Have you missed my love stories? I have a fresh one.
Something happened to me that still makes me laugh. I want to bring you the story, with a little irony.
In the original Russian post, I left several phrases in English because I wanted to remember them exactly as they sounded. We can also pretend I was helping my readers practise their English.
Content note: Ukraine, polyamory and drugs.
Some romances bring bright feelings and emotions. Others help us see, very clearly, “This is something I can leave behind.”
This one began in my usual way: with signs from the universe.
The first date
A couple of days after Brandon left, I opened a dating app out of habit, liked a few people and saw that a man using the name Rhythm had invited me on a date in a very beautiful way.
I sent him a message:
“You know, I’ve had a wild three weeks. I spent one week with my lover and then went through an intense shamanic retreat. I think I need more time before meeting someone new.”
Then I opened Instagram. The first story I saw showed a woman holding a card marked “Rythm.”
Okay, Shiva. I heard you.
We met the following day and felt enchanted with each other almost immediately.
“Soooo… what’s your story?” I asked him.
He was twenty-nine and came from California. He had turned an old school bus into a home and driven it across half of the United States. During the previous year, he had travelled between India and Bali: a familiar search for meaning before thirty, or an astrological Saturn return.
His work had also changed. He was looking for a new direction after running his own cannabis farm.
I smiled and imagined us sharing a joint. Then he added that he had stopped six years earlier and used no substances now.
He told me stories that sounded wild to someone raised in Russia. His mother became angry when she smelled tobacco in the house, yet she calmly accepted that he and his friends smoked cannabis at fourteen. Around the same age, he first tried psychedelics.
Interesting. You’ve got my attention.
As I prepared the original post, I wondered how all this would land with the people reading it. Would they feel curiosity, judgement or something else?
Plant medicine has a place in my life. I have rarely advertised it, and I have never tried to hide it. I approach it with great respect.
Respect matters here. I use these experiences to expand consciousness and meet feelings and perceptions that ordinary life may never reveal. Before my first mushroom experience two and a half years earlier, I prepared even more carefully than I had for my first Vipassana retreat. I meditated, set an intention and fasted.
The love I felt there later prepared me for Tantric practice. Kundalini Yoga, Tantra and shamanism can also open altered states of consciousness through practice alone.
Writing about this still feels difficult. A strong inner stigma tells me that drugs are unacceptable.
At the same time, every powerful practitioner I had met in the helping professions had taken part in an ayahuasca ceremony or experienced psilocybin mushrooms at least once.
When I raised the subject with my guru at the Indian ashram, she placed it inside a longer human history. She told me that sacred plants had opened people’s consciousness for thousands of years, and that such knowledge brought responsibility. Whatever I learned should serve something good. She also reminded me to stay grounded and continue meditating.
My first psychedelic experience happened at twenty-nine, after years of meditation, therapy and personal work. Even with that preparation, the inner expansion felt difficult to describe.
Rhythm — because this still is a love story — had first experienced psychedelics at fourteen.
Anyone familiar with a psychedelic state may understand the scale of that fact. I kept imagining myself at the same age. How would the experience have changed my life? Would my mind have had enough stability to hold it?
I feel glad that it came to me at twenty-nine. At fourteen, the same experience might have been far too much.
Who was this man?
The second date
After our first night together, I listened to myself and noticed something unusual: I was staying out of love.
I usually need very little encouragement to fall for someone. The warm oxytocin glow had arrived, yet my familiar tenderness had stayed away. Then I sensed the reason before I could explain it to myself: he had a girlfriend.
On our second date, I asked directly about his personal life. He checked twice that I truly wanted to know. Then he told me about his girlfriend in California. They had opened their relationship six months earlier. He spoke about her with such warmth that I began smiling too.
I laughed and told him I had somehow known.
“What did you tell her about me?”
He became shy. “That I’ve met this gorgeous Tantric woman. Extremely conscious. She knows how to make love.”
I enjoyed the description.
Then he continued. He also had a partner in Goa, and they had been together for several months.
I laughed aloud. “You already have two girlfriends. You understand that I have no wish to become the third?”
Inside, another realisation arrived. My years of exploring polyamory might have reached their end. I had left a previous relationship partly because I wanted openness and my partner wanted monogamy. Two and a half years later, my desires had changed.
The third date
By the third date, the joke had become absurd: his partner in Goa was Ukrainian.
“Let me understand. You are American, dating a Ukrainian woman and sleeping with a Russian woman? That sounds strangely political.”
Beneath the joke sat a more serious question. What happens when we meet someone who makes little sense for us, yet the attraction carries so much warmth, depth and electricity that walking away feels difficult?
I usually avoid romances with men who already have partners, especially two partners, with one living in the same place. Even in a short holiday affair, I prefer to feel like the central woman in a man’s life for that limited time.
I could have said the situation failed to suit me and left. I stayed because I felt life and a subtle exchange between us. Some lesson seemed to be present, even before either of us could name it.
The lesson came. One of his actions activated a powerful emotional response in me. It started a period of reflection on the kind of treatment I want from men at this point in my life. The conclusions mattered.
One more piece of context belongs here. My grandmother came from Odesa, my grandfather from Belarus, I was born in Kazakhstan and I hold a Russian passport.
I rarely write about the war, although it remains present in my life. In an international community, one sentence has almost become part of my introduction: “I am Russian, and I support Ukraine.”
Some readers may need to know that too.
