Control Tower

Loving More

by Mistress Matisse

I went out to dinner the other night and bumped into a friend I don’t see very often. We only spoke briefly, but I saw the curiosity in her eyes. The next day my phone rang.

“Who was that guy you were with last night?”

I smiled to myself. “That was Jake. He’s one of my secondary partners.”

“One of them? How many do you have?”

“Two—Jake and another guy, Roman.”

“And Max is cool with that?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that’s cool,” she said. “But three lovers? That’s a lot to handle. I like the idea of being poly, but I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

I sighed. “Oh honey, believe me, it’s taken me a long time to be ready for it myself.”

I’ve been calling myself “polyamorous” for over 10 years now, but of all my stigmatized identities, being poly was the hardest one to teach myself how to inhabit. From the beginning, I had no inner conflict or sense of guilt over being a sadomasochist, or about being a sex worker, or about having sex with women. I never lied about those things to any of my lovers—it was all part of who I was, and if you didn’t like it, well, you could hit the road.

But being poly was the weak spot in the boundaries that encircled my identity. I read books about polyamory, and I went to polyamory workshops and support groups and therapists and still, my inner Nice Girl (read: wimpy codependent) just wasn’t sure it was really okay to want to love more than one person at a time. So I’d speak of it to my lovers—but softly, and casually, and when they grew jealous and raged and cried and begged me to love them and only them, the guilt would rise up in my throat and choke me, and I’d give in. I’d cut off my other relationships and be grudgingly monogamous, silently growing more resentful by the day. Sometimes I cheated, but that usually just made me angrier—I hated feeling forced to lie. And before long, my resentment would reach the breaking point and I’d end the relationship.

I’m embarrassed by how many times I repeated this pattern, but I guess it was part of the process, because each time I finally found my voice and said, “No. I love you and I don’t want to hurt you, but this is a part of who I am and I’m not a bad person for wanting to be fully myself,” I believed it a little more. And when my final relationship with a closet-monogamist ended in a firestorm that lasted for months, I emerged from that crucible with the guilt burned out of me. I guess the Nice Girl decided she’d been punished enough, and I haven’t heard from her since.

I don’t think it’s an accident that now I’m with Max, who I adore, and who is the first lover I’ve ever had who completely supports me being poly. I believe that you can say you want this or that in a lover—but if there’s a part of you that’s in conflict about it, you won’t make it a priority, and so you won’t find it.

After building a relationship with Max, I then added Mike, formerly known as the Other Guy. Mike was a sort of low-impact secondary. We had a lot of fun, but our lives didn’t really lay in parallel lines, so our time together was limited, and our emotional involvement not terribly deep. But every time Max smiled and lovingly kissed me goodbye as I left for a date with Mike, I gained a deeper trust in his support of my being poly. And Mike’s unswervingly cheerful acceptance of my primary partnership with Max also helped me regain my trust in the idea that even if I wasn’t someone’s primary partner, I could still be a loving and positive presence in his or her life.

Now I have not one but two new secondary relationships—Jake and Roman. I’m fond of them already, and I expect to grow fonder still over time. It’s a change, and it’s a little scary sometimes. But resisting change is a form of death. Dostoyevsky said, “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” So I feel my desires, and I do still feel the fear sometimes—but I’m doing it anyway.