Relationship buckets

[greenstorm]

With the "butterflies-in-my-stomach-we-should-get-married-I-guess-this-is-a-relationship" and "don't-touch-me-naked-bodies-will-wreck-this-physical-pleasure-is-right-out-we're-just-friends" buckets out of the running as options to sort all my human interactions into, I'm thinking about other buckets I can break down all my relationships into.

I think the closest one may be "relationships where we build something" vs "relationships where things happen to us". I guess, relationships with mutual intentionality and relationships without.

This is where I would always run aground with Tucker: I wanted to create and steer our future connection, to bend the lines of our lives so they'd remain together in the future, and to deliberately explore and harness compatibilities in the meantime. He did not.

Building something with someone is a delicate dance of demand and generosity, of being shaped and preserving integrity, of communicating and doing. It takes awareness and humility and also the ability to just not take things personally.

Not building something? It takes experiencing a moment and then releasing it, over and over, and trusting fate. It takes being present both during contact and, equally importantly, in all other things when that person isn't around. It takes accepting that any moment of contact might well be the last, and being ok with that.

These buckets don't care what kind of relationship or contact is involved. Sex, conversation, emotional intimacy, it can all be part or not. All that's important is, is there a shared and communicated concept of what comes next?

Comments

[cz_unit]

Some relationships are Brigadoon relationships. The island comes up, it's magical and amazing, then the island goes away and we go back to our lives.

It's not a bad thing, it simply is...

[greenstorm]

I suspect I interpret folks' "we should do this again, this is important to me" too literally. Something like that is fine if everyone is on the same page, but I really do need to be clearly on the same page.

[yarrowkat]

that seems like a good sorting system. thinking about it, i would put nearly all of my friends (actual friends, not just "people i happen to know who might be loosely described as friends but really are aquaintances") into the "build things" category because just spending time together takes so much intention so much of the time.

maybe that's part of what went wrong for me with Avery. without the other person being willing to prioritize the relationship/contribute to building anything, i couldn't keep pouring energy into it.