Day 7 - Revising the introduction
This is an attempt to revise the introduction. I’m really scared of this for some reason. But let’s go. I will speak in gibberish some of the time.
It is occurring to me that “Relationship Borderlands” may be a good title for it.
This is approximately how long I want the introduction to be (aka how much patience I have for reading my own introduction before wanting to be doing something else.
I am noticing how much of the original introduction I want to be the starting off blocks for their own chapters. It is a kind of writing style in myself I’d seen before, where I write something quite long, and then in order to explain some blocks do need to break them off into their own chapters. Where what I have written almost ends up like the blueprint for what I want to write that I’d been looking for.
Introduction
Relational Borderlands
This book started because in my years of relationship counseling, the questions surrounding relationship borderlands came up again and again. People fall in love, over and over, with somebody who does not share their language, religion, or default assumptions about what it means to be married. Third‑culture kids grow up between worlds, with no single set of “normal” relationship rules to fall back on. Parents and grandparents live in other cities or other countries, so the old support structures for child‑raising and companionship are thinner, if they exist at all. People are moving across continents and contending with immigration law, changing workplaces, and changing healthcare systems. A concern that is putting a lot of weight on one relationship might not be a concern in another relationship — but another weight may be present instead. Blended families and second marriages are not edge cases. People break up not because there is an absence of love, but because there is an absence of coordination, and not enough desire to coordinate on a life together. Instead of being able to apply general best-practices, people are finding themselves in relational borderlands — those areas where the “obvious script” does not seem to work — or, often, which obvious script to use is not so obvious.
The timeless tragedies of relationships are still present. Illness, burnout, fatigue, infertility, disability, the slow death of a parent, the sudden death of a friend. But the old model assumed that other people are going through similar things, and relationship advice is based around many people going through those same things. The old model assumes you will have a village; many people today don’t have a village but do have a group chat.
And yet people cannot help but fall in love. Millenia of mammalian evolution means that human beings rest on an extensive history of successful, failed, and attempted relationships with each other.
This book is for people trying to navigate this new landscape of complex, modern—sometimes post‑modern or post-post-modern—love. It is written for people who are working out something that is at the edge.
This book was created for advanced practitioners, including curious people in positions of spiritual leadership, people who are hoping to decrease discouragement in their communities, mentors who are guiding friends towards marriage, organizers of kink and polyamory meetup groups, therapists, and coaches.
In conceptualizing the book, I had decided that a “choose-your-own-adventure” style would be suitable both for those who want to teach the material to others, as well as those who want to learn and complete the exercises for themselves, or with a partner.
It is for people who had already decided they have reasons to be learning more about their own intimacies, and helping with the intimacies of others. Now, they want to be good at it.
Bespoke Solutions
This books is both for people who practice monogamy, as well as for people who practice polyamory. It is also for people who are not sure what they are, or feel uncomfortable with a label. There are very many combinations of relationship styles, life goals, sexual preferences, and religious beliefs. No matter which combination you are, this book was written with you in mind.
Perhaps you are single, and are clear that you would prefer a primary nesting partner who considers themselves Ethically Non-Monogamous. Perhaps you see other people on occasion, but have lived with the same person for 20 years and so consider yourself Ultramonogamous. Perhaps you consider yourself poly, but feel yourself “saturated” at one partner in that you do not have more time or energy than others. Perhaps you are monogamous in a conventional sense, but had a relationship fail that you thought would lead to marriage, and you are not sure how to guard yourself from this happening again, or feel guilt about it. Perhaps you are very religious, but have not found many people practicing your specific religion, and so have broadened your search, but now have to work to calibrate if your beliefs are aligned enough.
I do not start with a premise that some relationships are better than others, or that some end states for relationships are more virtuous or enlightened than others. I think that the current dating environment is too diverse, with too broad a variety of desires and need to make a claim like this. Rather, I believe that certain aspects of relationships can be improved through intentional practice, deeper consideration, tools for noticing your own feelings and actions, and taking time to notice more the feelings and nervous system states of others people.
There are “implicit invisible shapes” that are present in monogamy. There are also “implicit invisible shapes” that are present in polyamory. In both systems, people can have a “fish in water” syndrome and not see that what they take is obvious may not be universal, or that what they are doing is actually fairly sophisticated and fine-grained. I see both systems as tending to borrow implicitly from the explicit tradition of the other.
This book investigates both the visible and invisible structures in both, in order to see what the actual building blocks of relationships are, so that those building blocks can be used to overcome bespoke challenges you may be having.
