I’m on the plane to Denver and finally feeling a bit less existential, so this seems like a good time for some narrative. John and I have begun the process of separating, just about 2 months shy of our 5 year anniversary. As sad and overwhelmed as this is currently making me, I am feeling equally as liberated and empowered. I have needed this for a long time. We both have.

For years now, our largest disconnect has been sex, but it wasn’t always like that. When we first met we had found an immediate commonality in our overt sexualities. He was confident and capable and the sex was amazing. We fucked constantly. I had started seeing Marcus just over 3 months prior to meeting John, and our relationship was already perfectly established, although due to both of our fluctuating sexual identities (a gay man entering into his first sexual relationship with a woman, working his way to a queer identity and a bisexual woman in her first cohesively polyamorous relationship, working her way to a queer identity) involved less sex overall than I was used to. It was my first big taste of “play” that wasn’t also consistently followed up with intercourse. While we boxed often, at least once a week, we would most often watch the tapes we made of ourselves afterwards and masturbate together. Now, don’t me wrong. I fucking LOVED this. The process of getting ready to fight; changing in front of each other, wrapping each other’s hands, tying our gloves on, forcing kisses through mouth guards and wild eyes ready for the fight. It was an intimacy unlike any I had ever known, and one that helped me feel the happiest and the healthiest I had ever felt. It helped teach me what true intimacy was. You know, the kind where you don’t even have to take your clothes off? I’d been waiting my entire life to feel something like that.

And then I met John. We fucked the first night we met and the next morning I told him everything about Marcus. Who he was, who he was to ME and how I had no intention of the dynamic of our relationship changing at all. If this was going to continue, which I very much wanted it to, then John would have to feel good about Marcus and the relationship that I had already established with him. And we spent the next month or so working on moving into that space. I wonder now, in retrospect, if this was something that he did just to keep me. If it was never something he was going to feel truly comfortable with, no matter how badly he wanted to. I don’t resent him for this. I honestly believe that he wanted it. He was just 21 years old, desperately in love with me and doing the best he knew how.

As time passed by I came to realize that there was an importance John placed on sex that was unlike any I had really experienced before. Our Sex always had to be made a priority over Other Sex. I honestly didn’t feel this was that unreasonable, as he and I had wasted little time shacking up and playing house with A and U while working towards a future together. It didn’t take long for it to become clear that if I was to not want to have sex with him for any reason that it required an explanation, even though most any of the reasons I may have had would be deemed “unacceptable”. There was an expectation and entitlement that surrounded sex for him that quickly became suffocating. I would come to learn that he had been molested as a child by one of his older female cousins. Pulling from what I had already learned of his family, I knew that this wasn’t something that had been handled properly and that John never really received the kind of help a young person should receive when faced with these circumstances. He instead began equating Sex with Worth, Attention and Validation at a very young age, and it had been left to continue into adulthood and therefore negatively affect his relationships moving forward.

I’ll be the first to admit that making the emotional shift from Marcus and our relationship being my primary, and really my only, focus for months was difficult. I loved him so completely, and the freedom I had being the secondary partner to a man who was already married and co-habitating with his husband just felt so right, ya know? I look back on this dynamic now as being the most right I have ever felt. I honestly believe that living a Co-habitating Partner-free life is what my Best Life was meant to be. Every day that passes without having to beg my partner to get out of his own head long enough to respect and understand me, without fighting in front of the kids, without being made to feel that I consistently wasn’t fulfilling an obligation that had been unfairly placed on me, only helps me feel more free. More right. I love him and I pray that he is able to move forward into a space where we can continue to love and respect each other while also no longer existing in the prison that our partnership had become. I know that I am.