I did not intend for this to happen, but in order for me to keep talking about my love life, I am going to have to provide a little bit more context about my situation at the time. I am going to have to tell you about my family, and most unfortunately I am going to have to tell you about my father. This is a departure from my romantic life, and a look into his as I explain his throuple era.
For my sake, you can imagine the parental figures who appear in the story as such:
Father- Lex Luthor (Jessie Eisenberg, not Nicholas Holt). Imagine he can’t grow a beard. This man once said “Lovefool” is the worst song by the Cardigans.
Marissa (My step-mom)- Do her the courtesy of imagining her as only the chillest, most laid-back, girl-power role-models like Jamie Lee Curtis in My Girl or Zooey Deschanel in Bridge to Terabithia.
My Mom- Fran Drescher from The Nanny with a sort of Lorelai Gilmore spunk. Give her a cigarette in a long holder and acrylic nails just for dramatic flair.
Kendra (My dad’s girlfriend)- The evil spirit of Joan Cusack in Addams Family Values, but unfortunately, no slay-factor. More like if Joan Cusack in Addams Family Values decided to go the “cool-not-like-other-girls” route. A nightmare.
Let it be known that I really don’t have a problem with throuples or ethical poly-relationships of any kind. I think non-monogamy can be a beautiful thing when agreed upon enthusiastically by two consenting adults! I don’t even think you should have to keep it at home, or whatever people tend to say. I think people should go out on dates with their polycules, raise kids with their polycules, and go to Pride with their polycules. All because love is love, and whether you prefer to experience that love in a committed 1-on-1 partnership, in an open-relationship, or in a polycule, I think that love deserves to be celebrated.
Unfortunately, there is nothing ethical about him, so expectedly, when he introduced Kendra into his marriage to Marissa, he did it with a toxic je ne sais quoi that metrosexual millennial men perfected.
Even at twelve, I was pretty hip with it, even in terms of alternative relationships. Certainly, my own queerness contributed to that perspective— but even before the concept of my own sexuality was on my radar, my life was rich with people of all shapes, sizes, and orientations. Fairy godmothers with bald heads and fake eyelashes, lesbian aunts and cousins, family friends whose pronouns could change by the day or the moment or the outfit or the joke. I knew what “normal” was meant to look like to the world from a young age, and I learned quickly that different was more fun.
My mother explained the concept of an open-relationship to me when I was ten.
She sat me down, and first she asked me if I knew what “bisexual” was. As a matter of fact, I did know what bisexual was because just weeks before, my friend Kelsey at school was speculating that a boy in our class was “bi” because of the indiscriminate attention he seemed to give both the boys and the girls, and for his flamboyant mannerisms. I was intrigued because before then, I thought everyone was either completely gay or completely not-gay. Bi opened up a world of possibilities that, at that age, I was truly not prepared to confront. Regardless, I lied and told my mom I didn’t know what bisexual meant, to make sure Kelsey’s definition lined up with the one my mom provided. When all the information seemed to line up, I nodded with all the solemnity I could muster, trying to give the appearance that I was taking it all in.
She continued on and told me that she was bisexual and so was her spouse, Charon.
“Okay,” I said, “cool.” I liked the idea of having a gay mom, even if she was just a bi-gay mom. Plus, I figured that two bi-gay parents were as good as one full-gay one.
I thought the conversation was going to end there, but it didn’t. She continued, “I am telling you this because Charon and I are in something called ‘an open-relationship” She explained the concept. She explained that her rules with Charon were personal to them, and they worked for them, but that other people have other rules that work for them. I remember thinking it was weird, but ultimately unimportant for me to think about too much.
Overall, I would say it was an adequate introductory talk on the topic of polyamory. I don’t think I could have done it any better myself, and the best part is it happened! That way, if I ever accidentally saw something I maybe wasn’t supposed to, or even if my mother and Charon ever did want to invite a third into their relationship, I would have already had the prior knowledge to fall back on.
I want to give myself credit for assuming that if my father had approached his situation with the same level of transparency, maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so bad so quickly. There is no way of knowing, but I would like to believe.
Here’s how it all started:
I was twelve, almost thirteen, nearing the end of 7th grade, when my father and Marissa started going out more. They were going out to dinners, parties, movies, you name it, and staying out late. At first, it was awesome for me, because it meant I got to babysit more, which meant more spending money (a flat rate of 20 dollars) in my middle school pockets. Eventually, as the date nights grew later and later, I began really wondering what it was they were getting up to— especially considering neither one of them drank. Eventually, they started coming home with Kendra.
