As some of you may know from reading the blogs of Scarlet and Marla we are all in a fairly new poly situation and are trying to learn how to adjust to it. This is my personal recount of how things have been going. I do not make any claims that this is the whole objective truth or anything other than my very limited perspective. Take it for what it is.
Scarlet and I have been together for quite a while. It’s been a little over 4 years since we first met. And towards the end of this month we will have lived together for 3 years. Our relationship has been through a great deal of changes and challenges which she has chronicled pretty extensively on her blog. Through it all we’ve stuck together and I feel we’ve both grown immensely as individuals and as a “couple”.
We’ve always seen ourselves as polyamorous by nature, but until recently there has never really been any serious exploration of that side of ourselves. This changed a few months ago when we got to know Marla.
Marla and Scarlet connected a while before Marla and I did. They bonded through reading each others blogs and through IRC and Twitter. They have so many things in common and it became clear early on that they related to each other on so many levels.
I started getting to know Marla a bit later, towards the latter part of February, and things started off really well, though not nearly on the same level as Scarlet and Marla. We still had a level of mutual attraction and friendship that kept growing. Through this period there was lots of talking, lots of communication and as things began to grow more serious, there was a lot of discussion around fears, insecurities and concerns from all involved. Despite this, there were also issues that could have been handled better.
One of my main flaws is that I have a hard time communicating my feelings, combined with an excessive need to shield people I know from pain and desire to avoid confrontation. These all combined to deliver what I believe to be a significant blow to our relationship.
Several months ago, we were all in the initial stages of developing the sexual side of our relationship, this was all done long-distance and typically done through IRC, text messages or even twitter. There had been lots of talk about sex, and flirting, but little real sexual interaction.
Scarlet and Marla had recently began going further and exploring their own sexual dynamic, but Marla and I hadn’t quite gotten there yet, when one day things just seemed to happen with increasingly lewd text messages eventually going to a level beyond anything we’d previously explored. At the time this happened we failed to really inform or communicate with Scarlet until things had gone pretty far. As a result of this she felt hurt and upset, though more from the surprise of it, rather than a reluctance towards Marla and I being sexual.
We talked about it quite a bit, and while it was decided that this was ultimately a good thing and we needed to continue with these explorations, I had a hard time with seeing Scarlet hurt, and so in some misguided effort to shield her instead of trusting her and allowing her to work through her reactions I pretty much withdrew from any attempt to develop a deeper sexual and in many cases emotional bond with Marla.
We kept telling ourselves that our focus would be on the triad, that we would all work on the “trilationship” first and foremost. As it turned on there was a lot of focus on that, but while the Marla-Onyx leg of the trilationship was to an extent put on hold, the Scarlet-Marla leg kept receiving a lot of focus from them both and grew stronger and stronger.
This was further solidified when they both met in DC. I wish I could say I was a being of pure compersion who could sit at home feeling nothing but happiness, but in truth the happiness I felt was matched with equal amounts fear and doubt. This in many ways intensified after Scarlet came home. There was something new there, something I felt excluded from, and there was a certain distance between Scarlet and myself I did not really know how to deal with.
The pain of separation with Marla being 3000 miles away became much stronger, and it affected us all. For Marla it was hard to deal with the fact that Scarlet and I could be sexual and intimate, while she could not, and this made it hard for us to do so, knowing it would cause her pain. We tried different ways of including Marla in almost every aspect of our lives, but it never seemed to work quite right.
About a month later Marla came to visit us for a weekend, and while there were hiccups and some difficulties it was still such an amazing weekend. Things for the most part seemed to work out really well and the sex…well the sex was amazing. Still, it was only a weekend and having her leave again was hard to say the least.
After she went back home, the distance issue seemed even more painful, it became harder and harder for Scarlet and I to be close without feeling bad for Marla who was so far away. We convinced ourselves that the only way to resolve things would be to help her come here and be with us as soon as possible and that became our primary goal.
