Tag: personal growth

Not every relationship lasts forever – learning to appreciate the beauty in endings and change

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Dead flowers are absolutely beautiful to me. There is a point at which they stop blooming and start getting darker and dryer, and they freeze in time.  They hit a point where they are brittle and fragile, but they don’t completely decay, they are frozen in a moment past their prime and stop changing at a rate that you can see from day to day.  That imperfect beauty is haunting to me, even something that has used up all it’s energy and potential for growth can still be aesthetically pleasing. They stay lovely for much longer when they are dead then they ever did while alive, still adding a morbid beauty to a room that can last for years before they inevitably crumble into shapeless organic matter, and even that can provide nutrients for new growth.

I didn’t like getting flowers for the longest time, I felt betrayed by the lifelessness of them.  It seemed sad, a burden to get something with a clock ticking down to the end of it’s life. They had been picked, they were no longer part of something living, but they were still alive for a short while longer. Once they were cut, the rest of their life was ticking down to their eventual death, but that death was a shadow that was so close now, visible in every facet of their beauty.  I couldn’t see the worth in something that had such a clear and obvious end stamp on it, a short term pleasure that would be over after one brief glorious bloom of color and brightness.

I felt the same way about relationships, my measure for success was often longevity.  I endured years in relationships that were toxic and incompatible because I knew that I had to make it work or else we had failed.  I remember when I finally broke up with my girlfriend Nova, we had been fighting almost daily for years, since a few months after the relationship had began.  We had done so much damage to each other, she had cheated, I had been controlling, she had lied repeatedly, I had gotten nasty and slung insults, and it culminated in a night where she hit me during one of our fights and I was just done.  I spoke to my other partners after, told them I thought this was finally it and I had to end things, it had gone to far.  They said it had gone to far a long time ago, it shouldn’t have taken the abuse becoming physical on her part for us to split, we had been emotionally abusing each other for years. They told me how they had been trying to be supportive, but watching us hurl ourselves at each other in a furious battle of passion and anger for years had been so devastating and stressful that they had almost walked away from it all and me with it, just to be out of the chaos. I hadn’t known the effect it was having, but it shook me.  I had almost torn down my whole world at the time just to try and maintain a relationship that was an exploding star, brilliantly bright as it imploded, but obvious to everyone else it was about to consume us in a black hole.  Even during the relationship, we had recognized the parts of it that were unhealthy and the cause of most of our fights, and had talked about ending those parts and transitioning to another type of dynamic, but each time one of us suggested that, the other would fight it vehemently, though we both knew it would have been the healthier option.  The idea of losing something, of part of our dynamic changing, disappearing, was too painful a loss to bear.  We didn’t want something dead, something gone, a constant reminder of what once was and could have been.  We didn’t want the end of one part of the dynamic that so early on was clearly not working, to be the dead flowers on our mantle. So instead we burnt it all to the ground.  Looking back, a relationship with dead flowers, where a part of our dynamic that had been given as a gift but had ended and was only left to look at and remember the beauty of, would have been better then us burning the whole fucking house down.

I’m not sure when exactly it changed, but I’ve learned to love getting flowers.  I love the moment where they are presented, the brilliant colors and softness of the petals, the perfume of life at it’s peak.  I love enjoying the brightness they bring, and their heady scents that transform the whole atmosphere of a room.  I love the slow death and decay, and that moment where they have past their peak and are now dark and dry and haunting, but still beautiful.  I adore dead flowers, lovely in a different way then they were when alive, but no longer sad to me, no longer a burden of something gone so quickly.

I feel differently about relationships these days as well.  I do value longevity when it makes sense, in the same way I value an herb garden that renews each year just as much as I value the dead roses on my alter.  I do not measure the success of a relationship based on how long it lasts though.  I am happy to go into dynamics that I recognize may not be permanent, and endings and change are not a thing I fear to a point that I would rather endure pain or abuse or toxicity rather then face them.  These days when I begin a relationship, I am honest to myself and to my partner that it may not last forever and that is okay, we focus on making it functional and enriching and healthy for us both, rather then making it endure.  When problems arise we work through them, and we lay out all options on the table.  Compromise, finding mutual understandings, accepting each others boundaries, changing expectations, talking through hardship, these are all viable options.  Ending a part or all of the dynamic, transitioning the dynamic to something different, allowing for the death of one thing and even the possibility that it may nourish the growth of another, these are all viable options as well.  Some of my most beautiful and enriching dynamics these days are ones that started out with entirely different structures and parameters, but were allowed to organically change over time.  I no longer try to fight change as though it were an enemy to be conquered or a failure to be avoided.  I no longer avoid relationships that may not last forever either, and I love receiving flowers now even though they will die, and in both I now have so many more beautiful things in my life then I did before.

One more thing has changed, as I said at the beginning, I still find flowers to be beautiful and appealing after they have died. It used to be when relationships ended, I would plow forward into the next one, needing my fix of something vibrant and at it’s peak of life.  I like looking at my dead flowers now, and I also enjoy looking back at the relationships that have ended, the ones that peacefully decayed, and the ones where we burnt the fucking house down around us.  There is so much to be learned, so much personal growth to be had, and so much tragic beauty in pain and parting of ways.  I am not afraid of it anymore, I don’t mind sitting with my pain and the ways in which I royally fucked up.  I made so many mistakes and I allow myself that now, I can be an imperfect person who was fragile and brittle and broke all over people who deserved much better.  I can become a stronger and more resilient person, one who grows sturdy roots and renews myself in healthier soil, but I can look back at my dead flowers and my lost loves and remember those lovely moments in the sun and the dark ones as we fought decay.  There is nothing wrong with the passage of time, with endings and beginnings and short lived loves.  I like to examine my past, I don’t wallow in it, but I open my eyes and allow myself to see it.  And I do really love dead flowers and all the life they remind me of.

A maelstrom of confidence and self doubt

It is hard to feel authentic.  I don’t see myself as a person that struggles with self confidence, I have a great measure of confidence in my opinion, but I have also realized I have a great measure of self doubt.  I always see a lack of self confidence portrayed as thinking poorly of yourself, self hatred, having low self esteem.  I don’t feel like I have low self esteem, I don’t find myself to be unlovable and quite to the contrary, I think I’m pretty damn fantastic.  I adore myself for being a quirky, loud, queer, oddball of a dude.  Lately though, I’ve been struggling with impostor syndrome and feeling like maybe I am not good -enough- or not real enough.

Part of the issue seems to be a feeling of lacking authenticity.  I often have a lot of complicated feelings in my mind, many lines of thought and emotion going on at one time.  It isn’t always possible to express all of that, sometimes I lack the time, sometimes I lack the words, sometimes it isn’t all relevant.  When I give someone a window into how I’m feeling or thinking, but they are just getting to see the part of the scenery visible through that window and missing the whole landscape, I feel inauthentic.  I also feel there is a lot in my mind that isn’t appropriate to express, that I want some measure of privacy for, or that does not fit with the person I am working on becoming. I know I have a right to some measure of privacy, but it contrasts starkly with the version of radical honesty I once practiced.  I also feel that in writing, I want to bare my soul, allow light into all of the dark cracked places of my mind, but it is hard to do so without feeling raw and open in a painful and violated way.  I almost have a desire to be the instrument of my own violation at times, to rip away everything I can hide behind and feel exposed in ways that make me intensely uncomfortable, as though that pain may be a release or way to rebuild.  It also could be terribly unhealthy though, so I dip a toe in here and there, testing the waters of pushing my own limits.

Lately in my life I have found a sense of community and of acceptance in various circles, and that gives me a feeling of home and of comfort that I have craved for a long time.  Like everything I experience though, it seems to be on a pendulum, my emotions swinging back and forth, back and forth.  I feel loved, accepted, a sense of belonging, and with that comes heightened energy and a zealous leap into my sense of self and identity that is -too much- to express in some avenues of life.  I can be a fabulous outspoken beacon of queerness when among my amazingly accepting social circles, a part of me that is not at home when at school or work or in the brightly lit aisles of the grocery store.  I feel alive and electric, able to dance and flail around in all my manic rainbow glory.  And then the pendulum swings back and I wonder if I’m pigeon holing myself into another narrow identity. I try and describe myself, I see the person I am in any one environment, and I feel like I am a person of a thousand faces, some more authentic then the others, but none truly whole. Sometimes I want to gasp for air, broken on the ground, unsure of how any person can be themselves when yourself is too much to be.  Then I feel more self-doubt because how can one person be so fucking melodramatic and still be real.

It’s a funny thing, confidence mixed with self doubt. Knowing you are someone you yourself can adore, but not feeling seen.  Feeling seen too much, but only through a window.  Feeling naked and raw, and still too private and closed off. Feeling alive and bursting with life and then so unsure of your realness that you worry you’ll disappear into a shadow and fade away.  Wondering if anything in your mind makes any sense, if its a mania fueled daydream, if you’ve regressed to a melodramatic teenager, or if this is just your normal.  Hearing that emotions are valid, but not being certain that these particular emotions are, or even if they are emotions at all.  I wonder if this is all too personal.

Much of my life is focused around emotional and personal growth, learning, and trying to help others.  I give advice and can relate experiences shared with me with ones in my past.  I try and connect the dots to tell a story, to write about what I know of a thing and maybe offer that up as a living sacrifice of words.  Then I realize fuck, I don’t actually have much of the knowledge base for this.  I haven’t spent the last ten years doing historical research that makes me an expert or even a novice in this subject.  I have the sentences spinning in my mind that I’ve gleaned from reading this article and that, I have the lived experience of one small person in a vast world.  I feel like an impostor.  I read about impostor syndrome being all too common and how to fight it.  I think about how maybe that applies to people with a wealth of knowledge far greater on my own.  I toy with not caring, pushing forward anyway and putting my voice out there with a stubborn resilience.  I wonder again if that voice has worth.

I am left thinking, am I real?  Who is this person I have become that speaks and writes and is never good enough? I hear reassurance, I don’t want reassurance, I don’t even know if I want confirmation or understanding.  Sometimes there are just too many thoughts, too many faces, and too many questions in my head and I want them to have somewhere to go.  I don’t know if I can reach a point where I do feel authentic and honest and raw, but there is a need for it inside me and this is an avenue to try.

It was short lived, it was toxic, it was still a success

The longest relationship I’ve ever been in celebrated eight years last month. We have not had a titled dynamic that entire time, in fact we don’t now, although I often use the word “partnership” to describe it.  But we lack an official label, we just use a variety of descriptive ones as necessary or relevant to the conversation at hand.  I have actually had longer dynamics as well, though I don’t count them as the longest because while for example I’ve known one of my loves for about twelve years now, we’ve varied in closeness over that time and been out of touch for periods.  With Kelev, who I’ve been with for eight years, we’ve been a pretty integrated part of each others daily lives for that time.  Of course I am not trying to devalue relationships that are comet shaped, that is to say where the person passes in and out of orbits of closeness in your life without an expectation of constancy or continuity. I recognize the value and validity of those dynamics as well, and the ones in my life are very important to me.  I just don’t count the years in the same way I would in a partnership with a secure state of constancy.

My thoughts this morning converged on this idea of counting the years and on how we as a society measure the success of a relationship by the longevity of it.  This train of thought really began yesterday when I was spending time in the company of dear friends, and they were working on character creation for a D&D campaign using my old 3.5 books.  One of them handed me a paper they had found from one of those books, and I saw the handwriting and realized it belonged to Cat, a prior partner.  I was with Cat for only about two years, we didn’t celebrate anniversaries that I recall, so I’m not actually sure exactly how long the relationship lasted.  I was a garbage fire of a partner, I was just descending into alcoholism, we were dabbling into kink to an extent neither of us was ready for, and I have adult onset bi-polar which decided to make it’s home in my brain right around the time we were starting to get close.  A lot of factors converged and I can say looking back that I was an abusive toxic mess, but we had a whirlwind romance where for a lot of the time we were hopelessly and completely devoted to each other, the center of each others worlds.  That relationship imploded, as toxic relationships often do, and I have never mourned the loss of a partnership as much as I have with Cat. In fact I still do, I miss him every moment of every day, which is something I cannot say of any other partnerships that ended.

It is seven years later. My relationship with my ex-fiance, which began before I met Cat and didn’t end until later, that lasted six years, has now been over for a few years.  I was in another intense dynamic that lasted somewhere in the range of three or four years, and have another partner who I am still with and we will be celebrating six years this year.  And there’s Kelev, who I have grown closer to than I ever imagined I could, who I met while I was still with Cat, and who actually was involved with us both during that brief time of overlap.  If I just looked at it from the perspective of my longest lasting relationship, the dynamic I have with Kelev is both the longest running, and the most impactful.  If I broaden the view though, the relationship that effected me the most in my entire life, second to my dynamic with Kelev, was my short lived furious romance with Cat, that went down in flames.  The relationship wasn’t successful by the measure of longevity, nor by many other measures, since to be blunt, we fucked each other up real good.  If we are measuring by impact and growth though, that was the second most successful relationship of my life.

I have never stopped learning and growing as a person from looking back, seeing all my mistakes, seeing the beautiful passionate parts in between, and recognizing the worst of me that came out in that.  My sobriety is because of Kelev and Cat, Kelev for his constant support and encouragement, and Cat for being with me at the very beginning and showing me what I could lose when I let alcohol control me.  That horrible toxic relationship, the one that most broke me when I lost it, I count it as one of the most successful because I measure success through what I learned and who I became.  And seeing his handwriting again, all the memories coming back so vividly, reminded me of how much who I am and how I grow every day can be traced back to one of my shortest and most chaotic relationships.  He will be a part of me that I carry with me every day, through the intensity he made me feel that has not yet been matched, and through the growth he inspired and continues to inspire even years after we ended.  That relationship was my biggest failure personally, in how I behaved and who I became in it.  But it is also one of the greatest successes of my life in all it taught me going forward and how much the memory of him continues to spur positive change in my life every day.  You can never truly measure the exact impact of a relationship, but if you do, don’t look to longevity to do so, look at who you were at the start, who you were at the finish, who you are now from the effects of it, and who you continue to become because of it all.

Do you see relationships through the lens of what you’ll gain or what you’ll give up?  

Do you see relationships through the lens of what you’ll gain or what you’ll give up?

I think generally when people are looking for relationships, they are looking to add something to their life.  Loneliness, a desire for affection or touch, a want for someone to confide in or grow with, all our needs for human connection are a motivating factor in seeking relationships.  We look for what someone can bring into our lives, how our life can unfurl with them and what can be mutually shared and enjoyed together.  Especially in monogamous dynamics, people often are looking to follow the relationship escalator. The relationship escalator is where you meet and make contact, get to know someone, engage in romantic gestures, begin to define a commitment, and follow the progression of moving in, then usually pursuing marriage, then children or pets, and a happily ever after of further intertwinement.  It is centered around taking steps higher and higher, gaining more safety and stability from the relationship with every step.

In polyamorous relationships, especially for people newly opening up to polyamory, people are sometimes trying to fill in areas of their relationships where they feel they are lacking, with a new person. I’ve noticed often, especially in newly polya folks, that a person may be looking to supplement a need for more sex or affection or someone they can relate to and confide in, in certain ways, with a new person. In fact this is often a driving factor in infidelity in monogamous dynamics as well.  This is not the only reason, or even the main reason, that people pursue polyamory though.  I feel it is safe to say that most people who pursue polyamory in the long run do so because they cannot imagine limiting romantic love and connection to one individual, not just because of wanting to fill their own need holes with puzzle piece people.  The point I am making though, is I think we do often view new relationships from the lens of what we will gain in pursuing them, whether it is meeting a need or want, or just expanding the love we feel to include a new person and sharing new life experiences with them.

I have noticed that I do something different, that I have over the last 5-10 years or so begun viewing relationships through the lens of what I will give up.  When getting involved with someone new, one of my first courses of actions is to strongly define my boundaries.  “Do not expect me to ever share a room with you.  Understand I may at times be willing to share my bed, but it will be on my terms and not something you can expect nightly or regularly.” I am almost defensive in the extent to which I put my boundaries forward, as though expecting them to be violated without reason.  I do have a reason though, they are hard won boundaries.  I spent years not only letting others bulldoze over them, but repressing them myself and indulging co-dependency rather then independence.  Independence was and still is the hardest skill I’ve ever had to cultivate withing myself.  In fact, it was one of my partners pushing me into it, modeling it for me, and making it clear at times that if I continued to be co-dependent with him that I would lose him altogether, that started me down that path to begin with.  It was hard to take the independence that I found in that dynamic and apply it to my others, not to just use people as puzzle pieces to fit in my co-dependency hole.  After fighting tooth and nail to become a more resilient and independent person, to become comfortable with aloneness, and as I continue down that path, new relationships are frightening.  When I begin to develop a closeness with someone I have to wonder, what am I going to give up to this person?  What parts of myself am I going to lose and what boundaries will I let them walk over?  What will I have to compromise in my other relationships? Will I lose the trips to the supermarket with the partner who I can relax with more than anyone, who makes me laugh in our car rides alone, a laugh that never comes as freely with anyone else?  Will I lose the time to myself each morning, after I let the dogs out and before I have had my coffee, where my mind is able to assimilate all the coping mechanisms that make me functional through the day?  Will I lose the strength I feel flowing through me as I sprawl out in bed by myself at night and realize that I can finally sleep alone without being consumed by loneliness or a need for a body beside me?  What part of me does this partner want from me, what can I give them, without it being a loss for me?

I know that I am not alone in this.  In polyamorous dynamics it is clear that there is not enough time and energy for an unlimited amount of loves, there is always some kind of trade off in your own personal time or time with partners when you engage with someone new. When you have been co-dependent as well, freedom and independence are so hard won that you may always be vigilant that they are slipping away.  If you have dealt with abuse as I have, you may be constantly concerned that your boundaries will be trampled and wonder what you must compromise to earn someone’s love. I won’t claim to know which way is better, or if there is a better.  In all likelihood the answer is as usual, some kind of balance.  I know for me though, I do look at relationships through the lens of what I must give up, it is a struggle to allow someone into my life for that reason.

Relationship anarchy has helped some with that.  Being able to have dynamics that are fluid, that can take shape organically and do not need to follow the relationship escalator, and are formed by finding the common ground and desires of those involved, has helped negate some of my fear.  I have become confident in my autonomy and my respect of the autonomy of my partners as well, and more sure of my ability to maintain my boundaries.  To relate to people in a way with less labels and societal norms, and to enjoy the ways in which my life touches others without expectations, has allowed a little more comfort.  I am still guarded, I know this.  I anticipate expectations and obligations put on me, I warn and ready my loves for disappointment, and I still defensively insist on my boundaries with an often unneeded vehemence.  I hope more healing is to come, I am not sure if I will ever look at relationships from the completely what will I gain perspective I did in the very first ones I entered into, but maybe some day I will be able to worry less about what it will cost me every time I fall in love.

Does helping someone else cheat make you a cheater?

There are many bumps and pitfalls when you engage in relationships outside of the societal norm, such as polyamory and relationship anarchy.  In a monogomous relationship, sharing sexual or romantic intimacy with someone else is almost always seen as cheating.  In a polyamorous relationship, cheating is still possible, just not so easily defined.  Since polyamory involves engaging in multiple romantic or sexual dynamics, cheating is usually defined as breaking a relationship agreement.  This almost always refers to relationship agreements relating to intimacy with other people though.  After all, while your spouse might get jealous if you watch the newest episode of Desperate Housewives with your friend Jay, even though you may have promised to watch it with your spouse first, they are unlikely to label this as cheating. If on the other hand, you have sex with Jay and tell your spouse afterwards, and you have agree to run new sexual partners by each other beforehand, then your spouse would likely feel that you had cheated on them. When a relationship agreement is broken, in a monogomous or polyamorous dynamic, and it does relate to intimacy with other people, the label of cheating is often applied.  And cheating is often seen as the worst offense, the sex you had with Jay is a much greater betrayal then your watching of Desperate Housewives together. So what about when you are not the one breaking an agreement, but you are Jay, and are just the third party involved in the breaking of the agreement?

So you have ventured into polyamory, or maybe you have been polya or a relationship anarchist for years.  You befriend an adorable creature who shares some social circles with you and begin to get to know each other.  You meet up for coffee and get lost in their eyes, your discussions stay with you for days after.  Soon you realize well fuck, I really want to kiss this person, but alas, they are in a monogomous relationship.  What do you do? Okay, well obviously don’t kiss them without consent, you have to make sure they want to kiss you too, but assuming mutual desire has been established, do you go ahead because you both want to, or do you refrain from doing so out of respect for their relationship? The cry I’ve heard echoed in most all the polya circles I’ve been in is full stop! Respect their relationship!  For many years I was in Camp Respect, I would have said that you were enabling cheating, and in doing so you were just as bad as a cheater yourself.  If that were still the case this writing would be pretty boring, as it would end here.  I no longer believe that.

This boils down to an ownership mentality.  While polyamorists often try and unpack the idea of owning their partners much more then monogomists, it is hard to completely throw off that societal conditioning.  But I don’t feel like I own my partner! they may say incredulously.  Well, do you accept that your partner is a completely autonomous being who has every right to have and express their emotions as they come up, and share their own body as they wish? If not, do you feel you have a right to restrict how your partner feels and expresses their feelings or shares their body?  If you answered yes to the second question, there is a sense of entitlement over your partner’s body and mind. That possessiveness is the ownership mentality I’m speaking of.  You may have answered yes to the first question, you do accept that your partner is autonomous and can share their body and heart with who they choose, and that means we’re on the same page. As a relationship anarchist, this principle is of extreme importance to me. Shrugging off the ownership mentality, the idea that I had some say over how the people I am close to could share themselves with others, was no easy task, but one I continue to put a lot of effort into.  The motivation behind that is the most important thing.  I truly do believe in the importance of autonomy. I do not believe your partner is ever your possession, or that anyone has a right to treat someone else as a commodity they can keep to themselves or only rent out to others as they choose.  So, in a situation where a person is in a relationship where their partner has dictated, or the societal norms have dictated, that they may not do the delightful kissing or other such things with other people, respecting that is buying into that ownership mentality and acknowledging that they are a possession of their partner.  I refuse to take part in that coercion any longer and as such, if I consent to the kissing of the new adorable creature over the coffee date and they consent to kissing me as well, I will not respect a monogomous dynamic that allows their partner to dictate what they may consent to, and in doing so disrespect their own autonomy to decide.  Now I do acknowledge that them breaking the agreements of fidelity with their partner are hurtful, even if I believe imposed monogomous relationship agreements are unethical.  I also acknowledge that cheating usually includes an element of deception, and that is not a dynamic I will walk into, so usually I end up refraining from the kissing for that reason.  I have no interest in helping someone lie, because while I do not find a disregard for possessiveness and restriction of autonomy to be unethical, I do find dishonesty to be unethical.  My response would likely to be an expression of my desire to kiss the person, but an acknowledgment that I have no intention of being part of a secret where we mutually work to keep it from their partner.  And if they express that they will keep it from their partner, and I need have no part in that, possibly because I don’t know or will never meet their partner, well the desire to do the thing is gone because I don’t really need to be swapping spit with someone who is happy to lie.  So, it’s often a non-issue, but I feel the reasoning behind it to be very important from an ethical standpoint. Especially when my ethics dictate bucking against a culture of owning-ones-partner as much as possible.

Now what about if the person you are interested in is polyamorous, and it’s not a matter of coercive monogamy structures in which fidelity is assumed and there is an expectation of a persons body belonging only to their partner, but instead you have people who respect each others autonomy and desire to explore with others, but have made agreements to guide how they do so? This is where it gets sticky and even I am still working out my hard feels about this. So if you make an agreement with your partner that you will let them know before you have sex with other people, is that coercive and ownership based?  Sometimes I think the answer is yes, I’ve seen these sort of agreements made, where one partner felt they had to agree to restrictions to be “allowed” to be polya, and that is clearly coercive.  Assuming though, that there wasn’t overt coercion, is there a problem?  Well, if you want to tell your partner beforehand, and your partner wants to tell you beforehand, you both will do so, is there need for an agreement there, that if broken = cheating?  If the agreement is truly being made out of a mutual desire to do so, there really isn’t a need for an agreement at all, because both people will do the thing anyway when acting out their wants.  If one person no longer wants to do the thing, then honestly, they are no longer a mutually consenting participant in the agreement.  I think though, brains are not that simple, and desire is not that simple.  If we are assuming agreements made without coercion, without any pressure from the other person that restricts autonomy, and with a deep respect for each others desires, then a person might agree to something that they know is an overarching want, even if their in-the-moment wants might conflict with that. I have agreements with some of my partners to discuss new partnerships with them as I am considering them.  I have these agreements because my base wants are to share my emotions as I enter new experiences, and to give my partners a platform to share their emotions.  I will not let a partner control my new connections, but I do want to know and understand what they are feeling and address that with them, and also include them in my emotions and life experiences, even ones that don’t directly involve them.  In the moment I may at times find these agreements restrictive, and for that reason I do question them, and I may evolve away from them over time.  But at this point I have chosen those agreements and they are my primary want, even if they conflict with other momentary wants.  So I keep to them.

What do you do when you are the third party in these situations though?  You don’t know if agreements that a polya person has with their partner might contain some elements of coercion, or if they are agreements gone into with a respect for autonomy.  When the adorable creature you want to kiss tells you that it would be breaking their agreement but they wish to do so anyway, is there wish to do so a passing fancy that conflicts with their overarching desire to do the thing they agreed to, or are they bucking against and agreement they did not desire to make?  For this matter of ethics, I would say you can’t really know.  All you can do is ask and then trust their answer, and if they say that they truly with to do the kissing, more then they wish to do the keeping of the agreement, you are not ethically bound to hold them to an agreement they do not want to be engaged in.  Now again, I would likely have other reasons for not moving forward.  One reason would be again the possibility for dishonesty here, are they someone who would lie to their partner about this later, or are they letting their partner know and informing them that the agreement is no longer something they can keep to?  And also, I would likely disengage at this point because I do take agreements so seriously due to my distaste for ownership and coercion.  I want to make sure my partners will only agree to things with me that they are sure they want to make a commitment about, because they know they do have a strong autonomous overarching desire for it. I want partners who are self aware to be able to see these things about themselves and determine their own wants and needs.  Someone who is going around making and breaking agreements, when coercion isn’t a factor, is lacking a measure of self awareness and understanding of their desires before making commitments, and I don’t want to get involved there.

I think in the end what we need to understand is that ethical blame is often misplaced due to the normalization of ownership mentality and a lack of respect for autonomy.  Cheating is not unethical because you are sharing yourself in an intimate way with another human, it is unethical because of the dishonesty and breaking of commitments involved  And breaking those commitments is not always even unethical when they were not made in an environment free of coercion in the first place.  When you are participating from the sidelines, not the person who is breaking their agreements to begin with, but the person who is just engaging with an individual regardless of their agreements, you are not taking an unethical action.  Respecting someone else’s choice to decide for themselves what to do with their body is not unethical. You are not required to buy into respecting their agreement to hand that control over to someone else.  You are not required to buy into the concept that someone else is owed or deserves that control.  And you are not responsible for deciding which of their wants are most prominent or overarching, especially if they tell you otherwise or don’t have the self awareness to tell you at all.  I would advise against engaging in those kind of dynamics for many other reasons, dishonesty and causing hurt being some of them.  But I would like to dispel the myth I once perpetuated that helping someone cheat makes you a cheater as well, and put forward that instead we dismantle the structures where we feel we can own someone else’s body and cheating is even a thing.

Engagements end, personal growth is endless

On December 10th 2011, seven years ago, I got engaged.  I had been with my partner Otter since November 27th 2007. We bought a house April 12th 2012, and split up in May of 2014. That is no longer the longest running relationship I’ve been in. I look back on it though and I can say it was probably one of the most, if not the very most, toxic relationship I’ve ever been in.  Not just for me, certainly for both of us, because we were both pretty terrible people for each other in different ways.  I have so many stories I could tell of ways in which we battled against each other, how I grasped for control, how he lied about everything from the minuscule to the great, how we both poisoned each other with anxiety and fear. It’s hard to zero in on one memory, one lesson, one moment of failure, or one moment of joy.

I don’t actually remember much joy in that relationship, except maybe in the earliest days.  Thinking back though, most of it was joy of experience and indulgence.  I remember late night runs with our friends to taco hell and stuffing our faces full of gooey cheesy goodness that we could suddenly have in abundance because as college students we were adults, and had no real adults to tell us that maybe trying to eat enough burritos to feed a small village all at once was a poor life choice.  I remember the first winter break, where I was kicked out of the house and spent it with him, how we ate out every day and it felt like a celebration. I felt so grown up being able to get in his car and go anywhere with him, instead of having to rely on where my feet or the metro or my parents would take me.  I remember on breaks how he would drive the hour down from his place to mine, and our hurried frenzied sex in the car in my parents drive way in the middle of the night before we would go in to their home and curl up in separate beds because they would never consider the idea of letting us sleep together under their roof.  I remember the first time we went to Disney, a vacation we could never have afforded on our own but that my parents gifted to us. It felt so grown up to be on vacation together, but most of my memories are of us getting drunk, the sex, and making pesto in the hotel room kitchen naked.  In fact all of my great memories with him revolve around food or sex in one way or another.  I’m sure there was more to the relationship then that, but I can’t remember any truly soul touching conversations or any times I felt like I was expanding and growing as a person.

I am still a hedonistic being in many ways.  I love to cook and make rich foods that are bursting with flavor. I love savoring new cuisines and experiencing the deep taste of cultural heritage that I know I can never truly understand, but get a glimpse of through the evolution of a food culture that’s progressed for centuries.  I love touch, both platonic and sexual, from the few people I am comfortable enough to let into my space.  I love kink, and walking the lines of pleasure and pain and sensation drawn out over a moment until it is endless and overwhelming.  There are so many physical pleasures in this world that add to the wonder of existence, and are gratifying to share with my partners and loves and friends.  But the most savory thing of all in my life right now is that these hedonistic pleasures are not the only isolated source of joy, and not my sole way of connecting to the beautiful people I share my heart with.

One of the milestones that occurred right after my relationship with Otter ending was my starting back in school.  It was necessity, I needed to pursue a career that I could both enjoy and that could support me, now that I would be taking over ownership of the house we had bought together and supporting myself on my own.  It marked an extremely important change though.  As I transitioned away from a relationship that was filled with, after all the lies and control and fights and neglect, a self indulgent seeking of pleasure in the material world, I began to focus again on higher learning and growth.  How could I have lost so many years to an alcohol filled haze and so many burrito filled nights of gooey cheese and comfort, but not much else?  I was someone who had prided myself on my intellect, my lust for knowledge, my fascination with the human mind and the human condition.  I was someone who had given all that up for the comfort of a warm body with an income, midnight trips to taco hell, and a pretty ring. When he finally left, after it was all over and I was left with a human shaped hole where I had stashed all my codependency and loneliness and straining for security, it was a massive relief.  I was empty and lost and it felt glorious.  I was not alone, I had various other partners who were glorious supportive and loving people, but none were that picket fence and two and a half children shaped normal facade of comfort and security.  And in my emptiness I saw the road to growth and learning again unfurling in front of me.  I slowly began to stretch out all the cramps in my mind, spent a few years filtering out the daze of alcohol with several bumps in that road, and began unfurling my brain and heart again to reach towards a sense of real fulfillment.

These days I still have some of the glorious people who stood by me through the ending of that relationship and my growth following it, in my life.  Some of them were there from before my engagement, and some from before I even ever got into that relationship.  There are many who have come along after as well.  What I can say of all of them is they are not normal, they are not picket fence and two and a half kid shaped humans, they are not people who bring me joy only through hurried sexual escapades in the back of a car and midnight trips to taco hell, they are not people who I try and control or people who lie to me and make me grasp out harder in fear.  They are people who encourage my personal growth, my love for knowledge, my dabbling into psychology and philosophy, and my desperate need for conversation and to be challenged.  These days I have learned to never sacrifice my progress and personal growth for comfort and hedonistic pleasures.  As much as I love my food and my sex and the comfort of stability and security, it is only valuable to me in a life also filled with challenges and mental exercises and a pursuit of knowledge and understanding.  I need to feed both my body and mind, and I need progress.  I am too much for a house and a marriage and a life with a sweet but normal partner to contain.  I can be endless as long as I can always grow, and I won’t ever lose that again.

My path to choosing radical honesty and onward

I was not an honest child.  I was actually known for elaborate but obvious lies in my childhood.  To this day my parents frequently remark about my ability to make up imaginative and unbelievable “stories” as a child, but stories are a nice word for lies.  Whether it was to get out of trouble, or just to see if I could, I often concocted ridiculously complex untruths, and while lying was definitely a thing my parents discouraged, I also got the feeling that my creativity was appreciated and that was positive reinforcement.

As I came into my early teens, I was the center of attention much of the time in my little group of misfits.  I continued to use my penchant for creative lies to elaborate upon stories to make them more exciting and interesting. I adapted others stories and experiences as my own frequently, or outright concocted completely fabricated tales.  They were well received, although partly so because they were often believed as truth.  I made myself a persona as an exciting risk-taking hilarious individual, and I was loved for it.

When I was sixteen I met Q, an individual who told me they valued honesty strongly, and I concurred.  Of course honesty was of extreme importance, it was integral really.  I saw myself as honest, because I was more true to myself then most of my peers in that I certainly flew my freak flag high.  As a goth kid who was out about my sexuality since I was 13 and bucked gender norms, I gave few fucks about what others thought of me, and I saw that as an aspect of honesty.  In a world when so many people hide who they are out of fear of judgement and rejection, I was honest in that sense.  But I still told stories that were exaggerated and filled with half truths.  I had begun to feel prickles of guilt when I did so, and had dispensed with the ones that were all out lies, but I was not what I would these days think of as an honest person.  Back then though, I considered myself honest because my lies were usually exaggerations, bending of the truth, little white lies, lies for the comfort of others, and so on.  I fell in love with Q, and made some silly teenage promises of being together forever and staying with them no matter what.  I think most people expect that forever for a teenager means maybe eight months if you’re lucky, but Q took me at my word, after all I had said that I valued honesty as much as they did and they had no reason not to trust me.  Looking back, I do think that it is a bit excessive to expect a sixteen year old to know what they want and to be self aware enough to be able to commit to a lifetime relationship.  In fact I believe these days that while forever is a pretty word, it should be never taken as an absolute commitment, because relationships can become toxic to one or both individuals, and anyone is free to walk away at any time regardless of prior commitments and regardless of the reason.  We were both young though, and I made a lot of promises I could not keep, and portrayed myself as a much more self aware and honest person then I was though. In many ways I was manipulative, and I knew it as well.  I was not malicious, but I was starving for love and belonging, and I wanted Q in particular to feed my insecurities and be singularly attached to me.  My issues with insecurity and co-dependence may have begun in that dynamic, and a lot of other factors played into that as well.  What it boils down to is while Q was older, and I saw them as a learned authority figure, they were new to relationships and socially isolated for much of life.  I was a social butterfly who’d been with quite a few people by then, I was well versed in manipulation and lying, and I had an overblown opinion of myself and my level of self awareness and honesty.

When I left them the approximate eight months later that a teenager’s forever lasts, I shattered something in them. I don’t remember those moments in the detail that they do, so much of that time in my life is a blur to me, but I remember thinking over and over in my mind that I had broken them.  I didn’t know you could break a person.  And I’ve learned many many things in revisiting those moments with them over the years, as they are still one of my dearest loves and friends thirteen years later, but at the time what impacted me the most was realizing they had actually believed me when I said I would be with them forever. That idea was incomprehensible to me, I had been left by many people who had said the same thing, and left a couple myself, and there was always this unspoken understanding that forever only means forever until it doesn’t.  I had a lot of anger towards them for other things that transpired in the relationship, I felt wholly uncomfortable with them and also uncomfortable with losing the grip of control I had on them that meant not being alone and slipping into that dark place I went when I wasn’t drowning my depression in social validation. So I tried to maintain a closeness as we battled against each other in a messy break up, and I got an up close and personal window into how much my lack of honesty had wounded someone.  It was something I was wholly unprepared to deal with.  My initial response to crippling guilt and horror was to shut down and take solace in my next partner, a give-no-fucks asshole who actually probably ended up having more of a heart then I did back then.  I rebelled against Q’s need for me to be a facade of a decent human and was a horrible combative combustion of fucks.  While it would be years before I came out the other side of our cycles of fights and reconciliations with them, my experience worked away at the landscape of my mind like a flash flood eroding a riverbank and I was left changed.  I knew I wanted to be a real honest person, not just someone who pretended to be brave and honest because they were a rebellious queer goth in a sea of “normals”.

I discovered a concept called radical honesty.  Actually I discovered a perversion of the concept.  The original idea was a self-improvement program created by Dr. Brad Blanton that espouses being blunt and direct even in the face of painful or taboo subjects.  I don’t remember exactly who explained it to me, but in a game of philosophical telephone where psychology and philosophy were learned from a myriad of original and unoriginal sources and discussed and passed along among my rag tag group of friends until the ideas only resembled the original content, I somehow stumbled upon this one. The concept as it was explained to me was blunt unequivocal honesty, saying whatever came to mind with absolutely no filter.  No lying to save someones feelings, no little white lies, no bending the truth, and no holding anything back at all.  No matter how brusque or inappropriate a thought that popped up in the meat space of your brain was, you voiced it. I figured that was pretty much the opposite of my attempts at honesty that involved exaggeration and tweaking of the truth and little white lies here and there to save face, so I would do that thing!  And that was how I made a few friends in college by bouncing up to them and telling them all about the fabulous first ever dildo I had bought earlier that day, because that was what was on my mind the very moment I first saw them and decided to talk to them!  Some of them are still my friends even today, and probably think I’m just as much of an oddball freak as they did in that moment.

It wasn’t all hilarity and awkwardness though, radical honesty was hard.  It was absolutely painful and terrifying and humiliating to be that extremely truthful and blunt.  Stripping away the protection of filtering your thoughts and laying yourself bare for the world is horrifying.  It was what I needed though.  I have always been a person with a driving need to push to extremes, and doing so allowed me to appreciate the gifts of honesty as well.  I thought people believed and trusted me before and I didn’t see how much of that was all a dishonest facade as well.  I needed to push myself to a level of inappropriate and completely filter-less honesty as a way of hitting the reset button and deconditioning myself to believe that my twisting and bending of the truth would be rewarded with admiration for my creativity or when believed, admiration for my daring escapades.  I also realized pretty quickly that while my thoughts were fairly strange and surprising to some, I was a much less interesting person then I expected I was, when I had to tell the truth about myself and my adventures all the time.

I kept to the radical honesty for a short time, I don’t remember exactly how long, but it was a matter of months, maybe up to a year.  Once it had served its purpose in making lying seem so alien and abhorrent to me that I never wanted to go back to how I was, which wasn’t a far reach after seeing the devastation I had wreaked on Q, I transitioned to a form of honesty that was still blunt and often vulnerable and forthcoming, and definitely allowed for no deceit, but did allow for something of a filter at least.  A situational awareness for what was appropriate and what wasn’t, like not telling a church group of grandmothers about the kinky sex you had that weekend (no that is not something I did, but more because I don’t know any church groups of grandmothers, had I encountered any during my radical honesty phase and been thinking about my sex life at the time I would have). There’s also something important to be said for respecting consent and what other’s are willing to hear, but consent was something I learned more in depth at a later period.

I’ve transformed my life completely on many occasions, but this was probably one of the first times I changed myself so completely.  I learned to value a depth of honesty that I still don’t see often in the world, a commitment to truth when it is hard and scary, when it hurts and when it scars, when it threatens to take away the things you love, when it can ruin your reputation or charisma and leave you standing alone.  I still ascribe to keeping to that level of honesty and integrity, though in a way that is also appropriate and allows for tact, though never deceit.  I am someone who may now say “I do not want to share that”, but I won’t make up a lie to cover anything up.  I also found that I became a radically more adventurous person, one who consumes any new life experience with a sense of abandon.  When you can’t exaggerate or embellish or create stories about yourself, you have to actually live a more exciting life if you want to stay interesting.  And the depth of trust people give me when I’ve proved I truly am worthy of it is one of the things I treasure most in the world, made all the more precious by the road I’ve walked to earn it.

I would not recommend radical honesty, especially the perversion of it I endeavored to try, to everyone.  I would recommend a truer honesty then most every attempt.  The world opens up to you in a million glorious ways when you face it with truth and vulnerability.  When every part of your fucked up edgy self is authentic, all your adventures actually lived, and all your emotions self aware and from the hard, this life is an intense and wondrous thing and connections with others are profound.  So don’t take the whole damn filter off and trash it, but do fold it up a bit and let yourself out into the world, and do learn to trash any deceit or bending the truth that you’ve held on to.  The world really is more glorious when lived authentically and you will leave less broken people behind you and find more appreciative loving ones ahead to welcome you and your truth.

Things left unsaid

I’ve always found it interesting how incredibly different two people can experience, describe, and remember the same situation.  Our experiences are very much rooted in our own perception, formed of our own beliefs, emotions, and all our other experiences that led up to that point.  Our judgments of others are much the same way, they reflect as much on us as they do on the person we are making them of.

I was thinking about then when I was contemplating one of the relationships I had over the last decade.  It swam it’s way up into my mind initially because I was thinking about one of my current partners, and how while we have been together for less than a year and the dynamic is a long distance one, how intense it is.  And while I try not to compare partners, my brain related it back to Kayla* and how it was odd that while that dynamic lasted a bit over a year, it was one that really had a quite negligible impact on my life at all in comparison.  I can’t say for sure, but I feel like it was a much larger part of her life then it ever was mine.  Which got me thinking about how different our perceptions of a situation or experience can be.

If you asked Kayla, she would likely say our dynamic ended because she couldn’t handle polyamory. I’ve certainly heard her say many times since we broke up, that she found out through dating me that being in a polyamorous relationship was not something she could do. I don’t mean to invalidate her experiences with my own thoughts, but to be quite frank, I disagree.  I don’t know that she could be happy in a polya dynamic, I’m fairly confident she wouldn’t be able to handle the kind of relationship anarchist way of relating that I have fully embraced now, but I don’t think that polyamory is why we broke up, even if she does.

Before Kayla and I started dating, we had known each other for years.  We ran in some intersecting social circles, and there was some low key flirting online from time to time, but I wouldn’t say I knew her well or that she had a real presence in my life.  Then she sent me a message asking about the possibility of experimenting with some kinks together.  My fiance and I had split a year or so before, which had opened up a lot more space on my dance card because that had been a very co-dependent relationship.  My lovefriend, who has been the central dynamic in my life since we got involved, is a person who often varies between attached and integrated, and extreme bouts of independence.  It was an independent time, so his presence in my life was still a constant, we cohabitated, shared finances, and were part of each others daily lives, but he needed more space and I was looking for other ways to spend my time so as not to bother him. So I was in a place where I wanted company, and I wasn’t quite emotionally healthy and had some holes in myself that I should have been filling with personal growth but was eager to shove a person into instead. Kayla had few experiences with relationships as a whole, and had told me that she’d never really been in love or in a committed relationship. I was also on a path of recovery from alcohol addiction at this time.  The year before I had gone from drinking a 6-24 beers daily for three or four years, to being sober six months. I then attempted to learn to drink in moderation, but had backslid some when things ended with my fiance and the drama that ensued after.  I was starting to get a hold on it again and making a lot of progress in moderating my drinking when that message from Kayla popped into my inbox.

I read her proposition, and I was craving some of the kinky interactions she was interested in, so I fired back a response and we agreed to meet up at a regular gathering of her friends and see if there was any chemistry between us.  The gathering we met at was one where alcohol consumption was not just regular, but a glorified thing, and drinking in excess was encouraged.  I felt a prickling discomfort that this was not a healthy place for me, but I pushed it aside, and soon became a regular at those weekly get togethers.  Kayla and I also quickly ended up in a relationship, the kink dynamic ended up not being as much of a central focus, and soon we were in some semblance of love. She warned me from the start that she was not sure how well she would handle polyamory, but during the heady rush of NRE she claimed to be coping very well with it.  She claimed that as long as she felt important and valued, she thought she could manage it with ease, and I agreed that the hard parts like jealousy were usually fueled by insecurity, and feeling appreciated and having all your needs met were a good remedy for that.

As the months went by, I realized that in getting into that relationship, I was compromising a lot of the personal growth I had been doing and sliding back into unhealthy habits.  I stopped exercising daily in favor of spending time with Kayla, she had offered to come with me on my walks but they weren’t the same when they were no longer a time I could start to become comfortable with moments alone with myself.  I drank a lot more on our weekend parties, and even when we stopped going to those as frequently, we just began drinking at my house instead.  She was an alcoholic too, and it was easy to rationalize that I was doing okay when my drinking in excess was normalized by hers.  We talked about wanting to improve, on working on our problems together, but I knew deep down that I really needed to work on my issues alone because a lot of them stemmed from a previous propensity for co-dependency.  Then there were the times where she would get so drunk she would black out, or close to it, and I saw her get into some vicious arguments with friends where words were screamed and things were thrown.  She was never violent to others, so I told myself it was okay, but the punching walls and yelling scared me the few times it happened, because it reminded me of the precursors to abuse I’d experienced before.  Then we got into a few fights when drunk, and she was no longer a reasonably good communicator, but someone who resorted to nasty insults and threats of break ups. I don’t know exactly at which moment I began to withdraw, but I know it began much earlier then I realized.

Kayla began to tell me she was struggling with jealousy and was questioning how well she could cope with being polyamorous. We talked about insecurity, we talked about asking for her needs to be met.  She began asking for more time with me, for doing specific things that mattered a lot to her.  I said I would make time for them and often I didn’t.  I then recognized myself doing that and began to say I could not commit to that, I could not promise to do those things, I would try, but that was the most I could give.  And looking back, I didn’t try very hard.  I was starting to sense that the relationship was very bad for me, and I was putting distance there and pushing her away in fits and bursts.  I would draw back in for a moment, compelled by love for her at times, but more often by her need for me, wanting to please, or wanting to fill that hole inside myself.  Then it would cycle back to my realizing what I was doing, that I needed to learn a self that wasn’t co-dependent, that it likely wasn’t healthy to be involved with an alcoholic while trying to fix my own addiction issues, and that I could not be comfortable with someone who tended towards irrational anger and was verbally abusive and violent towards objects in moments of extreme drunkeness. I wanted intimacy less and less, and soon I wanted to spend less and less time together as well. By the time she texted me one day and said that the relationship wasn’t working and maybe we should end it, I was relieved.  It was something I’d known for months and couldn’t figure out how to say.  That was the first time though, that someone else had initiated a break up and I hadn’t fought for the relationship. In the past, even when I knew a dynamic was unhealthy and had thought about ending it many times myself, someone else initiating a break up would trigger insecurities and a sense of failure in me, and I would fight tooth and nail to try and justify continuing it and working to mend things.  This time was different, and I was ready to let go because my desire for other growth was calling me to strongly and I knew I couldn’t focus on that with her in my life.

The first time I heard her say afterwards that she couldn’t be polyamorous, and she had realized that when being with me, that it was not something she could handle, I thought I knew what she meant.  She had seen me giving time and energy to others, especially my lovefriend, who had transitioned from an independent phase to a more attached one a few months in to my dynamic with Kayla.  She watched our closeness there and how I often wanted to be around him and had an extreme level of comfort with communication and touch with him, something I was having less and less with her every day.  She felt her needs go unmet, as I gave time and attention to other people while she was practically begging for it from me, and I brushed her off with so many laters that never became nows.  She did struggle with some issues that would have made polyamory difficult under many circumstances, and she definitely would have been happier in a monogomous dynamic regardless, but I made things a thousand times more difficult.  Especially when hearing from me that you deal with jealousy by recognizing how much you matter to someone regardless of their other relationships, and by asking for reassurance and for the things you need from your partner. Well she saw how little she mattered to me over time because I pushed her away more and more, and she asked for everything she wanted and needed and I brushed her off.  The worst thing I did though, was I never said any of this to her. The closest I came to it was telling her that the way she treated me when drunk and angry was completely unacceptable and I was not okay with emotional abuse, threats, or insults.  But I never let her know how much I withdrew and how early on it began, partly because of her actions, and partly because of my own needs which were incongruous with a relationship with her in the first place.

So the relationship ended, and I rarely think about it.  It was relevant to me mostly in relation to the little bit of growing I tried to do during it, and how it spurred a lot more afterwards because of the time I felt I lost.  I know it is cold, but I know I may have mattered a lot more in her life then she ever did in mine.  She may have been frightening when in an alcohol induced rage, but I was the one who disconnected and tried to use a person to fill a hole in myself that should have been handled before I ever engaged in another relationship at that time. There was so much dysfunction, and still, that is a blip in the radar for me.  I don’t know how much it mattered to her.  I don’t know if she could have handled being polyamorous with someone who gave her the time and energy she needed instead of pushing her away.  I suspect maybe she could have, if her first experience had been radically different and healthier, although maybe not given how unhealthy of a place she also seemed to be in at the time.  I do know that now I’m a very different person and the way I approach relationships has shifted entirely.  I also learned to moderate my drinking in the year after we broke up, finally gaining some understanding of how to engage without frequent excess, and then followed that with a year of complete sobriety so I could focus even more on the person growth I so desperately needed. I think the way I remember things and the way she does must be so radically different that it is almost as though we had two different relationships altogether.  That can happen with any two people because there always is some divergence in how people experience things due to who they are and their past leading up to that experience. In this case though, it was compounded tenfold by all the things I left unsaid.

 

 

*I do often change the names/gender/identifying characteristics of folks I write about. I don’t do this for all the people I mention, but at times it feels appropriate for privacy or distance from the situation.

Vulnerability opens doors to community

Tomorrow I am hosting a potluck for my local polya group. I usually host a Thanksgiving celebration for my polycule every year, and a Christmahanukwanzikayulemastide celebration, but that’s been about it for a while.  We’ve had a few small game nights at the house here and there.  I have been saying for years that I would have some sort of BBQ, or plan a themed party like I used to, but it wasn’t something I managed to manifest from casual conversation into reality.

I remember vaguely searching for local polya groups a little over a year ago, I think what prompted it was curiosity, and one of my loves saying that we didn’t really have polya and RA folks in this area. This was the only local group I found, and while I joined a bit over a year ago as I mentioned, I didn’t really become active in it until this spring.  I don’t actually remember exactly what prompted me to start being more active in it, I believe it was noticing that a potluck was coming up, but it could be that I started engaging more first and that was why I noticed the event.  Either way, I RSVPed to it, and possibly because of that and their desire to make new folks feel welcome, or possibly because of my sheer queer magnetism, the two admins initiated conversation by reaching out to welcome me and start a friendship.

The beginning of the friendship that has developed with those individuals was interesting, I actually found that I took up a role of advise-giver and listener-to-rants for a while there.  That’s a frequent role I find myself in, so it was a comfortable one, but it was a little surprising to be that for two people I barely knew.  They were both at a bit of a rocky point with mental health, each other, other life situations, and I tried to help the best I could.  Despite that being a role I frequently find myself in, two things were different about it this time around.  The first was the amount of openness and trust and rawness they showed me, despite us just getting acquainted.  The usual skating around the issues and revealing a little bit at a time until trust was established and that picture perfect masked could be dropped, we just skipped right over that step. I value that raw authenticity beyond measure, it is something I crave in a world where people are guarded little drones pushing their identical Target shopping carts with their identical forced smiles.  These two people showed me the ugly parts of themselves and their relationship, and I was barely more than a stranger.  It wasn’t an over-share, it was a baring of the soul, and it was a courageous act. The second thing that was different was that in all my years as resident advice-giver in my groups of friends, I have almost never seen anyone really focus on examining the advice I gave so completely and then applying it.  It was unique to see someone actually evaluate the pretty advice scarf I painstakingly knitted them, realize it’s merit, and put it on and use it daily.  The fact that they put value on the time and energy I put into trying to offer assistance was an affirmation I had rarely been given, and was a true gift.  The fact that I was able to offer assistance to people who wanted that much to actually grow and improve, rather than mouth the words and continue on in the same old patterns, was so refreshing.  And seeing them both grow as people in tremendous ways over the eight months I’ve now known them, is an absolute inspiration. What I didn’t realize until much later was that being allowed to take the role of advise-giver for people who were so immediately vulnerable and also quite completely dedicated to personal-growth and positive change, also effected me in the most wonderful positive way.

I felt comfortable and at home in the raw gritty realness of those individuals, and in the inspiring growth they showed.  It mirrored my own fractured and flawed existence and constant search for vulnerability and need for self improvement.  I felt welcomed by the intensity of the sudden closeness I found with them, and the invitation to be myself.  I also was allowed to enter into my venture into the group within a role I felt very comfortable with, which eased the transition from mostly recluse, to reemerging social butterfly.  It was one of those times in life where circumstances line up in just the right way to allow for a new path to unfurl with radiant clarity right when you need it.  I was craving community, I was craving what it felt like to have a group beyond my polycule where I felt belonging and a sense of home, and I was craving a realness in my interactions with people that broke past the surface of the casual and polite and restrained that permeated my social engagements with your average human. That began to extend to others in the group as I went to the potluck and also began engaging in conversation through the group online.  The atmosphere in the online group forum was unique as well.  Most local groups I’ve seen have a lot of unicorn hunting and meme sharing, and not much else.  Here there were group conversations in which people also showed startling levels of vulnerability, where we talked about our traumatic pasts, and deeply flawed selves to a group of almost-strangers on the internet, and there was always an outpouring of support and love in response.  It also was one of the only communities I’ve been a part of that both centered and elevated and protected marginalized groups, while also welcoming those who weren’t really up to date on or concerned about social justice issues and gently guiding them to understand. I eventually joined the moderator team and found an even bigger new circle of friends I could be my absolutely obnoxious flamboyant self with, who even seemed to appreciate it and welcome it from time to time. People who came from all walks of life, but again shared a welcoming openness and realness that felt just like coming home.

And that led to now, where I’m getting ready to get up and clean house for a potluck tomorrow.  I’ve spent years saying I would host a gathering like I used to in the good old days when I had the energy to be a sparkling force of nature that hosted exuberant parties that brought people together. I also haven’t had any more then a shadow of the desire in me until now, the want to do so flitted around in my chest cavity but there was no passion for it to feed on and break out with.  The amazing group of people I’ve connected with changed that, I feel renewed having found a place where I feel at home, and a place that inspires my own growth as well.  When the opportunity came up to offer to host one of the events instead of just being in attendance, I was compelled to do so.  For me, that was a huge step after years of somewhat isolating myself due to a lack of passion and energy and motivation. The community I found that was so invigorating and raw has changed me, giving me back a certain spark that I have not felt in a good long time. So I hope, as I work on preparing food and finding places to hide my clutter, that this gathering has a few more new folks as well, who may also realize that they have found their community, and settle in and call it home.

The importance of freedom

Relationship anarchy is a style of relating to others that highlights freedom and autonomy. It focuses on the desires of the individuals and finding the areas in which they overlap to create the fuzzy little space of the relationship you can curl up in.  It also focuses on the freedom of each person to define their own boundaries and express their own preferences, and to live a life in which they pursue dynamics that fit their flow, without unwanted restriction from other dynamics.

Freedom is one of the merits of relationship anarchy, one of the things that makes it so appealing to many people.  To really understand why people choose relationship anarchy as a life path or relationship style, we have to first understand the value of freedom.

I was a philosophy major the first time I went to college.  I did not graduate with a degree in it, because when I was close to doing so I got distracted by a need to craft things with my own hands and ducked off stage a few credits shy of my degree. I had enough for a degree in general ed, so I took that instead, but I had amassed the knowledge from a plethora of philosophy courses, despite having no big official paper to show for it.  And boy am I rusty when it comes to philosophy in an academic sense, but I did learn ways of thinking that I still apply every day. After all, philosophy is the study of learning, the study of knowledge, and the study of existence.  We all apply principles of that in the daily meanderings of our minds.  For me, my love for philosophy and understanding is why I sometimes end up sitting and trying to really deconstruct why freedom is so important to me.

It is easy to justify things based on what would be lost in their absence.  Without freedom, you have restriction, rules, a box to fit in.  Society is pretty big on boxes you know, which makes sense since the human brain is wired for categorization of things, and society is a group of people with shared dominant cultural expectations.  So society naturally expands on the human tendency to categorize, and creates strong expectations or boxes for what different relationships are and the expectations within them. There are restrictive ideas in the culture I exist in, on what a friendship is, what a romantic relationship is, the exclusive nature of a romantic relationships, and the inferiority of friendships in comparison with that one special romantic relationship.  These boxes are in opposition with the freedom of relationship anarchy.  They are defined by an absence, having one monogamous relationship is a thing because you are choosing or agreeing to an absence of any other romantic or sexual connections.  Having a romantic relationship being prioritized above friendships is a thing because friendships are seen as being absent of the amount of commitment, life integration, depth of emotion, and depth of connection that romantic relationships have. Without freedom to explore each connection based on exactly what you desire with that individual at that time, you are forced to build a dynamic based on absence, knowing that you have limited allowances for what it can and can’t be while being socially acceptable. So we can justify freedom because we do not want to lose the potential that any new relationship has. We want the potential for friendships and romantic relationships to not be limited in their depth because they are seen as different societal boxes, to not be exclusive in nature and limit the potential of other connections.

I would rather justify things based not on absence though, but based on abundance.  I am not just an advocate of freedom and relationship anarchy because I do not want my life and relating to other people to be restrained.  It is in part about bucking against those boxes and throwing off the restraints, but it is also about what happens next when instead of an absence of potential you have an abundance of it. When I started forming relationships that were not structured around certain titles or expectations, where everything in the dynamic was based on the desires of the individuals and where the overlap was, and where the freedom of each person to pursue connections and have their autonomy respected was given focus and priority, something magical happened.  Embracing that freedom sparked a change in myself.  Suddenly there was an abundance of potential in my world, there was an explosion of fluidity and growth.  When I engaged in a relationship it was with the understanding that it could achieve any depth of connection, any range of life integration, it was alright if it changed and shifted over time, and expressions of love and affection and sexual interest were based on mutual consent and desire and not on a certain title or level of societal acceptability.  I had the freedom to move around and grow and expand, like a glorious tentacle beast uncurling on the floor of an endless ocean, or a fabulous demon spreading sparkling leathery wings after shedding it’s chains.

Here’s what actually happened, and what is still happening every day as I experience the self growth this freedom has given me.  I have learned to express affection and love freely to my friends. I can tell my friends that I love them and shower them with adoration and compliments of how spectacular they are. It no longer feels awkward or too much or prohibited.  I have found that when I simply lack the time and energy for new connections but miss the amazing fluff-balls-in-the-chest feels of meeting and getting to know someone and feeling that spark as love and passion develops, I still can experience that because I watch my friends and loves and partners do so and their happiness is contagious because it does not in any way detract from what I have with them.  I have less fear of break-ups because for the most part they are no longer a thing in my world. Dynamics may change, the type of interaction and level of connection may change, but unless the other individual wants to sever ties completely, it is more a matter of a -shift- and not an -ending-. Having that fear eliminated or minimized has made me less controlling, and as such, I’ve learned that being controlling actually was making me feel pretty shitty and I hadn’t noticed how much it ate away at me.

And one of the changes I value the most is this: When I was a kid, I went to a glorious socialist jew camp, and it was the norm for kids to sit in lines of one person leaning back in another’s lap, and that person leaning on the one behind them, and so on in a big train. Big cuddle piles of friend on a bed were a natural part of every day life.  I had an abundance of platonic touch and affection, and some that evolved into more romantic or sexual touch and affection, but it didn’t have to.  Touch was just absolutely normal and comfortable.  And then fast forward through years of trauma, sexual assault, toxic relationships, and becoming a controlling, insecure, and sometimes emotionally abusive person. I came out the other side extremely touch averse, with only a few partners as exceptions. I worked hard to not be a controlling fuckwad of the highest proportions, and did a pretty decent job of making myself into a person I could respect and that those in my life seem to think is pretty rad. But I was still very averse to touch, and that made me incredibly sad when I compared it to my childhood and early teen years.  Well, in the past year, as I’ve dived head first into the rabbit hole of relationship anarchy, after dancing around the edges and dipping my toe in for so long, I’ve slowly started to heal.  I am not the bouncing cuddly ball of rainbows I once was, but I have times where I have platonic cuddle-time with my friends and loves and feel warm-fuzzy-connectricity instead of skin-crawlies.  Giving myself the freedom to explore the abundance of human connection has helped me start connecting more in the moment and feeling safe with touch.  That is what freedom creates, that is why it is important, it gives you a field that is ripe for personal growth and healing.  It presents your fears for you to confront and overcome, and it allows for abundance and exploration in the ways you connect with other human beings.

So freedom is and always will be of extraordinary importance to me.  I want a life filled with abundance, I want a life with an absence of restrictions, and I want more then anything for all those I love to have the same and to never be someone who takes that freedom away.