“I’ve thought of something you should write about,” she tells me.
“Oh?” I say. She’s not the type to offer up ideas very often. Not much of an unsolicited advice giver. And her insights are usually great. So she has my interest.
“It’s about something I’ve never really heard anybody talk about in relation to polyamory,” she says.
I wait for her to finish.
Shedding Light on Compatibility…or Incompatibility #
“Polyamory has a way of demonstrating who you should really be with,” she says. “And it’s not always who you think you should be with going in.”
I nod. “We’ve both been in polyamorous circles for a long time. Seen so many relationships open up to new partners. And you never know, for sure, whether any one couple will make it.”
“Mmhmm,” she says. “But you _do _know that they’ll likely end up with partners that are really good for them. Whether that’s the person they start out dating. Or if they meet other people that make more sense for them to be with.”
I smile. “You’re really on to something. We all have this big fear of the game changer relationship. The partner who comes into our life and turns everything upside down. But it’s funny. When it happens, it’s usually for the better.”
“It is,” she says. “At least in the long run.”
I nod. “I think you can run into problems in the short term when one person runs into a game changer and the other person doesn’t. Then that other person is just stuck. I look at my ex-husband. It was devastating for him to see that other people were so much more compatible with me than he was.”
She nods.
“But another 6 months later, he was with someone who was the same way for him. Much more compatible with him than I ever was. And even _he _says now that we were right to get divorced. That we just didn’t make sense. Neither of us can believe we were ever married now. We should have been secondaries at most.”
She smiles. “But yeah, maybe you should write about that. How the scariest thing about polyamory is also the best: It has a way of shedding light on compatibility.”
“Or incompatibility.”
She nods.
“I will,” I say. “It’s a good idea.”
*