100 Days, 100 Dates:
Meta-Memoir of a Pansexual, Polyamorous, 39-year-old divorcée
An Introduction: Since They Asked . . .
Los Angeles, City of Angels, is my namesake. My non-biological father noticed the names my mother liked, Lise and Angelica, created the initials of a city in the States, a city where he wanted to move. So, by combining those names, our family’s fate was set and my initials became a concession to a man who wanted a Jennifer. Well, he didn’t actually want a Jennifer. A vasectomy in his twenties should have indicated just how little he wanted a child. My mother, however, really wanted to be a mom. Agreeing to be my father on paper was the price my legal father paid to get her back after she had left him. I would spend thirty-five years trying to win over a man who knew he didn’t want me years before I had been crafted in a university medical facility.
The day I learned of my atypical creation, I was fifteen years old and I’d just come out as a lesbian—or maybe bisexual, I wasn’t sure. To this day, I don’t understand the correlation, but my mother used my coming-out as the impetus to confirm something I’d suspected since I was a toddler, when I first asked her if I was adopted. As she explained my origins, I imagined a maple leaf with the words “Made in Canada” stamped across the bottom of my foot, just like the toys I’d played with as a child. From that day on, I knew my suspicions were true. I would never meet anyone like me. Life had made me an outsider from the moment a donated sperm joined with my mother’s Mennonite egg. Mennonites are an old-world, ethnoreligious group of pacifists, similar to the Amish. I invite you to imagine someone born at that intersection. I was unique from inception.
Los Angeles, City of Angles, is a place littered with giant billboards for the latest movies and television series. The stars whose faces adorn these billboards can be seen in the restaurants and shops below them, or, in my case, at work. As a child, I wanted to be an actor, but believed my beauty too ordinary to risk my livelihood on it. So instead, I used a perfect GPA, good exam scores, and a writing portfolio to get into New York University’s film school on a substantial scholarship. From there, I worked my way up to become a Hollywood editor, augmenting the worlds of more successful artists and celebrities for sixty hours a week.
In Los Angeles, City of Angeles, where everyone wants to be seen, my day job is to be an invisible magician. Editors are the people who make stars look like they remembered their lines, fix other departments’ mistakes, and help re-write everything from structure to sentences recorded after the fact. We help choose music and craft sound and tone and pace, and we get little credit for any of it. But we don’t get ripped apart, either.
For nearly two decades, it was comfortable enough in my little dark room to stay there, in the place colloquially dubbed “the cone of silence.” Edit bays are where writers, directors and producers speak candidly about the project, as well as the other people involved in its creation, including its stars. It is the editors’ job to know when to listen, when to offer advice, when to be a cheerleader, when to suggest a solution, and when to shut the fuck up and just operate the damn computer. That was almost enough for me for a long time. Almost enough, until my personal life got bigger than the stories I was helping others tell.
“Stranger than fiction” was a phrase I heard in response to things that felt mundane in my personal life. While I couldn’t get agents or producers to read the fictitious scripts I’d created, I often found myself candidly answering personal questions garnering reception that ranged from amusement to full-on theft . . . allusions to my life printed in scripts months later. I remember one producer even took out his notepad, about to jot down something I’d said, when I asked him not to use the information. “Never tell a writer your secrets,” he advised. But why would I treat a writer differently than I’d treat anyone else?
I’m not sure what compels a person to ask a stranger about their sexual activities and preferences, about their lovers, about their most intimate private moments . . . yet I have been fielding all sorts of personal questions, including these, since I was fifteen years old. It’s so common that I’ve grown to believe anyone who wants them has a right to my innermost thoughts.
Some use the term emotional labor to describe the effort it takes to educate people about the experiences of a marginalized group. Emotional labor came easily for me; that willingness to educate stitched into my aura like a beacon of tolerance. I spoke as the lower-class, American granddaughter of a Mexican-Mennonite grandmother, a Ukrainian-refugee grandfather, and the daughter of a Canadian-Mennonite mother who chose donor conception under the guise of fertility research. I educated as a bisexual-turned-lesbian-turned-pansexual woman who came out six months before Ellen spoke into an airport microphone. As a sexual minority, I advocated for better accuracy in the telling of not just my community’s stories but other minorities’ I’d made the effort to learn about firsthand. Still, for me, there is nothing that has resulted in expending emotional labor more than openly identifying as polyamorous since early 2006, when I was first introduced to the word after my then-girlfriend and I organically fell in love with another woman, forming a polyfidelitous triad.
