Many Love

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

  After a year of dating and dating other people and processing the dating of other people, Jaedon and I decided to “transition out of a primary partnership.” This was different from a regular breakup in that we didn’t fight about it, really. It was more like a formal, peaceful secession agreement cautiously signed by leaders of a formerly united country. When I tell people about this now, I say that it was easy, that it went off without a proverbial hitch. But, of course, that’s not true. We may not have fought, but we did spend hours and hours sitting in parked cars and on couches talking about feelings. I cried a lot. Human beings don’t like change, and even though I could theoretically transition out of a relationship with Jaedon, actually not being with him broke my heart.

  For example, Jaedon and I had started watching Twin Peaks together, and we hadn’t finished it. We’d agreed early on—as couples who are adopting serial television watching habits will do—not to watch it independently of each other. Had this been a clean, normal, textbook breakup, all bets would have obviously been off around the subject of watching more episodes of Twin Peaks. But this was not that. Hanging out together during this transitional time was painful for both of us, but we were mutually obtuse about our insistence on staying friends. So did I continue to save Twin Peaks for my non-boyfriend-but-still-friendly-friend Jaedon?

  Although this was confusing (understatement), it was also at the center of my interest in polyamory. Where are the lines between “romantic partner” and “friend”? I’m interested in a kind of fluidity—love among friends and partners and family members that resists definition and distorts traditional ideas about priority. Once, on a trip home to Portland from college with one of my long-term, monogamous boyfriends (Rory), I texted Jessica (remember Jessica?) to hang out. I asked her if it was okay if Rory came along, and she said, “I’d rather just spend some quality time with you.” At first I thought that this was an absurd request. “If you’re going to love me, you’re going to have to love him,” I thought. I believed I was going to be with this guy forever; I wanted my high school best friend to know who he was. Annoyed, I acquiesced, and we met for jam scones at the shopping center between our houses. In fact, we spent three hours together; I lost track of time with Jessica, just as I had done when we were in high school, before there were any boyfriends, when our time was informal and easy and unwound in the most comfortable and pleasurable way time can.

  Prioritizing my friendship with Jessica over my relationship with Rory felt unnatural. I’d grown up believing that romantic partnership trumped all the other friendships there were. As a result, I often got frustrated with my romantic partners for not being able to provide what my friends could—long, bubbly conversations about Ben Folds Five; long, serious conversations about childhood emotional trauma; or honest-but-friendly advice about what to wear to a costume party. It took a while for me to understand that I could have both kinds of relationships in my life; the important thing was that I actively prioritize each of them.

  My relationship with Jaedon gave me so much. He was interested in academic theories, stories, and philosophies, which reminded me of my family and my childhood dinner-table conversations. He and I both had experience in the professional performing scene (mine was mostly in comedy; his was in Greek theater). He listened well. We both taught at the same school, so we could discuss other teachers and class sizes and administrative changes. He was kind to me, and he often said just what I needed to hear when I felt small. I believe—based on the letters we exchanged and the late nights we spent unable to stop talking—that I gave a lot to Jaedon, too.

  It was painful to lose the things that came with our relationship. When you’re in a partnership with someone, you tend to default to your partner when the weekend rolls around and it’s time to make plans. Partnerships allow for you to order a whole pizza on a Wednesday night and eat half of it without experiencing any guilt. I liked sleeping next to Jaedon. He had a very sweet, curled-up way of sleeping that reminded me of videos of kittens. I liked sitting side by side with him, writing in my journal and listening to the Bad Plus. I liked his parents, and I liked visiting his family in Connecticut. These were activities specific to our partnership—perks that ran out when we downgraded to the less intense “friendship only” package.

  The loss was also illuminating, because it helped me see how deeply and naturally I had fallen into familiar patterns of exclusivity. (See the paragraph above.) I had wanted polyamory to mean that I could float between partners fluidly, loving each person differently but equally, varying my respective intensity with the weather. You know how when you’re watching someone who’s very skilled at yoga do some kind of crazy, upside-down pretzel pose, it looks sort of easy? Like, the person is smiling and maybe their eyes are closed, and you think to yourself, “I bet I could do that.” But then you go to actually try the pose and don’t even know where to start. You bend your legs and fold in your belly, but no matter what you do, you end up a pancake on the floor. I assumed that entering into a polyamorous relationship would be relatively easy; I understood the logic of it and saw other people doing it. But faced with its reality, I fell. At first, I was too used to the motions of making big promises (“I’ll be with you forever”) and claims (“You’re the only one I really love”) that I couldn’t keep and that weren’t completely true. I knew how to make a person happy in the short term, but I was unprepared for what it meant to be honest about my feelings around a relationship all the time (“I need some space, to tell you the truth”; “I want to spend Saturday with Hannah”). Polyamory asks its participants to be self-aware and to constantly examine their priorities. While that’s exhausting, I find it also to be a beautiful exercise in honesty—an exercise that, with time, becomes natural practice.

  Ultimately, I decided to not finish Twin Peaks without Jaedon. Friends watch TV together all the time, and I hoped there would be a time in our lives when we would be able to pick it up again.

  One of the greatest gifts of my partnership with Jaedon was the absence of anger when the relationship changed. There was sadness, and pain, and hurt—the normal stuff that comes with change. But I think we both left the partnership unscarred. Not unchanged, but without the trauma, the scabs, the ugly remnants most breakups leave behind. We still talk on the phone once every few months or so.

  Three months into my relationship with Luke, he invited me to run the children’s section of the French festival he coordinated. First of all, the guy coordinated a French festival. I’m not a Francophile or anything, but it’s very attractive to me when people are capable of coordinating things. I find it difficult to coordinate an outfit; there’s no way I could coordinate a whole festival. I’d agreed to volunteer because I wanted to spend all my free time with Luke. We stood in his dim kitchen and filled water balloons for “the storming of the Bastille”—apparently a lighthearted annual fixture of the festival.

  My job was to run the Bastille, or, as it was colloquially known, the “kids’ area.” We covered a play structure in the local park where the festival took place with white parchment paper and poured watered-down tempera paint into plastic cups. The kids at the festival were supposed to transform the play structure into a castle over the course of the day with paint and imagination. I tried to implement rules around this activity for approximately twelve minutes before giving in to the impossibility of the task. The dozens of children—some as young as two years old, some as impossible-to-boss-around as eleven—reduced my sorted paint system to anarchy, combining all the colors into a massive brown blob in the grass. They did this with a gleeful recklessness that I could only respect. Granted, had I been a parent of any of those kids, I would have been pissed about how the Bastille was managed. No one escaped unscathed.

  Luke, however, thought everything was going just the way it was supposed to. He loved the brown blobs of paint; he loved the messy, screaming kids. “You’re doing great,” he said, and then he disappeared to wire the sound system on a small festival stage near
by. I saw him fuss with a convoluted nest of wires and watched as the singer on stage, who had been silenced by a useless microphone, suddenly heard her voice amplified. I heard her say to Luke, “Oh, thank God. You’re an angel.” I’m not completely sure why this was the moment I knew I loved Luke, but I think it had to do with his priorities (there’s that word again): here was a person who was more interested in joy and fun and mess than he was in rules or order or neatness. At 5:00 p.m. he hauled plastic crates of water balloons to the play structure. He gave me about ten balloons; the rest went to the kids.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said. “Sort of.”

  Everything after that was a swirl of candy-colored rubber exploding everywhere, and water in my nose canal. After it was all done, I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who had put me in a position to spend a crazy-hot Saturday being attacked by thrilled children armed with water balloons.

  But I didn’t tell him. “I love you” freaks people out. Would he say it back? And remember: this was while I was still in a relationship with Jaedon. Did I have to tell Jaedon that I wanted to tell Luke that I loved him? I thought it would probably be prudent, but I didn’t want to. So I held on to it for a few months, until the feeling of love was too much to bear. Like a true hero with guts of steel, I decided I would declare my love to Luke via Facebook Messenger:

  * * *

  I want to tell you that I love you. I know that those are words relationships are scared of, but I do love you, and I also believe life is too short not to tell the people you love that you love them. I actually love you kind of a lot.

  * * *

  I immediately regretted sending this message. It wasn’t the same as reading the cues over the course of a romantic night and feeling the feeling of “I love you” and saying it cinematically.

  Within moments, Luke messaged back:

  * * *

  I LOVE YOU TOO!

  * * *

  I really do.

  * * *

  I was thinking about it last night.

  * * *

  I can’t wait to say it out loud.

  * * *

  And then he added:

  * * *

  Also, are you trying to build some sort of case to show that people can be in happy/intimate relationships despite things like Tinder and Facebook Messaging?

  * * *

  He had a good point. I felt embarrassed about this then, but I’m glad for it now, because I have primary relationship documents that can be used in a research context. That’s a big win for me. I also think I’m in a growing population of people who feel cooler, more articulate, and infinitely better at flirting in a text format than in person. I imagined that Luke imagined I was sitting at a chestnut desk wearing a beret and sipping one of those horrible tiny espressos cool people sip. (How do they even do that? An espresso is a single sip, period.)

  Saying “I love you” changes everything. Maybe that’s its real translation. “I love you,” read as: “I want everything to change now.” Like I said: it’s worthwhile to constantly reevaluate the meanings of important words in order to get the most out of relationships. In our case, “I love you” allowed Luke to call me whenever he drove to Baton Rouge for work (which was often); it let me occasionally name him as my plus-one at events; it stretched the boundaries around what permissible Christmas presents were.

  Six months later, after Jaedon and I had stopped seeing each other romantically and after Luke and I had spent hours discussing apartments and the possibility of someday getting cats, I rented a moving truck. I’d decided to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Luke was coming with me.

  Traversing the country in a sixteen-foot moving truck between New Orleans and Chicago required a lot—a lot of money, a lot of time packing and lifting and loading and unloading boxes, a lot of emotional energy, a lot of emotional time. When I say “emotional time,” I’m talking about the way time expands inside the space of real work. The moving day was probably the longest one of my life.

  I couldn’t imagine doing any of this by myself. Luke drove the entire way; he pulled expertly into an Indian restaurant right outside Memphis at dinnertime, about halfway along the route. He remembered to pack the mattress and the wineglasses last, because he knew we would need only a bed and a glass of wine when we walked into our new apartment at close to midnight. Luke had found the apartment on the Internet, and he called the guy to secure it, and he’d spent the past several months taking daily virtual Google Maps strolls down our new street, so he knew right where the 7-Eleven was. I wasn’t a damsel in distress here—I’d organized the route, and we’d needed my credit card to rent the truck—but it wasn’t a one-person job.

  This was not the first time I understood partnership. I’d felt this feeling with my roommates over the course of our cohabitation. There was always someone who could be at home when we needed to call a plumber; if one person was short with their rent, another person could make it up this month; when parents came to visit, the bathroom scrubbing and sink disinfecting could be divvied up. (That last one isn’t really true. It should have been true, but Hannah always cleaned everything. I didn’t really know how to clean until after I’d lived with her and observed her for several years.) A lot has been said on the functionality of mutualism, but the greatest benefit is absolutely emotional. Partnership implies a support system that reveals itself in times of peril—like when Hannah and Derek peeled me off the floor in the wake of my breakup with Sam and put me to bed. And for the record: yes, it was difficult to leave Hannah and Derek and our weekly family dinners, but we’d recently had to move into a smaller house, and it was beginning to feel a bit too small for three people. (I did sob uncontrollably in the moving truck at hour thirteen, when it hit me just what I was leaving behind. Luke was patiently sympathetic. I still cry sometimes from missing Hannah so much.)

  I had throbbing-cocoon syndrome. I was ready to move forward.

  The drive was a million hours long, and it was mostly past cornfields. Every once in a while there would be a big-seeming bird on an IHOP billboard, but it would invariably be something boring, like a crow. There wasn’t a radio or a CD player in the truck. Luke put his intermittently working boom box in the front seat, and we listened repeatedly to the mixtapes he’d made me. We exhausted the topics of road food, the imminently imploding love lives of our mutual friends, and houseplants. Eventually, it was time for us to speak at some length about our relationship.

  I decided to say that I didn’t really want to be in any relationships outside my primary partnership with Luke. In retrospect, this was manipulative. When I said, “I’m satisfied with our relationship right now; I’m not going to pursue things with anyone else,” I meant, “It would be an asshole move on your part to date other people, because I’m dedicated to you. At least for now. At least until something interesting comes along.” I expected Luke to react to my proposal of monogamy-for-the-time-being with relief. “Oh, yeah, me, too. Good,” he was supposed to say.

  But Luke told me that that didn’t sound like a polyamorous relationship to him.

  And, of course, he was right. So we practiced. We continue to practice—usually sloppily, but somewhat consistently—to this day.

  PART 6

  Jealousy

  I’m into the idea of polyamory, and I believe in it wholeheartedly. I’m in a polyamorous relationship with a person I really love and trust. But despite all that, I still get jealous. What do I do about my jealousy?

  Versions of this question came up four times during a taping of a Dan Savage podcast Luke and I attended.

  We leaned forward a little when those questions were asked. Savage sort of floundered with them, though. His answers ranged from “Jealousy is a normal emotion to feel in situations like these, and it’s fine to feel that way as long as you don’t act out because of it” to “I don’t know, yeah, jealousy is hard.” While a question like “What do I do when my boyfriend can’t get an erection?” comes with a
n arsenal of sexy things to try and self-accepting phrases to repeat and practice, “What do I do when I’m jealous?” leaves most of us feeling a little uneasy.

  When I talked on the phone with Savage, I asked him to extrapolate a little on the subject of jealousy. I hoped he would go on the record with some thoughts about what people who wanted to try polyamory but felt too jealous might do.

  “Jealousy isn’t necessarily this terrible thing,” Savage told me. “It feels awful, but it doesn’t have to destroy a relationship. Most people get jealous; I’m in an open relationship and I get jealous; Terry gets jealous; it’s normal. What matters is the process of talking about that feeling, and different people have different capacities for handling it. If jealousy is a bomb that’s just constantly going off, if it’s going to explode and hurt the relationship, hurt the people in your life, then polyamory may not be for you. But if jealousy is something you’re able to defuse through communication and processing, then it can actually help your relationship.”

  David M. Buss, a self-proclaimed expert on the evolution of human sexuality, writes that jealousy is necessary. There’s an underlying assumption in his book The Dangerous Passion that infidelity is terrible, and that participation in infidelity indicates that a person’s love for “his mate” has faded. Buss does acknowledge polyamory in one paragraph of his book and quotes scholars and advocates for polyamory stating for the record that they think jealousy is bad. He quotes activist Kathy Labriola saying that jealousy is “the biggest obstacle to creating successful and satisfying open relationships.”1 But he ultimately asserts that people who commit themselves to polyamory are not really acknowledging the usefulness of jealousy. Jealousy can be used, for example, to prove to yourself that you’re still emotionally committed to your mate. Jealousy indicates that the feeling of attachment still exists. Since humans have evolved to feel it, it must be useful.