Relationships
When Relationship Hopping Works
Owning the motive makes all the difference.
When I first encounter someone who is going to be significant in my life I know it. There seems to be a light emanating from their body and I often find myself staring at them, hoping I don’t seem too creepy. This light assures me that eventually they will be impacting my life. I don’t know when or where, I just know it’s coming and it always does.
That’s what makes Yael even more special. I didn’t see a light emanating from her because she lives a thousand miles away, but I did see it come from her words when I discovered her on Medium. I was new to the writer’s platform in 2018, stumbling around in an attempt to assess whether I belonged there. When I read Yael’s writing for the first time, not only did I know I belonged, I knew I was destined to know this person deeply. I can’t remember the details of the article, except for the fact that it was about sex. I started to formulate a picture of what she looked like in human form, and honestly I got pretty close. Long blond hair, fierce in spirit and lovely curves. A goddess in every way. After several months I reached out to her to open a dialog about having her write for Pollinate Magazine. I was fan-girl nervous. She accepted. Over many months I devoured her work and with every read the light got brighter. Sometimes I felt like she was akin to a search algorithm, invading my soul, taking my thoughts and then feeding them back to me with the most perfect introspection and timing. She was writing about her own life and it all just seemed to thread so beautifully with my own. I left her polite responses that all read something like “we are twins.”
I once again got myself tangled in the familiar web of an emotionally inaccessible man. He inhabited all my favorite attributes. Brilliant intellect as demonstrated by a wicked sense of humor. Smoldering sexuality that hinted to an irresistible recklessness. Stories for days and a love of adventure that was certain to create more. A killer ability to make cinnamon rolls. A softness that was born from the love of a strong mother and devotion to a feisty daughter. And most importantly, wounds and a transition that would make me simultaneously useful and irrelevant.
Everyday for seven months I woke up thinking, ‘Is this the day he bails?’ In a cruel moment of irony, that day finally came right when I started to believe that maybe this time I had met someone who really meant to stick around. The proceeding weeks of pain and confusion built upon one another as I tried to make sense of how I’d walked so far only to be back at the same place I started. At the apex of this journey I decided to engage in the one thing you should never do when leaving a relationship– jump into another one.
Yael and I had slowly gotten to know each other through sporadic emails over the course of the lost year of Covid, but when I sat down to type out an email on a late spring night, I was in the throes of deep mourning for myself; particularly my body. Loneliness was surging through my soul veins. It was searing and I was begging the Goddess to release me. She spoke only one word, “Yael.” So I sat down and typed out everything I was feeling. I knew it was more vulnerable than our relationship dictated, but at that point I didn’t care. I just needed to admit it out loud. I needed someone else to know that I was suffering. I told her I didn’t need her to respond, just be present for my witnessing. But she did respond and it went something like this, “we are twins.”
It turns out that she and I were crawling through very similar muck. She too was dealing with the latest in a lifelong string of emotionally unavailable men. When she wrote back it was as if we both found a dinghy in very stormy seas and knew we now wouldn’t drown. Neither of us wanted to talk to our already fatigued friends about what was going on. Hell, we didn’t even want to admit to ourselves that this chapter in our lives felt like the exact same chapter we’d written many times before. Each of us having someone who hadn’t heard the other’s respective story, but could simultaneously relate to it in every conceivable way, was nothing short of a gift from God.
Our correspondence became a flood of sorrow, anger, questioning, laughter, and discovery. It provided me with immediate safety. I knew straight away that nothing I had to share would be off limits. With every email, polo and text message, our safe harbor grew as well as our realization of how miraculous it was to find another person so alike in temperament and history at the very moment we were both feeling utter abandonment.
We got into a rhythm. She’d send me a polo (video message) at night before she headed to bed and I would respond when I woke up in the morning. We dissected our emotions, talked about coping strategies and gave each other permission for everything. We started sharing all the other aspects of our lives too; the status of our garden, our mothers and what we’d been working to publish. We became each other’s cheerleader both privately and publicly. Heart everything, comment with support. Don’t let her forget. . . you are not alone.
