Okay, so it's been a while since I posted an update.
As many of you know, my partners and I met about two years ago. We've been living together for over a year now, and we've been through a great deal. Following the "forming, storming, norming" model, we're still in the storming phase coming out of year two. Pretty much on schedule. For the first year we knew each other, we had a passionate affair, with lots of trips between towns, and trying to build some sort of structure that we could operate within to nurture four relationships (me/him, her/him, me/her, her/me/him). We did this with Google calendar and a rotating schedule of dyad and triad time. It didn't work perfectly all the time, or even most of the time. Sometimes emotions would throw the schedule out of whack, and we're three really emotional people. Also, we had this idea at the beginning of what the relationship "should" look like, and we used the schedule to "make it so". We would be an equilateral triad. Everything would be balanced to the best of our abilities. Everyone's "needs" would be met. We were committed to living according to shared principles. We did a lot of talking, a lot of writing, a lot of relationship building exercises and structuring, using relationship books, etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, NRE a-go-go. We thought we had it covered. We'd done the reading. We'd sympathized with lots of relationships on this and other poly boards. We felt educated. We felt ready.
We moved in together.
The second year, instead of us running the schedule, the "nurturing" schedule started running us. We moved in, named our house, hung up a sign, set up housekeeping. We drafted chore schedules, cooking schedules, parenting schedules, dating and sleeping schedules. Our Google calendars started looking like the confetti in the Macy's parade. We started attending the UU church. The schedule got more complicated. Sometimes, we were really happy, and everything really did seem magical. We got along well, had fun evenings, in, and out. We kept the house pretty tidy, and kept up with our chores, and kept the dinners rolling, and on and on. And the power struggles started before we'd even moved in. Who waits for whom to give the go-ahead on "I love you." Who gets which room to herself (me)? Which color do we paint the rooms? Who has their commitment ceremony first? What kind of rings do we get, and what fingers do they go on? Who can take vacations, how much can they cost, and how long can they last? Who "has to" work? If we all "have to" work, what are job hunting criteria? How choosy can job hunters be? Should they maximize their earning potential, or follow a dream, so long as the bills get paid? Who parents the kids? How is that done, exactly? Who "has to" do the hard parts, the messy parts, the boring parts? Who "should" come out to family, and in how many other ways can we be judgmental and unloving to each other? In how many different ways can we reject ourselves and one another? Can we make a drinking game out of it? Every time someone become paranoid, self-righteous, or a martyr, take a drink!!! We squabbled, we scrabbled for purchase, we "processed" into deep in the night. We became sleep deprived. Everybody's huge fearful baggage popped open and insecurities spilled out all over the place. Instead of us using the schedule for our purposes, the schedule started using us like a prison bitch, and the world became smaller, and the adults more inward-focused, until the smallest power struggle seemed a matter of life and death, and a single evening that didn't have a desired happy ending was the first sign of the apocalypse. OH NOZE, WE'RE GONNA DIE!
I guess it could have ended there. We could have paved the road between here and Boston using self-help books as stepping stones, and stepped our way into separate lives. Instead, we're taking stock, throwing out old structures. Cracking open ossified thinking. Kissing ideals and illusions goodbye. Let me tell you, folks, it sucks rocks to kiss your illusions goodbye. Those illusions are damned comfy. In them, you can do all kinds of selfish, shitty stuff and call it righteous. With the right yummy sounding illusions/delusions, you can be a self-absorbed, self-righteous, opportunistic, manipulative, exploitative, narcissistic abuser with a variety of colorful psychological problems, and convince yourself that you're doing it to be loving, and OTHER PEOPLE SHOULD BE DOING IT TOO. TOTALLY WILD what kind of justification the wily human brain can come up with in order for the ego to survive. Why am I telling you all this stuff? Well, in some other threads, some other folks are making different choices than we made, mostly with regard to telling the truth. In our house, even though it's full of super imperfect people, we sort of got addicted to telling each other the truth. It started out sort of like watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where you give the first season a try, and the monsters are totally fake and not scary, but after a while, even though the monsters really never get any scarier, something about it becomes so compelling and real, you just keep watching, and start wishing... (digression). Anyway, we started out dutifully dragging the more obvious and pitiful monsters out into the light and watching the fascinating puff of ash, and now we're grim, determined, and sort of maliciously joyful about it. We've got battle scars. We're like the end-of-the-world version of Buffy's heroes, missing eyeballs and limbs, and tearing the monster apart with our bare hands and wearing the goo like war paint.
