theferrett

One of the things hardly anybody talks about in poly is when your lover comes to you, crying, because their other partner just hurt them.

Shit gets surreal, because it’s time for you to play therapist.  And you’re not in a mood to play therapist, because the woman you love is upset because someone who’s Not You has just done something spectacularly shitty.  Your initial instinct is not “Well, let’s try to figure out what s/he really meant” but to drive over and punch him (or her) in the face for being such a meaniepants.

But no.  Part of a good polyamorous relationship is supporting your partner in their other relationships.  So you take a deep breath, and sit down, and talk it through with them.

And it sucks.

Because you know, relationship talks aren’t fun ever.  But at least when they’re about what you’re doing, it’s got some kind of easy benefit to it: when this is done, we’ll be happier together.  Whereas relationship talks with your lover about her lover’s foibles are exasperating, because the best reward at this point for success is that she keeps staying with a partner you’re not even sure she should be dating.

Fixing other relationships is also a bit of a trigger for most folks.  Because yeah, you know she loves you.  But there’s something about seeing her so upset about this other lover that makes you realize exactly how much this other person means to her… And there’s always that little tickle of, “If she cares that much, how can she have room left for me?”

The temptation is to go, “Just dump him.”  But no.  Instead, you wind up doing that one thing that’s harder than anything else – being fair.  Trying to separate what s/he meant from what s/he actually said.  Getting past this initial shock of pain and anger to try to figure out whether the sin is forgivable.  Sifting through past actions to try to anticipate what comes next to see whether the future will be acceptable.

For a guy who, at this moment, you don’t like all that much.

And all the while you’re hoping you don’t have to lead a horse to water, because if this relationship is truly broken, and you say, “You need to dump them” and God forbid it works out, sometimes they remember that.  You’ve seen other poly relationships where “You told me to dump him/her!” became a battleground later on as proof that you don’t really care.

No, you need to be supportive.  Remind them that dumping is an option.  Perhaps a strong one, if it’s that bad.  And swallow back that worry that if worst comes to worse and you have to say, “Look, I can’t deal with all the uproar this guy in your life causes any more, you gotta choose between him or me,” that she’s willing to choose you.

But getting her to dump them is not your main goal.  Your main goal is making her happy, and in that moment you envy all those poly couples who have a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy where you never cross the streams, but that’s not you.  She shares all the relevant bits of her life with you, and you want her happy (which she is, when this other relationship is functioning properly), so you bite back the snarkier comments and talk her through things like a goddamned grownup.

You fix ALL the things.  And she goes off to talk with her other lover, and you lean back wondering whether you’ve done the right thing.

You have.  It’s an act of charity and love, expending your time and energy to help patch up her other relationships.  It’s an act of mature love that goes beyond the greediness of “This is mine” and into what I’d consider to be the true polyamory of not just tolerating your partner’s other lovers, but actively supporting and encouraging a fullness of life and love and happiness.

It ain’t easy, though.  I know; I’ve done it for Gini, and I’m sorry to say I’ve done that to other people when my own poly-intentions have slipped a bit, and Gini’s had to play psychiatrist for me more than once.

So this is my thank-you letter for everyone who pitches in when the other partners cause stress, the quiet support behind the curtain.  You’re why the good poly relationships work.  And you don’t get acknowledged nearly enough.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

So over on FetLife, the Facebook for Kinksters, there’s a thread asking you to rate how good you are in the sack:

A) I will rock your world. I’m so good you’ll be pissed off at all of your past lovers for all the time wasted that you could have been with me.

B) “The best you’ve ever had” doesn’t begin to describe me.

C) I’m so good you will want to put a ring on it.

D) I get no complaints

E) You wouldn’t kick me out of bed for eating crackers and leaving crumbs

F) Mercy fuck, and teach me some skills please.

G) Don’t bother with a mercy fuck. I’m beyond hope.

Now, I’d like to rank myself on this list, but the problem is that I don’t really think there’s a generic “good in bed.” There are certain baseline skills you can use to ensure that you’re not awful, skills which can be honed by practice, but everyone’s chemistry is so different it’s hardly worth comparing.

I mean, look, my wife and partners think I’m great in bed – but why wouldn’t they?  They’re dating me for the long term, which means they must have clicked with me sexually enough to go, “Well, I should get some more of that.”  And presumably, as I learn what they like, I get better with time.

Meanwhile, I’ve gone on dates with some women who it just didn’t work out with sexually… and as a partial result of that non-connection, they’re not currently with me.  That doesn’t mean they’re bad people, but why date someone who’s bad in bed for them – like me – when we could just be friends?

Plus, there’s the curve.  It’s hard to look someone in the eye after the intimacy of sex and go, “Whoo, that was spectacularly mediocre.”  I think I’ve gotten a sum total of one “You’re terrible” comment post-coitus in my life, even when I was achingly aware of how terrible this was for them.  Usually, you go for subtler things, like correcting them in mid-sex, or steering them towards different body parts, or even just declining a second go-around, rather than going, “Hey, can I post that sex on FailBlog?”

So you know, I’m awash in a sea of positive feedback, but it doesn’t mean that much to me because it’s self-selecting.  And I think some folks take that feedback to mean “Yeah, I am SPECTACULAR in bed!” instead of looking at the circumstances surrounding that feedback and compensating.

I know I’m good with certain people.  Does that mean I’ll be good with you?  Who the hell knows?  There’s that mysterious element of sexual chemistry, and sometimes that just doesn’t pan out.  Like I said, some careful attention to what your partner likes can smooth over a lot of gaps, but sometimes people are just hard to read.  Sometimes it’s just fumble after fumble no matter how you try.

You know when I know you’ll be good in bed with me?  When we kiss.  That kiss will tell me everything I need to know about how good we’ll be, because the kiss itself carries so much – how well we read each other, our sympathetic styles, the scent and taste of you.  One kiss, and I can tell you how good it’s going to be.. for me.

When do you know whether I’ll be good for you?  Hell if I know.  Maybe you know, but I sure as heck don’t. And I don’t think I can tell you from any generic chart.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

I’m too fat and puffy.  I don’t mind being a little pudge-pot as long as I can run up a flight

of stairs without getting winded, but that time has passed.

So it’s time to get in shape, and the problem is that all the metrics suck.

And let’s be honest: good metrics are a psychological tool.  It’s all very fine and well to say, “I’m gonna get healthy!” – but for those of us who actually dislike eating well and exercising and all the sweat that comes with it, having a single number we can look at every day and see its movement is critical.  We like to know that all of this pain we’re enduring is providing results, even if we can’t see them yet.

We need a number to go up or down.  That helps us keep going on the days all we’re going to get otherwise is pained muscles and a crabby stomach.

The standard goal is “Let’s lose some weight!”  But “losing weight” is a goal that’s all too susceptible to gaming.  There are all sorts of stupid ways to lose weight – throwing up all your food, starving yourself, rinsing out your colon – and they’re at odds with some of the healthy things you should be doing.  I, for example, routinely put on about five to ten pounds before I start losing again, because I gain muscle faster than I lose fat.

But man, is it depressing to see that number go up after a hard day on the treadmill.

For similar reasons, you don’t want “Clothing sizes” or anything else to be your metric.  It’s too easy to find a shortcut where you cut some size in a way that’s actually unhealthy.

On the other hand, the “pure health” goalpoints are unsatisfying for different reasons.  Part of what you want is to fit into your skinny jeans, so “I’ve run for twenty minutes straight” feels unsatisfying when you’re still Mr. Chunky-dunk.  I mean, I hate exercise in all its forms, so the fact that I can do it for longer doesn’t feel good to me.

So what should I use as “A single number that indicates that I am losing weight and gaining fitness in a healthy fashion”?  Is there a single number that one could chart?  If so, I don’t know it.

That’s the problem, I think, with America’s fat obsession.  Weight is easy to track, has highly visible results… and it’s easily fooled as a metric, so that focusing on it alone leads to other problems.  What we need is an easily-trackable measurement that tracks overall health with a dash of weight loss.  And I think if we could find one, we could start battling the idea that less weight == more health.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

“Any history of suicide attempts?” the doctor asked.

“1987, 88, and 89,” I replied, hiding the fresh gashes on my arms.  “That was when I discovered my seasonal affective disorder.”

“How did you try to kill yourself?”

“Pills.  All three times.”

“So I probably shouldn’t give you any large prescriptions.”

Crap.  I hadn’t thought about that.  “…no.”

“Do you have suicidal thoughts outside of those times?”

“Once or twice a week usually.  Constantly now.  That’s why I’m here.”

“You said you don’t own a gun because you’re afraid of killing yourself.”

