All Good Things Must Come To An End

February 16, 2021August 23, 2022MelC 5 Comments

Love is not about losing freedom; it’s about sharing freedom with a partner who’s as talented a liberationist as you
~ Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

This post has been hard for me to write. Indeed, it’s been hard for me to write anything for Polysingleish of late — a combination of focusing my writing energy elsewhere, and also feeling like I didn’t have more to contribute here.

I started this blog because I didn’t have anyone to guide me when I began my journey in consensual non-monogamy. There was no guide for being polyamorous while in a primary relationship with one’s own self.

Naturally, I stumbled. I messed up. I slowly figured out (sometimes through trial and error) what it meant to be polyamorous without a primary and without being on the relationship escalator.

This blog has been around for over 8 years now— and over the course of those 8 years, my words have landed with thousands of other folks who have been exploring relationships in a similar way. It has been an incredible honor, and so very humbling to receive feedback — from both friends and strangers alike — who say I’ve articulated something that they’ve always felt but thought they were alone in their experience.

I want to stay in integrity with all of you who have read and followed this blog through the years, and offer you a reflective summary of what this journey has been, and share with you the important ways my relationship landscape has shifted.

“I’m in a primary relationship with my self and having an orgy with the universe.”

Before I had the language to define myself as Solo Polyamorous, this was how I would explain myself and my relationship desires to others. In 2012 — as I transitioned from living in a quiet, hippy-centric community on coastal British Columbia into the busy, poly-friendly city of Vancouver — I began blossoming into my Self in a way I never had before.

I’d married in my early 20s, and had so little dating experience prior to that. My marriage had been characterised by accommodation and compromise (mostly on my part) which I grew to resent. Through 7 years of marriage I lost touch with my own self, with the things that brought me joy, and the sense of play that had lifted me out of depression in my teens. Being a foreigner to Canada, introverted, and socially awkward, I had struggled to make friendships with people I shared values with. I had something of a community that helped me patch up a hole in my social fabric, but it didn’t totally fit who I was or who I aspired to grow into being.

Ending my marriage marked a new chapter, a coming back to my own self, and the possibilities of being able to explore and embody all the aspects of myself I’d kept locked away — through a childhood with a narcissistic, emotionally incestous and co-dependant homophobic mother, and through seven years of compromising my needs and dissocating from my desires within my marriage. I’d always dreamt of having multiple partners (so much so, it was a feature in my make believe stories as a kid). I knew I wanted to explore my sexuality with women. I had desires to unlock the kinkster within me. I yearned for connections that felt transcendental whilst simultaneously supportive, nourishing, and most of all where I could be fully myself.

My entry into the world of polyamory was bumpy. After early experiences of falling back into the temptations of Disney fantasies of romance, and feeling confounded by what was then a very couple-centric environment within the Vancouver Polyamory community (where almost everyone asked me if I had a primary partner), I said fuck it, I’m my OWN primary partner.

I started engaging with myself based on that: taking my self out on dates, doing things for my Self that I had longed for a partner to do, etc. This was such a radical idea in my mind. And my goodness, it was exciting. My commitment was to be firmly polysingleish for two years, and then re-assess.

I had many intense experiences during those two years. Looking back at it now, I see the younger me who was struggling: struggling with the loss of her relationship with her mother, struggling (still) to find a community who felt in alignment with her values, struggling to make a living in a city where the cost of living was twice what she’d been used to. That younger me took a long time to feel at ease in her relationships, but she had some incredible learning experiences along the way.

I remember the first time a partner asked for my consent for something sexual. I’d never been asked about my consent before. I remember nervously dating women for the first time. I remember the feeling of parts of my mind I’d never used before awakening, and the excitement that kept me up till 4am writing blog posts about my experiences.

I also remember when I felt things were not quite right. The overwhelm of attention that the ‘shiny new thing’ (as one partner referred to me) in a community receives. The fawn-responses that I gave to that attention because I didn’t know how else to engage with it, and so dearly did I want to belong in this polyamorous community that I was fearful of putting up boundaries, especially when it was community leaders who were taking an interest in me.

My own Monogamy Hangover would take over more than once.

In 2014, when that time to re-assess came along, I was in a space in my life where I felt so empowered. I had loving partners, I had incredible friendships, I was growing community through the Solo Polyamory group, and I was feeling seen, heard, and understood at a deep level for the first time in my life. I re-committed to remaining Solo, whilst diving in to loving, long term partnerships. At one point I had three incredible concurrent relationships. Between these three partnerships in my life, I felt like I’d found something of a centre to my life as a solo polyamorist. I felt confident in my sexuality, and in my Self. But shortly thereafter, I went through a series of experiences that left me overwhelmed, unable to cope, and struggling.

Dancing with Demons: Tackling Trauma

If you’ve never experienced trauma, then please consider yourself fortunate and privileged. Relational trauma is one of the hardest of all: human beings are relational creatures who need connection (albeit in differing degrees) as part of their physical and mental health. When you’ve had the experience of harm coming from an intimate connection, it does a number on your ability to trust and feel safe in future connections.

As time rolled on — after being bullied by a former partner, stalked by one metamor, assaulted by another, screamed at in public spaces repeatedly by yet another meta, and feeling the withdrawal from partners who didn’t know how to engage with my resulting trauma — my enthusiasm for exploring new intimate connections began to dim.

I shifted my focus. Embracing the principles of Relationship Anarchy that I had already found so much resonance with, I began focussing on my platonic relationships as being the primary source of security and stability in my life. In my journey of recovery from trauma, it proved invaluable to nurture my friendships and community connections as the web through which my safety needs could be met. Along with growing a stronger community, I began going to therapy, and gradually felt myself regain the confidence to step back into intimate relationships — albeit much more mindfully than before, and with a craving for more simplicity and less drama.

One of the most important pieces of the journey of this past decade has been an unrelenting self-questioning. Why? My inquisitive mind has asked why of everything: of monogamy, of polyamory, of polynormativity, of solo polyamory, of sex, swinging, kink, everything. I ask myself why in my own relationships. Why am I drawn to this person? Do I feel comfortable with them because they are familiar, and does familiar mean healthy? Is my nervous system truly at ease with this partner, and if not, why not?

I often follow up with another question: what else is possible? And it is the pondering of this question over the past few years that has led my inner landscape and understanding of my needs and desires to shift.

For the past four years I’ve taught classes on the Monogamy Hangover and run workshops on how to disentangle from the trappings of patriarchal monogamy. I’ve come to see that the Monogamy Hangover is all about the ways we seek out safety, security, and stability: it’s not the only strategy that can offer that to us, but it’s the one many of us are most familiar with, and so, we will keep returning to it until we find a BETTER strategy, one that makes the Monogamy Hangover obsolete. Every time I teach this, I find myself sitting down to question what aspects of the unconscious story and programming show up in my world still.

As I write this, I’m 38 years old, and the shifts in my life over the past decade have been profound. The lessons in autonomy, agency, and independence that Solo Polyamory have taught me have assisted me in finding my own radical path in life, and have supported me as I step into being the bohemian and rebel I have always aspired to be. I learned how to be secure and loving with my own company, and have done so much healing for my own soul.

But along the way, I found something was missing for me: a grounded and secure place to come home to, emotionally.

For all the incredible partners I have had, I never found my desire for an emotional home was fully reciprocated. For some, they didn’t have the capacity to meet me with what I was desiring in our relationship. For others, they had already found that with someone else, and struggled to realise that their polyamory was more about sexual non monogamy than it was about emotional non monogamy.

I also began to realise that the ways I had pursued my sexual freedom had left me with deep wounds, and as much as I had been able to heal and integrate that past, I was now holding back in relationships because I didn’t want to re-awaken sexual traumas, nor did I want to slip back into a space where I was traumatised through erotic experiences. The slutty singleish saga of my early 30s had lost its deep appeal, and I was struggling to enjoy even my solo polyamorous connections, which began to feel either too brief, too shallow, or too far away.

I was stuck, repeating the same pattern and expecting different results.

I returned to critical examination of my relationship desires and actions, digging deep into the questions of: what do I want, why do I want it, and where do I want to be in 5-10 years?

When I first asked myself those questions five years ago, I was clear: I wanted to live in a home with good friends, and enjoy loving relationships with multiple partners. Well, I got there. And, I wasn’t happy with it. I was agitated, anxious, stressed. I’d done all this healing work on myself, and about relationships, and yet something was missing.

Much to my surprise, I found a longing awake in me for something different than the Solo Polyamory path I’d been pursuing, and for two years I’ve held that longing gently in my awareness, allowing myself to be curious about it.

What would it mean to let go of this relationship path that has become so interwoven with my personal identity? What aspects would I want to maintain, and what specifically was it about SoPo that hadn’t been serving me in my journey to joyful relating?

The possibility of a life-partner, an anchor partnership based on co-creation and commitment to mutual healing work, has always been present in my mind. Indeed, in one old blog post I wrote that such a partnership might be the only thing that could pull me into a more nested dynamic, and away from my solo-ness.

Finding ‘The One’

Will I find “the one”? Oh goodness, I found ‘the one’ long ago: she’s me! But what I find I’m now seeking is a partnership that allows me to feel a little less alone in my self-primaryship. A partnership that doesn’t detract from, but rather, enhances that self relationship.

I’m not looking for a monogamous, escalator romance. This isn’t the ending of a journey or the arrival at some kind of ‘inevitable’ dyadic partnership destination. This is a continuation of a bohemian, radical upending of mono-normative, hetero-normative, and yes, even poly-normative thinking.

As a Relationship Anarchist I’ve held that labels should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. And the path I’m now on might no longer resemble solo polyamory. I am now absolutely, consciously, into creating an interweaving life partnership with someone… or someones.

But I’m not leaving behind that primary-ship with my Self. I’m not letting go of the agency that says ‘I’m allowed to change my mind, and live on my own terms.’ Indeed, if not for my journey as a solo polyamorist, I don’t think that I would have arrived at this place, and I don’t think I’d have the same understanding of just what it means to make bold changes to preserve one’s own right to do what you need to do for the greater wellbeing of your soul.

I don’t think this is an inevitable path for people practicing Solo Polyamory. And I worry that, having had such a place in the public eye of solo polyamory, the changes in my relationship landscape might be seen to invalidate the solo polyamorist’s path. So let me be clear: there is profound healing work that needs to be done outside of enmeshed relationship. We are so many generations thick in trauma from enforced monogamy and all the trappings it brings (including gendered oppression, and more) that I do believe every individual would benefit from spending some of their time in the realms of Solo Polyamory. What might, perhaps, be inevitable, is that each person in their journey may need to find their own way of balancing the tension between self-intimacy and intimacy with others, as a crucial piece of finding secure attachment and somatic ease within themselves.

Almost ten years since I started this blog, and the conversation in polyamory has shifted. We’re just starting to undo the couple-centric and monogamy hangover thinking that has directed most consensual non-monogamy till now. We’re starting to talk about having a trauma-informed approach to polyamory. And, we’re beginning to collectively realise the real significance of supporting a healthy relationship with one’s self as being paramount.

I take pride in having played a role in that shift. And even though my own relationship style has changed through the years, I maintain that primary-with-my-self attitude, and work to cultivate self-intimacy daily.

This is the last post I intend to make here on Polysingleish.

It has been quite the ride, and I am grateful for everyone who’s taken the time to witness it.

But my own personal journey is not over. Rather, it’s a new adventure that is beginning. One where I get to explore just how profound this self love can become when building conscious and transformative relationships with others. You can keep following my work over at Radical Relating, via my mailing list, and also on Facebook and Instagram. And, I promise you I’ll keep doing everything I can to offer validation to, and create spaces for those solo and singleish folks within the polyamorous communities, and within the world at large.

With all my love,

“Remember that self love is also revolutionary and world-changing. We cannot fight for others when we are fighting a war inside ourselves. Compassion is reflexive, a power that we first bestow on ourselves, and then give away through our actions — to people, to our planet. When we recognise that truth, that is when we let love become our legacy”

~Amanda Gorman.

On My 14th Wedding Anniversary

August 15, 2018MelC Leave a comment

Fourteen years ago today, I got married.

