Archive for Relationships
The weirdest thing that ever happened to me
I’m not sure this is definitively the weirdest, but it’s up there. I was wondering how I’d define my weirdest experiences if someone asked, and it struck me that some of the things that might seem weird from the outside (a 300-person orgy in a crumbling central-London mansion for example) actually don’t feel that weird at all. But Ah-um-ah-Andy definitely still rates.
I met him early in my TG days, when he politely, nervously complimented my boots and asked if he might rub my feet.
Me: Yeh, probably, wait… J, can this man rub my feet?
Equally eloquent, J said something along the lines of “Yeh, why not,” and my new foot fetishist friend hoisted me up onto a huge speaker. I was dressed in a style befitting the location: skirt with no sides, pinstriped waistcoat, and platform boots comprising more buckles than leather. I set about removing these beauties without flashing too much muff, and belatedly realized I was also wearing Sleepytime Pooh Bear ankle socks.
I whipped them off hoping to belie my noob status, and hid them in my boots. The guy probably didn’t care anyway, and set about giving me a (mediocre) massage. He didn’t seem particularly comfortable making small talk, and when I asked him his name he paused then came up with “Ah… um…. ah…. Andy.” Nothing too strange about that though* and he was communicative and conscientious when it came to sharing his intent and seeking permission.
After a while he nervously asked me if it was ok if he wanked, and I’ll admit his underdog demeanor contributed to my saying yes. I flicked my eyes over to J, who was hanging out with friends some way off, made some lewd gestures and he nodded his assent. Ah-um-ah-Andy set to it and came fairly quickly. While he was cleaning up (I can’t remember the details – wet wipes, tissues, wipe it on the curtains?) I said, “I’ve never done anything like that before. How was it?”
To which this previously timid, whispering, almost apologetic boy looked at me, shrugged, muttered “You were alright, I s’pose,” and disappeared into the night.
Thanks Ah-um-ah-Andy, you were magical too.
* J and I have never been smart enough to come up with fetish alter egos, but there are plenty of good reasons why people do.
Yes, you can.
How not to have an open relationship. Go read this Stranger article first, so the rest of this post makes sense.
I don’t agree that a relationship can’t evolve from one state to another if those states are determined (by whom?) to be too different. Shrews and warthogs share a common ancestor – all that separates them is a tiny handful of gene mutations and many, many years.
Time. This is the all-important factor, wherever the relationship is heading. In a situation where one person wants to be poly and another is set against it, you either have the conversation and possible separation now, or you say “Maybe we’ll be poly in the future”. If the anti camp still feels the same when the future arrives, you’ll likely separate then instead.
But… time does change things, not least warthogs and shrews. Sometimes when a person says “Yes, but not now,” they really mean what they say. Rather than assuming that means “Not ever”, patience, understanding, baby steps and a willingness to pick yourself up from the falls can help you reach a place where things really have changed.
I know cos the boy and I lived it. “One day” was the point we worked towards for many years. It wasn’t a case of “No, no, no” followed by a day when we stripped off our clothes and tripped naked through fields of third parties. Rather we got there in small steps.
Things didn’t always work out the first time, but that didn’t stop us trying again once more magical time had passed. Things didn’t always go at the pace I’d like, and yeh, sometimes I was impatient and bratty about that, which was hurtful. But I never doubted that we wanted to get to the same place, and that certainty plus a belief in the parts of our relationships that didn’t involve a poly label, meant the invested time kept ticking by.
Eventually enough of it had passed that our relationship looked very different. To labour the evolutionary metaphor, we changed to become adapted to the environment we’d chosen to live in. We’re red in tooth and claw, baby, and raring to go.
And having talked specifically about change at the macro level of monogamy or polygamy, I think there’s a pretty important message in here about change at the micro level of day-to-day happiness, however you structure your relationship. If you don’t accept that the first is possible, you are presumably more likely to overlook the second.
By accepting the small changes that happen daily, you make your relationship reflexive and responsive. You’re far less likely to look up one day and wonder where the warthog reading the papers came from.
The slut: quantified and qualified
Every so often I realise people’s assumptions about me don’t match reality – I guess this happens to all of us. Most recently it took place during a conversation with a drunken other about numbers of conquests.
Noble savage
Building on the Pleasure and pain post, here’s another SM question:
At what point does one trade a reluctance to inflict pain with a partner’s desire to be hurt?
What effect does that have on a relationship?
Singapore sex
Two thoughts.
The first is that I’ve realised I pull my punches in Singapore. In London if I got to a point in a conversation that referenced my relationship I just said it. Open. Poly. Any questions? I didn’t always expect people to understand, but I always gave them a chance.
Here I back away from those moments, leave things unsaid. I guess I’ve done that since I arrived, but lately it’s bothering me. For a start, it isn’t fair to assume I know how somebody else will react – if it’s something I would normally talk about I ought to give people the opportunity to decide for themselves how they feel about it.
Cybersex redux
Many things to write. Let’s start here because I promised part two a while back.
Last summer (a whole year ago, gosh) I had IM sex. I thought at the time I was chatting with a friend, but she told me later her boyfriend (a stranger to me) had used her laptop without her knowledge. More details here.
