polyfucked part II

on knowing what you want and letting go

In polyfucked part I I cast my mind back over two decades of personal romantic history in the making for your viewing pleasure. But also because when assessing the direction I choose for myself from here, I find it particularly useful to look back so that where I came from can inform where I go next, and so I will continue winding my way back to the now in part II.

Looking through the lens of anecdotal memory revealed a certain image of myself to me that I could never have seen back then. Especially those shakier, more vulnerable desires I’d learnt to deny, that became buried secrets to the younger version of me learning to navigate relationships with no reliable blueprint.

Whilst participating in a woofing project on a dilapidated house in Brandenburg, I was gifted a pocket sized, silk covered red notebook from the girl I shared my room with (two mattresses on the floor between desks and bookshelves). I took it with me back to India that year and on the first page I doodled mandalas and love hearts, and on the second I wrote the question ‘why do I have sex?’ and I carried it around with me all season long and it became my compass.

Incidentally, that summer woofing project was run by a Mexican woman and her German husband, who sometimes wore a turban and coordinated the security team at Kundalini Yoga gatherings. I arrived back there once after a weekend in Berlin smoking a lot of weed and gazing eternally into the eyes of the beautiful face I’d met on the tram to Sysiphos, and was cautioned by them not to be reckless with my love nor my sex. Sage advice perhaps, despite coming from someone who admitted to me that he selected their volunteers (particularly the women) based on their photos.

When it comes to sex and relationships, there are many differing opinions on how to do it and what’s deemed healthy. Some more progressive and exploratory, some so dogmatically ingrained into the pillars of our collective psyche that it’s hard to remember that they are still in fact just opinions. Not everyone is here to question those pillars. But some of us really are. Perhaps it’s because I grew up with a ‘resolutely single’ Mum with a dazzling front of sexual confidence, and very few examples of relationships that appealed to me, but I am definitely, and have always been, one of the questioners.

And lately, for what feels like the first time, I have landed consciously on something that might be the answer, for me, for now. And I know that I could not have arrived here without the full carnival of experiences along the way, and nor would I want to. It’s like the ending in the book Sidarta, where the father weeps as he realises he never ever had the power to stop his son from making the mistakes he was destined to make. Some of us simply cannot be told.

At the same time, knowledge is powerful, and knowledge is an ever evolving product of all our collective investigations and working hypotheses. Encounters with which direct us towards insights of the self. For example, reading about theories of attachment that teach about what is necessary for a person to open to real connection with another, be it romantic or otherwise, directs our understanding of how we learnt to give and receive love, and where it’s been blocked or controlled. By learning that the early experiences we have shape us in ways we will only ever be able to make sense of after the fact, maybe we can become more curious and less ashamed of the past that got us to where we are now. All this to say that smothering powerful knowledge and personal instights in shame and judgement only eats away at their potential.

Dipping below the shame distractions, I gained a level of awareness that simply wasn’t available to teenage me, who was busy blindly uncovering a separate sense of identity for the first time. As we mature, we get to make a choice about whether we want to cultivate discernement based on all those insights, or else get stuck feeling sorry for ourselves, which is sometimes much more comfortable - untill it isn’t. This isn’t about age, it’s about choosing to know more and developing the skills to be with it.

I’ve always shared generously about my love-life when I’m at home, so I know what it’s like to sit at a table of aunts, uncles and grandmothers and be met with confusion and silence. In this regard, one side of my living family are best described as tolerant, and I feel lucky that despite their sometimes fearful reservations, they haven’t ever explicitly told my brother, sister and I what not to do.

So, 4 years ago, I found myself blissfully indulging in a long-term, long-distance, poly partnership with the man (here-to, M). He was not only a great love of my life, but also a very dear friend to me. His romantic history couldn’t have been more different to mine now that I think of it but I’ll save the private details of his past, and only say that when we met, he was a couple years out of an 18 year long partnership and very much not looking for a relationship. We lived 1335km apart, him in Bristol and me in Berlin, and I was still in a relationship with D for the first year so it was, for all appearances, the perfect conditions for two commitment avoidant individuals to fall freely, head over heels in love with each other.

I wasn’t the young woman with the little red book anymore, but I still had my compass. I knew myself and my patterns around love, sex and relating much more intimately. The depth and turbulence of my relationship with D, including an initiation into a new phase of self through an abortion, taught me a lot about projection, avoidance, my sexual co-dependency anxieties and lack of responsibility. I was older, wiser and still somehow foolish to a fault. Swept up in a perpetual honeymoon, I would spend hours daydreaming about him and loved the long weekends and extended trips we’d take together. I still do. M was a friend of a friend of my sister’s, which connected him to home for me, and made it feel all the more real to me that we were together. He was perfect, we were perfect, everything was perfect.

When he fell in love and began a parallel, local relationship with someone else, my first reaction was to encourage it, naively believing that I would remain the only apple of his eye, like he did mine. Many things happened that crushed this view much faster than I was ready for. The boat was well and truly rocked, but it was this rocking that gave rise to the digging in and pulling out of the truth. I don’t know if I’d have gotten here without it, and even though it shattered my heart, I feel as though I should be grateful. I lost something I hadn’t even been able to name wanting and now I understood that to receive something truly, to really let it land in my system, I have to be capable of believing that it exists and that I can have it.

All this time I had not been letting myself believe in trusting love and attachment, which is sad becaues I have been so loved, so, so loved. Instead of leaning into that, I’d been unknowingly pouring the power of my imagination into micro-managing and manipulating it, because I wasn’t willing or perhaps also not able to surrender to it. You don’t need to be poly to do that, it happens in most relationships if you ask me, teetering on the push-pull of the next sharp edge of intimacy.

This period of time became a passage of realisations of who I am, who I have become, in practice, outside the concepts and the intricate system of beliefs that make up the fabric of my comfort zones. Even if I wanted to believe in the freest of free loves, the reality was, I was completely overwhelmed and out of my depth and acting out of fear. I’d outgrown the things that had previously given me a sense of expansiveness, power and attractiveness and they were now compressing me into silence. My perspective shifted and as I picked past the shame, I recognised that I could not regain a sense of worthiness that would allow me to receive again whilst still being entwined in a construction of ideas that wasn’t feeding me anymore.

It was insightful, break ups always are. But before I simply adopt these insights as a brick in a new fixed identity, I step back and observe what they have shown me about myself and then inquire into whether there’s any truth behind it. It requires a lot of wound licking and in my case encouragement that this new option can be hot and sexy too. I remind myself that one freshly collapsed ideal does not automatically decide that its opposition is now the only possible truth. I can’t return or go backwards so there’s inevitably grief to hold, and from there the potential to participate in what comes next, moment to moment, not bitter and resentful but informed and with more approval. How demanding, how beautiful, how full of glorious possibility.

Instead of charging on and on, I became the witness. Which has proven to be courageous and un-stabilising and given rise to discovering a mask that I’d been mistaking for part of my own face. I love that mask, I really do and I’m beginning to picture myself without it.

I did not know, when I started getting into somatic practices like yoga, that I would be expanding the range in my system for truth. But I’ve had some exceptional teachers in my time, and my devotion has taught me how to hold discomfort lightly. With less of a need to look away when something didn’t sit right, I got closer to my inconvenient self. People seem to think that embodiment and mindfulness will mean instant ease and relief, because they have not yet understood that presence actually means intimately knowing tension and conflict. To transcend fear and negative beliefs, you have to learn to feel them fully in your system without getting entangled in them. That is why we strengthen the fullest, most expansive range of the nervous system, not to remain calm, but to remain responsive in the face of trouble, just as much as delight. After a while, the fragile constructs of the mind are just not as necessary as they once were, so it becomes possible to see beyond them.

I still believe in free and liberated love, but one that includes real intimacy and tangible commitments and one that has been stripped away of performativity and egoic extraction. I am more interested in the chaotic, disruptive vulnerable intimacy, than pretense and lonliness. I understand what I am asking of myself and that I will figure out along the way what is actually possible for me.

A vision is only as strong as the body that manifests it into a lived experience, all visionaries must keep this in mind. I was holding more than I could carry so I loosened my grip and I lost a lot as the tower crumbled before me. Along with the ideology, I lost that old version of me that wasn’t brave enough to say don’t do it. Don’t fall in love with someone else before I’ve even had time to land here and map it out. Please don’t. I know there’s nothing more to hide in witty comments and laughter, because it’s all out there, released from my fist.

I’ve learnt that consent can only reach as far as capacity, that nothing shrinks capacity quite like denial and that anything outside of this window is a high-risk zone to be manouvered around responsibly. Anything banished to the shadows of denial will retain vengeful power over me, so rather than sticking to a script, I build up my strength to meet all my desires and all my fears for a stiff drink. I am not poly-wise*, not poly-secure* and I am also not poly-fucked. I have let go of the need to be any of those things and instead I am sweetening my tongue on a whole lot of approval and permission to know myself intimately and go from there. I’ve met some limits and instead of pretending they don’t exist, I’ve ever so slowly pressed my face into their porous bellies and promised to take care of them. And inspite of everything, that is really fucking hot.