Hey, new guy...

So you wake up and it's all happening.

At the beginning you fail to realize at all, you have the impression you're just getting together with this cute and crazy chick of waist-long hair and no sense of fashion. And who wouldn't? She spills high-brow hip jargon like a broken coffee vendor machine: polyamory, compersion, NRE, non-monogamy, radical honesty, ethical sluttery, threesomes and quads, butterflies and unicorns.

You're all pumped up, need I say more? Your eyes open wide like you're watching a trailer of paradise. Coming this summer: Heaven. "This girl puts the awe in awesome", you think, "she's on fire like an Iraqi oil field during the Gulf War!"

And perhaps it couldn't come at a better time. You've been poly for a while, or so you say. Some five years using the funny word and at least another five trying to do something that was equivalent. “Ready? I was born ready!” But let's be down to earth here: in a decade of dreams, have you learned anything from trying, other than how to fail and survive failure?

Are you really ready, hot shot?

You're gonna get a run for your money, that much I can tell you right now. Your girlfriend, if you can call her that, she follows this blog that's called “Everything begins to make sense”. At the beginning that's you ten times over, “Hell yeah, this is what I'm talking about!” But by the time you hit the first weeks in, this phrase really starts ringing a bell inside your head. Everything begins to make sense. No. No, it's quite the opposite. As a matter of fact, it's the perfect opposite: Everything is stopping to make sense, nothing is making sense anymore.

Reality is decomposing before your eyes.

You feel like a conscript sent to 'Nam. Few months of confined boot camp and then one day they thrown into the Asian jungle just so you can discover the text book was a hundred years old way before you picked it up. Nothing looks like in the exercises, nothing feels like in training. It is all horrifyingly new.

You're not prepared for this, you never were. If you do well, you had it in you, 'cus whatever this is, 'You ain't never seen shit like this before'.

You couldn't blame yourself either, it's just called being mono. You were monogamic 'til yesterday, face it. You were keeping up monogamic relationships because you 'had to', thinking “one day I'm gonna take me a poly girl and poly will be my new name”. But so far you've only been saying that on Facebook. You know you can be attracted to other women while being very in love with one woman and you think that's as poly as it gets. But that's just mono. Loving any amount of women, different among them, and having mixed and diverse feelings for them, all exceeding friendship, while at the same time being happily in love and in a stable relationship with one woman you 'had to get together with' reluctantly, is still just what every other monogamic person on the planet can do and often does. Many monogamists will deny this, but they do so to reassure themselves about the impossibility of such identical feelings popping up in their partners' hearts, which would threaten the relationship and themselves. The truth of the matter is, however, that everybody can love many. Not everybody can share.

But you know this, don't you, cowboy? You've read the manual, you know how it works. “No panic,” you tell yourself, “it's all cool”.

Then you look into her eyes and you realize that if done right, this could be the biggest thing you've ever put together, the brightest star in your night sky. And if you don't, you won't have anybody to blame but yourself. There will be no evil ex coming back from the grave to snatch you away, no better looking, bigger-cocked stud to make her think twice about you, and no passive-aggressive fits of jealousy to gut the relationship either. Hell this is not even about her, about losing or keeping 'amazing her'. That's why the people that fail at poly don't just call it a day and go home. They go fucking postal, and they go postal because that sad little trembling figure in the center of the stage... is you. If you fail, it will be one of your biggest failures ever. Ever! And if that doesn't make your stomach turn, then just take another look at her, her deep eyes and soft skin, her wide smile and cat-like demeanor, and you'll be dashing for the toilet in panic.

You fuck this one up, and it'll haunt you. But hey, at least you couldn't say I didn't warn you.

I'm Léu, and I'm the new guy,
happy polymers.

This time Mr. Monogamy doesn't win

I’m standing still, staring at the monitor. My fingers feel cramped.

