Four Reasons I Want Four Girlfriends

Listen, it’s the dream of many men. The fantasy that fuels the harem isekai market (which is a shitte tonne of anime these days if you keep up with it), this fantasy fuels my existence. No. For real. The brute fact of the possibility of me living an irl isekai anime, traveling the world with four women, is why I will never kill myself. Even if it doesn’t happen, even if it never could happen, holy shit but if it did happen, I can’t die.

I want to give you four reasons I want a long-term polyamorous relationship centered around me. Yes, number two is my ego, my sheer narcissism, which is one of my top mortal enemies as I am on a lifelong quest to attain humility. But you might find the three other reasons surprising.

1. Every night would be like a sleepover

I remember back in high school there were two girls I was really close friends with. They were seniors while I was a junior, and I was also young for my age so there was a huge age gap, but there was a time when my senpai and I were in the same bed taking selfies and stuff. We would speak about intimate things.

In college there was a math club, and a lot of my friends in there were women. We would party a lot together. On my 21st birthday I woke up the next day with five of them crashing in the same bed as me. I remember waking up, four facing the bed, “hey wake up [one] is in the kitchen making us breakfast.” They took selfies on my phone the night before. I have memories of them carrying me into a car (I was wasted) and a flash photographer was taking pictures of us with a nice camera. I never knew what happened to those pictures. I don’t even think that was the same night.

Frankly, there are a lot of stories from those times, but I was crossfaded or on hallucinogens a lot and between the drugs and partying I forgot a lot. I also feel so disgusting writing this. Those were close friends of mine and for these to be my memories, presented like this, with them as anonymous objects of some story makes me hate myself. It makes me remember yet again why they’re not my friends anymore.

My whole life I’ve loved sleepovers with women

It’s because underneath my niceness, I’m a misogynistic asshole. And no matter how much bell hooks or Andrea Dworkin or feminist anthologies I’ve read over these four years I’ve spent alone in my room reflecting since those times, there is something critical I do not understand as a man, and perhaps never will. And it saddens me because I feel that blocks me off from ever attaining love, even if somehow some woman or women decide to actually be in a relationship with me.

Deep down half the reason I’m afraid of talking to women I’m attracted to is because I fear my own misogyny.

The love of sleepovers is really the love of female friendship. My whole life I’ve loved sleepovers with women. It’s such a fun and positive space with good energy.

I’ve never actually had a threesome or moresome. I was kind of close maybe a few times, but it never materalized. My experience with sleepovers with women is largely platonic.

And I know from experience that isolating yourself from women and not talking to them for fear of doing harm because of your mental illnesses and social upbringing, and obsessively, compulsively reading feminist texts doesn’t make actually life any better for women.

You might just have to dissolve your misogyny into the love of women. And sleepovers are a perfect place to be surrounded by friendship and to unlearn the weird shit you think when you spend a prolonged period of time away from them.

2. It’s an ego thing

Part of the reason I want four girlfriends is because I’m a raging narcissist. And women are really good at keeping ego in check if we listen to them.

Women are really good at keeping ego in check if we listen to them.

You might be thinking, but wait isn’t this an ego thing for you because you want the appearance of being with all these women? To show up to parties and look like a badass because half these guys can’t even get one woman let alone four?

Not really. A polyamorous lifelong relationship isn’t parties all the time. And as Lacan/Zizek remind us, there is no Big Other, no singular audience watching your every move approving or disapproving of your actions.

Most of our life spent together will be in relative privacy, not showing them off like collector’s items.

Practically speaking, you shouldn’t want four women because it looks cool. That’s pretty fucked up to use people that way.

Unfortunately I’m a hypocrite because that element of fantasy has crossed my mind before. The appearance of hypermasculinity ironically signified by women. It does feel good to be at a party and show up with multiple women. It feels great.

But it’s more important to understand, as Anthony Steinbock writes in his book on Moral Emotions, understand that pride takes the form of thinking you’re above the contributions of others to your life meaning.

Humility is to accept and integrate what others may teach you. And I would like to enroll in lifelong lessons taught by, my favorite number, four women.

3. To take care of each other when I die

This is the more serious one. I read this book called Love Medicine in high school. I didn’t really get it. Read it again a few years ago, and wow. Really gorgeous book.

One thing about it is that this guy who was married had an affair with another woman. After he died, those women actually became friends and political allies and they fought for indigenous rights. God I hope memory serves me correctly.

It is very likely I’m going to die. I would like the work of mourning and completing the tasks of my will to be distributed.

I do not want anybody I love deeply to have to mourn my loss by themself. I also don’t want them to have to shoulder the burden of my last requests alone.

4. So my children are raised by a village

I’m more comfortable with the idea of child-rearing being distributed among the five of us than just me and one other woman.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then I don’t really want to raise one in a nuclear family.

Honestly I kind of want to be a house husband and spend a lot of time with my kids. Hence why I’m attracted to very independent, feminist, bread winners.

Domestic labor is work, and not just “women’s work” as weird patriarchs who can’t even do their own laundry like to say.

We can split that work up effectively and take care of each other. As the old proverb says “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”