Poly Pocket: Polyamorous In A Monogamous Relationship

When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.

Traci Medeiros is a 32-year-old Japanese American queer polyamorous Southern Californian in a functionally monogamous relationship. She/they are a therapist in private practice “doing what [they] can in Orange County to offer queer/kinky/non-monogamous folks a little bit of safe space and reflection” and running Queer University and Shame Kills Love.

This interview has been lightly edited.

Carolyn: How did you come to identify as polyamorous?

Traci: I’ve identified as polyamorous since I was in undergrad. I was doing all this work in social kinship networks and queer family building at the time and it just made so much sense to me functionally and emotionally. I also liked the idea of openness in terms of sexuality and the richness of experiences it offered, but I’m also a really sensitive and high context person. I’m low on jealousy but (very) high on communication/process. I have very few “acquaintance type” relationships — romantic or otherwise — because of this. I don’t have anything against them, but because of my personality they’re actually quite draining on me so non-monogamy/openness without the relationships didn’t seem like a great fit. Polyamory on the other hand seemed like all the good stuff — and more of it — with more people to help support everyone getting it!

Oddly, enough this interview comes at an interesting time because at the moment I’m functionally (and intentionally) monogamous with no future plans to open up my relationship. This is the first time I’ve been in this place in my adult life and actually the first relationship I’ve formatted like this as well.

Carolyn: What led you to structure your relationship that way?

Traci: Mostly just the right time and place for that specific human. We actually met at a party when I was on a date with my partner — not the person we were on a date with. We dated for about seven months, and then when I ended up separating from my primary partner and my legal spouse (different people) we decided to give it a go. I think we were both in a place for some streamlining, nesting, and efficiency in our lives. Not that those things are necessarily mutually exclusive from poly.

Monogamy was important to her and I was at a place that I wanted the support of poly but didn’t necessarily need that to be multiple romantic partners.

“I really like polyamory for the way it incorporates the ‘it takes a village’ idea. I like how it values multiple types of relationships and reminds us that there is value in different kinds of connection.”

Carolyn: Interesting! What’s that like for you?

Traci: From my own life, friends/family, and also the work that I do with clients, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of places that monogamy and non-monogamy overlap. I think we just tend to get caught up on the number of humans and titles. I really like polyamory for the way it incorporates the “it takes a village” idea. I like how it values multiple types of relationships and reminds us that there is value in different kinds of connection. I also like how it encourages us to value each other and ourselves for sheerly existing without needing to attach it to all these other functional pieces we’re responsible for in our partnerships.

I think that these goals can be really well supported by the structure of polyamory, but that we can still honor these ideals with a dyad at romantic/sexual center and other support networks sprawling outwards from there.

Carolyn: Looking specifically at your relationship: What about this is a struggle? What about it is exciting?

Traci: I think that while poly and monogamy can certainly overlap in end goals, the number of people (and the threat that goes along with that) can be really difficult for people to get over. This is understandable given our culture around romance and partnership. I’ve also noticed that it does seem like folks tend to have a bit of an inclination for one or the other. Out of all the pieces of identity I’ve had to come out about over the years (and there have been a few!) I have to say that “being poly” in the way that I see the world has been one that I’ve experienced at the deepest and most consistent core levels. On the other hand, my partner tends to lean towards monogamy so sometimes we have to do a bit of translating to hear each other and feel safe. It sometimes looks like a math genius trying to explain to someone who can’t deal with numbers, but with emotional math and in both directions.

As for the what’s most exciting: I feel really good about redirecting the space I use to use on navigating between different partners on her and our growing family. Coming from a place where I had more than two adults participating in finances and whatnot, I’ve noticed that it really simplifies things in that way. At times there are less resources to deal with, but also less folks to check in with about things. Decisions and process seem to be more focused. I’ve gotten to use this space to put to my practice and general self-care. It has really been the perfect fit for me in this moment in time.

“Seeing the world from a place of potential connection and collaboration rather than competition (which are pieces that are core tenets of my poly philosophy) interact with all other elements of my identity.”

Carolyn: In that context, where does poly intersect with other elements of your identity? How does it function within your understanding of yourself?

Traci: Whoa, big question. Well, seeing the world from a place of potential connection and collaboration rather than competition (which are pieces that are core tenets of my poly philosophy) interact with all other elements of my identity. As far as how it functions within my understanding of myself — I’m not entirely sure. I think this piece is sort of integrating and solidifying as the vision of functional monogamy continues to evolve for me. However, connection, collaboration, honoring other beings in our life for more than function, and having openness to folks creating lives that feel like a uniquely good fit for them are really significant parts of how I understand myself. These things extend to daily interactions big and small and even my food choices.

Carolyn: What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working towards or hoping for?

Traci: I want contentment. Feeling super old as I contemplate this, but this has certainly been rising in the ranks of life priorities. For me this means fullness and safety. I want to feel like I have enough — love, time, support, energy to offer others, and energy to offer myself. I feel really lucky that very little of my poly identity was rooted in scarcity, but I think as a queer introvert who has varying levels of connection with bio family creating my own familial support network was really important. As I’ve been telling others for years, I’m seeing that this exists in many formats and many different numbers of partners. I think it’s just in a different direction than most folks.

Poly Pocket: When Family and Friends Just Don’t Get It

When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.

Zevran is a 23-year-old non-binary queer black African polyamorous human living in Poland. “Zevran” is a pseudonym.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?

Zevran: My journey began when I was 19. I started with ethical non-monogamy, where I had a partner but was casually dating other people, and then a year ago I began to identify as polyamorous where no relationship hierarchy exists.

Right now, I have a girlfriend who I love deeply. She lives with her boyfriend. We’ve been together for a few months now. We all identify as poly and kinky and the V has no hierarchy and third-party veto (that’s what we are striving for for whatever constellation may arise). I can date or hook up with other people but after I inform my partner, not for permission but for a head’s up. I’ve met my metamour, we are on friendly terms, and since we are interested in similar things we often end up going to events as a trio.

Carolyn: What about non-heirarchial poly feels right to you?

Zevran: That was part of our negotiations before the relationship started. We all felt that since there are already so many layers and dynamics in our relationships, adding even more layers would complicate things. Personally I decided to choose such a relationship because I like to let my emotions and relationships develop organically.

In terms of those layers, my girlfriend and her boyfriend are also in a Daddy Dom/little girl relationship and they live together. My girlfriend and I also have a Dominant/submissive dynamic where we are both switches with each other.

“It’s important to ensure that no partner is treated unfairly and also to not be a complete asshole.”

Carolyn: What impact do your kink dynamics have on your poly dynamics?

Zevran: I like to joke that they make for very unusual conversations between the three of us. But generally it means that we have to be more conscious and aware of boundaries and work extra hard to find a balance.

I’ll give an example. They have a dynamic where she must ask for permission before doing something or face enforcement of a curfew and orgasm denial as punishment. That obviously posed a big problem in my relationship with her. So we have to work around that and make sure the kink stuff from one relationship doesn’t limit the other relationships.

Carolyn: How did you negotiate that? What did you decide on together?

Zevran: The basic thing we agreed on was that no relationship or partner is more important, no matter how many people each of us is with. We all make our comfort levels and boundaries clear and try to be considerate. I talked to them about the things I wasn’t happy with and we made a plan. Namely: no giving tasks that eat into another partner’s time. When she’s with me their dynamics and rules don’t apply. Basically I’m with her, not daddy’s little girl. The same will apply to all other partners.

Carolyn: How do you negotiate conflict?

Zevran: We respectfully voice our complaints then talk about it and find a way forward. Luckily we have a local poly support group, too. Sometimes they end in tears or total disagreement but so far we haven’t gotten something we haven’t been able to work through or around.

Carolyn: Earlier, you wrote, “I believe that honesty and clear communication is key. Compromise, being considerate and willingness to renegotiate can be helpful, especially when conflicts arise. It’s important to ensure that no partner is treated unfairly and also to not be a complete asshole, as applies to everything in general.” Was there a time when someone was treated unfairly? How was that resolved?

Zevran: That happened plenty of times during the beginning of our relationship when we were still trying to adjust ourselves to the situation. Boundaries were crossed, there was a time when it got so bad we were considering ending things or at the very least taking a break. I don’t want to get into specifics but it was tough on all of us.

What I did was talk to a lot of people more experienced than me — on fetlife or from the support group and my therapist is also very poly and kink friendly. Then we sat down and discussed the issues that were troubling us, and then negotiated.

I learned that there is no ideal way or correct way of doing poly. Sometimes what works perfectly in theory might fail miserably in practice. It’s important to know exactly what you want and accept that mistakes will be made, so how you resolve them is important.

Carolyn: How out are you about being poly?

Zevran: My friends and siblings know that I’m poly. Anyone who pays close attention on Facebook knows I’m non-monogamous, so I guess my mum knows, too, it’s just never come up in conversation. I’ve never announced it but it’s no secret, either. What I wish is that it wasn’t such a big deal. It gets exhausting.

In terms of queerness, my family and friends try to adjust themselves to the situation. My queerness is something they have accepted. But my family is mostly in Kenya and maybe that works in my favour; my close family has only met my partners through the years via Skype. So being from a society where “What would people say?” holds a lot of water, my not being there for societal comment makes it easier for my close family to accept and support me. And I’m far enough away from those who would give me shit about it.

“There is no ideal way or correct way of doing poly. Sometimes what works perfectly in theory might fail miserably in practice. It’s important to know exactly what you want and accept that mistakes will be made, so how you resolve them is important.”

Carolyn: How do your family and friends see your relationships?

Zevran: I’ve noticed the intersection of queer and not queer and poly relationships, especially when not all partners or people in the constellation are queer, leads to a lot of societal invalidation of the queer relationships. In my experience with my current partner that has been a real problem. Family and friends tend to recognize her and her boyfriend and pretend that I don’t exist, mostly because they have been together longer and queer relationships are not respected or recognized.

She tends to get invitations to events like weddings which explicitly state only one partner is invited, preferably the male one as people will be uncomfortable with my presence. That’s something we haven’t yet been able to work around. I would like to know how other people navigate such situations, because in as much as we see each other as equals, society doesn’t and I would be lying if I said that doesn’t pain me.

Carolyn: How does polyamory function within your understanding of yourself?

Zevran: Being poly allows me the freedom to be myself. I don’t believe that one person can realistically fulfill all my needs and I have the capacity to be with several people at once.

I’m already pretty untraditional and unconventional and being poly sometimes complicates things a bit more. I have friends and family who still haven’t wrapped their heads around my queerness and gender identity and they simply just don’t understand poly.

Carolyn: What do you want your future to look like?

Zevran: I want to be with two or maximum three serious relationships. I also want to involve kink in the relationships. Hopefully by then being poly won’t be so radical.

Poly Pocket: Being As Direct As Possible

Feature photo of Tyler by Morgan Phillips.

When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.

Tyler Vile is 23-year-old native and Jewish queer trans woman with Cerebral Palsy living in Baltimore, MD. She is poly and dating a few people, and is an author, performer, musician and activist.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?

Tyler: Well, I don’t think I’ve ever really been monogamous. I had a very queer adolescence. I went to an art high school and hung out primarily with other queer kids and punks, I had a handful of friends I used to mess around with, but never dated anyone seriously until I got out of my abusive parents’ house.

I guess I was introduced to the term when I was like 18 and my sister, who’s nine years older than I am, was exploring it. I read The Ethical Slut, which was problematic as fuck, but still insightful for me then. I thought, yeah, that fits and that’s just been my life ever since.

Carolyn: When you started to date people seriously, what did that look like?

Tyler: I was single for a good long while, like, just me and the occasional hookup for a couple years. I fell in love with a few people I’d been close to, but things didn’t work out for a lot of different reasons. I’m actually in my longest-term relationship right now. My partner Abby and I have been together for just over a year.

Carolyn: Aw rad! How did that relationship start?

Tyler: Oh, I love this story! We met when my sister, Jamie, was visiting Baltimore last May and we were walking to one of my favorite bookstores in town, Atomic Books, which has a bar in the back. We saw this gaggle of queers coming from the other direction and Abby recognized Jamie. We all headed to the bar and started hanging out. Abby told me later that she only stuck around because she thought Jamie’s sister was cute! We hung out as friends that summer a little bit, but we started working on a two-night queer variety show together called the Charm City Kitty Club. Our theme for our sketches that season was parodying all the Shondaland shows, but mostly Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. I played this Sarah Palin-esque character called Senator Vile whose husband was just murdered and Abby played my secret girlfriend, Katherine Knipp. So, at the end of the show, my character confesses that she’s gay and loves her girlfriend. We kissed for the first time onstage and on the second night, I improvised and asked her to gay marry me in character.

Carolyn: You’re dating multiple people: How did those relationships come about? How does everything fit together?

Tyler: Right now, I’m dating two people, Abby, who lives in Baltimore, and Magpie, who lives in Seattle. I have a few make out buddies and friends with benefits, too. I tour a fair bit as a writer and performer, so I meet some awesome people on the road and sometimes I sleep with them.

Magpie and I started dating when we were in New York City for a week long all trans women summer fiction writing workshop put on by my publisher, Topside Press in August. We were making eyes at each other for the first couple days and then everybody came over to my publisher Tom’s apartment in Flatbush where I was staying for a meeting to figure out the future of the workshop. We were all partying before it and Magpie and I started getting cozy. They were so shy that they, like, started to ask me for a kiss and then stopped mid-sentence, so I was like, “is it a kiss you want?” and she nodded her head. Then we took a walk down to this little Caribbean spot on the corner and got some plantains and made out instead of eating them. We went back for the meeting, and after the meeting, Tom moved the party into his room so Magpie and I could have sex on an air mattress in the living room.

It was intense, I thought it was just going to be a hookup, but we talked and said we really liked each other and we wanted to keep this going, so we video chat every now and then.

“‘Hey, can we check in about something?’ is one of my favorite questions. It’s open-ended and gentle, but firm. It gets to the point without hitting anyone over the head.”

Carolyn: Do you find that a long-distance poly relationship poly has any stand-out perks or drawbacks?

Tyler: It’s low-maintence, for sure. Of course, I wish I could see them more often, but I mean, we’re poor and live on opposite coasts, so this is how it works and it’s been good so far.

Carolyn: What’s your relationship with your metamours like?

Tyler: In general, I like to know my metamours. I don’t have to love them or have sex with them, but at the very least, I want to know that we’re all treating the same person with the love and respect they deserve. I watch Abby’s other girlfriend Erin’s five-year-old son sometimes, Abby’s boyfriend Brad drove me to the vet and held me the day my cat died.

Carolyn: How much do you share between partners?

Tyler: A fair bit. I mean, I let partners know who I’ve had sex with recently or who I’m going to have sex with just as a safety thing. A lot of the time it’s just, hey, I had a really good time with this person and here’s what we did, how’s your other person? If there’s an issue with another partner, I’ll vent to the person I’m with if I need to and the person I’m with can always talk to me about their stuff.

Carolyn: Within your relationships, how do you negotiate conflict? How do you negotiate change?

Tyler: I try to be as direct as possible and tell people exactly how I’m feeling and check in to see what they need. I really don’t have time or energy to mince words or let things go unsaid.

“Hey, can we check in about something?” is one of my favorite questions. It’s open-ended and gentle, but firm. It gets to the point without hitting anyone over the head. I prefer to have those conversations in person or at least on video chat so I can see and hear where the other person is coming from. If it’s a longer conversation, we make time to hang out and just talk about that thing for however long we need. I want all of my lovers and friends to feel comfortable bringing up issues and I do my best to make sure that they feel heard and not attacked when I bring up an issue.

Carolyn: I love that approach! What about poly is a struggle for you? What about it is most exciting?

Tyler: Poly comes naturally to me in a lot of ways, so I don’t really think of it as struggle. Every once in a while, I get a crush on a monogamous person and that can kind of be a bummer for a minute. But again, I check in with them and make sure that we’re on the same page. I’ve talked to friends where we’re both attracted to each other, but they’re in or want a monogamous relationship. There’s no use convincing anyone to be poly. I can say, “Hey, you might want to talk to your partner about that,” or, “Would you be cool trying it out for a bit?” but I would never say that poly is right and good and monogamy is bad and wrong, because that’s not true. The problem isn’t monogamy itself, it’s compulsory monogamy, the culturally enforced system that says “one man, one woman.” If monogamy works for you, that’s so awesome and I’m really happy for you. If it doesn’t, renegotiate it.

“I find a lot of joy in acknowledging all the ways I’m attracted to my friends and lovers and all the ways they’re attracted to me.”

Carolyn: Where does poly intersect with other elements of your identity? How does it function within your understanding of yourself?

Tyler: A lot, maybe even most of my queer, trans and two-spirit friends are poly, so polyamory and queerness are pretty much inseparable for me in practice. I realize it might not be that way for everyone, but I find a lot of joy in acknowledging all the ways I’m attracted to my friends and lovers and all the ways they’re attracted to me. Not all of them are sexual, in fact, I think it’s part of why I celebrate non-sexual attraction as much as sexual attraction. It’s not all roses, though, I was sexually assaulted back in May by someone who I considered a friend. So, as a survivor, it’s taken time and effort to get back to a place where I can hookup with friends again. I’m most people’s introduction to loving someone with a visible physical disability. There’s a cultural expectation that if you’re dating a disabled person, you’re their sole caretaker. I’m bucking that by having lots of friends and lovers and making sure none of them fall into a caretaker role.

