LYSF: 97% Monogamous

My most recent post on non-monogamy made me sound both wiser and more experienced that I really am. I am, in fact, neither wise nor especially experienced. I just did some math, and figured that Raider and I have been together for almost 235 months. During those 235 months, I have dated three other people for a total of...*counts on fingers*...just a hair under seven months. Raider, something less than that.

That's slightly less than 3% of our relationship. 2.97%, to be precise.

We are not exactly what you'd call swingers.

But why not? In my last post, I had much to say about the joys of non-monogramy. But non-monogamy as I practice it is hardly different from monogramy, at least statistically speaking. Why is that?

One reason is that I am profoundly conservative and prefer to protect my relationship with Raider, which is the best thing that has ever happened to me and the foundation of everything else in my life. If being non-monogamous makes me feel secure in my relationship, choosing not to date does too. I have been around the block enough times to know what can happen to people when they get caught up in their emotions. Heck, three different times, I have been the new girl on one end of a "V" when the person at the apex decided it was time to end their prior, long-term relationship (one of those three times was Raider, actually. That was a long time ago).

But there have also been long stretches of time when I just plain wasn't interested in dating--for instance, the decade or so beginning when I got pregnant with the Lego Savant in September 2000. During this time, I was very busy birthing and adopting babies and caring for them, while also teaching English, coping with chronic pain, homeschooling the babies when they turned into kids, watching all of Joss Whedon's oeuvre, and trying to have some semblance of a couple relationship with Raider. I had no time to think about dating. When I did think about it, it seemed entirely possible that my non-monogamous days were over.

Even when I have been willing to date, my parameters have been very narrow. I have tended to choose my time and place very carefully. My time and place was usually the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, where I was a worker for a number of years. I flirted a lot at festival, with women I knew only as Mocha or Mullein or Flame or Rocky, women who were conveniently going to return to homes far away, in Seattle or Nebraska, or even better, on another continent altogether. I need a lover that won't drive me crazy, was my philosophy, someone who'll thrill me, and then go away.

When I started to think, back in 2010 or thereabouts, that I might be interested in dating again, I figured it just wasn't going to happen. My days at Michigan are behind me, and there isn't anything else like it in my life. Sure, I still go to conferences. I attend the Friends General Conference Gathering almost every July, for instance. But it is hard to imagine any setting less like the heady hormonal stew of the workers' camp at Michigan. It's like the place is bathed in an anti-sex dampening field. (The High School & Young Adult dorms are probably exceptions to this.) And all the people at FGC, or in FLGBTQC, that I might have been interested in also attend nearly every year. In other words, I would almost certainly see them again! No, thank you.

Finally, dating often sucks. The afore-mentioned Mocha, for instance, went from Suave Seductive Butch to Frothing Drama Queen in something less than 96 hours. If the right woman can have Raider thanking her by proxy for the good energy she brings to our relationship, the wrong woman can have me flopping down on the bed next to him, sighing, "That was so not worth it." My first lover and I broke up in 1988; Raider and I got together in 1993. I packed a couple of lifetimes' worth of bad choices, drama, "processing," and tears into those five years. I have no patience for drama, but until very recently, I had almost no faith in my ability to date without it.

I still want to tell you all about those five years. You learn a lot from bad decisions; perhaps others could benefit from my experience without having to suffer quite so much. And I would like to tell you about the last six months, when I have figured out that dating doesn't have to suck, and that it can be a pleasure to see a person again, if you choose the right person. But that is about all I can say on that subject.

 

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