very busy, and time lapsed longer between calls.
Friendships change differently than romantic relationships; they have an elasticity that romantic relationships don’t. It’s rarer for friendships to end in breakups; rather, they tend to shrink and swell as time and space allow. I still visit Kim in Los Angeles about once a year. This year it was just for an hour—I was in town for a conference, and we grabbed lunch at a crowded food-cart garage full of loud men in tight jeans and waifish women in shorts that looked like underpants. The hour was enough
; with deep friendships like that, sometimes an hour is all you need.
On a recent phone call, Kim—who was starting to experiment with the concept of polyamory inside her six-year relationship—told me that she was interested in dating women. And then she said, “You were the first girl I ever dated. I mean, I realized recently that when we lived in Chicago, we were dating. We were in love with each other and we were dating; we just didn’t have sex or anything.” She said this so simply and matter-of-factly that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it myself. But it was more than that, too; this was another landmark turning point in my understanding of love. When Ben and I broke up but stayed friends, I began to see love as something outside romance. With Kim, the revelation was equal and opposite: we were “friends”—a term I had a loose understanding of—but there was somehow more to it than that. We didn’t get physical, but I prioritized her more than I had prioritized friends in the past. As in my relationship with Ben post-breakup, I didn’t have terms or parameters to define how I felt about Kim—and it was exciting. To this day, I wonder what our relationship could have become if we had had longer than a semester in Chicago to explore it.
Which brings me to Hannah Sadtler.
I met Hannah two years after I met Kim. I want to say this outright: the love I cultivated with Hannah is, without a doubt in my mind, the greatest love of my life so far. If I believed in God or otherworldly powers (and some days, depending on my mood and how hormonal I am, I do), Hannah would be my reason for doing so.
Many Love Page 5