Carolyn: What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working towards or hoping for?

Tyler: I mean, with Trump getting elected, I’m hoping I survive the Mad Max thunder dome by this time next year. In all seriousness, the future I want isn’t some queer utopia where everybody’s poly, there are orgies every weekend, and everybody loves each other. That’d be cool, but realistically, I just want to keep dating people as long as it’s healthy for me, I want to grow old, maybe care for kids, and keep publishing books, making music and performing. I’d also like to live in an anarcho-communist future, but a girl can dream.

Poly Pocket: This Is How Bisexual Comedian Gaby Dunn Does Poly

Feature image of Gaby Dunn by Robin Roemer.

When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.

Gaby Dunn is a 28-year-old polyamorous cis white woman. “I say bisexual but then people say no you mean pansexual and then I say fine queer and then people say queer is a slur how dare you so WHO KNOWS.” She’s a writer and YouTuber and actress/comedian.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Carolyn: When you say “poly,” what do you mean?

Gaby: I’ve said poly as a broader catch-all, but it’s weird because I do YouTube videos for a mostly younger audience so I think they’re just learning these terms and aren’t surrounded by any sort of different relationship models. Unless their parents are swingers in the suburbs. Or not even kids, for adults who watch the channel who are used to mainstream TV and movies. I try to… simplify. You can see them arguing in the comments about what it means. They’ll say, “Is he her boyfriend? Why does she say she has a girlfriend in this video? Why is she talking about dating?”

I have a primary person and then I can hook up or casually date or even have other relationships. So while I’ve been with my boyfriend, I had a girlfriend for a while. I do date/have somewhat serious relationships with other people. This girl was on and off for like a year and was a big emotional part of whatever else was going on. I think non-monogamy is just physical, right? And poly is relationships? That’s how I understand it but I could be wrong!

And I don’t always have to have one primary person either. I had two people I was seeing for a while who were pretty even in terms of how often I saw them and the level of commitment.

Carolyn: How do your relationships impact each other?

Gaby: I like having all my friends be friends so I think that influences how I do relationships. I want everyone to hang out! Which can be sort of shortsighted or selfish because I sometimes don’t understand why people wouldn’t want to. But it helps me a lot if they all get along. The last situation fell apart because of fighting between my boyfriend and the girl I was seeing. They were seeing each other some. They broke up but she wanted to keep seeing me, and that became a problem because now she was his ex.

Carolyn: Does the way you approach relationships impact what happens when they’re over? (Personally I seem to know a lot more poly and also queer people who are friends with exes, for instance.) Or maybe a better question is, how would you characterize your approach/attitude toward relationships?

Gaby: The queer people, everyone stays friends. But I’ve also never had the bad experiences with queer people that I’ve had with cis men so… Take from that what you will, world.

“That always seemed missing to me in monogamy. How can you be with this person and never talk to them about these things? But then I think about how hard it is to do and of course no one wants to do it.”

I think people would say I’m maybe too loose? Not enough rules? Which is a big thing I like about poly actually. It forces me to express myself and emotions in this very clear way that is VERY unnatural to me. I think of the poly discussions I’ve had and I feel like I sound pained. I talk so slowly and have to be so direct and explicit and it’s a thing I don’t think people in monogamous relationships ever have to do?

That always seemed missing to me in monogamy. How can you be with this person and never talk to them about these things? But then I think about how hard it is to do and of course no one wants to do it.

Carolyn: I think it’s a lot easier to do/not do when you’re in a relationship there are lots of models for instead of… not. What were your monogamous relationships like? How did you start to explore poly?

Gaby: That’s true. I think people don’t think it’s an option, or at least a viable option. My monogamous relationships were not great! But they also always had weird caveats for being open. I remember saying to college boyfriends, “Make out with whoever you want. Just don’t lie to me.” Before I even knew what poly was! My only concern was, “Don’t lie to me.” They always did. I think because they thought it was a trick.

Even grown men have been like, “This is a trick.”

It’s not a trick! Just don’t lie!

Okay but how can I lie then?

Just don’t!

Seems like a trick, no thanks.

In high school, I had a boyfriend but I was obsessed with this girl and I had this very teen movie thing in my head that hooking up with girls didn’t count, reinforced by, idk, every TV show and movie I ever saw. So for a long time, poly was like, “I have a boyfriend. I’m gonna be with hot girls too. Is that chill?” And the boy would be like, THE MOST CHILL. THE BEST. THIS IS GREAT. Except a high school boyfriend who lost his mind when he found out I’d been making out with this girl. He was really upset! And I remember feeling so confused. Why is he mad? It’s just a girl? Shout out to that guy for getting it.

With my college boyfriend, I was like, we can be together and see other people too. (I still didn’t know the word.) And he took that to mean, I will lie to you constantly about where I am and who I am with and also hook up with people in front of you even though you are clearly mad. All of college was me being like, “This can’t be right! You’re not supposed to lie!” And him being like, “I will now lie all the time.” I felt crazy. Because “don’t lie to me, but do what you want” seemed so simple???

And I was like, other people must be able to pull this off.

I was monogamous again for a while, and cheated on both those people and felt resentful. And then I dated another dude who was a repeat of college dude where I’d say, “Literally all I want is for you not to lie to me,” and he’d go, “Seems like a trick,” and then I found out all he was doing was lying and he’d fall back on “WELL YOU WANTED TO BE OPEN.” So it was my fault he was cheating because I was the poly one.

Then I dated a poly girl who was lovely, if a little too jealous.

Somewhere along the way I met a comedian named Myq Kaplan who’s pretty big and openly poly and talks about it and does jokes about it on TV and such. He’s rad. He became my best friend around that time and he was like, here are some books you’re going to be okay.

“I AM NOT WRONG. I am not broken! This is just different but it doesn’t mean I’m a fundamentally bad person!”

Carolyn: When did you evolve into your current form?

Gaby: Myq really normalized everything and I saw this successful, happy dude just talking about his life on TV and stage. And he sent me The Ethical Slut and he sent me links to Dan Savage and was like, “Right? Right?”

After the you-made-me-cheat-by-being-poly guy, I was so angry. And that anger became, “Okay, I AM NOT WRONG. I am not broken! This is just different but it doesn’t mean I’m a fundamentally bad person! I don’t have to be good enough for anyone!” Around that time I dated that girl who was great, but I think she wanted someone to be obsessed with her (which she’s since found so that’s a relief/great), and then I met my boyfriend.

He was not an obvious answer at all. He was monogamous and like, on paper the type of dude who says, “My father will hear about this!” But that was the first time I explained everything to someone and they were like, “Oh cool.” And I was like, you’re… fine? And he was like, sure yeah I’m interested in learning this. He’d had relationships fall apart in the past because of crushes he had on other people and didn’t understand why that had to be the case, so I think he was looking for poly too but hadn’t found it until he met me. And with him, it’s been what I fucking thought poly was all along! I knew I was right! You can just not lie!

Because he never thought it was a trick. He was like, “Oh, if I tell you this I’m just telling you. You’re not trying to trap me or get information to use again later.”

FUCKING FINALLY SOMEONE GOT IT

Carolyn: Haha

Gaby: I think monogamy is painted as a war between two people. Like any sitcom! Or even, I’ve had a lot of married men come after me in my life (I must give off a vibe?) and I always say, “Why don’t you just tell your wife you’re talking to someone?” And they laugh like I’m naive. One of them told me, “There are things married people keep from each other.” That really sat wrong with me. Why would I want that? Why would I want to be in a long-term relationship where I’m gaming the other person? Or being gamed? That would make me feel so unsettled. But it’s always in every movie or every show or every song or everything we consume: a couple against each other. They’re never shown as a team!

Carolyn: You never see just simply happy not-jealous not-obsessive long-term couples. Married people hate each other, or someone is trying to pull something over on the other, or there’s this “oh I must manipulate you all the time!” edge to everything.

Gaby: Yes! Why??? I don’t understand and sometimes I feel like an alien! Especially when monogamous married people make me seem naive for it.

Carolyn: “How dare you expect to like your partner?”

Gaby: Or even that you can talk to them! Why is it INSANE that you would say to your wife, “I have a crush on someone how funny.”

Carolyn: Above you mentioned that talking and expressing yourself and your emotions is very unnatural for you and that you have to force yourself to do it instead of falling back on rules. In those moments, what’s particularly challenging? I.e., Even when it’s okay to share, does anything make sharing especially hard?

Gaby: I get embarrassed about asking for things. I think because everyone wants to see themselves as above human emotion and as maybe the coolest person to ever live. So when something hurts me or makes me jealous, my instinct is to go, “No, you’re better than that.” But no one is!

I don’t like telling people not to do things, because I get resentful and my worst fear is someone resenting me in a relationship as being like, the old ball and chain. “Un-fun.” So when I have to say “no” to something someone wants and explain why (based on my personal feelings or my reaction or the emotions it brings up in me) I want to be like I AM A ROBOT I HAVE NO FEELINGS.

But then you have miscommunications. Like if I say, “Don’t hook up with that girl. She’s your friend’s roommate and your friend wouldn’t like it.” And then my boyfriend asks and the friend is like, “Oh go for it. I don’t mind.” He thinks my objection was because the friend would be mad. And once he gets the go ahead from the friend, he thinks he’s in the clear. (Which is a thing that happened.) What I should have said was, “I don’t want you to,” instead of making up reasons other people might be upset to seem like I don’t get upset.

Carolyn: It’s so much easier to make things about other people! How do your relationships shift when you date or sleep with someone new?

Gaby: Time management becomes a big thing. There’s periods where we see each other all the time and then where we don’t really. (We don’t live together.)

I think a lot of my monogamous friends go into a vortex when they start dating someone and hang out exclusively with them all the time so it becomes, “What are we doing tonight?” “What are we doing this weekend?” and that’s not a given here. With other partners too. You have to make a plan. Which is actually more interesting and leads to less boring “I’ll come over after work and we’ll just sit.” But there’s comfort in that assumption that the person is coming home so I get that too.

And I’ve tried to shoehorn like, “Okay I’m going out of town so everyone let’s just hang at this bar together tonight,” but my ex-girlfriend bailed once because she didn’t have any interest in competing for my attention while out at a bar.

Carolyn: How does being poly influence how you understand yourself or move through the world?

Gaby: I think it’s way less stressful because I’m free to be a person. To be flawed in the traditional societal sense. To not have to meet a mold that was set up a long time ago for agricultural reasons and then has continued I assume because of Valentine’s Day? It lets me create a community and to keep people in my life and experience all the different things I want to experience. I don’t feel like being with someone is the end of my life.

I’m not sure I agree with the common wisdom that a relationship is sacrifice. That seems horrible. Why would I want someone with me who is sacrificing enjoyment or experiences?

La India y La Negrx: Intentional, Radical Love in My Queer Interracial Relationship

by Angélica Becerra

Welcome to Autostraddle’s queer Latinx essay series: Our Pulse. In honor of celebrating Latinxs during Hispanic Heritage Month, Autostraddle curated a collection of essays by lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans Latina and Latinx writers to showcase our experiences, our pulse. 

I’m a 25-year-old queer, first generation Mexi-Salvadoreña, brown and hairy mestiza femme born on the east coast and living in Tejas. I share a life with a Black gender non-conforming partner who was born and raised on the south side of Chicago and who is transforming through their masculinity. We have been together four years as an interracial queer couple in a small primarily white town in North Texas. My partner is a talented body worker, jazz-loving fashionista musician, and I am a llorona pero chingona radical traveling poeta, maestra, and spiritual [art]ivista.

Around year two of our relationship, I playfully began tagging our dynamic and distinct duo as La India Y La Negrx on social media. Initially I did this as a way of documenting our beautiful and radical presence in the world (yay for the power of internet selfies and visibility politics!). Four years and countless “likes” later, our journey as #LaIndiaYLaNegrx in a white supremacist hetero patriarchal reality has grown from playful and self-affirming forms of visibility to a humbling and often times painful series of lessons on the radical decolonizing power of love and emotional literacy.

Photo by TL Ortiz. Edyka and her partner, Amari.

Like many other radical queer muxeres mestizas my journey into queerness was not graceful. I had no road maps, little support or mentorship, and little understanding of what was possible and what was to come from this courageous and intentional act of choosing love in such a radically beautiful form. To this day, I only recall two conversations ever had with my family of origin about queerness prior to me coming out. One was me being bold enough to ask my mother what she felt about gay marriage. Her response was that she believed marriage was only for a man and a woman. End of conversation. The second experience was with my father who, thinking himself very liberal and tolerant, explained that everyone will make their own choices; he just felt it was important that those choices happened behind closed doors and not in his face. Of course neither of these conversations stopped my queer little heart from committing to marrying a gender non-conforming person and living my choices out in the open.

Beyond this casual yet intentional dismissal of queerness, it was hard not to notice the overall aversion my families of origin had to difference in general. I still remember my tia telling me not to take interest in my cousins’ Guatemalan male friend because we would find a good Salvadorian boy for me soon enough. I imagine this was my tia’s attempt to somehow correct my father’s scandalous choice to marry and have children with a dark-skinned Mexican woman. Along with casual colorism known to many of us Latinxs and other POC, the unapologetic anti-Blackness was never missing from the dinner conversation when race was discussed. This was especially true whenever I came home from college and spoke passionately and genuinely on the need for Black and Brown people to stand in solidarity with one another. I did this loyally, only to encounter repeatedly the oversimplified myth of Black people not wanting to work while having all the privileges of citizenship and language access. This never failed to be accompanied by the story of that one time tal y tal was jumped down the street coming home from work by a group of morenos who stole his hard-earned money y “que esa gente pasan todo el dia tomados y usando drogas viviendo gratis del gobierno”. Ah, if they only they knew I was joining those morenos on summer daze in the projects down the street flowing over instrumentals and talking politics.

Yet as expected, over the years my cousins have married and procreated with other straight-identified Salvadorian or Salvadorian-Americans (usually at least as light or lighter-skinned than themselves) that come from decent hardworking families and have managed to have pretty stable lives living close to the extended family unit. Three generations in my immigrant family has transitioned pretty seamlessly to the American Dream and all that it has to offer. Now to be sure, I respectfully recognize that cultural enclaves, strong conservative family bonds, and the maintaining of cultural traditions have been vital for survival, conservation, and even resistance of many Latinx immigrant families in the U.S. Yet as a queer mujer it is imperative for me to name and recognize the ways these things have been deeply violent for many of us that dare to seek and uncover the unknown and/or the unsaid.

If I have learned anything living in this reality, it’s that the tools that come from resisting Eurocentric forms of assimilation allows us the freedom to heal, remember, and grow as a people that have inherited 500+ years of colonization and war. We grow when we resist, we resist when we believe another reality is possible. We must help one another live beyond fear into that belief. We must affirm for one another that we can change our realities one act of courage at a time.

Nothing has made this more apparent to me than my choice to invite transparent and intentionally radical love into my life in the form of my partner. By doing this I have actively rejected the idea that a conservative light skin or white middle class man will save me. By doing this, I have taken the time to uncover/remember that Black and Brown two-spirit bodies have been walking with each other since before Columbus and other European colonists invaded our lands. I have reclaimed the stories that tell us we have shared sacred prayers, knowledge, and medicine for thousands of years; we have stood together in war, and we continue to stand, fall, and walk together still.

I was in Oakland, California when I learned about the massacre at the Pulse nightclub. By then I had spent the summer mourning daily the new names of black and brown bodies that were being assassinated all over this country. I sat in a qpoc meditation circle (because The Bay) in which we took turns telling each other we were sad, angry, and over all disconnected and confused about what we were feeling or what we thought we should be feeling. It was a collective sigh of desperation that there may be no room for love in our lives seemingly dictated by fear and death. This I felt was the most violent part of all.

Above all things, I have come to believe there must be room for serious consideration of love as a political strategy and resilience practice in the lives of queer people resisting ongoing colonization and genocide. Yet such love requires intentional and constant work, just like any other activist organizing strategy.

Choosing to live unapologetically in a queer interracial relationship amidst the timeless reality of Trump politics in the South has meant choosing to be courageous. It has meant intentionally delving into the ways historical and present day trauma has stunted and damaged my perceptions of self and my capacity to love without the assistance of whiteness or cis maleness. I struggle daily with the manifestations of personal trauma that affect my day to day ability to be kind, compassionate, patient, confident, vulnerable, and nurturing in my relationship. These are all skills I now know are necessary to maintain a loving and healthy partnership. These are all also skills that have been affected by multiple forms of violence. From internalized self-hate rooted in racism and homophobia, to emotional neglect, to alcoholism; the genealogies of trauma are revealing of the ways many of us have unlearned the power of love for more then seven generations.

