Tag Archives: relationships

#WLAMF no. 13: Zaiah

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Today is the ninth anniversary of my relationship with my partner zaiah.

A lot of folks will say polyamory doesn’t work. “I knew some people who tried that,” they’ll say. “They broke up.” If you ask these people how many monogamous folks they know who’ve broken up, you’ll get some humphing and hawing, but you probably won’t make your point.

zaiah and I have had an interesting adventure, these past nine years. She and I have traveled across the country together, lived together, explored together, tried new things together. I’m looking forward to many more years of adventure. Happy anniversary, darling! I love you.

I’m writing one blog post for every contribution to our crowdfunding we receive between now and the end of the campaign. Help support indie publishing! We’re publishing five new books on polyamory in 2015: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thorntree-press-three-new-polyamory-books-in-2015/x/1603977

Some thoughts on consent

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With the state of California passing a new law defining an Affirmative Consent standard for public colleges and universities (and the wonderful commentary about it on the Yes Means Yes blog), the recent firing of radio personality Jian Ghomeshi over his sex life (which he claims is targeting him for participation in BDSM, though several women are alleging that he abused them non-consensually under the guise of BDSM), everyone all over the Internet is talking about consent these days.

And as seems to happen when everyone all over the Internet talks about something, a lot of folks are getting it wrong.

I’d like to think consent is something we all understand. And, in most situations, we do. A lot of folks are flapping their mouth-parts about how we can never really truly get consent for sexual activities because men and women are just so different and don’t understand each other, but seriously, that’s a load of bullshit. Bullshit with extra spicy smell-o-riffic chunks.

If you take sex out of the equation, we all understand consent pretty well. If you invite someone out to dinner and he says “well, you know, I’d love to, but I kinda have this other thing going on that day,” we know he’s said “no,” even though he hasn’t used the word “no.” If we ask someone whether we can use her bike or not and she says “listen, I really don’t know that I feel comfortable with that arrangement,” we know she hasn’t consented. And if she says “The combination on the bike lock is 5678, I need it back before class on Tuesday,” we know that she has, even though she didn’t say the word “yes.”

We get this. It’s part of the most basic, rudimentary socialization.

But for some reason, when it comes to sex, otherwise grown, mature adults start thrashing around, as if they lack the social graces of a reasonably well-socialized 6-year-old.

Some of this might be down to living in a culture that just plain doesn’t teach us about what consent is. I wish I would have understood this stuff better myself, back when I was still sorting out all this interpersonal-relationship stuff.

But a big part of the reason, I suspect, lies in the way we think about sexual consent. We get what consent is outside the world of sex, but when it comes to sex, we act like the purpose of consent is to follow a checklist of procedures designed to let us do what we want without getting in trouble. Otherwise intelligent, reasonable adults, for example, have asked if California’s new law means students on California campuses will need to get written permission to shag. (The short answer is ‘no,’ but folks who so profoundly don’t understand what consent is that the question seems reasonable to them, might want to think about doing just that.) Someone on my Twitter timeline asked ‘what if two people have sex but neither one of them gave affirmative consent–who’s at fault there?’ (The answer is if neither of them gave affirmative consent, then no sex act took place. For a sex act to take place, someone had to initiate the contact of the slippery bits, and that initiation is an act of consent.1) People–again, otherwise intelligent people who appear at least savvy enough to work a computer–have said things like ‘if nobody said no, that’s consent, right?’ (No. We’re conditioned strongly not to say ‘no,’ as in the “well, you know, I’d love to, but I kinda have this other thing going on that day” example above.)

Consent is not a checklist you go through in order to be cleared to do what you want, the way a fighter pilot goes through his checklist before being catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier (“Afterburners, check! Flaps, check! Condom, check! Let’s fuck!”). The purpose of consent isn’t to tell you what you can get away with; the purpose of consent is to make sure you and your partners are both on the same page and both enjoying what’s going on.

Consent isn’t something you get once, at the start of the proceedings. It’s ongoing. This is important, because it means the idea of getting written consent up-front to hanky-panky is entirely missing the point. Consent exists in the moment, and it can always be revoked as soon as someone no longer likes what’s happening. Even if I sign a form in triplicate, duly notarized, saying I want to shag you, if we get down to business and I change my mind, I have the right to say ‘stop.’

It’s not hard to get consent, really it isn’t. It simply means paying attention to your partner, checking in. It doesn’t have to ‘spoil the mood’ or ‘interrupt the flow’ or any of those other things the masses of people who don’t understand consent are apt to complain about. Consent doesn’t even have to be verbal. If you go in to kiss someone and she leans back, that’s not consent. If she meets you halfway, it is. We know this. Most of us are really good, in non-sexual contexts, of figuring out the difference between a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ even without hearing those specific words. We just forget, when it comes to sex.

Seriously, this shouldn’t be that hard. The key elements of consent are:

  • Is the other person into what you want to do? Pay attention to verbal and nonverbal cues. If you don’t know, ask. Don’t focus on what you want the answer to be; focus on what the answer is.
  • Is the other person still into it while you’re doing it? Pay attention to verbal and nonverbal cues. If you don’t know, ask.
  • Is the other person having fun? Pay attention to verbal and nonverbal cues. If you don’t know, ask.

There’s a point in here: consent isn’t something you get so you can have fun, consent is about making sure everyone is having fun. If you don’t care whether your partner is having fun, well, then, perhaps one explanation is you’re a terrible person and you oughtn’t be interacting with anyone in any capacity until you learn that other people are actually real. Oh, and by the way, consent is valid only if it’s informed; if you’re withholding information, lying, misleading, or manipulating other folks to get check marks in those ticky-boxes, you’re not really getting consent at all. I shouldn’t have to say this. It pains me that I feel I do.

Now, bad sex happens. It’s a fact of life. Bad sex doesn’t (necessarily) mean consent was violated.2

But it pays–it really, really does–to remember that consent is ongoing. If the person you’re with suddenly goes all withdrawn and unresponsive, and that’s not part of the particular fetish you’re exploring, perhaps it’s a good idea to check in, you know?

