Chapter 38: Somebody to Love

There is a children’s book called Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman that I used to read to Asher every night. In it a baby bird goes looking for his mother. He meets several animals, including a dog. None of them are his mother.

Too late I realized that bird was me, although I wasn’t looking for a mother, I was looking for a boyfriend. And I had no idea.

I thought Jack and I were just going to have sex with other people. That’s what I thought I wanted. In this way we would maintain our core companionship while finding sexual fulfillment elsewhere. This was our mutual intention—that’s what I told myself.

But the reality was, I was assessing every man I met for their long-term potential. And I was projecting onto each new love interest the same relational dynamics Jack and I shared after nine years together. I was unwittingly expecting them to serve a similar role in my life. I still didn’t know how to relate in a different way, that nonmonogamy was a different—altogether new—kind of relationship. What was its form? How was this new thing shaped? What were the constraints? I had no idea; I was just barreling forward like a hungry ghost, consuming whatever seemed like it might help.

I knew better than to try and talk to Viktor about my struggles. For one thing, he remained mostly unavailable. Though he professed initially that he wanted to establish a regular cadence of seeing one another every two or three weeks, we never managed that frequency after our first few dates. His availability continued to depend on how things were going at home. As I understood it, if he and Marin were in conflict, he couldn’t see me.

What’s more, Viktor made his feelings about helping someone find their way in the early days of nonmonogamy abundantly clear: “I’m not in a teaching mood.”

In other words, he wasn’t there to walk me through the learning curve of my polyadolescence, the initial period a person or couple goes through after deciding on consensual nonmonogamy.

Like any adolescent, polyadolescents are bumbling and awkward, lacking awareness and maturity, still growing into themselves. There’s no way around it; most partnered adults haven’t dated since they met their spouse. They’re out of practice. They’ve forgotten how it works. They are learning new rules. This aspect alone lends itself to folly.

What’s more, when a couple opens their relationship, they are each, developmentally, the same age they were the last time they dated. It’s no wonder a married person who has recently started sleeping with someone new might say they feel twenty-five again. In my experience, there are few exceptions to this phenomenon.

Another destabilizing aspect of polyadolescence is the way engaging with new people reflects a person back to themselves, which can challenge one’s self-perception. There is potential for a person to cultivate greater self-awareness. But perhaps just as likely, a person may find their sense of identity—ideas they’ve long held about who they are, how they live, and what they value—careening off the rails.  

Around the same time I met Viktor, I started talking to a guy on OKCupid that seemed promising. He and Viktor had a lot in common. They were both smart, Jewish, and in long-term, committed primary relationships. Each was highly accomplished, with brown hair and similar physiques. They both attended Burning Man every year. There was something a little slippery about this the new guy that unnerved me, though. Viktor was candid to a fault at times. My new interest, Gavriel, felt a little evasive. For example, he seemed to travel all the time, for business and pleasure. I couldn’t tell if he was legit or trying to impress me or both. It was hard for me to fathom a lifestyle so different from my own. Who flies from Seattle to LA for a party, then back home to get their kid, then all the way to Cleveland to watch a basketball game and home again, all in a span of three days? He did. And he acted like it was just another weekend.

After the first month of chatting, my messages to and from Gavriel tapered off. I was still wondering about him several weeks later, though, so I messaged him out of the blue and asked if he’d like to get together (i.e. DTF?). It worked, and we finally met at a yoga class. Our second date was also a yoga class.  

By the time we had our third date, we’d been corresponding for four months. Hundreds of messages back and forth, written conversations, which, for a smitten writer, is nearly as compelling as that many dates. By then I had imagined all kinds of things with and about him and I liked him a lot.

We were meeting in the penthouse of the W Hotel in Downtown Seattle—his idea.