Bespoke challenges often require bespoke solutions. What is hard about making bespoke solutions is that you generally have to move broader, and understand more than the general simplified context people often pull solutions from, in part because your problem is often a result of the simplified context being too simple a model of your current reality, or you yourself are doing something complicated such that the simplified model is not able to provide you with a solution. Therefore you have to more broader, and look at the more general phenomena that is happening, in order to get a specialized solution. You have to go broader in order to go narrower with more precision and accuracy.
Practice makes Possibilities
“More intimacy sounds like it might be nice, but I hear that it involves so much talking. Is it really worth it?”
Insofar as a relationship is two people moving together in some way, any relationship, no matter how smooth or compatible, will require movement in order to continue. People move together in different ways, in a large range of personal meaning and intensity. Some people would describe themselves as vibrating near people at the same frequency. Some people would use language of joint seeing, or joint understanding. Some people speak of playing tennis. Some people describe souls burning around each other. Some people describe their interactions with people as dancing. The dance will involve at times the holding of a hand, at times the reaching towards each other while apart, at times taking a step in a complimentary direction with your back towards each other. There are a number of movements, from any one spot, that can create more flourishing, joy, growth, and understanding of each other.
This is a book about constellations of feelings. It provides resources for examining individual feelings and the connections between feelings, with the aim to increase positive moods, and improve transitions between moods, while staying in touch with both your external and your internal reality.
This book offers exercises and principles for deepening your relationship with your truest feelings and for seeing the people around you with greater texture, nuance, and care, different though they may be. Because emotions shift over time, the hope is to help you nurture a steady practice of uncovering what is real within you even as the seasons change, and to move with those feelings with growing grace and understanding. Along the way, you may find new emotions beneath the ones you thought were most authentic, and new ways of meeting them — so that, even as time moves on, you keep becoming more fully the best version of yourself you know yourself to be.
A lot of people live their lives doing what they want, or deferring to their partner’s wishes, and then maintaining that fixed holding pattern for a long time, in order to either not push themselves out of their comfort zone, not offend their partner, or not look at things that are too painful to look at. This book is meant to show you what you can look at; whether you choose to look at it is up to you.
It is a book filled with the post-digested, post-chewing thoughts after experiencing many conversations of all relationship types, containing all kinds of pain. Usually the conversations included some kind of pain. Some fight, some misunderstanding, some phenomenological overwhelm, something crazy-making, something dark. Writing this book and transforming the knowledge honestly into “a communicated shape” involves getting back in touch with the original pains. The hope was not to erase the pain, but to create a pathway for dealing with the pain that does not recreate the pain. Going through the woods, being poked at by thistle and thorns, does not mean that a book about the path in the woods has to be full of thorns! The jagged painful thorns should not be jutting out of my book, poking myself and my readers — and in part because a book like this would be less honest book in that it is not how it feels inside my brain, it is not how the experiences and the ideas settled, and a book that did that would be “dishonest” to my concept.
I had seen this incredible artist, Mobina Nouri at an exhibition. She painted beautiful Arabic calligraphy on nude bodies, and photographed them in a way that inspired me. Her black line and gold drawings created textures in my mind. In some ways my thoughts about the book feel like the lacy calligraphy of Mobina Nouri. There is a beautiful woven mathematical dimension for me when I look at Arabic calligraphy. I cannot read it, but it creates a kind of peaceful feeling in my brain. Something aspirational, and like I can become better or “more sane” when I go towards it. The ideas in the book settled in my mind, in a way much closer to this. There is complication in relationships, but in the same way that there are complications in celestial bodies, and there is beauty in the geometries.
This book contains exercises, common mistakes, and terms of art that you can use as guideposts in your journey. The ensuing conversations can be difficult because conversations about intimacy naturally will involve discussions of fear, loss, jealousy, priorities, and even grief. When these conversations are most difficult, sometimes it is when parties kick each other’s shins, let go when they need to hold on, or cannot clarify when they need to brace for a fall. But sometimes it is difficult because these conversations are intrinsically difficult. In either case, a compass can help with the navigation.
For teaching, or for mentors when somebody comes to them for help, the book can be used as an addition to your existing toolkit in noticing what is going on with the person coming to you for guidance. It can be a way to guide the people coming to you with perhaps less strain, and leaving more autonomy for the person seeking help. (For example, if somebody approaches you about wanting to open their marriage, the section on power dynamics can be useful for encouraging the person to take an inventory of the power dynamics in their relationship, before certain very complicated fights happen.)
This book is not a “download” of information. It is meant to be a practical book to be picked up and put back down. Some of the exercises and games will feel too hard. They will “bounce” off of you. In those situations, I would encourage you to take what seems relevant to your life, and to do in your real life what feels fitting. It is common for a person to start an exercise, and then start thinking about many things. As long as this is not anxious rumination or avoidance, this can be very good. An exercise as a starting point for getting to what is actually what you want to be thinking about is a good thing. If it is anxious rumination or avoidance, it can still be very good, if then the anxiety and avoidance are explored. These can be very large breakthroughs.
