girly things.

Emma and I got our hearts broken and Nora broke her collarbone mountain biking, and as shattering as this season has unexpectedly been, I can’t help but feel like I’m flopped down in a bed of pillows watching my girlies take care of one another.

Meaning, Emma and I couldn’t eat for a few weeks following our breakups, and our girl friends kept making us food and bringing it over in Tupperware for us.  Nora needed errands ran while she laid up on Oxycontin waiting for surgery, so Emma and Lena ran them.  Emily is watering Emma’s plants while she’s away, and Katie drove down from Leavenworth to take my sad ass backpacking.  My sister has stayed on the phone with me from the hours of two and four multiple times, just listening to me cry, telling me I’m loved.  My sister sent me a care package with a breakup playlist they wrote down on a little booklet they made me, as well as a cool rock they’d found.  Deb, my roommate’s girlfriend I barely know, bought me roses the week my breakup happened.  Lorna brought me homemade cookies and a note expressing her love for me.  Ashley scorched herself in our community center hot tub with me for an hour while I told her all about my grief.  People are checking on my dog while I’m at work, and Lena has helped me with homework since my no-sleep-no-eat-diet of steady cortisol spikes and dopamine withdrawal has made my reading comprehension just flit out the window.  We are offering to sleep in one another’s beds, and we are cuddling on the floors of parties we force ourselves to, and we are, again, taking turns making each other dinner.  I think if I asked for help with my rent my girlies would happily pay it.

And all of this has me reflecting on recent trends in “decolonizing love” (lmao) and how popular polyamory has become.   I think what the poly preachers are actually wanting is what my girlies and I have.

What I mean is every poly person I talk to is like “listen, no one person can meet all your needs” and to that I say…no shit.  That’s why we have friends.

I listen to the podcast Multiamory every night (especially now that I don’t sleep), as well as the Savage Lovecast and Making Polyamory Work. I read Polysecure twice, and I loved Mating in Captivity, and I follow poly influencers on social media because, confession, I totally believe in nonmonogamy.  Like, spiritually, intellectually, politically, I fucking LOVE nonmonogamy.  I was in love with Austin and having great, exciting and fulfilling sex with others for years.  My flings and non-attachment based relationships didn’t change my love for and desire for Austin.  My now former partner’s relationship with his bestie/ ex didn’t change his love for me and I was certain, especially in those last few months of couples’ counseling and a teensy dose of relationship security (LOL) that he could sleep with and date whoever he wanted and I knew he’d still want life with me.  I was edging toward non-monogamy, toward a more “liberated” relationship, almost exclusively because of my political leanings.  (I ain’t no cop.)

I say all that just to let you ENM people know, I totally get it and I don’t think you’re all just horny and avoidantly attached.

AND…I think what most poly people want is just intimate connection with multiple people, and our nuclear family-focused culture has robbed us of the natural way humans like to live and connect.

Colonialist mindset is like this; move west, young man, and you get a certain lot of land that is yours (so those pesky Indians can’t lay claim to it anymore) to subdue and extract from.  And young man, if you have a young wife, you get even more land.  (Young woman, you get jack shit; your value is as “wife”, or rather your husband’s key to more land, making you property too.)

This pioneer policy incentivized not only child brides, but the separation of man and wife from community.  Suddenly instead of living in big family groups and villages, (tribes?) the American human lived in what we now call the nuclear family, isolated from others and vulnerable.

This concept, the man and wife plus babies and a dog, has prevailed in our country and abroad as countries try to emulate us even though it is so wildly far from the way humans and other primates have evolved, and what is clearly best for us.  “It takes a village to raise a child”, right, but it also takes a village to be a functioning, fulfilled, healthy human being.  The trees are connected to one another through mycelial networks and we evolved to be connected to the plants and animals and other humans around us, engaging in conflict resolution and meal-prepping for one another when we need it. We need each other’s skin microbes to be healthy, and co-regulation isn’t some “codependent” sin it is how we evolved.

 

Before my total whiplash of a breakup, I was trying to compile a bunch of pictures and videos of Ky and I to make a cute anniversary post, and was dismayed to find that most of the pictures and videos I have of the two of us also have several of our friends in them with us.  Dismayed, and then really touched and grateful that our love has never existed in a vacuum; we are always in community, always breaking bread with our loved ones, always attending events together and always sharing intimate conversations, cuddle puddles, and playful little vacations together.  I love that my big romance was never separate from our community.  I even, at one point, ranted that I wanted our relationship to not have his ex’s involvement in it anymore before it hit me; she is part of our relationship, the way our friends and families are part of our relationship, the way my dog is part of our relationship, the way none of us exist in isolation.  It suddenly washed over me that day in the bathtub together that I liked that all our other loves were part of our love, and our hurts and tensions were too.  I felt like a goddamn tree with a million fungal networks feeding me, and feeding us, and I felt so grateful that I never believed in American individualism.

 

Anyway,  Back to my friends.

