“Wow. You guys are so casual. I wish I could do that!”
Said to me and my Main Bromiga, after I told her to go visit my girlfriend and give her a giant smoooooch right on the lips for me. Because my girlfriend is her girlfriend, who lives in a different city and who the Bromiga’ll be seeing in a couple of days.
Right now, we make it look easy. We tease each other constantly. We rhapsodise about Mutual Girlfriend’s many wonderful qualities. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.
It wasn’t always this easy. We worked to get here. We worked hard. In the beginning, there were weeks of long, difficult conversations. Saying things that were hard to say and hearing things that were harder. There were times when I wondered what the hell I was doing. I wondered if all of this would be worth it in the end. I was scared of hurting myself or either of these people I loved. And we talked more. There were tears, more than once. We spent weeks blindly talking, communicating, trying to figure out where we could all be happy in this unmapped terrain.
People assume that poly people have some kind of magic. That we’re miraculously free of jealousy and insecurities. We’re not, you know. I get jealous at times. I get insecure. So do the people I love. We’re only human, you know? I just talk to the people I love, love them as hard as I can, and trust them as well as I’m able.
And it seems to me that if you do that long enough, things mainly turn out okay.
I miss you all so much. 🙂 We’ll be together again soon, I know. 😀
Aww, I miss you too! Can’t wait till we can all be in the same place again- I’m thinking there’s many days/evenings of video games and roller disco and nerdery and those nyommy steamy dumplings to be had
I’ve been mad curious about your set up since I started looking into poly stuff and reading The Ethical Slut, so thanks for this!!
Actually, myself and A were thinking of popping a poly related vlog up this weekend if we get the chance. Anything you’d like us to include in it?
Ooooh exciting! I guess one thing I’d be especially interested in would be, when it comes to things like jealousy, are you always totally honest about your feelings or do you ever try the whole ‘fake it til you make it’ route? I imagine if I were in that situation I might try telling myself that I feel fine about something as a way to reassure myself, but I worry that if that were to fail I might end up feeling like my needs had been ignored or something.
I don’t know if that makes any sense, but looking forward to seeing you do your thing in any case!
That makes perfect sense! I’ll see about me and A talking about it, definitely, because it can be a knotty one.
From my perspective, though, I try really hard to be totally honest and I appreciate when people do the same back. One thing that I try really hard to do is to make a space where saying “I feel jealous” isn’t the same as saying “…so you should stop doing xyz now”. Knowing that sharing feelings is just that makes it a lot easier. We’ve also gotten to the stage where we’ve a whole vocabulary for levels of insecurity and jealousy/envy- everything from feeling a little bit wobbly to full-on aarghfest. It’s really nice, actually, because that way I know how people are feeling and we know when someone might need some extra reassurance and care.