Ultimately, this is a book that is meant to be a texture for people to “bounce off of” and think about their real life in new ways. It is a book of gentle geometric shapes, derived from data collection, that you can then add your specific situational knowledge to. The basis for this book includes thousands of hours of conversations with real people. Now, these conversations have been distilled into a shape you may find usable.
It starts with a premise that “knowledge is not bad, in itself.” This book is designed to lead to actual conversations for people to have with themselves, their partner, and their reality. There is no universal framework or philosophy to be downloaded, except perhaps this: there is always a new angle you can use to look at the same problem. Sometimes it will be very helpful. Sometimes it will not be helpful. But the practice of looking at the same problem again, from another angle, is something that can be practiced, and can lead to something better than before.
HAVE TO TAKE A LOOK AT THESE AND DECIDE IF I WANT THEM IN INTRO OR IN THEIR OWN CHAPTERS
This book is also suitable for guiding people around the topic of marriage. The exercises in this book are intended to be useful to individuals in any relationship circumstances, including being single, being hopeful about marriage, being engaged, being divorced and newly searching, and anything in between. It is suitable for people who are in various stages of polyamory, or various stages of opening up, but it does not go into much detail about which lifestyle choice is better.
One challenge in navigating extended intimacy (intimacy over long stretches of time, space, or multiple people) is that the navigation even for monogamous couples ultimately ends up involving the desires of more than one other person (the demands of family, children, bosses, the demands of an abstract cultural archetype or ideal) – but this immediate interpersonal navigation is only a small part of the challenge. The greater long-term challenge is navigating how any set of two lovers can help make each other’s dreams come true while buttressing agains and holding each other in their sense of threat and their fears.
This book was written as an aid for lovers to figure out the steps in their dance, if they want it. Perhaps you are in a happy relationship and want it to be even better. Perhaps you are in an unhappy relationship, and do not know if you want to put effort into the relationship, or end the relationship.
The exercises in this book, if done correctly, could indeed lead you to reconsider some of your existing relationships. With some relationships, more clear-seeing includes seeing that you and your partner do not wish to be together, that both of you have different life goals or learning goals that you do not wish to support each other with, or that conflicts with one or both of your value systems, or that something is badly wrong. Legibility means that something that was previously unclear and bad becomes clear and bad. Often, something hidden becoming “obviously unsustainable” leads to its own upwell of intense emotions.
There are exercises in this book for those situations, too, and I would encourage you to use the “[managing intensity]” and “[aftercare]” sections liberally when you feel yourself dealing with strong emotions. Those exercises are designed to help navigate these higher valence emotions.
In disentanglements, continuing to be able to feel, and maintain, the parts of yourself that you like most about yourself is especially important. And so the principles outlined in this book continue to be relevant in relationships that are breaking down. Many relationships end in boredom, abandonment, betrayal, or, even when everything goes well – sickness and death.
As disentanglement can also include feelings and changing feelings, the general principles and exercises described in this book should still be relevant.
Ballroom dancing is a sufficiently strong metaphor that I do recommend spending some time ballroom dancing with your partner. A clenched hand means you cannot spin your partner without hurting them. A push or a pull with structure or vision can magnify momentum and look very beautiful, but a push or pull without structure often halts whatever momentum you had and restarts it. Sometimes this is exactly what you need, but wouldn’t it be better to know what tools exist, so that you can operate at the precision you desire? Perhaps you want to learn how to do a more delicate step sequence; perhaps the complete opposite. Perhaps you want to know how to expand and be wilder, freer, than you ever thought was possible.
This would mean paying attention to more things. Being good at extended intimacy does not just mean being good at intimacy. It includes being good at a number of different skills, that will be useful in all sorts of domains. It means becoming more attentive, becoming better at noticing, becoming better at noticing other people’s fears, noticing your own fears, noticing other people’s fantasies, letting the hard times roll off, noticing your own hypocrisy, noticing other people’s different ways of “trying to be good,” acknowledgement of how your past trauma affects how you feel and how you perceive, and acknowledging how other people’s trauma affects how they feel and how they perceive. It means being gentle with deficit, scarcity, and imperfection, and not letting those real-life setbacks get in the way of a vision of abundance.
FOR ITS OWN CHAPTER ON MONOGAMY AND POLYAMORY
I also believe that most people, much of the time, are already in the borderlands between monogamy and polyamory. In modern dating, more and more people are suffering from problems unique to the edge cases of both monogamy and polyamory. In the case of monogamy, people would like to be faithful and committed to one person, but often already have had previous partners and do not have the tools or the faith in their own capacities to raise a family or really support somebody through all stages of their life. In the case of polyamory, many people have desire to make an individual person their focus and to make them very happy, and still have to find bespoke ways to coordinate with any individual even inside a generally standard polyamorous framework. In my years of counseling, people have been having many partners in all kinds of unique structures that they have had to navigate.
