[poly] discussion outcomes and inevitable evolutions
after this afternoon's post, matthew and i continued the discussion from last night about perceived relational shifts versus misidentified bucket errors. the end result is the understanding that things *will* change, short of the two of us dropping all our current relationships and never developing others ever again. we're going to meet new people; some will become friends, some will become lovers, some who become friends will then become lovers, or vice versa. somewhere down the road there may even be lovers who make it past the "casual" demarcation line and become boyfriend/girlfriend-type relationships. instead of trying to box up the human relational process into misclassified buckets with an expectation that no relationship will ever move from one bucket to another, we're going with a simpler approach: "I'm going to have sex with [X]; it will be whatever it will be after that."
anyone who has been following the development of matthew's and my relationship since the beginning might have a clue of just how big a retooling of the process this simpler approach represents. the whole bucket classification system came about as a means of preserving some kind of emotional control over developing relational situations with non-primaries: if we knew what bucket the new relationship went into, we felt we knew what to expect, and could therefore use the bucket classifications as a means of measuring each other's congruency to stated intentions within each relationship within each particular bucket. erring from the path of the bucket-specified expectations meant a lot of work and time and energy in trying to either squeeze the developing relationship back into the originally-specified bucket, or trying to manage the damage control when our own expectations had to change because the developing relationship was suddenly found to be a better fit in a different bucket.
in the earlier days of our relationship, we had neither security nor trust in each other's ability to manage our respective non-primary relationships so as to bring minimal impact down on the primary relationship. in a couple of cases, this lack of trust and security was amply justified by some stellar incongruities between classifications, expectations, intentions, and actions, sufficiently enough that our faith in our ability to stay together, let alone get married, was deeply tried. time and communication - better understanding of each other's motivations, improvements in the communications processes, time in the groove of non-primary relationships making clearer judgements into more consistent behavioural patterns, probably other things i'm forgetting - are the only things that have made a transition like this even remotely possible. (well, all that, and possibly a small dose of nihilistic fatalism that suggests that "she's never going to get any better at her classifications, so why keep beating heads on that particular wall??"). matthew, as recently as today, acknowledged that the buckets were largely a personal safety measure so that he could always believe he knew what to expect (even as i repeatedly surprised him by failing to stick to what he interpreted as the game plan, not through deviousness or malicious intent, but simply because of what i realized only now about subconscious selection criteria and everything that goes with the internalized expectations associated with those.)
finding out that we're now in a place where the buckets can be done away with is very cool, and very scary. anyone assuming this means there's going to be less work would be dead wrong, of course :). we still need to talk about all of the same stuff: the who/what/when/where details, the prioritization of resources, the degree of emotional investment, general availability, and any changes in state for the latter three. but instead of defaulting to a starting point of faulty classifications with an expectation that those won't change, i'm going to stop identifying relationships by their bucket label and instead make a concerted effort to use the active language instead; instead of "we're just casual lovers" implying sex and nothing else, it's more like "we're having sex, and we occasionally hang out, talking about books and seeing movies," et cetera.
the paradigmatic shift in the language is scary, because i'm well aware of how lazy i can be in communicative speech patterns, and use lazy expressions when accuracy might be a better bet. "it's just casual" is a classic example of how what i know internally and what i communicate externally can differ in the short span between my brain and my lips. so i have to become accurate: i have to communicate accurately, which means i have to be willing to think accurately (or, as mister_robinson puts it, "Right thought equals right speech equals right action"). which in turn means i have to stop catching myself with my homework down around my ankles, because apparently it's been slipping again.
the shift is also scary because of the loss of perceived control over the unpredictable potential changes in matthew's relationships, as i can't form assumptive expectations based on those self-same convenient buckets. i have to do more work to understand what he's doing, in order to achieve the same degree of comfort i have traditionally drawn from assuming he's delivered accurate relationship categorizations. what's good for the goose has to be good for the gander, no? (well, no, not necessarily, but we're going ahead with both of us eschewing the bucket system anyway.)
doing away with the buckets doesn't change the fact that relationships change: at the very least, they come and they go, even if they don't always evolve from low-investment to high-investment interactions. but not having the buckets means avoiding the historical issue of getting trapped by that "once in a bucket, always in THAT bucket" assumptive pitfall (which was more often an issue of my miscategorization than anything else). if i stop pigeon-holing relationships at the outset with inaccurate labels, if i stop using the labels that i think would get me closest to what i want with the least amount of friction in the short-term even if they prove inaccurate in the longer term, if i stop trying to define relationships by what i think matthew wants to hear as opposed to actually thinking about what's going on or what might happen in the future... if i opt for active language with a more accurate expression of what i'm doing and what i want, i strongly suspect the overall workload will remain the same, but the amount of tension caused by perceived incongruencies should drop.
it all *looks* so easy in print. i have to trust myself that i can *be* more accurate; it requires a degree of internal honesty and equally honest external expression that hasn't always been my strong suit.
(and you can stop giggling any time now, redhotlips; i can hear you from here :)
anyone who has been following the development of matthew's and my relationship since the beginning might have a clue of just how big a retooling of the process this simpler approach represents. the whole bucket classification system came about as a means of preserving some kind of emotional control over developing relational situations with non-primaries: if we knew what bucket the new relationship went into, we felt we knew what to expect, and could therefore use the bucket classifications as a means of measuring each other's congruency to stated intentions within each relationship within each particular bucket. erring from the path of the bucket-specified expectations meant a lot of work and time and energy in trying to either squeeze the developing relationship back into the originally-specified bucket, or trying to manage the damage control when our own expectations had to change because the developing relationship was suddenly found to be a better fit in a different bucket.
in the earlier days of our relationship, we had neither security nor trust in each other's ability to manage our respective non-primary relationships so as to bring minimal impact down on the primary relationship. in a couple of cases, this lack of trust and security was amply justified by some stellar incongruities between classifications, expectations, intentions, and actions, sufficiently enough that our faith in our ability to stay together, let alone get married, was deeply tried. time and communication - better understanding of each other's motivations, improvements in the communications processes, time in the groove of non-primary relationships making clearer judgements into more consistent behavioural patterns, probably other things i'm forgetting - are the only things that have made a transition like this even remotely possible. (well, all that, and possibly a small dose of nihilistic fatalism that suggests that "she's never going to get any better at her classifications, so why keep beating heads on that particular wall??"). matthew, as recently as today, acknowledged that the buckets were largely a personal safety measure so that he could always believe he knew what to expect (even as i repeatedly surprised him by failing to stick to what he interpreted as the game plan, not through deviousness or malicious intent, but simply because of what i realized only now about subconscious selection criteria and everything that goes with the internalized expectations associated with those.)
finding out that we're now in a place where the buckets can be done away with is very cool, and very scary. anyone assuming this means there's going to be less work would be dead wrong, of course :). we still need to talk about all of the same stuff: the who/what/when/where details, the prioritization of resources, the degree of emotional investment, general availability, and any changes in state for the latter three. but instead of defaulting to a starting point of faulty classifications with an expectation that those won't change, i'm going to stop identifying relationships by their bucket label and instead make a concerted effort to use the active language instead; instead of "we're just casual lovers" implying sex and nothing else, it's more like "we're having sex, and we occasionally hang out, talking about books and seeing movies," et cetera.
the paradigmatic shift in the language is scary, because i'm well aware of how lazy i can be in communicative speech patterns, and use lazy expressions when accuracy might be a better bet. "it's just casual" is a classic example of how what i know internally and what i communicate externally can differ in the short span between my brain and my lips. so i have to become accurate: i have to communicate accurately, which means i have to be willing to think accurately (or, as mister_robinson puts it, "Right thought equals right speech equals right action"). which in turn means i have to stop catching myself with my homework down around my ankles, because apparently it's been slipping again.
the shift is also scary because of the loss of perceived control over the unpredictable potential changes in matthew's relationships, as i can't form assumptive expectations based on those self-same convenient buckets. i have to do more work to understand what he's doing, in order to achieve the same degree of comfort i have traditionally drawn from assuming he's delivered accurate relationship categorizations. what's good for the goose has to be good for the gander, no? (well, no, not necessarily, but we're going ahead with both of us eschewing the bucket system anyway.)
doing away with the buckets doesn't change the fact that relationships change: at the very least, they come and they go, even if they don't always evolve from low-investment to high-investment interactions. but not having the buckets means avoiding the historical issue of getting trapped by that "once in a bucket, always in THAT bucket" assumptive pitfall (which was more often an issue of my miscategorization than anything else). if i stop pigeon-holing relationships at the outset with inaccurate labels, if i stop using the labels that i think would get me closest to what i want with the least amount of friction in the short-term even if they prove inaccurate in the longer term, if i stop trying to define relationships by what i think matthew wants to hear as opposed to actually thinking about what's going on or what might happen in the future... if i opt for active language with a more accurate expression of what i'm doing and what i want, i strongly suspect the overall workload will remain the same, but the amount of tension caused by perceived incongruencies should drop.
it all *looks* so easy in print. i have to trust myself that i can *be* more accurate; it requires a degree of internal honesty and equally honest external expression that hasn't always been my strong suit.
(and you can stop giggling any time now, redhotlips; i can hear you from here :)