By Maria Padhila
I’m listening to moans of pleasure coming from the next room: “Mmmmmmmmm… hot water… mmmmmmm… water pressure… mmmmmm…”
Chris is taking his first real post-Burning Man shower (not the tepid motel trickle), and as I can hear, it’s a near transcendent experience. He can have it alone (his shower’s a one-manner), and after three weeks in the desert building scaffolding, pounding rebar, and facing into whiteout dust storms (fierce and frequent this year), he deserves to.
In an odd way, I feel I’ve spent almost two months alone. It’s been a summer of missing, for all the enjoyment and time together. What it made clear is something poly people find hard to get others to understand: that those you love aren’t interchangeable parts that fill in for each other when another is gone.
Recently, the Dr. Drew show (an American physician who has a talk show about sex issues on CNN) did a piece featuring the quad from the Showtime polyamory show. An ‘expert’ brought on to talk about polyamory posited that some people use poly as a dodge, “a way to avoid intimacy and a deeper relationship.” The sense is that if you’re deeply afraid that someone will leave or abandon you, or if you’re afraid to open up and be truly close, you’ll play partner games, assuring yourself that if one leaves you, you’ll always have a ‘spare’.
It doesn’t work that way. It might be easier if it did.