"Being" vs. "Doing"

Lately I've been thinking about the difference between being x, and doing x. Take being gay. The way it's usually modeled now, homosexual is a thing that you are, an inborn quality that cannot be changed. But it wasn't always that way. It used to be modeled as something that you did. Anyone could do a 'homosexual act', but it didn't mean that they were anything.*

Both of these models have upsides and downsides. One set that I see is when homosexuality is seen as a bad thing. If it's modeled as something people do, then anti-homosexuality says that people shouldn't do the bad thing and people who do it should be punished. If it's modeled as something people are, then anti-homosexuality says that those people are bad people and bad things should happen to them. That may not seem like much of a difference in practice, but I think it's a very fundamental one with subtle effects only some of which I can unpack on my own. This is something I can only see from a distance, so to speak, so I'd be very interested to hear other perspectives.

Another place where I see both models of being x and of doing x is polyamory. People argue over whether poly is an orientation - something innate that you're born with, or a relationship philosophy,lifestyle etc, and it just strikes me as really silly. To me at least, it's obvious that they're each true for different people. Some people are innately driven to have multiple intimate relationships at once. Flowers is like that. They're very happy with Hats, but they actively want to have additional partners. I'd say they they are poly. Hats and I, on the other hand, just sort of ended up in a relationship set that was poly through happenstance. I'd say we do poly. In the abstract I'd be fine having just one partner, it's just that that's totally not how my life is shaping up right now.

I find instances of this being x vs. doing x distinction all around gender and sexuality, but the concept is even further generalizable. I do art. I'm not an artist. Artists express themselves through their medium; I just make stuff that looks nice. Sometimes my work is meaningful, but usually not. I still see myself as a crafter, or, better and more generally, a maker than an artist.

* I'm playing fast and loose with history here. I'm making it sound simple and linear which it wasn't (isn't), but for the sake of my point the loose version will do.

Modeling

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
- George E. P. Box

I do a lot of modeling of complicated and muddy emotions and stuff, but I think it's very important to remember that what I'm doing is just that - modeling - and that each and every one of my models, while useful, is flawed, misleading, and wrong. I'm building a web of models to help me understand the world, but I must take care to not become too attached to my models and convictions, lest I miss something else just as important and valid. My current ways of thinking must not blind me to new information and new ways of thinking. I must also guard against the idea that my definitions and ways of looking at concepts are the 'right' ones. They work for me, and for many of the people I'm trying to communicate with, but to expect them to definitively describe all human experience would be a pinnacle of hubris.

Jealousy is Useful

The first pass at jealousy goes like this: It's a negative emotion and we shouldn't have it. Jealousy will ruin our relationships, so we should try not to be jealous ever.

The second pass goes like this: Jealousy is an emotional reaction to something that's going on. Like anger and disappointment, it's an emotional indication that not all is right, and one that's common in relationships of all sorts. If we can figure out the root cause of it, we can address the problem and fix the symptom and all will be well again. We don't have to be afraid of being jealous on occasion as long as we deal with it and don't let it be a caustic thing, or handle it badly if/when it comes up. Denying that we feel jealousy if we do could be very destructive, because it would put off addressing the underlying issue(s).

This second pass is what I see around polyamory websites, and I find it very valuable. Me being me, I have a third pass, which pulls jealousy apart into two sub-categories.

One kind of jealousy I see is "That is mine and you can't have it.", or alternately "I don't have that and you do and I wish to take it from you (so I have it and you don't)". It's what could be called possessive jealousy. It's the kid on the playground lusting after the toy his brother is playing with. It's seeing your partner holding hands with someone and being consumed by possessive green envy. It is "this should be mine and only mine."

Possessive Jealousy

The second kind is gentler, though not necessarily any less intense. It's "I see that you have this and I want it too". It's the kid on the playground seeing other kids with ice cream and begging his mother to get him some too. It's seeing your partner holding hands with someone and going "wow, can she do that with me sometime?" The key difference is that with this kind of jealousy, you want to have something, but you don't need everyone else to stop having it so you can. I'm going to call this suggestive jealousy.

Suggestive Jealousy

Both of these responses are natural and useful. Possessive jealousy is good for pointing out problems that need to be addressed. This site explains that very well, so I'll leave you with that link and move on. What I really want to talk about is suggestive jealousy, and how useful I've been finding it.

Suggestive jealousy is useful because it shows me what I want. I've had this problem where I want something, but I don't know exactly what it is that I want. Specifically, I want physical intimacy with Hats (and, to a lesser and fluctuating extent, Flowers), but I don't know what specific actions will satisfy that desire and also be comfortable for us and our relationship. This isn't a case of not knowing if it would be okay to do a particular thing, it's a case of having a nebulous craving and not knowing which particular things will fulfill it.

What does this feel like? Say that you've never heard of cookies, but you want something sweet to eat. Candy? No, you want something baked. Pie? No, that's too mushy. Cake? No, you really want something chewy that you can hold in your hand and take bites out of. Like Candy? No...no, you guess cake is really what you want, even though it's kinda big and messy. So you have a piece of cake and try to convince yourself that that's what you wanted, because its the thing that fits your criteria the best. You couldn't say 'No, I want cookies' because you'd never heard of cookies. But if you saw a cookie, you would immediately realize that that's exactly what you wanted to eat.

I see three ways to go from this situation. First is the lazy option. You eat the cake and try to convince yourself that you're satisfied, because that's the thing that's closest to what you wanted, right? But as anyone who's ever had a food craving knows, that may work some of the time, but it's not the most satisfying solution.

Second is the very effort-intensive option. You bust out the apron and bake batch after batch of sugary messes, trying to invent a cookie without knowing what it looks like or how its done. Eventually, if you are persistent, you will emerge triumphant with your new creation, and that will be pretty awesome, but that takes a lot of work and a LOT of failed batches of cookies which you must scrape sheepishly into the compost, or force yourself to eat even though they are really sub-par.

The third option is a middle ground between laziness and effort. You take tours of bakeries, peering at all the shelves and sniffing the air until one day you spot in the back corner a rack of cookies and go 'AHAH! That's what I want!'. This is what I am trying to do with touch. There are a lot of ways to be physically intimate out there. Just in my everyday life and in my chosen media, I see dozens of examples of affectionate/intimate touch. This is me wandering around the bakery. So how do I pick out the things I like? Suggestive jealousy. It would take an enormous amount of thought-energy and reflective patience to carefully analyze each instance of physical affection to determine whether it's something I want. Fortunately, suggestive jealousy is the feelings equivalent of a big flashing neon sign in a bakery, pointing at a plate of cookies and mouthing 'over here'. It makes me perk up and go 'yes, that!'.

So when I watch Hats kiss the top of Flowers' head, or see the two of them cuddle in a new configuration, I am jealous, but it's not that I want them to stop doing that, or that seeing those actions makes me feel bad. It makes me feel good, both because they're happy, and because it points out to me something that I want, which I can then articulate, which I can (probably) then get. It's actively useful to me. They're happy, I'm happy, and I don't have to do all the work of figuring out intimacy from scratch. Everybody wins.

Note: I originally wrote this post when I was living near Hats and Flowers and seeing them very often. I tweaked it a tiny bit for tenses and to use the new names, but nothing more. This active process of figuring out touch is on hold while I'm away at school and out of touch-range, but the suggestive jealousy has turned up in a different light. Now it serves as a good measure of how touch-starved I am. I've found that I miss touch quite a lot when I'm away at school, and how much I miss it varies depending on my stress level, how long it's been since I visited Hats and Flowers or talked to them, the weather, and so on. Watching how jealous I am when other people hug each other is a good way to keep track of it.

Internet haunts

Today I have a brief grumble about polyamorous blogging. When we started discussing having a multi-person partnership, I started poking around some polyamorous corners of the internet, with varying degrees of success. I keep running into one of three problems:

1.  The site is crusty and old and full of broken links (Has nobody talked about polyamory on the internet since 2000?) 

2.  The content and/or advertising is highly sex-oriented (Yes, I want to learn about alternative relationship structures. No, I do not want to purchase sex toys.) 

3.  The site/people talk almost exclusively about couples 'opening up' their relationship and bringing in someone new (Not at all my situation.)

I've also found the topics of conversation to be more limited than in ace circles. There doesn't seem to be as much interest in deconstructing assumptions, which is my specialty and fascination.

My perception. I'd like to think it's wrong, but...well....

On the one hand, I'm a bit disappointed by my findings. I strongly suspect that I'm just looking in the wrong places. Anyone have good site recommendations?

On the other hand, asexual blogs/AVEN are rockin' places to discuss sexuality, relationships, gender, and so on. Flowers has enjoyed the new wealth of vocabulary and concepts they've discovered here. I think the asexual community has a lot to offer (to anyone, not just asexuals) because of how much careful dissection we've done. It's not that often that you find a place to talk about sexuality where critical thinking is the norm.

Updates all around

Hello, blog. It's been a year. Much has changed, and much has stayed the same. Let me get you up to speed.

Genders:
Hat Guy? Not a guy! She's moving towards female identity and presentation, and using she/her pronouns. This is exciting and is making her sooo happy and I'm so glad that she's figuring out all this stuff about how to be a self-version that she likes and which feels genuine and good. I'll call her Hats here.

Flower Lady? Not a lady! At least not all of the time! They've ID'd as genderfluid as long as I've known them, but mostly always presented female. Now they're moving more aggressively toward rad androgyny and using they/them pronouns. Yaaaay, happy self-vesions all around! I'm gonna call them Flowers here.

Me? Yeah, I'm still a girl.

Relationships:
Flowers and Hats are getting married this July! Hats and I still love each other. Flowers and I are still friendly and figuring out what to be to each other. We still want to live together, although not necessarily under the same roof. We're thinking the optimal setup would be if I had a tiny house (tiny house!) and planted it in their yard.

There have been some pretty large ups and downs over the course of the last year+ and a lot of side-to-side, which seems to be par for the course (the course here being relationships period). There's also been some additional poly happenings with Hats and Flowers (as in, additional parters/date-friends).

"Home":
My parents moved, so I now have to go visit Hats and Flowers* intentionally rather than seeing them by default whenever I go home. My concept of 'home', always very particular and meaningful, has gotten rather weird. 'Home' is now, in no particular order:
   (1) where my parents live
   (2) the place where I used to live, which I love
   (3) where Hats and Flowers live (conveniently the same as #2)
   (4) my dorm room at school.

School:
I'm still in school (or rather, in school again after a break), with one year left until graduation. It's pretty great, although I don't like being away from Hats and Flowers for so long at a stretch. Hats is still in school, or rather, going back to school in the fall after break. Last semester she was absolutely flat out awful busy (the kind of busy where you don't have time to eat or sleep, never mind talk to your fiance who lives with you, never mind email your GreyWanders), which sucked for everyone, so now she's taking a semester of rest. Flowers is also going back to school in the fall, after a few years working.

Now what?
I will continue to post things sporadically when the urge strikes. The blog never died, I just didn't have anything relevant I wanted to talk about publicly in the last year. Now I do. I've been lurking around ace blogs the whole time, and while there's been a lot of stuff I don't have much to say about, recently there's been some more of the kind of discussion I go in for, so that's got me perked up. Also, I know ace people! In real life! Talking to them gives me food for though which may end up here as well. It's mostly shorter stuff though. Anecdotes, observations, thoughts, little comics, and so on. Long thought-out posts may still happen from time to time; we'll see! Also, I've been thinking a lot about trans and gender stuffs, so that will make it's presence known.

*Hats and Flowers sounds like a very cute little shop in an old brick storefront nestled in the historic downtown.

Flower Lady: Origins

Sexuals and Grey-Area relationships

This is a response to The Thinking Asexual's post Are Asexuals Capable of Nonsexual/Nonromantic Love Unique to Us? Like most of The Thinking Asexual's posts, it is well thought out, well argued, and makes some very good points. It is also quite mistaken.

The post starts off like this:

Recently, I started to deeply contemplate an idea that has flit in and out of mind a handful of times, and the idea has evolved into a theory. The theory feels strongly probable to me, but I haven’t yet decided to view it as truth. I feel like my life experience has been building to this theory for a long time, but I haven’t explored it long enough to make it a part of my worldview.

The theory is this: Asexuals, including aromantics, may be capable of feeling a unique kind of nonsexual/nonromantic love that romantic-sexual people cannot feel. 

Later, the theory is stated more strongly:

"romantic-sexual people can’t feel the feelings necessary for these types of friendships"(Where "these types of friendships" refers to relationships that fall outside 'just friends' or a traditional romantic relationship. Grey-area nonsexual relationships.) 

This is something I know to be false. I have a few case studies to illustrate my point, but even more than having counter examples, I know deep down that "everyone in X group is incapable of Y feelings" is probably always going to be a false statement. It's too general, too restrictive, and too simple. If there's one thing I've learned about people and identities, it's that they're frigging complicated. Nothing is clear-cut, and even when two variables seem to be linked, it's never a 100% correlation. There are asexuals who feel arousal, who have sex, who masturbate, even ones who seek out sexual experiences for their own pleasure. We know that knowing someone is asexual tells you nothing about how and whom they love and what they do with them. They could experience a whole dictionary of types of attraction to any gender imaginable. They could desire and have relationships that are monogamous or polyamorous, kinky or vanilla, romantic or platonic. We do not assume to know their feelings on any of these things based solely on their asexuality. So why on earth would it be alright to assume knowledge of a sexual's feelings, based solely on their sexuality?

But I'm not just arguing assumptions here. I have data. Let me restate the original theory here.

"romantic-sexual people can’t feel the feelings necessary for these types of friendships"

Yes, they can. Or rather, some can. I have no idea what the majority take on this is, but I have three examples of romantic sexuals who do have these feelings. (It only takes one example to prove this theory false since it's stated as an absolute.)

My first example is on the internet, so you can go have a look. She is a sexual who clearly states a desire for a non-sexual, non-romantic partner whose importance would equal that of her romantic-sexual partner. A really cool thing about this lady is that she had, nurtured, and articulated this desire all on her own. There was nobody going 'Hey, we should be platonic life partners!'. There's no platonic partner at all right now. There's just a heterosexual lady sitting around going 'Man, you know what would be the bee's knees? Having a deep platonic bond on the same level as my hypothetical marriage.' 

My second example is my own Flower Lady. She's romantic bisexual, and when I asked her to read The Thinking Asexual's article, she had a similar reaction to the one I had. Good thinking, good arguing, but clearly wrong, because she (Flower Lady) has experienced the kind of non-sexual, non-romantic love that the author describes. She wrote up her thoughts on her own blog, and I find her perspective very useful.

My last example is Hat Guy, and this one's my favorite because Hat Guy is the last person you would expect to understand this based on his labels. He's white, cisgendered, male, middle class, young, able-bodied, basically all the privileged labels you can think of. He has a somewhat conservative family background, and is happily engaged to a lovely (Flower) Lady, and yet he loves me deeply in a way that is totally non-sexual, and is outside his definition of romantic. Not only does he have and express these feelings, but he developed them and decided what to do with them on his own. 

Well, not really on his own. Relationships are kind of a two-way street. What I mean by that is that I did not sit down and say "Hey, we should have a queerplatonic relationship". I sat down and asked "What is this?", and it was Hat Guy who said it was obviously more than 'just friendship' but could/should not be a traditional romantic relationship. It was Hat Guy who thought that as long as we knew what was going on we didn't need to label it. He was the one who first formally stated what we were, and placed it cozily in the grey area as if it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world.  So there you go. A sexual who not only can feel these emotions, and sustain these relationships, but who deliberately engaged in a very non-normative relationship, despite having no context for it, or having any specialized words to describe it.

At this point I have shown The Thinking Asexual's theory to be false, but I'd like to keep going because there were some good points behind the theory. 

Like this one: If sexuals can experience these feelings, why don't they...you know...act like it? Why is it so enormously uncommon for anyone to understand that there are relationships to be had other than garden-variety friendship and romantic-sexual ones? The Thinking Asexual has an answer to this:

I think that when it comes to the sexual population’s disconnect from gray-area nonsexual relationships (romantic friendship, passionate friendship, and primary nonromantic relationships), there are really only two explanations:

1. They can’t feel the feelings that fuel these kind of relationships.

2.    They can feel the feelings that fuel these kind of relationships, but through their own social conditioning, they come to believe that such relationships do not and cannot exist and have nothing desirable to offer. In the event that they do feel emotions for someone that are naturally of the gray-area nonsexual friendship kind, they mistake those emotions for romantic and sexual and thus pursue a romantic-sexual relationship with someone they actually want to be romantic friends/passionate friends/nonromantic primary partners/super close QP friends with. Or, they don’t act on their feelings at all.

