Fast and Fragmented

Ever since my last entry, I've been intending to write something about internet dating.  And I will, I will... but not tonight. 

Sometimes I feel like my life is just zipping by at light speed, and I wonder what it will seem like in retrospect -- when, after several years, I look back on this crazy period in my life.  There's no way I'm going to remember everything.  I pride myself on my excellent memory, and yet it happens that entire episodes just fall out of my brain: the other day, a friend of mine was talking about how, when I was pregnant with Sienna, we used to see so much more of each other, and I honestly didn't know what she was talking about.  For example, she referenced an evening when we went out for dessert together, and it sounds plausible enough, but I have no memory of the event.

Today I did a little bit of everything, and then some.  A lot of playing secretary (no, not the fun kind of playing secretary), a lot of laundry, dishes, house cleaning, my property management gig (talking to prospective renters, etc.), some editing, reading books to Sienna, a convivial dinner with friends (interrupted by 10 minutes of making out in the parking lot with Travis, who happened to be driving through my part of town), business strategizing with Parker, tea and a chat with my son Denali, phone calls to my brother and Lilianna and the car insurance people...

What would it be like to wake up with nothing to do?  Or maybe just one or two things, with plenty of time to focus, no need to divide my attention up into little bite-sized portions?

And yet it's also true that, though I sometimes long for more leisure time, I'm feeling very happy with my life right now. I guess this is the luck of the lucky draw: go, go, go!

Polyfidelity: Happily Ever After?

This morning at Travis's, wandering naked from the bedroom to the kitchen, I discovered something interesting on the coffee table: Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer, by Ryam Nearing.

“Hey Travis, what's with the book?” I asked, knowing that he most likely hadn't picked it up for himself. “Have you actually read it?'

“Nope, never read it. I ran across it when I was moving stuff over here, and thought you might want to take a look,” he said. “Sallie must have given it to me.”

Travis and Sallie have been close friends for more than twenty years. They started out as boyfriend-girlfriend, but after living with each other for about five years, their relationship transitioned into friendship. Travis and I initially met through Sallie, actually – it's a bizarre story, which I'll save for some other time.

I've long maintained that polyfidelity is basically a contradiction in terms. I've never understood why anyone who identifies as poly would choose to be in a closed marriage of any kind, even one in which there were more than two people.

So I went back to bed, book in hand, curious to see what this Ryam Nearing person had to say.

Nearing defines polyfidelity by describing the form it takes: “a group in which all partners are primary to all other partners and sexual fidelity is to the group; shared intent of a lifelong run together” (p.10).

Perhaps not surprisingly, polyfidelity is then held up as “the highest evolution of the sound ideals of individual choice, voluntary cooperation, a healthy family life, and positive romantic love” (p.26).

My own relationship style, which Nearing calls “open coupling,” is apparently less than ideal, although it can be tempting to try it at first, because it's “a smaller and therefore easier step for most people to take in moving beyond a one-to-one closed partnership” (p. 58).

Wow: watch those polyfidelitous black-belts go! Look at that nifty relationship pretzel they just made! No loose ends anywhere! I only wish I were that advanced!”

Oh, please.

To be fair, Nearing does give a pretty spot-on critique of what is perhaps the biggest problem with open coupling. I'll quote some of what s/he says on this topic:

“Equality in relationships is an important value for those choosing polyfidelity. From either side, as the primary in an open couple or as a secondary relating to them, the difference in status simply feels uncomfortable....Short term, while first getting involved with an outside lover, the secondary status is easy and feels right. But as the relationship develops in intensity, tough questions arise. If your primary partner is always the highest relationship priority, how does it feel to give less to your other lover?

“...As someone's secondary, what does it do to your self-esteem, long-term, to always have to make your plans after your lover and his partner have finalized theirs? How does it feel to have her go 'home' time after time to someplace other than your place? ...[T]he inequality factor becomes virtually abhorrent, if not at the start, then after some difficult and heart-wrenching dramas unfold” (p. 59).

