Dear Ribbons: Does Jealousy Mean I Have to Give Up This Hottie?!

 

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Dear Ribbons,

What do I do about jealousy? My newish play partner is a total hottie. Half of me is genuinely happy for them and just feels like they should have everything they want in this life and just have people tell them they’re cute all day, and half of me is like oh my god, they really do have so many lovers. And I know if I continue down the casual sex road, many people I sleep with are gonna 100% be sleeping with other people.

Do I have to give up my popular hottie?

Love,

Aspiring Compersionist

Dear Aspiring,

First, the bad news: jealousy isn’t just for casual cuties! It crops up in all relationships! Just like all the other emotions, we have to learn to welcome and listen to jealousy, because fighting it and trying to get rid of it will only make it stronger. I am so bad at this! Some of the relationship moments I’m most ashamed of have come from jealousy, but I think I’m getting better with time and practice—you can too!

Let’s open up The Artist’s Way and remind ourselves what Julia Cameron has to say:

 

I’ve carried the phrase “Jealousy is a map” with me for twenty years, but that last line is hitting home in a new way this morning! “When you learn to harness its fierce energy on your behalf, jealousy is part of the fuel toward a greener and more verdant future.”

I think that’s so true! Though I will forever relish being petty about Mrs. Shy One’s 475,000 year birthday week, I have to admit it inspired me to expand my own! For almost a month, I celebrated in new and old ways, making quality time with old friends, new friends, and one only-around-for-a-week-but-very-charming-and-beautiful-friend! Jealousy map for the win!

But come on, let’s be honest, jealousy fucking SUCKS! I don’t understand why it make me feel like I’m gonna DIE sometimes! It seems really maladaptive for jealousy to inspire such fight or flight when there’s no real danger!

But sometimes, too, when there is real danger! I can think of at least one time when jealous flight tried to save me from a WHOLE lot of horror. How can we even tell the difference!?

This is all complicated by the fact that, I think, the poly community has a tendency towards emotional perfectionism. I think we like to see ourselves as constantly benevolent, generous, and communal, somehow above the less-cute human relationship pitfalls. As much as we give lip-service to “processing” jealousy, I think it’s way easier sometimes to perform uncomplicated compersion, even to the point of self-erasure.

So here’s the frame I think would work best, Aspiring:

1.     Jealousy can help us articulate desires we may not have even known existed! Yay!

2.     Jealousy feels terrible. It feels bad to feel it! Yuck!

3.     Jealousy can sometimes guide us away from situations where a potential partner doesn’t have the time or bandwidth we need. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that! Take your time, follow your intuition, use your judgement.

4.     Find partners who are open to talking about jealousy! In fact, let’s all talk about it more! I would love to learn to view jealousy not as a failure or a taboo, but as a natural part of connection.

I hate to keep coming back to The Guest House, but make jealousy some tea and let it in. It’s exhausting to keep trying to hold the door closed.

Expansively,

Pretty Ribbons

From Good Second Date to Ghost, Part One

 

From Good Second Date to Ghost, Part One

Nearby Guy and I chatted for most of the summer, on Hinge and off. I originally asked him if we could be just friends because I was scared about poly stuff after that adorably mortifying late-afternoon with Poly Friends’ Partner. I fully owe PFP an apology for griping about his friends-ish winky-facery! When Nearby Guy and I finally met for a just-friends dinner a few weeks ago, I was a fountain of mixed signals, using the friends word a jillion times but at no point turning off the flirt.

Not JUST because his Hinge profile included “pretty good with knots” or because he’s wildly geographically desirable, but also because he seemed to be the perfect combination of hot and warm. I felt comfy with him. He’s just a little bit shorter than me and just a bit fatter, a dark-skinned black man with just the absolute sweetest smile. Plus big dommy hands I could not stop thinking about when I got home from that friendly dinner. Horniness and bravery overtook me and I asked by if we could retroactively upgrade our friend dinner to a date-date. He said he was down so yay!

So it was that I found Nearby Guy on my couch a few nights ago. We’d met up at a bar but it was too loud so he graciously agreed to come over even though I had nothing to offer but the supersweet pink Moscato I like to mix with Pasteque La Croix. (My official drink of lesson planning, and also of typing this.)

I swear to jeepers, it was a paradigmatically good second date. We chatted for hours, touched a little, then touched more and more. I had so much fun talking to him that I almost forgot to be distracted by the playlist. (It’s really time to make a new makeout playlist. The last one I made was for Mr. Sweetface in 2017 and it lives in what used to be iTunes—on the desktop! Why does that feel so old-fashioned? And why isn’t it in my Apple Music? Mystery!)

Oh my goodness he was so lovely to be next to, strong and soft and so warm. His smell, a dizzying/lush perfect musky man smell, reminded me of Pagan Boy so I felt right at home.

Once we finally kissed, I insisted that he high-five me, forgetting for a sec that he hadn’t been in the same drought as me, hadn’t just finished an epic trek through the touch-desert.

You know I love some hot hand-holding, and this was…oh boy. Our hands and forearms felt made for each other. I loved feeling his soft pulse under my gentle grip on his wrist. I loved that thing where we put our hands together to compare sizes. Oh, those fingers. So strong-but-yielding, so alive.

So of course when he asked if I wanted to go upstairs, (Inviting me to my own bed, but that’s fine!) I said yes. I changed out of my pretty date dress and into my pajamas.

Gilmore Guy Part Three: Please, Please, Please

Though Gilmore Guy lives on a busy block and it was Friday night, I did show up wearing pajamas. I wore my favorite old soft pair, the ones I usually wear after the beach when I want to feel femme-y and relaxed and posh—black with purple, line-drawn lilies, stretchy but with pretty, sheer trim. Underneath, I had on a regular good black bra and one of my few pairs of undies that doesn’t go all the way up. (Confession: Though it’s hard to imagine anybody reaching around inside them, I really like wearing briefs. I wish they weren’t so stigmatized! Darn you, Bridget Jones! Although come to think of it, they really didn’t hold Bridget back, did they?)

