"Monogamy is over, or ending..." say the magazines. Relationships don't survive, say the experts, but apparently monogamy doesn't seem to help very much. Those relationships fail at a similar rate. Living outside of monogamy doesn't help, either, but it does beg the question... if everything will fail anyway, why not live a life beyond imagination?
Well, that is just an observation/reaction to a headline sent to me by the lover of imperfect heroes this morning. I don't mean to suggest that he was Peter Beard's lover. I'm just saying that monogamy might not have saved Beard or anybody else.
One of the more difficult things to make work after the volatility of intense passion is gone is love. It might take years before you realize how much the volatility carried the weight of the romance at times. Take Raquel and I, for example. We have broken up in a significant way at least four times. I don't mean just an angry "go home" argument when we were together but living apart. I mean the type of breakup where one of us moves out from where we were living together and we start seeing other people. We would be millionaires by now if our love had been more adequately anchored.
When we went to Burning Man we were to meet a friend who was bringing his son that is close to Rhys's age. When we got there it was difficult to tell what wasn't quite right, but I could sense something. I have learned not to spend too much time trying to figure things out at an event like that. I'm sure there is some stated principle around "radical self-confusion" or something similar.
By the next day my buddy was wanting to explain things. His wife had announced herself as polyamorous to him. She was camping elsewhere. He was left to try and understand what he had been told. To add to this, her situation had been further explained to him by one of her lovers and that, if he really loves her, he should accept her as she truly is and praise her inner beauty. One of her other lovers might have also encouraged him to likewise accept her true self. He was surrounded and in a safe space they implored him to understand.
It was too much for him. He packed up and went home, leaving us to explore the playa as a three-headed reveler. He tried to shake it off, but Burning Man is not always the best place to ask or answer the more serious questions of life.
That said, I left my wedding band in the temple, lodged between two slats of wood, where it burned to liquid and is gone forever. Though, I had made the decision to do that before we arrived. Melodramatic, you think? Not at all. This is the first time I've mentioned it to anybody, and will probably delete this paragraph before I click the publish button. It was a quiet decision. While you may not answer the toughest questions of your life in a place like that, it can be a useful place to exercise letting things go.
The non-religious can lean into ritual as needed. Symbols can go up in flames, too, says the great golden Buddha in the sky.
I have accepted that mine and Rachel's relationship is doomed and over twice out there in the desert now, and have been forced to accept the same in far worse environments. I couldn't have been wrong every time.
Nothing is over when there is a child. Not even death can end those vast empty tensions.
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