Come with me and you’ll be in a world of no imagination!

“Come with me
and you’ll be
in a world of pure imagination…”
–Willy Wonka

_ _ _

I’ve always thought that my imagination was a bit overactive. As an example – I can’t actually watch The Walking Dead because I get realistic nightmares about being in a zombie apocalypse. And my reaction to that, anytime someone asks what I would do in a zombie apocalypse, is to say that I will immediately shoot myself in the head. Not even kidding.

My brain has always had a way of incorporating fears and anxieties into fantastical scenarios. And it’s also really good at turning my optimism into unrealistic expectations and fanciful scenarios, too.

What an ass.

But in some ways, my imagination is boring, cliche, and absolutely stupid. The most notable would be when it comes to dating and attraction.

Let me explain…

I’m a big fan of the idea of “dating your own species”. This can mean any number of things, whether it’s about poly vs. monogamy, or life priorities, etc.

If you’re an avid outdoorsy type – chances are, you would not be happy dating a couch potato who would rather marathon Gilmore Girls and eat take-out food on a Friday night.

If you’re a gym type, the same is likely true.

So when approaching dating, I have sort of self-selected my range of guys who I find attractive, who would likely also find me attractive. And with that second part, I am absolutely making the choice for them.

Which, if you aren’t aware, is kind of stupid and isn’t giving anyone the ability to decide for themselves.

But the thing is – I haven’t learned how to turn that part off. It’s obviously rooted in insecurity about myself.

I’ve always been this way, for as long as I can remember.

Someone conventionally attractive is showing me attention that I might be able to construe as flirting and/or interest? Well, obviously this is a Josie Grossy scenario from the movie Never Been Kissed, and I’m going to end up being egged by this hot guy and his equally hot date as they slow roll my house.

Girls like me aren’t supposed to date conventionally attractive guys. It doesn’t matter how nerdy or dorky they are. I’m a large woman (tall, previously muscular, and yes a little fat), and thus I should only be dating fat guys. Anyone who is of a healthy BMI is off limits, says my brain, don’t even THINK about it! You can get away with a guy who has a nice face, but that’s IT!

So, I just sit there, and look at a ridiculously attractive guy, who is saying that he finds me attractive, and my brain is all “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! DANGER!” and I just make this face the whole time:

And I look at myself from the outside, and imagine how RIDICULOUS it must look for someone like me to be actively flirting or trying to maintain the interest of this actual attractive guy.

Girl, you ain’t sexy, wtf are you doing?
Oh god, you didn’t just say that?!
Come on, you look like an idiot…
Oh, now you’re biting your lip? Great move! Now they’re going to assume you’re hungry or something…

And I proceed with caution (if at all). And eventually my seeming lack of interest (due to crippling anxiety about my obvious inadequacy) crushes any hopes of a connection. Because my actions are basically calling this person a LIAR! And who wants to be thought of as a liar? Or have their motives questioned?

And my brain does this every. single. time.

Boring. Cliche. Stupid.

My brain definitely needs new source material, because it’s obviously not creative enough to come up with its own script.

Fuck you, Drew Barrymore.

We Did the Mash – We Did the Poly Mash

I was working in my lab, late one night…

This turned out to be a long one – Bear with me, because the context matters.

_ _ _

Ah, boundary stretching – we meet again.

Today was not my best day in recent memory. I’ve been feeling under the weather, and it was confirmed that I have ye olde tonsillitis, which is a common consequence I come across as a smoker. Smoking sucks; I’m working on it.

What I’ve learned today, and what I continue to learn, is that boundary stretching experiences rarely take place in lab conditions. There are so many confounding variables in any given situation, that things are just not going to go as you plan or expect.

This all comes back to that expectations and idealism that I’ve gone over a lot in my previous posts. It’s my biggest sin, every time.

So, today was the first time that I agreed to leave the house without any actual plans so that my husband and a partner could specifically have alone/sexy times.

The original plan was that they would be seeing each other between 4pm and 6pm and that I would be home at 6pm after “festivities” had ended. He even set an alarm for 5:40pm to make sure that things were wrapped up by 6. Our definition of “wrapped up” was never clearly communicated, and you’ll see where that ended up taking us as the story progresses. In case you can’t tell already – things did not work out as I expected.

At a little after 3, hubby gets a text that his new partner is on her way, so I hustle to gather up my coat and purse and get out of the house before she arrives. (We have not met yet, and springing me on her when she’s first arriving to initiate sexy times would be uncool).

So already we’re off to a rough start – I was not planning on leaving until shortly before 4, and here I was leaving a little after 3. Hubby still wants to enjoy their time until she has to leave (which is 6). Sooo, instead of finding distractions and things to do for 2 hours, it’s now for about 3 hours.

First stop for me was the Patient First, as over the past two days, my left tonsil had become exceptionally swollen, and I knew it was tonsillitis, as I’ve been down this road before. So, I get to the Patient First, and it looks like this is totally going to eat up a ton of time! Not bad!

Nope. I was out of there in just shy of an hour.

At this point, I’d started feeling very lethargic and significantly more “sick” than I was previously – I had a slight fever when they took my temperature. This made the prospect of staying out and finding more things to do really annoying – but I knew that hubby and new lady have limited time, and I didn’t want to intrude, even though all I wanted to do at that moment was nap.

Okay… so… what to do now?

Second stop became an oil change! That should eat up some time. I thought to myself “I bet there’s a long line with people gearing up their cars for holiday travel!” I got there, and it seemed to be the case, with a full garage already and 3 cars ahead of me! Woohoo!

Yeah, I was in and out of there in 45 minutes…

So at this point, I still had an hour left to kill.

I headed to the WaWa right next door to the oil change place, grabbed a coffee and sat in my car staring at the clock for a while.

And for almost all of this, I was chain smoking cigarettes like crazy. My car smells hideous right now.

I drove back toward the house around 5:15, and decided to stop at the Royal Farms nearby the house. I gassed up my Prius (which didn’t take long), and then I sat in the Royal Farms parking lot listening to Podcasts, drinking my WaWa coffee and staring at the clock some more. (You may note here that I did not get gas at the WaWa, and that it was really weird for me to stop at one gas station and then shortly thereafter another… but I really was just trying to come up with things to do as I headed toward the house – don’t judge me).

It was about 5:30 at this point.

I started to play Farm Heroes Saga. That eats up another 15 minutes.

Checked Facebook. Texted boyfriend back and forth.

5:59pm.

At 6:00pm on the nose, I figured I would have heard from my husband giving the all clear, so I text him an “Are you decent?”

He then tells me that he is, and then asks me if I’d like to meet his new lady.

I mention that I’m exhausted and just went to the urgent care and am just not in the best state to meet. I’m getting upset at this point, because I was SOOOO ready to be home. There was no actual discussion about meeting her prior to this. Plus, in our initial conversations I said that I really didn’t want things to run over the 6 o’clock mark.

He understands and says she needs to gather her stuff to leave, and he’d text me the all clear.

10 minutes go by, and I get a text that’s likely meant to be light-hearted but pissed me off about how she’s just chatting away and he’s trying to nudge her toward the door.

At this point, I’m so over this waiting game and angrily text “Fuck Dude, I’ve been sitting in this Royal Farms parking lot for almost an hour!”.

He gets the hint, and about 5 minutes later he gives the all clear.

I am in a terrible mood when I get home. He’s in the shower, and I just crawl into bed, super upset and exhausted.

He comes out of the shower and doesn’t understand why I’m upset. Initially I do not want to talk, but he lays down in the bed and just continues talking to me and asking ridiculous nonsensical questions until I get to the point where I’m cooled down enough to explain why I’m so upset.

What it boils down to is that I thought we’d agreed to specific things, and then it felt like none of them were adhered to. The time frame was shot to hell on both ends. There was no discussion of meeting and I expected to be home at 6 with her having already left.

In reality, the only thing that was really dumb was that my husband brought up the possibility of meeting me to his new lady at around 5:30pm, and she said that would be alright, and he forgot to close the loop because he assumed I’d be okay with it. He had forgotten that I felt awful and just wanted to take a nap (which I’d texted to him while at the Patient First). He got caught up in conversation after asking her, and forgot to get the other person involved in this meeting (me) on board. If he’d asked me around 5:30, I might have made the effort, but when he asked me at 6, when I was expecting to be at home, I was not in any mood because I’d already felt like the boundaries of what we’d agreed to were violated.

After about an hour of conversation and discussion, I started to feel less awful – at least about the situation (I still feel sick).

As I write this, I feel stupid for being so upset. I definitely overreacted (though I didn’t yell or threaten or anything – I mostly just whined). I’m not generally on my best behavior when I’m feeling sick, and I spent the last 2 hours of my “trip” wanting nothing more than to take a nap, but being unable to do so because I was exiled from my home. And then when the moment arrived that I was supposed to be free to go home… it was snatched away from me, and I had to wait an additional 20 minutes. Which is an eternity when you feel like hot garbage.

Boundary stretching experiences are not guaranteed to occur under the best case scenario or circumstances. Just like experiments outside of the lab, you are likely to come across a lot of confounding variables that may taint your view of the boundary, but really have nothing to do with it. But coming across those variables is extremely valuable if you take the time to separate them from the actual experiment.

I think this whole thing would have been absolutely fine if I hadn’t felt so sick and shitty. And if my husband hadn’t have been so dumb and forgotten to ask me if I was in any state to meet his new lady. But that probably also wouldn’t have been so upsetting if I hadn’t been desperate to get home and curl up in bed due to being ill.

So… at the end of the day, what I learned is: Don’t try to stretch your fucking boundaries when you’re a whiney sick baby.

Just kidding (sort of).

The real lesson is that taking the time to separate the incidental shittiness from the broader experiment is key in stretching your boundaries in a healthy way. I could very easily assume that this is a hard boundary for me if I were to forget to remove the confounding variables of my illness and my husband’s forgetfulness.

Don’t give in to the idea that a bad experience is bad and should never be attempted again because of the boundary stretching – look closer and see if it’s not something else entirely.

Wheelin’ and Idealin’

This post falls under both the depression and poly categories, because one of the big things I have to contend with is tempering my expectations and being okay if things don’t go down exactly as I would have hoped.

In my ideal world, I would see everyone I love in a one-on- one time capacity, as well as normal group activity capacity, as much as I could ever want! In reality, things don’t often work out that way.

My boyfriend works a crazy job. Sometimes he’s out of state for a week or more. Sometimes he’s in town for 22 hours before having to head back out – and he doesn’t really even know this until the night before he has to head out again. And he’s been honest and upfront about this from the beginning.

So, from the get-go, we’re talking about limited time seeing each other. Add on top of this that he obviously has other things he needs to do and other people he wants to see. And when you’re a person who’s not sure how long you’re actually going to be in town, you’re going to tend to try to get in as much time with as many people that you haven’t seen in a while as possible.

My current struggle is really the tendency for my depression to take over and entirely reject the non-ideal scenario of group activity because I’d prefer some one-on-one time. This is obviously compounded by the newness of the relationship, as well as the general lack of seeing each other. Aaaand there’s also the mild social anxiety of hanging out with a lot of people I don’t know, who my “anchor” is very interested in catching up with, thus making them a somewhat less reliable anchor.

If you’re unfamiliar with what an “anchor” is in this scenario, it would be the person that you know who makes social situations less anxiety-inducing because you can look at them or signal to them and they can give you a little bit of reassurance that everything is cool. A lot of people with mild social anxiety are able to function in large crowds of strangers if they’ve got a reliable anchor.

This then feeds into my depression, because it’s quite a burden on someone else to make them your anchor like that, particularly if you’re going into a situation where they want to interact with a lot of other people, and thus shouldn’t feel obligated to constantly be reassuring you throughout the evening that everything is cool. I mean, let’s be real here – I’m a grown ass woman. I should be able to handle interacting with people I don’t know. All of that makes sense on an intellectual level, but I can already feel my heart beating faster, and tears behind my eyes threatening to pop through just thinking about it.

And get this: There’s no guarantee that a group thing is even going to happen!

So here I am fretting, as usual, about how I’m going to react to varying situations that may not even happen.

I thrived in a monogamous relationship, let me tell you. The routine, the comfort, the reliable anchor, the balance of alone and group time. I can’t even remember a time during those 5 years of monogamous marriage where I ever felt even REMOTELY the amount of anxiety that I have over the past 10 months. Routine is a godsend for someone with depression and anxiety.

Poly is not really known for its routine. But it has brought many wonderful things into my life – including actual semi-regular sex (kind of). It’s brought amazing people into my life who love me and care for me and make me laugh and who make time for me when they can. But good Lord does it make you work on your insecurities. I have insecurities that I had completely forgotten about since my early 20’s.

So, I continue on my road to improvement in both my relationships and, more importantly, myself.

“No one can be your everything” is something that is at the core of ethical nonmonogamy, and it shouldn’t be taken as a negative, like that everyone is shitty or something. What it really means to me is that all relationships you choose (very important word) to engage in are valuable, even if they’re not what one might consider “ideal”.

Now, this isn’t to say that some relationships aren’t entirely untenable based on actual compatibility issues – but if someone is meeting your basic relationship needs, and you have no other MAJOR issues, there’s no reason to throw that baby out with the bathwater just because they don’t have sex the way you might want them to, or don’t high five you as much as you’d like, or whatever part of your individual self that might not be embraced or stimulated by this single other human being.

I think I can adapt that to my current issue and say that not all situations are going to be ideal or satisfy all of my needs at once. There’s no reason for me to completely reject a less than ideal scenario and opt for NO needs being met when I should view it as an opportunity to get at least some of my needs met. Time with those I love is time with those I love. (There are limits to this – like, I’m not going to attend an orgy with either my husband or boyfriend just to get some time with them – that’s where my need to NOT watch them fucking other people overrides my need to see either of them.)

Now if I can just get my head and emotions in agreement on this one that would be… ideal.