E— texts yesterday afternoon. Dammit. [Kid] has a fever. I ask if it’s a real fever, or if it’s because it’s ridiculous hot out. It’s a real fever.
We’d been planning a phone call last night. I’d asked a few days before, said I wanted to talk about sex. Specifically, what he thought about adding sex back into our relationship. I’d wanted to feel him out on it when we met up for dinner a few months ago, but we never had the conversation because lockdown.
I read his text, asked if he needed anything, and figured we probably weren’t talking that night. And that was ok.
***
About three weeks ago, Amanda Palmer told her Patrons that Neil Gaiman had left New Zealand, where they’d been in lockdown together, and flown back to to the UK.
“all i can say is that i’m heartbroken, i really am profoundly struggling and i need to call my community to me like never before. i need you. “
It hurt. I don’t know either of them, have never met either of them outside a signing line. And yet. They were supposed to be solid. They were my model for love after divorce, for the possibility of an open, loving, long-term relationship. If Neil Gaiman and AFP can’t make it, what does that say for the rest of us mortals?
***
I have been turning over in my head the conversation that needs to happen next if the answer from E— is a yes.
How do we do this without either of us getting hurt? Without ruining a friendship we both value? How do we reconcile the things about poly that are hard for both of us, that time is limited and children require an immense amount of bandwidth? That healing from trauma is a long process which rarely proceeds in a straight line, and often leaves casualties along the way?
***
Sex at Dawn describes a culture where people live with their extended families and sexual partners are not expected—or allowed—to become part of the family.
“A Mosuo girl has complete autonomy as to who steps through the private door into her babahuago (flower room). The only strict rule is that her guest must be gone by sunrise. She can have a different lover the following night—or later that same night—if she chooses. There is no expectation of commitment, and any child she conceives is raised in her mother’s house, with the help of the girl’s brothers and the rest of the community.”
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn
Women do not need to rely on their sexual partners for emotional, financial, or any other type of support.
“Sassy and confident, [a Mosuo girl will] grow up cherished in a circle of male and female relativies….When she joins the dances and invites a boy into her flower room, it will be for love, or lust, or whatever people call it when they are operating on hormones and heavy breathing. She will not need that boy—or any other—to have a home, to make a ‘family’ She already knows that she will always have both.”
Cynthia Barnes, China’s Kingdom of Women.
***
I’m in liminal space right now. With the enforced pause on any kind of intimate contact, I have time to think on what I want—what I want, not what cultural norms tell me I ought to.
What if I can have my emotional needs met through my community? What if, when I’m having a rough day, there are 5 or 6 people I could turn to for support instead of only the person I’m having sex with at the time? What if I’m able to take lovers for a night or a season or even a lifetime based on our mutual desire to be with each other rather than our compatibility as nesting or anchor partners?
***
About ten days after the initial post from AFP, she and Neil Gaiman posted a joint statement.
We have been trying to figure out how best to love each other for twelve years. It is fair to say that this relationship has been the hardest, but also the most rewarding, collaboration of our lives. . . .We will sort out our marriage in private, which is where things like this are best sorted. We’re working together to try and do this better. We care about each other so much, and we have a small boy we love and delight in, and those are reasons enough to work together to fix things.
***
E— and I talk in the evening, as he walks home from a Tylenol run. It helps, I think, that we’ve known each other a year now, and have been friends instead of dating for half that. There is a level of trust, of emotional intimacy, that didn’t exist when we were dating. The kind that builds through time and hard conversations and doing the work to stay friends rather than saying goodbye.
We agree, with a fair amount of conspiratorial giggling, that we are both a hell yes to sex. We agree with less giggling and more seriousness that keeping our friendship intact is a priority. That neither of us wants to hurt the other or get hurt.
We put a pin in the rest of the conversation. It’ll keep for a time his kid is not waiting on him to come back in the house with the Tylenol.
And that, too, is ok.
Back in New York, and a strange sort of not-quite jet-lagged. We started in the Keys at 8:00 yesterday morning, spent the night somewhere in the Carolinas, and crossed the river onto the island at 4:30 this afternoon. In some ways, I think it’s easier to get onto a plane and travel across a continent than it is to drive that same distance. At least with the first, you can fool the body into thinking it’s only gone a short distance.