Our throuple dispelled my belief that it was impossible to romantically love more than one person at the same time. It also opened the door to a relationship structure requiring more self-awareness and inner work than most twenty-somethings have capacity for, and, unsurprisingly, our triad imploded after two drama-soaked years. It was that relationship, however, that opened my mind to having an open mind. If I could be wrong about my own capacity to love two humans concurrently, then surely I could be wrong about most assumptions too premature to have the benefit of experience.
My most recent primary relationship, which lasted ten mostly harmonious years, had been defined as polyamorous from the outset. As two people assigned female at birth (AFAB), we presented to the world as lesbians, which you would think American society would have had a grasp on by 2008, when we first met, though you would be wrong.
I recall one romantic dinner, while on vacation in Carmel-by-the-Sea. We had splurged on a bottle of wine when normally we’d order a glass. The restaurant owner, a gregarious Jordanian fellow, pulled up a chair, accepted a glass from our bottle, and proceeded to ask about our lesbian experience for over an hour and a half. His intentions seemed innocent, we felt physically safe, yet we struggled internally with our desire to share a romantic dinner alone and the queer call of duty. Same-sex marriage was still illegal in our home state of California, and federally as well. Armed with open-minded curiosity, I knew this man had the ability to spread news of our humanity to people who might never speak with queers so honestly. He wanted to understand our life, from social impact to familial complications and logistically what we did together in bed, at one point asking how we didn’t “miss male anatomy.”
Most of you are undoubtedly thinking I didn’t owe him an answer to these questions, and it’s true, I did not. Yet I answered. I answered every question posed that night, as had been my nature to do. Later, when we opened up our relationship fully, I answered a series of questions so regularly that I could predict the order in which they would be asked. I continued to hear these questions throughout the writing of this book, and use dates twenty-one to twenty-five to answer them for you in detail. I answered these and other questions throughout our marriage when things were going brilliantly, and I fielded painful questions throughout our divorce. My soon-to-be-ex-spouse and I made ethical non-monogamy work for a decade. When our marriage and family therapist asked my ex if they had any regrets, they said only that others would assume our separation was due to polyamory. It was not.
I had found myself with clinical depression and anxiety after losing both parents to estrangement, followed by the deaths of two family members in short succession, compounded by an extended period of unemployment. This occurred just prior to my ex coming out as non-binary, changing their name, dropping the pronouns she/her in favor of they/them, and telling me they wanted a new job, home—basically, a new life. Many of these could send people into crisis and are hard on the most committed of partnerships. To occur one on top of the other, I guess it was too much for either of us to manage. That’s my best guess as to why it ended, at least. To this day, the reason my significant ex cited was that they found me annoying. While this is probably true, I couldn’t imagine many couples would make it past the ten-year mark without using that adjective about one another on occasion. I had similar thoughts at times, but the love I felt for them was what I chose to focus on most often. It was a love I was committed to transmuting into the most amicable divorce I could muster.
Six months of conscious uncoupling later and I had reached full acceptance. I saw the person I thought I’d rock into old age with grow into a human I barely recognized, but whose happiness mattered to me. That’s the thing about love . . . when you love someone the way I loved my significant ex, their happiness becomes even more important than one's own. Even if it means you have to start over.
This book was born ten months after our separation, seeing the experiment as a twofer. It was a creative way to make the most out of something I never wanted, divorcing someone I still loved and doing so at an age when a woman’s worth is most called into question. It was also the opportunity to answer every personal question anyone has asked me at a cocktail party, work lunch, or date-turned-info-session.
Perhaps if I give you, dear reader, a first-hand glance into my life as a pansexual, polyamorous, thirty-nine-year-old divorcée, I can reach enough people to feel like I’ve done my duty. So, to all of those who have wondered “how does it work?”, I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell one story with chaotic grace. This is what it looks like when a woman who is hungry for connection—without limits on gender, race, nationality, age, height, ability or class—puts everything she can into finding polyamorous love during the final one hundred days of her thirties.