SQ came out to her whole family, and all of her friends in one fell swoop, chip-on-the-shoulder fashion. Her family's got Irish Catholic roots, and she was pretty sure things would go badly. Her mom still has a bit of trouble, and did get pretty sassy about it when she first heard, but she's cordial to me every time I see her. It wasn't the end of the world. VS came out to his family strategically, by starting with an aunt he'd colluded with on other slightly emotionally risky dealings. Then he came out to the parents, who were fine, for about ten minutes. And then they waged a Freak Out Apocalapse that has lasted two years. At one point, they told VS that disclosure to the Elderly Grandparents would be the Instant Death of Them Both, and Their Deaths Would be on VS's Head For All Time. His sister accused him of adultery, and implied he would be going to hell after being accused of molesting my teenage daughter. Meanwhile, in a somewhat surreal aside, his dad is nice to me in person, and loves my daughter. We laid down a floor together; we bonded over power tools! The aunt, from before, in a preemptive strike, decided to lay the bomb on the Grandfolks herself, starting a family war that still has a nuclear dust cloud hanging over New England. But I'd like to mention that the Grandfolks are not dead. Grandma is still spry enough that she might hit me over the head with her walker someday. Nope. They are not croaking over the news any time real soon. I'm not close with my family. They live all the way across the country, or in other countries. Still, I told a cousin, who rejoiced that I was happy. I keep starting a conversation about it with my dad, but each time I get to the critical moment, he deflects me expertly with a report on his golf score. He DOES NOT WISH TO KNOW. I wrote my mother, a devout Catholic who lives in the Philippines. Possible to spite my father, who she has loved for 40 years and never got over, she told me she'd take the news to her grave, and congratulated me for finding happiness. One of her sons is a dentist, one is an anthropologist, one ran away from his family on the arm of a Filipino "dancer," and she hasn't spoken to her other daughter after she and my sister had a fight over a matter of fact in a Harry Potter book. They're all bipolar. My mom said, "Hey, I get it. I was a swinger in the 70's." I said, "Ma, TMI." And we left it there. Oh, and by the way. When each of us told our friends, we got about an 80% rate of "Oh yeah, I tried that once." So far, honesty and disclosure has killed no one. At worst, it has caused some growthful estrangement, and the growth of actual healthy boundaries.
Where are we now? Still reading self-help books. We're reading secular Buddhist philosophy, and trying to live with courage, acceptance, and lovingkindness. We're making space for ourselves. We're kicking our own asses, and learning how to climb up out of navels to blink at the painful sunlight. SQ has made a plan to get a permanent job and has been temping for about a year. She's gone from agoraphobic, terror-stricken, do what it takes to avoid getting out in the world stay-at-home mom to a somewhat nervous but game career-seeker, and starts her first class toward a certificate or degree in some sort of web design program at the local college tomorrow. She's been in therapy, and seems to be doing well there. VS has gone from fear-driven, impatient controlling chore-hating guy, to Pema Chodron-reading, Sunday-school teaching, fledgling self-aware guy who listens to Lady Gage while dancing and doing the dishes. I've sort of grown in some ways, and sort of regressed in other ways. Somewhere along the way, my codependence flared up, I picked up some unhappy habits, and I'm working through those now. I've come to terms with my career: I work as a manager in a biotech company, and the responsibility is scary and I want to bail out sometimes. For five years, I've been looking for a way to run away from my career, but I've recently realized that there's a middle path. I'm a published writer. I can keep my job, make a few career-development sacrifices, and spend my free time writing instead of spending it all processing. I have OCD, GAD, panic disorder, and I tend to find innovative ways to run away from commitment, and in about 45 minutes, I'm going to sit down with my partners and talk about plans for purchasing a house. The documents won't look the same as when we drafted them a year ago, when we still felt all NRE-smacked and idealistic. They're going to look much more like documents you'd draft between business partners. So if the relationships fall apart, they're written to keep us from suing each other's pants off and making the whole thing inelegant and ugly. We are both the unhappiest and probably the healthiest and most honest people that we have ever been. Weird.
So, folks, you're certainly free to choose the path of less truth, if you want to. It's a free country, and you can lie to people and say it's all for the best if you want to. I'm learning how to have boundaries, and I realize that controlling you is outside my sphere of influence. But I'm a proselytizer, and a remorseless influencer, which is the reason I would be a bad board moderator. In many ways, I'm not idealistic, and yet I believe that the truth will set you free. In my life, the truth hasn't destroyed anything but illusions that needed to go anyway, and it hasn't killed a soul. We've discovered that our relationships aren't what we'd prefer them to be, and even then, you can still choose to keep them, and learn to love them for what they are. Right now, we don't know what they are. We feel love, irritation, loyalty, frustration, distrust, faith, and pretty much every other emotion in the human spectrum. We're learning that nothing is certain, and you can fall into your navel and spend the rest of your life bemoaning the lack of uncertainty. Or you can spelunk yourself out of your navel, stay with the feelings, and take the next step on the path.
Wish me luck on my third year, (will "norming" start soon? best not to get my hopes up!) and imagine being accepted for exactly who you are. Ugly, suppurating, stinky warts and all.
September 02, 2010, 01:28:15 pm