There’s a depressing part of all these discussions about consent, and that is the widespread cultural narrative that allegations of coercion, assault, or abuse are likely to be vindictive women making up stories to entrap and punish blameless men.3 It’s so entrenched that it’s hard to see any woman reporting sexual abuse who’s not immediately attacked all over the Internetverse for it…which would seem to fly in the face of all logic and reason. (Because any woman who talks openly about sexual assault is likely to be attacked vigorously and aggressively, it’s difficult to imagine the motivation of someone to invent such a tale. What’s her goal…to see how many people will call her a liar on YouTube?) And while we’re on the subject, “innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t mean “everyone who reports being sexually assaulted is a liar until proven otherwise.” This shouldn’t need to be said, but there it is. (And just for the record: If you’re one of those folks whose first reaction to learning about allegations of sexual abuse is “she’s making it up,” shame on you.)

This seamy dark side to the consent conversation comes, I think, from the notion of consent as a list of ticky-boxes you check off before you get down ‘n’ dirty. If you went through the pre-flight checklist and ticked off all the things on the list, you should be golden, right? So what’s she doing making all this fuss afterward? She consented, right?

This is also something we get when it comes to issues of consent outside the bedroom. If a roommate offers to let us borrow the bike all week, then on Wednesday says “sorry, mate, but my car’s in the shop, I need the bike after all,” we know that she has the right to do this. I can’t help but think if we were to apply exactly the same standards to sexual consent that we apply to consent to borrow a roommate’s bicycle, a whole lot of people would be a whole lot happier. Yes, your roommate might fabricate a story about how you stole her bike…but really, what are the odds? I mean, seriously? And someone reporting bike theft isn’t even subject to the same explosive blowback as someone reporting sexual assault!

Now, I will admit I’ve made some assumptions in all this. I’m assuming that you’re genuinely good-intentioned and you value the idea of consent. There is a group who benefits from making consent seem muddier and more difficult than it is; the same group also benefits from reflexive thoughts of “She’s making it up!” whenever a report of abuse surfaces. I’ll give you three guesses who’s in that group.4

It’s possible to participate in all kinds of sexual activities with all sorts of partners under a wide range of different circumstances and not ever end up being accused of assault. It’s not even that difficult, really. All it takes, at the end of the day, is remembering that there’s more than one person involved, and checking in with the other folks to see how they’re doing. You don’t need to get it in writing. You don’t need to involve lawyers and witnesses. You just need to pay attention. If you’re shagging someone you’ve never shagged before and you aren’t sure how to read their signals and body language, use your words! I promise it’s not hard.5

Far from spoiling the mood, it can even be hot. “You like that, hmm? You like when I touch you there? You want more? Tell me you like it.”

Seriously. Give it a try some time. Keep in mind, it’s not about getting someone else to let you do what you want. It’s about two (or more!) of you doing things you all like to do.

Oh, and if someone comes to you with a story about being sexually assaulted? Here’s a strategy: In absence of clear and compelling evidence to the contrary, believe them.

1 Absent some other form of coercion, anyway. It isn’t consent if someone gives you head to get you to stop beating her. Lookin’ at you here, Mr. Ghomeshi.

2 Though one of the things that separates people who are good at sex from people who are bad at sex, I think, is the former sorts of people pay attention to their partners as a matter of course.

3 It’s a narrative that hurts men too, by the way. Imagine the blowback if you’re a guy who’s reporting being sexually assaulted…and yes, it does happen.

4 And if you need all three, you might be a terrible person.

5 If you can’t use your words about sex, maybe you might benefit from addressing that problem before the next time you have sex, ‘kay?

Some thoughts on privilege: Look, it isn’t about your guilt.

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I participate in a lot of online forums about polyamory. It’s almost impossible to talk about polyamory without eventually talking about OK Cupid, which is arguably one of the best places online for poly folks to meet each other (I met my live-in partner zaiah there). And it’s almost impossible to talk about OK Cupid without talking about how often women tend to get harassed on online dating sites. Any online dating sites.

And, it’s almost impossible to talk about how often women get harassed, on dating sites or anywhere else, without a whole succession of men trotting up to say “well, I personally don’t harass women! Women act like all men are harassers! I’m totally not like that, and I don’t understand why women don’t talk to me online! I totally deserve to have women talk to me online! If I spend my time writing an email to some woman online I am entitled to a response, even if she doesn’t want to date me!”

And, of course, from there it’s just a short hop to talking about male privilege, and as soon as that happens, inevitably those same men trot up again to say “this talk of privilege is just a way to try to make me feel guilty!”

And I gotta say: Guilt? Seriously? You think it’s about guilt?

Guilt is for things you can control. Feeling guilty over things you can’t control, like the race or sex you were born with, is silly.

If you think talking about privilege is about making people feel guilty, you’re completely missing the point.

It’s about being a decent person.

People who are privileged may still struggle, may not always get what they want, but the whole point is they have a lot of advantages over other people. Advantages they can’t see. Advantages they don’t know about.

Talking about privilege is about awareness, not guilt. When people don’t know about the advantages they have, they act in messed-up ways that show insensitivity to others. Like, for example, telling women who experience harassment on a scale that men can’t even understand how they should feel about it, what they should do about it, and why they should, like, totes respond to ME because I’M not like that! I’M not one of those entitled jerks, and therefore I DESERVE a reply!

The purpose of understanding your privilege isn’t to make you feel something. Not guilt, not shame, not anything else. It’s to help you understand that you have a set of things you take for granted that other people don’t have, so that you can change the way you act.

Got nothing to do with feelings at all.

Change the way you act in small ways. Like, not telling women how they should feel about sexual harassment. Like, not telling inner-city blacks that the police are their friends. Like, listening when women talk abut harassment, instead of just saying “oh, you’re saying all men are harassers.” (Hint: No, they’re not.) Or saying something like “well, I just don’t see color.” (Hint: Not seeing color is something you can only do if you happen to be the privileged color. When you belong to an oppressed minority, you don’t get the luxury of not seeing your status.)

Change the way you act in medium ways. Like, if you are a man with a normal social circle, statistically you probably know at least three harassers and at least one rapist. Seriously. So, when you’re with a group of your friends and someone makes a racial joke or a rape joke or talks about how women are bitches or whatever, speak up. Remember, if you don’t say anything, those harassers and that rapist in your social circle–and yes, they are there, even if you don’t know who they are–assume you’re on their side and think the way they do.

When people make cracks about sending a woman into the kitchen to make a sandwich, or talk about how they’d sure like to get that hot chick drunk and bend her over the table, speak up. Say it isn’t cool.

Yeah, it’s uncomfortable to speak up when all your friends are yee-hawing and back-slapping about how absolutely hysterical that rape joke was. Deal with it. The discomfort you face speaking up ain’t nothing on the discomfort women face just walking down the goddamn street.

Change the way you act in large ways. Don’t vote for political candidates who talk about how only lazy blacks are on welfare or blab about “legitimate rape.”

People aren’t telling you you’re privileged to make you feel guilty. People are telling you you’re privileged because privilege is a system and an institution that benefits you and that you participate in without even knowing it. When you know about it, maybe you can stop participating in it. Maybe, if you’re brave and willing to pull on your big-boy pants, you can even put yourself on the map against it when the folks around you are participating in it.

On Feminism and Getting Laid

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A little while ago, I wrote a blog post called Some Thoughts on Rape Culture.

Every time I write a blog post like this, as sure as night follows day, the same thing happens. Invariably, I will get at least one, and sometimes several, private emails in my inbox. The content of these emails is always the same, and they’re rarely stated in the blog comments. Every time, they’re some variant on the same theme:

That must be working pretty good for you, huh? Pretending to be a feminist must really get you laid.

This has happened for years, and this last blog post was no exception.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the assumption that a man who espouses feminist values must be using it as a ploy to get sex. The first time I encountered this, it was quite a head-scratcher, I must confess. Really? I thought. That’s your take-away? I am pretending to support values and ideals about women’s agency because I’m trying to score sex from feminists? Seriously?

Now, in all fairness, if you look at all my partners, it’s very unlikely I would be involved with them if I weren’t a “feminist man,” or, as I like to call it, “a man who thinks women are people.” I have simple tastes; I prefer strong, smart, confident women, and those tend–surprise!–to be women who like being treated as people.

But here’s the thing.

The fact that these women would only be likely to get involved with a man who respects the ideals of feminism doesn’t mean that they’d get involved with every guy who respects those ideals. Treating women as people is necessary but not sufficient; if you treat women as people, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be involved with them, but if you don’t, you won’t. Yes, in order to have sex with my partners, you have to be a dude who’s a feminist. You also have to be a dude who they think is worth having sex with, and you can’t fake your way into that.

So as a strategy for getting laid, adopting feminist ideals is, by itself, kinda rubbish.

And pretending to adopt feminist ideals is even more rubbish.

I don’t quite get what’s going on in the head of some guy who thinks pretending to be feminist is a ploy to get laid, but I have to assume that a guy who thinks that, probably doesn’t think women are very smart. If someone pretends to think women are people, but doesn’t actually think women are people, I suspect the ploy would be revealed rather quickly. Probably some time between appetizers and the main course, and certainly well before any clothes come off. I really don’t think it’s possible to pretend to be feminist, at least not for any length of time longer than a dinner conversation.

I don’t say that rape culture is a thing because I’m hoping to get laid by women who say that rape culture is a thing. I don’t think women deserve agency and personal autonomy as a tactic to try to get them to use their agency and personal autonomy to fuck me. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? How is it that someone might seriously think that being nice to feminists is a strategy for getting laid? Is it because he thinks feminists are so well-known for…um, having sex with any guy who’s nice to them?

If I were to advocate some kind of duplicitous scheme to get more sex, I would definitely recommend “learn to swing dance” over “pretend to be a feminist.” It certainly seems far more likely to succeed. Pretending to be a feminist when you really don’t think of women as real people, just to try to get in the pants of women who want to be treated like real people, is just…it…I just…what is this I don’t even.

More Than Two: Moving toward and moving away

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I’ve just written a blog post in the More Than Two book blog about building polyamorous relationships where we move toward something rather than moving away from something. Here’s the teaser:

I was recently asked to do a media interview about polyamory. This happens from time to time, and most of the questions I’m asked tend to be fairly predictable: How do you deal with jealousy? What do you tell your parents or your kids? Do you think polyamory is the next cultural revolution?

This interview was quite different, and one of the questions I was asked helped crystallize for me some of the guiding ideals about the relationships I choose.

The question concerned dealing with fears, and while I was answering it, it suddenly occurred to me: throughout my life, the relationships I have found most rewarding have been those that are guided toward something rather than away from something.

You can read the whole thing; feel free to respond there or here.

Some thoughts on rape culture

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A couple of days ago, someone on a (closed) Facebook group I belong to posted a link to a blog post about rape culture.

And, predictably, one of the first comments to that link was along the lines of “this is just another attempt to say that male sexuality is bad.”

It doesn’t even really matter where the linked blog post is (though if you’re interested, it’s here); the “you’re just demonizing men” reaction comes up on any conversation I’ve ever seen about rape culture, as sure as night follows day. And it’s annoying.

It seems to me that if that’s your take-away from discussions about rape culture, you aren’t paying attention.

Male sexuality is not inherently evil, and acknowledging that rape culture is a thing isn’t the same as “demonizing male sexuality.” This seems obvious to me, yet it’s a persistent trope: saying that we have a culture that normalizes, trivializes, and to a large extent even excuses sexual violence is conflated with demonizing male sexuality, as if, I don’t know, male sexuality were somehow inextricably tied to rape or something.

I personally have never met any women who believe that male sexuality is tied to rape, though I keep hearing from other men about that’s what “feminists think”.

When I see a trope become that deeply embedded in a conversation about something, I tend to wonder who it benefits. I definitely think there are men who benefit from this trope. There are some men who want to conflate “discussing the cultural component of sexual violence” with “demonizing all male sexuality.” These men want you to read articles like the blog post that led to all this and respond with “you’re saying men are evil! You’re saying all men are rapists!” That’s the interpretation they want you to have.

There are two kinds of men who want you to have that response: rapists, and men who want power over women.

Not all men are rapists.

There is, for some people, a knee-jerk response to any conversation about rape culture that goes “You just think all men are rapists!” That isn’t what this (and articles like it) say. What they say is that women have to act like all men are potentially rapists, because rapists don’t wear a special hat or have a special handshake or anything.

A strange man is probably not a rapist, but he might be. Since there’s no telltale signal that lets you tell a rapist from a not-rapist, women have to assume that a stranger could potentially be a rapist, simply out of self-preservation. A common analogy here is that not every strange dog will bite you, but it’s usually a good idea not to approach every strange dog you see with reckless abandon–because some of them might bite you, and you have no way of telling which.

Rapists and men who want power over women are quite pleased when people deflect conversations about rape culture with “you’re just saying male sexuality is evil,” because it shuts down conversation about the reality of rape culture…and that suits them just fine. It allows things to continue on exactly as they are–which is to say, allows society to continue blaming victims of rape for their own attacks (“did you see what she was wearing??!), allows rape victims who come forward to continue being disbelieved, allows the courts to continue under-prosecuting rape.

All of this serves the needs of men who rape and men who want to control women, and the only side effect (other than the fact that, y’know, women are marginalized) is that some men are treated like they might possibly be a rapist.

You’re a guy, and you don’t like it? You don’t like the idea that women who don’t know you might respond as though you are a potential rapist, even though that’s something you would never, ever, do? Do something about it! Do something to make our society less welcoming to rapists. Don’t trivialize rape. Don’t whine “but what about false accusations?” when women talk about how claims of rape are rarely taken seriously. Don’t treat tape as a punch line.

Look, this is not rocket science. If you’re a guy, you have a disproportionate amount of power, even if you personally don’t feel like it’s true. It’s not enough to say “Well, I’m not a rapist, and I don’t trivialize rape, so I don’t like it when women treat me like I might be a rapist!” You have to do more. You have to stand up to the people around you who do trivialize rape. You have to stand up to people who are rapists–yes, I’m talking to you, and yes, statistically, unless you live as a hermit in a one-room cabin in Montana you probably know at least one rapist in your social circle. Even if you don’t know who he is.

You don’t like the implications of discussing rape culture? Don’t dismiss those discussions; that doesn’t serve anyone except rapists. Do something about it.

The Cucumbers of Wrath: “Fairness” in Poly Relationships

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This video, which was presented in a TED talk about moral reasoning in animals, shows two monkeys who have each been trained to perform a simple task (handing a researcher a rock) in exchange for a reward (a bit of food).

In the experiment, the researcher could give the monkey a bit of cucumber or a grape as a reward. Monkeys given cucumber rewards were quite happy…unless they saw another monkey being given a grape for the same task. When that happens…well, see below.

The things these monkeys are feeling translate directly into the things that can trip us up as human beings when we’re involved in non-monogamous relationships of all sorts.

OF GRAPES AND CUCUMBERS

The notion that relationships have “cucumbers” (things that help feed the relationship, but aren’t necessarily fun or thrilling) and “grapes” (exciting things that are fun to do) seems straightforward.

The problem, naturally, is that what constitutes a “cucumber” and what constitutes a “grape” can be highly subjective, and can change depending on where you happen to be in the relationship configuration.

For instance, to me some of the most delicious grapes of life are also some of life’s most mundane things: the day-in, day-out living with a partner, doing all the tasks and chores that add up to shared intimacy and a shared life together. I’ve had relationships where I live with my partner and we spend our time doing dishes, watching Netflix, and snuggling on lazy Saturday mornings, and relationships where I see a partner perhaps once a year for a wild frenzy of hot kinky group sex in a French castle.

Don’t get me wrong, the hot kinky sex in a French castle is a grape, no doubt about it. But for me, relationships where I spend time just quietly sharing a life with a partner are incredibly rewarding, and it’s far easier to build intimacy with that kind of shared life than with one week a year spent together. No matter how much fun that week happens to be. With a partner I see seldom, the time spent with that partner can look like an intense whirlwind of nonstop fun, because we have to pack all our relationship time into a very small space. It doesn’t account for the long periods of time spent apart, when the relationship is barely fed at all, with grapes or cucumbers. (I am a person whose love language is touch; it is harder to meet that need long distance.)

To a person who has that day-in, day-out living together, the weekend trips to a faraway land can look like grapes, and the doing of dishes and moving of furniture looks like a dull and unappetizing cucumber. On the other hand, to the partner who only gets my time in small dribs and drabs, the shared experiences of a life spent together looks like a plump, sweet, delicious grape. And so each person sees nothing but cucumbers in front of them, while the other person has an entire plateful of grapes.

GRAPES AND HIERARCHY

When you look at your own plate and see nothing but cucumbers, while it seems like someone else gets entirely 100% grape,it’s reasonable to feel like the monkey in the video up there. And when we feel like that, often our first impulse is to want all the grapes for ourselves.

It gets worse if we feel that we’re entitled to all the grapes, or that someone else might steal our stash of grapes.

Since I’ve been thinking about polyamory in terms of grapes and cucumbers, it has occurred to me that often, the rules and hierarchies imposed in prescriptive relationships, particularly prescriptive primary/secondary relationships, seem calculated to make sure that all the grapes belong to one partner and other partners are metered out nothing but cucumbers.

This can sometimes even go so far as “grape hoarding”–fencing off particularly tasty grapes to make sure nobody else comes near them. (Examples of grape hoarding might be forbidding a partner to go to a certain restaurant with another partner, say, or forbidding a partner to spend any holiday or vacation time with another partner.) Even sharing a grape with someone else can make us feel like that poor monkey on the left, if we feel that grape belongs to us by right. When our monkey emotions get monkey going, someone’s likely to get things flung at them.

The impulse to want to keep our grapes and make sure nobody else takes them isn’t just a human thing, or even a primate thing. Dogs do the same thing; a dog trained to do a trick to get a reward who sees the other dog get that reward for nothing may stop doing the trick.

SEPARATING THE GRAPES FROM THE CHAFF

What are the grapes in a relationship? I’ve been thinking about that ever since my sweetie showed me this video.

Kinky group sex in a Medieval castle is definitely a grape, don’t get me wrong. Intense experiences that form lifelong memories are very tasty indeed.

But focusing on those kinds of grapes, I think, makes me lose sight of the grapes I get every day–the grapes that it’s easy to disregard because I have so many of them. I’ve resolved to be more conscientious about valuing the grapes that I have, the ones I might otherwise take for granted.

If I were to make a list of the grapes I’m blessed with, it would include kinky sex in castles and trips to exotic places, no doubt. But it would also include:

  • Being able to wake up nearly every morning with my partner.
  • Having my partner close enough to touch, almost all the time.
  • Curling up on a rainy afternoon with my partner, snuggling beneath warm covers.
  • Building a private language from a shared history of experience.
  • Having someone next to me while I deal with all the various ways I have to hold back entropy.
  • Being able to plan with someone
  • Working on projects with a partner.
  • Creating with a partner.
  • Having a partner who sees me, who really get me and understands me.

So I do very much like the trips to see my distant sweeties, but I wish they were closer. I enjoy vacation time spent with far-flung lovers, but I would not trade those experiences for living with a partner. At the end of the day, if I had to choose, I would give up the vacations for having the people I love close to me all the time.

And that might be the real test of what’s a grape and what’s a cucumber: Would you choose to trade places with the person you see getting all the grapes? If the vacation experiences seem like such tasty grapes,would you trade a life spent together for a distant, vacation relationship?

How about you, O readers? What are your grapes and what are your cucumbers?

Polyamory, Monogamy, and Ownership Paradigms

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On another forum I read, someone made a complaint that folks in the poly community tend to see monogamy in terms of ownership and control; that is, for many poly folks, monogamy is about owning your other partner, while polyamory is more egalitarian, treating other people as fully actualized human beings.

And, sadly, I’ve encountered poly folks who do believe that. The misguided notion that polyamory is “more evolved” than monogamy comes, in many cases, from the assumption that monogamy is inherently rooted in ownership and polyamory is inherently egalitarian.

As with many preconceptions, it’s possible, if one squints hard enough, to see where this idea comes from. There’s nothing inherently wrong or controlling about monogamy per se; monogamy, by itself, is not necessarily disempowering or ownership-based.

But there is some truth to the notion that monogamy as a cultural norm comes with a set of social expectations that are deeply planted in the soil of ownership of others.

People in our society are expected to believe not just in monogamy, but in a whole set of social expectations that comes along with it. People say things like “you let your wife spend time with other men?” or “you let your husband talk to his ex?” as though it is natural and expected that we should be able to control who our partners interact with. People say things like “I would never allow my partner to masturbate” or “I would never permit my partner to fantasize about other people” as if it is normal to control our partners’ bodies and minds.

Not every monogamous person does this, of course. But these ideas are very commonly attached to our social expectations of monogamy; monogamy as a social institution began in cultures in which ideas of ownership were deeply embedded, and those ideas have proved very tenacious.

There’s a problem, though, in that polyamory is not necessarily any better.

People who live outside the cultural mainstream love to believe that they have escaped the petty social norms that enslave all the other sheeple still trapped in the spider web of normative behavior. In reality, though, cultural ideas have an insidious way of seeping into us even when we’re aware of them. Simply knowing that we were raised in a climate of ownership assumptions about sex and love doesn’t make us immune to internalizing them. In fact, many, many people in the poly community cling just as strongly to paradigms of ownership and control as they believe all those poor “unevolved” monogamous folks do–they simply manifest differently, that’s all.

I’ve been putting some thought to the sneaky ways that social expectations can creep into relationships even when they’re outside the social mainstream. Here are some examples I’ve come up with.

Control paradigm Egalitarian paradigm
I let you have other partners. This is a privilege I grant you. I can tell you who, under what circumstances, when, and how you may have other partners. You are a human being with the right to make your own choices about having other partners. I will tell you what I am comfortable or uncomfortable with, and trust you to make choices that honor and cherish our relationship.
I let you have sex with other people. This is a privilege I grant you. I can tell you how you may or may not have sex or otherwise control the timing or manner of your sexual activity. You have an intrinsic right to make choices about your sexuality. I will communicate you what I am comfortable or uncomfortable with, because I trust you to make choices that honor and cherish our relationship.
My sexual health is your responsibility. I will set limits on your behavior to ensure that you only engage in sexual activity that meets my sexual risk limits. My sexual health is my responsibility. I will communicate to you my sexual health boundaries, risk limits, and concerns. Because your risk limits and concerns may not match mine, you are free to make whatever choices with your own sexual health that you like. If your behavior exceeds my threshold of risk, I have the right to change the sexual relationship between you and I, including adding barriers or even ending it entirely. If having a sexual relationship with me is something you value, you can make choices to remain within my levels of acceptable risk.
I may fetishize your other sexual partners for my gratification. I have the right to tell you how to or not to have sex and/or demand the intimate details of your sexual activites for my sexual gratification. Your sexual activity with other people and your other partners are not merely for my sexual gratification. I will accept your right to choose sexual activities that you and your other partner find fulfilling, and that you and your other partner have a right to privacy about your own intimacy.
If I am sexually attracted to your other partners, it is your responsibility to share them with me. You have an obligation to provide me with access to your partners if I want it.

