Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

In the series Babylon 5, various emissaries of the Light and Dark (or seemingly Light and Dark… it turns out that things aren’t actually quite so clear) ask the more mortal protagonists simple questions that lead to somewhat profound answers - questions like “What do you want?”

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot lately.

There is a great deal in my life right now that I’m enormously happy with. I have a (part-time/non-primary) D/s relationship that is better than I could have imagined it would be - both sexually and emotionally fulfilling and easy to be content in as well as excited about. I have a house I love and a career that is flexible enough that I can spend my time pursuing all my varied dreams. I am, when I’m not depressed or frustrated, happy… and yet I’m still not good at being content.

I’m always looking towards the next thing. This habit gets worse when I do have stability to base myself off of. If I am set in one area of my life, I tend to take more risks to move the other areas forward. Sometimes this works out brilliantly, other times I mourn the roads I’ve stepped off of, but I tend to jump first and wonder if it’s a bad idea second. The problem is that my wandering eye, my risking mind, is powered by two things - not knowing what I want and wanting too much.

I’m a scatter-brain. I may be an extremely intelligent and highly productive scatter-brain, but my flakiness is undeniable - I’m always moving in too many directions. There are too many things I want to do - books I want to write, performances I want to give, instruments I want to learn, careers I want to excel in - and while I could probably do any one (or even two of them) if I gave it my all, I don’t. I want everything and so I have minor success at many things and no overwhelming accomplishment at anything. I’m scattered. I don’t know what I want to focus on. That’s the problem with my professional life - I want all the options and I’m afraid to close any doors in case I might miss out on something amazing. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with that - accept that I can’t have it all and figure out which subset I’m willing to live without.

In my personal life, I have the opposite problem. I don’t know what I want. The biggest looming decision, because of my age, is whether I actually want to have kids. Sometimes I do, very, very much, and other times I don’t - particularly when I think about having to take on all that responsibility alone. I love children, and I have sperm stored in a freezer at my gynecologist’s office, but I’m having trouble bringing myself to use it. I was ready last summer, when I thought I was losing my mom and imagined that my relationship with my gf was going to go well - that she would have her kid and I would have mine and although we wouldn’t raise them together we’d have each other for support - but couldn’t schedule the insemination. Now… I’m no longer as certain. Even scarier than ending up alone is ending up with more responsibility than I can handle on my own, and I can’t bring myself to visit that nitrogen-filled tube. I’m not certain enough that it’s what I want to give up all the things I have.

The other issue is my love life. I feel like I should want a primary partner, and sometimes I think I do, but I’m not entirely certain that having one would actually make me all that happy. On one hand, I want to share my life with someone, but on the other hand I’m awful at doing so. I’ve lived on my own for more than half my life, and I don’t know if I’m capable of giving that up. I’d love the mutual emotional support and knowledge that someone is there for me, but I’m not convinced that I’d be able to handle the reverse responsibility. I’m quite selfish with my time, energy, and space.

The thing is, right now I’m actually getting all my emotional and physical relationship needs met by my MDP. That’s great, but it’s not particularly fair. I’m also abstractly concerned that it may not be particularly wise.

The truth is that I’m not currently motivated to try and find myself a primary partner (not that being motivated to look has actually ever netted me real possibilities in the past) both because I’m happy and because I’m not sure it’s what I want. I don’t know if I actually have any desire to be that much of someone’s life or have someone be that much of mine. I often think I do, particularly when I’m depressed or upset, but I question whether that’s actually true. I have, repeatedly, been quite happy in solid non-primary relationships, but never managed long term success in anything that could have turned into full-time. When my poly relationships have ended, it’s never been because I wanted more. In fact, it’s usually been because more suddenly ended up on the table when I could quite happily have done with less.

It was easier to explain this to myself and to others when I was in graduate school and I could say that my Ph.D. was my primary partner. Even now, though, I am obsessed with work. It gets a lot of my time and attention, and I’m not sure that I particularly want to change that. Maybe the solution is to hope that if I do find someone who could be a primary partner that they’re just as much of a workaholic… or something-productive-aholic… as I am. I would love to come home to someone at night, but I don’t need to have a partner. Not the way I need to have work I’m passionate about. I used to think that made me a fundamentally flawed person, but maybe it’s just a different way to live my life.

It’s hard. I see some of my friend’s marriages and think “I want that.” I want to have a partner who I can love, respect, and count on, but I also want us both to be independent people with independent passions and lives. I just don’t if I could be good at that - if I could give up enough to make it work even if I found the person I wanted to make it work with.

One thing that I will say is that it’s wonderful to look at these amazing families and see how they make polyamory work in their lives. It’s giving me a much greater appreciation of the fact that sometimes the best person to build a life with isn’t always the person you’re romantically and passionately obsessed with. It’s nice if those areas of your life coincide, but it’s not necessary to be happy.

I’ll also say that I wish I’d had kids when I was 22, but that’s another post for another time.

1. Poly wanna cracker:

As I wrote the last time I was musing on polyamory, I’m not firmly in one camp or the other when it comes to relationship structure. I can do monogomy or I can do polyamory, and I have been drawn to both at different times throughout my life. Spending time as I did over the weekend, however, with a lot of poly people whose relationships really seem to work, always pushes me over a little farther onto the poly side of the scales. It’s always nice to see such an abundance of shmoop, and while I don’t think that monogamy in inimical to shmoop, it can be rather restrictive in determining who any given person gets to be shmoopy with. Shmoop shared is shmoop mutiplied… or something like that.

2. Whip cracker:

I got single-tailed three four five (six?) times over the weekend. I love single tails - even if I can’t quite keep track of how many of them I was hit with. Only one of those was actually a single-tail scene (rather than a single-tail interlude, or a single-tail en passant, or … I’m out of other things it could be,) and it was really nice (all but one of them were, honestly.) I was quite sad that I had to call it short because I had promised someone else they could birthday single-tail me and I wanted to make certain I had enough skin left for someone whose skills I wasn’t cognizant of. But while it lasted, it was lovely. Slice, slice, slice. Fire, intensity, pain. Yum. I wonder if people, in general, appreciate how much of a skill inflicting good pain is. It doesn’t simply require good technical skill with a particular implement, it requires some level of ability to read the person you’re inflicting it on so that you can tune it to something they enjoy or, if you want to, something that they don’t. I’m so not a top that I often feel guilty taking up the time of someone whose doing a really good job of beating me, since I have trouble imagining that they’re enjoying hurting me as much as I’m enjoying being hurt.

3. Crack(er)ing up

Laughing in scene, or in scene spaces, is joyful - if sometimes unexpected. It’s not so much a matter of “why do it if it doesn’t make you happy?”- since there are different ways of being happy and different things one can get out of a scene depending on the headspace with which one goes into it - as a matter of “a different way of enjoying it.” Shared laughter is just fun, as well as being a damn good ab work out. Serious is good, but so is silly. I’m still looking forward to doing that piercing scene with googly eye beads at some point…

4. Vanilla wafers

I’d like to pretend that I had something profound to say about vanilla sex here, but mostly I just wanted to put vanilla wafers into my box of crackers. Cuddling is good! Everyone should have regular smooching! There we go. Nom nom!

5. Totally crackers

I have 2-3 more substantial posts that are stalled on technicalities. Hopefully one or more of them will get off the ground sometime soon. It depends on how much work I feel like avoiding, and if I can write my way around the roadblocks.

I stumbled into polyamory when I was in graduate school. At that point, I hadn’t dated much. The furthest I’d gone with anyone was kissing, or possibly some mild clothed groping, and I was not feeling like that was likely to change any time in the near future. I knew I was kinky, and after moving to my new city had started to explore the local scene, but I was still aggressively single and terribly shy. I had vaguely heard of polyamory - primarily as a plot device in Heinlien novels - but it didn’t see to have any relevance to me. Until I met my first serious boyfriend… who had two other girlfriends of his own.

For the next few years of poly dating, I felt mostly like I was a monogamous person who just happened to fall in love with poly people. In retrospect, I think this was because of two things:

1. I’m picky almost to the point of pathology.
2. My graduate degree was my primary partner

Oddly enough, although I used to joke around about the second factor, I don’t really think I had any clue of how true it was until earlier this year. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t have the time for a major relationship, as that I didn’t have the emotional energy. Doing my Ph.D. had to be my first priority, because I didn’t want to be a perpetual grad student. I wanted in, out, and done, and in order to accomplish that I needed to have focus. I had so much focus, in fact, that I think I may have set a record in my program for graduation speed. Most people took 7 or more years to get out, and I finished in just under 4.5. At that point, the kind of relationships I was having were perfect for me. I was almost always involved with people who had live-in primaries, and I was the other girlfriend. Which worked well, but I still thought of myself as basically monogamous. I would be dating X who would be living with Y and maybe X (or Y) also had a couple of other girl/boyfriends, but I was generally pretty content to focus on one person at a time… and my Ph.D. I was monogamous; I just happened to be in love with someone who wasn’t. Or two someones, since quite often I would end up at least as strongly emotionally attached to my partner’s primary partner as to my partner, if not more so.

It’s just more evidence that I have mad skillz when it comes to denial, but I really didn’t see myself as inherently polyamorous. These days, however, while I think I could probably do monogamy with the right person, I’m pretty sure it isn’t my ideal. It’s not about the sex. Although god knows it’s nice to have options, and I would be thrilled to have someone to be close to every single day, I can (and have) gone for years without getting any when there’s been no one I had any mutual interest in sleeping with. It’s about the connections and the closing of doors.

I’m an affectionate monkey. I form connections with people through touch, and it would be very hard for me to turn that off if I had a monogamous partner who was threatened by it. If I like someone, I have to work to not touch them when they’re nearby. I hold hands like a child, even when I’m just walking down the street with my friends. I touch shoulders, and snuggle, and lean in. I kiss, and I cuddle, and I seek sustenance from touch. Plus, in the past, my partners have had awesome taste in partners and I’ve gotten to meet some amazing people through them. Connections leading to connection.

As for the other, I have an almost visceral fear not of commitment, but of the loss of possibility. This isn’t just an issue in my romantic life, it’s true for me at work as well. “If I take this show, will I lose the chance to do something else?” So, particularly in recent years, I’ve tried to make choices that don’t close doors. It’s an unattractive admission, but it’s true. To put it in physics geek terms, I don’t like to collapse my probabilities. But what I actually like in my work life is commitments that don’t close doors. My four main jobs, at the moment, are jobs that I should be able to keep for the indefinite future, but which don’t restrict me from seizing any really shiny opportunities that pass my way. The vast majority of the year, although they may take up a lot of time, they don’t take up any _specific_ time, and the only thing that limits the amount of additional work I take on is my need for sleep. I could keep my jobs if I booked a national tour, or had to travel for a TV gig, or fell in love and moved to the west end of nowhere - as long as the west end of nowhere (or a hotel room on the road) had a halfway decent internet connection and I could occasionally find time to plug in. I may work my ass off, but the reward I get for it is freedom and possibility.

Which, the more I think about it, is not really the same thing as what I want in my personal life. I would love to find someone to love and share a commitment with, someone to build a family with. I just don’t feel like family needs to be exclusionary. The relationships I’ve had have always been strengthened by having tertiary partners, when they’ve fallen apart it’s never been because of anyone other than the two people sharing the break. I suppose it might be different if I was in a different role (I’ve never been the primary partner with a new person coming in, although I’ve been a strong secondary relationship with new people coming and going), but I suspect my fundamental feelings about all of it would probably remain the same. I guess, when it comes down to it, I am pretty inherently polyamorous after all. I still don’t think it’s for everyone, but it does seem to be for me.

Despite the fact that I tend to talk in something of a hierarchical model of polyamory, I don’t think that’s the only, or the ideal, way of doing it… it’s just the way I’ve experienced poly in the past. I’m actually really attracted o the notion of stable non dyadic relationships, but they are not terribly common and very hard to come by. I have to say, this has been a very big year for personal growth for me in terms of figuring out what is, and what is not, important to me in terms of relationships and what I do and don’t want. Why couldn’t I have figured all this out when I was 25? Not that figuring it out necessarily gets me any closer to having it, but it’s nice to have emptied out so much baggage so that I can stick it back into the closet where it belongs. Closet’s nice and big too, given that I’ve cleaned out many of the skeletons and haven’t lived in there myself for years. I’m here. I’m queer. I need to stop writing and go to rehearsal.

Or was I just happy to see you?

My partner in straight-razordom stopped by to visit earlier today with her family and was kind enough to leave with a pocket full of vibrators. I think I gave her at least six of the ones I wasn’t emotionally attached to from the pile of review toys, and it amused me to no end when she put them in her coat inner pocket and started flashing them at me like she was showing them to the police (although I was slightly sad to see the light up vibe go, I really have way too many vibrators.) I like her. She makes me laugh. Even if she refused to listen when I refused to consent to her giving me too much change back at lunch. “I do not consent to having money shoved in my pocket! I do not consent! Do you hear me? NO CONSENT!!!!!” We’re weird. Still, now I have room for more vibrators, and since I just got another three in the mail to review… this is a non-trivial source of happiness.

I’ve been having an oddly bi-polar day in the fantasy section of my brain. I woke up this morning and was having all sorts of squishy romantic fantasies - cuddling with someone in bed, nuzzling their neck, doing family stuff - and was just about to write a long post on how my fantasies go in cycles from “dream about romance and gooshy stuff” to “dream about violent kinky sex” when my fantasies shifted from nuzzling to being thrown across the room and hurt and fucked and I lost the ability to concentrate.

A lot of this is because I finally got up the nerve to ask someone out who I’ve had a low-maintenance crush on for several years, and he said yes. On one hand, I’m very excited that I get to go out on a date with a smart, funny, adorable boy, and on the other hand… I’m stuck on the fact that I don’t think he’s either kinky or poly, and right now what I’m really jonesing for is violent kinky sex. I mean in the grand scheme of things romance and love and family are all more important, but right now I really want bruises and teeth, pain and sex. So I feel a little weird, especially since when I go up to his city to take him out for a date I will be in a city where I might actually be able to acquire one or more of those things without too much difficulty. But that seems wrong. Well, sort of. It’s fine, in my mind, if I go up to his town for a non-sexual playdate with an established partner and then take him on a date while I am there, but it seems really wildly inappropriate to go up to his town with the express goal of going out with him and seeing if we have any chemistry and then to look for potentially more sexual fooling around with someone else on the same trip. Fortunately the kinky person on whom I have a mild crush of more recent vintage is, I’m pretty sure, not interested - which means I should be able to behave.

Gods, I’m sick of behaving. I don’t want to behave. I’m also sick of having to be sexually aggressive with the men I’m attracted to*, which I know I’ll have to be with date guy if I want anything to happen (I have been told by a mutual friend that I am going to have to make the first move, and I suspect that rule does not stop at the asking out. I suspect I’m going to have to kiss him first too. And then… well, anything else that comes up.) Sexual aggression is really not my preferred mode of interaction. I like to state my interest clearly and then be transgressed against. Sadly, it hasn’t been working out that way for me lately. I’m ridiculously picky as to what men I am willing to have sex with, and recently those few men who I’ve actually been interested in sleeping with just haven’t been all that interested in me. It’s very frustrating. I’m reasonably cute! I’m not more annoying than the average monkey! It shouldn’t be this difficult**!!!!

Whine whine, complain complain. Maybe I am more annoying than the average monkey! I may have approximately one million vibrators in my house, but it just isn’t the same since they can’t hold my hands down and hurt me.

–
*I do so much better with women, which is why it’s annoying the hell out of me that lately I’ve been so focused on sex with men.
**There’s a limit to how much I am reasonably allowed to bitch about this since I have also turned down men, and so can not blame people for behavior which I myself exhibit. That would be unseemly.