What is Love? (With Apologies to Haddaway)

I don't know, what can I do? What else can I say, it's up to ewe.

Now that you have that song in your head, let's talk about what I've learned about me and romantic love since being poly: 

There is more than one kind of love.

Love is not just what society tells us it is. It is not just kissing in the rain, marrying your high school sweetheart, holding a boombox outside someone's window, letting them have the whole damned door to float on even though it's clear there's room for you too. It is not just what is written in Hallmark cards. It could be any of these things, or it can be something completely different. It could be letting them have the last bite of cake, checking up on them in the middle of a really tough day, wearing their hair ties on your wrist even though you don't have long hair. The love I feel doesn't have to fit into someone else's mold.

I don't have to love someone the same way I love someone else.

Love is an amorphous feeling, and therefore can be different for everyone I love. I don't love Adam in the same way I love Joel, and I don't love Joel in the same way I loved others before him. I don't expect to be loved in the same way my partners love their other partners. And just because the love is different, doesn't mean it's not significant or shouldn't be communicated (or communicated about - see below).

Love doesn't have to be a floor on the relationship escalator. 

For a long time, I thought that relationships became real when you started saying "I love you" and whatever came before that was just casual. I thought that once you started slinging around love, more things were slated to come, like moving in together, going to (and almost breaking up at) Ikea, getting incessantly bugged about having kids. And then a few years ago, I fell in love with someone who would be leaving town just a few months later and realized that love doesn't have to be on the way to something else, or the end of something. It just is. 

Love can be scary.

In the past, I have taken for granted that love is a concept (and emotion) that has always come easily to me. I love often, early, and strongly. I fall hard. But not everyone is like that. Love is complicated for those who have only ever known it to be one thing for one person at a time (or for that matter, one person, period). Love is hard to express when you don't know if the emotion carries other obligations or expectations, and it's tricky to qualify, quantify, and clarify because it sometimes feels like doing so cheapens it. It's not always as simple as "He loves me, he loves me not."

I need to hear that I'm loved. 

Affirmative language is something I need a lot of in poly relationships, even if my partner and I aren't using "love" to describe how we feel about each other. Even though it does bring me comfort to feel a warm embrace or a tender kiss, the words "I love you" mean a lot in making me feel valued and important in a relationship. Obviously, if love is felt, it should be shown, but I'm wired to need to hear it too.

And finally,

Love should be communicated about, not just communicated.

It took me far too long to realize I needed to communicate what love meant to me versus what it meant to others. I think sometimes we think that it's this subject we have to tiptoe around because saying it for the first time is supposed to be special and important,  and because it means something. But really, it's more dangerous not to find out what that something is to everyone involved before diving in.

I truly believe that it is more enriching to live life with the potential to love more than one person. But at the same time, I know that this concept can be complicated and messy. It shouldn't be kept in a collector's box high on the shelf to maintain its pristine condition. It should be taken down, taken apart, played with, and most importantly, experienced. 

Happiness Is Not a Fish*

On a good friend's bathroom mirror, written in dry-erase marker, it says, "You are looking at the person most responsible for your happiness."

The message appeared there after one of the many parties he throws, and it's stayed there since. I read it every time I'm washing my hands, which is a lot of times over the course of a party because my bladder is the size of an olive. I read it and look at my reflection and read it again, hoping that the more I read it the more will sink in. (That pun was free. You have to pay for more). Because it's one of those phrases we read and think, "Yeah. Right on, mirror," and then we go back out into the world and it's gone, like my reflection, and I'm back at looking to others to cheer me up or make me happy.

I've been doing the 100 Happy Days project on Instagram, despite feeling kind of sheepish about the perceived notion that I'm flaunting all the things that I have that others might not (including happiness). But I know that I have trouble with looking for happiness from others - especially in my relationships - that I thought I would chronicle (mostly) other things that make me happy that I have had the power to seek out myself. I'm almost done - today will be day 93, and going back I can't believe how many of those pictures were things that weren't people-dependent: new books, office supplies, coffee, LOTS of pictures of my cat, beer, nature. These are things that no one else had the power to give or take away from me. 

And yet, others still have the power to not only make me happy, but make me incredibly unhappy. I feel like I have little control over this, and it's infuriating. This past weekend I looked up at the mirror after a particularly stupid evening that I let turn south and wondered why I couldn't take it to heart. I'm a responsible person. I pay my bills on time. I keep my cat alive. But the happiness thing I let slide. I'm not saying I can't get happiness from others, but they can't be responsible. That would be like depending on someone else to come over and clean my cat's litter box. Someone might do it a few times, but once they stopped, I'd be in a crapload of trouble (okay, that one was free too.)

In addition to the 100 Happy Days project, I keep a journal where I write a few sentences about what I did each day. Last night, out of curiosity, I went back through the 146 days we'd had so far in the year to count and see how many of those days I mentioned being unhappy because of someone else. It was a fifth of the days I tracked. That's too many. I need to stop sucking at being responsible for my own happiness, because there are (obviously) a lot of things that do make me happy. Some of them are people. Some of them are new pens and notebooks. Some of them are fluffy animals. But I am the only one who can give them power over my happiness.

I don't feel like I'm getting any better at this, but past experience tells me I am. I was unhappy in the Midwest, so I left. I've been unhappy doing jobs or activities, so I've quit. I've been unhappy in relationships, so I've tried to adjust. I'm impatient. I see those 32 days out of this year in my journal and want them to be gone now, not in six months. But I'm starting to get that happiness is an investment. It's not always going to pay out right away. It's a paycheck, not the lottery, so I best keep working.

*Our Lady Peace was right.

Alone

Over my mother's stressful visit last November, during which she caught Adam and I kissing and proclaimed loudly how much she didn't approve of our life choices, she told me she was worried that dating all these unavailable people meant I was just going to end up alone. "You can't be alone, Katie," she said. "I know you."

My first response was, "How could I be alone around more people? That doesn't make sense!" and my second was, "Well even if I am, I'm happier being alone than I used to be. I've changed. You'll see."

And I thought that I was getting better at it, that I relished those nights at home with no plans, that I still took comfort in reading or drawing or writing when I needed some restorative time, that I liked stretching out in a bed all to myself. I grew up an only child, after all, I should be used to being alone. Shouldn't I? Wasn't my mother just basing her fears on a societal stereotype that single people are lonely?

This morning, I said goodbye to Joel for a week as he embarks on a fun trip I can't take because I have to give a final and then grade them. Adam and his wife just bought a condo, so they're furiously trying to prep and pack and don't have a lot of time for dating this month. Instead of being excited that this time is an opportunity for me to get back to doing these activities I like to do solo, the prospect of a week without either of them, and then several weeks without Adam, makes me feel empty.

It shouldn't. In fact, if anything, being in love and in happy relationships should make me more okay with being alone because I know I'm really not - that there is someone (more than one someone!) out there who cares for me and looks forward to seeing me the next time we have plans. I've even met some wonderful new people I'm excited to get closer to and see more of. So why am I so lonely? Why has comfort with Joel and lust for Adam made it harder for me to be alone, not easier?

I'm frustrated with myself. I want to be stronger than this. I want to be telling my mom the truth when I say that if I end up living alone with no domestic partner for the rest of my life, I'll be OK. But right now, I'm lying to her and, I think, also lying to myself.

Sometimes I tell myself I just need a primary partner who isn't unavailable. That the problem is I keep becoming involved with people who already have homes, or who are okay with being their own home, when in reality I want someone to make a home with. But that's not going to solve the problem. I had that once and it didn't make me happy. Even if I had that again, there would still be times like this week I'm alone and lonely and empty.

