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On the evening of July 7 a year ago, the following incident happened with a woman I had been dating for almost four months.  (The post reprinted below is lifted from my LiveJournal account and was posted at 10:19 that night):

A few days ago, I made a comment to another person’s post about my polyamorous situation with my friend, Millie.  I said something to the effect that the past three months have been wonderful with her, but lurking in the shadows is the fear that she’s involved with so many people that I’m just going to drop off the bottom of the list someday.I think that it might have happened this evening.

I dropped my husband off at the airport for his weeklong trip to Wales at 5:30 this afternoon and then proceeded on to Millie’s house.  We had made plans to go out to dinner….and then……  (???)  I threw some overnight necessities in a bag, just in case I got an invitation to spend the night and decided to accept it!

First of all, she told me on the way to dinner that she had a recent one-night stand to confess, something that she needed to tell to all her partners.  She had been flirting with her kid’s karate instructor for the past six weeks or so and “got carried away” last week.  She didn’t think that this was a good situation to be in with this man since she feels he doesn’t understand polyamory, and he has a girlfriend who would be jealous if she knew about this affair.  She doesn’t want to be in that situation, but they had sex.  Hence, the one-night stand.

Okay.  Thanks for sharing, Millie.

Then over supper, she said that she’s been in a confused place about all these relationships she’s got going on, and there are a few.  There’s me.  There’s the guy in San Francisco.  There is the guy in Beloit, Wisconsin.  There are a couple of local men she’s having sex with.  She just got out of a messy menage a trois with a local couple that went on for quite awhile, although she is still in contact with the former participants and I think she’d like to return to it if they could work things out.   She mentioned something to that effect this evening.

She’s still cruising the Fast Cupid website, reading profiles and making contact with people.

She said that there is something missing in her life.  She wants to be in love.  She said that hanging out with me is nice but…..  She was out to our house for supper last with her 3-year-old and that was nice, too, but…..  She enjoyed being at the park after supper with my husband and me and watching her son play, but….

But there is something missing for her.

I don’t know what’s missing.  Therefore, I don’t know if I can provide it for her or not!  

I know that I’m uneasy about all the “activity” going on in her social life.  I’m technically polyamorous but I’ve never had more than two relationships going on at a time: that with my husband and that with a female lover.  I honestly don’t know what to make of all these various relationships she’s got going on, all in various stages and levels of frequency.  I’m having a hard time finding common definition with the term polyamory as it pertains to my life compared to how she chooses to conduct her polyamorous life.  I have found myself frequently pondering that term polyamory lately and wondering what it really means.  My recent observations would lead me to believe that for some people, it is a lifestyle of numerous sexual affairs going on concurrently, sometimes spontaneously and impulsively because HEY!  I’m poly, and it’s okay!  The only thing that separates that behavior from your basic ”affairs” and general sexual promiscuity is the level of honesty and self-acceptance about what’s going on.  

But that’s not how I’m comfortable conducting my sexual relationships and therein lies the problem.  

So, I’m home tonight.   We had supper together.  (She clarified that she wasn’t breaking up with me, although it sure felt like it!)  We shopped for a bit at the shopping mall by the restaurant.  I took her home.  We hugged goodnight.  I declined to go in.

I think it’s over and I’m sad tonight.

Sad but not surprised.

For those of you who have followed this blog (which may just be my husband and me, but that’s fine), you’ll know that running into Millie again at the BECAUSE conference kick-off evening the end of March was the incentive for the birth of this blog.  I had not seen or spoken to her since the night of July 7, with the exception of the note I put in her package which contained the repaired necklaces she had given me to fix and a paperback book I had borrowed from her.  It was done.  Over.

Over except for my remaining anger and confusion about what had gone on between us, something that hit me full in the face the evening our paths crossed at the BECAUSE conference and I left that evening, not to return for the full day of the conference on Saturday because she was giving one of the sessions the next day.

To end this year since my last dinner with her, an interesting thing happened.  As I’ve mentioned, I am a member of a dating site since the end of March.  I think it was on Wednesday that I noticed a local couple had looked at my profile.  The names they gave in their profile were Michael and Diane.  Common enough, All-American names, but it gave me pause because the couple in the menage a trois that Millie was involved with was Mike and Diane.  I read through their profile and picked out the fact that they were both from another state and had relocated here within the last couple of years.  Millie talked about them a lot with me and this rang a bell.  The ages seemed right.