Aye, there's the rub. All very pertinent, too, given the discussions Travis and I have been having lately about what he's going to do when Parker and I move to the Northwest in June. Travis has said he doesn't want to be “like an Army whore, picking up my skirts and following you every time you decide to pull up stakes” – but the prospect of a long-distance relationship isn't attractive to either of us. What to do? The worst thing, Travis says, is that he feels like he is “alone” in his decision-making process – that Parker and I have our plans, which weren't made with Travis in mind, and now he's got to figure out how he's going to deal with a change that feels like it's being imposed on him.

A long-term solution is probably going to involve a shift in the group dynamic, toward a structure that feels more balanced. Perhaps, over time, Travis will become more integrated into my family; or perhaps he'll find his own “primary” partner, while keeping me as his “secondary”; or perhaps he and his new partner will join me and Parker and we'll form a blissfully balanced four-sided shape of some kind. But whatever the solution, I know one thing: it won't involve polyfidelity.

I can't see myself voluntarily pledging sexual or emotional fidelity to anyone – not to a person, not to a group of people, not ever. I'm not a person to promise something I can't deliver.

A locked door doesn't make me feel secure, it makes me feel claustrophobic. I'll happily stay in the house all day, as long as I know I can explore the great outdoors whenever I choose. But if I have to promise to stay at home, to forgo the company of outside visitors, I immediately start chafing to get out, neurotically pacing the length of my cage like a panther at the zoo.

Being open to people and possibilities, getting to make new discoveries about myself and others, allowing love to grow organically, accepting that I don't have complete control over my life, and cultivating the flexibility I need in order to weather changes gracefully – these, to me, are fundamental values. In other words, I chose a polyamorous lifestyle because it meets my need for openness.

In my mind, polyfidelity represents the worst of both worlds: you've got all the restrictions of monogamy (albeit with more people in your closed “marriage”) and all the drama and inherent instability of non-monogamy.

What's more, polyfidelity is not going to solve the underlying problem of inequality that arises whenever a relationship structure moves beyond that of a closed dyad. (Note that couples in traditional marriages spend a lot of time arguing about perceived unfairness in their relationship; adding other people into the mix just means that there are more people constantly evaluating who's getting the better deal and who's getting shafted....)

It doesn't matter how vociferously Ryam Nearing defends the idea that, in polyfidelity, all partners are valued equally. The fact is that some relationships will be stronger than others; some dyads will experience a more compelling connection than other dyads in the group. The group dynamics are going to suit some people better than others. Some people are going to get along peaceably and others are going to get into power struggles. And friction between any two people in such a group will have ripple effects on all the other relationships: everyone is going to get drawn in to the drama, like it or not.

Finally, the whole polyfidelitous endeavor seems so artificial to me. I don't have anything against intentional communities. I live in one, and I love it. But my co-housing community isn't a commune (there's no partner swapping, and no shared finances except insofar as each family must contribute to the maintenance of our common property), and it certainly isn't closed: people are free to come and go. There's no vetting process of any kind. 

In contrast, people who choose polyfidelity have a whole long list of requirements, things they're looking for in a potential partner. They're out there in cyberspace beating the bushes, often in vain, for the person(s) who will complete whatever vision of the “perfect family” they've concocted – I've seen their advertisements on sites like PolyMatchmaker, and I always have to roll my eyes. It's a more ridiculous version of what happens when a single person decides it's time to get married, without having anyone in particular in mind.

It goes like this: you've scripted out your play (let's call it “Happily Ever After”), decided on the role(s) available, and now you just have to put together your cast. So, you put out a casting call, and, assuming that anyone comes to audition, you evaluate the hopeful(s) against your checklist of criteria. This method is notoriously ineffective for single people looking for true love, and I'll bet that it's even less likely to succeed when multiple people must be equally thrilled by, and equally willing to commit to, the brave (or foolhardy) soul who shows up to audition for the part.

Ultimately, polyfidelity is very similar to monogamy. It seems to be largely about achieving and maintaining security. There's nothing wrong or ignoble in that aim. I too have a desire to build relationships that are going to last, to find a sustainable group dynamic. But "sustainable" is not the same thing as "static."  

