“Interdependent As Desired” (South Bay Poly #249 - Sept. 2016)

People talk about being “open and honest.”  The point is not to conceal anything that someone you’re involved with would want to know. 

However, not everyone wants to know everything about your other involvements. Sometimes they just don’t care, or just aren’t interested.

This is not the same as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  The point isn’t how much you want to tell or not; the question is how much they want to know.

Nevertheless, there is an issue, I think, of privacy.  Just because you are involved with someone, that doesn’t mean you have to share everything with them.  A person still has a right to some privacy.

Some people will disagree.  “Open and honest,” they will say, means you conceal nothing.

I’m not sure.  What I do know is that balancing these considerations may not be easy.

But relationships never are; and this is even truer for polyrelationships.

“The Mystery of Our Attractions” (South Bay Poly News #248)

Keeping it simple this month.  I’ll just say, the more I think about how I am attracted to people, and the more I think about my past relationships, both successful and not successful, the more I am puzzled and intrigued by just what is going on in these matters—my inner feelings on the one hand, and then my interactions with other people.  How do successful relationship come about?  Why are other relationships painful and even disastrous?  Now wouldn’t that make a nice theme for a novel (hm…..)?

And of course, the more relationships you have at any given time, the more challenging life is; but also that much more rewarding!

The monogamous might say that’s precisely the point; Multiple relationships are too fragile—or too explosive.

But I’m drawn to many people; what can I say?  I care about many people.  And having multiple relationships works for me and is rewarding for me.  Maybe it is not for everyone, but it seems to be for me.

Now, about that novel…

Gloomy Thoughts on Election Night

Driving home from work, I was thinking about a conversation I’ve been having on Facebook, resulting from my relative’s post about how we must “keep all Muslims out of the U.S.”   Even though the other man involved in this conversation and I both seem to agree that good Muslims exist, he seems to think we just can’t risk letting any into the country, because “as a whole they’re bad; we can’t permit terrorists to slip in among any good Muslims.”  I don’t think we can make a blanket judgement on a billion or whatever people.  I think many Americans exhibit paranoid hysteria.  I’m much more likely to die from a traffic accident than from a terrorist attack.

So, driving home, listening to early reports from the Iowa caucuses, thinking about all the elections and campaigns I’ve watched in my lifetime, going all the way back to 1960, I suppose—although at ten I was too young and only remember the actual election in November , not the primaries.

I worry about the country.

And I wonder why people end up the way they do, as far as their political views.

My family has always been almost entirely Republican—why have I always been a Democrat?

I grew up in a conservative military environment.  When I graduated from high school in 1969, I had spent eight of my twelve school years on Air Force bases.  I had spent two years living a half-mile from an Air Force base in conservative New Hampshire.  I had spent my other two years living in conservative Virginia.  How did I end up a Democrat?  It just always made more sense to me.  And, in the 1960s, even though the segregationists in the South were Democrats, so were John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who were supporting civil rights laws.  In 1968, before I could even vote, it never entered my mind to support Richard Nixon, much less George Wallace.  I think that they seemed hateful and vindictive, while the Democrats—the Kennedys, Johnson, Humbert Humphrey—seemed hopeful, seemed positive, seemed to speak to a greatness of spirit.  The Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King inspired me.  Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon—they didn’t.

To me, the Republicans always seemed disgruntled, self-centered, and selfish.

But then—the movement against the Vietnam War was also disgruntled, angry.

# # #

Currently, I’m not angry.  I’m sad.  Trump talks about “making America great again.”  What?  He thinks we’re no longer great?  The richest country in the world, the country with the most powerful military, the world trend-setter in so many ways?  What he and his supporters really want, perhaps, is for the United States to be able to do whatever it wants to, without anyone daring to challenge us.  I think that’s what they actually want—“how dare anyone oppose us on anything?!”

I’ve sometimes had an intuition comparing Kaiser Wilhelm and George W. Bush.  Not meant to be mean-spirited;  I lived in Germany two years (with the U.S. Army); I don’t consider Wilhelm a monster; just a leader with certain shortcomings.

More recently, my intuition has connected Trump and Hitler.  Again, not mean-spirited.  I recognize the horrible things that Hitler was responsible for, but—dare I say it?—I don’t viscerally hate him; I just regret that he did what he did.  I’m not suggesting that Trump would do anything like him, but—just something about Trump’s personality disturbs me, in a way that brings to mind Hitler.

I’m sad about so many things:  the way people think of politics and politicians; many of our peculiar American attitudes.  I don’t feel we live in a tyranny.  I don’t really dislike the federal government; I tend to support it and indeed treasure it.  So in this year of the “angry voter,” I am not angry.

I’m not terribly worried by foreign threats; I’m more disturbed by the possibility that Americans are beginning to distrust one another, and their government—any government, whether federal, state, or local.  There is much too much talk of “treason” these days.  I sense that the primary threat to the country is internal:  Hateful citizens turning against one another.  I shiver at the prospect of another Civil War, or of Americans turning against one another in anger and violence.  I see no good coming out of it.

My Parents’ Environment

Driving home from folk dancing this evening, past eleven p.m., I think of my parents and their environment they grew up in:  Very different from the environment I live in now.

I’m driving down Highway 101 in California, from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale; no more than ten miles.  The highway is full of cars driving seventy miles an hour; the lights are blinding.

This calls up memories of Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, when my parents and I (and my sisters) lived on an air base in Hampton.  How does this call up these memories?  The environments are opposites!  In 1960 the Interstate highway system had not yet been constructed through Hampton.  We would not have been driving on such a highway, full of cars, so late in the evening.

As I recall, almost everything in Hampton would have been closed by 11 p.m.  Certainly the airbase would have been completely quiet except for the Air Force personnel on duty, somewhere out around the air field.  Although, remembering later years when I lived on an air base in Japan, I can imagine that the Officers Club, just a block from where we lived on the air base in Virginia, might have still been open.  But for me, who lived there as a boy from age six to age eleven, Langley Air Force Base was quiet indeed in the evenings.

Whereas I have just spent an hour watching and listening to traditional dance music from Eastern Europe, which of course would have seemed odd to American military personnel in 1960, smarting still from the launching of Sputnik and the Russian downing, over the Soviet Union, of the American U2 spy plane piloted by Frances Gary Powers.

The Challenge of Polyrelating

(From the October South Bay Polys newsletter).

I hadn’t begun a new relationship in eight years, and last month I plunged into not one but two – what on earth was I thinking?  On the other hand, why not begin two relationships at the same time?

But all the old issues come up immediately!  Beginning any relationship can be difficult; that’s one of the things that intrigues me so much.  What does it mean to be in a relationship with someone – a “relationship”—what does that even mean?!  Someone to go to social events with?  Someone to share meals with?  Someone to have sex with?  Someone to spend lazy afternoons or evenings with?  What do they want, what do you want?  Are you comfortable together, at ease with the same things—not at ease?  Are you open to love, to falling in love?

And then the whole polyamory “business.”  Are they comfortable with polyamory, comfortable with being “someone significant” but maybe not “The Only One?”  Do they even know what polyamory is, what it entails?

And if they don’t know, but are open to learning—what do you tell them; how do you explain polyamory to them?  Even if you come to care very much for one another, there’s all that background and upbringing—all the past experiences that make each of you what you are, that have burrowed deep into your personalities and become maybe almost instinctive—how do you account for that and commit to growth together in spite of possible fears and perceived difficulties?  Or do you choose another path—platonic, or parting altogether, or perpetual sadness, or monogamy?

Ah well—but new relationships do seem worth it after all!  Love and Caring seem worth it!  At least I think it does!