Category: dating

State of the Relationship Address: The saga begins

queer_house

I should have wrote this two months ago, because I can already feel myself shifting from this position, but this is where I was then.

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Alright folks, gather round fer some truth tellin. So here’s what I know about my relationship situation so far.

I met my first wife when I was 17 years old. When that relationship ended I immediately (like next day immediately) started dating my second wife. Was that smart? Probably not, but you’re falling behind already so try and keep up. So, I’ve been in two concurrent relationships for the last 21 years which means that I only had sex with two people (perhaps shallow but relevant later). I’m now going through my second divorce and as far as break-ups go it’s one of the best. It would seriously go down in the record books for how well we get along and how we immediately moved into being friends.

I’m not afraid to be vulnerable again and in fact I’ve already put my heart in harm’s way a couple of times and I’m better for the experience. However, I have no desire to settle into anything similar to the type of relationship that I recently ended. Not yet. It would be too much too soon. Plus I’ve never really dated so I want to enjoy that experience for awhile.

So where does that leave me? Well, it means that for the moment I don’t want a monogamous relationship. Part of me feels that non-monogamy will be less serious. Not because it is necessarily so, there are some very serious open-relationships out there. However, there seems to be more non-monogamous people who are willing to accept casual as a viable choice. The other is that I want to experience sex in a multitude of forms and with more than one person for awhile. I settled down so fast that I was never able to explore. If it happens that I find myself with one person again I want to do so knowing that I was able to venture in my own way for awhile. I do have a few things to check off of my sex bucket list. (Sex Bucket! Coming to a store near you!) This means that I don’t expect my partners to be monogamous either. This little bit is pretty much all I know. Although, it’s not a bad start.

My unknowns are vast at this point. Mainly because I’ve never done this type of thing before and society doesn’t write the script for this relationship style. Quite the contrary it is generally frowned upon.

Among the many things that I wonder is how long should these relationships last? Sometimes I feel like it would be better to have shorter relationships in order to make sure I don’t enter into anything too serious before I’m ready, but I can’t reasonably guard against that without being unreasonable to my partners. “Sorry we have a really cool thing going, but it’s been 6 months so we have to stop.” I don’t want that to be my style either.

That brings up the question of whether my ultimate choice for a relationship will be one of monogamy or non-monogamy. The choices I’m making now could very much influence my future. I have to consider the chance that I’ll find one or two people so special that I want to try and live out the rest of my existence with them before I ever officially make a choice.

I don’t know if any of this really seems like a struggle to any of you, but all of this stuff is bouncing around in my head on a near daily basis. I’m trying to be open to all of the possibilities and not force anything, but it’s easier said than done.

Does Polyamory Make Sense for Me?

I wondered what to do with this writing. It provides a snapshot into one particular time of my polyamorous relationship. I figure that there might be other people going through this same situation and maybe they can glean something from it. I can’t say whether that will be a positive thing or a negative, but then maybe that is precisely the value of this story; it’s interpretation can be left to you the reader.

I used to find a lot of stories from the polyamorous trenches, but they always touted the value of being poly. Rarely did I encounter one that laid bare the doubts someone was experiencing as they experienced them. There was always an undercurrent in the culture that made it feel like if someone was expressing doubts then they hadn’t conquered enough of their demons yet. Those people were doing poly wrong. I call bullshit on that.

What I do know is that if this helps you in your poly relationship then run with it my non-conventional brothers and sisters. If it makes you decide that polyamory isn’t for you then so be it. I really don’t care which way it moves you, just that you do whatever is right for you.

I wrote this seven months into our polyamorous arrangement and two months before my wife and I decided to get a divorce. While my marriage didn’t work, keep in mind this is not a necessary blueprint for every couple deciding to venture down the same path. Your results will vary.

In retrospect, I was right to have my doubts, but I had placed too much faith in my wife’s proclamation of polyamorous happiness. In reality, she was happy because she had found someone else she liked better. As it turns out, she’s now in a monogamous relationship with the guy she was seeing while we were married. Her thoughts on this are that she thinks she wanted a polyamorous relationship because something was missing. It’s hard to argue otherwise given the results.

I don’t hold any ill will for those involved. In fact, I wish her and her partner the best of luck. I hope she’s found the one this time. My entire relationship with her was a grand experiment and we knew that from the start. I would do it all again (maybe sans marriage) because it was one of the most beautiful times in my life. I was able to spend three glorious years with someone I loved dearly and I learned so much about myself in the process. That’s a definite win in my book.

So given all of that, here is what I wrote one night on my phone when I couldn’t sleep:

Polyamory makes so much sense and gives a viable alternative to the dominant culture out there. I love polyamory on an intellectual level, practically speaking I’m not so sure.

Truth be told I’m in a polyamorous relationship even though I’m only seeing one person. The thing is my wife has another partner which I have been intellectually supportive of and yet I’m having some emotional trouble with simultaneously.

My conundrum lies with the fact that I’m not sure if this is what I want. It’s possible that I could meet somebody and fall in love with them at the same time that I love my wife. It sounds great except that it hasn’t happened for me yet. Plus, I don’t know if I really want this to happen with my partner and yet it has.

My finding someone isn’t for a lack of trying. I’ve been on dates with men and women but either I haven’t wanted to continue or they haven’t. In the situations where they ended it I was hurt and yes I cried. I didn’t shed tears over the person, I wasn’t super into any of them anyway, but rather the idea that I won’t be able to find someone at all. Moreover that I will always be caught out in a situation where my wife is happily partnered with another, but I won’t be. Right now my present and seeming future with polyamory has been to be the one sacrificing while receiving none of the positive things that I was hopeful would come with it.

Is there something that makes me undateable aside from the fact that I’m a middle age man who is married?

What if I can’t connect to someone because I’m not wired that way? What if I only want to love one person and for that person to be devoted to me? I don’t know if these are really statements of how things are. I can say that they are legitimate fears of mine because if these concerns are true then I have no reason to doubt that I would be happiest in a monogamous relationship.

Meanwhile, my wife says she’s never been happier and while I know that means it’s because she’s getting to express an aspect of her personality through polyamory that had long been silent, it’s still hurtful. It signifies that for everything great and wonderful we had, that it wasn’t as good as having her other partner as well. It makes me wonder if I’m not enough and if I ever was.

We always used to say that if we had to stop dating tomorrow that we could go back to having just each other and be perfectly happy. We didn’t know it then but that was a lie. Certain things have become clearer as we’ve moved along.

The first is that you can’t just stop loving another person. I can’t ask my wife to stop seeing her other partner, it wouldn’t be fair to him or to her. Her relationship with him happened under all of our watches and I knew going into this that there was no going back. My wife loves without abandon and she falls hard and fast for someone. It’s one of the reasons that polyamory suits her so well. On top of that she’s wonderfully intelligent, emotionally aware and a truly beautiful person inside and out. It was only a short matter of time before she found someone who would want to be with her and share in that. I also knew that they would both be in love in very short order. That’s how it happened to me after all.

We don’t practice hierarchical polyamory. So we try and keep everyone’s relationship on the same level as much as possible. Just as her partner couldn’t rightfully ask her to stop loving me, I can’t ask her to stop loving or seeing him. The genie is already out of the bottle, consequences be damned.

The second thing is that she couldn’t be happy with just me. Not really, not anymore. I can tell something has changed. It would be like a gay person trying to go back in the closet after feeling the liberation of being out. She is polyamorous and that’s that. Even if I could stop her, presuming I wanted to, she would always harbor a resentment for me and a longing for that aspect of her life back. I would be the reason for her misery and I love her too much for that.

No, polyamory is here to stay. That much I have to accept.

This brings me around again to my central thesis which is what am I? Polyamorous? Monogamous?

Sometimes I catch myself wanting to pull away. I have thoughts about how it might occur that I can’t take it anymore. Sometimes those thoughts culminate in me leaving. Other times, I just imagine how I will break down and wonder if I can ever recover again. Is this purely an emotional response or a way of my mind telling me that it can’t operate this way? Culture certainly hasn’t groomed me to accept polyamory. Does knowing that my partner has another person keep me from loving her as much as I could?

I don’t have any clue. For now all I have are haunting questions that I’m not sure I really want answered just yet.

Gay Guys Can Be Shitheads Too

So my physical relationship with men has been a roller coaster. I’m attracted to men, but it’s something I’ve only been able to explore fully in the last 9 months or so. That means my experience isn’t where I want it to be. Of course, there’s no shortage of men who want to fuck me or be fucked by me, but this is difficult as well because I’m interested in a much narrower grouping of men than I am women. Not to mention that a lot of guys with sex on their mind throw all courtesy out the window when they’re trolling online and I deserve more respect than this. Yup, that means I don’t want to see a picture of your dick. Try the novel approach of actually having a real conversation (and not about sex).

I just ended a horrible, albeit super short encounter (supposed to be physical in some way) with a guy I met on Grindr. Okay settle down, I hear you and you’re right. The Grindr crowd is a fairly toxic population but I’ve met a couple of good people on there and had awesome sexual experiences with them, plus I can usually weed the shitheads out. Actually, I’m about to talk about a guy I had ruled out once before. I should have stuck with my earlier ruling.

Anyway, the short explanation of what went down is that I wasn’t attracted to him. After we had agreed to meet he had an event to attend and would be over shortly after. I heard from him next when he said he was just finishing up eating tacos. Since highly spiced meat doesn’t do wonders for someone’s breath I asked him to take some courtesy measures. He said, “I’ll have to run by home then.” Great, he wasn’t planning on doing this in the first place that’s reassuring. I don’t think it’s too much to expect someone that you’ve never met to have good oral hygiene when making out is on the horizon. Once he arrived home he said he was freshening up a bit. Given that his house wasn’t one of his intended stops before coming over what kind of disrepair was this guy in before he went to tidy up?

I found out soon enough once we got into the light. He showed up in a shirt that I’m pretty sure was wrinkled and stained and not in a designer clothing kind of way. He was scruffy which I had expected, but it was unkempt.

His conversation wasn’t any better. He had photography listed as a hobby so I was trying to chat him up on that but it wasn’t working. I showed him a few of my pictures, but still nothing. He actually showed disinterest in any conversation. He seemed put off that I didn’t want to swallow his dick as soon as we walked in the door. Was I reading him wrong? Of course not, but at the time I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

We sat down at my behest and started talking. Oh wait, did I say we? I meant me. He put his hand on my leg and his other hand down his pants. Classy right? As an aside, I’ll also be hosting a seminar on how to find all the good men. In case anything happened (which at this point seemed pretty fucking slim to none) I initiated the STI conversation. He withdrew his hand (both of them) and dejectedly said it was a buzzkill to talk about it, but he was clean.

Whelp! That pretty much does it for me. At this point I was at a loss of what to say but I wasn’t about to have sex with whatever this was in front of me. I started by saying that I’m not sure I want to do anything. His reply is that if I’m not sure I want to do anything physical then that means I don’t. It’s the most he had said in my presence and he was right. I said that while I was in the mood earlier that I just wasn’t feeling it currently. He immediately got up and walked out.

He was there for 5 minutes total. If he hadn’t been so impatient and actually entered into a conversation maybe I could have seen that he was a nice guy and given him a shot or made out or something, but of course when someone storms out after they find out you’re not going to have sex with them you can rest assured that they weren’t a nice guy.

I waited for what was inevitable. I knew I would be bombarded by angry vitriolic messages that would hinge on his insecurities and demonstrate his true nature. Basically, I was about to receive confirmation that I made the right choice. Like clockwork they came streaming in. He said I wasn’t genuine, my photography was shitty, I look older than my photo (it’s about 2 months old and only adjusted for color), basically he attacked anything and everything he knew about me.

I told him that it was my mistake because we should have met somewhere first to gauge our attraction and that it just wasn’t there for me. The insults kept streaming in after that, something about how I wasn’t attractive either, but I don’t even really know what was said. I blocked him. There wasn’t much point in having my phone light up all night to keep me on edge about messages I wasn’t going to read. I had done what I needed to do and his meltdown was his own problem. I don’t owe anybody sex. I don’t care if I do meet someone on the skeeziest hookup app there is and talk about sex till we’re blue in the – uh . . . face. If at any time I (or someone else) says no then that’s definitive.

My take away from this is that I should always meet someone out for a drink first to gauge who they are and my level of attraction as much as possible. This goes for hookups too. I should probably only select guys from my narrow band of interest. I hate to be like this and I wish my attraction was more varied, but it’s not apparently. Also, and this is key, I should probably delete my Grindr profile and the app. For now though it still remains on my phone beckoning me to reach out and find Mr. Wrong.

Getting Dumped, Kind Of: A story of honesty

For those of you who don’t know I’m currently choosing to date non- monogamously. For some of you this probably sounds great because I can have multiple partners. This is technically true, but it hasn’t really worked out that way for more than a week or two at a time. This brings me to the other part of being non-monogamous, that you may not have considered, which is that I end up getting dumped more often.

This just happened to me ten minutes ago (at least at the time of this writing). Here’s the skinny: I met someone online and reading her profile was like reading my own in many ways so I reached out to her and we clicked. On our date it was awesome. We met with a long hug. We laughed and shared intimate moments of our existence with one another such as how she doesn’t share her phone number with people until she can trust them. When I moved closer to her just for the sake of it she closed the gap, kissed me and then told me how great it was. Later upon kissing her neck she moaned. The night was over in a flash, but we had talked for 6 hours. When I walked her to her car we held hands and kissed goodbye.

I sent her a message later that night with my phone number. I told her that she didn’t have to use it until she was ready and that we could use the dating app until that moment arrived. She replied with a text telling me that I had beat her to it.

I was in, or so I thought. The day before our next date she sent me a text to say that our distance was an issue (20 miles) and that a relationship she had with a guy in the same town as me hadn’t worked for that reason. I called bullshit (in my head) on both fronts and decided to remove that excuse. I knew she wanted out and that I wasn’t going to change her mind; so be it, but I wanted to know the truth. I told her if that was all there is to it I could be the one to come see her each time. Of course, such a one-sided solution is not a tenable situation for any relationship, but I was just gambling and cutting through her fake answer.

It worked. “To be honest,” she said, (for the second time) “I was trying to make it easier by saying that. I’m just not feeling it.”

I told her I accepted that and thanked her for being honest. Just knowing the real reason helped me to put most of the situation behind me immediately. I don’t know what to make of everything else that happened, but now that I have the truth, somehow I don’t have to.

Make A Good First Impression

http://www.sparkol.com/engage/make-any-stranger-your-bff-with-our-first-impressions-masterclass/?_sacid=BlgWebvidSeaFacAD1511txt+StrangerBFFHL1

I think there’s some good crossovers here for the dating world.

My Tips

Here’s one of my tips and it falls under the category of confidence: Make the first thing your date sees be your smile. I’ve started dates with and without a smile and the one’s that begin with a big grin go down better without a doubt.

Here’s the kicker though; the secret of a good smile isn’t in your mouth or teeth. It’s in your eyes. I know because I had a date compliment me on my smile. I thanked her and told her that I had been self-conscious about my teeth until recently. She said, “It’s not your teeth it’s your eyes.” Of course! Think about when you smile in the mirror. Yes you see your mouth and teeth, but most of your gaze goes to your eyes. It made so much sense to me that I felt silly for not having realized it earlier. She was a fucking genius!

The good news is that you can stop worrying about that imperfect smile you think you have because it doesn’t matter near as much as the story your eyes tell. The bad news is a forced smile looks fake because your eyes aren’t on board so the only way to get this right is to practice.

You have to really feel your smile radiating from your inner self through every part of your expression. I always imagine myself responding to something funny my date says and then laughing. I usually do this in the shower. Don’t ask me why it’s just where I do a lot of my thinking (not that kind of thinking, get your head out of the gutter). After you do this for awhile you can move on to using a mirror. Just make sure to pick out something positive about what you see and keep building on that as you go along.

The more you do it the easier it becomes and trust me when I say that the first time someone tells you that you have a beautiful smile that it will make you want to smile even more. It’s a viscous circle and it’s pretty fucking awesome.

 

A Middle Finger Salute to Valentine’s Day

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Everyone by now knows the story of St. Valentine. He created a bad name for himself peddling heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and greeting cards with sappy sayings on them. The final straw came when he did “a diamond is a girl’s’ best friend” commercial and he was beheaded. Those Romans might have been cocky, but they didn’t mess around.

For the first time in 21 years I’m experiencing Valentine’s Day as a single person and I’m absolutely fucking thrilled about the idea. Can you say stress free? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being in love and doing things for my partner. I’ve done more candlelight dinners than I can count. I’ve read heartfelt poems with tears streaming down my face and willfully performed a host of other gestures that would be worthy of happening on February 14th. The kicker is that very few of them have occurred on that day. I’ve just done whatever, whenever I’ve desired.

I have also been lucky that my past partners haven’t been too hung up on the day as a way to define a relationship. Even so, Valentine’s day has always been an uneasy fit for me; a forced gesture that if not fulfilled, society seems to insist, renders all of my other relationship qualities and occurrences meaningless.

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It was a home invasion officer!

To me Valentine’s Day feels like the dis-ingenuousness of a window dressing or an election campaign. It’s mainly subterfuge and not representative of my real world experiences with my loved one’s. There’s a tendency of not just trying to prove the worth of my relationship on this one day, but to prove it against other people’s relationships as well. “Did you hear what Jim did for Brenda on Valentine’s Day? He jumped out of a plane with only white doves slowing his descent and a banner trailing behind him professing his love while he sang a song he wrote with Coldplay (because not everything can be A-list).”

I think this day can be whatever we want it to be. We each have to make our own way in this life, but for fucks sake people, let’s not get carried away. Remember that this day has been created for you by a greedy corporate class. At it’s core Valentine’s Day is a way to commoditize our emotions and sell them back to us in the form of products and services. If corporations have to use your insecurities to get what they want (your money and loyalty) then they’re cool with that. Hell, those slimy bastards went to college and studied hard so they could learn to do that very thing.

My hope is that you don’t wait for a single day throughout the year to tell those close to you how you feel (or to judge the state of your relationship). Tell them now, show them often and say fuck you to the commodity based holiday calendar.

For those of you, like me, who are single on this day. Count your blessings. Maybe you want to date someone or maybe you don’t but realize that there is a certain freedom in being free from the rat race of consumerism. Besides, if you feel left out you could always take up celebrating Christmas.

So with all the smarmy sarcasm I can muster, “Hey Fucker! Won’t you be my Valentine?”

Moments In Dating: The Hitler conundrum

An OK Cupid question: Are some human lives worth more than others?

My answer: No

My explanation: Philosophically, which is where my mind always goes, worth is a construct of our minds and not an objective reality.

Practically speaking, probably. I mean, if I had Hitler and a nice grandmother in front of me and one of them had to be shot, then I’d give the gun to the grandmother and let her kill Hitler. No freebies.

Does Dating Someone “Older” Make For A Better Partner?

The answer of course, is yes which is why you should totally contact me. All joking aside, I think it just depends on what you want in a partner.

Older Women

http://www.mode.com/stories/the-perks-of-dating-an-older-woman/11787561

Articles like this have to make a fair amount of generalizations and of course some of these will be just as erroneous as they are correct. People are highly varied and our lives have all crafted us differently (and thank goodness for that).

I would have to say that generally I prefer to date women that are approximate to my age, which is around 40 (possibly older as well, I’ll let you know if it ever happens). I find that women around that age range are far more open and straightforward in their communication. This means that we can both be completely honest with one another in situations that would probably facilitate a argument or self-doubt with a younger person.

However, I also tend to attract the more mature individuals from younger age brackets and I’ve had some wonderfully open and communicative experiences with them as well. So it may just be that this is the type of person that I attract across the board. Like I said, generalizations aren’t 100 percent accurate.

Older Men

http://stylecaster.com/dating-older-men/

So while I’ve done a few graphic things with older guys, I’ve never actually dated one. However, I have been the older guy who was married to someone 17 years my junior.

No, I wasn’t going through a midlife crises. I was actually the most self-actualized that I had ever been during that relationship. Although, I did get a kick out of saying that I married her because I couldn’t afford a Corvette. Yup, I make awkward jokes even in person. However, in so many ways it was the best relationship I’ve been in, but I digress.

I think this article makes a lot of good points that I feel are probably true. I feel like there is a lot of overlap between both of these articles.

What do you think?

I actually want to open this up to everyone who has dated someone with 10 years or greater age difference. What are your thoughts about this experience (positive and negative)?

 

Why I Don’t Care About Your Myers-Briggs Result

If you’re unaware, the online dating world is fraught with people clamoring to fill their profiles with information about their personality type. This makes perfect sense except that this information is almost invariably provided by the results from taking the Myers-Briggs personality test.

I’ve had a decent handle on who I am since I was about 18 years old, at least as it pertains to my personality traits, and very early on I learned that tests like Myers-Briggs don’t amount to a steaming pile of, well . . . beans. The results never really matched me and I would get different results based on when I took them. I pretty much always ranked personality tests into the same mental category as astrology; they’re both fun to tinker with for 15 minutes or so, but woefully worthless in the grand scheme of things.

Apparently, I’m not alone and the psychiatric community has long disavowed any usefulness for these tests. So instead of using that vital space on your profile to tell me about your personality test you can use it to mention which sports team you root for or that you swipe right for dogs or beards. I can’t get enough of that.

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless

Poly and Pansexual: The benefits of being out

I have to admit that I don’t have the slightest idea of who Gaby Dunn is, but then I live in a box informed only by my specific news interests and fueled by copious amounts of punk rock so this is not surprising to me. However, I don’t have to know her other works to appreciate the wisdom in this one.

What she speaks to here is one of the things I have started doing. I’m out to pretty much anyone. It’s one of the only ways to control my identity and prevent bisexual erasure. If I let people know that I’m pansexual then they won’t necessarily think me straight when with a woman or gay when with a man.

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/sex-and-love/polyamorous-pansexual