Over these four years I have yelled different versions of “I don’t need this shit, I’m leaving!” many times over. I have done this only to humbly come back and uncover my visceral responses as manifestations of past experiences. Choosing my relationship with my partner meant choosing to intentionally be committed to this painful work (yay for counseling, literary resources like bell hooks, and long conversations with supportive friends!). I have come to understand that the emotional labor required of me in this relationship is endless and all encompassing. It means learning to understand my oppression as a mestiza mujer and also learning how to work through my anti-Blackness and be an ally to my Black gender-nonconforming partner. This has been truly painful, messy, and overwhelming. Yet at the end of the day, it’s the work I believe truly matters. This is healing work that I choose to do for myself, my beloved, my community, and the lineage of mujeres behind me and in front of me that are hungry for love and reconciliation of the violence that surrounds us.

Yet, as romantic as it sounds to engage love and partnership as a political practice, I would argue it might be the most difficult form of activism. At the end of the day there is nowhere to hide, no room to make excuses and justifications, no email to send that might buy you time. Love as activism for qpoc requires a great deal of humility, painful honesty, and endless courage on the most personal of all levels. It’s the ultimate form of accountability that I have encountered in my living. It requires you to take inventory of the things you have avoided in your life, the things you never had words for or the courage to sort through. It requires you to own up to your choices, your words, your action on and off screens, on and off microphones or megaphones. Love in partnership as colonized/racialized bodies is courageously undressing the walls we have built to survive and showing others the chaos that war has left behind.

By Pam Buchunam

I by no means claim to be an expert on this work or even greatly successful at it. I say this as I recall all the past and recent heartbreaking situations where I failed at embodying the politics of decolonizing love with people I truly care about. However, if you were to ask me now what I am most proud of I would tell you it is my dream to continue becoming a person I never saw or imagined I could be: a mujer free and whole, emotionally stable and grounded, living in love that is inexhaustible and without condition. As far as I can tell, these desire are not included in the makings of a fabricated “American Dream”. The dream that my parents so desperately hoped would save me. Yet ironically there is nothing like standing on the intersections of everything this country hates only to realize what this country or any other historically white institution is not capable of giving you: love. Love is something we must be courageous enough to choose for ourselves.

Poly Pocket: Gray Ace, Bi & Poly

When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.

Linh is a 22-year-old Vietnamese-American women who is bisexual, gray ace, and poly, and lives in the Bay Area. She is in one long-term committed relationship and is casually dating around with the hopes of finding other long-term partners, and works as a full-time content creator for a tech startup by day, writer of fiction and personal essays by night.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?

Linh: The first time I started exploring polyamory was when I was technically someone’s secondary partner. It was really strange because I went from being a serial monogamist to becoming someone’s secondary partner. It was such a drastic change and it really hurt my self-esteem I think. I don’t think I was emotionally ready to be in that position, and my partner lived really far away and didn’t deserve to deal with my jealousies and issues, so I decided to end that relationship.

It’s not all sad, though. That relationship sparked some discussion of polyamory in my current relationship. I realized that polyamory was perfect for me, but only when I felt ready for it (which I did and do with my current partner).

Carolyn: What was that initial discussion in your current relationship like? Was there a catalyst for it?

Linh: I had started hanging out with my current boyfriend near the end of that initial relationship so he knew that my ex-partner was polyamorous. That kicked off the conversation because he had never heard of polyamory before. We were also talking about our sexualities and he basically wondered if I felt stifled never having had long-term relationships with women (or much experience, really, outside of my first poly relationship). We loved each other, but he didn’t want me to feel like I couldn’t date and fall in love with women just because I was with him. It was a really open, honest, and vulnerable conversation and I was scared because I hear about how bisexual women are stigmatized and objectified, but my boyfriend never made me feel like that. I’m glad I’m exploring polyamory with him!

Carolyn: That’s such a great reaction! How long ago was that? How have things evolved since?

Linh: It’s been around a year now! We opened up our relationship summer of 2015 and it’s been great! Jealousy isn’t really an issue with the two of us so we’ll talk openly about dates and crushes and it’s totally fine. Once in a while I’ll go on a date that, after I tell him how it goes, he’ll tell me it made him uncomfortable and so we’ll talk about why and come up with rules from there. The way we go about evolving our poly relationship is really organic in that way.

As for how dating is going for me personally, it’s been tough to: (a) find queer women to date (though Tinder helps) and (b) find queer women who aren’t looking for a threesome buddy. I’ve met plenty of cool people, but haven’t really had a connection with most so I can’t say I’ve found another partner yet. Being gray ace and an introvert makes it tough for me to find people I click with romantically and sexually so it’s probably gonna take a while before I find another partner haha. It’s been fun, though!

Carolyn: What reasons might there be for developing a new rule? What sort of negotiations take place around them?

Linh: Well, mostly it’s from things that we can’t predict! For example, I went on a date with this woman once and it went pretty well. However, near the end I somehow suddenly ended up hanging out with both her boyfriend and her (I think I was walking her to her car, but then it turned out her boyfriend was there and was expecting to meet me). It made me feel weird because, to me, that’s like if you brought a close family member or your best friend on a first date — it’s just awkward. My boyfriend was uncomfortable because he felt like it wasn’t a date with me and one other person, but rather a date with a couple which is something we never thought to discuss before. From then on, we decided that going on dates with couples, intentionally or unintentionally, was a no-no.

Basically, if someone feels like something’s fishy or weird, then that person’s feelings have to be first priority and decisions are made accordingly. It’s been working out for us so far because we generally have the same vibes given the same situation.

“Basically, if someone feels like something’s fishy or weird, then that person’s feelings have to be first priority.”

Carolyn: How does your relationship shift in any other ways when you date or crush on someone new?

Linh: It involves a lot of playful teasing and advice-giving! We both get super flustered with new crushes (as most people do!) and I find it super cute to see him in that phase again, and I know he finds it charming when I’m all blushy and crushy too. It adds a new layer of excitement to our relationship. Similar to how your best friend would be super excited to hear you have a crush on the local Starbucks barista.

He has a lot more experience flirting with women than I do, so I always ask him for advice on, say, response texts or asking women out. He also comes to me when he wants a second pair of eyes at a flirty message, too.

Carolyn: I love that kind of compersion! What’s the best part? What sometimes feels like a struggle?

Linh: The best part isn’t even the dating, tbh. The best part is feeling open and honest with my best friend/lover! In a different relationship, I can imagine feeling this inner turmoil of never getting to explore my queer identity and further digging myself into this hole of feeling “not queer enough,” all because I’d primarily been in heteronormative relationships and am generally femme-presenting. Being poly with my boyfriend makes me feel like myself in a truly indescribable way.

The struggle is the dating lol.

Like I mentioned before, I’m gray ace and introverted so it takes a while for me to open up to people and it’s hard to even be attracted to people. I think I was a serial monogamist before because once I fall for someone, I fall hard — there’s really no in-between for me. It’s super rare, that’s all. Tinder’s great for helping me find queer girls to date, but it’s a terrible way for me to find someone I could be attracted to so it’s all been a real hit-or-miss for me.

And this is a cliche poly answer for a reason, but the other trouble is time. On top of spending time with my boyfriend, I have lots of side hobbies and family and friends I’d like to spend time with so spreading time between it all is already hard as it is. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to meet up with a stranger who I may or may not hit it off with.

Carolyn: Time management is such a real problem though! When I was first learning about poly I read a lot of things that distill to “infinite love, finite time,” and nothing about that has changed over the years. Do you have any boundaries with how you spend your time, or any ways of managing it across all types of relationships?

Linh: “Infinite love, finite time” describes it perfectly!

I wish I had a more concrete answer to your question, but I don’t think I’ve progressed far enough in my other poly relationships to know the boundaries that will have to be set. So far, all of our rules have been pretty organic so I imagine when the time comes, the boundaries set will come about organically as well.

Carolyn: Above you alluded to something you’ve spoken about a lot on Twitter: the intersection of your queer, Asian-American, femme and gray-ace identities. Where does poly intersect with these?

Linh: I think the idea that all of these identities exist in a single person is all at once radical and stereotypical. For a long time, I was afraid I was living out a stereotype. I was afraid I was a “greedy” bisexual, greedy in the sense that I’m poly. Asian/Asian-American women are sexualized and fetishized as is, so my “greedy bisexual” identity made me feel like I was a “bad queer,” someone who took away from the community more than I could ever possibly give to it. I felt like my identity was false, even though I knew it was my truth.

It took me a while to see my identity as not a stereotypical one, but a radical one. It’s one thing to think bisexuals are “greedy” and that Asian-American women are sex objects. But it’s another to accept that a bisexual, poly, Asian-American woman exists and is in full control of her own sexual and ethnic identity. Being queer, Asian-American, femme, and gray ace — this is my identity and I get to choose that that means to me. Not anybody else. My identity isn’t any less of a queer identity because somebody out there decided to take it and twist it into something else. My identity, and all of its intersections, is just one of the many beautiful identities that exists. And they are all just as valid as any other.

“I felt like my identity was false, even though I knew it was my truth. It took me a while to see my identity as not a stereotypical one, but a radical one.”

I’d like to touch on being gray ace and poly for a second. When people think of polyamory, they usually imagine a huge orgy or someone who’s having sex with a lot of people. In my case, that’s not what’s happening at all (power to the people living their lives like this, though! It’s just not for me). I just know in my heart that I am capable and willing to love more than one person — sex or no sex. I’ve already felt this love for some of my friends while I was in perfectly happy relationships before. I thought it was platonic love before, but looking back now, I’m confident that it was romantic love. None of it escalated to sex, but I was happy regardless with our relationship. Not all poly people are in it for the sex. When I say I am capable of loving more than one person, I really do mean it. Just love would be enough for me.

Carolyn: That is really beautiful! …That is geeky but it’s also true. What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working toward or hoping for?

Linh: Ideally I’d be in a triad with my boyfriend and another woman and we’d be a happy little family! It’d be cool if we were all in love with each other, but if my boyfriend and partner were just good friends I’d be perfectly happy with that too ☺️

Poly Pocket: Building Intentional Community and Relationship Anarchy

When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.

Josie Kearns is a 33-year-old queer, polyamorous, white, trans woman living in Chicago. She has been married for 12 years and also has a long-term girlfriend. She just left her job as a production manager for a local theatre for a hiatus, which she’s spending mostly with her two kids (ages seven and one). She also lives in an intentional community and helps organize Chicago’s poly scene.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Carolyn: When and how did you start to explore polyamory?

Josie: I started exploring it about five years ago. My wife and I had been married monogamously for seven years prior to that, and after we read Sex at Dawn, a book on non-monogamy, together and decided it fit us. A friend recommended it, and we brought it on a trip not even really knowing what it was. Then we started reading it and were like, “oh shit…” We ended up trading off the book the whole vacation, and on the plane ride home made the decision to give it a shot.

It was boring at first. We spent six months or so not doing anything but talking about it. Doing more reading, etc. Then I got on OKCupid and the first person I messaged blew up into a crazy intense relationship overnight. That made it harder. ☺

Carolyn: What is your relationship situation now?

Josie: My wife and I are still together, in a relationship that’s evolved into something that’s mostly platonic (though still really awesome). I also have a serious girlfriend, we’ve been together nearly two years, and a third person who lives far away but we keep in touch and flirt and get together when we can. My wife also has a boyfriend who lives with us and helps raise our kids, so even though we aren’t partners he’s really part of my relationship situation too.

“I find it much more meaningful to say, ‘I’m choosing to do this because I care about you and I know it will feel good to you,’ than to say, ‘I’m doing this because it obeys our rules.'”

Even though I dislike the pretentiousness of the label, I identify pretty strongly now with the idea of relationship anarchy. To me it means that my partners and I don’t control our relationships with other people — we set boundaries, but we don’t ask to enforce rules on each other. I find it much more meaningful to say, “I’m choosing to do this because I care about you and I know it will feel good to you,” than to say, “I’m doing this because it obeys our rules.”

Carolyn: What do you find most exciting about that approach? What’s about it is a struggle?

Josie: For me the most exciting part of it is that freedom. I probably romanticize it, but I feel a deep connection with someone when we are both in essence saying to each other, “hey, we’re defining exactly what we want this relationship to look like, and we’re both choosing every part of it of our own free will.”

I think the biggest struggle is that anarchy is a scary word. If a partner is feeling insecure it’s easy for them to say, “well you believe in relationship anarchy, that means you’re just going to do whatever the hell you want regardless of how it affects me.” I don’t view it that way at all, and I dislike the term for that reason. But I’ve had that conversation a couple of times.

Carolyn: Do any of your other partners or metamours practice different styles of poly? What’s it like negotiating between them?

Josie: I think we all have our own views on it. Most of my polycule doesn’t identify with the anarchy term, and there can be hurt feelings stemming from the differences in how we view things. But at the end of the day all of our styles are so much more similar than different, it’s not something that has a big impact on our relationships. If someone gets into a relationship with me they do so knowing that I will never give them the right to control me, and I might do so knowing that they may have another partner who does have that kind of control. It’s still a choice we both make to be together.

Carolyn: Tell me about your polycule! What relationships are there between metamours? How did it develop? What drew you to that more family-style poly network instead of a looser arrangement?

Josie: The family-style network is the main reason I was interested in polyamory to begin with. I love, love, love the concept of having a big intimate chosen family. I live in an intentional community for the same reason.

I don’t know how the family aspect will end up looking long term. At the moment my main group is a big string of people — to one side my wife and her boyfriend, to the other my girlfriend, her husband, and his long-term girlfriend. Most of us have some less serious relationships too, but those are the biggies. And on that string I’d say everyone is super close with their immediate metamours — the ones two steps away on the chain — but as you get farther away on the chain the bonds are less tight. The two extreme ends of the chain haven’t even met each other, I don’t think. So as a group we aren’t really a family at this point.

The intentional community came from my wife and me as well — we both were really drawn to the idea and bought a big house a couple of years ago. It came with five bedrooms and we built three more, so now there are eleven people living here altogether. Not everyone is poly, or queer, or genderqueer, but we have a lot of all three of those categories, and everyone is super sex positive. It’s a pretty fun group.

Carolyn: That sounds incredible! But also potentially challenging. When issues come up, how do you handle them?

Josie: It’s a LOT of talking. But for us it’s worth it.

Carolyn: Above, you mention you and your wife have children together and your wife’s boyfriend lives with you and helps raise them. What’s it like practicing polyamory and having children? (And it sounds so normie to ask “what do the kids think” but I’m also genuinely curious, what do they think? I’m imagining one extra person and then the rest of the intentional community to maybe get attention from but also in trouble with.)

Josie: Ha, yeah. The kids are seven and one, so the older one is just starting to register that our family doesn’t look like everyone else’s. But he still views adults by their relationships to him more than each other. So he basically has three parents and then some really close adult friends. Last year he didn’t want to invite any other kids to his birthday party, he just wanted the adults.

But overall we don’t hide anything from them, and we don’t go out of our way to explain it either. We just act like it’s normal, because for us it is, and then if he asks questions we’ll answer them.

Carolyn: How do your relationships or family shift when you date/sleep with/build a relationship with someone new?

Josie: The shift just sort of happens naturally. If one of us starts casually dating or sleeping with someone new, it doesn’t affect the family any more than it would if one of us started hanging out with a new friend. The existence of sex in the dynamic is pretty irrelevant to anyone who’s not actively participating in it.

If one of us starts building a new relationship, then the person would gradually start being around more and getting to know everyone more. When my girlfriend and I started dating, we spent a lot of time alone, but then she’d come hang out with me and my wife, or my roomies, or my kids. Now she has stuff in our bathroom, my kids get excited when she visits, and when she walks into the kitchen for coffee in the morning the roomies all ask her about her husband and her dogs and her job. It feels pretty boring and normal, to be honest.

“I think people get ideas in their heads that we have raucous sex parties, or elaborate drama, or something. Most of the time our days look just like anyone else’s — get the kids to school, get to work, whose turn is it to make dinner. There are just more people involved.”

Carolyn: That also sort of sounds like the dream though!

Josie: Oh it’s incredible! There’s so much love.

I think people get ideas in their heads that we have raucous sex parties, or elaborate drama, or something. Most of the time our days look just like anyone else’s — get the kids to school, get to work, whose turn is it to make dinner. There are just more people involved.

It’s more complicated in some ways, but in others it’s quite a bit simpler. It’s a lot easier for my wife and me than it is for most couples with small kids to get out on a date night.

Carolyn: How does polyamory function within your understanding of yourself?

Josie: I used to be really closed off to who I was. This, to me, is about honesty. I’m someone who wants lots of people around, who wants to be intimate with lots of people, who wants a huge family and sexual exploration.

When I was monogamous I had walls up — I’d hang out with someone but there were things I couldn’t do, couldn’t say, couldn’t think. There were rules. Now, if I want to kiss them, I do! Or whatever. It’s much more honest. And from that honesty comes intimacy, and from there, community.

It’s also freed me up to be a lot more honest about other aspects of my identity too. The whole experience has been incredibly liberating.

Carolyn: What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working towards or hoping for?

