Many Love

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

  For example, on the previous page you’ll find a list of questions you can ask before you have sex with someone if you want the sex to be good. (Keep in mind that you should answer these questions, too; sex is a two-way street.)

  Importantly, sex is generally (but not always) what separates platonic relationships from romantic ones. And so it should go without saying that sexual compatibility is incredibly important when forming romantic bonds with someone. This is something Dan Savage talks about a lot in his column and on his podcast: while he concedes that “other shit matters, too, of course—stuff like emotional compatibility, similar life goals, being on the same page about kids, etc.,” he emphasizes that basic sexual compatibility is essential. “Its absence will eventually undermine everything else.”4

  When we spoke on the phone, Savage told me that the same is basically true about ideas around relationship structures. “If one person feels like they can’t be in a poly relationship and the other person feels like they have to be, then, well, I’d say that relationship is doomed,” he told me. One of the most wonderful things about polyamory is that it allows you to acknowledge that you will have similarities and differences with the people in your life; maybe the person with whom you’re most sexually compatible isn’t the same person with whom you’re most emotionally compatible, and that’s okay—because you can prioritize both of those people in significant ways. If sex is a major part of your life (it’s a major part of my life), it’s worth knowing a little about what you want so that you can put it on the table when you start to enter into new partnerships.

  It took me a while to figure all this out. The people I casually (and not-so-casually) dated bore the brunt of my sexual exploration, and they did it with aplomb. By the time I called myself a polyamorist, I knew that I liked a little more kink than most of the people I’d slept with did. I had my feelers out for someone who owned ropes and knew how to use them.

  I met Bob at a summer arts camp where we both worked. I’d been seeing my partner Luke for almost a year at that point, and Bob was the first new person I was interested in since the beginning of my and Luke’s time together. Integrating Bob into my love life wasn’t easy; there were a lot of conversations and a lot of jealousy, but I’d like to fast-forward to the good part, just for the purposes of sexual exploration. I’ll get back to the superfun jealousy stuff later, I promise.

  Bob and I talked about sex as soon as we started kissing. We wrote long emails to each other about sex that were almost clinical at first, asking questions like a med-school student trying to impress a doctor. I went back through our email threads while writing this book and found so much that impresses me. At one point I wrote, “An erection is not necessary for a great time; I’ve come to be one of those people who thinks there’s too much pressure on penetrative sex, and that it can be kind of a downer for both parties.” Great point, Past Sophie! When we had sex for the first time, Bob knew more about what I liked than most of the people I’d dated long-term had. As a result, the sex was very good. It continued to be good. Actually, it only got better.

  Luke and I communicated about sex, too—a lot. We also had tremendously good sex. But there were some fundamental sex-communication questions that Luke and Bob each answered differently. For example:

  My own answers, if you haven’t already guessed, more closely resembled Bob’s. Before Luke and I had sex for the first time, I asked him what he liked. He told me he liked kissing and rolling around, mostly, but he was “open to other stuff.” Bob, on the other hand, had written me a novel about the kinky, dominant sex acts he had responsibly explored before our own genitals even entered the equation. Having a sexual relationship with Bob allowed me to live out my sexual fantasies with someone I knew was just as into them as I was.

  But let’s go back to Luke’s answers for a minute. There’s really nothing better than being with someone whose biggest turn-on is your pleasure. It’s a dream come true when you find someone who keeps condoms around all the time. It’s amazing when your lover is willing to try whatever it is you’re into. I’m still making up for a young adulthood full of sexual missteps and trauma with a current sex life that’s characterized by constant communication and lots and lots of female orgasms. Yay.

  And it’s not really my fault that I was so misinformed about sex. When I was growing up, sex education—even in Oregon, where laws were more lax—was piecemeal at best. Since the dawn of humanity (I’m guessing), adults have grappled with how to talk to kids about sex. In the 1990s and early ’00s, America underwent a fresh crisis on the subject.

  A Brief History of Hooking Up in America

  1920s: An increase in automobile use leads to an increase in young people dating.

  1940: Emma Goldman, who proclaimed that “marriage and love have nothing in common,” dies, sending notions of free love into relative obscurity for over a decade.

  1960s: The sexual revolution famously terrifies conservative family types.

  1961: Robert A. Heinlein publishes the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, about an alien so put off by sexual possessiveness that he starts his own religion.

  1980s: The AIDS crisis transforms sex into an even greater media villain.

  2002: Meg Meeker publishes Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids, which introduces the (frankly impossible) concept of the “rainbow party”: a get-together where girls allegedly put on different colors of lipstick and then take turns giving the same guy a blow job so their lipstick line might indicate who could go the deepest.

  2009: $50 million in federal funding goes toward abstinence-only sexual education programming.5

  2017: Donald Trump proposes a budget that would devote $277 million to “extend[ing] abstinence education and personal responsibility education programs” between 2018 and 2024.

  These days, schools that offer more extensive programming still almost unilaterally come at sex education from a risk-based point of view. The dominant message is: “If, for some inexplicable reason, like maybe your brain is temporarily taken over by aliens, or maybe you get momentarily bad and rebellious and start listening to the Misfits because all your friends are, you might, maybe, find yourself, terrifyingly, acquiescing to having sex with someone. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen, but in the worst-case scenario—because even airplanes have to have procedures for what you should do if they crash—you ought to know how to use this condom. Keep one condom tucked in a locked pocket of your purse at all times. You definitely won’t need more than one, because if by some horrible circumstance you do have sex, trust us: you won’t want to have it again.”

  But teens keep having sex (surprise, surprise), and college kids especially keep having sex, and the semi-recent rise of dating apps like OkCupid and Tinder have made hookups easier than ever to come by. There have been waves of opinions about this: Vanity Fair called this culture a “Dating Apocalypse,”6 and just a few months later Vogue countered that it was “the biggest NBD ever.”7 There’s been quite a back-and-forth to this effect: terrified parents trumpet the horrors of hookup culture; horny young people tell them to chill out; someone says that hookup culture promotes rape culture; someone else says that saying hookup culture promotes rape culture is antifeminist.

  For me, being able to combine feminist sex on my own terms with meaningful emotional relationships was the witches’ brew that brought me to polyamory. Yes, there was sex. Yes, there was love. Yes, there were more than two consenting adults. And yes, the transition into this kind of model led to the best relationships of my life.

  PART 5

  Many Love

  In my early twenties, I watched long-term relationship after long-term relationship blossom and fall apart in my life. For a long time, I held on to my mom’s ideal of finding “The One,” but it seemed like every “One” consistently faded into “Just Another One.” I began to wonder if this whole head-over-heels-in-love thing was really for me. In order to keep myself protected, I applied “science” to my dating
life. I put “science” in quotes because I mean that I constructed a set of categories, with the input and advice of no one at all, that I felt definitely described all the different kinds of love.

  If I could just avoid the two last and deepest types, I figured I would be safe.

  I’ve always been attracted to the idea that love is ultimately about chemicals, survival, something intrinsic and biological and unavoidable. But, in fact, evolutionarily speaking, love is tricky. We can’t identify another species that definitely experiences it, and it sure causes a lot of trouble without much obvious biological payoff.

  To that effect, my categories served me well. They allowed me to sort through my feelings mathematically, by shape and color. Treating dangerous emotions like so many fishing lures wore the costume of control.

  But my self-assuredness was interrupted in the midst of my dating-around phase when I met a tall, squinty-eyed gardener named Jesse. He cooked wonderful vegetarian shepherd’s pie and actively listened more than he talked. He also knew a lot about insects, which was weirdly hot. I kissed him on the lips in my bedroom one night after dinner, and the next day he showed up on my doorstep to give me a letter that said, among other things, “I think love is just when you want someone else to be happy. So I’m going to write this:”

  This sent my neat little tackle box into a full-on tailspin. I’d known Jesse for less than a week, and he was saying (or, rather, writing) “I love you.” How unorthodox! Leave it to a handsome gardener to throw caution to the wind. I should have known. Had I learned nothing from romance novels?

  That letter, though, was ultimately one of the greatest gifts I would ever receive—and not just because it came bundled with a burned CD of delicate acoustic ballads by under-the-radar singer-songwriters. Although Jesse and I went on to have a somewhat fraught romance, that notion—that “love” could be simply “want[ing] someone else to be happy”—lingered. The letter popped into my head years later when I was reading an article in Glamour magazine about commitment. It was titled “Men and Commitment: By the Numbers,” and was basically the results of a survey of a thousand men who gave their thoughts and feelings about “commitment,” in this case meaning “long-term monogamy.”

  You’ve heard that before, right? “When is he going to commit?” “I’m committed, so what’s holding him up?” “Now that you’ve locked him down with that ring, you know he’s committed.” But if I got to choose between being with someone who told me about the feelings he or she might be having for another person or being with someone who felt obligated to lie to me about those feelings, I would not only choose the former, I’d argue that the former was more committed.

  The colloquial definitions of “love” and “commitment” have to be flexible in order to accommodate different types of relationships. It’s not ultimately necessary that we all share the same definitions of these words; it’s only necessary that we know what they can mean for ourselves, and that we constantly reevaluate what they mean. Humans change all the time; our definitions are allowed to change with us.

  My definition of “commitment” was changing when I read that article in Glamour; at the time, I was in what I felt was the most committed relationship I’d ever had—and, incidentally, the first officially polyamorous one. After reading the article, I took to my blog and unloaded: “This relationship, for the first time in my life, is about taking care of myself and loving myself first and foremost; then trusting that [he] will do the same for himself; and then working together to build support and recognize not only each other, but the other people we are seeing. At the end of the day, being in my own ‘monogamish’ relationship feels like a pretty big commitment. It feels like I have a partner who is invested in his own happiness, just as he is invested in mine (and vice versa). That means being honest about what we want, and trusting each other to talk about it.”1

  The relationship was with a man named Jaedon. We met while I was substitute teaching at a New Orleans elementary school. We went on a few dates, and, although he was a full six years younger than me (and we were in our midtwenties, so that mattered), I fell in love with him.

  I didn’t mean to do that. I’d been battling this being-in-love-with-people thing for a long time and couldn’t understand why it kept following me around. No matter how much I insisted that I “didn’t want anything serious” or was “only interested in being a third,” I kept finding myself falling in love—and more than that, finding that the love was reciprocated! Every time this happened, I freaked out. Post-Sam, if you recall, I’d decided that I was not looking for love. So when someone told me they loved me, I tended to distance myself, cry a lot, and ultimately say something like, “Sorry, but this isn’t working for me.” Or, worse, I would treat the person I loved like shit until they said “Sorry, but this isn’t working for me.” Why did I keep falling in love? I didn’t know. I felt dysfunctional.

  So when I fell in love with Jaedon, I hadn’t meant to, but I also wasn’t surprised. This time, though, I decided to try a new tactic: rather than running away from Jaedon, screaming, “I CAN’T DO THIS I AM A MONSTER I HATE LOVE NEVER TALK TO ME AGAIN” (or some version of that), I said to him, “What do you think about being in a polyamorous partnership?” He said he was into it, and that that was just what he wanted. This was going to be great! And so we decided to try.

  We made rules. We didn’t write them down, because they were simple: you had to tell the other person if you were going to go on a date; the other person had the right to veto; and if you were going to have a slutty one-time hookup, it was okay if you told the other person right afterward instead of right before.

  There were typical, to-be-expected hiccups. I use the term “hiccups” here to mean “violent jealousy.” I started dating other people first, and I chose someone Jaedon had gone to college with. When I called Jaedon to ask him if it would be okay for me to go out on a date with this guy,

  I went on the date anyway, and we had a fun make-out. Afterward, Jaedon and I conversationally processed the whole ordeal for at least three hours. “Processing” is probably the most important word in most early polyamorous relationships. It’s a euphemism that refers to what people do when they know they shouldn’t be mad, but everything in their body is telling them to be mad. I would love to tell you that Jaedon and I got to a place where processing took less time, but we never did. On the other hand, I do think we processed things very civilly. We never yelled at each other, and we didn’t interrupt each other, either. We listened, reflected, empathized, took long breaths, rescheduled appointments to “honor this conversation,” and had reassuring after-processing sex over and over again. In fact, these conversations were at the center of why I felt that we were so committed to each other. They took a long time, and they were utterly respectful. As I listened to Jaedon and argued with Jaedon, I thought, “I have never loved someone as much as I do this person right now.”

  Our romantic relationship was wonderful, but it didn’t last forever. One night a few months in, Jaedon and I were playing on Tinder side by side on a couch (what a fun couple we were!), and a guy appeared on my screen whom I had had a crush on for years. He was a guy I’d referred to for a long time as “the guy,” in italics, because I didn’t know his name. We were in tangential friend circles but had never met. He seemed like the kind of person who would have a girlfriend (read: he was SUPERhot), so I never mustered the courage to introduce myself to him. One time I saw him at the school where I taught (I later found out that he worked for an education nonprofit) and followed him around for a good fifteen minutes, trying to no avail to engage him in aggressive eye contact. He was my hunky, faraway New Orleans crush, and here he was on my Tinder screen, which implied that he did not have a girlfriend and that he would maybe date me.

  “Holy shit, Jaedon, it’s the guy—the one I’ve been stalking for years!” I showed my phone to Jaedon so he could see the guy (Tinder informed me that his name was Luke).

  “Oh, yeah,” Jaedon said.
“That’s my boss.” (THAT WAS HIS BOSS!? WHAT?! New Orleans is a very small city.) He paused. “You should swipe right.” The tone of Jaedon’s “You should swipe right” was not wholly convincing. While I could tell that he wouldn’t have a problem with me swiping right, I could also tell that he wasn’t thrilled that I’d referred to this guy as the guy. I couldn’t blame him. Had the tables been turned—had Jaedon found a spectacular woman on Tinder whom he’d had a crush on for years and who was also my boss—I would have been nauseated. But, see, this was the guy. I swiped right.

  This is the moment people who are trying out polyamory for the first time are simultaneously terrified of and excited about: the moment when someone in the relationship really falls for someone else for the first time. In theory, this moment is fine; in fact, it’s terrific! This is the moment when you get to show how cool you are about everything; you get to demonstrate that, yeah, you can totally love two people at one time, or you can absolutely be happy for your partner to love two people at one time, or you are utterly excited about going on a three-way date with a person you and your partner just met at a party. In practice, at least for me and for the people I’ve loved, this moment is secretly stomach-turning and terrifying and exhilarating. Your body revolts against your mind; you want to feel chill and laid back, but instead you get a whole mess of emotions you didn’t ask for.