You Got Your Monogamy In My Poly, Or: My Awful Corrosion
One of the reasons monogamy is so damned pervasive is that you can win at monogamy. Every relationship in a monogamous setting has the goal baked right in: Date. Get engaged. Move in together. Marry. Don’t cheat. Die.
…aaaaand you’ve won at monogamy! Collect your prize from the funeral director in the form of happy signs from your mourners. They’ll all praise your legendary love. Fifty years together and they were still holding hands on their deathbed? My God, how inspiring.
Me being stupid, I ported that ideology straight into my poly, a subtle corrosion I didn’t notice until about six months ago.
Polyamory’s got a lot of overlap with monogamy, because like Soylent Green, both are made of people. But once you remove that core assumption that “exclusive sex is what defines us,” then everything else gets kicked strangely, bizarrely, up for play. How are you supposed to have children? Can you hold hands with your lover in public? How does the insurance work?
After a while in polyamory, you start to feel exactly how many aspects in a relationship are actually not fundaments, but rather questions that we assume don’t need to be negotiated. And those unquestioned assumptions are like poisons, leaking into the ground water – a subtle corrosion that can harm you in small ways over time.
My corrosion was approaching long-term poly relationships as though they were monogamous.
Here’s the secret truth of poly: it allows you to successfully date people you could never marry. You see the pressures of the Great Monogamous Victory crushing otherwise-happy relationships: I think we all know a couple who got along just fine as long as they had separate apartments and just had fun going to movies , but the moment they moved in together they devoured each other. But that monogamy train, man, it keeps on moving; if you’ve been dating casually for a while, well, eventually you gotta Get Serious.
Getting Serious involves stepping right in the lion cage with their worst faults. Does she have a temper? Well, as her boyfriend, you’re gonna be called on to calm her down when she starts getting angry, or at least to stand support as she breathes vitriol upon whatever’s pissing her off. Is he lazy? Well, you’re the one who’s going to be trying to pay the bills while his unemployed ass spends the weekend in his underwear playing Halo 4.
Getting Serious means you become, to a large extent, your lover’s primary therapist, because you’re with them 24/7 and you have to learn to deal with all of their moods. You might find his jealousy exasperating, but you can’t really walk away – as the primary, your responsibility to either defuse, reassure, or route around it. And I know, I know, it doesn’t necessarily have to work like that – but for most of functioning monogamy, if you’re relying on someone else to satisfy your emotional needs, and that someone is someone you can be sexually attracted to, then Bad Things are gonna creep in around the edges.
But with poly, if you hate the way your lover spends her weekends doing nothing but playing Borderlands 2, you can designate that as Not Your Problem. That laziness does not mean she is a bad person; it means there are certain circumstances under which you shouldn’t be hanging out. You don’t have to merge your lives. You can go on dates when your slothful partner feels like rousting themselves, and leave them to their own devices the rest of the time.
In other words, you can maintain light sexual relationships for as long as you’re comfortable with them. You don’t have to take it to the next level. There is no next level. There’s only what you want to have – and if that involves wanting to deal with her temper, then you can do that, too.
Now. The problem I made was approaching every poly relationship as if they were all going to reach Gini’s level.
My wife is my primary partner, but that term is so weaksauce when it comes to what Gini and I have. We fit together in every way that really matters, having spent thirteen years in the Pit Of Monogamy wrestling with each other’s issues… and we’ve been victorious because, over time, we’ve come to implicitly trust in each other’s good will. Which is not to say that Gini doesn’t knife me in the heart occasionally, but when she does I know that there’s no malice in it. She’s spent so much time trying to be kind and courteous and respectful of me that any bruises I get must, logically, be by accident.
Gini is the great love of my life.
Every woman I date, then, must therefore be on the path to become a similarly great love.
And the problem is that when you uncork that kind of sweeping romance at someone, it’s hard to say no; I’m passionate and poetic, so when I’d mutter yes, we’re meant to be together in their ears, they’d reply yes, this is special, it’s so amazing, isn’t it? And we’d start dating, and subconsciously what I’d be trying to do was groom them to be as intense and critical in my life as Gini is. Because hey, Gini was the best thing in my life, and therefore all paths must lead to something very like Gini.
But that’s the Monogamous Victory speaking. I’d swapped out “Get married, die” for “Have someone else as wonderful for me as Gini is,” but the victory condition was there all the same. And as such, I had to Get Serious with every woman I dated, as soon as possible, or I was losing.
Which led to tons of dysfunction. When we had a disagreement, it was critical not just to resolve the disagreement, but to approach this as a primary relationship and to ask all the followup questions that sprung from that: why did you think that poorly of me? What assumptions were we both making that led to this? Do you understand how exactly that hurt, and why, and grasp every reason why you must never do that again?
I believe in open communication. But there are also times when too much communication can smother a relationship. And all the while, I was having these Great Loves that I thought were the Next Big Thing, each of which evaporated in less than a year. And my poor, poor partners had to deal with a string of ridiculous NRE, followed by ridiculously strained conversations as I tried to turn what was a pretty good LDR into ZOMG THIS MUST BE CRITICAL TO OUR LIVES TOGETHER FOREVER.
Which is ridiculous. Gini is the best thing that ever happened to me, a lucky lightning strike, and cultivating every relationship as though eternal beauty was the goal led to, ironically, premature collapse. If I’d just been able to go, “Hey, that’s pretty cool, can we have a good time when we’re together?” I’d probably still be dating half of them. As it was, I was inadvertently slighting Gini (as if every relationship could become what we had made!) and applying a constant, hideous pressure to relationships that didn’t need them.
They crumbled. As they must.
But that’s the thing about poly: you have so many opinions that you’ve inhaled from monogamy, unwittingly taking it into your system, that you don’t realize how it’s affecting your life. For me, I carried this subliminal concern that every relationship had to go somewhere. But they don’t. Sometimes, they can just be what they are, hanging about. Stasis is not necessarily a bad thing, in polyamory.
Relationships are not Pokemon, man. They don’t need to evolve.
Why I Write About Polyamory, And The Dangers Therein
I was talking to a friend the other day, and she thanked me for blogging openly about my polyamorous relationships.
“I started reading your relationship essays not long after I started dating seriously,” she told me. “I was a late bloomer, and reading them helped me short-circuit some of the stupidity I might have had. Instead, I got to make completely different mistakes. It’s like having a huge ‘include’ statement in the process of What Not To Do.”
“So I’m like a programming library,” I said.
“A very nice and eloquent library,” she agreed.
I don’t know if the comparison is really true – I think my library’s a little bloated and redundant – but that is why I write about polyamory and relationships in general: I make the mistakes so you don’t have to.
I’m not wise. I have made, and continue to make, a lot of insanely stupid mistakes. I say hurtful things, ignore signs I shouldn’t, destroy my lovers. And when I’m standing among the wreckage of my own idiocy, often my sole consolation is, maybe I can stop someone else from doing that. So I write that up, in the hopes that at least one person will learn from what I did.
And I‘m still making those mistakes. I often joke that I have three hobbies – polyamory, programming, and writing – and all three put me in touch with my dysfunctional past. I’ll be upgrading some piece of code on StarCityGames.com and think, “What idiot wrote this inefficient, buggy code?” And then I’ll go, “Oh, that was me,” and take a quiet moment to meditate on what an idiot I was four years ago, and how much better I am now, and how the code I’m writing now will look like complete shit to the me of four years in the future.
What you see in my blog? Is not the total of who I am. It is, instead, a total of the lessons learned. And I fuck up in monstrous ways that don’t necessarily teach me anything new, and opening up those mistakes to the public would just humiliate the people involved, and so I don’t blog about it. My writings are an attempt, in many ways, to teach myself, to analyze the errors and see if I can distill it down to an essay that I might remember later.
So my blog, I think, is a library. Include it, raid it, call the functions in it that you need. The library is mostly bug-free, and I’ll let you know if I’ve applied a patch. Enough people have benefited from it over the years that I’m pretty sure it works on certain operating systems. I’m proud it exists, and if you ever have any questions on poly, I’ll try to answer them for you. Maybe I can head you off at the pass. And that’s the library.
But the me itself is a frail, human thing, prone to stumbling about in the dark like everyone else, and please don’t make the mistake of thinking this structure I’ve created to help guide you is me.
I am not the library. The library is the result of me. It’s a distinction I want you to recognize, because on any given day you could be a lot smarter than I am. And if I’m very lucky, maybe you’ll teach me a lesson.
I Wanted A Politician, Not A Puppet
One of the liberal complaints about Obama is, He didn’t do everything I wanted him to do. They had a laundry list of everything they wanted Obama to get done, including free socialist health care for everyone, and the fact that he didn’t do it means that he’s a bad politician.
Here’s my take: a politician who does everything you want is a bad politician.
See, politics is complicated. Really complicated. I couldn’t tell you who’s in charge of the Senate funding committees for the Pentagon, nor do I understand which Democrats have enough Republican constituents that they have to salve their conservative base periodically, nor do I have the slightest clues as to the rules of order for the House. I have a general idea of how things go, but it’s about as vague as describing the cellular mechanisms of my body fighting off a flu virus as “I sneeze a lot.”
I elect a politician to learn these things for me.
Electing a politician, any politician, is an act of faith. You vote for the guy who looks like he has enough of your concerns in mind, and then send him off to do your duties for you. And you trust that he’s smart enough to a) know the overall goal, and b) do what he’s able to do with what he has.
Look, do I think that Obama really tried hard to push English-style, socialized health care for everyone? No. No, I do not, and that is what I wanted. But did I also have a list of every member in both Houses, knowing what concessions I’d have to give to get them to vote for my desired health care bill, and a tally of the costs it would take? Did I have a list of the huge numbers of polls Obama doubtlessly took, determining what America as a whole thought on the topic? Did I know how much influence the insurance companies had in the House, or had I read any studies on the effects that a sudden shift to socialized medicine would have on America’s economy?
I did not. So I’m disgruntled, but I’m also willing to admit that Obama may have wanted just as badly as I did to have socialized health care for everyone, and was “only” able to push through a huge bill that completely changed the face of American health care. Politics is about realism, as in “What you can get done,” and I’ve read too many books on Lincoln to know that “what you want to do” and “what you can actually do now” are two very separate things.
If I had a politician who did everything I wanted, then I’d have a politician who had my expertise – which is to say, none. And he’d vote in all sorts of things, regardless of who it would piss off, regardless of whether it would actually pass, regardless of whether there were actually hidden consequences I hadn’t thought about that would make this disastrous if it did pass.
That’s not to say Obama gets a free pass, of course. It may well be that if I looked at all the secret data on Guantanamo Bay and the uptick in drone strikes, I’d be convinced to do what Obama is doing now. But I find that doubtful, and so if I had a choice on foreign policy, I might consider throwing my vote behind someone else. But, as the third Presidential debate pretty much proved, I don’t.
So no. I’m not entirely thrilled with Obama. But if I had a politician who did literally everything I asked of him, I’d probably have an inefficient puppet who made me feel good and accomplished zip. I’d rather have a politician who does what I want if I was informed enough to follow all the news to the extent that a politician does… which is to say a politician who’s going to frustrate and contradict me from time to time.
My Complex Thoughts On NaNoWriMo
I seem to be an unwilling participant in NaNoWriMo, since for two out of the past three Novembers, I’ve started a novel in November. I never finish them in a month, sadly – I’m a sloooow writer – but it’s kind of like going out for a casual jog and finding out that you’re accidentally running in the Boston Marathon. People are puffing next to you. Crowds are cheering. It feels somehow more convivial, and yet more pressure is brought.
For all that, I dunno if I like National Novel Writing Month.
I like the idea behind it – that you should create art. I think that there’s this rather silly idea that Art is made by professionals, and unless you’ve put your time into the mines you can’t possibly understand the mysteries of Art, and then some unknown untrained horrid thing like Stephenie Meyer or Suzanne Collins comes along and sells a billion novels that cause people to fall in love with their words, and then people start frantically redefining “art” as “something else” because my God, the plebes got in.
My personal take is that art is about connection. Sometimes you can do that with a lot of talent and little technique. Everyone can create beauty. And I think the more we encourage people to open up and start creating, the more wonderful the world becomes. Even if you never publish it, you’ve had the experience of creation, and that’s a good thing.
What I don’t like is the relentless push on words.
Look, I’m a slow writer – if I get 800 words done a day, I’ve been very productive. Sometimes, I squeeze out only 250 words, and then I have to erase them tomorrow when they’re wrong. The important thing is that a) I eventually get the story done, and b) when the words are complete, they’re the right ones.
Yet NaNoWriMo is measured entirely by words. How many did you write today? How close are you to the finish line? Gotta get to 50k or you’ve lost! And that’s all ridiculous, because 50k isn’t even a real novel by most publishers’ standards, so we have this completely arbitrary number where you’re pressured to shove out 1,666 words a day, or you’re falling behind.
Are you creating good characters? Are your descriptions interesting? Is your plot bouncing your people around like merry pinballs? Doesn’t matter. Make the words. And I think, you know, that encourages people to write a lot instead of digging deep and writing well.
And hey, I get that you need a spur to get you moving sometimes, that the roar of the crowd and the ticking clock helps set the fingers in motion. But I think once the deadline’s gotten you started, it rapidly becomes a weight that starts to drag people behind, and they give up because they won’t achieve victory.
Hey, girl; the secret goal is not to write a book in thirty days. The actual goal is, write a book.
But that failure to completion brings out the most uncomfortable thing in NaNoWriMo for me, which is the realization that some people don’t have much of a story to tell. They have an interesting idea, a set of characters, but then they start to write it and it dribbles into nowhere. That’s not their fault, but it is deeply terrifying to me because I’ve never had a problem finishing stories; if I don’t finish it, it’s because I can’t figure out a good ending, and even then I’ve usually written a good 70% of the buildup. I’m never sure whether that’s because I’m just some Creative Genius, or I know some trick to finishing stories that people don’t, or maybe I’ve lucked out for twenty years and one day I’ll fall into this sort of creative leakage.
I dunno. I’m not judging, but how do you not finish a story? People have explained it to me many times, and I can’t get it. When I get a story, my mind can’t stop thinking about it. It stays with me in the show, pesters me at bedtime, occupies all of my transitional spaces. It’s a puzzle I obsess over until it’s done, and seeing all of these incomplete tales makes me sad – a graveyard of tales, left to be told, died aborning. Some of them were interesting, and now we’ll never know.
(I kind of want to make a post on “How to finish your story,” but given that I don’t really fathom the root problem, I’m not sure I’m the one to apply solutions.)
So NaNoWriMo feels like this strange parallel contest to me. I’m sitting in my basement, working on my new crazy-ass novel, knowing that thousands of others are with me. But they’re doing it for different reasons, and they’re being driven and driven back by motivations that are alien to me, and most of them won’t finish. I can feel the millions of novels cry out in terror, then suddenly silenced. And that’s like writing with some demolition derby at my elbow.
Write with me, if you’d like. I’ve started with you since I agree, this is a nice encouragement to get me down the lane. But I’m going to meander on this path, and look at some roses by the side, and if there’s a particularly difficult patch I’ll take my time and ensure I don’t break my leg getting over the hedgerow. There’s a finish line at the end, and yes it has punch and pie, but the goal is not to break records; the important thing is that we make it there in the finest form.
Follow me, if you will. It’s a nicer path, I think.
All Over The Radio
Thanks to the help of many lovely people who tracked it down for me (but specially my old commenter “Alex From Leeds”), you can now hear my four-minute interview on the BBC Radio! I’m sixteen minutes in, and the sound clip they used to introduce the segment was spot-on perfect.
While we’re at it, be warned that my voice is never quite as deep as people believe it is. Don’t make me go on a rant about that. I might have to, come Lincoln’s release, which (accurately) has Daniel Day-Lewis approaching Lincoln’s (reported) higher registers as opposed to the deep, Presidential tones we all know he had. Because you can’t be smart or noble without sounding like Liam fucking Neeson – who, I should add, swapped his own rumbling tones for Voldemort’s high voice.
Anyway, I’m there. You can hear me making an idiot of myself. It’s what I do, no need to thank me.