When I first started thinking about having a boyfriend, around the 7th grade, I always had two or three candidates in mind. If one of them turned out to be not what I had thought, if he had an annoying laugh or was weird around my cat, then there was a back-up in place. I always had all of them interested in me, but held at a short distance.
With my first long-term boyfriend, a relationship that lasted nearly two years of high school, I still did it. I would change my back-ups, but there was always at least one.
My first serious boyfriend and I set up housekeeping together in a tiny cottage behind another house in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, which was not quite so posh then. [My neighbor diagonally across the weathered redwood backyard fence was the novelist and poet Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar!) and it was before he was married to Akiko, so being able to hang out with him lent beatnik cachet to this cottage life. What a memorable back-up.]
I was still in school, the boyfriend was pursuing a photography career as well as a burgeoning weed habit (to give you an idea of the quantities we had around, he kept it in a Palladium shoebox – yes, he seriously wore the Pallabrouse French Legionnaire boots) financed by a big puffy trust fund, and the singular most healthy thing we did was that we each brought all of our ‘own’ friends into the relationship.
He knew all of my friends, mostly other women, and I knew all of his, mostly other young men, and everybody got along. There was still a hippie-love hangover in San Francisco during the 70s, but we all really did like each other. Only in hindsight can I see that social melding like that is not so commonplace.
Over the past four decades, I’ve observed that usually one person ends up giving up some of their own friends, part of their own social network, and devoting more time and energy to their partner. That is not necessarily a negative thing – it can be that some friends can hold a person back from exploring, growing and learning new and different ways of being in the world. But you likely know at least one woman who sacrificed her good long-term friendships with other women for the sake of her new partner’s attention and affection. And it was a sad loss.
So in that relationship, I did keep my own friends, and among them were a couple of back-ups. Reserve boyfriends, that I’d known for a few years, and there wouldn’t be any unpleasant surprises. But in this time, I found new potential back-ups in his crowd. During these two years of urban cottage life I did find out he slept with other women on numerous occasions, but I wasn’t really bothered about it. Charming rogue was what he did. And he and his family thought I was the key to his healthy future life, with my positive outlook and lentil soups and super college cred.
The thing is, by the time I did learn of all of his youthful indiscretions, I’d already decided on an exit plan. And I did exit, and I did not recruit one of the back-ups. It was really nice to be by myself, and when I did want to go dancing or go camping with someone, one was called in. Like a temp assignment. Sometimes with weed and sex.
Later on, I did have longer affairs with two of the back-ups , and one of them introduced me to my husband. But throughout those relationships and affairs, I never got frisky with anyone else. I find the term ‘being faithful’ a little creepy, with all of those Judeo-Christian overtones and a scary hint of fundamentalist prisoner-wives, so it was just what I did, how I behaved.
I’ve been with my husband 43 years, and have continued to have back-ups around, but then it became only one, and as the years ticked by there were periods of 3 or 4 months where I didn’t think about it.
It’s not because I’m deliriously happy in love after all these years, more like I have a lot going on, doing lots of varied things, and it just kind of fell by the wayside. And speaking of varied, some of the back-ups have been women.
Then, this week, I had a revelation. I’m not interested in having back-ups anymore. This has been a lifelong habit, like eating chocolate while I read in bed. My horse is taking the solo path, no hitching to a wagon train or the single post outside the general store, this cowgirl is singing all the harmonies of this song herself.
Friends are it. Friends, the women who make you laugh like a hyena and can share your sobs, the men that just like to hang out and talk, the ones who repeat the same stories, the younger ones who educate me, the older ones who give me perspective, the whole messy lot of them. Choosing when and how to get together and for how long, the only expectation camaraderie, and the only commitment social interaction.
This is one of my freedoms.