![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
genderjumperThe first C is a whole saga that I will tell at another time. All that is relevant here is that someone whose name started with C was a serious partner for 2.5 tumultuous years and the explosive ending of the relationship kind of messed me up.
*****
The spring after that break-up, I went into a relatively new sex shop in town and had a look around. Keeping up with the biz, I guess. Things were quiet, and I ended up striking up a long conversation with the manager, a white girl from the Rust Belt with a huge, malevolent grin. Before I knew it, she was showing me her most abrasive tattoos and we were exchanging numbers. Her name, you may have guessed, was the same as the ex mentioned above.
When she called that weekend, I was deep in a cuddle pile at PolyBigFun, an annual retreat hosted by Austin Poly (that still operates, as far as I know). I answered the call, explained that I was indisposed but didn't want to ignore her, and said I'd call her back after the retreat (without going into detail). My polycule and I had a good laugh about it, since I'd already told them about the surprise connection.
When we did finally talk, I got brave enough to explain the retreat (I've never been one to waste time on monogamists, but in those early years I was way more likely to beat around the bush for a while). I could hear her smile and comfort over the phone, as she explained that she was also nonmonogamous with her "Sir". I wasn't enthusiastic about dating another BDSMer, but the chemistry was undeniable. Since the name she shared with my ex was anathema to me, I started calling her "New Coke" behind her back.
As I recall, we went on like two dates, primarily spent walking around or sitting beside a duck pond near the mall. The first date included a bit of heavy kissing, but for the second she kept her distance. She spoke obliquely about some STI scare that had happened in the interim and admitted she was exercising an abundance of care. I honored that and did my best to stay in touch, but it felt more like a Facebook friendship than anything else for a while. I'd stop in at her work or invite her to an event, but connecting just never seemed in the cards. I told her about "New Coke" pretty early on and she said she loved it, even though I never really called her that to her face. By the time I found out she was leaving "Sir" and denouncing him as an abusive, gaslighting manipulator, I was several years into caregiving and relatively poly-saturated myself. What's more, once she left the man and later the sex store, she moved to the other side of the Metroplex, and connecting in-person remained difficult. I learned when her birthday was and honored her tradition: she'd get blitzed on some very specific drug and solicit nudes from her friends. Somewhere in there -- time is bad, but I'm confident my grandfather was still alive, maybe even still home -- she did come over for one playdate. Years of excitement and diversions led me to show off a bit, and she was quickly spent before any of my clothes came off.
She soon found a new love, was eager for me to meet him, but that's never happened. They moved in together, got married, and she became a stepparent and a respectable office manager. She never had a negative word for me, but even when I was driving past her town during grad school we only ever mustered a couple of drive-by hugs and deep, fleeting kisses. She often interrupted herself when we saw one another, like I might be a figment of her imagination and she didn't want to threaten that etherealness (however grounded and reliable I tried to be). There have been a few career shifts over the past decade or so, earning up to six figures and then losing jobs abruptly, all the while complaining as loud and often as she could about customers and bosses on Facebook. Sometimes she seems to revel in her coarseness, but other times I think she wants to protect me from it. I rarely ever felt closer than arm's length.
It's been 3-4 years now since our last drive-by hug (no kisses due to COVID) and even when I make a point of reaching out and offering specific support for specific challenges in her life, I rarely hear back, and when I do it's brief yet effusive. I rather doubt I'll see her before I leave Texas, let alone ever get any more time to open up or play together, and I think she's resigned herself to it. It's so much clearer now than it was when we first met how much trauma and weaponization has defined her, but even in "peacetime" she struggles to just be around people who aren't equally bitter; I've sometimes wondered whether she has borderline traits or just doesn't know how to relax. I think the relationship is good for her, and I'm happy she has it, but I don't know if she lets herself have much of a self any more outside of work, primary relationship, and parenting. Still, as we approach 16 years of friendship, I have to appreciate that she's lasted longer than many of my friendships and partners, that I've never felt in any danger from her, and that even after all this time I might leave her a little breathless.
