There was an afternoon I spent in London with The Funniest, we were in a park somewhere eating ice creams. Earlier in the day I had made my discovery of the genius that is Reggae Reggae Sauce on bacon sandwiches.
I can’t remember if it was just after The Jellicle had split with Princess Lex or if… but that’s why I have a blog so I just checked, linked it above – it was just after that and after FJ and I had our one and only solo date up to Edinburgh.
The afternoon we talked about aims in life and I decided I liked The Funniest very much. Enough to tell her how utterly miserable I was that the four of us were no more, that I have, for as long as I can remember (oh hey and I’m not in the middle of a mental break this year so my memory is working almost worth a damn) found my deepest way of loving in multiple person relationships. I was very depressed that day because, I paraphrase what I think I said, it’s hard enough to find one person who loves you just imagine how hard it is to find more than one.
I was convinced that day that that was it, there wouldn’t be another relationship like that. I mean there wasn’t because no relationship is like any other. Reddit tells me (because of course I get my advice from Reddit, I’m that type of Millennial) that I should normalise being loved. I like that advice, of course it was given on the understanding that I have terrible partner selection, I disagree, I absolutely had terrible partner selection. I suspect it was based on the notion that anyone who loved me was strange and unusual and should be cherished. I rarely cut people off, in terms of friendship I mean, but I’ve done it twice not because they didn’t like me but because they were awful for me to be close to. I think I’m at that point where I can recognise when people don’t love me the way I want and I can walk away from bad partners, let’s be fair I’ve been at that stage for a while, though I absolutely do suffer from sunk cost fallacy.
What I didn’t talk to The Funniest about that afternoon was what the likelihood is of people falling in love who don’t all want the same things, because at that point in my life the idea that anyone could love me, let alone fall in love with me was completely alien to me. I honestly think until last year the idea that anyone (except for The Jellicle) might fall in love with me without a hefty dose of persuasion on my part was completely outside of my idea of what was possible.
But because therapy encourages me to look for patterns I got one with my relationships, I fall hard in poly situations, by that I mean multiple people loving each other reflecting that love back around and around again. I love ok one on one but so much better, deeper, harder in a group, but my problem has always been that I don’t get jealous often or in the same places as other people so I miss it when other people do and I miss that other people aren’t on the same page as me. Consistently. FFG and Giggles, Lexy and FJ, every damn time I’m not in the same emotional place as I think the others are. But it doesn’t really matter because that’s what seemed insurmountable on Clapham Common eating an ice cream with The Funniest.
What is insurmountable is that I don’t seem to want the same things out of relationships as maybe anyone else, certainly not many people. I’m 41 and I usually go for things with built in sell by dates, pleasant casual dalliances, I very rarely attempt the falling in love, full on Relationship and I suspect that’s why I’m 41 and only just figuring out how they even work. I do wide rather than deep and somewhere in here there’s still the girl who said she didn’t do Relationships and though people scoffed at that there was a level of truth right there. She always did do wide rather than deep.
I like third place, second if I have to, I like passion with time to recover afterwards, space to recover from the emotion of it all, but if you can cope with first or second place then you have to actively want someone else there as well and that’s really where my relationships tend to fall over. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Jellicle and I love M-I-L but I think this is why I love having metamours, at least if my girlfriends have boyfriends/fiancés then knowing them comes close to the situation of everyone at the dining table smiling at everyone else in love.