A Hard Landing

On relationships, polyamory, and sadness

Buckle up, baby - this is gonna be a long one!

If you read my last post, you know that I’m shifting the focus of my writing here on Substack. I spent this morning troubling over what to pull from my stash to start with, then realized what I really want to do is share where I am right now, in this moment.

I am sad.

A relationship that means a great deal to me is currently on pause. We called it a ‘break’ when we discussed it, but that word makes my heart ache more. Break alludes to broken, and I find myself hoping against hope that what we have is not broken.

That’s me, one month ago to the day. My partner attended a work party with me, and after we left, we went for a walk in a local park boasting a holiday light display. I’d walked up close to a castle made of lights, and took a selfie, not noticing until after I reviewed it that he’d inadvertently photo-bombed me. I started laughing and kept snapping, resulting in a string of pictures that show my glee. The emoji covers my love, who started making silly faces over my shoulder.

I was experiencing our weekend together as magical. It wasn’t often that we spent two nights together in a row, but we did that weekend. I noticed our ease at being in proximity to one another, and how sweetly domestic it had felt when we parted on Saturday to each take care of our own things, then came back together to attend the party. I told him that - how much I’d liked that we’d gotten to a point where we could be apart but together, how easy it felt - and meant it.

We also talked about the upcoming anniversary of our meeting one year ago. I think we were both a bit surprised - had a year gone by that quickly? Indeed, it had, and we discussed spending another weekend together between Christmas and New Year’s to mark it. We called it “sex weekend.” We’d spent two more of those - one shortly after we met, in NYC, and another at the end of summer as a staycation. Sex weekend’s were ones where we both forgot about our busy lives for a short stretch to focus on each other and the intense and satisfying intimate connection we share.

I went home the next day elated, feeling bubbly and expansive. I breezed into my home, smooched my nesting partner, and gushed about what a great weekend I’d spent with my other love. I fell asleep quickly and slept a dreamless sleep until 3am, when I woke suddenly, in a panic.

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Polyamory is having more than one committed, romantic, intimate relationship in your life. My nesting partner and I have been together for over 13 years, and practicing polyamory for the majority of them. Relationships like mine are gaining attention in the popular press, so chances are I don’t need to explain it all to you.

I’m writing about this for two reasons, though. One is to process the feelings I’m feeling right now, because writing about anything else would feel horribly inauthentic, and I don’t think I could bring myself to do it today. The other reason is to provide a glimpse into the depth of emotion that can exist in poly relationships.

My nesting partner has been very supportive through these last couple of weeks since my other partner and I paused. I feel very fortunate to have him in my life, for his support and wisdom.

I think, though, that people often assume that you can’t possibly love as deeply when you love more than one person. That is the furthest thing from the truth. While I’m not alone in bed every night, I am still pining for the connection I’m missing with my other partner.

I started a note on my phone titled, “Things I Want to Tell You,” but it’s a poor substitute for sitting on the other end of the couch from him, my fingertips playing with the fine hairs on the back of his neck while we sip wine and catch each other up on how we spent our time apart.

The very first entry came to me right after the last time I saw him - an unexpected final exchange of items in a parking lot near his place. “I’ve been falling for a year, so this is a very hard landing.”

It hasn’t even been two weeks but time is dragging. I struggle to stay focused on all the other things in my life that need doing. I’m traveling to visit my adult daughter tomorrow for the first time in her new home, and I’m hoping I can stay present when I’m there, and not be wallowing as I am today. Maybe my body is trying to purge the sadness ahead of time in preparation.

Because heartbreak is heartbreak, and it doesn’t matter if you have others in your life to help soothe you. While being alone through this may add an additional layer of poignancy or loneliness, it would overlay atop the same depth of sadness. Distraction helps but doesn’t fix anything - it just delays it.

Case in point - I spent Saturday with a lovely friend who fed me delicious things, listened to me talk about my love, rubbed my tight shoulders, and held me throughout the night. The next morning driving home I felt peaceful for the first time in weeks, and it was so needed. But why do I fool myself each time I go through heartbreak that I’ve survived it, when I know good and well that aches like these ebb and flow for a good, long time?

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Our pause is planned to last until February 8th, initially. We have loose plans to check in with each other on that day, twenty-five days from now.

When I came home on December 15th and floated off to bed, I was so filled with happiness nothing could have burst my bubble. Nothing but me, that is. When I woke early the next morning, tears dripping from my eyes before I opened them, I was confused. Why was I crying when I’d just spent such a long, luscious, connected weekend with my love?

It took a few days of pondering, and an awful lot of writing to suss it out but it came down to this - I don’t understand who I am to him, what I mean to him, and I feel groundless in this relationship. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know either.

Hence the impetus for the pause. He explained he needed more space in his life to do some deeper work, and that our relationship had been so good and comfortable that he’d been content to keep procrastinating. But when I brought up a few key things that were bothering me, that’s when he realized he needed to buckle down.

And I get it. Goddess knows, I get it. I’ve spent the majority of my life dissociating and seeking distraction, so I’m quite familiar with that. A previous partner and my nesting partner created that space for me when I was struggling through therapy for CPTSD. So, of course, I give him the space. What else could I do?

I just wasn’t prepared to spend the beginning of 2025 deeply introspective about what it might mean - to our relationship, to me.

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So now I feel trapped in a vortex, spinning out of control. I have moments of peace, moments of happiness. When they subside, though, I’m spinning and spinning. One moment I feel confident I can be brave, I can do hard things, I can hold space for both of us while he figures things out. The next moment I’m convinced that it is the end of what we were (and it is, I know that much - whatever we become now will be wholly different) and the pain is visceral and sharp. Grieving a wonderful year of connection, and increasing love, and where I thought I might be at this point in my life. And the sadness, just missing every little thing, keeps creeping up on me at inopportune moments.

The uncertainty is awful, too. I have zero control over this. In twenty-five days he could say he was a fool and wants me back in his life pronto. Or he could say he needs more time, and another amorphous stretch will open in front of me to endure. He could say it’s over. He could say it never meant the same thing to him as it did to me.

So I don’t know whether to focus on grieving or hold on to hope. Isolate or get myself back out there.

The other day I wrote to a friend, “We don’t even have that much in common.” It might be true. It might also be me trying to stop a gaping wound with a band-aid.

When it comes right down to it, though, there is one overriding emotion - fear. Afraid I’m too much (likely) and not enough, all at the same time. Afraid I’ll never feel the way I did that weekend one month ago, again. Afraid no one will ever get me in quite the same way, make me laugh, help me cum, and hold on so tight when he’s sleeping that I can’t possibly feel anything else but loved.