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I came down, not "hard", exactly, but firm on someone asking some advice. At least, compared to some of my other responses, I don't think it was "hard". But I didn't shy away from the main point. I didn't ease him into it, I just didn't pick him up screaming and throw him into deep, choppy waters.
And he *listened*. I find that to be admirable and impressive and I think there is a lot of good potential for his future in unlearning all the shit that society has instilled in him.
I think the advice is good, so I'm gonna re-post a modified version of it here as a general post not aimed at a specific person but at a situation that I see play over and over again in the poly community. I've left the gendered pronouns that applied to the OP, because I so often see this playing out with these pronouns and I often speak from my own experience, but the stories and the advice could be found with any mix of pronouns.
So, you're trying this poly thing out for the first time with your partner. You love each other, so naturally you don't want to lose what you already have together, but you also want to explore something new. So you discuss it a lot, and you make some agreements as to how to go about it that you think shows your commitment to and love for each other.
Then she comes to you and says that this agreement y'all had? She wants to change the agreement. Right now, because the thing you agreed not to do is about to happen. Or maybe already happened. Or maybe isn't about to happen right this instance, but it's now inevitable and it's *going* to happen and you can't stop it.
And you're afraid. And hurt. You agreed! Now she wants to change the rules! She can't just do that, can she? Well, I'm going to tell you something that you're going to like even less than hearing that. She's allowed to do change things. What she does with herself and with other people who are not you is none of your business. She can change the "rules" (whether you use that term or not) regarding what she does with herself whenever she wants to, and she's not "the bad guy" for doing so, even if you feel bad feels about it.
First of all, don't confuse "it's not your business, she's her own person and can do what she wants" with "don't have any emotional investment in your partner". A lot of mono people and recently-mono people make that mistake.
When your partner goes to work, or hangs out with her friends, is it your "business" to negotiate ahead of time what she does or doesn't do at work? I mean, you're sharing her with her job, right? You're sharing her with her boss. Shouldn't you get a say in what she does? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. You're not "sharing" her with her boss! Even though, technically, she does spend more time with him, the majority of her waking hours, actually. You don't get a say in it, you don't get to "negotiate" about it, and it's none of your business. What she does on her boss's time is between her and her boss. What she does with her best friend when they're out together is between her and her best friend. How she spends her time with her mother is between her and her mother.
But as a loving partner, you might be *interested* in how her day at work goes. You might want to hear all about it, or maybe what she does isn't of interest to you so you don't really want to hear all the details but you care how her job affects her. Her happiness or lack of happiness at work matters to you, so you're "invested" in her well-being at work. But it's not your "business" to know anything about her work, especially ahead of time when shit happens and things come up.
She doesn't have to report to you or notify you or tell you anything to soothe your own feelings. But she might want to share with you because sharing who we are and what we do when we're apart with our partners is part of intimacy and connecting with each other. And she ought to tell you things that could affect your own ability to consent to a relationship (or certain activities in that relationship) with her. But that's about your relationship with her and how *she* affects *you*, not her relationship with other people.
No one is saying that you shouldn't be "invested" in her and even in her other relationships, but this "need" to know that you're expressing *is* a form of control, whether you see it or not. It's scary to not know what's happening, and wanting to be kept in the loop isn't, by itself, a bad thing, but expecting to know, with the (probably subconscious) belief that by knowing you can then affect the outcome, is a drive to control.
If you think that she can't just announce it, and that a conversation or a dialog has to happen before rules or agreements can change, then you're likely believing that you can influence things. Conversation *should* happen so that you can both explore your feelings together, but usually when the person in your position feels *affronted* at the idea that he isn't granted the "right" to this conversation and feels that an announcement is insufficient, if you dig down deep enough, it's based on the assumption that he can control or influence the outcome.
And often, I see people being affronted even when their partner *does* ask for a conversation first. The very fact of "asking permission" is seen as offensive, because you "already agreed!" You had an agreement! Well, now she wants to renegotiate that agreement, and if that bothers you, then you have some issues with control right now.
Maybe you don't realize that's what you're doing, but right now you're not just expressing a desire to know because change is hard to deal with and you want time to adjust. You're also expressing a desire to influence the potential situation, to influence *her* decision-making process. That's control. You might not understand that your underlying, sometimes hidden, assumptions are being expressed, but they are and that's why people in forums jump down your throat when you ask for advice on certain kinds of situations.
The problem is that only people who have made it through to the other side can see what the difference is between control vs. interest, or between "not your business" and "don't get invested". Much like privilege, most of us can't see it when we're in it, but we can damn well see it when we're on the outside of it.
Because most of us, when we're on your side of the fence, can't tell what the difference is between "not your business" and "don't be invested", it probably sounds like I'm suggesting that you shouldn't *care*, because your side of the fence has all these different definitions of "caring" mixed up with each other. I've written before about the story of a friend who voluntarily gave up polyamory on the basis that he couldn't deal with his partner "not caring" about what he did away from her. He couldn't tell the difference between "not your business" and "don't be invested" either.
There are very subtle, but significant, things going on that make "none of your business" and "don't be invested" two very different things, but much like trying to point out to someone their own privilege, it can be very difficult to see what that difference is, until one day you just *do* see the difference.
Second of all, another common rookie mistake is that we often make it unsafe for our partners to be honest with us. Without doing anything intentionally, and without even going so far as "abuse" or "control", when our partners are afraid of how we will react to something, our partners often skirt things because it doesn't feel safe to be totally up front and honest, and they do that *without intending* to be dishonest.
There is a reluctance to admit to themselves what they're really feeling, which becomes a hesitation to admit it to us. They try to "ease us in" to situations, they downplay this thing or gloss over that thing. Because they don't feel completely safe in really examining themselves out of fear of how the revelations will affect us. This happens to newbies all. the. time. It's basically the transitional step - if you come from a mono world, you have certain habits and assumptions and expectations built in and getting past them into trusting oneself and one's partner is extremely difficult.
The example of someone who is upset that his partner originally agreed not to have sex with her new partner on a date but then calls to ask permission to change that rule while on that date is a *classic* example and the forums are filled with posts asking for advice on what to do now. He obviously had a problem with her having sex with her partner. She obviously picked up on that, whether he said anything explicitly or not. If he really didn't have any problem with it, even being surprised by a change in plans wouldn't have elicited the all-to-common plea for validation that the poly forums would see the next day, as he plaintively asks "that was wrong of her to change our agreement, right?"
She didn't feel completely safe advocating for her own interest in sex with her partner or in advocating on behalf of her partner's interests, so she hedged and cushioned and tried to ease him into it, until sex was right there, in her face, and she couldn't hide from the possibility anymore without being blatantly dishonest. She had to wait until the cognitive dissonance from the reality of potential sex was greater than her fear of hurting you before she could admit to herself, and then to you, that sex was an option.
Incidentally, this is why so many monogamous cheaters don't use condoms. If they carry condoms with them, then they would have to admit that the cheating was "planned". But if they don't come prepared, then they can rationalize to themselves, and later to anyone else, that they never thought about it before, they weren't planning it, that it just "happened", and that it didn't "mean anything". Somehow that's less hurtful than admitting that they planned it?
In poly situations, people find themselves "surprised" by suddenly having "feelings" that they didn't realize they had or by suddenly faced with sex that's just about to happen "without warning" because they're deliberately, but subconsciously, ignoring all the feelings they had that led up to this moment.
So they tell their partners that the new person they're dating is "just OK", or "we had an OK time tonight, it was just alright" or "eh, I mean, they're kinda cute and all, but I don't know if there is any chemistry", until they're both naked and sweaty and suddenly they have to stop and call home to ask permission to do what the other person knew was inevitable but your partner deceived themselves into thinking was still a long way off out of fear of hurting you. Meanwhile, you end up feeling blindsided because you were under the impression that this was not a big deal and not as far along as it is. All because she was afraid to hurt you.
This means that *you* have your own share of the responsibility here in setting up the situation you now find yourself in where agreements are changed or broken and you feel "betrayed" because her emotions and desires didn't conveniently followed the path that y'all somehow thought it was possible to map out ahead of time.
She needs to feel that her actions with another aren't going to hurt you, because she cares about you and doesn't *want* to hurt you, and she needs to see that enough times to really trust that it's true, before she'll learn how to let go of this habit of hiding her wants from herself, of downplaying herself, of diminishing herself, of making herself smaller for your comfort. She likely has a *lot* of programming from a multitude of sources over her life instructing her to make herself smaller for the comfort of others, particularly if your partner is female, femme, or socialized as a woman and has male or masculine or socialized-as-men romantic partners.
I've been there. Yes, me, the Internet Flame Warrior, who demands my agency and takes no prisoners in these battles for autonomy and respect. I know the complicated, swirling morass of unnamed and unrecognized feelings, the justifications, the compassion tinged with darker fears, that murky soup inside the head that makes me believe, if only on the surface, that no, I really am not as interested in this guy, no, I really don't want sex this soon, no, I'm totally happy not dating anyone else for a while, so please, honey, take your time and get used to things first.
I know how to shrink myself so slowly that even I won't notice it until the box I'm trying to fit in bursts from the pressure. I know how to put myself on the back burner, how to dismiss myself so that someone else feels better.
I also know that it's a false sense of security. I know that this usually just makes things worse in the long run because my partner starts to get used to this unobtrusive, inconspicuous little package, so when the box suddenly explodes and sends shards and debris everywhere, he feels like a bomb has gone off. Either way he's going to feel uncomfortable with me taking up my full size. I know this.
And yet, I know what it's like to do this anyway, even knowing it. Because I'm trained to do this. Everything in my culture and upbringing says that this is the proper way to behave. To be a "compassionate" person, a "nice" person, a "caring" person, you have to "compromise". You have to "move at the pace of the slowest person". You have to "give and take" and right now you have to "give" first.
She feels that she has to be smaller than she is. She has made herself so small that even she can't see who she really is and what she wants, and she did that because she's afraid of how you will feel if she doesn't. It doesn't even have to be a fear of punishment or retribution or abuse. She could feel afraid because she genuinely doesn't want to hurt you because she loves you.
But she feels that way because she believes that being herself and wanting what she wants *will hurt you*.
You have to set the tone, and you have to do the work before she will feel safe. That may take some time and she will probably stumble over her own bad habits for a while before she learns to trust you and to trust herself.
But it starts with you.
And he *listened*. I find that to be admirable and impressive and I think there is a lot of good potential for his future in unlearning all the shit that society has instilled in him.
I think the advice is good, so I'm gonna re-post a modified version of it here as a general post not aimed at a specific person but at a situation that I see play over and over again in the poly community. I've left the gendered pronouns that applied to the OP, because I so often see this playing out with these pronouns and I often speak from my own experience, but the stories and the advice could be found with any mix of pronouns.
So, you're trying this poly thing out for the first time with your partner. You love each other, so naturally you don't want to lose what you already have together, but you also want to explore something new. So you discuss it a lot, and you make some agreements as to how to go about it that you think shows your commitment to and love for each other.
Then she comes to you and says that this agreement y'all had? She wants to change the agreement. Right now, because the thing you agreed not to do is about to happen. Or maybe already happened. Or maybe isn't about to happen right this instance, but it's now inevitable and it's *going* to happen and you can't stop it.
And you're afraid. And hurt. You agreed! Now she wants to change the rules! She can't just do that, can she? Well, I'm going to tell you something that you're going to like even less than hearing that. She's allowed to do change things. What she does with herself and with other people who are not you is none of your business. She can change the "rules" (whether you use that term or not) regarding what she does with herself whenever she wants to, and she's not "the bad guy" for doing so, even if you feel bad feels about it.
First of all, don't confuse "it's not your business, she's her own person and can do what she wants" with "don't have any emotional investment in your partner". A lot of mono people and recently-mono people make that mistake.
When your partner goes to work, or hangs out with her friends, is it your "business" to negotiate ahead of time what she does or doesn't do at work? I mean, you're sharing her with her job, right? You're sharing her with her boss. Shouldn't you get a say in what she does? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. You're not "sharing" her with her boss! Even though, technically, she does spend more time with him, the majority of her waking hours, actually. You don't get a say in it, you don't get to "negotiate" about it, and it's none of your business. What she does on her boss's time is between her and her boss. What she does with her best friend when they're out together is between her and her best friend. How she spends her time with her mother is between her and her mother.
But as a loving partner, you might be *interested* in how her day at work goes. You might want to hear all about it, or maybe what she does isn't of interest to you so you don't really want to hear all the details but you care how her job affects her. Her happiness or lack of happiness at work matters to you, so you're "invested" in her well-being at work. But it's not your "business" to know anything about her work, especially ahead of time when shit happens and things come up.
She doesn't have to report to you or notify you or tell you anything to soothe your own feelings. But she might want to share with you because sharing who we are and what we do when we're apart with our partners is part of intimacy and connecting with each other. And she ought to tell you things that could affect your own ability to consent to a relationship (or certain activities in that relationship) with her. But that's about your relationship with her and how *she* affects *you*, not her relationship with other people.
No one is saying that you shouldn't be "invested" in her and even in her other relationships, but this "need" to know that you're expressing *is* a form of control, whether you see it or not. It's scary to not know what's happening, and wanting to be kept in the loop isn't, by itself, a bad thing, but expecting to know, with the (probably subconscious) belief that by knowing you can then affect the outcome, is a drive to control.
If you think that she can't just announce it, and that a conversation or a dialog has to happen before rules or agreements can change, then you're likely believing that you can influence things. Conversation *should* happen so that you can both explore your feelings together, but usually when the person in your position feels *affronted* at the idea that he isn't granted the "right" to this conversation and feels that an announcement is insufficient, if you dig down deep enough, it's based on the assumption that he can control or influence the outcome.
And often, I see people being affronted even when their partner *does* ask for a conversation first. The very fact of "asking permission" is seen as offensive, because you "already agreed!" You had an agreement! Well, now she wants to renegotiate that agreement, and if that bothers you, then you have some issues with control right now.
Maybe you don't realize that's what you're doing, but right now you're not just expressing a desire to know because change is hard to deal with and you want time to adjust. You're also expressing a desire to influence the potential situation, to influence *her* decision-making process. That's control. You might not understand that your underlying, sometimes hidden, assumptions are being expressed, but they are and that's why people in forums jump down your throat when you ask for advice on certain kinds of situations.
The problem is that only people who have made it through to the other side can see what the difference is between control vs. interest, or between "not your business" and "don't get invested". Much like privilege, most of us can't see it when we're in it, but we can damn well see it when we're on the outside of it.
Because most of us, when we're on your side of the fence, can't tell what the difference is between "not your business" and "don't be invested", it probably sounds like I'm suggesting that you shouldn't *care*, because your side of the fence has all these different definitions of "caring" mixed up with each other. I've written before about the story of a friend who voluntarily gave up polyamory on the basis that he couldn't deal with his partner "not caring" about what he did away from her. He couldn't tell the difference between "not your business" and "don't be invested" either.
There are very subtle, but significant, things going on that make "none of your business" and "don't be invested" two very different things, but much like trying to point out to someone their own privilege, it can be very difficult to see what that difference is, until one day you just *do* see the difference.
Second of all, another common rookie mistake is that we often make it unsafe for our partners to be honest with us. Without doing anything intentionally, and without even going so far as "abuse" or "control", when our partners are afraid of how we will react to something, our partners often skirt things because it doesn't feel safe to be totally up front and honest, and they do that *without intending* to be dishonest.
There is a reluctance to admit to themselves what they're really feeling, which becomes a hesitation to admit it to us. They try to "ease us in" to situations, they downplay this thing or gloss over that thing. Because they don't feel completely safe in really examining themselves out of fear of how the revelations will affect us. This happens to newbies all. the. time. It's basically the transitional step - if you come from a mono world, you have certain habits and assumptions and expectations built in and getting past them into trusting oneself and one's partner is extremely difficult.
The example of someone who is upset that his partner originally agreed not to have sex with her new partner on a date but then calls to ask permission to change that rule while on that date is a *classic* example and the forums are filled with posts asking for advice on what to do now. He obviously had a problem with her having sex with her partner. She obviously picked up on that, whether he said anything explicitly or not. If he really didn't have any problem with it, even being surprised by a change in plans wouldn't have elicited the all-to-common plea for validation that the poly forums would see the next day, as he plaintively asks "that was wrong of her to change our agreement, right?"
She didn't feel completely safe advocating for her own interest in sex with her partner or in advocating on behalf of her partner's interests, so she hedged and cushioned and tried to ease him into it, until sex was right there, in her face, and she couldn't hide from the possibility anymore without being blatantly dishonest. She had to wait until the cognitive dissonance from the reality of potential sex was greater than her fear of hurting you before she could admit to herself, and then to you, that sex was an option.
Incidentally, this is why so many monogamous cheaters don't use condoms. If they carry condoms with them, then they would have to admit that the cheating was "planned". But if they don't come prepared, then they can rationalize to themselves, and later to anyone else, that they never thought about it before, they weren't planning it, that it just "happened", and that it didn't "mean anything". Somehow that's less hurtful than admitting that they planned it?
In poly situations, people find themselves "surprised" by suddenly having "feelings" that they didn't realize they had or by suddenly faced with sex that's just about to happen "without warning" because they're deliberately, but subconsciously, ignoring all the feelings they had that led up to this moment.
So they tell their partners that the new person they're dating is "just OK", or "we had an OK time tonight, it was just alright" or "eh, I mean, they're kinda cute and all, but I don't know if there is any chemistry", until they're both naked and sweaty and suddenly they have to stop and call home to ask permission to do what the other person knew was inevitable but your partner deceived themselves into thinking was still a long way off out of fear of hurting you. Meanwhile, you end up feeling blindsided because you were under the impression that this was not a big deal and not as far along as it is. All because she was afraid to hurt you.
This means that *you* have your own share of the responsibility here in setting up the situation you now find yourself in where agreements are changed or broken and you feel "betrayed" because her emotions and desires didn't conveniently followed the path that y'all somehow thought it was possible to map out ahead of time.
She needs to feel that her actions with another aren't going to hurt you, because she cares about you and doesn't *want* to hurt you, and she needs to see that enough times to really trust that it's true, before she'll learn how to let go of this habit of hiding her wants from herself, of downplaying herself, of diminishing herself, of making herself smaller for your comfort. She likely has a *lot* of programming from a multitude of sources over her life instructing her to make herself smaller for the comfort of others, particularly if your partner is female, femme, or socialized as a woman and has male or masculine or socialized-as-men romantic partners.
I've been there. Yes, me, the Internet Flame Warrior, who demands my agency and takes no prisoners in these battles for autonomy and respect. I know the complicated, swirling morass of unnamed and unrecognized feelings, the justifications, the compassion tinged with darker fears, that murky soup inside the head that makes me believe, if only on the surface, that no, I really am not as interested in this guy, no, I really don't want sex this soon, no, I'm totally happy not dating anyone else for a while, so please, honey, take your time and get used to things first.
I know how to shrink myself so slowly that even I won't notice it until the box I'm trying to fit in bursts from the pressure. I know how to put myself on the back burner, how to dismiss myself so that someone else feels better.
I also know that it's a false sense of security. I know that this usually just makes things worse in the long run because my partner starts to get used to this unobtrusive, inconspicuous little package, so when the box suddenly explodes and sends shards and debris everywhere, he feels like a bomb has gone off. Either way he's going to feel uncomfortable with me taking up my full size. I know this.
And yet, I know what it's like to do this anyway, even knowing it. Because I'm trained to do this. Everything in my culture and upbringing says that this is the proper way to behave. To be a "compassionate" person, a "nice" person, a "caring" person, you have to "compromise". You have to "move at the pace of the slowest person". You have to "give and take" and right now you have to "give" first.
She feels that she has to be smaller than she is. She has made herself so small that even she can't see who she really is and what she wants, and she did that because she's afraid of how you will feel if she doesn't. It doesn't even have to be a fear of punishment or retribution or abuse. She could feel afraid because she genuinely doesn't want to hurt you because she loves you.
But she feels that way because she believes that being herself and wanting what she wants *will hurt you*.
You have to set the tone, and you have to do the work before she will feel safe. That may take some time and she will probably stumble over her own bad habits for a while before she learns to trust you and to trust herself.
But it starts with you.
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Date: 4/13/17 01:39 am (UTC)From:no subject
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