Good night, Mr. Nightly.

This past week, Mr. Nightly and I ended our relationship. He insists that it hasn’t ended, but that it has just shifted into a platonic relationship. To me, however, it certainly feels like the end of something, really something that has been going on for much longer than the physical time involved these past 9 months. That we will always love each other is a given; we have for over 10 years, and have a deep bond that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. But for now, we must renegotiate our boundaries. He is in a new relationship (let’s call the girl Frenchie), one where his partner has specified that she wants it to be just the two of them, and there is no longer room for me, or brat.

How does one deal with the end of a poly relationship? I find that I am dealing not with my own hurt, but my wife’s hurt as well. It is a break-up amplified. It is a break-up complicated by the fact that he is head-over-heels for a new woman who he has been with less than a week, and has already decided that is the end for us. The whole incident made me realize that all the communication we were doing about our situation, while good in theory, was flawed. We were each speaking, but our interpretations of each others’ words were in many cases off. I now find myself, with little preparation, dealing with my own broken heart, and hers as well.

brat is not an open person emotionally. She tends to bottle things up instead of expressing them. Tonight Mr. Nightly sat our living room floor, facing us as we sat on the couch, talking for an hour about his new love. I saw her listening without much emotion in her face, fidgeting with a hair elastic, twisting it around her fingers as he talked. He never mentioned any of the things that he should have to her (things he had said to me in our short private chat earlier in the evening). He didn’t explain his and Frenchie’s decision about not being with other people, but instead talked about spanking my brat in the past tense. After he left, brat curled against me on the couch, with her head in my lap. He cheeks were burning red. “I’m angry. And I’m hurt,” she said, looking up at me. All my pain throbbed in my chest as I looked down at the woman I have loved for over 5 years, and saw her in pain, pain that I was the partial cause of. I encouraged her to become involved with this man that I love, that she now loves. And now he has left us both. We knew it would happen in the abstract (as he had expressed that his vanillaness might very well preclude the continuation of our relationship when he found himself involved with a primary partner), yes, but we never knew it would happen so soon, or so suddenly.

Nor do I think he knows how much hurt he has caused. Yes, he knows we are hurt, but in the end I don’t think he really understood just how we saw him in our lives.

And yet, this is all for the best. brat and I have grown from the experience, as people, as a couple. We are ready to let someone else into our lives, knowing that all bets are off, and that we may be hurt again. This time, though, I will lay my cards on the table instead of keeping them so close to my chest. I will be open with what I want, what I need, what I desire from the very beginning. There is a new man we’ve enjoyed spending sometime with, and who knows where that will go. At the very least, we have a new friend that we will enjoy spending time with. But I don’t want the legacy of Mr. Nightly to be one that closes brat or me off from the excitement that is enjoying and loving others. Instead, it’s a lesson. A hard one. But it doesn’t mean stop- it means go.

A View from the Inside...

brat and I went out to dinner tonight, and I subjected her to yet another tirade about the boy, overanalyzing some of his recent comments and actions. I pouted, I cried, I whined, and she said to me, "Enough." She told me the patterns she saw in my relationship with him, the repetition of the same pain, the same hurt, the same conversation over and over again. She showed me my relationship with him in a way I never could have, because I can't step away and view my interactions the way she can. She's on the inside, but at the same time she has a distance that I don't in understanding the things we (the boy and I) do to each other. She made me realize that he almost never *means* to hurt me, that it's just his way of being in the world that so often does, unfortunately, leave me in tears. I know I can't change him, I can only change me, and my relationship to him.
So brat gave me advice, and finished with, "But this is only my opinion. You have to make your own decision." And she's right- as much as she is involved, this is my relationship, separate than the one between the three of us, and the two of them.
It may be a difficult clarity, in many ways an unwelcome one, but I thank her nonetheless.