Livre d'Or

10 years (and one month) ago some friends of ours, themselves a married couple, asked me and jack out. At the time we had no clear expectations for what 'going out' was going to mean, but we fell in love very intensely and rapidly and were thinking long term thoughts probably sooner than would be standard. Though there isn't really any 'standard' for a couple dating another couple.

A few months later our OSOs went to Legoland for their 10^th wedding anniversary, and we sort of joked that maybe when the quad reached ten years we should follow the same tradition. So this year we have in fact been together for ten years, and we did in fact go to Legoland.

( theme park and soppiness, passing mentions of Covid )

Anyway. The short version is that I had an awesome time with my loves and I feel extremely fortunate.

I managed to spend the night of Shavuot learning with my OSOs.

( some religion, some relationship stuff )

So yes, lots of changes, lots of feelings. Having had the positive experience of celebrating Shavuot together, including the travel, helps a lot. Another step I've taken is to set myself a challenge to leave the house every day, because if I don't have the motivation of just popping round to OSOs' I'm liable to get stuck indoors and that's not great for my wellbeing. I'm playing Pokemon Go again, and have treated myself to a fitness watch which gives me credit for moving around more. And in a few more weeks I'll have my second vaccine; I'm starting to believe I'll actually make it to that point, and after that who knows but I have some hope it will be better than 2020-21.

I am a ridiculously stubborn completionist, so I want to do the last four days of this 30-day meme that has taken me over a year so far.

I'm up to A song that makes you want to fall in love, and my immediate reaction to the prompt was, I don't really want to fall in love. I mostly agree with the pre-Modern idea that falling in love is a kind of mild mental illness. I want to love people, I want to have lifelong loving relationships with partners, friends and family, but I don't want to fall into being all giddy and hormonal whenever I see a person. Also I am poly-saturated: if I fell in love with any new people now, I'm sure we'd all cope, but it would be kind of annoying because I'd be distracted by a person I don't have any time or energy for.

I've always been somewhat drawn towards the kind of falling in love where you are optimistic about working together towards a cause. Perhaps that's best exemplified by אני ואתה:

You and I will change the world
You and I, and then everyone will join us
They've said it before, but it doesn't matter
You and I will change the world

The thing about that sort of love is that it doesn't at all have to be romantic, it can be a close friendship or just a really good partnership. But if someone evokes that feeling in me and I'm otherwise romantically compatible with them, I quite often will fall for them.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there's this wonderful song by Hazel O'Connor, Will you?, which is about the exact moment of falling in love. Though it's possible to interpret as being mainly about lust and sex.

And then we touch
Much too much
This moment has been waiting for a long, long time
Makes me shiver
Makes me quiver
This moment I am so unsure
This moment I've been waiting for
Is it something you've been waiting for
Waiting for too?

I think my actual pick is going to be a song that was played to me by someone I was already in love with, and it's not all the style of music I usually prefer, but it expresses the idea of what I want out of being in love: All of me by John Legend. It's about a kind of love that's being really seen for who you are, and appreciated. I particularly like:

Love your curves and all your edges
All your perfect imperfections

( video embed )

Five years ago, I married jack. At the time I'd never had a relationship lasting as much as five years, and now we are nine. Back in 2010, I spent a lot of time considering whether getting married to jack was really the right decision, but looking back I couldn't be more pleased with how it has turned out.

Also, a friend recently asked me for advice about marriage, from my perspective as a happily married person. I don't think I'm at all qualified to comment, because really five years together seems like a really short time. It's about 10% of the marriage I'm hoping for, and probably the easiest tenth, too. But anyway, it's a fun topic so I shall put some scattered thoughts here.

( rambling about marriage and relationships )

So in the end, the advice that I gave to my friend was that a good marriage is partly a matter of luck, and partly a matter of picking the right person. But it's only partly luck; the people actually involved in the marriage have some control over whether the relationship is happy or not. I don't necessarily count time-limited relationships as failures, but if what a person wants is a forever relationship, then it's important to think about what may help towards that. And I don't know if I will get that myself, but the first five years have been really good and I'm looking forward to lots and lots more.

The quad is mostly non-escalator relationships, though it does contain two married couples who live together and in my OSOs' case have children. It's more like, as we spend more time together we have more shared experiences and more closeness. And we've just noticed that it's a year and a half since we got together, and there are some small new things to report.

( diary stuff )

Meanwhile I'm handling a potentially career-threatening crisis at work in the middle of my busiest month of teaching, which is why I'm not very present online or in one-to-one communications lately. Definitely getting to spend time with my loves and put work stress out of my mind at weekends has been helping a lot in coping with this. But I'm hoping to be more in communication soon.

I missed National (nation of internet?) Coming Out Day, partly because I was busy, and partly because it wasn't the right time to make this post.

( coming out thoughts )

So with that preamble, I too, a much lesser writer than Penny or Monroe, have something to tell you: I am polyamorous. That is to say, I'm currently in romantic relationships with several different people, all of whom know about eachother and are completely happy and supportive. I don't think this is likely to be a surprise to most of my readers; I've not been making huge efforts to keep it a secret, and I'm sure many of you whom I haven't told directly will have found it easy enough to read between the lines. But this is the first time I've actually said the sentence, I'm poly, on my public blog. And part of why I'm saying it now is that it's not only a fact about my philosophy of relationship, and I'm not even sure it's a fact about my identity at all, poly is more a thing I do than who I am. It's also a fact about my life and the people who are important to me.

A year ago I became part of a quad, four people who are in relationships with eachother in various combinations. And it's been a completely wonderful year, full of new experiences, and we're all really hopeful that this can be a long-term, potentially a committed thing. When I was poly in the sense that I had various shapes of romantic-ish connections alongside my primary relationship, it didn't matter so much, partly because I don't identify as poly as such. People knew who I loved and who I was close to, and that was great, and it wasn't really anybody's business but the people involved exactly what form those loving relationships took. Now that I'm part of a quad, it feels like a different situation. Unlike with being bi, it's not that people need to know this fact about me and who I am, it's that I want people to know whom I love and the relationship structure I'm in. Every time in the past year I've referred to, or even introduced, my partners as "my friend" instead of "my partner" I've cringed internally; it's like going back 20 years and playing the pronoun game because I wasn't sure how safe it was to come out.

The thing about coming out about relationship structures rather than identities is that you're telling other people's secrets. The other three people in the quad needed to be free to make their own decisions about when and what to tell their respective parents. I told my own parents as soon as I was reasonably confident that the relationship was stable and not just a passing fling, and as when I told them I was dating a woman, they said supportive things and didn't entirely understand what I meant and have been slowly coming to terms with the idea that I'm in this multi-person relationship network instead of the dyad they expected when I got married. But, well, four people have a lot of parents between them, and part of why I missed National Coming Out Day was I didn't want to put anything on the internet until all the parents had been informed directly.

And even now I've made this post, I haven't just flipped the switch to being Out instead of Closeted. It's not that hard to connect this journal to my wallet name if you go digging, but I hope that a cursory web search on my wallet name isn't going to find this pseudonymous blog. I'm not out at work and I have no immediate plans to be; I'll carry on saying "spending some time with... friends" when people ask me about my plans for the weekend. And I'm not fully out within the Jewish community (though I'm out to individual Jewish people including obviously my parents), and both those things mean that I'm not likely any time soon to mention poly on Facebook.

In some ways being out about poly feels more scary than telling people I'm bi. That's partly because I've been lucky that I've experienced relatively little homophobia or biphobia. And I generally hang out with liberal tolerant types who at worst accept the culturally prevalent idea that gay people are just like "us" except that they happen to be attracted to the same gender. Poly in that sense is less "normal"; there are many people who generally see themselves as non-judgemental but have no paradigm at all for multiple or multi-person relationships other than having affairs and deceiving or cheating on one's (singular) partner. Even some LGBT campaigners and activists are so fixated on the assimilationist paradigm of "just like heteronormative dyadic relationships" that they are eager to distance themselves from any kind of poly or open relationship situation. But at the same time, although it's harder to tell people about my relationships with several people than it is to tell them about my (past) relationships with women, it still feels like it's my choices that are being disapproved of, not that I'm being oppressed because of something I just can't change about myself.

Anyway, I'm very happy and in love, that's the other thing I wanted to say, aside from all this political and angsty stuff. It's been a wonderful amazing year, in so many ways.

Please feel free to ask questions; I personally don't mind being a resource if you've not had much exposure to poly relationships before now. As you can see from this post, I'm being a bit cagey about the actual identities of my partners, but if you ask me general questions that I can answer without disrupting anyone else's privacy, I'll do my best.

atreic made a great comment on my post about Valentine's Day angst: it's not ... a day about traditional relationships celebrating themselves openly ... it's a day about secret love making secret hints.

My first instinct is to be scared of secret hints. I like direct communication, I'm afraid of horrible misunderstandings and even though it's really a very unlikely sort of danger to worry about, Far from the madding crowd still haunts me. There's also the issue of lots of teenage experiences where people sent tokens of affection (which were really badges of coolness) and I was among the despised group who didn't receive anything because I wasn't popular. I didn't want the valentines for their own sake, I wanted not to be laughed at for not getting any.

That said, I totally love atreic's definition of Valentine's Day:

It celebrates the fact that sometimes love isn't easy and people pine and don't know how to say things and that sometimes people are much fonder of you than you know they are.

So, I invite you to talk about crushes and pining and secret love and people you shouldn't have feelings for. Comment anonymously or identify yourself, talk about current situations or past experiences, anything goes.

( growing up gay )

Happy day of not knowing how to talk about your feelings, or having unruly ones.

Emily Nagoski has an excellent blog, The Dirty Normal, where she talks about sex and relationships from the point of view of a biologist. Really good stuff, and in particular an excellent counter to the people who like to run around the internet justifying mid twentieth century suburban American sexism by telling stupid just-so stories about "evolution". She comes from a fairly mainstream context, mostly discussing heterosexual monogamous couples and mostly vanilla sex and generally normative relationship expectations. I think she's a person of good will, she does make an effort to mention that there are other gender possibilities and relationship configurations out there, but in taking a biologist's view she tends to concentrate on the typical rather than the exceptions.

I think a lot of her information is very applicable even outside the context she's starting from, because it's just about how psychology and bodies work in ways that are still true regardless of gender identity or relationship choices. And she's really non-judgemental about people who don't fit her standard paradigms! She's always good, well worth checking out her blog including the sex tips project (lots of stuff there that would be very easy to repurpose in a more kinky context than where she's coming from!)

I wanted to link to a recent post in particular, though, because I think it's advice that quite a few of my friends could stand to hear. And not in a self-righteous way, either, because what she's discussing here is very much relationship mistakes I've made myself in the past and have no doubt I'm still prone to. I think the idea of "overfunctioning" is probably a more helpful frame than "codependence", which is what this kind of thing usually gets called. So, The Dirty Normal on Am I helping? Am I helping?

My joint birthday party with jack at the weekend was great fun. Lots of lovely people, including people I haven't caught up with in far too long, including deborah_c and hobbitz. It was my first experience of having a party that included small children; they were wonderfully entertaining and not at all destructive. But it also felt like a life milestone: I've reached the stage where several of my peers have kids. Also, purplecthulu pointed out that I have now reached the age of majority in hobbit terms. When it got to the late night stage, the thing that seemed like a really good idea was to impose a fairly formal structure, with a conch and points of order, on a discussion about government mandated traffic-light labelling on food.

On the negative side, though, my asthma was bad enough to scare me pretty much throughout, and not responding to drugs. ( health and relationships )

Feh. Lots of couples have worse issues with illness or career stuff or geography getting in the way of the relationship. We'll be ok, but celebrating milestone birthdays is somewhat dampened by this situation.

So I'm going to angst about it. I didn't go to Bicon this year. I sort of planned to, and it would've been a good year to do it, given that I had both time and money, and I was in the right country, but then I chickened out.

( I think I was supposed to have sorted this out by the time I was 20 )

I should probably stop trying to overthink this, shouldn't I?