Relationship Anarchy

All Good Things Must Come To An End

MelC 5 Comments

Love is not about losing freedom; it’s about sharing freedom with a partner who’s as talented a liberationist as you
~ Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

This post has been hard for me to write. Indeed, it’s been hard for me to write anything for Polysingleish of late — a combination of focusing my writing energy elsewhere, and also feeling like I didn’t have more to contribute here.

I started this blog because I didn’t have anyone to guide me when I began my journey in consensual non-monogamy. There was no guide for being polyamorous while in a primary relationship with one’s own self.

Naturally, I stumbled. I messed up. I slowly figured out (sometimes through trial and error) what it meant to be polyamorous without a primary and without being on the relationship escalator.

This blog has been around for over 8 years now— and over the course of those 8 years, my words have landed with thousands of other folks who have been exploring relationships in a similar way. It has been an incredible honor, and so very humbling to receive feedback — from both friends and strangers alike — who say I’ve articulated something that they’ve always felt but thought they were alone in their experience.

I want to stay in integrity with all of you who have read and followed this blog through the years, and offer you a reflective summary of what this journey has been, and share with you the important ways my relationship landscape has shifted.

“I’m in a primary relationship with my self and having an orgy with the universe.”

Before I had the language to define myself as Solo Polyamorous, this was how I would explain myself and my relationship desires to others. In 2012 — as I transitioned from living in a quiet, hippy-centric community on coastal British Columbia into the busy, poly-friendly city of Vancouver — I began blossoming into my Self in a way I never had before. 

I’d married in my early 20s, and had so little dating experience prior to that. My marriage had been characterised by accommodation and compromise (mostly on my part) which I grew to resent. Through 7 years of marriage I lost touch with my own self, with the things that brought me joy, and the sense of play that had lifted me out of depression in my teens. Being a foreigner to Canada, introverted, and socially awkward, I had struggled to make friendships with people I shared values with. I had something of a community that helped me patch up a hole in my social fabric, but it didn’t totally fit who I was or who I aspired to grow into being.

Ending my marriage marked a new chapter, a coming back to my own self, and the possibilities of being able to explore and embody all the aspects of myself I’d kept locked away — through a childhood with a narcissistic, emotionally incestous and co-dependant homophobic mother, and through seven years of compromising my needs and dissocating from my desires within my marriage. I’d always dreamt of having multiple partners (so much so, it was a feature in my make believe stories as a kid). I knew I wanted to explore my sexuality with women. I had desires to unlock the kinkster within me. I yearned for connections that felt transcendental whilst simultaneously supportive, nourishing, and most of all where I could be fully myself.

My entry into the world of polyamory was bumpy. After early experiences of falling back into the temptations of Disney fantasies of romance, and feeling confounded by what was then a very couple-centric environment within the Vancouver Polyamory community (where almost everyone asked me if I had a primary partner), I said fuck it, I’m my OWN primary partner. 

I started engaging with myself based on that: taking my self out on dates, doing things for my Self that I had longed for a partner to do, etc. This was such a radical idea in my mind. And my goodness, it was exciting.  My commitment was to be firmly polysingleish for two years, and then re-assess.

I had many intense experiences during those two years. Looking back at it now, I see the younger me who was struggling: struggling with the loss of her relationship with her mother, struggling (still) to find a community who felt in alignment with her values, struggling to make a living in a city where the cost of living was twice what she’d been used to. That younger me took a long time to feel at ease in her relationships, but she had some incredible learning experiences along the way.

I remember the first time a partner asked for my consent for something sexual. I’d never been asked about my consent before. I remember nervously dating women for the first time. I remember the feeling of parts of my mind I’d never used before awakening, and the excitement that kept me up till 4am writing blog posts about my experiences.

I also remember when I felt things were not quite right. The overwhelm of attention that the ‘shiny new thing’ (as one partner referred to me) in a community receives. The fawn-responses that I gave to that attention because I didn’t know how else to engage with it, and so dearly did I want to belong in this polyamorous community that I was fearful of putting up boundaries, especially when it was community leaders who were taking an interest in me.

My own Monogamy Hangover would take over more than once. 

In 2014, when that time to re-assess came along, I was in a space in my life where I felt so empowered. I had loving partners, I had incredible friendships, I was growing community through the Solo Polyamory group, and I was feeling seen, heard, and understood at a deep level for the first time in my life. I re-committed to remaining Solo, whilst diving in to loving, long term partnerships. At one point I had three incredible concurrent relationships. Between these three partnerships in my life, I felt like I’d found something of a centre to my life as a solo polyamorist. I felt confident in my sexuality, and in my Self. But shortly thereafter, I went through a series of experiences that left me overwhelmed, unable to cope, and struggling.

Dancing with Demons: Tackling Trauma 

If you’ve never experienced trauma, then please consider yourself fortunate and privileged. Relational trauma is one of the hardest of all: human beings are relational creatures who need connection (albeit in differing degrees) as part of their physical and mental health. When you’ve had the experience of harm coming from an intimate connection, it does a number on your ability to trust and feel safe in future connections. 

As time rolled on — after being bullied by a former partner, stalked by one metamor, assaulted by another, screamed at in public spaces repeatedly by yet another meta, and feeling the withdrawal from partners who didn’t know how to engage with my resulting trauma — my enthusiasm for exploring new intimate connections began to dim.

I shifted my focus. Embracing the principles of Relationship Anarchy that I had already found so much resonance with, I began focussing on my platonic relationships as being the primary source of security and stability in my life. In my journey of recovery from trauma, it proved invaluable to nurture my friendships and community connections as the web through which my safety needs could be met. Along with growing a stronger community, I began going to therapy, and gradually felt myself regain the confidence to step back into intimate relationships — albeit much more mindfully than before, and with a craving for more simplicity and less drama.

One of the most important pieces of the journey of this past decade has been an unrelenting self-questioning. Why? My inquisitive mind has asked why of everything: of monogamy, of polyamory, of polynormativity, of solo polyamory, of sex, swinging, kink, everything. I ask myself why in my own relationships. Why am I drawn to this person? Do I feel comfortable with them because they are familiar, and does familiar mean healthy? Is my nervous system truly at ease with this partner, and if not, why not?

I often follow up with another question: what else is possible? And it is the pondering of this question over the past few years that has led my inner landscape and understanding of my needs and desires to shift. 

For the past four years I’ve taught classes on the Monogamy Hangover and run workshops on how to disentangle from the trappings of patriarchal monogamy. I’ve come to see that the Monogamy Hangover is all about the ways we seek out safety, security, and stability: it’s not the only strategy that can offer that to us, but it’s the one many of us are most familiar with, and so, we will keep returning to it until we find a BETTER strategy, one that makes the Monogamy Hangover obsolete. Every time I teach this, I find myself sitting down to question what aspects of the unconscious story and programming show up in my world still. 

As I write this, I’m 38 years old, and the shifts in my life over the past decade have been profound. The lessons in autonomy, agency, and independence that Solo Polyamory have taught me have assisted me in finding my own radical path in life, and have supported me as I step into being the bohemian and rebel I have always aspired to be. I learned how to be secure and loving with my own company, and have done so much healing for my own soul.

But along the way, I found something was missing for me: a grounded and secure place to come home to, emotionally. 

For all the incredible partners I have had, I never found my desire for an emotional home was fully reciprocated. For some, they didn’t have the capacity to meet me with what I was desiring in our relationship. For others, they had already found that with someone else, and struggled to realise that their polyamory was more about sexual non monogamy than it was about emotional non monogamy. 

I also began to realise that the ways I had pursued my sexual freedom had left me with deep wounds, and as much as I had been able to heal and integrate that past, I was now holding back in relationships because I didn’t want to re-awaken sexual traumas, nor did I want to slip back into a space where I was traumatised through erotic experiences. The slutty singleish saga of my early 30s had lost its deep appeal, and I was struggling to enjoy even my solo polyamorous connections, which began to feel either too brief, too shallow, or too far away. 

I was stuck, repeating the same pattern and expecting different results.

I returned to critical examination of my relationship desires and actions, digging deep into the questions of: what do I want, why do I want it, and where do I want to be in 5-10 years?

When I first asked myself those questions five years ago, I was clear: I wanted to live in a home with good friends, and enjoy loving relationships with multiple partners. Well, I got there. And, I wasn’t happy with it. I was agitated, anxious, stressed. I’d done all this healing work on myself, and about relationships, and yet something was missing.

Much to my surprise, I found a longing awake in me for something different than the Solo Polyamory path I’d been pursuing, and for two years I’ve held that longing gently in my awareness, allowing myself to be curious about it. 

What would it mean to let go of this relationship path that has become so interwoven with my personal identity? What aspects would I want to maintain, and what specifically was it about SoPo that hadn’t been serving me in my journey to joyful relating?

The possibility of a life-partner, an anchor partnership based on co-creation and commitment to mutual healing work, has always been present in my mind. Indeed, in one old blog post I wrote that such a partnership might be the only thing that could pull me into a more nested dynamic, and away from my solo-ness.  

Finding ‘The One’

Will I find “the one”? Oh goodness, I found ‘the one’ long ago: she’s me! But what I find I’m now seeking is a partnership that allows me to feel a little less alone in my self-primaryship. A partnership that doesn’t detract from, but rather, enhances that self relationship. 

I’m not looking for a monogamous, escalator romance. This isn’t the ending of a journey or the arrival at some kind of ‘inevitable’ dyadic partnership destination. This is a continuation of a bohemian, radical upending of mono-normative, hetero-normative, and yes, even poly-normative thinking. 

As a Relationship Anarchist I’ve held that labels should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. And the path I’m now on might no longer resemble solo polyamory. I am now absolutely, consciously, into creating an interweaving life partnership with someone… or someones. 

But I’m not leaving behind that primary-ship with my Self. I’m not letting go of the agency that says ‘I’m allowed to change my mind, and live on my own terms.’ Indeed, if not for my journey as a solo polyamorist, I don’t think that I would have arrived at this place, and I don’t think I’d have the same understanding of just what it means to make bold changes to preserve one’s own right to do what you need to do for the greater wellbeing of your soul.  

I don’t think this is an inevitable path for people practicing Solo Polyamory. And I worry that, having had such a place in the public eye of solo polyamory, the changes in my relationship landscape might be seen to invalidate the solo polyamorist’s path. So let me be clear: there is profound healing work that needs to be done outside of enmeshed relationship. We are so many generations thick in trauma from enforced monogamy and all the trappings it brings (including gendered oppression, and more) that I do believe every individual would benefit from spending some of their time in the realms of Solo Polyamory. What might, perhaps, be inevitable, is that each person in their journey may need to find their own way of balancing the tension between self-intimacy and intimacy with others, as a crucial piece of finding secure attachment and somatic ease within themselves.

Almost ten years since I started this blog, and the conversation in polyamory has shifted. We’re just starting to undo the couple-centric and monogamy hangover thinking that has directed most consensual non-monogamy till now. We’re starting to talk about having a trauma-informed approach to polyamory. And, we’re beginning to collectively realise the real significance of supporting a healthy relationship with one’s self as being paramount. 

I take pride in having played a role in that shift. And even though my own relationship style has changed through the years, I maintain that primary-with-my-self attitude, and work to cultivate self-intimacy daily.

This is the last post I intend to make here on Polysingleish.

It has been quite the ride, and I am grateful for everyone who’s taken the time to witness it.

But my own personal journey is not over. Rather, it’s a new adventure that is beginning. One where I get to explore just how profound this self love can become when building conscious and transformative relationships with others. You can keep following my work over at Radical Relating, via my mailing list, and also on Facebook and Instagram. And, I promise you I’ll keep doing everything I can to offer validation to, and create spaces for those solo and singleish folks within the polyamorous communities, and within the world at large.

With all my love,

“Remember that self love is also revolutionary and world-changing. We cannot fight for others when we are fighting a war inside ourselves. Compassion is reflexive, a power that we first bestow on ourselves, and then give away through our actions — to people, to our planet. When we recognise that truth, that is when we let love become our legacy”

~Amanda Gorman.

Spiritual Paths, Solo Polyamory, and Primary Self-Relationships

MelC Leave a comment

“Honor your self,
Worship your Self,
Meditate on your Self,
God dwells within you as you.”
~ Swami Muktananada

325Muktananda was a controversial figure, who had a profound affect on many lives, my own included. My mother met him in the 1970s and became his student. He was an Indian Guru, a teacher of yoga philosophy and spirituality, who toured the world with an entourage of swamis and lay-teachers, establishing ashrams and meditation centers wherever they went. It was at one of these ashrams that my parents were married, and where I had many of my formative spiritual experiences as a youngster and teen. It was at another of these ashrams that I met my future ex-husband. Muktananda—  or Baba, as he was affectionately called—  and his teachings, have been a huge influence on my life.

When he talks about “God” he doesn’t mean some old guy in the sky. The God he talked about is Love, Bliss, Ultimate Freedom. The goal of the yoga path he taught was to become so open hearted one could greet everyone as a form of love, as a form of divinity, and in so doing, experience the bliss of freedom. Maybe this sounds a little woo. And that’s okay. I’m not trying to convert you here, I’m sharing with you how I came to be in a primary relationship with myself.

I never met Baba, though he gifted me a name in Sanskrit that I sometimes use. I became a student of his successor, a spirited and compassionate woman, Swami Chidvilasananda.  Their teachings have always been a guiding star for me to turn to whenever I have felt lost. Part of why I don’t talk about them openly is because they are a very private experience for me. It was these teachings I returned to when, in 2011, I separated from my then husband. When my mother started trying to guilt me into being monogamous and straight, I looked to the teachings that held more sway in my heart than my co-dependant desire to please her: I remembered Chivilasananda once saying that if we ever had to choose between tradition and love, to choose love, because Love is the highest spiritual path there is.

And so I chose to follow my heart. I embarked on a journey of polyamory. And when I started this blog it was with the general idea that I didn’t want a primary relationship like I’d had before- I didn’t want to be putting a partner before my own needs, or the needs of the relationship ahead of the needs of my heart and soul. I needed to follow Baba’s advice and honor my self first and foremost if I wanted to find freedom. I was going to be in a primary relationship with myself—  and have an orgy with the universe!

I haven’t written much directly about my spirituality on this blog before, but today it felt important to do so, in order to honor the roots of a philosophy that is so very dear to me, and thru the presence of this blog and my voice in the polyamorous community, a philosophy that has come to be closely associated with Solo Polyamory.

To be in a primary relationship with one’s self is not the exclusive purview of Solo Polyamory any more than it is exclusive to the spiritual teachings I grew up with. I’ve heard arguments that if people in primary, nesting, or cohabiting relationships are using this phrase that they are appropriating a value that is reserved for Solo Polyamory only.

Well, that’s nonsense.

What my spiritual path has taught me is that relationships where we see the divine in the other but not in ourselves—  that is to say that we forget our own sovereignty and surrender it to our partner—  we loose our freedom, we create a codependant dynamic, and we become trapped by the toxic stories within partnership. I’ve also learned that this is one of those ‘universal truths’, a nugget of wisdom that pops up in many traditions, religions, spiritual paths, and philosophies around the world.

In the past 6 years my experience has been that when I have returned to treating myself as primary, and honoring, caring, and fawning to meet my own needs as if I were two (incredibly sexy, intelligent) people madly in love and romancing and supporting eachother like a loving elderly couple might, then I am saner, happier, healthier, and am better resourced to be present in all my other relationships.

full cupAs a relationship coach, so often I see people caught in dynamics where they feel trapped or limited as a result of surrendering their self relationship over to the partnership in their lives. A lot of the work I do is centered around supporting my clients to reconnect with their own needs, wants, and desires, and empowering them to find the blissful freedom that is possible when they can prioritise themselves as an act of self love, so that when they go to care for others, they do so with a full cup.

“My primary relationship is with my Self. All others are but mirrors of it.”

~ Shakti Gawain

The idea of a primary self relationship is by no means exclusive to spiritual teachings either. Modern psychology and wellness has caught on to what monks, nuns, swamis, and other renunciates have known for centuries: that renouncing the ideas of being completely beholden, subservient,or entwined with a partner is one of the healthiest things you can do for your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing.

Sex educators, therapists, and feminist punks alike have been recognising the benefits of getting out of co-dependancy and dominance culture by nourishing a primary relationship with one’s self.

I have met many people in marriages and common law partnerships who tell me they resonate a lot with Solo Polyamory, and ask if they can be solo polyamorous while married. Well, technically I would have to say no, you can’t. The defining factor of Solo Polyamory is the eschewing of coupledom that entails— things like living together, sharing expenses, and so forth. However very few people in this world have the privilege to be able to afford to live alone. Many of us have experienced moving in with a partner, or with friends, and merging resources with others as a means for economic and social survival. So I don’t think those choices made out of a need for survival should remove us from the solo polyamory description. Practical intimacy is only one dimension of intimacy, and sharing a home with someone does not necessarily lead to ‘couple’ dynamics in emotional, social, and sexual aspects of relating. In relationship anarchy, we work to dismantle the socially endowed privileges that coupledom receives, and as such, couples who are embracing an RA philosophy may find that being their own primaries is useful to that end. In fact, many couples have found that by enacting more of an autonomous, solo philosophy in their relationships, their relationships have grown healthier.

My bottom line here: if everyone in the world could be in a primary relationship with themselves, and we could all learn to honor the primary relationships of everyone, we might have a much better world to live in. And who am I to deny permission for others to try this path out, whatever kind of relationship they happen to be in right now.

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If you want to read more of Baba Muktananda and Swami Chidvilasananda’s writings, please visit the Siddha Yoga website. You may also find resonance with the work of Christopher Hareesh Wallis, whose Recognition Sutras course I highly recommend.

Tolerating Trauma

MelC 1 Comment

I am tolerating my trauma.

As I sit down to write, anticipating the next session of the Good Girl Recovery Program, and reflecting on how my life has changed since I first took it three years ago, I realise: I am tolerating my trauma.

We look at tolerance in the program. A Tolerance is often a symptom of our Good Girl being in charge. Being ‘good’ often means tolerating things we don’t like, and the feeling that we can’t do anything about them.

I have been tolerating my trauma.

I don’t much like my trauma. It surrounds me, some days like a wall of steel, other days like an amorphous blob of goo. I love the days when I forget it’s there: days filled with forming new, happy, joyful memories, and nights spent feeling safe in my body, and safe in a lover’s arms. The other days though, the days when that barrier appears, and I am straight jacketed back into seclusion and fear — I don’t much like those days.

408562534_60cf923a09_zI tolerate the effect it has on me. I tolerate the terror that bubbles up when I try to express my sexuality with women, a fear that causes me to freeze from the inside out. I tolerate that second-guessing in my head every time someone gives me a compliment about who I am or what I do. I tolerate fear living inside of me — fear that the ones who gaslight me are right.

I am so done with tolerating my trauma.

It starts, unnoticed, like a pebble in your shoe, that discomfort you can’t quite pinpoint, but that irks you all the same. As you walk, it becomes noticeable. The more you walk, the more noticeable it becomes until finally you pull the shoe off and see the bloody hole in your sock where your skin has broken, given in to the repeated annoyance. I couldn’t stop to let the wounds heal. There were things to be done, places to be reached. I put that shoe on and soldiered forward.

I have been tolerating the pain.

The irony of these tolerances is that this all began when I tolerated disrespect of my body. I was silent about my sovereignty when I could have been far more vocal, far more articulate about my boundaries — both physical and emotional. I tolerated them being crossed over and over, by more than one person. I’ve done that my whole life in an effort to ‘be good’ and ‘fit in’. Tolerating disrespect of my body and my voice cost me dearly.

I have been tolerating my mistakes.

At night I sit sometimes next to my journal, but I don’t write. I’m afraid to record these thoughts in any way, scared that if I re-read them, I will chisel them into my psyche. I wonder, what if the un-named whispers are right? What if I stand in my community an imposter, a pretender, someone not deserving of this world? What if I am some ticking timebomb of Danger, the solo polyamorous anarchist slut, the unpredictable, unpartnered, unaccountable, waiting to explode chaos onto the world — or their world, at least?

I have been tolerating a community’s abuse of me, their dismissal of my voice, and of my experience.

I don’t need to tolerate these things any more.

I can do something about my tolerances.

I take steps to heal my trauma.

courage-1197366_960_720In gratitude, I work with therapists, bodyworkers, sexological workers, somatic healers, and more. I float. I begin to feel safer in my body, comfortable again in my own skin. The nightmares no longer wake me at night. I can relax in both solitude and company.

In love, I begin to experience my sexuality in new ways, different ways than before. My partners hold space for my orgasms of tears as much as the orgasms of laughter. They listen to my body. We move together, breathe together, heal together. I am in awe of these men.

In service, I look to explore community. I cannot be blind to the inescapable pedestalling, but I can look to serve, and offer what gifts I have to those who would ask, and invite them in. I stand strong and ask for my right to space in each group that invites me to dance. With shield raised, but sword lowered, I let it be known I wish no fight, only to participate and share. Some, kindly, listen, and let me in. I find myself tolerating the avoidant silences of others.

In community, I build stronger roots. No longer a career nomad, nor shackled to the idea of permanent impermanence of friendships, I seek sisterhood, I seek kinship, I seek family — and I find it. I desire to know these humans, and for them to know me, in our deepest, raw truths. I heal, through my community.

In integrity, I prostrate myself before the roots of my trauma. I seek to honour the teachers they have been, and to find a path of peace, not war. I recognise the tragic expressions of unmet needs we have all made — both myself, and others — and ask what do we need to heal?

As I write these words, I feel relief. The releasing of what has been tolerated opens a door to new joy, and in this generous space of possibility, a life that could be well worth living for.

I choose, not to be Good, but to be Kind.

I had tolerated being good and it made me mad and angry. I choose to change that. Not to act out of obligation and expectation of what I ‘should’ do, but rather, to move from my heart, to act from compassion — both for myself, and for others. Moving out of a space of tolerance is not so much a question of “what’s good for me?” rather it is “what would the kindest choice be?”

And in such kindness, I receive from myself, what I tolerated a lack of from others: a compassionate embrace, gratitude for what is, forgiveness for what I wish was not, and hope for a kinder tomorrow.

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Radical Self Reliance and Community Responsibility

MelC 2 Comments

“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce….. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past… Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.’ Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.’ …In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”

~Gabor Mate

 

I read an article recently on Radical Self Reliance, and how this concept is killing people. In it, the author talks about the concept of Radical Self Reliance as it exists in the modern influence of Burning Man Culture on the world at large. Simply defined on the Burning Man Organisation’s website, it is encouragement for “each individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.”

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walking across Playa, August 2014

In practice, it’s to encourage personal responsibility for one’s own well-being: you bring to the Playa what you will need, you don’t expect anyone else to look after you. It’s a fantastic principle to have, and I have found huge value in the practice of living life in such a way that I take on responsibility for my own well being and experience- it has taught me resilience and emotional fortitude that I don’t know I could have learned elsewhere.

I do, however, see a shadow side to this. Radical Self Reliance can become toxic, I find, when we shift into exclusively looking after ourselves, and forgetting that none of us are physical- or emotional- islands.

We are all in relationship to one another. Until only one human being is left on this planet, there is no escaping this.

Individualism and “Poly Libertarianism”

Individualism- putting the individual first, and ignoring the collective needs of a community- is, I believe, one of the most prominent characteristics of the endemic disconnection emerging in modern society.

“No one is responsible for anyone else’s emotions or meeting anyone else’s needs. There is no more co-dependence. There is interdependence, on a voluntary basis. Each member is an autonomous, free individual, who can come or go as she or he pleases. Our love is earned, not expected.”

