ten-day meme: day seven
three more days to go.
One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six
Day Seven: Four things you want in a romantic partner.
Day Eight: Three of your favorite possessions.
Day Nine: Two images that describe your life or yourself right now.
Day Ten: One confession
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this is a long one.
we're going to ignore the fact that i'm vaguely annoyed at how the question assumes a monogamous ideal. not that i couldn't be in a monogamous relationship, i just don't want to necessarily assume so.
1. dependence and independence. this is first and foremost and has a lot of depth to it which i feel the need to express. in any partnership i undertake with an individual or with individuals, those partner/s have to understand how to strike a balance between dependence and independence when it comes to our collective and individual lives. this comes into play with the other relationships we have with people, the habits and the schedule that we both keep, &c.
there's a fine line between compromise and adaptation in a relationship vs. sacrifice. compromise and adaptation is the core of any relationship between people romantic or not, but i don't think it's healthy for someone to sacrifice something of themselves for the sake of the relationship or sacrifice something of the relationship just for the sake of themselves.
as a specific example, i am a people person. there are a lot of people in my life who i care about, who i love, who i will always love. one of the most important friendships i have in my life is with one of my ex-girlfriends, a friendship that ramped up in strength after she found out about my kidney failure ordeal. i'm not sure what her husband thinks of our friendship now, but at the time the strengthening of our friendship bothered him a great deal and he didn't want her talking to me.
i don't misunderstand the sentiment, but it wasn't right for our context. of course we still love each other in whatever context we have, but our relationship is one of the past, and anyone who knows anything about us knows that neither of us are going to muck with the integrity of their partnership. She loves her husband. i love seeing her happy, and feel blessed that she wants me to have any involvement in her life, much less the close friendship that we have. it makes no sense that i would ever fuck with that just because of a selfish feeling of jealousy (which i don't really have).
this sort of philosophy doesn't work for everyone, and i know that, but for me, this is an important thing for any potential partner or partners to understand. That ex and others like her are too important for me to sacrifice any level of my friendship with them just to appease unreasonable feelings of threat or jealousy that may crop up, and i feel the same way in kind. if my future partner/s have meaningful relationships with their exes that are healthy friendships and a mutual understanding, how could i in good conscience want to suppress that relationship for no other reason than any personal sense of jealousy or possessiveness?
that's the one side. my partner/s should be allowed to be independent and their own person with their own friends. of course there's a balance of dependence on the other side, that whole unity and stable love and passion and all of that that most people already understand. but the two have to coexist for any relationship of mine to work.
2. a lack of complacency. priorities are always shifting, what's important in life changes over time, but something that i never want to be is satisfied with my life. even if i eventually have the important goal of providing a steady income for my family and devote myself to those family values, i don't want to stop learning or developing as an educator, a musician, as a person. the day i stop trying to learn or better myself or evaluate where i am in my life is the day that i might as well stop living, and a partner of mine needs to have at least some aspect of that so that we can continue to inspire each other and inspire those around us and make the most of our lives together and independently.
3. celebration of sex and physicality. i don't mean that we both need to have a high sex drive or that we always need to have that feeling of initial relationship passion. but sex is a wonderful thing and should be celebrated in its act and its philosophy. For me, sex is an art like music is. the initial tension to foreplay to the actual act of fucking/love making through climax and then the afterglow; the varied styles of long/teasing vs quick/dirty, playful/giggly vs primal/yelling, straightforward vs kinky; sex can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it and every situation calls for something different and can mean something different. a potential partner doesn't necessarily need to have the same tastes as me sexually or be as kinky as i can be &c, but the underlying principle of sex being a joyous and wonderful form of varied and complex communication and unity and pleasurable sensation is pretty important.
4. fundamental understanding. i'm a complicated person to understand. the way my brain thinks, why i have some of the habits that i do, my insecurities and securities, &c. i don't expect anyone to truly grok me, and i don't expect anyone upon a first meeting to come even close to understanding me, but there's times when i meet someone and there's an immediate kind of spark of "understanding potential", if that makes sense, and that always makes me warm up to a person and let down some of my guard. that's an important thing for me to have in a partner because although i'm a pretty confident and self-assured individual, i can also be very self-conscious about my quirkiness and complicatedness and i usually need someone who can understand that and nurture it in a way that makes me feel more at ease, and hopefully i can do the same in return.
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my answers started to get shorter towards the end because i've developed a little bit of a headache. i think that the original plan of trying to finish felix's polyomi stuff for the evening is going to get nixed for being lazy and trying to go back to sleep.