genderjumper | 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."