New notebook, new occasion to complain about how lonely and sad I am.
I want to think about the polyamory story. The question is—how to begin. I want to stay in my POV, but in such a way that I can fully inhabit the mind of the secondary main character.
The point is to show how my experiences as a guy doing polyamory/open relationships reveals that the whole pursuit is vanity, insanity, hubris. It works, or advantages, the man, just not this one.
The temporal framing is also important. That thing with E– and N– happened at the onset of the Online Dating Age; it also happened when millennials were the youth culture—the Young Ones. Now we are in a different place. Ostensibly mature, with different interests.
What scene am I most interested in? What drives me? It’s not just a question of reliving my “glory days”—this story has a real pedagogical interest.
No matter what, we don’t begin with me. We begin in the present. The trivia night is a good setting because of how over-the-top geared towards millennials it is, with the questions and the music, LOL!
Opening with A– is a good idea. Sets the tone—and the theme. Establishes some important character traits that will be important later on…but we want to get to the point of D– giving her speech, telling her story, ASAP. That’s the first major incident. The inciting incident? Where we get the first taste of our theme—strategies one how to love. Sexual differences.
Next, after that, is D– telling her story. A friend’s suicide, her boyfriend making out with another girl at her home. Sick and twisted. She tells her whole story, including mimicking his voice, etc; and only after, through my candour, do we learn that she is pretty much entirely responsible for her own situation. She made the bed that she’s unhappily lying in.
At that point—maybe we mirror her story by having me tell my own story; and that’s how we frame the analepsis.
The problem is that my whole story is too long. We need to settle on a particular scene that is capable of representing everything. It’s probably the conversation I had with E–, where she gamed it out and concluded that open relationships don’t work—they are a sacrifice: you can only be with people who are themselves into open relationships, which is a terrible punishment. It means that you can’t be open to the spontaneity of true love—the two are incompatible.
But another key thing is to describe N–’s psychology, and her entire rationale for why she thought it would be a good idea. Which is that, when she was 16, she and her best friend fucked the same guy—and to her, that’s being in an open relationship. That’s polyamory, LOL!
Key to that dynamic between her and I, how it played out, is that I somehow managed to find myself with E–, who is a AAA quality human being. No shitmuncher; not basic; my “superhero,” in fact. While N– is reading to me from her diary about how she’s fucking some random off of Tinder who rolls over and starts playing video games…E– and I had a true meet-cute, not to mention a courtship.