{"id":744,"date":"2015-03-25T21:23:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T05:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/?p=744"},"modified":"2015-03-25T22:34:52","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T06:34:52","slug":"i-am-not-broken-i-choose-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/25\/i-am-not-broken-i-choose-love\/","title":{"rendered":"I am not broken; I choose love"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece was written originally last year in my private journal, and it’s much more personal about my love life than I usually share publicly, although details that originally referred to specific relationships have been depersonalized to maintain privacy. <\/em><\/p>\n

I share it in hopes that it helps me continue to center on what I believe and value, and that it helps others understand me, themselves, or someone else.<\/em><\/p>\n

The question\u00c2\u00a0that is always raised for me by weddings: marriage is held up culturally as the end all and be-all. Even if you aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t getting legally married, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I choose you and you choose me\u00e2\u20ac\u009d partnership is held up in a similar way. Even in polyamory, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153primary partnership\u00e2\u20ac\u009d seems to be what most people aspire to.<\/p>\n

As I asked myself once several years ago, what if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the road that I personally would be happiest on? I remember walking home one night to my apartment on 19th, thinking, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I suppose I could do that. It seems to be what I want<\/i>. But what if what I want<\/i> isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the thing that would make me the happiest<\/i>? Or if there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a way that I could be equally happy, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just different.”<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always been the case that some people didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t marry, and for some it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most likely that they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t or couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t find a suitable partner, but for some, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost certainly because they were happier that way. In the end, it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t matter really if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re happier that way because you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re weird or emotionally immature, or just because you prefer not being partnered.<\/p>\n

The idea that we should all aspire to a level of emotional maturity where we regard partnership as the highest and best thing you could do seems weird to me in itself, and boy is\u00c2\u00a0that ever in the air at weddings. Sometimes they\u00c2\u00a0seem to be all about how the participants have\u00c2\u00a0journeyed through independence and arrived at interdependence, had the courage to be vulnerable, et fucking cetera.<\/p>\n

Which of course is delightful for them, if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what they\u00c2\u00a0want; and as I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve understood from many people I know who’ve married, it is. And I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve often thought that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what I want, and that perhaps it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only my own emotional development that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s holding me back. But how does one know this? You can certainly assume that if you desire partnership, but don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have it, that there is something you need to change. Or you could assume that your ideal partner hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t come along yet (a notion I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve certainly entertained as well).<\/p>\n

Or you could entertain the novel and culturally odd notion that perhaps you just prefer being single. Which I always find funny when I say it, because of course I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not \u00e2\u20ac\u0153single\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the sense that most people mean. But I do practice solo polyamory \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I consider my own needs to be primary to myself. And to be honest I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m content with that right now, and maybe forever. And I simply do not want to believe, nay refuse to believe, that this makes me invalid, immature, selfish, or otherwise a terrible person \u00e2\u20ac\u201d simply to\u00c2\u00a0want all my romantic and sustaining relationships to be relationships of choice.<\/p>\n

I love my current partner, and past partners; my life wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be complete without those experiences. (Just this morning I was thinking of something a former partner\u00c2\u00a0said a long time ago, that sometimes you can love someone best by just loving them, and not telling them anything about that. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how I feel about past partners sometimes.) They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve given me experiences that enrich and deepen my life, that are irreplaceable and precious. And in many ways, the preciousness of what has been given is entirely unrelated to the purported seriousness or depth of the relationship. I’ve had some absolutely wonderful experiences of being loved by long-term partners, and I am so glad I’ve had those experiences.<\/p>\n

But I’ve also had absolutely amazing experiences with someone who was closer to a friend, even though we spent most of our time together cuddling on the couch and talking nerdy, and I know we were never in love. I cherished our relationship without having to love him, or want to marry him, or even necessarily have a conventional sexual relationship with him. I would never want to live the rest of my life without romance \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s surely not me. And I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll never want a partnership. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to live, in the meantime, with the peace, contentment, and confidence that come from saying \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m okay with the way I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve chosen to live, right now.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Not necessarily \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m content with the state of my romantic relationships\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m content to choose relationships of choice, and to run my relationships based on ongoing mutual joy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

I’ve been told this by others when I didn’t want to hear it, and maybe it’s a little ironic that I’ve come around to it myself, much later. But sometimes we hear this when our relationship with someone is not the one we want with them, and therefore hearing it means the relationship is not one of mutual joy, for us, and nothing can\u00c2\u00a0turn it into one at that time. So ending those relationships can be the right decision; so can\u00c2\u00a0ending other relationships, even though I\u00c2\u00a0may sometimes miss the other person. That I\u00c2\u00a0miss what they\u00c2\u00a0could give is evidence that it was worth a try; that I\u00c2\u00a0don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miss the rest\u00c2\u00a0is evidence that it was time to let it go.<\/p>\n

I think, in such a modus operandi<\/em>, one does have to be peculiarly alert for patterns that interrupt joy; that certainly is something that I’ve seen: that choices I made to protect myself from stress also inhibited joy. Those tradeoffs are worth looking at; understanding what makes me cherish relationships, what makes them tick for me, is so much more critical when I have very little in the way of an external standard to judge against. What I owe myself is not a constant assessment of my theoretical deficits in being a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153full partner\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to someone, but a continuing awareness of what choices make me a better partner to those I love, and what choices on their part make them better partners to me, so that I can ask if they might be willing to make those choices.<\/p>\n

Comments are disabled. If you want to discuss this post, please reach out personally.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This piece was written originally last year in my private journal, and it’s much more personal about my love life than I usually share publicly, although details that originally referred to specific relationships have been depersonalized to maintain privacy. I share it in hopes that it helps me continue to center on what I believe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":750,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions\/750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}