Polybook Day 5: Why the book, a lot more people on the poly spectrum than would say in surveys, the sins apart from lust
I am not well today, but I still have to do the blogpost. Good thing these only have to be 500 words!
The topic for today is…..I forgot. Really. Thoughts flooded me in the morning about what to write about, but I could not write then. Now in the evening, I do not remember, though I tried remembering earlier.
Something that came up, though it wasn’t the main thought, was that way more people are on the “poly spectrum” at various points in their lives than might admit in a survey. For example, if somebody is in an unhappy relationship that is about to end, and they have some understanding about seeing other people, and the guy has a crush on a new friend he meets while trying to move on, I would say that is pretty poly-esque. Though something like that would not really have a name right now. Additive intimacy, and expanded intimacy, are names I had considered, though I am not sure how I feel about them.
And then, how would one navigate a situation like that? One could navigate it pretty well, or one could navigate it pretty badly.
I think one major enemy of navigating it pretty well is making assumptions.
I remember being excited about this earlier today for some reason, as I thought through various examples.
People who make assumptions often are wrong! And then they base a lot of things on top of that wrongness. And then when they are corrected, there is a whole stack of wrong things that they have to be corrected about.
And then, for poly, jealousy is a normal feeling. so is wrath.
Lots of the sins, are feelings.
What about avarice? Feeling mad at your partner, and then being righteously withholding.
Part of the point of marriage is deciding something is worth working on your sins, so that you get the good things with another person that you get when you work on your sins.
A lot of the books are about “feeling less jealousy.” I don’t think that is the only emotion you will encounter and will have to alchemize, or potentially the biggest one.
Handling jealousy is probably the one people have the most experience with. Handling intense wrath — now that’s a different one. Handling gluttony. Handling sloth. Each of those is an emotion that comes up in poly stuff because they are all emotions that just come up in everything.
“Being good at poly” means being good at these emotions, and not just for yourself, but when they come up for other people. Telling one of your partners, “just be happier like the books tell you to be” is not going to be particularly helpful to them most of the time.
Some people say jealousy is a natural emotion. Some people say compersion—joy for your partner, and not jealousy, is the more natural emotion.
I think that given everybody can feel a variety of emotions in a variety of situations, insisting that the “more natural feeling” is the one you should be trying to either feel, or resist feeling, on a path to enlightenment, is not particularly helpful.
Another thing that gets complicated here is the diversity of feelings, and in getting access to only the most convenient ones when you are in a relationship that isn’t a marriage.
For example, one person you hang out with may be fine with something that you are doing, and fine with your process of dealing with it, because they get to go home when they need a break from it, and you go home when you want to also. You both have some way to process a thing you did together, but you aren’t processing that together with each other. Perhaps each of you has another person at home, or a pet, or a demanding job, or an ideology that what you are doing together is fun and nice.
Now, if you lived together, and were trying to do something harder together, you would find each other’s behaviors intolerable, and find each other’s “sins” intolerable as well. What seemed before like unconditional, fun affection for each other was partial affection and tolerance for a limited time.
I use the words sin here. I myself am not sure how much I am pulling them from a religious ethos. If that puts you off, you can think about the Aristotle notion of virtues, or more modern ideas of feelings.
There are meditations you can do, where you give yourself a blank slate, clear your head first, and then allow yourself to feel pure bliss, or pure ecstasy, all by yourself.
You can have tantric sex, all by yourself, and have crazy levels of bliss.
So there is an art and science about “choosing to have the feelings you want to have.”
But most people do not bother training in this. And when choosing partners you want to notice if they have this capacity, or if you will guide them to something like this, if you have plans to train them.
You also must remember that though you are not responsible for other people’s emotions, as that is something they can choose to feel or not feel, you can very much be responsible for destabilizing another person, or taking away things that they use to stabilize themselves.
Sometimes people destabilize themselves, without you asking. But sometimes you you do a bunch of stuff, or don’t do a bunch of normal stuff they would expect in situations, and thus they feel very destabilized.
I think tracking feelings like “stabilization” and “destabilization” are things people can be surprisingly bad at, unless they have chosen a field where their work requires people be stable or unstable and them tracking how the change happens and why.
As you can see, already much more feelings than mere jealousy coming into play!