The idea that you can create the perfect structure, and then just make sure that it stays that way, seems awfully naive to me.  Human relationships take place over time, against the backdrop of all kinds of changes in circumstance; they are works in progress, and there's no "happily ever after" guarantee.  A pledge of fidelity has always been a flimsy barricade against uncertainty and loss. And if you're counting on more than one person to hold that line, chances are pretty high that you or someone you love is going to fall from grace.

Poly Drama-Trauma-Rama

If you look at the dating profile of someone who identifies as non-monogamous, there's a very high chance that he or she will have something negative to say about drama. “NO DRAMA, PLEASE,” for example. It's kind of a joke. You really don't want relationship drama? I've got the perfect living arrangement for you: a hermitage.

The fact is, human relationships are complicated. And maintaining more than one sexual/romantic relationship at a time can be very complicated.

I'd venture to say that most poly people have a high tolerance for complexity. Some even enjoy a certain amount of drama in their lives. (Hey, at least it beats feeling your thighs spread a little more every day, as you sit there on your sofa watching manufactured dramas on the boob tube and stuffing your face with hot-n-spicy fried pork skins. I don't know about you, but I can think of waaaaay more titillating scenarios involving many of those words I used in the previous sentence. IMHO, drama's occasional appearances are a small price to pay.)

However, sometimes, the drama-trauma gets out of hand.

To illustrate, let's look at the most recent sequence of events in my friend Lilianna's life:

1. Lilianna and her out-of-state boyfriend Robin spend the weekend together, and things go pretty well, even though they have a couple of difficult conversations about the fact that she's recently gotten back in touch with Paul, and she's slated to have dinner with him on Monday night.
2. She meets Paul for dinner, and they have a fantastic time together: they talk astronomy and ideas, and the evening ends with a spontaneous kiss. Lilianna is really happy about it. (She and Paul went out once or twice about a year ago, but somehow things didn't quite click then, and she felt like he'd flaked out on her. Recently, he contacted her, expressing regret that he'd let the connection slip, and she cautiously accepted his invitation to get together again.)
3. She gets back home after the dinner, and Rick has a glass of wine all ready for her: “Come sit here on the futon with me and tell me all about it!” So, they're talking, and her cell phone keeps beeping, because Robin's texting her.
4. She texts Robin, telling him, “Hey, it's late, and I'm talking to Rick.” Robin says he doesn't care how late it is, whenever she's done talking to Rick, she needs to call him, because he's feeling anxious to know how her date with Paul went. So she texts back, saying they had a nice dinner, talked astronomy, evening ended with kiss.
5. Robin's response goes something like, “What? What? NO. No, no, no! Make it stop, make it stop!”
6. Rick, who's wondering what's going on, reads Robin's text. Suddenly, he's furious. His response to Robin's response goes something like, “That fucking hypocrite! He waltzed in here five years ago and turned our whole LIVES upside down! And here he is, losing it over a dinner date and a kiss? Give me a break! What, we're all supposed to feel sorry for him, cater to his whiny-whine demands, because he's in so much pain, oh waah, waah? When he didn't give a fuck about how I felt? Oh, no, back then it was all, 'Oh, the eternal principle of love blah blah blah!' It's always all about him and what he wants! What do you even SEE in him, anyway? Name me one good thing about your relationship with Robin – besides the sex, I mean – 'cause I sure as hell don't see it!”
7. After Lilianna and Rick are more or less finished with their now-not-so-pleasant conversation, she gets a text from Robin: “I'm still up – are you?” It's really late – past midnight here, and two hours later for Robin. So Lilianna suggests they wait until morning to talk. He says he must talk to her now, that he doesn't care how late it is, he needs five minutes on the phone.
8. At 5 a.m., Lilianna finally says, “I'm sorry, Robin, but I have to hang up and get some sleep.”
9. As soon as Lilianna wakes up on Tuesday morning, Robin – who apparently has not slept one wink – pings her online, wanting to take up the conversation where they left off. He has now decided that what he really needs (assuming he can't manage to coerce Lilianna into agreeing to be “just friends” with Paul by threatening to break up with her) is for Paul to know how upset he is. Robin needs Lilianna to tell Paul all about their harrowing post-date conversation, in which Robin wept, gnashed his teeth, etc., etc., the whole nine yards. Robin wants Paul to understand exactly how much suffering he's causing someone else by pursuing this thing. At one point, Robin admits he's not hoping for compassion, he's actually hoping to scare Paul away: “Maybe he'll decide that it's just too much drama for him.”