“364 days, I’d be okay with it,” I told him, feeling the full depth of my crazy quiver through me.  “But I can’t take the chance of that 365th day.”

“Well,” he said, typing my history furiously into his laptop, “If you feel suicidal, can you promise to call me first?”

“I will,” I lied, “But I’d have to call three other people first.”

He stopped typing.  “You have three people you’ve promised to call before you kill yourself?”

(Actually, I had made promises over the years to about eight people that I would call them before I killed myself, but I only had three of their numbers now.  Though if it came down to that, I probably could contact some of them on Facebook.)

“…yeah.”

More notes.  “Actually, if you’re ever suicidal, your first call should be to 911,” he explained.

“Yeah,” I scoffed.  “If I called 911 every time I felt like killing myself, I’d be in the hospital three days a week minimum.  And you don’t just go for three days.  Once you’re in, you stay in.  I don’t have that kind of time or money.”

“Should you be in the hospital now?  For your own safety?”

He said it gently, but it was a gun being slid onto the table.  Convince me, it said.  If you can’t, you’re going to be going for a lovely little vacation whether you want to be or not.

And the thing was, under the doctor’s kind-but-stern glare, I wasn’t sure whether I shouldn’t be in the crazy ward.  I realized that I’d built my entire life as a cage to hold this rampant insanity – having a safety net of multiple failsafes I’d promised to call if ever my will weakened, making sure I had habits to keep working and writing even when I was so depressed I could barely get out of bed, the warnings to friends about What Happens In May, the way I know to stay away from the knives in the kitchen when I’m down.

Sometimes, in discussing depression rationally, I have been obliged to get into stupid “My pain is worse than yours” debates, wherein I have to pull out my credentials of years of suicide attempts – because nobody who’d really felt this agony could be rational about it, man.  Which is always irritating.  But it washes off.

But that doctor?  Made me realize just how fucking crazy I really am.

….so I didn’t post for a while.

What right does a crazy man have to post about anything?

Then I got to thinking about my appendix.

When my appendix burst and I almost died, and they sliced me open to pressure-wash my insides, it was a point of pride that I was out running the obstacle course in the bouncy castle the next week.

Thing was, yes, my insides were stitched up and my guts were still healing.  It was very painful, sliding belly-down in a child’s playground… But it was my birthday.  I had to play on my birthday.  So I kept going, even though I was broken.  I did the things I wanted to do, and my friends thought that was somehow admirable.  Bold.

My brain is broken.  Don’t try to tell me otherwise.  I spend days locked in depression, barely able to function, and it’s only thanks to two decades’ worth of habits that I manage to get anything done at all.  I’m pretty fundamentally fucked up, with a lemminglike part of my thought process that keeps urging me to cut myself, to overdose on pills, to leave my loved ones because they’d be better off without me even if they wouldn’t be.

My brain does not work properly.  I’ve kluged together some extensive work-arounds, which passes for wisdom sometimes, but I know its true name: experience.  But if my underlying architecture wasn’t so poor, I wouldn’t have to think so hard.  I’d just act in healthy ways.

Yet even with this shattered psyche, I can hope there’s something fundamentally brave about continuing on.  About speaking.  About continuing to stand in public, talking, and sharing the handful of things that I know.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

Here’s how dumb marrying is in Skyrim:

1)  You have to buy a magic necklace for 200 gold.  Once you do, you’re eligible.

2)  Find a stranger, who says all of the other identical things that strangers do.  Ask them to marry you.  They may require you to kill somebody first.

3)  A ceremony later, you’re married!  To someone with zero personality!  It’s like marrying a Kardashian.

My question: Who the fuck finds this satisfying?

I mean, okay, I adore the romance-trees in Bioware games, where after a lot of talking and conversation trees and exploring the personality of a well-written character, there’s an option to go to romance.  That’s fine, because I’m invested in that person, and am, if not attracted, at least understanding who this person is that I’m committing to.

But why even bother in Skyrim?  There’s nobody you talk to often enough to really know who they are.  I married my hireling, a fellow magic college student, and the only thing she ever did to me was to cast two botched spells on me.  Why would I want to commit to her in any way?  What do I know about her?

Likewise, in Fable, I can marry and have kids, but you know what I know about my wife?  She’s really amused by my amazing arm-farting skills.  As is every other fucking woman in town.  I can stand in the town square, farting and dancing, and I’ll have a flock of enamored women and men surrounding me like chickens.

