Sort of ponderingly. . . (relationship structure and . . . stuff)

[kiya]

Sort of inspired by discussions with teal7, and partly due to some of my recent drama and . . . stuff. Trying to lay things out so I can see them.


teinedreugan and I got together in my senior year of high school, his first year in college. I was involved in a sort of long-distance relationship at the time, but one without any expectation of monogamy. I sort of thought I was monogamous-by-nature at the time -- I turned someone down who had a crush on me on that basis, because I was fixed on Peter -- hm, gotta insert an asterisk here -- but the fact that the attraction to teinedreugan persisted when we got together again the summer before that year was a, "Guess I was wrong about that" moment.

That asterisk, before I forget -- in retrospect it wouldn't surprise me if, had we had the time, Greg (the person I turned down) and I could have wound up in a secondary-type relationship. He was a very sweet fellow, really, but he didn't ping my wanna-partner sense, probably in significant part because I felt I'd steamroller him terribly.

In any case, the concept of an open relationship wasn't alien to us when we started out. And I wanted to go to college in Massachusetts. He was in Maryland. And we thought that over, and figured that if someone was going to make us want to break up, we'd rather know about the possibility sooner rather than later -- we were, fairly early on in our relationship, talking things about marriage and permanence and children and other long-term. And we thought that monogamy at a distance was a little silly.

So we formally opened the relationship, and I promptly fell in love with my then best friend . . . who was also in Maryland, and that year, I believe, a senior in high school. So I wound up in two long-distance relationships. The irony was thick on the ground.

I don't really know how to describe my relationship with Eric. There was a certain amount of being young and crazy and stupid in there -- we were seventeen -- but there was something in that relationship that resonated with me very strongly. He was a musician, for one thing, and I have some very strange and powerful responses to music. He had . . . storm in him, both the good and the bad of that, the wildness that I found so attractive coupled with the berserker nature that went with it.

Over time I formulated the sense that I have the capacity to form two partnership relationships, of strongly complementary types; that having one brought out more of the stuff of that 'type' in the other; and that having those two relationships helped me be able to be stable. One of those relationship types is best mapped as Apollonian, which isn't the language I use natively, but close enough, and the other Dionysian. I'm a Dionysian personality.

I've also learned that the relationships that come out of the dark aren't as natively stable as the ones that come out of the light. The thing I crave in them -- the feedback loops of positive reinforcement -- can render them terribly, terribly unstable. When I only have a partnership with teinedreugan, though, we have a tendency to stagnate and get stuck in patterns and routines.

But the three of us went out bowling once, and I would sit in teinedreugan's lap when Eric was bowling, and in Eric's lap when teinedreugan was bowling, and that was one of the greatest forms of bliss I'd ever encountered, because it was all there. It was . . . satisfying. And balanced.


I would have spent my life with Eric, then. Not now; we've grown apart since he ended it. But I would have; would have had him as my mate, had children with him, all the things that have always been part of my craving for partnership. I think the fact that I'm so . . . domestic, I guess . . . was part of what ended it for us, because he had so much storm.

I grieved. I'd found something that gave me a great deal of happiness, and it was gone, and I was an amputee, I was broken. I spent a long time trying to figure out what it was that had caused him to lose the ability to love me, and . . . well, he didn't help much, because sometimes he'd say things that suggested that our problems were soluble, and other times he'd be hostile. But the synergy of what our partnership had been kept me hoping for longer than I think was really healthy.

I had a couple of relationships after that, still craving the synergy. And I wonder now how fair I was to them. The relationships had their own problems which led to them ending independently, and I know I did the best I could when I was in them, but I always felt that there was something missing, something I was craving. There was similar energy in them, similar flow, but nothing that managed to match the thing I had lost. And I think there may have been a part of me that resented them for not being Eric, or not being people who could touch the places that Eric did.

I don't know if there's something to regret there, if there's something I could have done differently to be a better partner to those people. I don't think I could have healed entirely without having those relationships, either, despite the strange bends that got put in my psyche as a result of them. Scars in one place, and a . . . a bunch of sexual stuff in the other that's not really to topic here. And I'd go home to visit, sometimes, and I would still feel the ache that was not being able to curl up with Eric or sit out on the grassy hill in my father's front yard and talk or the playing with music and lust or any of that.

