A True (Non-Hierarchical, Shared) Love

I sit in front of Cory the day after his birthday dinner, slightly hungover and jittery. I anxiously rip a paper napkin into many tiny shreds, stumbling through a speech about having needed to tell him something for weeks now. I do not need him to feel or say it back, I swear. I don’t want to make things awkward. I just desperately need the words to be out there, out of me.

I take a deep breath and sigh.

“I love you,” I say. There. It’s out there.

I’ve destroyed everything. I know it. I nervously chatter right on, concentrating again on the paper napkin, assuring him that this changes nothing and that it’s entirely my “hassle” to deal with. Finally, I’m done. I look up.

He’s smiling.

“I love you too,” he says.

Oh.

I’ve agonized over this for weeks. And now it’s…done? Just like that.

It seems perfect, that moment, as he holds me close, the two of us burrowing happily into the wondrous, downy softness of reciprocated love. The rest of the week, I’ll go about my day with staggeringly corny Bollywood songs playing on loop in my head. It’s perhaps the closest I’ve felt to floating up and away.

A few hours later, Cory tenderly kisses me goodbye and walks out into the warm Beijing evening. He heads home to his live-in girlfriend, who he is also very much in love with. As he is with his wife, who’s away in New York, in another steady relationship of her own.

Since I moved to Beijing last year, eating duck feet had, for the longest time, been the most unexpected experience my new home brought me. Then I go and fall in love with a polyamorous man.

---

I grew up in suburban Mumbai — a neighborhood called Vile Parle — the kind largely populated by respectable, upstanding retirees with offspring that have acquired engineering and IT degrees, and settled down in American suburbia. It’s a relatively more conservative part of the city, with most of my high school friends having married by the time we hit 26 — some to first boyfriends, some through arranged marriages. It’s a kind of life I spent most of my early twenties thrashing against, eager to find one that would fit me better. A string of relationships left me a bit broken, a bit lost, wondering if I should have just done what my parents always told me to. Maybe they knew better. My choices seemed to lead me nowhere.
Except for one, which brought me to Beijing. I arrived here at 27, determined to be a different person, keep my heart safe. No falling in love, no emotional investment. I dived into casual sex, learned for the first time in my life what casual racism feels like, what a not-quite-consensual sexual experience feels like. I stopped trusting men. I wrote. I wondered if I’d ever be “good enough” for someone to in fall love with. I missed home. I didn’t want to go back home.

---

I first meet Cory in March of 2017 when Beijing’s winter is still refusing to give way to spring and I’m mortally afraid of the static electricity coming off of every faucet in the house. We match on Tinder, me and this white 29-year-old political science student on an exchange program from the US. It’s meant to be a fling at most, really.

He’s cute. We talk for a bit – mostly about language. I tell him what made me want to learn Italian, and about growing up speaking Hindi, Marathi, a little bit of Gujarati. I find it cool that he speaks Korean and Chinese. As I’d learn later, his wife is Korean.

But ugh, what’s the point, I grumble to my friend Mitali who lives in New Delhi, the day before we’re supposed to meet. “He’s poly, yaar. Where can it go?”

“Go meet him,” she instructs. “You might have fun. People can surprise you.”

But do I really want to spend approximately six hours shaving my legs, washing my hair, venturing out into the chilly winter, and enduring what could potentially be a very boring date for at least 90 minutes, all for the prospect of a mildly pleasant surprise and half-decent lay?

---

I like the bar. Filled with candlelight, it’s tucked away inside a hutong, and has punk rock posters on the walls. “Mi-Thi-Laa…Mithila,” he repeats after I tell him how to pronounce my first name. He’s determined to get his tongue around the unfamiliar “Th” sound. Most Westerners pronounce it like the “t” in “matter”, instead of flattening the tongue against the roof of the mouth. Like the “th” in “then,” but with a slight aspiration.

It’s hard to explain, so often I don’t bother. It feels a tiny bit unsettling when he manages to get it right. The good kind of unsettling.

He excuses himself for taking a second to look at his phone. His girlfriend Erica has just landed in Beijing. She was in Wuhan on a work trip. He sends her a text. Then he puts his phone back on the table, face down.

Girlfriend. It’s still so weird. We get another round of beers and discuss intersectional feminism.

A few hours later, we’re entwined on the couch at the end of the room. He’s a good kisser.

---

A couple of months pass. I try not to meet him every week, but alas I do. Erica travels a lot for work so he and I spend whole weekends together, having sex, listening to podcasts, going for brunch. I try to make sure I see other guys too. But the sex with him is way too good. I become irritated with myself. Self-control, idiot.

Ah well, I assure myself, at least I’m not getting involved with him. He’s married. He has a girlfriend… I tell myself it’s too weird, that I’d never have a part in this.

We talk about very non-relationship-related things — from nuclear disarmament to Chinese grammar. It’s fun. Too much fun. I feel free to say whatever I want because I’m certain this is going to end soon anyway. This time, I don’t fake orgasms to please my male partner. I worry less and less about my body. It helps that he keeps telling me I’m beautiful which makes me feel as if I am. Because I’m not trying to turn this into a relationship, I have no desire to go out of my way to please him, to attempt to change myself for him. If he doesn’t like me, he can leave.

We become good friends. We’re affectionate with each other. He makes me feel heard. He helps me put broken parts of me back together.

I’m still sure it’s going to end any day now. I keep waiting for it to.

---

When we’ve been dating about two months, I meet his girlfriend Erica for the first time. It’s also her first time meeting someone he’s been seeing. She’s nervous. I’m nervous. Cory is irritatingly chill. “Neither of you has to like each other,” he reminds me, gently. “What we share is not contingent on Erica liking you. She doesn’t get veto power over my life, nor I hers.”

She has suggested the meeting. I have heard enough about her to know I’d like her. Cory says she feels the same. Well, maybe if we met in a slightly different situation though? I’m so nervous. We meet for xiao long bao – Shanghainese soup dumplings. Cory texts me when I’m on my way there to tell me I can sit on his side of the table. This is actually one among a few things I’ve been stressing about. I don’t want to end up on one side alone while they sit across from me, like it’s an interrogation. This text calms me down a bit. So does his hug when I meet him outside the restaurant door.

There is no PDA involved in that meeting. It goes very well. Erica and I talk about Mumbai where she spent some time as part of a work program, and about Harry Potter, and that dark phase in our lives when we both wrote fan fiction. I like her. She seems to like me. She invites me to her birthday party the next day. At the end of the night, as we’re standing around saying goodbye, she cracks a joke and Cory laughs and side-hugs her. It’s the most physical contact they’ve had all night. Later on, he’ll ask me if that had bothered me. I’ll tell him it hadn’t. My feelings are complicated. I feel so happy with them, so relieved it went well. They live together and are planning to move to London in the future. It’s an unusual feeling for me to be the new person in this equation. When I see them hug I feel affection for them. But there is also a little something else: a twinge of jealousy. I realize I’m growing fond of Cory. Ah crap.
There is also some guilt. A mutual friend shares while the two of us are out drinking that she worries a bit for Erica, because I’m the first person Cory has been seeing regularly since the two of them became a couple. She’s worried for Erica, who doesn’t have a new partner at that time, about whether this signals an imbalance. I ask her to let me know if Erica ever tells her she’s worried. I don’t want to cause any problems.

“Nope,” says my poly friend Naomi. “Respect Erica’s agency. If she wants you to know something, she’ll either find a way to tell you or she will talk to Cory. You’re not responsible for Erica, Cory is.”