Greenstorm's Journal

I've been struggling with something the last little while. I'm going to bring it up with my counselor - it's lovely having a counselor with poly experience - but I'm trying to sort through where the emotional core of the problem is.

When folks are new to having multiple partners, they usually:

Are super dishonest with themselves over whether something is likely to become a relationship, because we're not taught to evaluate that realistically and we're punished for making those evaluations. So, "I like this person and I don't know if they like me, but if they did I'd be open to a relationship" or "I like this person but there's this one barrier and if that was removed I'd be open to a relationship" becomes "nothing would ever happen with that person, I'd never have a relationship with them". It makes it impossible to discuss things in advance.

Are bad at communicating what's going on. Combination of poly guilt (not feeling like they *can* tell a partner about another partner or relationship because it feels gross and bad) and not knowing what's going on (believing NRE is Magic Destiny rather than a pretty predictable response, not being mindful in discussing and creating relationship structures because relationships Just Happen and you take what you can get because of legacy thinking around One True Lifetime Soulmate and just lack of knowledge of this kind of negotiation).

Commit to things they can't follow through. This runs a whole gamut from barriers or behaviours in sex (things just escalated and I didn't think to bring out a condom/I didn't feel like it was the right time to have a discussion about risk) to time management (I'll still make time for you every week) to future relationship stuff (let's move in together) to -- well, everything. And I get it, new relationships are exciting and anxiety-producing and it's way easier if you can make everyone happy by promising everyone what they want. And it's hard to sit and think about what's reasonable to commit to especially during NRE.

And I'm honestly fucking tired of it. I don't know what to do with it. I just want to sit the first several months out of folks' lives when they start a new thing at this point. They can come back and tell me what's going n when they've figured it out, right?

Because it's corrosive to have someone not follow the letter or spirit of their words.

It's disheartening to have someone misrepresent themselves over and over.

And it's poisonous to believe I know someone better than they do themselves, and even worse to have it vindicated.

It's really important to me that my partners are regarded as sovereign over themselves, as experts in their own experience. It's important that I can accept the truths about themselves that they give me. It's too easy to gaslight otherwise. That's not a dynamic I want to give room to.

At the same time, my own experience needs room here too. There needs to be room for the feelings I have when the last six, or eight, or dozen relationships I've been in where someone has taken a new partner and told me the exact. Same. Thing. and then didn't do it. I don't want to bury that experience, to just hide that feeling for a couple years until they've been through it enough to see their own patterns.

Most of the folks I've dated have been the ones pushing for poly within their relationships. That means they've been first out the gate, they have more experience being the "more poly" person in the relationship and less experience watching a partner go through this stuff. I more or less don't date folks who haven't at least been poly for a couple years, but a couple years doesn't mean having been through many partners and getting lots of self-knowledge about that process, I guess. One or two times through the rodeo and people are still telling themselves "what happened was an aberration, with enough willpower I'll just do what I say next time" instead of adapting what they say they do to fit what they can actually do.

And yeah, maybe the answer is just to only date Elder Poly folks. There are so few of those around, though. Maybe the answer is some sort of detailed questionnaire, but then we're back to folks being idealistic about their capabilities.

I don't know. This sucks. I don't have the emotional bandwidth for picking through this right now. I'm resentful and angry and aggrieved over what seems to be a very common set of human behaviours and that's not a great place to be in. Human behaviours don't change just because I think they "shouldn't be" a certain way. I need a way to be at peace with them, and to take my place within a world full of humans and their common behaviours.

I need... principles to work from? I need a direction to steer in. I need strategies that work for other folks to hold up against myself and see if they fit or if they can be altered to fit.

This trainwreck brought to you by yes-its-almost-blood-time-but-25%-of-my-life-is-pre-blood-time-so-I-still-need-workable-strategies.

Every day brings something. I guess that's how you know you're alive?

I suppose I'm alive again.

I learned of a fossil pit 3-4 hours up north into the bush. I can drive there, go exploring, camp, sift through the gravel and look into the past. I'll need to wait till the snow is off the ground. Maybe I'll find someone excited to come with me.

When I called the vet to make an appointment to put Mella down I called both vets. One had an opening; the other I had a chat with about "establishing a farm relationship". That's how we do it here now: there's no buying antibiotics or wormers at the co-op, instead a vet who has an established relationship prescribes. They said they could teach me to castrate, too. None of this will be cheap but I've been on this land long enough to need a good deworming program and I haven't met anyone locally who can teach me.

And Mella is going in tomorrow. Juniper will be on her own then, until I find her a rabbit friend. I no longer have a workplace I can bring animals to or I'd bring her in to work with me. She'll be sad. I'll be sad. This whole thing is hard.

I was supposed to be in the bush today but turns out I'm not. Instead the sun is streaming across the lake and in my window at work - the window with no plants yet. Water is melting and overflowing the frozen gutters and running off the roofs onto ice slicks from the freezing rain in the last few days. I want to sit outside by sleeping trees and remember that life still waits and comes again even when it doesn't look like it will. I want to strengthen my eyes to see those signs; I want to know that spring comes to these dark feelings as surely as I can tell by looking at an apple twig that the branch is healthy and sleeping and not shrivelled and dead.

Maybe tomorrow.