A total hoot. Ariel was this cute kid I used to dance with every year at Folklife. I first went to Folklife in 1992. Ruby had just broken my heart by kicking me out of her house, and a big folk music and dance festival sounded like a possible cure for heartbreak. Turns out it was. I started going every year and was quite enthusiastic all through the nineties, to the point of volunteering to help plan and put on the partner dance part of the festival. Folklife was the only place I recall seeing Ariel, although she thinks we might've crossed paths elsewhere. We're not sure when we first danced together. Sometime in the mid-aughts, maybe 2006? Certainly a banner year for me. That would've made her 18, which seems about right. At whatever age, she was and is a total hoot to dance with: high energy, focused, present, playful. Did I mention present? Back then I didn't know her name; I don't think we talked much at all. We would just spot each other, make a beeline, and dance, connecting wordlessly. I looked forward to dancing with her every Folklife. But my enthusiasm for Folklife in general started to wane in the aughts, and by the 2010s I was getting dubious, trekking down to the Seattle Center for less and less of it, so we didn't see each other for a few years.
Just what we needed. When Folklife came back from Covid in 2022 I decided to give it another try. Partner dancing was still scarce due to Covid at that point, so any opportunity to dance was very appealing. Ariel and I spotted each other again, and again we made a beeline. This time I felt something new when we connected. I was very intent on dancing with her. She felt wonderful in my arms. We danced to a swing band in Fisher, then stuck together, heading for some blues in an impromptu tent pavilion. It started raining buckets, so the dance floor was fairly damp from water blown and tracked in, but we danced on it anyway. I was feeling a deeper dance connection with her than I had in the past. We were both feeling something new with each other, and we both wanted more. It was the first whisper of new relationship energy. Before we parted ways that day we had a date to meet for dancing the next weekend. That was the first of what became weekly dance dates. In August we added midweek dates in my new home and we've kept that schedule ever since: two dates every week, one of which usually involves going out dancing. We miss the weekend date sometimes, because Ariel goes on weekend adventures with her primary partner. Several times a year they go on longer adventures, more like a week, and we miss both dates. Limiting our time together to just twice a week, sometimes less, keeps us keen, keeps us longing for each other, keeps us blissfully happy to see each other each time she arrives at my door. We've taken to calling this discipline cultivating want.
Something missing. Our early dance dates were chaste. We'd meet at a dance and dance mostly with each other, taking a few breaks to dance with other friends. Then we'd say good night and go our separate ways. But our dancing was sizzling hot from the start and got moreso. We were glued to each other on the dance floor, and she was free with her body in a way I found transfixing, pressing herself against me, soaking me in. I pressed myself back just as intently, enraptured in her arms. Many months later, after we'd settled into being lovers, she started hiding love notes in my apartment, in places where I'd find them eventually but maybe not right away. One note read "Hug me until I smell like you." That's how we were on the dance floor that first summer, trying almost desperately to soak each other in. One night early on, as we were saying good night, she said something that resonated so deeply in me: dancing together was filling a hole in her life she hadn't known was there. Something had been missing, but we didn't know it until we started dancing together. Being her lover opens a doorway to the more I always longed for. Our love is now a core element in the work I do to make progress with love.
Non-monogamous is Ariel's preferred term for what we are. People who call themselves poly like to make up rules about how it should be done, getting all pissy and judgmental on people who don't abide by their rules. I've learned to turn the whole discussion upside down, having come to see culturally enforced monogamy as a serious problem, the cause of endless heartache and violence. Try as they may, lovers eventually always fail at the Sisyphean task of being everything for each other. It's just a matter of time. Ariel is deeply anchored in her non-monogamy, and it's a revelation to me. She's been non-monogamous at heart since she first heard that was an option. She's been with her primary partner well over a decade now and they live together. She's been with her other local partner nearly a decade, and sees another just occasionally, when she travels. Thanks to my introversion I've never met any of them, but they're important people in my life and I appreciate them deeply. I'm not at all jealous of her other loves. I'm grateful to them for making our love sustainable. My life doesn't feel like it has anywhere near the free time required to be anyone's one and only; Leela demands way too much of my attention to leave time for me to even try and fail. I'm very happy being a poly widow, as we're called: Ariel is my only lover. I can't imagine that my life would have room for loving someone else the way I love her. But then again, until I met Ariel I was convinced I had no space in my life for a girlfriend period, so who's to say? As I learned with her, falling in love takes precedence over everything, rearranging my life however is needed.