My eyes see the lines of our chat sliding while you write, but the brain doesn’t record the words that are trying to reach me like an annoying background noise on the side of my eye.
A sudden drop of attention. It can happen, especially to me when I’m forced to listen to a boring talk. Or when I’m tired. Or when what I feel hurts me and I try to push it aside.
If you were here, you would be explaining to me that our relationship has to change because you’re unhappy like this, because when you love somebody you don’t need anyone else, bla, bla,   bla...
Need. As if people got together for need...Bullshit! What does that mean? It’s clear that I don’t need others, I don’t need you, what’s the meaning of that? I’m with you because I like you, not because I NEED you... As usual I’m not listening, I dissect the words and their use, dodging their meaning, pretending that I’m listening. Or maybe I’m listening, but pretending I’m not. I’m not here. I forgot what I feel. It hurts too much.


“Please, don’t leave me” cries the little girl inside me, curled up on her stomach.
Yes, yes, it’s all right, I knew this would happen, sooner or later. It’s just...I was hoping for the “later”. I didn’t realize that, for you, the time for us to part ways had arrived a long time ago. I’m brooding over “what I did wrong”... I should have given you more attentions, listening to you more, visiting you more. Who knows, maybe if I concentrated on you more I would have lengthened our time together, maybe I would have gained some more of your free week-ends, if you would have had any more. But I was selfish and I had little time and energy to dedicate to you. I’m not good enough at listening to and understanding the needs of the people I love, yet .  
You, however, explained even too clearly what your needs are: you can’t be with a girl that will not give up other men for you.


Would giving up Moreno for you make me happy? No, I would be losing two people I love at once, since I would end up hating you and feeling trapped. Once again I’m divided between the usual dilemma: is it me that’s not [insert adjective here] enough for you, or is it you the idiot that’s rejecting me because he doesn’t understand? Because he wants to control and shackle me?
It’s useless trying anymore: I’m poly, you’re mono. End of line.

Most of the people, out there, doesn’t even know people like us exists. The few who are trying to be informed, get distorted information from ironic jokes, and prejudices, or they filter that themselves, in an interpretative bricolage given by their own mindset. So the general opinion on polyamory is that it’s a momentary, strange trend, or a modern way to be a slut without problems.


Anyway, what comes through is the “recreational” aspect of being poly, which cannot be considered a serious way of loving and being committed in a relationship! Nobody among this stock of geniouses ever thought about the fact that in a relationship with multilple partners the investment of emotions and energies, and consequently of stress, are multiplied for the number of existing relationships, and so there's really not any fucking “recreational” aspect. Maybe poly people don’t suffer when they split up? What am I complaining about? For every guy that leaves me there there is another one ready to comfort me, right?


No way, I have no idea where to turn to.
“So you’re leaving me...it’s over.”
“Well, leaving...we never really where ‘together’..how do you leave somebody you were never together to begin with?” These are the usual play on words to bring back on earth the fairytales princess, reminder of the fact that we’re not a sweet couple, we never got officially engaged like the classical mono couples. Wake up! You never were my prince charming on a white steed, and horses stink anyway. We, for what concerned you, never existed. How convenient. Do you really believe it, when you say it? Do you rehearse saying it out loud, in front of the mirror in your bedroom, to convince yourself? Of course, you have a mirror in the bathroom only, sorry!


But I noticed how you look at me. You’re not gonna trick me, my dear. I know that the feeling we’re feeling are real, I didn’t make up mine. And neither did you. Can you really turn on and off your love whenever you like, just like flipping a switch? I know I can’t. I can’t close the tap of feelings and emotions that are flowing in and out of me, flooding the room when you’re here. Even when you’re not here. That, is my problem.


And also...if we’re not together, why would we need to change our relationship?
I’m trying to shake myself up, to ease the rage and understand, at a “technical” level, what means being “friends only”. What changes will ensue? I need a sign that you’ll still want to talk to me and that you’ll still care about me. But you’re elusive: you’re exhausted, feverish, and you look a little like an idiot. You want to go to sleep now that you’ve launched this bomb, and leave me alone with my fears.
We’ll talk later.


All I can get from you is a vague “no more sex and such”.  Ok, absorbment  phase: I minimize with stupid jokes, while my brain makes count of which memories of you shall I keep and which shall I flush down the toilet. But I can’t throw anything away. Shit...I close my eyes and I see myself again stuck on a hospital bed, fresh from a surgery, just out from anestesy, with a dry throat.
An hand genly puts a weth cloth on my lips and I suck it avidly, still half asleep. A light laugh comes from you, “hey, easy!”, you retreat the hand and you lightheartedly make fun of me.
I open my eyes.


My throat is dry but you’re not here. I’m alone in a little room packed of stuff, pieces of me that I drag around trying not to forget who I am and try not to fall apart.

We cheer and it’s time to go to bed.
I turn uselessly on the bed: sleep doesn’t come. Bad thoughts go adrift in my mind, gripping on rafts of doubts and obsessions. I need to choose. Choose. Choose if I, am the “wrong” one, or if you are.
I get the phone.


I could insult you, tell you to fuck yourself like I did with other monogamous idiots.
Instead I want to beg, despair, to do something extreme. Scream. I think about the past. I think about how much being emotional ended up separating me from the others and isolate me. No, I give up the thought. Better not make stupid mistakes. I set the phone down and turn around.
The little girl is still there, she occupies all the space on my bed.
She adjusts a brace of her salopette pajamas, she snuffles, she sulks.
“I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody. It’s better to be alone anyway.” But tears are welling up in her eyes and she sinks her head in the pillow trying to stop thinking.


Being alone is disgusting.


The sympathy and love of Moreno hardly gets to me: “Would you like me to call you?”.  I look at the reflexes on the ceiling, I dry off the tears. I listen to the city and myself.
Letting him call me...crying on the phone with him for someone else? I can’t do it anymore. Ok being “open”, but unloading on him all my shit does certanly not stabilize our relationship. I already made this mistake in the past and I was even scolded for that later.
I say thanks but no, goodnight my love, I isolate, I turn around the pillow on the dry side and try again. I sweat, undress, shiver, dress up again. I chat a little. I let steam off with a monogamous friend, whom doesn’t have a clue, he can only tell me that my lifestyle won’t make me happy, and that sooner or later everybody will leave me.
Hooray! 


“Even this Moreno, now he is at your side, but for how long?”.
“Fuck you!”. Defrag your brain, evil owl...


For how long? How long? When somebody foretells you that you’ll feel bad, you never know what to believe: if they fear it, or if they hope it, down below, just to feel better than you.
I try to sleep again, but it doesn’t work. The world is upside down and I don’t have a lifejacket.
I’m letting myself go...
In the end I text you. I don’t insult nor do I beg you, but I send you some of my despair. I’m too deep in love to convince myself that you don’t care for me at all, so I point for my other option: feeling inadequate and apologizing to you. Apologizing, yes, but about what? About existing? About not being as you want me? About not self-castrating me just to have the honour of being of your property? I’m getting more and more angry. Arched back and clamped mouth, head on the pillow. My body riots. I don’t have to apologize for who I am! The night goes by between nightmares full of people that abandon me and social workers that take my kids away because I have an “immoral lifestyle”...
The morning after my stress and uneasyness are skyrocketing, self confidence and enthusiasm are at their historical minimum.


Then your message comes:”Stupid girl you know that you’re wonderful”, it’s just that we’re different as you explain to me. Of course, of course...but the result is always the same, I lose you. 
“Well if seeing each other and not having sex means losing each other...”
A little hope...Friendship? True friendship, not that you stop calling me?
None of us two is wrong, then? We’re just DIFFERENT?
I needed you to understand it. Here is the third option I didn’t consider.
And you put me in front of it.

Then, friends!


...as soon as I understand how it works...
:)