text by: lilli, val, & mae
photos & drawings: lilli
-1-
“Intellectually, non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally, it felt like sandpaper across my eyelids”
Zoe Whittall
I think about the day we went out to this lesbian bar in Barcelona, was it the first night we were there? I watched you two exchange glances, laughs, and observed the tension between you two grow. Was it me who encouraged you two to finally kiss?
Yes!
It was one of our last nights. On our first night you arrived a little later than me and without many words shared, you fell into your beds in your separate room. I remember putting a tray with coffees in front of your door the next morning- I didn’t want to wake you but still wanted you to feel my presence and to feel connected to you (even if it only being the coffee my hands made touching your lips). I met you later that day on the beach.
I remember being excited and a little scared, scared that both of you will be in an entirely different dynamic as what I shared with Mae till then, scared that Val might intimidate me, scared Val might not think I’m intelligent or interesting, just a scared kind of excitement.
We kissed in a bar
outside of it
after spending the evening drinking sangrias and playing this lovely game.
I told Val that the only thing I could think about -Val do you remember?- was kissing her. And I remember the woman we took home with us later telling me that she thought we were together, we must have vibrated with love. Last Sunday we went dancing together and everyone there said something similar. That our love was streaming everywhere, pouring, elevating…
I remember your smile, the orange wall behind you. So funny that orange seems to be with us all the time now. I remember for just the shortest while, I saw you through Mae’s eyes, whose presence made the moment all the more special. I thought I was looking at you as my best friend of five years, as someone I had kissed before, merged with a val-perspective of nervousness, shyness, newness. I needed Mae’s existing love for you to give me courage and hope. It sits at the sandy foundation of everything you and I have built since.
I recall you really seeing each other for the first time in front of my eyes. It was as if I was an essential part of it and as if I wasn’t there, included and excluded at the same time. The way you two connected over things I knew I would never understand, the way you passionately shared thoughts and experiences, getting each other more and more every day, your desire for more apparent.
I find this such an interesting concept in nonmonogamy, especially in triads or v-dynamics: someone brings others together, in that sense they are an integral component of that love, but it’s also outside of them, its very own relationship, thereby also the embodiment of a selfless love: where you can hold and even celebrate that which lives completely outside you. Though I wonder, if it touches those you touch, loves those you love, can it ever truly be completely outside you?
-2-
“A world where it is safe to love
is a world where it is safe to live”
Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio
In January Mae and I were lying in my aunt’s bed. We were supposed to write an open call for a zine but instead had coffee after coffee talking about our future, about living possibilities, family constellations, languages shared, and things varying between the three of us. We talked about places we could move to, children we could raise, days in faraway years we could spend together.
We were both shaking from caffeine overdose.
This dream moves me.
-3-
I was filled with joy being by your side as your relationship developed. Imaginaries of our future together tangible. Sometimes, all of a sudden, especially when I was gone and you took that trip to the Netherlands together, I felt alienated, I had to cry, not necessarily sure of the cause. Was it because I was told that love is limited? Worried that there might not be enough of it left for me once you come back?
I am still scared sometimes.
I remember my body being filled with happiness. How I wanted all of it, share my life with the both of you, see all the directions our relationship will take us, to forever feel this craving of my mind and body for your touches and thoughts. This scares me and also, I am scared I cannot switch off the voices society has been implanting in my head for over twenty-five years [I know it is ok to share these fears].
I feel this too! I get so scared sometimes. Scared I will be left behind. My ultimate “bottom of the anxiety spiral” fear is: no one loves me like they say they do, and everyone will leave me behind. I totally get this. I sometimes wonder if what I’m trying to create is absurd and idealistic. I don’t know. But absurd and idealistic have usually been the backbones of revolutions. So here we go.
The fear that you are not enough will seep beneath your bones. Sexual exclusivity does not protect you from the deep rooted insecurity that you are not worthy of love. I am at times still nothing less than existentially afraid. Afraid I’m not as good as those my partners love. Not as hot. Not as smart. Not as interesting.
This is such a wonderful opportunity to look within myself and continue to walk the path of self-love and self-sufficiency. To see that I, in my flaws, my shortcomings, in the ways I cannot measure up to every other person on this Earth, am special. Like no one else. That when I am loved it is not because I am selected as superior to other potential lovers, but because I am me. Comparison is a demon you battle with perpetually in polyamory – but I assure you the work she beckons you to begin is worth each heartache and each tear.
