How my partner and I made it through our toughest year, thanks to his other lover
As we stood on the dance floor, I said I didn’t think Julian and I would stay together until the end of the year. It was October so this was more my way of declaring the relationship’s finality than a true sense of uncertainty. I recited the argument that I had been formulating for months, “We’re too different. I love him, but we want different things,” I said, leaving little room for debate. “At one time I thought we balanced each other out, but now I feel like our differences are too much. All we do is fight. I trigger him, he triggers me. I can’t take it anymore.” Nora looked me in the eyes. “He’s a king,” she said definitively. “You know it. There’s no one like him.”
I did know it, but more important to me was that she knew it.
Have you ever had that feeling when you meet someone and almost instantaneously it becomes difficult to imagine your life without that person? That was Nora for me. When I met her we bonded over a shared vision of finding freedom within romantic relationships. At that time I had been in an open relationship with Julian for three and a half years (and living together for three of them). I talked to her about the ways we managed to create a polyamorous relationship in a monogamous world. She shared her history of being in intensely intertwined monogamous relationships and her newfound desire to explore polyamory. One day she expressed an interest in going on a date with Julian and like a giddy school-girl I told him as soon as I got home.
After dating Julian for over a year she was able to see him in the way that I saw him. His kingliness was something hard to describe but easily felt. Nora felt it to her core and was shocked that I lost that perspective. She saw clearly and I needed her eyes.
Nora was able to cut through all of the layers that accumulated every time Julian and I bickered and fought. While we only saw those layers, she was able to remind us of what was underneath. Was Julian the man who snapped at me? Was he the person who made me feel like I never did enough? Was he controlling and an embodiment of many traits of masculinity that I’ve come to despise? She believed that he was all those things to me at certain points in time. She understood how painful it was for me and she agreed that I deserved more. But she also believed in him and in us and through her proximity to the both of us she knew that our partnership was something special.
Nora often quotes Forrest Landry in saying, “love is that which enables choice.” This might seem ironic in the context of this story. Wasn’t she limiting my choices by suggesting that I stay with Julian? Maybe if I walked through the exit door I would find someone even better for me on the other side. Perhaps. But that’s not the only way to understand the act of enabling choice. If “enable” means to “give someone the means to do something” Nora believed that’s precisely Julian’s greatest strength. Through dating him she understood his unique ability to be an enabler in all the best of ways — to support us in our lives work and to never let his insecurities limit our ability to find love with others. She felt that if he could love me so profoundly then there was little doubt that we could work through this difficult moment.
When I had spoken to other mutual friends they also encouraged me to work out my issues with Julian. But I needed someone who ‘got it’ because they could relate to it in ways that a mutual friend couldn’t possibly understand. I needed Nora. I needed her as my friend who wants the best for me, but more importantly, I needed her as Julian’s partner.
If it wasn’t for her, Julian and I wouldn’t be together today. Only 10 months later and it feels crazy for me to think that I would have given up on us. I often wonder about how many relationships end because they lose sight of the person they fell in love with. What happens to couples when the everyday pressures of being a human get multiplied by 2? What do we do when the constant negotiation required of being in a relationship starts to weigh on us because we are feeling unappreciated? What happens when we feel the other person pulling away and it triggers all of our deepest insecurities propelling us to behave in ways that push them even farther?
Dominant culture today is so focused on feeling good that we often forget about how hard it is to love one another. Love as an act of enabling choice does not mean to increase possibilities ad infinitum. It means supporting each other in ways that allow us to get in touch with and act on what we truly want. It sounds easy, but it’s not. We live in a world where we are not just alienated from our own desires, but we are limited by the material conditions around us. Structural forms of discrimination heavily shape our choices, providing infinite paths to some and only a few to others.
How can we create the conditions and social relations that can afford *all* people the ability to choose what’s right for them? In other words, how do we achieve liberation? This is the question that drives my work as an activist. Often, when I say that we need to replace the systems that are limiting us, such as capitalism, people tell me that I’m too idealistic. But as feminists have taught us, the personal is political. I know we can radically transform society because I see it every day from polyamorous people practicing a type of love that is not based on ownership and exclusivity, but rather mutualism and reciprocity.
I know it when I see people all around me doing the really hard work of unlearning the social norms and beliefs that keep us divided and building new social relations and ideologies in their place. Polyamorous people have even had to create a new language to describe their alternative way of being. When our partner is with another person we practice “compersion” which is the feeling of joy associated with seeing a loved one love another. For us, our partner’s partner is a “metamour,” someone who is intimately part of our community and sphere of concern; this definition could not be any further from that of a “mistress,” which connotes a secret lover. (Of course, historically women have been the only ones forced to be monogamous, so there is no word for the male equivalent of a “mistress.”)
I know that a new world is possible when I see polyamorous women completely break apart the expectations of how women should exist in relation to other women. Nora is not my competitor, she’s a core part of what makes my relationship with Julian work so well. She’s able to provide him with things that I can’t or simply don’t want to, such as their shared love for deep house music and her ability to converse with him in French. I get comfort in knowing that I don’t have to be his everything and he doesn’t have to be mine. When she fulfills his needs in the ways that I can’t he’s a happier person, which makes him a happier partner to me. And in addition to keeping us together when we were on the verge of breaking up, her relationship with Julian has allowed me the space to explore my other relationships more deeply. When she said “I love you” for the first time to Julian, I was also saying it for the first time with my other partner.
While the scale of our love is small, the effect of this form of liberation is not. Together Nora and I have found harmony and fulfillment in ways that seemed impossible before living it. Through taking love seriously we’ve been able to create a new world within the old one and have shown that we are capable of so much more than what we are conditioned to believe.
