[poly] proof positive that we continue to be two very different people
matthew and i are working on making explicit our expectations for lovers because, well, we've never really done that before (outside of specific contexts), and we're finding that differing expectations - and therefore differing implementations of those expectations - repeatedly trip us up and catch us with our homework down, as it were.
part of the problem with shaping explicit "rights & responsibilities" after five years of making it up as we go along (and suffering the consequences for that approach), is what matthew identified a couple of months ago as "reactive legislation", in which laws (boundaries, requirements, etc.) arise in response to a particular person/situation, and therefore either have a limited, circumstantial application, or fall prey to the weasels who like to play in the grey areas where nothing is explicit and therefore everything must be permissible (to the weasels' eyes, at least). and yet, if we don't know what these expectations actually entail - cue the background chorus, wailing, "How can we not know this stuff??" - and don't communicate them outwardly between us and to our lovers, how do *they* know when they've strayed away from expectations and into the murk?
in our case, we generally only know after the crescendo of the explosion has stopped reverberating in our ears and the dust has settled. eventually, even we had to figure out that there might be better ways of managing these differences and divergences, if only to stop offended lovers from hating the offending spouses once unseen triggers had been tripped and short fuses leading to unexpectedly large caverns packed with powder kegs had been lit.
not having the vaguest clue how to go about developing such a manifesto, however, i have avoided the homework for months; every time i started to think about it, i'd get stuck in the loop of emotional backwash coupled with reactive legislation tendencies, get frustrated, and give up before i'd really begun. i kept coming back to tacit's writings on the subject, and finally stopped prevaricating on the issue and just started to write - thus establishing, once and for all, that tacit is, in fact, as good as ten ninja crashing through the window.
my initial draft is essentially a dialogue of sorts with what tacit has written, done in two stages. the first stage is my unfiltered responses to his concepts, the second is a more positive spin in terms of the rights and responsibilities as one might (more effectively at least) communicate to someone outside the primary relationship. in taking this tactic, it becomes very clear that T's material is written based on his experiences with certain types of relationships; what he identifies as a secondary fits with what we would define that way, namely a serious, capital-"R" boy/girlfriend Relationship, which neither matthew nor i currently have, we have not had during our five year history, and are not likely to build any time in the near future. this means rethinking expectations in terms of the types of relationships we do currently maintain, but possibly allowing room for more invested relationships in the future. (matthew also pointed out to me that tacit and i diverge even before that, on the question of polyamory as "intimate inclusion" versus exclusion, but explaining how that works for me and for us is a whole different conversation; not post, conversation.) as with matthew and i, tacit and i are also two very different people :)
that's a lot of flexibility and forward thinking to ask from someone who's struggling to get beyond historically-knee-jerking reactive legislation in response to events in the past, you know.
this lead to this morning's Couch & Coffee Time conversation, in which we revisited the fundamental differences matthew and i have in *how* we connect with lovers. matthew's approach in recent years has generally been along the lines of, "boobies! wannafuck?", without any manifest need to establish any kind of relationship beforehand or afterwards. i, on the other hand, tried to break myself from that habit in my mid-20s (in the myriad ways in which men and women differ, are innumerable hangups about sex and self-worth and self-image, but i digress.) the relationships i establish and maintain now are generally drawn from within the circle of people who are already *friends*, which lowers my risks of emotional hurt sufficiently enough that i can establish sexual relationships just for fun, which is what happens when we remove the need to "be good enough" to be someone's partner that drives the Dating Rituals of many people. having met that particular need amply in matthew, and having established a social network that includes sufficient people of like-minds (intellectually, sexually, relationally), i can relax into sexual relationships. sex becomes the corollary component to the established friendship, and not a Thing Unto Itself. this is not to say i *can't* have lovers of that nature (in fact, i have one who comes pretty damned close to it), but i am generally choosing differently. matthew and i are quite different in this regard.
this adds another layer of complexity to the projected rights and responsibilities we expect of our lovers: when the range of those relationships encompasses people who are total strangers to one of us up to friends who are reasonably close to both of us, how do you define a global set of *anything* that covers that diversity? in much the same way that i often hear bodosom's mantra about communication, "Just Fucking Disclose" in my head, i hear a similar voice trying to pare down the complexity of even an organic and evolutionary document into the basic mantra, "Your job is to respect the primary relationship." while this is certainly an edict i can get behind and push, it has its limitations: for example, if you don't know what's expected of you with regards to your behaviours around and towards the members of the primary relationship, how the hell do you know what constitutes "respect" and what doesn't, short of trial and error and figuring things out the hard way? we often jokingly lament that a lot of things in life don't come with user manuals, and wouldn't it just be easier if some things, at least, did?
