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.

It begins…

Over the years I’ve noticed one thing about my relationships, they haven’t worked out. Good, bad and indifferent, I have been left with the feeling that I could have done things better, or the other person could, or that nothing either of us did was going to be enough to prod life into the dog dying at our feet. I’ve been engaged twice, married once, lived with three women and and fucked as many as I could honourably (when I’m at my best) lay my hands on, and I am currently in the position where I am in a contented partnership where we have decided to become polyamorous, or to put it in English, we’ve agreed that there is room for more than two people in our relationship.

I would guess most people would think that we had got to the stage where many couples give up, split up and go find other people to partner up with, but i contest that this is not the answer. We are perfectly happy to live together, there is a real bond of trust and love between us, but we both think that a devotion to one person to the exclusion of the possiblities of others is damaging and unnecessary, a devotion to a romantic Jesus that will channel us into the convent or monastery of a normal monogomous relationship and restrict our experience of the revolving world outside to that which the drafty slit in the walls of our cell will allow.

And so the social experiment commences, we both attempt to reassure ourselves that this is going to be good for the unterminated condition called us, and also reassuring each other that this is going to have legs, it’s going to be a process that will last. We will learn more as we progress, but I think the important point to note here is that we have faith in each other’s desire to return to each other, to want to give time and attention and demand love and care from each other. I don’t think we’d have a hope in hell without something like that, some desire to maintain a coherent us.

These pages will relate my success or otherwise in my progress through a different way of looking at life, love and the number 42.