Archive for Relationships
Imitating life and art.
So around the time I was asked the question below, I was (briefly) living it. A very desirable and pleasingly feasible third party rocked up and stuck around for five days, half of which while the Boy was out of town, the rest after the Boy returned.
(Perhaps I should come up with some fun but non-identifying handles for people, but the reason J and I used our own names at swingers parties wasn’t to make a bold lifestyle statement, it was just paucity of imagination. So Boy = J, other boy = old friend.)
Have fun kids, and stay safe!
I mention my open lifestyle here a fair amount, and hint at the actualities (last weekend: Bangkok, five star hotel, five naked people, far too much fun) but I’m not sure how much of it is, well, useful.
Yet I find myself answering questions and giving advice (as best I can) quite frequently in real life. So, at risk of sounding self-important, I’m gonna try and translate some of that to these hallowed pages, starting with three specific questions from a friend.
Warning: this is only the answer to question one, and it’s l-o-n-g! Perhaps it’s time to make the columns wider.
How do you and J avoid hurting each other?
Paying for sex
A guy I met on Saturday was in the middle of bust-up with his girlfriend because he’d been sleeping with prostitutes.
There are lots of reasons why this could end a relationship – deceit, taking risks with sexual health, psych issues – but once, a million years ago, I was the maligned girlfriend and my problem was that the guy was able to compare me directly with someone likely to be much better at sex.
This tells you a lot about my self-confidence at the time, and my destructive habit of measuring my worth in units of sexual prowess.
But talking about it this weekend, I realised my approach now to competing with prostitutes would be different. Sure, they are gonna be good at sex (I should damned well hope so if they’re doing it for a living!) but would it be the end of the world if they were better than me?
I still credit sex with more mystical influence than it probably has, but the idea of not being the best shag someone has ever had sits ok with me now. Plus sex is more than the sum of its parts, and I have things other than expertise to throw into the mix.
(I am often down on myself for acting in ways that don’t confirm the person I’d like to think I am. Quite a few times lately I have caught myself doing the opposite, being surprised when I realise I have become more rational and level-headed about things that used to upset me.)
Labels
Towards the end of last year I noticed something odd about how people relate to labels, but forgot about it until writing the previous post.
I refer to myself as bisexual. It doesn’t describe the nuances of my relationship, but it does a good job of conveying ‘attracted to boys and girls’. During two different conversations (both with UK public school boys) I made reference to this and both guys responded by asking ‘How can you be, you’re married?”
The implication being that the way we define ourselves is determined solely by our actions. I hadn’t got onto the non-monogamy label, so they saw a basic relationship between ‘sleeps with boy’ and ‘straight’.
This seems so nonsensical that I’d never considered anyone would think that way, but these examples proved me wrong. I asked the second guy if he considered everyone asexual until they’d lost their virginity, but that seemed to confuse him.
Whether we see labels as naming something innate or something we choose to be – surely they contribute to an overarching understanding of ourselves?
Pondering this got me thinking about my kinky life in Singapore (or lack of). I still describe my relationship as non-monogamous, despite six months of apple pie, mom & pops monogamy.
I am not using the term to describe my actions, rather my potential for action – which I guess is what labels come down to for me. The horny teenaged virgin knows exactly who they want to shag when the moment arises.
Remember when I was moving to S’pore, I said something like ‘If there are any perverts here J and I will find them’? Well there are, and in-between writing and posting this, we did.
Needless to say, I had a big smile on my face this weekend. I fear that saying more would be indiscrete 
A lot of love to give
Newsweek article on polyamory:
Only you. And you. And you.
It is impossible for me to read that header without hearing the Jim’ll Fix It theme. I guess that isn’t a problem in the US.
Anyway, long article on polyamory, interesting for its voyeuristic peek into the lives and sleeping arrangements of the group in question (p 3). The video package is cute as well.
It seems like the interviewees’ motivation is to raise awareness about a lifestyle that isn’t discussed much. There might be a bit of grandstanding beneath this but they are clearly proud of their relationship, as they ought to be. Ten years in a triad (or any relationship!) is a great achievement.
My favourite quote is this concluding remark from one of the guys interviewed:
“To look at an option like polyamory and say ‘That’s not for me’ is fine. To look at it and not realize you can choose it is just sad.”