*****
Later the same year I met New Coke, I also met a couple of friends of a younger (like mid-20s when I was entering my 30s) colleague from one of the political campaigns I worked. The first was ineffable, with a clever but identifiable Internet handle, impossible to pin down like Billie. She told stories, but they were off-handed and nigh unbelievable. Was she really hanging out with a lot of pro athletes or was she a pathological liar like the person I "lost my virginity with"? was she Latina, mixed, or spicy white as her Anglo implied? Was she ever stoned? Was she ever sober? We hung out two, maybe three times, and I never knew where it was headed nor what either of us wanted to happen from it. At some point we just stopped talking.
The second, however, left a big impression on me by holding up a mirror to my entitlement. There's no other way to put it, I read things wrong and I did so over and over again, and if she hadn't had the patience to be blunt with me I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to unpack some uncomfortable masculine assumptions that I am glad to have left behind me. It took me a bit too long to realize I was being the bad guy in her story. And as you may have picked up, she had the same C-name as my still-fresh ex and of New Coke.
We met a couple of times before connecting directly. She was just a small, dark-haired woman with big eyes and bigger glasses at our mutual friend's occasional gatherings. I don't remember specifics, but it would make sense that we added each other on Facebook long before we started having 1-on-1 conversations. It was in-person when lightning struck for me, though: we were at one of these gatherings, I was slightly older than everybody but not out of place, and the conversation took this very specific turn. I can't remember whether we were going from race to movies or movies to race, but I was trying to make some kind of point about how white people hurt themselves with racism and she brought up the movie, This Is England. I was not prepared. You have to understand that circa 2010, I had barely ever met another white anti-racist, and zero of them had been in Texas. And I had only seen that movie a few months prior and was in DIRE NEED of someone to process it with.
I would later to describe it to my polycule as analogous to if I had been taken away from a lost society, raised a longing outsider, and one day randomly heard someone singing a forgotten lullaby from my original people, but it held no such meaning for her; to her it was just a song she'd read in a book or something. I thought for a while that I'd found home in a way I didn't know I missed, all I had to do was deepen the connection.
I started referring to her as "C3P0" -- "shiny and whiny" -- but I never told her that. She was carrying a lot of unfocused exasperation toward the world, yet I was mesmerized and hung onto every word. She lived in Austin. We texted or called occasionally, but deeper conversations had to wait for when one or the other of us was visiting our town. When there was another party, I couldn't exactly pour out my heart in a public setting, but when I would go to Austin, my time was usually reserved for partners there. Finally, I had a long weekend in Austin with an afternoon to myself and invited her over to my partner's place to talk, really talk.
Looking back on it, I think I was a little manic. I tried to be respectful but that took way more effort than I was used to. I told her that we were connected and she was skeptical. I recounted the story about the movie and she basically shrugged and said, "So what?" I told her I was attracted to her -- probably for the first time, though it was never not obvious (and I can only hope I wasn't leering too badly) -- and she reiterated something she'd said on one of our calls: "But I like bigger guys. Fluffy guys." She even mentioned a specific guy she used to hook up with, whom I had met in passing and seen around Facebook. I wasn't feeling jealous nor competitive, but it all seemed so irrelevant.
"Yeah, but I feel so connected to you," I asserted.
"What, like you're in love with me?" Like that would have changed anything.
"No, not like in love, but... I don't know, I don't have words for it. There's something here and I think it's really powerful."
"I don't see it. I don't feel that way."
That part feels close to verbatim, but understand we went round and round like this for a good 45 minutes, maybe an hour or more (or maybe it was only 15-30; it FELT like forever). What's more, I was attuned to her enough to notice that she was becoming uncomfortable. Not afraid, not even annoyed I don't think, just out of place and frustrated by my stuck-ness.
I'm not sure why I was so resistant/skeptical/devoted. Did I just want her to give me a chance? Was I getting used to being "hot" and in disbelief that she couldn't fathom being attracted to me at 6'4" and 230 lbs? (I hope she's living her life well, but she should see me now!) Was I just so convinced of my own narrative that I refused to take no for an answer? It shouldn't have been so hard, but I had a lot of societal programming to overcome: just because I thought it was important, meaningful, or even possible, didn't mean it meant anything to anyone else. And her vague opinion mattered here, ultimately more than my own zeal.
Somewhere after she asserted for like the third time that she only saw me as a friend and saw no chance of that changing did I realize the narrative in my head was irrelevant to her. I didn't have the vernacular at the time, but I was treating her like a sexy lamp in my narrative and she was rightfully rejecting that. I wasn't going to create myself a starring role in her life, she was just going above and beyond to hold her ground (possibly because she didn't know me well enough to know I wasn't a threat, or possibly she was just as confused as I was from another angle) while I sussed out whether some deeper meaning lie behind her "no". It did not. She just wasn't interested. In that era, I had a lot of "mini-piphanies", but this was one of the more stark moments of realizations I ever had, not as powerful but more enduring than my original conviction that we were connected: I just wasn't important to her, regardless of how important I believed she was to me. She didn't owe me an explanation, she was just choosing to do that. (Here's a pop-culture equivalent that I don't think I saw until after this all went down.) What's weird is I might have relented faster if she'd just said she was monogamous, but I don't think it really came up one way or the other.
Once I believed her, I accepted that my reality was inaccurate and stopped arguing with her about her own feelings. I think we engaged in some cordial chit-chat, but she left soon after. I might have listened to her whine about something or other once more but we didn't really talk again. I'd like to believe this was the final boss I had to defeat on the path of truly understanding enthusiastic consent, but I still have one or two later stories that are even murkier. This was absolutely the last (and hopefully only) time I ever hesitated to take no for an answer, at least. I even got better about asking outright instead of insinuating.
*****
The spring after that break-up, I went into a relatively new sex shop in town and had a look around. Keeping up with the biz, I guess. Things were quiet, and I ended up striking up a long conversation with the manager, a white girl from the Rust Belt with a huge, malevolent grin. Before I knew it, she was showing me her most abrasive tattoos and we were exchanging numbers. Her name, you may have guessed, was the same as the ex mentioned above.
When she called that weekend, I was deep in a cuddle pile at PolyBigFun, an annual retreat hosted by Austin Poly (that still operates, as far as I know). I answered the call, explained that I was indisposed but didn't want to ignore her, and said I'd call her back after the retreat (without going into detail). My polycule and I had a good laugh about it, since I'd already told them about the surprise connection.
When we did finally talk, I got brave enough to explain the retreat (I've never been one to waste time on monogamists, but in those early years I was way more likely to beat around the bush for a while). I could hear her smile and comfort over the phone, as she explained that she was also nonmonogamous with her "Sir". I wasn't enthusiastic about dating another BDSMer, but the chemistry was undeniable. Since the name she shared with my ex was anathema to me, I started calling her "New Coke" behind her back.
As I recall, we went on like two dates, primarily spent walking around or sitting beside a duck pond near the mall. The first date included a bit of heavy kissing, but for the second she kept her distance. She spoke obliquely about some STI scare that had happened in the interim and admitted she was exercising an abundance of care. I honored that and did my best to stay in touch, but it felt more like a Facebook friendship than anything else for a while. I'd stop in at her work or invite her to an event, but connecting just never seemed in the cards. I told her about "New Coke" pretty early on and she said she loved it, even though I never really called her that to her face. By the time I found out she was leaving "Sir" and denouncing him as an abusive, gaslighting manipulator, I was several years into caregiving and relatively poly-saturated myself. What's more, once she left the man and later the sex store, she moved to the other side of the Metroplex, and connecting in-person remained difficult. I learned when her birthday was and honored her tradition: she'd get blitzed on some very specific drug and solicit nudes from her friends. Somewhere in there -- time is bad, but I'm confident my grandfather was still alive, maybe even still home -- she did come over for one playdate. Years of excitement and diversions led me to show off a bit, and she was quickly spent before any of my clothes came off.
