Keeping it Real – Real Interesting

By Maria Padhila

It hits me in the oddest times and places. I’m just pulling up to the school the other day, to pick up my daughter, and there it is: I’m actually doing this. This is really happening.

Later that night, when I went to see the acupuncturist, it happened again. She looked at me and said: “This is your magic. You made this happen. You’re surrounded by love now, and you thought that would never be possible. But it’s real. You brought this into reality.”

The next night, I had a long phone call with my best friend — the other best friend, the one who knows I’m poly. I was discouraged about writing, mostly, and many other things, and full of despair that I’d ever really get my work out there and get it seen. “There are so many sensationalist crap books out there,” she said. “All that I was a call girl, and I was a geisha stuff. Maybe your story is just too real.”

“I remember you talking about this before the person even came into your life — you were thinking about it, working it through, trying to bring it out into the open. And then the right person was just there.”

“You know,” she said, “I think people would accept someone being a crack addict before they’d accept being polyamorous. You know, the way all those right-wingers who are addicted to painkillers and whatever that stuff they’re taking is? That’s easier for people to accept. Because that’s not something they can control. People see it as something that just took over, that they couldn’t help.”

But this is a choice, a decision, a conscious and deliberate action. Something I’m trying to make happen in a way that I dream can bring more love into our lives, and might happen in a way that doesn’t hurt but helps. I’m smiling to myself now, thinking of that mighty Rev. Ike quote: “If you can dream it up, you can dream it down!” It works both ways.

There’s always a lot of talk around polyamory about authenticity, about what is honest, about what is real. This is natural enough, since it’s a practice that involves being open with the people you love about what you’re all doing together. What distinguishes it from affairs is that the people involved know what’s going on, talk about it, have the ability to choose how they’ll do it, etc. But how real is real? How much truth must you reveal, and to whom, to get your poly honesty card punched? Do I tell my husband about sex with my boyfriend, or vice versa? Do I come out to my mother-in-law, or my employer? What makes it real?

There’s an old-school meme from 4chan (the image site that spawned Lolcats, among other things) that bounces around in my head all the time: You’re Doing It Wrong. I do a lot of it wrong. I’ve been told, even on this website, that I’m doing polyamory wrong. Because I have to work this magic with care and craftiness and wit and, I hope most of all, grace, doesn’t make it any less real.

When I get discouraged about whether my writing will ever find readers, I think of all the crazy poets I most admire, and the top of the list is Emily Dickinson. You could say she hid away and refused to engage with the world, that she lived in fear of people and society and how she might be treated, that she didn’t “communicate her needs,” that she was dishonest with others and herself about wanting recognition, understanding and love. Say all you like, but no one could ever say that what she wrote was not real — probably the most intensely real poems ever written. A thousand others might proclaim their poetry that comes so sincerely and honestly from their hearts, and they won’t even come close; I’m sorry, it’s harsh, but you know it’s a fact. Your sincerity alone won’t measure up. She was possessed of an extraordinary sensibility, an ear, a capacity for making profound distinctions and linking them to ordinary, absolutely clear and understandable natural metaphors and details. There was magic there, and painstaking craft.

Most of the artists I admire, particularly the women and gay ones, had to (and often still have to) do this balancing act, make these choices, recognize these compromises and keep them from killing off their work and their souls. You do, too, don’t you? How much energy do you give your day job so you’ll have something left for your lover? Do you choose to have a lover and a child? What do you give your art, and what do you give your family? Do you make a casserole or a poem? The money from painting the cathedral will keep me, my family, and a dozen assistants alive for years, and it will enable me to paint my masterpiece, and it comes from that corrupt, murderous, pedophile they call a holy man.

What do you do? You write poems full of riddles, all the richer for what you can’t say outright.

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.

If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
But here’s the joy; my friend and I are one;

Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

That one is Shakespeare (and I don’t find it impossible to believe that a glover’s son could have written it). This to me is what is greatest about being human: the times I’m fully aware of the contradictions and disconnects and compromises, too, in human life; wabi, the crack in the cup or in the voice that gives it beauty. Not having everything I want, a little difficulty, a little friction, makes everything more interesting.

There are many points of intersection among polyamorists and those who practice radical honesty and its variants. The jargon of Honesty permeates the poly world, many of its writings and conversations. Being an artist, I find all manner of codes and conventions at best something new to work with and at worst an irritation, and I won’t have Honesty, self-improvement and enlightenment declared off limits for play. Being a contrarian, I don’t necessarily want to improve myself. I mostly want to enjoy myself, although I’d also love if everyone in America had decent health care — including dental, goddamnit — and child care.

This has actually been one of the hardest things about polyamory for me. There’s so much talk about working, working, working at it, always healing, healing, healing. We will all be more open, more honest, more ourselves, more healthy. It starts sounding like a stint at the Kellogg sanatorium, although at least masturbation is allowed. But I’m on the crooked path, the one of Mercury, patron of talkers and thieves. I’m more inclined to, as Emily says, “tell it slant.”

This short video has provided me with an excellent guideline for relationships for the past year or so. (Isaac just walked by while I was choosing that clip, and I told him this was my ideal that I tried to live up to. He said he was going to jump out the window. He’s a triple Virgo: perfection is achievable and desirable. But he’s obviously willing to make an exception in my case.)

I’m not perfect; everyone knows that. My friends aren’t perfect. My guys are not perfect. They’re fascinating, they’re interesting, they’re sexy, they make me argue, they make me laugh. They’re not infallible, not in their honesty or in their moods or in their actions. Clark Kent is hot. Superman is boring.

My relationships aren’t perfect. I’m not always sure of what I’m doing. I hurt people. I hurt, too. Maybe there are ways to lessen these hurts. But if you have a magic program that removes all hurt, I’m not sure I’m buying it. I need to do things the hard way.

Am I just turning it around and saying the radically honest, the self-improvers, the tireless relationship workers are Doing It Wrong? I’ll always reserve my right to poke at any system. But no — there’s an enormous amount to admire there. I might try it your way from time to time, but I don’t think I’ll make it through the first course. I do recognize that what I’m able to do in these relationships wouldn’t be possible if you, the insistent on absolute honesty and some perfection of open love, weren’t trying so hard. And here is a question to answer, honestly: Can you value what I bring to the table as much as I value what you give? Can you even see it?