7 years and 7 days later, I told my husband I wanted a divorce.

This is why I’m celebrating my anniversary today.

Yes, that’s really a photo from my wedding. Yes, that’s really a “DANGER” sign above my head. Our photographer had a healthy sense of humor.

I was married for seven years and seven days. Can you say ‘seven year itch’? But, I don’t regret it. Yes, there are things I would have done differently if I had known back then, at the tender age of 22, that I know now at 36. My marriage brought me to Canada, my husband introduced me to a whole other world in communities of artists and hippies, and I would not trade this journey in for any other because I really love where it has led me today.

My ex husband, he is a good human. Today, he’s in a loving, long term relationship, and is flourishing while he builds his dreams into reality. I’m fortunate that our seperation and divorce was amicable and relitavely easy.

We were a couple that seemed to have so much going for us: a common spirituality, shared goals and dreams, similar values about family and raising children in community. And, we both loved cats. But, that wasn’t enough to make our marriage work. Both young— in our 20s when we got married— we struggled financially, and we struggled with making some tough decisions together. We both carried trauma that neither of us really recognised or understood, and would inevitably trip over eachother’s wounds, and then lash out in blame and anger. We would shout. We would cry. We would throw things around and slam doors and stop talking to one another. We minimized and dismissed eachother’s feelings. We both became depressed. We went through grief and loss with my miscarriages, and eventually, we came to realise that we were compromising so much of our core selves to try to stay together.

At the time, it didn’t seem so bad. Our relationship was not an obviously toxic one. There was no malice or physical violence. But, it seems obvious now to look back and see the toxic emotional and mental patterns we were both contributing to in the relationship: the codependancy, the conflict cycles, the unconsciously abusive ways we treated one another. I go through waves of being completely at peace with it, and then there are days, sometimes weeks or months, where the smell of someone smoking, or a door slamming, or a couple yelling at one another, triggers something inside me and I crumble, my psyche time-travels back to a handful of specific moments, and I freeze up.

I’m a big believer in the power of ritual as a means of letting go. Four years ago I took my wedding dress to Burning Man, and wrote on it all the things I had left unsaid in our marriage.

It was cathartic, powerful. I left my wedding dress in the temple, and later as I watched the temple burn down, I cried out what I thought would be the last tears I would cry about my marriage.

Of course, pain and trauma don’t work that way, and sometimes the ouchy memories cycle back because there’s still something you need to learn from them.

Today, as a relationship coach, I often see people coming to me in familiar situations in their relationships, where they are compromising pieces of themselves in an effort to maintain a relationship that is no longer nourishing them. I have so much love and compassion for folks going through this. I know first hand how it starts off feeling like a loving thing to do— sacrifice something you want and make the other person happier. Our social code around relationships encourages this kind of martyrdom. But, what’s the pay-off for that? If martyrdom becomes our primary love language, how do our own needs ever get met?

In the past seven years I have learned a lot about this. Stepping out of my own patterns for self-sacrifice for a partner and into a stronger relationship with myself is an ongoing journey — and I’m still a work in progress. I’ve had so many diverse and nourishing relationships since my separation and divorce, and I’ve come to realise that relationships can be the greatest teachers: not only does the other person hold up a mirror for you to see yourself, but you can be challenged to hold true to your Self and not fall into the patterns of partner-pleasing (and other toxic monogamy scripts).

When I was 22, I didn’t have a framework for how to have healthy relationships, and thought self-sacrifice was the key. By my late 20s, I knew what an unhealthy relationship felt like, ad that I was unwilling to be a martyr for the sake of a partner. Today, I’ve got a framework for healthy relationships, one that is inclusive of polyamory, monogamy, and everything in between. It nourishes all my own relationships (including non romantic and non sexual ones) and has helped me in my own journey of healing. And that’s part of why I choose to do what I do as a coach. I don’t want others to feel held back by patterns in their relationships where they keep misunderstanding or misinterpreting one another, nor do I want people to feel disempowered and trapped by toxic dynamics.

Last night I had a dream where my now ex-husband came up to me and handed me a card. He began to speak and started to appologise for a long list of things that had happened in our relationship. I looked at him with love and said, “I’m sorry too. And thank you.”

In many ways my marriage— and the subsequent healing journey from my marriage— has been one of the biggest teachers. I ask myself, would I have found polyamory, if not for my marriage? Would I have catapulted into soloness, if not for my marriage? Would I have ever come to live in Canada, if not for my marriage? And, looking at the trajectory my life had been on before he came into my life (becoming an all grades school theatre teacher in the Middle East), would I have been any semblance of who I am today if my now ex-husband had not come into my life? Probably not. And so I know I’ve reached that profound place in healing where you can embrace the painful parts of your own journey, recognizing the wisdom you have gained through it all. And for all this, I am incredibly grateful.

Fuck Yes

July 18, 2018MelC 2 Comments

Today, this blog is six years old. Today, I share some recent reflections on this radical journey.

~~~

I said yes to marrying my boyfriend because I was afraid that my life was going nowhere and I thought it would prove I could be a successful grown up.

I said yes to not sleeping with other men when we talked about an open relationship because I didnt want him to feel inferior.

I’ve said yes to threesomes because I’ve wanted more time with a partner, even tho I wasnt so into the third person.

I’ve said yes to drinks because I yearn for social inclusion and to fit in.

I’ve said yes to kisses because I was lonely, because I was horny, because I was trying to get over someone, because I was in pain, because I wanted a distraction, because I wanted to feel attractive, because I wanted to feel powerful.

I’ve said yes to having my photo taken because I hope I might find out I am beautiful.

I’ve said yes to snuggles with strangers who clearly wanted more than snuggles because any kind of connection seemed better than no connection.

solitude I’ve said yes to sex because I seek pleasure that will erase the pain. Because I want to prove I can be one of the cool cats at the sex party. Because I don’t want anyone to know the internal labarynth I traverse to feel intimacy.

I’ve said yes to a date because I hope I might find that ‘one’ true soulmate, still.

I’ve said yes to dates that I was lukewarm on because I have told myself that, as a relationship coach, I have to have relationships, because I tell myself I shouldn’t introvert forever.

I’ve said yes to sex in hopes that I might fuck myself out of depression. I’ve said yes to sex because I yearn for a transcendental experience of ecstasy and have forgotten how else to experience it. I’ve said yes to sex in search of something that might alleviate the emotional emptiness and energetic disconnect between myself and the other person.

I’ve said yes in the hope that my pain might ease, that I might find more joy and more love. But when I haven’t been a Fuck Yes to the person (or people), or the activity, I have only found more pain. Hoping to move closer to something fulfilling, the hole in my soul grows wider when I’m saying yes because I hope it might be my salvation.

And I learned, that saying Yes when I’m not a Fuck Yes, through my whole body and soul,when my yes is not in alignment with my core being, isn’t really a yes. It’s a strategy, and also a clue for something deeper going on deep within. It guides me to get curious about what I really yearn for, and the conclusions I come to both surprise and delight me.

A Love Poem, for people who want to date me.

Will you
feel as delicious as my
feet dipping into a cool, glacial-fed river
on this hot summer’s day?
Can you satiate my tongue
like a mouthful of fresh garden picked raspberries
exploding in flavor between my lips?
Might your touch
bring ease to my soul
the way this July sunset casting its colors
behind the mountains
fills me simultaneously with awe and gratitude?

nakedness When love flows, it flows,
and I’ve found sex is overrated
when it’s not with someone who
blows me away.

Would your love hold me
like the soft hug of a friend
saturated with
the deepest trust of mutual surrender?
Could you love me, and not possess me?
let me be free
in my own bodily autonomy
and never seek to limit who or how I love?

This fresh purple bean, picked by my hands, bursting with salivating flavors— I chose to consume it months ago, and have been patiently waiting, composting, tilling the soil, watering, tending the vines, until at last, this orgasmically blissful bean has become one with my physical being.

I don’t want to fuck to
fill an emotional void
or
convince you to love me.

Can your kiss
send shimmering visions of
divinity thru my being?
Will your sweet whispers
sing in transcendent harmony
with the succulent melodies
already resounding within me—
this heart beating, this flow of
blood and breath?
Might your eyes
gazing with mine
sway me in ecstasy
like the ocean ripples
across my naked form?

Some seek sex as a pursuit of ecstasy,
and I too, have sought for such.
But now, in this orgy with the universe,
I would rather sex
as a celebration
of the ecstatic nature
I commune with
every day.

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Polyamory and Pride

June 8, 2018June 8, 2018MelC 3 Comments

This article is based on a public Facebook post I made, and adapted after much animated discussion, for which I am very grateful. You can check out the original post here.

The tl;dr summary: Language is important, and I believe it’s important we, as a polyamorous community, start to get this right if we want to have mainstream understanding and acceptance. “Polyamory” is NOT a born-with orientation, but “Non-Monogamy” might be.

Feeling activated or curious? read on?

So, it’s Pride month, and I see a number of folks in polyamory groups getting excited about Pride. This frustrates me. I want to remind everyone there’s no “P” in LGBTQI+, and that Polyamory is a relationship style and not a sexual orientation.

Polyamory — non-monogamous relationships with the full knowledge and consent of all involved— is a choice, one of many options for doing non-monogamy, and is not an orientation. Other ways to do non-monogamy could include: swinging, casual sex, open relationships, cheating, seeing a sex worker, BDSM relationships.

It frustrates me to see people in the polyamorous community trying to co-opt Pride for themselves. I know that there’s legal issues and social acceptance issues unique to polyamorous relationships. And yes, I get it, some people who do polyamory consider it to be their orientation— there’s also people who believe the earth is flat, or that Drumpf is the greatest president ever— believing those things doesn’t mean that they are right.

I love that polyamorous communities participate in pride and march in parades. I think that’s GREAT. But please remember to do so as ALLIES to the queer community, and not as a political statement or recruitment opportunity. There’s better times, places, and platforms to push for the rights of those who don’t do monogamy.

Too many people think the only way to do non-monogamy is to cheat. Or they read about polyamory and justify their cheating as being because “This is how I am!” and a partner’s refusal to open up a relationship leads to accusations of oppression. Thinking of polyamory as an orientation is how we get far too many men (usually) on dating sites saying “I’m poly but my wife doesn’t know”.
Like, no dude, just no.

If you do poly and are queer: great, celebrate your queerness!
If you do poly and are trans: amazing, celebrate your transness!
If you do poly and are straight and cis, but have a partner who is part of the LGBTQI+ community, then ask them how you can best support them during Pride!
If you are poly and are straight and cis and only date people who are straight and cis, you can support your friends in the LGBTQI+ world by being their ally. Being an ally means you support them to make more space for queer acceptance in the world, and in your communities. It doesn’t mean you take the spotlight for yourself.

Non-monogamy diagram - Page 1 (1)

Again, polyamory is one of MANY ways to do non-monogamy, and not an orientation, and isn’t related to gender. I will continue to repeat this at every opportunity. I have seen far too many people use “I’m poly, this is how I was made, you have to let me sleep with other people or you are repressing me” as a means to coerce a partner into ‘being okay’ with opening up the relationship, or to justify cheating. This does not make for healthy relationships.

I do however think that non-monogamy might be something that is hardwired for some of us. Just as Pride includes sexual orientation (eg lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, gay, etc), and gender identity (trans, intersex, non-binary, etc) I do think there’s the possibility for a third dynamic, that of relational wiring. Relational wiring might encompass aromatic, asexual/demi-sexual, and include non-monogamy. The Kinsey Institute has only just started publishing research on this stuff and it is early days yet.

So, let us say that non-monogamy is part of a spectrum of relational wiring, and perhaps that’s something that does deserve some space at Pride. Even then, we have a choice about how we do it. We can do it honestly or dishonestly. We can do it with integrity, or we can do it in the shadows. We can do it with the knowledge and consent of all involved, or we can be private and secretive about it. I don’t believe that honesty or ethics are qualities that can be inherently wired in us, I think those are a conscious choice, and polyamory is an ongoing action, rather than a permanent state of being.

I think the polyamorous community has a much better chance to public acceptance if we start to shift the conversation. “Look, I think I’m wired for non-monogamy. I could cheat, or I could do it honestly, and with the full knowledge and enthusastic consent of everyone involved.” is far more likely to be met with compassion, understanding, and acceptance. Not guaranteed to, but more likely, I think.

For me, queer is something that I am. Non-monogamous is also something that I am. Polyamory describes something that I do in my relationships.

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Me, being ever so queer, at the celebration for the rainbow intersection in Downtown Courtenay, BC, Unceded K’omox territories. Photo by Hollis Cellout

Reclaiming Queerness

February 17, 2018February 17, 2018MelC Leave a comment

There is so much that I want to write about right now, and I don’t know where to focus. I want to write about the excitement I feel after a day of teaching about Consent Culture, and engaging in rich conversations about how we might be able to build a compassionate world. I want to monologue about how boys are socialized with one slice of a full-spectrum emotional pie (anger) and girls are socialized with the rest of the pie (every emotion but anger). I want to rage about how violent binary gender divisions are and how they enforce Dominance Culture. I want to weep about the hurt and harm happening in the world today. And I want to pause to celebrate the little things and big things that are bringing me joy.

Two days ago I walked down the high street of the rural town I live in, carrying a bouquet of roses for my girlfriend. This town is a community in transition. I walked passed the mayor’s house— the mayor who voted against a rainbow cross-walk as a demonstration of the municipal commitment to queer inclusion— and then by the abandoned railway depot, once upon a time the end of the line. I glanced in at the cafe run by a conservative Christian community, who tell me they live according to the Book of Acts, and walked by three churches before arriving at the chocolate shop where I was meeting my girlfriend. It’s a 12 minute walk.

I thought about the sheer radicalness of this act: I had bought roses at a store filled with cis men of all ages clambering to buy a bouquet for their (presumably female) partners. The only women in the shop were buying lilies, carnations, and other flowers. I had taken my time to consider what color of roses I wanted to purchase, and how creative I wanted to get with arranging them at home. Flower arrangement is something that gives me a lot of joy, and I chose a combination of large red roses, smaller white ones, and one magnificent hybrid red and white rose. I know I’m not the only woman to have ever gotten her girlfriend flowers, but in this town, it kind of felt like maybe I was.

Stepping into my intimacy with women has been one of the biggest challenges for me. I used to blame the relationship with my mother, my disorganized attachment with women a symptom of the complex form of trauma from my upbringing.

I spent most of my life hating myself and feeling ashamed because of what my mother told me about gayness and sexuality. How confusing it was to hear, “You can be anything you want to be, I will support you and love you” and then to hear her condemn women who were lesbian, men who were gay, to belittle bisexuals as confused. It was confusing for me. I learned that I could be anything I wanted to be as long as it pleased my mother, but that I had to shut down my sexuality, my orientation, my gender, my very core expression.

No wonder I had such tantrums as a toddler. I had needs I didn’t understand or know how to express. I wanted freedom. Instead I was caretaker to a parent who was struggling under the weight of their own complex trauma that was being managed ineffectively, and living within parameters dedicated to making her happy, or at the very least, not cause her to get upset.

I was a teenager when I realised my sexual attraction to women. I found myself aroused by a music video, and felt so ashamed. I knew I had to hide this, but also knew I couldn’t deny it. When I was 16 I developed a crush on one of my friends. I had no idea how to communicate it, but we would make out at parties, hold hands walking around school, and I even spent a week one summer sleeping next to her in her bed. But I never expressed how I felt. I suppressed it. Outwardly, I would shame people who were gay. When, after high school, I learned she had been sexually intimate with another woman, I shamed her for it, and we grew increasingly distant.

It’s been a huge journey to identify my own internalized homophobia and challenge it. As much as polyamory has been a journey in self growth, I think the most profound transformations in my life have come as a consequence of my explorations with my queerness.

photo by Jennifer Brazil

I lucked out in my first handful of intimate experiences with women. They were within threesomes, there was a sense of novelty, exploration, curiosity, and everything went great. But when I went into actually dating women, I felt clunky, awkward, angry, frustrated, ashamed.

There’s something about the psychological theory that we are drawn to relationships with people who remind us of our parents. Those familiar patterns and behaviours, even when they are toxic, are enticing because we’ve grown up learning how to navigate them. And I kept finding myself drawn to relationships with women who needed caretaking, who weren’t addressing their trauma in healthy ways, who I wanted to please and save. My own unresolved trauma was running the show. It was disaster after disaster, including PTSD, and for the sake of my mental health, I stepped away from sexual relationships with women completely.

For a few years I felt a sense of imposter syndrome when I would describe myself as queer. I was mostly dating cis, hetero men. I was paralyzed by the thought of engaging intimately with women again. And yet, I was still engaging in close platonic relationships with women who resembled my mother, in their energy and ways of relating to me. Burnt out, overwhelmed, struggling to redefine my boundaries in relationships, I decided I had to figure out how to heal the trauma around my relationship to my mother before I tried dating or engaging deeply with women.

Turns out, I had it all backwards. Turns out, the key to healing from the deep trauma around my relationship with my mother was to figure out how to have healthy intimate relationships with women.

Trauma isn’t something that gets erased overnight. It sits with us, becomes part of us, incorporates itself into the grander tapestry of our beings. But, I’ve learned we can reduce it’s impact, we can transform it’s hard experiences into beautiful insights, and out of the darkness we might grow resiliency.

I think about who I am today, and what I do in the world. The things I teach, the work I do with people, so much of this comes out of the profound self-healing work I have had to engage in on this journey. It is strange to realise that, whilst I still feel hella activated at the idea of interacting with my mother— or any of the female former lovers I had traumatising experiences with— I am also incredibly grateful to have gone through those experiences, because of what I learned. I am a wiser, more compassionate, more resilient person as a consequence of those experiences. Circumstances pushed me to examine deeply the judgements I held, and also the pain and sorrow I felt around my sexuality.

The first time my girlfriend and I had sex is the first time I can recall having sex with another woman where I didn’t afterwards feel twisted up with anxiety and fear. Instead, I felt relief, ease, joy, deep affection, and gratitude. Over several months we had explored and unpacked the walls each of us have held around our sexuality, and leaned in to the clunkiness and awkwardness, getting curious about what might lie beyond that. We threw ideas and suggestions at eachother for weeks, and learned about how we might support one another if everything ended up going sideways. And when the awkwardness became about not doing the thing, rather than doing the thing, we dove in.

