The Journal Of The InnKeeper

Reminder: A very large portion of poly people did not come to polyamory through "opening up a relationship".  There are more than one avenue to discovering polyamory.  If you never "opened up" a relationship, you are not alone, and not even a tiny minority.

I know it seems like it, because "couples who open up" are the only ones who ever get any air time, but I promise that you are part of a very large segment of the community.  I am one of them.  I never "opened up" a relationship.  I discovered my own internal desire for ethical non-monogamy when I didn't have any romantic or sexual partners at all and every relationship I got into after that point was deliberately non-monogamous from the moment I entered into it.  My partner, Franklin, has just never had a monogamous relationship in his life.

There are so many of us that we have a diverse collection of stories of how our relationships look.  My non-monogamous history looks very different from Franklin's history, even though neither of us tried to "open up" a previously monogamous relationship.  We are not a small segment of the poly community, NYT articles to the contrary.

Also, not all people who discovered polyamory for themselves while not in a couple ultimately become solo poly. Solo poly is not synonymous with "single". Just FYI.

Dance Studios:  We want more people to learn how to dance!  And come to our dance parties!

Non-dancers:  OK, well, we don't know how to dance and we're not really passionate about it, otherwise we would already be learning how to dance.  So, how do we get into this dance thing?

Studios:  Well, first spend hundreds of dollars on private lessons, and a couple of hundred on special shoes, spend several weeks in lessons and practice every moment at home, and then you can come to our dance parties where everyone there already knows how to dance!

Non-dancers:  Uh, that sounds kind of intimidating.  Don't you have, like, a group class somewhere that we can just drop in to see if we like it before we start spending all that money and committing every week?

Studios:  NO YOU MUST COMMIT IF YOU ARE TO BECOME A *DANCER*!

Non-dancers:  OK, well, we weren't really interested in becoming a Dancer, we just thought learning a couple of dance moves might be fun.  You're the one asking for people to show up to your events.

Studios:  *Fine*, we'll add a lesson at the beginning of our dance parties.  We'll teach the same 3 steps over and over again for every dance party that we throw, and then we'll immediately open the dance floor to people who have been dancing for years and just throw you into the mix where you have to ask experts to dance with you and try to keep up with other experts moving around the floor.   How's that?

Non-dancers:  Yeah, didn't solve the whole "intimidating" problem.  We'll just stick to asking our token dancer friend to show us a few moves, and then never practice them again.

#IfYouWantPeopleToDoYourActivityYouHaveToMakeItAccessible

---

Non-Dance Friends:  Ooh, We've always wanted to dance!  Will you teach us?

Dancers:  Well, there are lessons available, and for safety you'll need suitable dance shoes.

Friends:  We don't want to spend any money, so can you just show us some things?

Dancers:  Well, you also need the space to do it, and that's my personal time that I'm giving up.  Renting space costs money, and if I teach for a living, you're asking me to do my job for free.  Plus, we already know that you need repetition to actually *learn* things.  If you really want to learn how to dance, you need to practice regularly.

Friends:  Nah, that's too much work and we're too busy with things that we prioritize higher.

[some time later]

Friends:  Ooh, we've always wanted to learn how to dance!

Dancers:  Well, there are lessons and dance events available...

#FromTheOtherSide #WeLoveToShareOurPassionButItTakesReciprocalEffort

Country music has a bad reputation for being pretty misogynistic.  The current crop of pop country is especially bad about that, sparking an epidemic of songs about girls in tight shorts who do nothing but sit in the cabs of pickup trucks.  But like most genres, country is actually pretty diverse and has a prestigious lineage of feminist music.  I've been building a playlist of "feminist" country music and I'm up to more than 50 songs so far.

Unlike Hollywood, however, this list is nuanced and shaded.  The movies would have us believe that there are only 2 kinds of feminist representations - the badass Strong Female Character who can kick ass (except when she needs to be rescued by the leading man, of course) and has no other personality, and the man-hating harpy.

But this playlist shows many sides to the "strong woman".  It's not all about women beating up their abusive men in retribution, although those songs exist too.  In many places, it intersects with classism (although, to be fair, it's still predominantly white, as is the larger country genre, but there is one song in there about interracial relationships at a time when they were still taboo), where sometimes some ideals have to be sacrificed for the more immediate need of survival. Sometimes it's not about triumphing at all, but about existing in a misogynistic society.

There are tales of revenge, of liberation, of parenthood, of singlehood, of being caged, of sexual freedom, of running out of choices, of standing up to authority, of making the system work in her favor, of rejecting her circumstances, of accepting her circumstances and making the best of them, of birth control and abortion and sex, of career options and motherhood choices, of sorrow and pride and love and heartache and loneliness and optimism.

They are all stories of being a woman. This is what feminism looks like.

Watch on YouTube

www.helpguide.org/articles/suicide-prevention/suicide-prevention.htm

I decided to start being open with my depression and my occasional bouts with suicidal thoughts. I decided to do this when I acknowledged that it is possible to continue to *live* while still being suicidally depressed. I acknowledge and accept that these thoughts are part of my condition and that I don't have to act on them. That makes it easier for me to talk about it publicly.

But because so many suicidal people do not talk about their depression or their thoughts, a lot of people are under the impression that, because I might mention something about death or hopelessness, I must therefore be in danger. Really, it's when I don't talk about it that I'm probably in the most danger.

And then I get all the usual reactions to people who have no idea how to handle other people having complex emotions, which is bad enough, but it's compounded by the fact that I'm not actually in any immediate danger so I don't *need* that assistance even if it was helpful, which it isn't.

A lot of the things on this list don't apply to me because of my decision to talk publicly about choosing to live while having suicidal thoughts. My talking about death isn't a "warning signal", but it might be for someone else. I'm talking about death because I can't handle needing to comfort other people with their own fears and concerned feelings about me while I'm also going through my own struggles with my own feelings. I can't do the emotional labor for the both of us anymore.

So I'm talking about it to normalize talking about difficult subjects so that the rest of y'all can learn how to do your own emotional labor so that you can better support those people you're feeling all those concerned feelings about instead of making us try to make you feel better when we feel like shit first.

So, even though a lot of this article doesn't apply to me, personally, I'm sure they apply to other people, and this list of Don'ts is particularly applicable to me.

"But don’t:

• Argue with the suicidal person. Avoid saying things like: "You have so much to live for," "Your suicide will hurt your family," or "Look on the bright side."


• Act shocked, lecture on the value of life, or say that suicide is wrong.


• Promise confidentiality. Refuse to be sworn to secrecy. A life is at stake and you may need to speak to a mental health professional in order to keep the suicidal person safe. If you promise to keep your discussions secret, you may have to break your word.


• Offer ways to fix their problems, or give advice, or make them feel like they have to justify their suicidal feelings. It is not about how bad the problem is, but how badly it’s hurting your friend or loved one.


• Blame yourself. You can’t “fix” someone’s depression. Your loved one’s happiness, or lack thereof, is not your responsibility."

I especially love this line here: "It is not about how bad the problem is, but how badly it’s hurting your friend or loved one."

One further note on the warning of antidepressants. When I went through my therapy the last time, the doctor began to prescribe something for me that would increase my "motivation", but literally in the middle of writing the prescription, I said something or other that made her change her mind and she prescribed something to lift my mood first but that wouldn't necessarily give me more motivation.

(No, I have no memory of what either drug was or what the mechanism was to isolate those two specific emotions. I did some research later and it lined up with what she said, but now I'm left only with the memory of the *effect* of this conversation, not the details. So accept it on face value).

The thing is, that I had at that point reached a place where I was a high risk. I was willing to die. But I couldn't get up the motivation to actually get up off the floor of my storage unit, where I had fallen to sob hysterically, to reach for my gun on the upper shelf. That lack of motivation was, literally, the only reason I didn't die that night. It was just too much effort to go through with it.

So, later, I went to the therapist and we discussed options and she changed her mind on what drug to give me in the middle of the session. Now see, my depression is situational, not necessarily my brain chemistry. And my situation changed shortly thereafter. So we don't really know if the drug worked or I just got out of that depression on my own.

But what I do know is that my *mood* lifted before I gained back my motivation to do stuff. It was still some time later before I could feel motivated about things, I just didn't feel so *hopeless* anymore. And that's when I did some research about the drugs we talked about and the incidents of people who accomplish their suicides after they begin taking antidepressants.

So I now believe that there are 2 parts to suicidal depression: a lack of hope, and a lack of motivation. And I believe that if a person who is suicidal ever gets their motivation to do stuff back before they lose their sense of despair and hopelessness, that's what causes them to take their own lives.

And if we're prescribing them shit that makes them feel motivated to do stuff but they haven't gotten over whatever makes them feel hopeless as fast as they gain their motivation, that may contribute to why people suicide after taking antidepressants.

So if you know someone who is suicidal and who is finally convinced to start taking medication, be aware of this motivation / mood split.

There have been a lot of rumblings in my various communities about the lack of accessibility for basically everyone other than straight white educated cismen. One popular option that a lot of people are choosing to take these days (and I wholeheartedly support them) is to look at the speaker lineup, and if they are the only POC or woman or disabled person or whatever on the lineup, then to decline the invitation to speak.

Another option is to do the same thing as a guest. A third / fourth option is to do the same thing *as* straight, white, cismen and to do it publicly as a way to give up your seat for someone who is not (especially if your "seat" is on a panel or podium discussing accessibility issues).

As I said, I support this choice completely. However, the consequence of all POC and women and disabled people et. al. refusing to participate is that these events *remain* white, straight, male, and able-bodied.

So, if we are a member of an underrepresented demographic, and we get invited (or accepted) to speak at an event where the speaker lineup has less diversity than we'd like, and we have the spoons or the matches or the hit points for it, and our lecture topics work this way, I'd like to propose doing more of this in addition to our boycotts.

Give our lectures and workshops and panels in ways that absolutely do not benefit the people who are not us but that do benefit the people we are trying to make these events more accessible for.

This will not be applicable to everyone who speaks. It's most easily demonstrated with something like hearing loss because accommodating people with hearing difficulties tends to be *inconvenient* for people who can hear, whereas many other forms of accommodation benefit everyone or most people even those who do not *need* the accommodation.

One of the things that I do is, in my Simple Steps workshop, where we take dancing exercises and learn how to apply them as actual communication tools, we deliberately arrange this hands-on workshop so that men have to touch other men.  Everyone other than straight cismen is socialized to allow some form of physical contact (often whether it's wanted or not), but straight cismen get to indulge in their homophobia because of the homophobic culture.

So we do not accommodate them.  They are forced out of their comfort zone in our workshop.

Obviously, this has limitations.  People who have mental health issues regarding physical contact will find our workshop difficult for them. We made a choice to focus on this one issue, and the nature of the workshop is to be hands-on and interactive.  But the same goes for the ASL speaker in the original meme here - people who have eyesight problems would have had difficulty in his lecture too.

Another thing that I do is I make many of the events I host to be either child-friendly or low-cost / free (or both) because poverty is one of my pet SJ issues.  I am not a fan of children.  But I make as many of my events child-friendly because I know how expensive child-care is and how difficult it can be to participate in a community when everything costs money and time and there are children at home.  Children running around an event is inconvenient to many adults.  But without childcare options, poor people (and mostly women) are left out. 

I will be considering some of my more popular lectures and workshops to see if I can adapt them to make them less convenient for various target audiences, to illustrate this point.  If there is a way to make your lectures more accommodating to the people you are representing while simultaneously making it less accommodating to the non-representative audience, please consider this act of civil rebellion in lieu of just not participating at all.

If we want separate spaces, that's one thing, but if we're asking for more inclusivity, some of us have to be the ones to barge through the door. Otherwise, the room will remain monochrome because we've all decided that forcing the door open is too much effort.



Event Organizer: We're sorry, there won't be interpreters at the event where you are presenting about Deaf things, sign language, and interpreting.

 

Me: No problem, I'll present in ASL without interpretation. Hearing people will have to get by.

EO: Ummm ...

I presented for 25 minutes, and opened with a couple of slides in written English that explained the situation. Told them to stay, so that they could "learn a lesson they didn't come here for." They all did.

I do not believe in "converting" people to polyamory, or any other relationship style or sexuality for that matter. I don't believe it can be done and I believe that attempting to do so is inherently coercive. I believe people have the right to choose whatever relationship style or sexual behaviour they want, no matter what it is or why they choose it, with the exception of anything that violates other people's agency (sorry, you don't have the right to choose to force young boys to give you blowjobs behind the alter just because you're their priest, you just don't).

You can *introduce* people to new things, but I don't think you can *convert* them to something they're not or don't have their own internal motivation to try and become. And I would rather not have these people being pushed into my communities because they flail around and smack up everyone who gets near them. If you don't want to try it, then don't. Please, don't. Stay out of my communities unless you actually want to be there.

www.quora.com/How-can-I-convince-my-husband-to-let-me-sleep-with-other-men-He-has-slept-with-many-women-before-our-marriage-and-I-am-jealous-that-I-did-not-have-that-experience/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How can I convince my husband to let me sleep with other men? He has slept with many women before our marriage and I am jealous that I did not have that experience.

A. You can't "convince" him. At worst, that would be coercion. You can lay out your desires and your reasons for them, and then you can A) accept his decision to not consent to an open marriage, B) accept his acceptance of an open marriage, C) cheat, or D) leave.

You have to decide, ultimately, what is more important to you - having other sexual experiences or remaining married. When you know what your answer to that question is, then you will know how to proceed with talking to your husband about deconstructing and reconstructing your marriage into an open one ("Opening Up" A Relationship Doesn't Work, Try This Method Instead - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/375573.html)

If your marriage is more important, then be prepared for him to say that he does not want an open marriage and you will have to give up your fantasy. If the sexual encounters are more important, then be prepared for him to say that he does not want an open marriage and you will have to divorce him if you want to remain an ethical person.

You are allowed to have your desires. But he is also allowed to only consent to the kind of relationships that he wants to have. Once you know where the line in the sand is drawn, you can share that information with him so that he can make an informed decision about what kind of relationship he will engage in with you.

Just be careful not to make it an ultimatum (Can Polyamorous Hierarchies Be Ethical pt. 2 - Influence & Control - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/349226.html). This shouldn't be a way to control the outcome of the discussion. You shouldn't go into it thinking "you better let me have other sexual partners or else I will divorce you!" That's punitive. If you are relying on the threat of divorce to get your way, that's coercion.

But if his "no" is an equally acceptable answer to his "yes", then saying "honey, I love you, but this is a thing I really need to do for myself, and if you don't want to share this journey with me, I'll understand, but I do have to travel this path one way or another and I hope I can share it with you" is not an act of coercion, it's an act of love and acceptance and of giving him the information he needs to make a decision. He might not feel that way in the moment, though. Sometimes it's hard to see the difference.

There are tons of books and forums and websites everywhere that can help people wrap their brains around open relationships. I'm sure others will share those resources in the comments. You can try giving him those resources and see if that helps. My favorite is the book More Than Two (www.MoreThanTwo.com).

But ultimately, you cannot "convince" someone to have an open relationship. Dragging a partner into any kind of relationship they don't want grudgingly makes things much worse. That goes in both directions, btw. You staying in a monogamous relationship grudgingly will make everything worse for you both too. Should you decide that your marriage is ultimately more important than having extramarital sexual relationships, make sure you own that choice. Make that choice *yours*, not something he forced you into. Don't frame it as "he won't let me have sex with other men", frame it as a choice you made to be with him. Otherwise, you might end up losing the marriage anyway.

First, look at all the worst case scenarios - you have other lovers and get divorced, you stay with him and feel resentful, you cheat and damage your integrity, his trust, and possibly get divorced anyway, etc. - and decide which worst case scenario is the one you are most willing to risk. Then come to your husband with that in mind. Lay it all out for him, including the consequences for what happens if he doesn't give his consent, so that he can make an informed decision.

And then live with your choices.

Answering that last question about casual sex without feelings verbalized something that I felt but hadn't quite brought to the forefront of my brain yet.

I have always been confused by people who ask things like how to have casual sex without developing feelings. And I think it's because they're coming at it from literally the opposite direction as I do.

I don't have casual sex and then try to make my feelings match. I have casual sex BECAUSE CASUAL ARE MY FEELINGS.

They're choosing the structure and then trying to shoehorn the feelings in to match the structure.

I'm looking at my feelings and going "what structure works best with these feelings?" and then I have that kind of relationship.

And it occurs to me that this is exactly the same problem as the Unicorn Hunters and like every poly newbie ever. They're all picking a structure first and then interviewing people for a job position that requires a mandatory suite of emotions.

Whether it's casual sex or emotionally intimate partnerships, I have the feelings first, and then pick the structure to match. If a person is simply not prone to high sexual attraction / low emotional attachment, then by having the feelings first and choosing a matching structure, they will, just by the "signal flow" if you will, rarely or never have casual sex.

If a person tends to have high sexual attraction for people without a strong emotional attachment, and they have the feelings first and pick the structure to match, then they will just naturally have lots of casual sex without "catching feelings".

But if a person picks the structure first, and either they pick a structure that runs contrary to their natural tendencies of sexual attraction vs. emotional attachment or they are the sort of person that is capable of a variety of mixtures of those two things, then they try to fit people into the structure, they are likely to wind up having the "wrong" feelings for the type of relationships they are in.

And then, if that person has any sense of entitlement or lack of respect for their partners' agency, they are likely to use that relationship structure to coerce their partners into something they don't want.

This is being girlfriendzoned. This is when someone sabotages condoms to get someone pregnant to keep them around. This is when they dismiss the other person's feelings with "you knew the rules when you signed up". This is cowboying and cuckooing.

We, as a culture, pick our relationship structures first and then try to fit people in them. We do this with friends, with intimate partnerships, and with fuckbuddies.

Don't do that.

Feel your feelings, and then pick the relationship structure to match. If you don't have casual-sex-feelings, then don't get into a casual sex relationship. That's how this works. It doesn't work by getting into a casual sex relationship first and then trying to prevent yourself from developing feelings other than casual-sex-feelings.

I don't worry about "catching feelings" for my casual sex partners because the whole reason they are casual sex partners is because the feelings I have for them are casual-sex-feelings. I'm not going to "catch feelings" because I already HAVE feelings. The feelings I have are casual sex ones. I have high sexual attraction + low emotional connection feelings. That's why it's a casual sex relationship.

This doesn't mean that my feelings absolutely won't change over time, but that's a different discussion. All relationships metamorphose over time. My point is that the reason why people have such a hard time with the concept of casual sex and how to handle "catching feelings" is the same reason why certain types of poly people try to prescript their relationships into equilateral triads or whatever - they pick the structure first and then try to find people to fit.

You will have much more success in all your relationships if you have your feelings first and then pick the relationship to match. And "casual-sex-feelings" are valid feelings. There is no need to prevent "catching feelings" in the event of a casual sex relationship if the feelings you have are the ones that match.

Image at www.instagram.com/p/BVOHz8YhnWU/

www.quora.com/When-doesn-t-a-pre-nup-work/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q.   When doesn't a pre-nup work?
Joreth Innkeeper, is currently writing a book with her ex on how to break up

A.  Times when a pre-nup doesn't work:

1. When you don't have one / haven't signed one / don't use a proper pre-nup form, etc


2. When you don't disclose or include something so that it's not accounted for in the contract and/or it can be contested in court because it wasn't disclosed or included.


3. When you focus only on tangible or liquid assets and then you start a business with your spouse but don't include any exit strategies on how to divide up the business in case of divorce.


4. When you're talking about things with emotional value, sentimental value, or intangible things like the well-being of the participants.


5. When it's clearly one-sided and a judge rules that it's not a fair protection of both parties and is therefore null.


6. When it's signed under duress or false pretenses or otherwise one or more signer is not eligible by law to sign a legal contract.


7. When it's not valid in the region or jurisdiction under which you are trying to enact it.

Since I am not a lawyer, do not take anything I've said as legal advice. I may be wrong, and I am certainly not familiar with contract law in any region I haven’t tried to engage in contracts under.

GET A PRENUP. GET A PRENUP. GET A PRENUP. GET A PRENUP.

I can’t stress that enough. I don’t care how much in love you are or how pure of heart you both are, if you are going to entangle yourself legally with another person, get your exit strategy down on paper in the most legal way possible, and do it while y’all still like each other so that it’s written as fair as possible.

No one has ever walked down the aisle and thought “I bet this person whom I love dearly with all my heart and am choosing today to commit to for the rest of my life will probably turn out to be a raging douchebag and someday try to leave me penniless.” Every single person in divorce court, at one time, thought the person they are now squaring off across the table with was a decent human being.

If you turn out to be right, and your spouse is a decent human being, then this is just a piece of paper that probably does nothing more than spark a conversation between the two of you about entangled finances, turning some implicit assumptions into an explicit discussion about expectations and intentions. Yay!

If you turn out to be wrong, this document could save your ass, or even your life. And you don’t want to wait until after you discover that you were wrong to also discover that you have no safety net.

By the way, there is also such a thing as a “post-nup”, although that’s not what it’s called (it’s not technically called a “pre-nup” either, but most people know what you’re talking about when you say that). It’s basically the exact same thing as a prenup except all the verb tenses reflect the fact that the marriage has already happened.

Like a will, the very last document signed is the one that rules in the courts. It is to your benefit to revisit your prenup after the wedding periodically and update it as a post-nup with however your assets have changed over time.

And if you got married without a prenup, you can still get a post-nup. Just like responsible adults have hard conversations about wills and what to do with assets in case of death, you should have this conversation with your partners in case of separation too.

This doesn’t have to be framed as “so, I’ve been thinking about divorcing you, and I thought we should hammer out the details early.” Nobody says “so, I’ve been thinking about intentionally dying in the next few years and I thought we should work out how to handle my arrangements now.”

Just be a grown-up and sit down to discuss worst-case scenarios with your partner - you know, that person who you pledged yourself to supposedly because they were your “best friend”? If you can’t have these kinds of hard conversations with your life partner, your helpmeet, your “best friend”, your soulmate, well … perhaps you shouldn’t have chosen this one to marry and these documents are more necessary than you think.

www.quora.com/Why-should-you-learn-ballroom-dance-or-any-dance-and-is-there-any-benefit/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Why should you learn ballroom dance or any dance and is there any benefit?

A.

• Dance is a great form of exercise that includes both cardio and flexibility work.
   
• Dance is a great form of social activity to meet new people and build friendships and community.
   
• Social partner dancing has been shown to decrease or relieve the symptoms of some forms of dementia and to also reduce the onset of dementia (https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcseriesblog/2016/04/04/keep-dancing-turns-good-brain/).
   
• Partner dancing increases your awareness of the space you take up and your effect on those around you, so it can help build empathy skills.
   
• Partner dancing improves non-verbal communication skills, which help in other areas of life such as romantic relationships, work relationships, familial relationships, customer service, etc.  (I teach a workshop where I teach non-dancers certain dance exercises that will teach them non-verbal communication skills to improve relationship communication with no dancing even required!)
   
• Social dancing offers clear guidelines for social etiquette, that can help improve self-confidence or relieve social anxiety, and can offer a framework for social etiquette in other contexts.
   
• Social dancing builds self-esteem as skill improves and as the dancer practices the social etiquette of asking for dances and dealing with rejection.  It builds emotional resiliency.
   
• Dance brings awareness to the physical body, which can help with self-esteem, and with awareness of the body that can lead to better detection of problems and better self-care.
   
• Dancing can be a safe outlet for physically expressing and processing strong emotion.
   
• A regular dance regime or schedule can provide a sense of structure while combining physical activity and artistic or creative expression, all of which are extremely valuable tools for children and young adults for building and maintaining healthy self-esteem and productive patterns that can be applied in other areas of life, and for people in any life stage who may be experiencing emotional upheaval, loss, change, or feeling unsettled or adrift through changing life circumstances, or who just might need or want an anchor or a steady point in their life.
   
• Partner dance is also great for mitigating the effects of touch-starvation, which a lot of people, straight men in particular, are brought up with very few outlets for non-sexual touch once we reach adulthood. This is a wonderful way to get some of the physical touch that we seem to need as human beings.

www.quora.com/Would-you-have-a-separate-bedroom-from-your-significant-other-and-why/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you have a separate bedroom from your significant other and why?

A. I do not sleep well with others.

• I have back problems and I need to sleep in a semi-reclined position (that means partially sitting up).  It makes my pillow arrangements inconvenient for people who sleep more traditionally laying all the way flat.  So I can’t really cuddle or snuggle with someone while sleeping, and if we’re not going to be touching at least part of the time, what’s the point of sharing a bed?
  
  
   
• I am a ridiculously light sleeper.  I wake at *everything*. My sister used to sneak into my room at night to steal my clothing and my cassette tapes.  My parents refused to allow me to have a lock on my bedroom door because they felt it was too “secretive” and they wanted access to my room at all times (they did not listen to me when I offered for them to have a key and they did not see any violation of privacy here).
  
  So I became super sensitive to motion at night.   I could hear the air pressure change outside of my bedroom door when someone approached.   I woke every single night to my sister attempting to sneak in, once I developed this sensitivity. Every night *for years*.
  
  So sharing a room with another person who snores, tosses and turns, mumbles, moves, or gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is incredibly disruptive to me.   No matter how many hours of sleep I get, when I share a room with other people, I sleep so poorly that I feel jet lagged all the next day.
   
• I have several sleep disorders - Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, Sleep Paralysis, and Night Terrors.   With the DSPS, my internal sleep clock is off by about 6 hours.   My body does not think it’s bedtime until around 4 in the morning and insists that it’s not time to wake until noon.  Sharing a sleeping space with people who are on a different sleep schedule is disruptive to both of us, as one of us is not yet tired and still active while the other is already asleep and then reversed in the morning.
  
  With the Sleep Paralysis and Night Terrors, these things are both triggered by regular disruption of the REM cycle, at least for me.  So, things like hitting the snooze button repeatedly for several hours (yes, I’ve done this) will trigger an episode, especially if I do this for several days in a row.  Also, people who are restless sleepers and move a lot will interrupt my REM cycle enough to trigger an episode.  So are snorers.
   
• I’m also probably a synesthete.  Synesthesia is a condition in which experiencing something with one sense is received as another sense.  So, like, some people taste color, or they actually visually see sounds.  My version is that certain sounds produce an actual physical sensation in my body that is not just the standard “air vibrations entering the ear canal” sorts of feelings, nor is it that internal thumping feeling everyone gets with really loud bass.  My favorite feeling is the sound of one particular type of singing voice that produces the sensation of what I refer to as “liquid cat fur” gently rubbing down the back of my throat.
  
  Snoring produces a painful, rage-inducing feeling in my head and chest.  I absolutely cannot sleep when there is any kind of snoring at all, even the occasional one-off snores that happens to almost everybody.  It will wake me instantly with pain and rage.  I’ve had to learn how to sleep with earbuds in playing music at full volume just to drown out the sound of snoring because sleeping through loud music and hard things in my ears was less painful than hearing that sound.
   
• On top of all of these health issues, I’m polyamorous and introverted.  The introversion means that I really need space that belongs just to me, where I can feel safe and go to recharge and where nobody else is allowed in without my express permission.  In most house layouts, there are very few options for giving people their own space, other than bedrooms.  And as I live below the poverty line, affording a home with a shared bedroom and all the normal rooms and also private space for everyone quickly starts to become very expensive.  It’s easiest to make the private space also be everyone’s bedroom.
  
  The polyamory means that I am likely to have multiple partners.  If I live with more than one partner, then all my health issues are compounded because there are more than 2 people all attempting to sleep in the same room.  Trust me, I’ve done this, and it did not end well for me.  I was in a group once with 6 people and they all insisted on sharing a bed together.  After the novelty wore off, it became a living hell for me with 3 different snore patterns, 2 “morning people” to my “night owl” pattern, no privacy for sex, and crawling in and out at the foot of the bed without disrupting anyone else to get to my space.  Even giving everyone our own bed-sheets did not solve the problem of different preferences in ambient sleeping temperature either.
  
  If any of my partners do not live with me, then when I want to have them spend the night, I either have to kick an existing partner out of his own bed (and then have sex in a bed that someone else sleeps in, which doesn’t bother everyone but does bother some), or we have to have a house big enough for a spare room that’s dedicated to guests and that goes empty the rest of the time.  I don’t usually have the money for houses big enough to have rooms that are only being used occasionally.
  
  If I live with one partner, and our house is big enough for a shared room and a guest room, we might as well just each have our own bedroom.  That way nobody gets kicked out of their “own” bed when a guest comes over.  Then there are no hurt feelings over used sheets, interruptions of routine, feeling “left out”, etc.

My personal preference is to live in my own, self-contained space like an apartment.  My ideal fantasy is to have that self-contained space be on shared property with other partners, such as an entire apartment building for everyone in the network where we all get our own self-contained space and also a “common area” where we can come together for large family meals, recreation, etc.

This way I get my own room, I get All The Closet Space for my costumes, I get a work space for my hobbies where my clutter and mess doesn’t impact anyone else, and a kitchen where *nobody touches my knives except me*, and yet I can walk barefoot down the hall, or in some state of undress, to the next door over to visit with a partner or metamour, and there is enough separation between us that sounds of sex or loud music or enthusiastic video game play are not intrusive to anyone.

This whole sharing a bedroom thing is a relatively recent trend in human history.  We have tried a whole slew of different sleeping arrangements, each with their pros and cons.  There is no reason to believe that the house layout of one master bedroom for a romantic couple and several smaller bedrooms for children with common rooms like a kitchen and living room, is the “proper” configuration.  That was a lie told to us by post WWII propaganda in the United States trying to force everyone into a nuclear family setting for a capitalistic, patriarchal society.

Family structures have varied all over the map throughout time and across cultures.  This one particular configuration should not be the “default” that everyone falls into automatically, and those who don’t are considered deviations.  If anything, this nuclear family model is the historical deviation, and it’s turning out to have less and less applicability as American and Western European cultures evolve into more ethical structures allowing more freedom for individual variation and preferences in people’s pursuit of happiness.

I think more heteromononormative relationships would benefit from separating sleeping quarters and developing personal spaces within shared homes the way some of us who do relationships differently have done with our own families.  This doesn’t mean that people can’t be *allowed* to share sleeping space when they want to.  Just that having their own space and learning to accept sleeping apart as a “normal” option for relationships (rather than a sign of a problem) helps in developing autonomy, individuality, and solves a lot of poor sleeping habits that we Westerners are kinda famous for.

Once we start sleeping better, the rest of our days tend to get more productive and we become generally happier, which will spill into the happiness and success of our romantic and familial relationships.  We currently spend a lot of money on various products designed to mitigate or compensate for the problems that come along with shared sleeping space.  Those are problems that could be solved entirely by simply not sleeping together (when our circumstances and finances allow for it).

I am in love with this corset vest meant for masculine fashion. I need to make one with feminine lines for me now.

Y'know, in my copious spare time.

The other corset vests seem to be more like standard corsets but with masculine lines.  The one in the thumbnail looks more like it's double-layered with a corset underneath and a vest on top.   That's the one I like and that's the one I'll be making, if I ever get around to it.

There was a great forum thread somewhere about how to make dresses for masculine fashion / male bodies.  The discussion was about how the trick was to not just put men in dresses, but to tailor non-pants to male bodies using "masculine" lines.

Feminizing male bodies or mixing masculine & feminine fashion is a different thing.   This was about taking "women's" clothing and turning it into something masculine people can wear and still be masculine.  Women have tons of examples of taking "men's" fashion and turning it into "women's" fashion by re-tailoring it to fit curvy bodies or using more feminine lines and elements.  Darting a button-up collared shirt, for example.

That's part of how we got away with expanding our available fashion choices into more masculine avenues, such as wearing pants - we feminized pants and now women in pants is just seen as "normal", whether they're feminized versions or not.

If men in our extremely patriarchal, fragile masculinity culture are ever going to move towards more freedom of fashion expression and break out of their much more narrow fashion boxes, one of the ways to do it is to masculinize traditionally feminine clothing, the way we feminized traditionally masculine clothing.

The examples in the thread (that I wish I could find now, so I could share it) gave some really great examples of do's and don't's for masculine skirt-wearing.  One suggestion was to avoid emphasizing the waist, which is the opposite recommendation for feminine styles because emphasizing the waist in a feminine style is intended to highlight the curve of the hips, waist, and ribcage.

Instead, drop or raise the waist, or pair it with shirts, blouses, or jackets that go about butt-length, to make more of a rectangular or triangular shape rather than an hourglass figure.  We see this in tuxes, where the waistline is hidden beneath a cummerbund or vest and the jacket extends to below the butt or even as low as the knees.  This elongates the torso and creates rectangle or triangle shapes instead of curved hourglass shapes.

This corset vest manages to both shape the midsection and also follow the above guideline by not shaping it in the same way that feminine corsets do with hourglass silhouettes and extending to the upper hip, creating a long triangular shape by extending the shoulders with the curve in the seams, which is very masculine.

As a straight woman, I'm attracted to masculinity. I just am, I can't help it. I think if I saw a man wearing this in real life, I might just swoon.

https://www.quora.com/What-should-an-orphan-girl-do-to-get-married/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What should an orphan girl do to get married?

A. Are you asking how a person without living parents goes about finding a romantic partner who will eventually become a legal spouse?  Or are you asking how to conduct a wedding ceremony without living parents to fulfill some of the traditional roles like the father walking the bride down the aisle or the father-daughter dance?  Because those are two very different questions.

A person without living parents goes about finding a romantic partner in the same way that everyone else does - they meet people, eventually falls in love with one (or a few) of them, decides that legal marriage is the right step, and then gets married.  There is nothing about parents necessary for any step in that process.

Some cultures do set up marriages through the parents as brokers.  The parents find the appropriate spousal applicants, a choice is made (either by the prospective bride and groom or by the two sets of parents), and then the parents arrange for the wedding.  In that case, when there are no parents to make these arrangements, the process is going to be much more difficult for a person without living parents to find a spouse.

For that scenario, I can’t offer any advice because I am not part of a culture that encourages this process, so I don’t know what the acceptable alternatives would be for them, because each culture that has this practice might have different protocols for choosing alternatives.  Perhaps some elderly neighbors would step in as the parents?  Maybe there are organizations that perform this service for a fee?  I don’t know.

As for how to have a wedding ceremony when there are people missing from certain key roles, well, there are tons of alternate wedding ceremonies out there.  Unless you are just absolutely dead-set on having a traditional wedding where those roles are mandatory, in which case, again, I can’t help you with that.  You have to be willing to be flexible if you want to participate in a tradition when you are not in a traditional situation.

My parents are living, and yet I did not have any traditional parental roles in my wedding.  My father did not walk me down the aisle, we did not have a father-daughter dance, my spouse’s parents didn’t attend at all so he didn’t have a mother-son dance, my father didn’t give me away, they didn’t even pay for the wedding.

We designed our own ceremony that followed the *pattern* of a generic American Christian wedding ceremony, but that actually subverted all of the traditional elements.

In our “unity ritual”, we performed a ritual that emphasized our individuality and interdependence rather than our joining into one.  In our family ritual, we acknowledged the importance of our other partners and family members as part of the whole and including them in our marriage, rather than talking about the family we would be creating with each other.

We did not have an aisle at all and the groom not only saw me and the dress before the ceremony, we got ready in the same room.  The entire wedding party (including the bride and groom) mingled with the guests before the ceremony, and when the wedding music started, we just all met up on the stage from wherever we were standing, rather than walking down any aisles.  We also did not have a groom’s side and a bride’s side.  We had our bridesmates and groomsmates standing interwoven with each other in a semi-circle behind us, with us facing the audience (so they could hear), and our officiates standing below and between us and the audience.  Also, we had mixed genders in our respective wedding parties.

We kept the ring exchange, because Franklin likes wearing rings, but we have an understanding that I will not wear mine regularly because I don’t like wearing rings in my dangerous, manual labor job.  We kept the first dance because the thing that started this whole ball rolling was my passion for dance and Franklin recently discovering his, so dancing together was an important symbol for us.

We didn’t have a cake cutting (I made mini cupcakes), we didn’t have a bouquet toss or garter toss, we didn’t have rice (but I did provide bubbles), we didn’t have a bachelor party (we had a pre-wedding party that everyone attended together, no gender segregation) … we didn’t have most of what makes an American Christian wedding a “wedding”.

And yet, it still looked like a wedding.

 

I have the entire thing detailed at http://bit.ly/SquiggleWeddingCon - the ceremony, the food, the music, the dress, all the pictures, everything.

Your wedding can be however you want it to be.  If you want it to *look* traditional but make some changes like not having parental participation, you can do that.  If you want to go out of your way and make it look totally different, you can do that too.  It’s your wedding.  It’s supposed to symbolize the people getting married - who they are together and the life they are building together.  So make your wedding ceremony reflect that.  If that means that someone doesn’t have living parents, then that’s how the ceremony will look.

www.quora.com/Couples-who-have-stayed-in-nontraditional-long-term-relationships-swingers-poly-etc-How-do-you-feel-about-your-relationship-now-What-would-you-tell-young-couples-who-choose-that-lifestyle/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Couples who have stayed in nontraditional long term relationships (swingers, poly, etc.) How do you feel about your relationship now? What would you tell young couples who choose that lifestyle?

A. I feel content, satisfied, excited, loved, aroused, humbled, and inspired by my relationships now. Notice that I used the plural there. Because I’m polyamorous, I have more than one relationship.

I am not a couple. I am not half of a couple. I am a whole and complete person who also has partnerships with other whole and complete people. I have my own identity, my own agency, my own autonomy, as do my partners. Because we are whole and complete people, we are *able* to enter into mutually satisfying and fulfilling partnerships of equals and we are able to design the kind of relationships that make us happy. One cannot have ethical relationships with half-entities or incomplete people.

As Jessica said, if you’re starting out as a couple, you’re already doomed. I would tell all new “couples” that they need to first disentangle themselves and find their identities that they have subsumed into their relationship before trying to engage with other people, regardless of the style of non-monogamy or non-traditional relationship they’re interested in.

Everyone you get into any kind of relationship with deserves to be in a relationship with a whole and complete person, not a relationship construct.

Rediscover your identity. Take back your autonomy. Become whole and complete people who are in a partnership with each other. And *then* try something different.

The Most Skipped Step[s] When "Opening A Relationship" + 1

I would also tell people in couples that it is not possible to “open up” an existing relationship. All relationships are between individual people. You have to deconstruct your relationship first and then reconstruct it as a new, “open” version (whatever version that means for you) where two individual people are now in a relationship that accommodates whatever non-traditional format you’re pursuing.

You might have to literally break up first and then get back together with a renegotiated relationship structure. Practice saying that: “we are not ‘opening up’, we have deconstructed and are reconstructing a totally new relationship that is open to X”.

"Opening Up" A Relationship Doesn't Work, Try This Method Instead

And then basically read everything I write under my Couple Privilege and Unicorn Hunter tags on my blog (which, to be fair, has some strong overlap):

Entries tagged with unicorn hunting
Entries tagged with couple privilege

Mostly I tell young people not to try polyamory.  It’s not really something that you can just “try”, like test driving a car.  The car has no feelings about your inexperienced handling of it and subsequent return to the dealership.  These are real people you’re “experimenting” with, and we don’t like being people’s chemistry experiments.  We’re usually the ones who get blown up in the lab when you make a mistake and then decide that open relationships aren’t for you and you go back to your comfortable, safe, monogamous couple.

While nobody knows for sure what they want if they haven’t done it before (and people are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy), I would rather not see anyone “try” open relationships.  I would rather see people taking a really good, long, hard look at themselves, really considering all the options, and deciding that this is something they feel, down in their very soul, that they need to be doing right now.

They don’t have to decide for sure that they definitely *are* poly, or whatever.  They don’t have to decide ahead of time what their relationship structure will look like (in fact, please don’t do this either).  They don’t have to make a choice that they will be forced to stick with for the rest of their lives.  They just have to decide that they will be jumping, all-in, when they make that leap, that this is a decision they are wholeheartedly embracing, regardless of the outcome.

They can have some wibbles, some concerns, some doubts, some fears.  Courage is not the absence of fear.  It’s acknowledging the fear and then doing it anyway.  But when “couples”, or people go into open relationships and leave a “back door” open for themselves, that makes the people they are asking to entrust them with their hearts (or their bodies) disposable.  That’s a Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.  That’s not fair, or ethical, for anyone.

If you can hear the cautionary tales and people like me saying that this is not a decision to make lightly, that you are responsible for how your actions affect those you get involved with, and you think about the type of relationships you’re attempting to have and you still really want them and feel like this is the right path for you to be on, then great.

But if you’re doing it because someone you love wants to and it’s the only way to keep them, if you think it might be “fun” to “try something new” or “spice up your relationship”, or you think that maybe you could be willing to explore something as long as there is a safety net for you to fall back on … don’t. Just … don’t.

And one last thing - listen to the community.  New couples have a tendency to come up with an idea and then relentlessly pursue it, while the veterans in that relationship style tell them there are better ways, and the new couples get mad at the community for being “mean” nor “not accepting” or “intolerant”.

Look, you’re not the first one to try this.  You’re also not a special snowflake who can somehow make all the same mistakes that thousands of people before you made but will come out of it with different outcomes.  The veterans are telling you things that often they wish they had known before starting out.  We’ve learned the hard way so that you don’t have to.  If the whole community is telling you that you’re “doing it wrong”, or you feel that everyone is against you, it’s probably something that *you’re* doing, not everyone else.

You’re going to have to learn some humility here and learn to listen to hard things from people who have been there, done that, wore out the t-shirt.  There is a *reason* why communities develop community wisdom or trends for how things are done.  You don’t need to burn your hand on the candle flame (or worse, burn someone else’s hand because you wanted to play with fire) - we learned a long time ago that fire is hot and how to play with it safely.  Listen to us and you’ll decrease the chances of anyone getting seriously burned.

Btw, just in case anyone else needs this info, I found a menstruating aid that can be worn during sex.

I decided to finally try out a diva cup type thing so I could go without underwear (which means no pads, and even though I can't wear tampons (TSS), I didn't want the string hanging down either).  I assumed I would be limited to no PIV, just other activities with a cup in, and that was fine as long as I could show up in a short skirt and no underwear and not get blood everywhere.

But right next to the cups was this package of something called Softdisc (disposable discs) that said on the side it could be worn during sex.  I know there are other products that can be worn during sex, but this was the only one on the shelves that said so on the package.  Probably my very first time wearing an internal menstruation aid shouldn't have been a product I had never heard of before while doing something ... questionable with it on.

But I tried it on the night before to get the hang of it and to see if it would trigger my TSS or otherwise be uncomfortable, and told him that if he could feel it and it was bothersome, we could stop and do other things.  He was all for trying it.

It's a large plastic ring with a soft, crinkly bag attached, like an internal condom, only the bag is much shallower.  You squeeze the ring to make a long strip instead of a circle, and push it in and *down*, not up.  Then, once it gets past the pubic bone, you push the ring up to form a seal around the cervical opening.  It just kinda hangs out there, hovering above the vaginal canal.

I could feel the ring with my finger (which is good because how could you take it out if you can't find it again?) so I assumed the hard ring would either be uncomfortable for him or get slammed into my cervix.  Neither happened.  He said he could barely feel it and it wasn't uncomfortable, and I didn't notice it at all.

However, it did slip a little, so I spotted afterwards until I changed it out.  And because it wasn't sucked up where it should have been, it slipped a lot during a bowel movement push.  That's how you remove it, btw, you push to make the ring more accessible and then hook a finger under the ring and pull while still pushing your bowel muscles.

So I would recommend changing it after penetration, but it worked as advertised.  And now I can have penetrative sex while on my period!  (I don't like messy sex, so I refused to before)

https://www.quora.com/Some-women-say-they-dont-want-a-guy-to-ask-for-permission-to-kiss-them-They-say-Just-do-it-But-the-MeToo-movement-and-current-culture-seem-to-make-it-risky-for-a-man-to-take-any-actions-without-getting-consent-How/answer/Franklin-Veaux

Consent is so difficult for some people to grasp!

So, I have a non-consent fetish. I really like rough, violent sex. I like it when it feels like my partner is so overcome with lust for me that he just takes me without regard to my feelings on the matter. My interest in violent sex waxes and wanes depending on other variables in my life. Sometimes I really don't want any violence at all and I'm totally into the whole sappy romance-with-candlelight-and-soft-focus-filter thing. But when I'm in a depressive state, my interest in violent sex is particularly strong.

I happen to be in one of those depressive states right now, while simultaneously actively looking for new partners. Which means that dating is particularly frustrating for me, because I really want that whole swept-away, passionate, lustful experience but men are just awful and I can't stand them right now because politics and depression. When some of the people on the dating apps that I'm using start right out with the kind of aggressiveness that I could have been into, I get pissed off at them. So, things are complicated for me right now.

But if I was out with someone, and there was some chemistry between us, and he did this to me ... I'd probably drop trou right there. Aggression, control, and still consent.

"lean in and whisper in someone’s ear, “You’re very attractive and I would love to kiss you, but I’m not going to unless you tell me you want it.”"

What if something like that happened at each stage?

I am frequently asked for TV recommendations. My parents just asked me to write down all the shows I was recommending to them because I apparently blurted out too many titles to remember. So I started writing out a list, and then also a short description so that she would know what they were about and why I recommended them.

Then I got the idea to archive this list somewhere and add to it as I go so that I don't have to keep writing it out every time. I watch a shitload of television (and movies), across just about all genres, and it's hard to remember them all, or to remember which movies to recommend to which people, who might have different tastes.

So I'm going to attempt to start a list. We'll see how well I keep up with it. I'm starting with a list of TV shows that I think my parents would like including my own description, and I'll be adding titles of shows that I recommend for other people, along with descriptions of those at a later time. For right now, if it has a description, it's because I'm recommending it to my parents. If it doesn't, then I recommend it, but for people who have different tastes than my parents. Later, when I update this post, I'll also update the explanation here.  It's late, so I'm just trying to get through my parents' list right now and I'll come back to this later for the others.

I am also going to list what network the show is on, but if the networks keep changing their inventory to make it too difficult to keep up, I'll abandon that. I may make a Listal list, but I can't include commentary on individual entries, just the groups within a list (apparently I can: https://www.listal.com/list/my-tv-show-recommendations).

I may also consider an airtable database, but you have to create an account (apparently) to see my databases and I know my parents are not going to do that, so that's a project for later down the road. I really like the Listal service, but I also really want to have my commentary on each listing.

So, for now, my TV show recommendations:

Netflix

• Grace & Frankie - hilarious comedy. 2 very different women in their '70s who don't like each other get dumped by their husbands so they can marry each other and the two women end up supporting each other. Hijinks ensue.


• iZombie - cop drama with an undead twist. A promising young doctor gets attacked at a party on a boat, falls overboard, washes ashore, and wakes up dead with a craving for brains. Unable to tell anyone that she's a zombie now, she gets a job at the city morgue so that she can steal brains without anyone noticing. She discovers that she takes on the personalities of the brains she eats and also accesses some of their memories. When a murder victim comes in, she tells the investigating police officer that she's "psychic" and starts teaming up with him to solve crimes.


• Cobra Kai - surprisingly good drama. Bad guy from the Karate Kid movie, Johnny Lawrence, is all grown up now and re-opens his old dojo and starts teaching karate. But he's still a jerk. Daniel LaRusso is now a successful car salesman with a beautiful wife and kids who tries to stop Johnny from imposing the abusive values of Cobra Kai dojo on the next generation.


• The Good Place - absurd comedy. Eleanor wakes up in an office waiting room, where she is told by an administrator (played by Ted Dansen) that she is dead and in the good place. But the description of Eleanor's life on earth in her file is not true. Now Eleanor has to figure out how to prevent anyone from finding out that she was actually a terrible human being so that they don't kick her out of the Good Place and send her to the Bad Place.


• Lucifer - supernatural cop drama. Lucifer, God's favorite son and angel who was cast out of heaven to rule hell, decides that he's done taking orders from an absentee father and abandons his underworldly administrative position for a life of luxury up on Earth. Where he meets Detective Chloe Decker and discovers that he rather enjoys helping her solve crimes even though she seems to be the only human on the entire planet who is immune to his charms.


• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - musical comedy. Rebecca Bunch is a successful New York City lawyer with a ton of anxiety problems who spontaneously decides one day to quit her lucrative position and move across the country to California, where her old middle school boyfriend lives, because dating him one summer is the last time she remembers being happy. The question is, can she convince him to love her and get back together, or is she just a psychotic stalker with a penchant for sappy musical numbers?


• Dead To Me - thriller / mystery. Recently widowed when her husband was killed by a hit and run vehicle, Jen struggles to cope with single motherhood and latent anger issues. Until Judy appears in her life. The exact opposite of foul-mouthed, angry Jen, Judy is sweet and kind and a little bit hippie-dippy. But who is she? Where did she come from? And who killed her husband?


• Dexter - cop drama with a murderous twist. Dexter is a forensic scientist with the Miami police department. He investigates murders by studying the methods by which people kill, including a specialty in blood spatter patterns. All the better to hide his own serial murders. But it's OK because he only kills other bad guys!


• Fuller House


• Sense8


• Altered Carbon


• One Day At A Time


• Black Mirror


• Sex Education

Hulu

• Elementary - Sherlock Holmes cop drama. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never liked the character he created and deeply resented his popularity. Consequently, the character of Sherlock Holmes is kind of a jerk. Doyle was trying to tell us that the sort of person who relies on "logic" is someone we should dislike, but for some reason, everyone loved his stories anyway. Over a century later, dozens of remakes have been made but they all have to work with this unlikable character. This imagining takes the Sherlock character into new realms, with Lucy Liu as Dr. Watson, not his sidekick and chronicler but a partner who can hold her own against the legendary Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Watson team up together to solve crimes while we get a very different perspective on who they both are.


• Lie To Me - Sherlock Holmes-like cop drama. Cranky, abrasive Dr. Cal Lightman develops the theory of "micro-expressions" - tiny, quick, involuntary expressions that pass over people's faces that give away what they're thinking. Very loosely based on a real (but debunked) theory where Paul Ekman would analyze expressions from video, one frame at a time, whereas Lightman is able to read these expressions in real life as they happen with almost magical accuracy. The Lightman Group is a private business for hire that will detect people's lies and solve mysteries, sometimes even partnering with the police to solve crime.


• Bones - odd couple crime drama. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan teams up with FBI agent Booth to investigate crime, loosely based on the real life and novels of a forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs. Agent Booth brings human remains to a federal science lab where Dr. Brennan "Bones" studies them to help solve their deaths.


• Numb3rs - odd couple crime drama. Two brothers, one a decorated and successful FBI agent and the other a brilliant math genius and professor, who don't get along with each other because they don't understand each other. Until one of Don's FBI cases needs Charlie's mathematical expertise and brings them together.


• Full House


• Family Matters


• Perfect Strangers


• Designing Women


• Wonder Years


• Golden Girls


• MASH


• Cheers


• Married With Children


• Firefly


• Doogie Howser

Disney+

• Agent Carter - historical cop drama. Agent Peggy Carter was a secret British agent who worked on the Captain America project in World War II. After Captain America went Missing In Action and the war ended, she moved to the United States to work with the super secret organization called the Strategic Scientific Reserve in New York City, where she tries to solve crimes while battling her coworkers' and superiors' disbelief that women are capable of doing anything other than serving coffee and filing paperwork.


• The Mandalorian

Other Networks

• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

I'm reading 19 Weeks, a kinky erotica novel by Franklin Veaux, where a woman suspects her husband of cheating on her, so she tries to catch him in the act, and in the process, discovers that their affair turns her on. But she's still really angry about the cheating, so she finds herself confronting them when she catches them, and instead of automatically threatening him with divorce, she insists that they owe her 19 weeks of catering to her desires since they spent 19 weeks ignoring hers for their own.

The story is an emotional processing of people who make some bad choices whose consequences lead them to a surprisingly functional D/s/s relationship with the woman in charge of her husband and his "concubine", as she ends up being called.

The story is pretty hot, but I'm straight with a slight gay male fetish. So, while re-reading it today, it occurred to me that I could make a few tweaks to the story and get a tale that would appeal more to someone like me.

In my story, the woman suspects her husband of infidelity, and she hides out in the house, waiting to catch him in the act. But what she doesn't realize is that her husband's new lover is another man.

While watching them start to have sex from her hiding place with the camera she's using to collect evidence for the eventual divorce, she discovers that voyeurism of two men gets her really aroused, and through the course of the book, she's forced to confront some of her assumptions about gender roles and orientation now that she recognizes this fetish.

As she is processing her anger and her surprising arousal when she confronts the two men, instead of simply threatening her husband with divorce, she somehow ends up demanding that the two men basically become her sex slaves to make up for the fact that they started their affair with no concern to how their behaviour would affect her.

Never having any experience or exposure to the world of kink, this experiment of hers unlocks desires she didn't even know she had, and leads her to discover kinks and fetishes she never knew existed, as our diminutive protagonist doms the fuck out of two much larger men, who bow to her every wish.

Except ... one time, she makes a mistake and crosses a line. As newbies will while they learn themselves and everyone's limits. She crosses a line and, overwhelmed with all these new conflicting feelings of shame, resentment, guilt, and a surprising desire for being dominated, the men rebel at their captor and collaborate to take her down - in a scene that both frighten and arouse everyone with its intensity of pleasurable feelings.

As she discovers a new kink she not only didn't know she had but would have been horrified to think anyone could actually *like* engaging in only a few weeks before, she decides to include this new activity of the men ganging up on her into their new routine ... except it will be done at *her* pleasure from now on, as she discovers a new vocab phrase - topping from the bottom.

What will happen after the time limit is up and everyone has served their time? Will she release them and the men go off together, without her? Will she try to "save her marriage" and go back to the way things used to be once their debt is paid, leaving the Other Man discarded and alone? Or will the three of them find a balance point, now that they know that this kind of arrangement can even exist, let alone work out?

I'm sure anyone reading this can guess where I would take this story if I were writing it.

Unfortunately, I am a pretty good writer, but erotica is not my area of expertise. I would love to read this book, though.

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.

#ProTip - Don't ask a woman to dance more than twice in a row either.  And by "row", I mean 2 consecutive songs, OR 2 times dancing with you with neither of you dancing with anyone else in between.  2 is the limit, and even that should be reserved for those times when the first dance is at least halfway through the song so that it doesn't really "count" as a full dance.

So, like, you ask her to dance, then you sit down next to her and talk at her for the next 3 songs, then you ask her to dance again, then sit down next to her and talk at her some more, and then ask her to dance a third and a fourth time, and neither of you dances with anyone else in between.

Don't do that.

Don't monopolize someone's time at a social dance.   If you sit down next to her and start talking to her, other people are less likely to come and interrupt to ask her to dance with them.  So she may only be sitting with you and not dancing with others because you just cockblocked them, not because she's actually that into you.

Ask someone to dance once.  Thank them, walk them back to where you picked them up, and then leave them.  Make sure you dance with at least one other person next.  Keep an eye out to make sure either she has danced with someone else, or she has been standing there so long that she might be feeling ignored so you can offer her another dance because that's what she came there to do.

In non-dance settings (dance settings being ballrooms, Latin clubs, swing dances, etc., non-dances being things like bars, parties, clubs, and other social events), it may seem a little abrupt to limit yourself to just one dance and then bail on them.  The Argentine Tango scene has a 3-song minimum limit, so if you're out, like, at a bar or something, you could probably go as many as 3 consecutive songs, or perhaps 1 song followed by conversation followed by another song.

I usually give someone 3 songs just in case they're an Argentine Tango dancer and not just socially inept.  I started doing that when I first ran into a Tango dancer at a salsa club.  He properly did the "ask, leave, ask later" method a couple of times, and then we danced a partial song so he asked for a second consecutive song, and then mentioned being a Tango dancer who was used to 3 songs, so I acquiesced to the Tango etiquette and he very properly dropped me off after the 3rd song and left me alone for a while so we could both dance with others.

Once I recognized this as a thing, I have now had it happen to me several times, so I give everyone a 3-song limit, where I will try to leave after one song, but if they hold onto me for a second song, I will give them 3 songs to let go voluntarily, after which time I will abruptly just leave them on the floor.  So far I have met several Argentine Tango dancers this way and I've only had to interrupt one person who was going for a 4th song and who was not a Tango dancer. (I also did not dance with him again).

Those who have mastered the art of flirting know the trick to "leave them wanting more".  Give them a taste, and then back the fuck off for a bit.  Tell them you see someone you know that you want to say hi to, and you'll be back later, or something.  Then surreptitiously keep an eye out. Are they scanning the crowd for you?  Or are they keeping their head low, hoping you won't see them again?  Or are they scanning the crowd for someone else to rescue them?

Catch their eye again, smile, nod, and go back to what you're doing.  Do they reciprocate?  Or do they seem to have a 6th sense for avoiding your eye?

Partner dance events have ages-old etiquette customs that are actually pretty good guidelines, for the most part.  Especially because, as a geek myself, I know a lot of people who find social interactions to be kind of mysterious.  So here's a good guideline if you don't have an intuitive sense of how to entice someone with the taste / back off / reel them in style of flirting.

No more than 2 songs.  Whether that's actually dancing or chatting and using the songs as a timer. 2 consecutive songs, or 2 times in a row of dancing with them with no other partners for either of you in between (or, say, 2 songs worth of conversation with them, one-on-one, with no conversations with other people in between).

Go away for a little bit, see if you can catch their eye and do they seem excited to have you come back?  Then come back.  Rinse, repeat.

If not dancing, do this unless / until you get into a conversation with them where they seem focused and engaged, and there is good back-and-forth where you are both contributing, they keep their attention on you and the conversation, and seem excited to talk to you about whatever you're talking about.

Then you can talk to them as long as you both seem to want to talk to each other.  But I still recommend looking for natural pauses in the conversation and breaking off to "say goodbye to my friend over there" or grab a drink or even to dance with someone else, and then coming back to continue the conversation later.  That excitement that builds as one hopes for you to return really seems to affect a lot of people, so use it.

It will feel a little awkward, and maybe even a bit contrived at first, but practicing enough times at the "hello, now we engage, now I'm off again, now I'm back!" social interaction will make it easier with practice, and it will help you to avoid those awkward moments when you think someone is into you and they're desperately hoping that the ground will open up and swallow them whole just to escape without having to tell you that they don't want to talk to you anymore.

#TheArtOfFlirting #PartnerDancingLessonsAreOftenApplicableOutsideOfTheBallroom

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.

I know that Black Lives Matter is getting the most press among the ethnic groups fighting for equal rights these days, and that the history of oppression of black people is horrific and different from the oppression of other POC in the US...

but there are other groups of people who experience racism in the US, including violence, internment, discrimination, microaggressions, and even internalized racism when people use the same tactics against each other as are used against them.

This is not an either/or issue.  This is a yes-and issue.  As each international incident flies past the headlines, the groups associated with that incident see a spike in both violent and casual racism, and our current US administration only encourages it each time.  But then when another "incident" happens, that group's oppression gets forgotten as we focus on the next group du jour, while the blatant and subtle and internalized tactics of bigotry continue unchecked because we're not looking at that group anymore.

Intersectionality is complex and difficult.  In our race to be The Most Woke Progressive, when defending one group, we can't afford to ignore how our defense affects the other groups.  While each group has its own unique background and sometimes differing needs, that doesn't give us the right to ignore the toes of one group while standing up for another.

https://theautisticalien.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/autistic-life-hacks/

I am not autistic, but I do have OCD as a side effect? of my anorexia, and I also never defeated my depression from my last depressive episode (like my first one that went totally away for decades until my life fell apart a few years ago and I had another episode that I combatted and am mostly OK from but still actively battling and sometimes lose ground with).

So I have a lot of executive dysfunction these days. I do most of the things in here. Switching to all disposable utensils has made such a huge benefit in my life. So has the dry shampoo and the tooth pick thingies instead of floss. Backup keys everywhere. Obsessive about places for things. 2 laundry baskets OTG when I started that! Giving in to pre-packaged food (sometimes the only time I'll get any veggies at all). Music and ear buds. Notes on my hands. To-do lists to prioritize. PACKING LISTS! ...

I have some somewhat younger, but still not "kids"-younger, coworkers at my retail store.  One of them is even an assistant manager, so she's above me in the hierarchy.

Often, some kind of subject comes up, in which I can say something like "oh, I've done that", or "I know how to do that", or "I used to have a job doing that", or whatever.  My coworkers, the manager in particular, boggle at how many different kinds of things I've done in my life.  She frequently asks me "is there *anything* you *haven't* done?!"  She says so with obvious envy and has expressed a desire to have accomplished more in her life so far.

So I tell her, which is what I want to tell everyone, that if there is something you always wanted to do (and you have no near-impossible barrier such as medical condition or lack of funds), just go out and do it.

The reason why I have "done it all" is because, every time I need another job, I take a job in an industry I've never tried before.  I've been officially working since I was 12 years old (like, taking-out-taxes kind of job), and unofficially working since I was physically strong enough to push a lawn-mower (but still too short to see over it - I had to hold my hands above my head and peer through the handle).

Then, when I say that an activity sounds like fun, I either do it, or I admit out loud that I'd like to but I'm not willing to make it a priority.

Do you know how many people tell me how exciting learning how to dance sounds, and how they'd love to get all dressed up and go out more often?  Do you know how many of them actually do it when I present them with opportunities literally daily to fit into their schedule and I offer free dance lessons and to go shopping with them to help them find appropriate shoes and attire?

I'll tell you, the numbers aren't even overlapping Venn Diagrams.  I've had one, count them ONE, partner who did not know how to dance, expressed an interest, and actually committed to learning, not just attended *a class* with me once and then gave up because of "time conflicts".

Unfortunately, we were not together long enough after that for him to become really proficient and I no longer speak to him so I don't know if he kept it up after the breakup.  So, even counting him as a partner who "stuck with it" is being generous.  And if I can't even get partners to learn to do a thing they express an interest in, that should tell you my success rate at getting anyone else to learn to do a thing.

(Also, I've only ever dated one person who was a dancer before meeting me, and we only danced 3 times in the 2 years we were together.  Franklin has learned how to dance since we started dating, but it wasn't because of me.  He resisted learning when I tried to teach him, so I gave up because I don't like to feel like I'm pressuring people and it took another decade and him moving across the country away from me to finally discover an interest in dance.)

So, here are my coworkers, with eyes wide and mouths open, awestruck at all the things I've done.  And I don't feel particularly accomplished - I've never traveled outside of the country, for instance (although that will finally change this summer), and for all the jobs I've held and skills I've acquired, I'm still poor as fuck.

But I decided as a child that I needed to learn things.  So I did.  And I decided as a young adult that I needed to face the things I was afraid of, so I do.   I take jobs that I have no experience in because they sound fun.  I created a social group to try new restaurants that we've never been to, just because.  I know far too many people who are afraid of food.

When someone says "I do a thing" and I think "that sounds like fun!", I make a point to try and do that thing with them (assuming they're the kind of passionate fan who likes to share their passions with friends).  Because of this, I have SO MANY interests and hobbies and things to do!  I can't even remember the last time I felt bored outside of being forced to be in a particular location where I couldn't access any of my interests (like at work with no internet).  I have vague memories of being a teen and older child who had long stretches of boredom.  I can't remember what that's like.

These days, my boredom is more about frustration that there are so many things to do but I can't get to them.

I recently pointed out some really long RV that I liked, and someone else said "wow, I can't drive something that big!".  And because of my reaction, I had to reflect on this a bit.  When he said "I can't drive that", everything in me just kind of froze, like he had started speaking a different language.  I couldn't process what he just said. What do you mean you can't drive it? You can drive a car. This is just a big car.

But before I said something out loud, I wondered at my inability to process what he said.  I realized that I drove a 40-foot school bus when I was in my twenties because it never occurred to me that I couldn't drive one.  I can drive a car. In fact, I can drive a manual transmission vehicle and most RVs are automatic transmission.  So the idea that I couldn't drive something simply because it's longer than my current vehicle ... does not compute.

So that's what I said to him - you can drive a car.  You can drive a van.  You can drive a vehicle up to 20 feet, so you can therefore also drive a vehicle up to 30 feet (the size of the RV I was commenting on), you just need to practice and learn it's longer size.

He was quite dubious.  And I realized how fortunate I am that it just doesn't occur to me that I can't do things unless I've actually tried it, or similar, and discovered that I can't do it.  I extrapolate - I can do this other thing, so of course I should be able to learn how to do this other thing that is like it, if I want to put in the effort to learn it.

I think a lot of people start out with the assumption that they can't do a thing, and that's what stops them.  I start out with the assumption that I *can* do a thing, so I need a good reason to be stopped from doing the thing.  Not being interested in trying it is one good reason.  Not having the money to do it is another.  Having a full plate of other awesome things is yet another.  But being afraid?  Assuming that I can't just because I never have?  Not good reasons.

So, there are occasionally times when I think "that sounds like fun!" but I don't make a point to try it.  But then, if I've expressed an interest in the thing out loud, I will immediately follow it up with something along the lines of "but I have so many other things I'm interested in, that I don't want to take the time to add another one, because I want to accomplish the tasks I have waiting for me from my other interests first."

Mostly, what I get from people is:

"I'd love to learn how to dance!"

"That's great! I'm happy to give some lessons, or here are a list of studios and events with cheap or free lessons."

"Oh, well, see, I don't have a lot of time, because I work 40 hours a week, and then there's that whole eating dinner thing at night, and the new episode of Game of Thrones is coming out!  So, sure, I'll go to a lesson.  Sometime.  Just let me know!"

"Well, how about a lesson right now?"

"Oh, uh, I dunno, I don't think I can right now, uh, hey, is someone calling my name?"

My point is that it's OK if you're not interested in a thing, or if you have other priorities.  Own that.  But if you are interested in things, and you feel any kind of envy over people who do interesting things, then you have to make a priority to go do interesting things.

Most of the time, people who seem interesting and exciting and who do lots of neat things don't have those neat things just fall into their laps. We make it a priority to go do those things.  If you want to be like those people, even just a little bit, you have to do what we do - go out and do things.  You have to challenge yourself, you have to do what frightens you, you have to just jump in and do it.

Nobody was good at any of the things we do the first time.  True, some of us had a little more natural talent than others, which made learning it less arduous.  But that's OK, I'm not talking about being *good* at things, I'm talking about *having experiences*.  We weren't good at things right away, and we were often nervous or frightened too.

And I'm still terrible at a lot of the things I do.  I'm like the worst bowler, for instance, but I still go bowling whenever I meet someone who likes it and is willing to prioritize going out and doing it.  Because it's not about being good at things, it's about having experiences.  I find a lot of things "fun" that I'm not particularly good at, so I make a point to find the "fun" part to be the important part, not the "good at" part.

But, the thing is, once you do a new thing, the next new thing is easier to do.  And the next new thing after that is even easier to do.

I learned how to rock climb on actual mountains in the Santa Cruz mountains when I was in high school.  I met a guy who I liked who was a rock climber with all his own gear.  So he took me to a good beginner rock that had rappel points installed at the top.  We walked up the backside of the rock, which had a nice but steep hiking trail.  He hooked me up into my harness, explained things to me, got me all safetyed in and attached to the point, and then said "go".

I stood on the edge of that rock and looked down.  It was terrifying. It was a sharp cliff edge and a straight rock face so that all I saw was the edge of rock and the ground many, many feet below me.

He said "no, you face backwards, stand with your heels hanging over the edge, hold onto your rope, and just lean back until you are horizontal to the ground.  Then you just ... jump."

It was the scariest thing I had ever done up to that point.  What do you mean, you just lean backwards over the edge of a cliff?!?  Are you fucking out of your mind?!  And then you jump?!!!?

"Yes, you jump straight 'up', which is actually sideways because you're horizontal.  You push off the side of the rock and away from it, letting some of the rope out as you go so that you kind of arc down.  You will swing back towards the rock, so then when your feet touch, you bend your knees to cushion the impact and prepare for the next jump, like your legs are spring coils.  Then you push off again, letting out more rope as you go so that you arc down a little further."

It took me a long time to trust my rope.  But I did.  I stood on the edge of that cliff, and I leaned backwards until I was horizontal to the ground, like a trick photography shot where someone is standing on the side of a building as if the side was the floor.  That leaning backwards part was the hardest part.  Once I was actually horizontal, the jumping part was much easier.

And then I learned the joy of flying.

My first rappel bounce was the most exhilarating experience I had ever had.  It was like a giant swing for grown-ups, in the most beautiful setting in the world.  I zoomed down that mountainside, learning my limits, feeling how much rope I should let out and how fast to achieve the perfect-to-me arc that gave me just the right amount of soaring and falling.

I felt like this was what I was meant to do.

This is my analogy for trying new things, not a story meant to convince you that all trying of new things results in fabulous, exciting, wonderful experiences.

It's scary to try new things.  It's like that first step of leaning backwards over a cliff - you don't know what's going to happen, you've never done this before so you have no reason to trust that your safety rope will hold you, and you don't know if you'll like it or if you'll fall to your death on the rocky ground below.

But after I touched down from my first rappel, I ran back up the backside of the mountain to do it again.  I hooked up to the point, I leaned over backwards, but this time, I knew that my rope would hold me.  It was still terrifying, but like a roller coaster that I knew I would survive.  So I leaned backwards much more comfortably and I much more quickly took my first jump out into the open space.

Once I tried a new thing and learned that I didn't die from it, the next time I tried a new thing was less terrifying.  Still frightening, but manageable.  I could deal with the nerves by telling myself that I had already done this and lived to tell the tale, and what a tale it was!  So worth it!  Maybe this time will be worth it too.

The more times I tried something new and didn't die from it, the easier it became to try new things after that, even though, by definition, they were things I had never tried so I couldn't know if I would like the experience or not.

There is still risk.  People still die from rock climbing and rappelling accidents, for instance.  I even met the guy who wrote a book, and then had a movie made about it, who had to cut off his own hand to escape being trapped by a boulder during a foolish solo hike and rock climbing trip.  This doesn't mean that either rock climbing or trying new things is always safe just because the last time I tried it, I didn't die.

But it means that being afraid is not a good enough reason to not try something that I otherwise want to do.

And there are some things that I think sound exciting but that I definitely do not want to try.  Sky diving, for instance - not my thing.  But I know lots of people who like it and I know I probably won't die from it.  But I'm not going to do it.  I own that.  I don't tell people that I want to try it, and then never commit to prioritizing it.

I also work in a craft store and I'm surrounded by all kinds of fun-looking projects that I will never get around to trying.  Again, I have lots of interests that I'm passionate about, so I am making a deliberate choice not to prioritize yet another new craft because I want to spend my time on the ones I have already started and love.  I own that too.

But if something sounds fun, and I have no medical or health reason or financial barrier to prevent me, and someone is standing right there offering me the benefit of their expertise, experience, and guidance into that world, I will take it.

And that's why I have coworkers in their mid-twenties who are shocked and amazed at all the things I have experienced in my life, who have said that they've only had this one job and no hobbies and feel like they have not accomplished anything in their own lives - I made a commitment *to myself* to have experiences, and they have not.  I made it a priority to try interesting things, so I have become an interesting person.  They have not made it a priority to try interesting things, so they feel that they are not interesting people.

This is a problem with a solution.

If it sounds interesting to you, try it.  No excuses (reasons, like health or money, sure, but no *excuses*).  Commit to leaning over that cliff.  Prioritize putting your heels out over the edge, holding onto that rope, and just pushing off.  It will get easier each successive time you try it, I promise.  Maybe only incrementally, but trying new things does get easier the more new things you try.

I’ve been writing a lot about Touch Starvation lately. Touch is one of my Love Languages. I have all kinds of baggage wrapped up in it, and, in fact, have been working on an adjacent theory about how emotional trauma affects the expression and repression of Love Languages. But that’s for another time.

What do you do when Touch is one of your LLs and your partner(s) is/are long distance? The last time I gave my 5LL workshop, someone asked me that question. Because of my baggage, I didn’t have a good answer, so I threw it out to the audience for brainstorming.  One of the proposed solutions that I managed to remember was to wear a shirt for a couple days and then send it to the partner so they could wear something that smells like you and vice versa. Preferably a soft shirt, something with pleasant tactile qualities.

Fast forward some time and after I announced our marriage plans, a metamour started working on a set of beautiful matching quilts for us, so we could have something tangible and symbolic of our relationship while apart. This combined the Touch LL with the Gift Giving LL and threw in some metamour bonding and was related to the theme of our wedding which was about the strength of partnerships being tied to the interconnectedness of the supportive family network.

So now, a couple years later, I find myself in strong NRE with a long distance partner at the peak of some Touch Starvation. I’m operating on a deficit of Touch already and all I want to do is be near him all the time. What to do?

As we’re getting to know each other, I’m slowly learning his LLs and his particular quirks and needs and limitations. The first night after I came home from my first visit to him, he remarked about “my” side of the bed still smelling like me. That stuck in my brain.  And then it hit me. I don’t exactly remember the order of events, did I think of this right then when he said that, or later at the fabric store or somewhere in between?

I came up with Long Distance Pillows. I’m quite sure I’m not the first to think of this. But I’ve never heard of them so someone else probably needs to hear of this too.

I know he likes soft things. I know he likes to sleep with pillows to cuddle. I know we both like Touch and that I, at least, am Touch Starved. I know he notices scent (not everyone does). So I found some very tactile-favorable fake fur material and made 2 small pillows.

The pillow of Me is solid black fur with little paw prints running up one edge, because I think of myself as a cranky black alley cat - a little rough around the edges, a little weather-worn, a little dark, but soft and lovable when I choose to be. He does not abstract himself in that way. He does not associate part of his identity with colors or animals or other symbols. So I picked a grey fur that matches my decor for the pillow of Him.

Then I slept with the pillow of Me for a month. When I went to visit him the next time, I revealed my surprise and my plan. He would sleep with Him and I would sleep with Me for the week, getting our respective scents on our respective pillows. Then I would go home, taking Him with me and leaving Me with him.

We could then have something soft to cuddle while we’re apart that reminds us of each other. When we get back together, we’ll swap pillows for the time we’re together and do it again.

A few days after I made the pillows, I was in a store and I found fake fur pillows just like the ones I was making. At first I was a little disappointed that I could have just bought a couple of pillows and saved some time. But then I realized that I like the fact that I hand made ours. In addition to putting in a zipper so they can be cleaned or the inner pillow can be replaced later and the little detail of the paw prints for Me, these are things I made myself with love and intent. That means something to me.

So, here is something that hits my Physical Touch LL, particularly the dialects of tactile sensation, scent, and sleep cuddling (which I like emotionally, but physically I have some challenges with), addresses, in part, some of my Touch Starvation, and hits my Gift Giving LL, particularly the dialects of tangible items representing thoughts I had of the person while apart and of creating which may overlap with Acts of Service as I use my skills to do something useful that I’m good at to meet an unmet need for someone.

So I share this for anyone who might find it a helpful idea. If you are not a crafty person, you can buy a pillow or blanket. If money is an issue, you can send a clothing item that you already own either to give them something with your scent or to have them wear it and send it back - depending on what you have and your individual circumstances.

You can even turn old t-shirts and other clothes into pillows and blankets if you are moderately crafty and want to save money. Some methods don’t even require sewing, you just fill the shirt and tie the openings shut. Check out no sew pillows on YouTube. This might be a good idea for those who have certain sentimental items like a concert shirt you got at a show you went to together or something. Even paper items can be turned into quilt squares (I’m not a quilter so I don’t know how but I’ve seen it done) so, like, love notes or doodles on a napkin or stuff like that.