She soon found a new love, was eager for me to meet him, but that's never happened. They moved in together, got married, and she became a stepparent and a respectable office manager. She never had a negative word for me, but even when I was driving past her town during grad school we only ever mustered a couple of drive-by hugs and deep, fleeting kisses. She often interrupted herself when we saw one another, like I might be a figment of her imagination and she didn't want to threaten that etherealness (however grounded and reliable I tried to be). There have been a few career shifts over the past decade or so, earning up to six figures and then losing jobs abruptly, all the while complaining as loud and often as she could about customers and bosses on Facebook. Sometimes she seems to revel in her coarseness, but other times I think she wants to protect me from it. I rarely ever felt closer than arm's length.
It's been 3-4 years now since our last drive-by hug (no kisses due to COVID) and even when I make a point of reaching out and offering specific support for specific challenges in her life, I rarely hear back, and when I do it's brief yet effusive. I rather doubt I'll see her before I leave Texas, let alone ever get any more time to open up or play together, and I think she's resigned herself to it. It's so much clearer now than it was when we first met how much trauma and weaponization has defined her, but even in "peacetime" she struggles to just be around people who aren't equally bitter; I've sometimes wondered whether she has borderline traits or just doesn't know how to relax. I think the relationship is good for her, and I'm happy she has it, but I don't know if she lets herself have much of a self any more outside of work, primary relationship, and parenting. Still, as we approach 16 years of friendship, I have to appreciate that she's lasted longer than many of my friendships and partners, that I've never felt in any danger from her, and that even after all this time I might leave her a little breathless.
*****
Later the same year I met New Coke, I also met a couple of friends of a younger (like mid-20s when I was entering my 30s) colleague from one of the political campaigns I worked. The first was ineffable, with a clever but identifiable Internet handle, impossible to pin down like Billie. She told stories, but they were off-handed and nigh unbelievable. Was she really hanging out with a lot of pro athletes or was she a pathological liar like the person I "lost my virginity with"? was she Latina, mixed, or spicy white as her Anglo implied? Was she ever stoned? Was she ever sober? We hung out two, maybe three times, and I never knew where it was headed nor what either of us wanted to happen from it. At some point we just stopped talking.
The second, however, left a big impression on me by holding up a mirror to my entitlement. There's no other way to put it, I read things wrong and I did so over and over again, and if she hadn't had the patience to be blunt with me I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to unpack some uncomfortable masculine assumptions that I am glad to have left behind me. It took me a bit too long to realize I was being the bad guy in her story. And as you may have picked up, she had the same C-name as my still-fresh ex and of New Coke.
We met a couple of times before connecting directly. She was just a small, dark-haired woman with big eyes and bigger glasses at our mutual friend's occasional gatherings. I don't remember specifics, but it would make sense that we added each other on Facebook long before we started having 1-on-1 conversations. It was in-person when lightning struck for me, though: we were at one of these gatherings, I was slightly older than everybody but not out of place, and the conversation took this very specific turn. I can't remember whether we were going from race to movies or movies to race, but I was trying to make some kind of point about how white people hurt themselves with racism and she brought up the movie, This Is England. I was not prepared. You have to understand that circa 2010, I had barely ever met another white anti-racist, and zero of them had been in Texas. And I had only seen that movie a few months prior and was in DIRE NEED of someone to process it with.
