Abstract
“Two girlfriends? I barely have time for one.”
This is the first pronouncement I recall my then-boyfriend, now-husband making on the subject of non-monogamous relationships. I viewed things differently, more like, “Two boyfriends? That might be fun.”
Roughly a decade later, we’ve revisited that conversation a number of times, always concluding, “Not for us, not right now.” Nonetheless, the conversation sometimes grows tense; in one frustrated moment, he pointed out, “This is not what I signed up for.”
Indeed, our first serious, “For real, do you want to do this?” polyamory conversation didn’t occur until we’d been married for a couple of years. However, I feel an affinity for the topic that stretches back farther. Husband feels no such affinity; he still thinks it sounds like a lot of work.
Ruminating over both the questions “Have I always been like this?” and “How many romantic relationships would I really be able to keep track of?” in a particularly nerdy mood, I sat down to graph a history of my desire.
Hypothesis
Yes, I have always been like this.
I journaled avidly as a teenager, producing stream-of-consciousness Microsoft Word documents that I printed, bundled together, and still keep on the top of a bookshelf. Memories of those teen years include lots of academic endeavors, summers of reading, learning to drive and to hold down a minor job. My journals reflect none of this. They record primarily the breathless “He looked at me!” moments of adolescence, day after day of pining for attention that I was too shy to pursue.
Turnover of the leading men in these journals is low; the excitement of sharing a lab bench with a pretty boy could keep me hooked all through the school year. Volume, however, is high. Many entries read as rundowns of the day’s brief interactions with all of the boys I was pining for at the time, a number that fluctuated between three and seven. Given the sporadic nature of my actual interactions with these boys, their number soothed my ego. Maybe Joe had ignored me at lunch, but Chris had smiled at me between classes, so it was a good day to be a flighty fifteen-year-old.
Two and a Half
For most of those teen years, I wouldn’t have known what to do with those boys had they looked at me for longer than a glance. My daydreams ended with hand-holding, perhaps a kiss. As I grew older and more of my peers dated, I didn’t see any girls holding hands with five different boys in the same week, and complicated machinations of breaking up and getting back together with people crept into my fantasies. I wanted them to be realistic, after all, and it wasn’t realistic to be involved with more than one person. I took for granted that, should one of the objects of my affection return my feelings, I would promptly forget about the others. When one finally did, and I didn’t forget, both of us took for granted that this was a relationship-ending problem.
While I’ve always had trouble focusing on only one person, I do adore Husband and also the state of being married. I don’t miss longing for half a dozen people. Nowadays, the most appealing configuration, at least in theory, is to be married and to also have a steady significant other. I’d expect other crushes to come and go, as they do, but I have difficulty imagining the logistics of handling more romantic relationships than this. I characterize this as two and a half relationships.
Considerations
There’s oddness to this kind of quantification — even among people who are polyamorous in practice, not everyone is comfortable with the use of “primary” and “secondary” to describe relationships, never mind encoding them as numbers in JavaScript — but it’s a thought exercise, not a drug trial.
I’ll look at it as measuring my feelings, which are my business, not the relationships themselves. It’s a touch awkward for my husband, since we do run a monogamous shop, but it’s also familiar ground. He is well aware of my fondness for what I call “personal complexity” and he calls “drama.”
Process
Husband works with data visualizations professionally, and likes to be helpful, so he’s a natural source of advice.
“Darling, what can I use to code up a Gantt chart? I want to plot some phases in time.”
After some explanation of what a Gantt chart actually entails — I don’t need to model dependencies — he suggests a simpler timeline representation. We fiddle with sample code, and then I pull out a notebook to record my data.
“So, what are you actually doing?”
The first thing I’m doing is brainstorming men. Tangentially, I’m occasionally interested in women, but in approximately the same way I’m interested in learning Russian, a “That could be interesting sometime,” sort of way. When I am consumed by someone, thus far, it has been a man. I decide to go back fifteen years, to my mid-teens, but that means some head-scratching as I tried to recall old crushes.
There has to be some cutoff for inclusion; there are too many attractive men in the world to list out every single one who has ever seemed like a good idea. I decide to go with men who had taken up regular residence in my mind, people I’d thought of romantically on a daily or near-daily basis for at least a few months.
Husband looks over my shoulder and nods absent-mindedly; he knows these names. After all, several of these men were once a source of drama in our relationship. Of those who pre-date him, some he knows through other means, and most of the rest are names I’ve mentioned in passing. Still, his eyebrows travel upward as the list lengthens, and he comments on a few.
“X? The guy from Copenhagen? I didn’t think you were that into him.”
“You weren’t there.”
“Why did you cross off Y?”
“I wasn’t really into him, he was into me.”
“Really? Maybe I could have been less jealous.”
“That would have been nice.”
With a reasonably comprehensive list, I fill in dates. Start dates are easy — I still remember sitting in English in February of 2000, heartbroken at having passed by some blond cherub I had an eye on, his arm around another girl. End dates are harder. Most of these are longings, not relationships, and they fade gradually. I’m tempted to pull down my old journals to fact-check, but now Husband is pouring us wine, and I will only be lucid for a couple of glasses.
Some people get several time spans. Dating Husband is distinct from being married to him. The couple of months I spent chasing someone mid-college belong on this chart, but in a different category than the subsequent two years of getting over him, also different from the next six years it took to be able to think of him with equanimity.
This “category” is the nebulous part to define. Intensity. Space in my life. I pen a six-point scale that goes from “light crush” to “husband,” and collapse it to five after realizing that when it comes to the amount of mental space a romantic interest takes up, whether or not we’re in an explicit relationship doesn’t really matter. Husband, mollified that he gets his own category, tells me about his day at work while I code up my data.
The timeline turns out to be unsatisfying, primarily because there are too many people to fit readably on one screen. Rather than tweak the chart’s aesthetics, I note that it also doesn’t make it easy to see if my “two and a half” theory is correct. I need to aggregate. Stacked area should work. I tweak the intensity scale again, reducing it to four categories:
- Marriage
- Feelings strong enough to ponder, “Do I love him?”
- Casual relationships
- Unrequited feelings: crushes and time spent getting over someone
A significant amount of data entry later, this yields quite the rainbow.
Discussion
Husband is the dominant polygon, well on his way to eclipsing everything else put together. Teenaged life was indeed a minefield of distraction and drama, maxing out at seven unique colors in one month. As I grew into more serious relationships, the number of simultaneous interests decreased, but has never been one, and only briefly two. The top line has never dipped below three — a steady significant other, or three crushes, or somewhere in between — and has generally increased. Thus far, it has topped out at nine, followed by the most abrupt drop-off on the graph. A long purple stretch is pushed higher and higher by a growing green area, until it disappears. The green area itself then moves upwards as new color appears, ending rather suddenly.
If memory serves, that green relationship disintegrated because he felt neglected. My attention was elsewhere in a way that it hadn’t been when I was working every night and weekend in grad school, or when I was living across the country from him. It didn’t help that my hours at work increased, but more than that, it didn’t help that they’d increased in part because of an attractive coworker. There wasn’t enough space in my head.
Shortly before that relationship fell apart, I also finally got over the longest-standing of old longings. This is old news — one gets over one person by getting under another. It’s the exact quantity of people I want to be under that I’m trying to pin down. It took almost eight years to accumulate enough other romantic complexity to finally squeeze out that old preoccupation.
Regardless of the numbers and angular lines, this is a narrative. The points are manipulated and oversimplified, tweaked until the pixels tell the story that looks like my life.
