LJ Idol Week Two - All That Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust.
I'm a mess. I feel like I've been a mess for months. I guess I'm just going through an adjustment phase of realizing that I'm not the only person that my boyfriend wants to get naked with. I understand that, I do, I mean, the rational part of me does. The other part, the part of me whose self worth is wrapped up in his opinion of me, fails to distinguish between sex and love. Somewhere along the way sex and love ceased to be two separate entities. Are they meant to stay separate? Isn't that what everyone is looking for: the perfect amalgamation of the two? I blame that Disney mentality I grew up with - searching for that one person who could be your everything. And that's what he is for me, everything. I can't get past the notion that if he wants to go and have sex with other people it means that I can't be that person for him, and he doesn't and could never love me the way monogamous people experience love.
I feel like I don't understand anything about relationships anymore.
Even the word "polyamory" gets my heart rate accelerating at unnatural speeds. I've gotten so far as to look up "coping with jealousy" on a polyamory forum, but my head just fills with images of the person I love most in the world living with six women with whom he has frequent gang-bangs and I am just lost within the number. Clearly I need to get it together.
"A few years is a long time," he says bluntly, catapulting me out of my reverie. "What?" I give my head a shake, remembering that I had just told him I need more time, that I'm not in a place where I can own my insecurities and my jealousies. It's been two months since that conversation in August when he first brought up his fantasy of watching me fuck someone in front of him. I referenced a Reddit post I read about a woman's fear of meaning less to her boyfriend when they included a third in their relationship, and said that was my main fear, meaning less. I had said that I probably need a few years. After all, I'm going to have to unlearn everything I've ever grown up believing about relationships in order for me to fully embrace this. And I want to, and I'm trying, but I'm struggling so much. Sure, a few years can be a long time, but when you've only been dating for a few years is it such an outrageous demand to ask for more time? He seems so flippant with my concerns, so dismissive. It is because he is so sure of the strength of our relationship? Or has he really not given this as much thought as he lets on? It's all I ever think about anymore, it's eating away at me like a parasite.
My whole life has become that moment when you're descending a staircase in the dark and miss a step, and then you're stuck in what feels like a blind free fall for a heart-stopping moment or two before you reach the landing. Only this time I don't know that the landing is coming. I am the blind tumbler in the dark.
It's December now, and neither of us can sleep. "Alex, I'm not happy," he says into the darkness of our room. I know he's not happy, it's the thing I'm the most certain about in the world. He thinks that it's because our relationship isn't filling his needs, that I'm suffocating him with my Insecurity. We've been living together for three months. "I just felt you literally sink into me," he continues, as I'm falling apart inside. Of course I did, of course I am, why wouldn't I? I know I'm suffocating him, I'm suffocating him because this desire of his is transforming into a need, suffocating me. He once said that even if I couldn't ever fathom a polyamorous relationship with him that it wouldn't be deal-breaker, but I could hear the invisible ticking clock counting down the limit of his patience, even if he couldn't. My worst fears are confirmed when he tells me that he needs to know that our relationship is going to be open in the future, and not just with sex, with everything, or else he doesn't think we can be together anymore. Two months ago he said that he would only ever want to have an open sexual relationship and nothing beyond that. I don't even feel satisfied at my own foresight.
I feel stripped of my agency, but of course I don't know that I feel that, not yet. All I feel is inadequate, I feel like he knows me better than I know myself and if he thinks something is good for our relationship I'd better get on board because he is the love of my life and I'll never find another love like this one.
Still, it feels like we've barely been together. We haven't even experienced the full potential of our relationship as a twosome. We've been long-distance for years, I thought this was supposed to be our time. Our time to live together in the real world and figure out our lives and take those steps together. Now he's telling me that if we can't have at least one or god knows how many other people, these steps can't happen at all.
I shrink away from him, lying on my back in our king-size mattress on the ground. Some small part of me feels an uncrossable distance growing between us. Some small part of me whispers: "This is the beginning of the end," in my head. I silence it with the sobs that come out of my mouth and I tell him that I'll try, I'll try to be what he needs me to be. If he's giving me this chance it means that we still have one, doesn't it?
I feel like I don't understand anything about relationships anymore.
Even the word "polyamory" gets my heart rate accelerating at unnatural speeds. I've gotten so far as to look up "coping with jealousy" on a polyamory forum, but my head just fills with images of the person I love most in the world living with six women with whom he has frequent gang-bangs and I am just lost within the number. Clearly I need to get it together.
"A few years is a long time," he says bluntly, catapulting me out of my reverie. "What?" I give my head a shake, remembering that I had just told him I need more time, that I'm not in a place where I can own my insecurities and my jealousies. It's been two months since that conversation in August when he first brought up his fantasy of watching me fuck someone in front of him. I referenced a Reddit post I read about a woman's fear of meaning less to her boyfriend when they included a third in their relationship, and said that was my main fear, meaning less. I had said that I probably need a few years. After all, I'm going to have to unlearn everything I've ever grown up believing about relationships in order for me to fully embrace this. And I want to, and I'm trying, but I'm struggling so much. Sure, a few years can be a long time, but when you've only been dating for a few years is it such an outrageous demand to ask for more time? He seems so flippant with my concerns, so dismissive. It is because he is so sure of the strength of our relationship? Or has he really not given this as much thought as he lets on? It's all I ever think about anymore, it's eating away at me like a parasite.
My whole life has become that moment when you're descending a staircase in the dark and miss a step, and then you're stuck in what feels like a blind free fall for a heart-stopping moment or two before you reach the landing. Only this time I don't know that the landing is coming. I am the blind tumbler in the dark.
It's December now, and neither of us can sleep. "Alex, I'm not happy," he says into the darkness of our room. I know he's not happy, it's the thing I'm the most certain about in the world. He thinks that it's because our relationship isn't filling his needs, that I'm suffocating him with my Insecurity. We've been living together for three months. "I just felt you literally sink into me," he continues, as I'm falling apart inside. Of course I did, of course I am, why wouldn't I? I know I'm suffocating him, I'm suffocating him because this desire of his is transforming into a need, suffocating me. He once said that even if I couldn't ever fathom a polyamorous relationship with him that it wouldn't be deal-breaker, but I could hear the invisible ticking clock counting down the limit of his patience, even if he couldn't. My worst fears are confirmed when he tells me that he needs to know that our relationship is going to be open in the future, and not just with sex, with everything, or else he doesn't think we can be together anymore. Two months ago he said that he would only ever want to have an open sexual relationship and nothing beyond that. I don't even feel satisfied at my own foresight.
I feel stripped of my agency, but of course I don't know that I feel that, not yet. All I feel is inadequate, I feel like he knows me better than I know myself and if he thinks something is good for our relationship I'd better get on board because he is the love of my life and I'll never find another love like this one.
Still, it feels like we've barely been together. We haven't even experienced the full potential of our relationship as a twosome. We've been long-distance for years, I thought this was supposed to be our time. Our time to live together in the real world and figure out our lives and take those steps together. Now he's telling me that if we can't have at least one or god knows how many other people, these steps can't happen at all.
I shrink away from him, lying on my back in our king-size mattress on the ground. Some small part of me feels an uncrossable distance growing between us. Some small part of me whispers: "This is the beginning of the end," in my head. I silence it with the sobs that come out of my mouth and I tell him that I'll try, I'll try to be what he needs me to be. If he's giving me this chance it means that we still have one, doesn't it?