California Reaming - A Woman's Adventures In Polyamory

Since re-entering the wacky world of online girlie dating three years ago, I have observed how nearly all the lesbian women I run across seem driven by one consideration. It is not about sex, unlike gay men, who not only seek that out but find it with alarming alacrity. Rather it is about finding the partner of their dreams. Hetero couples engage in this too, but with lesbians it has been elevated to an art form almost.

The Quest For Love. It ranks right up there with the Quest For Fire, one supposes. Well, how do the ladies make out generally? Generally, I would say not very well. Mostly because I think they are looking too hard. There is the scent of quiet desperation.

The real problems occur, lo and behold, when a gay woman thinks she has located Ms. Right. Now the best is yet to come. There are a lot of jokes within the community about how gay women, almost singlehandedly, support the U-Haul businesses out there. Because as we all know, once a lady finds her lady, a moving van is not far behind. Hhmm, as we check our watches we see the girls are right on schedule to move in with one another and start living on top of each other and, in essence, really really having fun together.

I am being quite sarcastic here, because I find so many of these living arrangements head south pretty rapidly. The intensity of the desire to nest really skewers everything, I feel. No relationship could survive with that hefty amount of expectations piled atop it.

As I go through the women's personal ads on Craigslist for the San Francisco Bay area, I notice a now-large number of ads of women who just want an NSA relationship. That's No Strings Attached for you. So maybe the times are a changin' and younger lesbians are no longer so hell bent to find the perfect lover.

But there is another larger group on Craigslist who are searching for that. Since I am partnered with a male, most of these women figure I am poor dating material. As one of my former lovers stated in her email when she blew me off, she didn't see "where this could go." Well, there are many places such relationships can go; all it takes is a willingness to explore the possible paths, which I thought this particular lover, J, possessed. But apparently I was wrong.

I tend to like the dyke crowd when I play with women. I am not so interested in other bi women, mostly because they all seem so one-sidedly femme. I need someone a little butch of center for life to work for me. But this narrows my chances of finding someone in the lesbian community.

So I get to observe them a lot instead. I remember noting, when Mayor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco allowed gays to marry last year, that there were a number of fine-looking women down at the courthouse. Dave and I commented about one early female couple in particular. The one woman reminded me a lot of J. The other one was very appropriate for her too, I thought. So I watched them and I felt jealous. They seemed so compatible.

Well, lo and behold, we find out much later that the pair got divorced three months after the "wedding."

These looked like smart, educated women who were old enough to know their own desires. How can it be that THREE MONTHS later things have fallen apart? This is mind-boggling to me.

Is this what the drive for monogamy does to people? Well, to lesbian people anyway. Maybe someone ought to whisper something nasty into these girls' ears, like "You don't need to buy the whole cow just to get a little milk from her." Of course I will get flamed for saying this in many circles, but you have to wonder. Because the desire to be monogamous obviously conflicts with the desire to be more sexual. And when these two elements butt heads, break-ups are almost inevitable.

Why can't the gay girls be more like the gay boys? For the one group, monogamy is etched in stone; for the other, monogamy means you can cruise with your male partner. The fact that, in the States, the two communities don't really socialize that much anymore makes this gap seem wider. This is sad, because each group has some valuable perspectives to offer the other.

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