I found myself in the position I never expected to be in, echoing the words of countless women undone by the violence of the men in their lives: ‘But I still love him.’

flickr/jon madison

M y relationship with Anthony was like most relationships. It was good until it wasn’t. In this case, it was exactly what I’d always wanted until it turned inside out, became something so distorted it didn’t seem possible it was the same relationship.

I fell in love with Anthony. Because I’d never been in love before, I figured that he must be good. I couldn’t have loved him otherwise, right? I’d been through too much, was too smart, too vigilant, too feminist, to be with anyone but a kind, sensitive man.

I’d done my time with ungenerous men. I’d racked up a handful (or two) of questionable nights where I was too drunk or he was too pushy or my “no’s” dissolved as if they were never said. I’d done my time healing those wounds. Anthony seemed like the reward.

For a while, he was. But then, the relationship collapsed, irretrievably. He revealed a capacity for violence I never thought I’d see in my own life.

I found myself in the position I never expected to be in, echoing the words of countless women undone by the violence of the men in their lives: “But I still love him.”

#MeToo Has Made Me See Anyone Is Capable Of Sexual Abuse—Including Me

We started dating at the beginning of last summer. It felt like a balm.

Anthony didn’t care about being successful, popular, or traditionally masculine. He didn’t particularly care if I was pretty, smart, or nice.

His childhood was marked by violence and poverty, and when his peers went to college, he went into the desert to camp, heal, and figure out what mattered. What mattered, it turned out, was nothing except his cat, guitar, and climbing.

He didn’t even care about sex, which was a relief. I asked if we could wait, and we did. Lying in his arms, I’d dissect my fear of men and intimacy. He would listen and then say everything I’d always wanted to hear: “We don’t ever have to have sex. If we do, it will only make us closer. There’s nothing you could do to make me like you less.”

When we finally had sex, I knew, for the first time, that I really wanted it.

He offered infinite room that seemed able to hold anything. I filled up plenty of that space with insecurity and fear, until I realized that for the first time, I had drained myself of my self-loathing, and he had stayed, essentially unfazed. I was stunned by the feeling of stability and sure-footing. I liked who I was when I wasn’t trying to be the best, and was surprised to find that he did too.

One night, I got sick and threw up outside the car window and all over his bathroom. I was embarrassed and on the brink of tears, but he rubbed my back and told me not to worry: “I’ve chosen you and once I choose someone there’s really nothing that can bother me.” I wanted to build a home inside that sentence.

After a heady summer together, I went to Mexico for a month in the fall. The night before I left, we said we loved each other and held hands until morning.

I was stunned by the feeling of stability and sure-footing. I liked who I was when I wasn’t trying to be the best, and was surprised to find that he did too.

I left sure that I was in a loving relationship, something I’d feared I’d never have. I spent a month in Mexico pining for him.

The day I got back to the States, the collapse began.

I called Anthony, and an automated voice told me the number had been disconnected. I texted our mutual friend, Elle, and she told me he got a new number. I still felt unsteady, but he texted me from the new phone a few minutes later. “Deep breaths,” I thought, “don’t be paranoid,” but it felt like my stomach had slid from my body.

I saw him in person a few days later. It was then that he told me what had happened while I was gone. He’d cheated on me with Elle (first he told me it happened once, then maybe twice, then “a handful” of times).

Before I could absorb this news, he told me that after I’d been gone a couple weeks, he’d packed up his room, changed his number, ghosted his job, and drove to Oregon. He would still have been in Oregon when I got back, he said, except once he got there he “had a bad feeling.” He turned the car around and came home.

The following month was a blur of unrelenting pain and confusion. We mostly didn’t talk, but I couldn’t adjust to this new reality, couldn’t understand it. Hadn’t he said he loved me? That he was proud to be with me?

A Letter To My Abuser

At the end of the month, a fatal combination of events contributed to my dwindling emotional strength, and I texted him to hang out. I didn’t leave his room for four days. On the fourth, he kissed me goodbye and went to work. Three hours later, he texted me to say he’d walked out of work, again. He was leaving, again. If I wanted to see him for the last time, it would have to be soon.

I crawled through the day, feeling betrayed and abandoned all over again. Then, a few hours later, an acquaintance told me something that froze the edges of my organs.

He’d been threatening Elle over text and at their shared workplace. “He’s been manipulating everybody, especially you and Elle,” the acquaintance told me.

Hours before he left for good, we went to a coffee shop and I asked him about the threats, waited for him to tell me I’d misunderstood.

Instead, he told me he wished Elle would die of AIDS. He called her a filthy whore and said he’d punch her if she were a man. He wanted to push her off of a cliff. “I really mean it,” he clarified.

I forced myself to say his words were unforgivable, terrifying.

I Loved The Man Who Abused Me

His face folded with anger. “Good luck with everything,” he said, before standing up and walking out of the cafe. I ran after him and convinced him to get in my car to drive him home.

Once in the car, he said he might jump out.

I tried to keep my breath calm, my eyes even, but I was scared, like I was next to an unpredictable stranger. “Just get him home,” I thought. I’ll drop him off, drive away alone, and find a way to survive the knowledge that I was in love with a lie.

But when he calmed down, he cried. He apologized over and over. He didn’t mean to get angry. He wasn’t in control. I believed him.

He told me he didn’t know how to deal with Elle, but that he shouldn’t have done what he did. He loved me, I was the best woman he’d ever been with. He didn’t mean to hurt me. Maybe we’d be together one day, he said, if he could take accountability and if I could heal from him. I wanted to believe that, too.

He got in his car and drove to New Mexico.

He apologized over and over. He didn’t mean to get angry. He wasn’t in control. I believed him.

I’d entered the relationship eager and anxious, so happy to be in love for the first time. The way it ended — and ended, and ended — broke me.

“I’m a feminist!” I wanted to yell, “How could this have happened?” To me! An advocate for sexual assault and domestic violence survivors, a sex-educator, a reporter on gender justice!

I recognized his threat to leap from my car from a pamphlet on domestic violence: “Red flags include threatening self-harm or suicide.” I recognized his apology from the cycle of violence wheel I’d passed out countless times — blowups are followed by apologies so that the cycle may continue. Calling Elle a filthy whore wasn’t a red flag, but a bloody banner proclaiming his disregard for women.

I remember a night I’d been called into the hospital to advocate for a woman whose husband had dragged her across their driveway. Her body was covered in scrapes and bruises. She cried for her husband and the only time she spoke to me was to beg me to find him. My training had told me this was common, but I struggled to understand how she could want someone who had hurt her so badly.

Now, I understand more. I understand how the black and white pamphlets articulating the bounds of a healthy relationship fail to register in the part of the heart that yearns for love, or what feels like love.

What My Own Abusive Relationship Taught Me About My Mother’s

I tell people what Anthony did — the cheating, the deserting town, the threatening Elle — and feel like I’ve done something wrong. When I try to talk about about how good the relationship had felt, people stiffen with the shadow of suspicion or pity. As if I’m temporarily insane. As if I don’t realize I’ve been manipulated. I become strange to myself — how can I miss a man who would do any of what he did?

Friends are quick to call him garbage, a psychopath, abusive. I understand why, but the words don’t resonate, don’t seem right. They cut me — what does it say about me if I fell in love with garbage?

The therapist I start to see when Anthony leaves town tells me to read Why Does He Do That?, the seminal text about abusive men.

“I’ve read that!” I want to scream. “I’ve given this book to women! You don’t get it!” But when I skim the pages, some bullet points are chillingly familiar. I slam it shut.

What does it say about me if I fell in love with garbage?

The truth is Anthony had said things that registered as red flags, but I was careful to qualify them, to add them into a larger narrative I had about him being a tortured soul healing childhood trauma and unlearning toxic masculinity.

He told me he struggled with anger. His car was dented from when he’d battered it with a shovel after a bad day. His life work was to contain the anger and not cause harm, he told me. He was always so gentle with me, and I thought that if he was self-aware then I needn’t be worried — you can’t hold people’s pasts against them, right?

I should have listened when he told me he’d escaped his childhood by leaving his family, town, and life completely, and that he’d been escaping like that ever since. Not anymore, not with me, I thought.

He also says I should have listened. The last time we spoke, I told him I was still stunned by what he said to and about Elle. He didn’t take it back. In fact, he was frustrated:

“I told you this is who I am. I tell people this is who I am, but then when it comes out, they can’t deal with it. Those things I said are minor. I don’t understand why it matters to you so much. I wouldn’t actually hurt her.”

No amount of screaming or crying could make him realize how badly he’d hurt me or Elle.

I realized with excruciating clarity that nothing could touch him. The love and vulnerability I’d shared so freely with him hadn’t touched him. I’d thought that in his unshakeability, he’d been holding space for me. Actually, he just was space. The trust and care I’d shown had floated away. When he told me he loved me, it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t obey the rules of gravity. It slid into black space. Threatening to punch someone, wishing death on a woman — those words slid to the same place.

