Вереск sent me an "icebreaker" message on okCupid. I rarely got unsolicited messages from women, and almost never got ones longer than a phrase like "hi there," so I paid attention. We hit the chat console and talked almost entirely about bike riding, with a detour into comic books. I'd never met a woman with a sizable comic book collection, so I had curious questions. Classic Wonder Woman and Catwoman were her favorites.

We met a week later for a morning bike ride.  A tall woman in casual cycling clothes, with long black hair, about my age. Again, the pictures were a little too flattering - she needed to lose over 25 pounds if she wanted to look like that profile - but I didn't care by this point.  I was going to have a nice day no matter what.

We biked over to Alameda and set up on a picnic blanket near the beach, in the same park Моника had taken me walking through half a dozen times in the past.  The weather was perfect, and teenagers and pets romped in the park behind us. We talked for over an hour, sitting near each other but not too close, and then went for a walk in the sand. The tiny waves off the bay lapped quietly alongside us. It might have been romantic except we were both in the same heavy mental space: We were unburdening ourselves, with someone who would lend a kind ear. Recent history loomed over us so completely that there was no ground for anything new.

Вереск had left a real downer of a relationship a few months ago.  That, after two back-to-back seven-year ones.  The guy she dumped had been a drug addict, and constantly lied to her face about big and small things to conceal the extent of his habit. When he "slipped up" - either in his lies or by overdoing his self-medication to the point where it was completely impossible to act normal - she would get upset and tell him she couldn't stand it, and beg him to change. But he was an expert at telling her exactly what she wanted to hear to calm her down and keep her on his side. This cycle repeated, and repeated, until she was emotionally crushed.

"It was the lying, really," she said. "I mean, I can understand addiction. Or maybe I just thought I did. I thought for a long time that if he would just be completely honest about what he was doing, I could manage it somehow. Like, manage to live with it. Because it would be hard, but it would be a known thing I could prepare for, right?"

I said nothing. I had my own experience with this, and it wasn't good.

"If I knew he was going to just be out of his mind for an entire day, and I knew he was safe somewhere, maybe I could arrange my schedule so I wasn't stuck waiting for him, and I wouldn't need to be disappointed and worried and ask him all these questions that he would just lie about. Or, if he was honest enough to tell me he really couldn't drive because he'd been drinking since eight in the morning, it would be a lot better than him smashing my car into a parking barrier and making up some weird story about a guy threatening him with a gun, then making excuses for why he never called a cop or even filed a police report, and then forgetting he made up the story at all and just saying his foot slipped, and there was no guy with a gun -- like, what are you talking about? Guy with a gun? When did I say that?"

She sighed. "In the end, I had to cut him off. I said I never wanted to see or hear from him again. And it was true. I mean, it had to be true. I can comfort myself with the idea that maybe it woke him up enough to make some real change. But if that happens, I won't know about it, because I can't ... care either way. Caring was how I kept getting pulled back in. So... Yeah."

After that imploded, she had taken six months off from all romance.

"At first it was all work. Healing from trauma is good for my job." She laughed. "I got so much done. My apartment is totally redecorated. It looks great."

She revealed that I was the first person she had seen, breaking the hiatus.  I felt honored.  We continued to talk, and I told her my traumatic stories from earlier in the year. As I spooled out the words to a willing audience, I blundered into a fresh perspective. We were technically on a date, which compelled me to tell the story in a way that sounded more settled, like I'd learned from it and done some kind of moving on - which I hadn't, at least not yet - because if I came across like I was stuck in the past, I would look like a jerk for even asking her on a date at all. Why would I do that, if she was just going to witness me moping for an afternoon? Of course, we were both doing some of that now, so...

Anyway, the thing I realized was, I had been using sex to feel more intensely connected to someone than I otherwise could be. I'd been doing that with Кэрол for months. And when things got complicated and her physical attention was split among several people, I felt deprived and nervous. The bigger pool of negative feelings demanded a bigger supply of positive ones to balance it out, making waves inside me that crashed back and forth, getting bigger and bigger until I couldn't stand it.

