This essay is part of a collaborative project with Black History, Continued. We invited readers and renowned writers to respond to the question “What is Black love today?”

I’ve always been wary of sports, competition and falling in love. So growing up, I avoided all three. As a kid, I would shrug when “accidentally” letting goals into the net from the opposing team. I would walk slowly behind everyone else on the basketball court as they ran from end to end. My mother eventually stopped asking if I was interested in signing up for extracurriculars and my friends came to understand my lack of interest in playing board games, card games, drinking games or anything that required competing for the title winner.

I was even able to avoid acting on romantic feelings for a long time but with age I let up slightly. After an indecisive football player, a shady basketball player, and a club bouncer who was as bad at kissing as he was at his job, I decided I had made a mistake opening myself up, and convinced myself that the real issue was vulnerability. I would no longer be attaching any emotional investments to my sexual partners. I never bothered to be competitive or to fall in love because I didn’t care to win.

I met him on HER, a dating app for queer women and gender diverse people. He had long brown dreadlocks with subtle hints of blond and a promising smile. There was something about him that told me he would be the exact kind of fun I was looking for. He approached me with a smooth pickup line, and I responded with something much less cool. Before I could give it much thought he told me that he was assigned female at birth and had transitioned to live his life in the gender that was most authentic to him. “So, what are you looking for?” I said. “Well, I’m in an open relationship. So I’m not anticipating anything too serious,” he responded, adding that he and his partner were engaged to be married.

My friends wanted to know how someone could be committed to a partner while pursuing other relationships. I didn’t blame them: the idea of a relationship where both partners agree to seeing other people while being together isn’t something that most learn about in “the birds and the bees” conversation. My immediate reaction when I learned he was in an open relationship was relief. I would have fun with no emotional responsibility. They were deeply in love and had a strong foundation on which their love was built. They knew that marriage was the ultimate goal of their relationship, and had its benefits both legally and personally, but they also knew that, in order to meet both of their physical and emotional needs, their marriage would need to be unconventional — which, in this case, meant leaving the door open for other intimate possibilities.

What neither of us expected was the fast progression of our feelings. I started wondering more about when he’d see his fiancé next. He wanted details about the dates I went on. We both grew possessive as our unanticipated love bloomed. We began feeling entitled to each other. Yet, while my insecurity grew more obvious, he managed to mostly keep his casual demeanor. And of course he could. He always went home to the loving arms of his partner, and I always went home to thoughts of a lover that I couldn’t truly call my own.