We sat quietly in my girlfriend’s gold Corolla, sipping our smoothies in an awkward silence.
This was weird. Something was going on.
“I have to tell you something,” she told me. Oh boy, here it was. The unspoken apology in her tone of voice, her worried eyes. She was about to say something important. My grip on my smoothie tightened.
“I…”
Oh god.
“I think…”
Was it too late to just open the door and run?
“I think I have a crush on Tyler.”
I was still braced for impact, but after another ten seconds or so, I started to realize that she’d already dropped the bombshell. Funny. That was her big confession?
“I mean, I still love you,” she told me. “A lot. I’ve just got these feelings for Tyler, and I can’t help it, and I know I shouldn’t, but—”
I knew that I should be angry, that I should be outraged, hurt, and indignant… and yet, I couldn’t fathom why I would be. Liz hadn’t done anything wrong—it wasn’t as if she chose to develop a crush on Tyler out of spite. She hadn’t cheated on me or betrayed my trust. She’d simply found herself attracted to a good friend. Being outraged over this seemed comically absurd, and yet, everything I’d been told about relationships said I ought to be. I was staring at a puzzle piece, certain it was supposed to fit, and yet finding, unquestionably, that it just wouldn’t.
Kisses, hugs, and reassuring hand-holding helped convince her that really, I wasn’t upset in the slightest, and before long, we were back doing whatever we had originally planned to do. My mind was still occupied, though, finding fault with the society that reduced my girlfriend to anxious tears simply because she cared deeply for more than one person.
Through almost all of my adolescence, I knew only one narrative for love, sex, and romance, and it went like this: Boy meets Girl. Girl turns out to be The One—the girl who fits him perfectly, who satisfies all his wants and needs, who fulfills his life, enriches him, and completes him in a way no one else ever could, and she feels the same about him. They start dating and fall in love. As they date, they become increasingly sexual with one another, and eventually have sex (the penis-in-vagina, “sex-sex” kind). Their love stays strong, so after a while, they get married, move in together, and live happily ever after, never wanting anyone or anything different because their love is so strong and they are such a perfect fit.
The end.
This was the only story I knew. Fairy tales, movies, novels, news reports—every narrative I heard reflected this same underlying story. Love was a matter of finding The One, the person who would fill your every want and need. We were all half-empty, waiting for the perfect person to complete us in a way no one else could.
Yet long before I was thinking about narratives and social constructions, long before I’d ever heard the words “polyamory” or “nonmonogamy”, I was already deviating from that narrative. If I page through my journals, I can find instance after instance where I approached my romantic relationships with far more openness than seemed the norm. Sometimes, I wasn’t even aware of the divergence—others, the difference between my feelings and what was “normal” was painfully stark. Taken together, however, they provide a portrait of someone for whom monogamy has never quite made sense.
My bus arrived at 7:43, and in order to get to the bus stop, I had to leave by 7:35, yet I glued myself to the computer screen, eagerly clicking “refresh,” up until the last possible second. It was the early 2000’s, I was in middle school, and Kara, the girl I’d had the biggest crush on in elementary school, had finally emailed me back saying she liked me too. I hovered over my Yahoo Mail inbox each morning, rereading our short exchanges and hoping for a new message before I had to leave for school.
Ask either of my girlfriends, and they’ll both agree: I take forever to tell someone I’m attracted to them. This has been true since my very first crush. Kara was my second crush, and I hardly said a word to her throughout all of sixth grade, instead preferring to relish every time we were assigned to the same workgroup and daydream about hearing her say, “I like you too.” Only after we’d “graduated” form elementary school and moved on to our own respective middle schools, far apart from each other, did I work up the nerve to tell her that I had a huge crush on her. I was over the moon when she responded in kind.
For a month or so, as we settled into our new middle school environments, we exchanged emails back and forth. Unsure of what came next, we wrote emails that wallowed in the painfully mundane, seasoned ever so slightly with hints of open flirtation. Eventually, Kara stopped responding, and whatever tiny tea light of a relationship we might have had was snuffed out (though not before I made an embarrassingly exerted effort to get in touch with her to figure out what was happening).
