17

Swinging

You knew it. Or at least you said you did: polyamory was a lifestyle change. But what does that really mean? Lifestyle changes usually refer to eradicating cholesterol or taking up exercise. The phrase doesn’t really capture what is involved in a switch to polyamory. People refer to swinging as “The Lifestyle,” too, but polyamory isn’t just something you do on a Thursday night. Polyamory is a change you initially made only to accommodate your desire to love many, but it ended up shifting the way you thought about the world and your very sense of self. It’s given you a clearer idea of consent, abuse, privilege, feminism, ethical food choices, what you want for your children, whom you choose as your friends and what you want to do for a living. In short, there is no area in your life that has not been affected in some way by polyamory.

But you, like many others, fear change. Many of the difficulties you faced were of your own making. Not because you were responsible for the acts of others, but because you were resistant to change and terrified of what lay ahead. Fortunately for you, once you’d started down the path to polyamory, there was no going back…even though you sometimes desperately wanted to.

The threads that run through our lives create a tapestry; if one thread is pulled out, we have little way of knowing how it will affect the final picture. If you had known about every tear you would shed, how sick you would feel…that you would lose your professional life, your beliefs in what was wrong or right in the world, and eventually your relationship, would you still have done it? Probably not. Such enormity is difficult for us to embrace in advance.

How could I help you, my past you, when you were crying and at the bottom of your reserves? I cannot and would not change what you went through. But if there were any way to make it easier and prepare you for everything that was to come, I would have told you this:

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

~ Richard Bach

Change happens, and it is not the end of the world (even if you might sometimes prefer it was). It is just the beginning of a new one. Remember this in future, because you’ll need this lesson a lot.

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Everything changes, and change is easier when you embrace it. You will get through it, and you might even fly like you never have before.