No wonder, when I called up Lilianna on Tuesday afternoon, she exclaimed, “I'm so glad you called – because I really need to talk to someone who is not involved in this whole thing!”

No wonder, when I went over to her place today with my daughter Sienna, Lilianna seemed delighted to spend her afternoon dealing with a not-quite-three-year-old, whose simple demands are easily addressed: “Of course you can help me stir the cornbread, honey!” or, “No, that's enough for now -- too much lemonade will give you a tummyache.”

 

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Whether we're talking about the U.S. military's stance on gays or a method of coping with jealousy, my opinion on “Don't ask, don't tell” is the same: bad policy.

Yes, there are times when it's appropriate to keep your lips zipped about what exactly has been going on in the bedroom(s), boardroom(s), or other place(s) of pleasure you tend to frequent. But I've never yet seen a case in which a blanket “don't ask, don't tell” policy has worked out well for people in an intimate relationship.

Why is that? My guess is that all that not talking about IT, whatever the big, scary “IT” might be, is just not conducive to intimacy.

In the throes of jealousy, ignorance can look like bliss. But when you tell your lover, “Do whatever you want, just so long as I don't have to hear about it,” you're signing up for all kinds of petty discomforts that, over time, will grow to far outweigh your present pain.

To illustrate, here's a typical “don't ask, don't tell” phone conversation:

Person A: “So what have you been up to?”

Person B: “Oh...Nothing much.”

Person A: “Oh. So...is this not a good time to talk?”

Person B: “Not really, unfortunately – I'm supposed to be somewhere in 5 minutes.”

Person A: “Where?”

Person B: “Oh, I'm just meeting...someone...for lunch.”

Person A: “A friend of yours?”

Person B: “...Yeah.”

Person A: “Who?”

Person B: “I thought you didn't want to talk about this kind of stuff.”

Person A: “Oh. That kind of lunch. Well, I guess I'll talk to you some other time, when it's more convenient for you.”

I know how these types of conversations go because Scott, my I-don't-know-what-to-call-him/ex-boyfriend/occasional lover/hopefully lifelong friend, maintains that he doesn't want to know anything about my “dating life.” He says it's just too painful: even after all this time, he gets bent out of shape whenever he thinks about me with anyone else.

The problem is, his method of coping with jealousy doesn't work. It doesn't work for me, and it hasn't worked for him. If it works for you, please tell me how, exactly, you manage to live with all those awkward information gaps without feeling empty inside.

How do you maintain intimacy with a partner who doesn't want to hear about things that feel important to you? How do you satisfy the desire to have your loved ones know you fully and love you for who you are, if there's a part of you they just can't accept? And how do you keep your own counsel with an entirely clear conscience, especially when this means keeping someone in the dark?

It may be that someone can provide satisfactory answers to these questions. Until then, I'll be on my soapbox.

A 'Sweetie' by Any Other Name...

So here's a perennial poly problem: what to call one's special people?

All right, it's not a huge problem, and maybe I'm the only one fretting about it. But it does keep coming up for me. 

A lot of poly folks have hit on the solution of referring to their significant others as “my sweetie,” as in, “So I went out to dinner with my sweetie So-and-So, and she spent the whole time talking about how her other sweetie was having a hard time with one of his sweeties....”

But I'm not really a fan of “sweetie” – too saccharin for my taste.

Other options aren't a whole lot better.

At a party in the Bay Area I once attended with Parker and Scott, we were introduced as “Viny, her husband Parker, and her O.S.O. Scott.” It took me a second to decode “Other Significant Other,” and I wasn't sure I liked it. Economical, certainly, and maybe kind of amusing, but also potentially marginalizing, kind of like an Honorable Mention or an “Also Ran....”

I have tended to favor more traditional terms like “boyfriend” or “lover,” but these don't seem like accurate descriptors for some of the people in my life.

Parker is my husband. Travis is my boyfriend. Okay, so far, so good.

Ex is a useful term, if you've got a relationship that has clearly transitioned into a platonic friendship. But poly people don't always simply end a relationship that isn't working.