We opened into deep vulnerability because that is the state we were in when these almost-men left us. We needed someone else to hold that vulnerability and honor it completely, because that is what we had offered, and that is what had been rejected. This is where most people find themselves in the immediate aftermath of a breakup; with so much to give and no one to receive it. It is a struggle for emotional survival because you aren’t just dealing with the reality of loss and rejection, you are deciding whether you are going to abandon the hope of love all together. As with someone fighting for their lives, you often fight the hardest at the end. It was at this precipice that I found Yael and started to fight for my faith in love.
The Non-Rebound Rebound
There is no question that rebounding from a devastating breakup by jumping into another relationship is generally a bad idea. I recently saw an acquaintance, who I know was going through a break up, post on her social media that the best way to get over someone was to get under someone else. There were multiple responses supporting her strategy.
Uh . . . no. The best way to deal with pain and anguish is not to use another human being in an effort to deny your feelings. That is exploitative and cruel to the person you are using, and yet it is completely supported in our culture. In fact, this is how and why I believe most people use dating apps.
It is a completely unrealistic coping mechanism. Jumping into someone else’s bed and their life isn’t going to solve your problem, it will just delay it. When you figure it out, guess who’s going to be holding the bag; that sacrificial bod you picked out of a crowd. And trust me, they’re not going to understand why you’re pulling away or changing your mind. They are just going to be sent into the hell of rejection and questioning you decided to pass on when you rebounded or worse, used them as a ‘pre-bound’ to exit an existing relationship.
That being said, it occurred to me that if Yael were a man, and we were fucking, that our relationship might qualify as a rebound relationship or relationship ‘hop.’ Here’s why it doesn’t, beyond the fact that she’s not a man and we aren’t fucking.
I’m not trying to emotionally replace the person who bailed on me with Yael. I’m leaning into her love, and she to mine, in support of our mutual healing. Our relationship is allowing me to dive deeper into my pain by allowing me a safe, supported space to explore it. There is no question that we are filling some legitimate empty space for each other and that our devotion to each other is a life line some days, but we are both clear about this, and because we are, we actually celebrate this aspect of our connection. I think this transparency and understanding is so important. It brings an equity and safety to our relationship that is imperative for the rebuild we are both working on. A rebuild that is required by anyone who has endured a breakup.
This is what I believe is missing in conventional ‘rebound’ relationships. The choice to openly make the primary purpose of the relationship to provide healing, not an escape hatch. I mean how much healthier would these relationships be if we went into them acknowledging the need for healing through the relationship? I think if we made authentic space for this type of relationship we all wouldn’t be pretending to be completely fixed, whole or healed for a partner. Is that really ever the case anyway? Are we ever really done with the journey to ourselves? I hope not. Additionally, we wouldn’t forgo the opportunity for legitimate healing love because we’re ‘not ready for a relationship.’ We could embrace the idea that love has many purposes and timelines. We would recognize that relationship exists outside of the limited scope of eternal, exclusive, co-habitating, pro-creative, Disney-esque trope our culture has invested in so heavily. We could meet each other where we are at instead of waiting in vain for someone to show up where we are.
Although my clarity on this has come through platonic love, that doesn’t mean platonic love is required for this type of transparency and acceptance. It can happen with people who are sexually engaged with each other too. I do believe, however, this transparency is even more crucial if you are sharing sexual space.
The irony is that the beautiful and complex man that exited stage left, bringing Yael more deeply into my life, provided only one clue as to his sloppy departure. He was moving through the final stages of a divorce and told me early on in our acquaintance that he didn’t want to do what he’d always done in the past and ‘hop right into another relationship.’ I don’t know if this is true, or a bunch of shit, but on my better days I prefer to believe that he ultimately chose to love me by not making me another tragic rebound relationship (by establishing some boundaries and ultimately leaving our relationship) when he so easily could have. On my bad days I reach out to Yael, and she reminds me of the power of divine timing and that opening to love with honest intention, especially in your darkest hour, is forever worth it.
©Kathryn A. Dickel 2021
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