Love’s Illusions

Last Thursday, if you had dropped in on me unannounced, you would have found me sitting on my stairs, weeping. Yes, my body was trying to decide whether to start a new cycle (or not) - which certainly both intensified and clarified things in a way I’m pretty sure most women will understand - but that is not why such deep sobs were wracking my body. It was one of those cries that sets free the grief of a thousand little sadnesses, and some of the big ones too. Where they all seem to converge like rivers into a deep ocean, and there is nothing to do except swim. But to explain at least part of why I was in floods of tears in that moment, I need to go back, back to the start of my adult relationship journey.

Today I feel an impulse in my body to tell you a little about what this journey has felt like, what it has brought me, and what I have let go of along the way.

Certainty, a need to control and pin down have definitely been left behind. In their stead, I have acquired a far greater capacity to be in the now - to be with difficulty, with joy, with the full range of what’s available in any given moment, without necessarily needing to manage or resolve it. My sense of humour has grown in direct proportion to my ability to hold more challenging emotions without being overwhelmed by them, proving Gibran’s beautiful line, “your joy is your sorrow unmasked.”

Along this path, I have also gradually shed unacknowledged beliefs - like a swimmer undressing on the way to the pool. Beliefs that I would only be loved if I performed to a version of perfection. That I would only be accepted if I accommodated those around me. Or that things ought to look a certain way. Beliefs and thought patterns developed in childhood in order to survive or inherited through generational trauma.

I came to realise that these beliefs were an armour. And in relationship, armour becomes a shield against the very thing we are yearning for - intimacy. To truly feel. To deeply receive. To give with a generous heart.

So, back to the start of the journey.

*

In the first significant part of my journey, you will find me in my twenties and early thirties, in a marriage where I entirely abandoned myself.

We were the couple that boasted about never arguing. It’s only now that I understand how unhealthy that was. I defined myself entirely around my partner, kept myself small in every area of my life, and called it love.

It started before the marriage had properly begun. When we moved in together, I asked that we make our relationship known to HR - he was a member of faculty at the institution where I was still a student, and I wanted everything open and above-board. He convinced me it would damage his career. And so, I agreed to keep us secret during the four years it took to finish my studies.

I agreed because I wanted to support him. What I didn’t examine was the assumption underneath that impulse - that his career was worth more than my social world, my network, my opportunities. Nobody had told me that explicitly, I had simply absorbed it. I had absorbed it so completely, I didn’t hesitate or even register it as a sacrifice.

Years later, I understand the damage. Those four years overlapped exactly with the final stretch of my higher education - the years when my peers were socialising freely, building networks, taking up opportunities as they arose. I was doing very little of that, if at all, and then with one hand tied behind my back. The cost to my career has been real and lasting.

But the cost wasn’t only professional.

Very quickly, we settled into a groove in which I didn’t feel seen, heard, or held. I didn’t know exactly what I was missing or how to ask for it. One of the ways I feel safe and loved is when someone deliberately makes time for me - to listen, to pay attention, to be genuinely interested in my inner world. I wanted to feel desired. I rarely felt appreciated. When I did speak up, I came away feeling more lonely, not less. So over time, I stopped altogether.

It will be no surprise to you that it didn’t take long for me to lose my sexual desire for him. Emotionally I felt like we were light-years apart, and physically I didn’t have the tools to ask for what I needed. I think on some level I thought it was normal to become uninterested in physical intimacy. Truly, I don’t think most of us understand how much more sex can be than a perfunctory act. There is very little useful, holistic, or empowering information in the general culture that gives us the tools to be truly fulfilled in that area of our lives. In my adolescence, I had read Anaïs Nin’s erotica. I had dreamt of creative lovemaking and deep connection. But I knew as little how to ask for it as he did how to provide it. So, like many people, I performed - which was, of course, just another form of abandoning myself.

*

My seventeen-year marriage was just ending when I realised I loved two people at the same time.

I don’t fall in love easily, so this made me start asking questions. Questions I wish I’d asked sooner, perhaps. The confusion had me turning to the internet; my first research results brought up a book by a French journalist, Françoise Simpère, who had built her life around loving more than one person. Looking back, I think she only scratches the surface of the topic. Since then I have read many books on attachment styles and relationships that are much more useful and enlightening for any type of connection. But at that moment, so much of what she wrote resonated, and it was crucial in helping me make sense of my experience.

Like most of us, I had been conditioned to believe that romantic love is only real if it looks a certain way. That it is finite, and that it is only possible to love one person at a time. I had also absorbed countless models of desperate, pathological obsessions as the truest and most legitimate version of romantic love.

Reading Simpère’s account of loving more than one person at once, I felt a deep relief that I wasn’t alone, and that it was possible to imagine a different, more authentic kind of connection. Holding relationships as an ethical and dynamic space, a playground for growth and self-knowledge - made more sense to me than anything I had been handed until then.

That was the true start of my journey.

*

Shortly after my marriage ended, I reconnected with an old flame. Years of no contact, and then - the moment I saw him - I felt my whole body come alive. Desire, from my toes to the tips of my nose. And when we made love, it was everything I had written off as literature. Intimate, connected, exploratory, unhurried. Anaïs Nin was not using poetic licence after all! And what I had been yearning for was indeed real.

The next few years were full of new experiences; new people - men and women, long-term and shorter-term. But all of them, without exception, were connections I explored to the exact depth that was available between us. No more, no less.

Over time, I noticed my capacity for true presence increasing. Sex moved from being performative to something else entirely - an exploration of energy, of dynamic, of what becomes possible when two people intentionally make themselves available to each other. I learned that looking after my body also meant ensuring I had deep, connected physical intimacy in my life. I share this so openly with you because I feel very strongly that this need - so crucial to experiencing the full exquisite pleasure of being alive - is so important and so often glossed over.