This comic says very succinctly what I want to do: not be so worried about filling the hole in my chest. I think there is a misconception that poly people can't be lonely, or even that coupled people can't be lonely, but the truth is that if we're unhappy with being with ourselves, it doesn't matter how many people we live with or are dating or trying to fill that hole with. We have to figure out how to be happy letting it whistle as we run. I'm still working on it.

Maybe my first step is to get over my hatred of running.

The Trap, or Why Facebook and I Are on a Break

The biggest irony is that I am, indeed, posting this to Facebook. 

A few weeks ago, I was wasting time online when my mood changed from relatively content to sour. As I continued to scroll, the sourness deepened, and I went from gherkin to sauerkraut to lemon wedge to Green Apple Warhead in about thirty seconds. By the time I pried myself away from my distraction, I had settled into a funk that stayed with me for most of the morning. If someone had gone back through my browser history to try and get to the bottom of my mood, the findings would be inconclusive. No one would have been able to tell that it was spurred by counting "likes" on Facebook.

I've taken various breaks from the "Book of Faces," as a few friends call it, at different times, mostly during busy periods of my life where I simply can't afford the distraction. Up until a few weeks ago, though, I'd never stepped away from it because I thought it was "bad" for me. I always just figured I had a "healthy" level of addiction just like everyone else, that I could step away from it whenever I needed to get things done, and that it would continue to be a source of harmless entertainment. That was until some other factors in my life made my emotions go on a bit of an amusement park ride, and I realized that Facebook wasn't so harmless after all.

I got jealous. I started comparing the number of "likes" on my posts to others' posts. I even started counting the number of times certain people "liked" my things versus others' things. I craved that little cartoon thumb, but at the same time hated it. So I stepped back again, this time to get my head back in the real world, where people actually like me.

How my Facebook newsfeed affected me wasn't healthy, but it isn't rare, either - studies have shown a correlation between spending time on Facebook and depression, like this one from Sweden, which found that "women who spend more time on Facebook report feeling less happy and...less content with their lives." I can usually catch myself becoming more discontent the longer I scroll, and I know the cure is to walk away and focus on the happy things that are happening in my own life. But that's where the trap pulls me in again.

Because a mark of our generation is to share things. To share everything. Not just information, but pictures. Look at this sandwich. Look at this sunset. Look at this cat. And sometimes I think the sandwich doesn't seem as delicious, the sunset not as brilliant, the cat not as adorable, if we can't get someone else to share in our satisfaction. So back to the internet we go, and wait for the "likes" to pour in. And if they don't? It must not have been that great of a sandwich/brilliant of a sunset/cute of a cat after all.

The only way right now I can break the cycle is to step away from it - well, partially anyway. I'm still on Twitter and Instagram, still wonder why there are fewer hearts on my pictures of me and Adam than on my pictures of the cat, still wonder if anyone even read that last Tweet. But for some reason those darts aren't as poisonous, so for now, it's where I'll make my social media home*.

But Kate, you ask, why don't you just step away from everything and go out and live your life? If you're so worried about the quality of your experiences being marred by your desire for social media validation, why don't you just unplug altogether? Because, disembodied voice talking to a blog post, I live in 2014. I'll always be right back in the soup, and so will you. The trick is not letting it slosh out the sides.

*But of course I'm still posting a link to this on Facebook. That's where you found it, right?

At the Funeral of Spontaneity: A Eulogy

We were the warriors of the Google Calendar. We fought under its cheerful blue banner, killing free time for it, sacrificing for it, crying for it. We were mocked for having to rely on it, for being "too popular" and having "too many friends" or "too many dates."  We were offered tiny violin concerts for lamenting our struggles. But we did struggle.

We did too much to please too many. We couldn't say no but yet often still couldn't say yes. We turned away from work to play and play to work. We carried cannonballs of guilt in our stomachs, shot from others who expressed disappointment at having to wait to see us, and yet we still returned fire on others.

We despaired in the face of too much and were relieved in the instance of last-minute reprieve, yet refused to leave openings in the first place. We fortified the walls with dates, with discussion groups, with volunteering, with singing, with extra work, with parties, with pubs, with more dates. We could not leave our posts. We could not be alone.

At times, we knew too much. We shared our schedules and despaired. We watched our loved ones form allegiance with others, and even though we craved allegiance, our breath sometimes caught in our throats to see it happen before our eyes. We pined for those living under our same roof. We were lonely in the middle of a battlefield a thousand strong.

And among this, among the colorful, carefully timed blocks of work and play and sex and drinking and travel, we forgot to fight for ourselves. We forgot to schedule even an hour for us, because that's the hour we'd been invited to fill with something else, something we'd always wanted to try or learn; or someone else, someone who we'd really been meaning to get to know if only we had a moment.

We left few survivors. Instead, we left a string of casualties, of fading friendships and lovers, in our wake. But to live the lives we chose, we knew no other way.

So here we lie, the warriors of the Google Calendar, crushed under the weight of our own ambitions. Come place bouquets of paper Day-Planners and number two pencils at our graves. Come lament that we were given such little time.

Our Salon Article Disaster

I am, overall, usually quite sanguine about the media's portrayal of things I hold near and dear, like polyamory and bisexuality. When others are raging, I am usually the one going, "Well, at least we're getting press." But this. This throws me so far off my middle-of-center, "let's give 'em a bit of credit" mentality, I think I finally feel what others have been raging about.

The "this" in question is this article, though I want to say up front that I'm not actually against the content of the article itself. I like Nicholas Garnett's writing. I thought the post itself was honest and raw, and the writer in me appreciates phrases like "We burrowed down into a grinding disillusionment and mutual resentment from which our relationship never really recovered." So I don't think I should blame Garnett for the anger I'm feeling this morning. Or, rather, I don't want to blame Garnett.

I want to blame whoever is responsible for the title: "Our Polyamory Disaster."

Yes, polyamory has been kind of a hot topic recently in the news (Yay! We're getting press!).  So okay, Salon, I understand your desire to jump on the bandwagon with some clickbait (a concept I didn't really fully understand the significance of until this very morning). I understand that you want to be on that bandwagon so bad you thought you'd share a two-year-old article on your Facebook page to bring in the droves of readers. The former sorority marketing chair in me really truly understands.

The polyamorist in me really truly wants to write more explicit insults here that I don't feel match the tone of the rest of my blog, so I am refraining. 

The bold italics have probably tipped you off that you have finally reached the portion of the post where I talk about why I'm so mad. Ready?

The article isn't about polyamory. The word "polyamory" doesn't even appear in the body of the article. The word "monogamy" or "monogamous" only appears twice, when the author realizes he has a crush on a woman he is having sex with while both of them are high off the myriad drugs he talks about them all doing over the course of the weekend in question (I'll get to this in a minute).

The title furthers the conflation of "polyamory" with "promiscuity." Related to above, Garnett writes: "Rachael and I were curious. Everything else about [the lifestyle of our partying gay friends] seemed to be working for us. Could promiscuity?" The composition professor in me applauds Garnett for setting up the reader for exactly what he will be writing about: a vacation in which this couple tries having sex with other people at a sex party. Being poly does not necessarily mean an arrangement like this, though it can, and on its own promiscuity is okay (and something to be celebrated when done healthily!). But the two words and ideas are not the same.

The title makes it sound like polyamory is about having sex while high. In short, it's not. I have so many thoughts about how many risks they were taking, not only with the substances but what the substances were doing to their capacity for consent, but that could be a whole other blog post (or two or three). A more appropriate title would have been, according to a friend of mine, "Drug Use and Sex Parties: Not for Everyone, Try Before You Buy." It obviously wasn't for them.

