(Here’s a song I listened to while I wrote this. Click here for a full playlist.)
I am in a polyamorous relationship. I have two partners—one I’ve been with for 16+ years, and one I’ve been with for about two months. I love them both with my whole body with a love that transcends time and reason, specifically this new love who has come into my life without foreshadowing or preparation, and yet I feel so deeply for this person with such an ease that it feels like I’ve loved them for years. The love between us reminds me of the love I have for my other lover, how even though it moved fast and went against all logic, I knew I wanted to be with him through hell and high water—and in the 16 years we’ve been together, we’ve experienced both.
I love both of my lovers like they are extensions of me, as if they were part of my ancestry. There’s a naturalness to this love that bowls me over, makes me question every cynical thought that’s ever been engrained in me about love. This love moves me to tears regularly. I do not love them the same because they’re each so different. There are textures and sensations of the love of one that the other doesn’t have—not out of lack or inadequacy, just out of difference. Just like a rose doesn’t lack beauty because it doesn’t have the characteristics of a sunflower, I am doing my best not to compare the unique contours and heat of either of my loves. They are each their own form of preciousness to me.
I am in a polyamorous relationship and I am being transformed by love. Split open, rocked, lulled, and softened by love. I never knew I could love this much or this hard. I didn’t think I held the capacity in my body to love this deeply. I grew up with a lot of scarcity around love, saw it as finite, as a resource that is as rare to exist as it is to regenerate over and over. I grew up thinking that love was a double-edged sword, that harm and betrayal are the prices of admission one must pay in order to attain it. I grew up believing that I was hard to love and that love would be hard for me to find. These two relationships that I’m in now are changing how love gets received and given, how I let it express itself through my body. It feels like what I imagine bursting through a cocoon feels like—painful, primal, celebratory, miraculous.