Book Day 13: Layers of Legibility
I have talked about “legibility” before. Here are a few layers that I ought to make a chart about.
When you and your partner say “we’re open” or “we’re monogamous,” is that statement legible—could a stranger watching your life tell what that means? Would they know how to interact with you given that information?
Legibility to yourself, as an individual
Do you know what you want and how people tend to get it or not? Do you understand how some people might actually not like being around you and your choices, not because they hate you, but because it affects their own goals or their own sense of self-stability or self-legibility? Do you have a lot of self-lies that you need to uphold to keep yourself together? Do you understand what your own relationship to sex or kink is?
I have met people who are frustrated that they cannot get something that nobody in the world actually gets, but that they think other people get all the time and they are “denied.” For example, many women just throwing themselves at them, without them “doing any work.” Or a rape fantasy that is real rather than a kink thing, with a woman wanting him so much that she is willing to deny all sense of self preservation to allow him to have exactly what he wants with her.
Self-legibility usually has two parts. One part is bringing the crazy parts of your unconscious into view, so that you can look at it and feel it, and then once you have felt it, allow yourself to make decisions about what you want to do with it.
The second is to test it against reality, and make updates to your view of the world, yourself, and your capacities. If you have not been able to get something you want, maybe it’s for a good reason, and it may be that you do not want to get that thing in the way that it is possible to get that thing in the world. And then in not doing the thing in the world you don’t want to be doing, you are also doing something you want and getting something you want. Not getting what you want, but also not doing the thing you don’t want to do, ends up squaring off.
Having legibility in this way means that you get to harvest the happiness that although you don’t have everything you want, you also aren’t doing a bunch of things you don’t want to be doing, and then you can act out of a place of integrity rather than resentment or constant seeking for something that doesn’t really exist. You will become motivated in the direction of self-improvement, to get things that you can get through changing yourself.
If you see yourself as uncompleted, and the other person as protection or validation as some sort, you are less likely to see them, and you are way more likely to be a bad hinge partner who lets social dynamics bleed through you and onto other people, rather than having those dynamics stop at you.
Legibility to yourselves, as a couple
Even if you have multiple partners, each dyad would have legibility or illegibility.
Do you know what you like about each other, and what the potential for the relationship is? Do you have reasonable expectations for the relationship, that have grounding in what you know about the other person?
Is the other person saying something clear about the relationship and what they want out of it, and what they are willing and not willing to do for it, that you are not paying attention to?
Is the other person having patterns of self-deception or a history of self-denial that is not easy to predict future changes in, that you would have to work around?
Do you understand what kinds of things they plan to be doing with their time and energy, and what kinds of things they don’t plan to be doing?
Are parameters you set on each other’s actions ones that the other person agrees with the philosophy behind, such that they can enthusiastically adhere to those parameters without becoming resentful?
Legibility to the people you meet
If you have any desire to “do things with other people” then legibility to those other people *as a couple* becomes important. Even if you are “dating solo” other people still have intuitive awareness around what might be going on.
It is amazing how people can just tell someone has a boyfriend or girlfriend they are cheating on, and how people can just tell if the boyfriend or girlfriend really would mind or not, or if it’s a good relationship, or if one of the people really wants “out” of the relationship. People have a sixth sense for these sorts of things.
You want to have legibility. If it seems your boyfriend would punch you, or punch him, and everything won’t actually be ok, the guy you meet will have a lot of reservations around flirting with you, and the guys you meet might end up the guys who *do not care about this.* You will have implicit filters around the kinds of people you attract due to what is legible about your relationships to other people and what is not.
A bunch of poly negotiations actually have to do with how to be legible to other people, even though they might be about something else.
For example, if you are a woman dating a man, and you are okay with the man doing everything except penetrative sex — this means that the man can flirt with people at events and have some amount of fun there, but if he wants to find someone online, the number of women who want to “just do stuff with a man up to sex” limits the kinds of women who would be into that. Not because these women do not respect you or his choices, but because they have their own interpretation around what this means. They may decide that your man is going to be extremely annoying in a lot of different ways. Also if they do something *up to sex* but then she wants to have sex, she would have to go find another guy. Might as well hang out with that other guy to begin with.
The physics of people who ever have sex, versus the physics of people who have *casual sex* as a lifestyle, ends up being different enough. The people who have casual sex as a lifestyle often do not want overly costly or overly annoying sex, even if they are into a person.
Legibility to other people includes what you post online, say online, and how you talk about your partner to other people. Ideally your partner should be liking the way that you talk about them to other people.
Legibility to society
You can have a few different relationships to society. Perhaps you are doing a very transparent, “this is how I am” thing, never plan to run for public office or have a day job where you have to hide any part of your lifestyle. Perhaps you are quite poor and expect this lifestyle to be a core part of the joy in your life, or perhaps you are quite rich and have fuck you money and don’t care much about what anybody thinks.
Perhaps you do have a job where you have to be more hidden about this stuff, and you don’t want to quit that job because you really like it and like the social role you perform there and how you contribute to the world using that role.
Perhaps you want to be legible around your lifestyle not hurting anybody, not hurting any of your partners, and it not actually being that scandalous. Perhaps you want to make clear that none of this is actually a threat to any actually robust social order.
Perhaps you want to be a lighthouse for other people who might be embarrassed about their taboo interests, and you want to signal that in your harbor they can learn a thing or two and then lead their lives as they want, with one extra friend.
Perhaps you are a diva and want to be maximally scandalous and maximally disruptive. Perhaps you think the social order is pretty corrupt and you want to be throwing some stones at it.
Questions:
Is your move toward non-monogamy mostly about adventure, or mostly about a hedge against loss—and does your partner know which?
What is the story you tell about your relationship, and where does it openly contradict your rules and your daily practices?
Which current rule exists only to protect an old myth (“we never fight,” “we’re so chill”) that might not be serving you anymore?
If you had to drop either half your rules or half your practices, which choice would preserve your mythos more honestly?
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Which parts of your “poly identity” or “ethical monogamy” are actually copium for avoiding specific work (like therapy, skill-building, apology)?
Where does “this is just how I am” clash with your stated desire to be a good partner?
Where are you expecting your identity label to do work that actually belongs to skill (e.g., “I’m poly so jealousy shouldn’t bother me”)?
Are you changing structure (adding partners, opening) without upgrading skills—hoping the new shape will fix old problems?
What would you have to work on if you weren’t allowed to change structure for a year?
Case study:
Lin keeps telling herself that her partner is “just more poly” and she needs to “grow” whenever he breaks agreements, shows up late, or disappears emotionally after intense dates with others. She reads more books, works on compersion, and never asks the question: “Is this person actually committed to my flourishing?” Copium here is a misuse of growth language to avoid acknowledging that the specific relationship might not be workable.