Chapter Seventeen The Late Night
Seventeen
The Late Night
As the trip to see David approached, Paul started going out rather often with women he knew. One night he met up with a female friend at seven p.m. That day had been busy. I’d volunteered at John’s food pantry and then spent a few hours at the library. Once home I took a bath, cleaned the bathroom, did laundry, washed the dishes, listened to a whole audiobook on double speed, fed Nate dinner, vacuumed and mopped, ate a bowl of grapes. By this point it was eleven p.m.
I fully intended to stay married to Paul. I didn’t want to lose him. He was faithful. There was no reason not to trust whatever he told me. Besides, I figured I would have to let Paul do whatever would make him feel better about my being alone with David. Though I did wonder if expansion without contraction was sustainable. I thought of the cliché about how staying married forever meant never wanting to get divorced at the same time. Was that going to be a problem for us, that I was yearning for someone else, and if he started doing that too we’d collapse? Or would we struggle either way, and if he also had someone else he’d feel more dignified?
Midnight. He still wasn’t home. I frowned at the clock. I’d been cast in a role for which I had never auditioned. There was nothing uglier to me than jealousy, but here I was playing the Jealous Wife. I was angry at myself for feeling that way. And embarrassed too. How could I care what he did when I was full of desire for another man? I had no moral high ground. I shouldn’t have been so upset, and yet I was.
So whose job was it to cure me of this suffering? Was it his job not to give me cause to feel jealous, or mine to learn how not to feel it? As Veronica liked to say, “Where does your neurosis end and his bad behavior start?” I longed to be so pure of heart that I’d be like the rabbi who ran after someone who’d stolen his wallet—not to get it back but to yell, “You can’t steal that from me! It’s a gift! I hope you enjoy it!”
Like a soldier praying in a trench, I picked up Polysecure . The book began with a discussion of attachment theory, developed by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1960s. I did the quizzes and realized I related to the “fearful-avoidant” attachment style. The principles of consensual nonmonogamy struck me as deeply reasonable: “love is not possessive or a finite resource; it is normal to be attracted to more than one person at the same time; there are multiple ways to practice love, sexual and intimate relationships; and jealousy is not something to be avoided or feared, but something that can be informative and worked through.”
I respected the work. But I saw myself in the line: “It is not uncommon for me to hear people say that they theoretically want to be poly, but emotionally they don’t know if they can do it because they feel like they are losing their mind.” I didn’t want to “rewire my triggers,” or learn about “trigger contagion,” or explore my “cycles of reactivity.” I just didn’t want Paul to have sex with other people, and I wanted to keep the other man I loved close. Was that too much to ask? Obviously.
The book’s charts about what kind of relationships were where on the spectrum of open to closed made my head spin. I felt like all the writing about polyamory and swinging and the rest were insufficient when it came to how totally out of control I now felt in the face of love.
From the book—and really, was Paul still at the bar?—I learned the ways in which having more than one lover is, as therapists might say, complexifying. When our partner turns toward someone else—even with our knowledge or consent—it can start to feel very bad very fast.
Attraction to multiple people at the same time outside of the emotional Thunderdome of Bachelor Nation feels surreal. I wanted to be a good polyamory disciple, but I kept pushing back on every lesson like a petulant student in the last row rolling my eyes at everything the professor says.
Twelve thirty a.m. I’d never in my life done this, but I texted Paul to ask if he was coming home. He’d been at the bar with that woman, if they were still there, for six hours. I was relieved when several minutes later he wrote back and said yes, they were wrapping up, he’d be home soon. The bar was a five-minute walk away. I wondered if I should go there. Then I realized my dignity was more valuable to me than knowing what was happening.
At one thirty a.m., when he still wasn’t home, I started physically shaking. I entered what I’d learned to call the trauma vortex of abandonment terror. I broke out in a cold sweat, the kind you get when you see a tiger in the jungle. I was sure I smelled like fear. Insecurity pulled me into a ditch like a blown tire.
I continued to read about attachment, and how to calm down when you start to panic. I tried to self-soothe. Still, I felt like I had to do something, only I didn’t know what it was. I started throwing books into bags. When Paul walked in the door at about two, baffled to find me upset, I was furiously packing and trying to decide where I was going to go, if I was going to have to start over in a new city, if…
He said I was acting crazy. He’d stayed out that late a thousand times. Nothing had happened with the woman. After I’d texted, he’d gone to the bathroom and come back to find out they’d been given free drinks by the bartender, and his friend had started telling a long and involved personal story. He’d felt like it would have been rude to tear himself away.