So two and a half years ago, more or less, I fell in love with brooksmoses. We talked a lot; I talked about wanting family, and heard what he said in response, and . . . it was the first time I'd heard anyone I fell in love with out of the dark who sounded like he wanted family like I wanted it. I warned him that I'd scared people away with coming on too strong (that was one of the problems Eric and I apparently had; weird sexual chemistry). I told him that my relationships of that flavor had a history of ending after about a year, and I was more than a little superstitiously afraid of that. And I found . . . or thought I found . . . that the ache was gone.

When I came home for Winter Solstice Holidays that year, after meeting brooksmoses face to face for the first time a couple months before, I confirmed that yes, the ache was gone. The wanting to reach out to Eric and touch him and be with him was no longer present. So sometimes I say I have a bifurcated personality and both halves are monogamous, even though I still love him; the desire to form a partnership is gone. There was something good in that, but it made me wonder sometimes if I would have healed that last bit if I hadn't found someone else who reached that spot. Which distresses me a little when I think about it.


Recently, brooksmoses and I have been having Difficulties. As I posted to my friendslist, we're doing better now, more or less, but it's been a fairly rough time of it for me. (Compounded so by finding that the family stuff wasn't as comfortably true as it had seemed early on and, well, weird sexual chemistry.) I spent a good bit of time contemplating the concept that he might not be an intimate part of my life in the future -- something that I'd managed to get settled in my head after we passed the year-and-a-day supersition glitch by two separate means of counting and felt secure in after the first time my subconscious explicitly included him in a long-term dream.

Scared the hell out of me. Partly because, while I knew I could heal from that loss, because I healed from Eric, I could tell how much more it would hurt to have to do so -- not only because of the time we'd spent together, but because the relationship ran deeper. It occurs to me now that I feel the danger of that is somewhat past that it might well be comparable to spending time near Eric without being able to be near him, and thus survivable, but that sort of thing hasn't been exactly clear in my mind for the last couple months.

After Eric broke up with me, I wrote The Rose Remembered. I'm still pleased with the image of the hand curling around the stem of the non-present rose, the holding on to memory and the fist twined together in the same iconic representation. I couldn't have given up the memory and the pain, because it would have been to say that what I had hoped we would have wasn't important to me, wasn't significant; it had its time to mourn. There's still a little pang there, that we couldn't have done better, that one of my little specific dreams never happened, a dream that could have happened if we had only been able to stay together. I mourned for four years or so.

Mostly I wish I could have given up the mourning before I found something better, but I don't know if that was possible for me, not so long as I could feel that ache of missingness, like a toothache.

Sometimes I feel that having that pain until I found brooksmoses is something I should ask forgiveness for . . . from Eric, from teinedreugan, from brooksmoses too.


That was long. Not entirely sure why I wanted to write it all down either.

The song that's playing now is a perfect fill for the Tune slot, so I'll stop while it's still true.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

*ponders*

I'm not sure that I have anything useful to say to this, but it doesn't seem it should be left all lonely with no comments, so here goes....

I think the bit about being in mourning and pain until you found me is something that bothers me, a little, too; I'm not really sure why. Mainly, I guess, because it's something that could translate into obligation, and parts of my brain goes weird in relation to that sort of obligation to stay in a relationship even though there are plenty of reasons I want to be in it. I dunno; it's becoming a smaller thing, I think.

- Brooks

[brooksmoses]

Adding on to that ... I also wanted to say that it's a useful thing, I think, seeing it all written out all of a piece, even though you've told me much of it before in bits. Thank you for writing it.

- Brooks

[kiya]

I'm trying to remember how I expressed it to Graydon once, and the words aren't there anymore. But it was like . . . there was a sort of hungry I didn't realise was being fed until I lost what was feeding it.

And afterwards, there were things that . . . tasted like they could feed that, but that never did, quite.

I don't know if that makes it any better, though.