Andrea

I’ve never titled a blog with a person’s name before. I didn’t want to. All the names on this blog are fabricated, so it is potentially both pointless and disingenuous. But there was no other way of doing it, because this blog is all about her. Andrea.

Andrea is Dorian’s friend of 14 years. But their history is far more complicated than that simple sentence. Quite a while ago now, and for a time, their friendship ran very strong and deep. But there was a rather unfortunate… one can only say schism, caused by an infamously meddling mutual friend. They didn’t speak for many years.

In August of 2014 (I think), I joined Tumblr. I did it so it would let me send a message to Heidi. Heidi was previously known to the blog (the old blog) as ‘the girl who I don’t like to talk about on here’ or similar unspeakable Voldemort type pseudonyms – not because she had done unspeakable things – but rather because I had, and I felt I wasn’t even worthy of speaking her fake name. I have given her a name now for the sake of ease, though I remain unworthy. I had discovered that she was on Tumblr because I was Googling her, again. I had just gone to a Taking Back Sunday concert and had my heart torn open by a thousand lyrics that took me straight back to high school and my infatuation with her. I listened to these songs and I lost myself in it all.

Taking Back Sunday – Beat Up Car

Taking Back Sunday – Stood A Chance

Brand New – Mixtape

Taking Back Sunday – You Got Me

I cried a lot. I still can’t listen to ‘You Got Me’ without tearing up. I realised a lot of things about why I did the things that I did and how badly I had hurt her. I read about the Brand New/Taking Back Sunday feud and realised that I would always be more Taking Back Sunday and she would always be more Brand New, and that things would never be the same between us in just the same way. I wrote her a letter, but in truth I didn’t have the guts to address her personally. It felt too confrontational. I was the one who had made the mistake. I wrote the letter to myself, telling my 16 year old self not to fuck up our friendship but why I was going to do it anyway, and imploring myself to be grateful and not destructive. I wrote a song from the letter too, then I had to condense all my thoughts into an instant message of 500 characters or less. But for once I managed to write all those missives without repeating my ever tired and useless “sorry,” though my message was still ill-conceived. Needless to say it garnered no response, and I was heartbroken but unsurprised. It did however prove to be a catalyst for Dorian reaching out to Andrea again, in the shadow of the great schism. For him, things went a lot better.

I don’t know the details of how things were rekindled between them, but I started to hear about Andrea a lot more, and flatteringly, how she thought I was great and wanted to get to know me. I had only experienced Andrea in passing, and these brief glimpses had not left me with the best or most consistent impressions. The first time, I think, was when Dorian pointed her out to me across the university square. I remember her looking absolutely stunning, like Dita Von Teese but in everyday life. The second time I saw her was at one of a mutual friend’s many housewarming parties, she was drunk and loud and “holding court” (an expression she’ll never let me live down) in the lounge room. The impression she left was quite coarse, and very at odds with my first glance. The third time was at a steampunk event with Dorian, where the impression was more underwhelming than anything. This all seems quite harsh and unfair to say now, at this juncture, but one must understand how unfortunately our first meetings had gone, in order to comprehend my disinterest and lack of expectation with regard to seeing her again. So when Dorian brought her over to our house, I thought I was going to sit at my computer and continue with that.

Andrea and I talked for a good 10 hours straight. Dorian hardly got a word in. Far from the social butterfly I had known him to be, he was instead the meek and polite-to-a-fault wallflower that Andrea had known many years earlier – particularly in the face of our rabid and vivacious convergence. I don’t even know what we talked about. Everything. Literature and romance and culture and James Spader and closeness and high school and sex. I didn’t know if she was interested in me, though I had inevitably acknowledged the possibility in light of my hubris and caddish tendencies, and Dorian’s saying that I was potentially just her type. What I did know was that the intense air of standoffishness and impenetrable personal space that I seem to project was discomforting to her. She, like Dorian, enjoys being physically affectionate with her friends, but as much rapport as we had, she felt like she couldn’t touch me. I explained, at length, as I often have to, that:

I’d like people to be affectionate towards me

But no-one has ever been affectionate towards me

So I don’t know how to be affectionate towards people

Hence I’m not affectionate towards people

So people think I’m not someone who is into affection

So people continue to not be affectionate towards me

Which means I constantly feel rejected and like no matter how much I want affection I’m obviously not the kind of person people want to give it to. Like there’s something wrong with me. I always bring up how all the kids in high school used to hug each other goodbye and hello, every single kid in that school with every single one of their friends – except me. No-one hugged me in five whole years. Unless I was dating them, and even then it was painfully awkward. Damien, my ex, was the first person who ever broke through my barbed aura and physically touched me in a way that intimated closeness. I think it’s almost the entire reason we had a relationship. I was so fucking floored that he’d struck up a conversation, asked me out and then had the mettle to touch me. I think I would have ended up dating the first person to do those things no matter what. But I came to realise that with Damien it was all just a very short-lived ploy to get me into bed, and in fact he was such an under-affectionate partner that when he wasn’t having sex with me I felt so unloved and rejected I almost literally ran away into the night. After that relationship I was such an awkward person to hug that even though Dorian (bless him) did hug me, he almost didn’t persist in doing so because I didn’t seem to respond well. We’ve spent a lot of time since relishing in each other’s affections, but it doesn’t seem to have made me any more approachable.

But Andrea wanted to touch me, and after much explaining that intellectually I was open to it, even though my body might be showing all the wrong signs, we cuddled up on the bed, Dorian, Andrea and I. Dorian and Andrea had been sharing a few kisses here and there, which I had been very happy for him to have, as they seemed to have a long standing fondness for one another. When Andrea asked me for a kiss it was basically my first indication that she was interested in me in that way, but soon all three of us were unclothed and very pleasurably involved. We had planned for Andrea to spend the night in the spare bed, but it became apparent that she had her sights set on sleeping in the main bed with Dorian and me. I gave the usual primer about my neck problems, but against my usual judgement I thought I’d give it a go. I had in my head all the anxiety usually inherent in this situation, about not moving about and my neck hurting and feeling upset in the stomach and being thirsty and needing to pee and feeling sweaty. But I was prepared to tough it out since she seemed so gleefully keen.

Andrea snuggled down between us, curled up to my back, her hand around my waist. And it felt… nice. I wasn’t filled with anxiety and an inescapable sense of foreignness. It felt snuggly and endearing. I will always remember what ran through my head as I realised what I was feeling. “How is this comfortable? Why is this comfortable? How can this be? This isn’t how it usually goes.” And then another voice, “Is it because, because maybe I like her in the girlfriend way?” “In the girlfriend way” was the exact turn of phrase my mind chose. I wasn’t sure exactly what I meant. It wasn’t like this was my first female attraction and I was considering for the first time that I might want relationships with women. I had also basically just met this woman and it seemed a lot presumptuous and out of character for me to be thinking of dating her already. I wasn’t even looking for a girlfriend, and certainly not expecting any of what had happened that evening. But why did her holding me in the bed like that feel so right? What about this was different to every other woman I’d been with in the last few years, whom I’d lusted after, been friends with, had sex with countless times or that had hugged me and caressed me? –We had talked for 10 hours. I had made love to her mind. We were exalted by each other. Voracious and salient and satisfying. And I somehow trusted her because of that, trusted in the quality of her person because of how we interacted. That’s what was different.

***

My sexual attractions have always been something I was rather sure of. My very first memories of attraction (at age 7) were to both boys and girls. I don’t think I have ever identified as straight. By the time I was asked what my sexuality was I knew about bisexuality and I was using that label. As I grew up I became aware of the ‘in-between’ or ‘other’ spaces surrounding the gender binary and found that these too were in the scope of my attractions. I read about pansexuality through Alan Cumming and decided that this may be a more appropriate label for me. I haven’t been with anyone who didn’t identify as basically cis-male or cis-female, but I have found myself attracted to people outside of the gender binary. But the most important factor for me has been that I can’t imagine myself discounting or rejecting a relationship with someone on the basis of gender. I’m not genderblind, I find gender and gender expression to be interesting and even sexy, and an important part of the whole person – but there’s no gender expression, or set of sex organs, that it is inconceivable for me to be attracted to.

But generally, people tend to think that the chief outlining factor for attraction is gender. That is, you pick a gender (or genders) that you are attracted to, and then within that group there will be individuals that you find particularly desirable. Expressing a gender preference is the most common way of delineating your overall attraction preferences. But what if that marker is useless? What if, instead of dividing the available pool of partners roughly in half, it does absolutely nothing?

My sexual attractions are unrestricted by gender and instead solely determined by all the usual things that we know to be outward markers of good health: healthy hair, skin, nails and teeth; cleanliness; hardiness; and relative fitness. And this makes sense as people who are ‘attractive’ tend to actually be healthier so, from an evolutionary standpoint, they produce better offspring. I’m also motivated by my own personal, nuanced and inexplicable sense of aesthetics: certain kinds of body shapes, hair, facial attributes or modes of dress. I think everyone’s attractions seem to follow more or less that formula. Gender > health > aesthetics. Mine just looks more like: health > aesthetics. So in this way, pansexual has always sat well with me. I have nothing more to tell you about my preferences beyond your average person, except for the fact that gender isn’t an excluding factor.

I hadn’t ever really thought about what my romantic orientation was. Or that it might be different.

In some ways I think romantic attraction is a more difficult thing to label as it can take a lot longer to develop and can encompass a bewildering array of factors. I knew, as with my sexuality, that gender had almost nothing to do with it. However, sexual attraction was something that I could experience with very little input from the other party. Just seeing someone across a room, hearing their voice or even looking at a picture was enough to pique my interest in a lot of cases. I was also pretty good at describing what an ‘attractive’ person looked like. My sexual attraction potentialities have always been very diverse and open, and they’re something that I have explored and talked about and introspected at great length, from a very early age. Romantic attraction is something that I have experienced much less readily, and much less often. It requires a lot more interaction with the person and usually takes time to develop. It’s also incredibly hard to pin down a description of a ‘romantically appealing’ person, and not something that makes for casual conversation. Sure, I could tell you what traits might make someone an appealing life partner (respect, communicativeness, maturity, cleanliness, etc.), but I couldn’t tell you what was going to make me have romantic feelings for them.

***

The concept of sapioromanticism hadn’t really entered my mind until Dorian and I signed up for a certain dating website which mentioned it (interestingly at the suggestion of Andrea). Its unfamiliarity intrigued me, and I looked into it. It is loosely, and I say loosely, defined as romantic attraction to intellect. The sexual attraction version is called sapiosexual. Of course I couldn’t look into something like this on the internet without getting a bucket of shit along with. Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of mental one-upmanship surrounding this topic, and so some people will tell you that the Latin is wrong, and that sapio actually means “to taste good.” But I think this entirely misses the figurative links and connotations of the word. Pleasing -> have (a) good taste -> discernment. Taste is both a physical sensation felt in the mouth, as well as an intellectual sensibility. The sapio definition page has all these things, and then if you simply change the tense to present active participle, sapiens, you find the definitions to be: “1. Discerning, wise, judicious. 2. Discreet. 3. A wise man, sage, philosopher.” Then, if you go even further you find that the English word sapient is taken from this. The internet is full of people who have stopped at definition one of page one of Wiktionary and then run screaming back to the corner of Tumblr/Urban Dictionary/Facebook/Some Sexuality Forum that they feel needs to be lectured in order to make themselves feel better. The other part of the internet will tell you that sapioromantics/sapiosexuals ‘hate disabled people’ and ‘are ableist.’ First of all I think this is bullshit, because attraction is attraction and I think everyone has a right to be attracted to whatever they’re attracted to so long as they do no harm. You like what you like, just don’t be a prick about it. Secondly, among the slew of Einstein porn, it made me think about how I’ve known plenty of people who were incredibly smart, IQs much higher than mine, quantum mechanics under their belt, great works of poetry memorised and comprehended – you name it – but I wasn’t attracted to them. I’ve also known people whose IQs were perfectly average, and whose academic performance bordered on poor – that really did it for me. So I think that it’s not so much that I am attracted to intelligence, as the definition may suggest, but that I experience romantic attraction through intellect. Intellect is the mode of attraction, not the standard for attraction. It’s not just sheer quantifiable book smarts, but something about the way certain people use their minds. Perspicacity, respectfulness, inquisitiveness, mental vivacity, and eloquence will always be the way to my heart it seems. Why else would I so revere and adore people like Stephen Fry, Russell Brand, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, David Sedaris, and James Spader?

