joreth | Entries tagged with relationships

Q. What can make even a poly person jealous?

A. The same things that make non-poly people jealous. Because, here’s a secret … you ready?

Poly people are people.

That’s right, we’re just regular old human beings like everyone else. We are not emotionless sociopaths, we are not aliens, we are not relationship wizards. We’re just people. We have all the same emotions as you do, and we fuck up our relationships just like you do.

The only real difference is that we have a culture that prioritizes curiosity, authenticity, and autonomy. That doesn’t mean that individual monogamous people don’t prioritize those things and it doesn’t mean that individual poly people are necessarily *good* at those things. It means that we like to *say* that those things are important to us.

So we are pressured, from our culture and from our own internal sense of morality, to respect our partners’ right to make choices about their own bodies and emotions, and we are pressured to constantly inquire within ourselves about what the signal light on our dashboards is trying to tell us, and then to solve the actual problem.

Because that’s what jealousy is - it’s a signal light telling you that something is wrong. That’s all. Sometimes that signal is trying to tell you that you’re in a relationship with someone who is not respecting *your* autonomy, or your boundaries, or whatever. Sometimes that signal light is trying to tell you that you have unresolved issues to deal with that aren’t your partners’ fault.

Some people don’t like signal lights. They’re annoying. So they put a post-it note over their dashboard and try to pretend like the light isn’t on at all. That’s the culture that most people come from, including most poly people. It’s the culture that tells us that if you see a signal light, if you feel jealousy, you need to make the thing that’s lighting up your dashboard go dark - you need to stop the activity that’s making you feel jealous. Doesn’t matter *why* you feel jealous, just stop the feeling whatever the cost. Take out that light.

Poly culture tells us to pop the fucking hood and get your hands dirty trying to figure out why the damn light is on in the first place, and then fix. the. problem.

Unfortunately for us poly people, none of us are born mechanics. We’re all learning this shit as we go too. So our signal lights go on for the same reasons everyone else’s do. We all got the shitty factory programming.

But *some* of us stop the car, get underneath it, and shine flashlights around until we find the problem. Some monogamous people do that too. Because we’re all just people.

I was given a compliment that was definitely intended as a compliment and that I'm taking as a compliment and that, even though it includes a comparison, was definitely not intended to insult the person it was comparing, but nevertheless the compliment shouldn't actually need to exist and I'm using as a metaphor for a larger conversation on gender.

I have decided that there is actually a partner dance that I don't like: country swing. There are no patterns for the feet, it's literally a dance all about how fast and how frequently the lead can spin his partner (because gender norms). Now, dance involves the body so a dance style that doesn't focus on memorized step patterns can still be a legitimate dance style. But this is a dance style that is all about sequences of tricks with no concern for steps or musicality and relies on the strength of the lead to make the follow go where she is supposed to go.

And don't get me wrong but the really good country swing dancers do use step patterns and have musicality and the follows do as much work as the leads. But that's not the social dance experience. Usually it's a dude spinning the fuck out of some thin, young woman with no regard to how well it matches the music that's playing or whether she even knows how to do what he's making her do. Brute force will spin her and stop her without dropping her whether she knows what to do or not.

So, there was a guy at the wedding I went to recently who claimed to be able to two-step and swing dance. My sister grabbed him for a two-step and he was all over the place with her - no control, no musicality, just "slow-slow-quick-quick-spin-slow-slow-quick-quick-spin-spin-another spin-slow-slow-quick-quick".

When they sat down, he said that he was really rusty with the two-step and that he was better with swing. I would rather have danced a two-step with him, but since he said he was better at swing, I asked him to swing dance with me. So we got up and did a country swing exactly as described above - spin, spin, spin, who the fuck cares about beats and music?

I was told later that the dance with my sister looked pretty out of control and my mom was worried that he was actually going to hurt my sister, but she was amazed at how well I kept up with him. And I kind of downplayed it because 1) my sister was never as into partner dancing as she was into line dancing; 2) she hasn't danced in a while and I try to keep up with my dancing; and 3) I know exactly what "country swing" is and I know how to handle guys who dance like that.

So I've been feeling a little pleased that I impressed people by dancing with someone who had very little control and making it look like we were less out-of-control than we really were, mainly because *I* kept control of *me*. And it's legitimately not an insult to my sister, because he was the lead, so all problems were his fault. She's not even a poorer dancer than I am, necessarily, he was just that bad of a lead. I am, after all, a better follow than a dancer.

Here's the metaphor part: Too many cishet dudes are allowed to move through life like these country boys move across the dance floor - full tilt, without regard for their surroundings, who is around them, how they impact others on the floor, how out of control they are, dominating their partner, and with no regard to the mood of the music. And I have spent a lifetime developing the coping skills for how to keep my own feet underneath me when one of these guys swoops by and spins me around. And that's a compliment because it is, indeed, a skill that I've worked hard at and I am a good dancer (and "dancer") because of it.

BUT I SHOULD NEVER HAVE NEEDED THAT SKILL IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I should not ever be complimented for how well I can compensate for men's failings and flailings. Because men should not be allowed to stomp all over the floor and through life the way they do. But so many of them do so, that we just gave it its own dance style name and genre and said "yep, that's legit, that's how you do that!"

And we have done the social equivalent of tolerating and accepting men who do that in life.

Country swing is actually a really fun style to both watch and dance, *when done well*. But what *I* (and competition judges) think counts as "done well" and what social dancers think counts as "done well" are two very different things. It is, and should be, a legitimate style. But the way it's executed on a social floor is just fucking dangerous. It may be athletic, but it's not artistic, and it's not considerate. It's performative without being connective.

So don't be one of these country swing dudes. Pay attention to how you move through life, how you impact those around you, the space you take up, whether your partner is (or is able to) contribute equally to your partnership or are you just flinging them around with you, and for fuck's sake at least try to learn something about musicality because musicality is just emotional connection manifest physically. With a little math.

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.

Something I want to be careful of is the vilification of gaslighting. And by that, I mean that I want to draw a line between "this behaviour has harmful effects and we need to stop doing it" and "the people who gaslight are evil manipulators deliberately trying to drive you insane".

The reason why I want to draw that line is because characterizing it as the latter makes it too easy for people to distance *ourselves* from acknowledging when we do it. "I am not an evil manipulator, so I can't be gaslighting anyone." Even "evil" abusers see themselves as the victim in their stories.

The reason they abuse is because they have a *belief* that the actions they take are genuinely right, good, acceptable, appropriate, or warranted. Many of them feel that they are a good influence on others or that they are trying to better their victims or doing what they do for their own good. They can't change until they recognize that they are doing something wrong.

See The Villains As Ourselves

So when we use the latter definition, we give them justification room in their minds to excuse their actions. But if we use the former, then we ALL have to take a look at our own behaviour and keep working on bettering ourselves, and we can do that without the cognitive dissonance fighting us and telling us that we are a "good person" so this can't apply to ourselves. This makes it harder for outright abusers to excuse their own actions if the culture around them encourages this kind of reflection and correction of everyone.

Gaslighting is such a normal part of our society that we're mostly all raised with it all around us. That makes it difficult to identify when we do it ourselves.

One of the classic examples I use to illustrate non "abusive", well-intentioned gaslighting is a mother trying to get her child to eat her vegetables, the child says she doesn't like them, and the mother says in exasperation, "yes you do, now just eat them."

We likely have gaslighted people in these kinds of minor situations many times over our lives and never realized it, so never recorded it in our memories. Why should one of these totally normal conversations stick out in our minds, especially years later? It's *the way things are* in so many circumstances.

I can't remember anything specific but I'm sure I've said to people at various times "oh, yes you do!" when they said they didn't like something or didn't want something, and I'm sure I had good intentions when I did it. I'm not "evil", I'm a meat body driven by a belief engine and a product of my environment, which means I'm flawed.

The best I can do now is to be mindful of my language and try not to contradict people when they tell me their inner landscape. If I have reason to doubt them, such as suspecting *them* of trying to manipulate me, maybe I can ask for confirmation or I can point to conflicting *behaviour*, but I will try not to outright tell other people what they are feeling.

In this post, I want to be clear that I'm doing something that I often rant against doing - stretching the definition of a very importantly narrow term. Gaslighting is not simply remembering things differently, or even *just* telling someone with confidence that their memory of a thing is wrong, even if the "thing" in question is part of the other person's inner landscape. The original term "gaslighting" is, in fact, the second definition I used in my opening paragraph.

In the movie Gaslight, which is where the term comes from, a husband is *deliberately* changing the level of the lighting in the house (created by gas lights, not electric lights), and when the wife comments on the change in light, he *deliberately* says there is no change, so that the wife comes to doubt her own senses over time. The husband does all this *deliberately* so that he can have his wife committed to an asylum so he can access her money. This is a 1940s villain caricature, an evil mustachio'd villain who knows he is doing evil and doing it maliciously and selfishly.

The problem is that this is not how real life "villains" operate. And that's the point that I'm making here. It's important to keep a narrow definition of terms like "gaslight" and "abuse" and not round up just anything uncomfortable to these terms. But we have to *also* make sure that we don't keep the definitions so narrow that it only applies to people in black hats cackling in their lairs and stroking their white cats while they plot world domination.

Because that leads to everyday, ordinary people doing horrible things and justifying themselves because they are not evil villains. We have everyday, low-key examples of people trying to convince other people that they are not experiencing the things that they are experiencing. This is not the same thing as correcting people's flawed memories or understanding of factual claims, although that can also be weaponized. I'm talking about "yes, you do like broccoli!" when you do not, in fact, like broccoli.

These small little disregards of our inner landscape *lead* to large disregards of other people's inner landscapes, because it's the same thing but a manner of scope. The mother *believes* that it's in her child's best interest to eat veggies. And she's right, it is in her child's best interest, and the mother is, in fact, in a position of authority and power over the child to do "what's best" for the child. This is the nature of that relationship.

So it's a very small step to go from a parent / child power dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour, to a romantic partnership dynamic who uses an agency-dismissing tool to manipulate and control one's behaviour *for one's own good*. This is a tool we have been given by our society, so it's a tool we may not even notice that we are pulling out and using because our brains are little more than belief justification engines.

And if our society has also encouraged us to see villains as black hatted evil caricatures of people, then our giant justification engines are going to work overtime to make sure that we are not Bad People(TM). And since we are not Bad People(TM), we therefore cannot be doing the things that Bad People(TM) do.

And THAT is the point of this piece. Gaslighting, the action, needs to be understood as a Very Bad Thing, but it needs to be separated from our personal identities as a thing that only Very Bad People do. The action is a tool that we have all been taught how to use. It's normal and reasonable for people immersed in a culture that uses this tool to reach for the tool themselves. It is an *inappropriate* tool, but the people who use it are regular, everyday people who have understandable reasons for reaching for it.

And now that you know it is a common, ubiquitous even, tool in all of our toolboxes, we ought to be on the lookout for when *we* reach for this totally normal, common but unhealthy tool. Gaslighting is not a tool reserved only for the most evil of all evil people. It's a tool that everyone has been exposed to, and taught how to use. All you have to do now is teach yourself how to put that tool down and reach for another one.

www.morethantwo.com/polyprisonersdilemma.html

I wrote a rant a while back about my observation of a gender-based set of tendencies in the poly community. This is basically what I was talking about - People socialized as men have a higher tendency to start out defensively while people socialized as women have a higher tendency to start out cooperatively. But I don't mean that in the emotional sense, because often there is no clear gender line between people who feel *emotionally* cooperative and people who feel *emotionally* defensive.

So, let me expand a bit on what I mean there.

"I tend to see a lot of people in poly relationships who are very uncomfortable with the idea of meeting a lover’s other lovers. This is one of the most common sources of angst I’ve noticed for people who are polyamorous, especially if they’re fairly new to polyamory.

Meeting a lover’s other lover presents a host of opportunity for cooperation or defection. You can reach out to the other person and try to make that person feel welcome; you can be closed up and defensive to that person; you can even be actively hostile to that person. And, of course, your lover’s lover has similar choices."

When it comes to people who think about the idea of metamours, and who feel uncomfortable with the idea of meeting the metamours, I, personally, have not noticed any gender differences. Newbies, generally speaking, feel all kinds of anxiety about meeting metamours - should they or shouldn't they? How should they meet? When? Under what circumstances? Etc.

But when it comes to *actually* meeting, I've observed that, in heteronormative relationships (regardless of the gender or orientation of the participants, these are relationships that fall into heteronormative traits, habits, patterns, can take advantage of hetero privileges, etc.), it usually falls to the women to making it happen. Women are the ones encouraging the men to meet each other, and women are the ones voluntarily reaching out to other women to meet (or ask in the forums how to go about doing so).

Not without trepidation, not without playing dominance games, not without anxiety. But actually *doing* the emotional labor in poly relationships, I see more women doing more of the work.

In my observations, men have a tendency to just wait around until their women partners instigate or organize some kind of event that will bring the men into proximity with each other. Where they might bother to chat, if they happen to be near enough to hear each other, but unless they find some kind of common interest that sparks curiosity and enthusiasm, men have a tendency to just leave it at that and not put forth much effort to go uphill trying to build connection that takes some effort and doesn't happen spontaneously and easily. And if the men are the pivot points, they just sit back and let the women meet or not meet.

But women as the pivots have a tendency, in my observation, to keep talking and prodding their men partners to meet. They're the ones who schedule the dinner date, or host a party, or set up Skype for the men to meet each other. And if the women are the metamours, they are less likely to wait for their pivot man to insist on meeting and they'll send an email to their women metamours, introducing themselves and arranging a coffee date, or whatever.

These observations are not related to how each person *feels* about meeting metamours and not related to the *strategies* each person employs in meeting the metamours. I've seen people of all genders play out dominance games or pull rank or be passive aggressive, and I've seen people of all genders have excellent communication skills and get along well with metamours.

It's the *labor* that's involved that I had noticed often falls along gender lines and that's what I was ranting about in that post. And it has been my observation and experience that, when the women do all this early emotional labor involved in reaching out and establishing contact, then shit gets done because the groundwork has been laid.

Sometimes the "shit" that's getting done is productive. The women build friendships and a level of trust that enables them to weather turbulence in relationships because they built a foundation to have faith that trouble will eventually be worked out. That foundation gives them a sense of resiliency that makes the metamour relationships more likely to be successful and closer-knit.

And sometimes the "shit" that's getting done is not productive, including hierarchical primaries laying foundations for rank-pulling and place-setting and generally undermining the relationship between their partner and metamour. This is when the traps for hierarchy are set for future snapping shut on the poor secondaries and when cuckoos get the eggs in place to push out of the nest.

My point was that "shit gets done" because they start the work early.

But when men, generally speaking, just kind of passively allow their women partners to take the lead, they end up not having these sorts of foundations with their metamours. And then if a conflict ends up happening (which it doesn't always, but if it does), then the men don't have that connection, that trust that they will find a solution together through collaboration. They see themselves as on an island with their woman partner, who sometimes sails over to another island and stuff just kinda happens over there, and then she comes back. They don't see themselves as really *part* of their metamours.

And when men passively allow their women partners to do all the emotional labor in facilitating their own metamour relationships, that adds to the anxiety and stress and *effort* of the women maintaining those metamour relationships. Regardless of whether they all start out cooperating or not, the women metamours in this scenario are doing it all on their own while the men pivots just sit back and let them hash things out. The women carry the burden of maintaining both their romantic relationships and the metamour networks.

I generally have good metamour relationships. Not without their bumps, but pretty healthy and collaborative. But I'm an introvert and managing a lot of emotional relationships is fucking *exhausting*. It would be nice to have a little help facilitating, especially in the beginning when I don't know my metamour very well and we haven't yet found our common paths.

Add to that, the effort I have to put in to maintain *other people's* metamour relationships, because without me poking and prodding, none of my men partners have ever reached out on their own to meet each other.

I take that back - Sterling often reached out without me prodding him. He would often ask me if it was OK to contact one of my other partners and he would reach out to them. But he's the most social extrovert I've ever dated and has none of the social anxiety or concern that people might find his reaching out to be intrusive.

I've dated other extroverts before (and, in fact, I prefer to date extroverts to compensate for my own introversion), but they were either too concerned with pushing themselves on people, they gave up after a lack of reciprocation, or they were simply too passive and content to spend their energy on their own friends and partners.

And I see this *all the time* in other people's relationships too. Once I started seeing the gender split, I couldn't unsee it and it makes me very frustrated at how poor men's communication and collaboration skills are, especially initiating.

But all of that is a side-step to the point of this link. This link is focusing more on the things that people actually *do* to or for their metamours, not the more abstract application of, basically, using the cooperation / defection as a filter through which I see emotional labor.

"In a very literal sense, you make the social environment you live in. People take their cues from you. Even in a world of people who adopt a hostile, defecting strategy, it is possible to do well. On your first move, cooperate. Open yourself. Invite this other person into your life. Only if it is not reciprocated—only then do you become defensive, and stay that way only for as long as the other person is defensive."

"It turns out that even in complex situations, the simplest strategies tend to work the best. In fact, consistently, the programs that were most successful were nice, meaning they never defected before the opponent; retaliating, meaning they would defect if the opponent did, but only to the extent that the opponent did; forgiving, meaning they cooperated and forgave if the opposing program stopped defecting; and non-envious, meaning they did not attempt to score greater gains than the other program."

The bottom line is to start out being nice to someone, start out hopeful and optimistic and see your metamour as an opportunity instead of a threat. If you do that, they are more likely to do it in return. Couples keep asking how to get their potential "thirds" and "secondaries" to "respect" the primary relationship? The only way to do that is to start out by respecting your secondary and their other relationships.

You *have* to give first. But unicorn hunters never want to hear that answer. They *think* that they *are* respecting their secondaries, but the very act of wondering how to *make* someone "respect" a preexisting relationship is an act of disrespecting the other person. You get respect for giving it.

And then, you have to let them fuck up at least once first. That's the Tit For Two Tats strategy that this link mentions at the end. Start out being nice. Then, when they fuck up, assume good intentions and continue being nice. Only after they show a pattern of operating in bad faith do you start reacting defensively, not before.

Intimate relationships are not a medieval war game. If you try to put up battlements first to "protect the primary relationship" from this interloper that you're hoping will "respect" you, you will lose.

War strategies are basically methods for how powerful people fight each other to stalemates - both sides shore up their own walls first and then warily eye each other over the spikes in the walls and promise to cooperate as little as they can possibly get away with before the opposing side decides to retaliate. It's a game of how much can you optimize your own wins before you lose them in a battle when your opponent gets pissed off at your optimization.

Intimate relationships are the opposite. It's a trust fall. You have to open yourself up to vulnerability and you have to be willing to be hurt for the potential greater payoff in the future. Because you WILL be hurt. Your partners and your metamours will fuck up and your tender side will be exposed. That's the nature of the relationship.

But the goal here isn't to optimize our own gains *in spite* of an opposing force. The goal here is to build a cooperative structure where sometimes one side loses a little but sometimes the other side looses a little too and it all balances out in the end where both sides come out further ahead together than they would have alone. This takes them out of opposing sides and puts everyone on the same side.

The goal is to get out of the Prisoner's Dilemma entirely and build up systems where cooperation is always in everyone's best interest, and voluntarily taking turns conceding is in everyone's best interest because it'll payoff in the next round, and everyone is on the same team.

OTG don't start a relationship with someone who is in the process of leaving an abusive partner! And for fuck's sake, don't get upset when they act inconsistent or seem to reconcile or "go back" to said abusive partner.  Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head and they really need to find their own identity before beginning a new relationship.

Escaping one abusive partner into the arms of another creates a coercive dynamic because of the fucked up shit going on inside the victim's head, *even if you try very hard not to be coercive*.  The key part here is the loss of identity. Abuse wipes out victims' identities, and without a clear sense of who they are as an individual person, they are unable to create healthy boundaries for themselves in other relationships *which makes those other relationships coercive by nature*.

You cannot force someone out of an abusive relationship before they're ready, and you SHOULD not encourage them to leap straight from the abusive relationship to a new relationship, poly or otherwise.

Be "on call" for them to go pick them or their stuff up at a moment's notice, field or facilitate the finding of a new place to live so that their abuser doesn't find out about it, believe them and give them space, and most importantly, don't take it as a personal rejection or blame them when they inevitably backslide in some way including going back to their abuser.

Abuse does all kinds of fucked up shit to a person's head. If you can't be a proper support system for a victim, which includes not pushing them into leaving before they're ready and not complaining about how hurt you feel or that they "used" you or "played you" or "ditched" you when they end up not leaving or they gradually stop talking to you or they go back to their abuser, then back the fuck out of their lives. Otherwise, you risk making things worse for them.

For a better idea on how to be a "proper support system" for a victim, check out the resources in the back of Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft which includes books on how to be the loved one of an abuse victim.

This was in response to a "couple" who wanted advice on how to start a relationship with "a third" who was trying to escape an abusive partner. Other people's responses were ... abhorrent. Some of them argued for this couple to "just go get her out of there" and a few suggested that it's not the best idea but you can be careful or otherwise not treat this like an actual life or death situation that it could become.

To that, I must give a reminder: escaping from an abuser is the most dangerous time for a victim. This is the time abusers are most likely to escalate the violence to murder.

This is not only dangerous for her, it's dangerous for everyone around her. She doesn't need to escape into your home, she needs to escape to a place that knows how to keep her safe from an escalating, now pissed off abuser and that fully understands the situation she is in.  Every time you hear about some woman and her kids or her parents or her new boyfriend being murdered by an ex, it's almost always during the time she is trying to escape the ex. Everyone around the victim becomes a target for an enraged abuser.

What do you think an abusive ex, hell bent on power and control and now extra pissed off that his little punching bag is leaving, is going to think of the new boyfriend *and girlfriend* who "stole her away"?  He's going to *blame* the couple and polyamory as being a bad influence on his girlfriend and believe that he needs to teach everyone a lesson and reassert his authority. This is the time when previously emotional-only abusers escalate to physical violence too.

I can't stress enough what a dangerous time this is for her and why the concern needs to be what's in her best interest, not what's in your pants. That's also why you can't force her to leave if she's not ready. Only she understands the extent of the danger she is in, and if her mind has to rationalize why she stays in order to keep herself safe, then that's what she needs to do.

Please, everyone, read Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. This is so much more serious than most people who haven't been there really understand.

When your partner *sees* you...

Franklin: What I love most about my wife Joreth

Joreth takes zero shit from anyone about anything. Try to manipulate, judge, or emotionally blackmail her and she’ll laugh in your face. She never, ever asks questions like "is it weird if I do thus-and-such?" or "will people like me if I do this or that?" What you get with her is her raw, unfiltered self. You never have to wonder where you stand, you never have to search for hidden meanings. She is who she is without fear or shame, and she apologizes to nobody for being who she is.

Runner up: her passion. As far as she's concerned, if you don't love it with every fiber of your being, it's not worth doing.

"You were with your partner and all of his other girlfriends? Did you feel ... I dunno, alone without anyone there for YOU?"

I wasn't there alone without anyone there for me. I had plenty of people there "for me". My partners' other partners are not on "his side". We don't face off like some weird poly West Side Story. My metamours are MY metamours, not just his partners. My metamours are my family. Even the ones I'm less close to. We've built our own intimacy together, our own relationships, our own bonds. Between the strength of our ties and the length of time we have been together, "his side" is also "my side".

Because we're in this together.

After all my past breakups, I typically have 2 outcomes (with few exceptions I'll get to in a minute) when it comes to metamours: 1) I was socially friendly with my metamours while we were together but not really intimate, so when we broke up, my metamours and I remained socially friendly because the poly community is small and we continued to cross social paths. Some have faded out over the years, but no real drama.

Or 2) my ties to my metamours got even stronger and, in many cases, both of us lost all contact with the guy who brought us together but became even closer post-breakup, turning them into metafores. The term "metafore" is a portmanteau of "metamour" and "before". It means a former metamour whose emotional bonds are still close after the breakup so that they still feel like a "metamour" even though they are technically no longer.

Not all former metamours become metafores - only those who still feel like "family" so that you still want to call them by a familial name. Metamours who don't remain that close but who are still friendly and metamours who lose ties completely don't have a special title - friends or "former metamour" is usually used.

One exception to these two outcomes was when my relationship to an abuser ended and I had to cut off contact with his entire side of the network in order to prevent them from passing along information to the abuser that would help him keep tabs on his victim (a former metamour of mine) with whom I was still in contact.

But even then, even knowing that they were enabling an abuser, the loss of that family was devastating. The loss of my entire support group was even worse for me than the breakup with the boyfriend itself. Other exceptions were when the relationship between the mutual partner and his ex was so toxic that she and I either also split apart because of the breakup or we were never close to begin with.

Although, interestingly, one metafore relationship really only developed long after I had broken up with our mutual partner AND as *they* were going through their own breakup a couple years later. He had begun dating her too close to the end of our relationship for us to have the opportunity to get to know each other while we were both still metamours, but we became friendly after my breakup with him, and then when they broke up, she and I bonded and became close. So really, our mutual relationship with him was practically incidental to becoming friends with each other.

I do not develop the same level of close intimacy with all of my metamours. I and some of my partners over the years have been ... let's say popular. I have not been able to keep up with everyone that my partners have dated, especially when you add in the short-term relationships that never really took off. And even with some of the longer-term relationships, we didn't always have a lot of depth to our friendly and genuinely caring feelings.

But when I think of all the times I have spent in the company of the amazing people that my partners have liked and loved over the years, it's never felt like two "sides" squaring up. I've felt that way when I was monogamous and I met a partner's family-of-origin for the first time, but not when I was poly, and I've occasionally felt that way when meeting a partner's *friends* when the social group is not also made of polys.

But hanging out with his other partners? Not that I can ever recall. I've never felt out of place, isolated, alone, overwhelmed, or ganged up on. In the kind of poly that we do, I've always felt like we were all our own individual bodies, weaving in and out of each other's lives, and their presence adds to my own tapestry of life.

And honestly? My luck and skill with choosing partners has been way less successful than my luck and skill at forging healthy, supportive metamour relationships. It's kind of ironic, given my former Chill Girl "I just don't get along with women" status. I mean, I have some good relationships with exes and some not so good, but the majority of my ex-metamour relationships are, at worst, fade-outs and not blow-outs while many transitioned to metafores.

So no, when we all get together, it's never "don't you feel alone without anyone there for you?" It's more like feeling that we are all there for each other and all there as individuals, not on anyone's "side".

It's more like coming home.

#MetamoursAreTheTrueTestOfPoly #AmorphousSquiggle #InternationalPolyJusticeLeague #IPJL #MetamoursMakeTheFamily #gratitude

Reminder: Friendship is not the consolation prize, nor is it the stepping stone - the landing pad where you wait in the queue for your turn at a romantic relationship.

Friendship is the goal.

If you approach your relationships from the perspective that you will enjoy it in whatever form it takes *including platonic friendship* and that is your end-goal, then maybe, sometimes, occasionally, it might turn into a romantic relationship as a *consequence* of being a decent fucking person that they enjoy being around.

However, if you approach your relationships authentically instead of as tools to get you the one kind of relationship you think you want, then it won't even matter if it doesn't turn into a romantic relationship because you will have achieved the "right" relationship anyway. So don't try to be friends with someone if you are interested in them romantically and think being friends is the way for them to learn enough about you that they'll eventually return your feelings. If you aren't interested in the friendship for the friendship's sake, just don't be friends.

Because, I'll tell you a little secret here, you aren't their friend if you do this. If they never develop romantic feelings for you in spite of all your effort being their "friend", they're not the one stringing you along. You're the one pulling the bait-and-switch by dangling a friendship in front of them under false pretenses.

If you're thinking "how can I get someone to like me / love me / have sex with me?" and you come up with any sort of answer that includes any variation of "be their friend", you're wrong. Being their "friend" is not how you "get" someone to like you. Being their friend is how you BE THEIR FRIEND. What you "get" out of it is the pleasure of BEING a decent person who someone wants to be friends with.

Don't be friends with someone unless you honestly want their friendship and are fine with that being it, because you're *not* friends with them otherwise anyway.

*sigh* Met a really cute NASA engineer who is also a very good swing dancer, and who has taken it upon himself to learn other styles of partner dance. I knew it would be too much to hope for that he was poly, but he *does* come from an area where another dancer recently came out as poly, so it might not have been *that* big of a fantasy.

Except he's ULTRA Christian.

Reason #46 why I hate living in Florida - unlike other similarly-sized metropolitan areas, the partner dance scene is conservative and religious so I can never hope to find potential dating partners who also know how to dance. At best, I might meet guys who are open to me teaching them some basic dance steps. Which is fine, I enjoy teaching and I enjoy sharing my passion.

But what it usually means in practice is that we end up breaking up before they ever get proficient at dancing and I don't have anyone to challenge *me* to get better; I never get to play the student so I never progress above my current level, which is advanced-beginner or maybe beginning-intermediate.

I have only ever dated one person who is as good (technically, he was better) of a dancer as I am, and we only danced maybe 3 times while dating.

Dancing is such a strong passion of mine that I feel a distinct black hole in my life that I don't have a romantic partner to share it with. I *did* have a couple of partners who were actively working on learning how to dance while we were dating, but for logistical reasons like distance, I never actually got to dance with them and, as I said, I don't have the opportunity to challenge myself.

Of all the things that white men could have decided wasn't "masculine" enough, they had to choose dancing. Y'know, that hobby that has strict gender roles where the man is in control and athletic and gets to hold women in his arms, and requires a good sense of rhythm and is guaranteed to attract the attention of just about every woman in the room? Yeah, that's not "masculine" enough for white dudes, so for generations, we dumped dancing as a culture until most white men are convinced that they can't dance and never developed an interest in it.

Yay fragile white masculinity.

However, in some religious circles, partner dancing is still encouraged. Mormons and that weird "progressive-conservative" southern Christian type still partner dance, so in this backwards superficially-progressive state if I want to dance, it's with people who have a strong religious faith. Which is fine for dancing, but pretty much rules them out as a potential dating pool.

"Orlando is really just a small southern town with delusions of grandeur." ~Joreth Innkeeper

I have written about the benefits of metamour relationships before, and I recently wrote about my frustration with feeling burdened by the default responsibility to maintain metamour relationships, and I'm also working on the section of my breakup book regarding the metamour's role in a breakup. So this subject in general is on my mind.

I just want to make it clear to any current, former, and future metamours that, regardless of what happens between myself and any partner, our metamour relationship is on its own merits. If we find value in a connection, I will maintain that connection independent of what is happening between myself and the person who brought us together.

If we have largely unrelated orbits, I will not force a connection between us no matter what is happening between myself and the person who brought us together.

Our connection is our connection. We may not have been brought into each other's circles if it hadn't been for a mutual partner, but the size of those circles and how we maintain them is between us. Our connection may be *influenced* by what's going on between either of us and our mutual partner, because, as I said before, we are not islands.

But you are not my friend, or my distant acquaintance, or even someone I don't connect with, *because* of our mutual partner. You were *introduced* to me because of that mutual partner, but what we are together is because of who you and I are as people.

*Sigh* Normally I have no problem blocking people who are becoming a pain in the ass, but when it's a *friend* who says *several times* that he will back out of an argument and then refuses to do so, sometimes I have to hang up the phone for him. But I'd rather not, and it hurts to do it.

I already know that when I lose my temper, I'll say things that I will later regret. So when I back out of an argument, I back out. I know that I can't be trusted to have a productive conversation when I'm too emotionally invested in my position to really hear the other side. If you have the foresight to know that about yourself too, then seriously, back out when you say you're going to. Because I guarantee, no matter what the person on the other side of the argument is like, you will only make things worse if you stay in an argument past the point that even you recognize that you need to take a break from it.

The other person could be the best, most calm and collected arguer ever, or they could be a total douchebag, and either way, if you're not in the right emotional space for the argument, anything you say is going to make things worse. Which is why I back out when I'm getting pissed off. Unfortunately, though, online spaces don't offer very good ways to "back out" and they rely on the other person's cooperation or nuking them.

I wish FB had an option to just, say, put someone in a time-out. I mean, I know that you can unblock people later, but it's so ... final, so harsh. Maybe I just want to stop someone from talking at me for a while. It's like, if you're in an argument with someone in person, you can leave the room. But if you're in an argument with someone at a *party*, then you have to either leave the party to prevent them from following you around the party to continue arguing or kick them out of the party.

Sometimes, neither is an acceptable option for the circumstances. Sometimes, I just want someone to stop talking at me while I go into the "quiet room" at the party, or go talk with someone else on the other side of the room. I can turn off FB for a while and let them rant and rave at an empty inbox, but then I can't wander around FB. That's me leaving the party. Besides, then they're still ranting and raving and those messages will be there when I get back. Leaving might prevent *me* from saying something I don't want to say, but it doesn't make someone else take the space they need but won't take. And obviously I can't kick *them* off FB (nor would I want to).

Unfriending & unfollowing aren't always the right options either. When the problem is that someone I know posts shit that I don't want to see, then those are two reasonable options. But when the problem is that someone keeps talking at me, unfriending and unfollowing don't prevent that. I don't necessarily want to stop seeing *them*, nor do I necessarily want them to stop seeing *me*. I want them to lose the ability to contact me for the moment, either DM or comments or tagging me.

And, maybe I don't *want* to actually unfriend someone. I grew up understanding that friends and family argue sometimes, and it's not the end of the relationship. Sometimes those arguments are some pretty ugly fights, even, and it still doesn't mean that the relationship *has* to end over it.

I've been reading some stuff (citations not at hand atm, but check out The Gottman Institute for more on that) that suggests that there is a point in an argument at which nothing productive is happening because the participants are "flooded", meaning too emotional, and taking a break at that point significantly increases the chances of a resolution post-break. My family did this intuitively. I think it's one of the reasons why I maintain such strong emotional ties to members of my family who have such different worldviews from me.

Sometimes I just don't want to be in *this* argument right *now* and the other person doesn't seem to have the self-control to stop arguing. But, for whatever reason, I don't want to nuke the relationship. It would be nice to have, like, a 24-hour Wall of Silence, where neither of us can message each other or comment on each other's posts, until we've both had some space and time to calm down. But, y'know, you're still friends, and maybe you can even still see each other's posts and still interact in groups or mutual friends' comment threads. You just can't PM them or talk *in their space*.

But as long as people can't seem to help themselves and continue talking at others past the point where even they recognize that they are not in the right frame of mind to be continuing the conversation, I have to resort to blocking.

And I don't like that. There's not enough nuance in our online responses, and I think that hurts us individually and as communities.

I am not a fan of Dan Savage. He occasionally says something not terrible, but so do a lot of other people who don't fill the rest of their time with toxic nonsense. Just because a stopped clock is right twice a day, it doesn't mean that you should rely on that clock as your timepiece. A working clock is also right those same 2 times a day, but it's right all the rest of the time too.

This rant is brought to you by Savage's Campsite Rule. This rule states that you should leave your partners "better" than you found them, including no stds, no unwanted pregnancies, and no emotional or sexual baggage because of their experience with you. Aside from that being literally impossible to guarantee, the problem I have with the campsite rule is that it relies on the very person most at risk of being the problem to self-evaluate.

I've been involved in identifying abusive dynamics in my communities in the last several years, and what we've all learned the hard way is that abusers see themselves as victims even while they're actively abusing someone. Asking one of them to take on the responsibility of not leaving their partner worse than they found them is like asking unicorn hunters to take on the responsibility of not harming their unicorns, or the police department to evaluate and take on the responsibility of correcting its own level of racism and corruption. We need objective and independent evaluations, not our subjective opinions of ourselves which are inherently biased to think of ourselves as "Good People".

Abusers blame their victims for their situation. The abuser always come away from abusive relationships thinking that *the abuser* was the "good one" and that the victim is worse off without the abuser in the picture. I'm sure we've all heard "what does she see in that loser? She could have a Nice Guy like me! Women just want guys who are assholes! They don't even have enough sense to notice a good catch like me when I'm right in front of them!"

Abusers think that their victims are not capable of making good choices for themselves and they require corrective action from the abuser. The abuser is the one who knows how the victim should live / date / dress / eat / work / be! The victim is lost without the abuser to tell them the proper way to cook eggs and raise children and dress for work and clean the house and think about themselves! So the abusers say.

So I'm not a fan of telling people to leave their partners "better off" than they found them because abusers - the people most in dire need of these sorts of restrictions - honestly think they *are* doing that. They think that their victims *came* to them with baggage and that the abuser is the only one who can "straighten them out".

In the book Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft, we hear stories from the sessions with abusive men. Without exception, they believe that their partners are the fucked up ones, that their partners need their corrective hand to survive, that their partners will ruin their own lives without their personal guidance, and that they are absolutely justified in whatever tactics they employ to "guide" their victims.

We all like to think of ourselves as the heroes of our own story. In my observation, it's the victims who are most likely to think that they are too "broken" to be a good partner for someone and everyone else doesn't really believe at the beginning of a relationship that they will one day become a bad influence on their partners. Even without being an abuser, most of us genuinely do not believe that we will one day break up and our partners will be a bigger mess because of their experience with us.

I know that I've had partners, in my early poly days, who were absolutely not ready to deal with ethical non-monogamy. And to this day, I still do not believe that I treated them unethically. But their pre-existing issues did not mix well with my more advanced relationship skills or my own flaws and some of them probably have some baggage after dating me. I am not a beginner relationship. If you throw someone into a situation that is too advanced or too complicated for them to handle at that stage, they're likely to come away from that experience with a few issues.

*We* are generally not the right people to evaluate ahead of time what will or will not be "good" for someone after it's over. We're not even very good at evaluating what will be good for ourselves, let alone other people.

So I think that is a terrible metric to use in evaluating ethics in relationships. We have more concrete, objective metrics involving power dynamics and domestic violence red flags. We should not be relying on our own subjective opinion of ourselves when it is ourselves that need evaluation for potential harm. We are too biased for that evaluation.

From a comment I made in another thread about the lesson I learned about metamours:

I am generally friends with my metamours and some of them are closer to me than our mutual partner. 2 of my closest friends are metafores (a metamour from before) where that metamour relationship lasted longer and is closer than the mutual partner who brought us together.

All that said, if I have a metamour who is "a drama starter", that is not a problem between her and me, that is a problem between my partner and me because he would think that it's acceptable to be involved with someone like that.

All relationships bring conflict. I have conflicted with every metamour I've ever had at one time or another. Occasionally the personality conflict is big enough that we choose to merely coexist. The rest of the time, the conflict is like any other - we work it out and get through it.

Think of metamour relationships like in-laws. You don't have a choice who your in-laws are - they come with your partner. If your partner keeps a relationship with them, that's because they see value in those relationships even if you don't have the same value system. You can try to befriend them or you can largely ignore them, whatever you think is appropriate for in-law relationships, but they *will* affect your romantic relationship one way or another depending on how close your partner is to them.

And if you have a problem with your in-laws, then you really have a problem with that partner for choosing to remain connected to them. If the problem is not about how they're influencing your relationship but just about personality differences, then you work through it with them directly until you find a balance you can both live with.

Poly people like to think we're inventing the wheel, that no one has ever done anything like what we do before. But most of the skills necessary to navigate poly relationships are available to us through our other relationships and our other practices.

Metamours are basically in-laws. You can't make your partner choose your in-laws based on your preferences without overriding agency and utilizing coercion so you learn to deal or you recognize that the problem is between you and your partner for having incompatible relationship goals.

No photo description available.

"Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I wrote this post on Facebook 5 years ago. It turned out to be disturbingly prescient for a relationship I started after this post was written and ended more or less for this reason.

Me: I need this information to assess where I should place my boundaries.

Them: It hurts me that you would even ask me about that! Don't you trust me to tell you? Your boundaries make me feel bad. Don't you care about me to let me in?

Me: Sure, it's cool, I'll just do the emotional labor so that you don't feel bad.

If people wonder why I'm so standoffish and hard to get to know on an interpersonal level, this is why. It's easier to keep people at a distance than get into fights over who should be shouldering the burden of emotional labor. If I push, I'm a nag or I'm disrespectful of someone's hurt feelings. If I don't push, then I don't feel safe so I place my boundaries farther out and then I'm "cold" and "emotionally distant". Which hurts their feelings.

When I was a portrait photographer in a studio, I used to have lots of clients bringing in their toddlers and babies. It was my job to make their bratty, cranky, frightened children look like the advertisement photos of baby models who were deliberately selected for having traits conducive to producing flattering portraits (including temperament and parents whose patience was increased by a paycheck). I would spend more time than I was supposed to, patiently waiting for the parents to get their kids to stop crying and fussing.

Every single session, the parents would exclaim how patient I was! How did I do it?! What I couldn't tell them was that I had built a barrier in my head to tune them out. I just ... spaced. I did not notice the passage of time and I wasn't really paying them any attention. I just let my muscle memory control the equipment and make the noises that got kids to look and smile. It's an old trick I adapted from getting through assaults by bullies as a kid - tune out, mentally leave the body, make the right mouth noises to get the preferred response.

That kind of emotional labor management takes a toll. I couldn't express any irritation or annoyance at the client and I couldn't leave to let them handle the kid and the photographing on their own. So I learned to compartmentalize and distance myself while going through the physical motions.

But the price? I now hate kids. I used to like them. I was a babysitter, a math tutor, and a mentor and counselor. I originally went to college to get a counseling degree so that I could specialize in problem teens from problematic homes. Now I want nothing at all to do with kids unless it's an environment where I am teaching them something specific and I can give up on them the moment I am no longer feeling heard or helpful.

That's not what made me not want children, btw. I was already childfree-by-choice at that time. I just still liked them back then. Now I can only stand certain specific kids who are very good-natured, interested in my interests, and able to function independently (as in, introverted and not dependent on my attention).

So, yeah, I can do the emotional labor. But the cost is high. Doing the labor for too long, to the point where I have to shut myself off from empathy to bear the consequences of doing that labor, results in my emotional distance. That's what happened with my abusive fiance. He wanted a caretaker, not an equal partner. Everything I did to remain an independent person "hurt" him. I bent a little in the beginning, as I believe partners are supposed to do for each other. But eventually catering to his feelings while putting my own on the back burner took its toll.

So I shut down. In the end, I was able to watch him dispassionately as he lay on the concrete floor of our garage, supposedly knocked unconscious by walking into a low-hanging pipe conveniently in the middle of an argument. And then calmly walk upstairs without even a glance behind me to see if he was following. He described my breakup with him as "cold", like a machine. I had run out labor chips to give, even to feel compassion as I was breaking his heart.

Of course, I didn't recognize his behaviour as "abuse" until years later, or I might have bothered to get angry instead of remaining cold. Point is, emotional labor isn't free, and if you don't pay for it in cash or a suitably equitable exchange, it will be paid by some other means. I don't mean we should never do emotional labor for anyone, just that it needs to be compensated for because it will be paid one way or another.

Since this method has served to end several relationships with abusive men where I never felt "abused" because it didn't "stick" (I just thought of them as assholes), I don't feel much incentive to change it, even though it would probably be better to either not take on so much emotional labor in the first place (which is hard not to do because I *want* to do some forms of emotional labor in the beginning as an expression of love back when I'm still expecting a reciprocal exchange) or to leave or change things before I run out of fucks to give.

But I do eventually run out of fucks to give and I do eventually stop taking on too much emotional labor. And it always seems to surprise people when I do. Because I was so accommodating before so that I wouldn't push "too hard" or seem "too selfish". But that always comes with a price. People are often surprised to learn that.

So far every single match online who was even a slight possibility has failed my second test (the first one being "can you even read?" with my bio having specific terminology).

As a "single" woman, a poly person, and someone who prefers kitchen table poly in particular, I prefer to meet people for the first time in social settings. I like meeting at parties and public events. The other person can even bring their friends with them. I realize this isn't common, but it's what I prefer to do.

This does several things - it keeps me safer from danger because I'm in a familiar setting with other people, it gives us both an "out" if we don't click. They have people they can talk to, I have people I can talk to, someone in the group is bound to be That Person who can keep even a limping conversation going, one of us can always leave early because we're not really "ditching" someone if they're there anyway for the event itself, if the other person sucks, we can use our friends as a buffer, etc.

And finally, it shows me just how comfortable they are with the idea of polyamory, or even just with someone being sociable and outgoing and having their own friends. I don't have a lot of free time, so I tend to combine activities so I can see the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time.

I also prefer for my partners to get along with each other, at least socially, if not become friends. So I want to see how well these prospectives handle meeting my friends. How well they handle me sharing or splitting my attention. I am not a beginner relationship. I throw people in the deep in right away because I don't have time or energy to teach them how to swim.

And I want my friends' opinions on the new guy because I don't trust rose colored glasses. I don't need my friends' "approval", but I want some independent verification. Plus, the social event is usually an activity that means a lot to me. How accommodating is he of the things I'm passionate about? How interested is he in the things I'm interested in?

I know that not everyone likes large social events, but that's a compatibility issue in its own right with me. If they really hate social events that much, we're not going to get along long-term. I also know that it's hard to have a more personal connection in these kinds of settings, but that's not what I'm looking for when I arrange them. I would have had to develop some kind of connection before even inviting them out. Now is the time for me to see if there is any real-life chemistry in a safe, controlled way.

And only then, if I don't instantly hate them on sight (something that happened to me when a guy I met online from out of town planned a week-long trip to meet me, which really sucked for both of us), I'll plan something more personal and intimate to get to know each other better.

And so far every single person (but 1) who has made it past the first test has failed this one. Every single person I agreed to meet from an online dating app has said they'd meet me at some public event and then failed to show up.

So, guys, when a woman you're interested in says that she is passionate about this thing, and she would like to meet you in this context, don't fuck that up. She is inviting you into her world in a way that gives her a feeling of control and safety. When a woman you know invites you to a thing she is really interested in, don't fuck that up. She is inviting you into her world, to share something with her that sparks joy in her life.

These are Bids For Attention. When Bids For Attention go unacknowledged, people pull away. When it happens enough times in proportion to the investment already made into the relationship, this will kill the relationship.

And for something that hasn't started yet, it really only takes once or twice. So now even guys I was actually interested in meeting are now off the table for me. They totally lost their chance by refusing (not being "unable", but *refusing*) to meet me under the circumstances I proposed.

Because it's not like I'm a passive communicator or someone who drops hints. I've said outright that this is how I prefer to meet people and why. Quickest way to kill any interest I might have in you is for you to ignore my Bids For Attention, to overlook my safety concerns, and to dismiss the things that I'm passionate about.

A few years ago I wrote about a dance situation where I was sliding into a depressive state but putting on my best pretend-happy face (https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/387838.html). I went out dancing and met up with 2 friends that night - one dancer and one non-dancer.

The non-dancer and I had been having some incredibly intimate conversations recently and we were getting to know each other *really* well. He saw the effect that the endorphins had on me and thought I looked happy. I was smiling, outgoing, and having one of my best dance-skill nights where I was totally killing it on the floor. The non-dancer saw all of that and remarked on how happy I looked.

The dancer friend and I had not had that same level of intimacy and we only knew each other marginally well. But after one 3 minute song of full-body contact, he could see the depression behind the smile and the dance endorphins.

So now I want to give another example of how partner dancing gives people amazingly good non-verbal communication skills.

In 2019, I started a casual relationship with another dancer. We were becoming pretty good friends, but we still had some barriers up in the emotional intimacy department. We were having fun, but that's about it. But he's a fantastic lead and can build very good partnerships with his follows on the floor. I'll call him Michael.

We had not told anyone in our dance communities that we had been sleeping together. First of all, we weren't *dating*, so it felt weird to be making announcements about a casual relationship, but second, we are both community leaders and we didn't want to make things weird with overlapping our private and public lives.

Plus, he's ultimately monogamous and available for a dating relationship, so eventually he would want to find a romantic partner (probably from within the dance community) and having everyone already know that he's hooking up with someone else tends to make potential monogamous dating partners keep their distance. He would, of course, disclose to anyone to whom that information is relevant, but it didn't need to be public knowledge. Ah, the complex, twisty rules of mono culture.

I have another friend, who I'll call Anne, who is also a dancer. She and I have a similar level of platonic emotional intimacy - decent friends but still getting to know each other. Anne and Michael have their own friendship with each other, and it's possibly a closer emotional relationship than I had with either of them.

So, on this particular Wednesday night, I went to my usual dance event, and I met a guy there who was interested in using the venue. The manager wasn't there that night, so he wandered over to my event to make connections. So we chatted and I let him in on how our event was arranged and stuff. I'll call him Nick. I was feeling some chemistry between us, but I wasn't sure how much of that was real and how much was just because I had really good sex earlier in the day and I was still all after-glowey.

I found out that, in addition to Nick being a promoter, he's also a Latin dancer. So I invited him up to my DJ booth to pick whatever song he wanted and to dance with me. So we did and he's a fucking amazing dancer - one of the best I've ever danced with.

Earlier, he had given me his business card, offering to help me with promotion of our event. It felt like a pretty typical networking type of exchange. Later, while bent over my laptop looking at music (he also gave me a ton of his own music, so we were talking and exchanging files), he suggested I call him to get together and do more music exchange when we had time and more drive space, and he gave me his personal number.

Now, this could have gone either way. It could have been more networking, or it could have been a soft flirt to see if there was interest. I enthusiastically accepted his number, y'know, to exchange music. Then we danced. He said several times that he was impressed, given that I'm not a Latin dancer, I'm a Ballroom Latin dancer (which is different) and a beginner at that.

So I put on a bachata, which I like better than salsa, and we danced again. Then he mentioned another style of dance that I might like and when I asked him what it was like, we danced again. I was definitely feeling the chemistry. After the 3rd dance, the conversation lulled, and I excused myself to mingle with my other guests and friends. Here's the relevant part...

As I was walking across the rather large dance floor, apparently I was smiling. Anne and Michael were standing next to each other, both watching me (everyone had stopped what they were doing to watch me dance with Nick just a moment before). Michael remarked to Anne that I looked happy.

Anne, knowing that I often get trapped by men in uncomfortable conversations because a) I'm a woman at a nightclub and b) I'm the event host who has to make the rounds and talk to everyone, suggested the possibility that it might have been a tense smile. Keep in mind that I'm still a good 50-60 feet away and it's dark with flashing, disorienting lights.

Michael, without taking his eyes off me, said "no, that's a happy look". Apparently Anne glanced sharply at Michael as she realized that he was able to tell the difference between my happy smile and my pasted, polite but tense smile. She looked at him, looked back at me, back at him, back at me, and on the third glance back at him (all of which I could see as I walked towards them), she asked him if we were sleeping together.

Surprised, he looked at her, admitted it, and then asked how she knew. She said that the first clue was his knowing the difference between my smiles, and what confirmed it was the expression on his face as he watched me walk over to them and his relaxed posture, as well as my own body language while I walked towards them.

All of this happened in the span of time it took me to walk across the dance floor. When I arrived, I told them all about who the guy was and mentioned that I got his number. Michael said "see? Happy smile!"

So, here is someone I have been dancing with for months able to tell at a glance from across a *dark* room the difference between genuinely being excited about something and being polite to a new person and my general enthusiasm for the activity. Because he is getting to know me very intimately through dancing. The sex helps, but that's relatively new compared to how long we've been dancing together, and also sex is very contextual. Dancing expresses a lot of different emotions, and we can feel that with the music and the body contact. And here is someone else who I have *not* been dancing with but who has general non-verbal communication skills, and who *has* been dancing with the other person in this scenario so she knows *his* body language almost as intimately as I do.

He can read me, she can read him, and through our mutual connection with him and our general skills, she can infer my mental state too. Kind of like the dance version of metamours.

I know that a lot of people don't like dancing or think they're bad at it. But I can't stress enough just how valuable those skills can be in interpersonal relationships. I've known some people who are just naturally that intuitive, but I don't know of any other activity that people can practice that develops this level of intuitiveness and awareness of other people. This is an activity that can *teach* and *improve* exactly this kind of non-verbal communication and intuitiveness regardless of one's starting point in intuiting non-verbal communication.

I would like to encourage more people to try partner dancing, or at least to learn lead / follow exercises, to add one more *incredibly* powerful tool to their relationship toolkit.

www.quora.com/Is-there-commitment-in-a-polyamorous-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Is there commitment in a polyamorous relationship?

A. I always find it weird and disturbing that people seem to think that sexual exclusivity is the ONLY thing people can commit to, when it's is CLEARLY not the only thing that they commit to in their own relationships.

If you have any question at all about how polyamorous people commit to each other without sexual exclusivity, I have to wonder what your monogamous relationships look like. Did your wedding vows consist entirely of "I promise to never let anyone else see or touch my genitals" and nothing else? Does your relationship not have any sort of promises or agreements or desires to be there for each other, support each other, encourage each other, through sickness and in health, richer or poorer, good times and bad?

Can you honestly not think of a single thing that people can commit to each other that doesn't have to do with sex?

I've written an entire page detailing all the kinds of things that I commit to in my relationships. It's true, some of them may not be the kinds of things that you would commit to, maybe haven’t even thought about it, or maybe you choose to commit to other things that I don't. I’m not saying that every single person commits to exactly the same things as every other person.

I'm saying that the notion that sexually non-exclusive people can’t be "committed" to each other because of that lack of sexual exclusivity is either a shocking lack of imagination on your part or you are being disingenuous.

Because if I turn the question around to you, and ask you what could you possibly commit to that isn't sexual exclusivity, I know that you will have some answers of things that you commit to in your relationships that don't involve your genitals. So you KNOW there are other things to commit to.

You’re just not applying them to us. But we're people too, and our relationships are every bit as real as yours.

www.TheInnBetween.net/polycommitments.html

www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-considered-being-dumped-as-a-blessing/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever considered being 'dumped' as a blessing?

A. Yes. I was dating a man who was abusing his other partners. I do not feel that he abused me, but only because I, coincidentally, hadn’t done anything that triggered his insecurities that led him to abuse his partners.

Abuse comes from a belief that it is OK to control another person. At the time, how I behaved was exactly what he wanted from me. So he had no need to attempt to exert his control over me because I was already doing what he wanted.

Then he got another girlfriend, and shortly thereafter she started dating someone else. That triggered his insecurities. So he attempted to control her to assuage his insecurities. She resisted that control, so he tried harder to control her, and it spiraled into abuse.

By the time I finally saw what was going on between them, *really* saw what was happening and not just believing what he was telling me about their relationship, I was in a position to be open and available to new relationships myself.

But because I saw how he was treating her, I got angry at him. I decided that I would not coddle him by making any concessions in my new relationship to make him feel better. I was just going to throw him in the deep end by allowing my new relationship to progress however it wanted, with no feedback from him.

He *really* did not like that. He had never before had a partner who didn’t give him a voice in her other relationships. He felt personally betrayed because his vote in my other relationship didn’t count.

Because his relationship with his victim had escalated to a ridiculous level, *all* of his other relationships were suffering. So he was constantly putting out fires - first trying to rein in his victim, and then trying to soothe his other partners (who he had already cowed into submission) who felt neglected by how much time he was spending reining in his victim.

Every relationship in his life was falling apart because of his one partner who kept resisting his control. His other partners had long since given up control to him, and I (until that point) hadn’t needed any controlling.

So his reserves were low. He had no more patience and no more ability to handle a partner who resisted him. And then I came along and did something that freaked him out (I started dating someone new), and not only did I resist his control, but I did so easily and without any conciliatory or apologetic attitude about how my resistance to his control might make him feel.

His victim, who did not realize he was trying to control her and all the drama was because she knew something was wrong but she couldn’t figure out what - she would resist his control but she would feel really badly about it because she couldn’t seem to understand why she kept "hurting" him.

I, however, had no such confusion. When he attempted to insert himself into my other relationship, I said plainly and immediately that he had absolutely no say in the matter of what I did with my body or time or emotions and he certainly did not get a say in what my new partner could do with his own body, time, or emotions.

I stood my ground. This shocked him so much that he dumped me with almost no build-up, surprising everyone around us. To all of us in the network, it seemed that my relationship with him was the only stable one he had. We didn’t have any of the constant drama that came with his victim trying to figure out why the gaslights kept changing levels (that’s a reference to the movie from whence the term "gaslighting" comes), and we didn’t have any of the arguments that he had with his other partners about how they never got to see him anymore because all of his time was taken up trying to manage his victim.

He and I were wickedly compatible in almost every way. We were even more compatible in some ways than he was with his wife of 20 years. So, to everyone in our network, our breakup came out of nowhere. It took one email exchange over this new partner of mine, where he insisted he should have a say in our relationship and I said absolutely not, and then he dumped me.

At the time I was hurt and angry. I had just lost my place to live and had to be "rescued" by a friend offering me a spare room, only to have that "friend" torture my cats while I was away resulting in both of their deaths. That was the 2nd of what turned out to be 7 moves in 2 years. I lost my housing, my cats, my boyfriend, and even my new partner decided to move to another state right when we got started (although we did not break up), and even my local community staged a coup against me when I tried to oust a guy who was beating his wife so I lost my entire social network too.

It was too much for me all at once, and I fell into a suicidal depression. A few months after that breakup, his victim finally escaped and she and I had several opportunities to talk about our experiences with him. I learned about a lot of things that happened in their relationship that I hadn’t known at the time because of the way that he controlled the narrative of their relationship.

So, in hindsight, him dumping me was probably the best thing he could have done. If he hadn’t, I would have stayed with him and continued to try and work with him on getting past his insecurities when he actually had no intention of getting past them because they were too valuable as a tool he could use to control his partners. I would have continued to minimize his abuse of his victim because I couldn’t see her side as clearly while I was romantically linked to him (although I had begun to see more of the truth before we broke up).

I was not ready to leave him, so I would have stayed with an abuser for much longer had he not made the decision for me. And I’m glad now that it didn’t drag on longer. I didn’t get out of there without scars. I’m not sure how bad the damage would be if I had stayed longer. As it is, I’m still not fully recovered. So I can only be grateful that he didn’t string me along any further.

When I look back over my past and think "would I really erase this from my history if I could?", most of the time I don’t think I would. As many people have said in other contexts, the experiences I went through have made me who I am today. Going back in time and preventing myself from having some of those bad experiences means I would not have come out the other side as the person I am now. So a lot of those experiences I would go through anyway.

But not this one. I would erase this entire relationship if I could. I would erase all the good memories along with the bad ones. I would do this for a couple of reasons - 1) I don’t like having all those happy memories tarnished by the after-knowledge that he was ultimately abusive and he fundamentally does not believe his partners can make decisions for themselves; and 2) I do not think that he deserves the memories of our good times or of my intimacy and vulnerability. I would take that away from him if I could.

Since I can’t rewrite history, all I can do is be grateful that he ended our relationship before I would have.

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.

www.quora.com/What-is-the-safest-most-discreet-way-to-find-a-suitable-man-for-my-wife-to-have-sex-with-We-are-new-to-this-type-of-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the safest, most discreet way to find a suitable man for my wife to have sex with? We are new to this type of open relationship.

A. For the love of whatever you find holy, don't "find a suitable man for [your] wife". She is an adult woman. She has her own preferences, desires, opinions, needs, wants, and boundaries. And since it's her body and her experiences that'll be involved here, none of those things have anything at all to do with you.

I know, I know, "but she's my wife! What happens to her affects me!" Sorry, but in this case, it has nothing to do with you. She is the sole arbiter of her. Only she should have any say at all in what she does with her body, mind, emotions, and time. If she loves you, she'll take into consideration how her actions with another affect you, but ultimately, this is something that is happening *to her*. It's something that *she* is experiencing, not you. You are not relevant in this equation.

Therefore, you should not insert yourself into this experience for her - not to "find a suitable man" for her, not to control or dictate the encounter, not for anything. This is all about her, not you. Stay the fuck out of it.

As for "safe" and "discreet", several online dating apps are adequate for people looking for hookups. Your wife (and her alone) can create a profile sharing what she (and only she) is looking for, and she can be a grown up and do her own homework on vetting potential partners.
She chose you, didn't she? Either she is capable of finding her own partners that are good enough for her, or she isn't. If she isn't, that says something about you. If she is, then let her go about her business and trust that she loves you enough to take care of her relationship with you.

Relevant:

You Can't Be Trusted - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/294586.html

Before We Open Up, Let's Discuss Some Boundaries - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/359151.html

It's Not All About You - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/313759.html

Don't I Get A Say In Their Relationship? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/311860.html

But We NEED Rules To Keep People From Lying To Us! - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/310810.html

What Kind Of Partner Will You Be When Your Partner Wants To Do Something Scary? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/371654.html

How do you bring a healthy third person into an existing marriage? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/368069.html

It Is Never OK To Restrict Someone Else Even If They "Agree" To It - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/363349.html

On Autonomy And Agreements And "Boundaries" In Poly Relationships - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/359626.html

I Love You, Just Don't Disrupt Anything - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/275094.html

www.quora.com/Wives-would-you-be-upset-if-you-are-overseas-and-your-husband-hangs-out-with-a-gold-digging-female-friend/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Wives, would you be upset if you are overseas and your husband hangs out with a gold digging female friend?

A.

I am not overseas but I am literally about as far away from my spouse as I can possibly get without crossing an ocean or international borders. We live on opposite coasts and also on opposite north/south borders.

I do not police who my spouse hangs out with. He's a grownup, he can manage his own friendships. Nobody can do anything to him that he doesn't permit (short of actual robbery or violence). I have nothing to fear from any other person. Should my spouse do something with another person that makes me upset, that would be his fault, not hers, because he is responsible for his own actions.

I do not make assumptions about the motivations of other people. This question implies the assumption that said "female friend" is not just interested in securing economic stability, but that she is planning on doing so at the expense of my spouse. That's a whole lot of unspoken assumptions right there.

Should any woman attempt to manipulate my spouse into some kind of con for the purpose of getting his money, I probably wouldn't do anything about it but laugh at her. My spouse is broke. Of the two of us, I'm the one with the money, and even I live below the poverty line. Plus, we have a pre-nup and our finances are separate and we maintain separate households. He might get swindled, but my finances won't be touched. And then he might learn a lesson about being too trusting too soon.

I do not throw other women under the bus. Other women are not my enemy. The term "gold digger" was deliberately and consciously subverted by a wealthy patriarchal class who was offended at the idea of women achieving any socioeconomic power of their own: https://nationalpost.com/life/relationships/in-defence-of-the-gold-digger-and-the-fight-for-class-economic-and-gender-equality & http://skepchick.org/2013/10/in-defense-of-the-gold-digger/

tl;dr - No I would not be upset if my spouse was hanging around with anyone, let alone a woman who prioritizes her economic stability. Good partner selection solves an awful lot of problems before they ever come up, and treating people as individual agents rather than children, dependents, servants, or things solve most of the other problems.

www.quora.com/What-is-a-common-sign-that-a-marriage-relationship-is-heading-for-a-breakup-which-many-people-often-neglect-or-dont-know/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is a common sign that a marriage/relationship is heading for a breakup, which many people often neglect or don't know?

A. Dr. John Gottman and his team of relationship researchers have identified what they call the Four Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse. When these 4 traits appear in a romantic relationship, Dr. Gottman can predict the demise of said relationship with a ridiculously high degree of accuracy (most reports are over 90% accuracy). So if your relationship has these 4 things, it's probably doomed.

The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling - https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-recognizing-criticism-contempt-defensiveness-and-stonewalling/

2 things that most people don't know is that 1) just having conflict in a relationship or feeling anger is NOT, by itself, a sign that a relationship is heading for a breakup - people have arguments and conflict and feel anger and that's just the nature of interacting with other people in intimate settings, so just having arguments doesn't mean that the relationship is unhealthy or about to end, but that 2) there is a ratio of how *often* or how *much* conflict or unhappiness a relationship can withstand and it's much lower than most people think.

In a relationship, Gottman and other researchers also discovered that there should be a ratio of "negative interactions" to "positive interactions" overall in a relationship that is 1:5. That means that for every bit of ";negative interactions", there should be 5 bits of "positive interactions". Lots of people think that they should stay in relationships until the happiness ratio tips over to where you are unhappy more than half of the time. That's not true.

The Magic Relationship Ratio, According to Science - https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/

So, the predictors of the ending of a romantic relationship are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Anger is not among the predictors. If you have these criteria in your relationship more often than 1:5 compared to positive interactions, the relationship is probably on its way out.

Q. What is a open marriage?

A. The term "open marriage" was coined by Nena and George O'Neill, and they intended it to mean a partnership between two equal individuals that fostered and encouraged personal growth through the development of a complex network of interpersonal relationships outside of the marriage. They felt (and the research supports) that interpersonal relationships were healthier when the individuality of each person in the relationship was maintained and celebrated and ties to other people were welcomed.

The context in which the concept was developed was post WWII when women had spent time in the work force, being independent and heads of their own households while the men were at war, and now the men were coming home and pushing the women back in the kitchen.

In order to convince women that their place was in the home, the US started a campaign to make marriage the cornerstone of the family, and to make one's marriage be one's everything - friend, lover, soulmate, confidante, the person who could satisfy your every single need, to supersede all other relationships with extended family and even with religion and community. This way, it was thought, women wouldn't be tempted to go outside of the home and take jobs away from men or congregate in public where men were used to going.

This turned out to lead to some extremely dysfunctional and deeply unsatisfying relationships. The O'Neills believed that spouses needed to retain their individuality and their independence by maintaining close relationships with other people in order to come together as partners, who could then bring their best selves to the partnership to build resilience into the partnership.

All subsequent research into romantic relationships supports this theory. People who have a strong emotional support network outside of their romantic partner report more satisfaction within their romantic relationships, better conflict resolution skills, stronger bonds during both good times and bad, and more resilience when it comes to breakups and the death of a loved one.

Gender studies that show women having better social support networks vs. men maintaining only superficial ties to other men (leaving their spouse to be their sole source of emotional support) reveal that these women who experience the death of their spouse are better able to live fulfilling lives after their widowhood and they live longer than their male counterparts, for instance. This is thought to be a contributing factor to the difference in mortality rate between the genders.

In the O'Neill's book, they mentioned in one little section deep in the middle that having a romantic relationship in which both partners are open and honest with each other about who they are, what they think, what they feel, and what they want, and in which the partners support and encourage each other's personal growth, just might possibly maybe potentially allow room for extramarital sexual relationships, perhaps.

Because sex sells, this is the one thing that everyone remembered about the book, and now "open marriage" is synonymous with "extramarital sexual relationships". The O'Neills hated this and Nena O'Neill wrote a follow-up book where she backtracked and tried to put that genie back in the bottle. But it was too late. Now everyone thinks it means a married couple that has sex with other people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Marriage_(book)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201101/open-marriage-healthy-marriage
https://people.com/archive/george-and-nena-oneill-helped-to-open-marriage-now-theyd-like-to-close-it-a-little-vol-8-no-25

www.quora.com/Are-you-in-an-open-relationship-If-so-what-is-the-most-challenging-part-for-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Are you in an open relationship? If so, what is the most challenging part for you?

A. Having to constantly answer questions about how “difficult” my relationships are, or people wondering how I deal with jealousy or scheduling … basically dealing with other people thinking that I’m doing anything at all different in my relationships than they’re doing.

I have relationships, just like everyone else. Some of them are effortless, some of them take work, some of them are totally wrong for me, some of them are bliss, pretty much all of them are some combination of the above, just like everyone else.

The only difference is that I have more than one romantic relationship at a time. Everyone has more than one relationship at a time - you all have parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, in-laws, relatives, exes, co-parents, etc. You all have to manage and juggle multiple important people in your lives. Those relationships are all different from each other, even when they have similarities.

We are having all the same relationships and they feel the same way to all of us. I’m just overlapping my romantic ones, that’s all. There’s nothing more or less challenging about my multiple romantic relationships than about any of my other relationships or about other people’s relationships.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVOHz8YhnWU/

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/How-do-I-keep-from-falling-in-love-with-my-fwb/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How do you handle a casual sex relationship without developing feelings?

A. You don't. You can't control your feelings. Your feelings will do what they will. When I have casual sex, it's *because I don't have a strong emotional connection*, not the other way around. I don't get into a sexual relationship and then try to keep my emotions casual. I have a low emotional connection to someone with a high sexual connection, so I structure the relationship to be a casual sex one because *those ARE my feelings for them*.

Some people just seem to be wired to have their emotional connections and their sexual attractions linked in some way - either having sex causes an emotional attachment or they can't have sexual attraction without that emotional connection first (see: demisexual).

I am not one of those people. I can have sex with or without emotional attachment and I can have emotional attachment with or without sex. If I start a relationship under one premise and then discover that my feelings about the relationship fall under another premise, I discuss with my partner what our options are. If they are open to renegotiating the relationship to match, then great!

If not, I decide if it's possible for me to just have my feelings while in a relationship that doesn't match. My feelings are my own. They are not the responsibility of the other person to manage, and I do not have to act upon them. I can have whatever feelings I have, I can feel them, experience them, lean into them, and my behaviour is whatever I believe is most appropriate for the situation.

I have had romantic feelings for a number of people who did not return my feelings, so we maintained a platonic friendship for a long time. I did not pressure them to get into a different sort of relationship with me, I did not remind them of my feelings for them (thereby making them uncomfortable), I did not behave in any way other than platonically, I did not pine away for them, I did not plot or scheme to use our friendship as a vehicle to steer, convince, or "trick" them into another kind of relationship, I just felt what I felt, and I appreciated the friendship for being what it was.

Sometimes I have romantic feelings for a casual sex partner that are not compatible with remaining in a casual sex relationship, for some reason. Wanting something different from them makes what I *do* have with them feel hollow or inappropriate. When that happens, I have to end the casual relationship for my own well-being. I do not stay in a casual relationship hoping that, if I just stick around long enough and am good enough in bed, he'll eventually come around and give me the kind of relationship I'm really hoping for.

You can't control your feelings, you can only control your behaviour. You can't stop yourself from "catching" feelings, if that's just what your feelings want to be. You can reduce exposure to certain activities that might encourage emotional bonding, such as not having any in-depth conversations, not going out in public together in ways that feel like "a date", meeting at neutral locations, not meeting their parents or friends, etc.

But if your feelings are going to develop through sexual activity, there's nothing you can do about that. Have a conversation with them to see if they'd be amenable to a more emotionally intimate relationship with you if that happens.

If they are not, you choose - continue to have a sexual relationship without a reciprocal emotional attachment from them and enjoy it for what it is without pressuring, cajoling, convincing, coercing, or hoping for something "more"; or end the sexual relationship if you are not happy having one with them where they don't reciprocate your emotional attachment.

But the best way to minimize the odds of developing an emotional attachment to a casual sex partner is to not get into casual sex relationships when you have an emotional attachment to them in the first place. Get into casual sex relationships *because the feelings you have for them are casual sex feelings*. Those are legitimate feelings to have for a person.

It's not a "lack" of feelings, it's a particular type of feeling. You may still catch teh feelingz, but, for most of us, if we're capable of having that particular kind of feeling in the first place, we are less likely to be the sorts of people who develop emotional connections just because we're having sex with someone. Our sexual-attachment-without-emotional-connection-feelings are real, valid, legitimate feelings in their own right.

People who tend to develop emotional attachment through sexual relationships tend not to really feel that low-emotional-attachment-high-sexual-connection in the first place, so they are always fighting the development of what's more natural for them to feel. I don't have to fight that because I am already feeling the feelings that are appropriate for the relationship style that I'm in.

So, have the feelings first (or at least, recognize the potential of what your feelings might want to become), and then structure the relationship to accommodate. Have casual sex relationships *because you have casual sex feelings*. Trying to structure the relationship first and then force your feelings to fit the structure is often a recipe for disaster.

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:

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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/How-do-I-decrease-jealousy-to-a-minimum-when-in-an-open-relationschip/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. How do you personally deal with jealousy in your open relationship?

A. The same way I deal with any negative emotion - by introspecting and talking it out until I find the root cause, and then I address the root cause.

Honestly, it’s like people think jealousy is some magical mystery compulsion that comes over people from out of nowhere and totally takes them over like a brain-eating parasite or something.

Jealousy is just an emotion. So is anger. So is sadness. It’s not magic, it’s not a curse, it’s not a parasite or a disease, it’s just an emotion. We have emotions, we deal with them. Monogamy never prevented anyone from feeling jealousy either, I just don’t try to control my partners when I feel something negative. I look at it head-on and actually solve the problem.

Q. What's the most romantic first date you've ever had?

A. That's a tough one, actually, because I don't "date" very much. I tend to get into relationships with people I meet through my social circle, and it's really difficult to make a distinction between a "date" and friends doing things together. Even dinner and movies is not reserved only for romantic interludes. Platonic friends can do those things too.

So I don't have very many first dates. I meet people through my social circles, we hit it off, and usually we make out and then decide if we want to be "in a relationship" or if it was a one-time thing, or an ongoing casual thing. After we decide to be in a relationship, we might do date-like things, but going on dates with a boyfriend who was a friend that you already know pretty well is very different from a classic "first date".

There is a tendency for guys who do the "ask a near stranger out on a first date" thing to be guys who aren't part of my sex-positive communities, so on the rare event I go on a more classic "first date", those events tend to be rather bland and uninspiring, usually following some kind of trope because they don't know any other way to start a relationship with someone, especially someone they don't know very well.

But a few "first dates" have stuck out in my memory as being noteworthy. My first night with my most recent ex is one that comes to mind. But when I think about this question, one of my most memorable "first dates" has to be with my high school sweetheart, because we didn't just have a romantic first date, we also had a good meet-cute.

I got myself invited to a Halloween party at this guy's house who, as I found out later, didn't even want me to be there because some douchebag I met at camp that summer spread some rumors about me. But my friends were going, so he let them bring me along.

He was big-time into vampires (still is). And I mean, not like he read Twilight (that hadn't even come out yet) and thought it sounded pretty cool. I mean he researched vampire lore from different cultures and throughout history. As did I, which is how I knew he wasn't full of shit or just one of the many goth wannabees who thought they looked badass with plastic fangs and black eyeliner. I didn't know this about him yet though.

At this same party, I met another guy who was blind. He said he liked listening to movies but it was better if someone described the scene for him. Lost Boys was on the TV, so I described it to him, which was really easy for me to do as it was one of my all-time favorite movies and I also had that whole vampire-lore background thing to fill things in and go off on tangents. That's about where my soon-to-be high school sweetheart took notice.

Then some things happened for another story. But eventually, he finally got around to asking me out on a real first date. He took me to Santa Cruz, after the Boardwalk closed. Those of you who are not from NorCal in the '80s, or not borderline obsessed with vampire flicks might not know that the Santa Cruz Boardwalk is where Lost Boys was filmed. I honestly don't remember what we did, if we did anything, earlier in the evening. It was a quarter century ago, after all. But I remember this ending.

We wandered around the closed Boardwalk like the dopey '90s teens that we were, finally finding ourselves strolling along a moonlight beach, the sound of waves crashing on the rocks as the soundtrack to our date. As we turned a corner around some rocky outcrop near the shoreline, with the cold moonlight hard overhead, we came face to face with an entire colony of sea lions hauling-out for the night. Letting out a roar of warning, the one closest to us, the one we startled, charged.

We took off running across the sand, back up the way we had come. This was not my first time being chased by a wild animal because I had encroached on its territory, and it would not be my last. But it was my most fun. Unwilling to end the evening, we moved from the scene of the teenage undead and the much scarier and meaner wild life, to his karate dojo where, as one of the assistant teachers, he had the keys. We spent the rest of the evening making out on the mats right there in the middle of the dojo, because my fetish for unusual places was well and firmly established by that point already.

So, I'd have to say one of my all-time favorite meet-cutes was bonding over a passion for Lost Boys and Bram Stoker's Dracula at a Halloween party, and one of, if not the most romantic first date I've ever had was traipsing around the filming location of Lost Boys, getting chased by a territorial sea lion, and making out in a karate dojo on the eve of Christmas Eve.

Now that I think about it, as much as I hate the plot of most rom-coms, if you were to do a cheesy '90s semi-gothy teen version of a rom-com, our story would probably make a good plot for one, complete with "started out disliking each other" followed by miscommunication and ensuing hijinks. There were even romantic rivals trying to split us up and nearly a "love triangle" plot with "which guy will get the girl?" tension.

Maybe I'll write out the whole story someday.

www.quora.com/What-should-I-do-if-my-best-friend-and-I-like-the-same-guy/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What would you do when you and your best friend like the same person?

A. The same thing that I do when anyone and I like the same person - find out what the other person wants. Their input is kinda important here, and really the deciding factor. If the other person likes us both, then we both date him. If he only likes one of us, then he dates one of us. If he isn’t interested in either of us, then neither of us date him.

His consent makes any potential conflict pretty much irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how much I like someone, they have to want to be with me in order for me to be with them. If they don’t want to be with me, then no amount of my feelings for them will change that fact (short of overriding their agency). His relationships with other people are not my business to control or dictate. He can have relationships with whomever he wants and manage them however he wants.

If what he wants or how he does the things that he does conflicts with my value system, resulting in a loss of respect for him, then I can choose to remove myself from the situation. If what he wants or how he does the things that he does infringes or imposes (negatively) in any way on the well-being of my body, mind, emotions, finances, or anything else that belongs to me, I can choose to remove myself from the situation.

But him just liking someone else? Him dating someone else? Him being romantic or sexual with someone else? None of that has anything to do with me, so if I and my best friend happen to like the same guy, well, there’s nothing TO be done about that. I do what I do with the people who consent to doing those things with me, my friends do what they do with the people who consent to doing those things with them.

It’s like asking me “what do you do when you and your friend both like the same restaurant?” Uh, we both eat there whenever we feel like eating there (sometimes together, most of the time apart) as long as the restaurant is open and catering to our business. Whether my friend likes that restaurant or not has nothing to do with what I do about liking the restaurant, except if my friend doesn’t like it, I probably won’t invite them to eat there with me.

I actually find that a lot of my friends’ exes or current partners make good dating partners for me too. Not always, but often. As I like to say, polyamorous people come with references! If my friend likes someone, then at the very least, he’s probably a pretty decent human being, and then I get the bonus of having metamours that I already know I like and get along with.

Of course, we don’t always have the same taste in partners. I’m straight, for instance, and most of my friends are bi or pan. And just because someone is a decent human being, it doesn’t necessarily translate to romantic or sexual interest. A lot of my friends’ other partners are great people to be around, but I’m not interested in dating them. That’s OK too.

The point is, who my friends are interested in is irrelevant to how I handle being interested in someone myself. The person I’m interested in has the deciding vote in what happens there - without his consent, it’s a non-starter. With his consent, we can negotiate the kind of relationship we want to have with each other, and whether anyone else is interested in him has fuck-all to do with what he and I negotiate between ourselves. That’s between them.

I just read a thing that said "abusers are good at making your anger seem worse than their abuse." And I thought "yes! They do!"

But then I thought a little more about my last abusive ex. See, he would do this thing, where he would try to control his partners' behaviour, and they would do a thing that resisted that control, and then he would get angry at their resistance and call it "abuse" and accuse them of hurting him, of not caring about how their actions affected him, of destroying the relationship, etc.

If anyone accused him of "overreacting" or of blowing things out of proportion or of doing anything at all that was "too much", he threw it right back at them that they weren't allowing him to have his feelings (because all feelings are "valid", yo). He was VERY good at making it seem as though his victims were making his anger seem worse than the so-called "abuse" his victims were doing to him when they resisted his control of them.

I still remember the day one of them called me up in tears, hyperventilating, totally freaking out because she may or may not have broken some fucking rule they had, depending on how the rule was interpreted, and she was upset not because of what he might do in retaliation for breaking the rules, but because she thought she was a horrible, thoughtless person for 1) breaking the rule and 2) not knowing if the rule had been broken because she didn't get clarification on this point.

I made a blog post a while back where I used actual quotes from one of our email exchanges post-breakup where I told him that I did not want him to contact me again except to apologize for one very specific act he had done during the breakup, and he responded quite indignantly about how he didn't "consent" to me placing "limitations" on the conditions under which he was allowed to speak to me.

Dude, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

So, I realized that it's not so much that abusers do particular things like making your anger seem worse than their abuse. Because someone skilled in abusive tactics will make it seem like YOU are making THEIR anger seem worse than YOUR "abuse" of them, when in reality, their anger is part of the abuse.

And also, as I've learned, we all have abusive tactics that we have learned just through exposure to it throughout our lives, from our families and our culture. So when we are mistreated, we ALL reach into our own bags of tricks, and some of the responses we pull out can be pretty shitty too.

So sometimes (in my experience, basically all the time), it can be really difficult to tell who is the abuser and who is the victim, even if you apply the axioms "follow the lines of power and see who has the locus of control" and "the one who is trying to run away is probably not the abuser".  In this same relationship example, we all thought that the victim was the abuser at first because she was the one doing what seemed like controlling things. You see, he was also deeply fearful of losing the relationship. Abusers are in real pain and feeling real fear. What makes them abusers is how they deal with that pain and fear.

So, to prevent her from ever getting up the courage to leave him, he would play on her fear of losing the family group, which would fuck her shit up, thinking that she could lose everything at any given moment, and it would trigger her anxiety about being "left out".  To relieve her feelings of being left out, she would request that no sex happen among anyone unless the door was left open in an implicit invitation for her to join, even if she didn't want to join.

To me, that seemed incredibly controlling. But he was desperately afraid of losing his relationship with her and he desperately needed to make this a whole group thing with no individuality or independent-ness, so he made it seem like he was "acquiescing" to her demand to control the sex he was allowed to have, even though "everyone subsumes their identity into the group relationship and we are all one Borg, resistance is futile" was exactly what he was going for.

I'll be honest - the reason why I had a hard time believing that she was being abused is because I had a history with her as a metamour through another partner, and she tried to control our relationship then too. So it seemed totally in character to me that she was being controlling, even though it was contrary to every value she *spoke* for.

But her controlling behaviour was a *reaction* to HIS controlling behaviour, just as it was the last time (she had just gotten out of a relationship with an abusive metamour and used controlling tactics as a survival technique). Most of us develop toxic coping mechanisms to prolonged exposure to abuse. He provoked it by preying on her fear of being alone, left out, of losing the family group. And then, when things escalated to a level where I could more clearly see who was pushing whom, he strung her along by making it seem as though she were the one dismissing his anger to make it seem worse than her "abuse" of him.

So, it's not that abusers do any particular thing or particular tactic. It's that abusers flip the script. They take whatever tools you give them, whatever scripts that society gives them, whatever is available, and they flip it to make it seem like their victim is the "bad guy".  Some abusers are sophisticated about it and it can be really hard to tell that this is what they're doing. Others, like a particular villain in a TV show I'm watching right now, are really fucking obvious about it (#ProTip - if someone says "the whole world is against you / doesn't believe in you / is holding you back, and I'm the only one who accepts you / believes in you / trusts you / encourages you / is not holding you back", then they're being abusive, just FYI).

This is why I am not a fan of Non-Violent Communication. It's a ridiculously easy tool to convert into an abusive weapon, and we ALL have abusive tendencies - yes, even you, dear reader, you are not above this shit - so I've never seen NVC used in a healthy way.

And I don't need anyone to tell me "but I use it all the time!" 1) I'm sure there is someone out there somewhere for whom it has never been warped into a tool of abuse - statistics guarantees that this must be true somewhere - and the fact that someone like this exists is not the point; and 2) I just got done pointing out that we all have abusive tendencies, so in this rant, I am dubious of anyone's claim that they have never misused a communication tool because I believe we all have, either knowingly or unknowingly, simply because we are all fucked up and I'm not letting you off the hook for this.

I'm digressing. The point is not NVC specifically. The point is that abusers flip the script. The point is for them to make you question your reality, to question "who is the bad guy here?" and to come up with the wrong answer. And they will use whatever script they have access to in order to flip it.

So, an abuser may make your anger at them seem worse than their abuse of you. But they may also make it seem as though YOU are making their anger at you seem worse than your resistance to their control of you.  Sometimes anger is the correct and necessary reaction. When someone is trying to control you, your anger is appropriate. Anger is my primary defense mechanism, so let me tell you how hard it is for me to admit this next part... But sometimes anger is also a weapon, and you are totally correct to resist their anger at you, because their anger *is part of their abuse* and their efforts to make it seem like you're the one minimizing their anger *is part of the abuse*.

And I don't have an answer for you. I don't have a checklist for you. I don't have a listicle for how to make it easier to tell which is which. We can follow the lines of power (if they control your income, if they are your superior or supervisor in business, if they own the place where you live, if they influence who your friends are, etc.) and we can try to tease out who is running away and who is doing the chasing.

But those have limitations. Many abuse victims do not try to run away for a long time. Many of them are only *capable* of being abused because they're desperate to hold onto this relationship so they submit to the abuse out of fear. Or out of grooming - where they get the victim to submit to a small violation, and then the next larger violation is excused because it's so close to the first one the victim let through, and how can you let one go and not the other, you hypocrite?

And many people gain power over a romantic partner in ways that are invisible to outsiders. How many of you ask your friends the details of their economic situation? How many of you know who controls the income? When romantic partners are business partners, can you really tell, from the outside, that a division of labor based on skills doesn't have an element of power built in, such as one person controlling the money?

How many of you have witnessed those private conversations where one person steered another away from building intimate friendships with people the first person didn't approve of, and they did so subtly, without overt threats?

How many of you can *really* tell the difference, from the outside, between "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me" vs. "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me, except I know how desperate you are to please me so that even mentioning this will make you choose the option I prefer even though I have said it was OK to choose the other option because we both know it's not really OK to choose the other option"?

In fact, how many of you can really tell the difference between those two things even from the inside, when you're right in the middle of it? From either side? The human brain is not logical or rational, it is a justification engine. We are very good at justifying all kinds of things to ourselves and others.

And abusers are particularly good at this. Which means that, since our brains are optimized for it, we are all capable of abuse. Abusers flip the script - whichever script we have, an abuser will turn it around to justify their control of their victim. And even they might not realize that they're doing this, because of that justification engine thing.

But they will take whatever is handed to them and use it to control. If that means they use your desire to seem "fair" and "impartial", if that means they use the "all feelings are valid" principle, if that means they ride the coattails of the #MeToo movement, if that means they flip the gender script, if that means they *use* the gender script, if that means they use social justice language like my ex, if that means they use their social capital, if that means they use your good faith - whatever it means for them, that's what they'll do to come out looking like the "good guy", or if they can manage it, like the "victim" themselves.

Abusers flip the script. Even if they have to use "flipping the script" to flip the script, as long as it makes you question who is the abuser and who is the victim, they're doing it right.

www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-be-in-an-open-relationship/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever been in or seen an open relationship that worked?

A. These are always such weird questions. Even though the divorce rate for monogamy is around 50% (for first marriages, it’s way higher for second and third marriages) and basically 100% for every relationship prior to the marriage, and even though abuse runs rampant in monogamous relationships, and we all know and have all been in relationships that ended and that the people came away with regretting ever getting into, nobody asks “have you ever been in or seen a closed or monogamous relationship that worked?”

And, as someone else already pointed out, you have to define what you mean by “worked”. Some people think that the only marker for a “successful” relationship is if somebody dies. Personally, I think that’s rather gruesome, but some people seem to think that one person outliving the other, no matter how happy or unhappy the people were before death claimed one of them, makes a relationship “successful”.

I’m of the camp that thinks any relationship that makes the participants feel content or satisfied with the relationship for the majority of the time together and/or accomplishes the goals they set out together, is a successful relationship, no matter how long it lasted. As the saying goes - sometimes people come together for a reason or a season in addition to those that happen for a lifetime.

If I have a relationship with someone and we have certain goals or purposes for our relationship, and we accomplish them and then go our separate ways, happy with the outcome, that relationship would be successful to me. If I have a relationship with someone that lasts only for a short time, and life then takes us in different directions, but we were happy and satisfied with our relationship while we were in it and content with the way that it ended even if we are also saddened by the separation, that would also count as a successful relationship to me.