I didn’t know which bell to ring, so I texted and he came down. I’d broken a sandal-strap on the way from the car, so I had to awkward my way up the steps. His (their) apartment was impeccably clean, with a feeling of the midcentury about it, like Mrs. Maisel’s apartment but not so fancy. The walls were painted a warm, vivid orange, which should have been hideous but was not.

Though we’d talked all about sex already, including the awkward testing talk, there was a lovely tentativeness between us—it’s nice that no matter how worldly anyone gets, the time before a first kiss is so often fizz and jangle, innocent and silly and new. It’s a wonderful, excruciating feeling, and I wonder when it will happen again.

His alcohol selection rivals my pen collection (and my Instagram feed) in terms of pure (artistic, one hopes) obsession. I handed him the mint from my garden, which I had forgotten to wash. His mojito-ing process was LONG, and he got sidetracked a few times having me taste fancy things I hadn’t had before. I noticed the sprig of pink silk-flower butterflies in a vase on the table, the same dollar store ones I use in my street art. I took it as a good sign.

His living room was warm and full of pillows, festive with street noise from the bar downstairs. The room very clearly belonged to Gilmore Lady, but could have equally housed Max Medina. I scanned the bookshelves (mostly philosophy) wondering if their book collection was merged—I mean, of course it was, right? His DJ equipment was in there too, though he said he hadn’t used it in quite a while.

We watched the Demi September 21 videos (Seriously, google it, “electrolemon September”) and then settled in for the Gilmore Girls.

“Stars Hollow looks so different,” he said, and filled me in on facts I’d forgotten about how things changed after the pilot. I was soooo happy to be starting my yearly rewatch, next to this gorgeous man, with a bespoke mojito in my hand, proud of my mint and swoony with good luck.

            Unsurprisingly for two switches, it took a little effort to figure out who would put their arms around whom. I wanted to wrap him up, take him, cocoon him protectively, but he did that for me instead.

            Probably about ten minutes into the Stars-Hollow-is-so-different pilot, I looked up into his face and it was easy. It felt natural and right, as if we had been kissing for our entire lives. His mouth was soft, yielding but also insistent. Our faces, our mouths, we fit together and the night clicked into place. Our fate, at least for the next few hours, was sealed.

A Little Polyphobia, Two “I Love Yous” and a Blocked Number

            In the past, I’ve always found a way to diffuse my shame and sadness at the end of a love story by making the guy into a villain, which only one character in this blog every really was. The hurt is normal, the shame is my problem and my responsibility, and the rejection is not personal, so I want to treat the end of the Mr. Makeout Music story as kindly as possible.

I’m not sure what made me think I should be as out with him as I was. Maybe it was our mutual love of Steven Universe, the fact that he used to write erotica, or just the attraction making me all shiny and self-love-tastic. The librarians who supervise me at work range from queer-friendly-and-ready-to-learn to genderqueer and poly-leaning, so I don’t really feel the need to hide my queerness or poly tendencies. It’s not like I’ve talked directly to the kids about it, but I never worry about them overhearing. They all know by now that my ex-wife is my best friend, that I enjoy handsomeness, and that I’m active in LGBTQ and feminist causes.

There have been a couple of painful misunderstandings, but for the most part I feel safe to be myself—it’s part of why I love the job so much. Through honesty and careful conversations, I’ve helped make it a home that accepts me.

And before I tell this story I should say, it’s not like I haven’t acted polyphobic before. In my frustration and failure to fit and find love in the poly world, (Or, it sometimes seems, any world…) I’ve lashed out and been judgmental, impatient, and pushy in ways that I really regret. I’m grateful that my poly friends have been so generous and patient with me while I figure out what the heck my deal is.

Anyway, so Mr. Makeout Music. I REALLY missed him over Thanksgiving break. I wasn’t due back at the library until Tuesday, but I started wanting to sing out his name around Monday night. When I walked in and saw him at the front desk, everything seemed to go really well. He knocked me out telling me that he’d tried to watch some Gilmore Girls for me! We had a little awkward moment when I told him I didn’t like the book he’d leant me (Y: The Last Man, because apparently he thinks feminism means murdering all the men through childbirth…) but I felt like we were settling back into an easy flirty rapport and I was so delighted to see him.

He came to visit my department almost right away and we were talking about how awesome Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was. The conversation randomly wandered to my arbitrary dislike of Helena Bonham Carter (It’s probably because she killed Sirius Black!) This topic opened a surprising and irritating can of worms.

“I think she had some kind of love triangle thing a while back? Although, that doesn’t seem right. Why would I not like a love triangle, they’re kind of my thing.”

“Children’s department…” He said warningly, and I felt like I’d been slapped in the face.

“I’m not ashamed of being poly, and I don’t expect you to be, either.”

“I’m not ashamed, but they’re kids. There’s a time and a place.”

“You don’t need to protect the kids from me.”

“I need to protect them from everything.”

I was completely shocked by this exchange for several reasons, mostly because we had been talking about all the topics for months and months! Never anything it was inappropriate for the kids to hear, but definitely things more scandalous than a love triangle, which is the basis of like A THOUSAND Disney movies. I didn’t like his assumptions about what I was saying and the fact that flirting and being me was suddenly something he thought he had to control, something that was suddenly wrong. It was one of those loss-of-trust moments that’s hard, maybe impossible, to come back from.

When I got a crush on somebody at work, what happened next was what I was afraid of. I asked him to come into the meeting room and talk just a few minutes before the kids were due to come in and make paper snowflakes.

I told him what it’s like to have grown up queer, to have so often been perceived as a threat to children. The bad thanksgiving was weighing on me so much and I’m sure that made this more fraught than it otherwise might’ve been.

Though we’d spent months sneaking in flirting into a million different library conversations, he kept insisting that I’d been talking about sex in front of the kids this time. He kept repeating the “time and a place” thing. I think when I said “love triangle” he heard “threesome.”

It was Annoying Heteronormativity 101. I explained that some of the three-or-more relationships I know are families, that I was talking about love rather than sex. If he wouldn’t feel bad for talking about his family, I shouldn’t have to talk about (VERY VAGUELY ALLUDING TO,) other kinds of families. He was really mad and defensive, but he did try to listen.

