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. 

Intimacy Scales

I forget how it came up, but somehow Flower Lady noticed that she viewed hand holding as a very intimate, romantic thing, but Hat Guy thought it was just a friendship thing that girls do, and so didn't think it meant that much when she held his hand.

Realization: Different people can process the same action as more or less intimate than others would process that same action.

This makes a lot of sense. It explains why some people, like Flower Lady, are very physical and hug acquaintances, while others, like me, need large personal bubbles and take a long time to get huggy with someone. I had a model that explained that before, which went kind of like a slide rule. On the bottom ruler there was a scale of how well you knew a person, and on the top ruler there was a scale of touch, and different people slid their rulers so that the things lined up differently.

I am aware that this is not what a slide rule looks like.

But that one doesn't work. It doesn't work because it's not just that different peoples' scales line up differently, it's that their scales are actually different. This is one of those things that seems really obvious in retrospect, but surprised us because it had never occurred to us to think about it before. So we set ourselves homework to draw up our own personal scales of intimacy - to rate actions from least to most intimate. The results were...complicated. It turns out that - surprise, surprise - people are really complicated, and the way we think about physical intimacy is all tangled up with other things. I may talk about some of that tangling later, but for now, here are our results stated as simply as possible:

Hat Guy:
Hat Guy organised things in bins of relationship type. He noted that a relationship could be sexual at any point along the spectrum, but that for him it only makes sense to have sexual relationships come further down the line than romantic ones.

Click to enlarge

Flower Lady:
Flower Lady organised things similarly. Hers was a scale of emotional/physical intimacy, right up until the purple physical attraction (by which she meant sexual attraction) category. That one she said was different, because she experiences sexual attraction and emotionality as different things. Not necessarily unrelated things, but different (so not along the same scale).

Click to enlarge

Me:
My graph was actually much more complicated because my emotional intimacy and physical intimacy don't map to each other linearly. For the purposes of this post, I've re-done the linear part of mine using something like the colour scheme that Flower Lady and Hat Guy used.

Click to enlarge

Let's tease out some of the differences here. Hat Guy sees making out as a romantic thing, while Flower Lady sees it as a sexual thing. Flower Lady sees resting with physical contact as more intimate than light cuddling, while Hat guy sees it as less. I see holding hands as extremely intimate, while Hat Guy does not.

There are lots of complexities I'm skating over here. The point is, different people think the same physicals acts convey different levels of intimacy.

Need/Want

In my original post outlining my intended family structure, I left room for myself to have another serious, probably romantic relationship in addition to the base unit of me, Hat Guy, and Flower Lady. I did that because I felt that having such a relationship could enrich my life, and because I wanted the opportunity to develop bonds with people in whatever ways seem appropriate at the time. In other words, I didn't want to be unnecessarily limited by my existing relationships.

That's why I left room for another person. I did not do it because I anticipate having needs or wants that could only be fulfilled by having another relationship. Ideally, the base unit (plus the friend/family network) will be able to fulfill all the needs and wants of everyone in the base unit. This is part of being a functioning, stable unit.

At this point in our conversation, we the unit demonstrated how super useful we are. We went "We're setting the goal of making sure all our needs and wants are addressed somewhere in our relationship structures? Great! Let's map out what each of us needs/wants and where we can get that". And that's what we did.

Vaguely inspired by Morrissey and Cake's physical boundaries checklist, we made a big huge table of things that people do in relationships, or that at least one of us needs/wants to have happen. We put those down the left column, and across the top we put each of our relationships (Hat Guy and me, Hat Guy and Flower Lady, me and Flower lady, and the group). We also put a column for people outside of the base unit, a column for objections, and a column for whether things are allowed to happen in public.

Click to enlarge

This was very much a write-in table, not a check-off table. Specific entries were things like "yes", "ask first", "no problems", and "required". The objections category in particular got wordy, because we were using it for all types of objections, such as how I have to be completely out of earshot when sexy times happen, that Flower Lady should not be allowed to go grocery shopping alone lest she bring home the entire store, and that none of us want to spend time around each other's ex's. This table covers a lot of stuff, and what we got out of it was entirely proportional to the effort we put into filling it out. I have a feeling that this is only the first version of this table.

Why is this useful?
In general, because none of us are mind readers. No matter how well we know someone, we can't know what they want and don't want unless they tell us. Yes, there's body language and stuff, but words are really the clearest, most straight-forward way to do it. Unfortunately, telling someone that you want them to change what they're doing is not always easy. For me and my unit, charts make it easier to communicate. Clearly laying everything out in a very utilitarian way opens up lines of communication, which allows us to be frank about what we need/want. This in turn allows us to get what we need/want. Useful.

In the case of multiple relationships (those could be romantic, family, friend, or something else), there's more than one person available to fulfill your needs/wants. That makes things easier, because you don't have to rely on just one person to do everything for you, but it also makes things more complicated, because you have more options of people to go to, and more people relying on you. It can be tricky finding the right balances. By mapping out what everyone needs, you can start intentionally matching those needs together. The goal is to make sure everyone gets the attentions they desire, and don't feel pressured to give more than they wish to. 

Wait a minute, this is stupid.

So I was chopping vegetables the other day, and suddenly it struck me: The Kinsey scale is kinda dumb. Why? Because it measures two entirely unrelated variables (attraction to people of your gender and attraction to people of the opposite gender) along the same axis.

That's really dumb! It's like graphing how much people like bananas and melons using the same axis. If you don't see what's wrong with this, imagine that you don't like melons or bananas. Or that you hate melons and like bananas, but don't like bananas as much as everyone else who's all the way over on the not-melon side. There's no way to express those ideas on this scale, because the only way to like melons less is to like bananas more. This is stupid because how much you like bananas is not related to how much you like melons.

Dumb

To bring it back to sexuality, being less attracted to one gender does not mean that you have to be more attracted to the other gender. Those variables are independent. What the heck are they doing on the same axis? Really the graph should look like more like this: 

What a nice-looking graph. ...Except then this happens:

Dang it, gender binary, things are so much easier to graph if I can just pretend you exist! (But I can't.)

Cheat Sheet #1: Orientation Terms

I've been poking around these parts of the internet for years, so I've picked up a lot of jargon (and there is a lot of jargon around here) and forgotten I haven't always known it. This was fine until I started talking to people who haven't been reading about orientation for years. Jargon can be overwhelming at first, especially if you haven't seen enough of it to notice the patterns, so I'm making a series of cheat sheets to help out folks just arriving to the party who need a jump on the vocab.

The first sheet covers orientation terms. I tried to keep it clean and concise while being reasonably comprehensive. If there are things that I missed, misrepresented, or otherwise could have done better, please let me know in the comments.

Future sheets will include Gender Terms, and Attraction/Intimacy/Relationship Terms. (That one may end up being more than one sheet.) The most recent versions of all the terminology cheat sheets will be available in the glossary. If there are any other areas you'd like to see a cheat sheet for, let me know!

Click to enlarge, or right click and open in a new tab/window for a zoomable version.

Variable Separation (or, Asexuality 102 and Why Sexuals Should Hear it As Well)

One of the things I’m most excited to do on this blog is talk about separating variables. What do I mean by that? Let’s use attraction as an easy (Hah, jokes!) example. I am (somewhere on the) asexual (spectrum). What this means is I do not experience primary sexual attraction. I do, however, experience romantic attraction. I've been thinking of sexual and romantic attraction as separate things for years now, so it seems very natural to me, but I remember a time when, like mostly everyone in our society, I assumed that the two could or should only be experienced together. Figuring out that they were actually separable variables was one of the most important mental adjustments I've ever made. Right up there with object permanence. It can be very valuable to be able to pull complicated things apart into their component bits.

I really like metaphors, and in particular food metaphors, so I will now explain variable separation in terms of coleslaw. Imagine for a moment that you are an orphan who has grown up on pre-plated food and have only ever seen cabbage, carrots, and dressing tossed together in the form of coleslaw.

Please sir, I want some more.

Since you've never seen a cabbage on its own, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to think that all cabbage is part of coleslaw, or even to not realize that cabbage is a thing – you could just see coleslaw and not think about the different bits that make it up at all.

This is what most people do. They look at things – attraction, in our example – and either don't see that the things are made up of smaller parts, or assume that, since they've never seen the component parts individually, those parts must always go together. But I can have cabbage without having carrots or dressing, and I can have romantic attraction without having sexual attraction. Getting people to understand this is not always easy.

Click to enlarge

Attraction is the category I have the best model for. Here is a list of attraction variables which I, and a nontrivial number of other people, believe to be independent. Make no mistake, they can and often are closely linked for many or most people, but I don’t believe that they have to be.

Primary Sexual Attraction

Secondary Sexual Attraction

Physical Attraction

Romantic Attraction

Aesthetic Attraction

Emotional Attraction

Kinky Attraction

For a more detailed essay on these types of attraction, I highly recommend this post over at Intimacy Cartography, a blog I envy for its excellent name.

Types of attraction get talked about a lot in the asexual community because they need to be, but I think that they could have real value to sexuals as well. My clearest example of people who could benefit from this model is queer folks. Some people wake up at the age of seven and go “Yep, I’m gay,” and that’s great. It is by far the most direct path. But many queer people go through a lengthy and painful period of introspection, often in middle or high school, where they’re trying to figure out what their orientation is. This can be very confusing. Go to any teen advice website (or Queer Secrets) and you’ll find a slew of anguished questions something along the lines of “Am I in love with my best friend? The other day she slept over and we had this really sensual massage session and I enjoyed it – does that mean I’m gay?”, or “I get butterflies in my stomach when I think about this boy, but I’m not [sexually] attracted to guys! What’s going on?”, and so on.

It seems to me it would be a lot easier to figure out your sexual orientation if you had a model of attraction that didn't mash all the types together, particularly because sexual orientation is based only on sexual attraction. Separating the variables would give people the tools to go “ahah, I am romantically, but not sexually attracted to this guy, but since I only get sexually attracted to girls I must be straight”. Trying to figure out your sexual orientation with "attraction" being one unified category is like trying to tell someone whether your coleslaw is made with green or purple cabbage if you're an orphan who's never seen cabbage outside of coleslaw. You can probably do it, because it tends to tint the entire dish, but some things may not line up. Like orange carrots. What the heck?

Being able to make those distinctions between different flavors of attraction could be enormously helpful to people of any orientation. Think of the drama that could be avoided if people had the tools to think “I have a romance-like friendship with my best guy friend and that’s very important to me, but I don’t want to get physical at all, even just hugging”, or “I find this person very sexually attractive, but I’m not romantically attracted to them, so I shouldn't accept their offer of a romantic relationship structure”, or "I find this person very aesthetically attractive, but I don't want to interact with him". Better yet, imagine that people could communicate their feelings clearly to others using widely agreed-upon vocabulary. Amazing!

That’s what all this dissection in the asexual community is all about. That’s why I have an obsession with variable separation. It’s all so that people can have frameworks to think about themselves in ways that make sense, and vocabulary to talk about it with others. I'm talking about models of attraction here, but variable separation is incredibly useful in almost any category. I'll tackle some others in future posts.

The Love Garden

Since our initial realization that we should totally live together, Hat Guy, Flower Lady, and I have been doing a lot of thinking and talking about how we want this to work. We established early on that the goal here is to have a function family unit.

What that means for us is this:

The green is a stand-in colour, since we're not sure what that relationship will look like.

Within our family unit there are four relationships. There's a relationship between each pair of people, and then one for the whole group. Each of these must be happy, loving, supportive, communicative, and fulfilling for all involved parties. If any one of these relationships is faltering, the whole system is sad.

Right now, we have something that looks kind of like this:

Clearly there's some work to do. In particular, Flower Lady and I need to build a more-than-surface relationship together. We all have some ideas about what that relationship should be, but there's also a large element of natural and unpredictable growth which has to happen. My analogy here is a love garden.

You can make a box for a love garden, and water it (spend time getting to know each other), and weed it (talk a whole bunch to nudge things in useful directions, or at least away from bad directions), but in the end you just have to wait and see what grows in it.

Relationships can bloom without such attentions - that's what happened with me and Hat Guy. We just had this box of random plants that happened because we knew each other, and one day we turned around and went "Hey, look, flower buds! We should probably water those." What Flower Lady and I are doing is intentionally constructing a box, sitting down with our watering cans and our gardening gloves, and going "Okay, I want a plant with flowers. Go." And hopefully something suitable will appear.

It's important to note that there aren't any seed stores in this metaphor. We can have great ideas about what we want to be to each other, but in reality a relationship cannot be forced, and just as we can't plant seeds in the garden, we can't make ourselves have feelings. And that's scary, because what if nothing grows? But it's also okay. Because a love garden is a lot more exciting and interesting and, ultimately, fulfilling than a love lego sculpture. That's because a lego sculpture doesn't have room for pleasant surprises, but a garden does.