Monogamous people, faced with a problematic relationship, are very tempted to just break it off, because they take it for granted that they can't pursue anyone else as long as they're still attached. Poly people, who don't have to be single in order to move on, tend to keep former lovers in their lives in whatever way seems to work best. In label-land, as elsewhere, being poly is a complicated business.

Is Lilianna Parker's ex-girlfriend? I'm not sure, but it doesn't sound quite right. What about that episode under the apricot tree a few months ago? Or the trip they're talking about taking together?

Another example: Scott and I broke up years ago, but nearly every time we've seen each other since then, we've ended up in bed together. So, what does that make him? Not my boyfriend, since we see each other only once or twice a year, but “ex-boyfriend” implies that we're totally over each other, and we're not.

My mother recently came up with a good catch-all term when she informed me that she had no interest in interacting with any of my (here she paused, searching for the right words...) extraneous people.

Extraneous Person. I think I like it. From now on, everyone I love who isn't part of my parent-approved nuclear family will be designated as an E.P. I'll append the identifying letters to each name, in a little superfluous bubble, like a TM.

Or maybe I should just suck it up and go with sweetie, like everyone else.

More on Friends and Lovers

I've had sex with seven men. Three of those relationships began as simple friendships. I've been sexual with two women, both good friends of mine. That makes a total of nine sexual partners over the course of the eighteen years that have passed since I first became sexually active.

And I'm still friends with eight of these people. Nine, if a Facebook-only friend counts.

Last night, I had dinner with three of them (my husband Parker, and our friends Lilianna and Rick). On the way home, we stopped off to see another (my boyfriend Travis, who is moving into his own place, and who needed Parker's help to move a couch and dresser). Later that night, another one called me (Scott, who wanted to commiserate about how lame Mormon parents can be). Then, early this morning, I got a call from another (Drew, whom I fondly call “my darling Ex”).

This is why my friend Erika's statement about not fucking one's friends made no sense to me. I guess the underlying fear is that sex ruins friendships, but that hasn't been borne out by my experience.

It's true that the transition from being romantically involved with someone to being just friends can be painful, but those kinds of hurts generally fade, and what remains is something worth preserving – provided there was anything of substance there in the first place.

Which brings me to the topic of casual sex.

For years, I claimed that I just wasn't “into” casual sex, even though I didn't have a clear idea what casual sex might be. Now, I think I have a better idea.

There are two kinds of casual sex:

1. Casual sex with a friend. In this case, although there may be no “romance” involved, both people genuinely like each other and are committed to maintaining their friendship.
2. Casual sex with someone who's not a friend. In this case, the connection is almost entirely physical: there's little interest in developing a relationship of any kind, except insofar as basic social niceties are sometimes necessary in the pursuit of sexual gratification.

The jury's still out on #1, but I can now say with complete conviction that I am not interested in #2.

My opinion is that being friends is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for being lovers.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that, in my own life, my one experiment with casual sex is also the only exception to my rule: he's the only lover I've had who is not currently my friend (except on Facebook). This is because he wasn't my friend to begin with, and, during the five months or so that we were lovers, our social intercourse was just about nil. We were attracted to each other, sure, but we basically didn't have anything to talk about.

In a previous post ("Photographers I Have Known"), I made it sound like the reason I broke off that relationship, if something so casual can even be called a relationship, was because I felt competitive with the guy's wife after he emailed me some photographs he'd taken of her. Actually, though, I had already resolved to end things with him: it was feeling increasingly weird to me to be spending so much time with someone I hardly knew, someone who really wasn't interested in letting me get to know him.

In that entry, I made my break-up letter to him sound much more glib than it really was. Here, in part, is what I actually wrote him in June of 2009:

“Much as I like you, and much as I've enjoyed the evenings we've spent together, I don't think I am really cut out for a relationship this casual, even though its very casualness had originally been appealing to me after so much relationship drama with [Lilianna] & co. I'd been mulling this over, some, before our last date, and had intended to talk about it then -- not as a decision, but more as a conversation I wanted to have with you -- and then found myself completely unable to bring it up. And since then I've come to the conclusion that, if I can't feel comfortable talking to you about how I really feel about something, I ought not to be having sex with you. (I say this not in terms of some kind of global judgment about the way things ought to be in relationships, but simply as a statement about what suits my own personality.)”

