I Love Him Like I Love My Life Itself
"How can polyamory be true? I want it to be true, but how can it be? I've never loved two people at once the way I love you."
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Last night I was reading the third book in When Women Were Warriors, a trilogy about every facet of love. I felt my heart freeze up in my chest as I imagined what it would be like as I projected the situations onto my own life - what if I lost Paladin? What if he stopped loving me, or betrayed me, or died?
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I called him to be with me, and he got up from his desk and came around the wall to where I was reading in bed. He joined me. At first I couldn't speak. I just looked at him and drank in the sight of him, healthy and whole. Mine, shining and beautiful. The idea of him ever vanishing from my life somehow making him burn even brighter now.
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I clutched him to my breast, aware he had asked me questions, but unable to speak at all.
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Finally, I said, "How can polyamory be true? I want it to be true, but how can it be? I've never loved two people at once the way I love you."
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I looked into his beautiful brown eyes, gazed at his golden hair, stroked his soft beard, traced his beautiful, strong cheekbones. The depth of my feeling for him coursed through me. My heart felt heavy and full in my chest. My almost constant food cravings were silent. The air was uncommonly warm.
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He said something in reply, but my mind was so focused and my heart so full of it's own feelings that I couldn't take it in.
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I asked, "Do you love your mother?"
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He thought about it for a long time. I clarified, "This isn't a trick question. Just by your own definitions and from your own perspective, do you love her?" I expected him to say yes.
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He said, "I wish her well. But I don't really love her." I was surprised. He often seems pained by Marigold in one way or another, but I guess by his own definition it isn't love.
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"Do you love Thistledown?" I asked.
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He was quiet a shorter time, and said, "Yes."
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I nodded. I expected that. And I said, "How would you feel if you lost her? If she died tomorrow?"
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He replied quickly, "A little sad."
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I snorted. "You'd be shocked," I said. "You'd cry. You'd probably cry a lot and realize you cared for her more deeply than you thought."
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"Probably," he said.
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"And what if I died tomorrow?"
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He said, "I'd be very, very sad."
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I snorted again. "Understatement."
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He smiled a little and said, "Yeah."
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"You'd be bereft."
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He nodded, "It would be more than just the loss of you as a person..." He paused, thinking.
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"It would be the loss of your direction, your purpose, your largest reference point in life," I said.
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He nodded, "Yes."
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I tried to come up with a way to express how much I'd discovered the depth of my feeling for him by exploring what it would feel like to lose him in my mind. I didn't come up with the words.
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"Being with you and my friendship with Dolphin is the closest I've ever been to polyamory," I said. "But even Dolphin says, 'There are parts of me I wouldn't want to show you because you'd disapprove.' Even she doesn't trust me fully or feel safe with me fully."
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Paladin said, "Dolphin is an anxious girl."
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"Yes, but she's opened up to me more than anyone else has," I said, not including Paladin or my exes of course. "More than Mermaid. More than Ocimum. More than Basket Bear or anyone else I thought perhaps I might have a relationship with."
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Later, when I was crying in his arms he asked me, "Are you sad about Mermaid?"
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I felt my pain at the loss of her friendship for a moment in response to his question, but what I was feeling through my entire conversation was the potential loss of Paladin himself. I shook my head. I couldn't seem to express it, and it made me feel distant from him, and even more sad.
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"You'd appreciate what we have more - you'd probably be happier - if you'd ever had a relationship like this before and lost it," I said to him. Before me he only loved two other women. He lived with neither of them, he didn't even have sex with either of them. He was a virgin before me. I didn't know that until after I taken his virginity, just like Dragon hadn't told me he was a virgin until afterward either. I suspect Wolf may have been a virgin too, come to think of it.
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So my first, second and fourth loves were all virgins when they fell in love with me.
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My third love had had one serious relationship before me, and it was pretty messed up. She had his baby, and yet when he came to the hospital where she had just given birth to his child, she said to him, "You shouldn't have come." That sums up how bad things were between them, huh? He told me he just wanted to forget everything about her, so I was surprised when my third love (Porcupine) told me years after our breakup that he hadn't forgotten me or even really tried to.
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But my first love . . . How did he get so wise in the ways of love before he had ever had a love before? I told Paladin much about my first love (Wolf) that I hadn't before.
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"Wolf always complained that my tone-nails scratched him at night. I didn't cut them until the day he left me." The lesson there was that I didn't take his needs or desires seriously enough. I didn't adapt myself to him seriously enough until it was too late.
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Will Paladin not learn until it is too late? Or has he already learned more than his fair share of how to adapt and mold himself to me? Do we appreciate what we have, or are we now taking it for granted now that we've been together over five years?
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Two years with Wolf in my early teens, one of which we lived together. Then he left me because I had cheated on him. I was bad at monogamy. I thought I was in love with anyone who I wanted to sleep with.
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A little less than two years with Dragon in my mid-teens, most of which time we lived together. He was in my dreams last night, and two nights ago. I dreamed he and I were sitting together on the first floor of my parent's house on the couch under the mirror. I leaned in and kissed him. He kissed back hard, and I tried to soften him. We were not touching each other besides where my legs were folded under me against his and where our lips met. “Touch me,” I said to him, wanting desperately to be pleasured, but he did not.
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A bit more than two years I was with Porcupine in my late teens. We lived together almost the entire time. He supported me financially. We had a lot of sex. I felt very deeply connected to him. I was happy to throw my entire life into his, to make his dreams my dreams. I revolved my entire life around him. I felt like I was killing myself when I left him, but I couldn't stay with someone who constantly chose to be out drinking with his friends when he supposedly was coming home, when he supposedly wanted to stay with me forever and have children with me.
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And then, at the beginning of my twenties I found Paladin over the internet and moved in with him. I had the loss of my life - and world - three times over before him. I was broken in many ways from it. I cherished every moment of falling in love with him. I felt every landmark along the two year path, and was astonished to find that some of the territory was unfamiliar - that two years went by and we were not falling apart.
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Are we falling apart now? I wondered.
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"I feel like we're growing distant," Paladin said to me a couple days ago, "And I don't know what to do."
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But are were growing distant? Or are we just so afraid of losing one another that we're imagining things?
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Paladin wasn't in the dreams I recall from last night.
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I was with Dragon outdoors at my own birthday party, but unlike any birthday party I'd ever had. My Dad was there, and strangers, and briefly I glimpsed Ocimum. I never spoke to Ocimum in the dream though, and at some point later in the dream I felt a pang of guilt for having ignored him unintentionally.
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There were little shops and venues all around. The sidewalk was like soft rubber of many different bright colors in stripes. This was a special little area of the city. I put my arms around a man in front of me who I thought was Dragon. I whispered in his ear, “I love you.”
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This was interesting for a few reasons. For one, I was feeling deeply loving in the dream. For another, it felt very "present" and "now." It didn't feel like a memory whatsoever. It was my current-day love of Dragon. Yet, how is that even possible when I have not seen him in six years, and left him eight years ago?
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Then, in the dream, I suddenly realized that I didn't know who the man I was hugging was. He was one of the people who came with a group that lived in a small co-op house of six people. So, sheepishly, I added, “In a sort of way that I love everyone. I'm feeling very lovey-dovey at the moment, I guess.”
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The man who I had been holding seemed unimpressed with my words. He stood up. He was white and tall (and didn't look like Dragon who is black and muscular with dreads down to his thighs). At first this mystery man had a short buzz cut, but then later in the dream he had brown white-person dreads down past his ears, and I thought to myself, “I wish I didn't make an ass of myself. Perhaps I could really love this man, truly.”
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Lavendella (a female associate of mine) arrived at the birthday party long after many others. I was preoccupied and thought sadly that I wouldn't have time for her. I reflected on how Knotweed didn't have much time for any one person at her own party. (That dream reflection was interesting since it pertained entirely to the actual birthday party of Knotweed's that I attended a week ago.)
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Dad discovered a little entry way into a venue that was just a large dance floor inside with music. I stepped inside and it was a huge cavernous place. I came out to tell everyone what we had discovered. I saw that the six folks from the co-op were leaving down a large alley. I urged them to stay.
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One of them said, “We're heading to a place with a dance floor.”
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And I said, almost frantically, “We have found a huge, amazing dance floor. Come see!” And then they followed me, although I feel like I led them to the entry way and didn't go in with them. I don't recall dancing.
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I encountered Dolphin. She and I talked briefly. I asked her if she loved me still. She said, “Yes... I've just been busy working.” And I pushed her down to the ground beneath me and kissed her. She resisted only a little. I pressed my chest to hers, wanting our hearts to touch and mingle.
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Love is a strong theme in this dream. I felt love quite deeply thoroughout, even when I was worried, anxious or frantic. I feel like love is the theme of my emotional processing lately - what is love? Who do I love? Who loves me? Is it unconditional, and not really real otherwise? Is it just attachment? Is love a rainbow of all the emotions?
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I wish I had another love like Paladin. Just as deep. Just as real. Then I would feel safer. I feel like I'm in danger of losing my entire life again, the way I did when I lost Wolf, and Dragon and Porcupine.
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But it'd be worse this time. Because never before have I been so completely mingled with someone as I am with Paladin.