"Women...What About Men Baffles You the Most?"

Oh, the irony of a guy who has often wondered if he was a human being, let alone a male one, empathizing and relating so deeply to the questions and answers in this thread.

The top voted comment: "That you really can be sitting there thinking about nothing."

That yielded a torrent of anecdotes about men who were in fact thinking of *something*...it was just something utterly inconsequential, highly embarrassing or incriminating, or (most often) both. It wasn't until well on down that subthread I found someone who said he didn't just think about nothing, he could tune his surroundings out for the most part.   I won't belabour the point that this is my default state. I will simply say how comforting it is to know I'm not alone.

But absent a pressing need to think about something, I am in a state of no-thought.

"How can you be so oblivious to subtle (and sometimes not-to-subtle) hints?"

Said "hints" usually have something to do with a woman being attracted to us, and let me tell you, despite all appearances, we're not oblivious to those sorts of hints. We are, rather, completely and utterly terrified of acting upon one of them, just in case we turn out to be wrong. The price of inaction is. at worst, a lifetime's regret. That pales in comparison to the price of action, which could range from being publicly humiliated to, in certain contexts, jail time.  It's Pascal's Wager in miniature....some men would suggest that a woman being attracted to them is in fact proof of the existence of God, but I digress. Like somebody said, "I could have pained "date me" on his forehead"...and somebody else noted "well, then he wouldn't see it there on his forehead, would he?" A third said "until he got home, looked in a mirror, and realized what he missed."

"The way you are just as moody as women, but still complain about women and their emotions."

Because, of course, men are taught to stifle and suppress theirs. Crying is a sign of weakness, right? Actually, it's more likely a sign you've been too strong for too long, but we'll let that go.
This one still trips me up: that women don't want their problems solved, just listened to and empathized with. I'm pretty good at both those things, if I do say so myself, but I still have to stomp on the urge to say something like "but this would all go away if you'd just..."
...but then it would be gone, Ken, and she'd be confronted with the quintessentially male state of thinking about nothing. Can't have that! 
One thing I don't do is complain about emotions. They are the touchstones of the soul and they lubricate most social interactions. Without them we would not be human. But yeah: I often think my feeling this is not the problem, the thing causing me to feel this way is the problem.

"Why do you guys play with yourselves so much?"

Because it feels good. Next question.

No, wait a second. This is one of those things that actually causes no end of friction in many relationships, friction that expresses itself with some variant of he's jerking off and he could be having sex with me.  I'd like to address this, as, ahem, touchy as it is, because it contains a couple of assumptions about men that are just plain wrong.

For sin-stance: We are explicitly rejecting you by masturbating.

Believe it or not, men will often masturbate to orgasm out of sheer boredom. Or because pressure has built up and has to be relieved. Bothering you to do it--which puts performance obligations on us--is not necessarily something we want to do. Not always for selfish reasons, either. We understand that you're tired/Aunt Flo from Red River has come for a week's stay/you have a headache (sex is actually a pretty good analgesic for menstrual cramps and mild to moderate headaches both, but sssshhhh). We can take care of the situation in two minutes flat without making a big production out of it. Doesn't mean we don't want you.
And edging into more controversial territory: ask any man about the visuals he may be using as a prop and if he's articulate enough, he will tell you quite sincerely that he's not fantasizing about the porn star. He's probably fantasizing about you doing  the things the porn star is doing, which may or may not be part of your repertoire, but he's not thinking about being with the woman or women on screen. Many men, faced with the actual opportunity to be with a porn star, would be intensely conflicted. Great sex, to be sure, but she had to practice to get that good. With other men. Umm...

(There's men being silly for you: what's the appeal of a virgin, anyway? Give me somebody who knows what they're doing, she might teach me a thing or six.)

He might be thinking of somebody else while he's ruining his eyesight and growing hair on his palms. He will never admit this, of course, but thinking about sex with somebody is miles away from having sex with somebody. I thought about sex with damn near everybody from the age of eleven on and didn't actually have sex with somebody until I was nineteen: I rest my case. If he's thinking about your sister or your best friend or a co-worker while he's actually there with you, well, that's a real issue. If he always thinks, obsessively, about that sister/friend/co-worker, that's a real issue. Otherwise: it isn't.

Here's the one that really hit me where I live, and I'm going to quote "stitchedlamb" at length:

Why they don't get how sexy they are. Not in the way they usually think (muscles!) but the way they work their hair when they think no one is looking, little half smiles, shirt riding up to show their skin, stuff like that. Dudes doing little things can get a lady wet as hell and it seems like that part of male sexuality is glossed over in our culture. I know you straight guys don't get it, but we love looking at you like you like looking at us. Whenever I explain this to male friends, they look at me like I'm nuts. Why is it so hard to believe?

Loaded question, that last. It's like a hanging curve floating right into my low self-esteem wheelhouse: there's been one woman in the world who ever called me sexy versus probably a dozen who have explicitly called me ugly and countless others who refrained from doing so out of good breeding.  I never once believed the girl who said I was sexy. Didn't stop me from marrying her, though.

It's not just me, though. Guys, even sexy guys, don't generally get called sexy. Or handsome. Or anything.

I've seen it time and time again on Facebook. There's a former colleague of mine at Sobeys who is quite simply stunning. Every two months or so she'll put up a new profile pic, either a selfie or what appear to be professionally done portraits, and they will cause the heart of any functional straight man and probably most of the lesbian hearts to beat just that little bit faster. Nothing remotely sexual about any of these pictures: she is "just" a beautiful, beautiful woman. I'll contribute to the torrent of praise she gets: "wow, ######, you look incredible", all the while thinking boy, I hope she doesn't misinterpret that, especially given I'm old enough to be her dad. Ken, did you just twitch a little bit? You dirty old man, you.

I'm far from alone, although the female compliments outnumber the male ones ten to one.

Men don't put up selfies on Facebook, as a rule. When they do. they'll get a smattering of likes and a few comments--invariably from women, and (in my experience) either tepid or so overblown there's no chance in hell I could misinterpret them. Nothing to what women get.

I find this sad on both sides. For the women, of course, their self-worth seems to be tied entirely to their physical appearance. This, incidentally, is completely untrue, and not just because Ken says it is. I wish I could find the link, I've spent twenty minutes of intensive Googling and nada, but trust me: somebody once ran an experiment where they photoshopped various ugly and misshapen bits into a thoroughly off-putting photograph, paired it up with an entirely fictitious and really scary personality description, and set the creation loose on some dating site. Result: hundreds of replies.

Men very rarely get any responses on dating sites. Just like they rarely get complimented on Facebook selfies. In this case it's a little more nuanced: dress in a suit and tie and it's not that you're handsome, exactly, it's that the suit and tie signify a man of action and accomplishment.  That's sexy. Men doing things. It's another of those fantasy tropes, the one Shrek turned on its head: the woman is there to be rescued. Preferably the slaying of dragons is involved, but the knight in shining armour-slash-prince is of course a fine specimen of manhood: he had to be. Ugly fat guys don't kill dragons.

So, to summarize: men can't compliment women because rapist pervert and women can't compliment men because he'll think I want him. Sad state of affairs.

Even sadder: Men never compliment other men because eww, that's gay, dude!

Actually, not quite true. I have one male friend, straight as an arrow, who is secure enough in every way to say "I love you" to me every once in a while. I'll say the same, because it's true. I do love the guy. Men, you love your best friends, don't you? Of course you do. Wouldn't it be a better world if we could just say it?

It would be nice if we lived in a world where compliments could be freely given without fear or shame. Both genders are afraid to say anything just plain nice to strangers or acquaintances of the other gender lest they be mistaken for sexual advances. How awful is that, really? It's even more of a minefield because women, in particular, are conditioned to crave sexual attention, on account of it being -- supposedly -- the sole measure of a woman's worth. And men are "supposed" to want and desire sex above all else (sigh)...you can perhaps see the conundrum.

As a man, I reiterate: what does make it hard, pun definitely intended, is when you field a compliment from somebody to whom you may actually be intensely attracted. Even an innocent one. We don't get compliments much: we cherish the ones we do get...but at the time, we almost have to ignore it, or at best shrug it off: she probably didn't mean that the way I heard it.

I'd like to live in a world where compliments might lead to hugs, and hugs might lead to cuddles, but none of those things automatically had to lead to sex. I think it would be a better world.

In the meantime, it is perhaps a little bit of a relief to see that men are every bit the puzzle we say women are.

Shared Pain

"No fim, tudo dá certo. Se não deu, ainda não chegou ao fim."  
"In the end, everything will be okay. If it's not okay...it's not yet the end."
--Fernando Sabino

Another long one coming, to make up for the hiatus. Trust me, folks, you want to read at least part of this one.

As I am sure you have noticed, the blog posts have dried up around here.  That should be changing -- somewhat -- from here on out, but I will make you no promises and tell you no lies. The state is called "flux", and I'm starting to wonder if "flux" is the original f-word.

Let's start with the good parts.

THE JOB

I have a full time job. I now work for Big Blue. No, not that Big Blue. I mean the retail one. Wally World. The largest retailer on the planet. 2.4 million strong.
Let me tell you this on short notice: they got to be where they are for a reason. I'll tell you this, too: what appears corny and cult-like to outsiders (an employee cheer, seriously?) is both genuine and surprisingly powerful once you've done it a few times.

It's like doing an Om. Have you ever done an Om, in a group? Not the kind of thing people tend to do if they want to keep any semblance of street cred, right? And yet it's the oldest sacred sound we know of, symbolizing All That Is, the original divine vibration. And if you go into it with even the slightest of open minds, you will come out of a group Om with a changed consciousness. Trust me on that. How changed depends on the spiritual energies you and everyone else bring into it.

The Wal-Mart cheer is like that, in a way. It takes individuals and makes of them a team; it then takes that team and charges it with positive energy. That's something I have really internalized about my new workplace. It is exceptionally positive.

I have worked in retail most of  my life. Everywhere I have worked features a backroom in which language that would make a stevedore blush is thrown around carelessly, almost as random syllables.
Not at Wal-Mart. Just one f-bomb can get you written up--even if it's not directed at anyone in particular.  Respect for the individual is one of this company's core values and from what I've seen, unlike many companies, they actually walk their talk. The group I work with on nights is top-notch, and so are my departmental day-mates.

The biggest culture shock has to do with breaks.

I worked for ten years in a place where breaks, like "overtime pay" and "employee recognition",  were pipe-dreams. Oh, yes, you are supposed to take your breaks, but you're also supposed to get your work done, and most times there is more work to be done than there are people to do it. Work or breaks. Shirking one will get you in trouble; shirking the other won't. Which one is which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

I worked for three years at another place that was only slightly less dismissive about rest periods. I grew to loathe sitting down when there was work to be done. I'd rather work right through and get off half an hour early, if that's an option.

At Wal-Mart, it isn't. You will be "coached", written up, and theoretically fired if you don't take your breaks, every least minute of every last one of them. Even more of a challenge for me is that on nights those breaks are supposed to happen promptly at one, three and five a.m. Dairy and Frozen call the breaks, as they're the ones with the perishable product on the floor, but woe be unto us if we're more than, say, three or four minutes late calling "three o'clock lunchtime".

I am not a clockwatcher. I start looking at the time when I sense it's getting on time to go home--several times I've overshot by fifteen minutes or half an hour. Having to force myself not just to look at the time, but plan my night around arbitrary stoppages...let's just say I'm still getting used to it.

They have a computer system that puts everybody else's to utter shame.  When all is going well, not only can a handheld ordering unit tell you what is in the building, it can also tell you exactly how much is exactly where. I mean on which shelf in the back room, cooler, or freezer. And never mind scratching the surface...I'm still hovering over the surface of what the system can do.

When all is going well. As with any computer system, the garbage in, garbage out principle applies. I hope to show my new employer what a dedicated data sanitation engineer I am.

One thing I do know is that the chances for advancement are practically limitless. Two of the four assistant managers who interviewed me were hired on less than four years ago, one of them part-time. Name one other retail company where that kind of progression is not only possible, but almost routine.

It's straight nights, which is not what I would have preferred. Three reasons there:

•  one, I am a natural lark;
•  two, generally, Eva's on an opposite schedule;
•  three, nights tend to harshly compromise a social life.

 But

• the lark can be subdued over time. I am halfway there now: I have no trouble being up all night. In a week I will be able to sleep during the day, hopefully without the prescription-grade sleeping pills I still need.
• actually, when Eva works afternoons as she normally does, I see just as much or even more of her when I work nights as opposed to days. I normally go to bed around ten or eleven a.m, which is when she leaves for work, and I am up before she gets home. It means each of us has the bed to ourselves...sometimes sacrifices need to be made.
• As I seem to keep saying, I have an absolutely astounding group of friends. I've had breakfast dates and evening get-togethers and neither I nor my social life feels compromised at all.

My schedule is Thursday night through Monday night, leaving me off Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I just wrote the final exam for my Tuesday class, which is a nice little segue into

THE CLASSES

I am nine weeks away from a Certificate of Fluency in French from Conestoga College.

This probably doesn't mean what you think it means, and it certainly doesn't mean what I think it should mean. By my definition, were I actually fluent in French, I would be able to rewrite this blog en français without missing a beat.

Not even close. Most of the sentences I have written here would take me a solid chunk of time to translate and I'd need a dictionary and likely a grammar text handy to do it. Take that last sentence, for instance: I'm fine up until "would take me a solid chunk of time". I can say "would take many minutes"...that's not the same thing. "I'd need a grammar text"--that's do-able...."handy"? Not the foggiest. I could say "close to me"--is there a better translation than that? If I were fluent, I would know. 

You get the idea. I'm not fluent. Nowhere near. I can understand most spoken French if it's spoken at a speed that would put actual French people to sleep (the listening exercise on my final last night was on eco-tourism in Lebanon, written by francophones for francophones, and there was easily five minutes worth of information I had to try and glean from a 90-second clip. ) I can read French passably well and I can sort of write it, given world enough and time. Speaking: not so good yet. I have to write it in my head before I can say it. 

Luckily, this last course, French for Business, is really heavy on oral and aural comprehension. It's also much more challenging that I had thought it would be, given that I have taken French V and the prerequisite for this is only French IV. I am learning that just as there is a difference between informal spoken French and textbook French, there is a difference between French spoken in business and French spoken anywhere else. The prof, who is more fluent in French than she is in English, is great in that she speaks at warp speed...but covers the material very slowly, with lots of repetition. C'est parfait. She is also an absolute stickler for translation. I mean, I know Google Translate is almost useless, but she thinks Linguee is bad, and Linguee shows you direct translations of government documents. Ah, well. Just have to learn what she likes, and do that. Isn't that school in a nutshell? Isn't that married life, too?

I adored my last French teacher, Carolyn Cresswell. She was also my teacher for French II. She's a bit scatterbrained every now and again, but she was super-friendly, quick with an anecdote, and we share tastes in music. Sadly, she was stuck with a totally unfair situation for this course: she was asked to teach it on two days' notice, using a horrible textbook she had never seen before...and the class was more than twice as big as it by rights should have been. At first we got lots of real-world French instruction at the expense of essentially having to teach ourselves the textbook grammar. Then time constraints came into play and we lost a lot of the fun by sticking to a textbook that everybody agreed was awful. (They're switching it up for the next class). The evaluation we had to write left no room to explain any of this: most of it was about whether the hallways were clean enough and whether or not we felt discriminated against as a member of whatever little club we had to identify as belonging to.  Ugh.

But Carolyn: I will miss her. 

Having been unemployed for nine months, working full time and taking a class feels as if it is using up all my free time. It isn't, of course, not even anywhere near, but it feels that way. That's one reason I haven't blogged. Another is

THE HOME LIFE

You may know my wife Eva had bariatric surgery in November 2013: story here.  

You may also know that at the one year mark, she was moving along tickety-boo, all systems go. She has been making a very difficult journey look easy.

What very few of you know and the rest of you are about to find out is that she has suffered a setback, a rather serious one. 

The symptoms presented gradually, though they seem sudden in the context of so much relative health and wellness. They have progressed to the point where she can no longer work or drive, and there, for the moment, they seem to be stalled. We think. We hope.

Eva has earned the right to put alphabet soup after her name: if she's feeling particularly snooty, she can legitimately say her name is Eva Breadner, ALMI, ARA,  PCS, AIAA. 

The PCS stands for Professional, Customer Service and I have always tried to model my customer service on hers. She has always been able to anticipate and respond to client needs before they are articulated or often even recognized. This is because like me, she is incredibly empathic...and unlike me, she is gifted with a logician's brain. I probably don't have to tell you how rare it is to find someone who is both profoundly intuitive and supremely analytical. In all my life, I've met exactly one other person who even comes close. Eva told me I'm not supposed to spend too much time praising her here, but what the hell, she is my wife and I love her.

The focus that she has always brought to bear on any least task is pretty much gone, as is a large piece of her short-term memory. That was our first clue that something was badly awry: the diminishment of a prodigious gift. There were other signs and signals: her digestion, which for a bariatric patient had always been exemplary, was suddenly extremely poor, all the time; she began to suffer from chronic fatigue...and so on. Most alarming to me--well, aside from the Eva I know having been stolen and replaced with a pale impostor--is the stutter. It comes and goes, from barely there to moderately severe, and it is terrifying to hear a woman who has never hesitated over a single word suddenly having trouble with single words. 

On Tuesday she had an appointment with her bariatric team of specialists, which includes one of the most respected bariatric surgeons in the country. They examined her and pronounced what we already knew: she is suffering from malabsorption. Her body is not using much of what little she does eat. This is also the case with her pills, both bariatric-related and otherwise. The otherwise is probably compounding some of the issues.

As to the whys and wherefores--the underlying reasons I have always sought, everywhere, and often come up wanting--we got a whole lot of what Danny Torrance in The Shining refers to as the worst words of all: NO ONE KNOWS.

The consensus is that it's not directly related to the surgery. It is most likely a medication issue, we are told. Something is out of balance. Maybe somethings. Exactly what, amongst the many, many pills and supplements that bariatric patients depend on for survival, is a monkey's guess;  any monkey reading this can guess as to what might happen when you go monkeying around with medications.

We had hoped for a roadmap, complete with a little distance table. We got a big white space with the words Here Be Dragons. This is terra incognita, folks, and it's not very nice out here.

It is  not easy to live beside. I can't even imagine what it's like to live with.

I feel guilty and ashamed even admitting the difficulty. This has been going on scarcely a month and in the grand scheme of things it could be ever so much worse, after all. 

This is Eva's road. I don't drive; I am merely a passenger, as I have been since I met her. But as a passenger I have certain sacrosanct duties. I am a navigator; I am the person who keeps driving Eva awake and functional; I am the person who keeps her calm when some asshole cuts her off. I am failing, abysmally, at all three of these duties. We are lost, she is not functional and often not awake, and calmness is something that seems to be in very short supply chez Ken just now.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME, either, and I struggle to articulate any of this lest people think I'm trying to make it All About Me. This is about Eva, and how to make her all better again, and NO ONE KNOWS.

So.

The road is just beginning, it seems. And here I'd like to publicly and profusely thank Mark, without whom it might be completely unnavigable.

Mark is Eva's partner of nine months. They share a deep bond for a relationship of such short duration, but knowing what I know of the man that's no surprise. He has been a rock. Aside from all the quotidian support--he's been ferrying Eva to what seems like daily doctor's appointments, and running any number of other errands that require a car, even dropping me at work on occasion--he has also provided nonpareil spiritual and emotional solace, certainly far beyond what I am capable of right now.

The man radiates calm in a way I deeply admire and wish I could emulate. I'm capable of that level of serenity, provided nothing is spectacularly amiss in my world, but just at present the most spectacular missus in all my worlds is rather amiss. 

If I try for what seems to be Mark's level of calmness--something I am trying desperately to do, as anxiety helps nobody in this situation--I overshoot and go into robot territory. That's me burying my fear, and I do it because I am filled with a sort of impotent rage and the last thing I want is to add to her own. No, the LAST thing I want is Eva thinking it is at any way directed at her. 

But Ken, aren't you jealous?

No.

I will admit to a fierce pang the day that Eva had her consult with the specialists. That was Tuesday. I worked Monday night, and I had that French final exam at 6:30 Tuesday evening. I have to leave shortly after four to get there on time...and Eva's appointments went all day, something she is still recovering from. Mark drove her, of course, and kept her steady all through the day, no mean feat. There is simply no way I could have been there, which in no way lessens the ironclad belief that I should have been there. And no, at this point I don't think it should have been me, not him...I think it should have been he and I together. And if somebody had've had a problem with that, fuck them sideways. Eva needs all the love and support she can get.

But I wasn't there, and it eats at me. I find myself thinking if only I had been there, I'd have asked the magic question that would have yielded the magic answers. Preposterous! Arrogant! There's nothing I could have said that Mark, who has more of a medical background than I do,  couldn't have said better--and answers are not forthcoming anyway. 

As I said on the polyamory subreddit:

The support everyone gets when a family member is ill isn't just multiplied with poly, it's more like squared. Or cubed. Raised to the power of love? Now I'm getting corny. But it's really a godsend to be able to count on both logistical and emotional support when your own emotions are failing you.

Someone responded:

When I was growing up, and imagined life as poly (before I even knew that word) those scenarios were the ones that pushed me to stronger belief that poly is "right" (for me). Years later, when I tell people that logistical and emotional stability is the reason I seek poly relationships, they say "No, but really, it's the sex right?". No, it's not. And this is proof. Thanks for sharing!

I have a dear friend I'm not going to out here, someone I love very much who has been providing me with the same kind of thing over roughly the same period of time,  always there with a listening ear when I'm going to explode, and always with wise counsel and encouragement. Look at that word--it's another of those en-words that people don't stop to examine often enough. Hyphenate it: en-courage-ment. She gives me daily injections of courage I can share with Eva; Mark gives Eva daily courage that she can share with me. Strength lends its strength.

Life is hard just now. But if ever I needed proof that shared pain is lessened, I have it in spades.

Blogging Break

Production will be shut down here in the Breadbin for an indeterminate time,

Thank you for reading...

Two Parrots (desiring crackers) With One Stone

Or, two poly topics in one blog post. New month, new allotment, and stuff has been bubbling up.

Stuff I HAVEN'T ACTUALLY WRITTEN BEFORE. Yay!


FOR EVA, MY SUN


Just last night I posted this on Facebook: a basic primer on polyamory from one of the most famous "out" poly personages in the world: Laurell K. Hamilton, the best-selling author. She lives in a poly quad, incidentally, and her novels are positively rife with polyamory.  My friend asked,

Okay, here I am exposing my ignorance: why marry? Why enter into a legal covenant with one singular person? If you love and are committed to more than one person, why is the institution of marriage necessary for poly folks in this day and age?

It occurs to me that I have been remiss in not addressing this question much earlier, especially since it was the very first question fired at me when I first came out to the first person I came out to. Fired with the force of a SIG-Sauer P226, it was.

I'll give you the generic answers to this before I get as personal as I'm willing to get.

It's true, many polyamorous people do not get married. Many others have group marriages, handfastings, covenantal ceremonies and the like--why do they do that? The same reason any two monogamous people get married, to demonstrate to the world their unity of purpose and commitment.

But many, perhaps even a majority, of polyamorous relationships incorporate a traditional two-person marriage, or common-law relationship (which in Canada has nearly the same legal ramifications). How does that happen?

Often it happens because one or both of the people in the marriage don't identify as poly at the outset.  Polyamory is negotiated, over time, and added to the marriage when (ideally) both spouses are ready for it.  (Add it in before and...well...the marriage will probably implode. Poly people have a saying: you can't fix a relationship by adding more people.)
I've talked before about some of the reasons why people might go down that road: mismatched sex drives or sexual styles, or just loving natures that don't seek to place restrictions on love. A common scenario: Somebody might find themselves falling in love with another person and rather than cheat, see if that third person can be accepted by the existing partner.

Why established poly people get married--you'd have to ask them, because any marriage is a deeply personal thing between partners and whatever deities they may or may not happen to believe in. Of course, in some countries there are very prosaic reasons to get married, such as health insurance and the like. Sometimes in poly-world, though, it's an assertion to the world of one relationship's primacy, and that all others must be subservient to it.

Any sort of polyamory is challenging. As Laurell Hamilton noted,  any solid relationship is, but as you might imagine,  poly tends to compound things. The 'hierarchical polyamory' detailed above may work for many folks, but it has some ethical red flags. It is a little bit disingenuous to say you are willing to engage in multiple committed relationships simultaneously and then put big wooden fences around those "secondary" relationships to make sure they don't encroach on the primary. How does that third person feel, only getting so much--and "so much" is being dictated from outside your relationship? Worse, primary partners often have "veto" power over budding secondary relationships, and arguably the biggest heartbreaks in poly involve a veto.

