Tag: love

Demisexual pride flag for a guest post about discovering her demisexuality by Lacie Bee

[Guest Post] The Demisexual Slut by Lexie Bee

Published on by Amy

Today’s guest blog comes from Lexie Bee (she/her), a new writer to C&K! Lexie is here to talk about her journey to understanding her demisexual identity and the role that emotional intimacy plays in her sexual attractions.

In brief, a person is demisexual if they only experience sexual attraction in the context of emotional intimacy. Demisexuality is part of the asexual (ace) spectrum and some consider it one form that greysexuality. The header image for this post shows the demisexual pride flag.

I can’t believe that in over 8 years of this site, I’ve never published a piece about demisexuality! It’s time we rectified that.

Amy x

The Demisexual Slut by Lexie Bee

I’ve been dating since I was 4 years old—I was something of an “early bloomer” in that department. It’s hard to tell if liking boys was a chicken or an egg situation; was my attraction to them something I’d possessed since the womb, or had I acquired it during my hyper-feminized childhood upbringing? All I’ve ever known is that if there’s a boy, I should be interested.

This ideology led me to be a smallish, slightly sizable super romantic:

I was in love with love. 

Having a boyfriend was always on my mind, even before I hit puberty.

In preschool, there was…

– Bradley, a spiky blonde-haired boy who would kiss my hand under the pre-K playhouse.

And in elementary…

– Eric, the little Black boy in my Bible school class who gave me a necklace.

– Kyhlen and Noah, the only two Black boys in 4th grade (which meant I had to like them, since y’know, I was one of the only Black girls in the 4th grade class—and Cultural-CompHet was a lesson many years in the future.)

In middle school…

– Raymond, a sunkissed and freckled country boy who played the fiddle next to me in orchestra.

– Bailey, Joseph, and Tyler, the aptly aged trio of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who were childhood friends in my neighborhood and simultaneously pining for my affection.

And in high school, I fell for Nathaniel and Seth and Devin and Ryan and Grady and Alex…

…In college, Corbin and Mitch and Josh and Jack…

…After college, Duncan and Ben and Daniel…

And about 50 or so others!

Yes, the Autism in me made a list of EVERY guy who had a romantic tie to me, based on the central premise of the book The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart.

Maybe it was because I always felt inferior in both the looks and personality departments, or maybe it was because I saw the world through bubblegum pink glasses. But all I knew is that I wanted to be wanted.

It was the one never-ending quest: to find my Happily Ever After.

I didn’t discover that I had ADHD or very unhealthy anxiety until I was 19 and having a mental breakdown after my first year of college. It wouldn’t be until I was 24 that someone would tell me they thought I was on the spectrum, and that everyone else “thought I knew.” For my 25th birthday, I discovered that my surely delusional paranoia would be validated as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

In other words, I’ve always been something of an awkward, oddly-behaved duck.

But without even realizing it, I had become an avid hyper-fixator on two of the most universal concepts of them all:

LOVE & SEX. 

My first boyfriend was deemed a dork who would be forever alone. And I was the girl-dork who, people assumed, would also be forever alone. So we decided to date. If you can’t beat ‘em, outsmart them. Play to win.

There was a sort of power in being able to tell others I was spoken for, even if by the least desired guy around. It meant that no matter how uncool I was, I was at least cool enough to score a date. This social currency would carry me into my adulthood. So, like anyone who becomes an expert in their field, I planned and practiced.

I had a multitude of methods at my disposal, which went roughly like this:

STEP 1: Never miss your shot. Anyone could be THE ONE.

After I hit puberty, no guy was off the table for consideration. Humiliation be damned—if he could breathe, he could and would be asked out by me. Or flirted with, at the very least.

STEP 2: PLAN PLAN PLAN. 

Knowledge wasn’t just power. It was precision. I had my first kiss a month shy of my 14th birthday and lost my virginity the week after my high school graduation at an amusement park motel; nothing too far from ordinary. What no one else knew was that there was 4 years’ worth of bookmarks telling me how to kiss with tongue, folded Cosmopolitan magazines with instructions how to pleasure a perineum, and copious peer-reviewed evidence in the form of sex blogs highlighted.

I wouldn’t just have sex. I’d win sex.

STEP 3: JUST DO IT

I had my first one-night stand on a drunk guy’s floor at the end of my first semester in college. He gave me strep throat, ruined a blockbuster film I wanted to see, and I would occasionally have an awkward encounter of seeing him ride the same campus bus for the rest of the year. 

One day, after he was kicked out of college, my high school crush reached out to me to rekindle our friendship. After a year of asynchronously communicating, he rented a hotel room for an hour to have sex with me. Midway through, he made a comment on my performance that would inspire me to become a power-bottom from that point on. My anxiety about being considered “bad in bed” told me that if guys desired girls who are good at sex, then that’s the girl I needed to be. Bad sex = no sex = unattractive to the male sex.

That night, shortly after he finished, we sat beside each other on the hotel bed and without hesitation both proceeded to open and scroll on Tinder. I pretended that I didn’t care about his apathy to our reunion after those few years. I brushed away the sinking fear in my gut that I had been used.

Over time, I kept a log of everyone I had slept with. But it was becoming harder to remember the names or even faces of those people after those first few encounters. Anytime sex was asked for or offered, I took the opportunity.

Every date, good or bad, became a hookup. Think of it like an unpaid internship on a resume; a crappy job was still one you could reference. And that experience was accompanied by the liberation of being a young adult in college with my own agency, in tandem with the maturation of my body, to give out something of my own that was ALWAYS valued.

I wouldn’t have traded that feeling for the world.