I’m watching them show up in big ways for one another, and I see that we naturally have what poly people call “attachment-based relationships” with one another.  When we hurt each other’s feelings, we talk about it and resolve our conflicts.  We rely on one another, and we are reliable.  When we need something we ask for it.  We make time for one another, we spend money on one another, we encourage and support one another, and Idk, is that so different from a romantic relationship?  And is the way women love one another (tangibly, physically, reliably) why so many men only form intimate relationships with women and not with one another?  And because they’ve only ever formed these deep relationships with women they’re attracted to, they think that all their attachment based relationships must be sexual or romantic?

 

(The meme of the dude with the emotional support ex is funny because of its reliability.)  

 

One time my former partner and I had some…uh, truth serum, and wound up talking for hours without ego and with near perfect openness.  It was awesome.  One thing he brought up though, was that he often felt insecure about my connection with one of our male friends.  He said he noticed that he couldn’t keep up with the understanding we had for one another (specifically about religious trauma) and that he felt we were attracted to each other, and he said he didn’t want to be a “cage” for me.  He saw that my friend could meet needs for me that he himself couldn’t.  He said if I wanted to explore sex and romance with this friend he wanted to support me, and he’d find a way to deal with the insecurity and jealousy he would surely feel sober.  It was so touching I could have wept, but the main thing I felt was…this friend was already meeting needs of mine that Ky couldn’t, and I didn’t need to consummate our relationship sexually for it to be extraordinarily valuable to me.

 

I really like the idea of not being a cage for your romantic partner.  I like the idea Dan Savage talks about, the whole “be the reason they can, not the reason they can’t” thing.

 

I am also watching my girl friends feel coerced into relationship structures that mainly serve their male partners, because they wanna be the “cool girl” or they wanna live up to the decolonizing pressure, or they think they have to minimize their needs for consistency just to keep some semblance of connection alive.  I am seeing men think all relationships must be sexual or romantic if they are to be as valuable as the ones they have with their girlfriends, and it’s a bummer.

 

It’s especially a bummer because of how held and supported my girlies and I feel by each other right now and always, and how much we know our exes deserve the same care and will probably only receive it from women.  Moms, exes, new flings, female roommates…how do men even begin to unravel what the patriarchy has robbed them of in terms of emotional connection?

 

The women in my circle have been protesting the genocide of Palestinians for eleven months straight, every weekend.  We’ve been climbing together, we’ve been dancing at parties together, we’ve been attending city council meetings on pipelines we oppose and we’ve been making each other dinner.  We have been donating to causes that don’t immediately affect us, learning about prefigurative politics, how to form coalitions of care, what mutual aid means, and we’ve been helping each other with chores.  I’ve never felt so witchy.  Some of us even jump in the Deschutes every full moon.  We have sleepovers, we hold hands, we stand up for the marginalized and exploited.  Is polyamory really that radical, or is it only radical for straight white men who don’t engage in other radical beliefs and lifestyle choices?

All I’m really saying in this long-winded thing here is what I feel like is happening, why polyamory is having suuuuuch a moment right now, is that people are recognizing the failure of the nuclear family and the isolation inherent in late stage capitalism and western individualism, and instead of creating truly radical coalitions of care and intentional communities they’re stuck in romance-focused thinking enough to believe its radical and problem-solving to have multiple sex and romance-based relationships at once.  Poly isn’t what’s radical; intentional communities are radical, and polyamory can be part of that.  In one poly podcast I listened to a woman was explaining one benefit of being poly is that when she went through a breakup, she had another partner to hold her and support her through it.  And again I thought…oh do your friends not hold you?  Are you not supported, tangibly, by people you’re not romantically involved with?

My girlies lean on more than romance and sexual attraction when it comes to the attachments we form.  We like radical thinking to extend beyond who we have sex with.  If sex is the only thing someone can “decolonize” are they really all that radical?

Honestly I don’t blame men for mainly being able to connect deeply with women.  We love like its romantic, no matter who we’re loving.  We love in attachment-based collaboration. We love fiercely, in steadfast commitment to one another.  And years of patriarchy has made it really difficult for men to say to one another “I need support right now”.  It would be absolutely radical to break free from the mold and begin, and I’m thrilled to see so many in my immediate circle doing so.

People say things like “girls mature faster than boys” but they say that to mean, it’s ok that I hit on teenagers.  They forget what that should mean is ‘boys, look to the girls in your life for guidance.”

Not just the ones you’re sexually attracted to, either.

 

Sidenote; Ky didn’t ask for polyamory. That’s not why we broke up.  We broke up because we fight about things.  Commitment makes him feel trapped so he pulled away when it felt like we were “heading” somewhere, and having an insecure attachment brought out my most cop-like behaviors (ewe) and my hypervigilance about imminent abandonment made me hard to wanna commit to.  It was a positive feedback loop of neither of us feeling security or freedom like we need to thrive.  Oops.

Other sidenote; I am also being held by male friends who love me for me, and male bosses who let me take time off work.  Its different but its there, and I have men in my life I feel safe with and supported by.   I’m honestly really spoiled with the men in my life, coming over to sit on my couch while I cry and inviting me out climbing, inviting me out swing dancing, and listening to me rant about feminism or Palestine or veganism or whatever.  I’m a lucky girl.

Other sidenote; I’m too lazy for fake names in this post.  Here we are.