One of the biggest myths I see being promoted in the polyamory community is that people can control their feelings to the same extent that they can control their behavior. Couples who use “rules” will often include rules that aren’t just about behavior (i.e. “Ask me before you spend the night with someone else”) but also about feelings (i.e. “You can have sex with other people, but you can’t fall in love with them”; “We can’t love any other partners more than we love each other.”)
While you can, in theory, respond to unwanted feelings with behavior that neutralizes them (i.e. breaking up with a partner you’re developing feelings for), that will often be emotionally difficult and very painful, and also sets up a situation where people are very likely to break their promises in a very human and understandable way.
But even leaving the issue of rules aside, poly people (myself included) often make decisions based on the fantasy that we can control our feelings.
How many of us have gotten involved with someone who has made it very clear that we will never be allowed to be as intimate with them as they are with their “primary,” that certain forms of intimacy–being publicly known as partners, spending holidays with each others’ families, sharing a home, raising children–are forever off the table, all because we assumed that we can just choose to never *want* those things?
It’s easy at the beginning. You have a first date with someone from OkC, or you hook up with a friend, and you’re thinking, Wow, this person is super cute, I’ll see them casually cuz they don’t want to/aren’t allowed to be serious with anyone else, it’ll be great. Maybe it will. Sometimes that’s how it’s been for me. Other times it’s led to massive heartbreak when I realized that I wanted her to be my girlfriend all official-like, or that I could see myself living with him someday, but that would never happen because that person had already decided before we’d ever even gone out or kissed or fucked that it wouldn’t.
That’s why, nowadays, if someone tells me that their preexisting relationship literally precludes certain forms of intimacy with others (except the ones I truly don’t care about, like children and marriage), I won’t even fuck with it. Even if right now, you’re just a random friend I think is cute. Because we don’t control our feelings and I have way too awesome a life to live without sitting around mired in heartbreak because we love each other but can’t hold that truth up in the light and really look at it.
I like potential. I like being casual because that’s how the two of us have decided to do things, not because some third person I didn’t choose to be in relationship with has decided with you, for me.
The problem is, even rad consent-aware poly folks are rarely upfront with this. It’s usually only weeks or months into a dating situation that it comes up that, hey by the way, you’re always by default less important to me than this other person, sorry not sorry.
As far as I’m concerned, if I didn’t know from the beginning that that’s how your polyamory worked, then I didn’t enter into our relationship with informed consent.
True! The “you can totally control your feelings and make reliable agreements about what feelings you will have” thing also comes up a lot in regards to what we’re comfortable with when your partners do go out and have intense intimate relationships.
Like, for example, I can promise not to limit what kind of relationships my partners can have. That is an action. I can promise not to try to control the intensity of the relationships my partner can have. That is an action.
I can not promise not to feel ugly if they have 4 partners and I have 1, of not to feel lonely if they spend a month without me, or not to feel insecure if they have a child with another partner. I can control my actions, not those feelings. I can’t not have ‘the wrong’ feelings. I could hide those feelings but it wouldn’t be healthy for me or for my relationships.
And a lot of ‘advice’ from poly people comes down to “no don’t feel that way, feel this other way that makes more rational sense”. Stuff like “but your insecurities are all about YOU” often boil down to “you have to feel this other way”. Which is absolutely incredibly massively fucking useless.
That’s all very well and true, especially as someone who used to be the “third” who wanted more
But as someone who is now a primary of the same person in question, I’m not really sure what to do with this information.. You’re telling me that hierarchical poly doesn’t work and I can see why you’re saying that, but.. we don’t want non-hierarchical poly…
Read the post again. No one here is saying ‘this can’t work’. People are saying:
-don’t pretend that you can always control how you feel -don’t pretend you will never have unplanned or unexpected feelings -accept that the ‘rules’ you once set together may one day be unacceptable to you or your partner(s) because of feelings you could not predict
– accept that if you put limits on your ‘secondary’ relationships some people will say ‘no thanks’ to being your partner because that’s not what they want and that’s okay -don’t lie to any of your partners about those things because intimacy through deception is not consent.
The last point should be common sense and the other 4 create challenges in ANY relationship
I now see why I struggled with showing my interests to my parents when I was a kid.
I’m listening to my cousin going on about Fortnite. The kid adores the game and is talking about the battle pass and he how hopes to get it later on today.
My mum just flatly says she doesn’t know what that means and has told him to hurry up as they go through the door, not giving my cousin any wiggle room to explain what it means. Fortnite is special to him, he wants to talk about it, he wants to engage but how can he when at that moment, the adult he’s talking to shuts him down?
Why can’t some people just take a damn minute to listen, REALLY listen to what kids are saying? He’ll now sit in the car in complete silence because his aunt isn’t interested in what he likes.
I’m not saying everyone has to be a fountain of knowledge for things like that. Hell, you don’t have to like what another person’s into but for the love of god, at least TRY and give it a go in understanding why it’s so important to that person.
“Oooh, that sounds neat! Tell me about it?” Is one of the best things you can say to a kid. (Or an author.) It matters less that you understand it than it does that they are allowed- are *encouraged*- to explain it
Plenty of people have outlined what’s fucked up about that “white male atheism is fundamentally different from Marginalized Atheism” post, but I just hit on the main reason it bothers me:
It positions religion as the human default, from which you are excused only if you’re sufficiently damaged. Like “I guess it’s okay if you’re shipping to cope” – if it’s just a consolation prize for being broken and pitiable, it’s not really okay at all. It’s okay if you can’t be religious because of trauma, but always remember that this is a personal flaw, a result of your damage, and that *healthy people* are religious.
Under this schematic, atheism isn’t simply another way to be human and think human thoughts. It’s a deviation from the “natural”, i.e. religious, state, and you’d better have a damn good reason for going against the grain. You think you can defect from normal society just because you *want* to? That’s just your white male privilege talking. Marginalized people have suffered enough to earn the right to defect, but you’re gonna shut up and praise God like a normal person.
This is exactly it! I’m not an atheist because I’m damaged, or because I don’t have numinous experiences, or because I haven’t enjoyed them.
I’m an atheist because when I think about the question of whether gods are beings or stories, my answer is consistently that I think they’re most likely cool stories.
Like, I try to tell myself “think they’re not stories for an hour or two, just to understand people better!” And my brain goes “but I’m pretty sure they’re stories…?”
I know people find this insulting, and I think I get why, but honestly… I’m in fandoms, and those fandoms have literally saved my life. “Megatron is fictional” and “Megatron is unimportant” have different truth values to me. So me thinking your god is probably a story too actually isn’t me thinking “your god shouldn’t matter to you.”
I get that it’s something you still might not like! And that’s okay!
But calling religion made up and calling religion stupid are actually different things.
This. This, this this, good fucking lord this.
Scepticism is healthy. Atheism is often a natural result of scepticism. It doesn’t matter what your skin colour is or whether or not you’re angry about having been lied to or whether or not you have a fucking penis.
A lot of these anti-white-male-atheist screeds are anti-scepticism and anti-rational-thinking, and it makes my fucking brain hurt.
Calling religion made up and calling religion stupid are actually different things.
Yep yep that thing right there is why I have complaints about that whole discourse, too.
I don’t really self-identify as atheist, but my view leans towards “I believe gods exist in some kind of meaningful way, but I also believe Luke Skywalker exists in a meaningful way in that stories are things that demonstrably exist and the characters in them can be meaningful and have a great deal of cultural significance and/or importance to individuals who exist in the flesh-and-blood sense, and maybe that’s what gods are too”. I’m flexible about entity-vs.-construct (both at once? something else?) views of deities, and think that many people who believe one way or another have some good arguments for their viewpoint but there’s no proof either way so it’s really just a matter of what you decide to believe. And what you decide to believe on subjective-opinion matters like “do gods exist and if so what are they exactly” is far less important than how you treat people who disagree with you about them.
Yeah, I’m not *terribly* far off from this.
Hell, I tried to do the whole “I’m religious but I also think gods are stuff humans made up” thing.
I just personally ended up eventually going “but wait… then I’m technically still an atheist?”
If I can, I always opt to ditch my name tag in a dementia care environment. I let my friends with dementia decide what my name is: I’ve been Susan, Gwendolyn, and various peoples’ kids. I’ve been so many identities to my residents, too: a coworker, a boss, a student, a sibling, a friend from home, and more.
Don’t ask your friend with dementia if they “remember your name” — especially if that person is your parent, spouse, or other family member. It’s quite likely to embarrass them if they can’t place you, and, frankly, it doesn’t really matter what your name is. What matters is how they feel about you.
Here’s my absolute favorite story about what I call, “Timeline Confusion”:
Alicia danced down the hallway, both hands steadily on her walker. She moved her hips from side to side, singing a little song, and smiled at everyone she passed. Her son, Nick, was walking next to her.
Nick was probably one of the best caregivers I’d ever met. It wasn’t just that he visited his mother often, it was how he visited her. He was patient and kind—really, he just understood dementia care. He got it.
Alicia was what I like to call, “pleasantly confused.” She thought it was a different year than it was, liked to sing and dance, and generally enjoyed her life.
One day, I approached the pair as they walked quietly down the hall. Alicia smiled and nodded at everyone she passed, sometimes whispering a, “How do you do!”
“Hey, Alicia,” I said. “We’re having a piano player come in to sing and play music for us. Would you like to come listen?”
“Ah, yes!” she smiled back. “My husband is a great singer,” she said, motioning to her son.
Nick smiled and did not correct her. He put his hand gently on her shoulder and said to me, “We’ll be over there soon.”
I saw Nick again a few minutes later while his mom was occupied with some other residents. “Nick,” I said. “Does your mom usually think that you’re her husband?”
Nick said something that I’ll never forget.
“Sometimes I’m me, sometimes I’m my brother, sometimes I’m my dad, and sometimes I’m just a friend. But she always knows that she loves me,” he smiled.
Nick had nailed it. He understood that, because his mom thought it was 1960, she would have trouble placing him on a timeline.
He knew that his mom recognized him and he knew that she loved him. However, because of her dementia, she thought it was a different year. And, in that year, he would’ve been a teenager.
Using context clues (however mixed up the clues were) Alicia had determined that Nick was her husband: he was the right age, he sure sounded and looked like her husband, and she believed that her son was a young man.
This is the concept that I like to call timeline confusion. It’s not that your loved one doesn’t recognize you, it’s that they can’t place you on a timeline.
What matters is how they feel about you. Not your name or your exact identity.
THIS. sometimes ole miss thinks i’m her son, or her husband, or her cousin bill or her friend kathi, and once she called me “mommy.” doesn’t matter. she knows i’m someone who cares about her.
when my grandmother developed dementia, she took to calling me ‘virginia’. she had gone to a time in her mind when long red hair did not mean her metalhead grandson, it meant her eldest son’s fiancee. she gave me a lot of advice for how to keep my head and my temper with young leo, who could be a handful but was a gem if you didn’t let him push you. “i know you’re a firecracker, ginger,” she’d tell me, “but don’t make a fight out of it. just hear him out and then make your own decision. he respects that.”
i didn’t correct her on my gender or the year or my name. i didn’t tell her that virginia and leo had been married forty years and were doing fine; i thought that might reassure her, but then, it might just throw her for a loop, so i kept it to myself. i kind of wanted to tell her leo had been an excellent mentor to me and she’d taught him well, but i figured i could save that for a better opportunity. (as it happened, i didn’t get the chance, but i think she knew she did a good job.)
i just understood that she saw me as a young person she wanted to teach and look out for, and maybe a person whose agency she wanted to validate despite society trying to squash it.
so i listened to her advice and thanked her, and told her i’d think on it, and she was happy. and i did think on it, too, and it helped me in my relationship with seebs.
people with dementia are still themselves. they’re not clear on the details, but they still love and care and have things to teach.
My grandmother recognized me and my husband, but she also thought I was ten years old, so, yeah. Timeline confusion. Just roll with it. You can’t “fix” them with the “truth” when truth is a concept that has lost all objective meaning for them.
Just a friendly reminder that eye contact can literally cause pain for us. Like the pain centres in the brain light up if we’re in a brain scan.
So if you’re autistic, don’t feel bad for not making eye contact. If you know autistic people, don’t make a big deal of the lack of eye contact.
This this this this.
Some of us can maintain eye contact if we’re in a good place mentally but we may break eye contact under stress or when anxious. Or we may simply never make eye contact at all.
I fall under the former. And yes, it does hurt. It’s a crushing burning feeling and it feels… just awful. Please never demand an autistic person to maintain eye contact with you. It is literally torture.
And even if it doesn’t physically hurt us… cos everybody’s different…
it can feel unnatural, overwhelming and/or not let us concentrate on anything else.
If you have to choose one, do you want a person to be paying attention to what’s going on, OR only looking like they are paying attention?
And for the boys, no not wanting it doesn’t make you gay, less of a man, or anything to that effect, you’re allowed to say no too, and when she says “am I just not hot enoughy for you” that is an attempt to guilt you into sex.
Reblogging for IMPORTANT addition.
You are allowed to only sleep with people you like & WHEN you want to. Don’t let anyone else tell you different, ever.
And girls (/those raised as girls), you’re taught that if a man is not in the mood for sex or is not able to orgasm, it’s because you’re not good enough. That’s not at all true! Don’t end up doing what wynterroseskye said above because of insecurity.
This is how you write about disabled people accomplishing things. You focus on what they accomplish while acknowledging their disability but not framing them as impressive for just doing something while disabled.
This blog covers women from history who were badass. This post focuses on Sarah Biffin as a person and artist not as a diabled body, not as inspiration porn. This is how you write about disabled people.
“Plenty of gay guys in HS get bullied, play video games, & get rejected for dates. And yet we don’t hear about them going on killing sprees after getting turned down by a boy they like.
This is about misogyny & a society that tells men they are entitled to women’s bodies.”
Start teaching consent when they’re little. There’s even children’s books that teach about bodily autonomy. My daughter has a book called No means No, and it’s a useful way to reinforce what I’m already teaching both my daughter and my son. That their bodies belomg to them. That someone else’s body isn’t theirs to do woth as they please. We ask before we tickle. We ask before we hug or kiss. And if someone says stop, we work on recognizing that and stopping.
I was just answering an ask about how to teach a four year old boundaries. This isn’t hard.
Start early people. I have 10 year old boys and girls at work who ask why it isn’t okay to touch other people without asking. Umm, they really should have learned that well before 5th grade.
And no, “But they _________” is not a justification to touch anyone anywhere. I don’t care if they touched your stuff. I don’t care if they accidentally touched you. I don’t care if they intentionally touched you, you don’t touch them. Retaliation is wrong. We can handle it in better ways.
“We understand it’s hard for families to think about the impact of their actions on their child 20 years or so down the road, but this is also where there is value in trusting the lived experiences of disabled people.”
Don’t share stuff about your kids. If they is able to consent, get their consent. If they isn’t then DON’T DO IT. Inability to consent is LACK of consent.
Stop commenting on people’s mobility aids. I don’t care if they look too young to use it. I don’t care if they don’t look like they really need it. I don’t care if they’re not using it like you’d expect them to. You know nothing about their body or why they use it. Them using their mobility aids in public is not bothering anyone. Leave them alone.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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