The trust and care I’d shown had floated away. When he told me he loved me, it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t obey the rules of gravity.

Losing him was painful, but in the months following my return from Mexico, I felt like I was also losing myself.

I’d found the scrape of energy necessary to tell Anthony that I was on Elle’s side. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let the words “I wish she’d die of AIDS” slide. Words like that tend to wake a person up.

I found myself willing to forgive almost everything — the cheating, the lying, the abandonment. The only thing I couldn’t forgive was what he did to Elle. I was lucky that his most extreme violence was directed at another woman — I had more clarity about what she deserved than what I did.

The lessons I learned from the breakup are also burdens. I learned that resources, training, and feminist credentials didn’t stop me from falling for someone capable of violence. I learned that his violence was his, and that I neither provoked nor could have prevented it. I learned that I am not immune from the thoughts that I know are typical of people who have had unhealthy relationships — I feel ashamed for choosing the relationship and for struggling to move on. I feel embarrassed that I still sometimes miss him. I fear that I can’t trust my intuition or feelings in the future. Some days, I think maybe it wasn’t that bad.

Why We Must Walk Away From Destructively Dependent Relationships

I struggle to tolerate multiple truths — I loved him, and I think he loved me. He was also violent and unremorseful. I can’t choose just one of those truths without hurting myself.

The worst thing Anthony did was to put me in the position of nearly choosing him over what he knew I valued most — the safety and equality of women. Ultimately, it felt like choosing between myself and the memory of feeling loved. I chose myself, but barely.

Now I’m back in my life after months in a cloud of pain. I have hope for the future again, and feel proud of my resilience. But I’m hurt. Every morning since I got back from Mexico, I wake up and before I open my eyes, tell myself that I’ll be OK, that I’ll survive the day.

I had hoped to learn about intimacy, love, and sex with Anthony. But the greater, more subsuming lessons have been about healing from the emotional pain caused by the violence of men — these are lessons I’m tired of learning.

I become overwhelmed when I try to understand why everything happened, and what it means for my future, so I’ve liberated myself from thinking about either. I only know that I want to care and be around others who care. I want words to mean something. My internal world has rearranged since Anthony left — it’s more sensitive, more complex, more grounded. For now, I spend each day occupying more of my own body, my own life, exploring its contours and boundaries. There is more room now that I’ve been pulled apart.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/women-watch-out-for-this-ominous-sign-at-your-dinner-date-bae5ba7346d/ Sat, 07 Apr 2018 17:01:01 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2690 Read more]]>

In the age of #MeToo, what does it mean if he insists on ordering for you?

Huy Phan/Unsplash

By Liz Posner

I n January, at the tail end of a storm of accusations of sexual misconduct by powerful men in Hollywood, Babe.net published an account by “Grace,” a woman who went on a date with actor and comedian Aziz Ansari and later described it as the “worst date of her life.” Many critics of the article derided one detail in the article that must have seemed important enough to the writer to include: “After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. ‘It was white,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.’”

To suggest that Grace’s lack of control over the wine they drank foreshadowed Ansari’s later abusive behavior indeed seems a bit trivial. But on closer inspection, and amidst #MeToo conversations about how so many men get away with exercising control over women, maybe this detail deserves more serious examination. It can be argued that men who choose what their dates eat and drink without first asking them what they prefer play into a wider gender power imbalance in dating. In the cases of some men, it can even be a sign of more dangerous behavior.

The ability to select what they want to order in a restaurant is a freedom most women take for granted. Historically, women sat silently in restaurants while their male companions ordered for them. As Chowhound writes, “The first female restaurant-goers would not have dreamed of ordering for themselves. Women began dining out for pleasure around the 1840s in the United States… Before this, public eating establishments consisted of taverns, inns, and men’s clubs and did not cater to women. Well-bred women always had a male companion who ordered their dinner.”

To Raise A Feminist Son, Talk To Him About Aziz Ansari

Men continued to order for women long after the 19th century. In a Quora chatroom from 2015, a woman said it was her boyfriend’s habit to order for her on occasion, and she wondered if it demonstrated “controlling” behavior. One respondent explained that this was normal male behavior until fairly recently: “I am almost 70, and when I [was] first starting dating, it was normal for a well-brought-up young man to order for a woman.”

Some self-proclaimed “old-fashioned” men still insist on ordering for women, especially early on in the courtship. Men may do this out of a sense of chivalry if they’re more familiar with the restaurant than their date and consider themselves the host. “He likes to order for people,” Zadie Smith wrote in her profile of Jay-Z for the New York Times’ T Magazine after the two dined together. “Apparently I look like the fish-sandwich type.” Jay-Z, whose most popular songs include references to misogyny and violence against women, has talked publicly about his struggles with his alpha male identity, including infidelity in his marriage to Beyonce. By no means does Jay-Z’s habit of ordering for women mean he is a bad man, nor does it imply that any man who orders for women at restaurants will necessarily exhibit toxic masculine behavior in any other capacity. But all of these actions fall under the umbrella of exhibiting male control.

Women who have been on these kinds of dates share stories amongst themselves, usually alongside the question “should I be bothered by this?” There are also some frightening stories about women whose partners insist on ordering for them at restaurants, or exercise control over their food choices in other ways. Reddit is full of such food-control stories, including one in which a man actually snatched a plate of potato salad out of his girlfriend’s hand after restricting her to a carb-free diet, claiming it was for her health. Or another about a man so controlling he “freaks out” when his girlfriend eats candy in front of him. Both women describe their partners as nutrition-obsessed, but their partners’ actions have negative impacts on their relationships, as well as the women’s relationships with their own bodies.

In a piece for Refinery29 on the topic of food control, Kathryn Lindsay writes that according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, some red flags for abuse are “jealousy of your friends and family, isolating you from them, controlling your finances, as well as making demeaning comments, shaming you, or pressuring you into sex. Food control is not necessarily a warning sign of abuse, but it could be a symptom.”

Although man-who-opens-the-door-for-woman gets much more debate among feminists about whether or not he is sexist, man-who-orders-for-woman perhaps deserves more scrutiny. It is 2018, and surely, women should be asserting control over what they eat just as they seek to speak and be heard without being silenced, and have control over their finances and general autonomy over their own bodies. We can draw a direct parallel to reproductive rights. Controlling what a woman eats implies a desire for dominion over her body — the same kind we’re still seeing conservative men proclaim in the abortion debate.

Control over women’s bodies is a theme on the political right; in the past year alone, the Trump administration has insisted on detaining pregnant undocumented women and blocking teenagers from having abortions, while conservative legislators are doing everything they can to make it impossible for poor women to safely abort their pregnancies, even going so far as to deny women who are raped the opportunity to terminate the pregnancy.

Ordering for women at restaurants may seem like a chivalrous gesture. But unless the man has the woman’s consent, it’s just another degrading gesture pulling us back to a time when women did not make such decisions for themselves.

Of course, not every woman has a problem with men who chose their meal for them at restaurants. In a piece titled “Is Ordering For Your Lady Friend Low-Key Sexist?” Helena writes for xojane about the phenomenon: “In the long list of potentially chauvinistic stuff I’m cool with cute guys doing, ordering an entree for me during dinner is one of them. It’s weird and old-timey and therefore sort of sexy in the same way that suede elbow patches can act as an aphrodisiac. But chauvinism done sexily can only work if the dude doing it is in on his own joke.”

It’s clear that even for those women who aren’t seriously bothered by men who do this, it’s hard to deny there’s something creepy and paternalistic about it.

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/dont-think-about-him-7423fb76032e/ Thu, 29 Mar 2018 21:23:13 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2540 Read more]]>

It’s exhausting to remember him and even more exhausting to actively not remember.

Illustration: Sophia Foster-Dimino

By Carol Hood

Content warning: Descriptions of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse

Don’t think about him, don’t think about him. They tell me not to think about him. They tell me that thinking about him gives him power. Thinking about him makes him important. Thinking about him must mean I’m not over him, that I somehow still want him, that I somehow still miss him. Don’t think about him, don’t think about him, don’t think about him. Why do you still think about him?

It’s Christmas now and I try frantically to make Christmas fun. My mother is a Christmas monster. Since Dad died, she takes on Christmas like it’s a Leviathan. She claims she does it for me, but last year, when I was too busy thinking about him to get out from my bed, last year when her back hurt too much to put up the lights outside or finish the ornaments on the Christmas tree — she holed herself up in her own room and cried. My brother found her under her covers sniffling.

I never got over that gloomy Christmas Day, and when it turned 2017, I was determined not to think about him. I didn’t want to think about how he’d raped me. I’d been able to think of myself as something other than a rape victim, back when he’d just grow extremely angry and shout at me for hours and hours when I didn’t want him. Then after a day of shouting, he’d cry, say he was sorry, and then try again. If I resisted, the cycle would continue. Eventually, I learned to stop resisting. Eventually he would just do what he wanted to do and then be mad at me for crying through it.

If I resisted, the cycle would continue.