I would later to describe it to my polycule as analogous to if I had been taken away from a lost society, raised a longing outsider, and one day randomly heard someone singing a forgotten lullaby from my original people, but it held no such meaning for her; to her it was just a song she'd read in a book or something. I thought for a while that I'd found home in a way I didn't know I missed, all I had to do was deepen the connection.
I started referring to her as "C3P0" -- "shiny and whiny" -- but I never told her that. She was carrying a lot of unfocused exasperation toward the world, yet I was mesmerized and hung onto every word. She lived in Austin. We texted or called occasionally, but deeper conversations had to wait for when one or the other of us was visiting our town. When there was another party, I couldn't exactly pour out my heart in a public setting, but when I would go to Austin, my time was usually reserved for partners there. Finally, I had a long weekend in Austin with an afternoon to myself and invited her over to my partner's place to talk, really talk.
Looking back on it, I think I was a little manic. I tried to be respectful but that took way more effort than I was used to. I told her that we were connected and she was skeptical. I recounted the story about the movie and she basically shrugged and said, "So what?" I told her I was attracted to her -- probably for the first time, though it was never not obvious (and I can only hope I wasn't leering too badly) -- and she reiterated something she'd said on one of our calls: "But I like bigger guys. Fluffy guys." She even mentioned a specific guy she used to hook up with, whom I had met in passing and seen around Facebook. I wasn't feeling jealous nor competitive, but it all seemed so irrelevant.
"Yeah, but I feel so connected to you," I asserted.
"What, like you're in love with me?" Like that would have changed anything.
"No, not like in love, but... I don't know, I don't have words for it. There's something here and I think it's really powerful."
"I don't see it. I don't feel that way."
That part feels close to verbatim, but understand we went round and round like this for a good 45 minutes, maybe an hour or more (or maybe it was only 15-30; it FELT like forever). What's more, I was attuned to her enough to notice that she was becoming uncomfortable. Not afraid, not even annoyed I don't think, just out of place and frustrated by my stuck-ness.
I'm not sure why I was so resistant/skeptical/devoted. Did I just want her to give me a chance? Was I getting used to being "hot" and in disbelief that she couldn't fathom being attracted to me at 6'4" and 230 lbs? (I hope she's living her life well, but she should see me now!) Was I just so convinced of my own narrative that I refused to take no for an answer? It shouldn't have been so hard, but I had a lot of societal programming to overcome: just because I thought it was important, meaningful, or even possible, didn't mean it meant anything to anyone else. And her vague opinion mattered here, ultimately more than my own zeal.
Somewhere after she asserted for like the third time that she only saw me as a friend and saw no chance of that changing did I realize the narrative in my head was irrelevant to her. I didn't have the vernacular at the time, but I was treating her like a sexy lamp in my narrative and she was rightfully rejecting that. I wasn't going to create myself a starring role in her life, she was just going above and beyond to hold her ground (possibly because she didn't know me well enough to know I wasn't a threat, or possibly she was just as confused as I was from another angle) while I sussed out whether some deeper meaning lie behind her "no". It did not. She just wasn't interested. In that era, I had a lot of "mini-piphanies", but this was one of the more stark moments of realizations I ever had, not as powerful but more enduring than my original conviction that we were connected: I just wasn't important to her, regardless of how important I believed she was to me. She didn't owe me an explanation, she was just choosing to do that. (Here's a pop-culture equivalent that I don't think I saw until after this all went down.) What's weird is I might have relented faster if she'd just said she was monogamous, but I don't think it really came up one way or the other.
Once I believed her, I accepted that my reality was inaccurate and stopped arguing with her about her own feelings. I think we engaged in some cordial chit-chat, but she left soon after. I might have listened to her whine about something or other once more but we didn't really talk again. I'd like to believe this was the final boss I had to defeat on the path of truly understanding enthusiastic consent, but I still have one or two later stories that are even murkier. This was absolutely the last (and hopefully only) time I ever hesitated to take no for an answer, at least. I even got better about asking outright instead of insinuating.
Tags:
