Well, *duh*
Wow, did last night ever reach unprecedented new lows of "Hard", as I sat for an initial consultation with new clients, a married couple who, I swear to ghods, could have been me and Matthew in different hairdos. It was the weirdest sensation watching someone else unfold our recent life (with variations on some themes and a couple of pertinent wrinkles all their own). Matthew, ghods bless him, was extremely supportive in the aftermath, even into the difficult conversation that followed; hey, if you're going to roil the waters with a Great Big Metaphorical Stick, shit's gonna rise to the surface.
There is so much *stuff* that came out of last night (not the least of which was some fairly brilliant surfing and management of the tide of association and counter-transference on the professional level, as well as some equally deft work with the couple themselves that seem to put them at ease) that I almost don't know where to start. So many things that made me angry, so many things that gave me hope. So many things that start to glimmer a little as little pieces of them catch the light of day for the first time, just hints and glimpses for now of something bigger lying just below the water's ruffled surface.
I hate this feeling. I especially hate the "Why them and not us?" feeling and the anticipation of not liking a single damned one of Matthew's answers, especially the ones I cannot refute. (Or maybe especially the ones I *can* refute*; it could go either way, really, on a moment to moment basis.) I hate the hours spent afterwards trying to stop my head from spinning ineffectively around on the concepts of things they did differently or resubmerging into the litany of all the things we did wrong; it makes for a piss-poor night's sleep, I have to say.
One of the major stumbling issues I've been fumbling around since bed-time was the wonderment that learning to become vulnerable and emotionally intimate, this couple reignited their passion for each other, and physical intimacy took off in a full-blown renaissance. I look back over eight fucking years of *deliberately-developed* emotional intimacy (as imperfect as it proved to be, it's still leap-years above anything I'd ever had in previous relationships, or what I witness in most intimate relationships around me) that involved a prolonged decrease of sexual activity, I can feel a little resentment for that failure. It certainly underlines the difference between "working harder" which is something we're good at) and "working smarter" (which is something I really don't think we're good at at all.)
Sexual relationships frequently ebb and dip over the course of long-term relationships when the drudgery of daily life gets in the way, but especially when emotional intimacy takes a back seat for all the innumerable reasons it does. This happened in previous relationships; one previous LTR even went so far at one point as to accuse me of being frigid. I didn't know any better; he might have been dead to rights for all I knew about my own sexuality, or understood how things change over relationship durations and chronology, or due to factors like chronic pain.
I don't think Matthew ever really understood why things fell off as they did, even before grad school (which absolutely exacerbated the situation of our interconnectedness on every bloody level). People who don't live in chronic pain never really grok the longitudinal impacts of living with what amounts to a moderate sprain for every day of one's life. I don't look injured, I don't move like I'm injured; it becomes really easy for everyone to forget the pain is a very real drain on my spoons every day.
Significant as that factor is, that's only the most outer layer of the onion.
Matthew also never really forgave me, I think, for what he felt was a version of the bait-and-switch game in which the transition from the early dating days to the live-together-coupledom also seemed to predicate that precipitous decline. In truth, I don't think it was so much the moving-in-together issue so much as it was the abrupt adjustment to living with another person's expectations and values before we'd really made what I thought was a decent job of exploring all of those elements with the minimum safe distance of a province between us and the safe mode of communication being online channels. My weasels really weren't ready for him, and he wasn't really ready for my weasels... and so when the contests for mindfulness and authenticity started, the real battle for me at lease was between what I said I wanted, and what I was actually willing to live with.
And you can't introduce that much strain and striving into a relationship without also introducing a lot of...
... fear.
Hands up, dear readers, if you can see now where this is going.
We worked really hard without always being particularly smart. I was far better at deflecting Matthew's inquiries than I needed to be, and he let me get away with it in order to remain conflict-avoidant. Calling me on my shit every step of the way is not what he signed on for, not by a long shot, but I wasn't going to manage to catch and reroute the weasels on my own, and by the time I managed to get them into some kind of harness, a lot of the damage had been done (especially around one particularly disastrous relationship of mine) and the seeds of distance and disconnect were already sown. We were already off-balance; we were already allowing things to slide out of any kind of parity. And the more unstable we became, the more afraid I became, and the less simple it was to connect with desire and arousal... with Matthew.
Sure, an easy sexual relationship is a simple thing to have when there isn't so much mental and emotional baggage getting in the way. Also, when you only see your lover at intervals, it's easier to set everything aside for the duration of the weekend and just get inside each other's skin as much as possible; you're trying to cram a week or two weeks or months' worth of skin time into a very finite window, and trust me when I say that situation creates its own kind of passionate urgency.
...One that vanishes as soon as you move in together, even before all the other stuff starts to get in the way. So basing expectations on the artificial limitations of a dating relationship, especially a LDR, creates a number of falsehoods that are impossible to live up to. And yes, I felt pressured to perform; I tried finding ways to let that happen that would meet his needs without triggering my own, and unsurprisingly, all of them failed over time. Also unsurprisingly, successive failures build up their own obstructions to continuing attempts in good faith, I remember in very vivid detail the night Matthew, who had repeatedly told me over the years that given the apparent differences in our sex drives, "I'll pretty much be ready any time you're interested", snapped at me, "I'm not interested in being your performing monkey" one night when I'd expressed disappointment over making overtures and having him refuse them.
We just kept missing each other, and allowing every rejection and failure to be another brick in the wall neither one of us knew how to scale.
And yet the irony was, sex with other people never seemed to be a problem. As soon as you remove the overhead of all that interpersonal baggage, it's *amazing* how sexual we become (don't believe me? Ask Matthew's girlfriend or my own lovers.) Of course, once something that starts as a sexual relationship starts to develop more overt emotional entanglements, that's when the attachments and investments also start to provoke the fears, and the whole snowball starts to roll downhill once again. This is also exactly why I've chosen to avoid relationships that might progress past being sex-only; I've needed all resources available to manage the relationship with Matthew. I sure as hell didn't want to be fighting the emotional equivalent of a European land-war on multiple fronts (I know I've used that analogy elsewhere recently, but it's a remarkably apt one).
Almost all of my intimate relationships have started as sexual ones. As a young woman profoundly lacking in self-esteem, I operated from the mindset that "If you have sex with me, you'll like me", until it became apparent that in an ongoing relationship, I needed more: more to rely on, more to offer. Only... I had no clue how to engage on that level. Remember, for all that my parents lived together for 19 years, they hated each other for 17 of them, and I grew up in what was effectively a Cold War zone. I learned how to disengage and distance like a wizard, but intimacy and engagement? Not a clue. Post-coital intimacy and affection? Also clueless. Developing something past the sexual glow into something sustainable was a complete mystery, and even now, most of what I know that *does* work is stuff I do simply because it doesn't appear to have failed yet, not because I actively understood how I got there or what to do next. Yeah, I know... the irony of the relationship therapist saying this is, well, ironic. But if there's nothing else my clients and fellow therapists have taught me, it's that there are a lot of us in this damned boat, all making it up by trial and occasionally-thoughtless error as we go.
This would be an excellent place to remind myself the goal going forward is to approach all of this with the "work smarter, not harder" mindset. Matthew may not realize or appreciate it, but one of the biggest learnings I've managed is how to have additional relationships without making emotional connections, simply by being mindful of the decisions I make about interactions and managing expectations. There's been no "accidental falling in love", no back-handed establishing non-primary relationships to be need-meeting relationships without actually looking at what was happening (not since the disastrous first foray). Using sex to build relationships is a very different thing when sex is pretty much all that relationship is likely to be.
But for all our emotional vulnerability with each other, we couldn't - we wouldn't - knock down that wall between us. Matthew never figured out how to confront it effectively, and I apparently learned to wield it like a highly-maneuverable shield between us (which frustrated him to no end when he could see me doing it but couldn't get around it to reach me, because I was too terrified to let him). So we did everything we could to pretend the distance was something we could live with, and set about getting needs met elsewhere...
...and I think the rest of the failure cycle is pretty obvious, if not well-documented, from there.
I forget where I was reading recently the reinforcement that men need sex to feel emotional intimacy, and women need emotional intimacy to develop an interest in sex (I think it was in “Sex at Dawn”, since that’s the only non-fiction I’ve read lately). I apparently seem to have reached a point in my life where I can have one or the other, but to have both is a path fraught with peril, and too many people willing to step into my shoes should I fail - which doubles the fear of failure and rejection with the added spice of believing you’ll be easily replaced if you do fail. You might expect this makes being polyamorous particularly challenging, and you’d be right. Again, that’s mostly the fear talking, although there’s a not-small body of historical evidence that backs up that perception, so it’s fear-based-in-experience as much as it’s fear-talking-outta-my-arse.
