My parents have two pets: a high-strung hunting dog (a German shorthair pointer, if you’re curious), and a psychotic cat with no claws who originally belonged to my sister. The dog is exuberantly, enthusiastically erratic, ninety pounds of jumping, barking, tearing around the house, freaking-out-without-warning teeth and claws that has actually injured my mother badly enough to require surgery on a morning walk. (“Oh look! A squirrel! I’m going to go chase it, oh boy oh boy!” led in very short order to a torn rotator cuff, when the dog hit the end of her leash.) The cat doesn’t much cotton to people, or to anything else really, and will growl, hiss, and generally make her displeasure known when one of us naked hairy apes intrudes into her presence.

This is actually a post about polyamory. I’ll get to that in a bit.

The dog doesn’t much like the cat, and the cat doesn’t much like the dog. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It’s probably more fair to say that the dog, being carefully bred for the purpose of hunting, rather does like the cat, in much the same way she likes any prey animal, and the cat hates the dog with a fury that is scarcely comprehensible to mere humans, but it’s a fury that is as impotent as it is malevolent. There’s no contest between the two. If the dog were actually to get at the cat, the dog would kill the cat in very short order–game over, the end–exactly as the dog has been bred to do.

For this reason, my parents carefully segregate the dog and the cat. The cat lives in one side of the house; the dog lives in the other, and doors are closed between them.

It would only take one mistake, one accidental slip-up, for my parents to own not two pets, but one pet and one collection of bloody scraps. So they are religious about keeping the animals separated. Doors and windows are checked after every passage (the cat’s domain includes the screened-in porch, which the dog is not permitted in). The habit of closing the door after every passage has become so strong that every door in the house is generally kept closed.

In some ways, this mirrors their relationship. My father lives on one side of the house; my mother lives on the other. They interact seldom and actually spend time together more rarely still. Even on vacations, they tend to go in separate directions.

A very large part of the poly community seems predicated on the same model as my parents use with their pets.

For many people, polyamory in practice seems a bit like owning a dog and a cat that don’t much get along, or in some cases might even try to kill one another. Each relationship functions as a separate entity, and doors are shut between them. If Alice is dating Bob, and Alice wants to date Bill too, and Bob and Bill don’t much care for one another, the solution is scheduling. Keep Bob and Bill away from one another, and it’s all good.

After all, Bob and Bill aren’t involved with each other, right? There’s no reason that Bob and Bill have to force a friendship, or even interact with one another at all, just because they’re both dating Alice, right?

Well, right. Certainly no reasonable person would suggest that Bob and Bill should try to be something that they’re not, or should attempt to force a connection or a friendship where none exists. that way disfunction lies.

But that misses the point.

Presumably, Alice has a choice. One would, generally speaking, probably assume that Alice can choose who she becomes romantically linked to. Alice can choose to date Bob and to date Bill, if she likes…but she can also choose not to.

I may be getting cynical in my old age, but it does seem to me that many people in the poly community approach their relationships from a desperate, starvation model. Connections are so rare, and the number of people who would actually want to date me so few, the reasoning seems to go, that if Bob asks me out, I have to say yes! If I don’t, I may never get another chance to start a new relationship again. Best to take every opportunity that comes down the pike; best not to risk never having a new relationship ever again.

And sure, it can work, in much the way my parent’s lives work–you learn to cope, you develop the reflex of shutting doors, you learn to police yourself constantly and to keep the things in your lives segregated. The habit of openness can be quashed, in time; you learn not to share things with Bill about Bob, you learn not to schedule things where Bob and Bill might interact. You develop a subconscious internal policeman, whose job it is to maintain that separation, to ensure that Bob and Bill forever occupy different spaces in your life.

But what the fuck kind of life is that?

It’s not necessary to try to make Bob and Bill like each other. Nor is it even possible, really. But what Alice can do is make choices. She is not obligated to date anyone who will have her; indeed, most people would argue that dating anyone who will have you is likely a symptom of a pathology.