Thus, many people are already feeling the intense edges of both monogamy and polyamory! Each, as its own system, has a bit more meat on it, and fat, and sinew connecting itself to itself, that can make either system work out well. A lot of people meanwhile are ending up in all kinds of tensions between systems, and between different spaces in their own hearts.
Polyamory is often described as a distinct culture with its own norms, rituals, and identity, separate from monogamy. Monogamy, in turn, is treated as the default software everyone is born with, unless they “opt out.” But both of these are high‑level settings. Underneath, people are doing a smaller set of things: making promises, trading risks, allocating attention, integrating or hiding parts of themselves.
The general cultural contours of polyamory and monogamy are still useful in navigating social scenes, or helping people identify those with whom they are completely incompatible, and those who they might be compatible with. But in the current environment, two monogamous people may meet each other, and not have their preferences be understood by the other, just as two polyamorous people may actually be very different.
The culture war accentuates the differences between these two modes of life.
The book therefore is meant to help people get more in touch with the set of activities that every person is doing, no matter how they identify, rather than feeling pulled in various directions by various forces that they have encountered, either through current partners, exes, social norms, or family expectations.
This book is meant to fill a niche, which is cataloguing a set of reflective techniques that are inclusive both of monogamous and polyamorous lifestyles. The book aims to explore the “general building blocks of relationships” that you can then explore on your own terms.
FOR ITS OWN CHAPTER ON OBSERVATION AND RESISTANCE
Any relationship, open, closed, or anywhere in between, will involve effort, in so far as momentum is force times time. Creating a “force” takes effort, in that you have to observe the outside world, have to observe yourself, have to observe your partner, and have to observe your impact and the size of your impact. If “observation” did not take any effort, then at our resting state, we would need as much food to sustain ourselves as does a snail, with its much smaller nervous system. The truth is that observation does take effort, and putting in the effort to learn to observe better compounds exponentially in your benefit.
The effort can be used to obtain more information, or to prevent yourself from gaining information you would rather not know, because knowing the information would make you accountable in “acting as if you know the information.” Effort can put into a practice of curiosity, or it can be put into a practice of self-defense or resistance. If you know, for sure, that you need to break up, this can be very heartbreaking and require many uncomfortable life changes. Sometimes it seems better to not know for sure.
This effort can take the form of talking; it can take the form of resistance to talking; it can take the form of maneuvering anger or suppressing anger. But unless two lovers choose to let slack their end of the rope, as long as there is a cord between two lovers, effort is what is keeping the rope tense enough to maintain the relationship.
FOR ITS OWN CHAPTER ON TRIANGULATION
If you had ever had a friend show you some texts between them and somebody causing them emotional distress, you have likely had the experience of spending a fair bit of time learning what the emotions are behind the text messages. You might have noticed that you are doing some kind of triangulation between what the texts say, what your friend is telling you about the situation, what kinds of texts you yourself have sent in the past and what you meant, and your general impression of how people in certain kinds of relationships tend to think and feel, and how they communicate about it.
There are a lot of things you are doing outside of the immediate objects your friend is presenting to you in order to be helpful to them. You are triangulating between many different things in order to understand what is happening, both in the broader context than what you immediately were seeing, and then in greater granularity and specificity. Often when you present some of your own perspectives from your own experiences, or present novel objects (perhaps some of your own texts), your friend unveils more information about the situation that they did not think to mention before. It takes a while to figure out what is really going on.
This book is meant to be a shortcut to this triangulation process. Of course, you should continue to use your existing support system. It is meant to “fill in gaps” rather than be a replacement for a social support system. If anything, it is meant to augment what you talk to your friends and partners about.
GRAVEYARD
in order to find the leverage points where you can either change yourself, or find the relationship that you want to be in, either by more fully understanding the kind the person you want to be with or the shape of the relationship you want to be in. Sometimes you want to be with a different person, and cannot explain to yourself why. Sometimes you want to be with your person, but change the shape of your dynamic to be different, either by having greater autonomy or greater intimacy.
Having distinct cultural norms from monogamy is one of the main points of polyamory being a distinct culture and a distinct identity. However I had a thought that by examining this spectrum between the two modalities, you can find the building blocks of all relationships, and use those building blocks to overcome bespoke challenges you may be having.
Therefore, I do believe that certain issues in monogamy, and certain issues in polyamory, are well-suited to an approach that considers the building blocks of both, rather than each.