On Being a Secondary: Feeling Beside Myself

I dealt with the tenuousness of being Rick's secondary-secondary by attempting to make myself smaller. My tactic with Drew was exactly the opposite: I made myself larger than life.

Drew met me head-on, too. He's quite the character.

And there's the rub: we weren't ever real with each other. The realest thing Drew ever said to me was, “Sometimes I worry that all my relationships are shallow. And that what it means is that I'm shallow.” Coincidentally, perhaps, we never had sex again after this remark of his, uttered during a post-coital pause, in the hushed darkness of my bedroom.

But although our relationship wasn't substantial enough to nourish either of our souls for long, we did really enjoy being shallow together. You could even say that it was a passion of ours. I mean, we're talking some seriously intoxicating ego-gratification.  We were big, we were bold, we were dazzling.

It turned out, of course, that our bling was just dime-store-variety sparkle.  No matter: it was still a thrill to put it on and parade around together.  Even now, jaded as I am about the whole thing, I can still get a kick out of playing the occasional dress-up game with Drew, and I'm still pleased when I win the prize for "best costume".

Our most recent text session demonstrates our dynamic well, I think:

Drew (texting out of the blue): I know you are, but what am I?

Viny: Funny, I was just thinking about you, Mr. Beauty Queen...

Drew: Don't hate me because I'm beautiful: hate me because I'm never a runner-up. (And because I won the talent contest.)

Viny: The tiara looks stunning on you, darling.

Drew: But this make-up is sh*t, don't you think? Wrong shade?

Viny: You're right. Lilac doesn't suit your eyes. And you've overdone the glitter, as usual.

Drew: YOU JUST WANT MY F**KING CROWN.

Viny: I don't need your crown, honey. True princesses don't need to wear anything: even naked, I'm royalty.

You see, with Drew, it was always about dressing up and dressing down. We were in the process of remaking ourselves, he and I. We were busy trying ourselves on: “Hey, whaddaya think, does this personality do anything for me?”

It occurs to me that Drew was also trying me on, posing in front of the mirror, admiring how I made him look. I think a big part of the attraction was that he got to feel all avant guard about associating with me. The whole poly thing both fascinated and frightened him. It gave me a certain cachet that I wasn't shy about exploiting. My relationship with Rick had put a serious dent in my self-esteem, and I was getting off on being exotic and dangerous for a change. The first time I kissed Drew – yeah, it was my move – he marveled, “Wow, I feel like such a badass!”

When we first began dating, Drew and his wife were preparing for a divorce. They hadn't had sex in years. This was his take on the situation: “I was feeling like a ripe fruit that was going to fall to the ground and rot, untasted” – so one day, he decided to take off. He went to New York and had a torrid four-month affair with a Latin lioness, and then returned home to begin the torturous process of extricating himself from his 20-year relationship for good. When I met him, he still shared a house with his soon-to-be Ex. But he had retreated to his bedroom, where he spent most of his time online, orchestrating his complicated correspondence with various besotted female hangers-on.

And there were an awful lot of them. Drew may not have been comfortable with the concept of polyamory, but he was certainly interested in spreading the love around. I had the dubious pleasure of dating him during a particularly promiscuous phase. We met on March 1, 2009, and by July 1, which was the date of our first full-on sexual encounter, he'd slept with three other women. I went on vacation in mid-July, and by the time I got back, he'd gotten sucked into a whirlwind romance with yet another woman. Much to my dismay, this meant that he and I were “off.” A couple of weeks later, after things had ended badly with Ms. Whirlwind, he came knocking at my door again. It made my head spin.

That was another thing about my relationship with Drew: it was highly contingent. His plan was to ditch me as soon as someone more suitable came along, and I knew it. In fact, that's exactly what happened. By mid-August, he'd begun to zero in on a particular midwestern divorcee – charming, intelligent, and grateful to the point of slavish abjection, which is to say, exactly his type. My growing attachment to Travis gave Drew just the excuse he needed to back out of our relationship gracefully: he got to play the part of the aggrieved lover, to pretend the end was my fault.

Or maybe we were both pretending. The truth is, I was getting tired of having to watch my every move on the Big Screen.  That larger-than-life me just wasn't me.