And so there was my label. Sapioromantic. Not hetero or homo or anything to do with gender, but still the term I could use to encapsulate my most far reaching preference. I realised that I’ve never fallen in love in a moment like a long stroll on the beach gazing deeply into each other’s eyes and saying nothing. What has sparked things for me has always been the long intense conversations, the more words shared between us the better.

It all got me thinking about the people in my life that I had actually loved, cared for their wellbeing on a deep and personal level and sought perpetual closeness with. And I realised all of those feelings had started with intellectual rapport. With Heidi, with Damien, with Dorian. Mainly with Heidi and Dorian. About half way through my relationship with Damien I’d realised that we didn’t talk about nature and art and travel and philosophy any more, and I was saddened. By then the addictive unhealthy aspects of our relationship had taken root and kept it ploughing onwards when I maybe should have realised things weren’t right. But Heidi was my best friend. We wrote sometimes eight page letters to one another almost every single day of high school for years. Our appetite for getting to know one another was insatiable. I shared my soul with her. We never fought, until we did. I fell in love with her and things got… too difficult. Dorian was my tutor, we bonded over grammar, his novel/thesis, and the occult. And we never stopped talking about the big things like the meaning of life or the little things of everyday life. I was so delighted by the fact that he could keep up with me. That he understood everything I was saying and could relate to it and speculate on it and bring it back to me enriched. Finding someone like that was so important and fulfilling to me in ways that I hadn’t even imagined. And I think I may have found another in Andrea. I had never experienced such a pinpoint moment of intellectual attraction. To go from having no expectations and no knowledge of each other, to such an intense rapture of the mind.

***

Many months have gone by since I first met Andrea and started writing this blog, and the more I talk to her and spend time with her the more I realise my feelings. But I haven’t said anything, except in this blog which she has read snippets of and will read the length of soon. I don’t know how I feel about my feelings. I’m not the kind of person who regularly has them. I see Dorian reaching out and opening up and sharing his love and feelings of love so freely with our partners, and it’s beautiful. And I see him tell our friends how he loves them, in a wonderfully warm and familial way. And he says ‘I love you’ to Andrea, and he loved her in the past, and he still loves her, but I know that saying ‘I love you’ back is not a place she’s in at the moment. But he says it anyway, because that’s how he feels, and that’s who he is. But I’ve never been able to say things like that. To anyone. I’ve only ever been the one who said, “I love you too.” I don’t know if I can ever say anything else.

I think I realised this for the first time when Andrea was visiting me alone one night and we were cuddling on the bed. She wanted to stay and sleep over, but Dorian wasn’t there that night because of my bad sleeping habits and the fact that he had work the next day. And I felt very guilty that I would have ended up sending him away and denying him the comfort of sleeping with me, only to give that to Andrea instead. It’s not that I thought he’d be jealous or mad, it’s just that the only polyamory thing that has ever put my nose out of joint was very closely related to this, and I didn’t want to be a hurtful hypocrite.

Dorian hadn’t ever wanted to stay up past 10:30pm on a work night, which is fair enough. But this doesn’t fit with my sleeping habits and we’d ended up having many an unpleasant conversation about it. I wanted to go to bed for him at that time, but I couldn’t; and every time I was upset about going to bed he thought I was angry with him rather than the abstract concept of bedtime or my inability to follow it. So when he was cavorting (my dramatic phrasing) across the landscape with Marian at midnight on a work night, driving her back to her place – I felt a bit jealous. She was new and exciting and in need, and he was going the extra mile for her. But I was just the wife. When I wanted to stay up past 11 I felt like the biggest burden and inconvenience. And so I envied her, I envied her getting to spend time with him that he wouldn’t let me have with him, but maybe even more I envied the fact that she didn’t feel like a burden, that she just enjoyed it because she didn’t know any better. And then I felt like she should know better. And that was bitter of me. Dorian and I talked it out, and I do realise that there is that phase in a relationship where you get swept up in things and go that extra mile, and it’s natural and OK, and impossible to keep up forever. And I had mine. And I want him to have his happiness, in whatever form, and with whomever. What we have is different and no less valuable, and it will always be everything that it is, forever strengthened by our experiences together.

But here I was, in that same situation. And as much as I’d gotten over it, and as much as he hadn’t seemed to have an issue with the idea of it, I still didn’t want to put him in that position. So I told Andrea she couldn’t stay. But I really wanted her to. I felt so close to her in that moment, so close. Physically and emotionally. She looked so beautiful and felt so wonderful in my arms, and I knew it would be so good to have her stay. But I also knew that if I let her, I’d probably say something I felt I shouldn’t. But I wanted to say it anyway, right then. But every time I tried I felt like I was going to cry. And I didn’t know why. I even did that horrible movie thing that I so detest where I started to say it and then backed out. Thankfully she just thought I was dead tired and cracking up a bit. I felt like such a coward.

After she left I truly realised how I felt, how much wanting to say those things gave weight to my feelings. And what that meant. And I cried and cried and cried. I really broke down and got out a pen and started scribbling down all my tormenting thoughts, and at the crux of it was this: How dare I want to give her something I couldn’t even give my husband? And how dare I have these feelings for her? Because how dare I want to share myself with two people, when I’m not even good enough for one? It just brought all of this hideous relationship inadequacy crashing down around my ears. Here I was, in the throes of my relationship with Dorian, still dealing with how I felt depressed and not good enough, and I wanted to be romantically involved with another person? Promise them the world and then blight them too with all my failings? And it hurt. Having those feelings for her hurt like hell. Because I’d suddenly realised I wanted to give her the world, and I knew I couldn’t. I was absolutely crushed. I considered never seeing her again. I wasn’t going to be able to keep the feelings hidden, and then I’d inevitably be a disappointment and a source of pain. And telling her how I felt would just confront me with all that. It had everything to do with my issues. I wasn’t scared of being rejected at all, really. I mean, it would be splendid if she felt the same way, but I would totally understand, and I don’t expect that she would feel the same way. Thankfully Dorian was amazing. And I talked about it with him and words cannot express what a support he was to me. I cried again, but because his words were so beautiful and so right. Just what I needed to hear, and so full of sense. He was so much more across love and polyamory and its wonders and trials than I thought he was and than I was myself. I was so relieved by his words. He gave me hope. For everything; for our relationship and Andrea and myself.

So I managed to go on. I continued to see her and have a wonderful time of it. But every now and then I found myself wanting to say the same words at the end of a phone conversation that I would with Dorian. Or to console her with them. Or to commend her with them. Because that was how I felt, and feel. I’ve seen her a lot less lately due to circumstances beyond our control, and so my feelings have remained much more in check. But Andrea, there’s something I’d like to tell you…

I love you.