NRE is hard to deal with

New Relationship Energy (NRE) is hard to deal with on all sides of the equation. In my case, it seems really obvious to me that I’ve clearly got the worst end of the deal. I have to watch my primary partner and her lover go through the glowy stages, the excellent chemisty and the fantastic sex. What do I get out of this?

But it’s not just hard for me, it’s hard for him and her too. NRE is an admission of vulnerability. Neither of them can read the future. And it makes both of them willing to do things they would otherwise never do, and no one likes being irrational, especially in polyamorous relationships where love comes at the price of being a social outsider. Let me clarify that last point. Since you have to choose between being something of an outcast, in a real tangible way, or being essentially monogamous, poly folks tend to put a lot of emphasis on their analytical reasoning skills. A lot of poly folks cleave to the idea that they are poly not just because of what’s throbbing in their pants, but because of what’s throbbing in their skulls. Therefore, the irrationality that can come with intense NRE can be irritating.

For him, in this situation, it’s hard to deal with the NRE because he’s not in the best place in his life right now, emotionally and in other ways too. It’s hard for him to want to commit to anything, but the NRE seems to be over-riding what he might otherwise consider good sense. He finds himself feeling things that are complicated, and wanting things that don’t fit into his game plan for his life. He doesn’t want to make any decisions based off biochemical reactions that could affect his long term goals adversely, and it’s a hell of a lot more nuanced than that. The NRE could cause serious pain, and he can’t really handle that.

For her, it’s the first time for her to experience intense NRE outside her primary relationship, and it’s scary for a lot of reasons, including the concept that she doesn’t really view herself as a particularly emotionally available person. Not only that, but there’s a lot of obvious things coming up for her in the near future, and she’s not really ready to commit to a serious relationship that the NRE seems to be indicating. It’s all very confusing, and the two folks are very vulnerable. All armor down. It’s scary as hell.

From the outside it just looks like exhilaration and crazy awesome sex. You know, the kind that leaves you breathless at work, just thinking about it. The kind of sex that changes your perspective. Really robust, healthy sex.

I don’t really have anything great to say about it, I just wanted to note to myself that it’s not just hard for me.

Sex and Spirituality

There’s clearly been a historical connection between sexuality and spirituality. There’s the sexual rites in Moses’s temple, the tantra that binds chakra and sex together, the sanctifying of sexuality by rite in Christianity, the repression of sexuality due to spiritual concerns in Islam.

I was talking to my wife about this the other day and she looked at me like was bat-shit crazy. It’s really simple, not like a mystical thing. Basically, I wanted to know if she had ever had any spiritual feelings during sex with me or her partner. Because I clearly have had precisely those feelings/experiences.

When I was younger, the church got a foothold in my mind, and I went to a lot of christian events and such. It’s fairly easy to organize a context in which a spiritual feeling/experience would happen. And the feeling was often very close to a lot of the same feelings that happen during sex. I suppose that the chemicals that are released in the human mind during spiritual ecstasy are very similar to the ones that are released during sexual ecstasy. Which begs some interesting questions.

I’ve never really approached sexuality from a spiritual perspective, because that would take a lot of time. I wonder if it would be functionally useful to do so. I suppose it would be necessary to define what I mean when I’m talking about spirituality here. But I’m not gonna. You can just read into it whatever you want.

What I’m suggesting to myself is largely this: what if I found a way to mentally prepare myself for sexuality before through mental preparation, and some physical ritual? I understand that physical and mental attitude affect how brain processes chemicals. It stands to reason that I might be able to firstly, appreciate the sexual experience more through specific  preparation, and secondly, I might be able to intensify the experience.

Is the chance for greater intensity worth coming up with some practices? What are the ramifications of affection my sexuality in a spiritual way? There’s always crazy and profound effects when you start paying attention to your sexuality in a new way.

Quads

In my experience, relationships with couples are pretty spectacular, though there’s a lot of pitfalls, as you would imagine. Yet they seem to work out really well even so. Especially in bed, as you would imagine.

What seems to be the problem is that the person who is the least into poly wants to keep the relationship only on a quad level becasue it’s emotionally safer, less room for romance that way. Romance seems to scare people a lot, as if they can’t trust romance, as if romance was a madness that was going to sweep them away.

In terms of polyamory, romance can be tamed quite a bit. Since there’s no taboo on loving others, you can have your current relationship and the new one. You don’t have to elope. You just have to convince your mother not to kick you out of the family before taking a practical look at what you’re doing.

But in quads, romance is safer with the larger group because there’s less chance that one couple is going to develop something dangerous. So even if love develops between two members of the quad, it feels safer to explore the love with all four folks together. That affects the way the love will develop.

What is the relationship between survival and finding your happiness?

What happens when someone in your tribe dies?

In my life, I’ve lived through a lot of death. It affected the way I lived my life for a long time. Looking back, proximity to death looks a lot like proximity to celibacy. I mean that for a long time after tragedy in my life, I was sex-negative. I wonder if that’s the case for a lot of people. For me it was particularly fucked up because I was young, and I was a blooming moron to boot.

Just something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. There was such a long time that I was deeply unmotivated to go out and get what I want. I wonder if that’s an ingredient in lots of people’s lives. It’s easy to forget all the nuances as to why people don’t go out and find there happiness. The world can be a hard place to stay alive in.

What do you think the correlation between survivalism and polyamory is?

Having more than one girlfriend in high school

It recently occured to me that I had two essentially poly relationships in High School. Both of them were situations where liberated females were dating other men and then brought me on board. I wasn’t precisely aware that they were dating other men, but they both hinted at the fact that they were.

Both of them were highly intelligent, well read, and had major ties to social circles I was entirely not privy to. I am not certain that has anything do to with it. One of them, who for all intents and purposes, we’ll call Seaborne, was from Sweden, and was an exchange student. I’m not sure what’s stereotype there and what’s not so I won’t try to speculate on the assumptions she maintained that allowed her to date multiple people, and also retain a sense of self worth, but she did it.

I would go more into the similarities between the two and the role the other partner played in my education, because it’s very interesting, but I have a point I need to stick to,

This picture doens't even have abstract relation to this story, but it's pretty aweosome nonetheless.

and that is this: If everyone else had behaved with the intelligence and maturity that the two of them displayed, the competitive dynamic in High School could have been completely different.

Bear with my while I give one more example to illustrate my point. I had my eye on dating a young woman who we’ll call Lilystem for several years. She became available, and myself and another young man asked to date her. She accepted his hand, but not mine, although she made it clear that it was merely a superior match on his part, rather than lack of connection between her and I. Had she been operating under similar assumption as Seaborne, she would have agreed to date us both, and none of us would have had to cope with feelings of competition, and catastrophic lack of worth. Plus she would have gotten to date me, and I’m a pretty hawt date.

Hope and Polyamory

Pablo Neruda composed all his poems in green ink, because it was the color of hope.

If the human capacity to love fills the full boundaries of a person’s time, then we must be driven to hope. It no longer becomes something we can fail to do. We know that something good is coming. Perhaps that knowing is not precisely the same thing as hope, but it is an element that runs through many polyamorists writing, thinking and dreaming. We shall be filled up with love. And love is the thing that we most desire.