On The Table
Dec. 6th, 2007 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormThis is an oddly hard post to write. It's another growth time for me, a change time, and huge amounts of ancient muck are getting turned up and left to steam and melt in the sunlight.
I'm shedding my poly skin for a little while, I think previous posts have implied that. It's logistically annoying, it's part of a pattern I seem to have been concreted into, Angus prefers it, and-- it's been a decade, near enough. A decade of pattern without reconsideration is death.
It's frightening to do. I fear failure of my ability, and I fear too that people will abandon me if I don't hold out the lure of sex. I think about each of my friends and there are few of you who I feel that way about individually, but I know it's a strong pull and I know I've used it often. What will happen now?
So far (and yes, it hasn't been long) it hasn't been *hard*. I've come to the stunning revelation that sex has come to be, for me, more about social networking, obligation, comfort, and duty than it has come to be about desire. I feel like if I care about someone and they want sex, I have an obligation to give it to them sometimes because hey, it's no skin off my back. I feel like if I've slept with someone and enjoyed it well enough that I then have an obligation to continue unless something terrible happens. I feel like the easiest way to comfort someone who's lonely or to distract and cheer someone up is through sex. It's a great way of cementing and acknowledging companionship and closeness (here we are in this same place together, the two of us, and this shared thing is ours). Really it hasn't been that common for me to have body-burning-under-my-bellybutton-my-flesh-needs-this sex.
I don't have sex that I don't enjoy, it's a super-pleasurable thing, but that's rarely been the impetus in the last several years.
This also makes it sounds like I fuck all my friends and do nothing else with them. That's pretty far from the case but not wholly; many/most of my close male friends are also exes. The sex question has been resolved by ploughing right into the middle of it.
I want to learn to negotiate that question with less of that feeling that if someone is interesting and provides me with time, attention, and neat conversation that I owe them my body or even if someone shares a super close intimate experience and I want to have sex with them as a consequence, that I must then continue to fuck them. I wanna practice making friends, not exes. I want to do other things with my time, too.
But anyhow, the point of this post is to try and express the sheer weirdness of the situation. I decide, two weeks of monogamy will let me look at these habits and isn't a huge commitment. Then I start to live that and the hardest part is feeling like I'm disappointing people and abrogating my responsibility. I mean, this is weird stuff in the inside of my head. It's crazy-- standard primate social setup, I guess, but still! I had no idea it was there, and I think it's about damn time to get rid of it. Before I felt like I was a compelling enough person to spend time with for other reasons I couldn't have looked at this squarely. Not I'm not worried, and it feels like a good time for the turn. When I'm not feeling guilty I'm feeling much freer.
Still, every couple of hours my brain comes out and says holy shit, Greenie, who knew you had such crazy buried thought processes!
Yeah, well.
Job hunt is super exciting, there's so much out there that it's like Christmas (well, I guess it is Christmas) and I'm not looking for something for a long time. The goal, therefore, is to try something I haven't before. I put out fifteen resume-and-cover-letter combos by email Monday morning in response to craigslist jobs and got eight interviews and so far six or seven yes-offers. It feels good. I'm gonna keep pretty busy this month, both as a reaction to so much time off lately (damn bills and that week of sick at the end of November) and because I want to be busy with doing-stuff to help break my people habit.
It's surprisingly hard to turn down a job offer in favour of a better one-- I feel like I'm disappointing people again. ;)
Today is a crazy-beautiful day. I'm going to go outside in it and be happy.
But yeah, that's where I'm at.
I'm shedding my poly skin for a little while, I think previous posts have implied that. It's logistically annoying, it's part of a pattern I seem to have been concreted into, Angus prefers it, and-- it's been a decade, near enough. A decade of pattern without reconsideration is death.
It's frightening to do. I fear failure of my ability, and I fear too that people will abandon me if I don't hold out the lure of sex. I think about each of my friends and there are few of you who I feel that way about individually, but I know it's a strong pull and I know I've used it often. What will happen now?
So far (and yes, it hasn't been long) it hasn't been *hard*. I've come to the stunning revelation that sex has come to be, for me, more about social networking, obligation, comfort, and duty than it has come to be about desire. I feel like if I care about someone and they want sex, I have an obligation to give it to them sometimes because hey, it's no skin off my back. I feel like if I've slept with someone and enjoyed it well enough that I then have an obligation to continue unless something terrible happens. I feel like the easiest way to comfort someone who's lonely or to distract and cheer someone up is through sex. It's a great way of cementing and acknowledging companionship and closeness (here we are in this same place together, the two of us, and this shared thing is ours). Really it hasn't been that common for me to have body-burning-under-my-bellybutton-my-flesh-needs-this sex.
I don't have sex that I don't enjoy, it's a super-pleasurable thing, but that's rarely been the impetus in the last several years.
This also makes it sounds like I fuck all my friends and do nothing else with them. That's pretty far from the case but not wholly; many/most of my close male friends are also exes. The sex question has been resolved by ploughing right into the middle of it.
I want to learn to negotiate that question with less of that feeling that if someone is interesting and provides me with time, attention, and neat conversation that I owe them my body or even if someone shares a super close intimate experience and I want to have sex with them as a consequence, that I must then continue to fuck them. I wanna practice making friends, not exes. I want to do other things with my time, too.
But anyhow, the point of this post is to try and express the sheer weirdness of the situation. I decide, two weeks of monogamy will let me look at these habits and isn't a huge commitment. Then I start to live that and the hardest part is feeling like I'm disappointing people and abrogating my responsibility. I mean, this is weird stuff in the inside of my head. It's crazy-- standard primate social setup, I guess, but still! I had no idea it was there, and I think it's about damn time to get rid of it. Before I felt like I was a compelling enough person to spend time with for other reasons I couldn't have looked at this squarely. Not I'm not worried, and it feels like a good time for the turn. When I'm not feeling guilty I'm feeling much freer.
Still, every couple of hours my brain comes out and says holy shit, Greenie, who knew you had such crazy buried thought processes!
Yeah, well.
Job hunt is super exciting, there's so much out there that it's like Christmas (well, I guess it is Christmas) and I'm not looking for something for a long time. The goal, therefore, is to try something I haven't before. I put out fifteen resume-and-cover-letter combos by email Monday morning in response to craigslist jobs and got eight interviews and so far six or seven yes-offers. It feels good. I'm gonna keep pretty busy this month, both as a reaction to so much time off lately (damn bills and that week of sick at the end of November) and because I want to be busy with doing-stuff to help break my people habit.
It's surprisingly hard to turn down a job offer in favour of a better one-- I feel like I'm disappointing people again. ;)
Today is a crazy-beautiful day. I'm going to go outside in it and be happy.
But yeah, that's where I'm at.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 07:26 pm (UTC)However, I do think that this should be the only tool in our toolbox - nor do I think people should feel it's ALL they have to offer each other.
I really did have to go back to basics in the past couple years to "Do I want this? Why?" and I discovered that I LIKE sharing sexual intimacy. I think that's because my identity in my old relationships I was the provider of sex and I got so invested in that being 'who I was', I had trouble being anyone or anything else...which was part of how I got so diminished in my old relationships.
However when I don't feel an intrinsic drive or desire, or I think that I'm only offering sex as a bargaining chip, it fucks me up badly. So I do double checks now.
Basically: Consent (not just to choose it but that we can choose not to) is important. Desire is important.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 07:34 pm (UTC)I've been working on this one for years through friendships and relationships and out of them. It's basically at the core of all my 'sexual dysfunction' over the past 5 years. I'm feeling better about it. I tend to have less sex in numbers, but better in quality.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-07 01:13 am (UTC)Certainly important to mix it up a bit, for me! And I haven't been doing that much. I need to release myself from the duty before I can take the pure pleasure of it.
But for me two weeks will be enough to see if I want to continue to try it or not. It's a short enough time that I can do it, that I won't feel trapped in my own commitments, but for me to try the experience. It's also a long enough time that I actually have experience these feelings of breaking-obligation, I can't just be distant and write it off as 'a bad week'. I suspect that will be the hard part, and once people's expectations of me as a sex partner are broken, I won't have any trouble with it.
Vancouver's a great place to be looking for work right now. I'm not sure I ever met you much-- whereabouts do you live? Do you know anyone who's been looking without success? I did notice a post on the Vancouver livejournal community (http://vancouver.livejournal.com/) by someone who'd been looking for a long time and couldn't find anything at all, which fascinates me.