I am a child born of water. From the day I was brought into this world, I have not lived more than 30 miles from a major body of water. It has defined me. Regardless of where I go, the chopping water and endless horizon of blue remind me of home. It centers me and travelling to Maui, 2500 miles from the Puget Sound, was no exception. As I floated in the
Pacific, the waves pushing against me, I resolved to let them take me wherever they would.
Loss, among the pain, anger and aimlessness, is a learning experience. One of the more prevalent lessons has been that all things in life are dynamic. The ability to embrace change is a necessary skill for the widower and one of the hardest one to learn.
I've tried dating now for over a year. Each little bit of it has had its own failures, though rarely the ones I expected. Each of them has had a core of an inability to stand still. I spent 14 years mostly in the same relationship, I don't want to enter another until I've tired of being single, until I've explored the joys and heartache of not being paired.
For the past year, it's meant dating multiple women, but not really willing to commit to monogamy with any of them. It's not that any of them were undeserving or that I couldn't see myself in a relationship with them, I just wasn't ready for that type of thing. Just as things would get close with someone, the waves would push me away.
It took me quite a bit of time to recognize the pattern and the reasons for it. Dahlia was my anchor. Without her, I am ungrounded. I am incapable of being stationary. After too many tears and break-ups, I'm starting learning to embrace it. I'm learning to like where the waves take me.
It's taught me to reject the ideas of the past. It's led me to two very different, but somehow interconnected ideas. The first was that traditional ideas of romance and gender are not for me. For most of my adult life, I've been attracted to all sorts of people, but it's not something I've pursued since Dahlia and I were in love. Nothing else mattered.
It's easy enough to be closeted as a bisexual man when you’re married to a woman. The state of denial can even reach internally. Thoughts and desires which arose in college or on a drunken escapade with friends are dismissed with little fanfare due to cultural ideas of fidelity, homophobia and bisexual erasure. Despite mentions of male attraction to Dahlia over the years, it took almost a year of dating women before I was comfortable enough to admit to myself that it was the person, not the gender, I was attracted to. It took me another four months to get over my own anxieties before I started actually seeing men romantically.
Realizing the at same time that this need to explore needed to come with lower risk of hurting those I cared about, I decided to learn more about polyamory. Despite being explicit about my inability to commit to a relationship with those I've dated, I've realized that information has come after there's been emotional investment by both parties. It's one thing to say it on the fourth date, it's another to say it before the first. It's caused me to adopt the term polyamorous, though I'm not sure it’s quite appropriate, but commitmentphobic doesn't have the same ring to it.
Right before I left for Maui, I made plans to see a woman seemed perfect for these new revelations. Ann is queer, polyamorous and very charming woman when it comes to convincing others to join those particular groups. Plus she's from Michigan, so at the very least, I could get a good game of Euchre out of meeting her.
So there I floated in the welcoming waters of the Pacific, I resolved that all that all that kept me still would be washed away. While I don't feel cleansed, the last three months have been revelatory. I'm just trying to figure out what those revelations mean.
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