First, Do No Harm?
You know what I hardly see anyone ever talking about in polyamory? What responsibilities we have, if any, to our lovers’ other partners.
’cause I know if I wrote an essay on “Here’s how poly people abuse their lovers,” I’d get a zillion fist-pumps and a hundred inbound links and a hundred comments going, “SO TRUE! Polyamory is all about being good to the one you love.”
But if I wrote an essay about “Here’s how poly people abuse their lovers’ partners,” I suspect I’d get a faceful of awkward silence, followed by a round of defensive, “Well, it’s not my problem. I don’t need to worry what happens over there.”
Yet that shit happens. You and I both know there are so-called “poly people” who start dating with the idea of chipping away at all the other lovers, edging them out like this was some sort of battle in the arena. You and I both know that there are folks who don’t ask, “Hey, is this cool with your other partners?” when they’re both caught up in NRE and spiralling out of control. You and I both know that for every case of polydickery, there’s another eager poly person going, “Well, every time I kiss him it’s like tin foil on her teeth, but I don’t care if she’s hurting as long as I’m satiated!”
You’ve got a lot of folks who are basically saying, “Well, if those other people get hurt, that’s awesome, as long as I get what I want.”
And I dunno. I treat poly like I’m going camping in the woods; leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures. (Lots and lots of pictures.) When I’m operating in someone else’s ecosystem, I try to be respectful of not just them, but the people they supposedly love. And if I sense they’re acting in a way that might potentially hurt those people, I take a full stop and go, “Wait, is this okay?”
Which leads to some really awkward and painful fucking conversations. It’s killed some chances at sex, because some folks get really upset when you double-check their motivations. But my whole goal is to leave this relationship as I left it; when I walk away, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that even if things are dysfunctional, at least I didn’t function it more.
…which is not to say that I’m a slave to the poly web. If I think my lover’s dating someone who’s doing something bad or irrational, I’ll discuss that with them, encourage them to bring those awful habits up for discussion. In doing so, I make some more room for myself. But I always try to treat the guy (or girl) on the other side of me with respect, so at least if I’m pushing an agreement they know why.
Yet that’s also an aspect of privilege. I’ve got my primary, and I’m always going home to snuggle up in a warm bed with someone I love. If I was in the all-secondary, all-the-time club, would I be so magnanimous? There’s a good chance I wouldn’t. It’d be harder to walk away when the alternative is masturbation in an empty apartment.
I think the reason why the polyamorous really hate having these discussions is because getting to the partners on the other side is fuckin’ hard, yo. You’re not dating them. In many cases, you may not like them enough to want to sit down for long couch sessions to determine what they want. In some cases you may see them as actively toxic. You’re seeking out the company of people you don’t want to have conversations you hate to have that may lead to a breakup.
As noted, my insistence on “…and is this okay with the collective?” has torpedoed a couple of relationships. It’s caused some intense fights I would have preferred to avoid, leading to premature shakeouts. It’d be a lot easier just to shrug my shoulders and go, “Fuck it, that’s their issue” – and maybe that’s the correct thing to do. You can’t save everyone from their own desires, and if they’ve got a problem, then they should have the guts to walk away.
And you get more sex and love. For you.
Still, personally? I can’t counsel a polyamory where you’re okay with protecting your lovers, and okay with watching the people your lover supposedly cares about get brutalized. To me, that has the unpleasant stink of psychopathy about it, in that those “in the circle” are deserving of protection and those “outside” can eat a dick.
Plus, there’s also the aspect that I’m going to be an occasional inconvenience; that’s just how it is. If my lover is callously disregarding her other partners’ feelings when I’m the new hotness in town, how can I trust that she won’t do the same to me when the new star rises in the east?
I dunno. If my partner is dating people I can’t fucking stand on any level, perhaps that’s a valid approach; shes got me. Dating all people like me might be too redundant, and so she finds people with wildly varying personalities to fulfill all the various needs in her life. But if they’re so opposed that I can’t sit down with them for an evening and have pleasant conversation, that’s a dealbreaker for me. I don’t want to have to tiptoe that much.
Thing is, if people weigh in, I’m sure they’ll weigh in as though there are clear and easy moral answers to this. There aren’t. Which maybe is why you don’t see a lot of ramblings like this hitting Kinky and Popular on FetLife; it’s really easy to thunder, “DON’T FUCK OVER PEOPLE YOU LOVE!” Because if you did that, you were 100% wrong.
Yet it’s a lot less morally satisfying to say, “Don’t fuck over people you don’t really care about.” Because you probably have, on some level. And knowing how to avoid that is tough, yo. Tough.
Spending My Time Wisely
Where was I at 12:12:12 today?
Curled up in my wife’s arms. Just the way we’d been on December 31st, 1999, 11:59:59, watching the numbers change. No cell phone, no Internet, just ensured that we were together for this transition, as we’ll be together for all transitions.
It’s a tiny, foolish thing. But our lives are knitted together by tiny, foolish things. We embrace them, just as we embrace each other when the last-of-a-lifetime event slips by so noisily.
Love you, sweetie. More than meatballs.
In Other News, I Kind Of Adore This Breakup Song
I don’t know why I adore this as much as I do. The song is pretty simple, and the singing isn’t particularly great… but I think that’s part of what makes it for me. This painfully honest and simple breakup, as chronicled via harmonica, wind instrument, and a dance that I think we all should do from time to time.
How Borderlands 2 Lied To Me
So I’ve been playing a fair amount of Borderlands 2, and last night I finally thumped my head against the glass ceiling; level 50, babies. As high as one can go.
It’s been fun, because Borderlands 2 is not, shall we say, a challenging game. There’s some mild elements of dexterity involved, but basically it’s an auto-gunner; the game actually has an option to aim your gun for you, homing in on the closest enemy if you get within range. (Which I use, because the X-Box controller sucks for fine reticule targeting. I miss my mouse.) There’s no penalty for dying except they scrape a bit of cash off your account. It’s nothing like, say, the moderate complexity of Half-Life.
Mostly, Borderlands 2 is about optimizing your build.
It’s a spreadsheet game. How good a gun can you get? (As some wag noted, in Borderlands 2, you aren’t a character, you are your gun.) What skill tree can you max out to support this fabulous gun? Can you team up with a friend to get better weapon drops? And from there, it’s all about maximizing damage per second and taking advantages of cooldown times. Occasionally you have to find cover, but if you feel like it you can just walk in guns a-blazing until someone drops you, then respawn and go back.
And that’s oddly relaxing, because I don’t have to work really hard to get ahead in this game, I just have to go here and shoot something and go there and fetch something, and it’s enough activity to keep the game-brain ticking without actually frustrating me. I can just get into the groove for a few hours.
It wasn’t until the expansions came out, bringing with them special multiplayer-only “raid bosses,” that I realized what Borderlands 2 had done to me:
This was a MMORPG.
A single-player MMORPG.
Once I realized that, it all became clear: the obsession with equipment, the hunt for better drops, even the dudes hanging around with exclamation points over their head. I’d never played a MMORPG because, well, a game with no end point is a one-way ticket to unemployment for addicted old me. But here I was, several months of my life into this game, and they’d snuck a MMORPG in under the radar.
And just as predicted, it sucked out several months of my life. These things are predicated on the Diablo model of advancement; I know Yahtzee hates the “drop and stop” method of playing, but it’s a way of constantly littering your path with just enough rewards to keep you hungry. It may be another two hours until you level up, but is that gun better? What about that shield? Hey, it’s orange, it must be great! And so you keep yanking that slot machine trigger, firing at things in the hopes of getting the massively great gun.
As it is, I’ll probably quit until they raise the level cap. The Pirate expansion was quite good, but the Torgue expansion is drier, and as it is the Siren build I have stops dead one level before I get Blight Phoenix, the one skill I was working towards. So unless they make it level 60, and let me have my gouts of acid, flame, and slag, then I’m not interested.
But I find it fascinating, the way that they basically ripped off much of what made World of Warcraft work and just quietly turned it into a first-person shooter. Well done, Borderlands. Well done.
Why I'm Eating Terrible Fruit
The box of blackberries I just ate? Was terrible. A sour, seedy box of tartness that even Gini acknowledged was pretty foul.
Yet I ate them anyway. To the cries of the Internet, who asked, “Ferrett, why don’t you eat good fruit in your quest to acclimate yourself to eating healthy?”
And the answer is simple: it’s another excuse.
The central problem with my snacking is that I don’t want to eat fruit, so I find excuses. I was doing smoothies for a while, but the smoothies took ten minutes to make, and chocolate milk was thirty seconds tops, so if Gini was running late or I was lazy that morning or hey, Erin’s here, I gotta make three smoothies… I didn’t make the smoothies. Because they were tolerable, but I didn’t want them in any sense except that I wanted to have had them. Which is, in much the same way that I often want to have exercised, not nearly the same thing as actually desiring a smoothie.
I wanted the health that came with them. Not the actual taste.
So as it turns out, fruit is often pretty nasty. Which I honestly did not know. I knew there was “rotten fruit,” but I ate so little fruit in the course of my life that I assumed that all strawberries were pretty decent – sure, there were some excellent strawberries that people would drool over, but in my mind there was a certain minimum standard of strawberriness that vendors held to. Strawberries were like Hershey bars in that they all tasted pretty much the same.
As it turns out, there’s tart berries and sucky berries and out-of-season berries, and you can’t tell the fucking difference. The blackberries Gini and Erin ate last night were great. The blackberries I had this morning, which looked identical, were icky.
Yet I chowed them down. Because “eating only good fruit’ would be another excuse. I’m trying to enter a new world, one where I can eat fruit everywhere, and part of that bargain is that some fruit isn’t that great.
If I only eat good fruit, then my fruit-not-liking mind will go, “Well, I don’t have to eat those bananas. They’re not good! So I’ll just eat this Pop Tart instead.” And lo, strangely enough, I’ll start finding all of these fruity weaknesses, and I’ll be back to escaping the Land of Icky Fruits. (And remember, in the World of Ferrett, all fruits are icky, even those delicious ones you love.)
No, my friends; I must treat this fruit like Gini treats her marriage with me. Is Ferrett always sweet and wonderful and good-tasting? No. Sometimes he’s foul and wrinkled. Yet Gini bravely consumes her daily dosage of me, for this is not a one-time occurrence, but an averaged value. Some days, Ferretts will be meanish, other days Ferretts will be delightful. She sticks with me regardless, because I have some awesome benefits.
So, too, shall I struggle through the bad fruit. Because otherwise, it’d be all too easy for my very devious Gollum-mind to create another reason not to have them. Fruits are good and bad, and sometimes I’ll have bad ones, and I’d better learn to tolerate those tart little fuckers, too.