Love Stories/Skills: Update Ready, Download Now?

My long-distance dating partner (I still don't have a very good term for us... our dates were 99% walking until they moved out of state and we finally got to hook up in June)* coined this analogy. It's for when you need a relationship check-in that may be substantive or not, but it definitely requires some dedicated time and attention to find out.

As much as I still whinge about the 10-year partner who slow-ghosted me a few years back, she showed me a lot of insights and behaviors that improved my ability to have relationships at all, let alone nonmonogamous ones. I'm reminded this time of a night that I ended up making out with 2-3 people in one night and set up the check-in afterward to be devastating: "Hey. I'm sorry this is out of the blue, but something happened. We need to check in." Then when I told her, she didn't say, "This could've been an email!" but she did say I had oversold it quite a lot. And after that, I got better about meta-communicating (a term I coined, though it's intuitive and I hope it catches on, whether from me or not) when asking for a check-in. So that conversation would have looked more like, "Hey, I had a little fun last night! Nothing earth-shaking, but let me know when you want to check-in about it."

That really came in handy with my nesting relationship, because nesting partner has zero tolerance for unnecessary information and knows that I am notorious for crushing and squishing and (at least before the pandemic) playing around without big risks or commitments. She's demiromantic and finds a lot of processing tedious. "I only need to know if you're falling in love or changing barrier habits."

Even then, I sometimes blurt things out before she's ready (or when she's expecting a different kind of conversation), so I'm going to tell her about this analogy and see if she wants to use it in the future. "Hey, I have an update ready. Would you like to download now or schedule it for later?" Knowing her, she'd want to know how big the update is going to be -- are we talking resume use in 90 seconds or mandatory reboot after an hour? -- which is perfectly reasonable.

*DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince coined "creative dating associate" in their 1990 classic "A Dog Is a Dog" about the freedom to date around before settling down. Not exactly a nonmonogamy cornerstone, but at least a cornerstone of "Don't rush into monogamy."

Love Skills: Are You Open to Pleasure for Its Own Sake?

Back when I was facilitating Poly101s/201s, I think we struggled to get to the questions underneath the questions; this entry's title came to me as one of the simplest questions that doesn't get asked and, as such, hinders so many people's understanding of their own relational values. Ethics, orientation, priorities, negotiation, a lot of it comes back to this:

"If there were no emotional, logistical, or financial hindrances nor benefits to doing so, would you pursue sexual pleasure for its own sake (and if so, how much)?"

This is also my quick and dirty measure of what someone may have of their place on the asexual spectrum (which is a real and valid phenomenon, but I have seen interpreted in such extremes as to supplant the existence of what we used to call "chemistry" (as in, "those two have a real chemistry together," I wonder if they'll fuck? Honestly "alchemy" might be better used here, but that's a whole other topic). 

Anyway, I think a lot of people would have difficulty answering the question, and that's a good thing. They should slow down and pay attention to how their answers vary from others'.

Religious and hyper-monogamous types are pretty straightforward: the answer is no because it is wrong or undesirable to them. You're not going to convince them otherwise, nor should you! (Shoutout to my college sweetheart, who at the tender age of 44 recently had nonromantic sex for the first time. I'm so proud!) Others are fully asexual and would prefer to pursue some other kind of pleasure guilt-free. A very very few of us will be able to answer in the straightforward, "Yes, absolutely." We may or may not have higher libidos than average, but we are significantly less encumbered with moral and cultural scripts about what sex is "supposed to" connote than others. Either we grew up with fewer of them or we've done a lot of personal work to unpack and reevaluate them (and perhaps most frequently a bit of both, as in my own case). And we, of course, still have to think carefully about the rest of the question, because there is reality behind the abstract: if we were to construct our lives in such a way that pleasure were more easily accessible, what would we be willing to sacrifice? Time? Status? Emotions?

The overwhelming majority of folks I've met would have difficulty accepting the premise, because they have never been able (whether from external influence or internal enforcement) to disentangle their own values from the values others have placed on them. Pleasure has baggage for them, and this baggage is the real reason for asking the question. "What are you holding onto that makes this question so difficult?" Their character, meanwhile, is demonstrated by how they might sit with such discomfort: are they intrigued, frustrated, or even upset? Not many people (nonmonogamous or otherwise) are any good at negotiating multiple relationships, power dynamics (real or imagined), and social exile for making an unpopular choice unless they have leaned into such inquiry.