You may be wondering why there’s a picture of rocking chairs from Cracker Barrel. I’ll get there so you can understand why. But first, we need to start 15 years ago.
It was 2005, I was 21 years old and was engaged to the woman of my dreams. I was so excited, but despite my outward confidence, inside I was scared. I remember all of the adults in my life asking me “Are you sure? The rest of your life is a long time!” And I would say things like “I’ve never been more sure about anything in my life.” I was lying. I wasn’t sure. I had always struggled with commitment and I thought the only way to fix it was to just commit. When you’re scared of spiders, you push past your fears and hold the tarantula, right? Marriage was my tarantula and I was ready to hold it.
As we’re growing up and learning about relationships we’re taught that if we truly love someone we will not have feelings for someone else. It’s taught as a fact and anybody that deviates is just simply a slimeball of a human. While dating my fiance I had feelings for someone else. This meant that I was one of those slimeball humans. This “other” person existed in my life as a close friend and someone I talked to regularly. I had known her for several years and we were close. Even though I never “cheated” on my fiance with this friend, I felt like a piece of shit for loving my friend in a more-than-friend way while I was engaged to be married.
It’s 2006 and I get married. My feelings for my childhood friends should now cease, right? Boy was I wrong. Sometimes I would lay in bed wondering to myself “Am I really never going to get to connect with another person on a deep intimate level for the rest of my life?” and it made me sad and scared. It was a weight I carried in the world of monogamy. I was confused because I loved my wife a lot. I was attracted to her, we had fun together and I was happy with her. Why in the world would I have feelings for anyone else. I just kept telling myself I was broken and I had commitment issues. I would tear myself down and tell myself that if my brain worked like it was supposed to I would be perfectly happy.
Little did I know I was a square peg trying to be put into a round hole. Those late night thoughts of not being able to connect with another human manifested as a symptom of indifference. My wife could have broken up with me at any time and I would be perfectly fine. I obviously didn’t subscribe to the “There’s only one fish in the sea.” mentality.
I sit on all of these heavy feelings for 5 years but I continue to stay faithful and persever. It’s now 2010 and we are divorced. It didn’t end because of monogamy but because we got married too young. I wasn’t sad and I didn’t even cry. I told people I was sad because I thought that’s how I should feel and how they would expect me to feel. The truth is, the emotion at the forefront was relief. Only now can I look back and see that I was finally let out of my cage of monogamy and relief overshadowed any grief. Marriage was so uncomfortable for me that I swore I was never ever getting married again.
It’s 2011 and someone new comes into my life. I told them from early on that I had no interest in getting married again and I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted. Despite that I still found myself on the normal relationship escalator and was soon deeply entwined in monogamy again. I had a lot of the same feelings of indifference as I did in my marriage. Sometimes finding myself hoping my partner would leave me. I thought I was incapable of envisioning a future with anyone. Maybe I was going to just end up alone in a van down by the river for the rest of my life.
It’s now 2015 and we are sitting in front of the TV scrolling through documentaries available on netflix. Like most couples scrolling through netflix, we had no idea what we wanted to watch. We decided we were in the mood for a documentary. We went back and forth about which ones we wanted to watch but ultimately we landed on a documentary about polyamory. I had never heard of this “polyamory” thing but we gave it a go. It’s not even 15 minutes into it and.
My. Brain. Exploded.
I’ve obviously heard of swinging before. That concept is pretty prevalent and well known in our culture. As a demisexual that’s not really something that ever interested me. I wanted something much deeper than that. I was watching these people have deep meaningful relationships with more than one person and I was learning the language for that.
It’s the next day and I open my browser on my computer and type in the word “Polyamory”. The topic quickly consumed me. One of the first things I found was a TED Talk on polyamory. I found an amazingly insightful polyamory comic called Kimchi Cuddles that was both education and entertaining. The deeper I plunged into learning, the more I started to not see myself as broken, but just wired differently. I started to see that society was trying to put me in a box I didn’t belong. Most importantly, it meant I wasn’t broken or a slimeball of a human being. My partner and I then had the daunting task of converting an established monogamous relationship into a polyamorous one. I’ll spare you the gruesome details of that endeavor and just tell you we broke up a couple of years later.
It’s post documentary and I now have the luxury of starting off all of my future relationships under the pretense of polyamory. No more trying to fit into the box of monogamy that made me feel bad about myself. I could now love someone fully and still keep my heart and mind open to making other connections. Something really insane happened to me one day along my polyam journey. I did something that I thought I was completely incapable of. It happened so fast and was so arbitrary that it took me by surprise and I was completely overwhelmed with emotion. It was a beautiful spring morning in 2018. I was sitting on the patio of a Cracker Barrel with my partner. I looked over and saw an elderly couple sitting in rocking chairs and holding hands. It made my heart happy and it was really adorable. I looked at my partner and pointed to the sweet elderly couple and I said “That’s going to be us one day.” (Of course I added “With our other partners, too.” because Kitchen Table Poly FTW). She looked at me like she couldn’t believe what I just said. We had been dating for over a year and I never talked about a future together. Did I just imagine a future with someone? What is happening? Is this what it feels like to not be indifferent? We laughed and joked about this milestone for me. However, I’ll never forget it and neither will my partner. We even took a picture of that special day so we could remember. Here is the day that I was no longer afraid of commitment.
