Non-domestic partnership

A modern love story

1994 Time Magazine cover

Content advisory: this story includes sex.

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She: I’m monogamous.
Him: I’m polyamorous.

She: I’m anxiously attached.
Him: I’m avoidantly attached.

She: I want to live in a nice suburb.
Him: I’ll die before I leave Brooklyn.

She: I’m very Jewish.
Him: I’m a pagan who worships Dionysus.

She: Top sheet is essential.
Him: Top sheets are a scam by Big Linen.

She: I don’t date under 30.
Him: I’m 24.
She: Really?
Him: I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.
She: It’s just that...you have a couple grey hairs in your beard.
Him: So insulted then. Wait really?
She: Just a couple. Here––I have tweezers in my purse somewhere.
Him: No! …I have a phobia.
She: Of tweezers?
Him: Of tiny metal objects.
She: Well, my house is full of those.
Him: What the actual hell?
She (displaying both wrists): Watchmaking hobby.
Him: …
She: …
Him: Seems like we’re incompatible.
She: Yes.
Him: But…you’re hot.
She: You’re hot too.
Him: And actually I love you.
She: I love you too.
Him: …
She: …
Him: And yet we’re incompatible for domestic partnership.
She: We’ll need to get creative.

And so the two began a non-domestic partnership. It started at her coworking space in Midtown at 2AM after even the cleaning lady went home to sleep. They stripped each other of all clothing and fogged the windows of one of the call booths. If it hadn’t been for his noise-cancelling headphones, the one remaining grindsetter sitting at a triple-monitor hot-desk might have heard muffled sounds like this:

She: FUCK!
Him: GOD!

Eventually it spread to the daytime when they went up to the rooftop in their winter jackets, hid behind the ventilation shaft, and cupped each other’s mouths so they could scream without the neighbors hearing them:

She: OOOOOF!
Him: YEAH JUST LIKE THAT!

They were not allowed into each other’s homes. That would start a domestic partnership and – as we’ve covered – they were incompatible. They would never meet one another’s families, or become one another’s emergency contacts, or share passwords to the same streaming services. They would never adopt a pet together. One would never take care of the other when they were sick. But the love was undeniable and so it spread.

She: I want more.
Him: I do too.
She: Let’s add the gym.
Him: Which one?
She: Vital.
Him: That’s a climbing gym
She: Yes.
Him: But I don’t climb.
She: But they have solo bathrooms with benches and showers inside of them.
Him: I’ll get a membership.

And so their non-domestic partnership spread to the gym, and to all the other places of their lives untouched by the homemaking instinct. It did not spread to the supermarket, the DMV, or the doctor’s office. It definitely did not spread to IKEA. These were the domain of domestic partnerships. Instead, it spread to the nightclub, the coffee shop, and the rare books section of Strand. At these places they did things beyond merely undressing one another. They learned languages together. They explored the intricacies of one another’s pasts. They gave each other matching temporary tattoos. They listened to “their song.” (Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars.)

They were honest people, and so when they went on dates with serious prospects, they’d warn their dates that they were in a committed NDP.

Date: What’s an NDP?
She: A non-domestic partnership.
Date: Sorry, I’m looking for something more traditional.
She: So am I.

She became happily married. He entered a non-hierarchical polycule with an anchor partner, a nesting partner, and the nesting partner’s lesbian metamour. And yet the NDP became increasingly serious, filling up all the nondomestic cracks in their lives, edging out hobbies, TV shows, networking events, girls nights out, boys nights out, and book clubs. It grew to a crescendo:

She: I want kids.
Him: I also want kids.
She: I mean I want them with you.
Him: That sounds logistically difficult.
She: We’re creative people.
Him: OK let’s do it.

Their first-born was named James. He was emergency-delivered at 11PM in a hotel bar by a female business executive who claimed to be a doula.

She: Hold my hand.
Him: Is this really happening?
She: Oh god it’s coming.
Him: Are we really doing this right now?
She: Shut the fuck up and hold my hand!
Him: I see its head.
She: Nononono, I can’t, I can’t.
Him: Breathe!
She: RAAAAAHHHHHHH!
Him: It’s a boy!

Children tend to accept their immediate surroundings, and so James and, later, his sister Emily didn’t question why they were raised between movie theatre matinees, the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, and Shake Shack. That changed when James entered grade school, which he attended through Zoom on his mom’s laptop (at the coworking space where he was conceived). James started to have questions:

James: Mommy?
She: Mhm.
James: Why don’t me and Emily have a home?
She: Your father and I are in a nondomestic partnership.
James: What’s that?
She: It’s a type of modern relationship that acknowledges the freedom and sovereignty of both individuals.
James: But the other kids in my school have homes.
She: Their parents are not in modern relationships.
James: But dad told me that you have a husband with kids and that you all live in a home.
She: That’s true. It’s not a very modern relationship.
James: Is it better to be in a modern relationship?
She: I don’t know.

James grew up and applied to the most stable jobs he could find: accountant, actuary, compliance officer, residential real estate agent. He ended up as a social security eligibility specialist. Despite this, he continued to live across the spaces that felt most like home: the Port Authority Bus Terminal, various 24-hour diners, and a high-end bath-house in the Flatiron District called Othership. The owner let him sleep on the cedar planks of the saunas and even played him mysterious flute music to help him drift off to sleep.

Meanwhile, James’s mother moved to the suburbs of Hudson where she and her domestic family enjoyed shopping at boutiques of Main Street and attending revolutionary war reenactments on weekends. She visited James whenever her advertising job brought her into Manhattan.

James’s father moved into a large Victorian house in Ditmas Park with his non-hierarchical polycule, which had grown to over 100 members. Since domestic life kept his father busy, James was forced to commute to Brooklyn to see him. They ate momos at a Tibetan restaurant near the Q train every Tuesday.

At 42, James felt stuck in his job and entered a mid-life crisis. Soon after, his mother died. Neither he nor his father nor his estranged sister Emily were invited to the funeral. None of them made it into the will. That was the agreement that his father and mother had struck back in the year 2026, when nondomestic partnerships first became popular.

And so, three nights after the funeral, James and his father snuck into the home of his mother’s domestic family. They broke open a window with a rock from the garden that her husband tended. Once inside, they stole the urn of her ashes from the fireplace mantel, their barbarian silhouettes casting shadows by the light of the still-burning fire. Their shadows stretched across the living room carpet, and across the sofa, and across the domestic husband who stood behind the sofa slack-jawed:

Husband: Stop that! She’s mine!
James: Love belongs to no one!—
—James surprised himself by shouting.

The husband chased them from the property with a shotgun – that’s how domestic this family had become. They escaped the jaws of the family dog just in time by hopping the electric fence, accepting the shock that shot through their bodies. In fact, they needed it as raw energy for the coming sprint across the open fields.

Out of the corner of his eye, the father saw other forms racing toward them. It was his non-hierarchical polycule, here to assert hierarchy over his one wild and precious life. The polycule rushed forth through the tall grass, screaming like banshees.

Them (in unison): Admit that you always loved her more than us!
Him: I am a free man!
James: Dad, run for the treeline!
Them: [territorial scream]

They dodged between the trunks and boulders, eventually losing the polycule amongst a dense expanse of brambles. At last, they found a rushing river that James’s mother would have cherished. It seemed to babble in her native tongue, and it carried along dead leaves and stray branches. James broke the urn over a stone. Its porcelain shards scattered between the pebbles of the shore. They each grabbed a fistful of ash and prepared to throw it into the river.

James: I never learnt her name.
Him: I didn’t either.
James: Shouldn’t we say something?
Him: She hated words.
James: Still…
Him: OK.

He cleared his throat:

I crave your breasts, your neck, your hands.
I whisper feral prayers to your giggling flesh, like a
leopard prowling the streets of Manhattan,
hunting, sniffing, feasting until my belly bursts.

The holy men wrote “thy love was better than wine.”
Unseal the cask again and let me
drown in the waves of your ecstasy. Upon my death,
let seas of luminous juice drown over heaven.

I eat your memory. I drink your memory.
It fills me. It heats me from within,
makes my spine prickle and spark, a column of
flame that burns me into new shapes from the inside-out.

If anyone asks how you became the earth, don’t
explain the miracle.
Just kiss me on the lips.
Like this.

When someone asks what it means to “kill for love,” don’t
get into theology. Simply say,
“These grapes were plucked from the living vine,” and
“This meat was made from living things.”

And death, I feel, is very near.