So why even bother?  Why would you marry some personality-less entity, who looks like one of a thousand others like them?  Are these games trying to say that marriage really is about just getting service (since you can pay 500 gold to hire a sidekick, or just marry them) and pumping out indistinguishable children?  It’s not even like the Sims, where these people express at least people-specific quirks, it’s a set of completely interchangeable idiots you can marry, or not, and marrying doesn’t change a thing in your life.

Look.  I want to fall in love in games.  But it’s with people, not sprites.  I don’t even understand why they’re bothering to put in these options if they’re so poorly done, or who they really appeal to.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

I haven’t been hanging out on OKCupid a lot lately, mainly because FetLife is proving more interesting.  (Mainly because, well, you know, naked.)  But I still like OKCupid because of its complex ranking algorithms – I always love seeing who I’m compatible or who I’m not compatible with, and sometimes I sort globally by mutual match to see who is most like me in the world.

However, OKC’s introduced this new feature that creeps me out.

I just got an email that said, “The_ferrett, [user_name] is checking you out right now!”  And it told me that they’re bugging me now because she’s an exceptionally good match, in bold letters and all.  “You should check her out, too,” it urges me, and then tells me that “viewing someone a bunch won’t send multiples” and “you can stalk safely without looking like a stalker.”

(OKCupid apparently does not learn, since the list of people who’ve viewed your profiles used to be called “Stalkers” until some people without a sense of humor about such things complained vociferously.  Now they’re back to stalking jokes.  I’m sure that will go well.)

Regardless, though I checked out [user_name] – and while she was pretty, she was an 86% match.  Really, OKCupid?  86% is enough to Kermit arm-flail and get me to run over and say hello?  (For the record, I’m 99% with Gini and 94% with Bec, and there are at least fifteen other people in the Cleveland area – most of whom I know – who are over 90%.)

It feels uncomfortably like a stereotypical Jewish mother pushing me together.  “You’ll love her!” she reassures me, shoving me towards the door, knowing that 86% maybe isn’t the best, but it could be.  “What am I not here for, if not to set you up?”  And meanwhile, I’m sure she’s a very nice girl (in fact, “nice girl” is part of her user name), but did you have to call me out of nowhere to try to hook us up?

I’m tempted to send her an email saying, “OKCupid totally thinks we should get it on.”  But I can’t imagine that would go over well.

(In the meanwhile, if you’re on OKCupid, feel free to drop by my profile and tell me who you are – like I said, I’m obsessed with match percentages, and seeing LJ/blog people in other picture-heavy profiles often allows me to attach more of a personality to a commentor.)

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

Over on FetLife, that Facebook for kinksters, I’m musing about some problems I’m having in balancing my new kinkiness and keeping my existing girlfriends happy.  This was a problem that came to a head at the end of 2011, leading to me pulling back a little on certain aspects of my kink until I can find a better solution than what I’ve been doing.

The essay’s called Recent Poly Troubles, And Gordian Knots, and it starts like this:

I like to fuck a lot. I’m casual about sex.

I have several women I’m already entangled with.

This leads to problems.

In 2011, I started getting kinkier. And that’s been a tremendous boon in many ways; I’ve been learning to talk dirty (no mean feat for this polite New England boy), I’ve come to understand that my facility with words can make me a good Dominant even when my lack of physical training falls short, and discovering that a little rough sex added in with my usual cuddles can really spice things up.

And a large part of that opening up was due to sexting….

This essay’s a little more personal than they tend to run, since it’s about a current problem I’m still struggling with, as opposed to my usual relationship essays of “Here’s what I did, and the wise solution that Gini helped me engineer to fix it.”  And so I’m purposely stashing it behind a firewall of sorts.  If you’re interested, then go over and look (and I’m told that BugMeNot has some FetLife logins).  If not, then move on.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

So thanks to my wonderful Dad, I got Stephen King’s 11/22/63 for Christmas, and devoured about 550 pages of it on last night’s plane ride.  And it’s interesting thus far.

11/22/63′s pitch is “Man goes back in time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald,” but realistically it’s not about that at all.  The gateway to the past is in 1958, which means that Our Bold Hero has to live through five years of late 1950s/early 1960s life, and the first 500 pages are about him trying to get by in early America.  He tries to prevent a couple of past murders he knows will happen, visits wonderful Derry, gets a job as a schoolteacher and settles down.  It’s mostly about the feel of America on the cusp of a great change, as viewed through small towns and cities.

