Become the Sun

Author’s Note: This essay was originally written in September of 2023

Content Warning: This essay is about figuring out nonmonogamy structures. It discusses dealing with partner insecurities and how lacking boundaries can drag you and the rest of your polycule through hell. It discusses the problems that come when you displace yourself in your own priorities.

Your universe only has room for one sun, and it needs to be you.

I had a partner once who struggled deeply with what I now interpret as an insecurity that I would leave them when I found someone "better." In the end, this created so much tension between us and threw gasoline on the other fires going on that I proved them right by leaving them, for myself.

But before I figured out there was no way to be on the same page, I confessed a crush to another person and opened a massive can of worms.

We'd been nonmonogamous the entire relationship, that partner and I, but they were the only one having other relationships. As an aromantic person who rarely feels directional sexual interest, I'm often quite slow to date and invest heavily in the partners I do have.

Once I found another person I was interested in, there came a routine question from my partner:

Are you in love with them?

Now, that's not a useful question to ask an aromantic person, and that was evident in how we fought over it. Because I couldn't give an answer that satisfied my partner. I did love this paramour, but I also loved a lot of my friends. But I was curious about sex with my paramour, which is not consistent with my other friends. Did that make it romantic love?

I don't fucking know, but a lot of amanormative ideas about love seem to draw the line between romantic and platonic at "I want to fuck you," which to me, makes very little sense. Sexual love is not the same thing as romantic love, and it feels decidedly unromantic to conflate the two.

But looking back, I think my partner was asking this:

Are you going to leave me and all the plans we made to be with this person?

Which was a question I sensed and also tried to answer, but all I managed to do in that long messy process was disrespect my paramour and wear myself to the bone trying to exorcise my partner’s poltergeists.

See, I did love my paramour, and I wanted to fuck them. I loved my partner and had been fucking them. But that to me didn't mean they and my partner were competing or in a "I'll choose you over you" position for a number of reasons that felt self evident for me:

I liked the existing plans my partner and I made to settle down and start a hippie farm/activist commune. I admired my partners’ dedication to sustainability, to intentionally building radical spaces, to engaging in complex conversations. I adored their vibrance and the way they could pull in strangers and turn them to friends. I wasn't going to just quit in the middle because a shiny new person came by. I liked our plans and believed they were feasible. I believed my partner and I could work together on that kind of project and come out with something interesting without our relationship exploding under that kind of effort.  

They wanted to travel several months of the year, I needed months to myself, we could work something out where we both got those needs met. It worked as a plan. The pace that we wanted to live our individual lives was compatible with building a home together.

I adored my friend for their warmth and cleverness and I admired their ingenuity, ambition and commitment to building their life to suit them. And, what suited them and what suited me were drastically different speeds. They lived and breathed to travel and perform, which is part of what I found glorious and charming about them. This mattered so much to them they'd built a home from the wheels up to accommodate their physical comforts on the road, which I also found utterly brilliant and sexy. But I had no interest in living like that myself, and also there were numerous logistical barriers to us being anywhere close to syncing up that way, even if I did.

My paramour and I, I think, could have synced the paces at which we lived for brief periods in order to move arm and arm for a bit, but we could not have lived full time that way. Their gears would have lurched and stuttered to slow down so and mine would have bowed and snapped to speed up.

(Indeed I feel this suspicion came true in some ways, but we get to that later)

My partner I suspect heard this admiration as a threat, as me dreaming of another life with someone else.

But admiring the way someone lives and being able to/wanting to live that way yourself are not the same thing. My partner and I weren’t even in complete agreement about how we wanted to live, but we’d had several years together to find enough overlap that building lives side by side felt achievable.

They argued I could change. That I already had changed many times in the span we'd known each other. Which was true.

In the time I knew them, I found I love traveling for more than just business. Into the woods or the desert or down to the sea where I don't have to talk to a single fucking human for days if I choose. I travel to get to observe the world without feeling the obligation to participate the way I do when I’m home with my responsibilities or running classes. But I can only manage being away from my space for a month at a stretch before weevils start eating my brain.

See, I have realized home is in my workshop. Give me my beautiful weathered workbenches in a well lit room that smells of Barge cement, of fresh watercolor, of rich leather. Let me feel the hum of my sewing machine beneath my hands and foot as if it were an extension of my being. This is where I feel most myself, in a life where I can spend the day tinkering and come evening slip off through the backdoor to meadows and creeks, to the shadows of gnarled trees.

It's how I convinced myself that a life on the farm could work with my partner. Access to nature, to putting my hands in the soil to grow roots? To hours spent in a shed turned workshop? I could do that. My partner could be a planet in my life, a daily presence. Something that was fixed even as its orbit evolved with time.

But perhaps that was part of the problem. My agreement with my partner wasn’t born entirely out of romanticism, a need to be with them every day in my life. It came from the practicality of “we enjoy each other’s company, our plans are compatible in these ways, let us see how this goes.” Practicality doesn’t hold a fairy tale power to it.

