Friday, April 24, 1998

TGIF! It's significantly cooler in the city than in the East Bay today. Some days it's warmer, some days it's the same.

I had a good talk with my roomies last night. Sharon and I discussed the idea that there is "one true love" for everybody. She thinks there is. I realized, with a start, that I'm not sure about that anymore. I used to believe that fervently; I was certain I had a soul mate out there and that I would find him before the end of my twenties, we would fall instantly in love, get married, the whole bit. I assumed I still thought the same way (helped, no doubt, by my need to defend myself against Todd's constant scoffing cynicism on any love-related topic). I'm trying to figure out what happened to this idea, and why am I not so blissfully, optimistically certain any longer?

I could blame it on age, but I don't like to think optimism fades as we grow older. I rather think it's the move to California; it's shocking to move from Indiana to the Bay Area and realize how many people there are in the world. I see different people, new strangers, every day. How on earth am I going to shuffle through all of them and find THE ONE??

I've been marveling lately at the random series of event that shape our lives. For example: if Todd's friend, Dan, hadn't chosen to go to Cornell for undergrad, he probably wouldn't have gone to Berkeley for grad school. But he did. Then Todd moved out here with him, I came to visit on a spring break and decided this was where I was moving after college. I put an ad on Yahoo! personals to meet people in the Bay Area, met Kevin, who dragged me to Faire. At Faire last fall I met Ian, who introduced me to his roommates, Cliff and Mary Anne. Mary Anne introduced me to David. I would have never met this circle of friends if Dan had decided to go to, say, IU. How odd.

Back to "THE ONE" topic: I have had to deal with new ideas out here. Certainly, people I knew in Indiana practiced such ideas as polyamory (more than one love), but I never dealt with it directly. Out here I've found myself in this situation more than once. I'm inclined to say that I think the people out here are generally more mature and ready to deal with all the complications polyamory presents, but since I never dealt with it personally before, perhaps that goes without saying. Still, the whole concept of poly raises some questions, the big one being, if you're poly, how can there be THE ONE? THE FEW? THE MANY? THE ONE and the little ones? I dunno. It's the same fear I had as a child and will have from the other side as a parent someday: Whom do you love more? How do I love equally? I'm such a jealous person that I think dealing with this is good for me; learn to share, learn to deal with irrational emotions, learn to balance (learn to schedule).

But all this is for right now. I have no idea if I'm going to continue poly from now on. Some days I think I will; I imagine a big happy family, where everyone cares for everyone else's kids and the many viewpoints balance everything out. Our house will be a huge Victorian farm house on acres and acres of land, and we'll be famous for having so many talented artists in one setting and school kids will grumble about having to write essays on us while college kids compete for our internships.
Other days I think NO! I want my house with one other person, my space and his space becoming our space. Where our kids only know one mommy and one daddy and their aunts and uncles come visit often. A house with one large study where we can work together. A house where it's quiet at night, and we can sit entwined on the sofa and read. Something cozy like that.

And then there are the days when I know I won't end up in either. Those are the days I imagine traveling for years, coming back to settle alone in my own ecologically sound home that I built myself (heh). I imagine having lovers, and having children that I'll raise on my own. In this fantasy I am already wealthy from the zillions of travel/erotic/etc. novels that I've written, and I have a thrilling social life in the evenings and quiet, long days in which to write more.

These are all my fantasies, you understand. We cannot know the future (thank goddess).