Matthew asked at lunch about the night terrors ( Read more... )

A propos of everything, it’s ironic when I can invest several *hours* in purging the topmost level of thoughts about fear and how it has impacted my behaviours historically in costly manner, then spend an entire evening retreating into exactly those same damned patterns of fearful inhibition. Okay, so everything is tenuous right now and the rules ( Read more... )

1. I will do my homework to make sure I'm steady on understanding the mistakes I made that got me here. (F-locked post, sorry; link is here mostly for my own reference as I start the homework process ( Read more... )

Eight years is a long time. It is approximately one-tenth of the average lifespan of a human being. It's far longer than the lifespan of millions of species of plant and animal, even if it seems only the blink of an eye to thousands of others, and it's immeasurably, insignificantly short in the lifespan of any kind of cosmic body ( Read more... )

I think it's something about this time of year, in which the changing of the seasons from warm summer and autumn into cold dark winter tends to provoke people into staring down those long frigid months and getting shit off their chests before it festers and drives them into depression with the passing of the sun. Hey, you have your theories for SAD ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

...it seems inevitable that you will see things you've never seen before. and if you've got little or nothing to which you can compare the vista, it may seem enormous, lacking a comparative scale of measure. ( cut for the 93% of you who don't read relationship essays :) )

i have historically taken a very hands-off approach to a primary partner's other relationships (casual or otherwise). i expect to know they exist, i expect to be notified about date scheduling, i expect to remain the primary priority and be respected as such (by both my partner and his lovers); other than that, i generally don't want to know ( Read more... )

i have been made to promise that i will not "do therapy" on my friends (at least not unless they specifically seek my help on something), and i'm all in favour of not spending my dinner parties and other social opportunities wasting focus on unwilling participants when i could be engaging in far more fun and frivolous pursuits, like focusing on *me ( Read more... )

matthew has a philosophy that i've always thought seemed prudent: "It's not a question of whether or not you can trust people; it's a question of what you trust them to do." sometimes, you can trust people implicitly, even if it's only trusting them to be true to their own natures in the face of repeated contentions that their natural behaviours ( Read more... )