I've recently started to re-engage with my PhD data. Unlike how I usually describe it, my PhD is probably best summarised as looking at the ethics of relationship negotiation within new media environments. While my research wasn't looking at my life, my life certainly looked at my research! Going back to that data, while being single and occasionally submitting myself to the torture of dating, has got me thinking. About ghosting.
For the unfamiliar, ghosting is the practice of seemingly disappearing into thin air. It usually happens before people have even met; you're chatting away to someone on a dating app and then suddenly they just disappear. Or they just stop replying to your messages. It also happens in the early stages, where after going out on a date or two contact suddenly stops. But really, it can (and does) happen at any stage of a relationship. All of a sudden, somebody just disappears.
To be clear, I am not against ghosting. I have experienced it plenty of time, both as the ghoster and the ghostee. It is certainly not the ideal way to end contact with someone, but seriously, when do people actually behave ideally?
New media technologies (which is an awful term... they're hardly new, but anyways, it's the one I'm sticking with for now) have not so much changed the types of relationships people have, but have created a hypervisibility and contactability. And this has at least changed the potential ways people can engage with each other.
The phenomena of ghosting is hardly new. People have been fucking off without saying a word forever, so let's not start with the whole "OMG kids today don't know how to interact like proper people" bullshit. I mean, hello, the whole "He just went down to the shop for a bottle of milk" trope. What is new is the potential to conduct digital surveillance upon one's ghost.
I could talk about the ethical implications of this, the ways in which people could behave to achieve some sort of idealised niceness around the awkwardness of ending relationships, in their various guises. I won't. Because, post PhD, current living in the actual world of being a single woman, I don't believe promoting an ideal is the way to go.
The other night I had drinks with a friend who is also using Foucault's later work in his PhD. We had what was for me a very liberating conversation about Foucault's neoliberalism. We acknowledged that, at the end, he turned to neoliberalism. Not as a wholehearted embrace, but as something which could be queered and co-opted into leading an ethical life.
The downside of this, which came out in my PhD findings (probably not as eloquently as I would like) is that the ethical framework he describes can be used in hugely unethical ways. When you develop this acute understanding of how power operates within your interpersonal relationships, you're faced with this red pill/blue pill situation. Do you use this knowledge to promote equality within your relationships, or do you use it to get what you want? That choice is up to the individual, and while Foucault is often said to be encouraging the even distribution of power, I think the reality is more complex than that. I think he was maybe a bit more OK with letting the world burn than is usually discussed. But that's a rather undeveloped critique best left for another forum another time.
As the night continued, my friend and I discussed our various experiences of dating and the complications that arise in negotiating relationships and feelings and that desire to not be a dick. And, of course, how to manage the situation when the other person turns into a dick. For me, this is where that desire not to promote an idealised niceness comes in. This is where I see Foucault with his matchstick burning shit down.
There is a huge discourse surrounding dating etiquette, in general, and a growing body of opinions/advice on how to deal with dating in new media environments. But telling people what to do is not the answer. People deal with shit differently, and saying things like "cyberstalking your ex is unhealthy and you are bad at doing breakups" is really unhelpful. Who is this person who is good at doing breakups? A sociopath?? Breakups are shitty and awful and they hurt, and there is no reason why being ghosted by someone you've never met should hurt less than the end of a long term relationship. Life is not linear or simple and the idea that we should all just be nice is ridiculous.
Despite my actual, certified recognition as an expert on relationship negotiation, I am constantly turning to my friends any time I have to deal with negotiating pretty much any aspect of a dating type relationship. Because there is no rule book; nor should there be. How people relate to one another is going to be unique to the context of that relationship and trying to fit it into some external framework is only going to cause everyone involved grief. That much I can put my stamp of expertise on.
Recently, I've had a lot of contradictory advice given to me, and this is why I think it's problematic to promote some sort of standard of how people should interact with one another. It is easy to get lost in these discourses about what you should and should not do. I found in listening to all these other voices that I was both losing myself and losing sight of the context of what I was negotiating. I was getting caught up in these external judgments (which may or may not have actually been happening) over how I was behaving. I was ignoring what my own needs are and how best, for me, to meet them.
How we use new media technologies, individually, in our negotiations of relationships is going to produce different things for different people in different contexts. There is no magical singular way to behave that will mean everyone is nice to one another and nobody gets hurt. And one person's strategy for mitigating the hurt they cause to somebody might actually be perceived as quite harmful by somebody else. The best we can do is engage authentically with ourselves and those around us, and, because we can't avoid hurting people, be accountable for what we do.
This brings me to the seance, which I am defining as the attempts at contacting someone who has ghosted you. Again, I place no judgement onto the seance, or onto the ghost's response or lack there of. Because while there is a need to be accountable to the person you've hurt, that need does not come at the expense of yourself. It's a tricky thing, negotiating that desire not to be a dick with what can sometimes be a legitimate need to be kind of a dick. I don't think there is a right or wrong way to manage this conflict. At the end of the day, you're the one who has to live your life. You're the one faced with the consequences of your actions. So you're the one who gets to choose.
