With All My Heart

Trigger warning: it's a rape survivor's story.

So it can be dangerous to wear your identity on your sleeve if you're a polyamorous woman. Men can think if you're not spoken for, you won't refuse them. And even if you do refuse, who's going to complain? Only you – and we all know how much that counts. But then, when you think about it, that's only one version of how rape or its relatives can go. It can happen whether you're in a relationship, single, a kid even. And all of those were how it was with me.

But this isn't about that, except as part of the background, dimming with the passage of time and my determination to reclaim an authentic sexuality, a lotus out of the mud.

We met at a conference a long time ago, and I was excited to hear he was moving to our town. We shared a passion for politics and I loved his taste in music and to hear him play guitar and sing. I was in a relationship with someone else, but it was supposed to be an open relationship, so I felt fine about falling for Adrian. All the same, it wasn't until Scott was away that I propositioned Adrian, delighted with his enthusiastic response – "shit yeah!"

Over the years, Adrian told me that the first night we slept together, he'd wondered what the hell had been going on with me and Scott – when I was so obviously getting into being with him, but froze at the suggestion he get a condom, and the implication we'd havethatkind of sex. And the way I so clearly relaxed, was so clearly grateful and enthusiastic when he didn't push the point, but suggested we could do other things. (Which we did, with gusto.)

I had been wondering what was going on with me and Scott, too. Something like our last night together, he'd pushed again for me to have sex with him, again setting us both up for his refusal to believe I meant "no." I'd already had two abortions because my moral support had failed: unwittingly using my diaphragm to say yes or no, and then not having the resolve to tell him there was no diaphragm, that my problem was not my religious upbringing that meant I couldn't say yes to the pleasure of sex: I really did mean no. I was feeling at the end of it all, helpless, desperate – when I bit him, on the finger, so hard I could feel the tendon like gristle against the bone. And while he swore at me and rolled away, I just couldn't stop grinning; the glee of the small victory of resistance filling me and taking me by surprise. Yeah, I should have known something was up, and that I wasn't after just something extra with Adrian. I wanted something completely different.

And then there was the fact that I'd been thinking that if it all ended with Scott, the next relationship I would have would be with a woman.

But here I was with Adrian, this gentle, loving human I was getting turned on to, fantasizing about, even willing to try straight sex with, despite what you could call a bit of a phallophobia. And it was sweet, it was nice, it was intimate and wonderful. The only thing that was missing was there were not lots of orgasms. They'd happen sometimes, they'd be a welcome delight. But the way it felt right to me to position myself on his dick, to wrap myself around him and slide slowly up and down, then faster and faster, giving myself up to the pleasure of my yoni, our closeness – it never worked for him. Something was always too much, the wrong angle, too intense. So I'd feel crestfallen, high and dry, disappointed and eventually resigned. This just wasn't going to happen. But the relationship was wonderful, sex usually great – just not fantastic, abandoned, ecstatic.

Some time after our daughter was born, when sex became an interest for me again, somewhere deep inside would hurt during and after sex if Adrian was too deep inside me. It was new, and it was unwelcome. So it was almost like we were starting again.

And somewhere along the line, as we negotiated our way, not just through our lives, but through every sexual encounter in bed, river or kitchen, it got better. Fifteen years after being raped while in Nicaragua, seeking comfort from the full moon, so alone that last Saturday in October, I marched at Reclaim the Night – and later noticed it was the first of all those marches where I didn't once think about Juan or what had happened to me, in the lead up to the march, or even at the march. I started talking about it, confident I was over it.

But still I couldn't put my fantasies of being coerced out of my mind for long. And they were always the easy way to get the orgasms I was missing. Time after time, after we'd make love, Adrian would ask was there anything he could do, but I'd say I was ok, imagine myself powerless and come. I'd alternate between accepting this was how it was and being repulsed that it was so, wishing I were stronger and able to fuck off every man or boy who had ever beset me, and all the imagery of our pro-rape culture, reject all the teaching of the fundamentalist church of my upbringing, end the nexus in me between disempowerment and pleasure.

Desperately sad, I prayed to the god of my childhood, the god I no longer believed in, and made a pact – if you take this away, I'll look for you again. When the fantasies disappeared, I kept my end of the bargain, grateful for the dawning of a realisation that I could get pleasure from acknowledging what I wanted – not to be made to enjoy myself against my will – but to let go and have a good time. I could reject the misogynist taunts of the men who'd said, "Relaje! Cerrate los ojos!" and "you know you want it" and turn my back on the separatist scorn, the fear of being complicit in my own oppression if I owned up to wanting the feel of a man's penis in my mouth, in my yoni. I could get turned on by that without any thoughts of force or fear.

Not that Scott had been right – I had stopped wantinghim– but in my fantasy life it had never seemed to work to just get in and enjoy dick. Maybe I'd resented and felt betrayed by a body that had had an orgasm while I was being raped. "Terminaste?" he'd asked. "Si," I'd replied, wailing inside, waiting for him to sleep so I could start trying to gather my shredded self back to myself.

But now I made peace with myself. Adrian's penis wasn't just something non-threatening, friendly and lovely, acceptable because it was part of him, his beautiful self, his patient, tender, loving self. I started to want his penis in my yoni – and not just his! The most explicit, most sexy dream I ever had, was a dream of a young comrade I'd fallen for – a dream in which I felt his dick right inside my yoni, as I moved up and down, all the way along it, all the way in, all the way out. Oh my god.

