You can always pick the anchovies off

I spent sometime last evening in my backyard out by the fire doing some navel gazing. I have to admit I like to be introspective although I also like to think I'm not too self absorbed. My loved ones would probably be the best judge of that, since it's human nature to be ignorant of our own character flaws.

I've had moments in my life, even as a child that I questioned my ability to be truly happy. I know I've felt it, happiness, and I know if you were to ask me I would say my life at this moment feels full and satisfied. But is that the same thing?

Over the last two weeks of busy holiday, family fun having hardly time for anything I have thought about this thing with Richard. This thing. I hear myself say it and it sounds detached and negative, like an unusual insect you could discover in traveling some place other than your native home. I guess what I mean is our relationship but it's been so strange and unusual an attraction I hardly know if I could rightly call it that, "a relationship". This is what dictionary.com has to say:
–noun
1.a connection, association, or involvement.

2.connection between persons by blood or marriage.

3.an emotional or other connection between people: the relationship between teachers and students.

4.a sexual involvement; affair.

—Synonyms 1. dependence, alliance, kinship. 2. affinity, consanguinity.

So okay, somehow that doesn't make me feel any better. I have always been into feeling, you know. I'm pretty aware of my feelings at any given moment, for some reason when I'm with Richard there is just a swirl of stuff and confusion. I've tried to dissect it a thousand times and make sense of everything that has happened between us, I seem to end up with more questions than answers. Anyway, one of my readers made a comment on the previous post that poly was unstable and monogamy only slightly less so. It's my opinion that monogamy or non-mono is really just life. LIFE can be unstable.

I've ceased to think of myself under those labels. I simply am. Stability comes from oneself, it's an intrinsic value in my belief, and though things like relationships can augment this value either positively or negatively they are not the value itself. So even with these external shifts of emotion and attachment going on around me it is not in me. If I haven't the ability to really be happy that's not because my environment is faulty, it's because I haven't yet learned the secret.

Am I the only one?