Josie: I’m not sure! There are lots of different scenarios I could picture living in and being completely happy. Most of them, though, revolve around this idea of family. Having a tight network of life partners and their life partners, living our lives together. Maybe it’s in this house, maybe a bunch of us move to a farm together, maybe we still have little groups that keep separate lives long term but come together in specific ways. I don’t know. It’s less about a specific vision than it is a feeling. Sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, somewhere, someday, and having this loving, intimate family with us. That’s the kind of stuff I think about.

Poly Pocket: Solo Poly Without Hierarchy

Welcome to the second introduction to Poly Pocket, a new series about polyamory! When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket will look at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own. Poly Pocket is opening with more than one post because I love getting meta; after today, look for this series twice a month.

Zaynab Shahar is a queer, black, Muslim (Sufi), fat, femme, cis woman living in Chicago. She is an academic the@logian and first year doctoral student at the Chicago Theological Seminary, an activist and a creative writer. She practices solo poly.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?

Zaynab: I knew about polyamory as a teenager. I vividly remember seeing the first edition of The Ethical Slut at Women & Children First when I was 16 years old. But it wasn’t until age 20/21 that I started exploring polyamory for myself as a viable option, reading books and trying to understand it better. After that I started identifying as polyamorous.

The first time I began to practice it was my senior year in college. I was having a casual relationship with another black femme that I was introduced to through mutual friends. We both were in a space of not wanting to be monogamous, not wanting to put labels on what we were doing, but also having those conversations about what it would mean for us to be sexually and/or romantically active with other people and how we would navigate safer sex and jealousy.

Carolyn: Where did those conversations lead?

Zaynab: It led to us being able to process those things at various moments. Granted, it didn’t always go well, but we made the effort when jealousy arose to acknowledge it and work through it.

Currently I am solo poly. For me this means I don’t have a primary partner nor am I dating with the goal of placing people on a hierarchy of primary/secondary/etc. I’m dating multiple people to have relationships and see where it goes and not really focus on having hierarchy right now.

“When I look to the future, my relationships play a role but are neither the sole thing on my horizon line nor the largest.”

Carolyn: What attracted you to a non-heirarchical approach, and to solo poly?

Zaynab: I realized how often within poly culture, especially now that it’s mainstreaming, hierarchical poly seems like filling the slots in a march madness bracket. I feel it creates a pressure to have a primary and secondary and fill the rows down the line in order for it to be seen as “legitimate” in the eyes of a monogamous dominant culture. But there’s not a whole lot of emphasis placed on actually being present in a relationship and developing the skills necessary for it to be healthy. For example, I’m currently casually dating someone who is really intent on hierarchal poly but from my perspective doesn’t have a working definition of what it means to have a healthy/unhealthy relationship, and I’ve seen the unhealthy relationships play out in various ways. Meanwhile, this person is constantly asking me, “When can we be ‘official’?” and in my head the focus shouldn’t be on making it official before doing that hard work, it should be on beginning to do that hard work in the process of getting to know one another and as part of deciding whether you want to be official in any sense of the term.

Now as for solo poly, I think that fell into my lap given the state of my life. I’m a full time graduate student, which is very demanding. I’m also a full-time organizer for Third Coast Queer Muslims as well as other various queer faith and liberation oriented projects. In terms of priorities I felt the need to prioritize myself and my wellbeing over trying to say “this is my primary, this is my secondary,” etc. It gives me the freedom to acknowledge that at this point in time “settling down” really isn’t on my agenda in the way it might be for others. When I look to the future, my relationships play a role but are neither the sole thing on my horizon line nor the largest. I still see myself as having an academic career, being a thriving activist and even artist, and having people around me who support that while understanding how demanding that can be.

Carolyn: You mentioned to me earlier that your poly is heavily rooted in anti-oppression praxis. What’s the theory behind that for you? What does it look like in practice?

Zaynab: Quite a number of things written about polyamory out there fail to really take oppression seriously as something that impacts the ability to have multiple relationships. So when I say my poly is rooted in anti-oppression praxis, I’m saying I want to be mindful of the way that dating another person might visit forms of oppression on me or how I’m able to do that to another person.

For example, one of the people I’m casually dating is younger than me. I try to constantly be aware of how age is a form of power that can be wielded oppressively. There are older people who date younger folx for epically predatory reasons, particularly to manipulate and control them, groom them into the ideal submissive partner. And when I think of my poly being rooted in anti-oppression praxis I think of how Thich Nhat Hanh essentially says that part of understanding and eradicating oppression is acknowledging the potential everyone has to be oppressive.

It may not manifest exactly in the same way along the same axis of power, but being a person who experiences oppression doesn’t exempt me from understanding how those things show up in my own behavior and learning how to change that. So yeah, I want to wake up every morning and believe that I’m not one of those older people who dates younger folx to be manipulative. But in order to do that I actually have to understand how that manipulation can show up and constantly check myself, reflect on my own behaviors, and be accountable for the things I say and do.

Carolyn: What about that is a struggle? What about it excites you?

Zaynab: It’s a struggle because I live in a social justice world, and I encounter so many folx who believe that just because they read the right things and say the right things that they understand what anti-oppressive relationships look like and therefore don’t have to do any work. I’ve dated people, primarily masculine black women and women of color, who thought just because we were both women there was no need for them to check their femmephobia, internalized misogyny or patriarchy at the door. I’ve ended relationships because those partners were not willing to do the work necessary to make me feel safe as a black femme within the relationship. So it’s a lot of loneliness involved in finding people who understand that if your anti-oppression praxis is only in the streets but not in the sheets, chances are you’re not really about that life.

What’s exciting to me is the new levels of queer intellectual and/or praxis production being done to combat these things. There was no The Revolution Starts at Home or Learning Good Consent when I was in emotionally abusive and toxic relationships as a teenager. The only thing available to me was the whole “mums the word” because people didn’t want the “dirty laundry” of interpersonal violence to tarnish efforts for marriage equality. I dealt with being emotionally abused, being stalked, being gaslit alone. So I’m excited to know that people are fed up enough to air the dirty laundry so loudly that people can’t help but hear it. And I want to play a role in not only airing the dirty laundry but having the conversations about healthy non-monogamous/polyamorous relationships, especially from a queer black feminist lens.

Carolyn: Turning to those healthy relationships: What for you is the key to doing that work and having those conversations within relationships?

Zaynab: The key for me is having conversations about tangible definitions and praxis. As an academic, I try not to assume everyone who’s reading my writing understands all of what I’m saying. Subsequently saying the word “consent” or “healthy relationship” means dramatically different things to different people. So it means actually sitting down and finding a working definition of consent that works for both of us, and understanding that it’s going to evolve as we grow and our needs change. It means being willing to share resources with each other to find shared language so mutual and individual needs can be met.

Like I’m not above having people read whole books if that’s what it takes. I sent my younger partner a link to Learning Good Consent. I routinely tell people who are new to poly to read Franklin Veaux’s More than Two. And the critical polyamorist is one of my favorite blogs hands down.

“Not leaning into change is a lot like staring at your house while it’s on fire.”

Carolyn: Within your relationships, how do you negotiate conflict? How do you negotiate change?

Zaynab: Conflict is something typically dealt with through conversation. Change for me is something I have to lean into because I’m not good with it. So when things change rapidly I don’t always respond well, so I’m trying to get better at meeting it where it is.

It is hard. But not leaning into change is a lot like staring at your house while it’s on fire. Staring at it burning doesn’t put out the fire. The act of putting out the fire is not only to stop it, but I think part of it is acknowledging what once was is no longer in the way you’re used to.

Carolyn: That’s such a good way to put it! Are there any logistics within/around your relationships that you’d like to discuss? Some people get really excited about ical, for example.

Zaynab: I think text messages are my digital logistic so to speak. I’ve yet to embrace calendars, and I think that has to do with having chronic pain and nothing for me really being set in stone. I can make plans ahead of time, but if I’m having a flare up then all bets are off. Subsequently, I enjoy carving out time to myself, so I’m reluctant to say “Tuesday is partner #1’s day” or some shit like that ’cause I don’t know how I’m gonna feel that Tuesday.

Carolyn: How does polyamory function within your understanding of yourself?

Zaynab: I don’t know that it really does. I’m not one of those people who thinks poly is the ultimate expression of queerness or radicalism. I’m poly because the thought of being monogamous puts me to sleep.

“The collective narrative around Muslims in society is that we’re monotheistic and dualistic. But I’m not, and that tends to be reflected in how I exude my faith and my polyamory practice as well.”

I will say, I do think being poly is a huge expression of my faith. I’m a Sufi dervish, I’m a heavy believer in non-duality, which is having more a both/and perspective verses either/or perspective on God and theology. So you’ll never catch me saying “There’s only one God.” I’m a little bit more of “There’s God, and then there’s Buddha, Spirit, the Orishas, some goddesses and some other things I’ve yet to encounter, and they’re all equally meaningful in expanding our view of the universe and the world we live in.” I recognize that’s a fairly unconventional view for a Muslim to hold, especially because the collective narrative around Muslims in society is that we’re monotheistic and dualistic. But I’m not, and that tends to be reflected in how I exude my faith and my polyamory practice as well.

So the way I see it, being polyamorous is at times the most honest expression of being a believer in non-duality the@logies out there. It means “I can date you, and you, and maybe even you and there’s no contradiction for me” the same way I can read the Qu’ran, zen koans or books on witchcraft and find meaning in all of them as they are, from the traditions and localities they emerge from.

Carolyn: You mentioned above that academia, activism and art are likely to be the biggest parts of your life on the horizon. But in terms of relationships, what do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working towards or hoping for?

Zaynab: In my perfect world, my futuristic poly utopia, I want to have an off-the-grid urban farm that supports the periods of my life where I want to live solo but also accommodate partners who want to live with me, whether permanently or for the duration of our relationship. I’d love to have live-in partners in the future, because I want to raise children in a radically green poly homestead.

You Need Help: Talking to Your Family About Your Partner’s Pronouns

by Maddie and Audrey

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

Q:

My awesome partner is thinking about going by they/them pronouns. I’ve found it easy to use these in queer spaces, but a lot harder to use it around straight cis people with limited genderqueer/trans knowledge. My partner presents pretty femme so people usually are confused when they don’t use she. I want to be supportive, but I’m anxious about introducing the topic to older relatives. Most internet stuff is directed toward the person going through the identity changes, and rightfully so, but some guidance on how I can help my partner navigate this would be rad.

A:

Hello wonderful person! We, Audrey and Maddie, have teamed up to offer you some ideas and feedback. Audrey is a genderqueer human whose identity mostly involves waving their arms in the air and running away. They use they/them pronouns and tolerate she/her pronouns. Maddie is a queer cis woman who uses she/her pronouns. She has talked to her family a bunch about using they/them pronouns correctly for her partners and friends.

Audrey: Sweet letter writer, I want to tell you that your partner is very lucky to be with someone who genuinely wants to affirm them even when the going gets tough. I hope you don’t mind if I frame this in terms of my own experience, because in some ways, my partner Wynn is a better advocate for me than I am for myself. I tell a lot of people about my pronouns, but I rarely correct them if they use she/her because of a brutal mix of insecurity, anxiety and my compulsion to make others feel comfortable at my own expense. In fact, I’m much more likely to correct people about other people’s pronouns than my own. But around Wynn’s coworkers, family and friends, she gently and consistently reminds them of my pronouns every single time. She teaches her older gay male colleagues about genderqueer and non-binary identities and gender-neutral pronouns. When we’re at check-out counters, she refers to me with they pronouns whether the clerk looks confused or not.

By Anna Archie Bongiovonni

This makes life easier in a lot of ways, but there’s also this: Wynn’s loving and determined use of the pronouns I like best makes me believe that I might just deserve to feel that good. She makes me feel brave about telling my friends and reminds me that I have the power to ask and perhaps some day even insist that people follow through. But she also never pressures me or judges me if I’m in a space where I don’t feel comfortable or safe using they pronouns. If we are in a new environment or around my family, she always checks in about what I want her to do in that space. It’s a kind of solidarity I never knew I could have in a partner, and it blows my mind.

Sweet letter writer, I can tell from your letter that you want to be that kind of partner, and I promise you it’s possible. Not everyone will get it, but most people — unless they’re confrontational assholes — will just accept what you tell them. They may not “believe” it, whatever that means, but most people will do what you ask even if it’s not in good faith. In a way, it’s easier coming from you. They can’t as easily argue with you, devoted partner, about someone else’s gender. You and your partner could work together on a 1-3 sentence explanation you can use, kind of like an elevator speech. It can be something like this:

“Just so you know, like many people, my partner uses they/them pronouns, which have been used as a singular pronoun for centuries. I realize this may be hard for you to understand or remember, but it’s really important to both of us that you make an effort.”

In that vein, it’s definitely ideal for you and your human to discuss just how hard you should push. Do they want you to correct people in front of them or in the middle of a conversation? Or would they rather you pull someone aside or text that person to remind them about your partner’s pronouns?

One of the most important things you can do is affirm your partner. It sounds like they are still in the process of deciding how to navigate pronouns and what feels right to them. They probably won’t need you to tell your sweet great grandma right away, ya know? This is a journey you two can take together, and you will both learn a lot, screw up some, and find the ways that feel right and work for you. If they are feeling hurt by people who don’t want to use their pronouns or just by a long day of having to gender in the world, listen to them and ask how you can help ease the stress.

Maddie It’s true. You probably won’t need to explain this all to your sweet great grandma tomorrow, but at some point, depending on your partner’s needs, that might become the thing that needs to happen. I have had conversations with 3/3 living grandparents about gender-neutral pronouns in various contexts, over multiple years, making reference to multiple partners and friends. There are a lot of ways for that conversation to go.

From my experience, even the most well-intentioned, liberal, gay-friendly older people have no idea how to deal with gender-neutral pronouns when they learn about them for the first time. (Honestly, they don’t even have to be that old.) What I’ve discovered is that with older relatives, if you want them to use the right pronouns for your partner, you’re probably going to need to make some time to have a real conversation (or several real conversations) with them. Otherwise, they will be confused and default to gendering everyone the way they’re used to doing.

When you do sit down with your relative, don’t make the conversation confrontational. This is not a test for your parents or grandparents. It’s about making your family a safe place for your partner. Chances are, your relatives want your partner to feel welcome, and using your partner’s correct pronouns are a way for your relatives to extend that welcome.

First of all, make sure you introduce the concept of “they” as a singular pronoun. The elevator speech Audrey explained is awesome. If you just say, “My partner uses they pronouns,” it will probably not get through. I’ve done this in the past, and I have had a variety of reactions, ranging from completely ignoring me, to a who’s-on-first-esque conversation where my family thought my partner identified as more than one person, which was not the case.

Give your relative some examples. Tell them other things about your partner using the singular they and them, both so your relatives get used to hearing they/them and so they know more things about your partner than what their pronouns are. Even though we do use the singular they all the time without thinking about it, it’s important to affirm that adapting to it is a learning process. Explain that if they mess up, it’s not the end of the world.

By Anna Archie Bongiovonni

Your relative will likely have questions. Answer them if they are reasonable. Respectfully and emphatically refrain from answering questions about the gender your partner was assigned at birth or what genitals they have, unless your partner has explicitly told you they want these types of questions answered. These are really personal questions and not appropriate for you to share, and that’s all you need to say in response, no matter how curious someone may be.

In my own experience, I’ve had family members who aren’t against my partner’s gender, per se, but who have had suggestions of other pronouns or approaches to gender my partner could adapt. If this comes up, tell your relative to get over themselves in the nicest way you can. Explain that your partner’s pronouns are not a rhetorical exercise or puzzle. Remind your relative that making you and your partner feel welcome in the family is more important than stubborn feelings on grammar. Point your relative to articles that point out that the singular “they” is used all the time, and that the argument that the singular “they” is incorrect is misguided and irrelevant.

There is also the possibility that some of your family members are excited about your partner, eager to be supportive, but just cannot remember or internalize an unfamiliar way of speaking because they are old and their brains aren’t wired to learn in that way anymore. Audrey and I experienced this recently, when they came to visit me and we stayed with my grandmother. (FTR Audrey and I aren’t partners, but all this stuff still applies with best friends.)

Audrey It’s true! Maddie handled it in a way that made me feel really safe. First, she asked me in advance how I wanted me her talk to her grandmother about my pronouns. We agreed that the most important thing would be to make her aware of my chosen pronouns and explain that Maddie would be using they/them for me. Maddie had the conversation before our trip, and Phyllis admitted that it would be really hard for her to remember. In the end, Phyllis referred to me with she/her pronouns the whole weekend, and Maddie used they/them. This was fine! But also, this may not work for everyone. In my case, she/her is not ideal and always catches my ear funny, but I don’t experience it as misgendering. However, if your partner, now or in the future, feels like they/them are the only appropriate pronouns, you will have to figure out other strategies to help the people in your life get it right. Share the load with your partner and take the heat when necessary.

Maddie We’ve mostly focused on the mechanics of introducing they/them pronouns to family members, but you also mentioned that your partner is femme and that people are sometimes confused when they don’t use she. This is really important to be aware of and ready for. When it comes to your older relatives, they likely won’t have internalized the false assumption common to queer communities that nonbinary identities and they/them pronouns connote masc-of-center presentation. But as my femme nonbinary partner pointed out to me, you still might hear “but your partner looks like a girl!” because people generally have a hard time with the distinction between what is femme and what is female. You can do the work of helping your family understand nonbinary identities in a framework that honors and lifts up your partner and their gender.

By Anna Archie Bongiovonni

Finally, after you’ve had conversations with your family and it comes time for your fam and your partner to share space, try not to make it weird! Use their pronouns as you would in everyday conversation, without flinching or pausing. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the point isn’t for your relatives to pass a test on pronouns. The point is to help your family build the tools they need so that your partner feels safe and welcome around your relatives.

Love Letters Across the Atlantic: How Distance Changes Your Relationship

It’s late June as I stand on my girlfriend’s balcony in Stockholm overlooking the paths that wind around the collection of apartment buildings. I am momentarily frozen in fear and sudden-onset nausea by a thought that seems mundane.

“What’s going to happen to my plants when I’m gone?”

This was the first time I had allowed myself to complete a thought about leaving since my arrival in Sweden two months ago. The first time I allowed reality to sink in again. After several weeks of refusing to talk about it and shutting down conversations on the topic of our limited time, the realization was here to stay. Of course, I knew she would take care of my tiny herb garden just as well as she looks after me. She’s good like that. But I would leave and they would grow up from their seedling states and by the time I saw them again, they would be unrecognizable.

We can only see each other for a maximum of three months at a time due to Swedish and United States visa restrictions. A day longer, and we’re at risk for deportation. If deported, we won’t be allowed back in the country for years. January through March, Agnes had saved up her money working a day care job to stay with me and my roommates in upstate New York. June through August, I stay with her in Stockholm, making a living writing from home.

It’s not as if she’ll be gone from my life when I leave Sweden. We’ll still talk every day: about the daily occurrences in our lives, the people in them, offering support to one another to fight away all the deep dark fears we both have. But when we make that change, and my girlfriend goes back to living in my phone like Samantha from Spike Jonez’s Her, things will be radically different.

To date long distance then live with the other in person is to be in two versions of the same relationship. One wishes desperately for the future and is fueled by daydreams of the past; the other tries to make every waking moment something special and ignores the fact that time is passing, whether we like it or not.

One of my first memories of being with Agnes is also one of my favorites. We had been out drinking in an out-of-the-way pub in Gamla stan. I had been denied entry into several bars because bouncers thought my New York State ID was a fake. But this particular pub had barely given it a second look. Several Coronas, maybe a shot or two later, our group was fucked up and marching through medieval alleyways in early January. Agnes walked away from me, my girlfriend at the time, and a mutual friend of theirs. She said nothing, knocked over a Christmas tree onto the cobblestone, and started dragging it behind her. I ran up to her, overjoyed for some reason, thrust my hand into the pine needles, and carried the other end. We arrived at a convenience store several blocks away and she gently set the bottom on the ground and I helped ease it against the wall. She went into the store and I stood outside beaming, admiring how perfect it looked there.

When we’re gone, I tell her this story at least once a week. It’s a story that I tell mostly for me, because whenever I talk about it, I remember how good I can feel next to her. We both do this, tell stories about the good times to keep going until we get to see one another again. Even now, when we’re living with one another and have been for months, I’m still in the habit of saying “Remember when…” and she responds, “Well yeah, that just happened yesterday.”

There’s a pressure that enters the relationship when we’re cohabitating; pressure to use up all of the time we have creating new memories, just to get us through the next stretch of absence. It’s worse for Agnes than it is for me; she has a clearer perception of the future than I do, and now that I’m in her country, she feels pressured to chart out our days so that each is its own fantastic journey. It becomes hard to just relax with one another and let that be okay, not knowing how these memories will hold up.

Our lesbian urge to merge is real. This underlying current of codependency that runs through our relationship increases when living in the other’s time zone. Some of the reasons for this are practical, like me not knowing how to get anywhere on the subway because I was too cheap to pay for an international data plan, so now she’s my constant navigator. Or the fact that we never really learned how to do laundry in the other’s country.

Add to that the constant feeling of time passing by, and the nagging fear that if we aren’t careful, it’ll be gone before we’ve had time to accept it. There’s no taking time out for yourself when time together is a commodity that’s constantly running out. We need to soak up every second when we’re together. While most couples feel like they have all the time in the world, we know that we don’t.

When our time is up I’ll spend a full day travelling, unable to contact her for almost all of it. There’s a special feeling of isolation in those hours that I struggle to define. I’ll return to my unbelievably supportive moms, and friends that have become my family through the years. The thought of being reunited with everyone is exciting in its own way, but I’ll be separated from my person. She will walk around a house full of things that I have touched, maybe find a forgotten shirt or two, and fall asleep by herself in a bed that still smells like me.

Photo by Agnes Tesch

Every time, it’s a grieving process. There is no gradual change, no halfway point, just a day of radio silence then we go back to living without one another and telling each other stories over the phone. She’ll send me mixtapes, photos, bead bracelets and letters written on paper scraps. I’ll send her odd little presents, tidy letters and poems. Once, she sent me a book of Swedish poetry with notes about love and jumbled thoughts shoved in between the pages on multicolored pieces of ripped paper and sticky notes. Once, I sent her a poetry chapbook I made for her with pages ripped from my journal, red thread, pressed flowers, lots of glue and sturdy bits of the light blue softcover book where I first got published in high school. It helps to have something sentimental to hold in your hand.

The hardest thing about LDRs is the eventual discovery that another person, no matter how much you lie around pining for them and missing them, will not be the solution to all of your problems. It’s easy to project your issues onto the absence of someone significant in your life. To say, “If only she was here everything would be better.” The reality is, some things are better for me when I’m around her. But some things don’t change.

On the phone, we would argue about me being dismissive sometimes, or not present enough in serious conversations. I told myself that these problems were just issues when your only source of communication is Skype and Facebook Messenger. “When she comes here to live with me,” I thought, “These issues will go away. I can be physically comforting without knowing what to say.” Turns out, even in person I’m not always tremendously comforting. It didn’t occur to me that a hug might be the last thing someone suffering from tremendous amounts of anxiety might want.

Photo by Agnes Tesch

We used to gossip with one another about petty issues with others, and now we have petty issues with one another. I have a constant, somewhat narcissistic fear that something terribly wrong has happened or will happen, and it’s going to be my fault. She’s the most emotionally intense person I’ve ever met and doesn’t use “compliment sandwiches” when asking me for something. This leads to intense arguments at least once a week, focused on the dishes, or turning the lights off, or my tone. These tend to end with us sobbing, holding on to one another, apologizing, explaining ourselves to the degree most would reserve for therapy and saying some incredibly endearing things.

The most important thing to remember about dating long distance: your issues won’t fly off into the sunset when you travel to your significant other. All the background issues get drowned out in the excitement of seeing your lady love for the first time in a long time. After a while of getting comfortable and getting past the shock, the relationship starts to evolve into something more. When you’ve gone so long without seeing the person, you’re able to appreciate the odd things that don’t come into play over the phone. These can be details like the kitchen lights constantly being on, post-workout stank, maybe even snoring.

The exciting thing about being in a long distance relationship is how everything about being near your partner feels exciting. How the necessity of constant emotional communication to keep things going despite the distance leads to a sense of closeness that’s hard to find otherwise. All relationships are beautiful wrecks in their own way, but the special thing about LDRs is the constant choice to keep working on a relationship with someone, feeling committed enough that you’re willing to cross oceans to be with them.

You Need Help: How Soon Is Too Soon To U-Haul, Get Married, Have Ten Babies, Be Together Forever and Ever and Ever and Ever?

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

Q:

My girlfriend and I have been together for almost 4 months now and I am HEAD OVER HEELS OMG SO IN LOVE WITH THIS GIRL LIKE WHOA. All I want to do is U-Haul so hard and I don’t want to stop there. I want to marry this girl. I want to marry this girl right now and start a family.

Overall I’m a pretty slow moving, cautious person. I’ve had other relationships that have lasted years (read: YEARS) and only sometimes thought, “yeah, I could MAYBE marry this girl, but maybe I should wait to be sure…” But this girl, I know. I JUST KNOW I want to be with her forever.

We were friends for several months before dating but I’ve still only really known her for less than a year. So logically I understand that it’s too soon to move in and definitely too soon to elope. Right? RIGHT?!

But in my heart of hearts I know that I’ve found her. I’ve found the one. The one that I want to be with forever and ever. The one that makes me a better person and who loves me for me. The person I love and want to be with all the time. The person I think is just so great and just so great for me.

So I need help. I need to be talked down from this crazy ledge. Or do I? Maybe I need a hopeless romantic to give me a little validation that sometime when you know, you know – and that’s okay. I don’t know what I need. I need help. Am I being crazy?

A:

You’re being in love! Being in love is a LOT like being crazy, especially at the start. Your skin is on fire, your teeth itch, you feel like 3-4 body parts are on the verge of explosion at any given moment. How did we get so lucky?, Oh my gosh this girl! This girl! I wouldn’t say I’m a “hopeless romantic,” but I believe in big feelings, unstoppable forces and not-so-tangible energies that make me vulnerable to the feelings you say you’re feeling so I’m not gonna talk you down. I’m gonna congratulate you on finding a magical thing, and then we’re gonna talk about what to do about this thing.

New Relationship Energy is a high, right? It’s a high. You feel high right now! And you don’t want it to end. Sometimes these choices — getting an apartment, getting engaged, getting married — are methods of maintaining that high, of ensuring there’s always something even MORE intense and devotional to do in order to feel that rush all over again. That’s one reason people make big decisions too quickly, but the other reason is that, as Harry famously told Sally, “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” You want to do these things because, well, you want to do these things!

But should you? Well, I’ve been a strong anti-U-Hauling advocate since before I knew what U-Hauling was — at 20, I’d radically misinterpreted my own personality and moved in with my boyfriend, who really liked eating at Hooters. Two weeks into our co-habitation I realized I’d made a terrible mistake, but we lived together, so it was hard to exit, and complicated, especially ’cause I’d been paying most of the bills.

I’ve resisted, since, opportunities to shack up too early, or at all. I’d been known to declare it “always a bad idea,” claim it “killed romance,” remind people that “you think it’s the same as just staying at each other’s place every night, but it’s not.” My ex-girlfriend and I took careful steps: nine months in the same town, a year in the same building, and then almost two years in the same apartment. (and then we broke up.)

And then I found my current person. Like you, I’d been in many relationships prior to this one and this one was markedly different. This was it! This was special! Just thinking about her looking at me and smiling made my stomach do flip-flops! (It still does, actually.) We’d only been together for a month when she left a farm in Oregon to be with me in California, but the rent where I lived in the Bay Area was astronomical. So either she’d move into my (still expensive but) rent-controlled place and we’d see each other constantly, or we’d find affordable apartments far away from civilization and never see each other at all. The first option was clearly the winner, but I still worried that we were gonna kill this thing before it started.

It didn’t. It was actually really fun, like we’d tricked our Moms into letting us have a sleepover every night! I mean when you’re first falling in love, any thing you get to do together, even grocery shopping or going to IKEA three times in one day, feels like the funnest thing you’ve ever done. (To be fair, that IKEA joy has never faded.) There was bickering, for sure, and it felt like a cruel crash-course in our assorted psychological triggers at times, but we made it, more excited about the future than ever. Less than a year later, we got engaged, moved across the country together, moved into a very small house with my Mom for five months, and then bought a giant house of our own and moved into it. Short of having a baby, we were officially on track to do everything way faster than recommended.

The good news is that we’re still together and still in love and still planning to spend our lives together. But for a minute there — shortly after moving into our house — it seemed like we might not make it after all. It was terrifying. And when we finally sat down and talked about our true feelings and desires and the kind of life we wanted, separately and together, a big thing that came up was choice.

As in: we’d never really had the chance to actively choose to be together — whether that meant have dinner together, take a vacation together, be monogamous, or design career paths with the other in mind. The way our life was set up was for all those things to be the default, and for doing things separately to be what required the extra effort.

Yeah, there are practical things worth eschewing U-Hauling in favor of putting off, like the possibility of occasionally feeling homicidal about one another’s various household chore-related inadequacies or the terror of financial logistics. But the real argument against moving too quickly into Official Commitments is that there’s a value in extending the period of time in which the way you build a life together is directed only by what’s in your heart and guts and brain, not by leases and legal documents and bill payments and shared sofas.

When you live separately, you choose to spend time together, and that choice is deliberate and special, it’s not a default. You choose whether or not you wanna have a sleepover even though you’re tired or cranky or sick or distracted, or you choose not to because of those reasons. You choose to invite her over when your friend is coming by rather than automatically turning friend-time into a group hang ’cause there’s only one living room and you’re both it. If you struggle with mental illness like I do and my partner does and many of us here do, it’s nice to be able to keep some of those “crying in bed in the morning for three hours” days to yourself for a while! When you live together, pretty much any time is a time you could have sex, which at first means you have sex all the time but then can eventually mean you never do because well, there’s always tomorrow, or next weekend?  (Look, I’ve read a lot of Lesbian Sex Surveys.) Even if you’re gonna choose spending every night together for the rest of your lives, the act of choosing and not doing it because you’re locked in to a lease or a marriage is an important act.

All that being said, we did everything “wrong” and we’re still okay! So it’s very possible that you could do everything wrong and also be okay. I don’t have any regrets. But if you DO have other options, I’d like to suggest considering them for a little while longer, or to at least wait until a practical time to make a change.

And, if you do move in together sooner rather than later, I’d suggest: radical honesty (don’t get passive aggressive, make room to be frank, don’t take household things personally), make lists for each other about your pet peeves and household desires right away, be clear about finances and get a two-bedroom or larger so you have the option of taking space from each other (and figure out how to do that without feeling insecure about it).

Remember that being in love doesn’t necessarily mean that you should want to spend every minute together, constantly be in touch, or rely on the other for all your basic life functions. But! Have fun. You’re in love! Follow your heart! You found her! GO FORTH AND BE MERRY.

Sincerely Forever,

Riese

ETA December 2017: The relationship I cited as “still okay” ended two months after this post was published, and the financial repercussions for me personally w/r/t home ownership when I needed to sell within a year of moving in were STRATOSPHERIC, just so you have the full picture here!! If I could add anything small to my advice, it’d be to avoid buying a fixer-upper in the middle of the country with only three (3) friends who live within a 3-hour radius of your home (and one of them is your mom) until you’ve known each other for a few years. And if you are buying a house, make sure you have a plan, in writing, for what will happen to it if you break up.

You Need Help: Will Studying Abroad Break Us Up?

feature image via Shutterstock

Q: Me and my girlfriend love each other dearly. However, I have been given the opportunity to study abroad, which may give me wonderful career chances I otherwise may not get. She is unable to accompany me for two years. We’ve tried long distance before for six months, and we barely got through it. In addition, she and I have different life plans (kids/place to live). I want to be with her, but I do not want to suffer through long distance again if we’re only going split up afterwards because of our different life plans. We are both afraid to confront this issue. What should I do?

A: Hello friend! First off, congratulations on being given the opportunity to study abroad! I studied abroad in Paris as an undergrad and I believe it changed me both for the better and for good. I recommend it to anyone who can make it happen. But I’m sorry you’re also feeling all these tough, mixed feelings as well. What could otherwise be an unmitigated celebration of getting this opportunity is bogged down a bit by relationship woes, and that sucks. There’s a lot going on here. Let’s unpack all of it.

First off, studying abroad and long distance, those aren’t necessarily death knells for a relationship, especially if part of what you love about each other is your drive and ambition. That’s how it is with my fiancée and I — even as we are getting married, we’re encouraging each other to apply for opportunities in other cities and other countries. Part of the price of admission for both of us is our focus on our careers, and because it’s the price of admission for both of us, it’s easier to deal with. If I apply for something that takes me to Europe for a year and I get it, we’ll figure it out. If she applies for something that takes her to Canada, well, we’ll figure that out too. But never will either one of us tell the other not to do something she really wants to, because neither one of us would appreciate being told not to do all the cool things we want to in our careers. And both of us have some pretty exciting goals.

While some of those goals are the same (we’re both on board for kids, for instance), a lot of them are very different from each other — I want to go back to live in Paris for a time, she does not. She wants to apply for opportunities in a lot of different US cities, some of which I actively dislike. But even in their disparity, what we have in common is our drive to pursue them. I love that about her, that she’s a genius with a badass career trajectory. She loves that I want to wander around the world telling people’s stories. We love each other so vigorously, so wholeheartedly. Every we day we get to support each other on our individual journeys, whether or not we’re right next to each other, is a joy. The rest, we’ll figure out.

I wanted to say that, that whole rambling paragraph, for those who may be reading this and grappling with some of the same issues — study abroad and long distance won’t kill a relationship if that relationship is strong and healthy. What I’m hearing here, however, isn’t that. When I first read your question, I thought this was going to be a simple talk about the price of admission for this one moment in your life. About how, if you both care about each other, it’s a question of whether or not you’re willing to pay the price to ride the ride — that price might be long distance for two years, or conversely it might be staying home from this great opportunity (which I am CERTAINLY NOT suggesting you do — such a thing almost always ends in resentment). But after your study abroad concern, you jumped to another one entirely: the lack of commonality in your goals. For some, that might not be a death knell either — it’s all about weight. For instance, back to the thing with the kids — I didn’t want them, or rather I wouldn’t have wanted them if my fiancée hadn’t. Whether or not I have kids in my life just isn’t that important to me. But it was the price of admission for my fiancée, and now I’m really psyched to do that with her (eventually, in five or ten years, timing is everything). I would be psyched to have them or not. Place to live is the same — I’m a writer, I can live a lot of different places. I can also travel a lot and still do my job. My fiancée goes to a building and works at a job where she has to be there, in the same physical space, every day. The way we decide on a place to live will be heavily weighted that way, because its more important to one party than it is to the other. We haven’t run up against a price of admission that we can’t pay for each other. But for you, it sounds like what’s happening is that each of your prices of admission—the goals and achievements you each want — are looking mutually exclusive to you as you progress in your relationship. This question isn’t actually about long distance or study abroad. This isn’t a simple price of admission talk, it’s a complex one.

Friend, that sucks because it feels like “well if it weren’t for this one thing, we’d be together.” But the things you want out of your life, the deal breakers, those prices, aren’t actually separable from the rest of you. They’re part of you. And for her, it’s the same. If she wants to live on a farm forever and that’s one of the most important aspects of her dreams, I’m sorry. That is a price of admission problem. And you probably will break up if you cannot pay it. And yo, what we don’t talk about is how totally okay that is. A lot of times we fall into this weird, “well if she loved me she would’ve sacrificed this one thing for me” vortex, or the feeling of guilt that you were unable to sacrifice that one thing for her, but that’s bullshit. It’s part of you, and sometimes you gotta break up because those important parts don’t fit together. I’m reminded of the (straight) couple that announced to their friends that they were breaking up via DIY music video a couple years back. A bunch of people bemoaned it as hipster nonsense or a grab for attention, but I don’t think it was. I think was actually really mature — sometimes the price of admission is mutually exclusive. It’s not about it being too high or reasonable or unreasonable or whatever, it’s literally that both prices can’t be paid at the same time. It’s as if you had to purchase a ticket for the wooden roller coaster and you had to purchase a ticket for the spinny teacups, but they were only each running once—at the same time.

But friend, I think it’s beyond even that. I hear no joy at spending time with her in the way you phrase your question: “I do not want to suffer through long distance again if we’re only going split up afterwards.” I hear, well, would this be a waste of time? If you’re thinking about your relationship in terms of wasted time, you’re about to break up. I’d bet money if I had any. You are already telegraphing the break up. You are essentially asking permission to break up. Moreover, if both of you are scared to confront the issue as you say, I’d also bet nonexistent money that both of you know what’s coming.

So what to do? Well, I’m an internet person to you and do not have to live with the consequences of your decision. You do. I will not explicitly tell you to finish reading this and go break up with this woman. In the end, you have to decide if you want to that for yourself. But I will tell you that if I felt like my relationship couldn’t survive this kind of career focus, this kind of long distance, this price of admission problem, then I’d take that not as a problem with study abroad or with the options before me, but as a fundamental problem with my relationship. And I’d act accordingly — with a scheduled conversation. If I were in your shoes and I was going to have this tough talk with this other spectacular human who has done nothing wrong, just as you haven’t, I’d consider having the tough conversation in a way that blames no one. The same way that the music video acknowledges that break ups suck and it’s no one’s fault — this situation could get messy, but neither one of you is to blame. I’d sit down and talk about the price of admission for each of you, honestly and earnestly. And then you’d both decide if the prices were mutually exclusive. And if either one of you feels that they are, well then, it’s probably breakup time. But it’s not blame time. You part ways and no one gets shit talked, no friends are asked to choose sides, and you don’t burn the bridge down behind you. Because that’s life. Good luck.

You Need Help: You’re Bisexual and Your Girlfriend Wishes You Weren’t

feature image via shutterstock

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

Q: I have been exclusive with my sweet gf for 2 years and lived with her for one. I moved to be in the same city as her because I felt so strongly about our future, came out publicly, and haven’t regretted it for a minute. I was honest with her from the get go about dating and sleeping with men. She is my first same-sex partner, I identify as bi when pressed (hate labels), and never hid that. She has had multiple heartbreaks when lovers left her for men, and she gets upset about my previous experiences. I guess I trust myself more than she does because I know our bond is stronger, our sex life better than anything I’ve encountered before, and she’s the kindest person I know. When I try to talk to her about my sexuality, she reacts badly and hasn’t come around to the idea that someone can be truly and permanently bisexual no matter their current partner. She will only be 100% comfortable with me if I identify as “lesbian” but I don’t want to lie about who I am! (Even if I imagine myself with women from here on out.) Instead, I now just avoid talking about my past so that I don’t hurt her feelings. I don’t want to think that our otherwise stellar relationship is doomed because of this difference in opinion, but don’t know how to move forward as candid conversation isn’t working. I long for her acceptance. I basically hope that her opinion changes with time. Am I in denial? Should I view this as a total dealbreaker? What is a girl to do?

This is a doozy, darlin’ — it’s both something that’s both highly specific to you, your girlfriend and your histories, and a tale as old as time. There’s a short answer to this — it’s not healthy to pressure a partner into an identity that isn’t theirs, and it’s unfair and biphobic to distrust your bisexual partner just because they’re bisexual, no matter what past partners have done. I think you probably already know those things on a base level, though, and you’re still here and still feeling conflicted. So let’s take the long way around to talk about it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that we all carry irrational beliefs around with us, even and especially into relationships. This is just how humans work! We’re all just trying to keep ourselves safe in a variety of ways, and our brains and bodies are doing their best to work towards that goal. Sometimes the things we do to try to keep ourselves safe are a bit mismatched with what the situation actually calls for. Sometimes the way we respond to something to try to keep ourselves safe is actually counterintuitive and makes something worse instead of better, often because we’re reacting to an extreme situation from our past rather than to a more moderate or even totally nonexistent one in our present. The challenge, both in life and in relationships, is to try to be constantly correcting for this, finding a balance between instinct and reality.

This was a long-winded way of saying: everyone has baggage and irrational fears in relationships — everyone! — and figuring out how to deal with them is part of the work. Sometimes, you compromise and agree to treat someone’s warped belief about how the world works as reality, because it turns out to be the easiest way to keep everyone safe and happy. My partner is terrified of flying, just totally 100% cannot do it. Instead, we take long road trips or Amtrak trips to visit family, sometimes up to 24 hours long, even though I am constantly aware that statistically we are actually in more danger in a car or even a train than we would be in the air. It’s stupid, objectively; but I don’t mind.The happiness and peace of mind I get from his peace of mind about the situation outweighs the inconvenience. This is a choice I’ve made, and right now also it’s the choice you’re making. Your girlfriend is wrong, and you know she’s wrong, but you’re agreeing to act as if she isn’t out of a desire to compromise.

Except in your case, it isn’t a compromise! In a compromise, both people are giving something up and both people are getting something. I get the pleasure and relief of knowing that when we spend time with our loved ones, it’s a purely positive experience for us both, not one that’s grounded in terror and resentment for my spouse. What are you getting out of your compromise? From here, it seems like what you’re getting is implicit rather than explicit reminders that your girlfriend doesn’t trust you and rejects part of who you are. And if that were enough for you out of the compromise, if this arrangement was working for you, I don’t think you’d be writing us.

Here’s another story about my relationship (which isn’t, you know, perfect! But it’s the only one I’ve got to reference, really, so here we are). I spent a lot of time growing up living with the constant threat of my father’s scary, violent, arbitrary anger. It could come out of nowhere, a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky — everything seeming fine, then all of the sudden my father refusing to speak to us, his young children, leaving the house for hours and leaving us on our own before finally coming back at night to scream at us for the some minor, randomly chosen thing. As often happens with children who grow up in environments like that, I’m hypervigilant about people being angry at me; so vigilant, in fact, that I can see things that aren’t there. If my partner is in the next room over and hasn’t spoken to me in 15 minutes, I can easily convince myself that it’s not just because he’s reading but because the last thing I said to him was wrong somehow, and he’s stewing and ready to scream at me any second now about how awful I am. This belief, though, is wrong. He doesn’t get upset about infinitesimal things, and when he is upset, that isn’t how he handles it. He’s not my father.

It absolutely makes sense for me to process information this way — in many situations I’ve been in, that instinct would have been correct, and helped me stay safe. But it isn’t correct anymore, and it would be unhealthy — and unfair — to act as if it were. I’m not wrong for feeling the way I do, but if I forced my partner to treat my feelings as reality — if I called him five times a day while he was at work to have him reassure me he wasn’t mad at me, if I forbade him from ever taking time to himself without reminding me it wasn’t about me, or ever being outwardly upset about things like having a bad day at work because it makes me anxious — that would be a terrible relationship for him to be in. I’m not wrong for feeling how I do, but it’s on me to make a plan for how to cope with it: to remind myself to look at the evidence and ask whether there’s any suggestion that I’m actually about to be harmed, to develop my own coping strategies, to be self-aware of my own history and the way I map it onto my present. I can certainly ask my partner for support in this, or to make some concessions to my history that he agrees are both fair and healthy for him, but I can’t ask him to bend over backwards for me because I’m not willing to do the work at all. We can’t justify harmful things we do to others by pointing to the ways they’re related to how we ourselves were harmed — a reason isn’t a justification. Even when bad things have happened to us, and even when those bad things influence how we see the world, we’re still capable of respecting other people’s autonomy, their needs and wants and identity, and treating them as they deserve. To think otherwise is, I think, to insult ourselves a bit.

The difference between these two scenarios, the plane and the imaginary fight I’m afraid of, is what’s being asked of each person; the cost. In the first, I am asked to pay the price of an extra day, day and a half of travel for my partner’s sense of safety and happiness. It’s a price I’m perfectly willing to pay a few times a year. In the second, what would be asked is a constant and profound level of performance during interactions that should normally be totally free and vulnerable — what’s asked is to obscure real and honest parts of one person so that the other never has to experience discomfort or do any inner labor of any difficulty. That’s something that should never be asked of anyone in a healthy relationship, I don’t think. It’s not something that should be asked of you.

Which is another long-winded way of saying: It sucks that your girlfriend has had these negative experiences with other women! It really does! But her ex-girlfriends aren’t every bisexual woman. And more importantly, you aren’t her ex-girlfriends. You’re you. And your girlfriend has a responsibility to deal with the baggage she’s brought into this relationship; while you can certainly support her in doing that, it’s not your job to contort yourself to fit how she’s feeling.

You’re hoping that her “opinion” will change; that’s certainly possible, but not if she never tries to change it. The bottom line is, you’ve never given her any reason to think that you’ll cheat on her or leave her, and it’s HER task, not yours, to remind herself of that every single time this comes up for her. It’s normal to feel anxiety and insecurity when you’ve had a traumatic ending to relationships like that, but she has to clock in every day and do the work of seeing it as anxiety and insecurity, not a fact, and to lessen it over time by checking it against how you really are as a partner and seeing how false it is.

You asked if this was a dealbreaker. I don’t know! That’s up to you. And maybe more importantly, up to your girlfriend. I’m not going to tell you to leave her, but I am going to suggest that you at least ask her to step up to the plate about this. If you can’t expect your partner to believe in your basic trustworthiness as a person, what CAN you expect of them? Ask her in a kind, firm way what reasons you, personally, specifically, have ever given her to doubt your faithfulness; what kind of person and girlfriend you’ve shown yourself to be. Tell her that you need her to treat you like that person: the real one, not the one she fears you could be. You’ve spent two years now patiently bearing her displaced distrust of you; it’s time for her to start taking on some of the work herself. You said she “won’t be 100% comfortable with you” until you identify differently and disavow the parts of your life that she wasn’t in. If you had a friend whose partner was still asking them to do penance (for something they hadn’t actually done!) before they would be “100% comfortable” with them — and who, when asked, wasn’t willing to work on changing the part of themselves that needed that from their girlfriend — would you advise them to stay? Why?

Dear Able-Bodied Partner

feature image via shutterstock.com

Dear Able-Bodied Partner,

At your predecessor’s apartment, I always took my shoes off as soon as I walked in. It wasn’t a house rule, but an effort to speed things along. My orthotics make shoe removal a complex procedure involving clasps, straps, and — much less sexy — a foam pad that looks like a Pringle. (If you don’t flinch at the Pringle, you’re a keeper.) It’s a clumsy detour to take once you’re making out so, as usual, I thought ahead. That’s a habit cerebral palsy forced me to form.

One night, I forgot until we were already in her room. She waited on the bed while I sat on the floor to unlace my sneakers, and I’d just pulled the left Pringle free when I heard “um… do you need help?”

We need to talk about that question, and all the ones like it that I imagine you have. What if you say the wrong thing? Do you acknowledge my disability right away, or not at all? Should you just ask? Is that weird? How much are you responsible for? And where is it okay to touch me? Should you even want to? What does it mean if you do? Or if you don’t?

Do you need help? Thought so.

There are expectations for couples like us. Namely, that I will be grateful, that you will protect me, and — most importantly — that we will “overcome disability” together, because that is what love looks like. No one says as much outright, but they reinforce it in smaller, sneakier ways. I can guarantee, for example, that you will earn praise for being with me. The truly bold (usually strangers or well-meaning relatives) will actually tell you how “nice” it is that you’re dating “someone like her.” But more often, your friend will get too honest one night, admit “I don’t know if I could do that,” and then ask you “what it’s like.”

Your panicked questions, the constant pressure, and those backhanded compliments all imply that my disability is a problem I need you to solve. That’s kind of the only language we have for when able-bodied and disabled people get together. And I, for one, am pretty bored of it. So let me offer an alternative: I don’t need you to save me. I need you to see me.

Notice what I did not say just now. I didn’t ask you to “see me, not my disability” or to “see past cerebral palsy.” Lots of people, disabled or not, are on the “see past” bandwagon, and I understand why. Being disabled can feel like not even having a shot at independence, connection, or being taken seriously, so of course there’s an impulse to distance yourself. That’s what happens when the world caters to somebody else. But personally, I don’t want you to separate cerebral palsy from who I am. Because (you ready for this?) it is who I am. Not entirely, of course — I am large, I contain multitudes — but if I should be proud of my other identities, why not that one? I’ve been disabled for as long as I’ve been a woman, gay and, y’know, alive. So I don’t even know how it’s possible to “see past” something so fully baked into my experience. Instead, I need you to work a little harder and understand disability as part of my value rather than a caveat on it.

What does that look like? (Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to unlearn one of the most fundamental and pervasive disability lessons and then leave you with no clue how to do it.) The best answer I have is that it looks like letting go. Instead of putting my disability in a vice grip, accept that it takes up space. Don’t try to defeat it; that is neither possible nor your job. Reconsider the assumption that I don’t want it and that you shouldn’t either. Because if you want me, you want it, too. There is no me without it. The fact is that vilifying cerebral palsy doesn’t make it count less. So acknowledge that it matters, and that’s not a bad thing.

On a practical level: maybe don’t ask if I need help with something I’ve been doing without you for 27 years. Trust that if I want help, I will say so. I’ll tell you right now: you will need to carry the drinks to our table, offer your arm when the stairs have no railing, and hold my hand through at least one major medical event. If you want to be the hero, there’s how. Otherwise, though, back off and listen. Give my body the room and time it needs. (It’s been through some things.) Find a better compliment than “you’re not like most disabled people.” When you tell your friends, resist the urge to clarify that I can walk. And most of all (this is the hard one), let me fail.

No one likes to see disabled people struggle; I think it’s just too much, like watching a turtle get stuck on its back. But when you respect someone, you let them make mistakes in front of you. You let them try things you’re not sure will work — or that you’re sure won’t. You let them drop the defenses, screw up, and speak honestly. And that, more than any kind of help, is what I need from you. That, to me, is what love looks like. Respect.

I don’t want to take my shoes off first thing anymore. I don’t want to apologize for my body or downplay its uniqueness. I don’t want to worry about whether or not you are afraid. I want to be all of myself.  And I don’t want you to “love me anyway.”

I want you to love me because.

The Impossible Math of Gay Soulmates

There’s an episode of This American Life called “Somewhere Out There” that has stuck with me since it aired in 2009, particularly the opening segment. In it, a Harvard physicist takes a scientific look at the notion of soul mates — more specifically, the idea that there is just one person out there for each of us. Explaining that the idea came about after a too strong pot of coffee (girl, been there!) the physicist, David Kestenbaum, based his study on something called the Drake Equation which examines the number of planets in the universe and interprets how many of these could potentially hold intelligent life. Because he was single at the time, he wanted to apply that equation to his life and replaced intelligent life with girlfriends.

Of course, nothing here is exact — we’re dealing with rough numbers, estimations and general deduction — but for statistics’ sake, Kestenbaum started with the raw number of people living in his city of Boston; about 600,000. He figured he could cut that down to 300,000 given the 50/50 male-to-female ratio and then he set up some basics. He was 30 at the time, so he made his age range ±10, which brought him down to 35% of 300,000. One hundred and five thousand straight women still had the chance to become Mrs. Kestenbaum, but 75% of them blew it by not being a college graduate. Argh! Kidding, excluding people based on college is terrible — bullet dodged! Those “basics” left him with 25,000 people, down from 600,000. He estimated half of these to be single. Now he had to deal with the real issue: how many of these would he find attractive? He guessed, in my opinion, a high percentage: one out of five. Even with that generous assumption, his number was cut to 2,500.

Without factoring any personal details — sense of humor, interests, goals, religion, etc — this straight male in a major city was left with a relatively low number of potential suitors considering his last and most damning factor: the chance of both parties being at the right place at the right time.

So what would my numbers look like as a gay woman?

At the time of its airing, I was single and living in Portland, Oregon. Like Boston, Portland at the time had a population of about 600,000, and for the purposes of this experiment I assumed similar demographics even though I know y’all are going to say, “Excuse me, Portland in not Boston,” but I need y’all to give this to me. I cut the population in half for women to 300,000. The statistics on my next cut are mixed — there was a recall on the “one out of ten” gay statistic; Gallup’s latest estimates in 2012 dip LGBT numbers to 3.8%, and city-specific statistics can toggle that national average significantly. But a 2012 report puts Portland at 6% LGBT, so for my population cut I assumed it was as gay as it ever was. Eighteen thousand. I used his +10 age range but not his -10 age range because at the time I was 23, so based on his age ranges totaling 35%, I halved that and was left with 17.5% of 18,000 — 3,150. I don’t hold any value in diplomas, but self education is important, and I assumed the same of 75% of gay women. Around 2,400. I cut that in half for those who were single and I had 1,200. I used his one out of five attraction scale and was down to 240. That’s before I got into anything personal. Half that for emotionally available people. Half that for a sense of humor. Half that for something Kestenbaum left out — their feelings toward you. Half that for everything else.

Fifteen.

Now imagine that I’d been realistic with the estimations. Still, 15 is nothing to scoff at! Fifteen people in the entire world that might be right for you, hidden by the constraints of space and time. It’s a genuinely disheartening number on its own! Except there’s a part of us that already knew that. It is – I suspect – why we U-haul, why we dig in, why we nest. Or rather why we resign, why we break ranks, why we untether. Or worse, why we settle. When the answer to the question, “What are the chances?” is a very small number, any of those choices seem like the most logical choice. Maybe the reason your friend/the older self-professed queen at the bar/your co-worker/that girl Claire won’t stop talking about finding someone is because they have 25 times more Keurig flavor options than the whole of their supposed dating pool. Be kinder to each other — we’re scientifically improbable.

Except the reality of it is showing a different picture. According to a 2012 census the number of reported gay couples grew by as much as 80% since 2000, and it’s only getting queerer. The internet, a cultural shift, federal recognition – whatever’s responsible, we’re defying the odds. How do you reconcile that discrepancy if not to invalidate the idea of a predetermined outcome completely?

When I sat down to do the math on this I thought I was just curious to find out a tangible number to a hypothetical theory. I’m just a crazy cool girl that likes to have fun! But when I dug down a bit, I realized the reason I was so interested in investigating the idea of soulmates was because for me the idea of “the one” has always felt mythical. Like the story of Persephone, the Greek goddess responsible for creating the four seasons after slipping down a crack into the underworld, it feels like tidy, accessible symbolism.

Soulmates as we’ve come to know them rely heavily on the kind of destiny that doesn’t just leave you inexplicably at the doorstep, it sees you through to the end of the story/movie/book. That kind of destiny by its very nature removes choice from the equation, and to dismiss the very real choices we make on a daily basis required to be better for each other assumes relationships are without sacrifice or that they’re innately seamless. Even beyond the complexities of relationships, the idea of soulmates as these star-crossed beings coming (and staying) together implies that we either stay the same our entire lives or that we grow in the exact same way and at the exact same rate as another person. Except we know neither of those things to be true. Do I think in some instances we meet, love, and pair in ways beyond our comprehension? Certainly. But not because I think we’re fated to do so.

[Carrie Bradshaw voice] Anyway, isn’t it more impressive that we choose rather than find each other? That we continue to say yes? Maybe the reason the original numbers don’t add up is because they’re approaching human connection in ways that can’t and shouldn’t be quantified. Or maybe the math seems impossible because we’re solving for one.

Interview With My Actual Girlfriend: Stacy

Our Autostraddle Plus series, Interview With My Ex-Girlfriend, is a big hit with all of our A+ subscribers, so our senior editors decided to riff on that and have me interview my actual girlfriend, Stacy. They came up with the questions and Stacy graciously agreed to answer them. Our cat, Quasar, almost participated but then changed her mind at the last minute because she’s very busy and important.

Okay, question number one. How did we meet?

Well, you were writing Skins recaps, so that’s how I knew about you. So I tweeted you. You claim the first tweet I sent you was a photo of Paula Deen riding a stick of butter —

No, no. Paula Deen getting hit in the face with a ham.

Paula Deen interacting foolishly with some kind of grocery product. But that’s definitely not the first time I tweeted you. It’s just the first time you noticed me.

People tweet at me a lot! I’m sorry!

I’m not mad about it. I’d say it worked out just fine.

The night we met, long before I understood Times Square as a NIGHTMARE HELLSCAPE.

Question two. Was I different in real life than I was on the internet?

No.

Really? I guess my personal brand is super authentic!

I can’t really put myself back in the headspace of only knowing you from the internet, but nothing about you struck me as being off-brand.

That’s true. We did stay out until 4:00 am talking about Skins the night we met.

And you got to know me really well that night because you got to see all my repressed anger issues because we were waiting in the snow for the US Skins premiere party and the cops busted up the VIP line and then we ended up in that cab and I had no idea where we should go, so we went to Cubby Hole and the bartender tried to serve you a Bud Light and I had finally had it. I was like “NO! SHE’S NOT DRINKING THIS SHIT!”

That was my first time in a gay bar and my first time in a New York bar, full stop; I would have just timidly taken whatever that bartender handed me. I had such heart eye emoji face when you sent it back. You’ve taught me so much about standing up for myself. And I haven’t had a Bud Light since then.

I have.

Have you? Where?

Oh, I don’t know. Whatever Brooklyn barbecue on a stoop when I reach into a cooler and it’s that or a can of Rolling Rock. Rolling Rock in a can, specifically, is the most revolting thing I have ever tasted.

NYC Dyke March, 2015

When did you know our relationship was special or different? That it was worth pursuing more than just like buddies?

For me, I don’t think there was a specific moment. Our love is like a rolling rock, tumbling down a mountain, gathering love moss. No, for real. It was like that. I didn’t have some kind of Don Draper Mad Men finale moment. DING! It really was a slow progression of small things. The more experiences I had with you, the more experiences I wanted to have with you. Talking about our lives, books, TV shows. I mean, I knew you were special, right away, and that alone made it worth pursuing — but I didn’t understand that we were special until later on.

What surprised you the most about me when we moved in together? Because we dated long distance for a couple of years.

I actually don’t think I was surprised by anything when we moved in together. The reason that question is tricky for us, or for people who may have had a similar experience as us, is that with a long distance relationship, when we did spend time together, we were together for long stretches. It’d be a week where I lived in your house with you, and then you’d come to New York and do the same with me. We went grocery shopping, we learned each other’s quirks, how we liked to sleep. We never went on dates where we’d meet for dinner and then go back to our own places. It’s like we were practicing living with each other, and then going back to our own spaces to process it, and then coming back together to practice again.

Okay, this question is from Riese. Do you ever worry that I don’t sleep enough?

Yes. I know people use the word “literally” liberally, but I literally worry all the time that you’re not getting enough sleep, and have worried about it every single day of our life together.

Oh. I did not know that. I guess this is a good follow-up question, then: What’s the hardest part about being partners with someone who also is married to the internet?

For you, I worry because your heart is so open and the internet can be such a monster. Autostraddle is really different than the other places you’ve worked, obviously, and that’s a relief, but social media can be terrible. A lot of people on the internet only care about their own agenda, only see things in black and white, and you are all about seeing things in grey, and I worry that you take some of the stuff to heart that you don’t necessarily need to take to heart. You want everyone to know they’re heard and loved, but some people just don’t deserve your attention. But in terms of how much you work, because my work is as time-consuming as yours, we basically never argue about our careers. We’re both work-a-holics. My worry is more about the culture of the internet beating your gentle heart down.

What’s your favorite thing that we do together?

Everything. We were just talking about this last week. Everything I do is better when I’m doing it with you — except for, like, going to the bathroom. Which I prefer to do alone. But everything else!

New York has beaches, did you know??

Of all the TV shows I’ve covered, which one do you hate the most?

Skins Fire. Next question.

Do you think I talk about Harry Potter too much?

No.

Come on.

No! I talk about the Miami Dolphins all the time and that has no redeeming value to society whatsoever, so it would be the worst hypocrisy on earth for me to criticize you for caring so much about a thing that has enormous value to our culture. We’re rereading the books together, right now, in fact.

Do you think we would have fallen in love at Hogwarts, even though we would have been in different houses?

I’m worried that I wouldn’t have been at Hogwarts because what if I was a Squib?

Baby, you are the brightest witch of your age!

Um, Hermione has a few things to say about that.

You aren’t Hermione’s age! 

Okay, here’s what I think. If we’d met at Hogwarts as teenagers, we would not have fallen in love, because of both of our personalities. We would have been in different Houses. You’re a Hufflepuff. I’m a Gryffinclaw — so you say. I do wonder sometimes if I’m actually a Slytherin, which is fine, but I’ll tell you right now that I wouldn’t have left during the Battle of Hogwarts, MCGONAGALL. So, but, yeah, I don’t think me as an adolescent would have fallen in love with the you that I know now. And I think the same is true of what I know of you as an adolescent. However, as professors at Hogwarts, yes. Absolutely. We would have totally fallen in love as Hogwarts professors.

51 Of The Most Important Things You’ve Ever Fought About

Over 3,500 people filled out our survey on fighting in same-sex relationships between women, and earlier this week we produced an impressive infographic and the data on what you fight about most often. For some reason “which was a better series: Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter” did not show up on that list. That’s what this list is for. Culled from your answers about “the stupidest thing you’ve ever fought about.”

51 Most Important Things You’ve Ever Fought About

1. She thought the best version of “Such Great Heights” was the one by The Postal Service when obviously it’s the one by Iron & Wine

2. I capitalized the dog’s name in text messages but not the cats

3. I woke her up at 2 AM to ask if she thought toasters have souls

4. Who was more popular in high school

5. How to paint a picture of a park

6. Whether or not the screen ratio on our Netflix account had changed with the most recent software update (it did).

7. Whether Rose was a better companion than Martha (no)

8. Which was a better series: Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter

9. Whether Rocky Horror is better than Titanic. I slept on the couch for three days, and still hold that Rocky Horror is a much better movie.

10. That she wouldn’t budge from the fact that she thought no one would ever be stupid enough to try to be Batman (be very rich and become a superhero using gadgets). I thought that it would be inevitable.

11. How many alien creatures (in a movie) could fit in a human body

12. I didn’t tag her in an Instagram photo THAT SHE WASN’T EVEN IN.

13. Which of our astrological sun signs is more of a bitch

14. Mario Kart

15. Kraft Singles

16. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde

17. Whether “mindfulness” is just being used as a buzzword now

18. Whether the Royal Family is really that well know outside of the U.K.

19. The merit of Bon Iver

20. I wanted to take her cat for a walk on a leash

21. The content of a meeting neither of us were at

22. What actor played the mean clown in Air Bud

23. Whether I would hypothetically take a snow day from work if it occurred. (The fight happened in July.)

24. If the comic book make-up tuturials were real or technologically enhanced

25. She made me feel weird about drinking milk with breakfast

26. Are leggings pants

27. I forgot Chapstick at home on the way to the grocery store and she didn’t have any either

28. I refused to eat at Guy Fieri’s restaurant

29. She wanted me to go get her cookies and instead of asking me directly to do it, she hinted at it. Then she got mad that I didn’t pick up on the hint.

30. We both identify as Ravenclaws, but she says I’m a Hufflepuff and I say she’s a Gryffindor

31. The difference between fried dough and funnel cake. THEY’RE NOT THE SAME THING!

32. Whether or not she could take in a wounded raccoon and raise it as a pet

33. I wanted two tortoises in the future but she said we could only adopt one

34. If someone’s favorite color could be orange. (it was my favorite color but apparently I can’t like the color orange because it’s no one’s favorite color…)

35. Whether I could buy a pair of pants while she was buying bras

36. I have a badass pair of boots that I’m not allowed to wear because boots are her thing, apparently.

37. Who gets to wear the stripes in the outfit: I have a thing about matching and have proposed a 75/25 balance in her favor, while she wants them 100% of the time.

38. If this old shirt of hers was pink, salmon, or coral

39. What the snapchat ghost looks like.

40. Someone else’s haircut

41. We fought about if fruit is a carb until it got so heated I had to cry in the bathroom

42. I don’t like the word “yummy” and she uses it a lot

43. Whether you could put on more than the actual weight of a chocolate bar by eating the chocolate bar.

44. Whether city streets in Chicago are built with a curve to encourage rain water to go into the gutter.

45. Whether I use the phrase “blue filter” too often when we talk about movies.

46. Whether or not we would gift our future hypothetical child a swiss army knife and at what age it would be appropriate

47. I said “my school didn’t have a teacher’s lounge” and she really, really, really didn’t believe that.

48. The true plot of the movie Avatar

49. One time we went to a communism themed party and I accidentally said something mean to her and it hurt her feelings really bad and we didn’t talk for like the whole weekend but I’m not sure what I said, to this day

50. She wouldn’t let me suck her eyeball

51. I can’t even remember but I started it and definitely cried

What Do Women In Lesbian Relationships Fight About?

We asked LGBTQ women in same-sex relationships to take our Lesbian Fight Club survey about the role fighting plays in your relationships, and over 3,500 of you answered the call! We’ve already released two hilarious listlings of some of your stupidest fights (The Gayest, Silly Household Things), and we’re ready to get into the rest of the data. The results were, honestly, fascinating. First, an infographic:

Infographic by Alex Vega

In the above infographic, the percentages indicated in the list of things you’re most likely to fight about come from your answer to “How often do you fight about the following topics?”. The answer options were Constantly, Often, Sometimes, Rarely, Never, and the percentages above represent those who chose Constantly, Often or Sometimes for that topic.

In the ensuing discussion, when I say “frequently” I am referring to the combined numbers of “constantly” and “often” only.

This Is What You Fight About

1. Relationship Expectations

What does this consist of, exactly? Well, a whole lot of things: how much time you spend together (an especially volatile topic for those in long-distance relationships or those with exhausting time-consuming jobs), the level of emotional support required by each partner, whether long-term goals and life plans line up, and who is putting more [time, energy, trust, care-taking] into the relationship. Sometimes you want such different things in the long-term that you’re not even sure if it’ll ever work. 71% of those who fought “constantly” about relationship expectations worried that their relationship might not last — a significantly larger percentage than those who fought constantly about other topics.

2. Pet Peeves or Annoying Habits

Although many picked this category, very few elaborated on it: but, interestingly enough, the overwhelming majority of people who picked this as something they fought about Often or Constantly used the comment boxes to explain that they don’t really “fight” so much as “bicker,” “disagree,” or have “briefly heated conversations.” This category for many people might just be serving as a stand-in for the various five-minute squabbles we have about the little things the other person does that annoy us: leaving drawers partially open on a dresser, exhibiting road rage, leaving the light on in the kitchen, talking too loudly, showing up late for things, losing their keys, checking e-mail too often, and so forth.

3. Sex

Sex is a huge issue in relationships and the most common conflict related to sex is frequency: mis-matched sex drives came up with almost every commenter who indicated fighting about sex constantly/often. Sub-complications of this genre included one partner’s sex drive being impacted by anti-depressants or stress/exhaustion, dealing with past sexual trauma, and feelings about who initiates more. As we learned in our Ultimate Lesbian Sex Survey, couples having more sex were more likely to report being “ecstatic” — the highest option offered on the relationship satisfaction matrix — in their relationship, but there wasn’t a huge correlation between couples who were “happy” (the second-highest option) and couples who had more sex. We’ve done a lot of work on this topic: on Moving Beyond Lesbian Bed Death and Bridging The Libido Gap, Surviving Lesbian Bed Death, what to do when  Your Girlfriend Never Ever Ever Wants To Have Sex. We’ve talked about (Having More) Sex, when You Can’t Always Get What You Want(In Bed) and when a particular sex act gives you PTSD — and also, Here Is A Worksheet To Help You Talk To Partners About Sex.

Unsurprisingly, those who fought about sex constantly or often were the least likely to report always having makeup sex – only 4.3% do, compared to 38% of the whole.

4. Housework

Seriously if somehow none of us ever had to do the dishes, we’d all get along way better — and the household things we find to fight about are really truly special. Although housework doesn’t crack the top ten most contentious topics for relationships who’ve been together for a year or less, it debuts at #6 for relationships who’ve been together 1-2 years, and continues climbing the charts — by the 5+ year mark, it hits #3 and settles at #2 for 10+ year relationships. So, basically, as soon as you start living together, you start fighting about how to live together! Most of these arguments are of the “who does more” variety and are further complicated by couples with messy pets.

5. Friends or Socializing

So here’s how this goes: you don’t hang out with each other’s friends, or you don’t like each other’s friends, or you wish their friends didn’t include their exes. Maybe they’re an introvert and you’re an extrovert. Or there’s jealousy there — she doesn’t trust you to go out without her, or seems to have more fun with her friends than with you. Of those who fought frequently about friends/socializing, 48% also fought frequently about jealousy/other people and 28% about exes, compared to 13.8% and 8.6% of the entire group.

6. Other People/Jealousy

Not trusting your partner and worrying about them cheating on you or being suspicious of her friendships can really put a lot of stress on a relationship, which’s perhaps why 42% of people who frequently fought about this think the way they fight is unhealthy, compared to 17% of the entire group. This was a source of contention much more prevalent in newer relationships than older ones, though, and it seems to be a somewhat larger issue for bisexual women: 41-42% of lesbians dating bisexuals fought about this, compared to 39% of bisexuals dating bisexuals, 31%-35% of queers dating lesbians, 33.5% of lesbians dating lesbians and 29% of queers dating queers. Non-monogamous/open relationships struggled with this more than monogamous ones — 42% of folks in non-monogamous or open relationships fought about this, compared to 34% of the whole group.

It’s difficult to draw conclusions from this without a longitudinal study — do couples fight less about jealousy over time, or are couples who get jealous less likely to stay together past a couple of years?

7. Money

45% of married folks fight about money, compared to 30% of the unmarried — combining finances isn’t easy! Money fights seem to fall into three main categories: one person makes more money than the other (or one is unemployed), there are disagreements about spending habits and saving, or tight finances overall cause general stress and tension. This issue is really stressful for lesbian relationships especially because women’s earning power is so much less than men’s — moreso for LGBTQ women — and we’re more likely to be cut off from family or social safety nets.

8. Work or School

A lot of you fight about work and school schedules — one partner working/studying too much or not enough, prioritizing work over the relationship or residual stress from work/school. And, of course, a lot of you are doing that super complicated thing where we work with each other (I’m guilty of this too — I co-own this website with an ex-girlfriend and run A-Camp with another ex-girlfriend!), which offers so many more opportunities for high-charged disagreements. Whereas only 26% of the entire group said they currently fight more than usual due to a temporary situation, 43% of those who fight frequently about work/school do. School, of course, is temporary, and all of us tend to imagine a time in our lives when we’ll be working less.

9. Relatives

This is another category highly impacted by length of relationship — it barely comes up for newbies and climbs the charts the longer a couple is together. In fact, by the time we reach the 10-year mark, you’re fighting more often about relatives than about sex! Heterosexual couples certainly deal with a lot of family-related conflicts, but queer couples are more prone to them: a lot of y’all are dealing with family who are homophobic, unsupportive or otherwise insufferable to be around due to their feelings about your sexual orientation. There were a lot of unrelated-to-being-gay family conflicts, too: disagreements on how to handle toxic family members, cultural conflicts, “her mom/dad hates me,” living with relatives and different attitudes towards family in general.

10. Health

LGBTQ women are more likely than straight people to have mental and physical health issues — something I recently dug into in depth using results from our Grown-Ups survey. On this survey, mental health issues came up a lot amongst people who fought frequently about health, as well as disagreements over how one partner is handling their physical or mental health — how often they exercise, what they eat, how often they drink or use drugs or smoke or how they manage a physical or mental health problem. Speaking from personal experience on all sides, relationships in which one or both partners have depression, anxiety, BPD, PTSD or any number of psychiatric diagnoses require a lot of understanding, patience and communication, and mental health is something we talk about a lot around here.

11. Exes

Exes, along with the next two items on this list, are a topic that only makes the top nine for couples who’ve been together for less than a year — and of those who fight frequently about exes, 96% also fight frequently about other people/jealousy. “Exes” is probably seen more as a sub-topic of “other people/jealousy” than its own thing and perhaps should’ve been treated as such on the survey.

The most cited conflict for this category was discomfort with somebody still being friends with their ex, but difficulties with ex-husbands came up, too. Another interesting tidbit: only 17% of queer/queer couples fight about exes, but between 21% and 26% of lesbian/lesbian, lesbian/bisexual and bisexual/bisexual couples do.

Also, one of you wrote: “She’s convinced I’m secretly sleeping with a man. I’m not. But she is.” YOU GUYS!! Y’all need to break up. Speaking of breaking up, those who fight frequently about exes were the most likely to agree with the statement “the amount of fighting we do makes me worry that our relationship won’t last.” This might be why longer-term couples fight less often about exes — although it’s also due to the fact that exes are farther in the past the longer you’re together, it’s also possible that couples who fought a lot about exes didn’t last as long as those who didn’t.

12. Drinking, Smoking or Drugs

This is our second topic that made the top ten most-fought-about topics for brand new couples but not for any couples together for one year or more — however, it’s not that more lengthy relationships fought about it way less often than newer ones, simply that topics that weren’t issues for new relationships overtook it (e.g., housework, relatives, health.) However, radically different substance habits be an insurmountable issue for many couples, especially for queer women who may socialize in all-female groups containing mostly mutual friends — as opposed to a boyfriend/husband who might go out “with the guys” to get hammered.

What’s happening with the couples who fight about this a lot? Well, they smoke and you hate it. They like to party and you don’t. You think she drinks too much or she thinks you drink too much or you think she smokes too much pot. Addiction issues, relapses or even scarier stuff — like she steals your prescription drugs or has ended up hospitalized for drinking.

Those who fight about drinking/smoking/drugs frequently were also the most likely to report fights that always, often or sometimes involved physical abuse — 6%-12.9% of them did, compared to 1.6-2.6% of the entire group. This topic was the third most likely, after “exes” and “other people/jealousy,” to report fights that always, often or sometimes involved emotional abuse.

13. Politics and Social Justice Issues

Sometimes these arguments deeply reflected that “the personal is political” —  a white partner not understanding a non-white partner‘s experiences of racism or differences in background (red state vs. blue state) leading to present-tense conflicts. Those who fought frequently about politics/social issues were the least likely to worry that their relationship won’t last because of fighting, despite also being the second-most-likely to fight every day. They were also the most likely to agree that fighting can be productive (56%) and the least likely to agree that the way they fight is unhealthy (27%). This ranked higher for new couples, perhaps because politics/social justice issues are often deeply tied to personality moreso than relationship dynamics, and it makes sense that they’re controversial mostly during the first year, when you’re still evaluating the compatibility of your partnership.

14. Children

The reason “children” fall so low on this list is probably because most of the survey-takers don’t have any — although quite a few people did report fighting about whether or not to have kids or tension around trying to get pregnant. Of those who had kids, many seem to have come into the relationship with kids from prior relationships. “Children” comes in at 14 out of 14 issues for all relationship lengths until we hit the 5+ year mark, at which point it crawls to #13, and then leaps to #9 at the 10+ year mark. The main thing worth mentioning about couples with children is that y’all are tired. Y’ALL ARE SO TIRED. You have fights about parenting styles but also a lot of you are just so incredibly tired and so you bicker every now and then but it’s usually fine. This is likely why those who fought frequently about children were the most likely to fight every day.

82 Silly Household Things You Fought About With Your Girlfriend

Over 3,500 people filled out our survey on fighting in lesbian relationships, and we’re crunching the data currently to unleash a glorious bundle of posts about your hang-ups and blow-outs and relationship issues. In the meantime, we’ll be publishing more fun lists to make us all feel normal for fighting about the dishes all the time. Seriously, y’all had a lot of things to say about dish-washing in this survey.  Only 20% of co-habitating people never fight about housework, and 21% of co-habitants fight about housework often or constantly.

We asked “what’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever fought about?” and a great deal of your responses were related to things around the house. Here are just some of the many crucial issues tearing our love to pieces, ripped mercilessly out of context (e.g., if you provided an analysis of how the fight was resolved, that bit might not be included below) and presented here for your enjoyment.

82 Of the Stupidest Domestic-Related Things You Fought About

1. I borrowed her hair scrunchie without asking. And her eyeliner.

2. Who had to call AT&T to get the internet fixed

3. I kept finishing off the chocolate bars that were in the cupboard

4. Someone had eaten the last of ice cream and I didn’t have any but once

5. She finished the yoghurt dip without sharing

6. She thought I’d eaten the last of the cheese and became unreasonably angry! As we were arguing, she accidentally trapped my hand in her knee-pit. I didn’t want to make her more upset, so I tried to slowly ease my hand out. It made her laugh so hard she peed on me!

7. Apparently I was supposed to bring home cheese doodles. HOW DARE I FORGET?!

8. She put bell pepper in a pot at the wrong point for a recipe we were making together

9. How to make meatloaf

10. How to melt chocolate for Christmas candy

11. How to bake potatoes (microwave vs oven)

12. How much ice to put in a cup

13. Not cooking fajitas the “right” way

14. Whether to boil the corn or eat it raw

15. If she boiled the water correctly for the mac’n’cheese

16. Whether or not you should add salt to food

17. Whether to add garlic to a pesto dish

18. Buying pre-made lasagne sauce, then not buying it, then buying the wrong one

19. How much effort it took to make a grilled cheese sandwich vs. putting pre-cooked chili ingredients into the crock pot.

20. Whether or not home cooked ‘fusion’ in both our heritage food cultures is appropriative (e.g. “Gouda in polenta?” Answer: it’s a no go, “Kimchi in leftover pasta?” Hell yes.)

21. Whether or not it is really necessary that we always brush our teeth together.

22. I painted a room and got paint on the light switch cover

23. I forgot to put a glass under the spout of a juicer before beginning to juice, and got beet juice on the counter

24. Who lost the cheese grater and thereby prevented us both from enjoying Parmesan covered pasta

25. One time I opened a new packet of IKEA straws and threw the packet away. My partner wanted them to stay in the packet.

26. She left the bathmat wet/damp on purpose because she knows I hate it. It was horrifying.

27. Leaving water glasses all over the house

28. Which setting on the dishwasher is the best one to use

29. The fact that she refuses to wring out the sponge after doing dishes

30. She puts her cup beside the sink rather than IN the sink

31. Having the tap open while washing dishes. I say the water is wasted, she says it’s worst if we close it and turn it on again.

32. If Frito Pie is an actual meal.

33. Why I can’t have steak every day for dinner.

34. Cereal. (She shouldn’t eat it. It has too much refined sugar.)

35. Filling the Brita filter

36. When clothes are dirty enough to go in the hamper

37. How many blankets should be on the bed

38. Who stole the blanket

39. If it’s too cold running the AC at 63 degrees

40. The ambient temperature we’d like to have in the apartment/whether it’s ok to leave the bathroom window open in the winter. All winter. 24/7.

41. I locked myself in the bathroom because she kept telling me I wasn’t cleaning the toilet the right way

42. Our very first fight was about how I was cleaning the electric waffle iron incorrectly.

43. I threw a waffle

44. I bought a type of shampoo I like instead of the shampoo that was on sale

45. If I was wasting money buying a sandwich instead of sandwich ingredients

46. Whether or not we’d get a landline in our future house. I ended up crying.

47. Using a towel to clean up cat pee

48. Me lying down on the bed for five minutes before I started to clean

49. My swiffering technique.

50. Whether to get a poster of David Bowie for our fictional workspace/studio

51. I didn’t want our pillows to be purple. PURPLE.

52. I told her the bathroom designed by her mother is too brown for me and I don’t want the same at home.

53. Where to put the doormat

54. Hypothetical spoons

55. I was making this giant cauldron of mashed potatoes (MY FAVORITE) and when I poured the milk in it was ROTTEN. All over my lovely potatoes.

56. She insisted on padlocking the garage door shut every time we drove somewhere

57. Closing windows loudly

58. I was sitting in the chair she wanted to sit in

59. A goddamn IKEA Förhöja kitchen island. Bloody IKEA.

60. The tone in which she asked me for help lifting a piece of IKEA furniture “up” while we we were putting it together.

61. A 30-min fight entirely in whispers on an IKEA bed display about what kind of bed to get

62. She was buying Starbucks mugs online behind my back

63. One person accidentally dyed the other’s nice white blouse pink by throwing it into a load of colored laundry

64. Why she had a stack of clothes on the dresser instead of hanging them up

65. How to change the bag in the vacuum cleaner

66. How to fold a towel correctly

67. How to properly get the toothpaste out of the tube (screw top or flip top)

68. Whether or not it was possible to paint a refrigerator hot pink

69. Whether certain items of crockery qualify as “deep plates” or “shallow bowls”

70. Whether or not a Roomba would actually vacuum cat hair

71. Whether she can call a flipper a spatula ( It’s a flipper)

72. A missing pair of shorts which she found while we were arguing

73. I stirred the pot (literally, not a euphemism here) when she had just done that.

74. She thought I was insulting her chicken by asking her to cook it well done.

75. She tried to make a custard and it failed terribly and tasted like seawater sludge

76. I want to get a bigger bed and she doesn’t!!!

77. Buying a baby pool for my adult self

78. I thought that she’d used expensive whiskey that was a souvenir to bake into a cake…

79. She wanted to adopt a cat, but we couldn’t because it was clearly stated “no pets” on our lease. She was mad at me because *I* wouldn’t let her adopt a cat.

80. Who was going to feed the pig

81. Whether or not we could keep a foster dog when only one of us was working and I was really sick and couldn’t help take care of it, plus it kept trying to eat our pet rabbit

82. The proper way to marinate filet mignon — there was yelling, things were thrown across the room, a shelf was knocked off a wall, both of us stormed out of the house. Never have we had a fight surpass the great steak marinade fight of our first year together (14 years ago). (Yes we eventually made the steak for dinner but I don’t remember who’s marinade we ended up using.)

43 Of The Gayest Things You’ve Fought About With Your Girlfriend

Already nearly 3,000 people have filled out our fight club survey, which means we’re gonna have tons of interesting data for y’all. If you’re a woman of any sexual orientation dating another woman of any sexual orientation then you should definitely fill it out, it’ll be open ’til the end of the weekend.

But already so many of the answers to “what’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever fought about?” are just too golden to withhold.  So let’s get a preview of just how special everybody is with an intro listling: sentences ripped mercilessly out of context from the answers to our question about your stupidest fight. The gay ones.

43 Of The Gayest Things You’ve Fought About

1. She was reading Harry Potter fanfic instead of wanting to have sex with me

2. The possible growth in popularity of women’s soccer in the U.S.

3. Who the cat loves more.

4. Putting together an IKEA bed frame

5. Fucking IKEA, man. I can’t even remember why but I remember just leaving her in the middle of the store for some reason.

6. When I said that men are terrible and not worth the work of rehabilitation.

7. The tone of voice I used to ask her to go down on me

8. I asked if she wanted to watch a Hannah Hart video and didn’t listen to the answer

9. Whether or not David Bowie’s hair in Labyrinth was a wig

10. My partner wore the pasties I wanted to wear for Pride

11. The colour of our future cat (WHICH NEEDS TO BE BLACK BECAUSE IT’S THE ONLY COLOUR I WEAR).

12. I showed her the film version of “Rent” and she hated it so much that we didn’t even get through “Take Me Or Leave Me.”

13. Probably Pretty Little Liars (looking at you, Heather Hogan)

14. She got jealous when I said that Ruby Rose “wasn’t ugly”

15. Who liked Melanie Martinez first.

16. Judith Frank’s novel “Crybaby Butch”

17. Whether or not “The Object of My Affection,” starring Jennifer Aniston, is “a feminist film”

18. Whether or not selfie culture upholds or demolishes the patriarchy

19. The feasibility of being Xena Warrior Princess when we grow up

20. How remembralls in Harry Potter work – and we still disagree about whether there has to be a logical, believable (but magical, obvs.) explanation for how remembralls work, or whether they just work because they work.

21. Cause of moon phases (she was right)

22. The quality of an Orca documentary

23. She felt I was too excited when Ellen Page came out. She had a point, I was fucking thrilled.

24. Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass”

25. Shonda Rhimes

26. Bernie Sanders (I’m a Hillary-enthusiast)

27. Whether or not Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” is a good song

28. Virginia Woolf, but I stand by that one.

29. Whether or not bisexuals exist. Hello, I’m bisexual!

30. Whether “introvert” is a valid and unique identification.

31. The word “dyke”

32. Why I fold polo shirts instead of hanging them

33. Whether or not pants are a gendered item of clothing

34. Who’s job it is to take the CSA box to the car

35. Whether to buy organic peanut butter or Jif

36. I dropped my veggie burger on the floor and wouldn’t let my girlfriend share hers with me because I wanted my own

37. An armpit hair. She didn’t want to let me just peek at a really long one.

38. My partner assumed that because I’m the one who carries a purse, she could always put things in it

39. Who would get to wear what costume for a group costume at DragonCon the next year

40. A random girl at a party was wearing a similar vest as my girlfriend

41. “You’re prettier than me!” “No way, you’re prettier than me!”

42. A list on Autostraddle

43. THIS SURVEY, RIGHT NOW