From there I told him how hurt I was that he acted so afraid of me back when I took his hand, that he was sometimes treating me like a threat. Not as much the rejection part, but the fear. He insisted that he wasn’t afraid, but it did look like fear to me, then and now.

I started to sob and he said “Ms. ________, please don’t cry.” And came over and sat right up against my side, so sweet, so loving.

After some more back and forth about polyphobia/rejection/election, he said “Ms. _______, what do you really think of me?”

“I love you,” I sobbed, and cried the ugliest, snottiest tears you ever saw.

“I wasn’t expecting THAT answer! To tell you the truth, I really do love you too.”

So that happened. In the midst of all the mess and misunderstanding, we love each other, in whatever way. It counts for something, although right now I can’t imagine what.

I genuinely tried to keep being friends, but I was madder than I wanted to be about the threat-to-kids thing, and he must’ve been mad too, because the next time he came to visit, he was grumpy and he kind of glowered at the paper snowflake I’d made him. (Pink and blue for gender harmony. Maybe that was a stupid thing to say.)

After a few minutes of him grouchily making one sixth of a snowflake and me trying to be professional/lighthearted/friendly, he said he had to go to dinner and left the snowflake there. I felt disproportionally sad about that. We’d given each other so many pieces of art, from homework margin doodles to a leaf rubbing that he named “Ms. ________ in Autumn” because the colors reminded him of me, to watercolor galaxies to me singing out his name, to these paragraphs, and his forgetting the snowflake made me feel like I couldn’t give him one more unrequited thing.

It wasn’t about the snowflake, of course. I texted him about it after work and we got in a really dumb fight that ended with me telling him he was using the wrong “your.” He was mean and I was mean, and I blocked his number and deleted the thread.

I’m stupid right now because of unrequited love. He’s stupid from love, too, and whatever else is keeping the friendship from being what it was. Nobody’s the bad guy, nobody’s wrong, nobody’s the patriarchy (Well, he’s a little bit the patriarchy.) Just a thing that didn’t go where we wanted it to. I can’t try to be gracious and cute about it anymore right now. I can’t quite get to magnanimous and sparkly and generous about it. We can’t fix it right at the moment and I can’t wish myself fine about it.

If I’m going to trust my heart, I have to trust the heartbreak too, and give it time, and take myself gently and firmly forward. Onward, and, more than anything else, outward.

Love, A Bad Thanksgiving, and Whatever Comes Next

I’m on vacation this week from the library and it’s given me enough space from Mr. Makout Music to really think through what our flirtship means/meant. Of course, there’s the simplest meaning, that it was a sweet attraction that didn’t work out and is now awkwardly in the process of becoming whatever’s next. The meaning we share is straightforward, kind, and a little sad, but my own side of things feels more complicated.

It’s hard in times like this to not get annoyed at my heart, at my romantic imagination, even at the sex drive I worked so hard (and only somewhat successfully) to embrace. It’s hard not to feel like we lost parts of what was nice between us because I just had to try and make things progress, but maybe things just progressed on their own, the way things tend to do.

A few months ago when he first suggested a too-emo-for-the-library-playlist song, I really did try not to let the song’s feelings run away with me. When he suggested I look up The Internet while I was doing my data entry in the basement at work, I ended up so swoony/squishy that I could barely walk up the stairs to my department. I thought I should probably try to stem the tide of feelings sweeping in with the lyrics, and I did try not to think he was telling me something with the songs. I know what music does to me, how it accelerates the heart’s processes and wakes up not-wholly-earned devotion. But sometimes, I just have to let it.

He told me once that he likes romantic music because he has a hard time expressing his feelings, that songs help him do so. He looked in my eyes when he said it, and after that I let the music take me where it wanted me to go, where I wanted to go, where it turns out I’d really missed going.

Still, I tried to be so careful this time. I asked and re-asked what he meant by things. I asked for as much definition as I reasonably could. I asked if the attraction was mutual before we were ever alone together, and he said it was. I hope it really was, that he didn’t just say it to be kind or to please me. I’ve found the best way is to take him at face value, to just try and straightforwardly believe what he’s told me. It’s hard.

My peer counselor at the local LGBT center has urged me through all of this to focus on facts, to concentrate on What Is. By that measure, he’s showed me hours of care and affection, given me so much without expecting anything in return. I appreciate the vulnerability it might take for a shy guy to come find me almost every day, to share some of his deepest stuff at work, in front of the kids and everybody. He said to me once “I want to hear all of your stuff and I want to tell you all of mine.” What a sweet, open thing to say, and I so much hope it might be true again after the awkward simmers down.

Yet in spite of What Is, I struggle not to see myself as somehow coercive, as an ugly, fat someone who was romantically deluded to think that someone like him could be attracted to me. My mind is so ashamed of the Stupid Delusional Crush Girl story that I superimpose it over every situation, though there are of course different reasons behind every connection and not-connection.

If I hadn’t been fighting the story so hard, would I have been in such a hurry? Would I have given him more space to make the first move and therefore be more comfortable, less pressured, more free? Maybe, but the problem with that line of reasoning is that it’s always going to be sexist to feel bad about being too forward, not just sexist but also counterproductive and counter to the only person I can manage to be—my barreling-forward, enthusiastic, soaking-wet-underpants self.

I know that the man for me is probably bolder, more available, probably more experienced by a lot, but right now I don’t want some stranger. This is the begrudgingly-go-back-on-OK Cupid phase of getting over someone, resenting them all for not being him, even though I know the next guy will feel equally best and equally-only when I’m with him, just by the virtue and magic of attraction. I know that when the next ones come along, the tide will come in and things will shift into place just as easily and emphatically, because bodies and hearts know what they’re doing. They’ll take us where we need to go.

Like most of America, I had a very hard Thanksgiving. Things aren’t good between my mom and me, and I was unable to keep great gusts of election rage from screeching out as pie was being served. As I drove home in the middle of the night blasting Arcade Fire and Frank Ocean, I couldn’t wait to be back safely in my city, in my apartment. I’m thankful that I’m amazing at rage driving.

My life is entering a new phase now and it feels both lonely and spiderweb-strongly connected. Friday night phonebanks at the feminist bookstore three doors down, marches as often as I want to go, a community art show to make a sanctuary for anyone made afraid by the election results—these things are home, who I really am, and I want to leave my tragically Trumpified family members behind long enough to settle back into who I really am.

I know that I’ve partly been focused on Mr. Makeout Music because crush-sadness is easier to deal with than election sadness, but the best thing I can do for both sadnesses is to take care, to find a way to appreciate myself as I really am. In that self, there’s anger and loss and a divorce I haven’t yet managed to finish. There are unsettled hurts on both a national and a personal scale. There’s an ocean of rage and an ocean of joy.

            But there’s also this simple and sheepish-making fact. I love Mr. Makeout Music. And I also love his “no.” I want to be as close to him as I can but also respect What Is, his real life and my own. I want to step back and let him be where he is, respect and support his goals, be someone accepting and unconditional. I want to let myself move on and find the enthusiastic, mutual, available love that I really do know I deserve, but I haven’t yet let go of the thread between us, of those suddenly-deep conversations, of the safe space his presence made for me right here in the middle of pussy-grabbing America.

            It is a hard time to be (STILL) trying to learn to connect with men. Part of the reason that I get so attached is that deep down I really, REALLY miss them. As independent and strong and spinsteriffic as I am/want to be, it feels like part of me is missing. I am happier with a man to love, and I really hope I get to feel what it’s like for a man to love me back someday. The joy I felt when he and I were so near to being a thing, it was beautiful, a breeze of relief in my heart, that magical unlatching that happens sometimes, that seduces me so. It was wholeness, it was being myself. Even as I try my best to let him go, I want to believe in that joy, to feel like I deserve it, to take the light with me even as I walk away. It might take more bravery than I have, but I’ll try it.

Supersweet Election Love Story: Part Five

After Mr. Makeout Music realized he was unavailable, I told him a little bit about my poly background, about why it hadn’t felt weird to have to schedule time or to have another woman in the picture. I wasn’t telling him this as a way to argue his decision but just to share my perspective and think aloud about where the heck I am in relation to poly, anyway.

            “If it were just you and me, it might be different, but I get really jealous…” Etc, the standard straight monogamous guy speech, I know it well and respect it, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him it’ll never be just him and somebody, it so very rarely is.

And I’ll pause here to realize that whether it’s a poly situation or just a family already in progress, “just you and me” is not what I want. Good to acknowledge.

We sat on stone steps on a secluded corner of campus, talking through a brisk and bright afternoon. I had to interrupt the very important conversation to Instagram a tree with sunshine lighting up every leaf.

We sat there for three hours, getting progressively more chilly and talking about all the things you can’t really get into at work—our families, his military history, my teacher/divorce meltdown, our imperfect and sometimes-intersecting paths to relative social awakeness.

But the topic that made him lose almost all of his nervous and relax into a curious smile, was confessing to him my various forms of sluttiness. His eyes lit up in a decidedly not-vanilla way as he asked me about Nude Years Eve and what BDSM relationships are like. I got his porn search terms out of him and told him my own. (Still lots-of-guys-one-girl; my time on lesbian island still hangs heavy.) He really wants to read my book, and he’s really not going to until we work in separate places. (It should come as no surprise to longtime readers that he’s got his firefighter’s exam coming up this weekend. Then he’ll know how to restrain AND carry people.)

There’s something about him that makes me lose all my filters (he has suggested that it’s my open heart) so I even told him that I’d had fantasies of dominating him that I’d already been sort of dominating him without meaning to. He said “I guess I’m so good at following directions that I didn’t notice.”

“Yes. You. Are.” I said in my best bossy/slutty voice.

Though he was still very clear about not being ready for things, he was sweetly curious and didn’t seem at all horrified. When I told him that the man for me would have to learn all his knots, he said “Oh, so it’s like scouts?” and I giggled for a long silly time.

Friends, it WAS chilly. After a little while of freezing and wishing I had socks on, I asked if I could sit closer just for warmth, and he said “I know what you really want.” And pulled my into one of my top ten favorite snuggles of all time. He put his arms around me and I lay my head on his knee.

“What are we going to do to make the world better, Ms. _________?”

I sighed a deep dreamy sigh and said “This is a good start.”

I felt as sunny and golden as the pretty fall trees. The horror and fraughtness and drama of the election fell away and I felt as warm and cared for as I ever have by a man.

            I asked where his nervousness was on a scale of one to ten (I was at zero.) He said he was at a four, but that was the world, not me. Then I confessed something I’d been thinking about hard for weeks, especially as I’d fretted about voter suppression dangers on Election Day:

“You know you have a permanent human shield now, right?”

“Thanks,” he said, and I know it was a weird and maybe wrong thing to say, but I’m glad I told him. The world had just gotten so much scarier for both of us and I wanted to fight and scrape and elbow to keep him safe. I wanted to give him my whole body, my life. I wanted to be the sacrifice, to bleed in the dirt in hopes that things might be healed so that he and his family could walk around safe.

That’s love, I guess, and hopefully it isn’t too colonizing, but whatever it was it was way too much to be thinking about a thing that wasn’t even going to be a thing. Our not-date was almost over, the glow was about to leave us, and I never wanted to move from that spot. He traced his fingers over my shoulder, I felt his beard graze my hair, and I felt at once strong and all the way broken open.

“I’m just gonna be near you as much as I can.” I said, and I think maybe that’s what broke the spell.

Supersweet Election Love Story: Part Two

I spent a lot of time angsting about whether Mr. Makeout Music was really available or not. I knew he lived with the mother of his four-year-old son, but he referred to her as his “son’s mom” and not his girlfriend. I have a pretty good instinct for signals, though, because when, after a not-insignificant amount of fretting and some crying about whether he was taken or not, I finally found out through good old fashioned facebook that he was, officially at least, single. I was optimistic in believing that his son’s mom might be a complication, but that with my poly skills I could treat her kindly and handle it.

Besides, he was just ALWAYS there. As the flirting between us seemed to ramp up and I started to let my heart open, I knew I wanted to try with him. After a Saturday where he spent an hour in my library office talking about all of the Deep Topics and distracting me from my data entry, I knew I wanted to get to know him outside of work. On the way out of work that day, I told him to check his facebook and answer honestly, and I asked him if he’d like to hang out outside work sometime, but that if he preferred just to be work pals, that would be okay too. (Lying.) He wrote back that he would really like to hang out, but when I asked about when, he said he didn’t have a lot of free time so he would have to let me know. I guess maybe I should have left it at that, but he was seriously ALWAYS THERE.

I stopped feeling self-contained and happily spinstery and started to get lonely for him when he wasn’t in the children’s department. I felt restless. I still happily went about my work days, but when I he wasn’t with me, I was looking for him. There were days when I felt almost paralyzingly self-conscious trying to look right if he should walk by. It was alternately exhausting and exhilarating.  I was either completely bereft of swagger or it increased tenfold, depending on the day.

The Sunday before last, we were supposed to have our first time hanging out alone. It was my idea for us to go to the record store and then on a Pokemén walk, and I was so excited, but he had to cancel, I assumed for kid reasons. I didn’t want to wait another week to get clear on his intentions, so I texted to ask if we were attracted to each other or if we were just flirty friends. He wrote back that he was attracted to me, that he’d never met anyone like me. He said I gave him the feels. We made plans for makeout music the following weekend. I must have read through those texts twenty times—we really liked each other! It really might happen!

Sigh. I’m so glad I got to feel that hope, that it’s still in me, but I’m achey thinking of how it really went so I’ll stop here for now.

Worthiness and Whether I'm Not _______ Enough

Just would like to refer back to this the next time I'm tempted to ignore a genuine concern because it might not seem poly enough or anything else enough:

"When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible. Keep worthiness off the table. Your raise can be on the table, your promotion can be on the table, your title can be on the table, your grades can be on the table. But keep your worthiness for love and belonging off the table. And then ironically everything else just takes care of itself."--Brene Brown

Big Therapy Project, Week Two: Ache and Gentle Progress

Heartwise, I’m still missing the Mysteries very much, and I probably will for a long time. I hope to never mix star-crossed love with internet-addiction again—I keep wanting to hurl my now-retweet-notification-less phone out the window for making me so lonesome for them. But I’m starting to forgive myself for taking comfort in a thing that didn’t make sense, because it also DID make sense. I wish I were still writing and receiving those “I love yous,” and now, in calm and quiet heartache, I still know I really meant them, so maybe somehow they did too.

I’m not really sure if I can go on identifying as poly, not because I don’t love a whole bunch of people at once but because I keep not asserting my real needs because I end up feeling guilty and ashamed of emotions and reactions that don’t seem poly enough. I keep pushing myself to accept more metamours than I can manage because not to do so doesn’t seem compersiony enough or something, and I try to power through and understand jealousy instead of recognizing it as the warning sign that it is for me. I should be able to identify and avoid things that don’t make me feel safe or cared for, but instead I try to process, change, and adapt to them lest I should not seem loving or understanding enough. When I type it out, those seem more like problems with my own boundary drawing than with poly, but I still don’t ever want to feel that nothing-feeling that I felt last Thursday night again, and I don’t know if there’s a way to avoid it in the poly world as I keep finding it. Relationships are a ways off for me anyway, so we’ll see.

Anyway, mental health: After last Thursday’s panic attack at school, my therapist made an extra house call Friday evening. By the time she got there I was in a pretty giddy state from being back in real life, but I had really worried myself the day before, so for the first time in my entire life, I broached the topic of being medicated. I wondered aloud if I should have an as-needed prescription for panicky times, but knowing how important it’s always been to me to not be medicated, she said it’s not necessary, that things aren’t serious enough to start messing around with my brain chemistry. I felt very validated, relieved and proud about that. (However, I threw a bottle of Tylenol in my work pocketbook—it’s been proven to ease existential despair, so maybe it works for temporary soul death too.)

Yesterday at work, another momentous mind-thing happened. I happened to witness something particularly ugly and triggering (in an inner-city school, this is a semi-weekly reality) and I didn’t scream or cry and my soul didn’t flee. I notified the proper people and teams and stopped downstairs after school to talk to my mentor about it. As we talked, I felt the experience physically leave my brain, like a little pain-butterfly. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an important or upsetting event, but if I could not carry around every scary thing that happens in my body, that would be a very good thing.

The Big Therapy Project is to start a dialogue with my 16-year-old self, and I wasn’t sure if she’d talk to me. Last week, she showed up in a dream, surly and sniping, in the guise of an old not-quite-metamour. She said I’d never given her any reason to trust me and then completely shut me out, so I’ve been asking her all week what I could do to help her feel safer. Somewhat unsurprisingly, she asked for privacy. She liked what The Puncher’s Girl said to me the last time I was at the Regular Dungeon: “Let me get your clothes, you don’t need to be any more vulnerable.”

And since I’m finally making her a priority, keeping her from slipping through the cracks, no longer putting her at the bottom of the pile, now that she is my highest and deepest priority, I have to take care of her and do what she asked for. This is a pants-on operation for a while (except Mr. Sweetface, whom she likes) until she feels safe again. I un-RSVPed from some nakedy things as an act of love for her. I don’t know how long it will be, but I do know that it will be worth it.

16-year-old me is deeper and wiser than adult me in some ways, she’s even optimistic. As awesome as she was at the art of the zipless fuck, she’s the one who believes in sex for love and she would really like me to keep trying for it. Maybe it was that summer writing letters to that nice Catholic boy, or maybe she’s just where the heart part of me lives. After I spent about 45 minutes writing a conversation with her, I felt spent and warm, the way I did that weekend at the Big Poly Conference. I slept better than I had in a long time. If I can keep turning my attention to my own heart until it’s healed, I believe I can get better and be closer to the loving person I really want to be.