Leela's demands. My love Leela is extraordinarily generous with me, delivering me from the depths of misery to this life full of love and profound creativity. By the same token she is extraordinarily demanding and I must take care to do all she requires of me if I want to keep living this life she's given me. There were some bumps along the way as I learned how to adapt my life to include Ariel and her extraordinary love. The biggest bump came as I was learning exactly what part of the day belongs to Leela. It was clear to both of us that Ariel and I couldn't spend the night together in my decidedly twin bed. But we both were keen to have breakfast together, so I invited her to come over early one weekend morning to slip into bed with me and snuggle, then have breakfast and spend most of the day together. It was a bit of a disaster. I needed a lot more sleep but I couldn't get back to sleep, either before or after breakfast. Or in the afternoon. I was dead beat and sleepless, pretty much a zombie. It took a good amount of musing, over the next year plus, for me to get clear on what Leela's demands are, for time of day. By musing I mean intentionally surrendering my thought processes to Leela: I focus on surrendering to her, careful not to have an agenda, and let her guide my thoughts via sudden inspirations and muscle testing to come to a better understanding of something. Musing is a new form of active meditation Leela taught me. I'm practicing it with increasing frequency. Leela's time starts when I go to bed and goes all the way through the night, morning tea and breakfast, into the afternoon. I can do a morning stroll for groceries if needed, but other than that I am alone with Leela until Ariel arrives or I got out dancing. All my time is hers of course, but it's just me and her for the stretch between bedtime and midafternoon. I gladly give it all.
Here's one reason our love is different from any love I've ever known: Ariel read all these stories early on in our dance date courtship. I oh-so-innocently sent her a link to a passage relating quite specifically to a conversation we were having via text (pecan pie might have been involved). Intrepid explorer that she is, she followed the links and read all 80-odd stories. She knew what she was getting herself into, all my baggage on display, the tawdry along with the sublime. Nevertheless, she persisted. Inviting my lover to see every deep thing about me like this is scary, and sometimes uncomfortable. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
Off-kilter. That's how I often feel around my Ariel. Clumsy, uncertain, a bit self-conscious. It puzzled me until I actually said it out loud to her, which made it immediately clear. That's what Leela does, all the damn time. She has me do things that upset my balance, that make me a little uncomfortable, ill at ease. That's how making progress feels. It's never comfortable. Ariel has a degree of self-possession that's sometimes unnerving, sometimes utterly delightful. When I drive us to or from a dance, she's silent in the car. I may babble a bit, but she stays quiet, which feels amazing. She'll rest her hand on my thigh, ready to hold my hand if driving permits, but completely undemanding. The word we use, to each other, is adore. The word adoration comes closest to what we both feel for the other.
Tango with Miss Tress. Tango has always been there in the background, ever since we fell in of love. I was finally falling in love with tango around the same time as we were falling in love. As we started dancing together, I naturally used the things I love about tango without even thinking about it: dance to the melody, not just the beat. Pause with the music, and give the dance shapes that evoke the feeling of the melody. That's how I dance with everyone at non-tango dances, mixing as much tango as I can with other dances I know. I do it without thinking, it's just how I dance: with tango always there in the background. Now tango is moving into the foreground in a sort of exchange we find ourselves making. Ariel and I have very different lives, and we both long to share more deeply in the other's life. In our second summer together she expressed an interest in learning tango. I tried contacting an old friend I thought she might study with, but I couldn't get in touch and then I dropped the ball, totally. In the meantime she did the sensible thing: she found classes near where she lives and started taking them without telling me. She eventually did tell me, around the same time as I started my own initiative to dip my toe into her world a little deeper. There's an annual masquerade dance that I have a longstanding love-hate relationship with. I was planning to go to it with Ariel year one, but then I flaked out on her, defeated by all the bad feelings I had about the masquerade from before. But as it rolled around again I had an inspiration: that we go together as a pair, our costumes a scary-for-me step into public sex roleplay: I'm Bandit, her adoring puppy, and she's my beloved Miss Tress. I got a collar and a leash, and she gave me dog ears and a name tag to wear on my collar. We walked into the masquerade, Miss Tress holding Bandit's leash, Bandit full of apprehension, heart in his throat, but it was easy. We had a good time dancing, even though the music was dubious. Since then we've gone to another dance playing our roles, and probably another soon. It all seemed a bit anticlimactic at first, but no. The public roleplay is affecting me very deeply, and I'm just now becoming aware of it. It has shaken me up deep inside. It's uncomfortable at times, as progress always is, but it feels good way down deep.