Essentially, the title gives fuel to anyone who wants to argue that polyamory is nothing more than drug-addled sex parties. It gives fuel to anyone who wants to believe that polyamory is a threat to "stable, happy" marriages (which, if you read this article, you can see that this one obviously wasn't, even before the party). It gives people something to point at and go, "See? Polyamory is a disaster. I morally oppose anything having to do with this destructive lifestyle and don't believe these people deserve even an ounce of the legal rights or benefits afforded to NORMAL COUPLES."

Because that, ultimately, is the fear - that misleading titles of articles that thousands of people will click on will send the wrong message. That those clickers who get the wrong message will oppose politicians and laws that would make it possible for us to be able to be visited in the hospital by all of our partners. And laws that would allow our children to be legally cared for by all of their parents. And laws that would allow our insurance to cover all of our family members. The fear is what made me so angry that I ditched grading this morning to write this. It made me realize that there is such thing as bad press, and if anything was a shining example, it's this.

The Price of Admission

Dan Savage was my first introduction to frank talk on relationships and sex. I remember fondly, and with some titillation, listening to the Savage Lovecast on my iPod while I did data entry at a temp job a few years ago. No one ever knew that as I updated databases, I was getting tips on having better sexual experiences and learning concepts like "DTMFA" (dump the motherfucker already).

Now I know that a lot of people are polarized about Savage, which I understand; I haven't been happy with things he's said either. But what I do like is when he takes a simplified look at some of the concepts in relationships that I think get muddled by centuries of idealizing what love and sex are "supposed" to be.

One of those concepts is the "Price of Admission": essentially, what one is willing to put up with, or "pay," in order to maintain a relationship (or what he calls "ride the ride"). In this video, Savage talks about it in relation to the little things: your partner chewing with their mouth open or leaving sandwich-making supplies all over the counter. (One of Joel's prices of admission are his sometimes disturbingly loud sneezes, for instance.) He admonishes an audience member who prompted the discussion for having too many deal-breakers - essentially, for saying he wasn't willing to pay any price of admission. Savage says, "There is no settling down without some settling for."

Beyond the problems I have with the concept of "settling" (which I'd really rather think of as compromise), I believe this is largely true, especially when it comes to loud sneezes and open-mouth chewing. If we are unwilling to pay some sort of price of admission, or make some compromises in our relationships, then we should get used to not riding much of anything at all (and yes, for those of you keeping score at home, that was a double-entendre).

But sometimes, the cost of maintaining a relationship - of riding that ride - is too high. Sometimes that threshold is easy to measure, like if your partner wants to move to a different country and you're already rooted. But sometimes it's not. Sometimes the threshold is simply at a point in time when a relationship, for whatever reason, is making you more unhappy than happy.

And where that threshold is could be muddled. You could lose sleep over it one night, cry over it half the next day, but after a little space and reflection realize you can afford more. Because you've thought about that ride, and it's been one of the best you've ever been on, and you're not ready to get off of it yet. But you're still aware that at some point, you might come up short, and that scares you. And you realize that this risk - the risk of too high a price of admission - is a price of admission in itself.

I feel like some polyamorous relationships have more prices of admission than monogamous ones. You have open-mouth chewers, loud sneezers, and messy sandwich-makers. But you also have jealousy, insecurity, impatience. You have relationship hierarchies and communication challenges and metamours. You have societal discrimination and scheduling issues. A polyamorous relationship can be a really big roller-coaster, which means it has the potential to be expensive and scary. But it also means it has the potential to be the best ride of your life. The question will always be, "Can you afford it?"

I wish I had a blunt Dan Savage-like figure in my life who could answer that for me, but I don't. And I don't know if I'd listen even if I did. Relationships aren't actually rides, after all; they're made up of people with feelings. And unlike a ride, the cost of maintaining them isn't set in stone - it's negotiable. Yes, the ultimate price of admission costs what it costs, but there's no reason you shouldn't try to make that cost affordable for both of you. If you - or your partner - ultimately decides the price of admission is too high, at least, then, you will have done all you could. That is all any of us can really do.