Luke came to my front door in New Orleans on a sunny day several years ago with a sparsely decorated cassette tape and said, “I made this for you.” I could tell this was a move he had used with other women, but I had to hand it to him: It was a good one.
This wasn’t the ’90s when mix tapes were a popular medium for revealing a crush. Even mix CDs had come and gone. If you were going to use someone else’s songwriting to convey your feelings, you did it with a Spotify playlist. I was charmed that Luke liked music and was obstinately analog about it.
I had only recently started dating Luke. We were doing that casual, millennial thing that begins on Tinder and spreads into bar dates, sandwiched between bar dates with other people. I tended to be dating three people at a time — both men and women — and the life spans of my pseudo-relationships averaged two months or so. I liked it this way. A capital-R relationship seemed too big for my life, a concrete shape I had no room for.
But when I listened to Luke’s mix tape, I felt tricked. This was not a casual mix tape. It had folk songs about longing and soul music about feelings. It had “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and something by Usher.
Luke soon revealed himself to be good not only at making mix tapes but also vegetarian lentil stew and weekend travel plans to canoe through Lafayette to find armadillos. We approached and passed the two-month mark before I knew what had hit me.
Two years later, we moved from New Orleans to Chicago and rented a one-bedroom apartment. We established a night to have family dinners. We got cats.
But I never wanted to give up dating other people, and neither did Luke. In Chicago, we maintained our Tinder accounts and would lie side-by-side in bed swiping right, occasionally showing off our respective matches.
Polyamory wasn’t something my parents easily understood. My grandparents told me they felt “truly worried” for me. But nothing about our arrangement ever felt unusual. Most people I knew in New Orleans were non-monogamous; being 20-something there implied that you kissed strangers at Mardi Gras.
Before Luke, I had spent almost a decade building and prioritizing a close platonic friendship with my roommate, and she never minded that I went on dates with other people. Why should it be different with someone I slept with?
In Chicago, we each dated only a few people. It’s colder than New Orleans so leaving one’s apartment is less appealing. Sometimes I got jealous; sometimes Luke did. We talked about our jealousy at length and afterward felt closer. Three years into our relationship, we kept dating other people, but we noticed that the jealousy just kind of stopped. In the spring, Luke filled our living room with yellow daisies and we got engaged.
The next winter, at a party, I met Kat.
She wore a skintight black dress with see-through keyholes on the sides. I couldn’t stop staring. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in real life.
She was there with her boyfriend, Brendan, who was visiting from Portland, Oregon, and they were also polyamorous. I liked Kat and I liked her boyfriend; we all exchanged numbers and said we would stay in touch.
Months passed. I saw Kat at birthday parties and once at a gay rights rally. Over the summer, we ended up on the same camping trip with mutual friends along the Wisconsin River. At night, we laid on our backs with our shins to the bonfire. I moved close so our arms would touch. She took my hand. We waited for the stars to fall.
I have always been scared of dating women. When attracted in the past, I have mostly gone emotionally limp, terrified of rejection. Women just seemed so untouchably beautiful; I was afraid they could see through my foundation-wearing, hair-dying tricks and know instantly that I was not a suitable lover.
After the camping trip, when I couldn’t stop thinking of Kat, I drafted countless text messages to her that I never sent, until finally Luke told me I should ask her out.
“Why don’t you ask her out?” I said.
“Because I’m not the one who can’t stop talking about her.”
I decided I would ask her out by writing her an actual letter and sending it. The letter had a long list of possible dates and times when we might hang out, and I drew cats on the front of it to indicate how whimsical and carefree I was.
Three days later, Kat responded that yes, she was interested. I jumped around our apartment as if I had just gotten into my top college.
Our first date was in my living room during a rainstorm. I tried on four outfits before settling on something that I decided would make it look like I had not tried on four outfits. I ordered enough Thai food for six, forgetting that on your first date you’re usually too nervous to eat anything. Our conversation blissfully meandered; I tried not to look directly at her because I feared the depth of my crush was written all over my face.
Luke got home as our date was winding down. He joined us in the living room for a few minutes before leaving us alone to say the kind of goodbyes that linger a little too long at the beginning of relationships.
That night, I lay next to my fiancé and told him about the woman I was falling for.
People ask me why I’m getting married, considering my open approach to sexual fidelity. It seems that marriage, for most, is a contract where you agree to give up having sex with anyone else for the rest of your life as a sacrifice to someone you love.
Which is a beautiful concept that works well for a lot of people — approximately 50 percent of the couples that try it. But for me, commitment has little to do with physical intimacy.
I’m getting married because I want to promise, in front of my friends and family, that I am going to love Luke forever. I want to assure him that if he can’t pay his rent, or when someone he loves gets sick, or if his car breaks down in an ice storm and he’s stranded on the highway, that he can call me and I’ll be there for him no matter what.
I want to keep our family dinners going indefinitely. I want to co-parent our cats. More than anything, I want Luke to know that I will tell him the truth, and that when the truth is painful I will stop what I’m doing and tend to him until he feels better.
But I am not going to promise him that our love won’t change, and neither will he promise that to me. The fact that love absolutely will change is one of my favorite things about love. Rather, as the love changes, I hope Luke and I will be able to hold each other with compassion; that we will stay curious and empathetic.
One night, after a December evening out, Kat walked me to the train station. Under the overpass, she pulled me toward her and kissed me in a small, sweet way that threw my stomach into knots. Our glasses fogged; we both wore gloves so thick we couldn’t feel each other’s hands. It was one of those fleeting rom-com moments you want to hang onto.
Talking with the love of my life about falling for Kat has been an incredible gift. Luke pets my hair and lets me wax poetic in a way that most of my friends can only tolerate for so long. And it goes both ways; I root for him when he goes on dates. Kat says she talks to her boyfriend about me, too.
Right before Christmas, Luke and I went to Portland (my family lives there; we always head over for the holidays) and met up with Kat and Brendan. We all went on a date together. After it was over, Luke and I lay awake in my childhood bed, laughing about how sweet and strange and beautiful our lives were turning out.
I know not everyone wants to love this way. I understand fear of loss, and I understand wanting to hold something still when it’s good. Ultimately, this particular shape makes sense to me: love as a blob that can’t be pinned down, as something alive, an animal that ventures from person to person but finds places to call home.
Sophie Lucido Johnson, who lives in Chicago, is the author of “Many Love: A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s).”
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