The Most Nothing I’ve Ever Been: The Last, Uh, Conversation? With the Mystery Family

On Thursday I woke up missing the Mystery Man a lot and feeling really sad about the choices I’d made with the Mystery Family, about having done the same self-erasing thing I’ve done so many times before. I felt like all of my efforts to take myself forward must be false if I keep doing this and maybe I would never be capable of loving people who actually want me. Though my Twitter account didn’t really feel like mine anymore, just a way to keep futile-ly reaching out to those unreachables, I wrote some sad Tweets before I went to work and I admit to hoping they’d get their attention.

It was a hard hard day at work. The kids were winter-frustrated and fighty and it was the second time I’ve felt so panicked there that it felt like my soul had actually left. A day in a classroom with 23 riled-up children when I’m feeling like I’m not really there was a very hard thing to get through. Credit our Gangnam Style Emergency Dance Party with the fact that we were able to (mostly) retain our sanity and make it to 3:09.

I know the panic was mostly an after-effect of processing the assault stuff and the Twitter-claustrophobia—I wouldn’t have made it a day in my job if riled-up kids were that upsetting. My therapist had warned me that there might be a delayed reaction to Sunday’s appointment, and I wasn’t giving myself the space to be kind to myself about it.

When I got home, the Mystery Lady I felt closest to (and the one who instigated my “relationship” with the Mystery Man) had said a bunch of nice things in response to my sadness, but she also said this:

“You’ve got a lot of people pulling for you, both here and IRL.”

She was still claiming to love me, and yet she was reiterating that we aren’t in the same life. They were real life loves to me and nothing I could do or say could convince them that we all live in the same world. She also told me to stop feeling sorry for myself, which is a bonkers thing to say to somebody whose heart you just broke over the weekend. Seriously, Lady, (I did not say) YOU get rejected by eight to twelve people at once and see how it feels! (Not that I would wish that on her or anybody. I wouldn’t.)

I very much wanted to go back to being friends, to them being comforting confidantes, people whose messages always propped me up during hard times, but I didn’t know how to do that since they were part of the Bad Thing now. I told them I missed them (the last message I got from the Mystery Man was an “I miss you too” tweet, which would prove by the end of the night to have been the worst, creepiest, most vile lie.) and then told her how I didn’t understand loving somebody she wouldn’t have over. I told her I felt betrayed because after all the paragraphs she’d read about my struggle with personhood, in the end she’d asked me to be a fragment of a person. (Less than a fragment, you’ll see at the end of the story.)

After I tweeted her all the things (Jesus, may I never use the verb “tweet” again after this.) Gold Star Winggirl picked me up to go over to her house for a beer and then to the neighborhood music night hosted by the Cute Church Couple. (By now they’re much more friends than crush.)

GSW was the perfect antidote to the online mess: “Oh, you dyed your hair,” she said, “Because you’re real!” When I told her she seemed to be really stocked up on soap, she said “See, these are the things we’re supposed to be able to learn about each other. This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

My soul was still hiding, though, so I couldn’t quite connect with the nice music night, but it was the best possible place to be. All of the songs seemed to be about real, in person love, starting with my good old talismans, The Beatles.

When I got home, the Mystery Lady had said more things, mostly making me feel like she heard and understood me, so although my still-panicking guts were telling me to flee, I started to write back. While I was doing that, though, she wrote a post thanking another girl for playing online with him “just when he needed it most. #Compersion #Poly”

#Gross.

It was the most nothing I’ve ever been. While I’d been missing him and longing for all of them and feeling guilty for wrecking the friendships, he’d moved right on ahead to the next thing and replaced me. That was truly one of the most humiliating moments in all of my adventures, maybe THE most because of its non-corporeal quality. I blocked them all, but that wasn’t safe enough. I deleted the entire account. I took comfort in the idea of all of my messages disappearing from their Interactions, all at once. It was the only way I could take back some of what I’d so foolishly given.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what prompted them to reach out to me, what I could possibly have ever been to them, what need I could have possibly served. Maybe it’s just pure addictive behavior on all of our parts. Since I was the third time something like this had happened, GSW suggested that they need to “love” and then other other people, break hearts and get sad and band together over and over so that they can draw together against the outsider and keep telling themselves this story about getting stronger when they really are a house of cards. I used to do this to try and be close to Sweetie, choosing guys who would break me partly so she and I could bond against a common enemy. Whatever the Mystery Family’s motive was, I’m so ashamed that I got sucked into whatever ugly drama they needed to have, that I let myself get (even momentarily) flattened by it.

But the real ugly drama here is my own. In the interest of learning how to stop being one crazy story after another, I need to understand what draws me to situations that make me into nothing. Clearly, there is part of me that wants to keep experiencing that. It feels so good when I am not nothing again, when my feet are solidly under me and I can hear the birds singing and be all the way in the room with the crazy students I love so much. Maybe erasing and unerasing is a way to prove to myself that I’m still alive, but really, by now, that should be assumed.

As much as I’m grateful to be polyamorous, the way some people practice it makes me feel unethical for being part of it. Polyamory is toxic when it’s used as a way to avoid actual intimacy. When it’s used as a way to treat people as if they’re interchangeable, it takes away their agency and sexualizes them. And of course I continue to be disgusted and dismayed at the way that outside partners are routinely treated with casual cruelty and neglect.

Since I can’t and don’t want to un-poly myself, the best I can do is be mindful of those possibilities and be more careful about choosing partners who fit my standards of egalitarianism, openheartedness, and genuine face-to-face communication. Those who remain on my dance card do, so I’m off to a good start.

Once I deactivated my Twitter account, I felt back on track. The next steps are to refocus on self-love and the Big Therapy Project, keep treating myself kindly about the griefs, and keep in mind the year’s goal of close-to-home connections. I wish the Mystery Family have come along with me, but in the end it’s a blessing to let go of any love that isn’t real.

Songs of the Week for Heartache

I still can't believe how much I can miss people I never met, so here are two pretty long-distance/breakup songs. I know we'll be fine, but jeez, I miss him.

Postscript to the Mystery Family, A Love Letter

In the end, I finally got to hear his voice, to tell him how much I love them all, how much I wish I could be with them. It didn’t make it any easier to break up, but it did take away the feelings of bitterness and helplessness that came from being confined to the internet. It did my heart and soul good to cry real tears to him, to tell his ears all the things I’d typed but never got to say.