Something in my soul is cracking open, and I am lost for words to describe it.

I wanted to buy her flowers because there is a way that heteronormativity in polyamorous culture de-legitimises the relationships of queer femmes. A relationship between two women is often dismissed as not as weighted or as serious as the ones between a man and a woman, and I needed to remind myself that this is every bit as real and as valuable and precious as any hetero relationship I’ve been in. It’s interesting: when I reflect on my relationships with men, they have often been engaged in with so much more abandon, a sense of care-free-ness, a lightness (at least at first) and with ease. Maybe I’ve been more fearful of how to engage with women because the stakes on some level feel higher, the possible emotional depth so much more potent. And as for gender-creative humans in my life, that’s going to have to be a whole blog post on its own.

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So, thank you. Thank you to the humans who have challenged my queerness, who have chastised and rejected my queerness, and who have embraced my queerness. Thank you to the others out there who live boldly in their queerness and give those of us struggling hope that we might also one day live so boldly. Thank you to those who have gone before me, who could not live in their queerness, but fought hard so that in these small fortunate pockets of the world, some of us might.

Together Independently

May 2, 2017May 7, 2017MelC Leave a comment

“How do you explain to people that it is not true that you have a fiercely guarded heart? That it just feels like you have not had the space that felt safe enough to fully share it? To really let people in? And that you found that space with people who came into your life in a moment.”
~Catherin Hunter, Solo Polyamorist

When’s the last time you had sex?
When’s the last time you had sex without fear? Had sex that was courageous?

I think of how often I have sought out sex in an effort to try and feel courageous, in moments when I have felt afraid. Having sex to fill a void in myself and seek out the intimacy and love that I didn’t experience in earlier life has been a band aid- one that has helped in short term healing, but that has hurt like hell when ripped off. Sex has been a remedy that’s intoxicating and addictive.

I’m used to fighting an internal battle during sex. It’s an effort to silence two voices of judgement. One tells me, “You’re being too much.” The other tells me, “You are not enough.” Both these voices come from a part of me that doesn’t feel like I have a ‘right’ to be who I am, that being solo, and polyamorous, and queer, somehow makes me ‘broken’ because I counter the expected norms. Over time I’ve learned how to navigate my focus away from those voices, but it takes some effort. And as my journey progresses, I have craved an experience of physical intimacy where those voices don’t hold any sway over me, and I can feel safe to celebrate who I am.

“Intimate relationship is perhaps the ashram of the 21st Century — a place especially ripe with transformational possibility, a combination crucible and sanctuary for the deepest sort of healing and awakening, through which the full integration of our physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions is more than possible.

Intimate relationship as a crucible and sanctuary for our healing and awakening — sounds good, doesn’t it? But once our honeymoon with this is over, the real labor begins. The path is not neatly laid out for us, in part because we, through our very relatedness with our intimate other, are co-creating that path, that relational unfolding, as we go, feeling our way — more often than not in far-from-straight lines — toward what really matters.
~ Robert Augustus Masters

This past weekend was the first International Solo Polyamory Conference. It was profound. It was transformational. It was healing. And I learned the incredible power of being honored, accepted, and celebrated for who I am, through honoring and celebrating people dancing the same path.

Singledom within a network of relations is, I believe, the new frontier for radical relating: it is predicted today that 1 in 4 adults will never marry and out of those that do, 50% will divorce. And it’s not that people are not wanting to have relationships anymore, they do! But within a social context that still prizes coupled monogamy above all else, we lack refined, accessible wisdom on how to actually do autonomous intimacy.

Solo Polyamory offers a ‘best of all worlds’ approach. Solo polyamory is honest non monogamy, without the relationship escalator. It is characterised by no primary partnerships, a focus on individual autonomy, and a prioritising of platonic support networks. It draws a diverse range of ages, ethnicities, genders, and orientations. We are something of a ‘fringe’ group within polyamory, overlapping a lot with Relationship Anarchy in our desire for sovereignty within relationships, and an aspiration for interdependence. In a world that seems to revolve around monogamous, dyadic coupledom, we eschew the idea that being a successful grown up means becoming a productive member of coupled-up consumer society.

To paraphrase Kim TallBear, we are people who are in recovery from monogamous colonization and upbringing.

This weekend was about making space, not just for ourselves, but for everyone who has felt disenchanted with the myths and obligations of monogamy.

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“It’s about connecting THROUGH independence.”
~Kale Gossen

Coming and being out in the non-monogamy world is ‘easier’ when our relationships are good, but it’s harder to share when things are rocky. Solo polyamorists face shaming around false notions that we are incapable of commitment, afraid of intimacy, or closed off from meaningful connection. More than once, I have experienced someone else take the slightest imperfection in my relationship landscape and jump on that to say “Aha, see? your fault, you didn’t commit.” My honest sexuality has been painted as predatorial. My solo-ness been interpreted as a psychological fault. And I’m not the only one who has been stigmatised and ostracised because they don’t subscribe to relationship escalator expectations.

This is why we had a conference. To gather together a critical mass of solo polyamorists and see what could be generated in terms of affirming our relational choices and making our collective voices heard. This weekend was about being big, and making space.

I marvel at the diversity of experience that was present over the weekend. Unified in our desire for autonomy in the way we build relationships, and an aspiration for interdependence, we formed a very unique micro-community. It was delightful to connect in person with people I had gotten to know online, and people who were totally new to me, as well as deepening some existing connections with the local Solo Polyamory community.

The weekend was rich and wonderful. With unconference sessions on everything from Consent and Abuse, to “I can Unicorn if I Wanna!”, it was liberating to talk frankly about things too often stigmatised and silenced. I felt a letting go internally of the shame I’ve held around my not-so-great experiences in my journey as a solo polyamorist.

I had a very visceral experience of the power of creating a safe space for people to show up authentically. Getting to sit into being more a participant than organiser during most of Sunday, I feel an alchemy in action. I had tears rolling down my cheeks during Kim TallBear’s keynote on decolonising love; and the tears continued thru the day, with sharings raw and personal during breakout sessions, and feeling profoundly seen and supported in a web of kinship bound thru shared values and relatable experiences.

The closing circle was, for me, the most profound part of the weekend. In talking about our weekend highlights, one participant stood up to thank myself and co-producer Hannah Darvill for our organising, and the specific things said to me touched me in ways that I am wordless to express the full impact and significance of: that they were grateful for my peer-leadership, my role modelling of consent through the whole weekend, for the way I inspired and brought together so many while still sharing in raw and vulnerable ways. I cried again, in front of everyone. I’m still working on breathing into how deeply healing those words were.

18156567_10158651748435584_6701670662310936136_o I won’t ever be able to talk publicly about some parts of my personal journey, and the challenges therein. Suffice to say that those specific things (servant leadership, consent culture, empowering individuals within community) reflect values core to who I am, but are also values which have been called into question in the past. To hear that positive reflection from someone I so greatly admire, and to see the resonance with others around the room- that’s a moment I’d like to dip into again and again and again.

I started this article talking about sex.

SoloPolyCon was not about hooking up. It was about connections. And my weekend experience was punctuated by a connection rich with compelling chemistry. I’ve always found my connections with other solo polyamorists to move with less friction and more speed; maybe that’s got something to do with the shared value of autonomous intimacy. We speak the same language that dances between freedom and connection, and there’s a tremendous sense of ease for me in that.

Travis came up to me on the dance floor at our social mingler on the first evening and thanked me for something I’d said about us having a shared value of autonomy. My comment had been met with laughter and resonance, but he had found himself experiencing a strong emotional response to this. He said he’s been looking for his “people” for years, and when he saw everyone raising their hands for autonomy, he realised- here we were! We spent that first evening diving into deep conversation, which concluded with a kiss goodnight.

I loved our autonomous and flirtatious interactions over the weekend, sometimes just a glimpse of eye contact or smirk at one another during sessions we were both in. At other times, a full on staring contest and radical honesty in conversation. Delightful. Mischievous. Unapologetic. I liked this guy! After so many months of wrestling with PTSD and struggling with feeling connected to my sexual expression, I celebrated my healing journey with sex that was bold, kinky and fulfilling.

We had sex that was fearless. Where the voices that say “you’re not enough” and “you’re too much” were silent and I no longer had to do battle with or play prisoner to them. I didn’t have to force them into silence. They. Just. Weren’t. There.

After a steamy Saturday evening date we celebrated our autonomy once again: I headed out dancing, and he back to his airbnb.

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My counselor reflected to me that it’s rare to find healing in similar circumstances to where our wounding happened. Having felt wounded in sexual intimacy, and then again wounded in poly community, I feel profoundly grateful that this weekend I experienced healing both in one on one intimacy, and within the greater polyamorous community. I felt loved and welcomed for every inch of who I am, and in no moment did I feel a need to justify or defend myself. It’s all still sinking in, and I suspect it will take a while for the immensity of what was created this weekend- for everyone, not only me- to fully land.

My cup is so full, my body vibrating, and my heart bursting.

Someone had remarked to me earlier that a lot of ‘movers and shakers’ turn up to conferences like these. In that closing circle we talked about the highlights of the conference, and the ‘what now?’. I was so moved to see dozens of people step into positions of community leadership in answer to an invitation to action. I have tingles up and down my spine thinking about this.

Alone, we’re solo and isolated, and can too often think we are powerless, or ‘broken’. Together Independently, we are a movement of social change and advocates for autonomy within intimacy. Though we are still detoxing from the monogamy hangover, we are, all of us, Superheroes- with the ability to inspire and celebrate one another in big, meaningful, profound ways.

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Keeping Up With The Joneses

September 25, 2016MelC 1 Comment

I love Bridget Jones.

If I had to pick three fictional characters I most closely resemble, she’s at the top of my list.

For a chronically single 20-year-old at theatre school in London, Bridget Jones’s Diary spoke to my soul. The awkward, granny-panty wearing, overweight singleton, was the first representation of a grown woman in media I genuinely identified with. Her self reflective journaling is an unabashed lense on her world; the book was a homage to loving — and being loved for — our messy, imperfect selves.

I identified with Bridget’s constant confusion in matters of the heart, and her distaste of “smug married couples,” her desire to prioritize her friends over lovers, and her determination to define herself on her own terms, not by the relationship she was in.

I had bought into the fear of singledom, though, and at 22 married the first man I had a serious relationship with, afraid of ending up in my mid 30s, single, miserable, alone, writing in my journal, wearing granny panties.

Well, today, I’m 34, divorced, writing in my blog, and wearing granny panties. And life is good.

I took myself out for a self date tonight. It’s a little ritual I’ve fallen out of practice with. There’s something delightful about treating myself to the kind of experience I once expected from — no, pined for — from a boyfriend. I was curious: in the decade since the last Bridget Jones movie, I’d been married, miscarried twice, and now lived as a solo and polyamorous woman making her way as an entrepreneur and writer. Bridget’s life would have changed in the intervening years too, and I wondered how her path compared to mine.

I won’t give you any major spoilers, on the off chance you do go see Bridget Jones’ Baby, where our heroine once again finds herself torn on the choice between two men. However, I squealed out loud half way through when she uttered the word “polyamorous.”

One of the fictional characters who inspired my chosen form of relationships, just said the word to describe those relationships — and in a mainstream movie no less! Did I hear that right?

Media is changing. We are at a tipping point, and there’s no going back.

bridget-jones-gallery-06 As I watched Bridget progress through pregnancy, uncertain of who the father was, I saw the new paradigm begin to shine through. I saw a portrayal of two men in competition for a woman grow kinship instead of rivalry, and even express compersion in the midst of jealousy. I watched an exploration of the possibility of non-traditional family, and I smiled because Bridget beamed as she watched the two men become the closest of friends.

Alas, the movie only hinted at polyamory, and while I’d like to think it helped set the stage for more unconventional storylines in the rom-coms of tomorrow, for Ms. Jones, polyamory was not to be.

It turns out Bridget went up the relationship Escalator after all, albeit in an unconventional manner, stumbling up and down (which isn’t surprising, considering her penchant for stumbling through important moments).

Meanwhile, here I am, firmly living a life bohemian and unconventional. While Bridget finally got the recognition she wanted through the relationship legitimacy she craved, I’m content to remain Solo: sharing love with my friends and my partners, no intention of childbearing. I’m a little more graceful perhaps than I was at 20, but hopefully I still have that awkward charm, loving the mess and imperfections of my life — and of course, my granny panties. I feel a small victory, being the single woman in my 30s, alone in the cinema, watching my heroine step out of her spinsterhood and onto the Relationship Escalator. I didn’t have to choose between Darcy and the other man, and the other, other man. I date them all!

I can’t help but wonder what’s next for Bridget. I have my fingers secretly crossed, that she’ll wake up one day and, true to her fiercely independent nature, realise she doesn’t need a partner to complete her. Maybe she’ll read a blog about a young divorced woman in Canada, and realise that she can be free and date and have sex with whomever there exists mutual consent, and she could actually have the best of all worlds, and not have to choose between her many male loves any more, whilst also firmly avoiding the trap of becoming part of a smug married couple.

Bridget Jones’ Polyamory? Ha. Maybe.

All images are from Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones’s Baby, by Miramax, Studio Canal, Working Pictures, and Universal Studios, based on the character by Helen Fielding. Please go see the movie: http://www.bridgetjonesmovie.com/

