I chose three for 3 reasons: community, personal space, and intimacy.  Loving as three people presented an opportunity to correct some of the pains of loving as two – the control, the expectations – and add layers of richness as it did.  I felt like a relationship with three people had potential to be exponentially more beautiful.  I don’t know how I feel about it now.  But I have rested quietly long enough in the fallout to know certainly that nothing is going to be the same after it.

I met him on an internet sex meetup site.  I met a lot of people there.  Surely a few hundred, over years, with no outcome of any meeting the same as any other.  Many were short – coffee, no thank you.  Many, both good connections and misconnections, never got sexual.  Plenty were strange, none dangerous, a few hilarious, and most just deeply human and slightly tragic.  I have a small group of friends (all men) from that time who are real and enduring.  The oldest was 32 years my senior.  The youngest, 21 years my junior.

He stood out initially because he was warm, patient, and notably vanilla – something akin to a kind of modesty.  A good communicator, clear, and just simply friendly.  Schedules dictated that we’d chat for a few weeks before meeting.  He had a wife.  They had been together since they were young and always had an open and sexually adventurous relationship.  They were deeply in love and committed to each other and their partnership, early 30’s, hoping to have a family soon.  They liked to play and wanted ongoing friendship and connection.  There had always been other people.  There was room.

These things, over time, turned out all to live on the distant fringe borders of the truth.  Week over week, for the year that followed, the truth slowly crawled closer and closer to the surface.  And things got weirder, richer, more profound, deeply beautiful, and more dangerous as it did.

I chose three because I had cycled through all the flavors of family I could think of, but still hadn’t given up on finding it.  I believed in an infinite array of ways to build family, discoverable to the open-minded and big of heart.  In marriage, I tried the kind of two that is supposed to turn into three, or four, or five, or more.  That didn’t work.  And in the fresh post-mortem marriage years, I would walk around picturesque, cozy neighborhoods with my dog, looking into the dinnertime windows, heavy with failure, thinking “How did all of these people pull it off and I couldn’t?” knowing full well that most of them didn’t or won’t indeed pull it off, but feeling confused and left out either way.

Not having any particular pull about babies, but dreaming of people around a dinner table, eating my food and talking, I assumed that a financially stable, healthy, not-bad-looking woman with some quantity of free time and patience in her late 30’s would be a great find for a nice divorced man with a few part-time kids who needed feeding and driving around.  But as it turns out, middle aged men come in a few dominant flavors 1) with kids and therefore only feeling understood by women who also have kids, 2) wanting kids they don’t yet have, or 3) living kid-less life and doing as they please (as I currently do – which is a good gig and not to be passed up).  So my brief hope to become a domestic servant to a family in progress was dead before it started.  There wasn’t a place for me.

There in the ramp up to middle age, I learned what it feels like to be a secret, never having been that before.  The men in my life, who had paraded around younger me like a prize, now worked desperately to enjoy me in the secret shadows of their legitimate lives and the people they cared about.

At that stage, vs earlier in adult life, everyone’s world is already in progress, filled with delicate, important things, surrounded by protections, damage, self-definitions and responsibilities holding on by thin threads.  The deep craving everyone sometimes has for support, companionship, and sex is counterbalanced by the knowledge of how deeply and permanently bad choices can brand us and steal life from us, and in the midst of the failure of middle life, how desperately we want to do just one thing right before our time is up – like successfully launching the children we probably wish we hadn’t had.

In this climate, my market value isn’t necessarily low, but more just time-boxed.  Like 2-8 hours, on average.

There’s nothing wrong with 2-8 hours of legitimate value.  It almost becomes an exercise in mindfulness.  Some people live 100 years without really being there for any of it.  Or they eat, sleep, breathe, and fuck with someone they love for decades, acting out only a series of habits.  If I get a few hours of sincere connection with bevy of real people, I will have lived hundreds of lives more than many ever will get close to.  That doesn’t make me feel sad or mistreated.  That makes me feel honored.  Also, it can be pretty fun.

So, honestly, at first the reality of his world didn’t much concern me, so long as it seemed to be within the bounds of what everyone had agreed to and I wasn’t being a party to something obviously hurtful or unhealthy.  My assumption was that I would see him once at most anyway, perhaps just a fraction of once.

But he stayed, and I don’t know why.  I didn’t expect him to.  When he said he was coming back, I appreciated the kindness of the statement and didn’t think much about it.  But he did come back.  Just a few days later.  And again a few days after that.  And then over and over every few days until he became the foundation of my days and nights.

We went hiking, had great conversations, sat naked and did jigsaw puzzles.  He asked about the little things in my world that no one who wasn’t immediate family had ever pretended to care about before.  He saw my weak spots and challenged me to navigate them in new ways.  He forgave me for the things I wanted to, but couldn’t quite be good at.  He made a fuss over liking my food and wanting my body.  This, to me, was more than I could have ever even conceived possible.  This is more than I would have ever wanted.

And at the same time, the situation set me free of my worst enemies in love.  He didn’t need me to run his life.  I wasn’t his mother or his project manager.  I wasn’t his business partner or social ticket.  None of those things was my job.  And because they weren’t, I felt loved and wanted in a way more pure and beautiful than ever before.  It left me space to live the free life I had aged into, without interruption or demand, still preserving this idea that I might be able to play a supporting role in something that looked like the last residual concepts of family I could picture.

