Love's Inconvenient Truth

The last time I wrote about love, I pondered what it meant to me now that I'm poly. In that post, I talked about there being more than one kind of love, that love can be scary, that I don't have to love two people in the same way, and that love isn't always what we see on TV. To that, I will add one more:

Love is not enough.

Author Mark Manson discussed this very concept on his blog, which resonated with me and made me look back at how much stock I've put into love throughout the years to be the end-all, be-all to my relationships. Not only did I think as long as there was love the relationship would be emotionally satisfying, I also thought that as long as there wasn't love, the relationship was over. While in some cases the second might be true, neither are true 100% of the time, and that presence or absence of love is not what dictates the happiness of all parties in a relationship. 

All three of his main points resonated with me. Like "Love does not equal compatibility": when I married my ex-husband, it didn't matter that his chosen career path (medicine) and my lack of career path would cause problems. It didn't occur to me that his desire to sit at home most nights and my desire for adventure would cause problems. It definitely didn't occur to me that his desire for children and my indifference would cause problems, and I'm utterly grateful we never got that far (and am happy he now has the baby he wanted).

I thought, too, of my relationship with my ex, and others, regarding "Love is not always worth sacrificing yourself." I've been so ready in the past to pack up my own desires (whether I knew what they were or not) and follow someone else, that I'm surprised I haven't found myself in more miserable situations. 

And finally, there's this: "Love does not solve your relationship problems." 

Manson writes that "while love may make you feel better about your relationship problems, it doesn’t actually solve any of your relationship problems." In fact, I think it can make them worse. It makes the highs of a relationship temporarily drown out the lows, so that the lows are tolerated for much, much longer than they should be. This is the most obvious in situations of emotional and physical abuse, but it can also harm perspective when no one is really "at fault." 

Adam and I have been together almost for a year, and I've spent a lot of that time trying to adjust to a relationship that had more challenges than I'd faced before. The biggest challenge was a disparity in emotion, and even moreso, a disparity in how he saw me as a partner as opposed to how I saw him. For a long time, I thought that if he ever told me he loved me back, our disparity would lessen. But then he did,  and while it made me feel all kinds of warm fuzzies, it didn't change much else. Love didn't solve our relationship problems - we have to tackle those ourselves, by taking a break and re-evaluating if there even is a middle ground for us after all.

I don't want to stop thinking about love as something special, but I have learned that I need to stop using it as an excuse to stay with someone (or stay in a certain arrangement with someone) when so many other things are missing or not working. I would recommend everyone - no matter your relationship style - go check out Manson's post. It's not a happy truth when we think about it, but it is a truth, and I hope that by taking it to heart, someday the happiness will follow.

[Enter the Popular Title of a David Bowie Song Here]

For the last few weeks, I've been thinking about change.

The most obvious kind of change is the big, life-altering variety: moving, getting over a long-term relationship or officially starting one (like marriage), starting a new job, coping with the loss of a loved one. These are "ushering in a new era" changes, and usually, at least at times, are scary. 

Then there are seasonal changes that occur, for me, every year: the beginning of a new school year, that joyous month-long break in January, and the transition to the summer, which, for me, is actually a more difficult transition than going back to school in the fall.

And finally, there are the smaller, everyday changes that I crave: I rearrange my room a lot, like trying new restaurants and going to new places, and swap out my profile picture on social media frequently. I even chose an Android phone over an iPhone because I can customize its look more.

Right now, I'm trying to juggle a few different changes. and putting them together at the same time makes me feel uncomfortable. I'd almost rather move to a new city, break off a long-term relationship, and start a new job all at once rather than try and parse how so many seemingly inconsequential and imperceptible changes are making me feel unstable.

Like my time: the semester ended and I plunged head-first into more free time, which is always a little jarring after feeling like I should be grading and working every second of every day. Getting used to being home by myself during the day instead of out teaching is always a struggle, especially when I always need to spend less money in the summer as well.

And my home: Our apartment lost a roommate who had a lot of furniture and gained a new roommate who brought a lot of furniture, so like a few summers ago, I'm living among boxes. Getting used to being home by myself during the day plus not being super comfortable in that home yet is even more of a struggle.

And Adam's home: After Joel and I spent an incredible weekend getaway with Adam and his wife, we dropped them off at their new apartment in a different neighborhood and I couldn't help but feel like they were completely different people, and that would make our relationship a completely different relationship.

Even the cat is going through changes of her own: she's got new roommates, too.