There aren’t many details I remember from our conversations, and blessedly, the emails have been lost, their constituent bits gobbled up and repurposed by Yahoo’s servers, but I do recall one particular part. Curious what was happening in Kara’s life—and for other reasons I can no longer fathom—I asked her if there were any cute guys in her life. She said there might be one, and asked me about cute girls, which I took as an opportunity to tell her about a growing crush I had on a girl named Katelyn.
I gave it no thought at the time. I suppose to some, a confession like that would sound like an admission of infidelity; after all, by saying I had a crush on someone else, I was admitting that Kara wasn’t The One. But I never saw it like that. I still had a big crush on Kara and thought of her as my possibly-maybe-sorta-girlfriend. It just hadn’t occurred to me that having feelings for one person was supposed to preclude your feelings for anyone else.
Fast-forward a few years, and I was in Japan for the first time in my life. I was part of a group of “Student Ambassadors,” 30 or so high school students from around Oregon who’d been chosen to spend two weeks in Japan so that we might develop a broader, global perspective. I had a handful of friends in the group, including Owen, a scruffy theatre kid, and Julia and Roxy, two twins who, as I discovered only after we arrived in Japan, also went to my high school. We hung out together, chatted, and joked around, as friends do.
There’s something about the structure of a group trip abroad, especially one with a short timeframe, that inevitably results in strong attraction. When you’re in a country you don’t know, surrounded by a language you can barely understand, sharing exciting new experiences with a bunch of people who are just as bewildered and amazed as you are, developing a powerful sense of solidarity makes sense. Throw adolescent sex drives into the mix, and it’s not surprising at all that within a few days, Owen and Julia were dating as if they’d known each other for years, while I was nursing an overwhelming crush on Roxy.
Oh god, did I long for it. I wanted to hold her hand, to kiss her, to let her curl up and nap on my shoulder on our long bus rides across the country. She was snarky and clever and beautiful, and she seemed to like me, and I wanted so desperately to meet her gemstone eyes and ask, “Roxy, will you go out with me?”
My airy anticipation would have carried me off far into the clouds, save for one pesky bit of reality weighing me down:
I still had a girlfriend back home in the States.
Once again, the pieces didn’t add up for me. According to the tale of One True Love, if I had a crush on Roxy, that meant there was something deficient in my established relationship. And yet, no matter how hard I searched my soul, I couldn’t conclude that I was unhappy. I still loved my girlfriend back home. I still wanted to be with her. I just, inexplicably, also wanted to be with Roxy.
I mulled it over in my journal. “There’s a large part of me,” I wrote, “that wants to have a relationship with Roxy, wants to love her. It also thinks that, somehow, a more-than-two-partners-total situation might be possible here.”
Setting foot in America again dispelled that notion, and within a month, my flirtatious friendship with Roxy had awkwardly withered away. The confusion lingered for a while, however, as I second-guessed my relationship with my girlfriend, still partially convinced that something had to be wrong—if not with us, then with me.
The worst storm of self-doubt came in my freshman year of college. My girlfriend and I had worked up the courage to try a long-distance relationship, so while I was beginning my college experience in eastern Washington, she was thousands of miles away, pursuing her dream by studying anthropology in a big, impersonal city.
Within the first two weeks of arriving at Whitman, I suddenly found myself hurtling past the event horizon of a supermassive black hole of a crush. Dawn was a talented musician with a gentle laugh, and she shared my nerdy enthusiasm for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It took all of two days before I was finding excuses to spend time with her and convincing myself she had a crush on me too.
It was the Roxy situation all over again, only this time, with a few more years of socialization under my belt, I was convinced that this crush meant the end of my relationship with my girlfriend. I knew I loved her and wanted to be with her, but my feelings for Dawn planted just the tiniest seed of doubt:
Maybe my girlfriend and I weren’t meant to be together after all.
