the new moon in pisces is about relationships. “how do you want to be loved?” the pattern asks me.
when your chart is dominated by libra placements, your whole life can become about your relationships. if i’m not careful, i become lost in relationships, creating a pressure on my friends and loved ones to show up for me in the ways i show up for them, instead of noticing when it’s me who needs to show up for me.
in the past, i called myself solopolyamorous. after repeated experiences of abuse, i needed to nurture my relationship with myself. i needed to get back in touch with who i was and what i wanted outside of what others wanted for and from me. i learned to value multiple kinds of relationships with others: relationships that allowed me to explore my sexual desires, relationships that stimulated me intellectually, relationships that made me laugh, relationships that made me feel cared for, relationships centered around children, relationships focused on collaborative projects, relationships with people i could talk to on the phone for hours.
but at the start of last year, i began to question my identification with solopolyamory.
i saw people around me immerse themselves in romance, in couplehood, and in doing life together, offering each other the level of care and communication i deeply craved. at times, i felt so let down by people who made commitments to me, and then chose to prioritize their romantic relationships over those commitments. and when i am hurt in relationships, i tend to ask myself: “what is my part? what can i take responsibility for? what can i do differently?” i know these are useful questions to ask myself, and i also know many survivors of child and intimate partner abuse grew up learning to dismiss our own needs and cater to the experiences, feelings, and needs of everyone around us. now i try my best to do both: honor my experiences, and communicate my feelings and needs to loved ones, while retaining my sense of agency–my belief that there are things within my control, things i can change and do to interrupt this cycle in my relationships.
i wondered, “am i calling myself solopolyamorous because i’m avoiding intimacy?” i wanted to allow myself to deepen in relationships the way i saw the people around me doing. i wanted to learn to trust. i called it my chalant era, an era of committing myself fully to intimate relationships, an era of shouting from the rooftops that i love to love, i love to be a loverfemmeboy. and if my friends weren’t ready to do life with me then i couldn’t dismiss the possibility of deepening in romantic partnership just because of my ambivalence of romance as a concept. i wouldn’t keep chasing people; i would love who was ready and willing to love me. i would love as a practice, as an action, as a verb.
i dated, i committed to relationships, i offered my presence and my care. i cocreated relationships thoughtfully, using the relationship smorgasbord as a template in both my friendships and romantic relationships. i was honest with partners, letting them know: i don’t really know if i get romance. i’d been engaging with dean spade’s work on the topic in recent years, and it’s resonated with me: i don’t want to fall in love, i want to create it and nurture it. i maintained boundaries where i needed them, too, though i noticed when relationships became more familiar over time, some of the boundaries i put in place would fall away.
i deepened relationships, and in the course of deepening, i’d sometimes come to see a mismatch in needs or values i knew would lead to me getting hurt in a way the other person wouldn’t know how to repair. it’s led me to reflect on how much alignment i need — in lifestyles, in values, in lived experiences — to maintain connection. i wanted it to be a perfect math, but it was always just a moving target. people change over the course of knowing them, and we’re not always changing in the same direction. so i learned to let go, to shift relationships or end them when we were no longer aligned around what we each needed.
i have never needed relationships to last forever to be meaningful. and also, in my longest term relationships, the friends and loved ones who have been in my life for 10, 15, or 20 something years, i notice there’s a lot of spaciousness to grow.
what i know now is that, with a sagittarius in venus, i need a lot of freedom in relationships, and i need to trust my instincts about what i need instead of following what other people do. i need the space to honor myself, to allow myself to be bold in the service of my own vision, to allow myself to be independent and free spirited. i want to do life with the people i love, but i want to do life with me too.
this weekend so far, i had a lingerie slumber party to celebrate my coparent’s birthday, and i meal planned and did face masks with the 11 year old, and i gathered with folks who are working to build more abolitionist systems of care in philadelphia, and i crafted zines with a neighbor friend, and i played a customized version of guess who with my two most beloved harm reductionists, and i have come back to understanding myself as solopolyamorous, someone who can experience intimacy in different ways in different relationships, and also needs to honor my intimacy needs in my relationship with myself. what i know now is intimacy takes many forms, and no form of intimacy requires me to lose myself in my relationships. instead, intimacy requires me to be honest about who i am and what i want.
relearning relationships 
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