By Maria Padhila
I want to apologize for last week, first of all. I got caught up in child care — my own and a friend’s — and had to focus only on that. But I should have seen it coming, and made some kind of accommodation.
I’ve been thinking, with all the traveling and shuffling around I’ve been doing myself and seeing others undergo, about home. The whole concept of home — do you have one, do you want one, do you feel like you’ll never have one? What does home mean to you? For many people, I think ‘home’ is inextricable from relationships: an intimate relationship means making a home with someone. Even if that’s not the reality of how we live, I think this is our ideal, our stereotype, our expectation. Moving in together makes it ‘real’.
For others, we’ve had enough of equating living together with true love. I know people of a certain age who find it the height of freedom and luxury — and often the path to romantic success — to have a home or even simply a room of one’s own. Some people have been through marriages and divorces and breakups and home buying and second mortgages and additions for kids and have simply had it. Relationships go here, and living space goes there, thanks. Others are living with grown or nearly so children, and getting away to a lover’s space for days or nights here and there is an escape to another life.
In an article online in Loving More, the polyamory magazine and website, Kathy Labriola runs through a lot of the issues, both psychological and practical, in a way that makes good reading for poly and mono people alike.