The more I realize, through the emotional spelunking of the past two weeks, just how deep the rabbit-hole of fear truly goes, and how many twists and turnabouts it takes on the way down, the more I come to appreciate just how difficult a job Matthew’s had for the past eight years. His own flawed understandings and flawed decision-making processes aside (and don’t get me wrong, he and I both know they’re there; just because you, the readership, only get to see one side of the aftermath, doesn’t mean he’s not digging out through his own homework… which, in truth, I don’t know for sure that he is, but at least in conversation we both know the errors that got us here are not explicitly limited to me. I’m just the only one of us who makes a pseudo-career out of advertising mine), he’s rightly infuriated by what he’s had to pay time and again for my being afraid. I can’t do a damned thing to help him process that anger except acknowledging and owning the parts of the broken processes that are mine, and genuinely grieving them in a way that makes authentic sorrow - the kind that should lie behind the words, “I’m sorry” - possible. Part of the wall between us is built by bricks of his anger, too, so in hindsight (ever, always, only in hindsight) do I see where there were crucial obstacles on his side of the sexual intimacy wall as well.
And for a number of reasons, I really don’t envy any relationships he has after me; we’ve ruined each other, for better and for worse, on expectations for sexual, emotional, psychological intimacy and mindful authenticity, as well as crafted some finely-honed and well-camouflaged traps based in fear and reflexive behaviours that are going to be a bitch to locate and diffuse, regardless of whether he and I are doing that process with each other, or with subsequent relationships (or ghods forbid, both). (He’s still finding and diffusing ones from his first marriage as things with me trigger them; this is “work of a lifetime” work, not anything that’s fixed with one-shot silver-bullet solutions. We know; we’ve tried. Many times.)
Walls work best when both people agree implicitly or explicitly to remain on their own sides. Shields are a more aggressive form of defence. In either case, the metaphor and the metaphysical obstructions have to be destroyed, or at the very least rendered more effectively permeable, for the desire to become unfettered. I wasn’t lying when I told Matthew recently that I never not-wanted him or his time; there was just so much other shit that got in the way. I’m chipping now at the tip of an iceberg I realize is so much bigger than anyone knew that I cannot see all of the impacts it has had over the years; we just know it’s been there, all along, crushing fragile things growing on the ocean bed somewhere below the surface and what we could see. If anything is going to regrow in its wake, the blind and drifting obstruction must be steered into better waters for it, and reduced to something that can be handled in safety.
It doesn’t matter who benefits from this work, ultimately; it has to be done. I don’t choose to be alone for the rest of my life, and I’d like to know what assurances I can make that will preclude winding up *here* ever again.
There is so much *stuff* that came out of last night (not the least of which was some fairly brilliant surfing and management of the tide of association and counter-transference on the professional level, as well as some equally deft work with the couple themselves that seem to put them at ease) that I almost don't know where to start. So many things that made me angry, so many things that gave me hope. So many things that start to glimmer a little as little pieces of them catch the light of day for the first time, just hints and glimpses for now of something bigger lying just below the water's ruffled surface.
I hate this feeling. I especially hate the "Why them and not us?" feeling and the anticipation of not liking a single damned one of Matthew's answers, especially the ones I cannot refute. (Or maybe especially the ones I *can* refute*; it could go either way, really, on a moment to moment basis.) I hate the hours spent afterwards trying to stop my head from spinning ineffectively around on the concepts of things they did differently or resubmerging into the litany of all the things we did wrong; it makes for a piss-poor night's sleep, I have to say.
One of the major stumbling issues I've been fumbling around since bed-time was the wonderment that learning to become vulnerable and emotionally intimate, this couple reignited their passion for each other, and physical intimacy took off in a full-blown renaissance. I look back over eight fucking years of *deliberately-developed* emotional intimacy (as imperfect as it proved to be, it's still leap-years above anything I'd ever had in previous relationships, or what I witness in most intimate relationships around me) that involved a prolonged decrease of sexual activity, I can feel a little resentment for that failure. It certainly underlines the difference between "working harder" which is something we're good at) and "working smarter" (which is something I really don't think we're good at at all.)
Sexual relationships frequently ebb and dip over the course of long-term relationships when the drudgery of daily life gets in the way, but especially when emotional intimacy takes a back seat for all the innumerable reasons it does. This happened in previous relationships; one previous LTR even went so far at one point as to accuse me of being frigid. I didn't know any better; he might have been dead to rights for all I knew about my own sexuality, or understood how things change over relationship durations and chronology, or due to factors like chronic pain.
I don't think Matthew ever really understood why things fell off as they did, even before grad school (which absolutely exacerbated the situation of our interconnectedness on every bloody level). People who don't live in chronic pain never really grok the longitudinal impacts of living with what amounts to a moderate sprain for every day of one's life. I don't look injured, I don't move like I'm injured; it becomes really easy for everyone to forget the pain is a very real drain on my spoons every day.
Significant as that factor is, that's only the most outer layer of the onion.
Matthew also never really forgave me, I think, for what he felt was a version of the bait-and-switch game in which the transition from the early dating days to the live-together-coupledom also seemed to predicate that precipitous decline. In truth, I don't think it was so much the moving-in-together issue so much as it was the abrupt adjustment to living with another person's expectations and values before we'd really made what I thought was a decent job of exploring all of those elements with the minimum safe distance of a province between us and the safe mode of communication being online channels. My weasels really weren't ready for him, and he wasn't really ready for my weasels... and so when the contests for mindfulness and authenticity started, the real battle for me at lease was between what I said I wanted, and what I was actually willing to live with.
And you can't introduce that much strain and striving into a relationship without also introducing a lot of...
... fear.
Hands up, dear readers, if you can see now where this is going.
We worked really hard without always being particularly smart. I was far better at deflecting Matthew's inquiries than I needed to be, and he let me get away with it in order to remain conflict-avoidant. Calling me on my shit every step of the way is not what he signed on for, not by a long shot, but I wasn't going to manage to catch and reroute the weasels on my own, and by the time I managed to get them into some kind of harness, a lot of the damage had been done (especially around one particularly disastrous relationship of mine) and the seeds of distance and disconnect were already sown. We were already off-balance; we were already allowing things to slide out of any kind of parity. And the more unstable we became, the more afraid I became, and the less simple it was to connect with desire and arousal... with Matthew.
Sure, an easy sexual relationship is a simple thing to have when there isn't so much mental and emotional baggage getting in the way. Also, when you only see your lover at intervals, it's easier to set everything aside for the duration of the weekend and just get inside each other's skin as much as possible; you're trying to cram a week or two weeks or months' worth of skin time into a very finite window, and trust me when I say that situation creates its own kind of passionate urgency.
...One that vanishes as soon as you move in together, even before all the other stuff starts to get in the way. So basing expectations on the artificial limitations of a dating relationship, especially a LDR, creates a number of falsehoods that are impossible to live up to. And yes, I felt pressured to perform; I tried finding ways to let that happen that would meet his needs without triggering my own, and unsurprisingly, all of them failed over time. Also unsurprisingly, successive failures build up their own obstructions to continuing attempts in good faith, I remember in very vivid detail the night Matthew, who had repeatedly told me over the years that given the apparent differences in our sex drives, "I'll pretty much be ready any time you're interested", snapped at me, "I'm not interested in being your performing monkey" one night when I'd expressed disappointment over making overtures and having him refuse them.
We just kept missing each other, and allowing every rejection and failure to be another brick in the wall neither one of us knew how to scale.
And yet the irony was, sex with other people never seemed to be a problem. As soon as you remove the overhead of all that interpersonal baggage, it's *amazing* how sexual we become (don't believe me? Ask Matthew's girlfriend or my own lovers.) Of course, once something that starts as a sexual relationship starts to develop more overt emotional entanglements, that's when the attachments and investments also start to provoke the fears, and the whole snowball starts to roll downhill once again. This is also exactly why I've chosen to avoid relationships that might progress past being sex-only; I've needed all resources available to manage the relationship with Matthew. I sure as hell didn't want to be fighting the emotional equivalent of a European land-war on multiple fronts (I know I've used that analogy elsewhere recently, but it's a remarkably apt one).
Almost all of my intimate relationships have started as sexual ones. As a young woman profoundly lacking in self-esteem, I operated from the mindset that "If you have sex with me, you'll like me", until it became apparent that in an ongoing relationship, I needed more: more to rely on, more to offer. Only... I had no clue how to engage on that level. Remember, for all that my parents lived together for 19 years, they hated each other for 17 of them, and I grew up in what was effectively a Cold War zone. I learned how to disengage and distance like a wizard, but intimacy and engagement? Not a clue. Post-coital intimacy and affection? Also clueless. Developing something past the sexual glow into something sustainable was a complete mystery, and even now, most of what I know that *does* work is stuff I do simply because it doesn't appear to have failed yet, not because I actively understood how I got there or what to do next. Yeah, I know... the irony of the relationship therapist saying this is, well, ironic. But if there's nothing else my clients and fellow therapists have taught me, it's that there are a lot of us in this damned boat, all making it up by trial and occasionally-thoughtless error as we go.
