"I couldn't manage it all."

So, I’m seeing the word “polyamory” and “non monogamy” a lot more in mainstream articles (The New Yorker, SEVEN PAGES OF ARTICLES in Vox, even f*cking Time) lately.  It’s not new, although I feel like the sheer amount of discussions are increasing.  I don’t have a lot of hot-takes, but the number of hot-takes I have is not zero. 

First off, I’m grateful as fuck that ENM seems to be received leagues better (indifference and vague judgment) than other experiences of queer-breaking-into-mainstream.  I may have gotten some looks with my tribe in the wild, but no one’s kicked us out of a bar, threatened our jobs, or come after our families.  And I know that’s not true of everyone’s ENM experience.  I have some midwestern friends who, during divorce and custody litigation, had to discuss a humiliating amount of detail about their ENM love lives, and lost a significant amount of custody time because of it.  People are still vicious, and they’ll still bite where there’s a free space.

But I’m "out" to just about everybody right now, except my job, and I sleep quite soundly at night.  I don’t have a lot of room to complain.  My opinions aren’t important, and I am not trying to throw shade on monogamy.  But I’m a writer, and I have thoughts, and I’m a terrible procrastinator on my more important projects.  So here it is.  

The nicest, most open-minded commenters in these mainstream “look at people doing poly” articles love to say things like:  “All the best to them; I could never keep track of all that!  It’s hard enough keeping track of one!”  And these commenters are giving their kindest and most open-minded contributions, so I need to assert right now that I’m a shithead for clapping back at it.  In truth, I’m grateful for their open-mindedness, and they have a solid point.

…but what does “keeping track” mean?  Keeping track of feelings (like we do in therapy)?  Of the schedule (like when you make plans with friends)?  Of the people themselves?  I don’t really “keep track” of my partners…I schedule them, and then we hang out.  Like you do with a partner you’re not living with.

It’s hard to find representative content to discuss relationships that isn’t dramatized, hyperbolized, or over-produced.  The poly yang to every mono yin is just as toxic.  Love is Blind on one side, Big Love on the other.  /R/relationships on one side, /r/polyamory on the other.  Predatory behavior on Tinder, predatory behavior on Feeld.  There’s no shortage of people fucking up and taking others down with them in their most representative way.

But when I think about “managing” or “keeping track” of people, I’m reminded of the enmeshment that necessarily happens in monogamy.  The relationship escalator, the pressure of marriage that is built into the culture of monogamy.  Hell, it’s in the very word.  We don’t call it “monoamory.”  We put the idea of marriage into the whole description of one-at-a-time love.  In fact, if you’re a one-at-a-time lover and not interested in matrimony, you might be dubbed a practitioner of “serial dating.”  Like…Jesus.

When marriage is the goal, the amount of checking in to make sure your partner is on the same emotional plane, on the same emotional page, with the same financial and locational goals, is sometimes overwhelming.  The resentment that happens in a monogamous relationship when one partner was planning for one outcome, and the other partner was planning for a different one?  The careful wordplay that gets used to keep things general enough for a loophole, but specific enough to quell a partner’s fears?  Nothing sounds more like management to me.

Marriage is wonderful with the right person.  But so is plain-old cohabitation.  Sex is wonderful with someone that you desire, but desire shifts constantly, and sex isn’t wonderful with someone that you do not desire.  Sometimes the best sex of your life is with someone who wouldn’t get along with your friends or family.  Comfort and excitement don’t come from the same place, but we’re always craving both of them.  

These are not polyamorous truths.  These are universal truths.  Life is hard to manage, and polyamory is a possible framework that can potentially help someone manage.

I think about monogamous people who, upon the fear that their partner is interested or excited by another person (also a universal phenomenon, not exclusive to polyamory), start to become anxiously aware of their partner’s phone usage.  The unavoidable calculations that start adding up when it’s clear that one partner needs distance.  The scorekeeping, the “after everything I’ve done for them,” the do-I-stay-or-do-I-go.

Yes, distance and breakups happen in polyamory too, and they hurt just as bad (no, the availability of other partners does not lighten the grief).  But I suppose the biggest reason I’m polyamorous is to avoid some of the management of the monogamous “lifestyle” (How’s it feel?  Just because you’re the majority doesn’t make you not-a-lifestyle).  Another person is not a threat to me.  I don’t get terrified when my partners go on dates.  I encourage the growth of my partners, because trying to stifle that growth is bad for everyone.  What do I manage?  Primarily, I manage myself.

In our throuple, my husband’s relationship with his girlfriend is theirs to manage.  My relationship with my girlfriend (even though she’s the same person) is hers and mine to manage.  There’s more circles in our venn diagram of relationships than there are in a monogamous couple’s, but none of us are responsible for intersections that we are not involved in.

You know what monogamous people manage?  Trying to fit all their needs into one person, making some inevitable compromises, and dealing with the resentment.  

What do we have in common?  The work.

All love is work.  It should be joyous work, it should be easy work.  But yes, love is labor.  You keep the person all but tangibly in your heart and mind, and you hurt when they hurt.  How does any mother love and care for more than one child?  How do people have more than one friend?  How does a doctor care for more than one patient?  (I’m cringing at my patent repetition of this poly mantra as if it’s my original thought, and not a song that’s been past down, word-for-word, among poly generations)

You know what comrades?  Labor can also be shared.  My partners don’t just have me to be vulnerable or passionate with.  Can you imagine the responsibility?  That’d be a fascist-ass relationship, which is what I feel like a lot of monogamous contributors believe when they leave comments about “management” of people.

Romance can be found in different frameworks.  It’s okay if some of them are not for you, and for the love of Christ, we don’t need any proselytizers.  Personally, I’m hoping that the continued conversation about polyamory will enable people to realize that they don’t need to stick to the factory-set relationship.  There are tons of negotiable aspects of relationships that we should be talking about that will enable us to live freer lives, without making our partners feel bad that they’re not always the perfect answer to every problem all the time.

3 Microposts from the Holidays

Happy Mondayest of Mondays (Gretchen Wieners whispers "It's Thursday").  Tits out to new beginnings.

I come to my laptop with renewed joy about my own writing process.  The writing I want to do, verses the writing that I think is important or entertaining or successful or enduring.

While I was away with family, I thought of so many things to write about.  I’m on a bit of a backlog.  So here are a few micro-posts.

–Cultural Validation:  Our society’s refusal to let go of the idea of “the one” is a little like religion’s refusal to stop selling the idea of an afterlife.  We don’t know how to live in the moment, how to sit through disappointment, how to move through grief, or how to stop worrying, so we create fantasies that only serve to make us more miserable.

Some of us move beyond the idea of “the one,” but then we meet someone who unintentionally fucks us all the way up.  Life with them breaks a certain limit of pre-programmed happiness, and life after them leaves us questioning what the fuck that was.  It’s easy to make ourselves the center of gravity in the universe of relationships (and to a certain point, we should), but we have to resist the urge to build a negative worldview around it.  The hot-people-are-objectively-terrible and the men-will-always-leave-you bits.  It’s not men or hot people.  It’s people in general.  It’s the difficulty of relationships.  Remember that you also unintentionally fucked someone all the way up.  And I know this makes me an asshole, but I find that comforting.

Those of us who do not believe in “the one” try our damnedest to warn others when we see them start to fall.  Don’t have any preconceived notions.  Don’t get carried away before you really get to know them.  There are plenty of fish in the sea.  But I still see every female high school student I teach fall into a stupor when a boy shows them a minimal amount of attention.  And it reminds me of all the ways I twisted myself, happily, to participate in a relationship that depleted me.  All the times I drove an hour to his place, low on sleep and energy, because simply the feeling of being near him exhilarated me.

I didn’t believe in soul-mates, and I sure-as-fuck wasn’t monogamous.  What fulfilled me?  I’ve been throwing around a theory that it was a kind of cultural validation.  That when I walked around with this guy who gave me orgasms but wasn’t respectful, other people would see me and know my experiences. The songs by Brand New, Say Anything, and Death Cab for Cutie were about me. Rihanna's pain in her music is my pain. High Fidelity is about me. Love Actually is about me. Everything is about me. The world sees me and I'm real.

Of course, cultural validation goes hand in hand with a strong lack-of-self worth, which is a deeper and more fundamental piece to the story. But the idea stays with me like a wall painting I never noticed before.  Especially when I think about every person who says they don’t believe in soul-mates, but still longs to get married.

– “Place-Holder” Dating:  This is strong in both monogamous and polyamorous people, and it comes from a monogamous mindset.  We date someone that we’re not crazy about because we want sex and comradery, and they’re available.  But we’ve got one eye open for a different person to “fill the spot” when we meet them.

This makes psychological sense if you’re a narcissist, but it’s quite a roundabout way of saying that the person is ungrateful.

When we fall in love and approach a vulnerability with each other that includes eroticism, desire, and consummation, sometimes we forget that this other person is still a person, with a schedule and goals and limited energy.  We don’t really forget this when it comes to friendship.  We assume friends will vacillate between layers of availability and closeness.  We assume we’re allowed to see other friends outside of them; that nothing is stopping us from hanging out with other people for entertainment and connection.  We don’t have “placeholder friends” that we hold onto while looking for a “perfect friend.”

While I truly don’t want to take the magic out of love and relationships (I’m a witch; I sort of thrive on magic), it is important to me as a relationship anarchist that I treat my partners as whole people.  Perhaps it’s also a part of being my own primary.  I don’t want to fall into an identity-crises-depression when a partner needs to shift their role or amount of time in my life, especially because when you increase the amount of partners, you also inevitably increase the amount of breakups.

–The Smart Asshole That You Miss, But Are Much Better Without:  There is a genre of person that we all left after therapy, and this is the person who projects as much intelligence as they do judgment.  They were so clever and funny, had a stimulating vocabulary, and made us feel smarter to talk to them.

…but they also made us feel stupider about some things.  Maybe about the differences in how much we read, or consume the news, or remember events from AP History.  At least once they’ve made us feel incompetent at our careers by pointing out a mistake that sounded fundamental, but was actually far more nuanced than they had the energy to comprehend.

Cheers, you fun and clever asshole.  Thanks for the fun, no thanks for the complexes.  I truly hope your self-image and personal relationships are better than when I last saw you.

Being present–artist, partner, dreamer.

 “I don’t even have time for a boyfriend,” I sigh over my steaming lavender earl grey.  “I just want someone to think about when I’m walking to my car.”

The winter hits me from a different angle every year, like a predator that studies me, and evolves with me.  A shell breaks around my crown.  A vibrating fractal that snaps as I push through it.

A year and a half into therapy, we finally get into my brain patterns.  Headspace has come up for me before, but it’s time to tackle it now.  My emotional back is sore.  I’m supposed to want to be in the present.  And I do.  I think.

My therapist is like a fairy in a cave, with a soft glow around her as she shows me around dark corners.  I unroll the parchment and draw another angle on the map.

Your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness, she says.  An artist daydreams, dissociates, floats off into the clouds.

“Elisabeth?  Earth to Elisabeth, are you there?” my second grade teacher asks me while I’m thinking about boobs.

“Are you dressed yet?  We’re late, Bissy,” my parents patiently urge while I think about the saddest Disney deaths.

“Anyway, that’s why I can’t sleep with my neck exposed,” my friend concludes, merging onto I-465 as I’m sailing between Canis Major and Canis Minor.

Don’t even get me started on where my head is when I’m in love.  Eros almost had me create a baby with a narcissist.  I was lucky.  Many artists are not so lucky.

Where even is my head in this blog post?  Does it even make sense?  I can’t tell if it makes sense.

I shoot uncomfortably back into my body as I cross the street, and then I immediately leave again.  I move out of people’s trajectories too late, reading my surroundings as if they’re a dense victorian novel, sometimes spinning around several times in the same block.

I wake up, unable to tell where my depression ends and his begins.  Love was a syrup; now it’s a paste.  I push my head side to side, but can’t see anything.  I reach out to stretch, and feel my body shoot inward toward a black hole.

I walk toward a tree trunk, smell the cinnamon bark, sink my fingers into the rough soil.  I creek with the branches.

Everything is moving, not just me.

   

Sometimes I need to wrestle the spirit that keeps me alive to the ground, and tell her to wait.  Sometimes I need to squeeze my brain back into myself, or bash it against something outside myself.  I can’t always tell, because just like everyone else, my angels and demons are the same people.

The black chaos that emerges from me in the form of words is the same chaos that makes reading too difficult to be a pastime.  The neurological patterns that make listening easy and relaxing are the same patterns that make talking a mental workout.  I fall into therapy roles the same way I sink into a couch.  And I can stay there too long, and lose my mind.

“So anyway,” he says, after ten uninterrupted minutes, “I think part of my damage is that the people who have always held sway in my life have insinuated to me that I’m never enough.”

I tense.

