friends & lovers i am so good at playing the part of the devoted girlfriend and so bad at making it a reality. i am really not meant for this. for monogamy, for loving only one person. i have never in my life only loved one person at a time, i don't even know how to do it. my first love was a love so brutal and so unreciprocated that i have always had to find ways to open myself up to other love, that i have never been able to love exclusively, because to do so would have meant to flounder in the brutality of loving only one person. i wish it hadn't taken me this long to realize it; i wish i had been able to admit it to myself sooner so that i wouldn't have destroyed relationship after relationship with my inability to be honest about the infinite capacity of my romantic feelings for people. i have just been so terrified of the consequences. because we live in a world that privileges monogamy so intensely, because polyamory is often read as synonymous to slutty. but maybe i am emotionally slutty. maybe i do want to share my heart with a lot of different people & want that to be reciprocated. maybe i'm finally at a point in my life where i can allow myself to be open about it, to experience it, to not rely on the safety of monogamous relationships. i am awfully tired of holding myself back. i think of love in such an ambiguous way; i have trouble distinguishing between the "relationship" kind of love and the "friendship" kind of love because to me there really is no boundary. i want my friends to be my lovers and my lovers to be my friends without all of this division between what those categories entail. i want love that is absolutely unpossessive, fluid, free, giving/nurturing, unlimited. i have always wanted this, but it is only now that i feel capable of articulating it. |