Some of the problem had been the huge pool of negative feelings from the rest of my life. Work stress, the end of my long relationship with Шеррила, the unfamiliar new house... But the problem was also Кэрол: We weren't actually a good match. Her lifestyle, her social circle, her priorities, her future plans, didn't mesh with mine at all. And worse yet, to get an emotional connection going with her I had to draw it out, almost from scratch every time we got together. What kept me coming back of course was the sex.

Yeah we talked a lot; we did social things; we shared some pretty legitimate romantic moments. But the actual point was the sex, because that's what it took to flush the physiological toilet in my head, draining all those negative feelings out: Pairing up with someone who didn't match me in a bunch of important ways but did match me in this one way, extremely well. Кэрол tore my fucking head off in bed, night after night, and that kept me from drowning in waves of anguish and disorientation.

This was mostly a rehash of things I'd already learned, but what struck me that day was the parallel with Моника: She had been using me exactly the same way I had been using Кэрол. By the time she met me, she had already broken up with her ex -- was already drowning in need. And when my commitment to Шеррила blocked her access to me, she felt the same despair, and tried various things to compensate, which failed.

The parallel came to me while I was describing it out loud to Вереск, and she nodded and told me it made sense.

"I think my six month break was me trying to avoid that, honestly," she said. "I mean, no judgement here. We all find a way to cope, right? But for me, after this last guy... The idea of going on even a single date felt terrifying. And you know, again, it was the lying. The idea of being lied to again just made my heart shrivel up."

"That sounds horrible," I said.

"It was! But I'm glad to be here," she said. "You seem nice. And hey, thanks for listening to this."

"Hey, likewise," I said.

Вереск wanted to set up a second date. I told her I would get in touch with her when I'd found a good time, though I doubted I would. I got on my bike and rode back home feeling triumphant, like I had reached a milestone in understanding. I don't think Вереск realized the depth of my ongoing obsession with Моника, and I was barely willing to admit it to myself, but because of it, I had wasted Вереск's time. I had no idea what she came away from our date thinking, and I was callous enough to not even care. I never contacted her again, and she never contacted me.

For the next few weeks I caught myself obsessing over Эриска like a kid in school, and decided it was mostly because of her body. Working through it with Шеррила, I decided that things probably weren't going to go anywhere with Эриска and I should just let her drift away. I was kind of surprised when she asked to come over for dinner and hang out with us on a Friday night.

She arrived in the late afternoon, and she and Шеррила snuggled with me on the couch, with the conversation ranging around. She seemed comfortable with us both. Eventually we walked to a restaurant. When we walked back it was dark, and we built a fire with the wood I'd chopped earlier in the day, and we snuggled up again beneath a blanket, with me in the middle. Эриска backed up against me on the floor until we were spooning, and I stuffed my face into the hair on the back of her head and lazily ran one hand along her leg and hip over the blanket.

She and Шеррила zig-zagged into a pretty racy conversation about shopping for sex toys, and Шеррила asked if she preferred to be a "giver" or a "receiver", which I then translated out loud into "pitcher" and "catcher". I joked that since there was no equivalent to being a "batter", we should try and figure out what that meant. That got into some pretty funky talk about the mechanics of sex, and we laughed a lot.

Эриска mentioned a friend of hers who was also looking for romance, and I mentioned hearing about his dating profile. She borrowed Шеррила's phone and logged herself into the dating site right in front of us to browse around. I followed her fingers on the keyboard and noticed with some amusement that her password was "HITTER". Very relevant to the conversation...

She stumbled around the app a bit and eventually located her friend. From watching her look at messages and profiles I learned that most of her interaction on the site had apparently been with me. I felt somehow relieved at this, as though I wasn't just a random face in a crowd. So much of her schedule and social life was a mystery to me, and I had been worrying there was some huge piece of it I would find alarming or alien -- like, for example, twice a week she went out to a bar and got plastered, or, every week she invited some hot but boring guy over and they got freaky on her couch just long enough for her to get off, and then she kicked them out. A weird mix of paranoia and inadequacy creeping around in my head. I was glad to dispel it.

