We met in an airport. We were flying to Arizona, where we were both going to a summerlong training session for new teachers; she recognized me from a preliminary session we’d attended earlier that week. I was attracted to her in a way that’s difficult to describe. It wasn’t a romantic crush, exactly, but my stomach lurched when she spoke to me, sort of like the way it did when I was going to give a speech in front of a full auditorium.
She asked me thoughtful questions about the Pacific Northwest—what I enjoyed doing on the weekends and how I felt about suddenly living in a place that was so hot and swampy. She’d recently spent some time living and working on a farm, and hoped that she would have enough time to keep making squash soup after she started teaching.
I found myself hanging on her words; her company was familiar and warm. She laughed effortlessly and made eye contact; she brushed my shoulder with her hand purposefully when she responded to me. I was scared of her.
In the past, I’ve used the word “intimidating” to describe this quality in women. Now I don’t think that word is quite right. “Intimidating” is a word I use to shift focus away from myself; if Hannah is “intimidating,” then I’m not to blame for being scared of her. But to describe someone like Hannah as intimidating is to do her—and women in general—a disservice.
While I was studying in Arizona, I saw Hannah on campus frequently. I was so uncomfortably infatuated with her that when I saw her coming, I crossed the street to walk on the opposite sidewalk so we wouldn’t have to interact. She waved to me in the cafeteria, and I responded with chilly half smiles. Eventually, I noticed that she was spending most of her free time with two attractive girls who I could tell were much cooler than I was. “Of course,” I thought. “Those are the girls she’s meant to be friends with.” I grew comfortable with the story that Hannah had rejected me in favor of those cooler girls.
Another girl, Leah, was much more aggressive about being friends with me, and although I felt she was too cool for me, too (can you sense a theme here?), she called a lot and insisted that we “hang out.” We were both vegans, and she had a car, so she took me to vegan restaurants in Phoenix (few and far between, but you don’t complain when you’re a vegan) at least once a week. Leah had also met Hannah, but she had not been intimidated, and they’d become friends. Over dinner, I told Leah that I thought Hannah was cold and dismissive. “What? No way,” Leah said. “You just have to spend a little more time with her.”
Later I learned that Hannah had, likewise, thought I was cold and dismissive. (In fairness, this was probably because I had acted cold and dismissive.) After we’d all finished the teacher training and were back in New Orleans, Hannah and I ended up at the same party at Leah’s house. I remember the party because it fell on the same day that my long-distance boyfriend, Sean, broke up with me. Hannah remembers the party because near its end, I (extremely drunkenly) told her that I was good at cutting hair, and that she had beautiful hair. Hannah needed a haircut, so this was useful information.
Hannah came over on a Saturday afternoon in October. We sat in the courtyard at the house I had rented in Uptown, and I cut her hair with children’s craft scissors. Just as it had in the airport when we met, conversation with Hannah came easily. She volleyed questions and answered mine with graceful equilibrium. Her hair—which was very shiny and stick-straight—was unforgiving in the hands of a novice stylist, though, and the uneven chunks I left were impossible to ignore.
When she saw her new haircut—which really did look like a kid’s multimedia art project—in the mirror, she (quite generously) said, “I love it. It’s edgy!” We swept up what we could, although a film of hair remained on the sweaty bricks for weeks afterward, stubbornly clinging to that lovely afternoon.
In January of our first year teaching, Leah and I threw Hannah a birthday party. By then, the three of us had developed an enviable friendship; we had chatty weekly dinners and talked on the phone about our miserable jobs. Leah and I decided to surprise Hannah after work by hanging streamers and balloons all over her house. Leah was an exceptional baker, and she crafted an artisanal cayenne-chocolate cake, complete with complex piping up the sides. Hannah was stunned when she saw it all; she practically choked up, mumbling something about how having good friends made hard situations easier.
She invited people over for a potluck brunch. Potlucks were a beloved part of the twentysomething experience, and there seemed to be one every week, which was okay, because otherwise no one would eat anything that didn’t come in a box. Hannah was dating a guy she had gone out with a few times, but she didn’t seem all that invested in him. He came to the potluck; she kept jumping up to tend to the napkins or to refill the water glasses whenever he reached for her arm. There was another guy there, though, who made her laugh, and who climbed the street sign outside while everyone else ate scones on the porch. That guy’s name was Derek, and within a year he and Hannah would be kissing for the first time in the triangular park just off the bayou. It was 2009; we’d all been out of college and living in New Orleans for almost a year. A few months later, Derek and Hannah moved in together. And I moved in with them.
Research shows that one of the keys to lasting relationships tends to be proximity—hence all the ill-fated long-distance romances that fall apart despite everyone’s excellent intentions. Living with Hannah brought us together all the time—at least twice a day, when we poked around the kitchen making meals. I have a theory that cook-at-home-together people are closer than people who go out to eat. There’s something about boiling potatoes in your underwear while rummaging through the freezer for some rogue pecans that’s more honest than sitting in a party dress at a five-star ramen place.
At some point after we moved in together, I thought I must be in love with Hannah. I wanted to be around her all the time, and I thought about her while I was on vacation looking at desert rocks or national monuments. Every morning we embraced while the water was boiling for coffee and the cast iron was heating up for eggs. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I thought about how in the morning I would get to hug my best friend, and I reminded myself that I was not really alone.
Three years after they started dating, Hannah and Derek opened up their relationship. The shift was mostly theoretical. They were allowed to pursue other people if they wanted to, or kiss without consequence on Mardi Gras. (Everyone should be able to kiss without consequence on Mardi Gras. Whether or not secret kissing is cheating, I consider this inarguable.) With a few fleeting exceptions, though, they didn’t date other people. What they did do was sleep in separate rooms.
Hannah liked to go to bed late; her task-riddled anxiety swept her up into the night. Derek liked to get up early; he was stalwart about practicing meditation and liked to do it at the traditional crack of dawn. They wanted to decorate their rooms differently. And maybe more than anything, they sometimes needed space.
In my twenties, the person who felt most “made for me” was Hannah. My friendship with her was the first friendship I had wherein I felt we were both equally committed to learning the balance. For the first time in my life, I was totally comfortable around another person; I didn’t feel the need to dress anything up. For instance, I told Hannah that I’d always faked my orgasms, which I’d never told anyone before. I told her because I knew she would be able to hear it and not reject me for it; I knew she would give me her time and her patience and her honest opinion. (Her honest opinion, of course, was that it was much better to not fake orgasms. But she also helped me dig into the reasons why I faked them.)
Another time, Hannah heard me crying in my room. She softly knocked at the door, asking if she could come in. Had it been any other person, I would have said no, or I would have said nothing, or I would have left the house. But it was Hannah. She came in and sat on my bed, and without saying another word, she wrapped her arms around me, and I felt safe. It was my friendship with Hannah that paved the way for every relationship that came after. I felt—and there is no better term fo
r this—in love with her.
But Hannah had a partner. And more than that, I liked that she had a partner, and I liked her partner—I even loved her partner; and as much as I loved them both, I didn’t want to have sex with either of them. I wanted to have sex with the clarinet player from the street parades, but I didn’t want to live with him. I liked going to the movies and cuddling up next to the comic-book artist I dated in New Orleans, and making out with him was the best (he did this barely-touching-soft-lips thing that I thought happened only on Dawson’s Creek), but I didn’t want to lie in bed with him on Sunday mornings.
The trouble with the way my peers often use the word “polyamory” is that there tends to be too much emphasis on sex. In some of my social circles, “polyamory” and “hookup culture” are synonymous. In my personal experience, the two couldn’t be farther apart. Aren’t there relationships that fall somewhere between platonic and nonplatonic? Isn’t there love that exists beyond “friendship” and outside of “lover” and paradoxically both inside and outside of “family”?
In his essay “For Lovers and Fighters,” Dean Spade writes that one of his goals in being polyamorous is to treat his lovers more like his friends, and his friends more like his lovers. One of the problems with dating just one person is that he sees “people prioritizing romantic relationships over all else—ditching their friends, putting all their emotional eggs in one basket, and creating unhealthy dynamics with the people they date because of it. It becomes simultaneously the most important relationship and the one where people act out of their most insecure selves.”11
When I began to explore what polyamory would mean for me, it had everything to do with my relationship with Hannah. For much of the time that I lived in New Orleans, I needed a way to explain that my most significant relationship was with a woman I was not sleeping with, and that I was open to other (sexual and nonsexual) relationships, too. This felt familiar; it reminded me of how I felt about Kim when we both lived in Chicago. Had you asked me then who the most important person in my life was, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash before saying that it was Kim. Now, with Hannah, I hoped I could finally put words to this priority. I wanted to define polyamory on my own terms: I didn’t have any interest in a “primary” partner. (Many people in polyamorous relationship structures identify one person as their “primary” and all subsequent relationships as “secondary” or “tertiary.”) I needed the people I slept with to understand that Hannah was one of my biggest priorities. I wanted a definition of the word polyamory that embraced all of this at once.
Luckily for me, Deborah Anapol gives us just that: “The freedom of surrendering to love and allowing love—not just sexual passion, not just social norms and religious strictures, not just emotional reactions and unconscious conditioning—to determine the shape our intimate relationships take is the essence of polyamory.”12 She adds that polyamory “involves a conscious decision to act altruistically, that is, to put the well-being of others on an equal par with one’s own.”13 To me, that’s what being a really good friend is all about. Polyamory is the continuation of the life we left behind when we hit puberty and, hypothetically, started searching for a singular perfect mate. It’s the bringing-enough-cupcakes-for-the-whole-class deal: try to treat everyone with equal intention toward love, generosity, and respect, and see where it takes you.
On my thirtieth birthday, I had a quintessentially shitty day plagued with bad luck. The summer before, I’d moved from New Orleans to Chicago. It was my first year living away from Hannah and the friends I’d had for almost a decade. I felt very lonely, but I was determined to overcome this loneliness by planning activities for myself that I knew I would love. I tried to get pie at the new pie restaurant down the street (I love pie like it’s my religion), but, tragically, the restaurant was closed. Then I tried to go bird-watching—as my birthday is gloriously in the middle of Chicago’s warbler season—but it started to rain. (In May? Unheard-of.) And then the guy who was going to give me my thirtieth-birthday tattoo—yes, I thought that undergoing a few hours of barely tolerable pain was a good way to celebrate my birth—told me I had fat arms! He meant it as a compliment (as in, “You have good, fat arms that will accommodate a tattoo like this well”), but come on: fat arms are never not the worst.
By 2:00 p.m. I had relegated myself to my bedroom, where I was sobbing into a bowl of stale tortilla chips.
A few days later, I went to New Orleans to visit Hannah. She picked me up in her maroon pickup truck and drove me to her house. When we got there, she opened the back door to a yard full of some of my oldest friends, all gathered around Derek, who was leading a sing-along. Tables had been covered in linen cloths and tall citronella candles to keep the bugs away; there were bowls of homemade salads and casseroles and guacamole; and there were multiple (MULTIPLE) kinds of fresh pie.
I should have known this would happen. I love birthdays—I think they’re such wonderful opportunities to celebrate the people you love, people you so often forget to celebrate in the bedlam of scheduling crises and to-do lists. Hannah knows I love birthdays, and she wasn’t going to let this one pass without something incredible happening; she never had before, so why should a thousand miles change anything? In our family (Hannah and Derek and I started calling each other “family” about five years ago), the cornerstone of any birthday celebration is the part where everyone sits in a circle and shares personal memories. They’re sometimes funny and sometimes not. It’s one of my favorite traditions.
During the memory circle for my surprise thirtieth birthday, Hannah talked about the time we went to Bogue Chitto State Park in Louisiana on a hundred-degree day. I remembered the day exactly—I’d been going through a work crisis that felt so terrible that I didn’t know how I would ever feel better. It was too hot to think, too hot to cook. We thought about going tubing a few hours away, but that sounded like a commitment we didn’t have the energy for, so we threw a heap of towels into my silver Volvo sedan and set out for the nearest, chilliest river we could think of. (Besides the Mississippi, which is visibly polluted, and has been rumored to cause people to grow extra limbs.)
When we reached the river, I parked under the only sliver of tree I could find, but it was way too skinny to produce anything like shade. The ground leading to the water was stony, with smooth rocks that pressed into your feet as you walked toward the river. The current was strong in places but mild in others; we waded in at a shallow spot that stretched a hundred yards across and was knee-deep in the middle. In the river, the white noise of water rushing over rocks drowned out the earsplitting screeches of midday cicadas—especially rowdy when the air was as hot and wet as it was that day—and in the icy quiet you could finally hear yourself think.
After a few minutes of acclimating, we agreed to float a little ways down the river, using our forearms to keep ourselves gently tethered to the ground. We reached a place where the water was deep, but a red maple had fallen across its narrow width. We both grabbed hold of the tree so we could stay in one place, tumbling like wind socks in the current.
By the time we fixed ourselves to the tree, Hannah and I had already spent three hours talking nonstop. The conversation rolled forward unpredictably. There were no lulls or awkward pauses; the things we wanted to say turned up without announcement, and then we broke off into other topics altogether.
Women are especially good at this, psychiatrists Jean Baker Miller and Irene Pierce Stiver point out: they engage in what Miller and Stiver call “connective” conversations—conversations that are uniquely healing, and, unfortunately, critically absent in public discourse. According to Miller and Stiver, connectivity occurs when both people engaged in a conversation are equally invested and share the emotional weight of the conversation’s experience. “Connection in this sense does not depend upon whether the feelings are happy or sad or something else; it means having feelings with another person, aside from the specific nature of the feelings.”14
Conversation with
Hannah was long and easy because we were not necessarily seeking solutions to our problems. In discussing the pleasures and pains of our daily lives, we constructed reality together. I know this is convoluted and theoretical-sounding, so here’s an example. Around the time of this trip, I was going through a particularly rough falling-out with a group of comedians I had been producing shows with for about a year and a half. In the car on the way to the river, Hannah—well acquainted with my fragile emotions on the subject—asked how I was doing in regard to the falling-out. She connected to me by relating my feelings to her own recent interactions with some coworkers. I’ve charted an example on the next page.
The focus on emotion rather than solution drives the conversation and allows things to come out that we may not have been expecting. In the example on the next page, Hannah was having some serious feelings about her relationship with coworker Rory and the ways in which Rory exploited Hannah’s friendship in order to hurt Other Rory. That came up later, and the emotional space then shifted to fit Hannah’s pain and frustration. This kind of conversation is hard to explain in words. Miller and Stiver spend 248 pages trying to do it in their book, and even then, they’re hard-pressed to explain this kind of conversation to people who don’t regularly engage in it (read: most heterosexual cis-gendered men).
One of the things people seem to not be able to understand about connective conversations is why a person would want to engage in them if the conversation isn’t going to solve any problems: “Our society tends to portray and value action as the result of the forceful exertion of the lone individual.”15 I guess this had a lot to do with my childhood belief that it was the job of a good girlfriend to swoop in and solve every problem.
Many Love Page 6
