amazon_syren

Hey! :-D

( That Title Was Serious, Here Be Ranting )

PolyCat.org

Lots of poly101 (and some poly202) resources and articles.

YAY!

Some favourites:


Quantum Love (101): Moreover, in polyamory, there is no social construction to rely on, no pre-written script to validate my emotions. So I am thoroughly me, with a responsibility to be honest with myself and with everyone else involved about my passions, resentments, needs, desires, my history and my dreams.

Fixing the Refidgerator -- How to deal with the scary stuff in polyamourous relationships.

NRE, Falling In Love, and Conscious Choices.

What Not to Do - Non-Disaster Version.

Posessive Jealousy vs Informative Jealousy -- How to tell the difference, and what they each mean.

How to Communicate 101

Link Posts:
Feelings, Communication and Negotiation.


Related Link:
Poly for Dummies.

Quotation: Own your feelings. No one can make you sad or angry or happy, they are your emotions. They exist in your head and nowhere else. You own them. You. There are always choices. Accept that sometimes you are going to feel good or bad for no reason at all - not because of the people or events in your life. When you make someone else accountable for your feelings, your disempower yourself.

This statement actually kind of drives me nuts.
In particular it drives me nuts because it tends to appear, if not in the same breath, certainly in the same article/101 post/book as statements like:
"You can't make a rule that says 'no falling in Love with other people'. You can only make a rule that says 'no more than two nights a week spent on dates with other people'. You can make rules to govern people's behaviour, but not their emotions".

Because - as every poly101 text says - emotions aren't rational.
You can't just *decide* not to feel, say, jealous and then actually be successful. You can decide to ignore your jealousy or not talk about it, and have it be the elephant in the room, and spend a lot of time crying or angry, but you won't actually *stop* feeling jealous until you actually sit down, figure out what the Real Problem underlying the jealousy is, and then sit down *with your partner* and figure out how to address *that*.

You can choose how you react to the emotions that get stirred up in a given situation, but... you can't choose the emotions themselves.

Statements like "you own your emotions [...] there are always choices" imply a significant degree of consciousness and rationality that emotion doesn't actually have.

I can't tell myself: "You will no-longer feel threatened by XYZ" and have it happen, any more than my girlfriend can ask me to do the same thing.


My girlfriend makes me happy. She makes me angry. She makes me feel safe. She makes me feel threatened.
She doesn't make me feel insecure, but she does trigger my insecurities fairly frequently.

I know that it's her presence in my life that is the cause of this or that feeling of peace or joy or wellbeing. I know that it's this or that action *of hers* that causes me to feel angry or crushed or safe or cherished in this or that situation.


That doesn't mean that I think the key to making myself not feel angry/crushed/anxious/fearful or whatever it is that's eating me in Situation Q is to get rid of Sara, or to make Sara pretend to be something she's not or feel something she doesn't.

The key to making myself stop feeling guilty about having three secondary sweethearts and half a dozen casual/play-partners while my primary partner is only dating me and casually playing with one other person... the key to that is neither to cut all of my sweethearts and five of my play-partners out of my life, nor to pressure my primamry to throw herself into more relationships than she wants.
It's to make sure that I'm giving my primary what she needs from me while also realizing that she's happy and comfortable with the number of partners she has and isn't actively looking for more.

I can choose how I deal with the emotional responses I produce.
Because they're mine.
But I can't choose which emotional responses I get in the first place, because emotions are not subject to that kind of rational decision-making.


Anyway. Blah blah blah, polyamoury.



Quotation that I actually like:
Let down your walls, trust, open up, risk and let yourself be vulnerable. Without vulnerability there is no intimacy. Emphasize friendship over romance. Take your time. Savor what you have instead of dwelling on what you don’t have. Practice truly unconditional love. Share. Learn.

Queer, Kinky and/or Poly Blogs (often also writerly):

No More Potlucks -- an Ottawa/Gatineau dyke blog.

Freaksexual -- first (currently) article is (A) long, and (B) about youth (as opposed to age) and poly organizing. So far, so interesting.

Radial Symmetry - The Blog of the Amazing and Delectable Megan Butcher.

AmandaEarl[DOT]Com - her new site, which includes poly stuff and writerly stuff, among other things. :-)

Radical Vulvas -- Ottawa Chapter. Keep your eye out for their August 14th show. :-)

Smut in the Capital City -- I posted this one a couple of days ago, but I'm putting it here, too. It's the blog of Rockalily co-founder Rawknee. Go take a look. :-)

AND

Sex Geek - also local. Sweeeeeeeeeeet. :-D


In particular, take a look at:
Ten Realistic Rules for Good Non-Monogamous Relationships,
desperately seeking a hot bi babe (or, the politics of recruiting),
AND
On (not) Being Femme.


