Book Day 25: A Case Study of Legibility
Say you have Alice and Bob.
Alice comes to Bob and says “Hey I’m polyamorous”
Bob says “I’m polyamorous as well”
they say great. Legibility check 1.
They start dating for a few months. Bob asks if he can go hang out with some friends of his
Alice says sure
Bob says these are friends he bangs sometimes, and he doesn’t know if it’s a banging hangout or a not banging hangout
Alice says that he should go and have fun, but she’s not ready for him to have penetrative sex
Bob says that he doesn’t have to go, and might not want to go if that’s off the table completely, because he wouldn’t know how to navigate the situation. How would he….stop? Or change the dynamic entirely with his buddies? He says he’d rather stay home until they can talk
Confusion 1
Alice and Bob talk. Alice says she’s poly, but does have hangups with penetrative sex. She herself usually stops short of it. She had come from a few monogamous relationships, and “sex with another person is really really bad” is really socially real to her. On a physical level, she is worried about stuff like pregnancy and STDs,
Bob has come from an entrenched poly community in a big city. For him, “sex with another person is not really really bad” is the premise of polyamory. He is confused, is Alice not polyamorous after all?
Alice says that she is polyamorous, because she feels she needs to disclose this to people, because her philosophy and comfort around what kind of touching and flirtation is okay goes far beyond what most monogamous people are comfortable with.
So now what
They spend some time talking about the social cohorts. Sex with another being okay is generally a premise of polyamory. But there are also asexual polyamorous people, or polyamorous people who let their partners only pursue partners of one gender or another. Besides, Alice had met many men at clubs who follow an “anything but penetration” rule with their wives.
Bob says, if anything but penetration is okay, why not penetration as an extension of the philosophy?
Alice agrees that this is a good point, and she doesn’t want penetration with other people now, but might some time soon enough, and doesn’t want to close off that opportunity for either of them philosophically.
She says the philosophy is feeling square to her, and what is left is it is more like a physical comfort.
She looks online and suggests that she may have “genitophobia” — a discomfort around genitals generally. She does not find them appealing, and does not know why somebody else would find them so. A lifetime of socially enforced revulsion around other people’s genitals perhaps had something to contribute to this. She says she is open-minded, but does have a confusing comfort thing here.
Bob says, “Okay but just because you have genitophobia doesn’t mean that you should impinge on my autonomy. An enormous part of polyamory is being okay with the other person doing things that might make you uncomfortable, and letting them do it anyway. I am not sure if we really are compatible because I am not sure if you really are polyamorous.”
Alice is saddened by this. She tells Bob that if having sex with other people is really important to him, then he should do it, and she will then contend with her feelings and see if she can sort it out.
Bob: “That doesn’t work for me, because I really like you and wouldn’t do something to just hurt your feelings. That’s not the kind of guy I am. I really do want to stay within your parameters and make you comfortable. Just your lines aren’t really workable for me.”
Alice: “Okay but then do what you want to do, and I’ll see if I feel okay enough about moving my lines.”
Bob: “I can’t just do what I want to do. You have lines that I need to follow.”
Alice: “But you just said you don’t like my lines and don’t want to follow them.”
Bob: “Yes but I will follow them and be unhappy about it.”
Alice: “I don’t want you to do that and keep saying I don’t want you to do that.”
And then this leads to a disaster. Both of these people start going a bit crazy.
Frame escalations like this can be extremely painful in conversations. Usually it is a trauma response, and is a response based on fear and hurt and past trauma. Often the person is reacting to a series of pains, as if that threat is present.
Bob is taking control of the frame here by suggesting that his idea of what polyamory is is the correct one, that Alice does not understand it, and that their options are either for them to break up, or for Alice to move into his frame.
That is a lot of things.
Notice also that Alice is doing a lot of intellectual and emotional work. She had articulated a source of discomfort, dug into her reasons, simplified them, and made them legible. She even didn’t constrain her partner in this process.
I would say that a different thing Bob can do here is to take Alice’s work stack as a gift, rather than as a threat.
A lot of people consider “intellectual labor” as an attempt to manipulate them.
However, this assumption, that somebody thinking about you and themselves is coercive, can kill relationships before they get to bloom, and poison otherwise healthy relationships.
It can even go as far as a person caring about your health, suggesting more nutritious food or exercise, or visiting a doctor, is “coercive control.”
“Maybe you’re going to bed super late because you’re eating sugar late at night” becomes not a helpful partner putting on their problem-solving hat, but is a nagging parent, a coercive partner, somebody who does not trust you and so you should not trust them back.
A practice here is “accepting things as gifts.” If somebody is thinking, and communicating, it is a gift.
When you go to college, and pay for a professor to talk and communicate, that is valuable. If somebody does it for free, that is a gift.
When you hire a consultant, a doctor, a designer, or a problem-solver to give time and attention to your problems, that is valuable. If somebody does it for free, that is a gift.
In the example above, an alternative conversational pathway could have been to continue to roll with Alice’s work and proof of work, rather than question it, or assume that the work “means this other thing” and taking the conversation there.
An alternative reality:
Bob: “genitophobia?”
Alice: “yeah”
Bob: “can you tell me more about that? I’d never heard about it.”
Alice: “Oh. yeah. it was on google. but I also sort of made it up. It has some of my own meaning to it, from my own experiences. I’m saying I don’t want to control you, and it seems like maybe a good frame for understanding some of my feelings, because I know how just saying “you can’t do this because I feel this way” is sometimes seen as bad in poly culture and starts a bunch of fights. I’m trying to preempt that.”
Bob: “How is it helpful?”
Alice: “Oh. I’m not sure. Maybe like…if I imagine you as having genitophilia — you like genitals, it makes all the social stuff around sex feel less relevant. I’m sure there’s stuff I like that grosses you out on this same dimension, but then it would be seen as us having different fetishes, not like us having completely different philosophies about relationships.”
Bob: “That makes sense…a little. Though I wouldn’t say I have genitophilia. I just like sex and would prefer to have sex in a situation where sex is possible than not have sex in that situation. In most situations where sex is on the table I’d rather just have sex rather than do a different thing.”
Alice: “Oh I know. I don’t mean you literally have genitophilia. I just invented the words to get rid of the social connotations.
Bob: “But the social connotations are what we have a disagreement about. You think the social connotations make the sex bad. I think the social connotations are wrong and the sex is good.”
Alice: “Right. I know this is what you think.”
Bob: “Right.”
Alice: “…”
Bob: “…”
So this also leads to something annoying. Bob rolls with her work, and that she did do some work, but then doesn’t accept that it could actually be helpful to him. He finds a different thing to criticize about her thought process, rather than accepting that she is doing the thought process to help him.
She is not just doing mental algebra for fun. She is actually trying something out for him.
Let’s give it another shot.
Alice: “Oh I know. I don’t mean you literally have genitophilia. I just invented the words to get rid of the social connotations.
Bob: “You think the invented word is helpful, how?”
Alice: “Well, one of the major blocks I have is in imagination. I do not really care about the fact of you having had sex with other people. In fact if I think about what I want long-term, I’d be sadder if you had sex with 0 other people this year than with 10, and sadder if you had sex with 1 than with 10. My preference is for you to hit triple digits this decade, and certainly before you die :P when I think about my actual philosophy. And for me to do the same. But when I imagine you having sex, it messes me up somehow, in a way that when I imagine you hanging out, cuddling, or having other kinds of intimacies doesn’t. Making out is okay, unless I really focus on imagining it. Then it becomes genitally-charged in a way that gets weird for me. And so if I imagine it as just something that feels a bit gross for me now on that axis, it helps me a lot in terms of not thinking about it as a big deal.”
Bob: “Do you think that’ll actually work and you won’t just hate me?”
Alice: “I don’t know if it’ll work. But that’s the spot where it gets messy for me, so doing an intervention around that set of feelings could be helpful. I’m not proud of those feelings and it’s a set of feelings I wouldn’t mind changing. I can see universes where it starts to feel hot for me and those universes don’t feel very far away.”
Bob: “What do you want me to do then, if I want to go have sex with someone else?”
Alice: “It might be helpful for me if you tell me later what’s fun about it. That way I have something in the imagination that is fun, versus whatever I’m thinking about that is gross to me.”
Bob: “But what if I don’t want to think about it, or tell you about it? Part of the point of casual sex for me is the casualness about it. Bringing it home might feel weird. I kind of just want to do it then forget about it.”
Alice: “Hmm…that might be pretty sad for me, because then I’ll still think about it, and pretty negatively without something there that makes me more comfortable. I’m not really into don’t ask don’t tell, at all, and so this might be an area where we are actually incompatible.
Bob: “……great…..”
Alice: “For me, polyamory is about making things feel hot for each other. I’m much less invested in the autonomous aspects. If that’s a really big deal for you, I might have a lot of trouble.
And then at this point, Bob can decide if he wants to deal with this or not, depending on how much he likes Alice and how much he wants to attempt to go through this process with her. But the actual disagreement has been revealed much more concretely.