Polyamory: Shared girlfriends

March 2011

 

Is it posible to love two or more women at the same time and maintain a relationship with each of them? Polyamory refers to the ability to simultaneously keep loving relationships without lies and with the knowledge and agreement of the parties involved. Below, Silvia and Susana tell us their experience of living love beyond the limits of monogamy.

- I’m in love with you, Susana. But I can’t put myself limits. I have a huge and free heart that is constantly renewing. I need, besides you, to have other partners. So begins this story. With a conversation that Susana remembers as a harsh slap just when the world seemed a rosier and happier place. She had been going out with Sandra for a month and a half, the girl she had met one of those nights when you don’t fancy anything at all, but in the end you go out because your friend asks you to join her flirting at a bar, and the wheel of fortune turns unexpectedly, making you, without any expectations, meet the girl who will become your most recurrent thoughts and the main topic of conversation with friends.

“Up to that time I hadn’t heard of polyamory, didn’t understand it and thought it was stressful. I’ve always been faithful and didn’t understand why wasn’t I enough for Sandra, if she was everything for me, all I wanted. It seemed to me it was only previously agreed cheating. She insisted on the issue of freedom, that monogamy wasn’t a natural thing, etc. I kept saying to her that was natural, that it happened to seahorses, sea lions and penguins, “says Susana.

Negotiations dragged on for almost a week. Sandra explained to Susana that this type of polyamorous relationship had more advantages than disadvantages: in the absence of limits and restraints, love would be more pure and lasting, and Susana, in turn, could also interact with other girls without having to break her relationship with Sandra. “I agreed. Not because I really believed her, neither because she convinced me. I accepted because I didn’t want to lose her and because I thought she might had never been really in love, and if she felt in love with me she wouldn’t want to be with anyone else nor she would want me to be with anyone else, “adds Susana. Things went well for the couple until Susan went to a family wedding in Tenerife. That night and the next morning, Sandra didn’t answer her calls. Susana, nervous, contacted one of the friends in common. “Yesterday we went out and saw her leave with another girl. But hey, you can do that, right? You have a relationship based on freedom, so I’ve heard, “said the friend. From that moment Susana stopped enjoying her short family vacation. When she managed to communicate with Sandra, her throat became smaller. Or perhaps the anguish trapped in there became bigger and bigger. ”Honey, sorry I didn’t pick up the phone. I was with Julia, a girl I met and I like very much. I think I’ll keep seeing her”, said Sandra on that occasion.

“Since Julia appeared, jealousy’s worst nightmares came true. I was Sandra’s girlfriend, but Julia was a kind of almost girlfriend whom she saw many evenings a week, while I worked. Sandra spent some weekends with her and I felt like dieing. Sandra told me I had to banish prejudice and leave my possessiveness aside. But as they say, what does not kill you at the end makes you stronger, so it happened. Little by little, I stopped careing so much. I was disillusioned and realized that more than girlfriend I had half a girlfriend. ” If the situation was already complicated in a three-way, before her first with Sandra, Susana met and got involved with Leti, and the scalene triangle became an even more irregular square. “I didn’t fall in love with Leti but I was very happy with her, we began to spend a lot of time together and my girlfriend, Sandra, was very jealous. She said she tried to respect my freedom but was having a hard time doing it, that she didn’t want to lose me, that she didn’t like Leti, if I could please stop seeing her. I didn’t understand how could she have the nerve to tell me these things after how bad I felt. At the same time, the half girlfriend of my girlfriend, Julia, didn’t like Sandra’s inordinate jealousy for me and we all started fighting. The theory became less and less attractive and we began to behave more humanely. When everything became more absurd, I choosed mental healh and broke up with both of them, I was overwhelmed. I thought again about my beliefs on the subject and I can`t stand a polyamorous situation. Not that don`t respect the freedom of my partners, but I do respect my freedom to choose to love a person in a faithful and exclusive way. And vice versa, ” concludes Susana.

Married and polyamorous

Elvira and Silvia have been toghether for 16 years. When political activist Pedro Zerolo married them, both asked him not to mention the issue of fidelity in the ceremony.

Silvia and Elvira are polyamorous and during the first three years of their relationship, being the first in Melbourne and the second in Madrid, became used to fill the absences in bed with other women’s bodies. The trips from city to city were too expensive and the distance was no longer adequate for the close relationship they had built, so Silvia moved to Madrid. ”We were already used to having a more open relationship. So we started making deals, for example we could have sex with someone only once. Later, as time passed, the deal changed to three, and so each time we were gaining more space. For us, polyamory is that we both believe that neither one nor the other owns her partner, we are free beings. Is our whole struggle as feminists for freedom, deciding what we do with our bodies. We love each other but we have freedom and space to love another person without that being a drama”, says Silvia.

Above all, both of them respect and value the truth. They don’t flirt with other girls when they go out together. If either one of them falls for a third woman, she tells her wife how she feels about it, the plans she might have with the third, ignoring the details that may be painful or uncomfortable. “When I was young I was extremely jealous and possessive”, says Sylvia, “but we must be realistic, occasionally someone who rings your bell comes along. It’s always going to happen, a single person will never fill you a hundred per cent, neither will I fill anyone that way. Why should we end a relationship when we are interested in someone else? How many lesbian relationships end up because an affair? Why follow the sexist and patriarchal model we have been taught? The idea is not to hide or cheat, to have the freedom not only to feel it, but to make that step forward and go after it. The times I’ve felt in love with other women, Elvira has been very mature and has given me the space for me to continue living it and for us to keep living together.

Despite the freedom, it hasn`t been easy for Sylvia to find a second partner who can understand this shared love, or in this case, relegated to a second place. ”I`m not looking for two simultaneous relationships of the same intensity. My main partner is Elvira. It’s a relationship that we have worked. We have many shared experiences. When I fall in love with another woman I don`t stop loving her. This second woman is not a mistress, is a relationship with love and affection. But lighter. ” Experience has taught Sylvia that while the theory of free love that questions the basis of fidelity sounds great, take puting polyamory into practice can be very complicated. That’s why all her friends are monogamous and declared incapable of coping with the emotional burden involved in seeing their partners having a relationship with another woman. “I know that if Elvira fells in love with another woman, of course that would hurt me. It woud hurt, I’d feel insecure, I’d be jealous. I know I hurt her too, but I can’t forbid her anything, can’t say ‘you, me and nobody else’, I think that sounds so male chauvinist. I worry when she has a date, I’d never think ‘Hope she has a good time’, you’re always afraid of losing the one you want. Right now I know there’s someone in Elvira’s life. It doesn’t make me feel very good because I’m going through a slump and I have a bunch of problems. But I have to respect her, swallow it on my own and don’t make a scene because she has always been so smart with me in that aspect. And of course, cross my fingers and hope she’ll always come back to me”, says Silvia.