Part Time Lovers
The 60s talked of free love. Millennials say fuck-buddies or if they want to be nice, friends-with-benefits. The term polyamory is having a day. It’s no newer than the other ways we negotiate the politics of sex and affection. Who are our lovers?
I live in compartments of emotion and logic. There is what I feel & desire and what I decide that it’s practical to say & do. The system works but love is an inconvenient fit. It refuses to stay contained to a schedule, a format, a relationship status. It screams like a ravening beast for more, more, never satisfied with the appropriate time and agreed-upon rules that it has been assigned. I don’t know if intimacy can be constructed with an easy-to-follow recipe, paused as convenient or left-swiped when it outlives its purpose. Because intimacy is not easy, convenient or of a purpose. It happens as it is built into the very DNA of human interaction.
We assign it words, weigh it with ideas like jealousy, self-esteem, ownership, patriarchy. But these are no more than nets we’re trying put around something that is fluid. Not even liquid because even that flows within the containers into which we pour it. Intimacy is air, love is plasma – moving between boundaries as if they don’t exist.
It is so much effort to erect and maintain walls that will anyway fall. Therein lies the nub. Love and intimacy are not hard; they’re terrifying. It’s a horrific prospect to go along with something to an unknown destination, knowing that it will transform you, take away from you and possibly give nothing in return. That’s not an adventure, that’s a horror story. It’s easier to run in a maze of our own making than fall into the wide unknown. So we work this together. Failing together, even in different places is a form of intimacy too.
“We are undercover passion on the run
Chasing love up against the sun
We are strangers by day, lovers by night
Knowing it’s so wrong, but feeling so right
I guess that two can play the game
Of part-time lovers
You and me, part-time lovers” – Stevie Wonder