His response to this was basically mild regret: “Ah well, I suppose we aren't looking for exactly the same things. I do feel a little bad that you didn't feel able to talk to me about it though. I guess I'm not the easiest person to get to know. If you change your mind about dinner this week, or anytime, the offer is always open. No strings attached.”

Then – and this surprised me – he concluded with this quote from Thich Nat Hanh:

When I have a toothache, I discover that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing. 

I had to have a toothache in order to be enlightened, to know that not having one is wonderful. 

My nontoothache is peace, is joy. 

But when I do not have a toothache, I do not seem to be happy. 

Therefore, I look deeply in the present moment and see that I have a nontoothache; 

that can make me very happy already.

 
So, who knows? Maybe we could have been friends.

Fucking Friends

“I don't believe in fucking my friends,” a friend of mine once proclaimed, in a tone that brooked no argument.

I don't remember what occasioned Erika's statement, or the mini-manifesto on sexual etiquette that followed, but I don't think it was because I'd been coming on to her. I'm basically straight, so I have a lot of friends I don't fuck – but not as a matter of principle, so I was surprised by how emphatically Erika (who identifies as bisexual) defended her position that friends & sex just don't mix.

I do remember wondering what had happened to all that high-flown rhetoric of hers the night I walked into my bedroom and, lo and behold, who should suddenly sit up in my bed but (you guessed it) Erika, wearing precious little. And there was someone else in the bed with her: her friend Parker, a.k.a. my husband.

Here's how it happened.

Parker and I were hosting a party in her honor at our house one night (she'd just passed the qualifying exams for her Ph.D.), and when it got late and the party was winding down, Parker announced that he was heading to bed. He's always been an early bird. So Parker went upstairs, and Erika started drumming her fingers on the table. Less than five minutes later, she went upstairs herself, and she didn't come back down. After half an hour or so, I walked my three remaining guests home. “You can always come crash at our house if your bed is full,” one of them offered. “I think I can handle it,” I said, laughing.

Standing in front of the door to my bedroom, not sure how to proceed, I couldn't help reflecting on the ludicrousness of my predicament: would I be interrupting something? If so, would I be a welcome or an unwelcome intrusion? Unwelcome because they were in the middle of some kind of “just the two of us” sex scene? Welcome because they'd both enjoy it if I were to join in?

Or would my intrusion perhaps be initially resented but appreciated later? Would I be thanked for breaking things up before they went too far, causing Erika to regret the fact that she'd violated her own principles?

I knocked on the door, waited about 30 seconds, then opened it. Erika bolted upright with an alacrity that was comic, clad only in bra and panties, her hair all in disarray. Parker was lying on his stomach next to her, naked, from what I could see. He seemed kind of sleepy.

“Hey,” I said. “So...I'd like to go to bed now.”

“Okay,” said Erika, not budging.

“You're welcome to stay,” I said, “but if you do, we're actually sleeping. Okay?”

“Maybe I should go,” she said, still not budging.

By this time I had gotten into a nightgown, although I normally sleep naked. “Oh, go ahead and stay,” I said, climbing into bed with them. Erika was in the middle.

It turned out that Erika and Parker had not had sex, although they had fooled around enough to get Erika worked up, and she wasn't in the mood to just go to sleep. She and I ended up making out, which piqued Parker's interest, perking him up considerably, and soon all three of us were entangled. Then Erika said she wanted to watch Parker and I have sex, so that's the way our little menage a trois concluded. Then we fell asleep, three friends in bed together.

The fact that Erika has never actually fucked either me or Parker is a mere technicality, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not 100% convinced that she'll stick to her resolution, anyway: she and Parker have been very close friends for a long time, during which time their relationship has gone through periodic sexual phases, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were to end up having sex with each other at some point.

I haven't asked Erika whether she's changed her mind about whether it's okay for people to fuck their friends, but I suspect that, at the very least, she'd be less vehement about disagreeing with my position on the matter, which is this: why fuck anyone else?