Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

One of the useful things about looking at the world on a slant is that I have no shortage of reminders that other people are not me. Though it's often a little bit disconcerting, because there's this sort of chasm of comprehension sitting there and I have no idea how to start bridging it.

I've been thinking about writing about this one for months; the comments that provoked the original thought are nowhere near current. But anyway.

One of the things that hits me really hard with the "Other people are different from you" cluestick are comments like, "Really, do monogamy because I'm lazy. Anything else is far too complicated."

Monogamy is way too complicated and confusing for me.

You see, I like knowing why things work. I have a hard time operating in systems I don't comprehend, because I am, for a variety of reasons, quite sure I'll wind up stumbling across some case of Breaking The Rules when I didn't pick up on an implication or an unspoken ... thingy, and trying to do that makes me awfully anxious and self-conscious, and I'm way too good at anxiety, self-abuse, and social fuckup to want to choose to do that sort of thing all on its own.

"I'm in a monogamous relationship because I'm not attracted to anyone other than my partner" makes sense to me. It makes no sense to have relationships without, y'know, wanting them. (And it would be hypocritical of me -- someone who hits a point where I just don't want any more relationships -- to dismiss someone who hits that point at 'one' rather than 'two'.) "I'm in a monogamous relationship because I choose to offer that to my partner" more or less makes sense to me. There's stuff that makes sense to me, for various levels of making sense.

But "too complicated" just throws me for a loop.

You know what's complicated, to me? Figuring out these little social boundaries of what is and is not supposed to be an appropriate interaction. I once accidentally hurt my best friend in high school quite badly by napping with my head in his lap on the way home from a concert, which he took as having romantic inclinations. But my social group in high school wound up evolving into the sort of strange organism which would, at parties, wind up lying in a great heap of people in the living room floor staring at the ceiling fan, listening to Erasure, and occasionally saying, "Uh, whose hand is this?" -- without the influence of any drugs whatsoever except perhaps pizza. There's this fellow I had this awfully confusing unrelationship with who wound up dying in my lap during the game of Paranoia in which we met, because I was giving him a backrub. (The friend-of-friend who'd brought him said, "I thought you two might hit it off.") The folks I spend time with these days are a fairly hug-and-snuggle crowd, and many of our gatherings are in a sort of clothing-fluid household. (Mostly taken advantage of by the owners of the space and by me and my horrible tolerance for heat.)

I don't understand what's supposed to be okay and what's not, under the principles of surrounding monogamy. I know of people who would be horrified by the sort of stuff I consider normal interaction, wouldn't have a relationship with someone who did that.

I hear people going on about "emotional infidelity", and who want to police vigorously against the possibility that someone might have a friendship with a person of the other sex (somehow, I never see this translated for same-sex couples), with vast quantities of "Of course I broke up with my [sex-of-spouse] friends when I married [spouse]" and "We only socialise as a couple". And mostly this just hits all of my "Warning signs for abusers: controlling friendships" buttonisation. (I know this isn't a universal monogamy thing, but it's one of the things that baffles me.)

And then sometimes I get specifics: this set of things is okay to do with someone else, this set of things is not okay. And ... I can't figure out why one thing goes in one list and not the other. I mean, I get emotionally irrational reasons -- I don't fancy the concept of anyone other than my husband trimming my split ends at all -- but these lists are often presented to me as being Obvious. A lot of "Of course one doesn't ..." and I don't ever see a why. And this is where I start getting paranoid, trying to figure out what The Rules for operating this way are, trying to figure out what the principles are, because otherwise the entire territory is this sort of teeter-totter of Unspeakable Consequences. The closest I get is "Don't do something that threatens the security of the relationship", which, okay, yes, I can go for that, but then I get stalled out on "What will threaten the security of the relationship?" and I don't know the rules. Some people say that the boundary is at sex, and I don't understand what differentiates sex from anything else; some people say that the boundary is at certain levels of emotional engagement, and I don't understand what differentiates the 'not-okay' emotions from the 'okay' emotions; some people say things about encouraging or discouraging the emotional stuff that goes off in directions where I don't understand why that sort of effort is worth expending.

I mean, I can start with what threatens me: not having a secure place in the relationship, or having my place in the relationship undermined by lack of time, space, and consideration. Okay, then. But that doesn't say anything about anyone else; it's, to put it in crass terms, "Are my needs being met here, or am I being told my needs will be met by someone who is not doing so?" But this doesn't get me any closer to understanding, because an exclusive relationship does not provide me with time, space, or consideration. I mean, I recognise that there's a cultural symbol-set there, but it's like the symbol-set of Catholicism to me -- I see it, I can translate it roughly, but none of that brings me salvation, or an understanding of why 'salvation' is something I should be pursuing. There's some impressive art, though.

The thing about the invisible boundary between friends and lovers is that it's invisible. And trying to navigate what's okay around there is too complicated for me. I much rather let relationships settle where they're quiet and stable and don't take too much work and self-conscious staring at figuring out what's okay.

And, y'know, I've had six lovers in my life, plus some groping. I'm terribly boring that way. And I want a boring, quiet, domestic sort of life, without the drama of new relationships or turmoil or change. That sort of thing I understand. I just can't correlate it in my head with monogamy, because monogamy is too weird and risky to be satisfyingly dull.