Musings on relationship
I was in Denver yesterday for a job interview, and I was about an hour early. It's tough to gage how much time you'll need to travel in Denver in the middle of the day; it could be nothing or it could be backed up for miles. So I tend to err on the side of caution and I left with plenty of time to spare.
So, I got to my destination about an hour early. Luckily for me my destination was very close to a coffee shop, and I settled down with a book to read.
I've been working on this particular book for a while; Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity. It's an interesting compilation of essays but they can touch too close to the bone and I've had to pick and up and put it down a number of times. But yesterday was one of the days I picked it up and the first piece I read hit me between the eyes with one paragraph.
Hard as it may be to allow a lover to be sexual with someone else, I can fight through that, but not the emotional jealousy it creates in me. I do not want my lover to share intimate moments with another woman; I do not want to take the chance that, even by accident, another woman might touch her so deeply that she might leave me that someone else might displace me and I could wake up alone again. I do not like needing another person so deeply. I do not want to know how delicate and uncontrollable this loving another person can be, how little our promises can protect either of us or make it safe to play with these feelings we rouse in each other.
The looking is never easy. The material of my jealousy is not what I want to understand about myself. But the examination changes me, makes hope possible, gives reason behind the fears. I need reasons to keep moving through this knowledge, reason and comprehension." Amber L. Hollibaugh
When I've been involved in polyamorous relationships, the idea of my lover having sex with someone else is intimidating. But frankly, my lover having sex with someone else is far less intimidating than her sharing small intimacies with someone else. Sex can be a lot of things, and we have sex for a lot of reasons. It can be fun, it can be hot, it can be angry, it can be intimate, but, I've had conversations that are a lot more intimate than some sex I've had. So, while I'm not going to lie and say that it's easy to know that a lover is having sex with someone else, for me it's so much easier to know that she's having sex with someone else than it is to know that they have their own petnames and sweetness and arguments. I've had sex that is amazingly intimate, and that's lovely, but intimacy is so much more than just sex.
Here's the thing about jealousy. I don't want to admit that jealousy comes up for me. I hate looking at that, because what it shows me is a lot of my own insecurity, a lot of my own anger and possessiveness. I want to create relationships that are free from any sort of ownership paradigm. I want to explore ways of creating realtionships that allow for intimacy and that encourage freedom and exploration. I want to be secure enough in myself not to have that kick in the stomach feeling of jealousy that is really fear that I might be displaced. I don't want to engage in this grasping quality, where there is a fear behind happiness, where happiness is dependent on the way someone else behaves.
AND, I want to be able to ask for what I need from my relationship. Being in a polyamorous relationship doesn't mean that you don't have expectations of each other, doesn't mean that each partner gets to do whatever they want to do, it means that there's still respect, that there needs to be even more consideration for the person you're with. And there needs to be an obsession with communication and truth. I've done it wrong a whole bunch. And I'm still committed to engaging in relationship this way, which seems like masochism, pure and simple. And I'm not saying I need six lovers or two lovers or even one lover, but I don't want to conduct relationships asleep. I want to be intentional about the way I am in all things.
And that means I can't deny things as they come up and jealousy, jealousy comes up.
