Thank you, Carl

It's funny how you get exactly what you need sometimes.

It's been a rough few weeks for May and I and our relationship. It has been a pressure cooker of emotion, negotiation, confusion, fear, sadness.

In a nutshell, I ended a relationship with a woman that I was really in love with but had no chance of going anywhere as the feeling weren't reciprocal, and we were at very different places in our lives. It was an intense and devastating experience having to walk away from it.

At the same time, things have been progressing rapidly with May's boyfriend, Don, and that has meant a huge amount of discussion and emotional processing for me.

So yesterday I hit a point where I was overwhelmed, sad, and had a distinct feeling of hopelessness that I would get past the quagmire of emotional and other challenges. Would this get easier? Will I get out of it what I need? Do I want this enough that it will sustain me through the hard times? And of course, the perennial favourite to ensure constant lingering doubts, "Will This Keep Working?"

I had arranged to meet a friend, Carl, for bubble tea that afternoon. I met Carl on an online dating forum a few months ago. He is a perfect example of someone who can be a great friend but never a lover; there is absolutely no spark there sexually.

I really didn't want to go. I felt raw, and had a great lot of emotion right on the surface. I don't know Carl extremely well, and I was hesitant to open up.

Carl is polyamorous as well. He is one of the few people that I know that actually labels himself that way. He became polyamorous in a very unplanned way; many years ago he simply found himself in the situation of being in love with two women at once.

For several years Carl had been trying to make it work with the two women. One of them he married, the other he had been working on a relationship with for a long time. Last time we met, a couple of months ago, it looked really unlikely that his secondary relationship would survive. It just seemed like it was being dragged down by some mysterious relationship-killing force. It was obvious it pained him greatly and that he was doing everything he could at the time to figure things out. But it wasn't going well, and it was taking a toll on his primary relationship as well.

So yesterday while we sucked our bubble teas, I told him about what had been going on in my life, and he, his. After all of the challenges that had been going on, and the demise of my brief but intense relationship, I was beaten and bruised. I kind of expected him to be, too, based on where his life was at during our last chat. But the most inspiring conversation ensued.

Just when everything looked basically doomed for Carl's secondary relationship, it made a total reversal. After years of Carl espousing his love for her, and never having it returned, she finally admitted that she was, in fact, in love with Carl. Exactly what Carl needed to hear to continue in the relationship he got, at a time when it seemed most unlikely. And from that, a deeper dialog between them emerged which brought out the issues which had been thwarting their relationship to begin with. Everything began turning around, the issues surfacing and resolving, the pieces falling into place. Thing working, finally.

Carl has faced some incredible challenges in his life. He has a brain disease, which doctors were unable to diagnose and treat properly for years. As it developed, it began destroying his memory and ability to think analytically. He went from doing incredibly well academically in university to completely failing. It took away his ability to do the very things that defined who he was. It destroyed his life.

I knew all of this before yesterday. But I didn't know how he felt about the experience. His disease had taken away his life as his lived it at that point, but he explained that it gave him a new life, one in which he was able to live more as himself, as he is at his core. It set him on a path he never would have experienced otherwise, which included beginning to define himself not by his academic or material accomplishments, but by the quality of his relationships. It changed him in ways that enabled him to pursue a polyamorous life, which he told me would have been impossible before. Given the choice, would he have chosen to have this disease? No. But he also sees the incredible gift he was given from the experience, a gift of a different and richer life.

Our bubble-tea chat reminded me that magic exists in this world. I'm not a religious person but for me the fact that things like this can happen in life reveals a layer of our existence which I can only describe as spiritual. As logical and analytical as I am I can't understand experiences such as these on that level. I can only grasp it as something larger than that.

Never give up, you don't know what may be just around the corner. Thank you, Carl.

The beginning...

It wouldn't work.

That idea ran through my head as my wife of 8 years, May, and I discussed opening up our relationship to other lovers. Like many new ideas that I have entertained, my mind has tended to default to a negative outcome, assuming catastrophe, despair, doom. This was no different.

There was some precedent to my skepticism. Our relationship began when I joined May and her then-partner in forming a triad. For the briefest of moments, it seemed like a good idea and that it could work. The three of us were great friends, there was good communication and openness, and there seemed to be potential. But May and her partner's relationship was on shaky ground, and after a short time, our threesome exploded apart spectacularly. The experience had been heartwrenching, and although for the brief period that it seemed to work showed me the possibilities, its demise showed me the potential.

Needless to say, I was hesitant to open myself, and our relationship, up to the perils of an open relationship.

But after many years of monogamous marriage there were unresolved needs we both recognized. Both May and myself are bisexual, and in the beginning of our relationship we agreed that neither of us wanted to give up being with people of the same sex permanently. To do so seemed like disowning a part of ourselves. Unlike May, who had been in lesbian relationships for many years prior to us meeting, I had just started exploring my attraction to men when we began our relationship. I knew that one day, I would have to continue my explorations.

As well, I was really influenced by a series of conferences on sexuality and specifically bisexuality that May and I attended. It was my first exposure to non-traditional relationship structures. At the conferences I met and listened to presentations by groups in three-way and four-way relationships, and pretty much every other conceivable arrangement. It blew my mind. Here I was grappling with how to live my life in such a way that I could honour my attraction to both men and women, and all of these people were living examples of possible ways forward for me. And it seemed to work for them. And they seemed happy. And they didn't seem crazy.

So it was in these circumstances that May and I married, put the idea of having other lovers on the backburner, and became monogamous. We spent the next 8 years building our lives together, bought a house, brought a son into the world, and established careers for ourselves.

May was the initiator. I can't remember the exact conversation we had that started us down this path, but I remember thinking as we discussed this possibility that, despite theoretically believing that this is something we should try, it is scary as hell.

I was pretty sure it wouldn't work. But reality has turned out far different than I expected.