Normally I agree with a lot of what Andrea Zanin and Franklin Veaux (tacit) have to say about alternative lifestyles and how to make them work, but last winter I became aware of a growing trend among the "popular" poly writers to adopt what was coming across to me, at least, as a kind of dismissiveness or denigrative attitude toward those people in the ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

There is a delightfully trite cliché that insists that the Universe (or God, or Karma, or the Goddess, or whatever your Higher-Authority-of-Choice is) never throws at us more than we can handle, it's only a measure of our willingness to rise to the challenges that makes us grow or keeps us small in those choices ( Read more... )

...I never feel like I've advanced much beyond "abject failure".

http://www.xeromag.com/fvpolypiano.html

*sigh*

I've been thinking a lot lately about choice, especially in how it relates to validation in relationships, which in turn relates to how people self-soothe (or don't) their anxieties through either self-validation or other-validation. this in turn has lead me to examine some of my own motivations through the years for selecting relationships, both ( 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... )

due to late gaming and other delays, matthew got in very late and into bed around 6am this morning, so the Saturday Edition of Couch & Coffee Time got a later and groggier (on his part) start than usual, but as is often the case, the good stuff is worth waiting for. ( Read more... )

on account of some Stuff happening here on the home front, matthew and i have been revisiting - with the intention of possibly reworking - some of our foundational understanding of how to manage non-primary relationships, in the areas of rules, expectations, rights, responsibilities, and powers ( Read more... )

i keep tripping up on the internalized expectation that what's good for the goose must also be good for the gander, with no room for differentiation, or we're doing something wrong. even as i keep reminding myself, "it's like we're two different people", i keep expecting that the things that bug me and want specific behaviours to redress, are also ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )