Why Do I "Have" To Choose?

These days, I fully admit to not watching very much regular television. I do watch rented or purchased movies in DVD or VHS format, and I do watch seasons of older TV shows through the DVD sets we have purchased in our household, but regular daily television with its bombardment of commercials and time spent surfing 200 channels to find the next thing to entertain me is something I haven't done since graduating from High School some 15 years ago.

"Friends" is the DVD TV shows we're watching today. We're on season two right now, and Ross and Rachael have broken up again, after a particularly sorrisome display by Ross when Rachael quit her job at the coffee shop and lucked into a job at Bloomingdales.

Ross's behavior was SO INCREDIBLY PATHETIC that my roommate and myself opted to skip about 6 episodes just so we wouldn't have to be subjected to the train-wreck-in-progress.

What about Ross's behavior was so pathetic? Simply this: His complete possessiveness of Rachael and his inability to trust in her love for him, simply because there's an attractive guy that Ross doesn't know very well, in the "at work at Bloomingdale's" picture.

"Friends" itself is chock full of "love anguish", where pretty much every Friend develops two favorable relationships with members of the opposite sex at some point, and then has to "decide" which one to continue on with. Every time it comes up, I'm not surprised, but I can't help but shake my head:

A lot of the time, the two people involved with the central "Friend" character actually LIKE each other and are already friends or could easily be friends. But for some reason, it doesn't matter how well all three get along, the focus is on "the choice". One or the other. Can't "have" both.

Oh, there's one exception to this pattern in Friends - one episode actually covers Joey's dad and his girlfriend, which the wife knows about and doesn't demand he make a decision for. Why? Mainly because with this second relationship, Joey Sr. has changed from a grumpy mean old codger to a guy who treats his wife well, and he's not planning to leave his wife broke, destitute and alone. The girlfriend ties strongly into this last part as well - she's obviously not of the mindset of "I must make him mine and mine alone", which is another monogamistic attitude that breaks up families just as much as discovery of the married person who strays.

Of course, Joey is freaked out about the whole situation, forces his father to tell his mother about the girlfriend, does some soul searching in what I believe is a "naive" way, and then in the end finds out that Mom already knew and would rather stick with the "don't ask, don't tell" mentality.

While I don't encourage folks to subscribe to "don't ask, don't tell", it's at least a little bit closer to acknowledging human behavior. And yes, I know there are those who believe our self-control (and opposable thumbs) is what separates us as human from animal behavior... that's something I agree with to a point. I don't agree that repressing emotion is a valuable human behavior.

Going back a little bit, I found Joey Jr.'s soul searching "naive" because he missed a key piece of information in his logic. He fully admits dating more than one woman at a time and sleeping with a number of them, and his father's infidelity made him think about his own ability to stay true when he finds the "one" to marry and spend the rest of his life with. He talks about "being a stand-up guy" and "going the distance", and Chandler reassures him by saying he's sure Joey'd be able to say "no, I'm married" when the tests came along.

The naivity, in my opinion, came in the fact that "habits" were not mentioned as any part of this fidelity equation. Joey's a toned-down "womanizer", in that we only hear about his exploits in passing instead of seeing that part of him every day - the show focuses on his relationship with his platonic friends and his acting career - but still a guy who enjoys women in general. You can't tell me that trait *poof* disappears as soon as he says "I do" or as soon as he starts dating "the woman of his dreams".

You see, habits are deeply ingrained patterns of behavior within humans. They're very difficult to see as "habits" sometimes, but I know I personally found that by examining almost every single behavior I exhibit, they're all "habitual" in nature. The way I put on my pants in the morning, the way I tie my shoes, the way I lay in bed, the way I act around strangers, the way I act around friends, the way I chew my food, my nervous habits... everything is a habit. And having to change any habit is DIFFICULT - even the seemingly minor habits I display.

No wonder so many people, like myself, go through a serious bout of self-hatred and depression before coming to terms with something like Polyamory - our cultural icons, unfortunately, are TV and movie stars, and the mainstream popular shows that "live" for 5-10 seasons and are aimed towards Adults trying to discover themselves after separation from Mom and Dad are demonizing honesty with oneself, one's emotions, and their impact upon others around them.

That's the main reason I don't pay very much attention to relationship-based mainstream media - I already grew up with a Mom and a Dad trying to teach me "right" from "wrong", and now as a well-raised adult forging my own adult life I'd rather have my mind expanded - to be educated on the expansiveness of life, how much there is to learn and to love, etc - instead of having it confined and encouraged into the dark corner of dishonesty with myself and others.

For those who are still in the grips of depression and anger at yourself for not fitting in to the proposed way of doing things in relationships, I hope you'll take a moment to consider that it is not necessarily YOU that has a warped way of looking at things, but rather the highly-regulated mainstream media that is shoving its own messages down your throat, despite the fact that it doesn't really care whether you're happy or miserable in following its direction.

Stuck On Youse (Macleans.ca)

Polyamorous relationships aren't any less committed -- they're just a bit more crowded

CATHY GULLI

When an old flame walked back into Helen's life just a few months before she was to walk down the aisle with another man, there was only one solution: marry her fiancé, Michael Schilder, and start dating Aaron Miedema again -- and have him emcee the wedding reception. "If I had been trying to choose a monogamous lifestyle, when Aaron came back into my life it would have been a crisis," says Helen Schilder, 33, a dressmaker. "I would have been thrown into a tizzy. But because I was polyamorous, we could share."

Read the rest of the Nov 2005 Macleans article

Fast Seduction and MLTRs

My journey down the educational road towards Polyamory started with a general feeling of confusion, frustration and depression because I was feeling something I had been raised like many others to believe was "wrong", and "bad". Yet, I didn't feel like I was a wrong or bad person, just a person who found connection with more than one person in my life.

My first educational readings surrounding my dilemma were on a Usenet newsgroup about "Fast Seduction", whose main purpose was to help guys change from being an Average Frustrated Chump (AFC) to being, well, Pick Up Artists. The main premise of the discussions were surrounding the topic of How To Get Laid, and a secondary premise was What To Do If You Wish To Stay Sexless And Miserable.

I, as a woman with no real close male friends with whom I could ask honest, tough questions, learned a lot from the readings, and I even hopped into some of the discussions as one of the rare females who didn't hop in just to start a flame war with all the guys and their "piggish" ways. I actually hopped into conversation with an open mind and asked some tough questions and answered some other tough questions that came back as a result.

It was incredibly difficult to read and participate in that forum because a lot of the focus was on guys getting laid and being desired, and there wasn't very much focus on ethics. There were some folks who talked about MLTRs (multiple Long Term Relationships) which had an ethical and honest tinge to them, but overall the focus was to get guys to a place where they feel confident and good enough about themselves in order to attract a sexual partner, and, well, since they need practice in order to really feel confident about it all, it's actually recommended that an AFC in recovery NOT get into a long term relationship for fear of falling back into their old self-destructive habits.

At any rate, my time in that forum didn't last long - perhaps 4 months or so. I learned a lot and still go back and refer to the Fast Seduction website every once in a while, but in general, it's not aimed at me as a target market, so I've leaned towards other places more regularly for information more directly useful to me.

Sometimes I think about returning as one of the few level-headed females that contribute to the discussions, but I wonder what the benefit of it would truly be. I mean, it's nice to "know thy enemy" (ie: the Pick up artist only interested in one night or interested in finding "that one" that will end up in bed with him tonight), but it also builds mistrust of men in me.

And I don't need that. There's already enough in life that contributes to that.