This would be an excellent place to remind myself the goal going forward is to approach all of this with the "work smarter, not harder" mindset. Matthew may not realize or appreciate it, but one of the biggest learnings I've managed is how to have additional relationships without making emotional connections, simply by being mindful of the decisions I make about interactions and managing expectations. There's been no "accidental falling in love", no back-handed establishing non-primary relationships to be need-meeting relationships without actually looking at what was happening (not since the disastrous first foray). Using sex to build relationships is a very different thing when sex is pretty much all that relationship is likely to be.
But for all our emotional vulnerability with each other, we couldn't - we wouldn't - knock down that wall between us. Matthew never figured out how to confront it effectively, and I apparently learned to wield it like a highly-maneuverable shield between us (which frustrated him to no end when he could see me doing it but couldn't get around it to reach me, because I was too terrified to let him). So we did everything we could to pretend the distance was something we could live with, and set about getting needs met elsewhere...
...and I think the rest of the failure cycle is pretty obvious, if not well-documented, from there.
I forget where I was reading recently the reinforcement that men need sex to feel emotional intimacy, and women need emotional intimacy to develop an interest in sex (I think it was in “Sex at Dawn”, since that’s the only non-fiction I’ve read lately). I apparently seem to have reached a point in my life where I can have one or the other, but to have both is a path fraught with peril, and too many people willing to step into my shoes should I fail - which doubles the fear of failure and rejection with the added spice of believing you’ll be easily replaced if you do fail. You might expect this makes being polyamorous particularly challenging, and you’d be right. Again, that’s mostly the fear talking, although there’s a not-small body of historical evidence that backs up that perception, so it’s fear-based-in-experience as much as it’s fear-talking-outta-my-arse.
The more I realize, through the emotional spelunking of the past two weeks, just how deep the rabbit-hole of fear truly goes, and how many twists and turnabouts it takes on the way down, the more I come to appreciate just how difficult a job Matthew’s had for the past eight years. His own flawed understandings and flawed decision-making processes aside (and don’t get me wrong, he and I both know they’re there; just because you, the readership, only get to see one side of the aftermath, doesn’t mean he’s not digging out through his own homework… which, in truth, I don’t know for sure that he is, but at least in conversation we both know the errors that got us here are not explicitly limited to me. I’m just the only one of us who makes a pseudo-career out of advertising mine), he’s rightly infuriated by what he’s had to pay time and again for my being afraid. I can’t do a damned thing to help him process that anger except acknowledging and owning the parts of the broken processes that are mine, and genuinely grieving them in a way that makes authentic sorrow - the kind that should lie behind the words, “I’m sorry” - possible. Part of the wall between us is built by bricks of his anger, too, so in hindsight (ever, always, only in hindsight) do I see where there were crucial obstacles on his side of the sexual intimacy wall as well.
And for a number of reasons, I really don’t envy any relationships he has after me; we’ve ruined each other, for better and for worse, on expectations for sexual, emotional, psychological intimacy and mindful authenticity, as well as crafted some finely-honed and well-camouflaged traps based in fear and reflexive behaviours that are going to be a bitch to locate and diffuse, regardless of whether he and I are doing that process with each other, or with subsequent relationships (or ghods forbid, both). (He’s still finding and diffusing ones from his first marriage as things with me trigger them; this is “work of a lifetime” work, not anything that’s fixed with one-shot silver-bullet solutions. We know; we’ve tried. Many times.)
Walls work best when both people agree implicitly or explicitly to remain on their own sides. Shields are a more aggressive form of defence. In either case, the metaphor and the metaphysical obstructions have to be destroyed, or at the very least rendered more effectively permeable, for the desire to become unfettered. I wasn’t lying when I told Matthew recently that I never not-wanted him or his time; there was just so much other shit that got in the way. I’m chipping now at the tip of an iceberg I realize is so much bigger than anyone knew that I cannot see all of the impacts it has had over the years; we just know it’s been there, all along, crushing fragile things growing on the ocean bed somewhere below the surface and what we could see. If anything is going to regrow in its wake, the blind and drifting obstruction must be steered into better waters for it, and reduced to something that can be handled in safety.
It doesn’t matter who benefits from this work, ultimately; it has to be done. I don’t choose to be alone for the rest of my life, and I’d like to know what assurances I can make that will preclude winding up *here* ever again.