that is, i believe, the whole intent of this exercise: trying to create a user manual including both the rules of engagement and the bill of rights and responsibilities, that can just be dealt with en masse at the relevant part of any new relationship interest. not all relationship types will trigger the document hand-off; matthew wondered this morning about *when* in a new-interest situation we'd be handing the information over. i don't think it's specifically time-delineated, because we have to consider where in our respective hierarchies* a new lover is being introduced: what type of relationship, what are our intentions, what is their exposure to the primary relationship, how much do we trust them to be doing their own homework, et cetera.
nor do i particularly think we're going to need to convey this level of detail all the time forever and ever, for every new lover going forward. as with so many other processes we've worked through in our relationship, we're currently looking at something with which we have been managing on supposition and instinct alone for quite some time, with diminishing returns for success over the period, ergo: rework. and it is the way of our people to drag everything out into the light of day, put some lexicon to it, give it some shape, put some conscious thought into how we deal with what we've identified, and we give that new process a couple of iterations and tweaks until it becomes second nature. while this doesn't mean we won't possibly be putting a physical document in someone's hands, it means that, for now, this is our process of making conscious and explicit a number of things that have been neither for a very long time, until we've got some better grounding in each other's innate foundations for those inherent expectations, and greater trust in our ability to communicate both our points of agreement as well as our points of divergence, perhaps especially the latter. as we expect this to be a somewhat organic, evolutionary process, like so much other work that we do or have done, this too is a process that will be revisited from time to time. eventually, i expect we'll have established a secure beachhead in our relationship from which we can venture forward into new relationships with a confident understanding of the rules and responsibilities that are attendant with whatever we're offering in terms of relationship to a potential lover; establishing the security means not requiring the attendant documentation. it's a good tool for now, even if it looks to anyone else like a naked stick used to poke into anthills.
* - matthew and i view the hierarchies differently as well, namely in the steepness of the angle between the "degrees of relationship". his angles tend to be more shallow than mine, suggesting there is less of a difference for him between casual sex, small-"r" lover relationship, boy/girlfriend "R"elationship, and primary Relationship. for me, there is a huge gap around the boy/girlfriend Relationships, namely in that i'm not cool with considering those yet on his part (if ever) and matthew's not terribly anxious about them at all (for himself or for me). the angle between casual sex and small-"r" lovers is relatively small for both of us; small-"r" to capital-"r" is also reasonably small for matthew.
part of the problem with shaping explicit "rights & responsibilities" after five years of making it up as we go along (and suffering the consequences for that approach), is what matthew identified a couple of months ago as "reactive legislation", in which laws (boundaries, requirements, etc.) arise in response to a particular person/situation, and therefore either have a limited, circumstantial application, or fall prey to the weasels who like to play in the grey areas where nothing is explicit and therefore everything must be permissible (to the weasels' eyes, at least). and yet, if we don't know what these expectations actually entail - cue the background chorus, wailing, "How can we not know this stuff??" - and don't communicate them outwardly between us and to our lovers, how do *they* know when they've strayed away from expectations and into the murk?
in our case, we generally only know after the crescendo of the explosion has stopped reverberating in our ears and the dust has settled. eventually, even we had to figure out that there might be better ways of managing these differences and divergences, if only to stop offended lovers from hating the offending spouses once unseen triggers had been tripped and short fuses leading to unexpectedly large caverns packed with powder kegs had been lit.
not having the vaguest clue how to go about developing such a manifesto, however, i have avoided the homework for months; every time i started to think about it, i'd get stuck in the loop of emotional backwash coupled with reactive legislation tendencies, get frustrated, and give up before i'd really begun. i kept coming back to tacit's writings on the subject, and finally stopped prevaricating on the issue and just started to write - thus establishing, once and for all, that tacit is, in fact, as good as ten ninja crashing through the window.
my initial draft is essentially a dialogue of sorts with what tacit has written, done in two stages. the first stage is my unfiltered responses to his concepts, the second is a more positive spin in terms of the rights and responsibilities as one might (more effectively at least) communicate to someone outside the primary relationship. in taking this tactic, it becomes very clear that T's material is written based on his experiences with certain types of relationships; what he identifies as a secondary fits with what we would define that way, namely a serious, capital-"R" boy/girlfriend Relationship, which neither matthew nor i currently have, we have not had during our five year history, and are not likely to build any time in the near future. this means rethinking expectations in terms of the types of relationships we do currently maintain, but possibly allowing room for more invested relationships in the future. (matthew also pointed out to me that tacit and i diverge even before that, on the question of polyamory as "intimate inclusion" versus exclusion, but explaining how that works for me and for us is a whole different conversation; not post, conversation.) as with matthew and i, tacit and i are also two very different people :)
that's a lot of flexibility and forward thinking to ask from someone who's struggling to get beyond historically-knee-jerking reactive legislation in response to events in the past, you know.