 Your other partners are human beings. As they are not your property, it is not your obligation to make them sexually available to me.
My sexual partners are mine. You are not permitted to express an interest in them; if I want to keep them to myself, this overrides the wishes or desires of both you and my other partners. My other sexual partners are human beings. As they are not my property, I do not have the right to "keep" them; they are people, not things, capable of making their own decisions about sexual intimacy and partner choices.
My fears, insecurities, and jealousy are your responsibility. I have the right to control your behavior and/or the behavior of your other partners in order to manage my fears and insecurities. My fears, insecurities, and jealousy are my responsibility. I have the right to communicate with you about them, and to ask for your help in dealing with them. Because you love and cherish me, you will work with me to help me when I am afraid or insecure. These feelings do not give me the right to dictate your choices, however.
I have the right to ensure that you may have other partners only to the extent that your other partners do not affect me or our relationship. I may limit or control your other relationships so as to make sure they do not affect me. I understand that there are many uncertainties in life. Everything from a new job to being fired to illness to family of origin problems to being hit by a runaway bus may affect our relationship together. When your other partnerships affect me in a way that concerns me, I have the right and the responsibility to communicate with you about it, so that we can work together to address my concerns.
Your other relationships exist only on my say-so and only for so long as I permit. I have the right to order you to terminate any of your other relationships if I feel it is necessary or desirable. Your other partners are people with needs and feelings; they have have the right to explore and develop their relationship with you, to be supported by you, and to expect that their relationship with you will continue for so long as it benefits you and them. I may reasonably expect that they will respect the relationship between you and I; they may reasonably expect that I will respect the relationship between you and them.
Understanding my needs is your responsibility. If you fail to meet my needs or expectations, even if I have not made them explicitly clear, you have wronged me, and I have the right to control your behavior so as to ensure they are met. Understanding my needs is my responsibility. Communicating my needs with you is also my responsibility. You can not be expected to meet any needs of mine that you are not aware of. I may ask for your help in making sure I am taken care of, and trust that you value me and want to take care of my needs.
The relationship between me and your other partner is your responsibility. I may require that you arrange meetings between us, that you keep the other person separate from me, that you ensure I am comfortable with your other partner, or otherwise make it your responsibility to manage the relationship between us.

 The relationship I have with your other partner is our responsibility. As I am an adult and your other partner is an adult, it is on each of us to negotiate what kind of relationship we want to have with each other.
I permit you to have other relationships only so long as they are subordinate to me. The people with whom you develop relationships have needs and feelings, and have just as much right as I have to asking your help in meeting them. Should our needs run into conflict, we can come together to communicate and negotiate as adult human beings; I may not claim authority over another human being merely because I met you first.
I have the right to control your emotional engagement with other people. This includes the right to tell you that you may not experience certain emotions (for example, you may not fall in love with another partner) and/or the right to control the extent to which you feel emotions with others.

 Your emotional experience is one of the most fundamental parts of who you are as a person. I recognize that it is impossible for us as human beings to place arbitrary controls on our emotions.
I have the right to control how far and to what extent you become entangled with other people. For example, I may forbid you to become financially entangled with other partners. Decisions about how to conduct your life can only be made by you. Realistically, whatever promises you have made and whatever rules I have made, there is nothing short of a shotgun and a length of chain that compels you to stay with me. I have the right to expect that you will uphold agreements you have made with me, and I have the right to expect that your decisions will account for the responsibilities you have incurred with me. Beyond that, I can not realistically lay claim to your autonomy; even if I want to, it is not possible for me to compel your decisions.
I have the right to control your expressions of love, affection, or feelings for others. I may forbid you to give gifts to other partners, do errands with other partners, use certain pet names with other partners, or have certain experiences with other partners. The way you express love is one of the most intimate of all choices you can make. Attempts to dictate how you may or may not do this are not only extremely intrusive, they may undermine the foundations of your other relationships. As long as you express the love you feel for me with me, it is not necessary for me to control your expressions with others.
My emotions are your responsibility. If I feel something that I don’t want to feel.this is your fault, and I may limit your behavior as a result. My emotions are my responsibility. Even when they are surprising or unpleasant, they belong to me. I have the reponsibility to communicate with you about my emotions, and I may ask for your help in feeling loved and supported by you.
I have the right to define your other relationships. As adult human beings, you and your other partners have the right to define your relationship for yourselves.
I have the authority to place your other relationships in a hierarchy of my choosing. As adult human beings, you and your other partners have the right to determine the shape of your relationship. I have the responsibility to communicate my needs to you; as long as you are able and willing to work with me to meet those needs, the ordering of your other relationships is a decision between you and your other partners.
Agreements between you and I are binding on any other partners you may have.

 All the people involved have a right to negotiate any agreements that may affect us.

I’m sure there are more. What are your experiences?

On the Care and Feeding of Giraffes

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Image: Luca Galuzzi, Wikimedia Commons

I am in love with a dragonslayer.

Not all dragonslayers, as it turns out, are knights in shining armor. The dragonslayer I love is a giraffe.

Her name is Shelly. She is not an ordinary person; one does not generally become a dragonslayer if one is content to travel from cradle to grave by the path of least resistance. And I have been in love with her for quite a number of years.

It’s interesting, and sometimes a bit intimidating, to be romantically linked to a hero of yours. We met at a gathering of polyamorous folks in Florida a very long time ago. We started dating a short while after that. I didn’t know then that she would become a dragonslayer, but she did tell me early on in our relationship that she is a giraffe.

By this point, you can be excused, gentle reader, if you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. Allow me to backtrack a moment to explain.

Shelly, this person I love very much, is not, as I have mentioned, an ordinary sort of person. Not being an ordinary sort of person often leads to loneliness, and loneliness leads to sadness; we are social animals, after all. Many years ago–long before I met her–she talked to a therapist about feeling alienated and isolated from the people around her. The therapist listened patiently, then explained that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her; she wasn’t alienated because she was broken, she was alienated because she was a giraffe surrounded by alligators. “Find other giraffes,” the therapist told her. “You’ll be fine.”

It’s easier to find giraffes nowadays than it used to be. Back before the Internet exploded all over the world like an overripe grape in a hydraulic press, locating a community of non-traditional, non-monogamous, sex-positive people was a bit like finding a hundred-dollar bill lying on the ground; sure, it was theoretically possible, and every now and then you heard of someone who knew someone who talked to someone who’d totally heard of it happening to someone else, but it wasn’t exactly something that you could count on to meet the household budget.

When Shelly and I met, we recognized each other immediately. I didn’t know, back then, what that would mean.

I wrote a while ago some meandering thoughts on the tenuousness of the connections that drift by us, and how these slender threads–the accumulations of entire lifetimes of choices made and random chance–can profoundly change our lives.

My relationship with Shelly changed me more than my experiences with any other person I’ve had in my life, arguably including my parents.

When we met, I was still married to a monogamous partner, someone for whom polyamory really wasn’t a good fit. We had spent quite a lot of time trying to navigate the tricky waters of balancing the needs of a person who can’t be happy within monogamy with the needs of someone who can’t be happy without it, and more often than not, it was other partners I got involved with who bore the brunt of that.

Shelly has a way about her. That way usually starts with her raising a finger, a slightly puzzled look on her face, and saying “I have a question.” Invariably, the questions that follow completely rearrange your mental landscape. “I have a question,” she might say. “If you say that you want to love other people, why do you bring them into a situation where it is not safe for them to love you back, because you can be ordered to end the relationship at someone else’s will?” Or “I have a question. If you say you value having other people in your life, why don’t you value their agency?”

There’s one very important lesson I learned about being involved with her: If you are to be romantically linked to Shelly, you had better have your house in order. She will not easily accommodate the thousand little compromises that many people make when they try non-monogamy, the little rules and rituals that reinforce insecurity and avoid difficult change. If she finds a weak place, an area where for the sake of convenience some little unintended cruelty has become written into the fabric of a relationship, she will push on it. Band-Aids over unresolved problems do not work for her. Feelings swept under a carpet will be dragged into the light. That’s the first rule of being involved with Shelly: commitment to honesty and self-knowledge. You don’t get to say everything is OK when things are not OK, and you don’t get to make compromises that exclude other people.

It was the relationship with Shelly that finally let me see how hurtful, for all those years before I met her, my rules and treaties with my monogamous wife had been to my other partners. It was Shelly’s insistence that I deal with that hurtfulness that brought me to the choice that I could no longer be a party to hurting others that way.

This is the ring I wear on my left hand. Shelly has one identical to it.

After we’d been together for several years, Shelly felt the call to become a dragonslayer. I have written about that here. One of the things she and I share in common is the fact that we both do not accept the idea of death. One of the things that makes her a better human being than I am is that she has made the decision to spend the entirety of her life fighting it.

She returned to school, to seek a doctorate that would allow her to do research in the field of radical longevity. She sacrificed a tremendous amount to do so, including moving away from where we had been living together to pursue her education. She made the decision and, just like that, both of our lives changed.

That is the second rule of Shelly. She has fortitudes of will that would astonish Winston Churchill. She is remarkably flexible in many ways, but when she has resolved to do something, wild dogs will not budge her. She is one of the strongest people I’ve ever met.

She went off to school. The company I was a minority partner in–one which would later implode in a fiery economic flameout that often happens, I’m told, when one puts engineers in charge of financial decisions–moved to Atlanta, and I went with it. We remained family, but the nature of our relationship changed.

That’s the third rule of Shelly. You don’t get to dictate what a relationship with her will look like. She is who she is; to love her means to accept that. She is neither flighty nor uncommitted; quite the opposite, in fact. She commits to the things that are important to her with ferocity. But she does not prefer the comforting illusion to the uncomfortable truth. People change. Shelly is not a person who hides from that change; she will not retreat into comforting routines.

Shelly does, and always will, hold a place in my heart, no matter what happens. There have been other people in her life while we have been together–people who sought to dictate only one kind of relationship with her, people who tried to impose restrictions on the way her heart will work. When they could not have what they wanted, they have chosen to fall out of her life.

It’s a poor choice, in my opinion. Being close to Shelly is incredible. I can not fathom why someone would that up simply because they could not impose rules on her about who she was permitted to love or how. But then again, I also may be part giraffe myself.

Caring for a giraffe, of course, requires special skills. One does not raise a giraffe the way one would raise an alligator or a puppy or a water buffalo. Here, as with all things that are important, flexibility matters; one can not toss scraps of raw chicken at a giraffe the way one might do with an alligator and then say there is something wrong with the giraffe because it does not thrive.

The biggest part of the care and feeding of Shelly I have discovered is simply developing the skill to listen to her when she talks about what she needs. Her needs in relationship, I have found, are generally quite modest, and easy to care for; but being heard is top among them.

Another is expectation management. Expecting Shelly to accommodate choices made for the sake of avoiding unpleasant reality is never likely to succeed. She has, more than anyone else I know, a commitment to emotional integrity that does not permit patching or working around problems like insecurity or fear. Almost all the practical skills I’ve learned about going under the bed, grabbing the monster that lives there, dragging it out into the light, and making it pay rent I’ve learned from her. Being involved with Shelly is not for the faint of heart.

And if her needs are not being met, she will let you know.

Funny things, needs are; when they aren’t being met, they can feel bottomless. In some relationships they are met more effortlessly than others; and in poly relationships, it can be very tempting to point to someone who’s needs aren’t being met and say “What’s wrong with you? Why are you so miserable? Why can’t you just be happy, like Sally over there is?” when the reality is that Sally is happy simply because her needs are being met.

Call this the Fourth Rule of Shelly: if her needs aren’t being met, she will be unhappy. She is not an unhappy person; she is, however, far less likely to sit in a corner and quietly suck it up if her needs aren’t met.

That is, as it turns out, a feature, not a bug…at least if you want relationships built on a foundation of absolute, unwavering emotional integrity.

Which, the cynic in me whispers, is the one thing many folks are not really prepared for. Perhaps that is one of the things that differentiates an alligator from a giraffe? Perhaps alligators prize relationship stability ahead of emotional integrity?

In any relationship, there will be times when chaos slips in through some neglected back door or some little crack in the ceiling. It happens. We are all born of frailty and error. I have, as I’ve gone about this business of placing my heart in other people’s hands and accepting their hearts in mine, learned that when those moments occur, there is often an instant, right at the start, when we make a choice. It’s a tiny choice, that happens in a fleeting instant, sometimes too fast for us to register, but it’s there: the instant when we choose compassion, or when we sigh, feel frustrated, and head down the path of “God damn it, I had plans to watch Friends on TV tonight and then maybe wash the dog–anything that’s more fun than dealing with human beings who have needs–and now here you are asking for my support with something, and and and why can’t you just be more convenient?”

Compassion, in case it needs to be said, is better.

I am fortunate beyond measure to have connected with Shelly, and I feel blessed to have her as part of my life. Thank you for being who you are.

Some thoughts on connection and love

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A few weeks back, I traveled up to visit my Canadian sweetie. While I was there, she observed something interesting. My blog, she noted, has half a dozen tags for sex, but only one for love.

The interesting thing about that is I actually care more about love than about sex, though I rarely seem to write about love.

I went to visit her on the bus. There’s a bus service called BoltBus that travels between Portland and Vancouver, you see, and it’s really cheap to take.

Sometimes.

They have this bizarre pricing structure where the first seat on a particular bus sells for a dollar, and the next few seats sell for eight dollars, and the next few seats sell for fifteen, or something like that. What it means is if you plan well ahead, and you are willing to sit there and click Refresh on their Web site over and over, you can sometimes travel for next to nothing.

Plus, their buses are black and orange, which is kinda cool.

On the bus ride up, there was a pretty girl with a blond pony tail seated to my right. She spent almost the entire trip texting someone on her cell phone. Ahead of me, two bearded geeks in glasses talked excitedly about Python on Linux.

We stopped in Seattle to pay homage to the monument of the Dalek god and drink coffee. Yes, there is a monument to the God of the Daleks in downtown Seattle. No, I don’t know why it’s there. It looks like this:

I don’t drink coffee, so I sipped my hot chocolate, given to me by a surly Starbucks employee, and contemplated the fact that these people I was sharing the bus trip with–the girl glued to her cell phone and the geeky Linux programmers rhapsodizing over Python’s, like, total readability–had crossed paths with me in a tiny, insignificant way, and that I would quite likely never see any of them again for as long as we all lived.

For a brief second, the threads of our lives almost touched, before they spun off in their various directions once more.

Statistically speaking, the odds that I would cross paths with any of them were vanishingly small. If you were to start some kind of probability assessment going form the moments of our separate births, the odds that we four should ever be in the same space at the same time would be incredibly low.

And yet, we did intersect for that short while.

Which started me to thinking about love.

Statistically speaking, the odds that I will meet, much less fall in love with, any given person are also incredibly low. Each connection we make is statistically improbable, the result of a long gossamer thread of chance, decisions, fortuitous happenings, heartbreak, and all the other things that make us take the path we do. A death in the family, a different choice of college, a different career, a phone call from a childhood friend, a flat tire, any of a thousand things could have altered the decisions any of us made that led us to be on that bus at that time. The breathtaking confluence of life paths, events, and choices that led to us all being there is as fragile as it is amazing.

That’s kind of how it is with love.

For any two particular people, chosen at random, to become entwined in each other’s lives in such an intimate way as falling in love requires a statistically improbable chain of events, any one of which could cause the connection to fail altogether. The person you love most in all the world might, with just a few tiny differences in life path, be living a life almost indistinguishable from the one that brought you together–and yet you would be strangers.

It might sound like I’m saying that love is an incredibly rare thing, but it’s not. Opportunities for it are all around us; the possibility of love is abundant. But each individual connection, each set of circumstances that leads to any two specific people falling in love–that is a rare and delicate thing.

It might seem like those two ideas–that love is abundant and that connections between any two people are rare and improbable–are contradictory, but they’re not.

Think about a casino. Imagine walking into a casino and, with the snap of your fingers, freezing everything inside. If you were to look at every hand of cards in play, the arrangement of every card in the blackjack shoes, the position of every ball on every roulette wheel, the odds of seeing that exact configuration are so remote that you could set up casinos just like it all over the universe and let them all run from now until the stars burn out, and you’d never see that configuration again.

And yet, there it is.

In a world of seven billion people, opportunities for love are everywhere; but that doesn’t change the fact that the odds of meeting and falling in love with any one specific person are vanishingly tiny, the connection between two individuals spun from the slenderest of threads.

Those slender threads can make a huge difference. Those threads change our lives. They wrap around us until every one of our decisions is made because of them. A chance meeting, that most statistically improbable of connections between two individuals, and their lives suddenly change course in dramatic ways.

A thread like that called me to Portland. Another put me on that bus to Vancouver, where my life intersected ever so briefly with the other people on that bus, each of them there because of the sum total of thousands of choices large and small they had made.

There would be people on that bus; the statisticians who design bus routes, the accountants who apportion resources all know it. but each individual person is there as a result of an unbroken line of choices, any one of which could have sent that person somewhere else entirely.

This is the person I was on that bus to see, the thread of connection that altered the course of my life and put me on that bus.

Whenever I think of any of the people I love, I always think about how improbable it was that our lives crossed paths, and how profoundly such an improbable thing has changed me. Yes, if I had made different choices, if they had made different choices, if our lives had not intersected, then we might not be lovers, but I would still have love in my life. I absolutely believe that’s true.

And yet…

It is those threads that have made my life what it is right now. It is those improbable connections, those fine threads of chance and choice, that brought me here, and that led to me writing the words you’re reading right now.

I like who I am. I like being where I am. I have, in large part, all those people who I love, all the delicate lines of chance and choice that brought us together, to thank for that.

I am profoundly grateful for every person who has touched my life in this way. I am profoundly grateful for every one of those connections, for every person I have ever loved and who has ever loved me. From tiny, delicate threads, entire lives are woven. For all the people who have helped me weave mine: Thank you.