Created by and available at http://tacit.livejournal.com/346761.html.
If you follow the link to the Tactit's LJ post that contains their Polyamorous Secondary Relationship Card, the first commentor pointed out the part that hits me the most:
"Being a single poly person, even in "non-hierarchical relationships" it isn't uncommon to be treated like this. Even after the other person has sworn they wouldn't treat you like this."
The moment you meet someone in a poly relationship, you know they already have established relationships that will come first. Their reasoning makes perfect sense. They don't believe in hierarchies, or they don't believe they're in a point in their relationship where they'd create hierarchies, but they already know the person they are involved with. They already know that person is important to them. If push comes to shove on time, whether it be time constraints, fears of exposure, convenience, jealousy on the "first" partner's part, discomfort over friends and family knowing the truth, difficulty juggling two or three relationships, whatever, you are the unknown. You will be the piece they give up.
As a 42 year old single, queer, poly, switch, I find myself participating in the world of online dating. I have tried a few different sites. Lesbotronics is great, but they rarely have anybody I match with. I've never met anyone through lesbotronics, and the site was even blocked at a Phoenix coffee shop. Pink Cupid annoyed me. Match.com was filled with monogamous people looking for love, marriage, and a baby carriage. Tinder was gross. So that leaves me using OKCupid most of the time.
I've created a list of things I search for in online dating profiles before deciding if it's someone that I'd like to meet. I am well aware that this list might mean I miss out on some interesting people, but these have ended up as deal breakers often enough that I just skip folks who smoke (for example).
If you're interested in my list, you can see it behind the cut.
Several years ago I was a writing tutor at the writing center of a university. I was horrified to learn that my job was not to help people learn how to avoid grammar errors. The sole purpose of my job was to assist students in learning to communicate clearly; grammar corrections were to be avoided unless there were regular problems distracting from the student clearly communicating.
So apparently some people
think consent talk ruins the mood. These are obviously folks that I don't get down and funky with. Of course, consent talk can definitely be done with a throaty voice whispering, "May I kiss you?" in your ear, but sometimes it requires a bit more finesse. There might be topics involved that require more of an ability to think clearly and not be distracted, and lets face it, even when consent
conversations take place in a non-sexual environment where you aren't
touching or talking dirty, consent conversations rock - no whispering or
dirty talk required!
Corporate rules exist to kill my dreams. My whole life I've dreamed that someone would hand deliver flowers to my desk at work. I've received flower deliveries, and once the most romantic cup of tea ever was hand delivered to my desk. But never flowers.
The first floor of what was once an entire building of offices is now being opened for retail businesses. So to ensure office safety, they're putting a security guard by the elevator and locking things down. All visitors need to be reported to the receptionist a day in advance, or if we have last minute visitors, we have to notify the front desk so that the receptionist can make arrangements with the guard.
Now I will never look up from my desk as some wonderfully romantic individual hand delivers me flowers. Sure, I know it's a stupid thing to dream of anyway, but I can't seem to convince that thirteen year old in the back of my head that it's irrelevant and based on an unrealistic idealization that not only doesn't exist bust isn't necessary. Nor can I get her to understand that I'd probably die of embarrassment if it ever happened.
A coworker told me that she always has a list of questions with her when
she's on a date. She'll pull them out as conversation starters (kind of
like a book I have that contains conversation topics that my ex used to pull out on date night back in the early-2000s so that we
talked about new topics and ideas, and I didn't keep repeating myself
telling the same stupid and boring stories).
Why am I telling you
all this? She emailed me her list of questions, and it is so freaking
adorably HER. I cannot imagine pulling this list out on a date (let
alone pulling out the list of questions to fall in love over that was making the rounds earlier this year), but I can totally and completely see her doing this.
So, would you bring these questions on a date? Or better yet, would you take them to dinner with your parents?
Although I've never wanted to be a man, I've always wanted to have a day or a week where I woke up and had a penis. I just want to take one for a test ride, ya know? Write my name in the snow, see if aiming into the pot is really that difficult, try to rub one out, go to a festival with 18,000 other people and not fear the port-a-potties, and yeah, participate in yummy adult activities with another person.
I'm a queer, cis woman who was in a 13 year monogamous relationship with
a heterosexual cis man. This meant that I couldn't go slinging my rent-a-schlong all over town but would need to make use of it at home. So every now and then I'd ask my ex if he'd play with me and my non-existent turgid member. I knew that backhole insertions would be rejected, so I asked about other fun and sexy activities.
Nope. Nada. No chance. Every time I asked he was quite firm that he would not, under any circumstances, ever have touch my dude-meat. He would even leave me if I woke up in my female body and had sprouted an extra body part overnight because he only wanted my quivering quim.
Remember, this is fantasy land I was asking about. I didn't ask him to fantasize with me about what I'd do with my non-existent throbbing protuberance. I just if he'd touch it. However, the idea grossed him out enough that he couldn't even just humor me and say, "Sure. If you wake up tomorrow morning with a tootsie pop, I'll lick it three times." My fantasy happy hopper and I would be all alone because he couldn't even handle saying, "Sure," to a ridiculously impossible circumstance that involved touching my magically appearing 5 inches.
Ok, I get it. He couldn't imagine a circumstance where he'd be willing to have some fun with my non-existent salty joy stick, but I wasn't ever going to have one, so why did it bug me so much that he'd refuse it? I mean, it would never exist!
At some point, I wondered if he thought I might want to change things up and get one surgically added in the future. I'd never questioned my gender identity. So then I thought about whether I'd like to be a man and always have a raging richard in my pants. No, there was no gender identity crisis. I just really want to know how the other side feels, and maybe learn how to finally do the mysterious act that I, like Garfunkel and Oates, have always been unsure about performing (words in video NSFW, close captioned).
Yeah, silly thing to be bothered by considering it was impossible, but I couldn't understand how he would not love me if I sprouted a healthy handsome new limb in my sleep. I felt oddly betrayed by this extreme level of heterosexuality - a heterosexuality that was so definitive that he would dump me if I turned into a boy EVEN THOUGH I NEVER WANT TO BE A BOY.
I've been dating some folks off and on over the last two years, and I've found that not all heterosexual men are so against touching other man handles. It's strange to think that even though I have no plans for a long-term, seriously committed relationship anytime soon, one of the questions I'm probably going to be asking my longer term partner(s) will be what happens if I grow an extra flap of skin that grows if the wind blows up my skirt.
I'm sure part of the problem is that I'm not heterosexual. I don't understand full-out homosexuality or heterosexuality. I understand not wanting to touch a specific person's bits but being unable to even think about touching the "wrong" bits makes no sense to me. Deciding that you can't love someone anymore if their bits change also makes no sense to me.
I date along the entire spectrum or sexual and gender orientations, but I think that if I ever engage in any long-term relationships in the future, they will be with folks who aren't so firmly entrenched at one or the other end of the spectrum that they can't at least pretend that there might somehow one day be some sort of set of circumstance under which they might touch "other" bits.
The funny part is that I am no longer monogamous, and I don't plan to enter any monogamous relationships in the future. So I wouldn't be "stuck" untouched in this won't-ever-happen growth situation because I could call around and find which of my partners would be ok with it. I also have a couple of friends who have told me that if these circumstances ever occurred, they'd lend a helping hand. Yes, I've had conversations with friends and found folks willing to take my rental wrangler out for a spin.
So with bizarre-ass dating rules like this, is it any surprise that I'm single?
*ponders*
Is it completely bizarre? I mean, I'm just stating that I won't have a long-term relationship with someone who is 100% at one or the other end of the spectrum. So many people have at least the tiniest bit of flexibility that this might not be a really bizarre rule. Or at least I assume there are folks out there who could humor my impossible, never-occurring scenario of waking up with a rooster in my pants.
----
I want to make it clear that my ex is not homophobic. He just didn't want to touch penii (is that the plural?) and didn't see any point in pretending he'd do it in some bizarre fake pretend situation. He just preferred real life to weird fake impossibilities.
