All this last year I've been puzzling over the abstraction of romantic partnership.
It's probably been longer than that, but this year I'm really living into the confusion.
My practices of devotional love have me in a lot of simple sweet relationships that are very hard to explain or define with the rigid paradigms of relationship most people have in their minds.
People ask me how many lovers I have, and I have no idea what they mean or how to answer that. My dating life is nothing like the attachment swamp. It is unabstracted, there are ZERO "what are we" conversations, never a "where is this going?"
My relationships are here and now. My love comes in indivisible portions of 100%, like my responsibility, and I live into a devotional partnership with whoever is around right now.
I'm "not gay" but this year has had me in two seriously playful domestic partnerships with women, where it is I and another woman holding the house together, each of our attention on the whole thing. We don't have sex, but is sex the hallmark of marriage? I doubt many married people would say that it is.
I'm "not poly" but I'm in at least two polycules that feel most accurately defined that way, even though they're not really dating relationships. They're not sexual relationships, and yet sometimes they are. We feel like family, the way marriage makes you family.
I am an alloparent to several children, with varying degrees of presence and involvement. I feel familially bonded with the children of my friends and lovers, I feel familially bonded with "lovers" I may never have sex with again.
What does it MEAN to be "in a relationship?" What does it MEAN?
And how could I “not be in a relationship?”
Co-wifing our close friend, whom I call my "work husband," with another friend, we drive to his home when he's been away for three weeks, feed his cats, make sure he has morning groceries, make sure the house is clean for his return.
He comes to me before even going home, and I make us a feast, and he revels in the warmth of welcome Home now represents.
We are FRIENDS. Deep friends. We are family, we are in this together, we don't ask "where is this going" because it is our life, and none of us know where life is going, nor do we need to. The question is kind of intimidating TBH. Nobody who really loved me would ask me that.
And what would an answer provide us, but distance from this very moment? This exquisite moment where there are always several people around to coordinate dinner and fun and nature time, to make sure we eat breakfast on a long workday, to do an airport drive, to account for us in a Costco or Trader Joe's run.
What is romance? What is lovership? What is partnership?
I'll tell you from experience—it's not the moment he puts an engagement ring on my hand, nor is it the moment we speak vows in front of others, it's not holding a shared dream of the future, and it's absolutely not a pattern of conflict and repair, trying to build something which can only grow.
Partnership puts a plate of food in my hand. It doesn't share my exact dream, and I don't ask it to, like I wouldn’t presume to ask life to deliver my own exact vision, either. Partnership is having an ear that will hear all my dreams, and another heart wanting me to have it all. It's someone telling me what to do around the house and I have the argument in my head and realize in minutes that they're right and I choose to trust them and get to work.
Perhaps it is the yearning for "a relationship" to be "a thing" that has people rejecting it where it might flourish, re-tilling the garden for how a seed didn't sprout immediately or how the sprout doesn't look like the fruit.
Partnership is built of repetitive here and now moments, ones that are so good we can't help but continue to iterate on them. Partnership happens in my ordinary life, and I can only recognize it if I know the magic of the mundane.