At the same time, practicing "non-hierarchical poly" means that the scary encroachment is almost bound to happen at some point, love being what it is. Let love in through a window, and watch it open up every door in the place. It takes a certain mindset to accept that, to recognize that relationships can wax and wane over time, and it's not a common mindset.

I would marry Eva all over again without blinking, even (perhaps especially) knowing what was waiting for us fifteen years down the pike. She is and remains my rock, my rock who never for a second became an anchor. I believe I am the same for her. We've taught each other so much over our time together: my debt to her is incalculable. We have one of the great marriages. I know it, she knows it, and several of our friends have remarked upon it themselves over the years. One dear friend--who happens to be in another great marriage--told me just last night that it's a matter of knowing the relationship is there. No matter how bad the rough patch, the question of "is it worth it to keep on with this marriage?" is always an emphatic YES.

Most importantly, and without getting too personal, our relationship is its own thing. Any other relationships that may exist are also their own things, very much independent of our thing, and have to be taken into account, just as those relationships have to take ours into account. It's a juggling act, to be sure, and it can sometimes result in some hurt toes as the jugglers careen around with their eyes in the air. But as with so much else, open, honest communication is key. Also key is the willingness to set ego aside, which can be easier said than done.

The thing that monogamous people don't readily get is the compersion that comes naturally to some polys and others have to work like a dog at. For those of you who haven't been along for the full cruise, "compersion" is joy at your partner's joys, wherever they may have come from. The Buddhist synonym is mudita, joy unadulterated by self-interest. In short, metamours -- other cherished people --  enrich a life, and an enriched life enriches other lives. That's what a poly community is, at heart: an enrichment tool, a tool by which love can be made not just to grow, but to spread.

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As far back as I have been aware, I have recognized that I am polyamorous. My loving one person doesn't auto-magically subtract my love from someone else, and people's shrill insistence that it does, it has to, it MUST, I eventually tuned out just as I tuned out most of the other bullshit society insisted on spewing in my face.

If somebody had explained the term "polyamory" to me when I was nine, I know for a fact I would have seized on it. But there are things that happen around poly people that I just don't understand. This shouldn't be a surprise: I am a human being (I think), and other humans have this distinct tendency to act in ways I don't understand. I'm male, and by God I don't get other males at all.

But one of the things I have repeatedly run into--at a remove so far, although sooner or later it'll probably actually happen close to home--is somebody, a "monogamous" somebody, willing to a be a party to cheating, but completely unwilling to be in a polyamorous relationship. Putting it in my own world: somebody who would be willing to date me, so long as Eva didn't know about her. If I was to inform this hypothetical person that Eva would find out about her immediately, she'd run away screaming.

Huh?

Polyamory is a subset of ethical non-monogamy. There are other kinds of ethical non-monogamy--swinging comes to mind. There is some overlap between the swinging and poly communities, but not a great deal of it, because most swingers are terrified of emotions. Whereas polyamory is founded on emotions, to the point where there need not be sex in a poly relationship at all:  just emotional intimacy that goes beyond the bounds of what monogamous couples are generally okay with.

Regardless, though, the key point is that it's ethical: honest, open and transparent. It's not an "excuse to cheat" or "cheating with consent" (now there's a ridiculous contradiction in terns). But it seems as if some people would rather cheat than engage in an open, honest, transparent relationship. This boggles my mind. If you're going to be non-monogamous, wouldn't you want to be ethical about it?

I've both cheated and been cheated on, in my distant past, long before Eva. Both sides of that equation are slimy as hell, and I resolved after having grown up a bit that I would never allow myself to be a party to a dishonest relationship ever again. Obviously there are other people who don't feel the same way. I have seen some poly militants who claim they have no problem being the other man or woman to a person with an oblivious spouse, perverting my assertion above that each relationship is its own thing, independent of other relationships. While that is true...such people are still cheating, as far as I'm concerned, and I have nothing but contempt for that kind of selfish, hurtful behaviour.


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BONUS: I just discovered this song tonight (lyrics provided on link) and I'm groovin' to it. I'm seeing more and more poly music out there...this is the most explicitly poly song I've run across yet, and one of the happiest.

"I'm a bird who sings in the springtime
She's a girl who smiles like the sunrise
Though I love the days when she's all mine
I don't try to bottle her sunshine..."