To me, sex seemed like trophy hunting. It was silly and funny to laugh about dating, about how goofy it was, about the situations I would end up in. And I enjoyed being an expert at something that I thought I was, by nature, supposed to be good at. Failed dates became my friends, and sometimes my friends with extra benefits.

Sex was just…sex.

I enjoyed giving my partners pleasure. So it didn’t matter if, throughout the sex, I was thinking about what I was going to eat for dinner.

Sex itself was boring. The story leading up to it was always more interesting than the sex itself. I never orgasmed, and most of the time I never even came close. Most men didn’t mind that I didn’t mind. And I wasn’t comfortable pretending or betting that my body would cooperate and give me the orgasm we both wanted me to have. It would take a couple hours of chatting before I even felt warmed up enough to the idea of having sex. I wanted it, sure… but really, I just wanted the ability to say that I did it.

By 23, I’d had 23 sexual partners—and nothing more.

After having my heart broken more times than I could count both romantically and platonically, I finally thought that #23 might be the one.

After a heartfelt and vulnerable 7-hour conversation until dawn, leading up to an incredible date that ended in sensually connected and intimate sex… He suddenly distanced himself until I never heard from him again.

I was distraught. But for the past 5 years, I’d had one thing that always picked my confidence back up: dating apps. A few nights out with some fellas would surely bring back my charisma, right?

But it didn’t.

I felt nothing. I was swiping and swiping and trying to convince myself that I wanted to meet these people for something R-rated. But really, I just wanted to be in the arms of someone who I could talk to about my feelings. That was always the best part about the sex for me: the part when it was over, when we could talk and learn more about each other, having shared a unique and intimate experience. 

I couldn’t understand why my usual method of motivation wasn’t giving me what it had done through all of those years. I guess after years of school, therapy, and experiences… My “body count” wasn’t enough anymore.

It was as frustrating as it was enlightening.

Here I was, in my time of need, and my go-to therapeutic solution was failing me! How could I possibly have been lying to myself for so many years?! The one thing that seemed the most normal and socially acceptable about me was now somehow nuanced and indescribably complicated.

The timing was serendipitous for so many things in my life. I had just moved from my college town to a completely different state. I had cut contact with my family and toxic friends. My crappy job had me reconsidering everything I wanted in life. My inescapable loneliness left me boundless time for intense self-reflection.

I’ve always struggled with using labels to help define me as a person. Accepting the mental health diagnoses I’ve sought in adulthood has felt imposing, connecting to my ancestral roots has felt appropriative, and getting constantly excluded and ostracized through my life has left a deep-seated fear that spiraled into a never-ending habit of trying to prove my self-worth without room for error. And labels– if judged wrong– were errors.

But I started to put together the pieces…

  • Fixations of finding true love…
  • Dating in order to fit in and be desirable…
  • Receiving praise for my sexy skillset…
  • Loving the rise but hating the fall of every date…
  • Only liking audio porn…

As a Black cisgendered woman, I assumed there were a lot of things I couldn’t be:

  • Anxious, because I liked being around others
  • Autistic, because I made an extreme effort to be liked
  • Abstinent, because my body was the one thing men liked about me

And finally:

  • Ace/Graysexual, because I had had a lot of sex with various men.

Giving myself these titles feels wrong—no, it feels illegal. I’ve never been the poster example of anything, much less as a person who has eccentricities that come with explanations. I’m just “that weird Black girl” and these labels are just excuses.

Or maybe…

Maybe discovering who I am, what I need, and what I want, without worrying about what’s “right”, turned into my Happiest Ever After of them all.

I never quite understood the idea that labels are all bad; they are simply just tools that help us navigate in the world we live in.  

Letters, after all, use labels to get to where they need to go.

So perhaps I should begin using my labels as tools, too. However, and whenever, it helps.

About the writer:

For Lexie Bee, every awkward date or failed-flirty encounter is a new avenue for growth, connection, and of course: storytelling! Finally coming into her own as a self-described ‘Pokedex of Intersectionality’ with her race, culture, gender, sexuality, class, and neurodiversity, Coffee & Kink is her debut into public and professional conversations about her sex life– past, present, and evolving. With the duality of comedy and conversation, she aspires to give others the confidence to speak without shame (especially if you’re sitting at the table with her!)

Header image for a post on how to get over a broken heart

7 Things That Helped Me to Get Over a Broken Heart

Published on by Amy

Heads up: this is not a generic “how to get over a broken heart” listicle. This is tremendously personal and I hope I can trust my readers to be kind.

Yup. It’s been an entire year, and we’re finally talking about this! I have tried to write something cohesive about this experience so many times over the last year, but it didn’t feel like the right time until now. I had to wait until I was sure I was really okay, really truly over it and out the other side, before I could write about it with the benefit of knowing for sure that the pain really does end.

One year ago today, I experienced the most brutal, absolute and devastating heartbreak of my life from someone I thought I would be with forever.

“Blindsided” is not even the word.

It physically hurt. I felt like I was dying.

I still don’t think I have the words to explain the depths of the grief I sunk into, the anger and the confusion, that time I screamed in my car down a deserted road just to let out some of the pressure that felt like it was crushing me from the inside. The nights I spent alternately crying until I felt numb and drinking myself into oblivion just so that, for a few blissful minutes, I wouldn’t have to feel anything.

But this post isn’t actually about that pain, or about the person who broke my heart. It’s about how I got through it. Because that’s the reality of even the worst heartbreak of your life: you do get through it.

One day, you wake up and find you don’t actively want to fucking die. One day, you wake up and you’re not crying before you’re even fully awake, they’re not the first thing on your mind, you don’t see their eyes every time you close yours. Eventually, you smile again. Laugh again. Dance in your kitchen while you make dinner again. Have sex again. Eventually, you even love again.

So this post is for everyone whose heart has ever been broken. It’s for everyone who’s going through it right now, who needs a reminder that there is joy out there and that this too shall pass. But most of all it’s for the Amy of a year ago who felt like she had lost a piece of her soul and thought she might never be happy again. Hold on, sweetheart. Joy is coming back. More joy than you can imagine right now.

This is just my little love letter to seven of the things that pulled me through.

Mr C&K

I have to start with this one because fucking hell, this man showed up for me when I needed him. He picked me up off the floor (literally, once or twice.) He fed me and took care of the house and the cat and our life in the immediate aftermath, when I could barely get off the sofa. When I woke up in the early hours of the morning already crying, he pulled me close and reminded me I was still worthy of love.

Pretty words and promises are nice, but they mean nothing if they’re not backed up with actions. Real love? Sometimes it looks like someone who’s been by your side for a decade sitting with you while you cry and rage and work through the confusion, and then filling the fridge with all your favourite foods in the hope that you’ll eat something even though your body is so full with the sheer weight and volume of your grief that you can’t imagine having room for anything as trivial as food.

Sapphic music

A couple of months after my breakup, I started making a giant playlist of all the sapphic, lesbian and queer girl music I could find.

It was partly an attempt to reconnect with my own queerness, to remind myself that no longer having a girlfriend didn’t invalidate my identity. I found the angsty breakup songs cathartic. The love songs gave me hope that I might find something like that again someday.

Most of all, it was a feeling of being held by these women. Women I’ll never meet but with whom I feel a kinship because of our shared experience as sapphics in a world that simultaneously invisibilises and hyper-sexualises us.

Fletcher, MUNA, Hayley Kiyoko, Girli, Chappell Roan, Xana, Girl in Red, Renee Rapp and more wrapped their words around my heart and, on the nights I felt most profoundly alone, their songs reached out a hand and said “we got you.”

Crafting

You know the cool thing about having yarn, fabric, a set of knitting needles or a crochet hook in your hands? You can’t text the person who broke your heart (or pound that ill-advised fourth shot of gin of the night) while you’re doing it.

Sometimes, making things – counting stitches and rows, figuring out pattern instructions, occasionally ripping it all out and starting again – was the only thing that could stop me from thinking about her, calm my racing mind from ruminating on how stupidly happy I had been and how it had all gone to hell so quickly.

I crafted so much in the few months following my breakup that I ended up taking a stall of my yarn-based creations to sell at a Pride event. Every time I saw someone smile and pick out a piece I’d made in their pride flag’s colours, a little bit of my heart healed. I’d turned my pain into beautiful things, and those things brought other people joy.

Slow, careful and mindful attempts at dating

I got back on the dating apps around August. If I’m entirely honest it was probably a little too soon but I decided, fuck it, it’s been six months, maybe I’m allowed to have a little fun now? (Or maybe I just needed the emotional masochism of confirming, once again, my utter certainty that I would never meet anyone who was right for me ever again.)

Only… I did.

I had a nice date with a woman. Things didn’t go anywhere, but going on a date – laughing and eating sushi and getting to know someone new – felt like gently flexing a muscle I hadn’t used in far too long, like taking the cast off a broken bone. Then I dated someone lovely for about three months. We had fun. Then we realised we weren’t romantically compatible and parted on good terms as friends.

And then…

Well. The next bit of the story comes later in this post.

Queer community

There’s an invisibility that often comes with sapphic love. This is doubled (tripled, really) if you’re polyamorous and your relationship isn’t a socially-sanctioned, legally-sanctioned, highly visible, hetero-read one.

So many people in my life didn’t understand that the relationship might have ultimately been short-lived and non-escalator, but that didn’t make it any less real. It fucking mattered. My love mattered. My heart mattered.

It was my queer community, particularly my queer polyamorous community, that understood. Those people witnessed and held the reality of just how much this fucking sucked. They allowed me to be sad then angry then hopeful then hopeless and then sad all over again. They let me go from laughter to sobbing and back to laughter, sometimes in the space of minutes.

And they never told me it didn’t matter because it didn’t last. That I should have known better, or that polyamory is always a recipe for disaster. They didn’t say at least you still have a partner as if that makes a broken heart hurt any less, or any of the other shit that clueless straight people hit me with.

Friends who understand

Sometime around May, three months after my breakup, I went for coffee with a well-meaning friend. When I got home, I said to Mr C&K, “I feel like an alien in my own life.” I felt completely detatched and cut off from just about everyone else on the planet.

There were a very small number of people who made me feel understood and seen. One of them was someone I didn’t even know all that well at the time, who had gone through a breakup around the same time. Over the course of a few months, our two person #BrokenHeartClub (or #BoozyBrokenHeartClub on the more difficult days) evolved into a friendship I’m profoundly grateful for.

My best friend and his boyfriend let me crash with them for a few days in the immediate aftermath while I got my head back on straight. My bestie alternately took me out and got me drunk in healing queer spaces (Eastenders-themed drag? Surprisingly good medicine for a broken heart!) and let me rage-sob on his sofa.

Finding love again

I had to save this one for last. It’s ultimately one of the most significant pieces of this story and the most difficult to find adequate words for.

There’s something a little paradoxical here. After a breakup, we’re not supposed to start looking for a new relationship until we’re fully healed. We’re supposed to get over a broken heart before we try to find love again. Yet, at a certain point, there is a form of healing that happens within a new relationship. If you want to learn to trust again, at some point you need to practice trusting someone. If you want to fall in love again, at some point you need to let yourself fall.

I met my now-girlfriend Em on a dating app in late October. Our connection was fast. We both read the other’s profile and had a moment of “were you made for me!?”. But it was also slow, in that it was over two months before we could spend time together in person. In those two months, we clocked up over 40 hours of phone and video calls.

On January 7th at 8pm, she walked into the bar and she smiled at me and I knew. On January 7th at 10pm, she asked me to be her girlfriend. Then, on January 26th, I told her I love her. Was I terrified to try again? Of course. But at some point, you have to feel the fear and try again anyway.

She was the final and most crucial piece. She profoundly sees me, understands me, holds me in the messiness and vulnerability of all that I am and have been and all that I might be in the future. With her, I felt able to take that risk. To trust someone. To stare down the fear of opening myself up to that kind of pain again and decide she was worth the risk.

She was – is – everything I needed in a new love. And she found me at the perfect moment.

If you’re trying to get over a broken heart, I hope this gave you a little comfort. I know you’ll get through it. Listen I love you joy is coming.

Wedding cake with bride and groom toppers, for a post about The Bold Type's Suttard and incompatibilities around wanting children

On “Suttard,” Fundamental Incompatibilities, and Happy Ever After

Published on by Amy1 Comment

This post contains spoilers for all five seasons of The Bold Type! Stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoilered.

Like many fans of Freeform’s The Bold Type, which just finished its fifth and final season, I was rooting for a happy outcome for Sutton Brady-Hunter and Richard Hunter (known collectively by the fandom as “Suttard.”) They’re the best straight couple on the show by far, from their Bluetooth vibrator sex date to their incredible Paris reunion in the season 2 finale.

At the end of season 4, the newly married couple have a blow-out argument when Sutton realises she doesn’t want to have children, causing Richard – who longs to be a dad – to leave her and then (at the beginning of season 5) begin divorce proceedings.

Over the course of the final season, Sutton destroys her wedding dress, throws a “divorce party,” starts therapy, and quits drinking in an attempt to get over Richard. Then they meet up to swap divorce papers, predictably fall into bed with each other, and Richard realises how much he loves her and that he doesn’t want a life without her, even if it means giving up his dream of having children.

So far, so romantic? But…

Fundamental incompatibilities

No two people will ever be perfectly aligned on every issue or desire. That’s impossible because we’re all multifaceted, nuanced, and complex creatures. But there are, I believe, a few fundamentals. Things you need to agree on (or at least be genuinely, wholeheartedly happy to compromise on) in order to have a functional relationship.

Having children is one of those things. (Others might include getting married or not, being monogamous or not, and possibly even political affiliation.)

Some things are just deal breakers. Some things should be deal-breakers. Because in reality, much as we want to believe that love conquers all, it doesn’t. Love doesn’t conquer wanting different things in uncompromisable situations. You can’t have half a child. You can’t be half married. Love, however real and powerful, doesn’t make these incompatibilities go away or create the potential for a compromise where there is none.

Fairytale endings: fantasy vs. reality

I’m glad the writers chose to end The Bold Type the way they did. Ultimately, this show is escapist fantasy – a Sex & the City for millennials with little grounding in the real world. Suttard fans were crushed when the couple split up and were rooting for them to get back together and somehow find a way through their conflicting desires.

The writers gave us what we wanted. Find me a single fan who didn’t let out a collective “awwww” at this moment:

GIF of Richard Hunter and Sutton Brady (Suttard)

But it really is just fantasy. In reality, fairytale endings like this don’t happen. Or if they do, they cause intense resentment and bigger problems down the line.

I admit that I struggle to relate to Richard, personally. As someone who decided early on that I will be childfree for life, I find it very difficult to imagine wanting to have children more than wanting to be with the person I love. (And my god, these two really do love each other – Meghann Fahy and Sam Page have incredible on-screen chemistry!)

But many people do feel like that, and it’s valid and real. Many people want to be a parent more than anything, even if it means they can’t be with the person they thought was their forever person. And those people can’t just switch that off the way Richard seems to in this too-neat-to-be-real happy ever after.

Happy endings don’t exist

A much younger, more naive version of me thought that I’d find a happy ending someday. When I left my abuser and fell in love with Mr CK, I wondered if I’d found it – if everything would be plain sailing from here.

What I can tell you now, years later, is that no. I hadn’t found a happy ending. Not because this relationship isn’t wonderful. It was then and it is now. But because happy endings of the fairytale kind don’t exist.

Real relationships require constant communication, ongoing compromise, and recalibration as you both grow and change. You can decide to be together, to commit, to go all-in, but that doesn’t take away from the very real work required to make love work long term.

Love is messy, love is nuanced, love is the best thing in the world. But it is not magical. It does not remove all obstacles or effortlessly sweep them aside. And some obstacles are too big to overcome.

So I’ll enjoy the Suttard happy ending for what it is: escapist fantasy wrapping up five seasons of escapist fantasy. But I’m glad it’s not real. Because as much as I want someone to love me for the rest of my life, I would never want them to give up their greatest dream to be with me.

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What is commitment without entanglement? Group of people in a cuddle pile

What is Commitment Without Entanglement?

Published on by Amy1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about commitment a lot recently. What it is, what it means, and how I can ethically incorporate it into my life in a way that aligns with my needs, my values, and my partners’ needs and values.

As a polyamorous person and an ethical slut, commitment matters a lot to me. Does that surprise you? Many people assume that true commitment is impossible in a non-monogamous context. Of course, I don’t agree.

What is commitment, anyway?

Oxford Languages suggests the definition of commitment as “the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc”. I think this is actually a pretty okay definition.

We all think we know what commitment means in a relationship, especially as it relates to mononormative culture. People often equate commitment with things like getting married, living together, and raising children together. Our society also strongly equates commitment with exclusivity. (Hands up every polyamorous person who has been asked “when are you going to commit to one person?”)

As a non-monogamous person, I suggest we look at commitment a different way. Instead of asking “what does society tell me a committed relationship looks like?”, ask yourself “what does commitment mean to me?”

Here are five things commitment means to me.

  • Commitment means I will prioritise you highly. This does not necessarily mean I will always put you first, and I will not necessarily prioritise you to the detriment of other important things in my life. But I will always consider you and strive to behave in ways that honour our connection.
  • Commitment means I will attempt to work through problems that arise in our relationship, engaging in good faith and seeking solutions that work for everyone involved.
  • Commitment means that I honour the ways in which you, I, and our relationship will grow and change. I want to grow along with you, not away from you.
  • Commitment means I want you to be in my life for as long as it is a happy and healthy choice for both of us. Ideally that means “for life,” but I accept things change. If our relationship is no longer good for one or both of us, I will let you go.
  • Commitment means that your happiness matters to me. To the best of my ability, and to the extent it doesn’t harm me or anyone else to do so, I will behave in ways that faciliate your happiness.

Your answers may be different. But I encourage you to think about what commitment is to you and maybe write down a “commitment manifesto” like the one I’ve shared above.

What is entanglement?

When I talk about entanglement in a relationship, I’m broadly referring to what is often known within polyamorous communities as “the relationship escalator.” Coined by writer Amy Gahran, the relationship escalator is described thus:

“The default set of societal expectations for intimate relationships. Partners follow a progressive set of steps, each with visible markers, toward a clear goal.

The goal at the top of the Escalator is to achieve a permanently monogamous (sexually and romantically exclusive between two people), cohabitating marriage — legally sanctioned if possible. In many cases, buying a house and having kids is also part of the goal. Partners are expected to remain together at the top of the Escalator until death.

The Escalator is the standard by which most people gauge whether a developing intimate relationship is significant, “serious,” good, healthy, committed or worth pursuing or continuing.”

The relationship escalator isn’t inherently bad, if it’s something you genuinely want (as opposed to something you’re following because of social, cultural, or familial pressure). But holding up the escalator model as the pinnacle of relationship achievement is deeply damaging to many people.

On or off the escalator?

Even though I strongly identify as non-monogamous, I’ve always valued having a core, deeply entangled relationship in my life. This is what Mr CK and I have. We live together, we share bills and cats and household chores, we are at least somewhat financially entangled. We’re each other’s next of kin at the hospital. We make big decisions together, and we hope to be together for life.

I also do not want all my relationships – or indeed any others – to be this entangled. The beauty of non-monogamy is that relationships don’t have to be all or nothing. If you have great sex but don’t have romantic feelings for one another, you can have a great friends-with-benefits arrangement. If you love each other but don’t want to live together, you can enjoy the connection for what it is without pushing for it to be more. When you have a need one partner can’t or won’t meet, you can get it fulfilled elsewhere.

This means you get to choose whether each relationship is on or off the escalator. It means you get to choose what level of commitment you want, and what that means for you and your partner(s).

You can even decide to take certain steps on the escalator but skip others, if you want to. For example, “we want to live together but no kids,” or “we want to get married, but monogamy isn’t part of our arrangement.”

Commitment without entanglement

When you try to define commitment without the trappings of heteronormative, mononormative, escalator-driven relationships, it gets complicated fast. It also gets really, really diverse.

Here are five things I’ve learned about how to do commitment without entanglement.

Create milestones that matter to you

Every serious relationship has meaningful milestones. What these look like and what they mean to you both/all will be different in each relationship. A few common milestones that don’t necessarily imply entanglement include the first kiss, the first time you say “I love you,” the first time you have sex, and the first night you spend together.

Unromantic milestones matter, too. In my relationship with The Artist, I remember feeling like our relationship had turned a corner the first time we navigated a (non-relational) crisis together. It wasn’t fun at the time, but in the long run it cemented our bond even further. I felt similarly after the first time they saw me in the middle of a major mental health crisis and didn’t run away.

What relationship milestones feel significant to you and your partner(s)? Think about both things you’ve already done (“the first overnight we spent together felt really significant to me”) and things you’d like to do someday (“I really want to introduce you to my best friends.”)

Have each other’s backs

For me, one of the biggest signs of commitment is when someone is by my side through difficult times. I enjoy the sex-with-no-expectations brand of relationship with some people. But I want to know that my inner circle people are there for me.

If you’re around when you want a hot shag but then disappear when I’m sobbing on the sofa because my depression is so bad, I won’t see the relationship as a committed one and will adjust my expectations accordingly.

Having each other’s backs isn’t the same as expecting the other person to drop everything to care for you in every crisis. But it does mean stepping up when you can, being there for the bad times as well as the good, and going out of your way for the other person at least some of the time.

Ask, don’t assume

When was the last time you asked your partner what love and commitment means to them? It’s easy to assume other people define these things in the same ways that we do. But assumptions are the fast-track to hurt feelings and miscommunications.

If you’re not sure what your partner needs or wants, ask them! If you’re not sure how they’re feeling, don’t try to guess. Just talk about it.

Learning each other’s love languages can be useful here. People often make the mistake of assuming that everyone gives and receives love the way they do. The love language framework isn’t perfect. But it gives you a way to explore and communicate your needs to your partner and to understand theirs.

Asking isn’t unromantic! Asking someone what they need or want is actually a huge sign of love and respect. Mononormative culture holds that we should be able to read our partner’s mind. This is bullshit. Don’t try. Seriously, I cannot emphasise this enough – just fucking ask.

Stand up for the relationship

When I was with my ex, one of the things that stopped me ever feeling safe was the fact that his wife had veto power. Even after years together, she could have told him to dump me at any time and he would have complied. Even though it was only ever hypothetical, we talked about the possibility at length. One of the things that really hurt was the knowledge that, if push came to shove, he would not stand up for our relationship.

I won’t date anyone with a veto arrangement any more. I believe that longer-term and more entangled partners should absolutely get a say and be able to voice concerns. But I cannot be in a situation where my relationship could be unilaterally ended by someone who isn’t even in it.

If you want to show commitment to your non-entangled partner, that means being willing to stand up for your relationship if you ever need to. This might mean telling your spouse or nesting partner that no, they don’t get to slam a veto down. It might mean speaking up when your friends or family (if you’re out to them) dismiss your non-entangled relationship as not real, not serious, or not important.

Keep the promises you make (and don’t make ones you can’t keep)

To my ex, promises made to me were always breakable if anything better came up (or his wife just had a bad day). This prevented me from ever feeling truly important to him.

In general, if you make a promise or commit to a plan with your partner, you should do everything you can to honour it. Emergencies happen, of course. Part of being in a long-term relationship means being flexible enough to roll with the punches when crises arise. But breaking promises or cancelling plans for minor reasons impedes building a true sense of commitment in a relationship, in my opinion.

The other piece of this is not making promises you can’t keep. My ex used to tell me that we – me, him, and his wife – would all live together and I’d be an equal co-primary someday. I eventually realised this was never going to actually happen. If I’d known that earlier, I could have adjusted my expectations accordingly. Instead, by promising something he never intended to actually follow through on, he deprived me of the ability to make an informed and consensual choice about how much I wanted to commit to that relationship.

If your non-entangled partner is asking for something, it can seem kinder to say “yes, someday” then just keep pushing it off into the distance. But if the real answer is “no, never” or “probably not,” it’s actually much better to tell them that. Hearing “no” to something you want is never fun. But it’s much better than being strung out on a false promise and then being let down again and again.

What does commitment without entanglement mean to you?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I’m so curious how other non-monogamous people handle this.

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Reunion

Published on by Amy2 Comments

Have you ever just fallen into someone and held onto them as if you would drown if you let go? That’s how it felt to me when I saw my boyfriend for the first time in sixteen months this last weekend. Throughout the 30 hours or so we spent together, I had to keep touching them just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

The last year has not been kind to many people, including us. We’ve survived many things in the four and a half years we’ve been together, from a terrifying car accident to my mental breakdown in 2019. But a pandemic that separated us for almost a year and a half was a different beast entirely.

Of course, our relationship wasn’t on hold during all this time. We couldn’t see each other physically, but we kept in touch with Skype calls and sexting and app-controlled sex toys and online theatre and movie dates. But it’s not the same. Sometimes I wanted to hug them so badly it hurt. Often, actually.

Even so, I went into our reunion not really knowing how it would go. So much has changed in the last year. Life is not the same. I am not the same. I’ve changed not just my hair and my body, but also my career and my relationship with myself in the past year. In some ways, I am far better. My self-esteem and my relationship to my work are both hugely improved. But in other ways, I am carrying the inevitable scars of the last year. I am jumpy and scared of things I was never scared of before. I don’t always know how to people any more, after almost a year in such isolation.

So no, I wasn’t sure if we would still fit. Because when people and circumstances change, relationships do, too. I think it’s fair to say they were more sure than I was, but I think they also had their doubts. How could we not, after all this time?

The doubt dissolved the moment I saw them, the moment we clung to each other and I buried my face in their shoulder and I remembered all the ways we fit together. Every time I looked at them, I wanted to laugh and cry all at the same time. Because yes, it still works. The love is still there. Our connection was tested but never severed. Our hearts and our bodies remember each other, and that matters more than days or months or distance.

Sometimes, in the sea of everything changing, you just need something that still feels right. You just need someone who will hold you as though they felt every damn second of all the months you were apart.

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I Don’t Believe in Soulmates (But…)

Published on by Amy2 Comments

“A true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”
– Elizabeth Gilbert

I don’t believe in soulmates.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. I don’t believe in soulmates in the “one person on earth for everyone who will complete you” kind of way.

Aside from the previously discussed mathematical absurdity of imagining there’s exactly one person designed for one other person, the One True Soulmate thing doesn’t account for polyamory, or people who are widowed and then find love again, or just people who have multiple serious relationships in their life because something isn’t retroactively less real because it ended. Then there’s the fact that we are all whole already and don’t need another person to complete us.

I’m not sure I even believe in souls, at least not in the metaphysical or religious way the term is often used. I’m both an atheist and fundamentally quite cynical.

So no, I don’t believe in soulmates. That doesn’t mean I am cynical about love. I’m not. I do believe in powerful connections between people, which might happen quickly or might grow over years.

When I hear “soulmate,” I think it implies a situation where you’re so made for each other that everything is easy. It’s the Disney-fied, romcom-style happy ending where all problems vanish and you live blissfully ever after.

But that’s not real. It’s a seductive lie, a dangerous fiction, a marketing ploy that leads real people to believe their relationships are inadequate.

I don’t want always-easy, because always-easy does not exist when it comes to meaningful relationships. What I want is someone who sees me completely. Someone who sees everything – the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken – and loves me anyway.

And, yeah, someone who can call me on my bullshit.

I don’t believe that anyone can know us better than we know ourselves. That is a fallacy. No-one else will ever be in your head or your body and you are always the ultimate and final expert on you. But I do believe that another person can see the bits of us that we’re not seeing, or choosing not to see, or trying to choose not to see.

Of course, it requires trust and vulnerability to let someone in that far. I’m not very good at either trusting people or being truly vulnerable. It takes me a long time to get there and the rest of the time, there’s a protective layer around me. Sometimes it’s a steel wall a foot thick, sometimes it’s barely perceptible and almost permeable.

A soulmate, in that fiction, would be someone who immediately fixed all those issues with their True Love. That doesn’t exist. What I want is someone who takes the time to see everything that is behind that wall, makes the effort to understand it, and wants to stay even then. Someone who does not expect pretense or perfection, but who embraces all that I am and – and this bit is important – all that I will be.

The “soulmates” ideal implies something static, something immovable and permanent. Real love isn’t necessarily like that. Our souls – our selves – are not static. Instead, I want a person who commits to growing alongside me. Someone who is all in, for the messy as well as the tidy, for the worse as well as for the better. And honestly? Someone who will walk away if it is truly no longer working, rather than someone who is so attached to an ideal that they stay to the detriment of both of us.

So no, I don’t want a soulmate. I want people who will do the work, make the effort, and show up again and again when it’s hard as well as when it’s easy.

It might not be quite so picture-perfect, but at least it’s real.

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Tree roots

Loving Someone You’ve Loved Forever

Published on by Amy2 Comments

“We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
– Louis de Bernieres (from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin)

I won’t knock New Relationship Energy for a second. It’s fun and it’s wonderful. Who doesn’t love that part at the beginning of a new relationship, where you’re feeling each other out, learning each other’s bodies and minds, figuring out how you fit?

But for me, the best things in a relationship have always come with time. Things like learning how to move around each other in the kitchen as we make a meal together. Knowing exactly what treat to bring back from the store to make the other’s day a bit brighter. Hearing I love you in words like “drive safely” and “you need to rest“. A whole shared language of jokes, memories, experiences, trips, fights and resolutions, fucks, films, friends, and so much more.

And sex with someone I’ve loved forever? For me, that’s where the really good stuff is. When there’s no pressure to be perfect. No worries about what if we don’t fit, what if it doesn’t work, what if what if what if…

No fear I won’t be good enough, because they’ve already seen me at my worst and they still love me. Knowing that if I don’t come, they won’t think my body is too finicky or complicated. Knowing that if a body makes an unsexy noise, we’ll laugh it off and carry on. Being 100% certain that if I say no, they’ll respect it and still love me. Not being scared to take my clothes off, because I know they find me hot, stretch marks and body hair and all.

All other things being equal, I’d far rather have sex with someone whose body I know. Someone who knows mine. The creativity that comes with keeping the lust and the spark alive over years. Morning sex when we’re still half asleep, afternoon sex when we’re both working from home, giggly sex when we’re just on the right side of tipsy, sex club sex when we’re getting off on showing off.

I’ve never understood people who think long-term relationships are boring, that forever love is unexciting, or that sex with someone you’ve loved for years has to be less passionate.

So yes, casual sex is fun and NRE is wonderful. Give me the breathless excitement of fucking someone for the first time. Give me the heart-skipping moment when one of us finally moves to kiss the other. Bring it on – I love that stuff. The ability to enjoy that stuff over and over, without hurting anyone, is part of why I’m polyamorous.

But more than that? Far more than that, give me waking up next to someone I’ve loved for years. Bodies that can keep rediscovering each other every time we come together, again and again and again for years. Give me the two puzzle pieces that know they fit together.

Give me roots that have grown together underground. In the face of all that, the pretty blossom is just decoration.

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[Quote Quest] Love is Many Things

Published on by Amy3 Comments

“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself- and especially to feel, or not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at any moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is.”

Love is many things.

Yes, sometimes love is red roses and grand gestures. But more often than not, it’s the quieter things that speak so much louder.

Fingers reaching for yours as you walk side by side. A hand on the small of your back as you wait in line at the supermarket, or resting on your knee as you watch TV.

Sometimes love is, “I love you”. But other times, it’s let me know you got home okay. It’s you’re exhausted, why don’t I pick up takeout on the way home? It’s I set the coffee pot up for you.

Love is the silly trinket they saw and couldn’t not get for you, because it spoke to some inside joke. It’s the meme in your inbox that they knew would make you laugh.

Sometimes, love is the person you’re fucking. Other times, it’s the best friend who peeled you off the floor when you were at your absolute worst and loved you unwaveringly anyway. Sometimes it’s a person who will hold you with strong arms until you feel safe again. But other times, it’s a gently purring cat who somehow knows exactly when you need a cuddle.

Sometimes, it’s I just met you but you’ve completely commandeered my thoughts. Then again, sometimes it’s also I’ll wait patiently for two years for you to fully let me in, because I know how badly you’ve been hurt before.

Love can be lavish dinners on special occasions, but it can also be homemade pancakes the morning after a night of filthy sex… or the morning after you’ve handed in your Masters thesis and all you want to do is fuse with the sofa and never move again.

Love is having your back and fighting by your side when someone has wronged you. But it’s also calling you out on your shit, because they love you and they know you’re better than this. It’s respecting your boundaries, and communicating theirs. It’s saying what they mean, so you don’t have to play guessing games.

Love is letting you feel your feelings. It’s allowing you to be where you are, without trying to fix you. It’s listening with curiosity and empathy, letting you define your own experience. Letting you sit in a space of uncertainty, not knowing, figuring things out.

Love is many things.

Love is not all you need, but it’s a damn good start.

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A firework against a dark sky

Firework

Published on by Amy

Something a bit different today. I actually wrote a draft of this post a long time ago and am only just ready to share it. This is the true story of the girl I call my firework.

“You are the reason that I breathe…” I hear our song, quietly playing on the office radio all these years later, and I am transported back. I don’t remember her birthday or what her favourite colour was any more, but I do remember the important things. The way she grabbed me for that first kiss, the one where I thought my heart would stop. How she was so tiny I had to bend to kiss her, yet I still felt so protected when I was in her arms.

For months, she was only words on a screen. We typed, typed, typed our words, back and forth, night after long night, but it was never quite enough. It was a long time before I even saw her face. I didn’t need to. Just her name, just those three little ellipses to indicate her typing, was enough to send my foolish teenage heart into a tailspin. She was the first person I ever knew who I could be completely myself with. With her words, she reached through the screen across the miles separating us and wrested my truth from my fingertips.

