It doesn’t feel very enlightened to admit it, but I’m not anti the idea of codependence. I mean, it’s sort of romantic—in a chic, pre-millennial toxic kind of way—as a concept really: One can’t function without the other; one must run everything by the other; one finishes the other person’s sentences. I used to relish this lack of distance in my relationship. I found it sort of miraculous that if a thought came into my head, it would be out of my mouth and into my partner’s ear before it had been filtered. “A membrane thick” is what we used to call the distance between us.
This distance, or lack, was something we lost when we opened up our relationship. And for a while that felt really complicated, really scary, perhaps too great a cost for the benefit of sex with others. Like a kind of end. Which it kind of was. You see, you realize that as you lust after other people and then actually follow through with it there are details of these escapades that are just too painful to hear or to tell. Details that bring about totally irrational, unhelpful, or unproductive responses in you or your partner. Of course that’s okay, sometimes. Irrational anger or disappointment are parts of the cycle of a longterm relationship. And projection or misinterpretation of our own emotions are par for the course when we’re taught we’ll best maintain a romantic relationship by masking or repressing our real feelings.
We had gone the other way. So much honesty. But then I learned that this membrane between us had to thicken.
After I’d heard one too many details about something my partner had gotten up to outside of us, I had a weeklong jealous meltdown. Nothing that bad. Just some light paranoia and super-intense-neediness. When I’d spent enough nights staring at the ceiling wondering if this was our last night sharing a bed together, we eventually discussed the rate at and depth to which we should share the things that happen outside of our relationship. And while we mutually agreed it is important never to lie to each other, we must consider the ways in which we tell the truth.
This took place after my second extramarital “relationship.” This one was a short one, but it had been quite intense and we had ended things because of said intensity. I didn’t feel like I could offer what they were asking for, and they didn’t feel like I was able to give it. It was mutual, and my fault. Naturally, after any breakup you feel a whole range of things. And in this case I felt mostly a split between anxious and sad. Stomach-knotty, not hungry, and a sort of pining for a divergent path now growing over with grass. A path that, of course, I did not want to take—of that I am sure—but more a mourning for all the yous-and-others there could have been. (Ironically I’ve found that it is these moments that make me feel more sure of my primary relationship, because I am actively choosing it).