Since Эриска had the phone, I showed her the emulated guitar app my friend had written, and she played a little song while we made up lyrics and laughed. I ran my hand casually across her stomach, through her shirt. It was taut like a drum. She breathed in, pushing into my hand, and there was the briefest flit of a shared sexual interest, then it vanished.

After a long time, she hauled herself upright, to go home. At the door she gave both of us a huge lingering hug, and I put on slippers and walked her to her car. She opened the car, then turned around and gave me an arms-over-the-shoulders hug, as though she was falling into me. Not some half-hearted man-style thing, but a hug that said "I like you a lot."

"I like you", I told her.

She grinned. "I like you too! You're both good people." A calibrated response.

She drove off and I trudged back inside, shivering, and curled up in front of Шеррила. We chatted about the day for a while longer, then she poked her laptop and I did some writing.

The date had been both encouraging and strange, but it turned out there wasn't much more to our story. I invited her on more bike rides, and to more dinner parties, but she turned all the invitations down. We lapsed into silence. Eventually I sent her a message saying I understood if she found someone else and wished her well, and thought she might like a copy of the questionnaire Шеррила and I had put together as we explored polyamory, because it made for good conversation. I was surprised when she responded with a heartfelt confession that her wife was struggling, and her mother-in-law was sick, and she had been too harried by work and plans for traveling back East to even think about romance or her social life. I had taken quite the wrong read of the situation.

The outcome was the same though: She needed to stay off the map for a while. I didn't mind.

A week after that she was blasted completely out of my consciousness - along with almost everything else - by Моника.

The first actual date I arranged on okCupid was with Эриска.  She sent me an unprompted message inviting me on a bike ride when she got back from a trip to New York. I never did ask why she clicked on my profile, but I assumed it was the photo of me on a bicycle.  I looked at her photos and instantly liked her. Small and strong, with pale skin, blond hair cropped short, and intense gray eyes, she seemed like a more athletic and butch version of Кэролин. We had fun chatting over the website console, covering light topics like travel and our careers. In a few days I got some SMS messages from her while I was on the bus home from work, saying she wanted to hang out that night. I proposed that we ride in San Jose Bike Party, and she agreed.

She arrived at the house early, and we wrestled her expensive bike from the trunk of her Subaru and put it together. She was even smaller in person than I'd expected, but every bit as good looking. I started to get a little bit of a "dirty old man" feeling, because she was ten years younger than me: 24 to my 34. What could her intentions be? I didn't want to ask because I didn't want the answer to seem so important, so I just rolled along.

Her cycling outfit was partly spandex, and gripped her legs and ass in a way that magnetized my eyeballs. Her bike was built for speed, and I sensed she was used to riding in a more competitive mode, but when we were moving in the huge Bike Party crowds she waited patiently for me to climb the hills on my recumbent, which I appreciated. The ride was more about us than the event. We kept a chatty conversation going, but it was surface-level stuff. More travel experiences and funny stories. I was having trouble with my own expectations: We had just met a few days ago and we needed to be friends, or at least friendly, before we even considered anything romantic, but all my friendships had started organically, almost always with people who shared the same wacky sense of humor. On the other hand all my romantic relationships had started because of an immediate sense of comfortable emotional intimacy. I wasn't finding either with Эриска so far, though I wanted to.

As we rode I got more of her story. She was born in South Dakota, and emancipated herself from her parents at the age of 16. I didn't ask for details on why. Since then she'd finished college with an engineering degree and done some traveling in South America, and repaired her relationship with her parents. It was good she hadn't deferred the reconciliation, because her father had recently died, at a relatively young age from a life-long battle with alcoholism.

She was new to this area and just scored a high-paying job, but didn't know if California was her style yet. For the first three months she rode her bike nine miles across the South Bay to her workplace, which she explained was why she looked more in-shape than her profile photos. I hadn't noticed a difference. As I listened to her and watched her face I read a strong current of masculinity. "I'll be surprised if she isn't at least bisexual, and mostly gay," I thought. "Is she just here to make a new friend? Maybe I should just ask her. On the other hand, we just met. Maybe she's trying to decide for herself."

A few times when we were merging with the crowds, she helped to remount the conversation by reminding me where I left off. I appreciated that. When we rode over a rough patch in the street she exclaimed, "ribbed for her pleasure!" That got a laugh from me.

I threw out a dozen flirtatious signals, but she let them fall into the cracks of the conversation.  We seemed to be steering towards friendship, and of course I felt conflicted because physically she was a knockout. As she maneuvered the bike with her strong, compact body, I widened my gaze and took in the people around her. She was getting a continuous stream of hungry looks from the men and women who pedaled close, which she ignored with a long-practiced ease. She was everyone's type, all the time.

She was used to being wary and frustrated by men, but I caught her broadcasting a genuine expression of warmth towards me, clearly in spite of herself - in spite of her own expectations - for a few moments when we stopped in silence and looked at each other. The shell around her was strong, but she did let it drift open during small moments.

By the end of the evening I had a working theory for what she was like. It was clear she had a large part of her emotional self closed off, and to be consistently close to her I would need to spend time teasing her open, across a dozen encounters. This effort would be entirely separate from any physical intimacy we might have: If she found me attractive, she would say so in short order, and we would fuck, but an actual emotional connection would be way harder. And it was optional for her. If I were a younger person with more patience, and actually single, I might fall for her and try to start something, but I'd been down that path a few times already and wasn't willing to walk it again. Better to share whatever warmth she might voluntarily broadcast and expect nothing more.

Eventually we peeled away from the crowd and rode back to my house, then disassembled her bike into her car. She had to get home and sleep, since she had to work early on Saturday, or so she said. The idea that she needed to have an excuse to avoid coming inside sailed past me: I had no intention of inviting her in on a first date. We hugged, and she tucked her head in towards my chest instead of out. She said we should hang out again, but the friend vibe was strong and we didn't make any immediate plans. It was hard to predict the future with her.

Over the next few weeks she came over to the house a few times, apparently to hang out with me and our other dinner guests. The first time she was friendly but didn't pay any special attention to me. The second time we went on a walk around the city together at night, wandering around City Hall and the nearby park. She had a physically competitive streak and we took turns seeing how long we could balance and hop across the rocks. The conversations were more natural, and we covered more of our intimate past. At long last, she told me that she actually was in a long-standing, long-distance relationship with another woman, who was still living back East. This relationship was so venerated that she used the term "wife", even though they didn't speak very often and had been living apart for quite some time. I didn't judge, but I was definitely curious at how it worked. It also helped explain why she felt comfortable walking into a potential polyamorous arrangement with me and Шеррила.

It was interesting comparing her to Шеррила. The fact that I was looking for a romantic companion to fit into an existing relationship was never far from my mind, and the question of what I wanted in someone I was dating could only be answered by comparing it to what I already had with Шеррила. In some cases, I wanted the same thing from a new person: Intimacy was top of that list, and a shared sense of humor. In other cases I was feeling more energized by differences. Эриска could be very sarcastic, and had the mind of an engineer more than an artist. She was bold with strangers and would slap you on the back like a fellow man. Emotional intimacy was hard for her, but it was fun to try. At the end of our long walk I told her I wanted to smooch her but wasn't sure where her boundaries were. She thought for a bit and said "I don't know either. I'm not sure if this is the path I want to walk right now. I hope you're okay with me not knowing." I said that was fine, and suggested cooking dinner at her house at some point. To my surprise she accepted.

The next day Шеррила and I had a long discussion about Эриска and how we wanted to play things. I made an exhaustive list of "rules" about our polyamorous dynamic, covering a bunch more scenarios that we hadn't considered months ago, and we combed them over, comparing it with one she'd written a while back. What if I spent a bunch of time dating someone, getting emotionally invested, and they decided it was friends-only? It was nice to have friends, but could I honestly make that transition? I didn't think I could. I decided I would pay less attention to Эриска, and if she couldn't make up her mind after the next date I would end things.

It was difficult territory to negotiate, because it involved an acknowledgement that we were both looking for something clearly beyond friendship with this polyamory exploration: We wanted sex with other people. To some unknowable but probably huge degree, sex was the point of it. Not just talking, not just buddies to go to events and throw dinner parties. Those other things didn't need a fraction of the negotiation and care we had to marshal. Could Эриска mesh with us long-term?