What A Community Can’t Do

Last month, I made the painful decision to leave the Unitarian church that has been my spiritual home for seven years. It was over a philosophical difference that really snuck up on me, a lightning-strike realization that we (the church and I) weren’t on the same page. I try to see it the way it’s best to see dating deal-breakers, that saying no to what doesn’t work makes room for what does, but leaving was a huge loss. I’m struggling with a mix of shame, disappointment, and sadness that is very familiar to be because I seem to hit a wall of it at least every few years.

In her wonderful new book Rising Strong: The Reckoning, The Rumble, and The Revolution Brené Brown says that in order to get out from under disappointment, you have to be brave and really examine the expectations for the situation. So I’ve really given a lot of thought to the conscious and unconscious expectations that keep leading me to be damagingly disappointed by groups, scenes, and communities.

1. A community can’t be a correction for a hurtful family. Just the way I’ve sometimes gone to doms for approval, I go to communities hoping that they can love me into realness, approve me into existence. There’s an underlying hope of “Now that   I’ve found/become/befriended ___________, I will finally be okay, will finally be welcomed into the world and find unconditional love. It’s sad to realize that I didn’t have that with my original family as a child, but I can’t expect healing and wholeness to come from anywhere but within.

2. A community can’t replace my own family, flawed though they may be. I live too far away from my family of origin and I don’t have a family to share a household with right now, and that leaves a hole that nothing can fill.

3. A community can’t fix rape culture, because rape culture is in all of us. It is always easier for groups to be angry at the person pointing out the problem than to face the problem itself. I’ll always have to speak up against it, but I’d love to learn to feel safe doing so.

4. A community can’t erase heartbreak. I’ve realized that, though there were other factors, I left the BDSM scene because I couldn’t process the rejections I’d experienced there. I tried to patch each loss with another person, (and the whole thing was an attempt to patch divorce grief) but the grief kept walking me down the same path. After three years, I’m to the point where I can see the loss for what it is, and I desperately want to stop sponging that pain onto other people. It’s hard not to try and numb the loss of Sweetie and the life we created together.

5. A community can’t stay the same forever, and it can’t change as I change. Just the way that, in dating, I have to walk away from a bad match instead of trying to torture the person into changing for you, I have to let go of situations that aren’t a good fit. It doesn’t mean that I have to fear or fight forever, just that I need to constantly let things come and go.

6. A community can’t replace love. I am sick of being single, but I still have some inner work (and a whole lot of book-editing!) to do before I’m ready to start a life with another person, but I have to look loneliness in the eye, to honor it. I have to realize how much I want my own family and stop trying to shoehorn other things into that space.

7. A community can’t come to my rescue. If I ignore my instincts and walk into something that doesn’t work, no principal, no dom, no friend can be expected to “save” me. I am a grown woman, and I want to train myself to hear and respect my inner voice so that I can stop reliving abandonment or having childlike expectations of “loyalty.” We’re all adults being ourselves, and it’s up to me to find out what actually works, and do it.

8. A community can’t define me, erase me, or absorb me. It can’t give me an identity, and any identity it DOES give will feel constraining. The only thing I know I am is me, and I have to find out a way to be solid within myself, so I can stop expecting others to create me.

This has been a harsh, lonely time. The double loss of J. and the church has made for a very sad couple of months. It’s hard to have faith in anything right now, so I’m just trying little things as they come along, letting joy and connection in whatever little windows they can find. I’m also still trying to find help with the walls and wounds I keep running into. I don’t like being back in this Groundhog’s Day of sadness, this most vexing part of the labyrinth, but I’m doing my best to learn as much as I can while I’m here. 

Oh Wait, It Wasn’t My Drama

I’m sorry to revisit the same stupid playdate-that-wasn’t over and over again, but it’s still weighing on me and it’s still taking away my fun. This seems to be the month of unpleasant conversations that give me lots of insight—this morning, when I touched base with Steampunk Girl to apologize for not saying hello and tell her that I miss them, I found out the truth about those cancelled plans: It wasn’t my expectations and drama that he was aggravated with, it was drama and expectations that she invented and projected onto me.

It turns out that she was upset that I hadn’t cancelled after she explained that I would need a more loving situation for my first ass-time. In fact, I had cancelled, but then I uncancelled when I realized that we weren’t the same person and didn’t need the same things. I felt perfectly capable of doing the gentle breaking-it-in parts myself (I think we’ve established that I’m awesome at that!) and taking care of the emotional parts on my own too. There are many other valid reasons besides love to play with somebody, and in this case I chose him for competence, chemistry, and release. And also because (I thought) he was my pal. I think I’d have rocked at that playdate, if the planning process hadn’t turned crazymaking.

She was then bothered when I declined to have my first anal time with Cute Master, which she’d deemed a more loving situation. Actually, it probably was, and CM may still get the honor, though it would only be in the most casual and matter-of-fact of ways. But even if CM WAS the better choice, who in the world was SHE to decide that? Whose asshole are we talking about here?

It was also her issues causing the schedule mess—she thought I’d have all this “aftermath” that he would have to deal with, even though I’d already taken responsibility for that part and asked him to just tell me when he was expected home. All that I’d really asked for (besides wanting to make him cupcakes) was a time-margin away from the school week so I’d be more relaxed, a high sex-to-snuggle ratio, and to be treated gently about the scheduling part.

I did romanticize the friendship, but that doesn’t mean I expected more than friendship. Regardless of my feelings, I never asked him for anything that went beyond the bounds of an FWB or play partner. And even if I did, all he had to say was no, there was never any reason to put me down and e-yell at me about it.

All this time I’ve been feeling like I failed to be friends with them, especially with her, but they were the ones who dropped me over one mismatched set of expectations, most of which they’d invented. They were callous, mean, and defensive all along. It if weren’t for something she decided I needed and shouldn’t have, the plans would probably have come and gone, a nice story and a happy step along the way, and I could have kept my muse and friend. But I guess if he let all that happen to me, then it was never really a friendship to lose.

I wish this had been a conversation with him and not a way-after-the-fact whisper-down-the-lane with her and more stupid paragraphs. I wish he would have acknowledged that I deserved better, that I had the right to prefer whichever partner I preferred, that just because her first time meant “loving” and “aftermath” didn’t mean that mine had to. It’s helped to realize that for all of my mess, I’m actually much more self-contained than she is, and certainly less insecure.

Of course any good poly reader could say that all of this would have been avoided through direct communication and a more transparent approach by all parties, but I knew those things weren’t there for them from like the second date and I proceeded anyway. I hope that I can treat myself more humanely in future partnerships—how many times have I said that?

As for the dungeon, TPG was so sweet and posted pictures of her bruises just as if I were a real Dom. Hopefully Old-Timey Guy will forgive me for running out, I’m sure he had a million other fun things to do. I may not go back for a while but when I do, I hope that I can find the brave person I used to be there, or at least find myself able to cry soulful tears.

In Praise of Expectations and Other Human Things

If I’m in a facebook argument, you know something isn’t right. I usually am very careful about avoiding them—Sweetie loves them, but they make me feel stressy and gross. A friend of a friend, a young, adorable queer guy, posted that having expectations had caused every problem his heart had ever had, and he was making the virtuous pledge never to anticipate anything or have hopes about anyone. Reading this status tapped into a deep well of anger I only vaguely knew I had. I wanted to avoid the anger so it wouldn’t tarnish the nice memories, but I’m gonna have to slog back to Steampunk Guy for a few paragraphs. If you’re someone who gets squeamish about the less-attractive emotions, consider yourself warned.

I wish I hadn’t taken down the posts about our falling-out, but it came down to him saying this:

“You seem more excited about me than about trying anal.”

This felt like rejection on such a fundamental level. How LOW was I in his estimation that he thought I didn’t even deserve to have a PREFERENCE about which partner fucked me in the ass for the first time? How deeply inhumane is the expectation that I think only of the act and not of the person doing it. This fucking-a-fetish-instead-of-a-person cruelty is the root of everything ugly that I’ve seen in the alternative sex community, all of the post-consent-world mindset that the Scary Party crowd walks around with, it’s the deepest, starkest sexualization and I will never and should never open my mind to it. In order to be acceptable to him, I had to be literally nothing but a hole, and he had to be just a dick, too. How easy it would be if I saw the world that way, I’d be just the belle of the horror-themed fetish ball.

I didn’t say any of that at the time, just broke off the planning, said I was disappointed, and gave him some (admittedly somewhat tragic) background on why I’d been wanting to make it a nice experience.

He wrote back “Personal drama! Expectations! Shame! Apologies!”

At the time, I felt bad for being all of those things instead of just a simple, fun partner the way I assumed the other girls managed to be. But a month later, those four exclamations make me livid, so let’s take them one by one:

“Personal drama!”

Dude. You were going to be the first person (that I know of) to put his penis in my asshole. It seems reasonable that a person might have some emotions emerge around that, even in a casual situation. If you aren’t up for complicated emotions, you aren’t up for fucking me as a human being. (I know. We already established he wasn’t. It still makes me mad.) Yes, I have personal drama. I’m divorcing my wife of ten years and I was somewhat inconveniently in love with you. You saw those things as flaws, but  I’m relieved to find that I don’t.

“Expectations!”

I am sick and tired of hearing expectations vilified. We mustn’t hope, envision, or anticipate, lest we create some unnecessary strain on things. But you know what? Those things are only a problem if THE PERSON ALREADY DOESN’T LIKE YOU. It’s not the expectations’ fault; it’s the match’s, or rather, the lack of one.

Moreover, you had expectations too. You expected me to plan around your schedule, not mine, to somehow intuit exactly how much you could offer and not ask for one milliliter more. You expected me to put on a pretty outfit and be absolutely no one to you, to squelch every human emotion so much that I’d be an absolutely absent nothing.

And yes, this was my idea, I’ll admit. Denial is a tenacious thing.

“Shame!”

Is a feeling that many people have, especially when it comes to their assholes. Given the amount that I panicked after our last exchange, I’m guessing my shame runs pretty deep. That doesn’t somehow make me a bad player or a bad partner; it just makes me a person whose body has a lot of stories in it, just like everybody’s.

“Apologies!”

Yes, there were many. I shouldn’t have tried to stay friends with someone who made me so sorry all the time, but I did. Because I’m in a weird place, because I loved you and felt like I should learn you, because I wanted to get laid in the midst of my mess of a life.

I started this post angry but something about answering those exclamations helped. Here’s what I think: For any given encounter, I think we all deserve to value each other as whole beings. I deserve to have wishes and hopes both dashed and realized, because that’s what it is to be a real live girl. I deserve to dream and plan and fantasize, and to let go of anyone who makes me feel like those dreams are way too far away.

Steampunk Girl told me the story of her first time having anal sex, a process that took months because her partner was so loving and thorough and gentle. I loved that story but honestly didn’t picture myself finding someone who’d have that much time for me. Something in me must’ve believed it was possible, though, and I love her for getting that story stuck in my head, for giving me better expectations, for (eventually) making me admit I wanted nothing less. Not more expectations, or fewer, just better ones.