More than a Boy
He’s more than just my Boy. I call him Son, sometimes, but he’s growing into something Else. I’m not sure what to label things, so I think I’ll just not and let them be what they Are, whatever that might be, or become.
David’s been here about two months now, and from what I can tell, things between him and myself are just getting started. We’ve got a settled pattern of behavior, which works for us both, for now. He doesn’t have a job yet, so that will most likely shift as time passes, hopefully. Still, the way we move together, and the time we spend with each other, has become more and more like time spent with another piece of me. We fuck, we laugh, we scheme, we talk. We work out together. We share common desires for ourselves and for our futures.
We are deeply in Love.
He’s still quite reserved about his feelings, though, and the last couple of days has been a bit of a deeper dive into that part of him.
He knows I’m polyamorous. He knew this entering into anything with me, knows of my partners and my connection to them, and knows that he cannot take up more space in my heart than he already does.
But I think he forgets sometimes. And I think he’s still testing the waters to see how he feels about all of this.
Apparently, loving a person who also holds love for others is a weirdly wired challenge for him, as it has been for the other young men I’ve attempted to bring into my life on this level. It’s a bit tiresome on my end of things, and I am finding myself holding back, dialing myself and my own expression of affection, connection, and emotion into a safer place, under control.
Naw, that’s phrased wrong.
What I’m doing is silently holding my feelings for myself and watching as he develops and changes to his new situation in his life. I think I’ve learned that it’s not on me to adjust myself so far out of whack with who I am to meet his needs. I don’t need to compromise how I identify or how I love, just to be enough for him. This time around, I’m keeping my cool, and keeping control of myself and my emotional state, while letting him go through what he needs to go through. I am constantly remembering that this could all fall apart at any moment.
Thing is, that’s the truth for all of my relationships. Each one of them is a daily choice to be made.
He admitted to me that he’s struggling with his sense of insecurity, which leans into the generic “jealousy” realm. Jealousy, is an over-arching word for a ton of other smaller feelings, and when I hear that word, I’m set off in search of the underlying feeling that’s more precise. In his case, he’s at a crossroads between wanting a singular man all to himself, like he has had before, or wanting the lateral flexibility to love more than one man, such as I do, and expand his understanding of committed relationships and love, overall.
Right from the start, it was he who told me that he wanted to love in a similar fashion to me. He wanted to hold space and affection for more than one person. I told him I could show him how it works for me, and I have been doing that for the last eight months. What I think might be happening is that he’s discovered there’s a boundary, and he needs to negotiate his comfort level with this. I’ve told him that I have made more space for him, at the expense of my other relationships, in order to make him more comfortable while he figures this out.
But I won’t go further than what I’ve done.
I don’t have to compromise so much that I lose parts of my heart in the process. I have worked very hard to establish and maintain the relationships that I have in my life, and they are vital to my life, and deserve attention and care. He knows this, respects this, and has recognized his own shortcomings that he, alone, will have to negotiate.