There will be posts talking about this stuff - particularly the last one - in a day or two.

For now, I need to get myself out for a walk and some writing.


- TTFN,
- Amazon.

Weirdly[1], this (from Iclysdale's journal) is what I'm working towards:

have the stupid fights that families have, have endless stupid discussions where we figure out what we really meant and sort it out

... and the other stuff, too. ;-)



I had an interesting (and rather relieving) discussion with Sara last night that included our explaining to each other how polyamoury (specifically "being in multiple romantic relationships") gets defined inside each our own heads.


In *my* head, polyamoury looks a bit like this:

I start out dating Person A. Person A fills up my Romantic Calendar and my relationship with Person A means that I'm getting a particular mental (probably unconscious) list of needs and wants met. YAY!

I meet Person B. We hit it off and start dating. Now Persons A and B are filling up my Romantic Calendar (so they're sort of going halvsies when it comes to things like time). My relationship with Person A is still meeting that mental list of needs and wants. And now Person B is also meeting *another* mental list of needs and wants.
YAY!

Two different people, two different lists. Though there is probably some (maybe even lots) of overlap between the two lists.

Continue to add People (sweethearts, lovers, FwBs, etc) until I realize that I'm going to run out of personal time in-which to date anyone else and still maintain some sort of a non-dating personal life + down-time of my own.



My darling Sweetheart's mental map of polyamoury looks a bit different. In her case, she starts out dating Person A, and her relationship with Person A satisfies the needs and wants of a particular part of herself. (Maybe the artsy-spiritual side, or the energetic-club-kid side, or they hyper-sexual submissive-masochist side, or whatever). Which means that there are still a bunch of parts of herself that are not getting their needs and wants met.
So eventually she finds Person B, Person C, Persons D & E, and so on until her romantic calendar is nicely filled and, more to the point, she's got enough sweethearts, lovers and so on that the needs and wants of all the different parts of herself are being met.



This helps to explain (to some degree) why hearing her tell me that "Part of me is crazy about you, and part of me likes you as a friend but is totally uninterested in you romantically," freaks me out to the degree that it does.


In *my* mental map of romance and relationships, 100% of me is interested in being with a given partner. Regardless of how many partners I have. (Granted, I've yet to have more than one Sweetheart, so this is all theory for me at this point).
So hearing about this 50/50 thing scared the hell out of me because, to my ears, it sounds like she's having a HUGE conflict of emotional interest and my situation as her sweetheart is very precarious.

Whereas, when she's *saying* it, she means (I think) something along the lines of:
"My relationship with you satisfies the wants and needs of This Part of Me. And This Part of Me is totally crazy about you because you're exactly what it wants and needs. All the other parts of me want and need something else that you can't be without NOT being what This Part of Me already wants and needs. So be yourself, let This Part of Me be totally crazy about you, and let me go and find Other People to take care of the other parts of me".


And when I think of it that way, it's a lot less scary.


Anyway. All this to say that: Wow. I'm really clueless about this and have a lot to work on. Okay then, let's do that. Wah. :-)


But at least I know. :-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)


[1] Actually, it's not that weird. And I know it's not that weird. I'm just still very much learning that "good, healthy, relationship" does NOT equal "we never fight, are interested in more or less exactly the same things All the Time, and the honeymoon never ends".
Intellectually I know that this is crap fed to me by the same culture that tells me that my purpose-as-a-woman is to pump out babies and/or to be a fuck-doll for The Man, and that fits of jealous rage mean my partner Really Loves Me. Emotionally, however, I'm having some difficulty letting this one go. :-P

Okay,

So a while back (late August?), when I was still searching madly for appartments, I spent an evening with Idioglossia. She made me feel better, so YAY HER! :-D
Anyway. I'm brining this up because we were talking about the Bullet Train to Marriage model of relationship-ing.

YOU ALL NEED TO GO AND READ THIS NOW:

Sex, Relationships and the Hazards of Making Default Decisions.


The above link goes to a blog article (by Greta Christina, author of Paying for It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients) that discusses just that: the internalized expectations of How Relationships Go that I, for one, have (A) concluded are doing me no good what-so-ever, and (B) am, despite this conclusion, still having one hell of a time getting rid of.

It's super-important, and I think everyone should read it.

Go. Read it now. Then link your friends to it, so that they can read it, too. :-)


Side note: This One, by the same author, discusses how sexuality is tied up with the Lure/Fear of the Forbidden in our society and how familiarity with sexuality is often thought to lead to bordom with sex rather than, say, comfort with it. It's also a good article. Shifter_Cat, in particular, I think would enjoy it. :-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)