The research is unambiguous about how important physical touch, intimacy, surrender, and pleasure are to our mental and physical health. And yet we live in a culture that simultaneously attaches shame to bodies and sexual needs and dismisses that dimension of life as somehow less important than the rest. Consider this: the only way we can experience our lives is through our body. We only have the one! And yet looking after it in all the ways it requires - through nutritious food, movement, connection, love, sex, intimacy - is something we are neither taught to value nor to do properly.

I have loved more than one person at a time, from inside a shared home and outside of one. I have practised relationship anarchy* and had kitchen-table relationships* with partners and metamours* - configurations where everyone knows everyone, and connection is chosen rather than managed. Each one looked, felt, and was managed differently, and all of them were consensual and ethical. I chose carefully, and over the years only one of the people I let in close was not able to have the hard conversations, take responsibility, and be part of a real repair when it was needed.

I tell you this because many people assume that multiple relationships automatically mean chaos, drama, and emotional upheaval. That hasn’t been my experience at all. What it has required is deliberateness, honesty, and a great deal of personal and relational work. The same things, it turns out, that any relationship worth having requires - and so rarely gets in a normative context, in which external contracts and agreements often replace the harder work of staying in connection. Or so has been my experience and observation.

It turns out deep love, connection, and intimacy do not require a life contract to be nourishing, fulfilling and expansive. The relationships I have had without a shared future tense have not been lesser versions of something. They have been complete and beautiful in themselves.

*

Shortly after all of this began, I fell into a new relationship - my first open* connection - precipitated by Covid, in ways that were partly outside my control. It felt at first like a massive departure from everything my marriage had been - and in some subtle ways, it wasn’t. How could it be, when I hadn’t yet done any of the work to excavate my own relational patterns?

He was creative and always ready for an adventure, but in other ways just as emotionally unavailable. Over time the relationship degenerated, and some of his behaviours became abusive.

This relationship was probably my greatest teacher. What it gave me, alongside its challenges, was access to an extraordinarily gifted couple therapist. That period of inner and relational work was the beginning of a significant and ongoing evolution.

In order to first survive, attempt to repair, and finally extricate myself from that partnership, I had to learn three things I had never properly integrated. First, to recognise what was happening in a dynamic, in real time, in my body - and trust that sense. Second, to voice what I needed cleanly and congruently. Third, to enforce consequences when those needs or boundaries weren’t respected. Without all three, nothing changes. I had been failing at all of them for years.

I finally began to understand that a dynamic can only exist in relationship. In other words, while I am notresponsible for someone else’s behaviour, I am responsible for my part in it. By failing to challenge it, communicate my boundaries, and enforce clear consequences, I was, by default, participating in its existence - and in the harm done to me. A very tough lesson, but a crucial one. I had been energetically leaving the door open to the abusive behaviour. Learning to close that door was a difficult, necessary and valuable life-lesson.

I left that relationship stronger. But also much softer. More able to open, to be vulnerable, to trust - myself, and others. To hold difficult conversations and difficult feelings without dissolving or running away. To recognise when I was being pulled into a codependent spiral or helping to create one.

*

In the last couple of years, one connection in particular has stood the test of time - and has helped me rewire my relational blueprint in ways I never thought possible. At this point in my life, I have never felt so cherished. I have more skin-to-skin, nourishing, pleasure-giving intimacy in a month than I had in seventeen years of marriage.

Which brings me back to me, sitting in the stairs as I sobbed my heart out.

One of my favourite people in the world - a writer, someone I love - published a piece about his relationship with his wife. I always read his writing; he has a rare way of expressing himself about relationships - precise and unguarded in equal measure. So when the Substack app on my phone pinged, I stopped what I was doing and sat on the stairs to read.

He wrote about learning to understand the way women communicate - which he describes as energetic. He named how women so often have to translate themselves into rational, direct language because that’s the only register most men can receive. And he named what that costs us. Then he wrote about learning to hear it in its raw form - to show up for his wife, to truly meet her.

I have experienced this with him.

I simply don’t have the words for what it feels like to be seen that completely. Understood. Met. All my mess and imperfection, not just tolerated - but welcomed.

Before I knew it, I was sobbing harder than I had in a very long time.

I think my tears came from two places at once. On one hand, relief - that this pattern had been named at all. That it was possible for someone to understand it, articulate it, see it.

And on the other hand, a voice inside me saying: I want more of that. More time with that. A deep yearning for more building, more sharing, more nesting* from inside that kind of understanding.

In my current configuration, the deep ethical relationships I have are with partners who all have life partners of their own. And while love isn’t finite, time and resources most definitely are.

My life right now is full. Not full despite something missing - beautifully full. I fill it, and let it be filled, with beautiful people, purposeful work, creativity, love.

And inside that fullness, something is stirring. A part of me that wants to build and share my life more fully with one person. From a transformed place of knowing myself and having experienced a glimpse of what might be possible.

***

A few terms

Open - a relationship in which partners agree they can have romantic or sexual connections with others, rather than assuming exclusivity by default.

Relationship anarchy - an approach that resists ranking relationships into fixed hierarchies (partner above friend, romantic above platonic) and instead lets each connection find its own shape, on its own terms.

Kitchen-table - a style of non-monogamy where everyone involved knows and is comfortable with one another - comfortable enough, the image goes, to sit around the same kitchen table together.

Metamours - your partner’s other partners. The people you’re connected to not directly, but through someone you both love.

Nesting - sharing a home with a partner. A nesting partner is the person (or people) you live with and build daily life around.