Illusionary walls
Jun. 12th, 2022 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormMonogamy is obsessed with sex; it elevates sex above other forms of human connection. It reads a sexual connection like tea leaves, expecting that type of interaction to predict and fulfill the whole of relating to someone. Sex can be emotional, connecting, or transcendent sure, but that's a lot of power to give one type of interaction. There are so many ways of relating that can also be emotional, connecting, or transcendent. It's weird to me to have compatibility in one stand in for compatibility in the others; likewise it's weird to rule huge swaths of connection out because they're notionally connected to one type.
Plus the rules always seem to arbitrary to me. Monogamous people themselves generally don't know them; if you ask two people in a monogamous couple where their lines are, what counts as allowable outside intimacy vs what doesn't, they will rarely agree even within the couple. What's more, they'll often universalize their expectations and assume all other monogamous folks share their own particular set of restrictions around physical/emotional/energetic contact.
For these reasons I struggle to interact with mono folks on a meaningful level. Keep it distant, keep it polite, because they can't be trusted to state their own boundaries up front and I can't know what they are from my outside perspective. Even something like texting daily, sharing a favourite song, hugging, hanging out late at night-- I can never tell what's not going to be ok, and I hate that. There are some folks I can trust to state and hold their boundaries but most of those people have been poly at some point.
That said, I had a lovely evening at J's last night. I still feel relatively comfortable inhabiting my body around him, which is something I'd worried about losing. I also like cooking for folks I care about, and who are appreciative.
On the other hand this is another connection that's going to inhabit the ok-right-now, likely-disappearing-soon space that my connection with Tucker does, I think? And that's destabilizing.
And this morning I'm super stressed about work; the way that's going down between management, and trying to figure out if I should pull the union in, around support for my autism/health stuff, is probably stressful enough that it entirely counteracts the shorter work-weeks I'm supposed to be doing to reduce stress and increase my capacity to work through this stuff. The command-and-control way work is approaching the situation is also super triggering my PDA, which in turn is making everything else in my life more difficult.
Ugh.
Plus the rules always seem to arbitrary to me. Monogamous people themselves generally don't know them; if you ask two people in a monogamous couple where their lines are, what counts as allowable outside intimacy vs what doesn't, they will rarely agree even within the couple. What's more, they'll often universalize their expectations and assume all other monogamous folks share their own particular set of restrictions around physical/emotional/energetic contact.
For these reasons I struggle to interact with mono folks on a meaningful level. Keep it distant, keep it polite, because they can't be trusted to state their own boundaries up front and I can't know what they are from my outside perspective. Even something like texting daily, sharing a favourite song, hugging, hanging out late at night-- I can never tell what's not going to be ok, and I hate that. There are some folks I can trust to state and hold their boundaries but most of those people have been poly at some point.
That said, I had a lovely evening at J's last night. I still feel relatively comfortable inhabiting my body around him, which is something I'd worried about losing. I also like cooking for folks I care about, and who are appreciative.
On the other hand this is another connection that's going to inhabit the ok-right-now, likely-disappearing-soon space that my connection with Tucker does, I think? And that's destabilizing.
And this morning I'm super stressed about work; the way that's going down between management, and trying to figure out if I should pull the union in, around support for my autism/health stuff, is probably stressful enough that it entirely counteracts the shorter work-weeks I'm supposed to be doing to reduce stress and increase my capacity to work through this stuff. The command-and-control way work is approaching the situation is also super triggering my PDA, which in turn is making everything else in my life more difficult.
Ugh.