I let this all simmer for a day and then decided, what the hell?  I shot them a message and asked if they had been involved with a local woman last year, that we may have a mutual acquaintance!  They gave me a honest reply back.  Yes, they were involved with a woman, a relationship that ended in early 2007.  They supposed that it could have been her.

I answered with the probable mutual acquaintance’s initials and said that I was just curious so I’d know who to stay away from in case she was still involved with them!

Michael replied that, yes, this was the woman and that if I were in proximity to them, I’d be about as far away from HER as I could get!

This resulted in a number of messages going back and forth over the next couple of days, some written by Michael, who had known Millie for a long time, and some written by Diane who had only met Millie through MIchael’s preexisting relationship with her.  The take-home message for me in all that was that Millie was/is an emotionally unpredictable woman.  I knew about her being treated for a long time for depression (for that matter, so have I), but MIchael postulated that she may be bipolar as well.    He went on to say after knowing her for more than a decade, “She has contradictory needs.  Sometimes she needs someone emotionally strong when she is feeling frail and needs someone to carry her and other times she needs them to be emotionally weak so that she can feel more control in her own life.   The people that seem to be best for her are either physically or emotionally distant from her…”

Diane said in a letter she wrote to me, “I would guess that she has quickly moved on to many other new conquests. It has been my observation that she flirts until she catches the person, takes what she wants and then moves on…”

Both of them agreed that it was good for me that I only experienced four months of this and decided to end it!

Have I had doubts about this?  Perhaps in some ways.  I know that I carry my own amount of baggage due to my growing-up years in a dysfunctional family and I know I tend to be hypersensitive to certain things.  Sometimes I have to pause and ask myself if I’m responding to some stimulus in an appropriate way or reacting from a need to protect an Inner Child from hurt and abuse.  This was one of those cases.

To “celebrate” the first anniversary of giving Millie the boot, I think that I can lay those doubts to rest, thanks to the input from MIchael and Diane, two people whom I never, ever expected to talk to!  They obviously didn’t have an easy time of it, either, and MIchael said that he let it go on for far too long.  This chance encounter with them reassured me that I was not out of line in making the decision I did, and I thank them for the words that they shared with me.

And now, let us return to our originally scheduled programming! 

Since online dating has tanked for me, I had to think about other options for meeting people (i.e. bisexual women.)  I knew that I needed to find a Real Life social circle, some way to get involved in a network of people that would bring me into the community I seek.  I needed to meet people face-to-face, perhaps with an external community focus involved, and bypass the whole “search parameters” thing that eliminated me from someone’s consideration on an online dating site before they had even met me!

I hadn’t done anything about it.  It’s easy to just let that sort of thing slide when one is busy with a full-time job, errands, chores, and last but not certainly least, a spouse.  I’ve been coasting, still occasionally going through the entire BiCupid listing of women near and far that fall within the age range of 35 to 65.

I’ve been a member of the Bi Resource Group on Yahoo for quite some time — not that they ever post anything relevant to the BiCities and I can’t attend a potluck in Santa Cruz, California! — but in January, there was a posting for:

LABEL THIS!       Because              Midwest conference on bisexualityFriday, March 28—Sunday, March 30, 2008Coffman Union, university of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota

About BECAUSE

The BECAUSE Conference is the premier weekend for bisexuals, queers, questioning, and all others who are neither one thing nor the other. BECAUSE attracts people from throughout the Midwest and beyond to attend various educational workshops, get active, and generally enjoy the community experience.

[Note from author: BECAUSE is an acronym that stands for "Bisexual Empowerment Conference: A Uniting Supportive Experience."]

I did a lot of “hmmmm-ing” about this.  Coffman Union, the University of Minnesota — my alma mater.  I’m only 10 miles away now.  Easy to get to.  The fee was reasonable.  $40.  Shoot, I had already spent $160 on BiCupid with nothing to show for it, so that wasn’t an obstacle.  After thinking about it for several weeks and talking it over with my spouse who said, “By all means, go!!  You should go!”, I submitted my registration for the conference.