I’ve felt my ground shake through every inch of this process. Every twist and turn that it takes you on. And yet I have always found it worth it. Everything we end up learning, the way we get to have evidence that we are programmable – that we have agency in our thinking, our feelings, and our behaviors – a quintessential psychological wellbeing marker.
Yes! I always think of my own efficacy and the neural plasticity -that you, Val have taught me so much about- as a central point of my poly journey… how I navigated my own jealousy, changed my reaction patterns. I was neither born nor socialized non-monogamously, rather I made myself to be that!
How empowering!
As for me… even though with the years I have definitely gained confidence, I still, at times, wonder if I, we, will ever be able to completely turn these voices off. Each vision of the future we share is at the same time beautiful, full of love, and suffocating, overwhelming. It pisses me off that we do not exist without the context of our queerness, we like it or not, our lives are political, and our love is an act of rebellion.
I guess it is kind of hard to dissect these voices and thoughts- there is literally not one message about love that I received as a child that wasn’t meant to convey monogamy and how I should always and forever seek it! In most cases, it was heteronormative monogamy! Through every canal, my brain, heart, and being has been socialized and conditioned to seek this single person to fulfill all my needs, forever.
EVERY TEXT IN MY LIFE, yes, everything, music videos on MTV, every dating show, EVERY song, advertisement, magazines, photo love stories in BRAVO, documentaries and films I watched on TV, I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney movies but even the Arthouse or Indie productions my mom let us watch: everything told me that one day I will find that ONE person and we will be happy forever.
Sometimes I cannot believe the power of storytelling, of the story we were told our whole lives, the story about half oranges, monogamy, and the limits of loving.
-4-
“The point for me is to create relationships based on deeper and more real notions of trust. So that love becomes defined not by sexual exclusivity, but by actual respect, concern, commitment to act with kind intentions, accountability for our actions, and a desire for mutual growth”
Dean Spade
I would like to be able to love you and plan the future without having to consider the legislation that discriminates against us, my home country in which we, both because of our queerness and polyamory, are seen as freaks, “unnaturals”. How much work do we have to invest in order to stay strong, build resilience against the accusations, doubtful looks questioning our existence?
I constantly find myself explaining. Val I love you and I love that you do so much of that work for me, you are educating me in so many ways when it comes to deconstructing and politicizing my love! I don’t think I ever had to explain why I date whom or how I date until I started to date non-monogamously. People constantly feel the need to guide me back to how I used to date…. I get a lot of questions like: but does it make you happy? how do you manage? but you never seemed to love like that? I think it is sweet that my friends care for my happiness, and I love talking about sex, dating, and love, I just sometimes feel like it is this extraterrestrial thing that could not possibly be the end goal…
And very often do I hear “I guess it makes sense on a theoretical level, but I could never….” sometimes it seems to me like people are not interested so much in whom I’m dating but rather in how I’m dating. I heard on the Multiarmory the other day that if someone breaks up with their monogamous partner, you always talk about the individuals and the dynamic but if there is a shift in the relationship of non-monogamous partners, society very quickly only looks at that aspect, being that it was a non-monogamous relationship!
Yeees, because every time a poly couple breaks up it is ONLY because of being non-monogamous and it is ALWAYS the proof of non-monogamy being impossible!
I also feel like I want to tell everyone that it can be hard sometimes, that I do feel jealous sometimes and that I have fears and anxieties. I want to do that to also make the image of non-monogamy differentiated, to make it flawed sometimes, dreamlike at other times – it’s like for me when I first read “In the Dreamhouse” and felt so empowered by the imagery of a toxic lesbian relationship, of not having to always make it better than perfect so people think its valid like what the fuck?! But why do people think fear, jealousy, and anxiety only exist outside of monogamy?
When I told my mom the other day that I was developing feelings for someone who dates non-mono-gamously she was so shocked and immediately told me to let go of that person and that I was worth so much more…. I kind of feel like I always have to convince people that what I’m doing is exactly how I want it!
That is why I at times prefer not to tell people about the way I love, as they plant doubt in my head, and even though I have been dealing with it for the past years, I am sometimes tired of explaining my love over and over again, justifying it, my needs, my way of living and doing relationships. And I still have not told my father about any of this… and so, just like many other queer people, I live a double life…
-5-
Yesterday I read this thought in an article on critical whiteness where it said that, yes without subjectivity there would be no politics but that politicizing doesn’t necessarily need to only come as a logical consequence of personal experiences; that it can also come from a critical analysis of our society. I guess what I want to say with this is that I kind of hope that the work can be shared among all of us, that you do not need to live and love non- -monogamously to start and see what is happening on a political (patriarchal) level when it comes to the structuring of so society in monogamous units.
I agree, but from my perspective, there is a certain power that comes with living it, despite all the questioning and doubt.
True. We do not only choose the life we want but also set an example that it is in fact possible.
I often reflect on my non-monogamous journey, and I am sure that one of the most important aspects that led to me living my happy poly life was having so much support from other non-monogamous people around me. Even mine and Val’s journey over the past six years, supporting each other in the navigation of first our other relationships, and then through the development of this relationship… all of this would have never been possible without Multiamory, Ethical Slut, my psychologist, and all of our beautiful friends sharing their experiences, speaking from their hearts about their fears, difficulties, and encouraging each other to live without a script, to reinvent ourselves and to try again and again and again.
-6-
Having read about the history of monogamy, marriage, or heterosexuality, three frameworks that have been unfortunately dovetailed in our society, I have learned just how problematic and anti-liberatory their histories are. By finding new ways to love, to be inclusive in our hearts, we make the personal unbelievably political: we bring put in the work to open our minds as well as our behavior to the multitudes of possibilities – the very essence of queerness. To commit to allowing, to leaving space, to not centering yourself are all acts of great love, not just for your lovers, but for society. When we de-couple society and we un-center the family unit, we facilitate for a more communal and equal place, where resources, both figurative and physical are more aptly distributed and shared.
Our love is political. Monogamous heterosexuality as having anything to do with love is basically a relatively recent construct designed to benefit an industrial-capitalist-patriarchal-white supremacist society. Anything that challenges the traditional structures of families threatens the very social fabric they are meant to represent.
Yes! Let’s threaten monogamous hetero-sexuality by loving each other! How simple, and yet powerful. Being able to voice our experiences is a tool we can use to stretch out the notion of “the norm”.
Sharing experiences through narratives is a political act, because of that queer temporalities thing -that you know about because you went to my talk- i.e. one way to kill queers is to take a future from them by removing any representation or also my straight up removing queers (ex. Inept response to aids crisis, homocides, removal of access to health care, job access, social mobility, etc, etc). So when we SHOW the community there is a WAY to be alive and THIS is what it looks like we grant LIFE.
I agree – one of the strongest tools of oppression is silencing. Every narrative makes reality more layered, deeper and more differentiated – therefore talking about your own experience and talking about our love story adds to the definition of queer non-monogamous love, or actually just to the definition of love.
So let’s shout, write, create, speak up about it, let’s challenge the dominating narrative by loving and sharing! Both for ourselves and our family, to make it easier for others, to offer them an example they can go by. To be queer, to deconstruct, to recreate, to understand relationships AS CONCEPTS that have infinite possibilities. To encourage others to feel connected to their needs, to feel the fresh air of freedom that comes when we let go of complying with unrealistic societal expectations.
-7-
In the “Art of Loving”, Erich Fromm writes about how love is not something that should end in its object: “If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody ‘I love you,’ I must be able to say, ‘I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”
Love can be expansive – a practice, a political act of resistance in a world that has asked us to demurely attach in symbiosis with one chosen person in a heteronormative dynamic.
I love love. I love being a part of it, to receive it and even more to give it. But I also love to witness it, to be a guest in someone else’s love, to be sprinkled with the same magic that exists between others.
How privileged I feel to have come across the people and knowledge necessary to develop the skills to expand my realities and deconstruct the art of loving. How lucky I am to have found you. The love you share -with each other- has created a nest, a sense of family to which I know I belong, and to which I will come back. I know there will be challenging times, but I do not fear them. Your hearts are my home, they do not scare me. I want to gift you with my full trust and my life. So, despite all the obstacles – “let’s love fully, let’s love loud, let’s love now”[1].. and let’s make that love contagious.
[1] Soko, We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow