When You Give Permission To Experiment, You Give Permission For Honest Mistakes

Let’s say you don’t trust your partner to do the grocery shopping for your house.  They’re not good with money; they buy all sorts of impulse items you don’t need and can’t afford, and they never remember to use the coupons.  Letting them go do it, knowing they’re going to come home with a cart full of cookies, just fills you with stress.
One day, after weeks of debate where you fear they’re going to fuck it up and they keep insisting they’re responsible enough to handle it, you let them go grocery shopping.
Miracle of miracles, they bought exactly what was on the list!  They avoided all the sample trays, didn’t buy those new Pop-Tarts.  And they used the coupons you gave them!  And –
“What’s this?” you ask.
“It’s milk,” they say.
“That’s whole milk,” you say, hands trembling.  “I needed skim.”
“It just says ‘milk’ on the list.”
“How could you not know what kind of milk I needed?”
“I’m lactose-intolerant, remember?  I don’t drink milk.  And I thought you drank whole…”
“I’m on my diet!” you cry.  “The one I started two months ago!  And now whole milk tastes disgusting to me!  I can’t drink this!”
Now, look, it’s reasonable to be a little pissy about it, especially if you had your stomach set for a delicious glass of milk.  (Mmm, milk.  My favorite drink.)  And clarifying what you mean when you say “milk” is certainly an action item to be discussed on the endless list of Shit We Need To Get Straight.
But if it’s two weeks later, and you’re still sulking and snapping about the time your trusted your partner, and they came home with whole milk, then you guys have got some work to do.
—————————————–
But that’s often how it is when people are starting with beginning polyamory.
The grocery store is not a grocery store, but some new partner they’re unsure of.  And the worry is not that your lover is going to buy an extra box of cookies, but that they’re going to do That Sexual Thing That You’re Totally Not Okay With.
And the milk?  That’s the miscommunication.  That’s where they thought that “kissing” meant “making out” was okay, and stopped when it got too hot and heavy, yet what you meant was “a kiss goodnight.”  That’s where they thought “going out on a date” meant “they could hold hands in public.”  That’s where they thought “cuddling” involved sexual tension, and you distinctly did not.
That’s super-common behavior for a partner who’s not sure they’re poly yet: straightjacketing their partner’s every new interaction with a thousand rules.  And some relationships feel they need training wheels at first, so the other partner can be sure that their partner is trustworthy.  (Some small segment of of them even do need them.)
But here’s the thing: If you give your partner permission to experiment, you have to give them permission to make honest mistakes.
Fuckups?  They’re going to happen in polyamory – and in relationships in general.  If you’re presenting them with a snarled tangle full of restrictions and then will punish them for weeks over the most well-intended slight, you have not given them an opportunity – you’ve given them the Temple of Doom, a maze of traps where the slightest misstep means doom, blame, and eternal shame.
You’re not wrong to be upset over what happened, mind you.  If it was necessary to your well-being that they buy skim milk, and she got whole, then it is perfectly reasonable to be grumpy, and perhaps hurt that she wasn’t paying attention to your needs better.
But can you take a moment to note all the successes on that initial outing?  The fact that they did not, as you feared, go hog-wild in an all-you-can-eat frenzy?  The fact that they took the time to use coupons that they’re not particularly trained in using?
Can you also accept that while they should have known which milk to purchase, you should have also been clearer in your communications, and acknowledge that there’s room for error among reasonable people here?
Can you accept that they didn’t try to conceal this milk from you, but instead laid all the groceries right out on the counter where you could see them?
Because if you’re expecting a perfect polyamory, one where nobody will ever step outside these boundaries you have oh-so-carefully marked for them, well… you’re not going to get that.  In fact, learning to deal with these sorts of miscommunications over perceived intimacies is one of the most critical skills in poly.
The thing is, these rules are often put in place by people who aren’t polyamorous at all – and I support you in not being poly, man!  Not everyone’s cut out for that.  I’m really glad you’re pushing your limits.  And if you eventually decide you’re not okay with your partner seeing other people, well, that’s not an unreasonable thing to want in a relationship.  (Though it may be a dealbreaker for your partner specifically, but that’s always the danger in pushing the boundaries of any relationship.)
But here’s the thing: mistakes happen.  And if you’re going to wail and rend your garments and gnash your teeth for weeks afterwards over a misunderstood bucket of cow juice, then the ugly truth is that you should never have agreed to let them go to the grocery store in the first place.

I Wrote A Story, And Now It's An Audio Production: "Shadow Transit"!

One of my most frequently asked questions is, “I love your blog posts, where can I read your stories?”  As it turns out, they’re all over the damn Internets.  But today, horror podcast Pseudopod has done an audio production of my story Shadow Transit, my tribute to Lovecraft-as-filtered-through-Stephen-King-as-filtered-through-me, and Marie Brennan has done a bang-up job as the childish voice of Lizzie, the seven-year-old-girl who is now a soldier to fight extralinguistic horrors.
This story was directly inspired by my complete inability to play with small children.  Here’s your taste:

Last night’s blizzard had choked the roads, leaving the cabinet factory short-handed for the Friday shift. So Michelle’s boss had called to give her a choice: she could come in for an emergency shift today and keep her job, or she could keep the day off she’d requested to visit her daughter at Shadow Transit, in which case she’d get her ass fired.
“Thank you,” Michelle whispered, glad beyond belief. “I’ll come in. Just…call them for me? Please? I’ll give you the number; they won’t listen to me. Make sure they tell Elizabeth that Mommy’s sorry.”
Jackson made his apologies, saying how he was sure Lizzie was needed wherever she was, but he had quotas to meet. Michelle barely heard him. She felt the giddy relief of a kid hearing that school was cancelled. Her boss had made the choice for her; she didn’t have to play with Lizzie this month and pretend that everything was okay. No three-hour drive out to the Colander. No watching teenaged guards struggling to remember how to pronounce English words. No worrying about what Lizzie had meant for days afterwards. She was free for another month and hated herself only a little for it…

From there, it’s a slow burn to total meltdown.  The podcast is live now, and it’s one of my favorite stories to perform because the climax is largely dialogue.  I have fun reading it, when I do – and Marie did a fine job with it.  Go listen.

The Annual Christmas Tradition: What Was Your Favorite Present?

Every year on Christmas, I ask the same question, because I love Christmas and want to know the answer:
What’s the best thing you got for Christmas this year?
Mine’s an interesting one. I’m supposed to get a large table saw, but that got delayed at Amazon, so I probably won’t see that until after the New Year.  (Though the note my wife wrote me explaining why my Christmas Tree was empty?  Epic, totally epic.)  My Dad got me Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, which stirred up all sorts of childhood memories.  And of course, there’s this new tattoo.
But the best thing I got for Christmas?
Hope.
Christmas Eve was looking pretty messy come that morning, with family-related stress, uprooted changes in scheduling, and snappishness everywhere.  I was anticipating a tense showdown of an evening, with sadness and tears and meanness…
…And what I got was a beautiful evening with cherished moments with my godchildren, and relaxation, and an unexpected reconciliation with an ex on the eve, and the perfect end to one of my favorite comedy series ever.  Christmas was giving, and happiness, and even some quality snuggling with the wife, and was all the sweeter when I was expecting nothing.
So.  What was the best thing you got for Christmas?  Tell me!  Tell me now.
(Long-term readers who are wondering what happened to the other Christmas tradition, the one with cheesecake photos, can see why that’s been discontinued in an essay over on my kink-blog at FetLife.  It’s not an unhappy thing, I assure you.)

So. Christmas.

I’ve been texting a lot of people on Christmas – hi!  Hello!  Miss you, Merry Christmas!
And what I’ve gotten back a few times is, “I am getting soooooo drunk to deal with my relatives.”
I’m super-lucky.  I like my relatives.  My Mom’s a hoot.  My Dad is a great conversationalist.  I look forward to spending time with them.
But I also like my chosen family.  The Meyers are wonderful.  My friends are wonderful.  Not a bad one in the bunch.  (If they were, they wouldn’t be my friends – but that’s certainly not true for everyone, as Lord knows a lot of people hate their families and then choose friends who are just as much trouble as their relatives.)
This isn’t bragging; it’s gratitude.  I didn’t choose my Mother, or my Father, or my Uncle Tommy, or Grampa and Gramma and Grammy.  I just got them.  And they, in turn, gave me one hell of a model as to how to build my life, so when I found someone as special as Gini I figured out how to keep her.
That’s luck.  That’s what gratitude is for.  You can be happy at the work you’ve put in – and Lord knows I’ve spent years massaging my psyche to be a better person – but the bedrock of almost any successful work is a layer of luck, and I had that.
Christmas seems a pretty appropriate time to celebrate that luck.  And to thank all my friends, the ones with good families and the ones without.  I miss you all terribly.  I love you all deeply.
Thanks for being here.

There Should Have Come A Cold Funeral

There should have been a cold funeral that day.  Umbrellas.  Mourners.  A coffin.
And Rebecca, come back from whatever town she was working in now.  She should have been in her early thirties, having left the confusion of her twenties behind, having finally steered herself into a career that made her happy, the chaos of her early-twenties love life subsided as she found more stable forms of happiness.  (Her love life would have been supremely chaotic; this, I am assured off.)
That funeral should have been an inconvenience for her.  They rarely come at good times.  I imagine her wrangling a day off, maybe asking Mom and Dad for some help with the airline fees, flying home to Cleveland on some red-eye filled with memories and finding people to cover for her.
And I imagine her at my funeral.
I imagine how she would have thought of me.  I don’t think we would have been close, at least not closer than the friends and drinking buddies she would have acquired in college; I’d be that old guy with the weird hats and the terrible puns, a comforting mainstay at Christmas and Thanksgiving and all the other visits back home, not so much a friend as just someone who’d always been in her life.  Whenever we met we’d share a beer and I’d ask her how things were going, and we’d make small talk about how grown she was, and I’d probably make some hideous comment that would embarrass her.
Yet Uncle Ferrett would be dead.
I imagine her at my grave, trying to think of our history together.  It would be sadness, grief, but more than that it would feel like the closing of a chapter to her; here was a man who was there at her home at least twice a month, a fixture of the family, that goofy guy who went out of his way to humiliate her as a teen when she had a sad excess of dignity, and cheered her on harder than anyone else outside her “official” relatives.  And she had moved on from me, feeling a little guilty about that – but she’d gotten entangled in her own life, hadn’t she?  Wasn’t that what you did when you get older?  And Uncle Ferrett seemed to do fine by himself, had always seemed satisfied with whatever attention she’d chosen to give, and now his heart had finally given out.
And she would feel, strangely, more like an adult at my passing.  Someone who had comforted her as a teen would be gone, another peg knocked out from under her; not that she had leaned on me in decades, of course, but somehow she’d always felt like she could, if the emergency came.  And now the world for her was a little less protected, and she would have to stand a little taller, because Uncle Ferrett – that bastion of her childhood – was gone.
I see her saying goodbye – not just to me, but to that chapter of her life.  I see her squaring her shoulders, recognizing that the world will be a little colder from now on.  I see her turning away from me, under the umbrella, someone she loved holding her shoulders, and it fades to black.  As it should.  I’m not there any longer.
That’s how it should have gone.
That’s how it should have gone.
Yet here I am, listening to the “Annie” soundtrack while I work, and suddenly I wonder what Rebecca would have thought of it – this mop-topped girl who looks so much like her singing her heart out, winning the affection of everyone around her.  She would have seen it.
What would she have thought?
It probably wouldn’t have had much of an impact on her.  But it might have.  She might have taken to singing Hard-Knock Life for us.  Or she might have shrugged and said “That’s lame!” and moved on; she always had a way of confounding expectations.
Yet I want to know.
And all I can think of today is the first thing she said after the doctors came in with that final diagnosis, the one where they told her the tumors were back and that she would have to go back to CHOP for chemotherapy, and she turned to me as sunny as anything to ask, “Will Uncle Ferrett be with me?”
She expected that I would always be with her.  She never questioned that I would not be by her side.
And I was.  I was there until the final moments of her life and after, holding her leg and weeping.
But it shouldn’t have been that way.
There should have been a cold funeral where she and I parted ways, and I should have been in that coffin, and some days I don’t understand the way anything works any more.

The Cold, Hugless Dystopia of the Future: I've Been There

I once complained about a stranger touching my goddaughter’s belly without consent, and suggested that perhaps young children should be given the option to refuse hugs and kisses unless they wanted them.
“WITNESS THE STERILE FUTURE OF MANKIND,” some commentors overreacted.  “IF WE DO NOT FORCE OUR CHILDREN TO HUG THE ONES WE HAVE DESIGNATED AS LOVABLE, WHAT WILL BECOME OF SOCIETY?  WHAT SORT OF LOVELESS WORLD WILL WE GENERATE, IF WE START PUTTING UP ALL THESE CONSENT-BARRIERS TO INTIMACY?”
At first I thought these people were crazy, leaping from “May I hug you?” to “The crumbling of kindness as we all know it” in a single bound, but then I realized: *I’m a science-fiction writer*.  (Seriously, man, with a book coming out and everything.)  It’s my hobby, spending hours dreaming of alternative futures – and most people don’t turn themselves into flabby prunes in the shower as they imagine the ramifications of cheap light-speed engines.  So it’s no surprise that your average person would be absolutely terrible at envisioning a world with the comparatively tiny change of inserting a “Is it okay if I touch you?” in between the desire to hug someone and actually flinging your arms around them.
And I may be slightly snarky here, but that fear?  Is very real.  It’s hard for people to get behind a new world without having a good idea of what it looks like.  If you’re a touchy-feely person who’s used to touching without consent and having it go mostly okay for you, a place where you have to ask all the time can seem legitimately off-putting and alien.
But the good news is, I’ve actually visited that world!  And if you’re a social conservative, I’ve visited the worst possible version of that world for you – a liberal dystopia where all of the stuff you consider insanity festers!  It’s a place with a tribunal that judges you, should you step out of line.  It’s a place with supremely strict rules.
It is the Geeky Kink Event, held once a year in New Jersey.
Now, if you don’t know the GKE, it’s infamously strict as BDSM conventions go.  In a world where people have legitimate shoe fetishes and leather fetishes – as in, they can’t get off unless those elements are present – the running gag is that GKE has “a consent fetish.”  They’re super-strict about all consent stuff.
How strict?  Well, I am told by insiders that a staffer was let go because he touched another staffer without asking first.  What kind of touch?  He apparently squeezed her shoulder.*
And when I say there’s “a tribunal,” I’m not kidding: there is a large playspace where people gather, and should you violate anyone’s consent there, at least one drunk person I know got yanked out and hauled before a group of people who pronounced judgment on him.
And as I have noted before, they screen their attendees against the sex offender list, which caused some debate last time as to whether that’s fair – and I’m giving y’all a heads-up right now that this essay is not the place to debate whether the GKE is correct in having all of these strict criteria.  They have it, it’s a successful con for them, and if you’d like to complain about whether this isn’t something you’d attend, take that shit to another thread, because that’s not the point I’m trying to make today.
My point is this:  The GKE is not a democracy as you know it.  It’s the PC fascism that FOX News viewers fear.  This is your worst-case scenario of liberals being oversensitive to the needs of the most zealous complainers, a weekend where the victim will be wholeheartedly believed if they speak up, and a world where you had best watch your fucking step because by God, they expect you to behave according to their rules.
And yet that convention had more happy hugs than the opening of “Love, Actually.”
Everywhere I looked, people were hugging, snuggling, kissing, purring.  You would have thought this was a convention entirely composed of thigmophiles, folks constantly holding hands everywhere.
As it turns out, people like to touch one another.  Even asexuals like to snuggle.  Touching is a natural human urge, and affection will squirt out no matter what rules you have in place.  There will be hugs in the future of consent, I assure you.
The only different was this: before each hug, there was a pause as people held their arms open and asked, “May I?”  And in most cases, the answer was an enthusiastic “Yes!” and amazing full-body glomps occurred.
Sometimes the answer was “No, I’m not feeling it,” in which case there were no hugs.  Or a quick negotiation down to a handshake.  Yet there wasn’t a disdain there, as people feared – nobody I saw was like like, “Eeew, you want a hug?  From me?”  The asking was perfectly okay, as long as you were okay with the answer.
And even more importantly, not everyone asked all the time.  Husbands still were free to hug their wives, the consent implied by years of intimacy.  The woman I spent three hours cuddling and talking with the night before?  I held her hand the next morning without an explicit consent, and no GKE cops showed up to yank me away from her.
The difference was that if there was any major uncertainty, you defaulted to asking.  And on the rare occasion you thought everything was okay and accidentally hugged someone who didn’t want it, you acknowledged you screwed up and apologized profusely.
That’s it.
It’s not a big change, really.  I know all this “consent” stuff can look like some sort of PC nightmare to the novice, a bureaucratic land where you must fill out a 27B-6 form before advancing to the “holding hands” stage.
Really, though, it’s just a slight change where you ask politely.  And I think the “asking politely” may actually amp the number of hugs given, because there’s no downside for asking.  You’re not a creeper for wanting something, as long as you express it in the correct ways.  And as such, the socially awkward like me who may want a hug but don’t know how to get it now have an easy avenue to get their hug on.
I know these societal changes can be scary, if you can’t see what they look like.  But I assure you that people’s need for physical affection won’t be exterminated or shamed in this new consent world we’re trying to build.  Yes, it may be a little awkward at first to go, “Can I hug you?” and have the answer be “No.”  But that’s not the creation of new awkwardness: it’s the transfer of awkwardness from the huggee to the hugger, because I assure you that some of the people you hugged probably didn’t want a hug, and had to tolerate one from you.
It’s not a massive crime, what you did.  But if we can make people’s lives a little nicer by asking first, then why not do it?
The world will not stop hugging.  The world likes hugs.  The only difference is that if someone doesn’t want your hug in this moment, they are now not obligated to receive it.
The good news is that you may get more hugs from people asking to hug you, and so the world won’t change all that much.  Not even in one of the strictest consent cultures I know of.
* – This is something I have heard from two reliable sources, but have not verified personally.  However, it says something about GKE that I believe it wholly.  And once again, should this thread break out into a series of whether they are justified in this culture, I will swing the banhammer, for that is a distraction from the point I am trying to make.

My Heart Will, In Fact, Go On: Medical Update

After spending three weeks in a heart monitor for a running test, the results are in:
I’m a whiner.
No, the awesome news is that I have all of these random chest pains and big thumpy heart-moments, and they’re my heart working normally as far as they can tell.  What I suspect has happened is that after you’ve had triple-bypass surgery and almost died, you start paying a lot more attention to every bodily tick involving your heart rhythm.  But they say it’s fine.  So let’s hope it’s fine.
I also had advanced genetic testing that shows that my body was destined to have a heart attack.  My diet was sucktacular, which didn’t help, but my body is a factory of churning out top-of-the-charts particles that are pretty much guaranteed to clog the arteries.  Even if I had a perfectly healthy diet, I’d need to be on suppressant drugs in order to not seize up and die.  Thank you, modern medicine.
So yeah.  Being a carnetarian didn’t help, but my body has some genetic quirks that makes a heart attack all but a certainty. I’d be more upset about this if we didn’t live in an age that’s designed to compensate for this fairly easily.  We are, and that’s good.