The problem is that we’re now at the point where Our Bold Hero is intersecting Lee Harvey Oswald’s path, and it’s boring.  Why?

Because Lee Harvey Oswald’s not that interesting a character!

Oh, King’s doing what he can, but Lee Harvey Oswald’s personality is pretty well documented – I struggled to get through all of Bugliosi’s lapbreaker of a book on JFK, and King presents Oswald accurately, in all of his overblown, wife-beating, insecure ways.

But I keep thinking, “Out of all the characters here, I don’t really give a crap about Lee Harvey and his pal George de Mohrenschildt and all the Oswaldian friends.”  King’s trying, but the weird thing is that this book is absolute proof of how life just isn’t as interesting as what a good fiction writer can provide.  The least-developed character is the one who Unca Steven couldn’t generate wholesale from his mind.  The real stunners, the ones who you want to be around, are the ones he made up whole-cloth – even his villains are more villainous.

That’s the sign of a great writer, man.  When you outdo real life.

(Also, this book is a fascinating parallel to The Dead Zone, another tale of a guy who has to assassinate someone to ward off a terrible future history, and I’m probably going to reread Dead Zone when it’s done to see how they match up.)

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

If you’re dating a person with depressive issues, you have to realize they cannot retain love.  They’re like a leaky bucket; you fill them full of love and affection and bold shows of adoration, and a few days later it’s all trickled away.

Most normal people can hold onto love for a while – a nice gesture will make someone content for a while.  Whereas a depressive will be working merrily and suddenly some dark part of their brain will go, You know she’s lying.  She doesn’t really love you.  It comes out of nowhere, this bucket-puncture, and all the affection that’s been given just vanishes – unless you’re a depressive, you can’t know what it’s like to be mugged by your own brain like this, where you’re filing papers and suddenly you’re consumed by this baseless terror that the person you love most is on the verge of leaving you.

Your job, as their partner, is not to take their need for more love personally.

Yes, I know, it’s crazy, two days ago you bought them a pony tattooed with “HERE’S HOW MUCH I HEART YOU” on its flank and then took them on an expensive ride around candy mountain.  They should know by now.  But the very nature of their disease means that this, too, slips away from them.  They’ll still be cuddled up with you, wondering.

If you get mad at them, it’s counter-productive.  Then their stupid-brain goes, Oh my God, he’s angry, I’m screwing this up further, they must not really love me, and wham they’re in a frenzy.  It’s difficult, I know, but you need to just nod and say, “Yes, I love you,” not the very reasonable riposte of “OH FOR GOD’S SAKE LOOK AT ALL THE PONY POOP IN OUR BACK YARD, DOES THAT REMIND YOU OF ANYTHING!?!”

You need to be calm, remember they’re pretty fucked up, and just say, “Yes.  I love you.”  Refill the bucket.  And remember it’s gonna drain again, and that it’s nothing you’re doing wrong.

As the depressive, it is your job not to make filling the bucket their job.  You must remember that your leaky bucket is not their issue.  The temptation is strong to go, “Well, my bucket’s empty, so they need to fill it now!”, but you can drain your partners really quickly that way, and eventually they do stop loving you because you’ve made them into little Mickey-brooms constantly toting endless buckets…. Or worse, you find someone who will be willing to constantly fill your bucket at a price, which leads to abuse and dysfunction like you wouldn’t believe.

You got a bad bucket, which means that you’re gonna have to learn to function with it empty sometimes.  Doesn’t mean you’re dying of thirst, man, it just means you can’t drink now.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

What I hope will happen when I write about my own depression: other people who are depressed will see that yes, it’s possible to suffer from a draining depression yet still function.  That it is possible to draw a distinction between “What it feels like in my head” and “What the evidence of the real world actually provides” and act according to what objective data tells you is reality and not this fucked-up horrorland inside your head.  That someone who’s depressed, somewhere, will feel a little better when they realize someone else somewhere knows exactly what they’re going through.

What I fear is happening: people are going, “Ferrett is such a whiner.”  They’re stepping away from me, talking about me behind my back as a drama queen, lowering their expectations for me.

Usually, hope wins.  I’m seized by emotions I have little control over.  It’s a disease.  And I struggle with it, and try to be open, because depression’s one of those hidden malfunctions where nobody has to know unless you let them.  And I think it’s important to acknowledge that it does exist.

Still.  When I am depressed, fear matters a lot.  I try to battle it with hope.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.