I now understand that I wanted my paramour as a moon in my life, waxing and waning as our orbits drifted closer and away from each other, the gravity of our relationship shifting us both in little ways. Their company made me feel more grounded in myself and witnessing them cultivating their life energized me to do the same. It feels like a blessing to finally understand what I wanted in that relationship, and a regretful curse that it came far too late.

My partner and my paramour were never competitors in my life. They occupied different spaces in my solar system. But I did a poor job making that clear to anyone involved as I let my fear in the face of my partner's anger and insecurity overwhelm me. I struggled constantly towards the end of that partnership to understand where my partner was coming from, why they felt threatened so deeply. A planet need not wax and wane like a moon to be wanted and a moon had no need to be ever visible in the sky in order to be loved.

Except my partner did not want to be among my planets, I suspect. They wanted to be my sun.

Relationships as a solar system is a metaphor I thank tumblr for, or specifically, I thank an unnamed older Black butch lesbian in a random tumblr user’s anecdote.

Said butch explained to the poster that she viewed her relationships as part of her solar system. Some were brief and brilliant comets that streaked through the sky before vanishing. Others were planets, ever present and long lasting. And some were moons, going in and out but always felt.

Reading that description, a dislocated joint finally slipped into place. I’d tried non hierarchical polyamory and found it riddled with unspoken hierarchies and rules that chafed. I’d done hierarchical polyamory and hated myself for the cruelty of forcing my relationships into fixed shapes. But this description? That didn’t designate which relationships could be planets or moons or meteors? This description gave words to my desires and my dreams. It made sense of my experiences, too late for some of them, but there will be others.

But if our relationships are a solar system of planets, constellations, moons, stars, where do we fit in?

We are our sun.

We sit at the center of our solar system, moving in relationship to each celestial body that flows in, out, through our lives, influenced by their pull but never dislocated by it.

It took me a while to connect this. It felt egotistical, to consider myself the center of a universe. But I’ve spent a lot of time this year supporting someone who never let herself be the center of her life and her heart is scoured raw with decades of resentment from that. Watching her has felt like a vision of my own future if I don’t cut the shit and stop trying to keep others around by displacing myself.

Humility is recognizing that I am the sun in my life and no one else’s, and that is as it should be.

Every planet in my life? They are a sun in theirs.

Ever moon in my life? They are a sun in theirs.

Every comet? A sun in their life.

And in their life I am? A planet, a moon, a shooting star.

What if I have made someone a planet in my life and I am only a moon to them?

Then there is room to talk about what to do about a mismatched emotional or tangible investment. How can we each get our needs met? What does commitment that fits us both look like? How can someone be very important to me without that creating pressure to match that in certain ways? How can I be a flowing presence in someone’s life without that shunting me to a back burner?

But if someone wants to be a sun for me?

There’s nothing I can offer, no compromise we can make that will satisfy them. We will hurt ourselves over and over attempting to bridge that gap.

The messaging we receive about love tells us that a romantic partner should be the center of our universe, and only one romantic partner at that. Nonmonogamy seeks to leave that narrative and restructure our relationships in a way that doesn’t place romantic love above all else, or at least doesn’t say one romantic love is better than all others. That’s a hard lesson to unlearn though and oftentimes I feel like nonmonogamy practices fail to actually address the ways hierarchy shows up in our relationships as adults.

The romantic partner we’ve been with five years often trumps the one we met six months ago. Which partners get the same consideration as family members we’re close with often varies widely depending on:

• our proximity to said partner

• how much we’ve entwined our lives

• how often we see each other.

And our monogamous friends and family can often reinforce that by how they respond to our lovers and partners, which ones get “friend” status and which ones they acknowledge the romance with.

And platonic friends?

Good luck allowing them to have any kind of ranking if you’ve entered into “serious” romantic relationships.

I haven’t been monogamous since I was nineteen. But I still fell into the pit of “if you want your lover to know you care, you have to make them your sun.”

I don’t believe in the ideas of soul mates or a singular true love, so I didn’t catch myself in the fall. Because I wasn’t tripping from the place of amanormativity, aka the normalization of romantic relationships as the highest importance in our social lives, I was falling from an old, rotting place in my heart.

The place that said if someone loves me they’re allowed to hurt me, to take from me. The place that says it’s fine to be scared of people who love me, since I am difficult to love. The place that says love is to give, and give, and give.

So why not make my lovers the sun?

Except what do you do, when it’s time to cleave the sun in two? What happens when it becomes three? Four? How many times can you crack open a star before gravity goes haywire? How many times before they all collide back into themselves vying for your energy and attention or crushed under the weight of upholding a galaxy they never asked for?

(How long until you collapse, your heart crushing in on itself to become a black hole, hungry for the love and acknowledgement you keep giving away to other people in hopes that they’ll stick around?)

Eh, not too long, honestly. Four and a half years to six months, depending.

I realized my partner wouldn’t be satisfied until they were my sun when I found myself sobbing in front of them over a blisteringly new break up and their interest in my pain began and ended with making sure I didn’t blame them for my heartbreak. This came after months of couples therapy, of processing conversations, of adjustments, of compromises and arguments that had left me stripped to bare nerves.

I ended that relationship a month later.

But that didn’t end my impulse to give away my solar placement.

My paramour and I got back in touch. And I, eager to atone for the ways I neglected them, for not making them feel loved, attempted to show them how important they were to me the only way I knew how: I made them my sun.

Except I was still a panicked, rolling eyed horse when it came to any relationship that involved a whiff of romance or sex. I hadn’t recovered from my exhaustion and overwhelm. So giving someone solar placement in my life felt less like worshipful devotion and more like frenzied fixation.

“You feel like a completely different person,” They told me.

Because I was. Because I had switched them categorically, into the realm of “You can treat me however you please, I’ll let you scare the shit out of me and still show up the next day to hang out if you offer me a half formed apology and promise it’ll be the last time. I will cry and I will beg and sometimes I will fight, but I won’t call it quits. I won’t hold a boundary. I won’t tell you to go blow smoke up your ass. I’ll just congeal, bones turning to jelly, until you're left holding my weight and we’re both wondering where my spine went.”

They didn’t want to be my sun. I didn’t want to make them my sun. But I didn’t know any other way to show my love and I didn’t slow down enough to let myself get out of crisis mode and into a space where I could breathe and think before I jumped.

If all that sounds like a recipe for pain, frustration, and disappointment, it’s because it was.

It took me half a year to catch myself, and truly the catching only happened after my friend scared the shit out of me by confessing several things that I feel like would have been very good to know months before they left their mouth.

But they were a people pleaser.

But I was a people pleaser.

But nobody was pleased by any of this.

They scared the shit out of me, but what scared the shit out of me more was realizing my own self destructive behavior was reflected in the creeping horror I felt about theirs.

I ran halfway round the world from that sinking realization, but it followed me all the way back home.

I thought I was being selfless by giving away the sun to other people. Thought I was showing the deepest devotion I could. Thought I could read my way out of the paradox of “how do you keep splitting the sun without all the lights going out in the sky?”

These days I suspect selflessness and self destruction share a bunk.

Selflessness is just the name we give to all the ways we tear ourselves to pieces to keep other people warm, because it’s socially acceptable to hurt ourselves if it’s to the benefit of others. And don’t misunderstand me, part of loving others is recognizing we will inconvenience ourselves for them. We will occasionally take on burdens as part of that loving, but there is a limit to how far that can or should go. And there is a reciprocity to that inconvenience and burdening. Sometimes you’re the hand up and sometimes you’re asking for the boost. That’s life and that’s love.

Except it can go too far when we find ourselves automatically taking on the burdens in relationships, reflexively swallowing our needs, losing track of our wants, and generally assuming that there is no talking through things there is only flexing to handle whatever comes our way. For a finite amount of time, that can make the other person feel profoundly loved and attended to, but that only lasts as long as our well of generosity is deeper than our resentments at giving beyond our abilities without fully voicing our own needs.

Then the hourglass turns over and the object of our affection bears the weight of a debt they didn’t know they were incurring.

I didn’t realize I’d lost the comfort of my friend’s benefit of the doubt until I’d spent it all on things unnamed. I didn’t realize I’d overspent my own belief in their goodwill until I found myself bracing for their hand to follow their words, an old expectation rising from the grave even though logically I knew it wasn’t called for.

Sometimes we only change the way a phoenix does, by burning all the way down to ash and taking a bunch of shit down with us.

My heart beats differently these days in the hearth of my chest.

I don’t know how to be the sun. I still catch myself trying to swap people–planets, moons, meteors, into place as the moment calls for. Who is having a hard time? Who needs attention? Who made me feel happy today?

Someone making me feel loved is not grounds for being the center of my universe. Wanting someone to feel loved is not grounds for making them the center of my universe.

If I am tired of my life feeling unstable, then I need to stop fucking with the gravity for every pretty face with a trace of kindness in their hands.

I’m a new moon in a lot of people’s lives these days. I’ve been stretched vellum thin and most of the energy I have is called upon by a small group of people who really need me to show up planetary style in their lives right now. I’m letting myself be okay with that, and trusting that the people who I’m drifting in far orbit from will have other folks swing in close when they need that kind of heavy support.

But the moments in between that belong just to me? I’m practicing what it feels like to be the sun.

What do I need today?

Who do I feel like talking to?

What am I craving?

Where am I feeling off balance?

What am I curious about?

How can I address my problems? Who can I ask for help?

Where do I want to put my time?

How do I want to look?

What pleasure am I after?

Where do I want to go?

What are my plans? What does my heart say? Who am I today? What hints do I see of who I will be tomorrow?

How bright can I glow?

I didn’t know my lungs could fill this deep.

I would do anything for love, but make you the sun. 

We have to live by the words of Meatloaf: I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.