Window shopping

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I posted on here, I thought it was a couple of weeks and I felt guilty enough about that as it is.

I’ve been corresponding with some women online, putting myself out there on the internerd, and I have realised something, not a great truth I’m sure, that internet dating is just as fucked up and screwy as hanging out in singles bars or picking up women at supermarkets. I would guess tht being with my ex-wife for 15 years and then TPG for the last 4 years means I have absolutely no idea how to get on with women in a flirty way. Relationships I’m pretty good with, I have the patience for it, but internet dating has me screwed both coming and going.

One woman who I thought I’d established a rapport with seemed very amicable and nice. She was a bit puzzled by polyamory, but seemed intrigued about it and we kind of chatted every night for an hour or so and kind of toyed with the idea of going on a date. At one point late of a Saturday evening I popped out for a smoke, TPG took my keyboard hostage and said hi to her, and she then proceeded to pour vitriol on to TPG, about her being a bratty kid that would be an albatross around her neck if she got into a relationship with me, that she had thought about it and didn’t want to be part of “your little family”. This completely out of the blue, we had been talking perfectly happily not 5 minutes before. After a little more animosity, we said goodbye and parted company. But the situation still lingers, because I don’t fit the accepted norm of being a 40 something who is single but still “up for a laff lol” nor am I an involved bloke trying to find someone to fuck on occasion when my partner’s back is turned. Predominantly the situation seems to match up to either of those two stereotypes, with a few hard to find interesting people squeezed in at the edges.

Why the hell isn’t there a polyamorous dating site for people who are already in a relationship and don’t need to lie to their significant other about where they’re going of an evening. It seems our best choices are to hang around swingers websites looking for people who are looking for more than an occasional fuck. It makes me feel sad, maybe I should start one. Problem will then be, how to propogate the knowledge through the poly community (assuming there is such a thing). But we could really do with one, and there of course I’m lining myself up for the fact that there is one and I just haven’t found it yet.

I admit to being a bit stumped now, I’m chatting to a couple of nice women still, but not with any expectation of it developing into anything serious, maybe something physical but that’s not necessarily what I’m after. Time will tell. The search continues, but in a slightly less optimistic fashion than before. We seem to be dispersed too much, maybe polyamory is too much a fringe attitude to have properly got itself into gear. There seems to be quite a few of us about, but I can’t find the pulse of the community to get into the bloodstream. I shall do some more research and see where it get’s me. And I shall try and comment on it slightly more often too, as something to do.

WTF?

Now I think it’s time I had a rant. I’ve been signed up to a few dating websites where you get to read the profiles of loads and loads of needy women looking for “Someone Special”, “The One” or “My Knight”. Now obviously because I’m poly I don’t lend much credence to the idea that there is one person who will make you complete, will solve all those self doubts and match you like a hand in a glove. I know it happens, I know people it’s happened to, but I contend that it’s far more rare than we are led to believe by the torrent of lifestyle propoganda that we face every minute of every day of our lives, created by people seemingly incapable of living by the morals that they broadcast in an attempt to make us docile and striving for marketable goods.

Now my problem with these profiles are many, from women who list themselves as wanting casual sex and then say that they are looking for their ideal partner in every line of their profile, to women who have a list as long as the Mason-Dixon line of stipulations, conditions, states and behaviours they demand you must conform to in order to meet their exacting standards, yeah good luck with that.But what really has me going at the moment is the women you strike up a mail conversation with, not the ones you mail and they don’t reply, that’s perfectly normal, but the ones where you get 2, 3 or even 4 emails into a conversation with these women, discussing your life and finding out about theirs, and then suddenly it’s all silent. Not a whisper, not a character comes across the lines to you. Now what did I do? Did I state something that was a deal breaker, did they find something out about me that was too unpleasant for them to consider?

Then tell me you aren’t interested!

Stop leaving me hanging in the breeze wondering what happened and keeping expecting to see something from them. This is twice in one week this has happened, and to be perfectly frank if they could could cope with me telling them about shitting in a sock when I need to go in the night I don’t see why some other random vaguery that I may have mentioned has caused them to run a mile.

OK the shitting in the sock was made up, but you see what I mean, it could be any one of a number of personal habits or emotional or mental states that warned them off, but…

I will never fucking know…

and that bugs me. If you’re going to stop having contact with someone that you have established a relationship with however slender, and both these women contacted me first I might hasten to add, then have the balls to tell me you aren’t interested, stop sneaking away like I wasn’t even worth the consideration of a “Piss Off”.

Where do we go from here.

It’s something I’m sure many people have said before, but it’s hard to blog when you have no angst and are relatively peaceful.

Last weekend Harry summoned the courage to come down and stay for a couple of days. Everyone got on, he’s a nice guy and is starting to become more garrulous as he gets to know me better, and without stress or pressure everything is starting to look rosy.

I do sometimes find myself becoming sad, as the traditionalist side of me thinks that he is entering the relationship because somehow I failed, in being everything TPG wanted, in supporting my end of the duet that we are traditionally supposed to share, in being a man who can keep a woman happy, at the end of the chain of logic. But I do know that emotionally, TPG was never going to be settled and content with one partner for life, monogomously, and to be fair to her I entered this idea willingly enough once I had faced the situation and decided on my options.My open minded willing adventurous side is mad keen to get on and explore this new idea, but still sometimes this other bit of me thinks that I am once again failing in something so many people manage (which is bollocks of course, my parents were a prize example of how it goes wrong for so many).

It’s been fun to flirt around the internet as well, although dealing with rejection has never been my forté, and rejection comes thick and fast when projecting yourself out in mails to women whose only knowledge of you is the desperate self advertising that you can fit in the boxes provided. I have been using this OKCupid website. It’s quite entertaining and a bit different. There’s more information on prospective people than usually found and you can get a feel for what people are after. So far the conversations I’ve had ranged from being invited by women to have sex with them behind their husband’s backs, and after reading one profile which stated she didn’t want to cyber until she got to know someone, she then proceeded to encourage me to cyber with her with mounting impatience while I was being terribly British and asking about her to get some rapport first, she being Dutch made this all the more complicated and long winded and I lost interest frankly.

In amongst the gloom about being rebuffed I did come to realise something. I am polite, ridiculously fair, gentle, honest, kind and deferential to everyone, I am patient, friendly, generous and can never pass a bird with a broken wing without wanting to gather it up and take it home. I have compassion, compersion, empathy and I know that I am non-judgemental and understanding. These things are who I am, they are not personas i adopt to impress or to deceive. I have a loving partner, a companion who loves her and is decent and honest and thoughtful himself, and I don’t need other people, I have a family. I may want other people, but that’s a different matter and not to be confused with the first. I am OK and am enjoying this. No need to strive to be something I’m not good at, which is needy and desperate.

One lives and learns as one goes, and I have learned that I’m good enough to be content, and capable of enough to want more. Time to stop looking inward and backward and start looking outward and forward I think.

More thoughts on polyamory

I had a slightly surreal moment last night, I was chatting and perving to a lady I’ve met the other day on a website, whom we shall refer to as Jane, and I heard TPG in the midst of phone sex with her other boyfriend Harry. The sudden scene, of me perving with Jane over the internet while TPG perved with Harry over the phone, and having a mighty loud orgasm in the process, really made me chuckle. It’s surreal for me, a man who four years ago was filling a life entirely bland and normal, married, one dog, two cats and a bland life, to have moved to something so blatantly sexual as us all perving at one another by some electronic medium in an open relationship which accepts that and welcomes it is a big leap in a short time.

I think we have a lot of learning to do about the rules we will and won’t accept. There’s a world of difference between accepting that you are willing to be in a poly relationship and the actual practicalities of having multiple people involved with each other, needing care and attention, looking for love and reassurance, wanting to contribute and being involved. One thing that we have agreed on that goes far beyond being a rule, is that everyone involved in a relationship with us gets equal and fair treatment and respect. So although I refer to TPG as The Primary Girlfriend, should there be other women involved with either of us, there would be no primary, secondary or otherwise. There might, at the moment, be the physical situation of the fact that me and her live together, but there can’t be a polyamorous relationship without all the components being of equal importance, for want of a better word.

Harry is a case in point. Myself and TPG are kind of making the rules up as we go, and trying to be fair to everyone involved. With Harry, he matches TPGs sexual predeliction perfectly, in a way she has never met before. You might think that I would have some problems with that fulfilment that Harry provides for TPG, that I am not quite capable of, and in the old me you’d be dead right. But I’m not the same man I was and now the newer me is delighted for her and for him, to see someone you love being satisfied in such a complete way is satisfying for me, and i am grateful to the man for his contribution to our happy home. He’s a nice guy too, although we’ve only met a couple of times, and he seems to be struggling with some of the same doubts I had when we got into this first. Should he decide to become part of the equation full time, he’ll be welcomed with open arms and most importantly, will not be in a junior position because she and I are already an established pairing.  The whole point of polyamory is that we have enough love for other people but the practicalities mean that we must allow each and every member to be themselves, free and discriminating souls with an equal right to be heard. Now that might sound like hippy tree-hugging crap, but it’s actually the only way to work that doesn’t end up with a traditional family organisation of one chief, one assistant and several junior partners, and how often do the junior partners of such a relationship relish the chance to get out and achieve some freedom?

I hope Harry comes aboard, I hope he finds within himself the kink or need or whatever to be involved with us, because there’s room for him, and he has something special with TPG, and that shouldn’t be overlooked. And we could be friends, and that might be worthwhile for both of us too. I don’t know where this train leads to, but I want it to be a happy train with loving and loved people on it.

And the beat goes on…

Further news developing in my subconscious, I think I have identified the gene that makes me shut down on people and things, and I’m quite shocked if the cause is accurate, it’s so beautifully self-fulfilling it’s almost demoniacal. It appears my stress is directly proportional to how well everything is doing. The more content and happy I am, if it’s not smooth and easy, the more stressed I get, and here’s the why. I am a fuck up.

Now this isn’t news to most anyone who has an over developed self doubt or an underdeveloped self esteem. But if things are going really well, if everything’s looking rosy, if I appear happy, then I’m gonna fuck it up very soon, or circumstance will and I may as well just stop caring now. So that’s the deal, the better life is to me, the louder the bang when I finally hit the ground.

Now many people think like that and worry accordingly, but the difference in my case is that I assume it’s guaranteed and start acting as though it’s already a done deal. With that being the case, if I find people that make me happy, I better start closing them out as soon as I realise their importance to me.

Now I just have to untangle that little knot of almost sensible logic.

Something had to give somwhere…

It’s been a stressful two or three days in the house, both myself and TPG being off work and…  let’s say…  issues to be dealt with. I thought I was just going to implode on Tuesday, or go in to a drug and drink fueled killing spree which relieved Reading of some of it’s less useful populace.

Honestly, I felt shit, i was stressing and unhappy, self-hating and bitter and there seemed no-way out. My post on Tuesday was but a skimming of the surface of the inner turbulence. And then I snapped, came out of it, pulled myself together. And I don’t mean pulled myself out of my entirely justified guilt and shame and self-destructive bitterness, I mean right out of it.

Out of being a null on the scoreboard. Something finally broke inside me that has been locked up for at least three years, some defence mechanism that I had re-instigated when I first started living with TPG and she would insist on upsetting me and my staid middle class catholic values but which in turn had been my defence for 20 years. When I was about 19 I seriously dabbled in the art of self-termination, until one night when I just sat in bed the night long with a pissed friend lying on the sofa, and contemplated how the hell I was going to survive the following 50 years when I hated myself enough to jump in front of buses and have to physically be taken away from edges of things while I struggled not to just jump. It was going to be  a hell of a long fight if I was going to contesting with myself all the time. So I came up with a solution. I was just going to have fun, enjoy my life and not give a fuck. I found I could feel better by being nice to people, and started to build up a self image that I could live with from what other people thought about me.

And I was good at it, I was the life and soul of any party, I was fun to be with, I made people feel good and everyone liked me. Except when they let me down, were selfish or hurt me. Then I didn’t feel so good, I felt like no matter what I did to make people like me and give me some value, people were selfish bastards who would let you down every time. So after people let me down often enough, I shut people off. For good, period. I stopped giving a fuck about anybody. I withdrew into being sarcastic, snide, always cynical, always expecting the worst of people, but with the skills I learnt trying to please everyone, I was good at it. I could be funny, I could still be the life and soul of the party, but this way I could get off on it even more, being sarcastic and cynical, being better than them, an observer rather than a participator.

Four years ago, I happened to come across TPG playing a computer game, we chatted a bit and her story just made me melt. For all the shit I had been through, for all the upset and hurt and self hate, I couldn’t measure up to one thousandth as much as she had put up with. And I woke up, I started to care for someone more than I had ever cared before, I started feeling again. I freaked out, had next to a nervous breakdown, because I was totally exposed, I was completely defenceless against all the fear and doubt that I had hidden away 20 and more years before. I became flaky, and because TPG had had the life she had, she reacted by looking for someone else to soak up the pain. This led to arguments and bitterness, I felt that I had dropped my defences for yet someone else who was going to let me down, that I had been conned into getting naked by someone who was just looking for something to make herself feel better for a little while and then move on.

So I shut down again. I stopped caring. I did a good impression of caring, because I didn’t want to lose her, but I didn’t actually care. Not properly. And now…

I finally proved to her and myself how much I had stopped caring and it held a mirror up into my face and I saw myself for the first time in 25 years, and I’m ok. I can like myself. I’m not a bad person overall, and TPG stayed with me. She didn’t let me down despite all the causes I gave her, despite the fact that she’s not intellectually or emotionally monogomous. She stayed with me and I’m nearly in tears now at the idea that I don’t deserve such loyalty, and maybe I do. She is my angel, my star, and now I have broken down the walls, I can show her how much she means to me, without fear or distrust. My little P.

I am damn scared. My stress level is way high and I have to calm myself before I can eat but you know what… it feels… something. When you haven’t really really felt anything for more than half your life, to feel scared is fucking great. I love it.

Fear of flying.

I’ve done probably the most horrible thing I could do to TPG and I’m ashamed of myself. I have virtually ignored her birthday. It’s been a night of upset and fighting, and I came way feeling like a shit, which is apt because that’s exactly what I have turned into. I’ve become so enclosed, like a nut, coming out only to do the barest minimum of anything, loving, living, experiencing, that it would be fair to wonder why I exist at all. What good or fair influence do I have on anybody or anything around me. I live with a wonderful, loving, far-too forgiving, warm, funny, annoying, stormy and demanding woman, which should be forcing me to be the largest person I can be in response, and all I can summon up in return is mediocrity. Today Matthew, I am going to be grey.

This can’t continue. I am selling myself short and TPG admits to being at her wits end in getting a decent response out of me. I am depressing and depressed, I shut off all supportive and loving behaviour. I undermine people around me with banality. I never used to be judgemental, in even the slightest way, but now I have boundaries that people aren’t allowed to overstep before I shut down on them,  measuring their actions and effects for that which might cause me upset or make me have to do something. I don’t laugh enough, or smile enough either.

So now I have to decide between being a grey selfish self-centred safe person, or opening up my heart and letting out the love I have for TPG and other people. I have reached a junction on my road and the main road ahead is easy to follow but damaging, hateful, small. The road I need to turn off onto is scarier and hard to follow, it keeps leading back to my grey dull road and wanting me to get off to the safe one, but really it’s time I grew up and stopped taking the safe option.  Because that road doesn’t lead anywhere, in fear of something it is I’m afraid of, rejection, hurt, dissappointment, whatever it is, I’m not progressing anywhere, I’m not living.

Step one is to look properly at my life and appreciate the good things I have. Step two is tightly connected to it, I have to love the woman I am with, and stop trying to shuffle back out to somewhere safe. Step three is to stop sitting in front of this thing all night every night and start living a litte, get pissed, smoke a little weed, kick back and enjoy myself some more, start living. Stop counting days and start making them count.

Looking ahead.

Well now I’ve done the tedious never-ending preamble, I can just get down to talking about me. I’m not used to that, I mean put me in a pub with a crowd of people and I look for the attention and praise of others, but really I don’t like that bit of me entirely and I want to stop it, I don’t need the acceptance of others if I have the honest and unbiased acceptance of my self.  But I’m a gobby bloke taken in social circles, making witticisms, talking and listening to people properly, trying to winkle out the shy and the uncomfortable and give them attention too, help them fit in. Basically I love playing to a crowd. I do miss a crowd, haven’t had one since I moved to my current abode, for good reasons and there’s been plenty of reward to balance the loss.

I realised something yesterday whilst driving that in fact most of my self esteem was based on the opinions of others. Without a herd decision I find myself directionless, unable to step boldly on any particular path. I’ve come a long way but I still find myself much happier in a group of three people than in a group of two, four rather than three, etc etc. I think what might have happened is that I have developed a better confidence in dealing with my own problems my way, but I still have that craving for outward approval, I still want to play to a packed house.

On the relationship side of things, I’ve joined some free dating websites, with absolutely bugger all response so far which leads me to think A) I’m a munter, B) multiple relationship deals aren’t very socially acceptable to the herd and C) I haven’t really given it very long and since when did I think I was the kind of guy who whistles and has women hurling themselves from passing vehicles to be the first to touch the hem of my coat. Leaves a bit of a question, there’s people who would decry my domestic choice, who I can ignore, and there’s people who would see some value in it, who I want to attract (assuming I find them attractive) but are websites like these the places to find the people I want to connect to? My forte always was meeting people in the flesh, chatting and getting on verbally and physically with people, but I don’t want to start taking up hobbies or side interests with the possibility of landing myself available women. That feels a little too stalkery for me.

At the end of the day a lot of it is just trying to make myself feel better about being possibly attractive to other people, as TPG seems to have a stable of attentive males to chat to and I have me. I’m sure things will change as I get out there and make connections, but at the moment it’s just too depressing to be bothered with.

PS Why do men think it’s attractive to send women pictures of their engorged genitalia, have any of these guys actually met a woman? Are there any women over the age of 17 who might think that a good come-on?

Paths to choose from

I envisage jealousy as being the biggest hurdle I have to overcome in the journey ahead. I am very touchy about being ignored, sidelined, overlooked or excluded. I have my family to thank for that. My parents seperated when I was 10 and as the youngest of five children, in the infighting about custody, in the further jockeying for position that happens in families when suddenly the balance of power changes, I got shoved to the back and stayed there. To be fair, my mother was working her arse off and feeding us hand to mouth, while my father worked three jobs to keep the house and pay alimony and still be able to keep things working, so my preteenage angst about being ignored would have been a little galling if it had been voiced i would imagine. To weight the other side of the argument, I wasn’t actually informed when my parents divorced, everyone just kind of forgot to tell me, so I found out some years later by accident. Blah blah, further teen angst, blah blah, exclusion, blah blah, after continuing events, some years later I decided that if they didn’t want to include me in their family then I wasn’t going to pine for inclusion, they could stick their family up their arse. Unfortunately by the time I realised this was a rather childish and negative response, it was so ingrained in me that now I’m afraid I am almost entirely without any familial feeling to them whatsoever. They’re nice enough people in their own slightly narrow-minded way, but not my siblings particularly.

Anyway, to get back on the rails, all this has left me with an absolute loathing for being excluded, deliberately kept out of the loop, it pushes my buttons in the most primal way. So as odd as this may seem, the idea of sharing TPG physically with someone doesn’t bother me an awful lot, apart from the obvious flare of seeing someone acting in a proprietary manner with her in front of me. The way I see it, it’s her body to use as she wishes, and if she chooses to shag somene with it, then my issue is with her loyalty to me, not with any physical act she may partake of. Also if I was given the opportunity to shag someone without upset all round, I’d take it, so I’m not going to be that kind of double damned hypocrite. I may be completely un-male in that respect, I don’t think that there’s one rule for men and one for women, that’s what comes of being brought up with three sisters i guess.

So, in summary, how do I get over the fact that at some points, TPG is going to be giving someone else attention and love to my detriment. How will I channel away that outrage and offence without just going to the obvious extent of finding someone else to give attention to. While that’s kind of the point of polyamory, I’m not going to be so childish as to run to the other person when TPG isn’t fawning over me. It’s a quandary that I imagine will have to be confronted when it arises. Positive reinforcement of my security is going to be in there. And maybe some whoring on the internet would help, should there be anyone out there who I can whore with. I need to not be dependant. There, I’ve said it. I need to be able to stand my own company again, to look at TPG’s being dsistracted by other men as a positive thing, something to allow me some more freedom or let me wank myself to pastry.

Basically, if you’re attitudes and responses are not to your liking, what can you do but move your base of observation, look at the situation from another angle. The programming is far too hard wired in many cases to just allow you to change your response to the same stimuli,  jealousy is an emotion you feel not a process you arrive at by reason. So the only thing I think I can do is change how I look at relationships from scratch, to program myself to welcome outside interaction, and also make sure that I am recompensed by adequate reward when it becomes my turn to recieve attention. Hell you can teach a dog to walk of you keep giving it treats.

Random musings

Having reread some of what I last posted I have to say that one thing stands out, I place entirely too much expectation on any relationship I enter into, and when they fail to deliver, as of course they always will, I then start to withdraw from it, trying not to be hurt by the shortfall in what I expect a relationship to give me and what I actually get.On my current relationship, I’m surprised to find I’ve grown up, so in the one relationship which has been the most co-dependant in nature, I find I’ve most outgrown my need to find a crutch to lean on rather than a partner who supports me while I do other things.

When I was married, I became so distant from my wife that we lived in the same house and shared a social life and that was nearly all there was. We could go for entire evenings without exchanging a word beyond “Hi how was your day?” kind of interaction. And with that I was happy for a while, nearly ten years in fact, because I was playing a single guy with a good friend that I lived with. There are worse ways to live, we were very good friends, but as arose when we talked about this and decided to split up, there was a whole side to my character that she had absolutely no idea of, had never seen or expected, which kind of threw the rest of the relationship into a sharper light. We’d been together 15 years and yet she thought I was someone I wasn’t in certain areas.  Was that my fault? undoubtedly mostly mine, I had shut her out quite comprehensively due to my own emotional retardation, my 3 year old had been hurt by various events and imaginary hurts or slights and had pulled the shutters down.

In the middle of this marriage, I had had discussions with the ex about having other partners, other friends, and she had seen what I was getting at, without in any way ever thinking that we were capable of doing that. I considered myself an aberration, wanting my cake and eating it at the same time, having sexual partners and a wife at the same time, that’s something that normal folk like I never actually experience without being unfaithful, lying and cheating on someone, which isn’t really my bag. I considered a lot of the things I fantasised about to me aberrant, I considered myself a bit of a perv and not in a nice way, I was sometimes disgusted with myself. That good Old Roman Catholic Guilt will kill you every time.

Now I find myself in a relationship with someone who wants a polyamorous relationship, sees it as a good thing, and I find myself agreeing with her. I know I have the capacity to be loving and intimate with more than one woman, the problem is, will I be able to get over the years of conditioning I have forced on myself, along with the training in a good Catholic upbringing that says that a relationship is a mummy and daddy and some kids living together and having a family. It’s good ingrained stuff, being jealous of her time and affection, being jealous of other men having access to her sexuality, but at the heart of any modern relationship, isn’t that what happens anyway. Don’t men and women have affairs left right and centre, or flirt and tease other people to make themselves feel better? And where’s the harm in that, if it doesn’t upset or offend the partner?

Like everything in life, if the expectation is matched by the experience, who is the loser?