How to Fuck Up

There's an interesting thread going on right now over at Mistress Matisse's journal about codependency and rescuing. In short: guy is at wits end trying to help his addict girlfriend, guy appeals to Matisse for advice in how to help girlfriend, guy ends up getting some advice he probably didn't at all expect about dealing with his own codependency. Unsurprisingly, the entry touched a nerve. The comments board is on fire with folks' opinions on all this.

Somehow, from links of links of links, I ended up at an oldie but goodie from the Alt.Polyamory FAQ. I haven't read Elise Matthesen's "How to Fuck up a Relationship" in a while, but it's still a good one. (And no, it's not just about polyamory.) If you want to fuck up a perfectly good relationship, there probably isn't a better game plan.

Go read it. I'll wait . . .

Seriously, though, building a healthy relationship keeps coming down to pretty simple strategies.

• Develop tools to know and understand yourself.
  
• Develop tools to communicate.
  
• Use them.
  
• Take on responsibility for your own "stuff": actions, emotions, feelings, desires. Be accountable.
  
• Respectfully decline to take responsibility for your partners' "stuff".

Sadly, while this stuff is "simple," it's sure as hell not easy. What is the saying? A minute to learn and a lifetime to master? It's that. It doesn't help that we're up against an entire culture that encourages dysfunction.

And everyone has their own stumbling blocks. It's not easy, not at all. But looking at the alternatives of codependency and mutual resentment, I can't imagine intentionally going the other way.

And its all on a foundation, one block on the other. If "you can't exchange power you don't have," it's equally true that you can't be in a relationship if you don't have a self to relate from.

It all starts with knowing yourself. I don't care what your practice for knowing yourself is. I'm fond of sitting practice and Julia Cameron's "morning pages" but everyone has their own way. Meditation, yoga, trancework, therapy -- whatever works for you is your way. But without that practice of self-knowledge, there is nothing to communicate. No responsibility to take, and none to withhold. There are no clear desires and no means to articulate them. There are no means to determine if something is working for you or not. And that feels like a very dangerous place to be, and a very dangerous place to take others.

Polyamory hits the dailies

Of the places I'd expect to see an article on polyamory, I can't say the Chicago Tribune was high on my list.

While the article isn't overwhelmingly positive (descriptions of folks past their teens gazing "googly-eyed" aren't generally approving), it also isn't a smear piece. Mostly, it seems to make polyamorous folk look, well, as pedestrian as GLBT folks.

"The majority of polyamorists are white middle- and upper-class professionals," says Elisabeth Sheff, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University. She's one of the few academics who have studied polyamory, interviewing hundreds for her research.

"Many work in the computer industry, so there is a strong online community. They tend to gravitate toward urban areas," she said, "much like gays and lesbians."

Dayplanners, and the onset of spring

Once upon a time, I was involved with a bard. It was a long-distance love affair: we'd gotten hot and heady over email, tossing Crowley references about and arguing philosophical minutiae. By the time we met at my first Pantheacon in '96, we agreed to make a trickster's bet and I was aiming to lose so we could sleep together.

All went to plan, and that began a completely whirlwind year. The bard and I saw each other in person only a very few times that year, but they were deeply meaningful to me. We called and wrote as often as we could. On one whirlwind trip, I met one of his other sweeties and her partner, who later became my lovers. The bard floated through life, living large as tricksters do, loving and eating and cracking bad jokes and playing heart-breakingly beautiful songs. I got to play muse and foil, and also stood up to him more than I think most folks did. It was a hell of a year.

It was the bard that gave me my first dayplanner. He was stunned I could live without one, and as I got to know him better I understood why. Not only was he touring the country to give classes and concerts, but he seemed to have a string of sweeties in each town. (It's good to be the bard.) You're going to keep a social calendar like that, you need a day planner.

These days, I am convinced that the day planner is the poly person's very best friend and confidant, tracking dates with gentle precision.

In our Brigid ritual the other day, I taught a song I learned from the bard, with the line: "I want to be merrily courted in spring." I warned folks up front: sing it like you mean it, or don't, but it's a spell. In the less than two days since the ritual, I've been suddenly flooded with new connections, two renewed offers for rope bottoms, and a fervent modelling request from a photographer who kisses rather well.

At the moment, I'm sitting with all of these lovely potentials and eyeing my calendar. Oh, bard, why didn't I get my dayplanner in order before the ritual? I know better.

Sadly, they don't all live in Texas

I have the world's best exes, I swear.

I was still smiling over my Darling Ex-Husband (tm) making Monty Python jokes at me to cheer me up when I got an invite from one of my first girlfriends to the Sex Workers Art Show. How cool is that? Heck, I might take one of my other (and more local) very favorite exes to go see it with me.

At coffee the other night, a friend suggests that it has to do with poly: that we poly folk have a continuum of relationships and that this allows us to maintain better terms with our exes than other folks might. Jack Rinella says something similar in The Compleat Slave, that you might decide that a certain kind of relationship -- say, M/s -- isn't for you, but that doesn't mean you can't be friends or even play partners again.

Maybe. I'm not sure what it is. Right now, I just feel blessed.

Polyamory, emotional distance, and practice

Mistress Matisse has some very astute things to say about polyamory this week.

And I think she nails the absolute key quality that helps keep things working: perspective.

No one can predict with perfect accuracy how he or she will feel about anything, but exactly how you feel isn't as important as how you respond to those feelings. There is a key trait in people who do polyamory well, and it's this: They are good at regulating their strong emotions. By that I mean, when something emotionally intense is happening to you, either good or bad, you're able to see it as part of a larger whole and keep it in perspective.

There's a lot of very good, pithy examples in the article -- go forth and read it.

As a magickal person, I'd add that this is yet another place where having a daily practice fits in for me. I don't particularly care what someone's daily practice is, but I am a huge fan of having a solid anchor to return to when emotions get off kilter. For me, that's my morning pages (unpublished writing in which I can rant for twenty minutes), my sitting practice, and my yoga. For someone else it might be regularly grounding and centering. Or aikido. Or a regular workout routine. For a poly person, it might be a regular time to personally sort through their feelings before a checkin with their sweetie.

The key to me is that these kinds of practices create just a small moment of distance between ourselves and our emotions. I have emotions, I feel them - but I am not the same as what I am feeling. "I am angry," has one set of implications. The difference between this and "I feel angry" is more than semantics.

The other thing for me about a daily practice is the discipline of it. I'm very good at pushing through the steep incline of learning something new. I absolutely detest the long plateaus that inevitably hit my practice afterward. Working through the sore muscles of renewing my workout practice? No problem. Actually getting on the mat twice a week no matter how I'm feeling? A lot harder.

But, I'm thinking a lot about what Matisse has to say about maintaining existing relationships in the face of new ones.

But you can't act like a junkie who needs an endless New Person fix or your original partner will freak out. You have to feel all the good emotions your new relationship is bringing you, while continuing to love your existing sweetheart the way they need to be loved.

True, that. And, also the lesson of a daily practice. Daily practice -- with the emphasis on daily -- is all about returning to center in the face of the new shiny. I write my morning pages as close to daily as I can, no matter what's up. At my best, I do the yoga whether or not I feel like it. And, the real nugget there for me is that despite all of my resistance, I always feel better after those practices than I did before. When I am on the mat, I may feel a ton of resistance. I tend to bargain with myself to make it through just five more minutes of class. It's just like trying not to safeword, some days. But when I make it through, I never have the thought that I wish I hadn't. I never once leave feeling that that investment is a waste of time. In a way, my practice is my existing sweetheart, and my practice gives me the skills to (one happy day) nurture a primary partnership through both the inclines and the steep slogs.

Poly pioneers, self-knowledge, and courage

Sometimes you just see the right thing on waking.

I've been giving a lot of thought to polyamory lately. The thing about poly is that there simply is no rulebook. Certainly there are pioneers who try to write about their journeys. And, some of those pioneers being actual relationship therapists, they have useful things to say. Deborah Anapol's Love without Limits is one I read early. Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy's The Ethical Slut is quite a good one. There's a newer rant called Redefining our Relationships by Wendy-o Matik which I have to say is one of my favorites right now (probably because it reminds me of my early rants on the topic).

Polyamorous folks are in the early stages of a very new kind of relationship. Which means that all of these pioneers can really only map out their own routes, and those of their tribes, and try to make sense of it all. The best route depends on the weather, the people, whom you're travelling with, your supplies, your navigator. So I worry about those folks who start holding up The Ethical Slut like it's a rulebook rather than a navigation tool. I worry about what will happen when they get lost on the path and find that Dossie is not in fact going to fly in and play judge and arbiter. Nope, only true consensus is going to serve any relationship.

One friend is fond of saying that there is no substitute for clear and open communication in the moment. And so I tend to think that statements like, "I'm queer," or "I'm poly" or "I'm kinky" should start discussions rather than end them.

But if there are no rules, there are still adages. Those pioneers come back with some crazy Zen wisdom in their forays. A friend in an open marriage once said to me, "There are no rules, Miriam! Only agreements!" (I think he was actually talking about drumming, but who am I to turn down a useful saying?) For most of the last year I've been chewing on that one like a Zen riddle, slowly teasing out more and more of it. Every once in a while I light up in a smile thinking I might have it, but it's a slippery little koan.

Today, Monk shares another quote from a poly person that lands for me:

She was talking about poly, about doing the more difficult things involved with being poly. She said to me, “The thing about courage is that it is not about the absence of fear, rather it is about committing to something in spite of your fears.”

Interestingly enough, T. Thorn Coyle hits almost exactly the same notes yesterday about the task of self-knowledge.

Different topics? I'm thinking not so much. In Thorn's article, the task of self knowledge happens within the context of love, the "fabric of all". This task of seeing and being seen is difficult work. Among all the other challenges polyamory brings up is more opportunities for being seen, all at the same time. That can feel like liberation, and it can feel like claustrophobia. Which it feels like at any moment has a lot more to do with my personal practice than it does with my lovers.

And this week I am reminded again, by those around me and myself - personality does not go away because insight has arrived. Personality is still danced with, laughed with, struggled with, loved and hated. "Know thyself" means this, too. The knowing does not make things disappear, no, it makes things appear more clearly. And sometimes that doesn't feel good at all.

But we see ourselves. Not wholly good, not wholly bad. We just are. One little piece in the web of life. And that, too, is perfection.