When sharing this story I hear an incredulous, oft-repeated question: Was the guy so good at faking it that I really, honestly thought he was my friend?
It’s a reasonable thing to ask, and I’ve wondered it myself. I had no doubt at the time and no reason to think a stranger would be lying to me – I was sure it was my friend. It was only when she told me, horrified and upset, what her boyfriend had done that I started remembering things that didn’t add up. The idea of an impostor slowly seemed to fit.
Then my friend moved abroad, leaving the nefarious boyfriend behind thousands of miles of ocean.
The filthy messages didn’t stop.
I think the realisation came with a flash and a crackle. Lies had been told but only when an ostensibly straight, ostensibly religious young lady woke up with a hangover, felt embarrassed or ashamed and made something up to assuage herself.
All the pieces I’d been trying to poke into place slid together seamlessly. The new messages read exactly the same as the first ones, at a time when the girl was alone in a new city. They were surprisingly explicit each time, which is maybe why she lied in the first place and why I accepted her lie – there was certainly an element to the language she didn’t use in person.
Needless to say, I’m over that shit. I asked her not to message me about sex any more. She ignored me. I told her next time she sent those messages I would log out of chat. She ignored me. I logged out. I stuck to my guns and eventually she stopped. *shrugs*
I rarely feel like my boundaries are threatened but this girl, thousands of miles away, managed to do so. I was pleased to find how easily and calmly I could defend them.
Where did it all go right?
The Boy and I didn’t always have an open relationship. We got together in 2002 while we were both doing a master’s degree. I was a little crazy at the time, trying to make sense of my previous relationship and fighting the inevitability of leaving uni and getting a job.
Our relationship reflected this in that it was torrid yet hesitant, and it was default-monogamous. We both played away and ‘fessed up, but it was always that – confession, admission.
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#10yearsago
The twitter tag writ large…
10 years ago to the minute, I was at a house party in St Peteres Loge, as the council insisted our student digs were called.
A rag-tag collection of us returned to uni during the Christmas break, to herald the new millennium from our wonderful, infested, enormous, used-to-be-a-church-but-was-built-for-parties place in Bath.
A few of my school friends were there, a few uni friends, but mostly a large collection of Boys From Sutton. I’d arrived the previous day, my little Mini stuffed with cheap fizzy wine from Aldi. Preparations involved moving the scummy mattress from the floor on the landing to the floor in the hallway, and buying a £60 bottle of Bolly I definitely couldn’t afford.
I wore a black strapless dress and red strappy shoes and tried to do my hair in ringlets but they looked terrible so I washed them out. There was vodka (I drank nearly a 70cl bottle by myself) and tequila snorting and a first stolen moment with a boy I saw last New Year as well.
At midnight everyone hugged and cheered and sprayed Aldi fizz on the ceiling (thank goodness it was cheap). The Y2K bug didn’t stop anything working, and how could it because we were young and fucking invincible and about to take the 21st century by storm.
Given the surreality of university, the ten years that followed included all my adult life. I no longer feel like I can walk on water – my life got less magical, more real. This sounds sad, but isn’t. I’m still not bound by oceans, but instead of expecting them to part, I’ve been learning to build boats.
In terms of shit happening, 2009 has been the hardest year of the decade. The sacking was only phase two of the work horror; phase one was much worse – to the extent that I couldn’t face writing about it. And the second half of this year has been home/people-sickness. It’s usually low level but sometimes it sneaks up and punches me in the solar plexus, leaving me breathless and prickling tears.
But in terms of my happiness and sanity, 2009 was far from the worst of the past 10 years. This discord means this year’s been invaluable, simply because it’s confirmed that it’s up to me to create that difference between how things are and how I react to them.
2009 saw the first anniversary of my marriage – something I was so unsure of that now feels intrinsic 🙂 And why were only recent months plagued by homesickness? Because for the first six spent here J and I had the luxury of focussing on nothing but each other. I couldn’t have weathered any of this year without him – if our fate together wasn’t sealed in Spain, it certainly was when we stepped on that Singapore Airlines flight together.
But cool people aren’t the preserve of the UK. They are found everywhere, including S’pore, and a big ‘keeping me sane’ shout goes out to one such person. In some ways our backgrounds are worlds apart, but we see ourselves in each other (especially the strange bits) – that’s rare whenever it happens and amazing when the homogeneity of the country you live in struggles to include you.
So not a bad year, and an amazing fucking decade. An entire, sparkling, magical (ignore what I said before) journey through London skimmed over in this post. A friendship forged with my sister. A relationship that’s gone from break-ups and accusations to sharing brunch with the people we fucked the night before. A culinary adventure from fried egg sandwiches to eight course dinner parties (palate cleansing sorbet ftmfw).
Life was already damned good back in Bath when we were partying like it was 1999, and it seems to have been getting better ever since. I’m excited about turning 30, maybe becoming a mum, learning more about life outside London, and that’s just 2010. The short long forecast: the next ten years are going to be fucking awesome.
Cheese sammiches and sex 