What she can do is choose the kind of life she wants. She can, if she doesn’t want to become a devout follower of the Church of Closed Doors, evaluate as part of the decisions she makes what impact a potential new mate will have on her existing mates. She can say “I like Bob; I enjoy Bob’s company; but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life closing doors and policing my partners, so if Bob doesn’t fit well in my life, I will make another choice. I can develop a friendship with Bob that honors and respects the connection between us, without being involved in a relationship with him. I can choose relationships with people who complement my life and each other’s…even if they’re not actually involved in romantic relationships with each other. I can build a life without doors and walls.”

There are disadvantages to this approach. One may, from time to time, have to pass up the opportunity to sleep with someone one wants to sleep with. One may not be able to pursue every opportunity that presents itself. But in a world of six billion people, we have to make choices anyway; and love is abundant. There is no need to date whoever will have you.

The benefit to a life without doors and walls seems opaque to some people I’ve spoken with. I can’t rightly comprehend that, because it seems obvious to me. It means less headache and less hassle. It means less worrying, less policing one’s thoughts and deeds. I am very fortunate to have found in Shelly, and in my other sweeties, people who understand this intuitively. And I am fortunate in that there are certain things I do not have to worry about. I never have to worry about Shelly’s other partners; I can trust implicitly that when she chooses to open herself to other partners, she will make those choices in ways that consider my needs as well.

The benefits are wonderful. She has chosen other partners who have become friends of mine as well–people who add value to my life, even though I am not romantically or sexually linked to them. Relationships like this–relationships chosen to complement one another, not be separated from one another–are not zero-sum. Everyone benefits; when she chooses another partner, my life is enriched by it as well, and vice versa.

Happy birthday, Shelly. 🙂

Recently, I received an email taking exception with something I’ve written on one of my poly pages to the extent that one of the most important parts of polyamory is to be able to know one’s partner’s partners. The person emailed me to say that as long as everyone was honest, that was sufficient; a polyamorous relationship in which, say, Alice and Bob are a couple, and Bob had other partners on the condition that Alice never meets, knows, or talks to them, is a perfectly okay arrangement.

My reply:

The thing I find most important about relationship agreements is not the form the agreement takes, but the REASON behind the agreements. This is, in my experience, most especially true with agreements of the form “I do not want to know about _____” or “I do not want to meet _____.”

Often, if you ask someone who makes such a rule “Why don’t you want to know about X?” the answer you’ll get is “I just don’t, that’s all.” To me, that tends to show a lack of communication; people feel the things they feel and want the things they want for a reason.

Now, if a person doesn’t want to know about, or doesn’t want to know, one of the people involved in a relationship, I think that speaks volumes about his approach to relationship. I’ve met many such people, of course; it’s hard to be active in the poly community without meeting people who have this approach. In every such case in my experience, though, without exception, the *reason* that the person doesn’t want to know about or doesn’t want to know everyone else always comes down to some unvoiced insecurity, fear, or uncertainty about the relationship.

I’ve met people who don’t want to know a partner’s other partner because they believe that keeping this kind of distance will help them preserve their primacy status in enforced, prescriptive primary/secondary relationships. I’ve met people for whom it is a defensive mechanism; they feel that meeting the other person makes that person more “real,” and that triggers insecurities. I’ve met people for whom it helps create emotional distance that prevents them from having to consider the needs and feelings of that other partner, and who fear that if they have to think about that other partner as a real human being, they will lose their power or status in the relationship.

There are many different forms that a polyamorous relationship can take. But all healthy polyamorous relationships–indeed, all healthy relationships of any kind, polyamorous or monogamous–have certain things in common. Healthy relationships live on open, honest communication; and it is not possible to develop good communication with a person you refuse to be in the same room with.

I can not reconcile “I refuse to meet your other partner, I refuse to know that person, I refuse to talk to that person, and I refuse to be in the same space as that person” with “respect.” When person A refuses to speak to person B, it is hard to make a case that A and B have developed good communication, and harder still to argue that A respects B.

I do not necessarily subscribe to the idea that as long as everyone talks about their feelings, it’s all good. That is a n ecessary first step, but building successful relationships requires more than just talking about how you feel. It also requires understanding those feelings, looking at them critically, figuring out where they come from, figuring out whether or not they are well-founded, determining if the things you feel match reality, figuring out if those feelings are healthy or unhealthy, and in some cases (such as with fear or insecurity) figuring out what you can do to change them. All of these things start with clarity and honesty, but clarity and honesty by themselves are not enough to guarantee success.