As much as online relationships are still a mystery to me (The combination of seeing the movie Her, reading The Circle by Dave Eggers, and trying online love has convinced me that modern times are completely unfathomable.) I don’t know how I would have made it through these winter months without him, without the daily images of their gorgeous and complicated life, without his affection—it was all completely irresistible. But at the same time, it’s a relief to let go of my fantasy of them and accept what’s real—they don’t have room in their lives for everything I have to offer, they aren’t able to give me what I really need. It’s a relief to love them for what they are rather than try to wait or fight for things to change, to accept them and try to let the crush part go.

Dear Mystery Man,

The fact that I can even write you a love letter means you’ve taken me a long way forward. Thank you for keeping me company in such hard, cold months. Thank you for loving me in the ways that you could and for letting me love you too. Thank you for giving me a clearer picture of what I want someday, of why I have to pull my attentions close to home and be present here with my whole heart. I don’t know how to stop longing for you and the Ladies, I probably won’t. I hate that circumstances keep us apart and I will miss you very badly.

Until you, I hadn’t told a man I loved him in a romantic way and had it returned since 1995. I’ve always fought a very deep belief that it couldn’t happen, and now it has. Thank you for letting me say it, and hear it, and practice it, so that when the heartbreak heals I’ll believe a little more that being loved by a man is something I deserve. It’s such a blessing to meet someone whose heart is as eager and voracious and fragile as mine, to believe that such a thing is possible. I’ll look for it in future loves, and think of you.

I still wish I could give myself to you and the Ladies, every single part of me. I don’t really know how to let you go, so I’ll carry you around in my heart forever like all the other characters. I wish there were anything I could write that’s as beautiful as the sound of your voice.

My heart is broken but much better for having let myself love you. Thank you all the way to the stars.

Love,

Kitten

Poly Conference as Benchmark: Very Good Progress

When I first attended the Big Poly Conference the year before last, it was almost like research as an outsider. I found many different kinds of comfort and acceptance (especially in my first nudist experience) but by the end of the day I was hurting and crying in the cuddle party, being comforted by the facilitator (who is, incidentally, now Showtime famous) and feeling like I should never be near such nice people, like I was just to rotten inside for all this togetherness. I cried my heart out all the way home that night, consoled by Sweetie in that toxic way we had, half-knowing that my relationship was part of where the rottenness was coming from.

Then last year I attended with much more experience and a few more good connections, spent the day mostly catching up with friends and being proud to find out where the big party was being held. That was the night I first really connected with the Sweethearts, Mr. Shiny Eyes, and the Recurring Character. Because Sweetie was staying in the hotel with me (though not attending the conference) I still felt separate from the poly folks and strangely protective of her, like I couldn’t give all the way in to everything that was going on around me.

This year, I shared a room with my favorite snuggle-couple, the Sweethearts, whom I’m still learning, of course, but thoroughly and emphatically enjoyed in both pants-off and pants-on ways. They feel like home to me, a physical and spiritual comfort to be near whether we were mid-scene or not.

As with last year, I spent a good amount of time catching up with the Lady of the House, who decided that wherever we are together talking is actually the nude beach--it’s exactly that sunny, embracing, and free.

I got to devour Mr. Shiny Eyes for lunch and have some emotional breakthroughs with him during postsex cuddles. (I’ll elaborate on all this as the week goes on…)

And yes, I did know where the party was, but I chose instead to curl up in a comforter and enjoy the warmth of my own company.

For all of the happiness, there was grief, too. I miss having someone to whom I could confess everything and be (until the next condemning fight, at least) absolved. And since last year’s party was all about Sweetie’s ropes, I missed the heck out of those too: I love that we were able to create such beautiful rope-magic even as we were falling apart. I miss the home of her even as I rejoice in finding and founding new person-homes.

This was also the weekend in which I finally admitted to myself that I believe in Tantric energy—I’ve experienced it enough times, I might as well. The first time I tried Tantric breath (at that same sobby conference cuddle party) I experienced it as stabby, almost debilitating pain, a grief-cramp that didn’t go away until I cried it out. This time, just after I left the Sacred Sex Puja, I felt such a warm, sunshiny glow move through me, and keep moving. Though I’m still facing some roadblocks and daunting obstacles, on some fundamental level I’ve come unstuck. There’s so much more work to be done, but sometimes I feel my body, mind, and heart giving me time and space to relax into the flow of whatever comes next.

One Resolution: Give Each Adventure Time to Be Special

Yesterday, I was settling in to make gingerbread cookies and I realized that Sweetie had taken the rolling pin. This was one of those unpredictable divorce-grief floodgates, and suddenly I was a mess. Yes, I could get my own rolling pin, but I didn’t want to have a separate rolling pin from her. Etc.

That grief widened out into tears for everything that’s gone past this year, and it got overwhelming. I realized that I never took quite enough time to soak up the emotions of each thing. I often (sometimes literally!) ran from one person to the next in order to minimize feelings about them—negative or positive! Maybe especially positive. There was no need to come to terms with the depth and nuance of one relationship when I was spanking and sparkling onto the next! It sure was fun but it repressed some of the experiences and turned others into neuroses.

So yesterday I got stuck and sad about all of the things that happened, all of the adventures that went by so quick. The way that one love/hurt/infatuation/grief bled into the next and everything got all tangled up. It was a beautiful mess, but I’m not sure that I honored each experience enough.

I am going to stop pretending that everything doesn’t mean everything to me. In the coming year, I will stop and let myself feel every emotion that comes with every adventure. I’ll share those feelings when I can and whether they are returned or not, I’ll coddle them, love them, kiss them and put them to bed, or let them go. I will not spend any more time trying to pretend things are not a big deal to me. Things are a big deal to me, and it’s time to let that be who I am.

A Little Metablogging: Toward More Private Play

I felt the same way last year around this time, maybe it’s a hibernation thing: the urge to experience my adventures without blogging all of the details right away. I’m going to keep posting and writing, but I think I’d like to keep some things to myself for a while. Processing all of the emotions and details of scenes with you has been productive and fun, but at the moment I feel protective of my experiences, like I need a little more time and space to take them in. Transparency is a wonderful thing, but one-sided super-transparency is quite a leap and a little too vulnerable for where I am at the moment.

I feel so deeply grateful to those who have opened themselves up to being written about. It’s been so generous and trusting, and I’m sure I’ll ask it of them (and of myself) again in the future.

I’m curious to see what will happen if I let my feelings develop without giving everyone involved access to them, if I let my mistakes go undocumented for a while.

Maybe it’s the new bed or the excellence of my time with Mr. Sweetface last weekend, but I’m having a taste for private play as well. This is not to say I won’t play publicly a million more times or on New Year’s Eve, but there’s something about the safety and comfort of home, of bed. I want to explore that for a while and see where it goes. Playing privately seems like a nice way to let in some more (or just a different kind of) intimacy and affection, to make room for more expression and trust. Just another way to practice, to get my feet under me for whatever adventures come next.

Single Life, Week Two: Welcome to District 14

“There is no District 12.”

I am certainly no Mockingjay, and my cute, overheated, modestly Christmas-decorated apartment and tough-but-fulfilling job are not quite a bombed out dystopian village, but I related to Katniss at the end of Catching Fire. She’d done what she had to do, she’d been brave and good, but the woods that gave her comfort were gone and she was headed someplace she’d previously thought was a myth.

I only had to save myself, and there’s a lot left that gives me comfort, but my marriage is behind me, my family feels like a death-trap thanks to the looming presence of my creepy mother, and the social cushion I tried to create within the poly and kink community isn’t really making sense.

It may be heartbreak making the Regular Dungeon feel like the Scary Party, but I suspect it might be something else. I fit within the ideals of poly and kink, wherein it’s supposed to be about expression, honesty, and communication, but the way I’m finding it actually practiced doesn’t exhibit those ideals at all. Thought many of my experiences this year have been life-affirming and good, I’ve seen so much (unintentional, I think) cruelty, judgment, carelessness, and emotional perfectionism that I don’t quite see where I can fit.

After that conversation with my mom where she berated me for not “behaving correctly” by having emotions she didn’t approve of, I realized that that’s what a lot of my relationship experiences have been about—trying to correct my feelings so that people would think I was nice enough, detached enough, openminded enough, that I wasn’t a threat to people’s narrow expectations or (apparently fragile!) relationships. I had to ask one lady to stop reading me because she just couldn’t stand the moments of frustration and would send me paragraphs of emotional correction until I felt like I might lose my civility. The worst mistakes of the year were made when I tried to tamp down my emotions but they just kept pushing to the surface like demanding sidewalk dandelions.

It’s not just the negative or “needy” emotions that have been met with fear, it’s positive, playful emotions too. Look at the way Fireguy scrambled to control my writing about an amazing, life-changing scene because he was petrified of his submissive’s jealousy, at The Man deciding I was a Glenn-Close-grade-stalker because I was nervous about meeting his wife, at the Steampunks making being excited for a playdate into something shameful and threatening.

Even the functional playpal situations only work as long as I don’t write too rhapsodically about people. Being able to keep people in perspective is a wonderful skill that I may never master and that I’m very grateful to have practiced this year, but it’s kind of sad knowing that playing with Old-Timey Guy has only worked for all this time because I’ve never gotten excited enough about him to get Punk Rock Girl’s hackles up. Pretty Slave and Cute Master, wonderful as they are, would ditch me the second I fell for one of them. Which would make sense, actually, in the monogamous world, but feels hurty in one where I still sometimes kiss them. I do know it’s a real friendship, but one that comes with its own guillotine.

As the judgy voices of blog-reading not-quite-metamours simmer down, I think that openheartedness and enthusiasm are two of my best qualities. It’s just that I keep putting/finding myself in scenarios where they’re not matched or welcomed, and that’s when they start to feel like crazy. According to one of the many, MANY How I Met Your Mother episodes over the weekend, the “Dahmer/Dobbler divide” hinges only on whether the feeling is mutual—what looks romantic in requited attraction can certainly start to look creepy when the feeling isn’t returned. So I guess if I want to value my romantic side and not keep feeling grossed out by it, I need to get rid of unrequiteds before they become a thing—like, three texts in if possible. It’ll be hard but probably worth it.

So I’m not sure where it’ll leave me, but I want to stay out of situations that call for the artificial tamping-down of emotions. There’s enough of that in daily life, why opt for it in relationships? More than anything, I want to find myself in situations where openheartedness isn’t met with fear and distrust.

Anyway, so my therapist, who maybe doesn’t have time for dystopian young adult novels, suggested that we make a plan to get me to District 13, but I explained that the residents there are very guarded and conservative from their years of subsisting underground.

So here I am in District 14. So far its accomplishments are modest: A small but very sincere Christmas tree, getting the bills sent on paper because I like paying them with stamps and envelopes, trying to figure out a holiday that won’t be too much pain to take. It will take a long time to build something stable, authentic, and unoppressive, but this is a start.

In the meantime, two gold stars:

1. That night the dungeon didn’t work, I left. I didn’t force myself to stay and keep being a sparrow bashing into the plate glass window of them. I had a bad feeling and (with the help of my super adorable friend) got the heck out of there. That is always to be rewarded.

2. Saturday I got asked out (actually, asked in) by a tall, beardy Beatles fan (“I spend my time thinking about…What I would say to Paul McCartney if I met him.”) and I asked him if it could wait until after the holidays because I’m having a spate of introspection. He said sure and I was so, so proud of myself for slowing down and taking the time I need. I did have all of those very urgent sitcoms to watch!

There’s still the matter of what to do about Christmas. I don’t want to make the 5 ½ hour drive to my sister’s, but I’m worried I’ll miss my niece and nephews too much if I don’t.

Yesterday Sweetie and I were in the Target picking up nonperishables for the food drive at work and we strolled through the Christmas section. I got the most AWFUL feeling in my gut and lower back until we walked out of that section. Day to day, I have a fair amount of Christmas spirit going, but something about the day itself is making me sick and afraid.