After a while!? My dear Ms. Blackstone — and the prefix is addressed to the 37-year-old you yourself describe as a woman cis — you're an undeniably fine writer, and my remarks are no critique of this. To unsuspecting readers, if I may — no matter how you identify and all of that, whether young or old, straight as a corkscrew or not the least bit queer or queeny, whether skinny or fat, short or tall, vagina or weeny — know this: it didn't get silly at all. It was born that way. Silly from the womb, so to say. As in silliness it came, so in silliness will depart.

Romantic obsessions, sexual compulsions, obsessions and compulsions of every intimate variety and sort — differences, in short, between men and women in these intimate matters of the human heart — they’re ancient and not new. They're verities well-known, documented to the point of weariness, in fact — verities and aspects of the human condition which are real, concrete, non-abstract, and not the silly part. The silly part is the late 20th early 21st century rediscovery and subsequent rebranding of them — you can call it poly or call it by a theory more queer in name, it doesn't matter in the least — specifically: how these ancient verities are regarded now as a novel discovery and treated as a novel art. That's where the silliness resides. That's the silly part. In the same way poly as a social clique was born cultic and in cultic grip blossomed, lived, and so will die, with an icepick at its heart — so in silliness the same-ol-same-ol obsessions with love and lust abides.