I adore my husband. He loves and supports me so much that it humbles me. He’s raised my standards for what I believed was possible in love and relationships.
And perhaps the most amazing part of the whole experience of finding him is this: I probably wouldn’t have dated him when I was monogamous.
Because you see, it wasn’t love at first sight. Movie magic. Nothing like that.
Instead, the first words my husband ever said to me were, “That’s what they make eyedrops for.”
I mean, to be fair to him, I was complaining about my eyes being itchy. But yeah. Hardly the stuff of romantic legend. But Justin and I met through other people I was dating. We were friends for about a year before we started seeing each other.
We did find each other physically attractive when we first met. But I thought he was boring, and he thought I was off my rocker. And it took us a long time of talking while we dated other people polyamorously to realize that we’d each been wrong in our first impressions.
Sure, I’m colorful and exuberant but emotionally grounded, patient, mature (mostly), and responsible.
And he had seemed like he was boring to me because he was frequently saying the things I thought. And I would think, Duh. This guy never says anything that surprises me. And it took me a while to remember that I’m a fucking weirdo. I have odd notions about things. And it dawned on me, Oh man, he’s not boring. We’re both weirdos. He’s my kind of strange.
So while we’ve gone on to eventually date and find that we’re really compatible, eerily so, we each weren’t the first person to attract the other person’s attention. Not by a long shot. And with the comparably more narrow windows that dating monogamously involves, it’s entirely likely we never would have figured it out.
Or in other words: Without polyamory, I probably never would have dated my husband.
Timing Still Matters in Polyamory #
Now, this isn’t to say that polyamory completely eliminates the role of timing in whether or not you can have relationships with people. That isn’t true.
There are plenty of situations where even polyamorous people become polysaturated and don’t have time to date new people, as cool as they might be. And there are instances where one person might not be emotionally “ready” for the other. Or life gets in the way — I think particularly of two friends I know where it’s clear they have good chemistry, but the fact that she became a mother about the time that he opened up his relationship threw a wrench into the whole equation.
So even in polyamory, the window isn’t infinite. But it’s usually a bit wider.
And I’m grateful for that every day. Every time I wake up and see Justin lying there next to me, I’m reminded of how much I owe to my past self, who took the scariest leap of faith into a way of rethinking relationships that made little sense to her at the time.
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