Amitayus: Those nine days in Korea were really amazing. We spent a lot of time exploring the temples and sites. Well, when we weren’t in bed.
Elica: Looking back, it was truly beautiful. It really felt like a honeymoon.
Amitayus: On our third or fourth night together, I asked her if she wanted children. This is definitely something I want in my life, so I wanted to make sure that we were compatible there.
Elica: Motherhood was definitely something I wanted and I had been planning to have kids with my ex-fiancé. When that relationship failed and I was getting closer to my late thirties, I had to do a 180 turn in my mind and face the possibility that I might never be a mother. I had to make peace with that.
When Amitayus suddenly came into my life in this way and he asked me about kids, I had to do another 180. Maybe the universe did want this to happen to me.
It was great that my friend had given me the heads-up so when he brought it up I wasn’t surprised and told him we were on the same page.
Amitayus: On our last night in Korea, I asked her if she would like to come to the States to be with me. She said yes, but told me she couldn’t make it for a while as she had already committed to doing a yoga and psychotherapy workshop in Koh Phangan.
Elica: I was creating something at the time that was going to take a couple of months. We decided that I would fly to see him as soon as my workshop was over.
Switching from polyamory to monogamy
Elica: When we came out of Korea, we were still in an open relationship.
When he was in India, he’d been with two other people. During this time, I’d also had a couple of other lovers. But after Korea, I didn’t want to be with them and on my return to the island, I didn’t reinitiate anything with them.
It was around two or three weeks after our parting that I went into a bit of a crisis. I sat with the feeling for a while so I was very clear within myself.
I’m a psychotherapist and I use a very specific modality called Internal Family Systems Therapy, which involves working with the sub-personalities inside of you.
My friends used to have a joke about me and would say anyone who was going to date me is going to have to know what their core wounds are because I wouldn’t want to be with someone who didn’t deeply understand themselves in that way.
I had already started transmitting this to Amitayus; a part of me does this and the other part does the other. We’d started communicating and working with each other in these terms because this was the language that I understood.
If I was to have a relationship, I needed to go deep with the person in a committed way because healing work would be a fundamental part of the journey for me.