Tolerating Trauma

September 16, 2016MelC 1 Comment

I am tolerating my trauma.

As I sit down to write, anticipating the next session of the Good Girl Recovery Program, and reflecting on how my life has changed since I first took it three years ago, I realise: I am tolerating my trauma.

We look at tolerance in the program. A Tolerance is often a symptom of our Good Girl being in charge. Being ‘good’ often means tolerating things we don’t like, and the feeling that we can’t do anything about them.

I have been tolerating my trauma.

I don’t much like my trauma. It surrounds me, some days like a wall of steel, other days like an amorphous blob of goo. I love the days when I forget it’s there: days filled with forming new, happy, joyful memories, and nights spent feeling safe in my body, and safe in a lover’s arms. The other days though, the days when that barrier appears, and I am straight jacketed back into seclusion and fear — I don’t much like those days.

408562534_60cf923a09_z I tolerate the effect it has on me. I tolerate the terror that bubbles up when I try to express my sexuality with women, a fear that causes me to freeze from the inside out. I tolerate that second-guessing in my head every time someone gives me a compliment about who I am or what I do. I tolerate fear living inside of me — fear that the ones who gaslight me are right.

I am so done with tolerating my trauma.

It starts, unnoticed, like a pebble in your shoe, that discomfort you can’t quite pinpoint, but that irks you all the same. As you walk, it becomes noticeable. The more you walk, the more noticeable it becomes until finally you pull the shoe off and see the bloody hole in your sock where your skin has broken, given in to the repeated annoyance. I couldn’t stop to let the wounds heal. There were things to be done, places to be reached. I put that shoe on and soldiered forward.

I have been tolerating the pain.

The irony of these tolerances is that this all began when I tolerated disrespect of my body. I was silent about my sovereignty when I could have been far more vocal, far more articulate about my boundaries — both physical and emotional. I tolerated them being crossed over and over, by more than one person. I’ve done that my whole life in an effort to ‘be good’ and ‘fit in’. Tolerating disrespect of my body and my voice cost me dearly.

I have been tolerating my mistakes.

At night I sit sometimes next to my journal, but I don’t write. I’m afraid to record these thoughts in any way, scared that if I re-read them, I will chisel them into my psyche. I wonder, what if the un-named whispers are right? What if I stand in my community an imposter, a pretender, someone not deserving of this world? What if I am some ticking timebomb of Danger, the solo polyamorous anarchist slut, the unpredictable, unpartnered, unaccountable, waiting to explode chaos onto the world — or their world, at least?

I have been tolerating a community’s abuse of me, their dismissal of my voice, and of my experience.

I don’t need to tolerate these things any more.

I can do something about my tolerances.

I take steps to heal my trauma.

courage-1197366_960_720 In gratitude, I work with therapists, bodyworkers, sexological workers, somatic healers, and more. I float. I begin to feel safer in my body, comfortable again in my own skin. The nightmares no longer wake me at night. I can relax in both solitude and company.

In love, I begin to experience my sexuality in new ways, different ways than before. My partners hold space for my orgasms of tears as much as the orgasms of laughter. They listen to my body. We move together, breathe together, heal together. I am in awe of these men.

In service, I look to explore community. I cannot be blind to the inescapable pedestalling, but I can look to serve, and offer what gifts I have to those who would ask, and invite them in. I stand strong and ask for my right to space in each group that invites me to dance. With shield raised, but sword lowered, I let it be known I wish no fight, only to participate and share. Some, kindly, listen, and let me in. I find myself tolerating the avoidant silences of others.

In community, I build stronger roots. No longer a career nomad, nor shackled to the idea of permanent impermanence of friendships, I seek sisterhood, I seek kinship, I seek family — and I find it. I desire to know these humans, and for them to know me, in our deepest, raw truths. I heal, through my community.

In integrity, I prostrate myself before the roots of my trauma. I seek to honour the teachers they have been, and to find a path of peace, not war. I recognise the tragic expressions of unmet needs we have all made — both myself, and others — and ask what do we need to heal?

As I write these words, I feel relief. The releasing of what has been tolerated opens a door to new joy, and in this generous space of possibility, a life that could be well worth living for.

I choose, not to be Good, but to be Kind.

I had tolerated being good and it made me mad and angry. I choose to change that. Not to act out of obligation and expectation of what I ‘should’ do, but rather, to move from my heart, to act from compassion — both for myself, and for others. Moving out of a space of tolerance is not so much a question of “what’s good for me?” rather it is “what would the kindest choice be?”

And in such kindness, I receive from myself, what I tolerated a lack of from others: a compassionate embrace, gratitude for what is, forgiveness for what I wish was not, and hope for a kinder tomorrow.

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Radical Self Reliance and Community Responsibility

December 31, 2015July 10, 2016MelC 2 Comments

“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce….. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past… Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.’ Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.’ …In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”

~Gabor Mate

I read an article recently on Radical Self Reliance, and how this concept is killing people. In it, the author talks about the concept of Radical Self Reliance as it exists in the modern influence of Burning Man Culture on the world at large. Simply defined on the Burning Man Organisation’s website, it is encouragement for “each individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.”

walking across Playa, August 2014

In practice, it’s to encourage personal responsibility for one’s own well-being: you bring to the Playa what you will need, you don’t expect anyone else to look after you. It’s a fantastic principle to have, and I have found huge value in the practice of living life in such a way that I take on responsibility for my own well being and experience- it has taught me resilience and emotional fortitude that I don’t know I could have learned elsewhere.

I do, however, see a shadow side to this. Radical Self Reliance can become toxic, I find, when we shift into exclusively looking after ourselves, and forgetting that none of us are physical- or emotional- islands.

We are all in relationship to one another. Until only one human being is left on this planet, there is no escaping this.

Individualism and “Poly Libertarianism”

Individualism- putting the individual first, and ignoring the collective needs of a community- is, I believe, one of the most prominent characteristics of the endemic disconnection emerging in modern society.

“No one is responsible for anyone else’s emotions or meeting anyone else’s needs. There is no more co-dependence. There is interdependence, on a voluntary basis. Each member is an autonomous, free individual, who can come or go as she or he pleases. Our love is earned, not expected.”

~Sara Burrows, on Poly Libertarianism

I see many people engaging in what has been labelled “Poly Libertarianism”, where they state their needs and shirk any responsibility for meeting what other people’s needs might be. Heck, I’ve done that and been one of those poly people. Prioritising my relationship with myself has been fundamental in my own journey in Solo Polyamory. For a long time, I needed to shut out the idea that others had needs and requests that I could (and should) respond to because I’d internalised damaging messages about having to please others. I view this behaviour pattern now as an adaptive behaviour I used to cope with my own personal experience of the collective trauma inherent with being a woman raised in a patriarchal society. I’d suppressed my own desires for so long that now, when I was finally free of that suppression, I didn’t want to stop and listen to what anyone else wanted. I had to discover what I wanted.

As much as that path allowed me to get clear on where the stories around obligations and ‘shoulds’ came from, as much as it taught me the power in saying no to meeting someone else’s desire, and asking for my own desires to be met, it didn’t bring me joy in my relationships, because it alone didn’t support connection. It was hugely valuable in the process of finding authenticity in myself, but it didn’t support intimacy.

Intimacy and Compassion

Intimacy doesn’t exist in individualism. Intimacy can only come from connection, and while individualism encourages more self-awareness and connection to one’s own needs, wants, and desires, it is Intimacy that asks us to recognise the needs, wants, and desires of our partners, families, friends, and indeed, our entire community.

“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through. If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it’s only because in their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed. Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate self-inquiry.”

~ Gabor Mate, In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts

For the first few years of my journey in polyamory, focussing on Solo Polyamory, I nourished and refined a fantastic relationship with myself. It has been a remarkable journey in self-intimacy. And yet, the relationships I had with others didn’t reflect the kind of intimacy I was desiring. I was so keen on my own radical self-reliance, that I forgot a very important piece: community responsibility.

Yes, you are responsible for your Self, I am responsible for my Self- and yet we exist in the same place and time, and therefore we have a relationship with one another. In that relationship, I cannot shake off responsibility for the effects of my words and actions on you, nor can you shake off responsibility for the effects of your words and actions on me. That is to say, while your reactions are your own, that doesn’t mean I can’t participate in the processing of your reaction, or that I should ignore the effects my own actions and words have had on you- no matter what my initial intent was.

I understand the drive for Poly Libertarianism, I really do. It provides an amazing buffer against the shadow emotions that can come up in relationships, experiences of jealousy, which some believe are rooted in feelings of fear, loneliness, loss, sadness, anger, betrayal, envy and humiliation.

I would propose, however, that the Individualism approach doesn’t actually address the core issue. I have found that those root emotions so often mentioned are all manifestations of fear, or more specifically, they are a side effect of living with a scarcity paradigm.

We fear loss, loneliness, betrayal, humiliation when we believe love is a limited resource, and we experience envy, anger, possessiveness as a reaction to that fear, still within the scarcity paradigm. These all relate to the core (false) belief that we can have ownership of someone else’s love, and that we may be entitled to it because there’s a limited supply.

And, scarcity is a story we can choose, and it is one that we are sometimes unconsciously choosing when we set ourselves apart on that metaphorical island where we are only responsible for ourselves, both physically and emotionally.

Our other option is to switch gears and choose to recognise that love is abundant and can come in infinite forms. And, that if we dare to show vulnerability and compassion, an infinite number of connections can form, and intimate community can grow.

“Cultivating intimacy with something means becoming sufficiently close to it to know it very, very well. When we don’t get close enough — like scientists keeping themselves emotionally stranded from their subject of study — we miss essential aspects of it. And if we get too close, to the point of fusing with it — like new lovers letting their boundaries collapse in a romantic swoon — we will no longer be able to keep it in focus.

In intimacy, we are deeply relating to an “other” — which could be a person, object, or state — getting close to it in a manner that transcends mere proximity. When it comes to cultivating intimacy with something, connection with it and separation from it are not opposites, but rather fluidly intertwined dance partners.”

~Robert Augustus Masters, “Cultivating Our Intimacy”

When you’re living in an abundance paradigm, the fear of loss, loneliness, and ownership of love don’t appear in the same way, you’re sharing love with everyone, you’re giving your care-bear-stare of compassion and welcoming to each person, whether lover or friend, in whatever way feels right and consensual, and you never feel depleted, nor do you feel lacking when alone.

The Balancing Act between Individual and Community

e727a05410166fcb542ee1eea918 I’ve noticed a trend when relationships hit rocky waters: we can confuse the need for individual sovereignty with selfishness, and relationships that put individual needs of one person over another can grow dysfunctional. Likewise, sometimes individuals shirk responsibility for their participation in another person’s emotional state. When that happens, I think there’s a repression of empathy and compassion, which ends up perpetuating internalised stories around scarcity, othering, duality, and disconnection. And, on the flip-side of that, Individuals who take on responsibility for another person’s emotional state are effectively engaging in a form of self-repression, where their own state is ignored and they become energetically subservient to another’s projections of them.

So what is the solution? Relationships that respect there may be both overlapping and incompatible needs, and approach this quandary with compassion- that’s where I feel healthy Intimacy lies. Recognising that our intent is often different from the results of our actions and interactions allows us to have boundaries whilst engaging with compassion. When things go awry and things aren’t the way we want them to be, we don’t necessarily have to take on responsibility for how someone else feels, but we can recognise our own participation in events that may have created that experience- and, more importantly, if those events have been ones that have hurt, injured, or left trauma with another person, we can engage in the process of healing.

Recognising our own potential for active participation in improving the experience of all our partners, family members, friends, metamors, and community, is a huge leap in nourishing both intimacy and compassion. And, huge leaps are not easy. This one asks us to grapple with the stories of self shame, pride, ego, the desire to Be Right, and to find in ourselves greater stores of compassion, humility, empathy, understanding, and that thing we all say we’re here for: Love.

For 2016, my invitation to you is this: don’t be an island. Radical Self Reliance is great, and- you also don’t have to be alone. Our society is suffering from a disease of disconnection, and I sometimes wonder if the urge to explore polyamory and other forms of non-monogamy stems from a deep rooted desire for greater experiences of connection.

Do you dare to open yourself to the possibility of deeper, and more intimate connection? Are you willing to examine what it is that you, as an individual, need, want, and desire? And also to examine what the people around you need, want, and desire? Radical self-reliance can teach us about ourselves; Radical Community Responsibility is the journey of growing to know one another.

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Self Intimacy, Sex-Positivity, Shame, and the Resilient Edge of Resistence

April 7, 2015April 7, 2015MelC 3 Comments

“Boundaries are an essential part of life. They delineate and maintain needed borders and separations, making differentiation possible at every level. Boundaries both contain and preserve the integrity of what they are safeguarding, be that physical, psychological, emotional, social, or spiritual. Without them there is no relationship and therefore no development, no evolution. But despite this clear truth, we often fall into the trap of believing that boundaries hold us back, preventing us from being free…”

~ Robert Augustus Masters, Boundaries Make Freedom Possible

skin