As soon as that seed was planted, more doubt crept in. The fact that I could even doubt our relationship in the first place—that I didn’t stand strong with unwavering faith and loyalty—became evidence that something was wrong. Doubt sowed doubt. I became worried that I was worried. In no time at all, I was convinced that there was simply something wrong with me.
Why did I always want more?
The One True Love narrative doesn’t leave much room for interpretation in cases like this. True Love is supposed to wash away all your other desires, so the moment you want something or someone that your current relationship isn’t providing, you’ve got evidence that something is broken. Having run into this at least a couple times before, it was easy to conclude that the broken thing was me.
Time and time again, I’d demonstrated to myself that I couldn’t focus my romantic or sexual attraction on a single person. What’s more, even when my girlfriend said she had a crush on someone else, I didn’t feel a shred of jealousy. And because I’d been taught that these were hallmarks of True Love, I saw no alternative conclusion: I had commitment issues.
For all my adolescent rallying against arbitrary sex norms, I was unable to turn the same critical searchlight on my understanding of romance. And yet, is it that surprising? My world was filled with people who seemed to exemplify the One True Love narrative. My parents, my friends’ parents—everywhere I looked, I saw couples who had found their True Love and lived together for decades being that person for each other. As far as I was aware, True Love and exclusivity were synonyms. It would take me at least another year before I even recognized that the exclusivity narrative was only one of multiple options. Until then, I could only blame myself for not living up to that norm—because I didn’t yet realize the norm itself could be imperfect.
Feeling guilty and confused, I failed to tell my girlfriend what was going on, and the combination of my secret-keeping and my sudden pessimism for the future of our relationship nearly spelled a breakup. Even after I’d strong-armed my psyche into thinking of Dawn only as a friend, I spent months reeling from the pain my “commitment issues” caused.
Today, of course, I know that you can be monogamous without clinging fastidiously to exclusivity in every realm. I know plenty of happily monogamous people who will freely admit they find other people attractive, or even develop crushes on new people. Monogamy doesn’t require you to hold yourself to a rigid, unrealistic standard.
But still, where’s that narrative? Prince Charming and Cinderella go back to the castle and live happily ever after, but we never hear about what they did when she found herself with a big honking crush on the girl two kingdoms over. Sitcom after sitcom wrings laughs out of the premise that a married man might ever have the audacity to think a woman other than his wife is beautiful. Our culture is saturated with a very particular monogamy narrative, and not only does this leave nonmonogamy out in the cold, it also provides very few examples for the monogamously inclined who don’t demand utter devotion from their partners.
I have no qualms with even the most exclusive forms of monogamy when everyone involved has happily and freely agreed to it. It’d be foolish to say otherwise, to insist that no one can be happily monogamous or that everyone is harboring a deep-seated desire to sleep with or love multiple people—I’m long past my absolutism stage in that regard.
But I know this: There are people for whom the strict tenets of exclusive monogamy don’t work, who fall deeply in love yet find, somehow, that they’re still drawn to others.
There are people for whom even the more liberal interpretations of monogamy don’t work either, who have watched themselves sacrifice some relationships in service of others and felt trapped by rules they never agreed to in the first place.
There are people who are monogamous because they’ve never been told there’s an alternative, and there are people, as I learned only after far too many years of thinking I was broken, who can have crushes on, be attracted to, have sex with, and even love more than one person at a time, for whom romantic love is not a precious stone valuable for its scarcity or a bathtub with a strict and definite volume, but a candle, able to share its light again and again without ever being diminished.
I know this because that’s who I am. And I am not broken.
Photo credits
puzzle pieces by Trevor Pritchard (tcp909) on Flickr, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 License. Thanks, Trevor!
Thunderstorm is coming by Jarosław Pocztarski (j-pocztarski) on Flickr, released under a CC BY 2.0 License. Thanks, Jarosław!
All other photos (and stick-figure drawings) are my own.