Commitment in Das Book

What a weird spot I’m in. I don’t really feel like continuing the story of my LSD trip. I think it’s interesting that, without mention of the acid, one probably couldn’t tell that I had been tripping from the way I recounted the story. This became apparent to me when Lindsey read us her journaling from the day of the trip. It was all so fucking profound and emotional and tripped out.

She frustrates me sometimes because with her, EVERYTHING is profound, and it leaves me no room for my own small profundities.

I’m experiencing some seriously weird relational shit right now.

On one hand, Alex and I are more super-solid than we’ve ever been. I’m completely committed. I’ve never felt this much trust before, actually ever, in any relationship I’ve ever been in. It’s like, whoa, damn, we are partners, for life, that feels so incredibly amazing.

But there’s this other part that’s hard. The part of me that falls in love a lot. Almost all of my major relationships (let’s be real here. All. No need for “almost.”) have ended, in some fashion, with me falling in love with another person.

At times, this has manifested in the worst way, and I actually cheated. Twice. That’s something I’ve promised myself I’m never going to do again. It’s against my personal rules and values these days. So it’s good to know that.

Other times, I’ve ended the relationship, but kept the cord intact until I fell in love with another. Not much better.

Seeing this objectively, it’s clear that in order for my stable, grounded, rock-solid relationship with Alex to carry on in that manner, I’m going to have to deal with the fact that I’m going to fall a little bit in love with other people over the course of my life.

Ideally, I could just love anyone, ever, and no one would get hurt, and it would be beautiful, because, seriously, I’ve got a lot of fucking heart to go around. I face a lot of frustration around the social construct of monogamy and how it goes against humanity’s evolution in so very many ways. It’s just not natural; it doesn’t line up with how we evolved. And I think it causes a great deal of pain for a great deal of people. But it’s the world we live in. And I could buck the trend and go for some sort of polyamorous situation, or just carry on falling in love with someone glorious and new every three to five years, but there are several reasons that I don’t desire to go either of those routes. Mainly, I deeply desire to be a mother, and in the world we live in, that’s going to work out much, much better for me if I maintain a monogamous relationship with a magnificent man (such as Alex). But, more abstractly, living day-in, day-out in a way that defies societal expectations is fucking exhausting.

And, the long and short of it is, I would lose Alex. He’s not going to be like, “Fuck yeah, let’s have an open relationship!” ever. Ever ever ever.

And he’s so, so worth the monogamy. Our relationship keeps deepening. The sex is better and better. The trust and intimacy that we’re building is out of this world. Having a partner in every sense of the world is one of the best things I’ve ever experienced.

So there’s that.

But then, there’s the other part of me, that is unambiguously and terrifically lusting after Cody. And not just lusting. Loving. Maybe I throw that word around lightly, but I’m almost thirty fucking years old. I know what love it. This friendship is deepening into something a lot like love.

And now he knows. And Alex has known. And now we’re talking about it. And it’s making it so much more present and real and painful that I can’t have my cake and eat it too.

Yesterday, I spent the morning with Cody and Lindsey doing a school project. (They’re in the throes of sorting out their own lusty feelings about each other, which makes this all the more complicated and weird. While they’re both single, dating/sex within the cohort is strictly prohibited, as we were informed on day 1 of the program by our Dean.) There were moments of sexual tension between Cody and I. And I can’t be having that all the time with my best school chum. Boundaries are in order. So I blurted out, while Lindsey was away, that we needed to talk. And he asked about what. And it took me a long time to decide the proper way to answer, but I just came up with the word, “Lust,” and left it at that. He nodded.

I dropped he and Lindsey off at his house, and went in to grab things I’d left in his car. He kept trying to get into the conversation while Lindsey was off doing other things, in the bathroom, on the phone, whatever. I was like, dude, not having this shit. Not ready to talk about it, and definitely not in snippets of conversation. So, I said, “Not today,” and then I went home. And then he called me two hours later.

“Hi. I know you said you didn’t want to talk today. But Lindsey just left. We had a talk. And now I’m calling you.”

“Mm.”

“I’m sorry. You said not today. I should let you go.”

“OK. Take care…“

“OK. Bye.”

I felt a little bit like a jerk. But also, I’d said that today wasn’t the day! But I remembered that I needed to spend all the next day writing papers. And also that the next day is his birthday. I didn’t want weirdness on his birthday.

So I texted him. Told him to give me a few hours. Spent some time writing because my feelings and thoughts were all ajumble and I needed to straighten them out before speaking with him. What I wrote turned out to be 50/50, half of it proclaiming my absolute devotion and love to Alex and outlining the fact that, in reality, his boundaries are my boundaries and his boundaries definitely do not involve me falling in love or even engaging in lusty behaviors with other men. Fair enough! But the other half, intertwined throughout, took the form of lusty love letter, proclaiming all of fantasies I’ve ever had about engaging in some sort of relationship with him.

It was pretty weird. But I managed to lay out the aspects of our relationship that, in an ideal, polyamorous world in my fantasizing brain, we would engage in. They boiled down to:

1) Deep, heart-to-heart friendship. Being able to speak truth to each other. Serving as support for each other throughout our tenure here as graduate students. This is already incredibly present.

2) Climbing partners. He’s an excellent climber. We climb together sometimes. It’s so much fucking fun, and I’m finally actually learning to climb so that I won’t always have to rely on others to have the knowledge and skills to take me climbing. And, perhaps most importantly, Alex is pretty uninterested in climbing, and is fully supportive of me climbing with Cody because it means he’s off the hook in that regard.

3) School chums. Cody is my favorite school chum ever. When I envisioned myself in graduate school, I saw myself engaging constantly in deepening discussions of the subject matter we’re studying with my peers. Cody has been that for me from the very beginning. We are similarly cerebral. He definitely enhances the school experience for me, and that’s been apparent this semester, as we don’t have every class together like we did last semester, and I’ve really, really been missing the scholastic conversations.

4) Cannabis compadres. Not only do we both really enjoy smoking weed, we also both struggle with the habit in similar ways. It’s been so fucking validating to explore my relationship with cannabis alongside someone else who has a similarly complicated relationship with it. For Alex, it’s simple. Smoke weed, enjoy the high, that is that. For me, sometimes it’s wonderful. Sometimes I use it for the sole purpose of avoiding shit. Sometimes it sends me spiraling into depression. It’s fucking complicated.

5) Passionate, attuned, dirty, lusty lovers. This is not, in any way, present in our relationship, except for in my mind and, apparently, in his as well.

So! There’s my ideal! But Alex’s needs and desires are layered on top of mine, so I know that I have to scratch number 5 off the list.

I met Cody and basically laid this all out for him, letting him know that this is like, my ideal situation but that of course it has Alex’s ideal situation layered in, and that he gets to layer his on top as well. He said that one through four sounds fantastic.

I keep running out of steam on these entries before the whole story is told. I’m basically just sitting here with a lot of feelings and knowing that I have to process through them and reach through the lust to the other side of this relationship with Cody seems really overwhelming right now. This isn’t just about Alex and I. Alex and I are rock solid, this isn’t going to change that. But my cohort only has 15 people in it, and we’re constantly doing therapy on each other all the time. Shit is intensely interpersonal. I have to see what’s on the other side of the lust and settle into it.