SEXIS WRONG

that Jack and I were not going to get married and live happily
ever after. For one thing, I was about to leave the state
to go to graduate school, and for another he’d informed me
that he was nonmonogamous and had several girlfriends. Besides,
we pushed each other’s buttons so intensely, we really
couldn’t spend much time together. I was still very young and
understood little about relating. At the same time, I knew that
Jack had touched my soul so deeply that I wanted him to stay
in my life forever.
I realized I had a choice. I could transcend my jealousy and expectations
and love him unconditionally, or I could try to shut
him out of my heart and forget about him. I chose to keep loving
him, not knowing at the time where this would lead me.
Several years later I married for the second time, trying to fit
myself into the traditional mold with an ambitious, personable
husband and a house with a white picket fence. He too
had unfinished business with an old lover, but
while continued friendships were acceptable
to him, extramarital love affairs were not. I was
researching domestic violence for my doctoral
dissertation at the time and was horrified to realize
that the dynamics of domination, control,
jealousy, and dependency that I’d observed in the abusive
marriages I was studying also existed, at a more moderate
level, in my own marriage. Determined to find a way to love in
alignment with my beliefs and life purpose, but still not knowing
how it would look, I divorced again.
I soon became part of a group of renegade psychotherapists
who met every two weeks for a couple of years. We would
take turns leading the group, facilitating others, working on
our own stuff, exploring the group mind, and creating innovative
tools and combinations of tools to take us into new
psychospiritual territory. We also fantasized about developing
a more cooperative, communal lifestyle, but this aspect never
went as far as I’d hoped it would. Although many of us were
in open relationships and some of us had partners within the
group and exchanged or shared partners over time, we did
not think of ourselves as polyamorous. In fact, my participation
in this group predated my “coming out poly” by several
years.
Nonetheless, Aaron, my primary lover at the time, and I were
fascinated by the dynamics of triangular relationships of all
kinds. We made it a point to experiment with them whenever
possible, both in the group I just described and in other situations.
Aaron introduced me to Damian, an acquaintance of
his who was well-versed in both pagan and Tantric practices.
I asked Damian to teach me Tantra, and he readily agreed. For
the first time I began to see that the play of energy that spontaneously
arose between me and some of my lovers could
be deliberately invoked and channeled. Damian shared our
passion for triangles, and soon Aaron, Damian, and I found
ourselves exploring three-way sexual interactions. We also
found ourselves tripped up time and again by our gender
roles. None of us had firm enough boundaries, none of us
had done enough sexual healing, and even though we were
relatively free of jealousy, none of us were free enough from
our other conditioning to really connect with each other.
Toward the end of this period, I met another man who, along
with Jack, would eventually become part of my present intimate
network. But it would still be many years before the
seeds I planted way back then would bear fruit. Now, after
many seasons of patiently—or often impatiently—waiting for
individual relationships to deepen and for different parts of my
network to come together, it truly feels like a miracle every
time old and new friends and lovers finally meet and connect
with each other with a shared understanding of the possibility
Polyamory is not philandering,
and it is not a way to justify an
uncontrollable urge to continually
seek out new partners.
we have to weave our lives together. Of course, not everyone
loves each other at first sight—though some do—but all are
curious and excited about the journey we are taking.
Meanwhile, discouraged both by my inability to succeed at
traditional marriage and my inability to do much more than apply
psychological Band-Aids to the battered women and children
who were casualties of our family institutions, I began to
research alternatives to monogamy and the nuclear family. As
luck would have it, practically the first people I encountered
were the group whose beginnings are described in my book,
Polyamory. By this time they had been together for over ten
years and had grown to a core group of four with two more in
the process of joining them full-time. I learned a great deal by
becoming part of this extended family, including all the basic
principles of new paradigm relating. They reached out to me
with such love and support, it would have been easy to let
my quest end there, but I seemed to have a need to blaze my
own trail, so I continued building my network from scratch.
Richard was one of many intimate friends I made in the next
few years and was also an important teacher for me. He
came into my life at a time when I was relating to several different
men who each brought out different parts of me. You
might say that I had a lover for each chakra. For the first time
in my life, I was fully engaged on every level, and as a result, I
attracted a man who could meet me on every level.
Richard had been in an open marriage for about 20 years and
soon told me he was looking for a number-two wife. Our
LOVE WITHOUT LIMITS 33