Well, things happened more quickly than any of us had dared to imagine and within a couple weeks it became clear that the opportunity for her to move would come to pass. A date was set and we began preparing for a new phase of our relationship. Of course some complications arose such as Marla needing to have emergency surgery just days before flying here. Still, the excitement and eagerness we felt were overwhelming, easily overriding the voices of caution telling us that this was moving too fast and that we were not really prepared. “Things will be so much better once she’s here” became our mantra.
After she arrived things did not exactly go as planned. Within a few days it became clear that the relationship between me and Marla was at a different level than I had thought. She explained she was not ready for a sexual relationship with me and even physical intimacy of any sort became strained and awkward. At the same time she and Scarlet had no such reservations and in the first few weeks their relationship blossomed, both emotionally and sexually. I tried telling myself that Marla’s inability to connect with me stemmed from stress over surgery, over moving 3000 miles away from everything she’s ever known and from having to adjust to a radically new life situation. She said she needed time and I told myself I would give her time, but the shock of the sudden change coupled with a feeling of Scarlet drastically growing more distant drove me into a level of pain and anguish that I have never felt the likes of.
I felt hurt, betrayed and abandoned. I would break down sobbing on multiple occasions. I would simultaneously want to escape to work so I could be away from the apartment, and dread being away because I knew that in my absence they were growing closer and more in love without me. In the months leading up to this we had talked so much about being careful not to leave anyone out and that our triad could only flourish if all three partners were on an equal footing. I felt all this had been abandoned and that I had been abandoned by them both with scarcely a second thought. Please note, that this is how I FELT, not necessarily what was actually going on, but at the time it was very hard to see things any other way.
At some point I hit rock bottom, I was ready to give up, convinced that only by removing myself from the situation was the only way to go on. I felt that I had failed completely, that my personal flaws, my own shortcomings had not only doomed my relationship with Marla, but also with Scarlet. That the joy I had found in our relationship was not shared and that I had been living in some sort of delusion the last few years. A lot of options were discussed, and at some point it seemed decided that the only way to salvage things was for me to move out and get my own place. We talked about how it would not be the end of our relationship, but that only by getting more space and distance could the whole thing be salvaged. Despite such assurances it was impossible not to feel that it was a step towards the end, that it would just widen rifts and pull us all further apart.
The only thing that kept me going was the discovery of friendships that I never realized could mean so much. Talking to old friends and wonderful new friends I’d met through twitter helped me regain a sense of self worth and a realization of how much of myself I had put aside, buried and almost forgotten about. Forced to confront the possibility of losing not only my new found love with Marla, but also the well-established and profound bond with Scarlet I had to come to grips with myself as a person and how to go on living by myself. I began realizing how suppressing myself, my feelings and my needs had caused so much damage not only to myself, but also to those I love. I found a new source of strength and it gave me the power to pull myself out of the dark pit I had been sinking into.
Things began to change, there were more talks with Scarlet and with Marla, but I could approach these talks from a new place, a place of greater self-insight and worth. I found some sort of peace where I knew that I could endure no matter what happened. The fear became replaced with a strange form of acceptance. I realized that things were not as bleak, not as hopeless as they had seemed. That there was still so much love and determination to try to work things out between us all.
The path ahead is not clear, I am still so very much wanting things to work out as we all had originally envisioned. Marla and I have gotten somewhat closer and better at working on things, though a great deal of uncertainty remains. I feel that Scarlet and I have gotten to a better place, where we are able to communicate better and have a better understanding of ourselves and our individual needs. Things often seem to be going two steps forward and one step back. There have been incidents, emotional blowups and challenges up to and including today, and I know without a doubt there will be many more. All the wonderful self-awareness and personal strength in the world doesn’t make things magically better overnight, but I know I have the fortitude to do what’s in my power to do. I still very much love them both, and am not yet ready to give up.
At some point I will be writing an addendum to this point regarding some of the more esoteric revelations this has led me to, but for now this will serve as my personal retelling of the events of these past few months.
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