I was very nervous as this weekend of the conference approached.  I don’t know exactly why.  I was NOT nervous about being out as a bisexual or being worried that I’d run into someone on campus who might want to know what I was doing there.  I am not that closeted and fearful about discovery!  

No, I think I was nervous about not knowing anyone there, about having to put my best foot forward and introduce myself.  I was concerned that I wouldn’t fit in there, that it would be a bunch of late teens and 20-Something college students who would look at me like I was their grandmother!  My husband and I had several talks about this as the weekend of the conference approached, and he pointed out, “Maybe this is your time to be a mentor, to be the voice of experience for a younger crowd.”  He’s right, but a part of me doesn’t want to be solely a mentor and a “voice of experience.”  I want a social life, too, and was just apprehensive that I was going to be relegated to that Mentor role because of my age, that my time for close relationships with women has passed.  Nope, not ready for that just yet!

The kick-off of the conference was the keynote address at 7:00 Friday evening at Coffman Union.   Dave and I met up after work and had supper together at the Caspian Bistro on the edge of the campus.  He went home to work on his model boat, and I went on to the conference just down the street about half-a-mile.

I got checked in to the conference up on the third floor of Coffman Union, filled out my name badge and selected my appropriate color-coded flashy dot to “label” me if I wanted.  I played along with it and stuck on the teal blue dot that stood for Bisexual and the golden-orangy one that stood for Polyamorous.  I filled out my boxed lunch selection for the next day which was being catered by a local coffeehouse and put that in the appropriate bin.   Then I went into the conference room and selected a seat just a row back from the front so I could see and hear the speaker well.  I draped my coat over the chair and cruised to the tables at the back of the room where they had a lot of books and magazines on display.

Then someone says from just behind my right shoulder, “Hello, Kinsey.”

I turned around, my stomach settling somewhere around my knees.  “Hello, Millie,” I returned.

Fuck!  Goddammit! 

“Thank you for repairing those necklaces.  That was nice of you.  They were perfect,” she said.

Keep your voice neutral and unemotional, I instructed myself.  “You’re welcome,” I replied, actually thinking, Nice of you to thank me for that repair work over eight months after the fact!  

“How have you been?” she wanted to know.

“Fine,” I stated, offering no further elaboration.

She paused for a moment and then said, “Well, good to see you.”    She turned and walked away.

“Yeah,” I muttered to her back.

I noticed that she was seated with another woman just behind where I had parked my coat.  Great.  Just fucking great.  I couldn’t even put some physical distance between us without making it obvious that I was doing that since I would have to retrieve my coat and bag from the row in front of her.  I decided to just sit where I was and not make any further display of my emotions about seeing her.

Several people got up and spoke during the next hour, and I enjoyed listening to all of them, particularly the local psychotherapist, Dr. Margaret Charmoli, who hosts a half-hour weekly cable TV show called BiCities!.  I don’t watch television and don’t have cable TV, but if I did, I would watch this show!  She is bisexual and a bi-activist, along with being a therapist and a TV show host,  and I loved listening to her talk about the quest to be included, the quest to be understood, the quest to be treated as the unique entity that we are and not as a “fucked-up subset of the gay/lesbian community.”  I found myself nodding my head a lot and really internalizing what she had to say.

The person actually designated as the keynote speaker is a psychotherapist and researcher by the name of Ron Fox, a man in his 60s who has identified as bisexual since his 20s.  He, too, captured much of the emotions and experiences that I have been through while making a similar journey during the same era.   While listening to both him and Dr. Charmoli talk, I didn’t feel crazy or confused or fucked-up for being a bisexual.  I felt proud and integrated and whole, and it was so refreshing and wonderful to hear these remarkably intelligent, productive, dynamic people affirm this!

Yes, yes, I thought, I soooo belong here!  I need to be here!  This is a great place for me to be!

Unfortunately, the whole time I was listening to the speakers, I was also aware of Millie sitting behind me with her friend, whispering their little conversations.  It was unnerving and unsettling.  I had not been prepared in the least to spend the BECAUSE conference in the same room with Millie!

I was quite undecided what I was going to do about that.  At the end of the speakers’ presentations, I did not stay for the refreshments and social hour.  I headed for the door immediately and made my exit.  Before I left, I stopped at the registration table and pulled my lunch order from the bin and pocketed it.

I drove home, feeling confused, upset, adolescent, and frustrated.