By those measures, I’d say about half of my relationships since I started having polyamorous relationships have been successful, including the relationship I have with my spouse, who I’ve been with for over 14 years now (and in an openly poly relationship from the beginning). One of my former romantic partners has transitioned to a platonic friend and business partner and we are writing a book together on how to break up ethically. I’d say my relationship with him is one of my greater successes, as we’ve managed to find a way to make our relationship work for us through a bunch of different life stages and different needs from each other in ways that we are both happy with.

I’d say that’s also a pretty average track record for all of the poly relationships of all the people I’ve known in all my years as a community organizer in the poly community (which means I’ve known a TON of poly people). Considering poly people have the potential to have more partners than monogamists do (unless someone is a *very* active serial monogamist) since we can overlap them, having a 50% or better success rate is pretty good.

However, since most monogamous people I know consider the mere act of ending a relationship to make it a failure, I’d say that, of all the monogamous people I’ve ever known (and since this is mostly still a monogamous society, I have also known a TON of mono people), the vast, vast, vast majority of monogamous relationships I’ve ever seen have not worked (using their own definition for “worked” or “worked out” or “successful”). 50% success vs. way more than 50% failure might imply that open relationships are probably more successful than monogamous ones.

The truth is, that all relationships work or don’t work because of the people in them, not because of the structure. Some people are compatible together, many people aren’t, some people are compatible only in certain kinds of relationships (while many of those kinds of relationships are prohibited by the culture around them so they often don’t even get to try the one where they might actually “work” out), and some people are compatible together for a while and then less compatible as they grow and change over the course of their lives.

It’s never the structure of the relationship that makes it “work” or not “work”. It’s the people in the relationship.

I don't know why this is so difficult for some people to grasp. If you are unable to say "no", then your "yes" is meaningless. If you *need* to stay with someone - you are financially tied to them and can't untie yourself, you are emotionally or physically threatened, the thought of not being with them is the worst thing you can possibly think of including being alone - then you can't really give consent to the relationship.

If you are free to leave a relationship, then choosing to stay is much more meaningful than being forced to stay by circumstances, emotional chains, or power.

So I'm going to say this slowly because it's apparently a VERY difficult concept:

This. does. not. mean. that. people. who. are. free. to. leave. a. relationship. and. choose. to. stay. do. not. commit. to. their. partners.

For some reason, some people hear "I am free to leave a relationship because there is no power forcing me to remain, yet I choose to stay because I am happy here and I love my partner", and translate it as "eh, I'm here because I have nothing better to do, but I don't have any commitments or expectations or intentions to stick around and if literally anything slightly more interesting comes along, I'm outta here."

It's like, in BDSM, some people engage in power exchanges. No, let me talk about something that's actually one of my own kinks: Bondage. I like being restrained under certain circumstances. I am literally being held by force. Except it's an illusion. At any point, I can tell the person tying me up that I don't want to be tied up anymore, and my partners are trustworthy enough that they will instantly release me (if I couldn't release myself - one of my superpowers is that my hands are almost the same size as my wrists so I can slip out of most restraints if I really want to).

But I'm here for the experience of being restrained. I'm in it until the end. Unless something goes wrong, I'm committed to sharing this experience. I prepared for it. I recognize that this may trigger some difficult emotional processing (for either of us), that there may be injuries, that shit may hit the fan and I'm here for that too.

But if things get *too* bad, if they cross boundaries, if they go *wrong*, not just challenging or difficult, I can leave.

I make a lot of commitments to my partners. I quite often stick around, often enough past the point where I should have left. My partners aren't disposable. They're not replaceable. They're not interchangeable. They're not *convenient*.  But I still have the ability to leave. And yet, I have chosen not to in many cases.

This is a False Dichotomy and a Straw Man, perhaps even a Motte & Bailey switcheroo. It's not *either* "you have the autonomy to leave a relationship" OR "you have commitments to your partners". Those are are not opposing things on a single scale, they're two different axes in the giant complicated chart that makes up all of any given relationship. I'd even argue that having the freedom to leave and choosing not to actually enables you to better live up to your commitments because you're not being forced against your will.

I am with my partners, committed to the various things that I commit to, such as operating in good faith, trusting that we are on the same team, supporting them, being there for them, sharing the joys and the trials of life together as *partners*, precisely because I don't *have* to be, BUT I CHOOSE TO BE.

My mom held a job for something like 15 years because she *had* to. She lived up to her obligations - she performed her job to the best of her ability and she did the things she had promised to do when she got hired for the job.  But she was miserable. She hated her job and hated her boss. Her boss did not value her and often made her job needlessly more difficult. They did not have a fax machine, for example, because he felt more traditional methods of communication were better. She had to walk down the hall to another company's office to fax invoices and other correspondence that needed to be faxed. She told me once how humiliated she felt at having to beg fax time from another company. He would have still had her keeping the books in a literal ledger if he could have.

After several years of watching her misery, we (her family) finally convinced her to look for another job. She resisted because she felt that she had to stay - she made a "commitment" to work for this employer, she needed to help provide for her family, etc. The threat of poverty is a pretty strong motivator and forces many of us to do a lot of things we would rather not do, some of which actually compromise our values and our integrity and our sense of self.

So her best friend told her about a job opening at her own place of employment and we all pushed her into applying. The job was a stretch for her - she had no computer skills thanks to her employer, and she had wicked low self-esteem thanks to her boss telling her that she wasn't worthy of anything more than being a "secretary". But we encouraged and we supported and she told her boss she had a dentist appointment one day and went downtown to apply for the job. She got called for an interview, and a follow up interview, and she eventually got hired.

At the first job she applied for after taking the leap to leave and find another job.

She was terrified and nearly turned down the offer. She just did not feel that she could leave. But she did. She went to work for this other company, and learned a whole bunch of new skills and made a whole bunch of new friends, and 20 years later she finally retired from a job that she felt brought her happiness and growth but that she was ready to leave and join her husband in retirement.

Once she left the abusive job, and she learned some skills and gained some self-worth, she worked for 2 decades at a job that she felt she *could* leave if she needed to because she had already left one job and the world did not end for her. In fact, it got better.  So she had the freedom to leave her new job, but she chose not to because it was a job that she felt happy and satisfied in. She threw herself into that job, often working overtime and taking on duties that weren't hers just to help out and generally contributed to a successful company and productive work environment.

And after she retired, her company begged her to come back when the person who replaced her went on maternity leave because she was so valuable to the company. So she did - on a part-time, temporary basis, but she still did. And she will leave again when her contract is up.  She *committed* to this job - to doing her best, to working in the company's best interest, to providing a salary for her family, but this time without compromising her integrity.

This freedom to leave was part of a general attitude on behalf of both her and the company that allowed her to truly commit to the job, rather than being forced to do the job that she left as soon as she could.  My mother, for all our differences, is an amazing woman who imparted many of my values and ethics on how to relate to people. She has had the opportunity to leave a variety of situations over the years, yet she chose to stay because *that's what commitment is*.

And now she sits, in the sunset of her life, deliriously in love with her husband, in complete adoration of her grandkids, with a long career and strong bonds with her coworkers behind her and two adult daughters who credit her with instilling the values we are most proud about ourselves.

Having freedom of autonomy does not mean having no commitments. It's *how* we are able to truly commit to relationships. Because we are not forced to remain in unhealthy, toxic relationships, our commitments actually mean something.  If someone were to slap me across the face because someone else held a gun to their head and made them, I wouldn't hold the person who slapped me accountable. They had no choice. That slap doesn't *mean* anything coming from them.

But if they slapped me because they *wanted* to, then it would fucking mean something and you'd be damn sure I'm going to hold them accountable for it.  That's a negative example of basically the same thing. Actions taken when there is no choice but to take them render the decision to do them meaningless. Actions taken when you have a choice imbue them with meaning.

My partners choosing to stay with me and honor their commitments to me gives those commitments *meaning*. Choosing to stay when they actually do have a choice does not negate their ability to make commitments, it makes their choice to honor the commitments more meaningful.
And the people who think that there is no power imbalance, and therefore no consent violation, when one's ability to leave is restricted frighten me. These people also tend to view having free will and choosing to exercise it as being "broken". That is a direct quote from a conversation I just read.

Considering that my abusive ex also feels this way, I shouldn't be at all surprised at how fucked up this is. He literally thinks that it is a broken worldview to believe that having the freedom to leave a relationship and choosing not to leave makes for more ethical relationships.  And I'm dumbstruck as to how I could have possibly missed this attitude before we started dating and horrified that I was ever with him at all.

But what's more horrifying is how many people who I once considered friends or close relationships of some sort also hold this position. There are an awful lot of reasonably intelligent, rational people out there who don't believe you should have any autonomy in your relationships, who don't see how coercive the lack of freedom in a relationship is, and who think this freedom / lack of freedom / consent / non-consent issue is an either/or with the ability to make commitments in interpersonal relationships. That, somehow, making a commitment *means* that you no longer have the freedom to leave, and that *this is a good thing* because otherwise people would just up and leave whenever.

And they think that *I'm* the "broken" one.

Just like courage means being afraid and doing something anyway, commitment does not mean being unable to back out. It means having the freedom to back out *and doing it anyway*.

I think I need to go to bed now, because I'm feeling a little nihilistic about the fate of our species after this.

www.quora.com/Why-has-it-become-common-for-married-people-not-to-wear-their-wedding-rings/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

There are an awful lot of assumptions buried in this question.

Q. Why has it become common for married people not to wear their wedding rings?

A. It was not common in the US for wedding rings to be worn by men until the 20th century, so it had kind of a similar effect as branding livestock - it said that the woman belonged to someone, but the man (because same-sex marriage did not exist at the time) had no such corresponding mark of connection or ownership.

So it was only “common” for some people to wear rings, and it was only common for other people to wear rings for a short span of time in our nation’s history. Wedding rings being common is a relatively modern practice, however they continue to be common today. While it may be more noticeable now that some people do not wear their rings, and there may indeed be an increase in that number from previous generations, it is still more common for married people to wear a wedding ring than not.

But reasons why someone would not wear a wedding ring can include:

Historically, the wedding ring was connected to the exchange of valuables at the moment of the wedding rather than a symbol of eternal love and devotion. Wedding rings are an archaic tradition used to mark humans as being “taken” or “owned” by someone else through this exchange of wealth. Some people choose not to be marked as such or to engage in archaic practices that are not relevant to their modern lives.
The modern version of wedding and engagement rings were a deliberate propaganda campaign by the jewelry industry to sell more products, said jewelry industry contributing to war and slavery in their goal to obtain more product to sell, and some people are conscientious objectors.
Jewelry is often inconvenient or even dangerous in certain lives.
Jewelry is a very personal expression of the self and a wedding ring may not match the aesthetic that a person is going for.
Some people just don’t like things on their hands.
Some religions discourage the display of wealth and jewelry. Methodist teaching says that people should not be "adorned with gold, or pearls, or costly apparel" (John Wesley, “The General Rules of the Methodist Church”). Mennonites do not wear jewelry, including wedding rings, as part of their practice of “plain dress”. Certain branches of Quakers have a “testimony of simplicity” and therefore do not wear jewelry and keep to “plain dress”.

I don’t wear my wedding ring because jewelry is dangerous in my job (#3). I work with heavy machinery and anything that can’t easily tear away, such as metal around fingers, necks, and through ears and noses, could get caught in something and rip said body parts off. My cousin’s fiance lost his ring finger a week out from the wedding (no idea why he was wearing his ring early) and had to go through the ceremony with a bandage on his hand and she put the ring on his right hand instead of his left. I play piano. I’d prefer to keep all my fingers, thank you.

As such, I have not worn rings in many, many years, so when I do put on a ring for an aesthetic look for dressing up or for a costume, it feels uncomfortable and gets in my way, much like long fingernails feel on people who do not wear their nails long normally (#5).

I object to the diamond industry, which is wrapped up in the jewelry industry in general, so I do not participate in displays of wealth and jewelry with materials associated with the diamond slave trade, the various gold rushes, or with the De Beers corporation and their capitalistic campaign to artificially create a market for themselves through their manipulation of the market (#2) with deceptive advertising. Diamonds and gold are symbolic of that campaign and the horrific atrocities committed to obtain precious stones and materials for jewelry for rich people. This could technically leave other materials and stones available to me for use as wedding rings or other jewelry, but I have other reasons for eschewing them in general.

I do not like being treated like someone’s wife (#1). I prefer to be treated like an individual human being. I have noticed that the way that strangers treat me changes based what they think my jewelry says about me. As a teenager and young woman, I used to wear a wedding ring deliberately to avoid getting hit on in public spaces.

As an older adult, even though I am still getting hit on, I find that not being hit on just because I have signaled that I belong to someone else is more offensive. My “no” should be more impactful than “there is a man out there somewhere who owns me and would not approve of you making moves on his woman”, so I would rather reject advances on my own than let the implication of some other man’s disapproval do the rejecting for me.

Aside from advances, I am treated more respectfully and with more deference when people find out that I am married (or when they think I am, such as when I used to wear a ring and was not married). Again, I would prefer to earn that respect just because I am a person and deserve respect, than because I have met the social obligation of tying my fate to someone else.

So a side effect of not wearing a ring due to danger, comfort, and personal aesthetic (the actual reasons why I do not wear a ring) is that I get to challenge people’s assumptions and demand respect based on who I am, not my connection to someone else. Some days I don’t want to put forth the effort of dealing with that challenge, so I might wear the ring to avoid it. But mostly I see this as an opportunity for change rather than a drawback. I consider it a feature, not a bug.

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).

www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-invited-another-person-into-your-marriage-If-so-what-was-the-outcome/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Have you ever invited another person into your marriage? If so, what was the outcome?

A. No, because it’s not possible.

People seem to think that they can build a house (a relationship) with someone, get it just the way they like it, then decide that they want it a little bit bigger, and merely add on a rumpus room to the back with no extra muss or fuss so that the house is mostly unchanged, just a little bit bigger and with little inconvenience to those who already lived there.

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Each relationship is its own thing, and requires nurturing in order to thrive. Even when 3 or more people are all romantically involved with each other, it’s not the same house just with more rooms. It’s more houses, perhaps all on the same property but sometimes not even that.

The more successful open relationships (and I define success by the happiness and satisfaction of the participants both during and after a relationship, not the longevity) operate on principles of individuality and respect for agency. Only when people who are partnered can see themselves as whole people, not halves of a whole, not partial people, not a relationship construct, are those people capable of having dynamic, vibrant, healthy, nuanced, 3-dimensional relationships with other people.

The people you get involved with deserve to be involved with a whole person, not a construct. They are not “joining your marriage”, they are relating to *you*, a human being, and anyone else they are getting involved with as well. That’s multiple relationships to maintain, not one giant relationship blob that just gets larger and subsumes everyone in its path.

I was polyamorous before I met my now-spouse. We got into a relationship as poly people and the relationship was polyamorous from the start. He and I have always had other partners and we had other partners when we started dating. Since we are both straight, the odds of us both dating the same person are almost nil.

However, one of his other girlfriends and I have a queerplatonic relationship that basically looks like a romantic relationship in all respects except for the sex. She was not “invited into our marriage”. He met her years ago at a kink convention that he and I and his other girlfriend attended. They hit it off. They began dating. She and I knew of each other through online poly communities, but after they started dating, we became very close and will remain “family” even if one or both of us ends our relationship with our mutual partner.

She is not a part of “our marriage”. She has her own relationship with him and her own relationship with me. Same as all of his other partners and he does the same with my other partners. Most of the metamours and metametamours (a metamour is one’s partner’s other partner) know each other and have friendships or other kinds of independent relationships with each other, so we have a large family dynamic together.

But each dyad, each partnership is its own relationship. And that’s the only way that each relationship can remain healthy.

Read these articles:

The Most Skipped Step[s] When "Opening A Relationship" + 1 - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/376186.html
Triads Are Advanced Polyamory Not The Beginner Starter Poly Package for Just Opening Up n00bs - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/390353.html
You Cannot "Add Someone To Your Relationship". Stop Saying That - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/364636.html
"Opening Up" A Relationship Doesn't Work, Try This Method Instead - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/375573.html
Honey, Let's Add On A New Girlfriend To Our Existing Relationship! - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/334953.html
How Impact Bias Affects Polyamory, Poly n00bs, And Couples Wanting To "Open Up" - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/384668.html
How do you bring a healthy third person into an existing marriage? - https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/368069.html

www.quora.com/What-can-I-do-if-I-would-like-for-my-wife-to-have-an-orgasm-but-she-doesnt-care-if-she-does-or-not/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What can I do if I would like for my wife to have an orgasm but she doesn't care if she does or not?

A. Let it go. It’s her body, her orgasm, so her desire to have one or not is the only one that matters.

Stop making her orgasms about you and what you want. If she’s ever going to have one, it won’t be while feeling pressured to have one just to make you feel better about giving her one.

I’m going to say this again: stop making her orgasms about you and what you want.

It’s so frustrating being a straight woman when so many men want to make my pleasure all about them. Take some lessons from lesbian sex - it’s not all about the orgasm. If you make sex all about the orgasm, you’re missing out on about 99% of the fun of sex.

It’s not about you.
It’s not about the orgasm.
It’s not about the penetration.

Just let her enjoy sex the way she wants to enjoy it, if you care about her experience at all. She doesn’t need to experience sex in the same way that you do for it to be a pleasurable experience for her. And she definitely doesn’t need for her ability to orgasm or not to become some kind of statement about you.

3 Ways Men Wanting to 'Focus On Her Pleasure' During Sex Can Still Be Sexist - Everyday Feminism - https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/focusing-on-her-pleasure/

Guys, You Can Learn A Lot From Lesbian Sex - https://www.bolde.com/guys-you-can-learn-a-lot-lesbian-sex/

www.quora.com/Is-it-ok-for-your-spouse-to-go-out-all-night-and-not-let-you-know-what-they-are-doing-or-that-theyre-ok-Do-you-expect-a-courtesy-call-if-theyre-going-to-be-home-at-4-am-or-are-they-grown-and-can-do-whatever-whenever/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Is it ok for your spouse to go out all night and not let you know what they are doing or that they're ok? Do you expect a courtesy call if they're going to be home at 4 am or are they grown and can do whatever, whenever, without any concern for you?

A. Since my spouse lives 5,000 miles away, I would find it very odd indeed if he gave me a courtesy call to let me know that he would be home at 4 AM.

Aside from that, though, I think the question is loaded. When I have lived with partners, I do not expect a call telling me what their plans are. They are grown adults and can make their own choices.

I would not say this is “without any concern” though.

If, for some reason, I had an *expectation* that they would be home at a certain time, then I would expect a courtesy call because that’s what courtesy is. If a live-in partner told me that they would be home for dinner and I was making dinner for the both of us, I would be both irritated and concerned for their safety if they did not come home reasonably close to the time they said they would.

If my partner has a regular and predictable schedule, and they failed to come home at a time that it would be reasonable to assume or expect that they would be home, I would probably be concerned for their safety.

If my platonic friend promised to meet me for coffee one day and didn’t show up, I would be concerned about the friend. If my sister said she would call me tonight to talk about our plans to give our parents an anniversary gift, and she didn’t call me, I would probably be concerned about her. If my coworker was supposed to have a business meeting with me and didn’t show up, I would probably be concerned about them.

If I have an expectation about the whereabouts of another person, the first thing I would do is examine if that expectation is reasonable. If that expectation is reasonable (i.e. they *said* they would be there and they’re not), then I would be concerned. But I do not generally expect people to keep me notified of their movements and behaviours unless those impacted me directly. My partners’ schedules are not mine to keep. Their time belongs to them. That’s part of what makes them autonomous human beings.

I eat my meals when I want to eat. I go to bed when I want to sleep. I wake up when I need to wake up. None of those things require a partner’s presence. My partners can come and go as they please, providing they are meeting their obligations and are considerate of how their actions affect other people.

Which is the expectation I would have of *anyone* I was dating and living with, dating and not living with, or living with and not dating. When I moved back in with my parents after college, my sister playing loud music in the room next door when I was trying to sleep was inconsiderate. It didn’t matter that she was my sister, we were sharing space. If a partner did the same thing, he would be equally inconsiderate.

And, likewise, I did not keep my sister’s schedule and had no idea what she was doing or where she was unless it was relevant for me to know. We often talked to each other about our lives outside of home, just because we love each other and sharing is a form of intimacy, but I had no *expectation* of knowing her schedule. We just talked to each other because that’s what people do when they like each other.

A partner would be no different. If my sister was supposed to be home for dinner so that she could wash the dishes, I would have been very irritated for her to not show up and do her chores. Same with live-in partner. But while she was out? Whatever, she’s capable of making her own decisions about how to live her life. Same as my partners.

It’s not without *concern*, it’s without *expectation* and with respect for their autonomy. Their time and their lives and their decisions belong to them. How those things impact *me* is when it becomes reasonable for me to have a say in them, insofar as the impact that I will allow. My partners can stay out all night if they want, but if I come home to make dinner for us and they keep not showing up, that’s wasting my time and efforts, so I can choose not to keep coming home and making dinner if they’re not going to respect my time and efforts.

If my expectations continue to mismatch with the reality of their behaviour, then *I* am the one with a choice to make - either adjust my expectations to match or leave the relationship to find someone who is a better match.

So, yeah, my partners can go out all night and not let me know ahead of time what their plans are. But it’s not without concern, it’s just without expectation.

It never fails. It is seriously the same conversation. Every single goddamn time, y'all think you're going to have something novel to say that I've never heard of before and it's never new. Never. I have not once been surprised by this.

JurisDr2000
33, Man, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Aug 5, 0:34
JurisDr2000: rawwwr

3:23
JurisDr2000: usually up late?

Aug 7, 13:45
Joreth: Read the profile

17:11
JurisDr2000: so i must know

how is it that u dont mind having spiritual friends but not partners

i ask because you seem to enjoy intellectual conversation

Joreth:  I do not have to have the same level of intimacy with friends that I do with partners. I *can* have that level of emotional intimacy, but I don't have to. I can refrain from discussing certain topics with friends and have that friendship survive.

But I do not block paths to intimacy in my romantic relationships, and avoiding speaking on topics blocks paths to intimacy.

I enjoy intellectual conversation, but I do not like having the same conversation repeatedly, and I have now had enough conversations with people who swear they have something new to talk about who don't, that I am no longer interested in discussing issues of spirituality with anyone.

JurisDr2000: lol i can most definitely understand that

im more curious to pick your brain then introducr anything "new"

Joreth:  and most people who have spiritual beliefs find my opinions on those beliefs offensive, which strains intimacy. Therefore I can have a platonic friendship with some limitations on intimacy with people who have spiritual beliefs but not with a romantic partner

JurisDr2000: thats interesting

one would thing spirituality brings balance and that lack off necessity to impress that upon others

but who am i to say

Joreth:  "picking my brain" is touchy. On the one hand, I am a consultant and I can offer my advice and insight for a fee. On the other hand, having the same conversation over and over again is exhausting

JurisDr2000: lol fee arrangement already huh

Joreth:  you're asking me to perform a service

JurisDr2000: i see you have your road map already prefabricated

Joreth:  and here we go with the predictable conversation

::block::

What always follows from this is how I have decided who and what he is and wants and I'm close-minded and intolerant for not allowing someone to interrogate me on my beliefs or lack thereof and how I should be open to this conversation and also enlightening other people whenever they want if I were truly "open" or "tolerant" or "unbiased" or even "curious" or "intellectually honest". And also how he was totes just trying to have a friendly conversation and how he is totally "open minded" and "tolerant" and "just curious" even though he immediately swung to judgement and condemnation and bias, but somehow I'm the one who has to listen to his shit.

No. I have done that enough times now and discovered that it is literally always the same conversation and I'm tired of having it. I. am. not. interested. I don't care what your spiritual beliefs are. I guarantee I have heard them from someone else before. I don't care if you think you want to understand mine (or lack thereof). I guarantee that you won't get them, because if you did, you wouldn't be having this conversation with me in the first place.

I'm TIRED. I don't want friends or partners to "challenge" me. I want them to *support* me in my growth and development as a human being (which does, in fact, require them to occasionally call me on my bullshit but in a supportive way), but I have no desire to be "challenged" anymore. I want partners, friends, and family, not adversaries. And also not non-paying clients expecting me to do *work* for them.

Do your own goddamn research / emotional labor / academic studies / relationship improvement classes or fucking pay me for my time.

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/I-m-having-casual-sex-with-my-ex-We-only-talk-to-meet-There-s-still-feelings-from-both-sides-and-I-sometimes-want-to-text-just-to-chat-but-I-don-t-do-it-We-are-not-compatible-to-be-togheter-but-I-can-t-doing-this-Is/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. I’m having “casual sex” with my ex.We only talk to meet. There’s still feelings from both sides and I sometimes want to text just to chat, but I don’t do it. We are not compatible to be togheter but I can’t doing this. Is this normal? What to do?

A. I’m not too worried about what’s “normal”. I prefer to pay more attention to what makes me happy. I find that not being concerned with what’s “normal” actually contributes to my happiness in general. One of the things that makes me happy is finding the right relationship structure for the people involved. There are plenty of people who are more compatible with me as casual sex partners but who don’t make very good long term romantic partners. And vice versa.

Sometimes it takes us a couple of different tries at finding out which structure fits us best. And sometimes certain structures work best for us *at that point in time* but not at others.

If you are not happy with a casual sex relationship with your ex, then this relationship isn’t working for you and that’s OK. You don’t have to have casual sex, and you don’t have to have it with any particular person. But there’s nothing “abnormal” or wrong with people who tried a romantic relationship, discovered that they weren’t compatible in that way, and who then try a casual sex relationship with each other afterwards.

A not very popular opinion that I hold is that everyone needs to take some “cool off” time after the end of a relationship before they try to transition to something else. After ending a romantic relationship with your ex, you ought to go no-contact with them for a period of time. This gives your brain a chance to “reset” itself regarding your feelings for them and to break old habits.

If, after having the chance to mourn the end of your relationship and start out fresh, you meet up again and discover that you have some sexual chemistry where a casual sex relationship would be appropriate for both of you, then great! Have fun!

But, chances are, if you’re not happy in this casual sex relationship, then you probably jumped into it too soon after the breakup when your brain hasn’t had a chance to grieve and move on. So now you’re confused and experience mixed emotions and holding onto something that is over because the old habits are conflicting with the new structure.

I’d recommend not talking to your ex for a set time limit. Don’t ghost them - that’s cruel. But say that you need time to process your breakup so that your old romantic feelings can stop interfering with your new post-breakup relationship, and that you’ll call them in a few months. Then take some time and really go through that breakup. Then you can call them up again with a clear head if you’re still interested in some other kind of relationship with them.

Explaining the difference is still very difficult for me. It's very much a "I know the feeling when I feel it" kind of thing. This is just how the difference manifests *to me*.

www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-romantic-relationship-without-sex-and-a-best-friend-How-are-the-feelings-different/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What's the difference between a romantic relationship without sex and a best friend? How are the feelings different?

A. For me, the difference is intention.

In a friendship, everything is taken on an as-is basis. We are friends, until we aren’t. We hang out together, unless we don’t. Although there might be *hope* for continuity and longevity, there is no *expectation* of such. I go for long stretches of time not talking to my friends, and when we get together again, it’s as if no time as passed. We just pick up where we left off.

This works for me in both platonic friendships and FWB type friendships.

But, for me, *romance* includes the intention of continuity and longevity. We have more of a commitment to actively working on the ongoing-ness of the relationship, whatever the structure of that relationship might be. It’s less of a default of being together and more of an active participation in being together, with explicit plans and intentions to continue things or work on things or being together.

It’s a very subtle difference, and not something that outside observers are likely to be able to see. But from within a relationship, it *feels* very different to the participants.

There is not a difference in the *potential* level of emotional intimacy. Each of my friends and partners has their own unique amount of emotional intimacy, because that intimacy is made up of the two of us in that relationship.

So, a "best friend" and an LTR partner might have a comparable amount of emotional intimacy. But it will be different kinds of intimacy because the two *people* are two different people but not because the two relationships are different relationship categories.

Because of the nature of each intimate connection being unique, sure, there are friends with lower amounts of intimacy than romantic partners. But they're not lower in intimacy because they're *friends*, they're lower in intimacy because that's just how that relationship worked out.

I suppose that, because of the nature of my romantic relationships having *intention* of continuity and longevity, that sort of by default, I do have an expectation of emotional intimacy there. I don't have those intentions with friendships, so I don't have an expectation of the amount of emotional intimacy, so my friendships can range all over the map.

Same with sexual relationships - just because we're having sex, I don't expect there to be emotional intimacy by default, so my sexual relationships range from no intimacy to all the intimacy. But I also tend to be more descriptive than prescriptive, so it's not so much "I have decided that we will be romantic partners, therefore I now have expectations of emotional intimacy".

It's more like "I noticed that this relationship really wants to be emotionally intimate and I would like to be intentional about our continuity and longevity, which would make this a romantic relationship for me".

Some of my non-romantic friendships have that same level of emotional intimacy, but I don't feel the pull to make things intentional. That's what makes them not romantic to me.

And then, just to make things even muddier, I do have some platonic, non-romantic relationships with some degree of intention, and those relationships get categorized in my head as "non-romantic family". Those are even harder for me to tease out and explain why they're different, though. I think it has to do with the specific things that I feel intentional about.

I am frequently appalled at why people marry. This is why I am basically opposed to legal marriage entirely, even now that I am legally married.

www.quora.com/He-and-I-have-been-together-for-2-yrs-I-want-to-get-married-I-want-to-have-his-name-and-the-respect-that-society-gives-to-the-wife-Instead-he-thinks-of-it-as-a-government-conspiracy-and-gives-me-the-divorce-rate/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. He and I have been together for 2 yrs. I want to get married. I want to have his name and the respect that society gives to the “wife”. Instead, he thinks of it as a government conspiracy and gives me the “divorce rate” argument. What can I do?

A. You two clearly have diametrically opposed worldviews. Even if you manage to convince him to marry you, your marriage is probably doomed. Mutually exclusive worldviews do not lend themselves well for long-term compatibility.

Incidentally, you do not have to legally marry and let the government into your bedroom in order to obtain many of the same things that marriage can afford. If the “respect” of a society that doesn’t think you are worth anything unless you are attached to a man is important to you, you can arrange your relationship to resemble a legal marriage without the legality (assuming your partner is willing to participate).

Nobody demands to see a marriage license when you introduce yourself as Mrs. No banks require a marriage license to purchase property together or open joint accounts together. If, at this point, you don’t know that babies can be born outside of wedlock, I don’t know what to tell you.

Personally, I don’t believe that anyone should get legally married unless their intention is to become legally entangled in exactly the ways in which a legal marriage entangles them. If you want something other than those legal benefits and responsibilities, there are other ways to get those things. You can even have the big party and white dress without the legal license, if you really want it.

Tying yourself to another person, ostensibly for life, just to get the “respect” of a bunch of strangers who wouldn’t know the difference if you weren’t legally tied anyway, is probably the worst reason to get married*, IMO. Followed by getting married to “lock them down” into a commitment. Marriages are easier to break than getting out of a shared mortgage these days.

If what you’re looking for is some societal respect, you’re probably going about it the wrong way. But that aside, your partner clearly does not share your views on how important that respect is or how to get it. All that convincing him to marry you will do is increase the odds of a divorce in your future.

At least if you stay unmarried, when you inevitably break up, you won’t be a divorcee, you’ll just have a paranoid ex-boyfriend in your past instead of an ex-husband.

*Excepting same-sex marriages … sort of. The reason why queer people fought so hard for the right to marry, as opposed to “different but equal” (which they weren’t) civil unions, was partly because of this exact “respect” argument.

As long as same-sex marriages were illegal, same sex partners could not pass themselves off as “married” and get the same respect, because the people who don’t respect them knew that their “marriage” could not be legal and therefore they did not consider their marriages valid. So they fought for the social recognition of their unions as part of a larger issue of validating and legitimizing their existence and their relationships, which, in turn, was part of a larger issue addressing the inequity and discrimination of an entire class of people based on who they love.

However, if it is generally known that two people are *able* to get married, then it is possible to just pass themselves off as married without the state-issued license and they will receive that societal “respect” because nobody actually checks for licenses when people say that they’re married, as long as they believe that those people have the ability to get married.

So, for an entire class of people to demand social “respect” through being allowed to access certain legal benefits that were previously only available to one class of people, that is a different situation than an individual person wishing to tie themselves to another individual person in order to get “respect” for the association. And that is what I meant by it being the worst reason to get married.

Fighting for class equality is not in the same camp as individuals using their romantic relationships to force those other individual people around them to “respect” them.

https://www.quora.com/My-wife-has-changed-since-marrying-me-She-isnt-as-laid-back-and-free-spirited-as-she-used-to-be-The-same-thing-happened-with-my-ex-wife-too-which-led-to-our-divorce-Why-do-they-get-bitter-after-marriage/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. My wife has changed since marrying her. she isn't as laid back and free spirited as she used to be. The same thing happened with my ex-wife too which lead to our divorce. Why do they get bitter after marriage?

A. As they say, “if all of your exes are crazy, the thing they have in common is you”. Lots of other commenters are pointing this out.

First, losing one’s free-spiritedness is not “bitter”. As someone else said, the opposite of laid back is not bitter. So one does not follow from the other. If they’re both “bitter”, then something serious is going on. But if they’re just not as fun as they used to be, then it’s probably your problem for expecting them to perform their personalities for your entertainment.

Either way, the problem points to something you’re doing that results in your partners ending up unhappy, which is point number two.

Third, women, in general, are still expected to be the Household Managers, even when their hetero relationships are more or less “equal” in other respects. When a man gets home from work, he might have to take out the trash or wash the dishes after dinner, but his job is essentially over when he clocks out. When women get home from work, they start their second job.

Even when *chores* are split evenly, women are still expected to be the manager. Men “help out around the house”. Men often say “if you want me to do something, just ask”. We shouldn’t have to ask. As an adult living in the house, you ought to know that the trash needs taking out and the dishes need washing and the kids need to be fed and the floor needs vacuuming and, and, and.

Project Management is a full time, highly paid job. But a lot of women are expected to do it for free, and without notice, when they get home while a lot of men are given all the credit for “helping out”. So a lot of women who, as single women with only themselves to care for, get married and have children and end up losing their “laid back” and “free-spirited” natures because shit has to get done and nobody else will do it unless they take the reins and make them do it. The household needs to be managed. It’s really difficult to be “laid back” and “free spirited” when there is shit that need to get done, especially when the people you’re responsible for overseeing don’t realize that you have a legitimate job as the overseer.

I’m a freelancer in an industry where crews are hired to perform job duties for a particular contract, and when the contract ends, we go on to find other contracts. Many of us who have been working in the industry for a while know each other and we often find ourselves on crews of the same people over and over again. Between regular contact and our industry’s traditions of networking for gigs, many of us are friends outside of work.

Because of this, we can often find ourselves working on a crew one day where our friend Joe was hired as the crew chief. And perhaps the next week, Emily got hired as the crew chief for this other gig and Joe has to work under Emily’s supervision when Emily was working for Joe just a week ago.

Some people who are new to the industry find it difficult sometimes to work for their friends. They go from being buddies who drink and smoke pot together, to now their buddy is “in charge” and making demands of them and they can’t respond to their buddy like he’s their buddy. Yesterday, he was their buddy. Tomorrow, he’ll be their buddy again. But today, he’s the boss.

When people get married, and someone ends up taking on the Project Manager role for the Household Manager, they are no longer that carefree, laid-back, free-spirit you went on dates with. Now they’re in a managerial role, and possibly a role they didn’t ask for and might not even want. And here you are wondering where your date buddy went, now that she’s been promoted to Project Manager and there is shit that needs to get done.

You will probably find that your wives are better able to act more laid-back and free-spirited if they had a little less management responsibilities on their plate. I know that I’m usually too tired for a spontaneous decision to get dressed up and go out dancing all night when I’ve put in 12 hours at work only to come home and find the house a mess and someone waiting for me to ask them to make dinner.

And I find that a lot of my last-minute “let’s just get in the car and drive and see where we end up and spend the weekend there!” plans to explore and adventure get scrapped when I have a grown-up job and a mortgage to pay and kids with homework that need to be done and dentist visits to schedule and swim meets to attend.

The ability to be “laid back” and “free-spirited” is directly negatively correlated with how many responsibilities need one’s attention and how many other people require attention to those responsibilities for their survival.

If you want your wife to feel more “laid back” and “free spirited”, then you could start by taking some of the responsibilities off her plate.

The Invisible Workload That Drags Women Down - “To truly be free, we need to free women’s minds. Of course, someone will always have to remember to buy toilet paper, but if that work were shared, women’s extra burdens would be lifted. Only then will women have as much lightness of mind as men.”

Women Aren't Nags—We're Just Fed Up - “that I was the manager of the household, and that being manager was a lot of thankless work. Delegating work to other people, i.e. telling him to do something he should instinctively know to do, is exhausting. … Even having a conversation about the imbalance of emotional labor becomes emotional labor.”

Why I Don't "Help" My Wife - “When you make a mess, you shouldn't expect your wife to clean it up. It's your job to clean up your own messes. You both live there, you're not “helping” her with anything because it's your home.”

https://www.quora.com/What-does-committed-relationship-mean-in-terms-of-polyamory/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What does "committed relationship" mean in terms of polyamory?

A. There is an atheist saying: “I contend that we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you”. It means that everyone lacks belief in gods, so when you ask what it’s like to not believe in *your* gods, it’s much like what it’s like when you don’t believe in other gods.

Commitment in polyamory is much the same thing. Everyone commits to a variety of things in their relationships. Polys just don’t commit to sexual exclusivity. Otherwise, we commit to many of the same things. When you took your wedding vows (or when people do, if you, reader, personally haven’t gotten married), there were all kinds of commitments in those vows, and I’d wager that none of them were “I promise never to let my genitals touch anyone else’s genitals”.

For instance, these are my wedding vows. I’d bet some of them sound pretty similar to a lot of your monogamous wedding vows:

I commit myself to you
As your spouse
To learn and grow with,
To explore and adventure with,
To build and create with,
To support you and respect you
In everything as an equal partner,
In the foreknowledge of joy and pain,
Strength and weariness,
Direction and doubt,
For as long as the love shall last.
We exchange these rings
To symbolize our connection to one another.
They represent a commitment
To honor and respect one another
And to recognize
The agency and essential humanity of each of us.

See? Nothing in there about genitals or sex. All we did, really, was leave out the parts about forsaking all others and the part about forever, but the rest is pretty similar to monogamous vows.

A friend of mine once said that being poly is kind of like being vegetarian, where people find out that she doesn’t eat meat, so they ask “OMG what do you even eat then?!” as if the absence of meat means that, literally, the majority of foodstuffs on the planet don’t exist. There’s so much more to eat besides beef, chicken, lettuce and Wonder bread, and if you thought about it, you’d realize that you eat a lot of the same things that vegetarians do too, they just don’t eat meat.

Because polys have to think a little more deliberately about the kinds of things we commit to, since there isn’t really a social template to follow and we can’t just do things by default, some of us probably have come up with some commitments that monogamous people don’t make. I’m not saying we’re *identical* to monogamy only without sexual exclusivity.

In fact, I’d even bet that *monogamists* aren’t identical to each other and y’all make some commitments amongst yourselves that are unique, or at least not common or that not everyone else makes too.

I’m also childfree by choice and solo poly, which means that in addition to not being sexually exclusive, I also don’t make commitments to things like co-parenting or cohabiting. So, I’m sure that some of my personal commitments are things that other people don’t make in their relationships. But they’re still normal sorts of things to commit to that even mono relationships could benefit from.

And a lot of them are things that a lot of people do commit to, but so much of monogamy is by default and by implicit assumption. So, if pressed, a lot of people could probably admit to some of them being values they also hold, they just never really thought about it or said it out loud like a vow.

I have so many things that I commit to in relationships, that I wrote a whole page on my website that I managed to get more than 20 blog pieces out of when I broke it down by each commitment that I make in my relationships:

www.TheInnBetween.net/polycommitments.html

The full explanation of each point is on that page. The bullet list is:

I am committed to respecting my partners' autonomy, agency, and personal sovereignty - that is, respecting their right to make informed, un-coerced decisions and to be responsible for their own decisions, their right to act according to their own free will, and their right to own their body and control what happens to it.
I am committed to respecting my partners’ right to make their own life choices.
I am committed to doing my best to practice flexibility and compassion with regards to the paths my partners may take in life.
I am committed to respecting the roles that other people play in my partners’ lives.
I am committed to allowing my metamour relationships to find their own structure and direction without forcing them into a predetermined shape.
I am committed to considering my metamours as "family" regardless of the structure or emotional closeness of our individual metamour relationships and to treat them accordingly.
I am committed to working through problems with my partners starting with the assumption that we love and cherish each other and are therefore really on the same side.
I am committed to supporting my partners in being the best version of themselves that they can be.
I am committed to taking care of myself so that I can be the best partner I can be.
I am committed to protecting the safety of myself and my partners through informed consent and risk-benefit analysis of behaviour, prioritizing evidence-based reason above emotional justification.
I am committed to addressing issues early in order to prevent them from becoming too big to handle.
I am committed to prioritizing situations, not partners, because all my partners are a priority.
I am committed to including my partners on the higher ring of priorities in my life (partners / work / pets / family emergencies / etc.) and to not passing them over in favor of other events or people too often.
I am committed to accepting assistance from my partners when needed, and sometimes just when it would be nice.
I am committed to limiting my actions and words which have the intent or goal of harming my partners, although I acknowledge that some decisions I may make for the benefit of myself or my relationships may result in hurt as a consequence, unintentional or not.
I am committed to be as clear about my expectations as possible, both with myself and with my partners.
I am committed to choosing the Path of Greatest Courage by always being honest with myself and my partners while simultaneously allowing compassion to dictate the delivery of my honesty.
I am committed to prioritizing the happiness of the individuals over the longevity of the group if / when those two values are in conflict.
I am committed to discussing harm reduction plans and contingency plans for when bad things happen, because I understand that we can’t always prevent them from happening.
I am committed to allowing the relationship to find its own structure and direction without forcing it into a predetermined shape and to considering alternate structures and directions before automatically resorting to breaking up when situations and priorities change.
I am committed to becoming a friendly ex should a breakup occur and the situation is such that it would not be harmful to remain in contact, with the understanding that “friendly ex” is a statement on my own actions, not the structure of the post-breakup relationship.
I am committed to choosing partners who share my values so that they also make similar commitments to themselves, to me and our relationship, and by extension, my other partners (their metamours).
I am committed to not expecting anyone to live up to the Perfect Poly standard, including myself.
I am committed to allowing myself and my partners the forgiveness and the freedom to be flawed, to have bad days, and to occasionally fail to live up to expectations or commitments, providing that the bad times do not outnumber the good times in either frequency or emotional weight and the commitment to prioritizing individual happiness over longevity still holds.

Honestly, the frequency with which monogamous people ask polys incredulously about what we could possibly commit to if sexual exclusivity is off the table kinda makes *me* want to question *them* about the kinds of things *they* commit to, since they can’t seem to come up with what else we might commit to on their own.

“But what do you commit to if not sexual exclusivity?”

“Wait a minute, what do *you* commit to? Is sexual exclusivity really the only possible relationship commitment you can come up with? Is that really the only part of your relationship that makes it stand out as something special? That elevates this relationship above all others? Is this really the only difference between your marriage and all your other relationships? That you have sex with just this one person? What happens if one of you gets sick and you can’t have sex with them anymore? Is that the only thing holding your relationship together? If you can’t have sex, does your relationship fall apart because you have no other commitments to each other? What do YOU commit to besides sexual exclusivity?”

https://www.quora.com/Would-you-ever-consider-a-new-relationship-with-someone-who-previously-dumped-you/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Would you ever consider a new relationship with someone who previously dumped you?

A. I have considered it. I have given second chances. I have gotten into several relationships with people who dumped me previously. I have regretted every single instance of this. Without exception.

Every time the second chance ends, I get bitter and say “no second chances ever again! If we break up, it’s for a reason!” And then someone comes along and, for some reason, I justify to myself that this one is different because of whatever specific circumstances. It’s never the exact same thing twice, but that’s because everyone I date is a different person. The relationship itself was different. The breakup was different. The reasons for the breakup was different. I wanted different things back then than I do this time. Whatever, it’s always “different”.

And not once have I ever been correct.

Not only have I never once been correct, but I regretted the second chance to the point of actually wishing I could undo the entire thing. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but for the most part, I’ve learned things from those mistakes that make me who I am today. If I were handed a magic telephone booth and told I could go back in time to change whatever I wanted about my own life, most of those things I wouldn’t actually change.

These second chances? Yeah, I’d change them. I’d erase the whole fucking thing. I’d get rid of all the good times that went along with them. I’d delete any lessons I supposedly learned from them. I’d get rid of the whole second chance for each and every one of them.

So here I am, still stinging from my most recent poor “second chance”, still angry about it, telling everyone about how I keep saying that I don’t do second chances and that each time I do is somehow an “exception” to the rule, knowing that I will probably find some other “exception” to justify doing it again in the future. And that I’ll write another blog post or social media post or advice column or whatever, telling people that second chances are bullshit and I don’t like to do them.

I am, apparently, an incurable optimist hiding in the skin of a cynic. I ought to listen to the cynic more often.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-feminist-women-are-gold-diggers/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Do you think feminist women are gold diggers?

A. Feminists are people who believe that everyone should have equal power and freedom and opportunity in a society where women currently are disempowered, and the goal is to empower them to full autonomy. Under a capitalist system, that means that women have their own economic security.

A “gold digger” is a patriarchal term where society sets up women to be economically disadvantaged, offers them only one way to improve or secure their economic status and that’s through romantic relationships, and then socially punishes women for pursuing the only avenue available to them for privilege, empowerment, security, or simply survival by calling them names for doing the one thing they are supposed to be doing.

So, by definition, feminists want to dismantle the entire system that puts women into the position of needing to pursue romantic partnerships with men for economic security.

Which would make them the opposite of “gold diggers”.

The way to remove the trend of women using their romantic relationships to improve or stabilize their economic status is to provide more opportunity for women to improve or stabilize their economic status in ways that do not involve romantic partnerships - i.e. equal pay, equal job opportunities, social services for drains on finances like childcare, healthcare, housing, food, etc. Separate the means of survival and economic status improvement from relationship status, and you remove the problem of women pursuing men for economic reasons.

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.

www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-ridiculous-thing-you-and-your-spouse-fight-about/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most ridiculous thing you and your spouse fight about?

A. Franklin and I once got into an argument at a kink convention. We were waiting in line for registration and someone walked past us with some kind of bright, unnatural hair color. I don’t remember what color it was, but it caught our attention. Franklin called the color by one name, I called it by another name. And I don’t mean he called it “carnation pink” while I called it “rose pink”, I mean we called it by actual different color names. We were both adamant that it was the name we called it. We were both shocked that the other apparently saw a totally different color.

For some reason, this debate felt personal and I had to insist we drop the subject. It got all wrapped up in my feelings of being dismissed by a partner, of having my judgement questioned, of being ‘splained at (because I’m a photographer and a lighting technician - I literally get paid to create color with light), of a whole bunch of other things.

I couldn’t understand why he was disagreeing with me, or why he saw the color so differently. Unlike the stereotype, Franklin is also a photographer and used to work in printwork, like, magazine layouts and stuff. He actually has a really good, nuanced eye for color. But we saw this color so very differently.

Later, we had a totally different conversation that clarified things for me. It’s not that we saw different colors, it’s that we both saw the exact same color and we just arrived at it from different perspectives.

You see, I work with light. Color in lighting is an additive process. You add colors together to get different colors. Franklin works with ink, which is a subtractive process (https://www.xrite.com/blog/additive-subtractive-color-models). You take colors out to get other colors. When you add all the colors of light together, you get white. When you add all the colors of paint and ink together, you get a dark, murky brownish, greyish black.

I see the world in terms of how light waves interact with each other. Franklin sees the world in terms of pigment. I see the world in RBG and he sees it in CMYK

Once we got to the root of the problem, the argument no longer upset me. It was simply a matter of coming to the same conclusion from two different perspectives - neither of us was wrong, but in different contexts, we each had different perspectives.

It’s my experience that “serious” arguments over “silly” things are really symptoms of deeper things like worldviews or perspectives. We could have just let this argument go and dismissed it as being “silly” because the name of that person’s hair color was completely irrelevant to anything important in our lives (or we could have asked him the manufacturer’s label for that color and solved the debate). And, honestly, we did both let it go.

But when an opportunity came up to look deeper into the conflict, I took it, and discovered something more important at stake - it wasn’t really about the name of the color, it was about respecting each other’s different experiences and knowledge bases and perspectives. We had the opportunity to learn more about each other as individuals, and through that learning came more understanding, which came greater respect.

So, while certainly plenty of “silly” arguments exist that have no real deeper meaning, I’ve learned that if an argument about “silly” things feels serious, it’s worth looking into why. This was a “silly” argument. But had we just let it go at that, without taking the opportunity that the subsequent discussion afforded us by making a connection to that “silly” argument, we wouldn’t have reached this better understanding of each other, and we quite possibly might have had an actual, real serious argument later where we were unable to find common ground because we hadn’t had this experience of seeing each other’s perspectives.

Not all perspectives are “valid” in that they’re not all equally correct. Sometimes someone really is just wrong about something. But, in this case, approaching a color from an additive perspective vs. approaching it from a subtractive perspective are both valid, in that they’re both legitimate approaches to arrive at a color. We got to see that about each other, and we can take that respect for our different backgrounds and experiences into our future conflicts, which have helped us to find common ground at times when it feels like we are seeing two totally different colors.

And now we play-disagree ironically about which is better - RGB or CMYK.

Profile

Joreth

The Inn Between

Page Summary

What Can Make Even A #Poly Person Jealous? #polyamory #polyamorous
Country Swing Dancing And The Systemic Obliviousness Of Men - A Compliment Becomes A Metaphor
Reminder: Lots Of Polyamorous People Never "Opened Up" A Relationship
The Vilification Of Gaslighting
Polyamory & The Prisoner's Dilemma (And Some Gender Role Bullshit In Poly)
Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire - Escaping Abuse & Leaping Into Relationships In Polyamory
Being Seen
But Don't You Feel Alone With His Girlfriends With Nobody There For You?
Friendship Is Not The Consolation Prize Nor The Stepping Stone To A Relationship
Why White Men Decided Dancing Is Unmasculine I'll Never Know
Our Metamour Relationship Is Our Relationship, Not Our Mutual Partner's Responsibility
We Need An Online "I Am / You Are Flooded, Shut Up" Option
Dan Savage's Campsite Rule Is Bullshit
Metamours Are Poly In-Laws. Stop Reinventing The Wheel.
The Cost Of Emotional Labor In Relationships
Almost 100% Track Record Of Being Stood Up By Online Dates
Yes You Really Can Do Exercises To Improve Your Non-Verbal Communicaiton Skills
Is There Commitment In A Polyamorous Relationship?
Have You Ever Considered Being Dumped As A Blessing?
How Can I Convince Him To Let Me...
How To Find A Discreet, Suitable Man For My Wife
Your Hubby Hangs Out With A Gold Digger?!
What Are Signs A Relationship Is Ending That People Don't Know?
This History & Meaning Of The Term "Open Relationship" Is Not What You Think
What's The Most Challenging Part Of Open Relationships For You?
Feel Your Feelings Then Choose The Relationship To Match
How To Not Catch Teh Feelz In Casual Sex
When Doesn't A Pre-Nup Work?
How Do You Deal With Jealousy In Your Open Relationship?
What's The Most Romantic First Date You've Ever Had?
What If You And Your Best Friend Like The Same Person?
Abusers Do This Thing, Except When They Do The Opposite
Have You Ever Seen An Open Relationships Work?
You Cannot Consent If You Cannot Say No
Why Do Married People Not Wear Wedding Rings?
Why Would You Sleep Apart From Your Significant Other?
Have You Ever Invited Another Person Into Your Marriage?
How Do I Make My Wife Care About Her Own Orgasm?
Is Your Partner A Grownup Or Do You Just Not Care About Them?
You Are Not Unique, You Are About As Common As It Gets
How Should An Orphan Get Married?
What If I Want More Than Casual Sex With My Ex?
What's The Difference Between Non-Sexual Relationships & Platonic Friends?
How Can I Make Him Marry Me For Social Respect?
Why Do Women Get Bitter After Marriage?
What Does Commitment Mean In Polyamory?
Do You Give Second Chances?
Do You Think #Feminist Women Are Gold Diggers?
How Do You Feel About Your Non-Traditional Relationships Now?
The Most Ridiculous Fight We Ever Had

August 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Ranty Lessons by Joreth

Entries tagged with relationships

Links

Page Summary

Syndicate

Banners