The Journal Of The InnKeeper

As I sit squarely in the middle of the season that triggered my last bout with depression, I came across this Facebook post I wrote towards a lull in the depression.  It's interesting reading it again almost 2 years later.  Although I think I have pulled out of the depression itself, I have not, in fact, gotten past my self-doubt of my character judgement, and I wonder how much of my inability to trust my own judgement has interfered with my ability to date and meet people in the past couple of years (really, this year shouldn't count, since I'm also not meeting people because I refuse to date in person, which, on top of my prickly online personality, means guys don't generally stick around long enough for me to consider them worth dating):

REALLY long rambling.   Basically, I'm just doing some introspection out loud.

My last several breakups have severely undermined my confidence in my ability to judge character and make good partner choices.  First was the guy who managed to date 2 feminists and then go full on misogynist "but misandry!" after we all broke up (his choice to breakup, btw, he's not doing some incel "the feminists dumped me, therefore women suck!" thing).

Next was the guy who abused all his other partners and I didn't see it.  Then was the guy who ghosted me and I gave him another chance, only to have him ghost me a second time.  Before that second ghosting was a casual partner who ghosted me once, I gave him a second chance, and he also ghosted me again.

Then came the dude who was so terrified that I would find someone to replace him that he dumped me for his ex-gf, because that makes sense.  #HeLiftedMeUpAndThrewMeDownCryingPleaseDontHurtMeMama

So in the middle of my depression, I'm having a serious self-esteem issue over my ability to make good choices for myself.  Which leads me to questioning and probing at some of my patterns, trying to identify and recognize them.  I noticed one pattern several years ago, but couldn't really identify it.  I could tell *something* was a common thread, but not quite sure what. I think I may be zeroing in on it.

I have different kinds of attractions to people.   I'm sure others do too, but I'm interested in mine right now, to troubleshoot, not trying to identify some Grand Unifying Theory Of Attraction that other people might also feel.  The most obvious is sexual attraction - we have a chemistry where we feel drawn to each other, aroused, can't keep our hands off each other, etc.

And I have an aesthetic attraction to someone where I just find them so pretty that I have to keep looking at them.  For most of my life, I mistook this as sexual attraction.  This partly contributed to my early confusion about my orientation.  I thought I was bi because I found some women so aesthetically attractive that I felt I had to keep looking at them.   But, it turns out, at least in me, the aesthetic attraction and the sexual attraction are two separate axis that may or may not cross and when it comes to women and femmes, they do not cross.

I can have an intellectual attraction to someone where we click really well on intellectual interests and pursuits.  I get excited just thinking of the conversations we could have together.  I also discovered something that I'm starting to call my Fascination Attraction.  I have noticed that there are a few people in my past who I felt drawn to in a unique way.   I felt a kind of fascination with them that wasn't really any of the above attractions.

It's kind of similar to the fascination that some people might feel when looking at a particularly interesting insect.  Some people find insects gross or creepy or weird or scary or whatever.  Some people find insects beautiful.  But some people don't find them to be either, they just find them *fascinating*.

And, of course, it's not purely aesthetic for me, but chances are that the person I feel this attraction to isn't necessarily *conventionally* attractive.   Not that they're *unattractive* - I mean, they often are considered attractive - just that, well ...

Let's say that the Avengers is a lineup of what counts for "conventionally attractive".   If you look at the whole cast, there's actually a pretty decently diverse range of appearances, given that it's still Hollywood.  I've seen a handful of different Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic/Good/Evil charts using Avengers characters.  There are quite a few archetypes in that cast.  But, because it's Hollywood, for all their diversity, they're still *conventionally attractive* within their archetypes.

So, let's say that the people I feel this Fascination Attraction to fit a description more like "interesting".   Even given the range of Avengers-attractive, they might be more aptly described as "interesting" *even if people also happen to find them aesthetically attractive*, if that makes sense?

That's really my type, if I could say that I had a "type" at all - interesting.   I like people with interesting faces.  Sometimes that falls under the category of "conventionally attractive", sometimes it doesn't.

So, I have this Fascination Attraction.  I'm not entirely sure what is drawing me to this person, because it's not aesthetics *even if they happen to be conventionally attractive* and it's not intellectual attraction *even if they happen to be intellectually stimulating* and it's not even sexual attraction *even if we happen to have sexual chemistry*.

I don't really know how to describe it, except that it's recognizable to me as this kind of attraction.  I can go through my romantic and sexual history and pick out which of my previous partners I felt which of these attractions for that drew me to them initially (over time, as I get to know someone, my attraction tends to be more nuanced and pull from several different directions).

But the point of identifying all these different types of attractions is to recognize patterns associated when I act on the different types of attractions.

For instance, when I act purely on sexual attraction, I tend to find out after the fact that we have radically different political views and I might regret either getting to know them better or having started a sexual relationship.  Like my mechanic, for instance - the homeopath conspiracist who thinks cigarettes won't kill him but chemotherapy will and that David Hoagg is part of a troupe of "crisis actors" who fake mass shootings.
 Like, sure, he was a good fuck back in the day when we were sleeping together but holy shit! I still haven't decided which is worse - finding out just how much of a barking moonbat he is or knowing that I used to get naked with him now that I know his bizarre ideas.

So, when I feel an instant sexual attraction to someone, I probably ought to rein in the hormones a bit and ask myself, do I really want to fuck someone who will very likely turn out to be my opposite, politically speaking?  Or am I willing to have the sexual experience and just go out of my way not to get to know him, so that I don't have to deal with that knowledge if he turns out to fit squarely in my Sexual Attraction : Wild Beliefs bell curve.

This Fascination Attraction, now ... that's an interesting one.  See, when I have casual sex with someone with wildly divergent sociopolitical views, I don't feel anything particularly strongly, except perhaps some embarrassment in some of the more extreme cases.  But with the Fascinators, that's where the roller coaster rides seem to happen.  Extreme highs and lows.  More regrets.  More "I wish I had known that up front" thoughts.  More "maybe I shouldn't have" or "maybe I should have gone more slowly" or "maybe I should have taken the other option".

I'm not yet sure if this is consistent across the board.   I have to do more plotting of my history chart to see if the correlation is steady or if there are any exceptions.   But with my recent self-doubt, it makes me very nervous when I find my interest in someone hitting that Fascination Attraction button.  I feel drawn like a moth who knows exactly what will happen when I touch that flame but I go anyway.

So I hit the brakes and pull back, and then I second-guess my second-guessing, and down goes the spiral.  With my depression and my recent painful dual breakups, I find myself less inclined for emotional attachments and more interested in casual relationships or hookups, but that leaves me open to the Fascination Attraction, which I am now second guessing because of the depression making me doubt my ability to judge people well or make good choices.

And 'round it goes.

I'm really kinda anxious for this whole depression thing to fuck off for a while.   It's making me lonely and driven to pursue finding partners but also to back away from potential partners because I assume I'm going to fuck it up by choosing poorly.  Catch-22.

https://www.quora.com/For-straight-women-would-you-rather-have-a-man-be-too-nice-or-too-agressive-when-approaching-you-for-a-date/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. For straight women, would you rather have a man be too nice or too agressive when approaching you for a date?

A. There is no such thing as “too nice”.  There is genuinely, sincerely nice, there is not nice, and there is passive-aggressively not nice masquerading as “too nice”.

I want someone who treats me like a human fucking being. I want someone who recognizes my humanity, who respects my agency, and who gets to know me as a person first so that they can treat me the way I want to be treated, not according to some rule book that says “all women want / like / should be treated…”.

That’s not “too nice”, that’s the absolute bare minimum, the bottom line, the lowest bar for “decent human being”.  You can’t go overboard on recognizing one’s humanity and respecting one’s agency and treating one as an individual.  You can’t be “too” of that.

Being a doormat, being passive-aggressively meek in order to curry favor, and being “aggressive” and ignoring boundaries are all just different ways of not doing enough of all that.

https://www.quora.com/In-a-polyamorous-relationship-how-does-your-wife-or-husband-differ-from-your-other-partners/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper/comment/84318016

Q. From your PoV, what changes would you like to see to the current legal requirements and benefits to marriage that would make life easier or better for you?

A. I would like to see there be absolutely no legal benefits, punishments, consequences, ties, connections, or anything at all based on *romantic* relationships.  I want the government out of the relationship regulation business.

I would like to see all the possible and existing benefits, requirements, etc., available as regular civil contracts, to be entered into by anyone who can otherwise enter any legal contract, and to have a few different “package contracts” with some of the more popular benefit/requirement combinations lumped together in ready-made contracts.

And then these would all be legal for anyone to enter into with whomever they choose.  They would not be reserved for romantic partnerships, they couldn’t be broken based on whose genitals touch whose (or don’t touch whose), they would be regulated based on relevance to the contracts’ various contents.

That would make my life much easier and better than one giant suite of benefits and requirements (which differ from state to state) that I can only enter into with one person who is obligated to be in a romantic relationship with me in order to provide those benefits that have nothing to do with romance, and for which the government can nullify if some government agent thinks we aren’t sufficiently “romantic” enough or doesn’t like what we choose to do with our own genitals in our spare time.

https://www.quora.com/Do-polyamorous-people-have-a-partner-that-they-love-more-than-the-other-others/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper?ch=1&share=406a3090&srid=B7tY

I really fucking hate this question.

Q. Do polyamorous people have a partner that they love more than the other/others?

A. Do people with multiple kids have one kid they love more than the others? If we’re being honest, then yeah, some parents probably do. But they would generally be considered bad parents by everyone else if they ever uttered that out loud, even though we really can’t help having the feelings that we have.

But do parents of multiple kids love each of their children *differently*, since each child is a different, unique, individual human being? That’s probably more common, and also not considered to be bad parenting.

Some people who call themselves “polyamorous” do put limitations around the amount of feeling they have for various partners, most notably those in hierarchical relationships (where the “primary always comes first”). These are generally considered by other polys to be people who are unsafe to get into relationships with because, as already established, we can’t help our feelings, so we know right up front that our feelings are not safe with them as we will be discarded if we ever catch feelings.

Other people who are polyamorous develop qualitatively different kinds of relationships, and hence have different sorts of feelings, for different partners. We can’t “rank” them into who we love the “most”, we just love people differently in the same way that most people love each of their parents differently, or love their sibling and their best friend “equally” but “differently” from each other.

Our feelings and our relationships are built on the unique combination of ourselves and the other person. There is no other relationship in the world that will ever look exactly like any given relationship because it’s made up of the people in them, and the people are unique individuals. Therefore, the feelings that go along with that relationship are a completely unique blend of a variety of emotions that will never be replicated with anyone else.

In addition to that, emotions and feelings change and flux over time. “Love”, for whatever definition anyone uses (which, incidentally, is *also* unique and individual), waxes and wanes and is influenced by and affected by all sorts of other feelings. How anyone feels on the first week of a new relationship and how they feel 10 years in is going to look and feel different. Which feeling is “more”? Well, the intensity and passion was probably “more” that first week, but the security and comfort is probably more 10 years later.

Each poly person loves in their own way, and each relationship they have is unique to those two people in that relationship. Just like monogamous people. So there is no way to answer a question about how all polys “love”, or do anything, really.

I, personally, do not have any partners that I love “more” than anyone else. I love people differently. A partner that I have been with for many years might qualify as someone that I “love”, while a person I just started dating is probably too new for me to say that I “love” him, so when those are the circumstances, you could possibly say that I “love” my long-term partner “more” than the new partner.

But the new partner still has the *potential* to also reach those same stages of love if given enough time and we wind up being compatible in those ways. The longer-term partner isn’t defaulted as the one I love the “most”, it’s just that this relationship happens to have lasted long enough, and we are compatible in the right ways, to reach that level of deep, intimate, all-encompassing love, while the newer partner isn’t there *yet*.

Sometimes a newer relationship hasn’t yet reached that stage, so in the snapshot of that moment in time, I might “love” one more than the other, but that newer relationship will grow into that stage eventually. Other times a relationship never quite reaches that stage, as we find out that we are not compatible and we break up before getting to the “love” part.

This is not a yes-or-no question. It’s both yes, no, and, to quote Marissa Tomei “nobody can answer that question, it’s a trick question”.

To single poly people out by asking if they love one person more than another is to imply that nobody else does, when the reality is that love can maybe be qualitatively described but we have no measuring tools for determining quantity of love. It’s not something that we can measure.

Love between different people looks different from each other. Some love feels strong, some love feels soft, some love feels deep, some love feels gentle, some love feels hard, some love feels like a liquid that seeps into every nook and cranny and some love feels like a solid mass crashing into everything and taking up all the space. And an awful lot of the time, love looks like all of the above, but at different times and in different moments.

Which one of those loves is “more” than the others?

Q.  I’m interested in your comment that a person should introspect and possibly speak to a therapist about why polyamory isn’t right for them. I’ve tended to think of mono/poly as an orientation like straight or gay - do you see it differently?

A.  Polyamory is both an orientation and a description. It can be the type of *person* someone is, and it can also simply describe the *structure* of the relationship that a person is in. You do not, necessarily, need to be in a relationship that matches, exactly, your orientation. I’m not a swinger, for example, but I am in a relationship with someone who is, and our relationship structure more closely resembles a swinger relationship than a poly one.

There are some people, like me, who cannot be anything other than poly, and some who cannot be anything other than mono - meaning that it doesn’t matter how awesome the people around them are, that person simply does not develop romantic feelings for more than one person at a time. The switch for desiring other people just shuts off.

Most people are somewhere in the middle. They might have a preference, but could, under the right circumstances, be happy in a healthy relationship of either type. But the catch there is “under the right circumstances”. Because of the way that monogamy is perpetuated and revered in this country, most people are monogamous not because they’re “hardwired” that way, but because they have some serious insecurities and biases and assumptions about love and relationships and about themselves. These traits may go so deep that the effort to undo all that programming may simply be too much effort to bother trying to deprogram them, so *effectively* there is no real difference between this person being “naturally” monogamous and being trained to be monogamous.

But sometimes these traits can be unlearned. IF the person wants to unlearn them. It takes effort, and most people just don’t want to put in the effort. You can see it when people say “I couldn’t do that, I’m just a jealous person”. Jealousy is just an emotion, and dealing with jealousy is a skill that anyone can learn. Nobody says “I could never be in a non-monogamous relationship, I’m just an angry person”, even though someone with anger management issues most definitely would have trouble maintaining healthy relationships of any sort.

But jealousy holds an almost magical place in our culture of being an immovable, inevitable, overwhelming force that revolves around insecurity. Insecurities fight for their existence. They will convince you that you can’t live without them, that your very identity depends on having them.

It goes something like this: I don’t like pickles. I don’t want to learn to like pickles. Because then I will want to eat pickles. And I hate pickles. So that would suck.

So the reasons *why* someone does not want to be in a polyamory relationship matters. If the reason is “I simply don’t fall in love with anyone new once I’m in love with someone”, then they’re naturally monogamous. But that sort of monogamous person can actually be in a healthy poly relationship and be happy in it. We even have a term for that - mono/poly relationships. Just because their relationship is open, it doesn’t mean that anyone is *required* to have other partners.

If the only reason why they’re mono is because they don’t fall in love with more than one person, but they have no issues or insecurities or jealousy or anything about their partner, then a mono person of this sort can be happy in an open relationship where they don’t have any other partners, but their partner does.

But if you ask people why they don’t want to be in a poly relationship, you will get a range of answers, some of which include things like “I’m just a jealous person” and “I believe a woman owes her body to her husband” and “I just think you should care about what your partner does with other people” and things that reveal some deeper issues with bodily autonomy, agency, possession, misconceptions about what love is and about the role that sex plays in love, and a variety of other things.

These kinds of issues make for unhealthy monogamous relationships too, btw. So even if the person goes through therapy and ultimately still decides that they would rather have a monogamous relationship, working out these kinds of issues is still an important process.

www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-move-on-from-a-friendship-relationship-that-ended-badly-and-abruptly/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How long does it take to move on from a friendship/relationship that ended badly and abruptly?

A. As long as it takes.

This may sound flippant, but it’s true. There is no magic formula that will let you predict how any given person will “move on” from any given breakup. There are far too many variables.

It’s kinda like how Ian Malcolm describes chaos theory in the movie Jurassic park:

The person, the breakup, all their life experiences up until that point, the specific things going on in their life at that same moment like work or family relations, hell, their hormonal balance at that time, who else they have in their life to support them through the breakup, their diet, everything in their life current and past adds up to how any given person will handle any specific breakup.

It will take as long as it takes.

www.quora.com/Do-friends-with-benefits-really-work-in-real-life/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Do friends with benefits really work in real life?

A. Mine tend to work out pretty well. It takes two people who are on the same page and reasonably emotionally mature - basically everything that Franklin Veaux said in his post.

Every time I’ve ever gotten into a casual relationship when one of us had an agenda for turning the relationship into something else, or when one of us merely *hoped* the relationship would turn into something else, the relationship was a spectacular failure with drama and shouting and slamming of doors.

But my current mechanic is also a coworker and a former FWB.  We have worked together for years, and back when we first met, the chemistry between us was really high, so we started sleeping together.  Neither of us wanted anything else from the other, so our FWB relationship went on for several years.

Eventually we both just had too many other things in our lives to devote any time to each other and we faded away.  We remain friendly coworkers, and since he works on my model of car as a hobby (he has 3 of them himself), he continues to offer his mechanic services to me.  In fact, I’m due over at his house next week to fix the front axle.

A dancer friend of mine and I both went through a tough breakup at about the same time.  So we turned to each other for a quick rebound fling.  Neither of us wanted anything more from the other, and we both knew we were not ready for any kind of emotionally romantic relationship, but we both missed feeling desired.  So that’s what we got from each other.  It was fun and what we both needed in the moment.  We are still friends and we still dance together.  We may or may not hookup again in the future, and we’re both OK with either possibility.

I am involved with a performer who is married with children.  He has an open marriage and likes having casual sex partners when he goes on tour but has no interest (or time) in a more interconnected sort of relationship.  I work in entertainment and always had a “groupie” fetish but never acted on it because I see it as high risk activity.

One day, I got hired to work his show.  I had always been a fan of his for his personal and political opinions, not just his performance, so I was delighted to get the chance to meet him in person and discover that he’s as genuine as he seems and that he liked me too.

With our similar values, I felt that I could trust him to give me that “casual sex with a famous person” experience without the whole drug use / lying / cheating / out of control crap that so often goes along with it, and he felt that he could trust me to enjoy a no-strings-attached hookup with him without demanding more than he was interested in.  So we started sleeping together whenever his tour takes him into my town or my work takes me into his town.  This has been going on for about 4 or 5 years now.  We have a date scheduled for next month.

I have 2 coworkers (people who work in the same venues that I work in, but who do not work for the same employers) who are FWBs.  We get along on worksite, but we don’t really see each other outside of work.  Occasionally we will sneak off during a break to make out somewhere on site.  Both of these have been going on for probably 8 or more years.

I could keep going.  I’ve had an awful lot of FWBs.  I like those relationships.  Because of my freelance work and all my hobbies, I go through frequent busy periods where I just don’t have time to maintain relationships that resemble “normal” romantic relationships.  I also like the fun and excitement of flirting and I enjoy the sexual tension that comes with casual sex partners between friends and coworkers.  I’ve learned a lot about myself through these relationships and I have some good memories.

Most of my friendships either remained intact or faded naturally as some friendships do.  Some of them exploded in a haze of sparks and drama.  Those were always with people who had other expectations, some of which were subconscious but sometimes they knew they wanted something different from me than what was on the table but “settled” for the casual thing.

So, yeah, FWBs can “work”, depending on how you define “work”.  Some of mine are ongoing, so if longevity is your marker for success, those would qualify.  Others served a specific purpose and we went back to being friends afterwards, so if accomplishing a goal is a marker for success, then those would qualify.  Others were fun while they lasted but we eventually outgrew them and faded away.  If bringing joy and happiness for a while and then quietly turning into fond memories to look back on in later years is a marker for success, then those would qualify.

I've made a lot of really bad relationship decisions in my life. And I've made some decisions that resulted in bad things but that genuinely couldn't be predicted would result in the bad thing, so it's not unreasonable that I made that decision at the time.

There aren't that many relationship decisions that, if I were given the key to real time travel, I would really go back in time and change that decision, because I have no way of knowing what the consequence would be, and sometimes I at least learned something or had some good memories in addition to the bad ones.

But I seem to be wracking up the regrets lately. Of the very few relationships that I would genuinely go back and time and erase, the majority of them were among my most recent relationships.

I would erase my time with my abusive ex-fiance back in college. I don't know if I would erase my time with my stalker, but I think I ought to have erased my time *after* my relationship with the stalker, where I maintained a friendship with him for like 10 or 12 years later. Those are way back in my past.

All the rest? Among my last handful. Not all of my last handful, but all the ones I would take back are *among* my last handful.

I clearly need to rethink how I get into relationships and why I make the decisions that I do. After my last abusive ex, my self-esteem took a pretty big hit because I felt that I couldn't trust my own judgement when it came to potential partners. The fact that I don't seem to be getting any better at it even with awareness of the problem isn't helping me at all.

www.quora.com/Has-someone-ever-left-you-midway-in-a-relationship-without-even-explaining/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Has someone ever left you midway in a relationship without even explaining?

A. How do you leave a relationship “midway”? Isn’t leaving pretty much the definition of the end, not the middle?

But if you mean, has someone ever surprised me by ending a relationship with me when I thought the relationship was going well or at least not at the point of ending it, and didn’t explain to me why they were leaving, yes. Several times. It’s called “ghosting”.

When two people go through a painful breakup that both are aware is a breakup, and one of them chooses to cut off contact with the other after the breakup, that’s not ghosting. Ghosting is when one person chooses to end a relationship when the other person has no indication that the relationship was problematic enough to make the other person want to leave, and the person doing the ghosting cuts off all contact and leaves no explanation. I have 4 examples I’ll talk about, but they’re not the only examples in my life.

The clearest example I have of someone doing that to me was when I had just started dating someone. We had been dating for only a few weeks, but he had already started saying that he loved me. He called me one night to say that there was a death in his family and he needed to go out of town (only a few hours away) to handle things. He would be back in a few days. His last words to me were “I love you baby, and I can’t wait to see you again.”

This was back in the MySpace days, where blocking people wasn’t an option and their profile showed anyone who visited when they last logged in. So I could tell that he was regularly logging into his MySpace, so he wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere halfway between my town and his family’s town where the funeral was.

Eventually, I camped out in front of his house and waited for several hours for him to come home from work. When he did, I confronted him. He gave me all kinds of bullshit excuses and promised we could work things out. I left that night knowing that I would never hear from him again, and I didn’t. I still don’t know why he did it.

I wasn’t asking him to get back together, I asked him why he would say what he said and then disappear. He tried to give excuses for why he hadn’t contacted me, but they were obvious as he was saying them that they were excuses. So I let him say them and I let him give me more false promises to call me and “work things out”, and I just left.

Another time, I met a guy who was quite a few years younger than I was, but he developed a crush on me. I figured, why not? We opted for an FWB relationship, but he kept having these intimate, vulnerable talks with me after our booty calls, so I developed feelings for him. He seemed to have feelings for me too.

Then he stopped responding to my calls. Just dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody seemed to know where he went, at least, that’s what people said to me.

Nearly 10 years later, he messaged me out of the blue. Still a little hurt, but hey, 10 years is 10 years, I answered. He wanted to talk on the phone, so we did. He said something about being young and immature and having family issues that overwhelmed him so he moved out of state to escape everyone. But since then, some shit had gone down that made him grow up fast. Now he was back in the area and he wanted to be friends again.

He started calling me while working his night job, and I would often fall asleep on the phone from talking for hours at a time. Eventually, he came to see me and talked about trying a real relationship with me, not just the FWB we had before. I expressed my doubts that he could do it, but he insisted he could. He also wanted to explore some kink with me, knowing that I was experienced and he had none.

We had one make-out session, which I ended by saying we really needed to discuss what kind of relationship we were going to have and what he wanted from a kink relationship with me. He said he was really excited about exploring something, but he didn’t even know where to start. So I suggested we go to a local kink club and a regional conference where he could be exposed to a variety of options and other people who might have some ideas or suggestions.

He sounded excited about that. We made plans to go, which he canceled on. And then he never responded to another text or phone call or online message again. So he ghosted me twice.

About 3 or 4 years later, he re-friended me on Facebook. I accepted the friend request but I didn’t message him. A few months after that, he sent me a message apologizing for disappearing, saying family shit overwhelmed him and he had to escape so he moved to another state. I said something like “huh, imagine that?” He asked what that meant and I said that was the same thing he said last time he ghosted me. He said something about his life being kinda dramatic. That’s the last thing we said, over a year ago.

The most recent example was someone else who did it to me twice. Many, many years ago, we met and had this amazing chemistry that he seemed to fight. But then one day he came over and said he was done fighting, we should be together. Then, literally in the middle of having sex, he got up, said he couldn’t do this, and left, half-dressed. He didn’t return any of my phone calls and the one friend of his who I knew would only say that he “moved to Texas” (he didn’t, as I found out later).

A few years later, we ran into each other again. It was awkward and uncomfortable and I got out of the encounter as quickly as I could. A couple years later we ran into each other again. It was slightly less awkward, but he apologized and said he was immature and frightened and didn’t know how to handle it. He wanted to be friends again.

Dubious, I gave him my number. We didn’t really keep in touch much. I invited him to a handful of social events, he would never go, I stopped inviting him.

Then, a few years after that, one day I just decided to invite him to something because I was inviting *everyone* in my address book. That thing he attended. So I invited him to another thing. He attended. Suddenly, we were talking to each other. After some very intense conversations, I decided that 10 years was enough for him to have grown up, to feel real remorse, and to be ready to try again.

So we did. This time, things were going well. We got along great with each other. We were open and intimate with each other. We both happened to suffer from a depressive episode at about the same time (unrelated to our relationship) and we were instrumental in each other’s recovery.

3.5 years into our second try, he started getting “busy”. When he used to spend 2 long weekends a month with me and constantly text me throughout the days apart, we very slowly started seeing each other less and less. I brought it up, he promised he was “working on it”, nothing would change, I’d bring it up again, he promised things were “getting better”, nothing would change, rinse, repeat.

Almost exactly a year after I noticed and started commenting on the problem, we had a Talk about it. I told him it was not acceptable to me anymore that he go 3 or 4 months without us seeing each other, given that we only lived a few miles apart. Since spending several days at a time seemed to be so taxing for him I offered him the option of one date night a month where it was focused time together. He turned that down and opted instead for our regular “weekends” together.

We never had another weekend together. Almost overnight, he stopped responding to texts, phone calls, and online messages. Finally, one day, I had been having things shipped to his house because things got stolen off my porch in my neighborhood and his neighborhood was safer. Something I had ordered weeks prior arrived at his house, and he texted me to let me know it had arrived. He offered to bring it by.

Having read the writing on the wall this time, I had all of his things that he left at my house packed up and ready. I didn’t plan to break up with him, but I was going to be prepared if he decided to break up with me. I was still hoping for some kind of answer and a change in his behaviour. Depending on how he handled the conversation I was going to make him have when he dropped off my package, I would either hand him his things or I would quietly unpack them after he left and not even let him know I had packed them..

He chose to come over when he knew I had only a few minutes left to get ready for work. I asked him “so, are we still dating or what?” As soon as he started with “well … you didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that I’m not fulfilling you, and …” I interrupted him and said “yeah, I figured that’s what you’d say,” and went into the other room to get his things and dropped them at his feet.

I told him that ghosting me was the absolute worst way he could have chosen to break up with me, given that he had done it to me once before and I only got back with him on the condition that he would not break up with me in that way again. He protested, saying that he never ghosted me. I pointed out that he stopped responding to all forms of communication for weeks and he only deigned to speak to me when a package arrived. That’s ghosting.

He said that he just didn’t know what to say or how to do it. I pointed out to him that I’m writing a book on how to ethically breakup with someone and I already have an online document titled my User Manual which gives instructions for exactly how to break up with *me*. Of literally anyone in the world, I’m one of the last people anyone should be confused about how to break up with me. I come with instructions.

I have no doubt that if he hadn’t needed to get my packages to me, I would never have heard from him again unless I chased after him.

So then, while I’m still nursing my hurt feelings over this breakup, a friend who I’ve had a thing for asks me out. I tell him that I’m not in a position for a big-r Relationship because I’m on the rebound and he’s never been in a poly relationship before, but perhaps we could talk about a fling. He says it’s an emotional connection or nothing - no casual sex for him.

So we talk and talk and talk, and eventually decide that we might try some kind of relationship and see where it goes. We have a couple of good dates, and our last one is really hot and heavy. We have so much chemistry between us! We continued texting on the way home and through the night when we got home. I have texts from him that night telling me how hard he’s falling for me and how safe and loved he feels with me.

Literally the next day, he texts me to say his ex wants to talk, do I mind if he goes out with her? I’m poly, so although I’m concerned about an ex, I say he can. He texts me that night to say he wants to have sex with her, do I mind? Again, I’m concerned, but as I’m also working on another FWB of my own, I say OK and thank him for telling me.

The next day, radio silence. He doesn’t respond to any of my messages. The day after, I message him to ask why the radio silence. I can see that he checked the message. After a long pause, he messages back to say that he’s getting back together with the ex and she “won’t have it”, meaning she won’t let him date me too. He has since blocked me from contacting him.

So, yeah, I’ve had lots of people ghost me, or break up with me at points in the relationship that I felt were “midway” or when things were going well, or at least when I felt that things were not at the end. I find it to be one of the most cruel ways to end a relationship with a person and I am permanently scarred from all the times it has happened to me.

This latest one happening on the heels of the one prior to it has triggered my depression again, so now I have to have people check in on me to make sure I’m OK. And all for someone I didn’t even want to get involved with in the first place because I didn’t think either one of us was ready for a relationship.

When people give you that aphorism “when someone tells you who they are, believe them”, believe them. There were plenty of signs, but I keep giving people the benefit of the doubt, and I pay for it every single time.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-basic-standard-rules-of-dating-concerning-seeing-more-than-one-person-at-a-time-Is-it-acceptable/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What are some of the basic standard rules of dating, concerning seeing more than one person at a time? Is it acceptable?

A. There are no “basic standard rules of dating … more than one person at a time”. Everyone does it differently.

However, there are some basic standards of *ethics* and those apply regardless of how many people you’re dating.

1. Don’t treat people as things. Other people are autonomous, sentient beings with their own agency. They are not supporting characters in the story starring You. They do not exist for you and you are not entitled to them or anything that belongs to them. Even in the context of a relationship. They are people and they are their own person.


2. Be honest with them about your desires, boundaries, limitations, and expectations. And in order to do that, you will need to also be honest with yourself about these same things.


3. Give other people the information they need to give informed consent to anything they do with you, including enter into a relationship in the first place. This is related to #2 because giving this information with people requires you to be honest about what you can do, what you’re willing to do, what you want to do, and what you can’t / won’t / don’t want to do.
   
   This includes the type of relationship you hope to have, in this case - dating more than one person at a time. They need to know that this is the deal, have all the information necessary to make their own choices and decisions, be free of coercion to make said choices and decisions, and then to agree on a relationship structure with you. If they can’t say “no”, then a “yes” is meaningless. So they need to be able to freely say yes or no to everything, and for that, they need information.


4. Build relationships on empowerment for the people in the relationships. The people in the relationships should always be more important than the relationship itself. The relationship is not a sentient being, although sometimes it feels like our relationships can run away from us and they take on a life of their own.
   
   But they’re not. The relationships should exist to serve the people, the people should not exist to serve the relationship. So empower your partner(s) to have control over their own agency and to have an equal say in their own relationships with you.


5. If you do choose to see multiple people, you need to treat *every single one of them according to these standards of ethics*. It is not ethical to respect your partner’s agency, be honest with them, give them the info they need, allow them the space to consent, etc. while not doing all of these things with someone else. Always keep the locus of control over the relationship between the two people in the relationship.
   
   Yes, even if you have “a relationship” of 3 or more people. Because you don’t. If there are 3 people who are all relating to each other, you have 3 separate dyadic relationships and one 3-person relationship dynamic. Each dyad is its own relationship, so the two people in that relationship ought to be the only two people with the power to control the relationship that they’re in. Relationships can be *influenced* by other people, because everything is “influenced” by everything else. But where does the *control* lie? Who has the most control? If it’s not equally shared between the two people in that dyad, then it’s not ethical.
   
   Some people will try to give you a list of “rules”, such as safer sex rules, One Penis Policies, couple-centric attempts to “protect the primary” or “protect the existing relationship”. None of those are “standard”, they’re just common newbie attempts at managing emotions. The more experienced people who practice some kind of ethical non-monogamy tend to know better and tend to structure their relationships based on a foundation of ethics as I’ve started laying out above, rather than a list of rules dictating behaviour to make people “behave” in a relationship.

“The people in a relationship are more important than the relationship” and “don’t treat people as things” are the most important axioms in building ethical relationships. From these two principles, the other ethical standards follow - respecting people’s agency, relating with consent, be honest, empower your partners, treat all of your relationships ethically not just the one that started first, etc.

If we could make this the standard of *all* relationships, instead of seeing it as a fringe standard for a subgroup of relationship types, I think we’d have a whole lot more healthy and happy relationship partners than we do. Monogamous relationships benefit greatly from following standards like these, and polyamorous (and other ethical non-monogamous) relationships can’t be done without them.

But they’re really not specific to just being involved with multiple people. That’s why they’re *ethical* standards, not open relationship standards. But if you want your open relationships to be ethical, then follow the ethical standards.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-an-open-relationship-differ-from-a-polyamorous-one/answers/114146576

Q. How can you tell if the person you are with us in an open relationship or a polyamorous one?

A. Ask them.

Ask them “what kind of relationship are you in?”

Ask them “how would you describe your relationship?”

Ask them “what label do you use for your relationship and how would you define that label?”

Ask them “would you tell me more about how your relationship works?”

Ask them.

#SeriouslyItIsNotThatComplicated #JustFuckingTalkToEachOther #IMightBeALittleBitSnarkyTonight #LowValueQuestions
 

Some people wonder how I can have casual sex.  It's because sex and intimacy often overlap, but they're not actually the same thing.  I can be totally naked, lying out and open in front of someone and I'm not really showing myself.  I'm showing my body, but not who I am as a person.

Maybe a little bit, because I'm authentic in everything that I do, but while I'm being authentic, I'm also not being my *whole* self.  When I'm working at my retail job, I'm being "me", but not *whole* me.  That's not appropriate in that context.  We all show only partial views of ourselves in different contexts.  So I'm "me", but I'm not all of me.  Or, rather, I don't *have* to be.

I get that, even if some people understand this intellectually, they still can't do it themselves and that's fine.  I'm not trying to convince anyone else to have any kind of sex they don't want to have.

I'm just saying that sex and intimacy are not the same thing.  They often overlap, but they're distinct concepts.  One can exist without the other.

And because I can do them individually (whether in conjunction with each other or separate), I have had the opportunity to explore some really good experiences.  When my sex doesn't require intimacy, I can have a lot of different kinds of sex and have it be enjoyable.  When my intimacy doesn't require sex, I can have a lot of different kinds of intimacy without being restricted or limited to just those few relationships that include sex.

The liberation of intimacy from sex gives the intimacy so many more flavors and colors and textures.  Likewise the liberation gives my sex so many more flavors and colors and textures.  When they are not chained together, I can explore each one on its own merits, including those times when they *do* come together.

Sex is a lot of fun.  But it's not intimacy.  Not intrinsically.  It's often associated with intimacy, but that's because we've made sex such a huge deal in our society that many people feel vulnerable about the very topic, the very act.  And that vulnerability makes the act intimate.

When I am with someone who I share intimacy with, who I share my truth with, who *sees* me, then all acts of sex with them are intimate because the relationship with them is intimate.

But sex is not the only vehicle for being intimate with someone, and intimacy is not necessarily required for enjoyable sex.  And when each can be enjoyed for its own qualities, both of them open up for even more worthwhile experiences than is possible when one is limited to only those times they are connected.

I wonder how much is related to my experiences as being perceived a woman when it comes to being able to have casual sex?  I realize that it's *unusual* that, as a "woman", I can have casual sex, but I wonder how much of my ability and interest is related?

What I mean is, that graphic above to stand in front of someone and say "I feel safe with you"...

As I told someone once, as a "woman", as someone in a very small body, literally almost everyone on the planet (adults) is bigger than I am.  Everyone is a potential threat.  Everyone can harm me.  And as a "straight woman", being in intimate relationships doesn't mitigate that problem.  According to the statistics, being in my intimate, hetero relationships actually increases the odds of being harmed.

So I don't feel "safe" with anyone, for the most part.  Everyone is someone who can harm me, even *when* I share intimacy with them.  Especially when I share intimacy with them.

So if everyone is bigger than I am, everyone has to be assessed for threat, and choosing to be in vulnerable situations with people is basically a leap of faith that, more often than not, still results in harm...

if all of that is just part of the experience of being me, then not feeling safe is just kind of background noise, so why shouldn't I experience and enjoy some sex where I am not also intimate, not vulnerable, not "showing my truth"?  I am on guard anyway.  Even naked, I wear armor anyway.

When one's experience of the world is that everyone is bigger than you are, some of us can only get through life by shrugging and thinking "well, they're all bigger than me, might as well go with it."

I wonder, as my friend wondered when we had this conversation that night, how some other people who never have to have the thought that literally everyone they meet is bigger and potentially more threatening than they are, I wonder how their view of things would change if, I dunno, we were invaded by aliens who are bigger and stronger than we are but who kept insisting that they didn't want to harm us.  If they just had to go their whole lives knowing that they're not the top of the food chain and they never will be no matter what they do.

It's not sustainable to maintain a constant, active fear at all times.  Even the feral kittens in my yard, constantly on guard, can be seen playing and occasionally trusting me enough to put their heads down into their food bowl and take their eyes off of me.  They're still wary, and still jump away at the slightest provocation, but one of them has allowed me to pet them now, and she also sleeps on my bed with Lovey.  Several others sleep in the living room on the nights I leave the door open for them.

Sometimes, some of us just live in a world where everyone else is bigger.  So we develop some skills to mitigate that threat to allow us to go about our lives.

My skill has allowed me to enjoy things like casual sex, where I am authentic, but not wholly "me", not intimate.  Everyone is bigger than me.  Everyone carries the potential for hurting me.  Being intimate with me doesn't lessen that threat, it increases it.

So why not just go with it?

"OMG WHEN TRIADS DON'T GO EXACTLY AS SCRIPTED THINGS GET HARD AND COMPLICATED AND MESSY AND HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO AND WHY IS THIS THING BAD BUT THAT THING IS GOOD AND WTF?!"

This is why triads are not beginner relationships.  They're super complicated and super difficult and super challenging and there are tons of little nooks and crannies and shadowy corners for abuse and consent violations and unethicalness to hide in.

It takes a *really* advanced, nuanced understanding of ethics to navigate all the complexity of triads (or even quads, or any other geometric shape where everyone is involved with everyone else).  Shit goes wrong.  People gonna people, and what people do best is unpredictable things like have emotions that they weren't supposed to or not have emotions that they promised to have or make decisions that they post-hoc rationalize as totally "logical" but are really based on all those messy emotions. 

This shit is hard and you need advanced relationship skills to navigate it when you start adding more and more people to the equation.  Things don't get "simpler" when everyone is involved with everyone else, things get even more complicated than if they were all just dating individually.

And if you don't understand that (hence the need to ask questions about ethics in triads), then you're not ready for a triad relationship.

My 6 Simple Steps to answer the question "how do you find people to start dating?"

1. Go to where the poly people are [or people who are whatever category of person you're interested in dating].
    
2. Be as open about yourself as you can in as many contexts as you can - other polys [or whatever category] nearby will find you.
    
3. Be open to meeting new people and trying new experiences, even if they don't meet some idealized image you have in your mind.
    
4. Be interesting and do interesting things. People are attracted to interesting people.
    
5. Treat everyone you meet as a unique individual. People find having their agency and humanity respected to be attractive.
    
6. Be patient.

This came at the end as a summary of a longer post, but I was writing that post on my tiny iPod and I don't think it's really that good of a post. My thoughts were kind of scattered and I didn't elucidate each point well or organize them well. That's how I ended up with this numbered list - I was trying to clarify and simplify the rest of the post.

So I'd like to rewrite it out for a real blog post. But later, because I'm still doing Halloween shopping and it's my one day off this week. In the meantime, here's the tl;dr version.

In the first panel, either what looks like a slave auction or a sad animal shelter, with unicorns up for sale and human couples wandering around, looking at the offerings, all holding really long checklists and mostly shaking their heads at the unicorns who don't meet their criteria while the cute little unicorn foals bounce in their cages, hoping to be chosen.  Outside, there is a line of couples trailing off into infinity, and only a handful of unicorns available for sale.

BTW, the couples should all look like clones of each other, with older men, very young women, piercings, tattoos, and probably some kind of pot symbol somewhere on them like in jewelry or on a t-shirt or something.  He should be hipster, she should be borderline goth.  And of course they should be cishet.

Next panel, we should see some of the same unicorns (all unique and identifiable, like My Little Ponys) getting dropped back off at the auction / shelter with angry or disgusted looks on the couples faces.  Maybe in a long Returns line or something.

Then we see those same unicorns, now a little more battered and disheveled, up for sale again and getting purchased.

And returned again.

And repeat for a 3rd time.  Each panel showing the unicorns looking more and more bedraggled and less and less excited about being chosen.

Finally, in the last panel, a handler drags one of the unicorns out to show, and she is resisting as hard as she can, angry, rearing up, digging in her hooves, baring her teeth, ears laid back, she clearly doesn't want to go.  She has battle scars.  Another unicorn is being dragged off the show floor or stage by her couple, in a similarly angry and scarred state.

The other veteran unicorns are all huddling together in their pen, while the new, young unicorns who don't know any better are jumping around in their own cages, hoping to be adopted.

From the audience appraising the one being brought out to show, one of the couples calls out "what's your problem? We're just looking for someone to love us! why you gotta be so defensive?! We haven't done anything to you!"

While, maybe outside, a trio of humans all holding hands walks past, looking in the window, and musing "look how they treat those poor creatures! It's so sad! I wish we could get these places shut down!"

#ItIsNotAboutTheTriad #TheyAreNotPetsTheyAreFuckingAutonomousHumanBeings #ItIsNotTheStructureItIsTheMethod #IfYouAreNotHuntingThenWeAreNotComplainingAboutYouSoWhyYOUgottaBeSoDefensive? #UnicornHunterBingo #SeriouslyTheyAllSoundLikeTheHipsterVersionOfStepfordCouples #Yall40SomethingMenDating20SomethingSubmissiveWomenWantingAnotherSubbyAreReallyFuckingCreepy #ScarfbeardManbun #SeptumpierceUndercut #QueeringHeterosexuality #JointTinderAccountForThreeways

So, I originally wrote this 2 years ago.  I can't believe how many relationships and tinder dates that never even made it to "relationship" stage this applies to in the last 2 years.

I like how sometimes you're all "hey, I can't do this Relationship Management stuff all by myself anymore. I'm going to need some help. Like, I need you to initiate contact more often, and plan some of our dates instead of me managing the calendar all the time. I'll be here to help you if you need help and guidance, I just don't want to smother you and micromanage you, so, y'know, whatever you need. You set the pace, whatever you're comfortable giving, I just need you to communicate with me and take some of the responsibility for keeping things going, whatever "going" means for us, just you tell me what you can do and what I can expect,"

and some dudes are all "OMG THIS IS SO MUCH WORK I CAN'T EVEN YOU ARE SO HIGH MAINTENANCE WHY EVERYBODY GOTTA DEMAND SO MUCH FROM ME I'M OUTTA HERE!"

#WhenIStopBackleading #EmotionalLabor #DomesticManagement #WhenYouAreUsedToEverythingBeingMagicallyDoneForYouEvenATinyBitOfWorkFeelsOverwhelming

#ProTip: For the record, when a partner complains that they don't see or hear from you enough to be happy, the correct response is *not* to refrain from contacting them or seeing them even more.

Not if you want to keep that relationship, anyway.

You can't turtle up when there is conflict in your relationships. You have to put in even more effort when a partner shares with you what it is they need to feel loved (learn their Love Language).  Believe me, as a conflict-averse introvert, when I start having a problem with someone, even someone I love, my automatic response is to start avoiding them, rationalizing that I need more spoons first.  Don't do that.

If a partner says they aren't getting enough time with you, the very first thing you ought to be doing, especially if you can't alter your schedule immediately to accommodate, is to increase the amount of contact you have with them, via whatever medium they like (texting, FB messaging, phone calls, Facetiming, MarcoPolo, whatever).

Then, you have to be proactive about making time for them.  Look at your calendar and pick a day, any day, and offer that day to them, no matter how far in the future.  If it's a long way off, explain that you can't change your schedule immediately because you already have commitments, but by This Date you will start making changes, so plan a date on This Date.

When someone complains of not getting enough time with you and asks when they can see you again, the correct response is not "I don't know" and leaving it hanging.  PICK A DATE.  Leaving it open-ended like that and making them do all the work to find some time is the Wrong Answer.

Give them a plan to look forward to, so that they can feel confident that change is coming if they're willing to weather the storm just a little longer.  But open-ended "someday things will be different" doesn't help.  If you have to, say you need to consult your calendar and you will get back to them *by a specific time*. And then get back to them by that specific time.  With a date.

Then you negotiate.  You offer a date.  If they say they can't make it, then the ball is in their court and ask them for their next availability.  If the date they offer doesn't work for you, COUNTER-OFFER WITH ANOTHER DATE.

This is a basic adulting skill.  When you reject someone's suggestion for something (and you aren't trying to blow them off or get out of it or whatever), your response should be a counter-offer.  Then theirs should be a counter-offer, and you go back and forth counter-offering until an agreement is reached.

If they don't know the rules to this game either, then you can tell them "OK, if that option doesn't work for you, which one does, then?" to gently lob it back to them.  It's OK to share the work here, but their request was them starting off, so it's your job to make the first offer.

Offer, counter-offer, counter-offer, counter-offer, agreement.  That's the formula, with as many counter-offers as it takes to reach an agreement.

Don't just say "sorry, I don't know" and throw the ball back in their court.  It's your ball now, take a shot.  Remember, ignoring your partners' Bids for Attention is a sure-fire way to kill a relationship.  Like, with something like a 90% death rate.

When your partners give you a clear Bid For Attention, when they share with you their Love Language, you can't get frightened or overwhelmed and just disappear on someone with a parting shot of "I don't know what to do, someday things will change".  You have to actually do the thing, even though it's hard.

Assuming you want to keep the relationship.

**Edit**

For clarity, I'm not talking about anyone asking for anything unreasonable or unrealistic (which is subjective).  I'm talking about when people ask for *something* and the *response* to that something is to do the opposite, with the given that both people still *want* the relationship.  I deliberately did not set any *amounts* because I don't want the amount to be the issue.  It's not even time, in particular, that's just an easy example of something commonly contested in relationships.

The point is to bring to people's awareness the concept of Bids for Attention and the fact that repeatedly ignoring ongoing Bids has a direct link to the demise of a relationship.  For reference, check out The Gottman Institute.

Also the point is to bring to people's awareness the concept of Love Languages, which is the method that a given person will likely offer a Bid for Attention by either expressing their love for someone in a particular way or asking their partner to do a particular thing so that they feel loved.

If we want to maintain our relationships, we need to learn how to speak our partners' Love Languages, whether we like them for ourselves or not.

Also, the point is to introduce a concept that is, apparently, not very well known, which is the offer-counteroffer-counteroffer method of negotiation.

If you actively want to maintain a relationship (of any sort - could be friendship, could be coworkers, could be romantic, whatever) and they suggest something to you that you can't do, the considerate response where you share the emotional labor is to propose a counter-offer, not just say "I don't know" and then stop.

People need to be doing their share of emotional labor and Relationship Management in relationships.

I regret every day being one of the pioneers who championed the concept of "prescriptive hierarchy" / "descriptive hierarchy" (or prescriptive / descriptive primary / secondary).  I helped to make this whole confusion about power vs. priority in the poly community and I wish I had never heard the phrase or ever uttered it once I did.

There is no such thing as "descriptive hierarchy". It doesn't matter if you decide before you get a "secondary" or afterwards, if you are disempowering your partners (or are disempowered) in your relationships, that's bad.

It doesn't fucking matter if you say "It is my plan and my goal to disempower my future partners" or if you say "well I didn't plan on it, but I currently disempower my existing partners" - HIERARCHY IS DISEMPOWERING AND BAD.

If nobody is being disempowered then it's not hierarchy.  Everyone has different priorities.  Everyone.  EVERYONE.  I am not in a hierarchy with my boss or my pets even though I have pre-negotiated obligations with them and I will meet those obligations even if a relationship has to come in "second" in order to do it.

Those obligations and responsibilities exist in monogamous relationships and in single people's lives too.  They are not hierarchy.  If I make an agreement to my boss that I will show up for all my scheduled shifts, and my partner has a bad day and "needs" me to stay home with them but I don't because I have an agreement to show up to work, that's not a hierarchy, that's being a responsible fucking adult who follows through on responsibilities. 

My boss has no power over my relationships with my romantic partners - they don't get a say in what those relationships look like, they get a say in what my time with them looks like.  My boss only has the power to determine what my relationship with my boss and with the company looks like, even though my boss is in an authoritative relationship with me. 

My boss is not in a hierarchical relationship over my romantic partners.

*I*, as an adult with "free will", negotiated a relationship with my boss that requires a commitment of my time in exchange for compensation, and then *I*, as an adult with "free will", negotiated a relationship with a romantic partner that accommodates the existence of an employment relationship with someone else.  The boss has no say over my romantic partner, and my romantic partner has no say over my boss.  Even though I have priorities for each one.

If I could go back in time, one of the things I'd like to do is go back 21 years and erase every single time I uttered the phrase "descriptive hierarchy" on every poly message board across the internet.  I would then explain to my younger self the difference between power and priority, so that my younger self could better write about it being OK to have relationships with differing priorities without adding to the modern confusion about hierarchy (which is exactly what I was *trying* to say but didn't have the power / priority language to distinguish and so used "prescriptive" / "descriptive" instead).
 

I was using "descriptive hierarchy" to refer to those relationships that just naturally, organically, develop different levels of *priority* with everyone's input and equal power to make those priorities, and "prescriptive hierarchy" for those relationships that disempower people by imposing an artificial structure.

I didn't know back then the problems with using the same word "hierarchy" to apply to two very different relationship constructs.  Because they superficially resembled each other, it was easy to use the same word to apply to both, but they're fundamentally, inherently, different concepts embedded at the very foundations of the relationship.

I had no idea "descriptive hierarchy" would be used 2 decades later to justify treating partners as things just because it's "descriptive" instead of "prescriptive" (i.e. our secondary totally wants to live on her own and never move in with us, so it's OK to treat her as disposable") or that it would become the new basis for a 30-year cyclic debate where one side talks about "power" and the other talks about "priority" and nobody can get past the semantics so we never address the problem.

The funny part is that I spent most of those early years arguing that "prescriptive" was, indeed, an actual word that I did not make up.  For the first decade, people insisted that "prescriptive" was not a real word and I had to explain, over and over again, that "prescriptive" comes from "prescribe", which means, literally, to WRITE BEFOREHAND (pre = before, scribe = write), therefore something was prescriptive if it was scripted out ahead of time, i.e. decided beforehand.  Now, suddenly, I have everyone arguing with me that hierarchy isn't wrong because there are two different kinds - descriptive and prescriptive, therefore I don't know what I'm talking about.

I HAD TO CONVINCE Y'ALL THAT PRESCRIPTIVE WAS EVEN A WORD AND Y'ALL WANT TO ARGUE WITH ME NOW ABOUT ITS USE

So the tl;dr is that I am one of the people (possibly *the* person - we couldn't really remember which of us first used this phrase) who originated the term "prescriptive / descriptive hierarchy" and I am saying that this was wrong.  There is no such thing.  "Descriptive hierarchy" was intended to describe healthy, ethical relationships of differing priorities, but that is not a hierarchy at all.  Hierarchy is a ranking system, which is inherently disempowering and therefore inherently unethical.  Hierarchy is always wrong.  If your relationship structure does not disempower, then it's not hierarchy, by definition.

Hierarchy is disempowering people. All alternate uses of the term are incorrect uses and therefore misdirections. As someone who fucking coined the fucking term in the polyamorous context.

In dance, we have what's called "back leading". This is where the follow actually guides the lead, on a range of subtle to ham-footed non-verbal cues. See, in a proper partner dance, the person who is the lead (in classical dance, it's the same person throughout the song, in progressive dancing, it can switch back and forth) is the one who initiates and guides the dance.

Dancing is like a conversation. One person does the initiating and that same person does the guiding. It can be structured or loose, like a conversation, but one person invites the other person to it, an then based on how the other person responds, guides the outcome. It can meander all over the place or it can be a focused discussion, depending on how the person leading it wants it to go.

It's also very much like a well-crafted D/s scene, again, where someone is "in charge", but the better Doms don't just rigorously plan the whole event moment by moment, tool by tool, emotional response by emotional response. They set the overall scene for the sub and invite them to play in that scene, guiding the mood but ultimately paying attention to the sub's mood and desires and re-crafting the scene in the moment as a response to the sub's responses to the Dom's efforts.

Also kinda like a DnD game. I don't game, myself, but I keep seeing memes about how a Dungeon Master will create a beautiful, rich, nuanced storyline, and then the players will sit down and, like, spend the next hour torturing a chicken or something. The DM has a bunch of stories and circumstances in their back pocket, to throw at the players no matter what choices they make, and sometimes they have to make something up on the spot because their players threw them a curve that nothing in their back pocket can cover. But ultimately, the DM is "in charge" (for whatever value of "in charge" one can have with a room full of geeks and their own ideas) and is responsible for guiding the outcome of the game.

Dance is like all of that. The follow is responsible for paying attention to the cues that the lead is giving, and working within the framework the lead offers to create a visual and physical work of art (or conversation, or scene, or game). Follows are given a range of freedom in how much input they have on the course of the dance, depending on the style, from almost none to "wait, who is the lead and who is the follow again?"

But sometimes we get a mismatch of experience in a dance pair, and the follow may be more experienced than the lead (or just think they are). And sometimes that follow will attempt to guide the lead into guiding the follow more properly. This is called "back-leading".

Sometimes this is appropriate. When the lead has consented to learning from the follow, the follow may choose to show them what the proper form or invitation feels like, so that they can learn how to do that move on their own. Sometimes, the follow does it out of a sense of compassion or kindness. The follow may find themselves dancing with a lead who doesn't know what they're doing, so the follow tries to "help them out" by guessing at the lead cues and going ahead and doing things anyway, making the lead feel that the dance is going well.

But this is kind of like faking an orgasm - sure, the lead might feel better about themselves in the moment, but they will believe that the execution of the move was done well because of something that they did, and they are likely to be tempted to continue dancing this way in the future, and with other partners. In the moment, in a social dance where it's rude to break into a song to teach someone who has not agreed to be your student, it might feel kinder to just smile and go with what you're pretty sure are their intentions even if they weren't really giving you the proper signals.

Most follows that I know do this. There is a certain threshold that we each have for ourselves before we will become exasperated enough to breach etiquette and correct someone in a social setting (or, if we're never willing to do that, we might just avoid dancing with that partner again).

Someone recently said that she was refusing to back lead anymore, because it was a "politeness" that was ultimately hurting the lead. The lead would never learn that they are not executing the lead signal properly, and if they danced with a partner who was less experienced than this follow, that other follow would not understand and would not do the intended move. The lead would then believe that the follow was at fault, and neither of them would grow from the experience.

But this follow also said that they didn't want to break etiquette by turning a social setting into a lesson when the lead didn't ask for it. I know that *I* hate it when my partner takes it upon himself to start "teaching" me, as opposed to suggesting a new move that I willingly want to learn in the moment (I have a whole other story about this that I'll share in the comments).

So, instead, this follow said that she was just going to not do the move that the lead wanted her to do if she couldn't tell from the actual lead signal what he wanted her to do.

There are some moves that just naturally move from one to the other, and if you are a part of a local community and are familiar with the lessons in that area, you likely know which steps they have been taught based on their experience level. Whenever I go to a new city, I can often tell who are the students who just had a class or who take the same series of classes, from the dancers who have been dancing for a while and just know things (or are visiting from different regions, like me), even if the students are natural dancers or are really good or have that whatever that makes them seem experienced. The students all do the same sets of moves in the same order.

Occasionally, a student will try to stand out from the crowd and do something "different" - throw a move out there in an unexpected place. But this usually feels like the lead is trying to "stump" the follow, trying to trick the follow to see if the follow is paying attention, or to be different for different's sake.

An experienced lead can mix up the order of dance patterns because they understand momentum and they can intuitively feel how one move leads into the next, so they know which moves can follow which other moves and they can mix and match. A student often doesn't have this understanding yet, so they just randomly throw things out there, and the follow's center of gravity might not be in the right place for executing that particular pattern, or they might be on the off-foot.

But I digress.

There are some moves that naturally flow from one to the other, so an experienced follow can often intuit which move the lead wants the follow to do even if the lead didn't give a clear signal (or any noticeable signal at all, for that matter). This follow declared that she was simply not going to intuit or guess what pattern the lead wanted her to do based on her knowledge of how dancing typically goes. If the lead didn't give her a signal that she could read, she would just not do the move and she would just basic in place until he gave her a signal that she could follow.

Things got really interesting for her on the floor when she started doing that.

Suddenly, leads who thought they knew their shit were all "why aren't you doing the move?" and she was like "I couldn't tell from your signal what you wanted me to do" and some of them were getting upset with her for not being able to read them. Many of the leads thought their collective failure to perform this dance was *her* fault, for not being a good enough dancer to know the signals, and when they tried to verbalize with her, would get hurt, shocked, or offended when she said it was their fault.

Especially when it was a partner she had danced with before and she had done that move in the past, so they knew she could do it, but seemed unable to do it now. Kinda like when someone who used to fake orgasms suddenly stops, and the other partner wonders why the technique that always worked before isn't successful now.

Some leads took her refusal to back lead with more grace, asking for advice on how to better lead her. Dance communities, after all, do (in principle) encourage and champion the art of Not Taking Rejection Personally, and there is the mantra that It Is Always The Lead's Fault (which has its own problems, but that's for another time).

But even with the social etiquette dictating a person's outward behaviour, to those of us so used to reading extremely subtle and nuanced non-verbal communication, it was quite obvious that a lot of leads had a hard time after a dance-lifetime of thinking that they were communicating, suddenly being faced with the possibility that they were not communicating well after all. And then simultaneously being expected to correct it and carry the load from that moment on, when they had no tools or experience for how to do that, because they thought they already were and it turns out that they weren't.

It turns out, suddenly refusing to be the Relationship Manager anymore, when one partner is part of an entire group of people who have been raised from birth to not do any relationship managing or maintenance and to not even see it being done because another group was raised to do all of it and to do it invisibly or risk the first group's ire - when one partner suddenly has all that relationship maintenance dumped in their lap with no instruction manual and expected to start managing things, that the expression on their face is a lot like those dance leads when this follow stopped back leading.

Relationship Management is an incredibly huge job description, much like Project Management in the work force. It covers a vast array of duties, big and small, and each Project or Relationship has its own unique mix of those duties. And a lot of those duties are learned "on the job", so we're not always aware that we're doing it, or how to train someone else to do it.

My attachment style is "secure", but just like Personality Types are actually more like spectrums rather than boxes, attachment styles also tend to have gradients and I fall more towards the "avoidant" end of the spectrum. When I'm having more mental health issues, I will jump out of "secure" and into "avoidant" completely, but mostly I fall within the "secure" spectrum, just towards the "avoidant" side in which tools I tend to reach for when it comes to Relationship Management and in my relationship expectations (attachment styles is a whole *other* conversation - Google it if this part doesn't make sense to you).

So, because I'm Secure-to-Avoidant, I tend to think of my relationships as really low-maintenance. I'm pretty flexible in what I find to be an acceptable "relationship". Lives 2,000 miles away? That's OK, we can still make it work. Has a busy life and can only see me once a month? I can work with that too. Prefers to chat online rather than by phone? Sure, we can do that. Needs to live apart? Definitely, we can do that.

But, as it turns out, there is still *some* Relationship Management that happens in my relationships. Whatever goals or expectations we set out for whatever style of relationship we have, those goals and expectations still have to be maintained.

Want to have a long-distance relationship where we only chat online? OK, we still have to make time to chat online. Want to only see each other once a month? OK, that once-a-month date still has to be scheduled. I mean, it doesn't have to be *scheduled* like, on the calendar months in advance, can't change no matter what, scheduled. But, like, at some point somebody has to contact the other person and we have to agree on a time and place that fits into our respective schedules.

Things in a relationship are deliberate. We all make choices about how to spend our time and how to behave around other people. Even when two people live together, there is still Relationship Maintenance to be had. A live-in couple might fall into patterns and habits where they just get used to both being under the same roof for certain hours on certain days, but laundry is getting done by someone, and food is being eaten and that food has to come from somewhere.

For a lot of us, certain aspects of Relationship Maintenance can fall to one or the other by default, without anyone really having a discussion about whose job it is to make sure the dishes get washed or whose job it is to call and ask the other one for a date. And to a certain extent, that's OK. We don't need to have conversations on our first date that go "so, I need you to call me and ask me out every time because I won't call you for a date" and "if we decide to do this relationship thing, it will be your job to choose where we go each time." Things can sort of fall to who has the inclination or the skill to do it, sometimes.

But we do need to be wary of how often certain categories of things fall to certain categories of people, and whether that happens in our relationships with each other because we deliberately take on those roles or because it didn't occur to us to try it differently.

When I get into a relationship, I start out advocating for my own needs. So I'll say that I want to see the other person, and I'll actively engage in the process of making a date with them. Sometimes I'll initiate, sometimes I won't, but the point is that I'm an active participant - looking at my schedule, negotiating the day and time, suggesting or vetoing activities, etc.

After a while, though, I will find myself *always* doing that work. If I don't mention that I'd like to see someone, if I don't point out that I'm free on a particular day, if I don't suggest an activity, those things won't happen.

It goes a little like this:

Me: Hey, we haven't seen each other in a while, we should get together.

Them: We should! I miss you.

Me: OK, so when are you free?

Them: I'm free on this day.

Me: Oh, I'm not.

Them: ...

Me: How about this day then?

Them: That sounds good!

Me: Great! There's this activity that I'd like to do.

Them: Sounds good to me!

Me: OK, it begins at this time. If you pick me up by this other time, we should get there just as this part happens.

Them: Alright, I'll be there then.

Me: Oh, the weather is going to be like this, and the occasion is for this kind of attire, so you might want to consider wearing this appropriate outfit.

Them: Sure!

So, what's wrong with that conversation?  I'm advocating for my wants and they seem pretty agreeable.  Sounds like we both got what we wanted out of the exchange and are happy about it, yes?

Well, yes and no.  There's nothing wrong with that specific exchange.  What's wrong is that this isn't a specific exchange.  What's wrong is when this is *every* exchange.  I'm not just advocating for my wants, I'm Managing The Relationship.  If I didn't initiate this conversation and have it in this way, the relationship wouldn't exist.  That's what's wrong.

Again, this isn't about people taking on complimentary roles and being happy with those roles.  Even in complimentary roles, there is still an equal input of energy and responsibility to that role.

In dancing, the lead is responsible for suggesting the next pattern, but the follow still has to do the pattern of their own initiative.  If the lead has to physically manhandle the follow into place, that's not dancing (tricks like lifts aside - and even then, the follow still has to contribute to the lift, but that's yet a whole other conversation).

When one's role is the Relationship Manager, and one stops doing that role for any reason at any time, the relationship itself stops.  Like when a follow stops back leading and the lead is used to being back led, the dance just stops because the follow is no longer doing anything.  And the mix of emotions from confusion to shock to anger to displacement of blame to expectation from a relationship partner when you stop Managing The Relationship looks just like the mix of emotions from a dance partner when a follow stops back leading.

I've decided to stop back leading.  If the people I'm dancing with (or will dance with) don't figure out how to lead properly, the dance will have to end because I'm just going to sit here and do the basic step until the music stops, and when that music stops, I'll thank you for the dance and walk off the floor.

I am not going to teach you how to lead unless you hire me to teach you (and I have limitations to my skills as a teacher - past a certain point and you will need an expert in this field).  I am not going to intuit for you and do the work in the background.  I am not going to stay here on the dance floor indefinitely, patiently, while you figure out how to make me move.  Eventually the song will run out.  Typically, that's about 3 minutes.

And then I'm going to go sit down and wait for another dance partner who knows how to lead.

OK, I'm waiting until I finish the whole show (up to wherever is current) before I give a full review of The Magicians, but this line really pissed me off:

She says "that's what I'm mad at you for - not the cheating part.  The part where what you did made me lose you."

Here's what happened -

A guy and a girl (both socially awkward) finally hook up after months of tension.  They start a relationship.  No conversation about monogamy takes place on screen.

The girl comes from openly poly parents.  Both the guy and the girl have a couple as their best friends who are clearly in a primary but open relationship with the guy in the couple being flagrantly bisexual and fucking every cute boy that moves.

So one night, after partying particularly hard to celebrate something big, the guy in question ends up in a drunken, debaucherous threesome with the open couple.  He wakes up the next morning with very little memory to find the girl sitting on the edge of the bed where the 3 of them are sleeping, pouting.  She storms off.

With no conversation about what any of this all means, they just assume that they're broken up now and the girl goes and has angry revenge sex with another guy in the social group.  They spend the rest of the season mad at each other and awkwardly tying to complete the tasks that make this a show in the first place.

What is pissing me off about this line is that it is totally devoid of personal responsibility.  She is not mad that he cheated, she's mad that his cheating *made her so mad that she broke up with him*.

WTF DUDE?

What he did absolutely did not "make her lose him".  That is a choice she made.  And she's totally free to make that choice, but it's still her choice.  Thousands of couples experience cheating every day and choose to stay together and work through the circumstances surrounding the cheating.  She of all people has a background in how to deal with this.

In fact, her own mother managed to have an affair and make it work.  Her parents have one of those toxic "poly" relationships where they only ever do anything *together*.  But her mother started a relationship with a guy without the father, and that counts as "cheating" in their relationship.  Eventually, they hashed it all out, and the Other Man joined the couple in a triad and everyone was happy.

So, I mean, toxic and fucked up, but even they had the tools to deal with it that didn't resort to ending a relationship for a first infraction and without talking about it.

If she didn't want to "lose" him, she could have prevented it.  He never intended to break up with her and regretted (what he remembered of) his night with the other couple.  It was a casual fling borne of high emotions and copious amounts of alcohol.  It was not an action *intended* to end his relationship.  That was not its goal.

She didn't "lose" him.  She rejected him after his infidelity.  Then she deliberately set out on a course of action intended to hurt him with her revenge sex (which he pointed out the difference when she got mad at him for judging her for it - "what I did was a mistake, what you did was on purpose and malicious").

And she's mad at him for it.

No wonder finding him in bed with their friends hurt her - she has no concept of owning her own shit, of accountability, of knowing her own emotional landscape, or of taking responsibility for her actions, let alone how her emotions dictate her actions.

I didn't much like her throughout the show.  Now I hate her.

If she is to be mad, she should totally be mad at the betrayal of their (implicit) agreements and promises to each other.  That's OK to be mad about.  Weird to me, because I don't operate that way, but a broken agreement is worth getting upset about.  But to be mad at him because *she* got so mad that she broke up with him?

That's some impressive mental gymnastics to abdicate any responsibility right there.

I am a science enthusiast.  I have also experienced a lot of things in my life.  Both facts about me are true because I am a curious person.  I like to learn.  I like to know.

But when it comes to breakups for romantic relationships in particular, I have learned that curiosity is not the most practical or helpful of my personality traits in building emotional resiliency and healing after the breakup.

One very huge lie that our society has taught us about breakups and endings is that we need "closure".  Not only do we not need it, it is not always possible to get, so we have to learn how to live with uncertainty anyway.  That needs to be our "closure".  We need "acceptance", not "closure".

I didn't get this for a very long time.  And, ironically, it was my late-blooming interest in science that taught me that not having the answers is an OK state to be in.  It's OK to not know something.  It's OK to live with the knowledge that I will probably never know something.

Our collective need to Know All The Things is what drives scientific innovation and exploration.  But it drives us "crazy" - it leads to a culture that accepts, encourages, and supports things like stalking, like harassment, like dismissing agency, like questioning our own self-worth, like doubting our own value, like creating and building entire mythologies out of thin air because we can't just fucking deal with "I have no idea why the world is the way that it is".

We, as a species, seem to need definitive answers, even if they're completely made up.  We seem to feel better with some kind of resolution.  So we either make shit up (some of which can be actively harmful to ourselves or others), or we drive ourselves "crazy" trying to find some kind of answer that we'll never get.

We may never understand why someone would do the things that they did.  We may never understand why the world is the way that it is.  If you want to make a career out of studying big questions starting with "why", then great!  We can always use curious scientists and philosophers with a commitment to rigor and reality-based truth-seeking methods!

But if you are just sitting at home being miserable because you don't know a "why", learn to accept that you may never know why and that it's OK to not ever know why.  Especially if attempting to answer "why" is a violation of someone else's privacy or agency (even if they were a jerk to you and you think they deserve "justice" or "payback" or whatever, or that you "deserve" answers or control over the ending).

Just let it go.  You may not ever know.  And the world will not end because you don't know, nor will you actually die from not knowing "why".

But you will continue to feel miserable as long as you keep insisting on asking yourself the question when no answer is forthcoming.  Like any really useful life-skill, it may seem difficult at first, but it will get easier with practice and your life will become immeasurably better for the practice, no matter how far along you are at mastering the skill.

Just let it go.

A comment in a thread that I ought to archive somewhere. I know I've told this story before, but fuck if I can remember where it is now.

This is in response to Person A who is interested in Person B, but Person B is partnered and the partner pre-vetoes Person A. There is this idea that the person who just got vetoed should not have any bad feelings about it because they were never a partner to begin with, and any pre-existing partners should always get priority over people who aren't even partners yet at all.

I've heard this story a hundred times, and, as far as I'm concerned, all it does is serve to train people that their wants and needs are not important, so that when they do finally get into relationships, they are already accustomed to being doormats and can accept second-class citizenship in little bite-sized pieces until they are completely subsumed by an abusive relationship.

First, your wants don't matter because you're not even a partner. Next, your wants don't matter because you just barely started dating (the old "of course a new partner isn't equal to a spouse! You wouldn't sign over the mortgage to someone on a first date, would you?!" response). Then, your wants don't matter because, although you've been dating a while, you're still the "newer" partner. And, of course, your wants don't matter later because you signed up to be a "secondary", so even if you end up dating for a decade, you're still never as important as the "primary", who may actually be "newer" than you.

It's a slippery slope that is not a logical fallacy in this case because it's actually how this mindset plays out. So here is my commentary to that:

---

That whole "I'm not yet a partner, so it should be OK to prioritize an existing partner over someone who isn't a partner at all" can muddy the waters pretty well.  That's why I take it out of the immediate situation and look more at the patterns and the philosophy.  It's not about how he's treating me, it's about what he thinks is acceptable and what isn't.  He's not just putting *me* on hold in favor of an existing partner, he's putting *himself* on hold in favor of someone else.  He's voluntarily giving someone power over his autonomy *and he thinks that's OK*.

In addition, I have a bias that this particular method is not actually a successful one in terms of building security.  So he'd be doing all this agency-denying crap for no reason, because it doesn't solve whatever problem it's being used to solve.

To give an extreme example, take my abusive ex:

He had such massive insecurity that even the mere thought of his wife being interested in someone else would literally send him into a catatonic panic.  His method of dealing with this insecurity was to infringe on his wife's agency by not allowing her to do specific sexual acts until he desensitized himself to the idea.  He actually used PTSD treatment language, as if him self-diagnosing as PTSD justified this.

So, his wife started dating someone but she couldn't kiss this new boyfriend until her husband (my abusive ex) first visualized it without going catatonic.  Then she could kiss the new guy but only when her husband was present, until he could watch them kiss without going catatonic.  Finally, she was allowed to kiss her own boyfriend without an audience.