I heard a great metaphor for boundaries recently, from my friend and mentor Marcia. Boundaries are like skin. Skin protects us from bacteria, contaminants- it keeps the bad things out. It also holds our bodies together and keeps the good things in. It has elasticity and can stretch and squish for short periods of time (this is called the Resilient Edge of Resistance, think of it as a plus/minus margin around your boundaries). Push that edge too far, and we reach our limits- the skin breaks. It is semi permeable, so we can let good things in (like sunlight and moisture) and sweat the bad things out. And without skin around us, things get messy.

Similarly, without boundaries, life gets messy.

In polyamory we are constantly being challenged to redefine our boundaries, to explore some of the difficult stuff in that resilient edge of resistance- sometimes we reach our limits. We also traverse an emotional field where we invite more vulnerability into our lives, because we are allowing more people to connect with that core part of ourselves that the boundaries are there to protect. The more partners we have, the more we are asked to live in that space of vulnerability. Doing so feels radical, revolutionary, and many people experience a sexual and emotional liberation when they begin exploring this.

In a traditional coupled relationship, boundaries are created to protect and preserve the primary relationship. They are there, like a warm blanket, keeping the relationship safe and in a place of comfort, where the individuals in it can relax and grow and flourish. This is true of monogamous and honestly non-monogamous couples.

However, when it comes to flying Solo, it is not quite so straightforward.

There is no primary partner, there is no obvious other to create shared boundaries with- though we absolutely can, many people perceive boundaries as limitations, and equate them with primary like relationships. Ultimately, we all have to develop our own clear boundaries around what we want to nurture in our lives, and what we want to keep out- and this is far more apparent when exploring Solo Polyamory. The nature of Solo Poly relationships is so often fluid and changing, that one can sometimes feel there is no safe-house to come home to unless you create one for yourself. But, it can be easy to forget this, and when you are unattatched to a primary partner, there are plenty more opportunities to explore that Resilient Edge of Resistence.

I pushed and stretched and redefined my personal Resilient Edge of Resistence for two years. After a lifetime of frustration with the limitation of my creative expression and sexual shaming, I dove heart first into a dynamic and powerful exploration of living life without restrictions. I began to embrace my sensual expression, I grew to honor my shadow self, I found alchemy in letting my spirit blossom and fly free. I looked to the free spirits around me and followed their examples. I was going to sex parties, being guest listed for kink nights, throwing my own kinky raves with my friends, being invited to participate in the sex-positive community both locally, and internationally. I felt comfortable having sex around strangers, and engaging in BDSM play to the side of the dance floor. It was so incredibly liberating! I had come so far from the shy, ashamed, repressed young woman who flinched at the idea of talking about sex.

And then, I became intoxicated with the freedom. I became addicted to my shadow self. I pushed myself too far.My resiliency broke. I lost my boundaries. I lost my skin. My guts went spilling all over the place, and toxic, unhealthy influences entered into my life.

Months later I still wake in the middle of the night from nightmares filled with flashbacks of trauma, and my heart remains heavy with heartache, regret, and deep sorrow.

After reaching a breaking point with exploring my resilient edge, I attempted to build a wall around my heart, and my Self, reinforcing my boundaries into an impenetrable fortress. While this made me feel more safe, it also made it impossible to reach out to the ones I loved- because I couldn’t connect to my heart without connecting to the pain too. They felt pushed away.

While all this was happening, I was diving into studies of the nature of intimacy, boundaries, and self-actualisation. I learned about something called Self-Intimacy, the conscious awareness of one’s own emotions, desires and thoughts. Without healthy self-intimacy, we struggle to engage in healthy conflict, and displays of affection can become shallow and disconnected. When we lack healthy self-intimacy, our negative emotions can build up, and without expression or support for resolution, they can drive us to disregard our limits, and live in a state where our resilient edges are being constantly pushed to breaking point.

I had spent so long pushing myself to explore my edges, I had forgotten how to relax, and just be with my self. My inner perfect poly person had grown adept at suppressing my shadow emotions in relationships, and my mind was at conflict with my heart. Even though I had intellectually consented to almost all of my experiences, my heart’s consent had not been present. I had been ignoring the messages from my body, ignoring the crushing pain of approaching my limits- until they had been reached, with heart-breaking consequences.

jumping Liberating ourselves of the shame around sex and embracing sex positivity shouldn’t have to mean going to orgies or BDSM play parties. It doesn’t have to be a process of pushing our resilient edges of resistance to breaking point- either physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. It might mean those things for some people- and that has certainly been part of my own journey- but I don’t think that it has to include those things. I think sex positivity is hi-fiving ourselves and our friends and partners for good sex, sex positivity is exploring healthy connections and physically empowering chemistry. It’s about not flinching when someone else talks about sex. It’s embracing your own nature as a sexual being. It’s accepting the diversity of experiences people have had, and the complex relationships each person can have to the act of sex- and respecting that most people do not need to live in the adrenalin addiction of having their edges challenged in relationships constantly.

I’m valuing the existential crisis inherent in all of this. In my personal quest for identity, relationship, and meaning, I have too often become trapped in doing mode, a state entangled in mental pathways, removed from the experience of simply being. Rather than following my head into new situations, I’m slowing down and listening to my heart, and my whole body. In finding solitude and quietude again, I’m reconnecting with the courage to just be, and finding freedom in that. The clearer I become on what I’m living for- my deepest desires- the more my natural boundaries become apparent. The margins of my being may not be what I once thought they were- or perhaps, they have changed- and I am giving myself permission to change, and nurture my resiliency.

I don’t need to live life on the edge all the time- and neither do you, if you do not want to. You have permission to be loving to yourself, to honor your physical, spiritual, mental and emotional body and boundaries, to embrace your shadow self, and your light. Life doesn’t have to be lived on the cutting edge, doing all-the-things. Life can also be lived with warmth and nurturing; life can be lived by simply being. You can love your boundaries. You can grow roots, live a life that doesn’t push your resilient edge of resistance to breaking point, and still be radical and sex-positive.

“We are not here to shed or abandon our boundaries, but to breathe integrity and strength into them, to fully illuminate them, and to make sure that they take a form that serves not only our highest good but also the highest good of all. We are not here to override or devalue our boundaries but to use them as wisely as possible… discovering the freedom in fully engaging our experience. Our boundaries stand as guardians on this path, with an authority that supports our growth and awakening.”
~ Robert Augustus Masters, Boundaries Make Freedom Possible

(with gratitude to Orion and Chelsie for editorial feedback)

In Limbo Lies the Love Languishing

August 21, 2014August 21, 2014MelC 4 Comments

“The ultimate state of love is freedom, absolute freedom, and any relationship that destroys freedom is not worthwhile. Love is a sacred art. To be in love is to be in a holy relationship.”

~ Osho

My heart feels heavy as I write this, aching in every direction. The self chatter in my mind talks about being foolish, rash, and irresponsible, and it’s fighting the deeply romantic part of my personality that wants to keep my heart open.

In every relationship, there’s a moment- well sometimes, oftentimes, it’s a recurring moment- where I find myself gazing with love and want to utter the words, “I love you”. But, I don’t. I hold back. I wait.

Why? Because we make such a big deal about the meaning of the words “I love you.”

I want to create a new way of dialoguing about love. Casual love is a thing. In the Greek language there are multiple means of expressing “I love you”- I remember vividly my grandmother tucking me into bed at night with the words, “kourichakimou, cartholamou, yagapoulamou, agapemou”.

Love is such a vast, transcendant, spiritual experience, why limit ourselves in the expression of it?

Sometimes I want to just use the Greek words directly. I am in Eros with you. I am in Phillia with you. I am in Ludus with you. I am in Agape with you. I am in Pragma with you. I am in Philautia with you.

Even just taking the time to think about what kind of love I’m experiencing can help me find clairty. It’s so enriching to engage in a way of appreciating the many layers of love that are possible.

I find that for myself, Eros (sexual passion) and Ludus (playful love) often give way to deep experiences of Phillia (friendship) and Pragma (Universal love).

I wonder if part of the reason I am Solo is that the way I love people tends to involve increasing levels of trust and connection until- I have to let go. When I hear of two people confess “unconditional love” for one another I wonder what that really means. To me, unconditional means without ownership, without expectation, and freely. I look at how my relationship with Orion has transformed- and I can honestly say that for both of us, our ability to love one another increased when we stopped dating. We dropped expectations of one another, and grew deeper in our friendship. It’s a really beautiful connection, one cherished greatly.

When you love someone in entirety, when you decide that they are someone you want to grow and evolve through knowing, there comes a breakthrough point where the next stage of loving them means letting them go, and remembering to stay true to your own self, your wants and desires, your own evolution. It’s a moment of selfishness that challenges how we are told to treat our relationships. We are told to be self sacrificing in service of a partner, when actually a healthy relationship starts with us having a healthy relationship to our self first.

Curled up with my dear friend Odin recently, talking about love, he said something that really hit home for me.

“Love is not as powerful as trust and acceptance; those are so much more specific in their ingredients. To me, acceptance is everything.”

Acceptance. Seeing another and being seen by another; seeing and embracing the shadows and not just the light. I feel like that’s the profound journey that love offers us.

I love in such a way as to feel free and to set those I love free. In other words, I want to experience love that is a celebration, and not an obligation. And sometimes that celebration means that, in freedom, they and I dance on, without attachment. I do not love seeking to own that which I love.

I’m in love with love, with feeling and sharing and expressing love, and I don’t believe that should be restricted to an expectation of behaviors. Love is something infinitely delightful to explore- whether self love, friendship, romantic, erotic, familial, or universal: the more we commit to engaging and being fully present to love (in whatever form it exists) the healthier we become.

Love is the four lettered glue that holds us together- as a community, as a species, as a collective of conscious beings sharing space and time cooperatively, love is the essential molecule. Without it we’d self destruct.

And so it hurts so much when I find myself second guessing or trying to stop myself from loving out of fear that I’ll risk too much, and be broken hearted again. I fear being taken for granted. I fear being not seen. And that’s why my heart is heavy as I write tonight. Several months ago a beautiful young man told me he was falling in love with me. And I dared to give myself permission to let that experience deepen, and to allow myself to fall in love with him too. As distance appears, as new chapters emerge, and uncertainty hangs over the evolution of our journey together, I’m looking for the courage to not just keep loving, but to be open again. To trust, believe, and share again. To live from a place of fearless authenticity, and trust that those around me are doing the same.

In a journey so tangled, the only way through is to dance.

Gratitude and Growth

July 19, 2014MelC 2 Comments

Just over two years ago, on a drunken stumble through the streets of East Vancouver with an ex, I was confronted with a question I didn’t know how to answer, and the quest for that answer changed the entire trajectory of my life.

“What do you want, M?” Jareth had asked me, and I stared back at him in silence as I realised that I actually did not know. I’d been functioning on default for over a decade, expressing desires that I thought were what I was supposed to want- family, children, a regular job… normality. His question landed on me with the epiphany that I’d never actually considered to ask myself if I wanted to have a normal life, let alone contemplate what kinds of relationships I wanted to have.

And that saw the beginning of an amazing journey, my adventures in being Singleish, my diving in to an exploration of what I want.

This past weekend at my local Burning Man regional, I spent my time fluttering between my two boyfriends, connecting with dear friends (including former lovers Orion and Elk Feather), and getting my flirt on with some delightful people in the local Burner/Poly/Kink community. I taught my first workshop on Ethical Non Monogamy to a group of forty people. And then on the evening of the Burn, I stood under the full moon, in contemplation of the fire- the burning edifice seeming to represent all that I had moved through in the past two years- and was filled with gratitude for all the synchronicities that have been aligning in my life since I was asked that question. In the midst of that sensation of being “illuminaked”, I heard a familiar voice nearby. I turned my head to look, and there was Jareth, standing right behind me, with his girlfriend.

Effigy Burn, BitF 2014, (c) Lukasz Szczepanski

The universe has a delightful sense of timing. I felt it was symbolic of coming full circle, the satisfying conclusion to one chapter and opening of another.

This weekend also saw me reconnecting in profound ways with both of my partners. Alexander and I spent some beautiful time together both one on one, and with his wife as they celebrated their anniversary. I’m profoundly inspired by witnessing their relationship dynamic that, in the midst of all the challenges that family life can bring, continues to find new inspiration and new ground to explore. I think it intimidates me a little, but I’m learning to embrace that trepidation and allow our connection to unfold as feels right. And, after almost seven weeks apart, spending time with Marco was incredibly nourishing and re-affirming. I delight in the joy he shares with everyone around him, and cherish our ability to be completely present with one another, even in fleeting moments shared on a dance floor.

When I started this blog, I made a silent promise to myself that I would continue to be Singleish for at least two years, that my primary relationship would be with myself. I find that I’m moving deeper in to two very beautiful, loving, dynamic relationships right now- but that I have loved this adventure so much that I’m not ready to renounce my solo-hood entirely any time soon. Whilst in the long term I know I’d love to live with a blend of friends and lovers and maintain an active and independent dating life, I’ve come to a place of certainty about the rules I have for dating myself.

-I choose to date people who are inspiring, intelligent, thoughtful, communicative, in touch with their emotional tapestry, who embrace change as a constant.

– I choose to engage with people who operate with full and honest disclosure; honest communication about all other relationships is paramount to me.

– It is important for me to not just know my metamors, but to develop my own independent friendships with them.