I cannot overstate how much I am saying there is no overarching right or wrong here. The only advice I'll give is this: think your actions through and do what's best for you.
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Monday, March 2, 2015
I Should Have Left You Long Ago (But I Stayed)
A couple of weeks ago I somewhat unexpectedly found myself unemployed. While it's a temporary loss of income, it's unclear how long it'll be. This left me frantic and stressed and scrambling to find work. Any work. OK, almost any work. Finding something casual and temporary has proved difficult. And while I haven't given up hope, I've realised it's more practical for me to be putting my energy into finding new work in my field, even if it means forgoing an income for a little bit.
As stressful as this has been, having this time has made me realise how badly I needed a break. It's not exactly ideal to be taking a forced, unpaid, break, but, it's made me spend some time taking stock of my life.
Some other things have happened as well, one of those being that I finally let go of a relationship that I'd held on to for too long. You see, I've got a long history of staying in relationships for longer than I should. In fact, if my life was a Country Western song it'd be called 'I should have left you long ago (but I stayed)'.
Walking away wasn't easy (or pretty). It was painful and messy and left me with some things to process. Fortunately for me, I've also got plenty of time to sit and reflect on how I got myself into that mess and why I stayed for so long.
What I realised is, the year before I met my ex was insane. There was so much big life stuff happening, and on top of that lots of ridiculous bullshit stuff that I was responsible for dealing with, that I'd just been surviving in crisis mode. There were health issues, housemate issues, housing issues, relationship issues, family issues, thesis issues, friend issues, work issues, money issues, immigration issues... At baseline my life was pretty stressful, but there was always some additional thing I also had to deal with. And every time I'd overcome whatever calamity had arisen, a new one emerged.
Things were finally starting to settle down for me when I moved into my own place. My housing issues were coming to an end, as were the housemate issues. Work was stabilizing, my income was fairly steady, my health was improving, my thesis was being examined, I had a plan of action for my immigration stuff, my family and friends were alright, and I was single and excited about getting to be single in my own place. I hadn't quite gotten the balance back into my life of focusing on myself, but it was on the horizon.
A week after moving into my new place, I met someone. I hadn't planned on it becoming a thing, I wasn't looking for it to become a thing, but it became a thing. He was handsome and charming and after what had been a very difficult year, a perfect distraction from dealing with my own life.
So I focused on him and on our relationship and for awhile, forgot about myself. It didn't last though, the distracting myself from myself. Once the magic wore off, my life was still a mess and I had the added burden of an unsupportive partner to deal with.
There were some practical reasons for why I stayed longer than I should have. But mostly it was fear. Not fear of being alone; I've been single most of my adult life and know that that's quite a comfortable and fun place for me to be. No, the fear was of having to deal with the mess my life had become. I wanted someone to hold my hand, to tell me it was going to be OK. But what that resulted in was actually me holding myself back.
I've said it before, and I suspect it's a lesson I'm going to keep re-learning for a long time: life is much easier once you let go and just face the fear.
It's been hard. It's been really hard. And it's going to continue to be hard for awhile to come. But having the chance to get back in touch with myself is worth all the hardship that's made it happen. Being forced to take a step back, I feel like I can see clearly again. It's still early days, but I've got a much better sense of what I want for myself and what I don't. I can see the parts of my life that were allowing me to grow, and the things that were holding me back. I am coming up with a plan of action for how I want to live my life now. I am thinking about ways to rebuild that will allow me to have the balance that has so sorely been lacking for far too long.
For starters, I need to get back to writing.
As stressful as this has been, having this time has made me realise how badly I needed a break. It's not exactly ideal to be taking a forced, unpaid, break, but, it's made me spend some time taking stock of my life.
Some other things have happened as well, one of those being that I finally let go of a relationship that I'd held on to for too long. You see, I've got a long history of staying in relationships for longer than I should. In fact, if my life was a Country Western song it'd be called 'I should have left you long ago (but I stayed)'.
Walking away wasn't easy (or pretty). It was painful and messy and left me with some things to process. Fortunately for me, I've also got plenty of time to sit and reflect on how I got myself into that mess and why I stayed for so long.
What I realised is, the year before I met my ex was insane. There was so much big life stuff happening, and on top of that lots of ridiculous bullshit stuff that I was responsible for dealing with, that I'd just been surviving in crisis mode. There were health issues, housemate issues, housing issues, relationship issues, family issues, thesis issues, friend issues, work issues, money issues, immigration issues... At baseline my life was pretty stressful, but there was always some additional thing I also had to deal with. And every time I'd overcome whatever calamity had arisen, a new one emerged.
Things were finally starting to settle down for me when I moved into my own place. My housing issues were coming to an end, as were the housemate issues. Work was stabilizing, my income was fairly steady, my health was improving, my thesis was being examined, I had a plan of action for my immigration stuff, my family and friends were alright, and I was single and excited about getting to be single in my own place. I hadn't quite gotten the balance back into my life of focusing on myself, but it was on the horizon.
A week after moving into my new place, I met someone. I hadn't planned on it becoming a thing, I wasn't looking for it to become a thing, but it became a thing. He was handsome and charming and after what had been a very difficult year, a perfect distraction from dealing with my own life.
So I focused on him and on our relationship and for awhile, forgot about myself. It didn't last though, the distracting myself from myself. Once the magic wore off, my life was still a mess and I had the added burden of an unsupportive partner to deal with.
There were some practical reasons for why I stayed longer than I should have. But mostly it was fear. Not fear of being alone; I've been single most of my adult life and know that that's quite a comfortable and fun place for me to be. No, the fear was of having to deal with the mess my life had become. I wanted someone to hold my hand, to tell me it was going to be OK. But what that resulted in was actually me holding myself back.
I've said it before, and I suspect it's a lesson I'm going to keep re-learning for a long time: life is much easier once you let go and just face the fear.
It's been hard. It's been really hard. And it's going to continue to be hard for awhile to come. But having the chance to get back in touch with myself is worth all the hardship that's made it happen. Being forced to take a step back, I feel like I can see clearly again. It's still early days, but I've got a much better sense of what I want for myself and what I don't. I can see the parts of my life that were allowing me to grow, and the things that were holding me back. I am coming up with a plan of action for how I want to live my life now. I am thinking about ways to rebuild that will allow me to have the balance that has so sorely been lacking for far too long.
For starters, I need to get back to writing.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
What is Love?
Just a minute ago I was walking down the street and had one of those moments where I remembered something about my ex that annoyed me and was overcome with a feeling of joy at no longer having to deal with this particular, very small thing. And I thought to myself "I mean, I loved her, but fuck she drove me crazy!" And then I thought "But did I really love her, if what I feel most about not having her in my life anymore is relief?" Of course I fucking did!
There is this idea that love is something elusive and grandiose, that it's only really real when it is big and intense and life threateningly permanent. Like when you would catch a grenade for someone, even though they wouldn't do the same for you. Well that's just stupid! Quite frankly, Bruno Mars, if someone is trying to kill me via grenade they're probably not going to stop because some fool got in the way and blew themselves up. No, if I've gotten myself into a grenade throwing situation I'd much rather my loved ones not get themselves killed delaying my assassination. I'd really rather they let me clean up my own mess, thanks.
Love is such a wonderful and complex emotion. Love can mean all sorts of things, can exist in all sorts of ways. But for some reason we seem really set on minimizing it, narrowing it down and restricting it. Why are we so scared of it?
I've been thinking a lot about relationships and love and how I want to live my life since my last blog post. I've been doing a lot of reflecting about how and with who and why I fall for people, what value I place on what types of relationships, and what different sorts of dynamics this produces in my life. That reflecting is still very much a work in progress. By no means do I actually have anything figured out.
What I have noticed, though, is that since I have made the active choice to stop buying into traditional relationship structures, I've had a lot more love in my life. Since I'm not restricted to giving all my emotional energy to one person, I've found that I have more energy to give everyone. And since I am not placing demands on a particular person to reciprocate my feelings/energy, I've got more emotional resources to draw upon and am less invested in trying to balance out emotional exchanges.
I feel like in traditional relationship structures emotions sometimes get treated like goods that can be bartered for. Like, "you gave me 5 apples but 2 of them were rotten, so I'm only going to give you 3 oranges." Now if someone gives me 5 apples I will appreciate them and give back to them how ever many oranges I can manage to give them. It might be 1, it might be 7. Maybe I'll give them something that's not even a fruit instead! The point is, instead of trying to exchange like for like with people, I give what I am able to give and take what they are able to give. If I want it, and vice versa.
There is less attachment to the love in my life now, though that is definitely still a work in progress! What I mean is, when I start to feel loving feelings for someone, I don't feel the need to clamp down on that person and make them be a part of my life in a particular way so much anymore. I'm getting better at just sitting with those feelings and letting them be there and letting the relationship be whatever form it will be. Again, it's something that I'm working on, not something that I have mastered.
It can be tricky because while I think about relationships and emotions as unstructured things, I quite often find myself in various types of relationships and having various types of emotions with people who take a more structured approach to things. To them, certain feelings or behaviours or whatever mean certain things, whereas to me, well, I've just summed it up in a new tattoo...
Loving someone doesn't have to mean anything more than that you care about them. Whether or not they reciprocate doesn't validate or invalidate your feelings. It's worth checking in with yourself to make sure that you're not investing too much energy on something that is not giving you anything back, you know, for self care and all that. And it's worth remembering that love is just an emotion. It doesn't have to be that big of a deal.
