In Thunder, Lightning or in Rain?

By Maria Padhila

There was a fantastic conversation that grew out of Jan Seward’s Sept. 1 Evolve column, when she answered a question from someone experiencing a love high and hangover after a relationship with a bad boy. The topic and her empathetic, wise response touched off a 40-response comment thread on matters ranging from “is there truly a one soul mate for each person?” to “is there such a thing as love at first sight?” to “do poly people have the equivalent of the ‘she’s the one’ experience?”

One of the happy side effects is that it has had this song by Bruce Springsteen, with its mighty Spector-meets-Bo-Diddley riff, echoing around in my head for five days.

So how do poly people deal with the ‘she’s the one’ thing?

You know, Van Gogh painted lots of self-portraits because he was a cheap and available model, and much of the time no one else could stand to sit with him for long. For similar reasons, I’ll start by examining my own feelings on the topic.

I am consistently cheap and available, and I have been difficult to stand sitting with this past week because of an evil combination of hormones, overwork, not being able to run and missing Chris dreadfully. He has been off in the desert, no doubt being tempted, for what has felt like 40 nights.

The night before Chris left for Burning Man, Issac granted us an overnight, which was tough for him and wonderful of him. We spent it in something less than romantic bliss. Chris graciously accompanied me to a café where I was giving a poetry reading. Attendance was about eight lovely people, the kind of turnout that poets can get resigned to, but which at least this time I could blame on the hurricane. Dinner was coffee and a couple of Larabars bought at a grocery store where the lines of hurricane preparers stretched on for hours. He then went out to do hurricane prep on a loved one’s yard, and then came home and attempted to fit 100 pounds of survival gear and costumes into 50 pounds of regulation airline luggage.

Because I was still forbidden from lifting anything post-appendectomy, and I couldn’t help anyway, I lay around on his bed, drinking my one glass of wine, which is all it takes, and snarking on the Facebook. When we were finally horizontal at the same time, we looked at the clock and saw we had about 10 minutes before we had to leave for the airport. I drove him there through the downpour as I screamed curses at the trucks and the elements, like King Lear.

I like to leave my lovers with something beautiful to remember.

So much for the stereotype that the legal mate gets the dull days of care while the ‘secondary’ gets the wild romantic nights. With Isaac, I’ve been about 20 percent hormonal bitch and the rest cooking, cuddling f-monster. OK, maybe 30 percent.

Chris believes we are soul mates, even though I am married to someone else. But he believes there are many people he’s destined to encounter, in different times and places, for different reasons. Isaac simply enjoys me, gods know why. I think he is his own soul mate. Both of them believe in relationships that build and last through time. I don’t believe in a single soul mate.

But you bet your ass I believe in lightning. I don’t want a life without the coup de foudre, the lightning strike, the knockout punch, the broken heart, the longing and despair, the ‘I’ve got to have you across a crowded room’ madness. Like the commercial says, I put that shit on everything.

It’s like any other mind-altering substance, for me. Know your source, know the dosage you can stand, take your protein pills and put your helmet on, don’t drive under the influence, don’t get busted, remind yourself the laws of biology and physics still apply, and then enjoy. Does this mean it’s not really, really, truly wild and unstoppable love? No way. It means you love all involved enough to hold some awareness of what you’re doing, to be cognizant of the consequences.

Listen to that song, for instance. The band is as tight as James Brown’s, but they’re still getting carried away. That’s my ideal. I have Venus in Virgo, Uranus one degree away in Leo: love is lightning in a scientist’s beaker.

I don’t even regret the difficult or even damaging relationship. I take a step away and see its beauty. I sometimes see people tearing themselves apart from each other and turning down all kinds of excitement and wildness that they might be able to tolerate very well — relationships that might feed a deep part of them — in a quest to maintain what they think is health and maturity. It’s like what I see in people in beginning running programs. They’re afraid to run because it makes them breathe hard, and sweat, and it makes their heart beat faster. They don’t know that feeling is natural, and that it will lessen, and that they’ll eventually even like it. They don’t yet know the difference between the kind of pain that’s a real signal of something wrong, the pain that is telling you ‘stop, immediately!’ and the pain that’s telling you you’re strengthening a muscle.

Sometimes it is a matter of survival, and you have to turn down these kinds of relationships. I can’t decide what’s right for anyone else. I don’t know what your heart is telling you. I do know that you can learn to tell the difference between these kinds of pain, but only if you keep listening and don’t give up — and don’t let anything get in the way of resting between exposures.

As far as poly people go, what I see, hear and read is that many take this aware — or what some would call detached and overly analytical — approach to the lightning strike. There’s even a special poly acronym for it: NRE, or New Relationship Energy. When it works the way it’s supposed to, it goes like this: You have a good, healthy, long-term relationship with someone, and you fall head-over-heels with someone else, but still love the one you came in with, and everyone nods sagely and says, “Ah, NRE.”

The two foolish lovers enjoy, and the other lovers enjoy the sweet spillover. The foolish lovers keep their wits and empathy about them, and they don’t blow off the other people they love so they can spend every moment together; they don’t talk constantly about the new paramour and spend every evening sighing; they don’t text the new lover while they’re having dinner with the other love; they try to be thoughtful and respectful.

Sometimes the other people involved resent this, thinking that any response that has to be so reasoned and calculated isn’t real love. I think if someone makes a strong effort to treat you well and lovingly, even when they’re in the throes of a major hormonal/spiritual/love/lust tornado, then that means the person is a damned good lover who must love you very much indeed.

The funny part to me is that the NRE’ers don’t tend to feel possessive about their energy. They’re like, hey, don’t bogart that NRE, my friend. Pass it down the line!

Even those who aren’t poly know how NRE works: You unexpectedly feel a flicker of wild lust for someone you see or meet, and suddenly you’re jumping the bones of your live-in every chance you get, right? Come on — you know you’ve done it once or twice. You’re not even fantasizing about the other person, necessarily. You just have all this wild energy coursing through you, and you want to use it. You’re in love with love and in love with the world. You see beauty and tragedy and hot splendor all over, in everyone, from the homeless guy on the corner to the apple tree in bloom, and you’re part of it all and you want to share it all.

Some people spend much of their lives in this condition; they were checking in on the comments and it was beautiful to read about. I often feel a romantic, sexual response to the elements of nature and the other humans around me. This is one of the best parts about being incarnated in a human body, it seems to me. And being human, we can choose to do with it what we will. Whatever else may appear to spark it, your love and your lust belongs to you.

When lightning strikes in nature, it can cause a fire that leaves a forest healthier. It can also be harmless. Unfortunately, nowadays lightning strikes ground that’s depleted, so the fire burns out of control. You can’t control where lightning strikes. You can try to run away from it, or you can lie down flat and hope it misses you. But if you’ve got a healthy balance of elements working in your own little piece of walking earth, you can use it for energy, for clearing, for illumination.

This is an old poem, from 2007, written after I saw a lightning storm and my life changed.

Afterburn

None of this was ever going to happen again.
Traumatized, all the stories told us we’d be —
Everyone was supposed to walk around like zombies
After all we’d been through. Or we were supposed to
Dress in costumes and feathers and throw bottles of
Flaming gasoline at each other, shooting and
Screaming into the burned-out buildings in the night.
But dancing at the bonfire? Singing
In the garden? Speaking words
Of love? No, no, we were all done with that.

Can I tell you my secret? The fires freed me.
The crash opened up the night, the lightning striking —
Well, listen, back before, I read about a man who,
Struck by lightning, could suddenly play the piano.
That’s me. I lie on your chest and whisper
Into your left ear, the one I was once told
Is linked to the emotional center of the brain.
That’s where I want my words to go, inside you.
That’s me. Suddenly, I could play.