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.