At the suggestion of a friend of mine, I’m writing in hopes that I might be able to get some direction about how best to navigate a pretty tricky romantic-cohabitation situation I’m tangled up in.

About nine months ago I moved to a big city to get away from a nasty political development brewing in my home state (I’m a trans woman). I was in a bit of a hurry to get gone, so I didn’t have much time to vet the folks I was moving in with, and I spent a lot of those nine months miserable because the roommate who’d been there longest turned out to be just dreadful to live with (left perishables out in the open for days at a time, put up her horrific boyfriend as an off-the-books fourth roommate with no obligations toward the rent even while they fought all the time). So obviously I was in a hurry to relocate again before too long.

About a month or so after the first move, my bestie, L, put me in touch with an old friend of hers, R. We met in person, hit it off, hung out the whole rest of the day, and had a couple of similarly lovely meetups in the intervening months of my original lease. When things started really deteriorating at home, R invited me to join him and split the rent on the new place he was looking for.

Two weeks ago we finished the big part of the move, and less than a week into living together full-time, we started messing around. Partly it’s chemistry, partly I come from a long line of women for whom sex has been the cause of (and solution to) many of life’s problems. R is pretty libertine himself.

L, my friend, has anxieties about the feasibility of this arrangement. As my bestie, her anxieties are my anxieties.

This is the best living arrangement I’ve ever had, even without the sex—R and I are both paying less in rent than we have, our personalities complement each other, and the neighborhood rules. We both want to keep this as stable as we possibly can, and it seems like one of the conclusions we’ve drawn is that trying to tamp down our attraction to each other would not help stabilize things.

This is further complicated by the fact that I’m actively polyamorous. I don’t want to leave other partners feeling sidelined by what I’ve got going on here, especially when it’s so new.

I like the idea of putting in the work to try and solidify this into something that can last and do us all some real good, but I struggle to picture what “the work” even looks like in a situation like mine, especially when any future at all seems so staggeringly difficult to imagine under current conditions. 

– What’s a gal to do?