Then, he had to visualize her open-mouth kissing ... and go through the whole process again.  Then he had to visualize the new bf touching his wife's breasts over the clothing ... etc. etc.  They literally built an excel spreadsheet and ranked every single sexual act and sexual position to keep track of what she was allowed to do with her bf and whether she could do it without an audience or not.

The thing is that my abusive ex *did*, over time, get accustomed to each specific act.  So over time, the wife racked up a whole list of specific sex acts that she could do with her bf that didn't send her husband into a catatonic tailspin.

They saw this as "growth" and "improvement".

What they never understood is that the *process itself* was harmful because he *never* reached the point where he recognized that he was denying her agency or imposing on her autonomy.  They both just saw a growing list of specific things that didn't freak him out and said "see? It works? He's getting better! He's becoming more secure!"

But he *wasn't* because *every new thing* still freaked him out and he still had to go through the process every single time.  He never learned security. He learned that infringing on his wife's autonomy was justifiable.

I didn't see this pattern at the beginning because 1) he deliberately kept the details of this method from me when we started dating, and 2) I didn't want that kind of power over anyone and said so, and he insisted that our relationship would be different from the one he had with his wife, and it was ... until it wasn't.

Just by coincidence and the way my own libido works, I happened to not be interested in a new person for the next couple of years, so his wife's relationship with her boyfriend kept "growing", and I didn't have my own new partner to challenge him.  When I finally did develop an interest in someone new, he fell back on old patterns, as one tends to do when one is mired deep in fear.  He tried to insist that, not only he but our *entire network* needed to give approval to any new partner I had before I became sexual with that new partner.  Because the underlying premise never changed - that anyone should have the power to infringe on another person's agency.

That does *not* work for me.

So I resisted. In the ensuing argument, he revealed to me that he had grown interested in this other woman, let's call her Chloe.  Years ago, I had a partner who had tried dating Chloe.  It was a disaster.  She has some of the worst communication skills of anyone I've ever met.

In the early days of our relationship, when we were still getting to know each other and exploring and explaining how we each do things, I had mentioned that I cannot be metamours with her.  I would not tell anyone that they couldn't date her, but if someone that I was dating *did* date her, I could not date them anymore.

So, later, when he became interested in dating her, he chose not to date her in deference to me. He *used* this in our later arguments to convince me that I should defer to him with my new partner.  He insisted that, because he gave up a relationship for me, I should be willing to do the same thing.

I was *horrified* that he would have passed up a relationship that *he wanted*, without even talking to me about it, just because he thought I would say no.

He also brought up another partner that he *did* end up dating, whom I'll call Sierra, pointing out how he waited until he had my approval before dating her.  I told him at the time that I was not giving "approval", that he was free to date or or not as he saw fit.  I thought he understood that he could still choose to date her or not, and that just because I liked Sierra and had no problem with them dating, this was not my "approval", nor my "permission".  But he didn't understand that, because he brought up Sierra, and the fact that he only started dating her because I said it was OK, in this later argument.

So, during this argument, I got mad at him for giving me this power when I explicitly told him that I didn't want it. But especially now because he did this whole self-sacrifice thing without even telling me about it and expected his sacrifice to persuade me to make the same sacrifice in his favor.

Very little infuriates me in a relationship more than "I did this thing for you that you didn't know about and you don't want, so now you have to do the same thing for me!"

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

So, not only did this whole "put someone else off until security magically appears" not work, it was a sign of a pattern that wove itself very deep into how his relationships work.  The act of denying someone their agency to assuage one's own fears reinforces itself when the fears are temporarily relieved.  All this method does is teach people that denying one's agency is justifiable.  

And it doesn't just teach the people doing the agency-denying either.  It teaches us to accept it from others with small, incremental steps.  Kind of like how abuse works.

[This is a post I made on FB on May 6, 2018]

Y'all, I'm watching a master gaslighter at work.  I thought my ex, who had me convinced that his victim was the real problem, was good.

Amateur. 

I then thought that this Missing Stair, who has left a trail of broken victims throughout her city and somehow managed to stage a coup against me which I caught wind of and yet she still convinced half the online poly community that I was unreasonable and on a power trip because I put a stop to the coup, was good.

Hobbyist.

It's truly impressive to watch a real pro categorically deny ever having done or said things when there exists actual print evidence that they did, and to see people fall one by one, like dominoes, into the pro's camp.  And there's nothing that can be done.  To speak up after the smear campaign has started is to create "drama".  And Hades forbid we have "drama" in our communities!  To keep quiet to avoid "drama" is to allow the accusations to go unchallenged, which makes them believable.

Any attempt at a defense is met with hostility by people who heard the first accusations and have chosen to "believe the victim" rather than look into the situation.  Remember, abusers often use our sympathy and empathy against ourselves.  In our current subculture climate, they can cry "victim" first, and be automatically believed, setting up their victims for a no-win situation and further traumatizing them. 

As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the difference between a true victim bravely stepping forward to share their story and prevent future abuse, from an abuser crying "victim" first to win over public approval and support and further traumatize their victim, without a thorough, deep dive into the situation, which most bystanders are not in a position to do. 

And the more gaslighters I have the misfortune to meet, the more and more difficulty I have in telling the difference because I keep meeting better and better gaslighters.  They just keep upping their game. 

This one is fucking *good*. 

Him:  I just don't get how you all keep track of everyone!

Me:  The same way I keep track of all my siblings and cousins. I know who they all are and what I've done with each.

Him:  But it's different when you have a real intimate connection. Then there's jealousy that you don't have with friends or family.

Me:  See, this is what I hate about emotional labor.  You guys are socialized to have women do your emotional labor for you and to only view your sexual partners as "intimate".  Women are socialized to have many intimate connections.  I can have several platonic girlfriends who are all deeply intimate connections, so I know that it feels the same as the connection I have to my romantic partner, sometimes it's a deeper intimacy, even.  If you could develop intimate connections with anyone other than your lover, you'd know that jealousy and all the other emotions exist whether there is sex or not and monogamy doesn't prevent them.

Him:  but don't you all feel sexual jealousy?

Me:  1) yes, but 2) not being poly doesn't prevent anyone from feeling sexual jealousy either.

Him:  But for me, sexual jealousy is this primal, internal, instinctual thing.

Me:  Yeah, all jealousy is like that.  Babies feel jealousy about parents and siblings.  You just happen to attach your feelings of jealousy to sexual activity, but it's still the same jealousy that everyone feels over anything.  Think of it like anger.  Jealousy is just an emotion.  Anger is just an emotion.  Some people are pretty laid back and don't really get angry or upset over much.  Some people get angry over very specific things but they're ok most of the time.

And some people are just Angry.  They see red.  Their anger is primal, and always there.  It's a part of who they are, it's in their identity, they are an Angry Person.

People who get angry have a few choices.  They can choose to only date people who never do anything to make them angry.  They can have random bouts of anger and that's just how a relationship with them goes.  Or they can try and learn some anger management skills and learn how to deal with their anger without making other people responsible for managing them.

But no matter which option they choose, the anger never "disappears".  There is no world in which anger is gone.  People who choose to date only people who never make them angry never lose their anger, they just don't have it triggered very often (but inevitably, *something* will, because nobody is perfect at managing other people's emotions).

People who choose anger management never lose their anger, they just learn how to manage their own emotions and, more importantly, how to choose reasonable behaviours in response to their emotions.

Now imagine that society said that the Angry Person is the default, that this is just how things are, that anger is immutable and fixed, and that all relationships should alter themselves to avoid triggering anger at all costs, and any relationship that allows the kind of behaviour that might make someone feel angry are "weird", "abnormal", and even "immoral", even if the people in those relationships are OK with having that kind of behaviour in their relationships and even if that behaviour doesn't actually trigger any anger in them at all.

Poly people are just normal people with the same range of angry feelings as everyone else but who said "I don't buy that, I think some anger is learned and angry behaviour is excused, and I think that there is a better way to feel and deal with anger."

Him:  See, that's why I admire you poly people.  I'm just a jealous person, so I couldn't do that.

Me:  #FacePalm That's the thing, you *could* if you wanted to.  But society is set up to support you in not addressing your jealousy, in just accepting it.  As long as you think it's "too hard" or you can't do it, you won't be able to because society will support you in not trying, and will actively work against you if you do try.  You could change this about yourself.  But only if you want to.

Poly people aren't special or better at any of this, we're just more deliberate about our relationships.  Anyone *could* do it, it's whether they *want* to overcome the hurdles that society has put in their way.  For some people, it's not worth the effort.  If you do not *want* to, then don't do it.  Don't come into my communities kicking and screaming and not wanting to be there.  You'll just fuck things up for all of us.

Just know that you're a making a choice. Your jealousy doesn't have to dictate your relationships, if you don't want it to.  It only does because you choose to let it.

#ActualConversationsIHave

PSA: When your friends are going through a breakup, if you are particularly close with them and have previously been in the role of support for them with their relationship stuff (or they have for you), and your friend reaches out to you for support during a breakup, you may choose to be there for them, or you may choose not to take on that particular role for yourself at this time.

But if you have not already established this kind of supportive role with your friend who is going through a breakup, try to resist the call to suddenly be their sounding board.  Even if you think you can handle it.  Even if you think that you truly have the purest of intentions.

Some people want to manipulate social circles with sordid stories of the breakup or the ex.  Some people want to gossip.  Some people want to elicit a more active role from you in revenge, punitive action, or other things.  Abusers, in particular, are *very* good at convincing others that they have been harmed and making it look like they're just "reaching out" for support when they're actually undermining the other person's ability to find their support.

Some people just don't have very good boundaries and don't recognize what is appropriate and what isn't in terms of sharing private and personal details of a relationship and a breakup.  There are tons of reasons - both benign and harmful in *intent* - for someone coming to you with the story of their breakup.  But there are very few times in which accepting that role is actually *helpful*, either for your friend, for you as the support, or for the community everyone is all a part of.

So if you don't already have that kind of relationship with someone and they contact you from seemingly out of nowhere wanting to connect or looking for support for a breakup, and *especially* if you *do* have a connection to the ex, it's probably best to clearly state your own boundaries that this is not a role you feel suited for at this time.

If *you* are going through a breakup and you have somehow managed to lose or avoid building your own support group with a very small number of people who can handle being in the role of "I will listen to you trash talk your ex so you can vent" buddy, you may find yourself now needing to reach out to people you haven't before.

Some advice:

Breaking up is hard. It's where your ethics meet the road.  And we ALL fuck up here.  This is how to fuck up a little bit less.