And then, despite feeling these feelings, they act totally confused and weirded out ... when asexuals bring up the subject of romantic friendship ... because they feel the need to uphold their own culture’s [norms] ... despite the fact that their own emotional experiences prove those norms to be bullshit. 

The Thinking Asexual applied Occam's Razor and theorized that explanation number one is correct, but I think that in reality there's a bit of each going on.  It is entirely possible that some (but not all) sexuals are incapable of these kinds of feelings*, but I think that in many (if not most) cases, explanation number two is spot on.

The effects of social norms should not be underestimated. Even I, an asexual-spectrum person living in an environment where the word 'heteronormative' is commonly tossed out over breakfast, took a long time to stop trying to put my relationship with Hat Guy in a neatly labeled cubbyhole and accept the weird grey-area stuff for what it was. Why? Because I didn't know that grey-area relationships were a thing, and for some weird (but very common) reason, that made it hard for me to come to grips with mine. And I had an internet of relationship anarchists at my disposal. In theory, everyone has an internet at their disposal, but information on grey-area relationships isn't easy to find, even if you're looking for it. I poked around the internet for months and months before I ever found mention of queer platonic relationships. When I did, it was through asexuality. If I had not identified with descriptions of asexuality, I probably would never have stuck around this corner of the internet long enough to discover all the nifty relationship deconstruction that goes on here. The fact is, sexuals are much less likely to come across this information than asexual-spectrum folks, and are therefore much less likely to realize that these feelings are a Thing - that they are legitimate and can go places.

Flower Lady theorizes that many a romantic-sexual relationship has ended because one of the parties' feelings, while loving, were not in line with the traditional romantic-sexual relationship model. They didn't feel the feelings society said they should, so they thought the relationship was a bad one and ended it. Society says that you either pair-bond sexually forever, or cease interacting (unless you can pull off 'just friends'). It takes an uncommon bond (or an uncommonly clueless person) to punch through that burden of norm. That, or access to information which will map out a new possible sub-norm.

Another factor here is necessity. As a sexual, you can sort of putter along with the assumptions you got in grade school. As The Thinking Asexual said in another post, it "takes guts" to engage in a non-normative relationship. It takes change, and in general, people don't change without a good reason. But if you're asexual (and that affects how you would behave sexually within a relationship), you have to look at non-normative options, because the normal ones won't work for you. Most sexuals never have a reason to question their norms.

So maybe that's why The Thinking Asexual has never met a sexual who has understood their desire for grey-area relationships. Because anyone who has those feelings inside of them has been trained to neglect and mistake them, hasn't had a strong enough reason the challenge their conditioning, and/or hasn't had access to the information and support that would be needed for them to be able to really shake off the norms and embrace a new way of thinking.

And now a word of caution. I cannot blame anyone for wanting to draw conclusions based on their personal experience. That is how we process the world. I do not blame The Thinking Asexual for arriving at the conclusion they did, given the data they had. But to take all the 7 BILLION sexuals our world has, and say that not one of them is capable of feeling deep platonic love... that's a long jump to make. It is also a very harmful one. This attitude of "I know your orientation, therefore I can assume ___ about you" is exactly the kind of thinking that hurts asexuals - and many other minorities - the most. It is no bad thing to theorize, and to try to find patterns in data, but we must all of us tread very carefully here, and avoid hostility and animosity where it does not need to be. The sexual/asexual spectrum is just one variable axis in a nesting thicket of variables, and grouping the world into 'us' and 'them' based on it does nobody any favors.

One-sentence summary: Sexuals can experience non-sexual, non-romantic love, and assuming things about people based on their sexuality is a bad idea.

* I also suspect that some (but not all) asexuals are incapable of these feelings.

Note:

One more thing: What about those periods of history during which romantic/passionate friendships were the norm? When women wrote gushing letters to one another and slept in the same beds without a whisper of impropriety? To be fair, some of those pairs were probably 'closeted lesbians' (to force the modern terminology), but all of them? I am willing to bet that at least a healthy portion of these relationships were between heterosexual women who honestly and (since their society accepted it then) openly felt and expressed passionate, nonsexual love.