There is this idea that love is something elusive and grandiose, that it's only really real when it is big and intense and life threateningly permanent. Like when you would catch a grenade for someone, even though they wouldn't do the same for you. Well that's just stupid! Quite frankly, Bruno Mars, if someone is trying to kill me via grenade they're probably not going to stop because some fool got in the way and blew themselves up. No, if I've gotten myself into a grenade throwing situation I'd much rather my loved ones not get themselves killed delaying my assassination. I'd really rather they let me clean up my own mess, thanks.
Love is such a wonderful and complex emotion. Love can mean all sorts of things, can exist in all sorts of ways. But for some reason we seem really set on minimizing it, narrowing it down and restricting it. Why are we so scared of it?
I've been thinking a lot about relationships and love and how I want to live my life since my last blog post. I've been doing a lot of reflecting about how and with who and why I fall for people, what value I place on what types of relationships, and what different sorts of dynamics this produces in my life. That reflecting is still very much a work in progress. By no means do I actually have anything figured out.
What I have noticed, though, is that since I have made the active choice to stop buying into traditional relationship structures, I've had a lot more love in my life. Since I'm not restricted to giving all my emotional energy to one person, I've found that I have more energy to give everyone. And since I am not placing demands on a particular person to reciprocate my feelings/energy, I've got more emotional resources to draw upon and am less invested in trying to balance out emotional exchanges.
I feel like in traditional relationship structures emotions sometimes get treated like goods that can be bartered for. Like, "you gave me 5 apples but 2 of them were rotten, so I'm only going to give you 3 oranges." Now if someone gives me 5 apples I will appreciate them and give back to them how ever many oranges I can manage to give them. It might be 1, it might be 7. Maybe I'll give them something that's not even a fruit instead! The point is, instead of trying to exchange like for like with people, I give what I am able to give and take what they are able to give. If I want it, and vice versa.
There is less attachment to the love in my life now, though that is definitely still a work in progress! What I mean is, when I start to feel loving feelings for someone, I don't feel the need to clamp down on that person and make them be a part of my life in a particular way so much anymore. I'm getting better at just sitting with those feelings and letting them be there and letting the relationship be whatever form it will be. Again, it's something that I'm working on, not something that I have mastered.
It can be tricky because while I think about relationships and emotions as unstructured things, I quite often find myself in various types of relationships and having various types of emotions with people who take a more structured approach to things. To them, certain feelings or behaviours or whatever mean certain things, whereas to me, well, I've just summed it up in a new tattoo...
Loving someone doesn't have to mean anything more than that you care about them. Whether or not they reciprocate doesn't validate or invalidate your feelings. It's worth checking in with yourself to make sure that you're not investing too much energy on something that is not giving you anything back, you know, for self care and all that. And it's worth remembering that love is just an emotion. It doesn't have to be that big of a deal.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Deconstructing Relationships
I used to believe in soul mates. I carried around this rather depressing view that there is only One True Love for everyone, and that not everyone is lucky enough to find their soul mate in their lifetime. I used to believe this quite strongly, and I still find this ideology lurking in the back corners of my mind every time I find myself falling in love.
Let's not mince words. The idea of 'soul mates' is fucked up! It perpetuates this false hierarchy of romantic love being better/greater than any other form of love, which then gives people excuses to behave like horrible human beings to the other important people in their lives (I've just finished watching the entire Twilight saga, and Bella Swan I am appalled!). And it creates this vicious cycle of rather unnecessary pain when a romantic relationship ends. It's hard enough saying goodbye to a relationship with someone you've cared about... having that ending imbued with these bullshit ideologies that either a) the love you experienced in that relationship was not as grand as it could have been, or b) that you will never experience a love as grand again... Can we all see how incredibly unhealthy that is?
While I don't think I've ever officially outed myself as a nonmonogamist, it's no secret that I'm not big on monogamy. Like with my sexual identity, it's one of those things where I had the feelings and ideas, but not the language or the conceptual framework to make sense of it for a long time. It's really only been in the past couple of years that I've started to explore what alternate ways of doing relationships can mean.
For a long time I've envisioned myself - my future, adult self - as a fairly independent person who is not tied down to a single, committed relationship, but who has intimate friendships and sexual relationships with lots of different people around the world. And when my last relationship ended, I decided it was time to become the future me that I have longed to be. The funny thing is, after making that decision I pretty quickly realised I already am.
When I was at the IASSCS conference in Buenos Aires, I was introduced to the term 'Relationship Anarchy'. This concept appeals to me because it does away with the idea of relationship hierarchies and acknowledges the value in all different types of relationships. It is a thoroughly queer way of relating! What appeals to me most about this concept is quite beautifully described on The Thinking Asexual blog (linked to above):
The most obvious example of Relationship Anarchy in my life is my relationship with my BFF. Thus far, that has not been a sexual relationship, but it's been pretty much every other kind of relationship. We used to jokingly refer to each other as our life partners, but that's stopped being a joke. That is what we are. We love each other, we support each other, we accept each other for the flawed individuals we both are, we challenge each other to grow, we even go out on cute dates. Our relationship will never be exclusive; we will never limit each other's ability to connect with and develop relationships of any type with other people. We will always be of importance to one another, even though we may not always be the 'primary' person in each other's lives.
I think that there is too much emphasis placed upon the form a relationship takes, and not enough emphasis upon the content. Increasingly, I am trying to focus on what it is that I get from my different relationships that I enjoy. What pleasure do I derive from having someone in my life? I am trying to acknowledge what that is more, even if only to myself. And in doing so, I am hoping to make myself more open to the possibilities of those relationships expanding. To finding support, to being nurtured, to giving, to growing. Instead of saying "Oh, I don't have a boyfriend/girlfriend!" and looking for that type of relationship, I am thinking about what ways of relating I feel are missing from my life and considering how I can fulfill my emotional needs for those particular kinds of relating.
For instance, currently I have a longing to have a connection where I can be both emotionally and sexually vulnerable. There are people in my life that I am emotionally vulnerable with, and people I am sexually vulnerable with (being vulnerable is a good thing, btw, perhaps a topic for another day!); but it is harder to find somebody who can offer me both of these things, on an ongoing basis anyways. (Life is complicated! Getting two adults to sort their shit out so they can build something together is actually a pretty big ask.) While I want to have that kind of a connection with somebody, I don't need for them to be my 'partner'. And I certainly don't need for us to share our emotional/sexual vulnerabilities with each other exclusively! There is no reason for that connection to be the most important connection in my life; it is just one of many ways of connecting, and happens to be a connection I currently don't have but would like to have.
The thing is, life is fluid. Relationships shift and change, and the emphasis we place on any relationship does not stay constant for the duration of the relationship; especially in long term relationships! To illustrate, I have one close friendship that is over 20 years old. At times that friendship has been pretty central to my life, and at other times it has been peripheral. The content of our friendship has certainly changed as we've gone through life! We started out as quite different people, found ourselves leading parallel lives for awhile, and are now pretty much polar opposites of each other. This friendship has remained important to me, but of course its role in my life is different now. How we can offer each other support is different now. This friendship has less emphasis in my life, less energy put into it, right now. Because it's not what either of us needs right now. And that will change as it needs to.
I think that people get that about friendships, but act like it is somehow different when it is a romantic/sexual relationship. But why would it be? Emotions might be felt more intensely in a romantic/sexual relationship, but they are not somehow immune to the ebb and flow of life and individual needs. When two people decide to commit to each other in a romantic/sexual relationship, it is not as if they suddenly become one person; they are still two separate individuals with unique emotional needs and life circumstances. They are both on their own life journeys, even if they are each other's travel companions.
As I said at the start of this blog, I am not immune to the ideology of One True Love. I do not think that forming romantic/sexual partnerships is a bad thing, nor do I think that it is bad for that type of relationship to be of primary importance in a person's life. I think it is incredibly problematic to idealise that type of relationship though; to treat someone as if their life is incomplete for not having that type of relationship in it.
I don't know how I'll feel the next time I find myself falling in love. I think it will be different, because I am redefining what relationships mean for me and look like in my life. I have stopped looking for particular types of relationships. Instead, I like to meet new people and just see what develops with them. What sort of chemistry do we have? What can we share with one another? What journey will we go on together? I have found that this has made me open to a lot of different possibilities and has lead to some really beautiful experiences.
Along with forming relationships in new ways, I am also trying to engage with them differently when they end. I like to focus on what was good about the relationship. What pleasure did that person bring to my life? What joy? What did I learn from them? How did I grow? I am choosing to honour those memories, to think kindly of the relationships that are no longer in my life. To remember their beauty and to let them go, thanking them for what they gave to me for however long that lasted. I think we focus too much on the pain and the hurt when relationships end, and that's not helpful. I try to remember that all relationships are temporary, even if they last a really long time. Focusing on the good doesn't make the hurt go away, but it helps. Because any amount of beauty and joy that something brings to your life is a positive thing.
Let's not mince words. The idea of 'soul mates' is fucked up! It perpetuates this false hierarchy of romantic love being better/greater than any other form of love, which then gives people excuses to behave like horrible human beings to the other important people in their lives (I've just finished watching the entire Twilight saga, and Bella Swan I am appalled!). And it creates this vicious cycle of rather unnecessary pain when a romantic relationship ends. It's hard enough saying goodbye to a relationship with someone you've cared about... having that ending imbued with these bullshit ideologies that either a) the love you experienced in that relationship was not as grand as it could have been, or b) that you will never experience a love as grand again... Can we all see how incredibly unhealthy that is?
While I don't think I've ever officially outed myself as a nonmonogamist, it's no secret that I'm not big on monogamy. Like with my sexual identity, it's one of those things where I had the feelings and ideas, but not the language or the conceptual framework to make sense of it for a long time. It's really only been in the past couple of years that I've started to explore what alternate ways of doing relationships can mean.
For a long time I've envisioned myself - my future, adult self - as a fairly independent person who is not tied down to a single, committed relationship, but who has intimate friendships and sexual relationships with lots of different people around the world. And when my last relationship ended, I decided it was time to become the future me that I have longed to be. The funny thing is, after making that decision I pretty quickly realised I already am.
When I was at the IASSCS conference in Buenos Aires, I was introduced to the term 'Relationship Anarchy'. This concept appeals to me because it does away with the idea of relationship hierarchies and acknowledges the value in all different types of relationships. It is a thoroughly queer way of relating! What appeals to me most about this concept is quite beautifully described on The Thinking Asexual blog (linked to above):
What relationship anarchy hinges on the most, for me, is the equality it seeks to create across the relationship board, so that sexual relationships are not superior to nonsexual relationships and “romantic” relationships are not superior to nonromantic friendships, and that equality means that a nonsexual and/or nonromantic friend has the same amount of access to love, intimacy, physical affection, support, etc. That means a nonsexual/nonromantic friend is just as likely to become an RA’s life partner or one of their life partners. Relationship anarchy provides the kind of respect, security, opportunity, equality, and love that a celibate asexual needs, especially if they are single or they’re not necessarily looking for just one romantic life partner to fulfill all of their major needs in a traditional romantic relationship.When I think about my life and how I have done relationships, this is what I see. I see the friendships I have had that have provided me with more support (emotionally and materially) than any romantic or sexual relationship ever has. I see the joy (and the pain) that romantic connections have provided me. I see the fun and the playfulness that my sexual relationships have given me. And I see that all of these things overlap; that their boundaries are not clear and that I don't want them to be clear.
The most obvious example of Relationship Anarchy in my life is my relationship with my BFF. Thus far, that has not been a sexual relationship, but it's been pretty much every other kind of relationship. We used to jokingly refer to each other as our life partners, but that's stopped being a joke. That is what we are. We love each other, we support each other, we accept each other for the flawed individuals we both are, we challenge each other to grow, we even go out on cute dates. Our relationship will never be exclusive; we will never limit each other's ability to connect with and develop relationships of any type with other people. We will always be of importance to one another, even though we may not always be the 'primary' person in each other's lives.
I think that there is too much emphasis placed upon the form a relationship takes, and not enough emphasis upon the content. Increasingly, I am trying to focus on what it is that I get from my different relationships that I enjoy. What pleasure do I derive from having someone in my life? I am trying to acknowledge what that is more, even if only to myself. And in doing so, I am hoping to make myself more open to the possibilities of those relationships expanding. To finding support, to being nurtured, to giving, to growing. Instead of saying "Oh, I don't have a boyfriend/girlfriend!" and looking for that type of relationship, I am thinking about what ways of relating I feel are missing from my life and considering how I can fulfill my emotional needs for those particular kinds of relating.
For instance, currently I have a longing to have a connection where I can be both emotionally and sexually vulnerable. There are people in my life that I am emotionally vulnerable with, and people I am sexually vulnerable with (being vulnerable is a good thing, btw, perhaps a topic for another day!); but it is harder to find somebody who can offer me both of these things, on an ongoing basis anyways. (Life is complicated! Getting two adults to sort their shit out so they can build something together is actually a pretty big ask.) While I want to have that kind of a connection with somebody, I don't need for them to be my 'partner'. And I certainly don't need for us to share our emotional/sexual vulnerabilities with each other exclusively! There is no reason for that connection to be the most important connection in my life; it is just one of many ways of connecting, and happens to be a connection I currently don't have but would like to have.
The thing is, life is fluid. Relationships shift and change, and the emphasis we place on any relationship does not stay constant for the duration of the relationship; especially in long term relationships! To illustrate, I have one close friendship that is over 20 years old. At times that friendship has been pretty central to my life, and at other times it has been peripheral. The content of our friendship has certainly changed as we've gone through life! We started out as quite different people, found ourselves leading parallel lives for awhile, and are now pretty much polar opposites of each other. This friendship has remained important to me, but of course its role in my life is different now. How we can offer each other support is different now. This friendship has less emphasis in my life, less energy put into it, right now. Because it's not what either of us needs right now. And that will change as it needs to.
I think that people get that about friendships, but act like it is somehow different when it is a romantic/sexual relationship. But why would it be? Emotions might be felt more intensely in a romantic/sexual relationship, but they are not somehow immune to the ebb and flow of life and individual needs. When two people decide to commit to each other in a romantic/sexual relationship, it is not as if they suddenly become one person; they are still two separate individuals with unique emotional needs and life circumstances. They are both on their own life journeys, even if they are each other's travel companions.
As I said at the start of this blog, I am not immune to the ideology of One True Love. I do not think that forming romantic/sexual partnerships is a bad thing, nor do I think that it is bad for that type of relationship to be of primary importance in a person's life. I think it is incredibly problematic to idealise that type of relationship though; to treat someone as if their life is incomplete for not having that type of relationship in it.
I don't know how I'll feel the next time I find myself falling in love. I think it will be different, because I am redefining what relationships mean for me and look like in my life. I have stopped looking for particular types of relationships. Instead, I like to meet new people and just see what develops with them. What sort of chemistry do we have? What can we share with one another? What journey will we go on together? I have found that this has made me open to a lot of different possibilities and has lead to some really beautiful experiences.
Along with forming relationships in new ways, I am also trying to engage with them differently when they end. I like to focus on what was good about the relationship. What pleasure did that person bring to my life? What joy? What did I learn from them? How did I grow? I am choosing to honour those memories, to think kindly of the relationships that are no longer in my life. To remember their beauty and to let them go, thanking them for what they gave to me for however long that lasted. I think we focus too much on the pain and the hurt when relationships end, and that's not helpful. I try to remember that all relationships are temporary, even if they last a really long time. Focusing on the good doesn't make the hurt go away, but it helps. Because any amount of beauty and joy that something brings to your life is a positive thing.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
The Q in Alphabet Soup
Apparently yesterday (or today, depending on your time zone) was International Bisexuality Visibility Day. Personally, I'm not a fan of the term 'bisexual' and I cringe every time it's applied to me. It feels dated and incredibly limiting; 'bi' implies a duality and when it comes to gender and sexuality, there are a helluva lot more than two options! Also, I feel like it's an identity that has been co-opted by this fantasy whereby bisexual ladies (and their nubile friends) are seen as eagerly available to fulfill all your sexual desires.
I don't say this to be dissing on any bisexuals. If that's how you prefer to identify, that's up to you. I'd be interested in having a conversation about why bi, though, given that 'queer' and 'pansexual' are also well established options (though I have an uneasy relationship with pansexual too because I feel like it presents all sexual desire as being on an even field and is therefore quite reductionary of sexual desire).
I identify as queer. Queer is something of a catch-all phrase, though not in the way it is often used! While you can say that a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, etc identity is a 'queer' identity, each of these categories are identity categories onto themselves - and contain their own plethora of subcultures and ways of being which may or may not be 'queer'. What I'm trying to say is, these categories are overlapping, yes, but distinct. A lesbian is not necessarily queer. And yes, my eye does start to twitch every time I hear someone using the term queer interchangeably with other identity categories in the rainbow flavoured alphabet soup.
The reason that queer is a catch-all phrase, and why I identify with it so strongly, is because it is about a lot more than who you fuck. Sure, that's a part of it, but you can be staunchly heterosexual and still be queer. Queer is about critically engaging with the politics of gender, sexuality, and relationships. For a start. I'd say it's also about engaging with the politics of class and race, but as a middle class white woman whose academic focus has tended to be on other middle class white people, I'm going to leave that discussion for people who actually know what they're talking about. (Sometimes I feel like it's narcissistic to be so focused on deconstructing myself. But, firstly, it's my blog and I'll do what I want with it! And secondly, the only thing I can really claim to be an expert on is myself.)
So, to clarify, I feel that it is incorrect to identify as 'queer' on the sole basis of having sex with someone of the same gender as yourself. Being queer is about challenging 'normativity'. You know, that thing where women and men are supposed to like each other and get married (to each other) and be monogamous and have babies. And that thing where boys and girls look and act in certain ways, and those ways are different from one another. Or, you know, the idea that certain ways of doing or learning or creating are more valid or productive or useful than others.
The reason all this is on my mind as of late is because my life underwent a pretty big change a couple months ago, and it's taken me down a rather unexpected path. My girlfriend and I broke up, and I decided to start seeing men. It's...complicated and I don't fully understand how I went from being adamantly disinterested in men and happily committed to a beautiful woman to falling out of love with said woman and becoming happily uncommitted to some wonderful men. But it happened fast. Or, it didn't. At any rate, the turn around from being devastated about the breakup to being really fucking happy with my life happened incredibly fast.
Have I magically turned straight? No, definitely not. Am I still into women? Yes...no...I don't know. After a 7 year hiatus from men it's just feeling really nice to be in the company of men. This whole thing has left me with more questions than answers, but, for the most part I feel like the answers to the questions I've got are pretty much irrelevant. As long as the answer to the question "Am I happy?" is "Yes." Which it is.
Which is funny, because, for a long time I felt like I couldn't be happy with men. Because 7+ years ago I was really, very unhappy being with men. But... a lot has changed. What I realise now is that it wasn't men, as such, that I was unhappy with, but heteronormativity. The expectation that I would conform to particular ways of being gendered, sexual, and in a relationship did not sit easy for me. Especially in Calgary, which, in case you didn't know, is a very conservative place! Nonconformity isn't exactly encouraged in Calgary.
But, I've spent the better part of past decade gradually developing my queerness and now feel quite comfortable to be myself - in all my normative and non-normative glory - across all my relationships; be they with friends, family, colleagues, lovers, strangers, housemates, or service providers. My relationships with men now are quite different from before. For starters, they occur on my terms or they don't occur at all. I feel quite free, actually. Even more so than when I was just dating women. Because now, other person(s) consenting, I can have whatever kind of relationship I want with whomever I want. My reflections on queering relationships and the problem with monogamy are probably best left for another day though!
I will just say this: I really am happily uncommitted. And I really do feel free. I'm very nearly finished my PhD, and I have absolutely no idea what kind of a journey that's going to take me on. It was wonderful to have a partner for a good chunk of this last push to finish my thesis; I will forever be thankful to my ex for the support she gave me in what was a very difficult and trying period of my life. A lot of the happiness I feel now I owe to her - both for being with me and for breaking up with me. I want to be focused on myself now. I want to be able to pursue whatever interesting opportunities come my way in this next phase of my (professional) life, without having to negotiate that with another person. And I'm very thankful that I get to do that.
I don't say this to be dissing on any bisexuals. If that's how you prefer to identify, that's up to you. I'd be interested in having a conversation about why bi, though, given that 'queer' and 'pansexual' are also well established options (though I have an uneasy relationship with pansexual too because I feel like it presents all sexual desire as being on an even field and is therefore quite reductionary of sexual desire).
I identify as queer. Queer is something of a catch-all phrase, though not in the way it is often used! While you can say that a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, etc identity is a 'queer' identity, each of these categories are identity categories onto themselves - and contain their own plethora of subcultures and ways of being which may or may not be 'queer'. What I'm trying to say is, these categories are overlapping, yes, but distinct. A lesbian is not necessarily queer. And yes, my eye does start to twitch every time I hear someone using the term queer interchangeably with other identity categories in the rainbow flavoured alphabet soup.
The reason that queer is a catch-all phrase, and why I identify with it so strongly, is because it is about a lot more than who you fuck. Sure, that's a part of it, but you can be staunchly heterosexual and still be queer. Queer is about critically engaging with the politics of gender, sexuality, and relationships. For a start. I'd say it's also about engaging with the politics of class and race, but as a middle class white woman whose academic focus has tended to be on other middle class white people, I'm going to leave that discussion for people who actually know what they're talking about. (Sometimes I feel like it's narcissistic to be so focused on deconstructing myself. But, firstly, it's my blog and I'll do what I want with it! And secondly, the only thing I can really claim to be an expert on is myself.)
So, to clarify, I feel that it is incorrect to identify as 'queer' on the sole basis of having sex with someone of the same gender as yourself. Being queer is about challenging 'normativity'. You know, that thing where women and men are supposed to like each other and get married (to each other) and be monogamous and have babies. And that thing where boys and girls look and act in certain ways, and those ways are different from one another. Or, you know, the idea that certain ways of doing or learning or creating are more valid or productive or useful than others.
The reason all this is on my mind as of late is because my life underwent a pretty big change a couple months ago, and it's taken me down a rather unexpected path. My girlfriend and I broke up, and I decided to start seeing men. It's...complicated and I don't fully understand how I went from being adamantly disinterested in men and happily committed to a beautiful woman to falling out of love with said woman and becoming happily uncommitted to some wonderful men. But it happened fast. Or, it didn't. At any rate, the turn around from being devastated about the breakup to being really fucking happy with my life happened incredibly fast.
Have I magically turned straight? No, definitely not. Am I still into women? Yes...no...I don't know. After a 7 year hiatus from men it's just feeling really nice to be in the company of men. This whole thing has left me with more questions than answers, but, for the most part I feel like the answers to the questions I've got are pretty much irrelevant. As long as the answer to the question "Am I happy?" is "Yes." Which it is.
Which is funny, because, for a long time I felt like I couldn't be happy with men. Because 7+ years ago I was really, very unhappy being with men. But... a lot has changed. What I realise now is that it wasn't men, as such, that I was unhappy with, but heteronormativity. The expectation that I would conform to particular ways of being gendered, sexual, and in a relationship did not sit easy for me. Especially in Calgary, which, in case you didn't know, is a very conservative place! Nonconformity isn't exactly encouraged in Calgary.
But, I've spent the better part of past decade gradually developing my queerness and now feel quite comfortable to be myself - in all my normative and non-normative glory - across all my relationships; be they with friends, family, colleagues, lovers, strangers, housemates, or service providers. My relationships with men now are quite different from before. For starters, they occur on my terms or they don't occur at all. I feel quite free, actually. Even more so than when I was just dating women. Because now, other person(s) consenting, I can have whatever kind of relationship I want with whomever I want. My reflections on queering relationships and the problem with monogamy are probably best left for another day though!
I will just say this: I really am happily uncommitted. And I really do feel free. I'm very nearly finished my PhD, and I have absolutely no idea what kind of a journey that's going to take me on. It was wonderful to have a partner for a good chunk of this last push to finish my thesis; I will forever be thankful to my ex for the support she gave me in what was a very difficult and trying period of my life. A lot of the happiness I feel now I owe to her - both for being with me and for breaking up with me. I want to be focused on myself now. I want to be able to pursue whatever interesting opportunities come my way in this next phase of my (professional) life, without having to negotiate that with another person. And I'm very thankful that I get to do that.
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