– I will not veto a partner’s other relationships, but if I find myself in unresolvable conflict with someone who is dating one of my sweeties, I can walk away from the relationship with that partner and focus my energy in positive relationships.

– There are two main ways in which I engage in intimate and sexual relationships: there are people who I choose to date and explore Relationships with, and friends who I choose to be sexually and intimately playful with, without dating.

– I don’t do random- even in casual situations, I want to get to know someone first to develop trust and communication.

– I will not have intercourse with someone who I do not feel trust and connection with.

– Sexual health is very important to me. I ask that my dating partners get tested regularly and that playful partners, talk about their STI status before engaging in any kind of fluids contact.

– I believe that the first priority for every partner should be themselves, and the things that enrich their life- family, children, work, relationships, are all, in my opinion, things that can take priority at different times.

– I embrace the creativity of customizing commitments within each relationship, rejecting the expectations attached to the societal templates for relationshiping.

– I choose to focus on what is within relationships, rather than on what is lacking; I choose to celebrate what each relationship is from moment to moment.

– My priority remains, as always, staying true to the primary relationship with myself, honoring my own edges as I seek to expand them.

Today marks the 2nd anniversary of my first blog post. Two years of sharing with raw honesty and vulnerability the experiences and lessons I’ve garnered along the way.

This started out as a blog about polyamory, but I think it’s been more of a journal that has chronicled my process of getting clear with myself about what it is I want. I remain humbled that my words have had an impact on so many, and I look forward to continuing to learn new things about my self, my lovers, my friends, my community, and being part of an unfolding paradigm shift in perspective on relationships.

I have embraced singleishness, without running away from connections when they arise, and I’ve learned to love the practice of nurturing that primary relationship with myself- be it taking myself out on a date, prancing around solo through an arts festival in the forest, or spending time journaling at home. I’m filled with gratitude for all the people who have played a part in this process of growing and becoming, and am excited to see what the future will unfold.

Expanding and Exploring

June 16, 2014June 16, 2014MelC 1 Comment

“You have permission to ask for what you want.”

Do you really know how to play?

These words of relationship advice, from Marcia Baczynski, shifted my perspective about the relationships I was in at the time, leading to an evolution in the way I have found myself approaching relationships today. I had been growing fed up of intimate relationships where it felt like no one ever knew what they were doing. In bed, I too often felt like a beautiful musical instrument, with a novice randomly plucking strings, hoping to coax a melody- or concerto- from this highly complex form. I didn’t want that any more. I wanted that to change.

Last summer at a music festival, I fell in love on the dance floor. The crowds parted and I became mesmerized by a young man spinning a glowing staff. My attention caught, I complimented him on his dancing, saw him again briefly a few days later- but it wasn’t until running into him several months later in the city that we actually had a chance to connect.

The incredibly beautiful, exotic, fire and poi-spinning Marco had me curious. We chatted online and on the phone for a couple of months before going on a date zero- I was a little hesitant to date someone eight years younger than me, but I soon forgot about that and had an amazing time. On our next date, we discovered that we lived ten minutes walk away from one another.

Marco puts extra anarchy into relationship anarchy, in a really good way. It’s almost impossible to keep up with how many women he might have dates with. His work schedule is on call and often unpredictable and so dates are sometimes really spontaneous. One of the things I enjoy the most is that the dynamic he and I share together is one of experimentation and adventure.

Where would the electricity be without willingness to experiment?

Our dates have included a trip to the STI clinic (followed by lunch), midnight booty calls, loud and kinky morning wake up calls, making a stilt-walking elephant together, an epic sexy after party in our hotel room where we mostly observed and directed our friends having an orgy, eating ice cream together in his bedroom hammock, sensually grinding together on the dance floor after almost 24 hours of no sleep, poi spinning lessons in my back yard, and whispering poetry to one another into the wee hours of the morning. We talk about kinky things we want to try out, we share thoughts about shamanism, and we collaborate on creative projects.

From past relationship experiences, I’ve found myself growing cautious of diving too deep into clothes-ripping passion all the time. I’ve had some really beautiful connections burn out because the focus was so much on physical expression- but not so much on exploration, and as a result I would have great sex the first few times, fuelled by the excitement, adrenalyne, novelty and NRE- but it would quickly peter off, resulting in a string of six-week long relationships.

I didn’t want this to be another six week relationship.

I also found myself in a quandry over sponteniety versus consent. Marco and I were exploring the edges of our kinky personas, and both enjoyed doing so with sponteniety. He knew I was very passionate about enthusiastic consent, and expressed once that, in his perspective, the conversation around consent was taking away from the spontaneous aspect that made things so much fun.

Just because you’re enjoying something, does it mean your partner is enjoying it too?

For my part, consent has become an important part of relationships and building trust. I’d experienced holding back a lot in intimate exchanges because I was afraid of having my own boundaries crossed or of crossing someone else’s unintentionally- something that had happened for me in the past. I mean, there’s always that hope that I will find partners who are 100% psychic and can read my mind to see if I’m comfortable or not- but the reality is, we can’t expect someone to know something about our intimate preferences unless we reveal that information to them, and likewise, we need to ask our partners for feedback about whether what we are doing feels good for them or not- instead of just assuming that it probably is.

One night when Marco came over to my place, I decided that I needed to ask for what I wanted. So, I put forward a proposal to him:

“Tonight, I’d like to invite you to explore me. Just do whatever you want. Follow your instincts. And I’ll give you feedback at every step. I want you to learn my body. And if something doesn’t feel good, or doesn’t do anything for me, I’ll communicate. And if it’s amazing- you’ll know, and if I know how to, I’ll guide you on how to enhance the pleasure for me.”

Never before had communication felt so sexy. As we played, I got to show him how my different erogenous zones can be connected, how a slap or a bite in just the right place can make me melt or take me to the edge. I learned things about my own body as he experimented with differing pressures in different places. And after, we talked about all sorts of other things we want to try further down the road.

After that experience, not only was the quality of our physical intimacy enhanced, but our communication around sex grew leaps and bounds too. We’d taken time to learn one another’s language. He, as someone who plays more dominant, had discovered how to read my responses, and I’d learned how to communicate with fewer words and in ways that made the communication part of the play. As a consequence of just that one night, we started to feel more comfortable with greater sponteniety. The trust we share evolved because we took one another to the edges and learned to recognise one another’s “no”.

“Practice Makes Perfect”

There is tremendous power in slowing down from the insane devouring passion and finding our way into a natural flow of communication between bodies. Tuning in, and learning how to read our partners, rather than just assuming we know what’s going to feel good, assuming that all people function exactly the same. Think of the difference between someone who sits at a piano and randomly tinkers on the keys hoping to make music, versus someone who has studied and become a piano maestro, effortlessly dancing their fingers across the keys and filling the room with the sweetest music.

We may both be Solo, we may be one another’s ‘proximal’ relationship, we may be in love, but we also know this relationship may not last in this same form for all time. Marco reminds me to be present to what’s in front of me, to be present to the moment. We are growing and learning together, and there is no telling what the future may bring. I pinch myself from time to time that someone as unique and talented an individual wants to hang around with me, let alone undress me and devour me with so much passion- and it’s a passion that seems to just grow deeper and deeper.

Exploring the edges of our comfort zones, and expanding beyond them, has never felt so comfortable, nor been so fun. We explore eachother’s bodies, eachother’s minds, eachother’s souls.

And the lesson in this- that asking for what you want is one of the best things you can possibly do within a relationship- has me contemplating all the other things I have often wished for but never outright asked for from my partners. There’s a sliver of risk involved in asking. What if they say “No”, or judge you for it, or break up with you because you asked for something? That’s the fear dialogue running through our minds holding us back.

We don’t have to listen to the voice of fear. We can embrace the risk and choose- dare- to ask the ones we love and trust if they might be interested in something that we are interested in too. And when we do so, we give ourselves- and our partners- the opportunity to experiment, expand and explore new edges of being.

Depth and Desire

April 15, 2014MelC 5 Comments

Two years ago, on the morning after my birthday, I woke up in a downtown Vancouver apartment, with a life changing epiphany.

I lay naked in bed, gazing at the man slumbering beside me, his fluffy feline companion curled up in between us. The previous night I had celebrated my birthday with friends, and had gone home with him. I felt a huge outpouring of love for this man. We had dated, broken up, reconnected- it was an intense relationship, one of those ones where the chemistry is so crazy strong it’s hard to stay away. I felt conflicted, and didn’t know what to do with these feelings. I reached into my bag and pulled out my journal and my Avalon oracle cards, and started shuffling. Yes- total new age hippie at heart.

The card that I drew that morning was, appropriately, “The Cat”.

“The Cat reminds you of independence and to set healthy boundaries. Love with freedom- do not look to own what you desire, for too much attachment can lead to loss. The Cat lends you its power to live freely and to remember that the adventure is just beginning… Live freely, love without unhealthy attachment, and remember that with the Cat as your companion, you may fully immerse yourself in life, for there will be many lives to come.”

I read these words, and something began to stir inside me. It was early, far too early to get up, but I felt a sudden impetus to leave. I rolled out of bed, packed up my things, and left the apartment without waking anyone or saying goodbye.

That morning was the beginning of my journey in being Singleish.

I had figured out that I wanted to be polyamarous long before that. I had explored things with a few different couples, had a few marathon days where brunch, lunch and dinner were all date zeros, and was having a casual sexual relationship with one of my male friends. I had been separated from my husband for over six months and had been enjoying my new single life, while all too easily and quickly falling into a default pattern of expectations every time something resembling a Relationship appeared in my life.

I reffered to that default pattern as the Disney Fantasy, and later heard others refer to it as the Relationship Escalator. And that default pattern just wasn’t fulfilling me. Every time it happened, I felt like I had only escaped the box of marriage just to jump into another box.

I started with the idea that being Singleish meant I didn’t have to be answerable to anyone at all. No primary. No one to veto my actions. No one to report back to. No one whose feelings I needed to tiptoe around or negotiate with. After a summer of pursuing several relationships with less integrity and honesty than I probably should have, I decided I need to be accountable to myself, and to avoid getting lost and distracted by the romance and intoxication of NRE, I had to establish a primary relationship with me.

All the time while I was married, and during all the explorations of dating I had done since separating from my husband- I had been seeking love externally. I have battled with depression for years, and in that battle I found that struggles financial, emotional and health-wise make it all too easy to feel down and to seek external validation. I realised that in the midst of all that I had gone through, I had forgotten how to love myself.

Furthermore, in an attempt to emotionally bypass the deeper things going on within my psyche, I was becoming enamored with multiple external distractions, seeking human crutches on to which to lean my wounded heart and spirit. I resolved that I didn’t want to do that any more. I decided that rather than seek a primary partner externally, that I needed to be my own primary partner.

I was also clear that being Singleish, for me, had to mean more than multiple friends-with-benefits.

As a person, I’m a die-hard romantic, and I know that I need relationships with substance. Just because I don’t want to jump on the Relationship Escalator with someone, doesn’t mean that I don’t want to connect heart to heart, or that I will tolerate being treated as a purely sexual object or objective. All too often has that assumption been made, and I’m tired of people thinking that being Singleish equals treating the relationship with me as disposable.

To some, this has seemed like a total contradiction- a woman who desires relationships with substance, yet doesn’t want to commit to the standard “lets get married now” ideal. An individual who values her autonomy and independence so fiercely, yet who desires to share sexual, romantic, and emotional intimacy.

At the same time, I’m realising that buried behind the joyous “I am Singleish; hear me roar!” battle cry is a huge amount of fear. I have grown to value my independence and free spirit so much, that I am absolutely terrified of sacrificing that or loosing it. I lost it in my marriage, and do not want to loose it again. Yet, I desire intimacy. I desire partnership. I desire to share more of my journey- but without jumping onto the Relationship Escalator, without finding myself entangled in an emotional co-dependency or, even more terrifying, an emotionally manipulative and abusive situation.

It has hurt to open my heart to others, because with heart opening comes trusting and an element of surrendering. It means I can’t be in complete control anymore. But I feel I’m moving past those fears, and into a place in my relationship with myself where perhaps I could take on more.

I desire depth of connection. And I know that deep connections don’t happen over night- they grow over time.
lovekitten

Recently, with the end of a beautiful emotionally connected and sexually charged six month relationship, I’ve been reminded of the energy of that Cat card again, about the importance of asserting healthy boundaries, and of diving in to the adventures life holds.

A huge part of my journey in the past two years- and increasingly in the past few months- has been learning about how to communicate in such a way as to nurture intimacy and closeness. I can’t nurture that when there isn’t deeply honest, vulnerable sharing.

As I ask myself whether it would be possible to have primary like relationships without being on the Relationship Escalator, I realise that a lot of what constitutes my definition of primary has to do with the ability to listen with ferocious honesty, to share with vulnerability, and for everyone involved to be willing to dive into the depths of their own love.

I desire love. Love with depth.

I desire to feel love, to share love, to be drunk with love.

This year for my birthday, I once more celebrated in the company of dear friends, including some people whose company I have come to value immensely. I woke up- in my own bed this time- curled up next to a beautiful man I’ve been seeing for a couple of months now. We had slumbered peacefully in one another’s arms, our naked bodies entwined, and as I stirred in bed he moved his face towards me and kissed me softly.

I used to be afraid of those deeply intimate morning kisses and would run away placing meaning on them that would drive me insane with expectations. But- no longer. I allowed myself to be present to his kisses, and in so doing allowed myself to be present to my own lips kissing him back. And I felt so incredibly content, and happy. Not just with that moment, but with where I find myself at today.

sunbathing

Two years ago, I didn’t know how to love myself.

I had gone so long without love for myself, I was looking to others to love me.

More than that- I wanted them to love the Me who I was afraid of letting out in to the open! Choosing to find a primary relationship with myself has been one of the most significant things I have ever done because it has guided me to a place where I am no longer afraid of being myself.

I’ve embraced that “Cat” energy, and loved without attachment, lived freely, and immersed myself fully in life- and what a journey it has been. I’ve discovered more about myself, and dared to step in to the fullness of being who I have always dreamed- and believed- that I could be. And now that there’s greater depth between me, myself, and I, it only seems natural to desire greater depth, authenticity, and presence, in all the relationships that I form.

“Without feeling the loving holding of the universe, we can have no basic trust. How can you really let go and let yourself be if there isn’t trust that things are fundamentally okay, that whatever happens is appropriate? If we don’t have this trust, we are constantly scared, tense and fighting reality – inner and outer. If we have this trust, we can interact with everything exactly as it is – Let it in, Let it out, Let it go, Let go of letting it go and Let it be.”
~ Gabrielle Roth

Shame and Sexuality

October 21, 2013MelC 3 Comments

What do you know of great love? Have you ever loved a woman until milk leaked from her as though she had just given birth to love itself, and now must feed it or burst? Have you ever tasted a woman until she believed that she could be satisfied only by consuming the tongue that had devoured her? Have you ever loved a woman so completely that the sound of your voice in her ear could cause her body to shudder and explode with such intense pleasure that only weeping could bring her full release?
~ from the movie Don Juan DeMarco, 1994

I’m taking part in a workshop called The Good Girl Recovery Program. It’s run by a woman called Marcia, who came highly recommended to me by some dear friends who are poly and kinky and have made great personal breakthroughs with her support. I’m finding this course amazing. It is challenging me, inspiring me, and getting me to unpack some of the old stuff that I had buried and forgotten about.

snow-white-37-whistle-while-you-work-1-f15

We can’t just sweep all the dirt under the carpet and forget about it.

The central theme to my personal journey- in the last few months, in the last couple of years, and arguably the central theme in my narrative as an adult- has been embracing my sexuality. I was given many messages in my childhood that told me sex was something bad, something to be ashamed of, something to be hidden and not talked about. My mother described it to me in ways that made it sound disgusting, painful, and something that would detract from my evolution as a spiritual and conscious being. And the surroundings I grew up in were resoundingly not sex- positive (I was at a private all girls school for four years, at a catholic school for two years, and spent my adolescence living in a country where kissing someone in public who wasn’t your lawful spouse could have you jailed, and being gay could land you far harsher punishment).

When I was about six or seven years old, my school had a visit from a charity that worked to prevent cruelty to children. They were a well known charity, fierce advocates of children’s rights, and had very well thought out ways of reaching out to kids who may have experienced trauma and abuse in the home. Unfortunately for me, one of their excercises had the side effect of kindling shame around my sexual expression.

It was quite a simple excercise. We had activity sheets given to us that had three sillhouettes of ginger-bread-men like figures. One had a green outline. In that one, we were asked to color in areas where we liked to be touched. The next one was red- that was for where we didn’t like to be touched. And then there was a third, I think it was orange, and that was for where people touch us.

Now, I loved riding my bike. Why? Cos it felt so good in my crotch. It felt better than good- it was amazing! And I also loved jumping on my space hopper. So my crotch was colored in quite intensely for the green figure. And, since it was somewhere I liked to touch myself, I colored it in very strongly on the orange figure.

My parents were called in to the school. I was questioned by the principal separately from my parents. After i explained that it was me who did the touching of my vagina, my parents were sent home with the message that their daughter might be sexually aware too young. My mother- who I later learned had experienced sexual abuse from a family member- was already very protective of me, and became even more protective after that. I wasn’t allowed to touch myself, not even to scratch. The first time a boy asked me out, my mother said I wasn’t allowed to go out with him unless I had a chaperone (that boy dumped me as a result). She watched my first high school boyfriend like a hawk and terrified him. And the first time I was out later than midnight with a boy, when I was sixteen, I came home to my mother sitting on the staircase, brooding and fuming, and received a lecture about staying out late that still, to this day, brings up feelings of terror and fear within me. She was very effective at making me feel ashamed of my body, and of my sexuality.

Shame around sexuality is something institutionalized and ingrained at the very core of current day society. I’m not blind to the fact that I now live in a delightful bubble of sex-positive, open minded, accepting, and pretty rad people. Sadly, the majority of the world is not like this. For the majority of people alive today, there are many mixed messages about sex, that it is sinful and dirty, that it is something to use as a tool for power and control, that it makes it okay to objectify the human form, that it should be hidden and hushed, that it is something we are all supposed to do eventually and then be ashamed of immediately afterwards.

I sometimes wonder if my mother has ever had an orgasm, if the trauma of her own abuse has stood in the way of her ever experiencing sexual pleasure. I know my grandmother, on the other hand, was a very sexually astute woman- and she may have been bisexual. She taught me about what all the parts of my vagina were for when I was a kid (“And this is where special honey comes from, for the boy you marry”) She was prescribed the use of a WAHL personal massager by her physician as part of the treatment for her hysteria when she entered menopause. I have a foggy memory of my mother and grandmother arguing about the presence of this WAHL vibrator on my grandmother’s dressing table.

I came close to loosing my virginity a few times as a teenager, but held off. I was shy and afraid and had no idea what to do. I masturbated by myself plenty, and enjoyed it a lot, but had no idea how to share that experience with another person. My first attempt at penetrative sex was when I was 20, with my ex boyfriend Tony who I’d dated when I was thirteen and trusted immensely. It was awkward and weird (we both agree, looking back with the hindsight of experience) and I remember thinking “Is this it? Maybe my mother was right.”

And then I ended up marrying the next guy I slept with. He knew how to play with my body and would let me masturbate to orgasm before we had sex, and that was a mind-blowing revelation for me. But, during my relationship with Finn, sex was often an obligation. “We should have more sex, we’re married,” was the line I often heard. And so sex became a thing I’d do begrudgingly. Even when I didn’t want to. And I slowly began to close up my sexual expression.

The truth was, I was having fantasies I couldn’t fulfill with him. I was watching lesbian porn. I was watching kinky porn. I had desires to be tied up and to do the tying up. I wanted to experience giving another woman an orgasm, and to have sex with other men- and maybe several of them at once. Since adolescence I’d held fantasies of crazy group orgies, of being both the instigator of such events, and also the recipient of attention from multiple people simultaneously.

And Finn just wasn’t in to all that kinky stuff. Kinky for him was buying a “sensual cocoa butter massage bar” which did one thing only: stain our sheets.

The first time I experienced a squirting orgasm, it was using my vibrator externally. It was about six months after I’d been living by myself, and I hadn’t had sex in a long time. I think I’d been going for about an hour, and thought I might never orgasm. I’d edged close to that precipice but each time my body shut down- something mental was going on for me, some sort of shame about sex would kick in and take me back a few notches. But then- then something magical happened.
Maybe it was that the music I was playing shifted, perhaps it was my body reaching a point where my mind couldn’t fight with my body any more. My mind let go, and my body convulsed in a crescendo of joy and deep moans of pleasure for a split second- and then I began to cry and scream and yell, like some old pain within me was being released. I lay in stillness. The sheets and pillows around me were soaked with sweat, cum, and tears. Was the pain from the years of repressed sexual joy? The hurt I felt inside from my two miscarriages? The restriction of my full sexual expression?

This mental block thing still happens to me when I get near orgasm. It has made it really challenging for me to orgasm with someone else unless I can trust them and open up about the most vulnerable parts of myself- and if I feel shut down, dismissed, or judged for any part of that, I can’t continue. Orion has helped me immensely in moving through the many aspects of the shame I feel around this. We’ve been exploring together ways to use elements of BDSM play to accentuate the experience of being trapped- taking it from a mental limitation into a physical limitation, and seeing how both my body and mind react in different ways. It has been immensely liberating to discover that I can have earth-shaking orgasms with other people on a consistent basis, that there is indeed a method to the madness.

I’m learning to be more articulate about what I want and don’t want. Over the last few weeks I have been developing a new relationship with a man who, for the purposes of the blog, we’ll call Gerard. He has been with women before who have had sexual trauma, and is incredibly aware about communicating proactively about what’s happening in the moment if he has a concern. And he has absolutely listened to all my “no”s. He’s been keen to learn my body, to figure out the little subtleties of what works, and is always keen to make sure I have satisfying orgasms. For a while, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to have sex with him- but after a great date zero and a fun date one, we chatted online and talked about kissing. And the next time we hung out, we kissed. Just, kissed. We made out for a few hours. And then we talked about sex, but didn’t have sex. But we talked about it, and so when it came down to peeling off our clothes two dates later, we already knew where we were going, and were not fumbling around in the dark, so to speak.

Between my recent experiences with Orion, and the new experiences with Gerard, I’m feeling far more confident in being able to talk about and express my sexuality. I’m realizing that I’ve been limited by labels of things, and that at my core, sexuality is something I enjoy being creative with when I share it with others, and that I don’t like to go at half-arsed. I can’t do quickies. I want to take my time to explore- and to be explored. I’m broadening my horizons. I’m daring to be out as sex-positive. ElkFeather posted something to facebook recently, about the word “pomosexuality“, a word that seems to describe transcending the ideas of clear cut orientation labels that might limit us (gay, straight, male, female etc) and that’s very appealing to me. I value the ways that people choose to identify, and at the same time, it’s not the labels that matter to me. It’s what someone has beating in their heart, the longing in their chest and their loins, and desires and the potential for mutual exploration where chemistry exists and inspiration strikes. That’s what matters to me.

My mother turned up in town a few weeks ago. Since I have now made it very clear on several occasions that I don’t want to have her in my life as long as she continues to believe that “gays are mentally ill” and that her attempts to send me “love and blessings” in the form of condescending sex-negative conversations are not welcome, I did my best to keep a low profile while she was around. After I found out she had tried to stalk me at work (unsuccessfully) I strategized where to could go on my day off where I could guarantee I wouldn’t run in to her. As it so happened, there’s an amazing store not far from where I live that specializes in celebrating and empowering women’s sexuality. And, as luck would have it, they had a sale on. I spent a good hour and a half in the store, picking up toys, asking questions, chatting with the sales associates about the pros and cons of different lubes for different uses, and even managed to learn about some things you can do with power drills that don’t involve construction or carpentry work.

I left the store with my proud purchase of a stainless steel butt plug. A milestone in the ongoing evolution of my sexual un-shaming.

The njoy surgical-grade stainless steel plug comes complete with tasteful gift box.

As I release the hold that shame around sexuality has had on me, as I stop letting myself shrink away (so beautifully described in this video going viral), and really embrace this process of blossoming in to the full expression of all who I am, I’m also beginning to embrace my dominant side. Asserting my boundaries in the bedroom, articulating with openness and honesty about intimacy ahead of time, and a genuine desire to help others fulfill their fantasies and release their own sexual shame, is leading me quite naturally to learn more about how to take control- with consent- and create positive experiences for others where I’m in charge.

Orion’s been teaching me a lot with this, and has half-teasingly called me a ‘shamanatrix’, because I keep referring to being a dominatrix as a potential extension of my existing work in the wellness industry. Not that I think I would ever do it professionally- though I can’t absolutely discount the possibility.

I like being sex-positive. I like being kink-positive. I like not letting judgmental attitudes about alternative lifestyles get the better of me. I like that I am now navigating sexuality not by what someone else has told me is okay and not okay for my body, but by what my body tells me feels good, and doesn’t feel good. I’m learning how to ask others about their body, their desires, their fantasies- and to never assume. And I am discovering that we are- all of us- delightfully creative, each of us ‘freaky’ in our own right, and that there is so much diversity- a diversity that is liberating.

There is still a lot that I’m working on. But, I feel like the cap has been lifted. The waters have broken, and this new, assertive, sexually empowered and knowledgeable, goddess-version of me is birthing her way in to the world and learning how to grow and flourish. I don’t know how this would have been possible had I stayed married, or if I had embraced monogamy. I’m committed to expanding the definition of who I am, and every single intimate relationship I’ve enjoyed in the past few years has revealed new aspects of myself to me and invited me to stretch beyond the squishy limits of my comfort zone.

Polysingleish

adventures in honest non-monogamy

Personal Experiences

All Good Things Must Come To An End

On My 14th Wedding Anniversary

Polyamory and Pride

Together Independently

Keeping Up With The Joneses

Tolerating Trauma

Radical Self Reliance and Community Responsibility

Self Intimacy, Sex-Positivity, Shame, and the Resilient Edge of Resistence

In Limbo Lies the Love Languishing

Gratitude and Growth

Depth and Desire

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