And soon, I saw that I had some responsibility for his heart, which no one had given me in a long time, and never so gracefully.  In return, I watched him take responsibility for mine and I relaxed into that and worked incredibly hard at finding new depths of courage within myself for showing up and trying.  I took more risk than I suspected I could, knowing that I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t, and also knowing that absolutely anything could happen – and that every minute I needed to be prepared to let go with grace and gratitude when it was over.  And it could be over instantly and without warning.

He was never going to be mine and I liked that.  Unlike my marriage, which was anchored in kindly responsibility and obligation, this had no anchor.  Every minute was earned and intentional, desperately wanted.  And the price was that it could end in a flash.

“You are the best possible thing she could have found.”  My friends said it multiple times and I believed it, because, like them, I know me.  I am honest, loyal, loving, and independent.  I like to cook, fuck, and help out – then be left alone.  I wasn’t looking for a husband or babies, and I had money and time to contribute, babysit, swing a hammer, or bring soup in the middle of the night.  If a younger (inarguably much more beautiful) woman wanted a team that included an unthreatening someone to keep her husband off the street, support her family, and do anything she needed, I’m it.  And I love the idea.  To me, love is largely an exercise in giving – and having two people to give to and enjoy feels just like more love to me – with the added freedom I feel like I have earned and need.

But that wasn’t how it played out, because, as it turns out, she was backed into a corner.  The marriage, the “adventure”, the deeply entangled karma between them, and her own journey of becoming were all much different, darker, and more complex than originally represented.  Month over month, it became more apparent.  The “open” relationship was a reflection of his belief that living that way was imperative for men, but against nature for women (as I came to see in his own expectations for me). The terms of the marriage were colored by misaligned expectations – hers of a lifelong commitment vs. his of a convenient green card arrangement.  The whole situation slowly and awkwardly showed itself over time to be much more painful and difficult than anyone wanted to believe it was.  I don’t believe there was ever deception as much as just pained optimism and longing – on all sides.

We tried in cycles.  She wanted to manage it.  She loved him incredibly.  Always will.  And he her.  If she and I had met differently, she would have loved me too.  But it wasn’t a fair ask.  Not for her, because she didn’t want to share their life, and not for me, because I very much did.  The only way for her to deal with the situation was to see any other woman a sexual object.  The only way for it to be healthy for me was to be wanted and welcomed as a valuable addition.  And all of the trying was risky and painful.

I am several months clear of it now and still incredibly grateful and permanently expanded, as well as deeply broken-hearted, which doesn’t seem to fade with time.  The expansion is pretty easy to explain.  He is pure magic and he showed me what that looks like.  And as if that weren’t enough, he valued me in a way I had never felt valued before.  The most magical person I ever knew valued me enormously, saw me honestly, and accepted me.

Losing that leaves both a huge hole and an even more substantial fullness.  I feel like there is this ghost of a person holed up inside my heart, happily plugging the gaping wound that used to be there, making things ok that have never been ok before.  I feel certain now that it will always be true and I feel the gravity and gratitude of what a huge gift that is.  The loss is pure, glorious grief, and while it fades from the minute-to-minute of life, its place in the deep fabric of who I am doesn’t move at all.

Grief and heartbreak maybe are different.  A gift had for a time and then set free is just a turn of the wheel.  Accepting that is making yourself available to possibilities by taking responsibility for their cost.  If you can do it, it is worth it.  Having that skill and experience makes all of life available to us.

Losing him was grief, pure and real.  But losing her was heartbreak, disconnected and confused – unfinished and misunderstood.  The pain has two sides – one pure (my connection to him) and one messed up (my connection to her).  And when I miss the whole thing, I miss them both in turn and sometimes together.  I miss him, but I also miss the possibility that I hadn’t considered before I met him – a collaborative life where I could love two people and be a valuable support to the family I wasn’t able to make for myself.  A puppy pile of life, making things just a bit brighter and easier by being together.  I miss him profoundly.  In some ways I miss her more.

I tried threeway love and it didn’t get very far down the line this time.  Everyone got hurt.  But I got a windfall of gifts I couldn’t have ever imagined.

I don’t know what they got, but I can only hope it was as good and as beautiful.  I tried very hard.  There was nothing more I could figure out to do except walk away when it seemed clear that it was time.

I don’t know if I’d try this experiment again.  I don’t, right now, know if I’ll try again at romantic love of any kind.  For the time being, I can’t imagine love, or even sex, being appealing by comparison.  I had magic.  And I tried intensely to hold up my end of the deal, as hard as it often was to know what that meant.

Let’s call it a success.  I just don’t yet know what the finish line looks like.  Still just trying to imagine the next step.  And somehow still grieving something that felt like it should have taken but never did connect.  It makes me sad to have never had the chance, but happy to be considered, I suppose.  And for now, I enjoy missing it more than I could ever enjoy having something else.

Note:  This is the post I have been trying to write for months and failing.  It was incredibly difficult and as I finish it, I am quite drunk on Madeira.  There is a much, much more expansive (and salacious) story here and I am writing it, as fiction, under another name.  I feel a lot of responsibility for representing all three of us with compassion and respect, though for good or bad, there’s no possible way for me to see the story through any eyes other than my own knowingly clouded view.  For some reason, this experience has turned me into a person I am excited about but don’t recognize, and that is wonderful and terrifying.  I am both grateful and broken – broken open rather than apart.  But I have to tell this story to get to whatever is on the other side.  I hope to get through it quickly and with integrity and love.

And lastly, if you want to be in the inner circle and follow this book as it develops, use the subscription link above to get on the list.  I don’t send many updates because I am shy about it, but subscribers will be the group I’ll be asking for early reads and insights.  <3