I was only eighteen; she, twenty-five. The first moment I saw her, 3D flesh-and-blood, real and alive and right in front of me on the platform at New Street Station, I knew I was lost. I knew that, whether she was with me for a decade or walked out of my life tomorrow, she would always linger like a brand upon my skin.

She taught me how to make love to a woman. But much more than that, she taught me how to say yes when something I desperately want, but am afraid to want, is offered to me. She taught me how to love unreservedly, how to give of my whole self and then more. With her, I dared to hold hands in public and kiss in front of people who might not approve.

“To hell with what they think,” she told me. Her bravery made me brave, too. We only got abuse shouted at us in the street once.

Of course she broke my heart. We broke each others’. I fell too hard, too quickly. She withdrew. We were both too young, too afraid. We didn’t know how to communicate. There was the built-in inequality, right from the beginning, of age and experience – of the fact that she was my first love, and I was not hers. We didn’t know what we wanted. With her, I entered a second rush of adolescence, when I was barely through my first.

It was only later, when I’d finished crying into bottles of strong alcohol and convincing myself she was the only great love that would ever come along in my life, that I realised a fundamental truth: I will never love anyone else in the same way I loved her. And that is okay. That is even good.

What we had, though beautiful for its brief time, was neither comfortable nor sustainable over the long term. She was not the gentle, comforting fire of long-term companionship. She was a firework; bright and dazzling and then… gone. And fireworks are beautiful, but there is a reason we don’t set them off in our homes to keep ourselves warm.

We will never be friends. Of that I am absolutely certain. On the one occasion in the last ten years that I’ve seen her face – Facebook is a curse – I found the longing still there. Dulled, yes – dulled by time, by the memory of how things ended, by the more real and present and immediate affection for the person I love now – but still there. Indelible. She is indelible, a handprint in the book of my life.

It took me a long time to get over that heartbreak, and longer still to get over the anger that I manufactured to protect myself from the pain. But now? Now I am thankful for those brief, fleeting, perfectly imperfect three months.

She, my firework, taught me to be proud to be a queer woman, and for that I will always love her.

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A blank open book with a red heart on the right hand page

The Love Stories That Weren’t

Published on by Amy

I don’t believe in “The One”. I’m a hopeless romantic, yes, but I’m also something of a realist. The mere fact that there are nearly seven billion people on this planet makes it absurd to me to think that there is exactly one person designed for everyone to love. I mean…

“It’s just mathematically unlikely that at a university in Perth
I happened to stumble upon the one girl on Earth
Specifically designed for me!”
– Tim Minchin, “If I Didn’t Have You“

Aside from the sheer numerical absurdity of the idea, my own experience shows that “The One” just isn’t a meaningful concept. I’ve loved a number of people in my life. Not all of them were healthy for me – some were pretty terrible – but the love I felt? That was real. And it isn’t retroactively less real because I don’t love them any more.

I say that Mr C&K is one of the great loves of my life, and that’s true. One of. What we have doesn’t mean he’s the only person I’ve ever loved or could ever love. It doesn’t mean I think we were somehow predestined to find each other and be together. It means that in this chaotic world, we did find each other and he’s the person I have chosen to spend my life with – to walk hand-in-hand with along the path of life, hopefully until one of us runs out of heartbeats.

Don’t you think the idea of choice, of choosing each other again and again every day, week, month and year, is more romantic that a notion of some pre-determined fate? I do.

I’m also very aware that, for all the people I’ve loved or been in relationship with in my life, there are others which could have happened, and didn’t for whatever reason. So this is for the almosts, the maybes, the “right person, wrong time”s. The love stories that weren’t.

The “what if?”

There was the one who was my first “what if…?” We were seventeen and I was already in a relationship. I didn’t have any kind of language for non-monogamous feelings, so I thought I was bad and wrong because I couldn’t stop thinking about someone while in a relationship with someone else. I don’t think he ever realised his crush on me was reciprocated. We’re friends to this day and he was one of the first people I ever came out to as bisexual.

The fundamental incompatibility

There was the one who was significantly more fundamentally-monogamous than I am. We knew it had no long-term potential, but we were powerfully drawn to each other anyway. He and I danced around each other, kissing and pseudo-dating and doing kinky play and pretending it was all very casual, for the better part of two years. At one point, we were talking on the phone almost every night. He used to call me Kitten. I used to say “I love you” after he’d hung up.

The one night stand

There was the one I got on a train and traveled six hours, on little more than a whim, to meet. This woman who looked like a 1950s pin-up model and kissed me with lips that tasted of green tea. I was recently out of my first same-sex relationship and exercising the age-old wisdom that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. She was curious, and her husband graciously gave her a one-night pass with me. I just wish I’d known the pass was only for one night.

The unresolved sexual tension

Then there was the one with whom the chemistry was so intense and so immediate that I felt the zing from across the room. Though ultimately it amounted to little more than a single very hot scene, it’s a memory I cherish.

The ghost

There was the one who I shared just one incredible date with. I remember looking at him across the table of my favourite Thai restaurant, wishing I could pour the moment into the empty wine bottle, cork it and keep it forever. I never did learn why he ghosted me afterwards. That one hurt for a long time.

…and all the others

I don’t like the concept of “the one who got away”. It has too many weird implications for me – and, again, is too tied into this notion of There Can Be Only One Real Ultimate Love. I prefer to think about it in the sense of how much possibility there is in the world. None of us, even the most polyamorous, could ever possibly explore every single possible love that might theoretically be out there in the world for us.

But isn’t that abundance of possibility just wonderful?