"Mom, I Have Two Boyfriends: How I Discovered I Was Polyamorous at 27"

Jezebel


Lots of people post stories of how they discovered poly, but this one struck me as especially well done. It appeared in Jezebel, a feisty online women's magazine owned by the Gawker Media Group. Jezebel claims to have 15.5 million monthly US readers.

The story is illustrated by the author.

Mom, I Have Two Boyfriends: How I Discovered I Was Polyamorous at 27

By Sophie Lucido Johnson

Almost every girl has a movie that breaks her. It's usually something intended for children, like Cinderella. The girl watches it and gets hooked on this idea that if she has an impossibly tiny waist and can talk to birds, eventually she'll stumble upon the man of her dreams. He'll put her in a carriage, and for some reason she'll be into that.

...I loved all of it. I knew then what most girls know at some point in their life: all I wanted, more than anything, was to be found, rescued, and loved forever.

A little over a decade later, I had been in six long-term, serious relationships. By "long-term" I mean that they lasted over a year, and usually almost exactly a year and a half. By "serious" I mean that marriage was discussed in every one of them — including the first one, when I was 16. I couldn't stand the idea of being in a relationship that didn't have the potential of being my Bed of Roses relationship. The boys I dated were almost all wonderful — they were all "husband material," as my mother put it — but something always went wrong and they all ended. By the time I was in my mid-twenties and still not married with a dog in the yard and a kid on the way, I was pretty annoyed.

Then I got into the relationship that I was absolutely sure was The One.... And then, all of a sudden, it ended.

...I spent a LOT of nights alone in my room watching Gilmore Girls for a while, muttering statements that included the phrases, "alone forever," and "lots of cats." What had gone wrong? How had this perfect relationship broken? Where was Christian Slater when I needed him?

I spent days doing what too many girls do post-breakup: I made a long list of everything that must be wrong with me.... And then at some point, the list got so comically long that it didn't make sense anymore. Suddenly, in a Haagen Dazs daze, I realized something: Maybe the relationship hadn't ended because something was wrong with me. Maybe it had ended because something was wrong with the model.

Right around this time, my roommates, who are a couple (couples are everywhere when you go through a breakup), had started to read this book called Sex At Dawn....

Read on (March 16, 2015).

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