this lead to this morning's Couch & Coffee Time conversation, in which we revisited the fundamental differences matthew and i have in *how* we connect with lovers. matthew's approach in recent years has generally been along the lines of, "boobies! wannafuck?", without any manifest need to establish any kind of relationship beforehand or afterwards. i, on the other hand, tried to break myself from that habit in my mid-20s (in the myriad ways in which men and women differ, are innumerable hangups about sex and self-worth and self-image, but i digress.) the relationships i establish and maintain now are generally drawn from within the circle of people who are already *friends*, which lowers my risks of emotional hurt sufficiently enough that i can establish sexual relationships just for fun, which is what happens when we remove the need to "be good enough" to be someone's partner that drives the Dating Rituals of many people. having met that particular need amply in matthew, and having established a social network that includes sufficient people of like-minds (intellectually, sexually, relationally), i can relax into sexual relationships. sex becomes the corollary component to the established friendship, and not a Thing Unto Itself. this is not to say i *can't* have lovers of that nature (in fact, i have one who comes pretty damned close to it), but i am generally choosing differently. matthew and i are quite different in this regard.
this adds another layer of complexity to the projected rights and responsibilities we expect of our lovers: when the range of those relationships encompasses people who are total strangers to one of us up to friends who are reasonably close to both of us, how do you define a global set of *anything* that covers that diversity? in much the same way that i often hear bodosom's mantra about communication, "Just Fucking Disclose" in my head, i hear a similar voice trying to pare down the complexity of even an organic and evolutionary document into the basic mantra, "Your job is to respect the primary relationship." while this is certainly an edict i can get behind and push, it has its limitations: for example, if you don't know what's expected of you with regards to your behaviours around and towards the members of the primary relationship, how the hell do you know what constitutes "respect" and what doesn't, short of trial and error and figuring things out the hard way? we often jokingly lament that a lot of things in life don't come with user manuals, and wouldn't it just be easier if some things, at least, did?
that is, i believe, the whole intent of this exercise: trying to create a user manual including both the rules of engagement and the bill of rights and responsibilities, that can just be dealt with en masse at the relevant part of any new relationship interest. not all relationship types will trigger the document hand-off; matthew wondered this morning about *when* in a new-interest situation we'd be handing the information over. i don't think it's specifically time-delineated, because we have to consider where in our respective hierarchies* a new lover is being introduced: what type of relationship, what are our intentions, what is their exposure to the primary relationship, how much do we trust them to be doing their own homework, et cetera.
nor do i particularly think we're going to need to convey this level of detail all the time forever and ever, for every new lover going forward. as with so many other processes we've worked through in our relationship, we're currently looking at something with which we have been managing on supposition and instinct alone for quite some time, with diminishing returns for success over the period, ergo: rework. and it is the way of our people to drag everything out into the light of day, put some lexicon to it, give it some shape, put some conscious thought into how we deal with what we've identified, and we give that new process a couple of iterations and tweaks until it becomes second nature. while this doesn't mean we won't possibly be putting a physical document in someone's hands, it means that, for now, this is our process of making conscious and explicit a number of things that have been neither for a very long time, until we've got some better grounding in each other's innate foundations for those inherent expectations, and greater trust in our ability to communicate both our points of agreement as well as our points of divergence, perhaps especially the latter. as we expect this to be a somewhat organic, evolutionary process, like so much other work that we do or have done, this too is a process that will be revisited from time to time. eventually, i expect we'll have established a secure beachhead in our relationship from which we can venture forward into new relationships with a confident understanding of the rules and responsibilities that are attendant with whatever we're offering in terms of relationship to a potential lover; establishing the security means not requiring the attendant documentation. it's a good tool for now, even if it looks to anyone else like a naked stick used to poke into anthills.
* - matthew and i view the hierarchies differently as well, namely in the steepness of the angle between the "degrees of relationship". his angles tend to be more shallow than mine, suggesting there is less of a difference for him between casual sex, small-"r" lover relationship, boy/girlfriend "R"elationship, and primary Relationship. for me, there is a huge gap around the boy/girlfriend Relationships, namely in that i'm not cool with considering those yet on his part (if ever) and matthew's not terribly anxious about them at all (for himself or for me). the angle between casual sex and small-"r" lovers is relatively small for both of us; small-"r" to capital-"r" is also reasonably small for matthew.