At first, Kendra was just a friend of theirs, someone they met at the running club. I was told that she was going through a divorce and that she needed support. When she moved in (moved in to our two bedroom apartment), I was told that she needed a place to stay— because of the divorce. Soon enough, Kendra was going on dates too, at which point I stopped asking, because any time I did, my father called me a “closed-minded bigot”.
I did not want all the dirty details, but I was piecing together more than I would have liked in all that was left unsaid. The easiest thing for me to piece together was that “running club” was not really a running club at all, and if it was, that certainly wasn’t all they were doing. Afterall, my father did not meet Kendra in person at all, but on a website called “fetlife.com” and presumably he met all the other members of running club there as well. I knew what swingers were because I’d learned about them not a year before in Season 3, Episode 18 of Bob’s Burgers, “It Snakes a Vision”. You can imagine my surprise as I connected the dots and realized that I was Linda Belcher!
If that was the extent of it, it really wouldn’t have been so bad. Sure, my dad being the ring-leader of a throuple and an active member in the Charleston swinging community did have the potential to damage me socially, but ultimately, I knew there was nothing my family could do that would make me appear more freakish at school than I already did. Anyway, Annapolis Maryland, was the only person from school I ever had over, and she was not judgmental so much as she was a connoisseur of juicy-stories. Considering the amount of time she spent reading y/n One Direction fanfiction (yes, exactly the kind you are thinking of), I think she was thrilled to have something interesting to talk about every time she came over.
On the surface, throuple-swinger dad is funny and innocuous. What was not funny or innocuous were the growing tensions in our home. Shortly before Kendra moved in, my father and Marissa were having routine screaming matches (which is to say, he screamed at her) that lasted hours on end. After Kendra moved in, she and my father began having their own screaming matches for hours every day after work. Then shortly after that, Marissa moved out of the master bedroom altogether and began sleeping on the couch. Not-so-slowly, I watched Marissa transition from my father’s wife to his au pair, to his enemy, as the screaming matches he shared with Kendra then turned more regularly towards Marissa, so that both he and Kendra were taking turns tearing her down. They discovered that they were much more powerful together, and although they still had full-volume arguments of their own, they more frequently began to turn their wicked tongues on Marissa and me, and even sometimes my little sister.
On top of the unrestrained verbal violence I could expect every day after school and the feeling that I could not bring anyone except my very best friend over, I was also beginning to feel like my labors were being exploited. See, not only was I the one in charge of watching my sister when my family disappeared on their I-guess-erotic marathons, but I was also soon enough put in charge of watching the children of his compatriots. While he and his friends explored their sexualities like they were in college again, I was following in his footsteps as a teen parent, begrudgingly entertaining toddlers (only most of them had nothing to do with me). As they would galavent about I would simmer on the fact that the adults in my life thought I was ignorant to what was going on around me, in the knowledge that if I ever even thought to question anything about his relationship, my father would call me names, and in the reality that I would be lucky to even receive my 20 dollars for the work I’d put in. When they came back all pink and glistening with sweat like pigs, I would smile through gritted teeth and fight the urge to spit in their faces as they all unanimously remarked on how good the run was.
As the end of 8th grade approached, I started formulating plans for how I could get away from it all before the start of 9th. When I went home to Colorado for the summer, I begged my mother and my grandmother to do something, to help me move back, but all I accomplished was insuring my father would be fuming when I got back. He screamed at me for three hours or so about what a “malicious spoiled brat” I was for trying to leave his house, and I made sure to enjoy it, because it was the last time he talked to me for about a month.
Because of all this, unlike the summer before, I didn’t have the emotional wherewithal for any serious crushes. Before leaving for Colorado, I had sort of rekindled things with Blaize Huckabee on the DC trip some of us took right after continuation. We had a lot of shared time on the bus for him to flatter me with compliments such as “you look just like Christina Grimmie but more beautiful” and “it’s so difficult to stay quiet in the National Cemetery with you, because you’re so funny”. Although his rizz game had improved massively, I did end up having to cut him off for good because:
A.) I thought I was going to move across the country.
B.) He sent me “The Less I Know The Better” by Tame Impala and told me the song reminded him of me, which I thought was weird.
I thought about trying to find a crush in my new neighborhood in West Ashley after getting back to South Carolina, but my depression-schedule of staying up until 8 am watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch and eating copious amounts of ramen left very little room for fraternization.
I would just have to wait for the year to start for things to kick off.
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