And because I enjoy them (although be warned, J won’t watch ‘em cos he says the acting is too bad), here’s interviewee Terisa Greenan’s polyamory web series Family.
Safe, sane and consensual
Cos nothing completes a complicated working week like a spot of non-consensual sex.
Be the change… yada, yada… Ghandi… yawn
Life has been disrupted by work training and pitches recently, adding to the displaced feeling.
Yesterday, besides getting some thoughts on paper, for the first time in three weeks I was able to:
• Get up and do weights
• Have porridge instead of hot dogs for breakfast! (At least the training included food)
• Go out and get fresh fruit and salad for lunch
• Leave work by 7pm
• Catch up on emails
• Have a healthy dinner
I also drank more than half a bottle of wine, which usually guarantees I’ll feel depressed the next morning. Yet today I woke up without the dread, fretfulness or sinking feeling that have grown to herald in each new day.
Positive mental attitude, self-fulfilling prophesy, extra vitamins? I don’t know, but it feels good.
Displaced
I’m having trouble wrapping words around my thoughts, which means I’m not sure I understand what I feel.
In simple terms, it’s half homesickness, half performance anxiety. The more I pull at those ideas though, the more they unravel.
Every expatriate I know says that months three to six are pretty hard. Quite a few of them talked about randomly bursting into tears. I haven’t been doing that, but I did sob all the way through The Book Thief, which is perhaps equivalent.
I haven’t been feeling depressed or manic, or any of the things I know how to identify. Just bemused resignation. “This is my life now.”
I am beset by overly romantic memories of London and the occasional, “Why would I give that up?” but I still want to know the world, even if doing so takes me away from people and places I love.
So, pretty confused on that front.
But come what may, we’re here until March. And fuck knows what the next 10 months will bring. When I think of my first six months out of uni, or the first six months in my last job, it’s hard to believe those times segued into the ones that followed, so different were they.
I am impatient though, even if I am better equipped to deal with change (or waiting for change) than I have been before.
Work has been a strange merry-go-round these past months. In brief, got job, hated job, temporarily lost mind, got new job, got counter-offer from old job, moved from Health to Creative.
This is perfect because it’s a great agency and ‘proper’ creative is what I really, really want to be doing.
But it is terrifying because it’s a great agency and ‘proper’ creative is what I really, really want to be doing.
What if I’m no good? I have more than two years’ experience, so I am expected to know my stuff, but I came from a small agency that didn’t focus much on teaching so I don’t feel like I measure up to the creatives here.
I know the whole point is that I’ll learn and get better, but now I have the opportunity I’ve been waiting for, I’m scared of finding out that I’m not as good in real life as I’ve imagined being.
It’s another part of growing up I guess. Watching our imagined lives stumble and get left behind as we embrace the median.
I haven’t accepted an imaginary Nobel prize since I was 17. Maybe I’ll be ok.
You could have it all
Had a really sad dream this morning.
Started with my old art director making a video that included a clip of mitosis taking place, then he animated the whole thing in jagged black and red (I think in a kind of rotoscope fashion).
I was with my mum and sister in a long room, showing the animation to them and my first boyfriend (see post below), who was a decent artist (irl).
In the dream I was conscious of the real life time that had passed since I last saw first boyfriend, and we fell to reminiscing – looking at old photos and sharing stories.
We walked away from my mum and sister and ended up in the garden of my second house (first boyfriend never went there irl).
The garden had an abandoned air but was far more beautiful than it had been before. There were large holly bushes, huge peonies, banks of wild strawberries and tall hollyhocks.
They were all leggy and overgrown, but that somehow added to their charm, as if they had rightly claimed the garden back since I’d lived there.
I was still reminiscing with first boyfirend, and mentioned that the garden was just as beautiful as I remembered, even though I knew that much as I wanted this to be true, it wasn’t and therefore the garden wasn’t real.
I woke really incredibly sad and reluctant to leave the dream behind, and have been humming the words from Hurt ever since.
Possibly revealing post script: old art director is the only guy I’ve had a really important relationship with that hasn’t been based around sex or the promise of sex. First boyfriend is the only important sex realtionship guy that I don’t have much contact with.
Unrelated (but is it really?) post script: about a week ago I wrote a post called ‘Fuck Prudence’. It’s still in my draft folder. I’m so lame.
I bet I think this song is about me.
