These are the confessions of a powerful polyamorous slut.
I am happy. I am in complete control of my life and I cannot foresee anything that might change that. I feel competent to deal with anything that life can throw at me.
I have grown and changed every year of my life, and I have been proud of the man I am for some time now, but I still discover new things about myself and sometimes those things are significant.
Struck by this realization as I was, it slipped into place so easily that I recognize this as something that I have known for some time but masked from my own perception.
I am easy to love, but I am very challenging to be in love with.
I am open and caring and honest and innocent and eager and overwhelming and arrogant and selfish and demanding and safe and nurturing and horny and wicked and brutal and oh-so-fucking-smart, and I do not hold back on any of these things.
When I am in love with you, the world ceases to exist when you are in my presence. You become the focus of all of the attention I can bring to bear.
I will be open and caring and honest and innocent and eager and overwhelming and arrogant and selfish and demanding and safe and nurturing and horny and wicked and brutal to you.
I am happy, and if you were in love with me, you would be too.
But I am an unrepentant slut.
I am easy to love, because I love so very easily, and honestly, and completely.
And when you are in love with me, this will be challenging.
I will make you feel special, because you are special.
I will make you feel happy, because it is difficult to be unhappy around someone who is so very happy themselves. Misery loves company, but it hates competition.
I will make the things that you despise about yourself okay and I will make the things that you love about yourself super-powers.
I will focus all of my unbridled enthusiasm right at you and I’ll use it to mold you into what I desire.
I will convince you that you are the most important person in my universe, all the while telling you about how I feel the very same way about someone else in my past, present, or future.
Time itself will take on special properties when I am around.
And then I will leave.
Not forever. Not even for more than is necessary, but it will still be difficult. I will return, because this wasn’t an ending – there are no endings in my life anymore – but the distances of space and time will be painful.
You will remember that all of those things that I made you feel – I am making someone else feel some of the times that you are not around.
And it will all feel like a lie.
But nothing was false. Nothing was untrue. Everything that you felt was real, and continues to be real in my mind – forever.
I am easy to love because I love you already.
I am challenging to be in love with because I love openly, fearlessly, and it will not always be directed at you.
But I will never stop loving you – I never have.
I don’t know who you pictured when you conjured the “you” this is addressed to. English being its usual self, “you” is both personal and plural here, of course – an ambiguity that befits the thought. I don’t know how many actual and hypothetical people are included in its ambit, but I’ll claim a reader’s privilege and imagine myself in it in some small way. That’s the invitation, or maybe the temptation, of writing like yours.
For the not much that it’s worth, I think you’re right — being in love with people like you can be very difficult, particularly for those of us who struggle with non-exclusivity. But sometimes we find ourselves without a choice, and learn to accept that we will go on loving people like you. In my own life, I have wished that I could make myself genuinely embrace polyamory (because disingenuously doing it helps no one) or make myself stop loving a particular person. Neither seems to have worked so far. So I do my best to hold it gently, and be grateful that there is love, however inconvenient. Thank you for writing this and acknowledging the place that some of us are in.