“Hold on,” I say, and take hold of his hand.  “Can we talk about…can we play tennis soon?  I want to see the direction that a ball goes when I swing at it.  From 50 different angles.  I want to feel physics the way a dog does when he chases a rabbit.”

“Oh, um, of course my love,” he says with stars in his eyes, and I run my hand over the couch and feel the microsuede texture that’s supposed to keep my cats from scratching it, but doesn’t.

In which I procrastinate on sending out poetry

I write good shit, because that’s what I like to do.

I like it when people read my shit, I like it a lot.

But this whole be-a-commercial-success thing, I dunno.

I’m a bit like Emily Dickinson in that I struggle with the outside world.

I grew up under benevolent eyes. I was almost good enough.

My father got me two kinds of gifts for Christmas–

classical music CDs from the discount bin

and a book that would help me with a school project.

Maybe it’s why I can’t stop dreaming about college.

It’s the same dream every time.

I’m going through those 4 years, again.

Yes, I got my degree.  But I’m getting it again.

Because I didn’t absorb it the first time.

Because I dared care about other things the first time–

My pleasures, my toxic relationships,

a new magic I was trying to use as it was using me–

I wrestled with entities separate from books and ideas.

I word-vomited banal generalities for all my papers,

got a lot of C-’s. But showed up enough 

to stretch zombified fingers across the border of B-.

And that means, in my comfortable shame, 

that I wasted my education.

But midway through every dream I look at the calendar

and realize I need to be at work.

That I don’t need validation as long as I have money,

which I am now earning on my own.

And I wake up in a world far less stimulating.

No Old Testament Literature, no French,

no Psychology 305.

Just a freezing dark room, a harsh lamp, 

a podcast about a world I can’t change,

and a pair of legs that will start working soon enough.

Lessons from my 37th year of living, my 22nd year of romantic involvement, and my 16th year of polyamory

 I come up for air from my favorite spot on his neck.  We’ve been holding each other for hours.  We lightly press our foreheads together and feel the vibrations of each other’s minds in the quiet serenity of our vulnerability.

“I have a gift for you.  It was in my pocket.”  He hands over a small ziplock bag with a ring.  It’s my birthstone, but not the type I’ve usually received as a gift.  It’s a black iridescent opal, surrounded by tiny gems.  It looks like the cosmos, like the life inside of a black hole.  It’s magical and dark, just like me.

I’m speechless, near tears.  I’ve gotten romantic gifts from boyfriends before, and I can recall the various women I’ve been in those moments.  There’s always an orgasmic rush of validation, the importance you have, tangible evidence of the space you occupy in his mind.  It’s not a lie–he loves you.  He thought of you when you weren’t there, and planned on a way to make you smile the next time he sees you.

I had associated passion with dread since my first serious poly breakup in 2019 (ending a ten year relationship in which I’d got a matching, permanent body-mod as a metaphor for our commitment).  Even more so when my second serious partner of three years (with whom I had much smoother and more gracious communication) had to leave because of a traumatic event that had nothing to do with me…making me question everything about love.

“Will he pass the test?” my wounds ask.  “Will he make you feel safe, and then one day decide that you’re not worth the effort?  Will he love you until something difficult happens in his life, and then be unable to proceed?  Was it really love that you had before?  Or did you become blind?  Does real love last?”

These are all vain attempts of emotional calibration, because they’re my wounds trying to figure out someone else, rather than my own strength solidifying a foundation that will enable me to participate in a relationship.  It’s what scores of hours in therapy has been helping me to understand, and it speaks to centuries of patriarchal, religious, and cultural conditioning.

We did love each other, it did end, and it will keep happening.  We all will keep loving and evolving, loving and moving, with each other and by ourselves.  I will learn a lot along the way about triggers and desires and needs.  About habits and cycles.  About headspace and holding space.  How to say no without worry.  How to let my partner own their feelings and time while I own mine.  How to engulf myself in the present and be grateful.

I look at this beautiful, ardent man next to me.  Not more or less perfect than any of my exes.  Just here, this version of him with this version of me, sharing this time which is now more valuable than it’s ever been.  We geek out about a tribe in the Amazon whose numbering system is rooted in the fibonacci sequence rather than base ten.  We give our nuanced opinions about Taylor Swift.  We crack up over easter eggs in The Simpsons and Family Guy.  We recite our favorite lines from our own poetry.

Our trust tightens like a cable knot, because I still don’t expect anything from him except his genuine self.  I love the ring; I’ll tear up every time I see it.  But I’ll still be just as grateful that he decides to send one more text or schedule one more Friday.

Relationship longevity is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t proof of our individual worth.  No amount of passion, paranoia, or loyalty will prevent us from being shrapnel in the bombs that life decides to throw, should we become unfortunate enough.  All we can do is continue to rebuild.

Facing My Triggers, pt 1: Headspace

The following post is dedicated to Kendrick Lamar.  Thank you for writing Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers.  

A mantra has been visiting me lately, like a bird who’s been watching me from afar, but has finally landed on my window.  The key to serenity is facing your triggers.

I grew up with 2 rules: be an exemplary Christian, and get good grades.  Neither of those are bad things. But for a while, there wasn't a lot of room for much else. I got used to hammering myself, and others, into that identity. I judged everyone who didn't fit what I was told to achieve. My brother and I created a moral intellectual elitism that didn't keep anybody warm, but at least explained the darkness we both felt.

So like a good little artist I created my own triggers.  Among them:  1) having my intelligence belittled or judged, and 2) being perceived as heartless, cruel, or ignorant.

So here I am spinning through time with open doors and windows, desperate for approval, just as lonely in my 20s as I was when I was 11.

And then the therapist shows me "the work."

1) Cut out the people feeding into my negative self-beliefs. The ingredients for the perfect storm are much faster drawn together than the ingredients for a self-directed life. I never wrapped my arms around happiness and didn't know how...what to feel for, or look for, or move towards. Get rid of the people holding my arms in place.

2) Get in the ring and tackle those negative self-beliefs. 

I am intelligent, even if judgmental left-brained people make me feel like I’m not.  As it turns out, judgmental left-brained people actually don’t understand a lot of artistic metaphors, and use judgment as a defense mechanism to protect their own self-perception.  But that’s not what this post is about, and I’ve given those types enough of my headspace.

I am kind, even if I draw strong boundaries.  Fixing people is not my job.  Fixing me is my job.  Fixing others is others’ job.  I am kind even if I say no when other people want yes.  Other people have to learn to deal with disappointment, just as I have.

Cool cool sounds good.

But then the trigger comes.

It finds me in the same crevice it was created.  A tone.  A glint of the eye.  A tight vibration of impatience.  A sympathetic laugh.

Most of the time, my process is internal.  I don’t tend to lash out unless I am overstimulated and my nervous system is reaching out for a lifeboat.  My go-to suffering is rumination. 

Sweet, dark rumination. I create a prison for myself so I don’t bother anyone. The rush of familiar pain vibrates up my vagus nerve.

I debate down a spiral staircase, thinking it's about logic.  I wash my hair, and turn my brain as hot as my flat iron while I have real arguments with people who aren’t there and probably haven’t given me a second thought since.

I never. win. these. arguments.  Even though I create them in my head. We’re just having more verbose, deep-cutting versions of the same argument we had before.

Someone knocks on the door of my brain.

“You deserve more headspace than this,” she says.

“Yes, I agree,” I say, somewhat embarrassed, as if my boss just caught me goofing off on the job, as if my dad just opened my bedroom door at 12 PM on a Saturday to pull me out of bed.

************

I look down at the piles around my elbows and find another mantra. Like a tupperware–boring, but reliable, and every time it’s used it changes a little: Habits only change through repetition and discipline.  Failing is part of the process.  Failure only fails through the fail of the fail.

I'm actually supposed to fail a thousand times in order to do one single thing correctly.

So it’s three days later, and I’m washing my hair again.  And I’m ruminating again.  And the work comes in a little earlier this time, because she’s macheted herself a pathway in.

“Hey. You deserve more headspace than this.”

“What should I think about?”

“Whatever you want?”

“I want to not think about my ex.”

“That was always allowed.”

“How about I think about writing.  God I don’t write enough.”

“You could lower your standards, which would make you write more.”

*Seethes angrily at a reasonable suggestion* “Yeah, I could do that.”

“Just try it.”

“Okay.”

“...”

“This song slaps.”

“Hell yeah it does.”

“You know what, I have a complicated relationship with alternative rock.”

“Say more.”

Holy shit I’m thinking about something cool and interesting.  And enjoying it.  And not thinking about other people.  Is this what passing the Bechdel test feels like?