So even though the submissive fantasies had started to come back a bit – I did mention they were never gone for long, right? – I was getting more and more turned on, making love with Adrian, feeling him come inside me, sometimes coming too. And I started to fantasise about sucking cock, not necessarily Adrian's, just cock.

And then Jonathan passed through and took my breath away. A traveling musician, political, polyamorous, friendly, open-hearted and frank. I found myself longing for more of him, wondering what it would be like to be one of his many lovers, what his life was really like, yearning to touch his soul as he'd touched mine – not just over the many years where his music had been the soundtrack to much of my life, but in the brief time he spent with us, where I started to get to know him as a person, not just a voice. So in a whirlwind of spring-fed passion, I crossed the country to spend a couple of days with him. The intimacy, the connections, the sex were all fantastic. But this is not that story.

It's the story of the aftermath.

So it turns out the dangers in polyamory aren't just the dangers women face whether we're polyamorous or not.

It turns out that if you're naïve, if it's been a while since you tried it out, if every other time you tried it out, it ended badly but you haven't worked out why, if you don't know what you're doing, if your beloved wants to want it for you and is afraid to acknowledge jealousy, and if you're prone to doing crazy things, wild things, when the spring wakes you .... you can risk someone getting hurt.

And while you're working out what has caused the hurt, while you're coming to terms with the fact that your big-hearted polyamorous feelings aren't the same as the conceptions your darling had of your open relationship, while you're reassuring your dear, stressed-out love that nothing has changed, that your love and desire are as strong as ever, you can be processing what has just happened, what it is you want now, and you can lose your focus on the sweet loving person you've been spending your life with, the one you know you want to keep spending your life with, and you can find yourself asking why and not feeling the love you know is there.

So you can find yourself wondering are you as polyamorous as you thought, is your heart smaller, somehow less elastic, than you were so sure it was. Wondering whether the fantastic sex you'd had was going to be the best in all your life, and whether you were going to be disappointed without the frenzied abandonment to the pleasure of the moment that you'd experienced – experienced and realised with a jolt just how much you were wanting it, missing it.

At least, that's how it was with me.

And you can decide to just say the words of love you know are true in you somewhere, sure you'll feel them again soon. And you can decide to wait and not say what you don't know for sure, because what does a polyamorous woman mean if she calls someone the love of her life? or says she loves with all her heart? And you can decide to make love, feeling gentle and tender and generous and loving and sometimes even turned on.

So that's what I did.

And sometime, somehow, it came to me. I was afraid if I let go my thoughts of Jonathan, my love and passion for him would disappear, that the constancy I value would fail. But I remembered how much I love my mother, my daughter – and how that love is there whether or not I'm thinking of them, no matter how long it is since I've seen them, or until I'll see them again. And that I really don't need to think of them while making love with Adrian. And how I can love them all with all my heart – my heart, my love, are not things that get parceled out in fragments. But it's only in being fully present, fully aware, that I feel my love, know my heart and its fulness.

And in our patient, negotiated, loving way, we kept reaching out our hearts to each other, found our way back to each other, reconnected with each other.

And I was just filled with love and longing for Adrian. I said his name over in my mind and looked into his loving, smiling blue eyes, and I could tell him I loved him, could feel myself wanting him as I began to kiss him deeply, firmly, lovingly, longingly. And I could look into his beautiful eyes without fear, without turning away, facing his honesty with mine and knowing it was pure and complete. And I could see him, and I knew him and I loved him and I could feel it all.

And when he licked my yoni I could stay with him, and when he entered me, I felt him and loved him and I think that's when I said "let's fuck" and it was so beautiful and I felt so close to him, I sobbed as I came, overcome with the relief and the intimacy, full of joy and welcoming the sound in my mind of a dear voice singing "if you love the water let it rain" and letting my tears and the orgasm and the song wash away my pain and fears as I sobbed to Adrian "this is so nice!" [knowing he would probably be worrying there was something wrong and wanting to reassure him that it was so perfect, so right], just clinging to him, embracing him, present with him, coming with him, loving him.

And later again, when we talked about how things were for us, I could feel my love and desire for him welling up past my saturation with Jonathan, past Adrian's stress and jealousy. As we started to kiss, I felt quite deliberate, conscious, you could say insistent. He always loves the gentle way I stroke his skin, and I love to turn him on like that. I love our negotiated love-making – is this ok? Can I touch you here? Looking right into his eyes, loving him, wanting him, I asked, "Can I go down on you?" wanting to be sure it was ok.

I relished licking and stroking his soft sensitive nipples, his sides, burying my face in his tummy, his balls, kissing them all over, kissing his dick, getting more and more turned on and sucking him, hoping it was what he had in mind when he told me about the nicest fellatio he'd ever experienced, with another woman long ago. Looking into his eyes when I could and losing myself in the pleasure of pleasuring him and the feel of his penis in my mouth, the pleasure of my yoni on his leg. Sucking and sucking, up and down his cock with my wet hand wrapped around his dick, moving along with my mouth, wanting him to come, really wanting it with my mouth and yoni, as well as because I hoped to be giving him pleasure. And the joy and relief and pleasure of coming, there with him, with his penis in the back of my mouth and my yoni pressed so close to his leg, feeling so close to him. And then he was coming too, and it all just felt so good.

And still licking and making love with him, with his dick inside my mouth. Then face to face, his penis in my yoni, seeing him, so close and loving.

Not thinking of anyone else, just there, fully present, loving him, the love of my life, with all my heart.