~Sara Burrows, on Poly Libertarianism

I see many people engaging in what has been labelled “Poly Libertarianism”, where they state their needs and shirk any responsibility for meeting what other people’s needs might be. Heck, I’ve done that and been one of those poly people. Prioritising my relationship with myself has been fundamental in my own journey in Solo Polyamory. For a long time, I needed to shut out the idea that others had needs and requests that I could (and should) respond to because I’d internalised damaging messages about having to please others. I view this behaviour pattern now as an adaptive behaviour I used to cope with my own personal experience of the collective trauma inherent with being a woman raised in a patriarchal society. I’d suppressed my own desires for so long that now, when I was finally free of that suppression, I didn’t want to stop and listen to what anyone else wanted. I had to discover what I wanted.

As much as that path allowed me to get clear on where the stories around obligations and ‘shoulds’ came from, as much as it taught me the power in saying no to meeting someone else’s desire, and asking for my own desires to be met, it didn’t bring me joy in my relationships, because it alone didn’t support connection. It was hugely valuable in the process of finding authenticity in myself, but it didn’t support intimacy.

Intimacy and Compassion

Intimacy doesn’t exist in individualism. Intimacy can only come from connection, and while individualism encourages more self-awareness and connection to one’s own needs, wants, and desires, it is Intimacy  that asks us to recognise the needs, wants, and desires of our partners, families, friends, and indeed, our entire community.

“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through. If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it’s only because in their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed. Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate self-inquiry.”

~ Gabor Mate, In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts

For the first few years of my journey in polyamory, focussing on Solo Polyamory, I nourished and refined a fantastic relationship with myself. It has been a remarkable journey in self-intimacy. And yet, the relationships I had with others didn’t reflect the kind of intimacy I was desiring. I was so keen on my own radical self-reliance, that I forgot a very important piece: community responsibility.

Yes, you are responsible for your Self, I am responsible for my Self- and yet we exist in the same place and time, and therefore we have a relationship with one another. In that relationship, I cannot shake off responsibility for the effects of my words and actions on you, nor can you shake off responsibility for the effects of your words and actions on me. That is to say, while your reactions are your own, that doesn’t mean I can’t participate in the processing of your reaction, or that I should ignore the effects my own actions and words have had on you- no matter what my initial intent was.

I understand the drive for Poly Libertarianism, I really do. It provides an amazing buffer against the shadow emotions that can come up in relationships, experiences of jealousy, which some believe are rooted in feelings of fear, loneliness, loss, sadness, anger, betrayal, envy and humiliation.

I would propose, however, that the Individualism approach doesn’t actually address the core issue. I have found that those root emotions so often mentioned are all manifestations of fear, or more specifically, they are a side effect of living with a scarcity paradigm.

We fear loss, loneliness, betrayal, humiliation when we believe love is a limited resource, and we experience envy, anger, possessiveness as a reaction to that fear, still within the scarcity paradigm. These all relate to the core (false) belief that we can have ownership of someone else’s love, and that we may be entitled to it because there’s a limited supply.

And, scarcity is a story we can choose, and it is one that we are sometimes unconsciously choosing when we set ourselves apart on that metaphorical island where we are only responsible for ourselves, both physically and emotionally.

Our other option is to switch gears and choose to recognise that love is abundant and can come in infinite forms. And, that if we dare to show vulnerability and compassion, an infinite number of connections can form, and intimate community can grow.

“Cultivating intimacy with something means becoming sufficiently close to it to know it very, very well. When we don’t get close enough — like scientists keeping themselves emotionally stranded from their subject of study — we miss essential aspects of it. And if we get too close, to the point of fusing with it — like new lovers letting their boundaries collapse in a romantic swoon — we will no longer be able to keep it in focus.

In intimacy, we are deeply relating to an “other” — which could be a person, object, or state — getting close to it in a manner that transcends mere proximity. When it comes to cultivating intimacy with something, connection with it and separation from it are not opposites, but rather fluidly intertwined dance partners.”

~Robert Augustus Masters, “Cultivating Our Intimacy”

When you’re living in an abundance paradigm, the fear of loss, loneliness, and ownership of love don’t appear in the same way, you’re sharing love with everyone, you’re giving your care-bear-stare of compassion and welcoming to each person, whether lover or friend, in whatever way feels right and consensual, and you never feel depleted, nor do you feel lacking when alone.

The Balancing Act between Individual and Community

e727a05410166fcb542ee1eea918I’ve noticed a trend when relationships hit rocky waters: we can confuse the need for individual sovereignty with selfishness, and relationships that put individual needs of one person over another can grow dysfunctional. Likewise, sometimes individuals shirk responsibility for their participation in another person’s emotional state. When that happens, I think there’s a repression of empathy and compassion, which ends up perpetuating internalised stories around scarcity, othering, duality, and disconnection. And, on the flip-side of that, Individuals who take on responsibility for another person’s emotional state are effectively engaging in a form of self-repression, where their own state is ignored and they become energetically subservient to another’s projections of them.

So what is the solution? Relationships that respect there may be both overlapping and incompatible needs, and approach this quandary with compassion- that’s where I feel healthy Intimacy lies. Recognising that our intent is often different from the results of our actions and interactions allows us to have boundaries whilst engaging with compassion. When things go awry and things aren’t the way we want them to be, we don’t necessarily have to take on responsibility for how someone else feels, but we can recognise our own participation in events that may have created that experience- and, more importantly, if those events have been ones that have hurt, injured, or left trauma with another person, we can engage in the process of healing.

Recognising our own potential for active participation in improving the experience of all our partners, family members, friends, metamors, and community, is a huge leap in nourishing both intimacy and compassion. And, huge leaps are not easy. This one asks us to grapple with the stories of self shame, pride, ego, the desire to Be Right, and to find in ourselves greater stores of compassion, humility, empathy, understanding, and that thing we all say we’re here for: Love.

For 2016, my invitation to you is this: don’t be an island. Radical Self Reliance is great, and- you also don’t have to be alone. Our society is suffering from a disease of disconnection, and I sometimes wonder if the urge to explore polyamory and other forms of non-monogamy stems from a deep rooted desire for greater experiences of connection.

Do you dare to open yourself to the possibility of deeper, and more intimate connection? Are you willing to examine what it is that you, as an individual, need, want, and desire? And also to examine what the people around you need, want, and desire? Radical self-reliance can teach us about ourselves; Radical Community Responsibility is the journey of growing to know one another.

 

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Radical Relationships and the Evolution of Identity

MelC 2 Comments

 

EDIT: Since this post was originally published, the podcast referenced has been taken down. I include my copy of the transcript below in this post for readers to enjoy. I am no long associated with Ian Mackenzie in any form. 



Three years ago I set out on a journey to explore my identity- I wanted to know who I was and what was going to work for me in relationships. I committed myself to a two year period of being Singleish, without a primary partner, and being Polyamorous, having multiple partners. Three years and thirty-nine lovers later, I have an identity- and it isn’t the one I started out with.

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Every so often I get asked about the difference between Relationship Anarchy and Polyamory. To summarise very obtusely, the former is more of a philosophical approach to relating to people, whereas the latter is the label given to a particular form of Non Monogamy. Yet, in practice, they appear to have a lot of overlap. For me, the more I dive into exploring and examining what Relationship Anarchy is, the more I develop a love/hate relationship with the term “Polyamory”- adoration for the freedom it offers, and frustration at the limitation it can present with.

I can tell you what I believe to be true about Relationship Anarchy- it’s a philosophy that provides a construct for the most consensually-based relationships. Whereas the act of applying labels like ‘monogamy’, ‘primaried’, ‘polyamory’, and so forth, is about defining what we have with someone (sometimes with the belief that by defining something we preserve it, a notion I don’t personally buy into anymore), Relationship Anarchy is a conversation about, “Where are we right now?” and “Who are we today?” and “What’s real for us in this moment?”

I sat down recently with Ian Mackenzie to talk about the concepts of Relationship Anarchy, and the possibilities I feel it provides for whole communities, along with the opportunities for a new paradigm of relationshiping to emerge- one in which individualism and collectivism can once again be in harmony. This is a paradigm that I think goes a little deeper than the scope of Relationship Anarchy, and so I’m calling it- Relationship Radicalism.


I think that Radical Relating- and the evolution we are seeing within that- represents a powerful paradigm shift around the art of relationshiping. It isn’t relating for the sake of arriving at some fixed destination, nor is it a process of auditioning for particular roles one requires to be filled. Rather, it is relating for the sake of relating.

It is relating from a place of authenticity. It is relating in a way that both honors the needs, wants and desires of the individual, whilst seeking connection- and synergy- with a collective.

This is the paradigm I find growing in my own life, as I witness myself blossom into a multitude of deeply loving, evolving, embodied, long term relationships, both romantic and aromantic, sexual and platonic, with lovers, metamors, friendtimacies, and platonic friendships all occupying significant places in my life.

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What I see coming in the not-too-distance future, both in my own life and in the communities around me, is something that is about much more than romantic, sexual, and intimate relationships; I feel that it provides possibilities for whole communities, and is independent of whether individuals are choosing monogamous or non-monogamous relationships. And, I’m excited to explore that together with some extraordinary people!

 

Transcript:

Mel: So Relationship Anarchy is an approach to relationship, it’s a philosophical mindset, it originated in Europe with the writings of a blogger called Andie Nordgen, but the principles of it are:

  • Love is abundant and every relationship is unique
  • Love and respect instead of entitlement
  • find your core set of relationship values.
  • Build for the unexpected

These are the core elements.

For me, Relationship Anarchy represents very much a consent based approach to relationships, so rather than saying “this is our relationship now” and giving it a label and then feeling that you are now obligated to meet the expectation of that label, it’s more an ongoing conversation- and so relationships can still happen, and they can change shape and form as time goes by- and it’s okay for them to do that.

You can have a plethora of close relationships, some that are sexually involved, some are emotionally involved, some are completely asexual and deeply platonic – and you’re not creating a hierarchy based on whether you are dating someone or not, based on whether you are sleeping with someone or not. Your friends are considered to be as equal as partners.

That’s my general summary of Relationship Anarchy!

Ian: I’d love to ask a few questions, and not necessarily connecting it to Tamera yet, but out of my curiosity, playing a devil’s advocate:

If someone says all relationships are considered equal, then how does one find the deep partnership that comes from living in, say, close proximity- maybe in a pair bond, maybe in a non-monogamous pair bond- but what is the danger of what cannot grow when there’s this non-hierarchical approach to all relationships? There’s something being sacrificed, that’s what I’m saying.

Mel: So maybe saying all relationships are equal is a little misleading. The approach I take to relationships is that we are all in relationship to everyone else. It is a question of whether we are aware of the relationship or not.

You and I have a relationship, we are friends, we have mutual friends, we are part of a close knit social group: so we have a relationship. That relationship between you and I exists as its own entity. We get to decide what that relationship becomes, just as two parents co-parenting a child might make decisions about their child. “It seems our kids is really into the arts, so let’s send them to some art workshops, lets invest in that for them” or “Our child really loves broccoli so let’s make sure our child eats broccoli.” We assess what our relationship is and what it needs in order to grow.

So in Relationship Anarchy, you’re looking at all your relationships in that way. As in, what’s authentic for this relationship? I think very often we follow default scripts about relationship cos that’s what we are given.

We get the scripts from hollywood, the media, scripts that our parent’s followed. You meet someone, and then you date them and move in and now you’re married- that’s it! You follow this script forever, on repeat. But with the Relationship Anarchy approach you are looking at:

What are the things I need, want, and desire?
What are the things you need, want, and desire?
And where does that overlap?
And where that overlaps, that’s where we get to explore engaging in relationship.

Does that make sense?

Ian: It does. I guess the troubled waters I anticipate,for a couple that has an ongoing relationship, how, in all types of open structures, and in things like monogamous structures, things like jealousy come up.

In a hierarchical structure there’s this artificial deference to someone who is higher in the hierarchy, which is because this person is a core partner or say primary, they’ll say well, you might have some beautiful relationship connection with someone else, but at the end of the day, because I’m primary, I need to be tended to more than these other relationships.

Mel: So the interesting thing with Relationship Anarchy is you can be a Relationship Anarchist, and also be monogamous.

Ian: And monogamy, are you talking more a sensual/sexual monogamy?

Mel: If it’s what makes sense for you in a relationship. If you’re like- wow, actually the flavor this relationship wants to embody is monogamy, you can choose monogamy in that relationship. Relationship Anarchy isn’t necessarily without hierarchy. There can be a hierarchy.

It’s not hierarchy in the way a lot of Poly writers talk about it where there is veto power; I think that’s different and getting into a power dynamic where third-parties have control over other relationships. I think you can have hierarchy in terms of priority. If you live with a partner, that’s going to demand a certain level of prioritising, in the decision making process, because if you want to have someone over for sleepover, well how is your partner going to feel about that?

If you are living with a partner you co-parent with, that again brings another layer of decision making in. Even if you are a single parent, that’s going to affect the way you prioritise your other relationships. The prioritising of things can change over time. If you have a long distance lover, when they come into town you’re going to prioritise time with them because you don’t see them very much, vs the live in partner you see every day.

Ian: The thing that struck me is, It sounds very similar, speaking to Boomers who lived through the first free love revolution or explosion, that there was this idea that free love is free from all types of someone else deciding what is and isn’t appropriate and in that sense it sounds similar to Relationship Anarchy.

But a lot of the critique that has flowered is: you do whatever you want, despite whatever the fall-out happens to be, and in many cases it was children being raised by parents who were barely acquaintances who had one passionate evening and all of a sudden were thrown in. There’s a lot of broken homes and this kind of sour taste in a lot of them I meet and say “We tried that and it didn’t work.”

I feel like this definition of Relationship Anarchy is different. It may have had roots in that kind of initial, rebellious adolescence of “I’ll do what I want. No one can tell me what to do.” but it seems like it’s grounded further in not just a philosophy, but in a radical beginner’s mind with every relationship you have.

Mel: Yeah, Relationship Anarchy has a strong emphasis on commitment, and your communication. So your commitments, you get to customize them. There’s a strong piece of integrity in there. I think that some people will hear “Relationship Anarchy” and interpret that to mean ‘Anarchy!’ ‘Chaos!’ ‘Haphazard!’ ‘We can do whatever we want!’ Kind of how you’re describing, ‘We can just be free!’

But you are not free from responsibility, you still have responsibility for your own actions. And this is why I say that Relationship Anarchy is a Consent Culture based approach to relationships, because in the work I do with Consent Culture, that’s about ongoing communication.

Just because you said yes to making out with someone last week, doesn’t mean you want to make out with them this week. So, not assuming that because a relationship existed before, that there was permission or a yes for something before, that you’re still going to have a yes for it now.

What I have observed with people who identify with Relationship Anarchy is that they are engaged in conversation about their relationship, ongoingly- which I think is very different from the monogamy paradigm I grew up with, and that you and I have talked about before. You grow up and you think “Okay I’ll be a successful grown up and do the marriage thing” and it kinda grows stale, and it feels very hard – and if you have to be talking about your relationship then somehow that means your relationship is broken and you failed and you did something wrong.

I see people being resistant to getting relationship coaching because there is this internal story about what that means. Whereas, in Relationship Anarchy you are constantly talking about your relationships- and, in Polyamory too, they say that everything boils down to more communication, being in a conversation and being able to step outside and come in from this meta space and talk about the relationship:

“I feel that in this part of our relationship, I’d like to have more sex” “Okay i’m fine with the sex we’re having.” And then you continue on the conversation. The conversation never stops.

Whereas, I think, in the traditional monogamy paradigm the conversation stops as soon as you say “I do”. And then the only conversation after that is logistics. Who’s doing the laundry? Who is taking out the recycling?

Ian: It strikes me that, and having come from that exact paradigm, the conversation that “I’m attracted to somebody else” is totally devastating to a traditional monogamous and non communicative couple because it taps into this core wounding, I think, of feeling ‘not special’.

If your primary has feelings or affection for someone else you must not be as special to them as you thought you were and everything else follows from that. And that’s not true; as soon as this is uncoupled, as soon as idea of uniqueness and specialness is decoupled from this idea of sexual fidelity, it’s just a completely different terrain that opens up.

I want to shift this over to Tamera. I do see some of this mapping on to what’s happening there. From what I saw, there were many in deep partnership, that we might even consider more traditional in terms of pair bonds living together, and some were practicing some forms of non-monogamy.

I would consider the dominant model I saw, from the lense of the individual, was very similar to Relationship Anarchy: people were encouraged to approach every relationship and every moment as it arose as ‘What’s the truth of this moment, what’s the truth of this connection right now?’ and a fearless willingness to say whatever might be present, even if it ends up being wrong. And so this whole idea of rejection and feeling, that “I got rejected” and all this kind of stuff that comes in the fear of making one’s self vulnerable in connection.

There, I saw this very kind of benign willingness to say, “Oh I’m feeling some erotic attraction to you right now would you like to explore this.” And the other might say “Actually I’m just enjoying this conversation and not feeling the need to move to that level” and it would be like “How wonderful.” It was just part of the fabric of the way the community moved and flowed.

The only thing that made this even possible was the structure of community.

And this is where I’m curious about Relationship Anarchy, as it is spoken about. In the things I’ve read so far, it’s a very Self-oriented path; in the descriptions I’ve read, it’s all built on the truth of the Self and then the truth and enacting one’s desire and there seems to be little talk of what does that mean for a community at large.

Where is the space for understanding the role of community and Relationship Anarchy?

Mel: Those are good questions. I’m really glad that you’re asking them. In what I’ve been studying and writing and learning and researching about, I’m seeing that we are on the cusp of diving into this in a big way. I love that Tamera is using Radical Honesty as part of their process, and I think that Radical Honesty is an amazing practice to embrace no matter your relationship style, with everybody, just acknowledging the truth of the moment.

So how does this translate into building a community if you don’t have an intentional community structure already in place? I have to go back to look at the way that society has evolved. Human beings are traditionally collective organisms. We like to live in groups and collective cultures are what we have all come from and there are many other cultures today that still function very strongly.

Latino culture is a collective culture. Asian culture is a collective culture. And by that I mean that your family is like a strong, almost tribe-like unit, and grandparents are respected, aunts and uncles are respected. You drop everything to help your family. Cos, why would you not do that?

In Western culture in the 20th century we have seen the evolution of Individualism. I think that’s had some great results and that’s also come with some adverse effects. The problem with collective culture is that we start following along with a tradition without it having truth for us.

So for example, in the Middle East, women traditionally covered their faces, when they were living in tribes wandering in the desert, because that’s how you protected the women from being stolen by other wandering tribesman. It was very much a part of women’s safety to cover up.

That’s now become ingrained as a cultural thing, and even though there is so much more in place, legally, to protect women’s rights, women are still expected to cover up in many parts of the Middle East.

That’s a small example of a collective culture rule, unspoken sometimes, that we have held onto that is no longer relevant.

So, Individualism has come in to these traditional collective cultures and gone, “Well, actually my truth is different from the paradigm that I’m living in.” So if we look at monogamy vs non-monogamy, my truth is that I don’t want to be monogamous, yet the world around me expects me to be monogamous. “Screw that I’m gonna do what I want.”

And we’ve done that now in many ways in the 20th and now 21st century. We see Individualism even in the way capitalism has come in. We have all this choice about what we can consume. Individualism has come in in political rights, you’re not just going to be voiceless, you have a voice. Individualism has become huge with the rise of social media – we all have the ability to be the stars of our own lives.

The downside of Individualism is that we have moved away from Collectivism to the extreme and this is why you have a lot of panicked Conservatives talking about “Oh you’re destroying family structure, we’re losing family values,” because they are seeing the selfishness of Individualism trump the vision of the community; so instead of serving the needs of the community, instead of serving the tribe, we are only serving ourselves.

So I think we are coming to a point of examining what’s true for our community.

The paradigm we have been living in is not working for us. Economically, socially, environmentally, socially, it’s not working, it’s not authentically serving our needs. So, what we all as individuals have to do is go “This is what I need want and desire. These are the things I need for my life to be joyful and happy. These are the things I want to do and develop with and grow. These are the things I desire and the people I want to be interacting with. These are the projects I want to see to fruition in the world.”

And we all need to get clear on that. Because when we are all clear then we get to see where the overlap is.

Each of us has the bubble of the things we desire and want and need. And we have to be clear as individuals what those things are. Wherever there is overlap with anybody else, that’s where relationships can grow and blossom. Now, we can do that on a one-on-one basis with people. We can do that friendship-wise, or romantically, or sexually. You can have those moments of radical honesty where it’s like “Oh I’m feeling sexual tension with you right now would you be interested in exploring that?” People can have an authentic conversation.

When you translate that level of authenticity into a bigger picture, even within our social group, there are situations where we’re going to put on an event, and we figure out what works for everyone, and we have to have amazing communication to do that, and we can only have that communication when we are being completely honest and have that radical honesty.

I’m really conscious as I’m speaking that this sounds really idealistic, and I recognise that. I recognise that it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight on a global scale.

However, I do think we are getting closer to it, because with the internet, with social media, with the speed we can communicate and process our ideas, the technology is there to help us see where that overlap is, i we are talking about big community projects. And I think that’s helping us to understand how we can communicate more in our relationships and our closer circle .

I definitely see a tribe evolving in my life of close friends, lovers, lover’s lovers, everyone kind of links around somehow. It’s quite exciting. There’s never a situation where everyone is hanging out at the same time, but pockets of us will hang out, and beautiful conversations happen, and everyone sees how they can work together.

Ian: Beautifully said. One of the things that strikes me about your description there too, is that we start to develop these constellation of relationships. Some interlock and some cross paths and some don’t. And the tension point, finding the balance seems to be between enacting one’s own desires and needs, what one wants to do in the world and how to be of service- and at the same time recognising there’s a potential for impact in the wider constellation: coming to that understanding, how do we balance now in the understanding that what we do affects far more than simply ourselves.

Mel: I think there’s a shift in awareness, to be conscious of the ‘tensegrity’ of relationships. So, tensegrity being a concept that Buckminster Fuller explored about creating physical structures, how everything is equally reliant on every other part- and I see relationships evolving in a similar way.

We’re not codependent on one another, it’s not like two cards leaning on eachother and if one gets knocked over, everything’s going to fall apart- but we exist as parts of a greater whole, and we all play a role in that, and our own personal integrity is key in creating integrity within the community.

We have constellations we may be part of, and we may be part of several constellations, and then we become a link between them.

Ian: It feels like the other missing piece for a properly functioning constellation or community is a shared vision, a shared understanding of what is this all for.

Tamera articulates this very beautifully. They began the late sixties on the backs of activist student movement against the State and the powers-that-be, and then they fell back into deeper understanding of “Well, we can’t fight the system we have to have alternatives,” and then proceeded to experiment- and one of those experiments became Tamera.

Right from the get-go, they understood that interpersonal conflict was at the core of so many of these communities that ended up failing, because of these questions around love and sexuality and partnership, and the lack of spaces for communication and for real trust to build between people.

I think that because they started there, I think it’s no surprise that they were able to build something on top of that, and this to me is why a lot of the conversation around relationship forms are in fact somewhat premature.

I think for people to go right into a non-monogamous structure, any couple going from a traditional monogamous partnership into an open structure- that transition is one of the hardest to make, because there is so much that gets broken, from everything that they thought they were as a couple, and it can be hard to reconstruct- or it’s probably better said that they they have to come together now in it pretty much a new relationship, not a mutated form of the previous one. In many ways it has to be grieved and let go of to come together in a different way

Mel: I’ve seen couples do that successfully. We don’t hear about it because they’re not the one’s posting for help on Poly forums.

You ask the question of, looking at the evolution of these communities, people asking “What is it all for?”

One of the things I found is key for successful long-term relationship is having a shared vision.

One of my partners, he and his wife have known eachother for almost 20 years, they’ve been married for 10 years, they’ve had an open relationship for those full ten years, and they have a common vision for their relationship that isn’t just about “We’re going to raise our child and have a house,” and all that.

Their common vision is: Our Relationship is here so we can share our Love with others and our Community. And they do that in a myriad of ways. They do that, I mean physically they have other partners, they open their homes entertain their friends, they will cook for friends, they will feed people at festivals, they have all these different ways of expressing their love with their community- and that draws them back to their core, that’s the core founding value in their relationship, or at least one of their core founding values.