I sometimes feel like a heretic in the poly community. One thing I hear repeated often, especially when issues such as jealousy or insecurity arise, is that “all feelings are valid.” I do not believe that’s true.

I do believe that all feelings feel genuine to the person who feels them, that feelings are inherently irrational, and that telling a person “Oh, you shouldn’t feel X, so just get over it already” is insensitive and unhelpful.

But that doesn’t mean that all feelings are valid.

As an extreme example, say that a person has a fear of being kidnapped by flying ninjas. Is this fear valid? It might be genuine, but is it valid? I would say “no, it is not,” based on the idea that flying ninjas do not (to my knowledge) exist; the actual odds of anyone save datan0de actually being kidnapped by flying ninjas is nil. So the fear is not “valid” in the sense that the thing being feared simply is not going to happen; the fear serves no purpose and does not reflect reality.

People act the way they do for a reason. People feel the way they do for a reason. If Alice refuses to meet Bob’s other lovers, there is a reason. “Oh, I just don’t want to, that’s just the way I feel” is not a genuine response; it is not a reason.

I say that not all feelings are valid. I also say that it is not enough to be honest about your feelings; there is also, if your goal is to build healthy relationships, the additional component of exploring the why of your feelings, and being honest about that.

There is also the component of recognizing that not all feelings are healthy, and not all feelings should necessarily be catered to.

I realize that “all feelings are valid” is a very validating idea; it makes people feel good about themselves regardless of how irrational or destructive their feelings are.

But not all feelings are valid, and not all emotional responses make for healthy, stable foundations for relationship structures. Sometimes, building healthy, functional relationship structures requires examining one’s feelings, and, if they are found to be predicated on ideas that are untrue or unhelpful, changing them.

This is extremely difficult, uncomfortable, awkward work, and it can and likely will take you nose to nose with some of your deepest fears and most sensitive, vulnerable areas. It’s not fun. But expressing how you feel is not enough.

Comments?

Tuesday, the Florida part of the Squiggle and I spent the evening at Disney watching the fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle. The Squiggle is the name given to this extended romantic network I’m a part of; Shelly, smoocherie and her other sweeties Fritz and james_the_evil1, S (who now has a LiveJournal! Welcome joreth!) and her other sweetie sterlingsilver9, and his other sweetie M were all in attendance.

Watching fireworks at Disney has become something of a tradition, if anything that one has done twice in a row can be said to be a “tradition”–though in all fairness that’s usually as close to tradition as I care to get.

I have a picture from last year, same time, same place. The people in that picture are not the same as the people who were there this year; looking at that picture, the social dynamic it represents has changed so much that it seems weird and slightly incomprehensible to me now. It’s interesting how much can change in such a short span of time.

But I didn’t come here to talk about fireworks, or my social life. I came here to talk about feelings.

j5nn5r made a post in polyrelations recently that has some words of wisdom I think bear repeating:

1. Just because I feel bad doesn’t mean somebody else did something wrong.
2. Just because I feel good doesn’t mean I’m doing the right thing.

These two things, taken together, would do much to alleviate about seventy-five percent of the angst, pain, and suffering afflicting the human species today, were they more universally understood and appreciated. Hell, these things should be tattooed on every human being alive today–as long as, y’know, it’s in a nice font or something. In fact, I’m going to say them again, because I like them so much:

1. Just because I feel bad doesn’t mean somebody else did something wrong.
2. Just because I feel good doesn’t mean I’m doing the right thing.

Universal application of these ideas would probably do more good for the sum of all mankind than universal application even of the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule prevents people from behaving evilly to one another; these two principles, properly applied, prevent people from behaving evilly to one another even when they feel justified in doing so.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about feelings lately. Over the course of the past several days, on various forums scattered all over the Internet, I’ve been participating in conversations with a person who was upset because her partner has passed a relationship rule forbidding her to masturbate; with a person who says that certain forms of roleplay in a D/s or BDSM context are always unacceptable under all circumstances, and that she would “beat up” anyone who engaged in, for example, Nazi roleplay; and with a person who’s been personally attacking and viciously slandering one of the lead software engineers of the company that makes one of the compilers I use, because the latest version of that compiler’s IDE has a radically different user interface than earlier versions did.

Now, on the surface, these seem like completely separate, unrelated things. But each one actually has the same roots. In each of these three cases, exactly the same thing is happening: someone is feeling a negative or unpleasant emotion, and that person believes that the way to deal with this negative or unpleasant emotion is by controlling the people around him. That is, each case describes a situation where a person is seeking an external solution to an internal emotional state.

Western philosophy and thought makes a great deal of the distinction between the rational self and the emotional self. We talk about these two things as thought they were entirely different; “Should I go with my head or my heart?” “What do you do when your thoughts tell you one thing and your feelings tell you another?”

This idea is pure poppycock.

Thoughts and feelings come from the same source; they’re not different things at all. Feelings are how the parts of our brain that do not have language talk to us; thoughts are how the parts of our brain that do have language talk to us. If there’s a contradiction between someone’s thoughts and his feelings, it likely means that person simply hasn’t taken the time to understand his feelings, that’s all.

Of course, we all know what it feels like to believe something is true, and then later to find out we were wrong; or to believe we understand something, and then later find out we don’t. Happens all the time; if someone believes that New York City is the capital of New York State, then finds out that, no, it’s actually Albany, it’s no big deal.

Feelings can be wrong as well. In fact, it may be that feelings will be wrong more often than rational thoughts; the parts of the brain responsible for our feelings are much simpler, much more primitive, less able to understand abstract ideas or complex situations.

So why is it people rarely seem to understand that their feelings might not always be right?

Emotions are one of the ways we make sense of the world. Unfortunately, an emotion always feels right, by definition. People tend by default to feel justified in their emotions, and accept without question that those emotions are true. The person who feels wronged believes he has been wronged; the person who feels betrayed believes without ever even stopping to consider, or even thinking about whether he should stop to consider, that he has been betrayed.

On one of the UseNet newsgroups I read, there is this guy who has written–loudly, noisily, and repeatedly–about how a change in the user interface of a particular compiler represents a personal “betrayal.” He feels, quite strongly, that the software vendor has betrayed and abandoned him, and to retaliate for this perceived injury, he has taken to (among other things) posting the most amazing rants while masquerading as one of the engineers from that software vendor. He has also attacked the engineers from that vendor in a most amazing way, even posting excerpts from their personal Weblogs with what can only be described as “colorful commentary” on the newsgroup.

Now, this guy is probably quite sincere in his feelings. He genuinely feels slighted and personally affronted; I have no doubt whatsoever that his feelings are very real. What he can’t do is step away from those feelings enough to see how completely outrageous and over-the-top his behavior is; if he does have a legitimate complaint about the redesigned user interface of his compiler, it’s totally buried beneath the landslide of extremely inappropriate behavior, and nobody’s going to listen to anything he says because of it.

When someone behaves in such a clearly outrageous way, it’s pretty easy to point and laugh and say “man, that guy’s a real nutjob!” But people do this same kind of thing, especially in romantic relationships, every day. A feeling of injury or slight always seems real from the inside; it takes a good deal of discipline and good skills at self-understanding to be able to step far enough away from them to say “Just because I feel hurt does not mean that someone attacked me.”

And the real bitch of it is that someone who feels hurt or slighted will behave in ways that under any other circumstances he knows are wrong, because when a person feels hurt, lashing out at the author of the perceived injury feels like the right thing to do. It seems perfectly justified and reasonable.

Feelings are deceptive, and should not be taken at face value, The fact that a thing feels justified and right does not necessarily mean that it is justified and right–but realizing that, and doing what is right, is very, very difficult to do.

It gets worse when the feeling genuinely is justified. There are many people who have a strong emotional reaction to Nazi symbolism, and rightly so. The Nazi party was an abomination, and perpetrated acts of atrocity on an almost inconceivable scale. The symbols associated with the Nazis still have an incredible emotional power; the Holocaust is still within the memories of people who are alive today. It’s reasonable to expect that this kind of symbol will trigger an absolutely overwhelming emotional response in a great many people.

The trap that goes hand in hand with that emotional response is the belief that the emotion justifies an action. The person on the forum I read who says she would commit acts of violence against people who use Nazi symbolism in a BDSM context is so overwhelmed by her emotional response that she lacks the cognitive ability to distinguish between a symbol and the thing that symbol represents, and feels so justified in her emotional response that she lacks the ability to differentiate between a feeling and an action. She, like the Usenet kook who believes that stalking, impersonating, and attacking a software engineer over a change in the user interface of a computer program, sincerely believes that her emotional response justifies her actions; she believes that it is acceptable for her to commit an act of violence because of the way she feels when she sees certain symbols.

The willingness to commit, justify, advocate, defend, or rationalize acts of violence on the basis of an emotion is arguably among the most evil of all human impulses. The irony, invisible to her, is that in her attitude, in her willingness to believe that her internal emotional state justifies violence, she is actually not so different from the very thing she hates. The only difference between her belief that her emotional reaction justifies her violence and the belief on the part of a Ku Klux Klansman that his emotional reaction to the thought of a black person having a romantic relationship with a white partner justifies his violence is in the minor details. In essential philosophical and moral attitudes, these two people are birds of a feather.

As human beings, we react emotionally to symbols; it’s written in our brains. When people confuse the symbol with the thing it represents, evil happens. Emotions are not sophisticated; the emotional part of the brain does not understand subtlety. To the emotional part of the brain, the symbol and the thing it stands for are the same; it takes the application of intellect to understand why they are not. In its petty forms, you get people who become so emotional over someone burning a flag that they imagine the nation that flag stands for has somehow been attacked; in its more virulent forms, you see people reacting so strongly to a symbol that they believe their reaction justifies acts of physical violence.

The thing that’s important, though, is that the emotion does not, of and by itself, justify an action, even in cases where the emotion itself is justified. I would be very uncomfortable if someone showed up at a play party I was attending dressed in full SS regalia; the difference between me and the person on the forum I’m reading is that I recognize that my discomfort is an emotion that belongs to me, and my emotions do not justify violence.

This same philosophy applies on a smaller scale as well. The person who feels uncomfortable or inadequate at the thought of his mate masturbating, and acts on that feeling by ordering his partner not to touch herself, is making the same mistake as the person who beats up someone for engaging in role-play that makes her uncomfortable, just on a smaller scale. In each case, the mental malfunction is exactly the same: the belief that the appropriate way to deal with an uncomfortable emotion is to force others to change their behavior.

Emotions tend to justify the actions they prompt, and emotions tend to try to make people believe that they are justified and right, so if there is a contradiction between the world and a person’s emotional state, it’s the world that has to change. The desire to try to force the world to change to suit our emotional state, rather than changing our emotional state to suit the world, is a very natural one; our emotions are one of the the mechanisms by which we determine whether something is wrong or right, especially in social contexts, so of course our emotions will always feel right. You cannot use your emotions to determine whether or not your emotions are justified; emotions, almost by definition, always feel justified. If we feel slighted, then our emotions are telling us we have been slighted; even if those emotions are wrong, they will still feel right. Believing that you are justified because you feel justified is not good enough.

The way out of the self-referential morass is actually quite easy: evaluate your actions with your head, not your heart. If you feel slighted, don’t assume that the feeling is valid; check your facts first. It’s tough, though, because “checking your facts” does not mean “look for things that validate and support the feeling,” but if you’re not careful, that’s exactly what you’ll end up doing…because, you see, it feels like the right thing to do. Doing what actually is right means fact-checking your feelings, which means that you cannot trust your feelings to give you the right answer.

Just because you feel bad does not mean someone did something wrong. Just because you feel good does not mean what you are doing is right. Feel with your heart, but check your facts.

Wow, it’s been busy lately…I’ve been working six days a week, ten to fifteen hours a day. As a result, I haven’t had time to read my flist, or in fact do much of anything else.

I have, however, finally managed to update my Web site, by taking my laptop to McDonald’s with me every day and working on it on my lunch break. Uploaded it from McDonald’s yesterday; this revision affects nearly every page of the polyamory section.

Most significantly, I’ve finally put the Mono-Poly Dialog up. After five rounds of editing, it still weighs in at about seventeen thousand, five hundred words, so it’s a significant read…but I didn’t want to cut any more out, as I wanted to preserve the feel and the content of the original conversation.

And now, off to work.