On top of this are little things: objects around the house I need but don't have anymore (like the vacuum) because they belonged to the old roommate, trying to find a new place for the cat scratching post, my mother's procurement of her first smart phone, new short stories, new dates, new bedspread, newfound interest in butter lettuce, new distance between my parents and I, new growth on the tree outside my window, new discoveries, new expectations and outlooks on relationships.

I used to think that if something in my life was always changing, I'd be happy, and that being static is what drove a lot of my unhappiness in the past. But right now, so much feels different that I've swung too far in the other direction. At some point soon I need to find something familiar to keep me grounded until everything else falls back into place again, so I can start to appreciate these changes for the positives they are.

What is Love? (With Apologies to Haddaway)

I don't know, what can I do? What else can I say, it's up to ewe.

Now that you have that song in your head, let's talk about what I've learned about me and romantic love since being poly: 

There is more than one kind of love.

Love is not just what society tells us it is. It is not just kissing in the rain, marrying your high school sweetheart, holding a boombox outside someone's window, letting them have the whole damned door to float on even though it's clear there's room for you too. It is not just what is written in Hallmark cards. It could be any of these things, or it can be something completely different. It could be letting them have the last bite of cake, checking up on them in the middle of a really tough day, wearing their hair ties on your wrist even though you don't have long hair. The love I feel doesn't have to fit into someone else's mold.

I don't have to love someone the same way I love someone else.

Love is an amorphous feeling, and therefore can be different for everyone I love. I don't love Adam in the same way I love Joel, and I don't love Joel in the same way I loved others before him. I don't expect to be loved in the same way my partners love their other partners. And just because the love is different, doesn't mean it's not significant or shouldn't be communicated (or communicated about - see below).

Love doesn't have to be a floor on the relationship escalator. 

For a long time, I thought that relationships became real when you started saying "I love you" and whatever came before that was just casual. I thought that once you started slinging around love, more things were slated to come, like moving in together, going to (and almost breaking up at) Ikea, getting incessantly bugged about having kids. And then a few years ago, I fell in love with someone who would be leaving town just a few months later and realized that love doesn't have to be on the way to something else, or the end of something. It just is. 

Love can be scary.

In the past, I have taken for granted that love is a concept (and emotion) that has always come easily to me. I love often, early, and strongly. I fall hard. But not everyone is like that. Love is complicated for those who have only ever known it to be one thing for one person at a time (or for that matter, one person, period). Love is hard to express when you don't know if the emotion carries other obligations or expectations, and it's tricky to qualify, quantify, and clarify because it sometimes feels like doing so cheapens it. It's not always as simple as "He loves me, he loves me not."

I need to hear that I'm loved. 

Affirmative language is something I need a lot of in poly relationships, even if my partner and I aren't using "love" to describe how we feel about each other. Even though it does bring me comfort to feel a warm embrace or a tender kiss, the words "I love you" mean a lot in making me feel valued and important in a relationship. Obviously, if love is felt, it should be shown, but I'm wired to need to hear it too.

And finally,

Love should be communicated about, not just communicated.

It took me far too long to realize I needed to communicate what love meant to me versus what it meant to others. I think sometimes we think that it's this subject we have to tiptoe around because saying it for the first time is supposed to be special and important,  and because it means something. But really, it's more dangerous not to find out what that something is to everyone involved before diving in.

I truly believe that it is more enriching to live life with the potential to love more than one person. But at the same time, I know that this concept can be complicated and messy. It shouldn't be kept in a collector's box high on the shelf to maintain its pristine condition. It should be taken down, taken apart, played with, and most importantly, experienced. 

Happiness Is Not a Fish*

On a good friend's bathroom mirror, written in dry-erase marker, it says, "You are looking at the person most responsible for your happiness."

The message appeared there after one of the many parties he throws, and it's stayed there since. I read it every time I'm washing my hands, which is a lot of times over the course of a party because my bladder is the size of an olive. I read it and look at my reflection and read it again, hoping that the more I read it the more will sink in. (That pun was free. You have to pay for more). Because it's one of those phrases we read and think, "Yeah. Right on, mirror," and then we go back out into the world and it's gone, like my reflection, and I'm back at looking to others to cheer me up or make me happy.

I've been doing the 100 Happy Days project on Instagram, despite feeling kind of sheepish about the perceived notion that I'm flaunting all the things that I have that others might not (including happiness). But I know that I have trouble with looking for happiness from others - especially in my relationships - that I thought I would chronicle (mostly) other things that make me happy that I have had the power to seek out myself. I'm almost done - today will be day 93, and going back I can't believe how many of those pictures were things that weren't people-dependent: new books, office supplies, coffee, LOTS of pictures of my cat, beer, nature. These are things that no one else had the power to give or take away from me. 

And yet, others still have the power to not only make me happy, but make me incredibly unhappy. I feel like I have little control over this, and it's infuriating. This past weekend I looked up at the mirror after a particularly stupid evening that I let turn south and wondered why I couldn't take it to heart. I'm a responsible person. I pay my bills on time. I keep my cat alive. But the happiness thing I let slide. I'm not saying I can't get happiness from others, but they can't be responsible. That would be like depending on someone else to come over and clean my cat's litter box. Someone might do it a few times, but once they stopped, I'd be in a crapload of trouble (okay, that one was free too.)

In addition to the 100 Happy Days project, I keep a journal where I write a few sentences about what I did each day. Last night, out of curiosity, I went back through the 146 days we'd had so far in the year to count and see how many of those days I mentioned being unhappy because of someone else. It was a fifth of the days I tracked. That's too many. I need to stop sucking at being responsible for my own happiness, because there are (obviously) a lot of things that do make me happy. Some of them are people. Some of them are new pens and notebooks. Some of them are fluffy animals. But I am the only one who can give them power over my happiness.

I don't feel like I'm getting any better at this, but past experience tells me I am. I was unhappy in the Midwest, so I left. I've been unhappy doing jobs or activities, so I've quit. I've been unhappy in relationships, so I've tried to adjust. I'm impatient. I see those 32 days out of this year in my journal and want them to be gone now, not in six months. But I'm starting to get that happiness is an investment. It's not always going to pay out right away. It's a paycheck, not the lottery, so I best keep working.

*Our Lady Peace was right.

Alone

Over my mother's stressful visit last November, during which she caught Adam and I kissing and proclaimed loudly how much she didn't approve of our life choices, she told me she was worried that dating all these unavailable people meant I was just going to end up alone. "You can't be alone, Katie," she said. "I know you."

My first response was, "How could I be alone around more people? That doesn't make sense!" and my second was, "Well even if I am, I'm happier being alone than I used to be. I've changed. You'll see."

And I thought that I was getting better at it, that I relished those nights at home with no plans, that I still took comfort in reading or drawing or writing when I needed some restorative time, that I liked stretching out in a bed all to myself. I grew up an only child, after all, I should be used to being alone. Shouldn't I? Wasn't my mother just basing her fears on a societal stereotype that single people are lonely?

This morning, I said goodbye to Joel for a week as he embarks on a fun trip I can't take because I have to give a final and then grade them. Adam and his wife just bought a condo, so they're furiously trying to prep and pack and don't have a lot of time for dating this month. Instead of being excited that this time is an opportunity for me to get back to doing these activities I like to do solo, the prospect of a week without either of them, and then several weeks without Adam, makes me feel empty.

It shouldn't. In fact, if anything, being in love and in happy relationships should make me more okay with being alone because I know I'm really not - that there is someone (more than one someone!) out there who cares for me and looks forward to seeing me the next time we have plans. I've even met some wonderful new people I'm excited to get closer to and see more of. So why am I so lonely? Why has comfort with Joel and lust for Adam made it harder for me to be alone, not easier?

I'm frustrated with myself. I want to be stronger than this. I want to be telling my mom the truth when I say that if I end up living alone with no domestic partner for the rest of my life, I'll be OK. But right now, I'm lying to her and, I think, also lying to myself.

Sometimes I tell myself I just need a primary partner who isn't unavailable. That the problem is I keep becoming involved with people who already have homes, or who are okay with being their own home, when in reality I want someone to make a home with. But that's not going to solve the problem. I had that once and it didn't make me happy. Even if I had that again, there would still be times like this week I'm alone and lonely and empty.

This comic says very succinctly what I want to do: not be so worried about filling the hole in my chest. I think there is a misconception that poly people can't be lonely, or even that coupled people can't be lonely, but the truth is that if we're unhappy with being with ourselves, it doesn't matter how many people we live with or are dating or trying to fill that hole with. We have to figure out how to be happy letting it whistle as we run. I'm still working on it.

Maybe my first step is to get over my hatred of running.

The Trap, or Why Facebook and I Are on a Break

The biggest irony is that I am, indeed, posting this to Facebook. 

A few weeks ago, I was wasting time online when my mood changed from relatively content to sour. As I continued to scroll, the sourness deepened, and I went from gherkin to sauerkraut to lemon wedge to Green Apple Warhead in about thirty seconds. By the time I pried myself away from my distraction, I had settled into a funk that stayed with me for most of the morning. If someone had gone back through my browser history to try and get to the bottom of my mood, the findings would be inconclusive. No one would have been able to tell that it was spurred by counting "likes" on Facebook.

I've taken various breaks from the "Book of Faces," as a few friends call it, at different times, mostly during busy periods of my life where I simply can't afford the distraction. Up until a few weeks ago, though, I'd never stepped away from it because I thought it was "bad" for me. I always just figured I had a "healthy" level of addiction just like everyone else, that I could step away from it whenever I needed to get things done, and that it would continue to be a source of harmless entertainment. That was until some other factors in my life made my emotions go on a bit of an amusement park ride, and I realized that Facebook wasn't so harmless after all.

I got jealous. I started comparing the number of "likes" on my posts to others' posts. I even started counting the number of times certain people "liked" my things versus others' things. I craved that little cartoon thumb, but at the same time hated it. So I stepped back again, this time to get my head back in the real world, where people actually like me.

How my Facebook newsfeed affected me wasn't healthy, but it isn't rare, either - studies have shown a correlation between spending time on Facebook and depression, like this one from Sweden, which found that "women who spend more time on Facebook report feeling less happy and...less content with their lives." I can usually catch myself becoming more discontent the longer I scroll, and I know the cure is to walk away and focus on the happy things that are happening in my own life. But that's where the trap pulls me in again.

Because a mark of our generation is to share things. To share everything. Not just information, but pictures. Look at this sandwich. Look at this sunset. Look at this cat. And sometimes I think the sandwich doesn't seem as delicious, the sunset not as brilliant, the cat not as adorable, if we can't get someone else to share in our satisfaction. So back to the internet we go, and wait for the "likes" to pour in. And if they don't? It must not have been that great of a sandwich/brilliant of a sunset/cute of a cat after all.

The only way right now I can break the cycle is to step away from it - well, partially anyway. I'm still on Twitter and Instagram, still wonder why there are fewer hearts on my pictures of me and Adam than on my pictures of the cat, still wonder if anyone even read that last Tweet. But for some reason those darts aren't as poisonous, so for now, it's where I'll make my social media home*.

But Kate, you ask, why don't you just step away from everything and go out and live your life? If you're so worried about the quality of your experiences being marred by your desire for social media validation, why don't you just unplug altogether? Because, disembodied voice talking to a blog post, I live in 2014. I'll always be right back in the soup, and so will you. The trick is not letting it slosh out the sides.

*But of course I'm still posting a link to this on Facebook. That's where you found it, right?

At the Funeral of Spontaneity: A Eulogy

We were the warriors of the Google Calendar. We fought under its cheerful blue banner, killing free time for it, sacrificing for it, crying for it. We were mocked for having to rely on it, for being "too popular" and having "too many friends" or "too many dates."  We were offered tiny violin concerts for lamenting our struggles. But we did struggle.

We did too much to please too many. We couldn't say no but yet often still couldn't say yes. We turned away from work to play and play to work. We carried cannonballs of guilt in our stomachs, shot from others who expressed disappointment at having to wait to see us, and yet we still returned fire on others.

We despaired in the face of too much and were relieved in the instance of last-minute reprieve, yet refused to leave openings in the first place. We fortified the walls with dates, with discussion groups, with volunteering, with singing, with extra work, with parties, with pubs, with more dates. We could not leave our posts. We could not be alone.

At times, we knew too much. We shared our schedules and despaired. We watched our loved ones form allegiance with others, and even though we craved allegiance, our breath sometimes caught in our throats to see it happen before our eyes. We pined for those living under our same roof. We were lonely in the middle of a battlefield a thousand strong.

And among this, among the colorful, carefully timed blocks of work and play and sex and drinking and travel, we forgot to fight for ourselves. We forgot to schedule even an hour for us, because that's the hour we'd been invited to fill with something else, something we'd always wanted to try or learn; or someone else, someone who we'd really been meaning to get to know if only we had a moment.

We left few survivors. Instead, we left a string of casualties, of fading friendships and lovers, in our wake. But to live the lives we chose, we knew no other way.

So here we lie, the warriors of the Google Calendar, crushed under the weight of our own ambitions. Come place bouquets of paper Day-Planners and number two pencils at our graves. Come lament that we were given such little time.