I walked into the Los Feliz gay bar dressed in my New York City best: leather pants, a crisp top-buttoned white shirt, sneakers, silver jewelry and a cow-print bucket hat. We had matched on Hinge, and she immediately offered to introduce me to the L.A. lesbian scene. Only a month into my move back to the West Coast, her invitation intrigued me.
I was fresh out of a year-and-a-half-long monogamous relationship that ended shortly after my ex and I had packed up our Manhattan apartments to start traveling the world together. After licking my wounds and crying through an existential spiral, I returned to the city where, as a 20-something, I was still trying desperately to be straight, hitting up the Bungalow and chugging whatever drinks the slick men working in entertainment bought me.
This time around, I was entering as a newly declared solo poly queer, an identity I had worked to cultivate during my five years in the city that never sleeps. I was looking to build community with other women loving women who shared my relationship anarchy-style philosophies around sex, love and dating.
This woman I met on Hinge fit that description perfectly. Her profile read “poly and partnered, we date separately.” With that, her dazzling confidence and her promise to bring me to the best gay girl parties in town, I knew I was in for a good time.
I sat down and sipped a mezcal cocktail as she casually mentioned that her wife had a change of plans and would be meeting us at the party later with some friends. While we waited for them to join, we bonded over the standard first date questions for nonmonogamous queers: how we came out, how we discovered polyamory, what we were looking for and what our boundaries were.
I shared how I discovered my queer and nonmonogamous identity simultaneously, but after a string of closed-ish relationships, I had committed to being my own primary partner and was seeking flirty connections and deep intimacy with experienced ethical nonmonogamous people.
She told me about her marriage, their opening a few years ago that led to a since-ended throuple and how she’s looking for fun, intimacy and sex (in that order) to add to her very happy, already primarily-partnered life. Her main boundaries? Her wife was her No. 1, and they would not be dating or hooking up with dates together.
A few drinks, a location change and multiple steamy kisses later, the night was a success. Her wife even invited me to join them at a play party that weekend (I couldn’t make it, but I did get a text from my date saying she thought of me — mid-orgy.)
For date No. 2, she took me to dinner before heading to a queer rave with her wife and some friends. I took Metro to meet her. (She called this “hot,” and I simply saw it as my New Yorker’s love for public transportation.) We had dinner before meeting up with her wife for a night of dance floor make-outs and what some might consider inappropriate group conversations about who would top whom, which of their friends they’d hooked up with and, of course, all the details from their play-party foursome.
At one point, deep in an upper-induced dancing euphoria, I swooned as she told me that the minute she saw my profile, she knew I needed to be ushered into the lesbian world. “You deserve to be shown the L.A. gay good time, and I knew I could do that for you.” She said that while she definitely wanted to hook up and date me, she was also excited for me to get to date and hook up with her friends.
After a somewhat difficult transition moving back to L.A. and struggling to get on my feet, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude to have so quickly connected with someone offering me exactly what I’d been craving. My therapist even pointed out that I had been seeking a community of more experienced poly lesbians, and in less than a month, they had found me and welcomed me with open arms.
For our third date, she invited me to the reopening of a lesbian wine bar in Silver Lake. She showed up 30 minutes late with a former crush she had gone to happy hour with. In classic lesbian drama, I ended up making out with that former crush later that night after my date’s wife took her home following too many glasses of wine.
After all of our initial dates, her leaving with her wife and me heading home alone, I would get a text from her raving about how much her wife loves me. I often wanted to text back: “Great, thrilled to hear that. But … do you like me?”
Clearly she did. We have since had dates with her wife and her wife’s girlfriend, sleepovers where her wife (who, to be clear, I adore platonically, never romantically or sexually) brings us breakfast in bed, and the three of us chat about the other people I’m dating. And yes, we’ve now gone on many dates that her wife doesn’t join us for — although usually we end up calling her at some point to hear about her wild adventures on their nights apart.
I don’t know if I ever imagined that three dates with a woman and her wife would lead to one of the most honest, free and grounded relationships I’ve been in. But that’s exactly what happened. I used to think stability had to come in one form: partnered, private and exclusive. Now it looks entirely different: shared, joyful and expansive.
In a city where I once performed straightness and monogamy, I’m finally choosing what feels good — with her, her wife and the queer community that keeps unfolding around me. I don’t know where this is going (other than a poly group trip to Thailand we’re somehow already planning), but I do know this: I’ve never felt more like myself.
The author is a writer and artist living in Venice. She’s on Instagram @taliasaville and writes a weekly Substack, Outside the Lines, about life and love through a queer lens, at otlwithtal.substack.com.
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This story originally appeared on LA Times