And I think of that translated to communities- What is our core vision, what is it that we are seeking to build?

I think that a lot of people engage in relationships inauthentically. We engage in relationships coming from a space of “I feel obligated that I have to do this.”

I see this in my life now, working as a matchmaker for monogamous people. There’s a huge pressure that people put on themselves about having partnership. That people feel invalid or not as you accepted as a human being if they are single or divorced or without someone on their arm, and I think that something similar happens when people start to explore non-monogamy. They feel this pressure- “Oh, I can’t actually be really Poly unless I have lots of relationships,” and so you end up with these ‘poly-filla’ relationships, where it’s like “I’m going to date all the people just because I can date all the people.”

But it’s not necessarily coming from a space of full authenticity. Yes, maybe there is chemistry there, and maybe the chemistry leads to a couple of really fun nights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to date.

Finding the space to be okay with that, and that that doesn’t make you a bad person if you don’t call them again or you don’t hang out again or don’t have sex again… people engage in relationships in inauthentic ways, regardless of their relationship style. What’s interesting is getting in touch with our own authenticity about that. And you have to figure out, it goes back again to figuring out what you need, want and desire. And then being really authentic with yourself and allowing yourself to be authentic with others around you.

And it is one of those things where the change starts with us. We all have to make that change individually in order for that to grow and ripple through in our communities.

Ian: Tamera has another imperative that they offer as guidance to all types of connections- they said they don’t make a story about it if there is none. They really speak to this idea that so much of contact has to come, has to almost reverse justify itself because of the baggage of previous understanding of love and partnership and sexuality, you have to like reverse justify something to make it ‘meaningful’ without actually letting t it be what it is

Mel: And well stories are great. As human beings we are addicted to stories, we make up stories about things all the time. Stories can be great as learning parables, but they can totally trap us into places that are not authentic. I think it’s fantastic they have that.

Ian: And the other piece, it struck me, and this is inspired by one of my other teachers, Stephen Jenkinson, that so much partnership is entered into inauthentically because a crucial piece is missing for so many- the ability to be lonely, without having to rush out and fill it, as a way of not becoming intimate with that feeling, not lonely as a sourful thing, but that part of the human existence is being intimate with loneliness without having to fill it.

Mel: I resonate with that quite strongly. When my marriage ended I kinda fell into some ‘pokemoning’ in my relationships and trying to date all the people- gotta catch them all!

I realised that I needed to have more alone time, and that led me to embrace the path of Solo Polyamory, where I really value my solo time. That was not easy, that was really not easy to find that, and there’s still times when it’s like “Oh I am so frickin lonely right now!”

Yet, with that ability to be comfortable with loneliness, you end up finding a more loving space in your Self, I think. And, you stop objectifying people as simply there to meet your needs.

I think when we are looking at other people as simply the means to get our needs met, we’re not really treating them as human beings, and then that’s not a space of authenticity.

So finding that space of peace with loneliness, being at home with loneliness is an important component in developing a more compassionate approach to living, and relating.

Ian: Well I’d love to share, in the spirit of what i think all this Relationship Anarchy, and certainly what Tamera is doing, is I think pointing towards, and what has been called many things but I’m currently calling The New Story of Love, which we are exploring in our film the Healing of Love, and was what we went to Tamera to explore.

I came across a long time member of the community and his partner, and they replaced the wedding vows for them in this marriage ceremony they did, but they are so different from any marriage vows that I’ve ever seen that I think I would like to share them here.

They call them, instead of marriage vows, they say “Five Ethical Guidelines for Eternal Friendship”:

  1. Our friendship is based on the mutual acceptance of and support for our sexual nature and its freedom.
  2. Our marriage means no claim to partnership; it is an act of friendship and solidarity.
  3. Our contact is anchored in community. If we at any point become entangled in old.
    morphogenetic fields of marriage, we will not try to solve it between just us two, but will seek the support of the community.
  4. It is not a closed couple relationship, but a basis for our love to expand; the marriage is by no means a restriction to any other love.
  5. We commit for a common path of learning love, mutual support, and collaboration for a future without war.

I feel like if that is what a relationship can strive to be, and be anything, have any of those, that’s certainly a worthy orientation.

Mel: That’s really powerful.

I can speak to my own truth about a few things. I find it very interesting that in terms of polyamory there is a shift in and focus right now

We have seen this happening with more awareness about Solo Polyamory and about Relationship Anarchy. Some Polyamorists are identifying as Relationship Anarchists now, even people like Deborah Anapol, who is one of the early writers about polyamory, is saying “I’m a Relationship Anarchist!”

I’m really excited to see how these ideas are going to continue to evolve in the group consciousness and I’m thrilled to be part of that process.

I don’t feel that Relationship Anarchy is the ultimate label for myself. I think that where I’m moving to is a space of what I’m calling “Relationship Radical”, cos it’s not just about my romantic relationships, it’s about my friendships as well- that is, it is about how I’m choosing to relate to every single person.

I think that a lot of people identifying to this kind of thing for a long time and I’m get the impression that I’m not alone. We’re starting to see beyond the little confines of our personal bubbles of community and making connections with more people across the world and we can feel close to them even though we’ve never met in person.

I don’t feel that we’re going to turn the whole world Polyamorous, I think that would be a really bad idea, and I never want to be one of those people who says “Monogamy is bad and we should all be Poly!”

What I’m really excited about is people embracing different paradigms and finding what works for them authentically.

I’ve talked with a lot of people who have explored polyamory and then decided it wasn’t for them and gone back to monogamy- and they have said that when they have done that they’ve gone in with a fresh perspective. They’re not just trying to carbon-copy that parent’s approach to monogamy, they are taking their own radical approach to it.

And I think that rather than focusing the conversation on whether you’re polyamorous or monogamous or open or not, where we’re going to see the biggest change is people just embracing that level of radicalism .

You know, with marriage laws changing in the States now, I don’t think Poly Marriage is going to happen. What I think what we are going to see happen is things like, being able to bring your friends in as family and have that legally recognised- because I think it’s ridiculous that family is decided by genetic relationship, legal adoption, and who you fuck.

Having family be defined by our conscious choice of who we want to have as family- I think that’s going to be one of the next steps that we see.

Ian: That’s beautiful, and I feel like it’s really complimented by my level of inquiry, which is really on the role of the Village on holding all these types of relationships forms, and also how do we create those faces of Truth in community that becomes a type of maintenance really for the proper functioning of these constellations, and I’ve already been actually experimenting with some of the technologies, the social technologies that Tamera has developed back here on Salt Spring, to some pretty incredible results.

It’s very promising actually. I can envision that these types of circles of truth and witnessing and being seen by community, should become a natural part of our human lives, that in many ways is the antidote to the loneliness that so much was feel, you know, being awash in choices that ultimately give us this impression of being in control of our destinies, that we are the master of them, when really,what so much of us want is to be embedded and be seen by others in a way that lets us truly be who we are and express our gifts and to be of service.

Mel: That’s amazing, and I think that as we develop more technology to allow us to connect in that way, we’re going to see that global community come together.

I see it being an admin for the Solo Polyamory group on facebook, which is 2500 members around the world. That’s a space where people get to come together and be authentic. And there’s a camaraderie between us, even though we haven’t all met.

And I think that the village you talk about, it doesn’t have to be like in one physical place. That Village is the Global Village; we are constellations of like-minded beings, and we may be in all these different parts of the world- but we are working towards something in common. I think it’s incredibly exciting that we have a technology that can help us keep up with that now. I’m really excited to see how this is going to evolve in the next five to ten years.



Born This Way: Polysingleish Interviews Rachel Lark!

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Sassy songstress Rachel Lark, formerly of Psychedelic-Rock Band Antioquia, is the rising star of the sex-positive comedy scene in North America. Emerging from Dixie De La Tour’s Bawdy Storytelling in San Francisco, Rachel has performed on the Savage Love Cast, and recently finished up a tour of North America. I got to meet her last year when she came to play at Vancouver’s Erotica Electronica and blew the socks off everyone! She just launched a kickstarter campaign to raise money for her first official music video- for her song Warm, Bloody and Tender- and I decided to find out a little bit more about this phenomenal woman.

 

The Importance of Play

10456169_965426473477060_1911291600581177019_nMel: Rachel! You’re a singer and songwriter. You used to teach music to babies…

Rachel: I actually still do teach babies, a little bit- I do a bit of contract work with preschools.  Basically I teach parents how to be musical with their babies, because kids learn from modelling, so if your parents sing to you when you are a child, it is very likely that you will be musically proficient. It actually doesn’t matter how good they were at singing, it just matters that they sang. So that’s what I used to do full time, and  I really like that balance, cos sometimes when you’re a musician, in clubs and bars, in makeup, dealing with drunk people… well, its really refreshing and energising to be around young children, who are completely unaware that later in life they’re gonna have to get drunk to be this silly, you know? They’re just into it because its fun. You don’t have to convince them at all. I love working with kids, I get inspired by them, and it’s a hugely validating experience to have a group of children super stoked and having a good time. Of course, if I was only doing that full time, I’d probably have to kill myself, because there’s only so many times you can sing “Pop Goes The Weasel” before you go crazy, but its a nice balance.

Mel: So how the heck did you end up touring North America and singing songs about consent, cunnilingus, and dropping acid on christmas day?

Rachel: They sort of happened simultaneously! When I first came here to the Bay Area, I came here to join a band called Antioquia, and we toured the country non stop for two years. It was my full time thing, we were all broke, and I had random gigs trimming weed and catering and substitute teaching and babysitting. We would come back home, do a couple of things to make money, and hit the road again. So it wasn’t till that band broke up that I wanted some kind of job in the Bay Area that was regular and fulfilling to me, rather than just all these gigs on the side, and that’s when I started teaching full-time, but that’s also exactly the same time I started my solo career, and picked the name Lark, and worked on the stuff I’d wanted to write for a long time.

So I found this stable job that was really fun and creatively gratifying, and I started making this music that was really fun and creatively gratifying, and it was really in tandem for a while till it hit the point where I really had to pick one. And it was hard to give up the teaching because, a) the money was good and b) it was really rewarding and great to get to know these kids and families. But I needed to be able to tour the country. And I decided, you know, I can teach twenty years from now, I can’t necessarily tour and play five shows a day twenty years from now.

But- maybe what you’re asking about is I sing about sex and drugs and I also teach kids? I think that makes perfect sense! I might be wrong, but I think that people who are good at working with kids tend to understand Play, and if you understand Play, well I think that we think of Play as being something that is reserved for children, and when grown-ups play, its usually like sex or drugs or dealing with life in a fun, uninhibited way. I think that Play is extremely important no matter what age you are. Clearly it needs to be age appropriate, but I don’t think there is any real contradiction there in understanding play at whatever stage you are at.

Mel: It’s almost like you have this Clark Kent Persona that teaches music to babies, and then you take the glasses off and let your hair down and are like, “Hi, I’m Rachel Lark, and I’m going to sing a song to you about a threesome.”

Rachel: I don’t feel that I’m a different person when I walk into my classes with kids. Clearly I’m not singing about the same things. But my suspicion is that if you were to come to one of my preschool classes, you would also be laughing your ass off and having a great time, and wouldn’t be disturbed by this new Rachel you see in front of you. I think it’s a continuous thing for me- and my bigger mission of just getting people to simultaneously to lighten up, and question everything, is very compatible with both of those ideas. I’m also lucky that in the Bay Area a lot of parents I meet are thrilled to find out what I do in the evenings. They don’t see too much of a contradiction. It is funny. It is good fodder for a memoir.

Sex Positivity

Rachel playing in Vancouver at Erotica Electronica, Oct 2014. Photo by Cameron Bowman

Rachel playing in Vancouver at Erotica Electronica, Oct 2014. Photo by Cameron Bowman

Mel: What does the term “Sex-Positive” mean for you?

Rachel: I just read this article about Sex Negative Feminism. To me, sex-positive means celebrating sexuality, and this article that I read was saying that this author’s view of sex negative feminism- and why she called herself a sex negative feminist- is because she believes that sex discourse has a place when we are talking about sexuality too. Some third wave feminists believe that whatever turns you on is great and we should never talk about how that could conflict with your feminist ideals, whereas this other author is saying, no, we should think about how patriarchy plays out in our sex lives and we should be analysing that.

I tend to be between the two. I think sex is fascinating to talk about from an analytical and political perspective. But at the end of the day I do believe that understanding what turns you on and embracing that is a wonderful thing, and I think that we have to live in this world, and we have to love ourselves in this world, and we are not going to help ourselves by feeling shame about what turns us on, because that is often like a very deep thing that is part of who we are.

I think that what’s wonderful about the Kink community and the overlap between feminism and kink: there are ways to play with these things that can turn you on, while also holding true to values that you have as an individual in other parts of your life. In short, I think sex-positive means loving your kinks, loving your turn ons, and having that eager curiosity to learn more about sex and appreciate the joy and the play it can bring into our lives.

Mel: Well said.

Rachel: Thanks!

Non-Monogamy and Healthy Relationships

Mel: I know you talked with Cunning Minx a bit about this- I’m curious, how would you define your flavor of non monogamy?

Rachel: Hmmmmm. Ummmm, my flavor of non monogamy. Well, I definitely feel like calling it Non-Monogamy. For starters! But, I don’t know. Since I did that interview a lot of people have talked to me about the Relationship Anarchist title, and I do like it, I think I do wanna stick with it. I believe in honesty and communication and commitments. but I don’t believe in promises about the future. I can promise behaviours for the present, and I can commit an intention about something, but I’m very jaded about the concept of “I will love you forever.” But maybe that’s just cos I’m someone who got married when I was 23! On my dating profile I write, “I make no commitments except to honesty and things not sucking.” Does that answer your question?

Mel: Oh, it totally does. And I can relate, as someone who got married at 22, that jadedness about loving someone forever- you learn a lot about getting stuck with those expectations and getting trapped and limited by them. I was going to ask you what you think makes a healthy relationship, but I think you’ve already answered that! Honesty and things not sucking, I like that.

Rachel: Yeah, you take care of you and I’ll take care of me, so we can take care of eachother. I think ‘healthy’ is such an interesting word. We have so many weird cultural markers for what’s healthy, and often ‘are you in a relationship’ is a marker of if you are healthy. You’re in a long term relationship- oh even healthier! I don’t identify with that as a gauge of mental or sexual health necessarily, but I think that healthy relationships of all kinds, whether they are friendships or romantic relationships or flings, are relationships where you both feel like you are being seen and valued for who you are, while at the same time being challenged to grow in the ways that you want to. I think that’s the good place to be. And if you’re a single person with a bunch of great friends and fuck buddies and you’re getting that, i think that’s extremely healthy. And you know sometimes we get stuck in relationships, and we’re not growing, and we start growing backwards and pulling out the bad parts of each other, and I think that’s very unhealthy, and you should get out of a relationship if that’s what’s happening.

Mel: Dan Savage has talked about the importance of people doing non-monogamy to be open about it, if they can. Do you see a role for yourself in promoting awareness of healthy non-monogamy?

Rachel: Absolutely! It’s a big reason why my boyfriend Andrew and I put our relationship status on Facebook. It’s not something either of us were into before we started dating, but I felt it was important to put “In an open relationship with so-and-so” on facebook, in large part because I feel it’s important for non monogamy to be visible. I want people to be aware that I am in a happy, public, non monogamous relationship. Also, I wanted him to have an easier time getting laid.

I feel like I’m in a place where I feel super fine being open about it and have no problem talking about it.

Consent

Mel:Your song “For the Guys” has become an anthem for Consent Culture. What inspired it?

Rachel: Yay! Oh, what inspired it? A couple of years ago I was in a community of musicians, and a guy in that community was sexually assaulting women in that community. It started with one rumor that was easily brushed off cos “she was crazy” but then it started to be more and more women. And I hooked up with this person, and had a situation where we were making out and things started going really fast and I said “Hey stop! Hang on!” And he didn’t, and I had to scream and push him off me. I wasn’t raped, but what I had been through certainly gave a lot of credibility to what other women were saying.

I was approached by some women who wanted to organise an intervention of sorts, and it was a really, extremely hard and strange process. We had no idea what we were doing. There wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute this person. A lot of the women felt they weren’t heard or seen by this community they used to be part of, and they wanted a chance to speak, and confront this community they felt had turned their back on them. We organised 50-60 people together, to have a meeting about what to do. It was one of those events where you see everyone’s true colors. Till this point we all knew each other from partying and having a good time, and things never got deep or challenging, and then we were facing this moment where you could see who was willing to step up and handle this, and who would rather act like its not a problem.

So we had this meeting. We brought in a woman from Bay Area Women Against Rape to talk about Rape Culture, and then each woman read out their story to everybody. There were eight women; those are just the ones we knew about. There was a facilitated meeting, a conversation. It was frustrating, because there was one comment at the time that really got me. This guy raised his hand and he addressed the women in the room, “You know, women, you guys need to express yourself more, cos sometimes it’s not clear, and sometimes there’s this grey area and we don’t know what’s going on.” And I didn’t have the words in the moment to say, “Cool, then get your dick out of that human! If it’s not clear, what the fuck are you doing?”

I didn’t have the words at that time to say that, and I was just in shock. There was so much in the meeting about what women can do to protect themselves better, and also how to help this guy. It was frustrating, realizing that a) I don’t know what to do in that situation, still, cos what we did didn’t do a damn thing, cos he raped two more women within a year after that and he’s still out there, and b) it was really amazing to see that people find it so much easier to believe that a community of women would make this up, than believe that it actually happened.

I stayed in that community for a while and was jamming at someone’s house one night, there were thirty people drinking and playing music, and at a certain point I was going to leave, and everyone was like “No don’t leave!” I joked to my friend about how no one was letting me leave, and he said, “That’s cos you’re the only girl left.” I suddenly felt really unsafe. But I realised I was drunk and so I decided to crash, and he gave me the couch. I went to sleep and turned off the lights and then I woke up later to a guy making out with me. At that point, I realised that community was toxic. And I held so much anger about this, and people were telling me to write a song about it, and I was like “Fuck that! This is so stupid, it’s so obvious you don’t behave the way these men behave!” I was kinda defiant. Assholes don’t get songs written about them! I’m writing positive stuff about positive experiences!

And then- there was a Bawdy Storytelling show coming up, and the theme was “Trigger Warning” and there were no stories about rape in that show. So I started writing it six months before I had to perform it. It was the hardest song I’ve ever written.

Mel: Wow, thank you for sharing that. That’s intense and, the sad thing is, that’s not the only community where things like that happen. I hear these stories repeated over and over again. It’s great that you wrote that song, I’m so glad that you wrote that song. Humor can help teach people. My experience talking about Consent Culture in my community has been that a lot of people just want to get angry about it and about fighting Rape Culture. But the people who are oblivious, who don’t understand there’s a problem or that they might be part of the problem, they don’t respond well to the aggression, and they just act defensively and say “Fuck You!”. But to have this song, and say, “Here, this is funny, and we can laugh at ourselves in this song” I find that sinks in deeper, and reaches more people.

Rachel: I agree! I have been sort of humbled and terrified that there have been several men who have come up to me and said “Wow I never really got it that way before thankyou.” I think, wow, I feel excited that my song did that for you but I’m also like- really? You didn’t get that before this moment? But yeah it is pretty amazing.

On the Rise to Stardom

Mel: So, you’ve performed for the Savage Lovecast, as well as for Bawdy Storytelling. How does it feel to be an up and coming celebrity in the world of Sex-positive, non-monogamous Relationship Radicals? What’s it like?

Rachel: Surprising! It’s surprising, it’s exciting- and yeah it’s certainly not how I thought my path to career musician was going to go. There’s so many great musicians out there who write great and funny songs about sex, and I didn’t think myself to be so different from a bunch of songs that Dan must have heard already. But, I’m super grateful. I do write about other things! And sometimes friends who have known me throughout my career ask me, “Is it weird for you that people just expect the funny raunchy stuff?” And- no. I mean this stuff is still super emotional for me. I don’t think it’s trivial, but also the reaction that I’ve gotten is that people who become my fan through hearing me on Savage Lovecast or Bawdy, once they discover my other music they are usually really into it and supportive as well. I don’t feel that it’s a different person I put on. It’s all me. And when people like an artist they tend to trust them to do different stuff.

Mel: I’m super appreciative of your musical versatility. I loved your loop set when you played here in Vancouver. You sang Flowers Fuck- with all the beautiful feminine vocal melody happening. It’s so cool! Its groundbreaking.

Rachel: That’s the next music video I want to make! For the electronic version of Flowers Fuck!

Mel: Speaking of music videos! Let’s talk about the Kickstarter campaign! You raised 25% in your first day! And from what you told me, it’s going to be a “who’s who” of today’s sex-positive celebrities. What more can you tell us about it? How do you think it will affect the world?

Rachel: Well, I can tell you that Dan Savage is going to be covered in… blood. And, call me crazy, I think that might get some reach!

It’s tricky being an artist and wanting your stuff to get a bigger and bigger audience and thinking maybe this will be the thing that goes big! And I try not to think that way cos my path so far has been through this awesome organic growth of community, and I think that’s more important than suddenly getting a million views on Youtube and being forgotten later.

But it would be cool. It would be cool to make a music video that gets picked up by some sex and feminism blogs, and I feel ready. I feel like the music is ready to be heard by more than just the West Coast pockets of sex positive communities that I’ve gotten into.

Being an independent artist and having a well done music video that showcases your message is critical, it’s like a business card, its an essential part of levelling up in terms of the kinds of shows you are booked at, the reach you are able to get, how much you get paid for different shows. It’s a critical step in your career, and to do it right, you do kinda need a lot of money. It’s going to be pretty epic. The team working on it is amazing, their sense of humor and professionalism- it’s that perfect balance of class and vulgarity that I tend to hang out in. It’s a really good fit. We’ve been doing pre production for months, and so much has already been happening. It’s amazing to see all these people who want to be part of this project, and that it is worth all this effort.

Mel: It’s my favorite song, well, other than Acid and Hot Springs.

Rachel: It’s a catchy one! It has a solid hook!

Mel: Yes! That sing along bit! One of the best things I have ever witnessed was three hundred kinksters and ravers sitting down to listen to you play that, and joining in with the chorus.

Rachel: Yeah, that’s the preschool training!

You can find Rachel’s Kickstarter campaign by clicking here, download her previous albums on her Bandcamp Page, and stay updated on her tour and show schedule by following her on social media here!

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Lessons to Our Younger Selves- Polysingleish Interviews Louisa Leontiades

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A freelance writer originally from the UK, Louisa lives in an open relationship with her partners and two children in Sweden. She writes full-time on her blog, Postmodern Woman, and is chairwoman of the National Polyamory Association. She also writes for Huffington Post, Salon, Nerve, Jezebel and the Guardian. She lives a life that makes for a lot of stories. The memoir of her first polyamorous relationship is due for international release through Thorntree Press in April 2015.
I have to say, my brief conversation with Louisa is one of the most inspiring that I’ve had with any other poly writers- I’ve always loved her fearless approach to writing about poly and non-monogamy, plus she’s been a big fan of this blog! I’m excited that her two-part memoir is being published soon!

 

“I was obsessed by someone I didn’t know. Someone I’d never met. And someone who was turning me on eight hundred miles away. More than my husband in the next room did. It was earth shattering. Mind blowing. Amazing but also horrifying. But no matter how horrified I was at the person I’d become, I couldn’t stop it. This was what I wanted. Me without the structure of society. Without the rigours of religion. Without the criticisms of my parents and in blatant disregard to my so-called decent upbringing. Which then sailed clean out of the window.”
~ From “The Husband Swap”

 

Writing about polyamory

Mel: Louisa, you are one of the most prominent writers on poly and non monogamy in Europe. You have your own blog and you write for Huffington Post in the UK, and you are working on a new book. I’m curious- what was the impetus for you to put yourself out publicly, as you (no pseudonyms) writing about non monogamy?

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Louisa Leontiades, polyamorous writer

Louisa: I think it’s the same reason I write about anything at all. And I’ve been writing for years. It’s a Pandora’s Box effect.

I think that I’m like many women, who have had their voices suppressed for a long time and have acted like the “Good Girl”. We build a sense of identity tied up with expectation, and then we come to a mid life crisis. Mine came fairly early, when I was about 18. And I’m not able to speak publicly terribly well, but I am able to write, and in writing I found the third eye for me to be able to analyse events from a different perspective. So “The Husband Swap” was something I wrote when our relationship was breaking up while I was a financial analyst in a very large telecommunications firm.

Back then I felt that I couldn’t function because I had had my voice repressed, and then I repressed it myself for so long. Therapy was one way of offloading, but that didn’t work for me. So I had to do something with all this pain, express it and re-frame it, I had to rewrite the narrative, and that was how “The Husband Swap” came into being. And- it probably played a part in me losing my job, something I don’t regret at all.

It stayed on my hard-drive for years, and of course now I look back and I think “Oh my god you were such a victim!” But nevertheless my voice was and is still valid. It was the story of me then.

It helped enormously, the power of writing and finding my voice. And once I started, it didn’t stop. I used to journal, but there’s something about writing in the public eye. It has to do with your self esteem and sense of self. You really have to face your demons. You have a choice to go back into your hole and keep repressing, or come out and say “Yes! This is what’s right for me!”

Mel: I can really relate to what you are saying with the evolution from journaling to writing in the public eye. There’s a level of accountability that comes into place.

What role do you feel that writing has played in the evolution of the way you relate in your relationships?

Louisa: There’s a thing called emotional blindness, alexithymia. Scientists don’t really know how it comes about, but it’s an inability to identify your own emotions. It can mean that you aren’t able to empathise with others, or you don’t know what’s going on inside of yourself.

In polyamory, issues around consent are a big deal, and in my case I think that not only did I let my boundaries be trampled on, I didn’t even know my boundaries enough to express them because I didn’t feel my own emotions, and  I didn’t have the structures to identify what was wrong.

Writing gave shape to my emotions, and it’s why I think there are so many great writers in polyamory- but not many of them talk as much about emotions or emotional pain as I do. The reason for that is because I sharpened my emotions, I practice feeling so that I really know where I want to put my boundaries so I can step up and say “This is not okay for me.” It used to take me years to figure out if I’m not okay with something. Now it takes around a few days; sometimes I can immediately recognise because I have a tiny little twinge, that’s like the tip of the iceberg that lets me know there’s something deeper going on. That’s something that writing has done for me.

 

Being out in Europe 

Mel: So, you’re based in Europe. It’s been years since I have been in Europe; all my poly experience has been in this progressive pebble of Vancouver, where I can throw a pebble and hit someone who is poly. My understanding is that in Europe there’s a lot of awareness about relationship anarchy, but not so much about polyamory. What’s your experience with that been like?

Louisa: I’ve experienced polyamory in Italy, England, and Sweden. I found they had very different flavors.

In Italy the poly movement was embryonic back in 2007 when we lived there. The non monogamy of the day was cheating, it was highly accepted, even though it wasn’t talked about. The idea that you would be honest poses this great risk to undermine the society’s structure.

Unsurprisingly,we didn’t find much in Italy, so we joined the groups in the UK, which intersected almost entirely at that time with the LGBT community. In the beginning I had no interest in becoming alternative. I was a financial analyst. I was very mainstream.

When we went to England we went to Poly Day and Open Con, we signed up for workshops. I felt a little lonely cos I wasn’t as brilliantly out there as many of these people. I had been hiding behind my suits. Then in the evening something strange happened- the heterosexual mainstream people started showing up. All of the people we met in the evening were ALL in the closet about polyamory. Because they had been doing the regular day job, they didn’t invest in the activism or activities of these events.

I totally understand the difficulty for people in coming out, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to lie even by association. They were protecting themselves, but I wasn’t attracted to a life in the closet.

So in Italy there was no one, in England there were plenty of people but we weren’t of a similar context. In England it is much more controversial. It’s a very difficult society to come out in, unless you are alternative and you’ve already made that step to be out somehow.

Then I got to Sweden and I discovered to my great delight Sweden doesn’t like seeing anything as out of the ordinary- even if it is! Whatever you get up to its “Oh, that’s what they are doing, okay”. Sweden comes at it from a liberal background, and they seem to have bypassed a lot of the hierarchical polyamory scene and have moved to more of a non-hierarchical/relationship anarchy idea. Being out here, it’s quite interesting to compare my mother’s reaction to my partners’ parents who were “Oh you’re not getting a divorce there’s four of you, that’s nice.” Whereas my mother was “Please keep it in the bedroom”.

My other partner, who is from Iceland, his parents were like “Well, there’s many ways to build a family aren’t there?” And then they invited us in for a glass of wine. They were very cool.

Mel: That’s amazing. I’ve heard diverse reactions from people in Canada. This is a mixed bag of cultures- there’s a strong Victorian English mentality that has stayed alive, that whole “what happens in the bedroom should stay in the bedroom.” Within the alternative communities it is so much easier. Being part of the BurningMan/Raver/Festival culture it is simpler to be out. I can be with a group of friends and there can be a lot of relationship styles happening, and there’s no judgement there. It’s interesting being in communities where there is freedom to explore relationships for yourself.

Louisa: I’ve lost quite a few friends, and they aren’t bad people, they are very lovely people- but they can’t take it, they can’t take who I am because it seems I am an affront to everything they stand for, and it’s terrifying

Mel: It’s so far out of the box that it challenges people. I think when we get challenged on one thing in our tiny box of how we see the world it calls into question everything else how we see the world and that’s a scary place to go

Louisa: I don’t know if I’m a big enough person to hold the door open if they change their mind. I want to be. But you know what they say, love might be infinite but time is not!

 

Polyamory Memoirs

Mel: You’re working on your book and getting ready for publication- tell me more! What do you want to give to the world through the book?

Louisa: There are two things that are going to happen with this book. It’s an expression of pain – one of my boyfriend compares it to the painting The Scream. It didn’t end well so it’s kind of a perfect book that could be picked up by hollywood because the happy-ever-after seems to, ostensibly be, monogamy. But my objective at the time of writing it was not to laud polyamory, it was a medium of self expression.

When I see people making the same mistakes again and again, and people more experienced in the poly community calling them out on that- I think, sure I agree with all of that, but it’s a process. And without the screaming you can’t get to that wiser, healthier, happier place. So I hope that it shows some people they aren’t alone, this shit happens and you can still come out the other side and laugh. The steps thru pain can lead to joy and they often do.

But for those who don’t have willing ears to hear it they will see this tale as a testimony to the dangers of polyamory. And that’s not something I ever intended. I’m still active in the community, still practicing moving forward.

So at the same time I wondered if I could write a companion piece- Lessons to My Younger Self- and so I’ve written that! Both books are with the publisher now! There’s The Husband Swap, and Lessons to my Younger Self. So you get a fuller perspective.

When I was writing ‘Lessons’ I thought “Bloody hell, look what enormous pain you inflicted. All this time you thought you knew what you were doing!”
One of the things I have learned is that I am responsible for my own life experience. I have a choice- accept it, don’t accept it, reframe it, or not: these are my life lessons. And of course, in any interaction out of four people, there will be a lesson out of it.

It was very hard to write. I definitely shed a few tears

Mel: That’s incredibly valuable. There’s a tendency in what’s been written about poly to gloss over the difficult bits and glamorize it. Whereas in my own experience is that it’s been the best self development tool I’ve had. There’s so much value in that introspection going back and asking what lessons did I learn from those experiences. That seems to be something that’s been missing in the ‘poly-sphere’ of writing- connecting in with the difficult aspects, the shadow side of polyamory.

Louisa: And I’ll go back to it in seven years and find new lessons! The Husband Swap, I know I’ll get push back from the media, because books like More Than Two or Love Without Limits or Ethical Slut, they are destined for a community that is already attuned to some of the issues. But this is a memoir, and, if it does well it will make a splash in the poly community and I’m happy about that. But- it might also make a splash elsewhere and- I’m gearing myself up for that.

 

Vulnerability and living outside the box

living outside the box

living outside the box

Mel: It takes a lot of courage and strength, and confidence in one’s self, to be that publicly vulnerable, knowing you have no control over how it’s going to land with the greater community of the world. I really admire that you are doing this. It’s trailblazing.

Louisa: Thank you.

I had help, you know. I was adopted- things never seemed quite right in my world. I was playing this two-point-four children family white picket fence thing, but it wasn’t true. It was a source of displacement in my life, and gave me this feeling that this life wasn’t real. I had a narcissistic mother, and that narcissism- that was also not quite right for me. The world told me how a mother should be, and she wasn’t that. And, I came from a foreign background, my father was Greek American, and so my name wasn’t right. I just didn’t fit in.

But if you fit in, there’s no impetus to find yourself or find the path. I mean, where is your discomfort? At a certain point, maybe even those who fit in start to feel caged by what is expected of them. So we all have these sources in different ways to kick us out. I think I had a lot of them at an early age. It kicked me out pretty early into finding myself. And as you find yourself, you have to develop courage, layer by layer, every time you take a step to find yourself. I feel I’m incredibly lucky for every tool that has been given to me in my life, to be able to be in this place right now.

 

“As time moves on new perspective casts light on the experience. Personal development and analysis has allowed you to see some of the lessons learned… emotionally processing after all is often what we polyamorists do best. To understand the reasons why your relationship crumbled so that you can avoid some of the pitfalls in future. And to demonstrate that the hardest of lessons can result in the most amazing gifts.”
~ From “Lessons To My Younger Self”

 

To read more of Louisa’s writings, and to follow updates on the publication of her books, check out her blog at Post Modern Woman!

Expanding and Exploring

MelC 1 Comment

“You have permission to ask for what you want.”

Do you really know how to play?

Do you really know how to play?

These words of relationship advice, from Marcia Baczynski, shifted my perspective about the relationships I was in at the time, leading to an evolution in the way I have found myself approaching relationships today. I had been growing fed up of intimate relationships where it felt like no one ever knew what they were doing. In bed, I too often felt like a beautiful musical instrument, with a novice randomly plucking strings, hoping to coax a melody- or concerto- from this highly complex form. I didn’t want that any more. I wanted that to change.

Last summer at a music festival, I fell in love on the dance floor. The crowds parted and I became mesmerized by a young man spinning a glowing staff. My attention caught, I complimented him on his dancing, saw him again briefly a few days later- but it wasn’t until running into him several months later in the city that we actually had a chance to connect.

The incredibly beautiful, exotic, fire and poi-spinning Marco had me curious. We chatted online and on the phone for a couple of months before going on a date zero- I was a little hesitant to date someone eight years younger than me, but I soon forgot about that and had an amazing time. On our next date, we discovered that we lived ten minutes walk away from one another.

Marco puts extra anarchy into relationship anarchy, in a really good way. It’s almost impossible to keep up with how many women he might have dates with. His work schedule is on call and often unpredictable and so dates are sometimes really spontaneous. One of the things I enjoy the most is that the dynamic he and I share together is one of experimentation and adventure.

Where would the electricity be without willingness to experiment?

Where would the electricity be without willingness to experiment?

Our dates have included a trip to the STI clinic (followed by lunch), midnight booty calls, loud and kinky morning wake up calls, making a stilt-walking elephant together, an epic sexy after party in our hotel room where we mostly observed and directed our friends having an orgy, eating ice cream together in his bedroom hammock, sensually grinding together on the dance floor after almost 24 hours of no sleep, poi spinning lessons in my back yard, and whispering poetry to one another into the wee hours of the morning. We talk about kinky things we want to try out, we share thoughts about shamanism, and we collaborate on creative projects.

From past relationship experiences, I’ve found myself growing cautious of diving too deep into clothes-ripping passion all the time. I’ve had some really beautiful connections burn out because the focus was so much on physical expression- but not so much on exploration, and as a result I would have great sex the first few times, fuelled by the excitement, adrenalyne, novelty and NRE- but it would quickly peter off, resulting in a string of six-week long relationships.

I didn’t want this to be another six week relationship.

I also found myself in a quandry over sponteniety versus consent. Marco and I were exploring the edges of our kinky personas, and both enjoyed doing so with sponteniety. He knew I was very passionate about enthusiastic consent, and expressed once that, in his perspective, the conversation around consent was taking away from the spontaneous aspect that made things so much fun.

Just because you're enjoying something, does it mean your partner is enjoying it too?

Just because you’re enjoying something, does it mean your partner is enjoying it too?

For my part, consent has become an important part of relationships and building trust. I’d experienced holding back a lot in intimate exchanges because I was afraid of having my own boundaries crossed or of crossing someone else’s unintentionally- something that had happened for me in the past. I mean, there’s always that hope that I will find partners who are 100% psychic and can read my mind to see if I’m comfortable or not- but the reality is, we can’t expect someone to know something about our intimate preferences unless we reveal that information to them, and likewise, we need to ask our partners for feedback about whether what we are doing feels good for them or not- instead of just assuming that it probably is.

One night when Marco came over to my place, I decided that I needed to ask for what I wanted. So, I put forward a proposal to him:

“Tonight, I’d like to invite you to explore me. Just do whatever you want. Follow your instincts. And I’ll give you feedback at every step. I want you to learn my body. And if something doesn’t feel good, or doesn’t do anything for me, I’ll communicate. And if it’s amazing- you’ll know, and if I know how to, I’ll guide you on how to enhance the pleasure for me.”

Never before had communication felt so sexy. As we played, I got to show him how my different erogenous zones can be connected, how a slap or a bite in just the right place can make me melt or take me to the edge. I learned things about my own body as he experimented with differing pressures in different places. And after, we talked about all sorts of other things we want to try further down the road.

After that experience, not only was the quality of our physical intimacy enhanced, but our communication around sex grew leaps and bounds too. We’d taken time to learn one another’s language. He, as someone who plays more dominant, had discovered how to read my responses, and I’d learned how to communicate with fewer words and in ways that made the communication part of the play. As a consequence of just that one night, we started to feel more comfortable with greater sponteniety. The trust we share evolved because we took one another to the edges and learned to recognise one another’s “no”.

piano maestro

“Practice Makes Perfect”

There is tremendous power in slowing down from the insane devouring passion and finding our way into a natural flow of communication between bodies. Tuning in, and learning how to read our partners, rather than just assuming we know what’s going to feel good, assuming that all people function exactly the same.  Think of the difference between someone who sits at a piano and randomly tinkers on the keys hoping to make music, versus someone who has studied and become a piano maestro, effortlessly dancing their fingers across the keys and filling the room with the sweetest music.

We may both be Solo, we may be one another’s ‘proximal’ relationship, we may be in love, but we also know this relationship may not last in this same form for all time. Marco reminds me to be present to what’s in front of me, to be present to the moment. We are growing and learning together, and there is no telling what the future may bring. I pinch myself from time to time that someone as unique and talented an individual wants to hang around with me, let alone undress me and devour me with so much passion- and it’s a passion that seems to just grow deeper and deeper.

Exploring the edges of our comfort zones, and expanding beyond them, has never felt so comfortable, nor been so fun. We explore eachother’s bodies, eachother’s minds, eachother’s souls.

And the lesson in this- that asking for what you want is one of the best things you can possibly do within a relationship- has me contemplating all the other things I have often wished for but never outright asked for from my partners. There’s a sliver of risk involved in asking. What if they say “No”, or judge you for it, or break up with you because you asked for something? That’s the fear dialogue running through our minds holding us back.

We don’t have to listen to the voice of fear. We can embrace the risk and choose- dare- to ask the ones we love and trust if they might be interested in something that we are interested in too. And when we do so, we give ourselves- and our partners- the opportunity to experiment, expand and explore new edges of being.

Endings and Evolutions

MelC 3 Comments

Almost all the the literature on healthy relationships is about how to stay together. Which, if you’re looking at it from a Relationship Escalator perspective, makes sense, right? We want to stay on that escalator. We want to ascend it with someone. That, after all, makes us successful at being grown up, or so we are led to believe. But, what if you aren’t interested in escalator type relationships? What about for those of us who are Singleish? The Solo adventurers among us? The Relationship Anarchists who aren’t attatched to any particular mold or outcome? Are solo style relationships ‘disposable’? Where is the literature,the self-help books, and the support forums about how to conclude relationships?

The reality is this: all relationships end.

And, when you choose a love-style that does not bind you to vows of “till death do us part”, how then do you recognise when it is time to part- and is it possible to do so without personal emotional rollercoasters?

People who are singleish will probably experience more breakups than their monogamous, escalator seeking friends. In the last two and a half years, since I separated from my ex husband, I’ve been through at least twelve “breakups”. Some of them smooth, some of them horrendous and turbulent.

kpi9I9J

There is almost nothing written about how to end relationships with integrity and positive intentions. With all the advice about how to have beautiful relationships, very little exists about how to have graceful breakups.

A while ago, I learned that integrity was one of my core values, and how to have, and conclude, my relationships with integrity is something that has become important to me. It is something I work consciously to create, as I dislike the messy, ugly, emotional breakups.

I stayed in my marriage way beyond the point when I was emotionally invested in it. It took me two years to realize that I was trying to beat a dead horse with a stick in attempting to continue a blind pursuit of a picket-fence-perfect family with him, when my heart, my dreams, my desires were already beckoning me elsewhere. When I reached the point in my marriage where I knew with certainty that I couldn’t stay married anymore, I felt awful for not having acted on the impulse sooner. I had strung him along because I didn’t want to disappoint him, I didn’t want to break his heart- even though I had been cheating on him and having an affair. I gave a lot of thought to how I could leave the relationship in a healthy way, regain some respect for myself, and honor the man I had called my partner for eight years.

There is tremendous power in walking away from a relationship that no longer feeds or nourishes you, in not binding one’s life path to another. Yet, leaving people to their journey and stepping back into your own- alone- can hurt. It can be hard- even though it is, ultimately, empowering.

There’s a beautiful point in relationships where we know one another so well we can see parts of the other person better that they can see themselves, and we grow to value the way that our partners can reflect those parts to us- but sometimes that’s uncomfortable. We aren’t always ready to go there to witness those hidden parts, and we can trigger one another because we try to see the Self that isn’t wanting to yet be seen.

Ultimately, my ex husband and I had been growing in different directions. We had both been compromising for the sake of our marriage, and neither of us was happy with that. It wasn’t easy to say those words to him, “I want to divorce.” But, once I said it, a huge weight began to lift from both our shoulders. It has taken time, and there have been many challenging conversations along the way, but we are, at last, legally unshackled from one another. And our lives have each flourished in amazing and previously un-imagined ways.

That’s not to say that everything is ‘done’. There are still some unresolved wounds from my marriage: the deep sorrow of a decade of never really being seen by my partner; the shame of sexual rejection; the pain of hiding under a proverbial rock- creatively, sexually, professionally- and only now realizing just how much of me had been missing from the picture. I wish I could have been seen, I wish I could have been all of me without the fear of being me. These wounds have bled in to some of the more recent relationships in my life, including one that I have held incredibly dear, and written about a lot in this blog.

My emotions have weathered far deeper, far harder storms than this. Processing the end of my marriage- I was already over it by the time I chose to end it. With Orion, however, getting over has been hard. Complicated. Unfamiliar.

417849_179968288824675_180673540_n

In the past, with breakups, I’ve been able to retreat away from the person, and they’ve been able to retreat away from me. In this instance, it’s different. There is no avoidance. I dance with my emotions and the discom-poly-ation of things and must learn to embrace and flow forward, despite the parts of me that yell and scream and tug. There’s no other way- the longevity of our friendship and the all-encompassing nature of the spiritual kinship and emotional connection we’ve shared more of in the past year plus means that our lives have multiple overlapping friendships, social connections, activities, and work opportunities. In this case, the only way out is through.

Breakups feel like waking up from the intoxication of a dream. There’s a hangover as the presence of the relationship in our lives begins to wear off. Now, writing a few weeks after the fact, rather than a ‘break up’ I see it more like a break through. I feel like it’s a leveling up, a giant gear shift to the next chapter of exploring what Singleish means for me. I’m learning completely new things about how I relate to my relationships, renewing the relationship with my Primary- my Self- and diving in to new, exciting, connections with others.

The transformations that I’ve experienced in the last few weeks seem to reflect that the relationship with Orion was over long before it was over. I feel disappointed that we both were stringing things along, trying to dance between friendship and friendtimacy when the healthier thing (as has now become evident) was to walk away entirely if we ever hoped to hit reset on the friendship. Rather than get caught up in the petty game of resentments- a path of bitterness that I do not choose to buy in to- I ask myself, what could I do differently, in the future? How can I build healthy relationships that have empowering conclusions, and do not emotionally drain any participant in the process of the relationship ending?

I have some theories.

First of all, acknowledge that all relationships have endings. Come to terms with it for yourself, and, acknowledge that with the person you are in a relationship with. Talk about it- remove the veil of fear that exists in talking about endings! One sweetie, Gerard, who I have been dating since last fall, has been great at conversations like this. Without going in to details, we both know that our intimate relationship has a very limited time frame. We don’t know when it will end, we just know that it will. That fact has been on the table right from Date Zero. And so we’ve talked about how we want to talk about that when the time comes. Very meta, right? I know.

photo (1)So that’s the second point- talk about how you like to experience endings. We have been ingrained with this terror of ending relationships, a fear that it means we will be a ‘failure’- and so when time comes to end it we either ignore the signals, or we act from that place of fear, that place of fight-or-flight. We might try to keep things going ‘as friends’. We may lash out. We can say irrational things. We start talking at one another rather than talking with one another. The best way to get over any fear is to deal with it before it comes up. Ask yourself- and your partners- how long do you want to explore this relationship? What are your indicators for when a relationship has run out of steam? How do you want to communicate these things to each other when they come up? How do you like to relate to former lovers when the relationship has ended? These are important conversations to have with ourselves, as well as with anyone we form a relationship with. It’s like having an informal relationship pre-nup chat.

Third- recognise that there are no problems, only opportunities. The end of one relationship births the way for new ones. The conclusion of a chapter opens the path for exploration of novelty. Learn how to embrace the changes it brings. For me, I’ve been reconnecting with activities that I love, and spending more time with people I haven’t see in a long time. I’ve shared beautiful walks in the forest with wise and intelligent friends. I reorganized my bedroom. I’ve been taking myself out on Me dates. I’ve discovered that someone I was mesmerized by on the dance floor at a music festival last summer lives ten minutes walk away from my home, and he happens to have a passion for rope and bondage that’s very compatible with mine. In summary- I’ve been actively rediscovering the world around me, and finding that I love it so much more than I thought I would, and so much more than I have been in the last several months.

Last of all: when things are ended, find a way, if you can, to communicate what you have loved and cherished about the relationship, and what the relationship has meant to you. Allow yourself to feel gratitude for whatever was in it to be grateful for. It could be big things, or it could be the little things. This is possibly the hardest part, as it can take years to figure out. Last time I saw my ex husband, we talked a bit about this. I shared with him that I was grateful to him for introducing me to the world of psychedelics, and for being the reason I came to Canada. I can’t imagine where my life would have gone otherwise. He, on the other hand, wasn’t sure what difference I had made in his life, but said he would think about it. It was one of the most nourishing and positive conversations we have had in years. Being able to say to a partner, “The external presence of you in my life has nourished the internal experience of my Self,” when we have broken up- that’s something I now aim for.

Endings signal evolution. Breakups breed growth, and growth isn’t in the easy flow. The easy flow is what you get to once you’ve grown. The growth is in embracing the challenge, in diving in to intimacy with your fears and judgements. It’s in being able to look someone in the eye who you have loved, who has triggered you, turned your heart inside out with thrashing anguish, brought about emotional reactions that have completely and utterly terrified you, and the absence of whom has made you feel you are nothing and insignificant- and being able to feel like you can still love their soul, fall in love with their cosmic essence, and dance with them in the uncertainties between you.

photo (3)