Things I’ve Learned Since the Ending

Ten years ago, I wrote about marriage without naming it. I wrote about compromise, humor, and the small rituals that keep two people together. That essay was about endurance—about how to stay.

This one is about what happens when staying becomes impossible.

Violence as Destroyer

The first time I was hit, I knew something had changed forever.

For many survivors, it takes many times to leave. Violence repeats, cycles, convinces you to stay, then punishes you for believing. That is the cruel rhythm of abuse.

I was lucky. I only had to be hit once to learn the lesson. It did not take a second or third time for me to understand that fear had entered the foundation, and that love could not survive it.

And yet, love does not vanish simply because violence arrives. I still love Dana, because of our shared interaction, because of the history we built together, because of the moments that were real before they were broken.

But love is not enough to make contact safe. No contact is safer—for me, and for Dana. It is the boundary that protects us both from repeating the cycle. It is the line that allows me to carry affection without carrying fear.

Leaving was still hard. It was still a process. But I carried the clarity of that first moment with me: violence is not conflict, it is domination. And once it arrives, the partnership is already destroyed.

Risk and Refusal

After surviving that cycle, I learned something else: I will always risk my heart, but I will never again risk the legal entanglement of escape.

Because leaving once was hard. Leaving many times would have been harder. And leaving through the courts was its own violence—papers, hearings, obligations that turned intimacy into litigation.

So I made a vow to myself: I will risk intimacy, but not entanglement that requires lawyers to undo. I will risk tenderness, but not contracts that become cages.

This is not persuasion. I do not argue that everyone should live this way. I only know what worked for me.

Polyamory as Renewal

Polyamory did not arrive as ease. It arrived as work.

It asked me to sit with jealousy, to name it, to let it pass without turning into control.
It asked me to sit with loneliness, to accept that no one person can fill every silence. That this is not failure, but freedom.

But after surviving violence, polyamory felt like freedom.
Because no single person carried the whole sky.
Because every relationship—romantic or platonic—was treated as equally important, equally worthy of tenderness, equally free to evolve.

Polyamory taught me abundance. It taught me that intimacy thrives when freed from scarcity. It taught me that love can be multiple without being diluted, equal without being hierarchical.

And the reward is this: you are not at risk of becoming codependent. Because when love is spread across a constellation, no single star has to carry the whole sky.

Equal Weight

This was not easy. I had to unlearn the cultural script that says romance is the pinnacle of intimacy, that friendship is secondary, that family is given rather than chosen.

I had to confront jealousy—the fear that if someone I loved gave attention elsewhere, it meant I was less. I had to confront loneliness—the ache of realizing that no one person could be everything.

But in that confrontation, I found freedom.

Polyamory gave me a new grammar: every relationship matters. Every bond deserves care. Every person I love is equally important, whether we share a bed, a meal, or a memory.

Romantic relationships do not carry more weight than platonic ones, because my heart loves people either way. Friendship is not a rehearsal for romance. It is its own ritual, its own archive. Partnership is not superior to companionship. Every bond is worthy of tenderness, of risk, of evolution.

This is not persuasion. I do not argue that polyamory is better, or that everyone should live this way. I only know that for me, it was survival. It was renewal. It was the refusal to let violence have the last word.

The New Grammar of Intimacy

Violence destroyed a partnership I once believed unbreakable.
Divorce taught me to risk my heart but guard my freedom.
Polyamory taught me abundance, equality, and the refusal of hierarchy.

Together, these lessons form a new grammar of intimacy: