If you hang around polyamorous circles long enough, you run into the concept of 'compersion'. It refers to the state, when you and a partner are involved in multiple relationships, where a partner's happiness with another person brings you happiness because you're genuinely invested in their own well-being and you don't view that relationship as a threat to your own.
Whether it's a natural outgrowth of healthy polyamory or a general goal some people struggle towards is a matter of hotly debated opinion, and I'm not going to weigh in on it here. I'm here today to talk about a different type of compersion: the manner in which it relates to the people your partner loves but is specifically not involved romantically with. I'm talking about seeking compersion with your partner's friend group.
I am part of a large, caring, close-knit tribe. We're loud, loving, honest and heavily invested in our success as individuals and as a group. Many of us struggle with some form of chronic physical or mental illness, so we support one another on the bad days and celebrate the good ones. We've got a diverse skillset that includes domestic, medical, technical, literary, financial, and social skills, and each of us is happy to put those skills to use to help one another, so that we all benefit from what we each have. Without this group, my depression would have claimed me years ago; other friends would have failed in things they wanted or needed.
Over the years, some of the people I've dated have been intimidated by my tribe. They see this group of unfailing advocates as somehow arrayed *against* them, in competition for my time, energy, or affection. One poor fellow once told me, "Well, I just feel like if they don't like me, you won't like me."
He had it backwards. If I love you and they see that you love me, my tribe will look at you through that filter, and if they don't understand what I see in you, they'll try to find it, try to build a relationship with you, try to meet you on some common ground, because they want my highest good. They are invested in me being well and happy, and they consider anyone who is invested in me being well and happy as their ally. It takes a lot for them to say, "No, I'm sorry, I know that this person is important to you, but I can't accept them." And in most cases, that starts with a partner rejecting the friends, not the other way around.
The effects of having a tribe like mine have been twofold. The first was that I chose not to pursue a relationship with anyone who treated my tribe as adversaries, and I feel that I'm much better for it. If someone couldn't respect the people who love and support me as an important part of my life and necessary to my emotional health, then that person wasn't committed to my happiness. My partner, on the other hand, has been delighted to find that I had such a wonderful support system, and he has really enjoyed building relationships with them. Our wedding was a celebration of shared happiness surrounded by people committed to supporting it.
The other effect is that I view my partner's friends as MY allies in his happiness. He has a group of good friends, and I have made it a point to know and have relationships with his friends, because if they are the people he enjoys and loves, who share in his triumphs and support him in his troubles, then they're on my side because they're on his. When he goes out with them, and has a good time, I get the benefit of seeing him happy. When we hang out together, we all have the shared baseline of valuing my partner upon which to build our own friendships.
That's where, for me, non-romantic compersion comes into play. I have some interests my partner does not share. He likes to do some things I either don't have time and energy for or an interest in doing. If we tried to be everything to one another, tried to be the sole support, then we'd both be less happy. But I can see him come home from an afternoon of games with his buddies, or plan to go out with a friend to see a show, and celebrate the joy he has in doing things he enjoys. When we have separate experiences, we have things to talk about together. Even in our monogamous relationship, we can embrace the things and people outside our relationship that make one another happy, and take our own pleasure from it.
Too often, I see the partners of friends or loved ones look at established friendships with suspicion, as obstacles to be navigated or power struggles to be won. I've seen partners who treated friends as competition for a finite resource, and that hurts everyone.
Love is never a finite resource; time is. And you have the choice, in your relationships, to compete for that finite resource and ensure that someone doesn't get enough of it, or to share it with the people who, when your beloved's demons come calling, will stand beside you as you help to fight them.
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Friday, September 16, 2016
BFFs are Totally a Commie Plot
I'm gonna talk about some things that will sound like Communism to some folks now.
Specifically: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
If that sounds familiar (which it should), it's because it's a paraphrase of one of the central tenets espoused in The Communist Manifesto, which is where people might get the idea that I'm talking Communism. I am.
I'm also talking community.
In recent decades, as Americans have stopped living in large extended family groups, as we've moved for jobs or schools or partners to cities where family and the friends of childhood don't provide a close-knit peer group, a lot of us have sought to recreate that social network.
We build tribes, squads, groups, phamilies, whatever word we choose to designate "these people are My People, they are more than friends, we are a unified entity," and what we are creating are communities. Some are huge (the 'Burner community' or the 'pagan community' which have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of associated people). Some are small, like a group of six or seven who meet up for dinner each week. They're online, they're in-person, they spring up at annual events.
We talk a lot about 'intentional community' and 'building community' and 'community standards', all of which is shorthand for "we were all raised with different sets of ethics and morals, with different ways of treating people and establishing relationships, and we need to navigate the process of developing a consistent set of ethics and mores for a group that will thrive and support all its members."
It's a struggle to create space that includes free speech and excludes expressions of hate and bigotry. Where laughter has a place, but people don't mock each other. Where those in need are supported, but those with more than they need aren't exploited to do it. All these things are important, but that last one is especially so, because it contains the seeds of ruination for every community: unequal resource flow.
This may sound cold, but it's true: all relationships are transactional, most of them unconsciously. You may not think "My friend bought me dinner when I was broke, so now I 'owe' her dinner when she is broke," or "My friend has spent seven hours listening to me complain about my job, and I have spent six and a half hours listening to him bitch about his partner, so in half an hour his time is up," but you can probably describe several times your friends have helped you out, and part of the value of any relationship is how much you have personally gotten out of it.
In healthy relationships, the transactions are most likely both unconscious and balanced. You don't stop to think what your best friend has done for you lately before doing something for them. You just know that this person makes you laugh, gives you insights, provides real value to your life in being there, and that having a relationship that makes your life better generally makes you want to make the other person's life better. As the scale expands and more people are added into the relationship, it becomes a community and the value of healthy relationships within that community increases.
One of the things that makes a community a community is the sharing of resources to improve the condition of everyone in the community. Resources can mean a lot of things: money, space, time, creativity, energy, emotional labor, physical labor, intellectual labor, physical assets like cars or tools, anything that the members of the community share with each other. That sharing allows the community to do more than its members could do alone, and it 'evens out' the experiences of the individuals, because having that resource pool to tap instead of needing to go it alone expands your ability to handle problems. Healthy community operates on the same principles as ideal Communist theory: we all put in what we can, and we all take out what we need, and it all balances eventually.
We've all seen it: you've got your friend group, your buddies, and over a few years you build a really solid structure. No one ever has to carry a sofa alone, everyone has someone to cheer them up after a breakup, you know that if you were about to be homeless there'd be a couch with your name on it till you got back on your feet. It's all good, all easy, all balanced.
Then something shifts. Maybe a new member comes in and doesn't quite understand the established give-and-take. Maybe an existing member suffers several setbacks in a row and just stops trying. Maybe someone has a sudden windfall that drastically improves their personal resources. Whatever happens, it exposes a problem you'd never realised: everyone is not working with the same understanding of how community resources should be shared, or even what should be community resources. The transactional nature of the relationships becomes both apparent, and ugly.
This is a make-or-break point for a community. If you're genuinely willing to face hard questions with integrity, and talk openly about your own philosophies on support structures and resources, you can come away stronger. If you try to avoid conflict and force the peace, you can end up with a badly unbalanced community. It can manifest as someone taking a disproportionate share of the community's focus and resources without demonstrating any inclination to share their own. It can *also* manifest as someone providing a much greater share of the community's resources, and expecting that to 'buy' them a greater voice in the ethics and philosophies of the community. There are a lot of possibilities for where the imbalance can lead. In any case, it's usually based in an expectation that someone should 'win' at relationships and someone else should 'lose' at them: the capitalist model of human relationships.
I've been a manager, moderator, guide, or leader in a number of different communities, and the percentage of them that ultimately failed because of resource inequality is high. My own failing as a leader was that I was not willing to put the health of the community as a whole ahead of each individual feeling completely included and happy on the terms they dictated. In trying to meet everyone's demands, leaders empower a few greedy and entitled individuals to destroy what we've built, when we should defend it.
The hardest thing: sometimes this means kicking someone out of your community, or just letting them walk away without trying to win them back. Someone who may be fun and funny, but who also doesn't feel inclined to support or share with others, while gladly availing themselves of what others offer. Sometimes it means telling someone that they have to fall, because they have worn everyone out with catching them and they refuse to stop jumping off cliffs. It *hurts* to do this. You feel like a bad person, a bad friend. Guilty.
It means standing up to a bully, saying "I don't care how much you give, you don't 'own' this." That's scary too, because maybe your community's gotten used to having what this person shares, and if you make them mad they'll take it, and leave. Will everyone blame you that you can't have pool parties any more, because you told the guy with the pool to stop making sexist comments to the women in the group?
We need to be willing to stand up for the value of our communities as their own entities, as discrete things, and be open and honest about expectations in the group, community ethics and ideals, and goals. We need to get honest about the real value of people's intangible contributions to our communities, and respect creative, emotional, or intellectual labor on behalf of the community as essential and worthy.
The days of the widespread family unit with consistent traditions and philosophy are gone, and if the structures we're building to replace it are to survive, they can't be based in capitalist theories of 'value' that view 'success' as coming out ahead of others. They have to be based in a communal understanding that we all do well when we *all* do well.
Specifically: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
If that sounds familiar (which it should), it's because it's a paraphrase of one of the central tenets espoused in The Communist Manifesto, which is where people might get the idea that I'm talking Communism. I am.
I'm also talking community.
In recent decades, as Americans have stopped living in large extended family groups, as we've moved for jobs or schools or partners to cities where family and the friends of childhood don't provide a close-knit peer group, a lot of us have sought to recreate that social network.
We build tribes, squads, groups, phamilies, whatever word we choose to designate "these people are My People, they are more than friends, we are a unified entity," and what we are creating are communities. Some are huge (the 'Burner community' or the 'pagan community' which have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of associated people). Some are small, like a group of six or seven who meet up for dinner each week. They're online, they're in-person, they spring up at annual events.
We talk a lot about 'intentional community' and 'building community' and 'community standards', all of which is shorthand for "we were all raised with different sets of ethics and morals, with different ways of treating people and establishing relationships, and we need to navigate the process of developing a consistent set of ethics and mores for a group that will thrive and support all its members."
It's a struggle to create space that includes free speech and excludes expressions of hate and bigotry. Where laughter has a place, but people don't mock each other. Where those in need are supported, but those with more than they need aren't exploited to do it. All these things are important, but that last one is especially so, because it contains the seeds of ruination for every community: unequal resource flow.
This may sound cold, but it's true: all relationships are transactional, most of them unconsciously. You may not think "My friend bought me dinner when I was broke, so now I 'owe' her dinner when she is broke," or "My friend has spent seven hours listening to me complain about my job, and I have spent six and a half hours listening to him bitch about his partner, so in half an hour his time is up," but you can probably describe several times your friends have helped you out, and part of the value of any relationship is how much you have personally gotten out of it.
In healthy relationships, the transactions are most likely both unconscious and balanced. You don't stop to think what your best friend has done for you lately before doing something for them. You just know that this person makes you laugh, gives you insights, provides real value to your life in being there, and that having a relationship that makes your life better generally makes you want to make the other person's life better. As the scale expands and more people are added into the relationship, it becomes a community and the value of healthy relationships within that community increases.
One of the things that makes a community a community is the sharing of resources to improve the condition of everyone in the community. Resources can mean a lot of things: money, space, time, creativity, energy, emotional labor, physical labor, intellectual labor, physical assets like cars or tools, anything that the members of the community share with each other. That sharing allows the community to do more than its members could do alone, and it 'evens out' the experiences of the individuals, because having that resource pool to tap instead of needing to go it alone expands your ability to handle problems. Healthy community operates on the same principles as ideal Communist theory: we all put in what we can, and we all take out what we need, and it all balances eventually.
We've all seen it: you've got your friend group, your buddies, and over a few years you build a really solid structure. No one ever has to carry a sofa alone, everyone has someone to cheer them up after a breakup, you know that if you were about to be homeless there'd be a couch with your name on it till you got back on your feet. It's all good, all easy, all balanced.
Then something shifts. Maybe a new member comes in and doesn't quite understand the established give-and-take. Maybe an existing member suffers several setbacks in a row and just stops trying. Maybe someone has a sudden windfall that drastically improves their personal resources. Whatever happens, it exposes a problem you'd never realised: everyone is not working with the same understanding of how community resources should be shared, or even what should be community resources. The transactional nature of the relationships becomes both apparent, and ugly.
This is a make-or-break point for a community. If you're genuinely willing to face hard questions with integrity, and talk openly about your own philosophies on support structures and resources, you can come away stronger. If you try to avoid conflict and force the peace, you can end up with a badly unbalanced community. It can manifest as someone taking a disproportionate share of the community's focus and resources without demonstrating any inclination to share their own. It can *also* manifest as someone providing a much greater share of the community's resources, and expecting that to 'buy' them a greater voice in the ethics and philosophies of the community. There are a lot of possibilities for where the imbalance can lead. In any case, it's usually based in an expectation that someone should 'win' at relationships and someone else should 'lose' at them: the capitalist model of human relationships.
I've been a manager, moderator, guide, or leader in a number of different communities, and the percentage of them that ultimately failed because of resource inequality is high. My own failing as a leader was that I was not willing to put the health of the community as a whole ahead of each individual feeling completely included and happy on the terms they dictated. In trying to meet everyone's demands, leaders empower a few greedy and entitled individuals to destroy what we've built, when we should defend it.
The hardest thing: sometimes this means kicking someone out of your community, or just letting them walk away without trying to win them back. Someone who may be fun and funny, but who also doesn't feel inclined to support or share with others, while gladly availing themselves of what others offer. Sometimes it means telling someone that they have to fall, because they have worn everyone out with catching them and they refuse to stop jumping off cliffs. It *hurts* to do this. You feel like a bad person, a bad friend. Guilty.
It means standing up to a bully, saying "I don't care how much you give, you don't 'own' this." That's scary too, because maybe your community's gotten used to having what this person shares, and if you make them mad they'll take it, and leave. Will everyone blame you that you can't have pool parties any more, because you told the guy with the pool to stop making sexist comments to the women in the group?
We need to be willing to stand up for the value of our communities as their own entities, as discrete things, and be open and honest about expectations in the group, community ethics and ideals, and goals. We need to get honest about the real value of people's intangible contributions to our communities, and respect creative, emotional, or intellectual labor on behalf of the community as essential and worthy.
The days of the widespread family unit with consistent traditions and philosophy are gone, and if the structures we're building to replace it are to survive, they can't be based in capitalist theories of 'value' that view 'success' as coming out ahead of others. They have to be based in a communal understanding that we all do well when we *all* do well.
Friday, February 14, 2014
I Am Capable of Procuring My Own Freshly Dismembered Plant Genitalia
I love cut flowers. I love them a lot, probably to an unreasonable extent. There's just something bright and cheery about them, a little bit of outside come in to beautify the day. If I could, I'd have cut flowers in every room of my house, every day, all the time; they're one of the few things that never loses its 'special' quality. It's possible I've played the Smithereens' "Cut Flowers" a few (thousand) times.
As a young woman, I absorbed the cultural narrative that cut flowers were a thing boys gave you. If you didn't have a boy, you didn't get any flowers. Sure, sometimes your dad sent them to you, and if you were in Texas for Homecoming your best friend got you a giant mum, but the 'flowers come from boys' meme was firmly entrenched in my head.
I was not a girl the boys pursued, and my luck ran to not-particularly-romantic gentlemen. "Happy Valentine's Day, I got you a tool set!" was always conflicting for me, because I *liked* the tool set, and I *needed* new tools, so it was a wonderful gift and I loved it, but I sure would have liked some flowers, and I had said so, but I still usually got told "Oh, you know, you're so fierce and strong and practical I thought you wouldn't go in for silly romantic stuff!" In between practical non-romantic boyfriends, I've been single for a lot of my adult life, so receiving flowers is still a rarity for me, something I find special every time.
Years ago, I was lamenting my perennial flowerlessness to an older friend, and she said, "Just buy your own flowers." When I protested that doing that seemed like giving up, like settling for what I could get, she said, "No. It's not giving up at all. It's independence. Flowers are easy. You walk into the store and you buy some, and then you have flowers. No meaning, no hidden statements about your worth as a person, just flowers."
The first time I gave myself flowers, I stood sort of furtively in the grocery store line, sure that everyone knew I was a pathetic loser who didn't have anyone to send her flowers. The cashier stopped, looked at them, looked at me, and then picked them up and SNIFFED them delightedly. "I love flowers," she said. "I wish someone would buy some for me, too. Your friend or whoever is lucky." I almost told her the truth, but couldn't quite admit that I didn't have someone to buy them for or someone to buy them for me, so I smiled and said, "I love flowers too."
Since then, I buy myself flowers regularly. I also go to movies alone if I want to see them, instead of waiting for a date to see them with. If I feel like dinner in a nice restaurant, I eat dinner in a nice restaurant, enjoying it whether my companion is a boyfriend or a book.
I'm not saying it happened overnight, the belief that going ahead and doing the 'date things' myself isn't settling. Even now I fight the curious looks from hostesses when I cheerfully say, "No, I'm not waiting for anyone. Just one, please," and refuse the suggestion that I sit in an uncomfortable chair at the bar and eat my furtive lonely dinner under a giant football game on the TV. No, I'll sit in the dining room, thank you, and enjoy my meal just like anyone else. And when the cashier asks me who the flowers are for, I smile and say "They're for me. I just love flowers." One or two of them even said, "I never thought of buying them for myself. I should do that!" and I always agree enthusiastically.
The journey to loving myself so that I didn't depend on someone else to do it for me has been so worthwhile, though. While I'm dating a lovely man who does buy me flowers and plan sweet romantic weekends, I'm able to look at those gestures and appreciate them all the more because I don't depend on them to 'prove' I am loved. They are allowed to be exactly what they are: expressions of love and appreciation that are sweeter for not being required, for not filling in some relationship check-box. If you're depending on someone else's love to make you feel worthwhile, then you never will. The void has to be filled from the inside; it'll just consume whatever you're given by others, voracious and unchanging.
Today is Valentine's Day, a difficult day for many. For some, the holiday is just a stupid commercial Hallmark holiday designed to throw another set of rapids into relationship navigation. For others, it's a genuinely painful reminder of love lost or missed, of personal emptiness. Some of my friends have lost a partner in the last year, and my heart goes out to them. Today, more than any other day of the year, we fight the social machine that tries to make us worthless, that slams binary genders into heteronormative monogamous constructs and dismisses everything else as 'weird'. If you don't have love, if your love is wrong, if the love you have is incorrectly expressed, you're told that it makes you different, ugly, deviant, less-than.
I'm lucky, in my life, to have so many shining examples of love done right. In all manner of incarnations, from freewheeling uncommitted singles to stable, dedicated polyamorous blended families, I am surrounded by people making love work, and making love into a life. Maybe it's maturity, maybe it's the power of attraction drawing people like me to me, but the core of people who form the closest and most important structures in my life all share one thing, regardless of relationship status: we all recognise the value of loving yourself, of being happy to buy your own flowers and delighted when someone else buys them for you. We all see, in ourselves, something worthy of loving and we're all committed to bringing that out into our daily lives. When we look at each other, our partners, and ourselves, we see beings of light and wonder, souls we embrace without reservation, and individuals worthy of love, and we love each other, and that's good.
I love you all.
As a young woman, I absorbed the cultural narrative that cut flowers were a thing boys gave you. If you didn't have a boy, you didn't get any flowers. Sure, sometimes your dad sent them to you, and if you were in Texas for Homecoming your best friend got you a giant mum, but the 'flowers come from boys' meme was firmly entrenched in my head.
I was not a girl the boys pursued, and my luck ran to not-particularly-romantic gentlemen. "Happy Valentine's Day, I got you a tool set!" was always conflicting for me, because I *liked* the tool set, and I *needed* new tools, so it was a wonderful gift and I loved it, but I sure would have liked some flowers, and I had said so, but I still usually got told "Oh, you know, you're so fierce and strong and practical I thought you wouldn't go in for silly romantic stuff!" In between practical non-romantic boyfriends, I've been single for a lot of my adult life, so receiving flowers is still a rarity for me, something I find special every time.
Years ago, I was lamenting my perennial flowerlessness to an older friend, and she said, "Just buy your own flowers." When I protested that doing that seemed like giving up, like settling for what I could get, she said, "No. It's not giving up at all. It's independence. Flowers are easy. You walk into the store and you buy some, and then you have flowers. No meaning, no hidden statements about your worth as a person, just flowers."
The first time I gave myself flowers, I stood sort of furtively in the grocery store line, sure that everyone knew I was a pathetic loser who didn't have anyone to send her flowers. The cashier stopped, looked at them, looked at me, and then picked them up and SNIFFED them delightedly. "I love flowers," she said. "I wish someone would buy some for me, too. Your friend or whoever is lucky." I almost told her the truth, but couldn't quite admit that I didn't have someone to buy them for or someone to buy them for me, so I smiled and said, "I love flowers too."
Since then, I buy myself flowers regularly. I also go to movies alone if I want to see them, instead of waiting for a date to see them with. If I feel like dinner in a nice restaurant, I eat dinner in a nice restaurant, enjoying it whether my companion is a boyfriend or a book.
I'm not saying it happened overnight, the belief that going ahead and doing the 'date things' myself isn't settling. Even now I fight the curious looks from hostesses when I cheerfully say, "No, I'm not waiting for anyone. Just one, please," and refuse the suggestion that I sit in an uncomfortable chair at the bar and eat my furtive lonely dinner under a giant football game on the TV. No, I'll sit in the dining room, thank you, and enjoy my meal just like anyone else. And when the cashier asks me who the flowers are for, I smile and say "They're for me. I just love flowers." One or two of them even said, "I never thought of buying them for myself. I should do that!" and I always agree enthusiastically.
The journey to loving myself so that I didn't depend on someone else to do it for me has been so worthwhile, though. While I'm dating a lovely man who does buy me flowers and plan sweet romantic weekends, I'm able to look at those gestures and appreciate them all the more because I don't depend on them to 'prove' I am loved. They are allowed to be exactly what they are: expressions of love and appreciation that are sweeter for not being required, for not filling in some relationship check-box. If you're depending on someone else's love to make you feel worthwhile, then you never will. The void has to be filled from the inside; it'll just consume whatever you're given by others, voracious and unchanging.
Today is Valentine's Day, a difficult day for many. For some, the holiday is just a stupid commercial Hallmark holiday designed to throw another set of rapids into relationship navigation. For others, it's a genuinely painful reminder of love lost or missed, of personal emptiness. Some of my friends have lost a partner in the last year, and my heart goes out to them. Today, more than any other day of the year, we fight the social machine that tries to make us worthless, that slams binary genders into heteronormative monogamous constructs and dismisses everything else as 'weird'. If you don't have love, if your love is wrong, if the love you have is incorrectly expressed, you're told that it makes you different, ugly, deviant, less-than.
I'm lucky, in my life, to have so many shining examples of love done right. In all manner of incarnations, from freewheeling uncommitted singles to stable, dedicated polyamorous blended families, I am surrounded by people making love work, and making love into a life. Maybe it's maturity, maybe it's the power of attraction drawing people like me to me, but the core of people who form the closest and most important structures in my life all share one thing, regardless of relationship status: we all recognise the value of loving yourself, of being happy to buy your own flowers and delighted when someone else buys them for you. We all see, in ourselves, something worthy of loving and we're all committed to bringing that out into our daily lives. When we look at each other, our partners, and ourselves, we see beings of light and wonder, souls we embrace without reservation, and individuals worthy of love, and we love each other, and that's good.
I love you all.
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