Ultramonogamy Book Day 8: A Chart of Feelings, and Recap of First Week
I have found joy working on this book in this manner. I likely will start working on my other book in this manner, in parallel. The other book is strange, and instead of posting publicly, I will likely print out the pages I print every day and put them in a binder. That book wouldn’t make sense to put out until it is a complete book.
There is a number of feelings you can feel that are bad feelings, in both poly and monogamy, that aren’t just the vague “jealousy” or whatever.
Let’s try to catalogue some of these feelings.
“Feeling the ick” — your partner is excited for a date, the date cancels. or worse, ghosts him. His feeling of excitement, contrasted with the date’s blithe disregard for him, gives you the ick.
This one is tricky. Either you naturally do not get the ick here, or you are relieved and excited to get your man back for the night, or you are annoyed. There is a plethora of feelings here that you could be feeling that aren’t just “jealousy that your partner is going out” that could be flattened to “oh you’re just jealous you should work on that.”
“What to do around your partner being or feeling humiliated” would need to be an entire important section.
Feeling FOMO
Your partner is doing something with someone else. You are not so annoyed that the partner is doing something *with someone else* but you are annoyed because you are feeling FOMO. You want to be doing the *something* that is being done.
this gets extra tricky if it is something you had been *dying to do* and have been *making noises about not getting to do for months.* Maybe it’s something simple like just a dinner date and then getting a hotel room and hanging out, without phones or the TV. Maybe it’s some hot adventure in the woods. It gets tricky if your partner then goes “oh well we don’t have a place to meet up, so of course it has to be the hotel room or the woods.” Which might be fine. If he ever did that. With you. Grrrrrrrrrrr
Feeling cucked
This is different from feeling jealous, and is more of an anger-based emotion. It is more a feeling around humiliation that something that is yours is being taken from you, without your knowledge or buy-in.
Men and women feel this.
Women can feel this if a man gives another woman a piece of jewelry as a gift, or celebrates a birthday with another woman, or does any of these kinds of symbolic spiritual things. A woman might be okay with a physical aspect of her man’s relationship with a woman, while not being okay with these kinds of actions that might make her feel cucked. The other woman “being in her space” such as in her car, apartment, or bed, might also make her feel very seriously cucked.
For men, it can be any number of things. Another man physically “taking his woman” without his knowledge, though, can feel really bad, even if they are technically speaking “open.” The dance around “does he know what is going on” can be really important. Whereas for women, the more important dance can be around if she is treated very well afterwards, if she is the princess and the “homecoming queen” for the “homecoming.”
This is a gendered assumption. It might not be correct. I wanted to write it anyway, to write down *something* of its shape before I can mess around with it and make it more accurate. I am sure that the above is true for *some* couples but not *all* couples. For the *some couples* that it is true for, there is also probably something distinctive about it.
Some people enjoy being cucked, and there are some stereotypes of swingers and poly people enjoying the feeling of being cucked. This is true of some people but is not true of all people. Having this as an assumption can mess things up!
RECAP OF THE FIRST WEEK
I do think I would be lazy if I do not do this at least to some extent every week. It is Sunday, time to do it! I have 40 minutes or so before my next call.
I could start by creating new chapter names, from what I had written:
Introduction: Origin & ethos of the project (repulsion + attraction to writing this book, my own confusions and caveats; making beauty from pain, pain from beauty, if pain is what you’re into; wanting to make a book that is not childish in its positive outlook, but that is a “happy” book nevertheless).
The Real Difference Between Polyamory and Monogamy: (this is where I go into legibility as the real crux)
Is this where I want to put Ultramonogamy?Skill issues: Where things get hard
Should this be a chapter, or an assumption in the introduction or foreword?
“Hard things to admit, therefore hard things to work on”
Jealousy is Not the Real Problem: Cucking, humiliation, FOMO, “ick,” and other non-jealousy feelings.
The Intersection of Kink and Poly: How interfaces, rules, and negotiations change based on which intersection is used.
Negotiation and its Discontents: Orientation / direction / negotiation as distinct modes, and how people misuse them.
Being Good at Making Things Good: Party-host metaphor, some people being better at making others “chill,” asymmetries in doing relational labor
How to Have Good Fights: This is where I can put the sin/emotion cluster: jealousy, wrath, avarice, sloth, gluttony; fights, recovery time, “doing the work.
Experiments. There needs to be a section on experiments, or perhaps experiments in every section would be better