The last day we lived together, we were in bed and when he stirred, I froze tighter than a body in rigor mortis. If I moved then I would be awake and if I was awake, I had to acknowledge him. Not just acknowledge him but acknowledge him first. Don’t look at the dog or my phone or anywhere but him or it would be a fight. He’d say I cared more about the dog and Facebook than him and if he hounded me this morning, today just might be the day I’d wake up in an insane asylum, watching my mother sob at me from behind a one-way mirrored room — oh God, it was better to just pretend to be asleep. I remember feeling something tug down my sweat pants. I batted his hand away, stop. He didn’t care. And I remember my eyes popping wide open as the hand came back angry and ripped my sweats down. “Stop,” I muttered, but I was too afraid to resist or he might yell. I do remember thinking, please don’t do this. This will be rape. Not mental coercing, not blurry-line peer pressure bullshit that I’d been convincing myself was something other than it was, but legitimate rape.

Now it’s 2017 and I’m a rape victim.

And who the fuck wants to think about that?

I needed to forget, and maybe shedding the body he tortured would help me forget. I had gained weight from the stress, the depression, the eating. Two years with him had left my body crooked and weak. I couldn’t get up the stairs without being winded. I could not fit in any clothes but the stretchy ones. And I looked so sad, I looked so goddamned sad. It was a wonder I never got grey hairs. He had plenty.

I waddled into a small gym that did interval training. The boy teaching it, his name was Adam and he kind of looked like an exotic Disney prince? An exotic Disney prince surveying his people, an ocean of beautiful white people, fit and flying. The bell dinged and they dropped into mountain climbers — and it was all too much. I started to back out, but it was too late. Adam bounced up to me grinning, and his radiance stirred a small competitive edge in me that I forgot existed.

I could not do burpees or pull-ups; there was a time when I passed through both without hesitation. I missed my old self. The woman I was before I knew he existed. Tall, athletic, and fearless. Confident. Could do burpees and pull-ups. But she’s dead, he killed her. And whatever is left wakes up every morning and stares in the mirror confused like, who is this bitch?

But it’s 2017 now and I said I’d stop thinking about him.

By spring I could do one or two burpees. Pull-ups are still out the question. People say they can see the weight leaving, the stress melting and taking with it years off my once solemn face. They cheer for me, say yay! You’re no longer thinking about him! About how he’d look when he’d yell at you, sharp eyed, all gnashing teeth like a gargoyle. Don’t let his voice echo in your ears. Don’t remember his tonality, the way his voice would break when he wailed words like, you bitch, you spoiled little bitch!

Try and date, they tell me. Try and date. Have fun! I try frantically to date, to have fun. I try to do anything but remember his friend, a woman, who he confided in. He told her how I made him feel small. She told him through text: There’s a reason she’s as old as she is and still single.

I was 30.

Don’t think about him, don’t think about him, don’t think about him. Don’t think about how he smashed that door, left knuckle prints in your chest of drawers. Forget about how he’d rather be right and you be sick than he be wrong and allow you antibiotics. Don’t wonder if any of the awful words he called you are true.

It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to remember him and even more exhausting to actively not remember. It’s exhausting to not talk about him, but when I open my mouth and his name comes out, I see the groans and the side-eyes. I see their glances that silently demand I just get over it, and I feel the burn of shame.

Don’t wonder if any of the awful words he called you are true.

And if I speak through the shame, he comes for me. He always comes for me. “Keep your name out my mouth,” he warns in a barrage of texts and emails. Blocking him doesn’t matter; he just finds another phone to harass from.

Even as I watch women take down much more powerful men than him, I fear our voice. I fear seeing a 504 area code pop up on my phone or his initials in my inbox. Mostly, I fear that one day I say too many words that may compel him to wait for me at my front door with his fists clenched.

So, it’s easier not to think about him.

Maybe 2018 will be my year.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/6-perspectives-on-being-in-a-monogamous-polyamorous-relationship-a4d49db58b17/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 23:08:42 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2962 Read more]]>

These narratives are a snapshot, not a complete picture. But they help to provide contours to a narrative that’s too often blunted.

flickr/Neighty (Natália Reis)

The idea of dating someone who is polyamorous had never crossed my mind until recently, when I met a polyamorous man on a dating website who asked me out for coffee. As a monogamous woman, I was curious about what it’d be like to date someone polyamorous.

Unfortunately, the date didn’t end well. It was cut short as he got into a car and left with one of his other partners, leaving me awkwardly sitting in the coffee shop, wondering what had just happened.

The experience got me wondering: What do successful relationships between monogamous and polyamorous people look like?

It’s an important question to explore — because even as interest in consensual non-monogamy rises, stigmas and misconceptions persist. A study last year found that polyamorous people see their relationships as less socially accepted than monogamous relationships, leading them to hide their love, and that people hold limited views on what polyamory encompasses.

Perhaps the most persistent myth is that polyamorous people can’t possibly be satisfied with their unconventional relationships — and yet the same study also found that polyamorous respondents were highly satisfied with their love life. (It’s also not uncommon for polyamorous — or polyam — people to be stereotyped as hypersexual cheaters prone to irresponsible promiscuity. Not true either.)

Is Love Infinite? A Polyamorous Roundtable On Jealousy

Stigmatization becomes even more complicated when applied to polyamorous people in relationships with those who are monogamous. How do partners navigate these distinct approaches to relationships? What are the parameters around communication? How does jealousy manifest?

In an attempt to demystify polyam-monogamous relationships — and to defy stereotypes surrounding them — I decided to interview seven people who are either polyam and in a current or past relationship with one or more monogamous people, or monogamous and in a current or past relationship with someone who is polyam. Keep in mind that experiences are always diverse, and these narratives are a snapshot, not a complete picture. But they help to provide contours to a narrative that’s too often blunted.

Keaira

Keaira met her husband, Carl, while in college, and they have been together for seven years. They are both polyamorous, and each have another partner who is monogamous. Keaira entered into a relationship with her second partner, Quincy, eight months after graduating college and starting her first job, and they have been together for three years. “We prefer being labeled as partners but occasionally use boyfriend/girlfriend,” she tells The Establishment.

“Quincy is older and has two daughters who just started college this fall. Even though he’s still living with his legal wife, he is very much divorced from her in everything but writing, but she doesn’t know about our relationship — it’s very complex. We have discussed whether he’d like to date other people someday and he has said no, so he’s monogamous.”

Earlier this year, Carl started dating a woman named Gina, who is aware that Carl is polyamorous, and that he is legally married to Keaira. Gina has expressed no interest in dating other people, as she is also monogamous.

“I think the challenges Carl and I have in our relationships with monogamous people have been different, and even more different from other people’s relationships because of the weird dynamic we have. For me, with Quincy, I have worried about balancing time, which is probably a common challenge. Figuring out how to spend time with Quincy while not taking away time from Carl, and vice versa, has been difficult. Quincy and I work in the same city, though I’ve moved from another company, so we’re able to commute together, go for lunch together, and spend time together after work — walking, drinking, or just hanging out.”

‘I have worried about balancing time, which is probably a common challenge.’

Keaira says it has gotten easier since Quincy’s daughters went off to college because now they can hang out after work more often, and longer than before, or even sneak in some weekend visits to each other. Keaira says that in the past she tried not to talk too much about Quincy to Carl, but that this has been changing as Carl and Quincy are starting to become friends on their own.

The biggest challenge ahead in her relationship with Quincy, Keaira says, will be dealing with the moment when he’s ready to tell his kids about their relationship. “They know I’m a person in their father’s life, but they also know I’m married — how do you go from that, to ‘oh and by the way I’m also dating her’?; It’s going to be difficult but it’s a very far off bridge right now.”

Keaira’s advice to those who are in a polyamorous-monogamous relationship is to communicate with each of your partners, and yourself, a lot.

“Carl and I do monthly ‘summit’ meetings where we sit down to a nice meal and assess how we’re doing, where we struggled this month, where we did well, and what we’re looking forward to next month.” Keaira says this was very crucial early on in their relationship, because neither of them ever imagined being polyam until she met Quincy, “and suddenly we had a new life we were figuring out that was both exciting and scary, because we didn’t want to fuck up what we already had together.” She says that being open and honest is critical.

Keaira’s advice to those who are curious about being in these types of relationships is to learn not to fear jealousy.

“Jealousy can be harder for the monogamous partner, and although I haven’t experienced much jealousy in my relationship with Quincy, it’s still something I try to be sensitive about. I try to respect boundaries and feelings, and check in to make sure [he’s ok]. That being said, Carl, Quincy, and I are actually at a point where the three of us are starting to hang out as a group, and Carl and Quincy are forming their own friendship, so this caution for me is passing.”

Keaira hopes that someday, she can openly talk about being in her relationships, as it’s hard for her now to have to edit herself as she talks to others, so as to not reveal that she is polyam.

“Being open about this has been difficult for me, because I’m very introverted and have social anxiety, so sometimes — even though my Twitter is set to private — I struggle to tweet about my partners. But when I do, people see how happy we all are, how happy we make each other — and well, that’s a hard thing to argue with. So it keeps me going in hopes that someday I can be publicly open about it.”

Gio

Gio is a 43-year old polyamorous man who is currently in a relationship with a monogamous woman. “My experiences are quite varied going between monogamous and polyamorous relationships,” he tells The Establishment. Gio was married at 19 in a traditional monogamous relationship, which ended in divorce 16 years later due to his spouse cheating on him. Gio would go on to have a brief monogamous relationship afterward that also ended in cheating. “During this span of my life, jealousy ruled my mind. The thought of my significant other sleeping with someone else drove me insane.” It was after his second breakup and a series of sexual explorations that he began to realize he could care for someone and they could care for him, regardless of who was sleeping with whom.

Following that realization, Gio began exploring polyamory, and found that the jealousy stemming from his years of bad relationships began to subside. When he met his current partner, she decided to try polyamory too — but after eight months, it became clear to Gio that it wasn’t something she actually wanted. Since then, Gio and his partner have decided to remain monogamous with each other, and they have now been together exclusively for four years.

Dear Media: Stop Acting Like Polyamory Is All About The Sex

When asked to address stereotypes about polyamory, Gio says, “Many people think polyam is just an excuse to cheat, when it’s not. It’s about having the ability to care for multiple people, and sex is just one aspect of it.”

Gio also notes that polyamorous relationships aren’t immune from cheating. Infidelity can happen if established rules and agreements are defied. For example, if a partner who says they’re monogamous starts discretely seeing someone else, that could be considered cheating. “Polyam, by definition, doesn’t mean a free for all, and having sex with whomever you want,” Gio points out. “There are still people involved who deserve respect and being treated right.”

Kari

Kari is a 41-year-old monogamous woman from Dallas — as she puts it, “the dirty south, where homosexuality, or anything abnormal, is wrong.” Kari met her husband 10 years ago, and they went on to have five children together.

Kari’s husband, who had been married and divorced twice before, had long felt that no one woman could satisfy him. “We talked,” Kari says, “and then we came across Big Love and Sister Wives, and we discussed that if he weren’t ‘cheating,’ but doing something with consent, he may feel like he is being himself.” Kari acknowledges that there were hard years of jealousy and fighting after her husband started dating other women — but she says it was also exciting to figure out how to handle their unique relationship while also having kids.

Recently, Kari’s husband ended a short-term relationship with a monogamous woman who Kari says “wanted him all to herself.” Since then, she and her husband came across a woman who made the relationship dynamic more inclusive for all of them.

‘We discussed that if he weren’t cheating, but doing something with consent, he may feel like he is being himself.’

“It really changed the relationship. There was some jealousy at first, sure, and insecurities, but now we are talking about her moving in and we have equal amounts of time with my husband, and arranging schedules is always a priority.”

Kari says that society thinks you only have a certain amount of love to give, or that someone must inevitably feel left out. “I want people to learn that it’s like child-rearing; it’s endless love and different kinds of love.”

Jim

Jim is a 54-year-old polyamorous man. He has been together with his monogamous spouse for a little over six months now. “My wife and I began to explore being polyam in the summer of 2016,” he says. “We’ve been married for four and a half years, and began dipping our toes in the water without a definite idea of where things would lead us.”

Jim met his other partner, Erica, on the dating website Plenty of Fish. He contacted her and says what followed was a pretty typical sequence (exchanging emails, a first date, platonic activities such as hiking), which led to the relationship that they have now. Jim says he did the whole online dating thing after his first marriage ended 11 years ago, and that things progressed with Erica in the same way they did when he was single.

“I suppose if I had one thing I’d want to shout from the rooftops about society’s view of polyamory it would be this: Cheating is the worst! I have been utterly amazed at how so many people apparently are more tolerant of infidelity than of consensual non-monogamy (another term for polyamory).”

Jim says the most telling example of this was an exchange of messages he had with a woman named Ashley. After he initially contacted her, he says “she went off on me for being in an open relationship, saying I wasn’t being honest with myself and my wife, since if we had an open relationship, it meant we weren’t really in love with each other and we should just go ahead and get a divorce. When I pointed out that she was on a website looking to cheat on her husband, she said something along the lines of, ‘Well, at least I’m keeping my marriage together.’ How do you argue with that form of microaggression?”

How A Hackneyed Romantic Ideal Is Used To Stigmatize Polyamory

The stigma associated with consensual non-monogamy is mind blowing, Jim says. “A very good friend of mine, who is much more on the ‘swinging’ end of the spectrum, says the same thing. She and her husband have had an open relationship for almost 20 years and she says there’s always been a lot of pressure to keep it hidden.”

With Erica, Jim says she wishes she could take him to social events and introduce him to her friends, but he feels like there is no way they could do that without harming both of their reputations.

Jim believes it all boils down to this: “How in the world is honesty, i.e. in my case being open with my wife and Erica, worse than dishonesty, i.e. cheating? Like I said, it blows my mind.”

Rachel

Rachel is a 41-year-old monogamous woman who has been in a relationship with her polyam partner for a couple of months now. She tells The Establishment, “I have always been monogamous. I’m 41 and he is 47 and married. I had never heard of polyamory until I met him.”

Rachel and her partner first met at a book club discussion that her partner organized.

“There’s a book called The Arrangement, about an open marriage, which was read and discussed. He and his wife expressed to the group that they had an open marriage for the past few years, and then I saw him on OkCupid. I was originally on there to delete my account after bad dating experiences when I noticed a message from him.”

Rachel was initially skeptical, but interested in becoming friends and understanding what exactly polyamory was. Since then, she says, “it is the best and healthiest relationship I have probably ever been in. The challenge for me is still being alone for holidays, not being part of a family, and no sleepovers or vacations.”

Rachel says she is becoming friends with his wife and things may change over time. “I am happy getting to know them both.”

Izzy

Izzy is 25, queer, polyamorous, and genderfluid. She has been keenly aware of how integral her polyamory is to her identity since she was 18, but she often allowed herself to remain in relationships with monogamous partners who were not understanding.

She’s been dating her current partner, Veronica, who’s monogamous, for just over two years, after meeting on Tinder while both studying in the U.K. Izzy says they actually recognized each other from their flight over from the U.S. and were glad to get a second chance to meet.

“At the time, I was sustaining a long-distance relationship with the first polyamorous partner I had ever been with, Jen. I was very upfront with Veronica about the situation, and about my feelings regarding polyamory, and was nearly certain by the end of our first date that she had no intention to pursue anything with me.”

But over the course of the following months, Izzy and Veronica grew closer. “She surprised me with her willingness to learn about my life, and about my other partner, Jen. She reached out and tired to make connections with Jen, in an effort to support me and respect her.”

‘She surprised me with her willingness to learn about my life.’

Unfortunately, Izzy says, despite the fact that Jen was polyamorous, she became very possessive and hostile. “That first year with Veronica, I was put in a challenging position of trying to balance my love for two people who wouldn’t get along, and I regret being as patient with Jen as I had been. Veronica and I were left very emotionally raw by Jen’s harmful behavior, and we mutually decided we should focus on healing and finding stability in our dynamic, before I sought out any new partners.”

When Izzy started a new relationship, Veronica decided to take the opportunity to explore how comfortable she felt being in multiple relationships. Izzy says they ended up in a brief summer fling of a triad that helped Veronica realize that there were some aspects of polyamory that appealed to her, but mostly that she was monogamous. As of now, Izzy casually sees other people while maintaining a loving and supportive relationship with Veronica.

“I hope that society starts to understand polyamory as a way for people to express their love as fully as possible. Too often, I see the misconception that polyamory means you are greedy and dishonest. I would say that accepting my polyamorous nature brought honest communication to the forefront of my relationships. I often see the misconception that there is something inherently enlightened about being polyamorous, or that jealousy doesn’t exist in polyamorous relationships. There is no inherent conflict in polyamory and monogamy; they are two ways of living that can even coincide with each other in healthy ways. Jealousy will happen in any type of relationship. Confronting that jealousy and the underlying causes is what allows us to move past it.”

As a transgender woman, I understand first hand what it’s like to be othered — to be seen as something different, and to confront a lack of understanding that often goes unchecked. I hope the people who were willing to come forward with their stories can serve as a lesson — that even with relationships that feel foreign to us, there is genuine and honest love.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-fixer-upper-a-love-story-d145cee3c8d5/ Fri, 23 Feb 2018 23:22:26 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2982 Read more]]> This isolated and imperfect project house embodies some kind of emotional petri dish.

By Erica Karnes

“Do you want to throw a drop cloth down?” he propositions from the hallway. Donning a paint-stained dress I once wore to client meetings, I’m barefoot and sweating, perched haphazardly above an open can of primer, a roller in each hand.

“No thanks,” I call over my shoulder, “I don’t really spill when I’m painting.” Distracted by a corner of un-taped trim, I return to my task moments later, only to misjudge the weight of my paint-filled tray. A quarter gallon of “Twinkling Lights” spreads across the floor.

It’s only while cursing myself, wiping paint from my brow with the back of my wrist, that I notice the drop cloth under my feet — painstakingly spread by him during one of my many manic diversions. I hear him silently shuffle down the hallway, waiting for the “I told you so” that never comes.

Such is the cadence of our DIY fixer-upper dance. Lacking essentially all experience around homeownership, I charge forth, uninhibited and uneducated. What I lack in familiarity, I’m convinced I earn back via guttural enthusiasm. Drop cloths are for chumps — as is mundane research or project preparation of any kind. Why waste energy mentally anticipating the multiple levels of asbestos, or rot, or rat colonies that foster under the fridge, when the crowbar sits within reach, and one can simply “figure it out,” en route?

His tactics, however, lie somewhere between studying for the best and expecting the worst. While his physical movements often appear sluggish, his face cast in a dubious scowl, mentally he absorbs and retains every resource available. Restless, I pace the hallway yielding electric tools I have no idea how to operate. He patiently perches atop an unfinished chair, watching YouTube tutorials on painting linoleum in one hand while he reads consumer reviews of various floor putty from his laptop.

Our personalities couldn’t reside further apart along the compatibility spectrum. And yet this project house — isolated and imperfect, sporting cracked tiles and off-kilter support beams — embodies some kind of emotional petri dish, and has enabled our quirks to sprout into respective strengths.

“Wake up!” I hiss. “Do you hear that? Wake UP!” I’m shaking him by both shoulders as he jolts awake in bed. “What? What is it?!” he gasps.

“Listen.”

We sit up. Silence. Dim moonlight cascades across the bedroom floor, offering the only source of visual assistance. We wait, sheets kicked to our feet. Suddenly, a loud grinding sound begins.

“It’s that fucking rat!” I whisper, furious and frantic. He says nothing, continues to listen. “We have to kill it. We have to do something! We have…” I’ve rolled out of bed, and am crouched on the floor, my ears pressed to the hardwood.

The chomping continues. As does my panicked rage.

“I wonder if it’s nesting,” he finally speaks.

“WHAT?!” I yelp. “Are you kidding me?!”

Deadpan, he shrugs “No.”

This continues for several minutes. The rat chomps. I crawl around swearing, looking for cracks in the walls or any evidence that either I could kill it, or it could kill me. By this point, he’s leaned back into the sheets. He watches me with an amused grin on his face.

“There’s nothing we can do right now,” he finally offers. “It’s in the walls. Or under the flooring. Whatever it’s doing, we can’t deal with it in this particular moment.”

Hunched over a slight seam in the floorboards, I look up. In that moment, I realize the ridiculousness of the situation. That ripping up flooring, under the white light of the moon, to declare war on a sole rodent that’s likely lived here longer than us veered dangerously closer to insanity than ambition. Resigned, I sighed and curled back into bed.

The next morning, as he started a fire and a fresh pot of coffee, I found him aggressively researching the nesting habits of rodents. He passed me some creamer for my coffee, proudly stating “I ordered some rat poison online. It got really great reviews.”

Perhaps it takes not just one seemingly unsolvable situation (stubborn rats that bypass poison for the innards of my dishwasher, for example), but an unending series of them — cracked walls, a resident family of otters, wonky plumbing, flooding floors, exposed mystery wires, etc. — to convince a compulsive, action-oriented, eternal half-asser such as myself to be slightly more detail oriented, or to convert a self-diagnosed perfectionist such as him into “a little less so.”

This isolated and imperfect project house embodies some kind of emotional petri dish, and has enabled our quirks to sprout into respective strengths.
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As he and this house stumbled into my life during the same fated weekend, our efforts together seem especially evocative. I had no plans for a partner, and no plans for property either. When, after a casual first date, we realized we’d both be visiting the same rural Pacific Northwest island at the same time — him to hunt for property with his father, me to build beach bonfires with local friends — we reconvened at its salty dive bar, and sipped scotch until the early hours of the morning on the boat he’d moored across the street.

The next day, while soaking up the sun from a friend’s back porch, I was informed they were planning on selling their secluded sanctuary. Combating both a slight hangover and new-crush stomach flips, I wandered their forested property, silently crunching numbers and whispering “what if…” to myself.

Needless to say, rather than the usual post-hookup text — “Last night was fun, let’s do it again soon” — I photo-bombed him with images of the heavily wooded lot, with some obscure message of “Last night was fun… I think I’m going to buy this house.”

He didn’t duck out at that moment; instead the whirlwind of newness took root simultaneously. Our love story was dotted with the anti-romance of loans and banks, insurance and inspections — but from under a cloud of charming mystique wherein we conjured up our country-life daydream. We’d raise babies and chickens, perfect our own crafts beside an ever-cracking fire, make love in the garden, forever protected from neighbors, society, pain, or disappointment. He’d chop wood shirtless and read all about sailing. I’d float about with some forever-glow of fertility, radiating wisdom and writing for “my soul” instead of for Silicon Valley. My hair would be fucking incredible too.

When, after months of logistics, the house was officially mine, we went out to celebrate and simply stared at each other, shocked and beaming. Flushed with the sheer adrenaline of possibility.

Sawdust sprays from the far end of the hallway. He works beside his father, a stouter, silver version of himself, to build custom door-frames for a slightly-tilted hallway. They mirror each other’s idiosyncrasies, frowning and focused, alternating stoic pulls of their unkempt beards. I’m painting again, this time the kitchen. This time, with a drop cloth spread under my feet. Various tools sputter and churn to a Rolling Stones playlist I’ve cranked full-volume, and a coiled trail of cords twist throughout the house, connecting each of our separate worlds by a multi-colored, utilitarian thread.

In this house that we fix — in this life that we build, we pay homage to the past while we anticipate the future. Chuckling together, we paint over the decade’s worth of pencil scratches that mark the heights of the previous owner’s children. We proudly discuss our own intended parenting tactics with a smug naiveté that can only come from the childless.

We bicker over décor. He feels that our space should be full of objects of meaning. Tokens from our pasts. Memorabilia full of ample potential stories for our ample potential grandbabies. Pieces should have a purpose. Knick knacks need a point.

In this house that we fix — in this life that we build, we pay homage to the past while we anticipate the future.
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I disagree, lining shelves with sparse relics of my childhood alongside free tchotchkes from the dump. Dog-eared books that I’ve read and reread throughout my entire life lean against insignificant literature that happens to feature an ornate, cool-looking cover.

We learn to balance incorporating things that meant something once, with things that might mean something some day. A rough-standing end table — yet another one of my free finds — acts as a placeholder, reserving the space for the antique chair his deceased mother rocked him to sleep in. While we’ll likely continue this tradition — cooing our own little ones to rest from a literal framework of nostalgia and nurturing — my guess is it will inevitably cradle a thrifty throw pillow. (One that matches my cheap area rug or Goodwill ceramics, of course.)

As the weeks pass, and projects evolve into even more projects, I watch his pedantry thin. The research never ceases, but his frustrated perma-frown slowly ebbs, and the slew of cursing that once capped any less-than-ideal outcome eventually morphs to a steadfast, “Good enough for now.”

I, on the other hand, never necessarily slow down. Rather, I begin to appreciate the adrenaline of channeling brute force or raw gusto into tasks that have already been roughly outlined, moderately understood, or proven to be non-life-threatening. I give him the time and space to ponder best practices and weigh options. He, in turn, redirects my eagerness towards “To Dos” that are already cued up, or worst case scenario, steps aside with a shrug and an eye-roll to let my stubborn flurry run its course.

And while the rat still occasionally scratches from beneath our floorboards, its nocturnal tap-dancing somehow seems less a call to arms — less a pressing project to immediately tackle, and more just a minor inconvenience and messy reality of a household already ripe with compromise. And promise.

By Katie Schmid

The wife is dead; long live the wife.

The wife has died and everyone comes to gather at her corpse to participate in the communal ritual of grief by which her body becomes a public monument. The dead body of the wife retains heat, a brick building that has soaked up the sun. People begin to rub up against it to warm themselves. A wife is a technology of pleasantness that all may enjoy.

“Her stroganoff was unparalleled,” says one person, leaning into the body of the wife and letting out an involuntary moan as the heat eases a shoulder pain. A dead wife is better than a rubdown with Icy/Hot.

Another man lies face down next to the body of the wife, such is his reverence for it. “I hear she followed her husband from job to job for eight years,” he says.

The body of the wife has expanded now and the mourners swarm. A man curls into her palm. Just before he falls asleep, he whispers, “She was an excellent mother. Amazing, given that I heard she also pioneered several advancements in some kind of science.” [1]

It is the woman who is gendered first, who is seen as the exception to maleness, the one who exists in the category of not-male. [2] It is the woman who finds her “natural” state in marriage, as wife. Marriage is, in the popular imagination, something that a man must be coaxed into, as a wild animal must be coaxed into a cage with a bit of meat. The woman is happy to be the meat and thus, through a series of coaxings, also known as “feminine wiles” or “nagging,” she entices him to accept his cage. (For more insight into the deployment of “feminine wiles” aka “harpyism” aka “bitching,” “being a real c word,” “the use of mysterious titpowers,” “that Cold War thing she does,” and “shrill whining only the dog can hear,” please see every sitcom ever made.)

But why is this the popular narrative when, in fact, the state of marriage, for men, increases their happiness and wellbeing? Research has shown that masculinity as it is socialized in the United States is a life-threatening condition, produced via aggressive policing in homosocial environments, characterized by violence and limited emotional expression, one popular solution for which is the salutary prescription of taking a wife. [3]

Wives are a technology of health. In the popular imagination, a man’s reward is the wife, who cultivates his emotional silence like a beautiful garden, imbuing it with worth and meaning; as a gardener who has for months sung and coaxed a bloom into being, the wife thinks she can feel the plant emoting back at her. The wife has been taught to make even the harshest ground bear fruit. The wife has been taught to look at an apple seed and call it an apple. [4]

The man is allowed his “essential” maleness, and this maleness is not seen to be threatened by the state of being a husband, provided that the man can make jaunts into homosocial environments, doesn’t accidentally become a stay at home dad, and doesn’t become mysteriously drawn into the yonic terrorhole of his wife’s vagina [5] such that he begins enjoying interior decorating, couples’ retreats, and “I” statements during arguments.

Contemporary culture is thick with images of reluctant, “feminized” husbands. We internalize the narrative of the horrors of the man who has been infected by marriage — we inhabit the logic and call it truth. This “feminized” man is a monstrous creature forged in the fires of a wife’s shrewishness. We can see this logic at work in every Judd Apatow movie ever written: A white, blond ice queen inflicts her will onto an equally monstrous 40-year-old frat boy, who slouches, cowers, and grows hair as his primary occupations. By the end of the movie, after several fights, an equal or greater number of bong hits, a montage of his manscaping, and several ironic deployments of the word “cunt,” the transformation is complete — the chastened man becomes a husband. For her part, the woman in such a romantic comedy displays very little emotional range [6] — she is angry, she is a font of tears. These emotions are part of the man’s journey to “mature masculinity,” but they’re also part of the fun. A wife’s misery is the highest comedy.

In the popular imagination, the state of being a husband is seen to be an attractive accessory to masculinity, a cravat or a particularly lush sock that decorates a man’s essential maleness, which has been painted on his body like a Ken doll’s underwear. Perhaps marriage-as-accessory is not entirely accurate, for the marriage is not purely decorative. Instead, there is a utility to the thing that is overlooked — it is the wife who allows him to escape the stranglehold masculinity has placed on his person. Studies of the sexual scripts of middle-aged men show that men do experience expanded emotional and sexual understanding as a result of moving from the locker room to the marriage bower, though this comes thanks to new narratives of women’s sexuality (in part due to the work of the sexual revolution and the Second Wave) rather than men’s. A corresponding revolution in the image of heterosexual male sexuality and gender performance does not seem forthcoming, and heterosexual men currently continue to be socialized to experience male sexuality as predatory, until such time as they find themselves in a relationship with a woman, who does that good emotional labor and provides him with a new paradigm. And still, men by and large view these more egalitarian practices in their relationships with woman as existing solely in their relationships, unable to incorporate them into conceptualizing their performances of masculinity outside their relationships. [7]

We can hear it in the ways that marriage is seen to enhance a man’s character and soften him: He becomes more sensitive, he’s “opened up,” his “rough edges have been worn down,” he is seen to have “settled down” after “sowing his wild oats” (sexual metaphors for men are always either confusingly of the naturalist bent, or incredibly violent). These metaphors are often employed in tribute to the wife, as though the man were stupid or not capable of it in his pre-husbanded state, as though transformation of the man into the husband was the job of the wife.

As in, “Wow, Derek really has opened up recently, and I think that’s all on you, Fran; he used to be a sucking black hole of rudeness and defensiveness.” Often, this kind of discourse sets up a logic wherein the wife is responsible for representing the husband to others (“I’m sorry Hank’s grumpy, he isn’t feeling well today. Due to masculine socialization, he frequently sulks when there’s inclement weather”), and is, thus, responsible for his behavior in public. Consider how radical Audre Lorde’s musing on emotional labor looks, in light of this cultural expectation:

“…I do not exist to do his feeling for him. Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.” [8]

Though in many ways women are still said to exist “to do his feeling for him,” to give him the practices and thought processes so that he might think himself out of the trap. To be fair, it is hard for a man to see his masculinity, much less theorize it, existing as it does in the form of covert, constricting nude Ken doll underpants. It is the wife’s job to delicately peel off the nude underpants, though she herself wears a choking pair of nude shapewear.

Who, then, theorizes wifeliness with the wife? It is, of course, other wives. It is a peculiar phenomenon of marriage as it is socialized in the West that wives wife for their husbands, and wives also wife for other wives. Wives, once they have got the hang of wifing, tend to wife all over the place. Paradoxically, the very condition of wifeliness is predicated on curtailing a wife’s attachment to anything outside of the marriage, particularly if that thing threatens heterosexual monogamy. The condition of wifeliness is a technology meant to usher the unattached woman out of the dangers of being single. Wifeliness curtails the possibility of bonding between women, with its queer potential and oracular possibilities. Take, for instance, Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seaton — one day, they’re kissing in gardens and composing political tracts in the attic. Everything is possible; they might be about to join the Bolsheviks. The next thing Clarissa knows, it’s 30 years later and Sally won’t stop bragging to her about the virile boys she’s birthed. It is the great tragedy of Mrs. Dalloway that Clarissa feels everything is possible with Sally, because there is no map for what they are to each other, but when next they meet, they are wives, and their prophetic potential has been subsumed into the language of wifedom.

It is no accident that the language at the heart of descriptions of these types of relationships rests in the unknown. The queer power at the heart of many types of relationships between women is profound and unrealized. Adrienne Rich theorizes:

“Woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community, the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other.” [9]

Consider Toni Morrison’s Paradise — the black womanist magic at the heart of the relationships amongst the women who live together at the convent. One by one, each woman comes to the convent to gather her strength apart from the world. A kind of power grows at the heart of their relationships with one another. It is so alien, such an affront to the known world, that the townsmen come and destroy it. It imagines another world. It is therefore destroyed by ours.

Every loving relationship between women is fed by an economy of care, the tools of which have been formed within heterosexist patriarchy, but which are profoundly antithetical to patriarchy. “Woman-identified,” a Second Wave term Rich uses, is meant to describe relationships between women that are undefined by patriarchy and exist, as much as they are able, in resistance to it. Rich draws upon Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” to define the erotic energy at the heart of “woman-identified” relationships between women as existing on “a lesbian continuum” where the erotic is “diffuse” and generative, a creative force, and springs up from “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, or psychic.”

These pockets of anti-marriage wifing crop up between wives, who turn to each other to repair one another. It is a betrayal. It threatens the very heart of the institution of marriage, which is hostile to all that it cannot contain.

The wife is a technology that winnows potential. To become a wife is to move from the state of being something unknown or threatening into a state of intelligibility, to move from anti-meaning (a place of resistance) to stasis (a place of deadness). To even acknowledge the extent to which wives already wife for each other is a threat not only to the state of marriage, but to the state.

The state of wifeliness can determine the existence of both allegiance to nationhood (in the form of access to contingent citizenship) and the existence of state-acknowledged personhood (in the form of access to civil rights). Wifeliness is a lens through which the great eye of the state may focus on the individual. To deny someone the ability to become a wife has traditionally been a line of demarcation between those kinds of relationships the state considers sufficiently human, and those kinds of relationships the state does not wish to understand. [10]

The condition of wifeliness has often been exploited by the state to achieve state’s ends. Think of the mainstreaming of LGBTQ rights into marriage rights and the state’s continued marginalization of the myriad other queer relationships and families. Think of the practice of some slave owners allowing a contingent kind of informal marriage in order to answer abolitionists’ charge of the cruelty of separating families. [11]

It is the wife who is the symbol of nation. In the West, traditionally, the body of the white wife is the foundation of empire; the progenitor of nation whose purity is the battleground upon which all wars are fought. It is the reason Emmett Till was murdered. The wife is a technology of supremacy inextricable from white heterosexist supremacy. To become a wife is to become complicit.

The wife is dead; long live the wife. It begins again every generation with a fictive exceptionalism: Our marriages will be different. There is no language and no framework for a feminist marriage trying to solve the problem of emotional labor. To place the burden of making the marriage egalitarian onto the choices of the individual parties involved ignores the hateful, rotting boards of the building the couple willingly enters into. There is a wound at the heart of every heterosexual relationship. There is a wound at the heart of marriage itself. To pretend otherwise places more burden and invisible labor on the already burdened wife. Why would anyone ever want to be a wife?

Notes

1. Loosely taken from The New York Times’ obituary of Yvonne Brill.

2. Simone De Beauvoir. Post-structural feminism is helpful here. Judith Butler: “If one is a girl to the extent that one does not want a girl, then wanting a girl will bring being a girl into question; within this matrix, homosexual desire thus panics gender” (Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender: Refused Identification,” in Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: between clinic and culture, ed. Murial Dimen and Virginia Goldner (New York: Other Press, 2010)). We can see this logic in the way (dis)ability is produced, in part, by public spaces that take a certain kind of body as “neutral” and “normal,” but thereby create the non-“normal” body as disabled (Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor, Examined Life interview series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE (Accessed April 04, 2016)). The term “natural” is a logic of power that attempts to produce subjects, but then hides that production of subjects by pretending that their adherence to a law outside of them in fact originates in their bodies.

3. Michelle Adams and Scott Coltrane, in “Boys and Men in Families,” note that the state of adolescent maleness as it is currently socialized is detrimental to men’s health: “In 1996, for example, 2,110 suicides in the United States involved youth under the age of 19, 80% of whom were male,” while “…married men are less depressed and have lower rates of mental disorder than do married women.” From Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, ed. R.W. Connell, Jeff Hearn and Michael S. Kimmel (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005).

4. “When you are hungry/learn to eat/whatever sustains you/until morning” (“For Each of You”) Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).

5. Vaginas are whirlpools from which you may never return. The sirens of the Greek myths who lured sailors to their doom enticed them into the ocean, which everyone knows is an endless void, which everyone knows is a vagina. All vaginas lead via a network of oceanic tunnels to The Great Vagina, aka Terrible Nothingness.

6. A now famous New Yorker profile of Anna Faris revealed that movie studios require that a woman is reduced to tears within the first 10 minutes of the romantic comedy genre, in order to ensure that she is likeable.

7. In “Beyond the sex machine? Sexual practices and masculinity in adult men’s heterosexual accounts,” authors Chiara Bertone and Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto assert that much is to be gained by men from their interactions and heterosexual relationships with women, especially in the expansion of emotional and sexual scripts for men, but that this does not help the man construct a less restrictive conception of masculinity: “…the intimacy script allows him to redefine his sexual positioning in couple interaction, but not to construct a sense of self based on a new model of masculinity: he only distances himself from a masculinity which he keeps defining as predatory.” The authors assert that sex role changes occurred because of the “…sexual revolution, which were based on a collective redefinition of female sexuality and femininity, but even when activating a change in how men experienced sexuality, [this] lacked a corresponding collective redefinition of masculinity.”

8. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, (Berkeley: Crossing Press Feminist Series, 2007).

9. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Feminism and Sexuality, ed. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

10. See, for example: the way the ability to wife has become the primary aim of the mainstream LGBTQA movement, thus eliding the concerns and civil rights of less mainstream members of the movement. Michael Warner, in The Trouble With Normal, attempts to envision a world where marriage is only one part of a larger push toward civil rights in the gay movement: “Is it possible to have a politics in which marriage could be seen as one step to a larger goal, and in which its own discriminatory effects could be confronted rather than simply ignored? […] It would have to say that marriage is a desirable goal only insofar as we can also extend health care, tax reform, rights of intimate association extending to immigration, recognition for joint parenting, and other entitlements currently yoked to marital status. It would have to say that marriage is desirable only insofar as we can eliminate adultery laws and other status-discriminatory regulations for sexuality. […] Above all, a program for change should be accountable to the queer ethos, responsive to the lived arrangements of queer life, and articulated into queer publics.” Of course, as Warner acknowledges here and elsewhere in the text, to extend these rights beyond marriage would change the nature of marriage, and would involve widespread acknowledgement that “legal” marriage is a controlling function of the state, rather than the sacred bond it is regularly cast as. Such acknowledgement does not seem forthcoming.

Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).

11. Tera Hunter and Michael Martin, “Slave Marriages, Families Were Often Shattered By Auction Block.” Interview by Michael Martin and Tera Hunter. NPR. (Accessed April 04, 2016.)

By Nicole Schmidt

Content warning: suicidal ideation

My last relationship was riddled with problems — but for the year and a half we were together, I told myself that the bad times were overshadowed by the good days.

We met while I was studying overseas in New Zealand, and after I left to go back home, we decided we weren’t ready to let go of each other. In the beginning, while we were still on the same continent, everything was easy, and being together felt intuitive. He was older than me, but it didn’t seem to matter because we connected in a way I convinced myself could never be replicated with anyone else. I fell in love with his mind — he was well spoken, creative, kept me intrigued, and made me feel special.

For every good trait, however, I later learned there was a flaw that carried more weight. When he drank, which was often, he had two sides: He could be vindictive and derogatory towards me, or deeply displeased with his own life. I preferred the latter because I knew that the sadness would subside the next morning. The slurs he hurled at me, though, made themselves cozy in the back of my mind; “slut” was his go-to. He didn’t trust me around other men and constantly criticized my feelings by telling me I didn’t love him enough.

I made excuses for him by focusing on all of the times he said I was perfect, that I was the only person who made him happy. But this fixation, too, had a downside: I’d lost my ability to see just how emotionally abusive my relationship had become.

His history with chronic depression and anxiety was something we talked about often; he spent the entirety of his twenties drowning in it, unable to leave his room for days on end. He was a long way from being okay, but he assured me that things were better now. At first, I thought it was something I could handle. Still, there were times when he’d piece together his darkest thoughts and talk about leaving the world.

I’d lost my ability to see just how emotionally abusive my relationship had become.
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Tear-filled conversations about suicide often transitioned into him planning for a future he refused to think about without me in it. Those days were the hardest. They left me feeling scared and overwhelmed — like I’d taken on the sole responsibility of keeping my partner upright. His life was at a standstill before we met. He had three university degrees, but hadn’t held a steady job in years because he felt like he had nothing to work towards. Our prospective future was his first real plan, and that brought ambitions — like cutting back on drinking and finding a proper job — to the surface. He wanted to move in together after I finished my degree, maybe even get married.

But there’s an unsettling pressure that accompanies being someone’s main source of motivation and happiness. Good days became more frequent, but when he was having one of his bad days, I became what he depended on. His problems always took priority over the other things in my life, because if I wasn’t there, he made me feel guilty by telling me I didn’t care enough. It consumed most of my free time and all of my mental energy.

My instincts were screaming at me to move forward, to stop answering calls in the early hours of the morning, to refrain from constantly wondering whether he was okay. I neglected my emotions until the pressure to help him be okay — to be there whenever he needed me, to reassure him constantly of my love — finally made me see that the person who once made me feel so special had become the source of so much fear and sadness.

Still, I was scared to leave. I was afraid of what he might do if I did.

We had plans to see each other at the end of the year for the first time since I’d left, but as the date got closer I started to ask myself whether I could ever really be happy in the relationship. I knew that no one person could give him the true stability he needed, and finding any sense of balance between us seemed like an impossible task.

When I finally did leave him, I felt a sense of ease. I could breathe again. But all of those previous fears became real a few weeks later when I woke up to his name on my phone screen. When I saw his text, everything unraveled.

“It’s time to leave this behind once and for all…I’ll always love you but you did the wrong thing by me,” the message read. “All I ask is your forgiveness for what I’m about to do. It breaks my heart that I wasn’t good enough for you.”

Frantic calls and texts went unanswered. Minutes spent on hold with the police dragged on. My mind wandered. I questioned my decisions and my self-worth. I cried until my body was numb. When I finally willed myself out of bed for work, I couldn’t help but feel disconnected from everything around me. I spent the day trying to quiet my thoughts, which seemed impossible.

After 12 hours, it was the who police confirmed he was alive. They showed up on his doorstep and found him drunk and unharmed inside.

The episode was devastating and frightening — but also clarifying. Suicidal ideation is a very real issue rooted in mental illnesses too often stigmatized, and threats must always be taken seriously and handled with compassion. At the same time, the scenario forced me to understand the importance of boundaries in my life — and how toxic his dependency on me had always been.

Sue Johnson, clinical psychologist and founding director of the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy, told me that when partners delve into extremes, they’re often driven by insecurities and a need for control. It’s natural to rely on another person for comfort, support, and affection, she says, but there’s a very important difference between constructive and destructive dependency. “Relationships don’t work on a level of threat. Relationships work when you help people feel safe…You can’t demand someone love you.”

There’s a very important difference between constructive and destructive dependency.
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Some relationships can be consuming to the point where any real sense of perspective vanishes. Mary Andres, a professor of clinical psychology at the Rossier School of Education, described it to me as your brain going into crisis mode: When you’re busy reacting to the emotional demands in front of you, trying desperately to hold up another person, it’s easy to feel depleted. Eventually, you can reach a point where you stop using your frontal lobes, which are responsible for problem solving and judgement. Andres spoke about one woman she worked with who spoke about her own life as if she wasn’t the protagonist — her partner was front and center in every problem and every thought.

“When you’re involved with a toxic person and they’re telling you that you should be able to make them feel okay, that’s a fallacy,” Andres says. “If we listen to them, we’re letting them define our reality…It’s difficult to make decisions when you’re in that place.”

At the same time, when you have someone begging you to rescue them, to be their entire world and sense of stability, saying “no” feels morally wrong. And so walking away — the most important thing you can do in such a situation — also ironically becomes the hardest part.

But as Andres emphasizes, ending an emotionally abusive relationship isn’t selfish; it’s the best thing for both people involved. “You’re saving your own life and it might be a precursor to the other person getting the help they need. A person has to experience loss to get incentive to make a difference,” she says. “But it’s not easy.”

As for me, it’s been 10 months since I left my partner, and I still sometimes wonder whether he’s okay. But the difference is this: that thought no longer takes priority in my life, because I know that my happiness is important, too.

Leaving was difficult — but it helped me realize that staying with someone out of guilt and obligation isn’t love.

Content note: discussion of sexual coercion and violation

Why do I have to see violence in my porn?

The housemate who asked this in a conversation about kink was upset that a feminist porn series she liked included scenes involving slapping.

On the one hand, I empathize. I’m more into textual porn than visual, but I don’t like being surprised by elements I find upsetting: luxuriant body-worshiping oral sex, characters crying out “I love you” at the point of orgasm, the ickily clinical m-word. It’s not the frustration at encountering unwanted content I object to. It’s the characterization of slapping as violent, and the implication, by contrast, that other kinds of erotic touch are nonviolent.

My teenage sexual abuse was painstakingly gentle. Soft kisses, soft touches, and afterwards, a round of obligatory moon eyes and gushing about how beautiful the thing I hadn’t wanted in the first place had been. Expect gentle touch from me, or touch without a power dynamic, and I’m back in my high school girlfriend’s bed, waiting for a sign that I’m allowed to stop, steeling myself to be held after. When I say gentle touch can be violent, I speak from experience.

What makes an erotic act become nonviolent isn’t the type of act; it’s whether the parties involved consent to it.

In a sense, this is consent 101: Consent is what distinguishes sex from assault. But the belief that gentle, power-neutral sex is a sort of erotic default muddies the waters.

When I say gentle touch can be violent, I speak from experience.

A few years ago, I found myself alone with a date. I was interested in playing with her, but I hadn’t yet ascertained whether she was kinky. When she kissed me without asking, before I could start a conversation about what sort of things we were each into, it became clear that we were on different pages. We had come back to my apartment from a bar on what turned out to be a pretext. “I’m sorry,” I’d told her after she’d kissed me some. “I don’t think I’m awake enough to have the conversations I would need to have to keep going.”

Not awake enough, not sober enough, and, given what I’d already seen of her approach to consent, not confident enough that a conversation about kink would end anywhere near where I wanted it to. But somehow — my memory fuzzes as to why — our night didn’t end there. Making out with her, detaching already from my body, I found myself silently bargaining. Maybe if I’m on top, I can still want this. Maybe if we play with pain. “Can I pull your hair?” I asked. She agreed to this, but as soon as I started, it became clear we weren’t on the same page there either.

“No,” my date said, looking up at me every bit as doe-eyed as my high school girlfriend in those endless numb afters. “Gentler.”

For anyone invested in consent, it seems obvious that my date could consent to gentle erotic touch but not to something rougher like hair-pulling.

What is less intuitive, I think, is that I might consent to rougher touch but not to gentle.

Particularly not as a top. I let go of my date’s hair and steeled myself to go mutely through with whatever she expected. Maybe I could have stopped things then — though my earlier attempts had been unsuccessful — but I was held back by the fear of how my no would sound: I only want to have sex where I hurt you*.

There is an oppressive idea I’ve internalized, something that makes my withdrawing consent in itself seem somehow predatory, and I’m trying to put words to it. Maybe it’s that I’d “led my date on” by not clarifying sooner that I wasn’t looking for normative sex, and wanting dominance or sadism instead seemed like a kind of bait and switch. Maybe taking gentle sex off the table seemed like a disingenuous tactic designed to manipulate my date into doing something kinkier than she’d ordinarily choose. Or maybe it’s just the simple idea that it isn’t fair to expect someone to be into the things I’m into.

Why I’ve Turned To Kink, Therapy, And Gaming To Heal From Trauma

I agree it wouldn’t be fair to expect my date to be into what I was into. But I’d add that it’s also not fair to expect someone to be into the things my date was into. I’d add further that expecting someone to be into anything is the wrong approach entirely.

What I had wanted to do, what I had gone into our date intending to do, was negotiate. I wanted to state what I was interested in and ask my date what she was interested in. If we wanted compatible things, we could do those. If not, I’d have been disappointed, but far less disappointed than if we’d gone forward with an erotic encounter that one of us didn’t want. I had gone in open to hearing no — maybe even expecting a no, even if I hoped otherwise — and to respecting that no when I heard it.

My date, on the other hand, didn’t even frame gentler as a question. She simply gazed up at me, her voice pitched soft and sultry, and purred a word that maybe, to her, seemed intimate and romantic. I don’t think it occurred to her that gentler might make the difference between an act I could enjoy and an act that would cause me harm.

I didn’t tell her. Maybe because she hadn’t responded to my saying no earlier. Maybe because my high school relationship had taught me that the sooner I resigned myself to going through the motions, the sooner I could get out of bed. But at least partly, I think, because of the idea my housemate had expressed in our conversation about feminist porn: What my date wanted was normal, and what I wanted was violent. Pain play might fly in some late-night dungeon, but here in the real world, where gentle was a sweet nothing in a lover’s ear, where we kissed without asking because there was nothing to ask about, what I wanted was monstrous. Maybe more than anything, I made myself have gentle sex with my date as a kind of penance for ever having hoped she’d consent to me hurting her.

Expecting someone to be into anything is the wrong approach entirely.

In some ways, what happened with my date is a classic sexual assault story: e were intoxicated; she initiated touch without my consent; she didn’t listen when I said no. Even without a kink framework, what my date did was harmful.

But I find it additionally valuable to read this story through a kink lens. Internalized shame about my desires, and the internalized belief that I should want to touch an erotic partner gently, made me more able to be coerced. On my date’s part, assuming that gentle sex was something everybody wanted, and that if I had desire for her, that my desire must encompass gentle sex, made it harder for her to realize that her actions were, in fact, coercive.

I’ve spent this blog series exploring why it’s important to talk about kink, and the story of my date offers another, somewhat grim, reason. The more we recognize that there are no universals when it comes to desire and erotic expression, that not everyone is erotically compatible, and that all erotic acts have the potential to be unwanted, the less effective this kind of coercion becomes.

No erotic act is inherently nonviolent. But the belief that some acts are violent, while others are normal and universal, leads to violence — particularly, to sexual coercion. A kink-aware consent framework helps push back. We need to approach potential erotic encounters with the understanding that different people experience desire differently, and that one set of desires is no more valid — and no less violent — than another.

*Or at least, that’s how I would have formulated it at the time, though now I’m not sure I would have wanted sex either way.

Originally published at circumstanceandcarefulness.com on December 7, 2017.

I was recently at a house party for Halloween; I incidentally had not gotten the memo from the friend who invited me that it was a space-magick theme or some such nonsense and I showed up as…Ursula; my dear friend was dressed as Bill Lumbergh, his center-part glistening beneath ’80s power-glasses.

We were not on theme; in fact we were sorely out of place. “Adventure Time” princesses sashayed; steam-punk cowboys swaggered about in velvet, leather, and goggles. We knew one person between us and after smiling and waving hello at our entrance that rivaled some of my more traumatic school dances — I had caught a tentacle in my spoke, tripping and dropping my bike when I walked into their yard — we found ourselves talking to each other in the corner of their porch.

I was nervously smoking spliff after spliff and sipping champagne from a solo cup. “We gotta get in there,” I said. “We gotta mingle.”

He winced, looking around. “Yeah, I mean, everyone is cool,” he said. “We should just go in and do a lap.”

“I just want to talk to you,” I moaned. “But we’re at a party right? We gotta…party?”

So we wandered in. We did our lap. And before I knew it I was happily drunk, drinking whiskey, and chatting with the human equivalent of a pitbull-meatball — a hulking, thick man with a Bic-ed head. He was dressed as, perhaps, an intergalactic monk?

In truth, I don’t know how we got onto the topic. No one believes me, but I really don’t. But we started talking about butt stuff. Straight cis men butt stuff.

And suddenly I heard myself say, “Oh man, my dear friend is a straight guy and he’s very intrigued by his asshole, but he can’t just, like, set himself free. He is so hung up on it. I feel like he’s got all this….” I waved my arm around, “maybe, homophobic shit around his own ass? And it’s just so sad because, like, ass stuff is the best!”

My new companion’s face lit up. Like Christmas.

The glorious prostate is a walnut-sized gland; you’ll find it between the bladder and the penis, just in front of the rectum.

The urethra, which carries urine and semen alike, runs through the center of this flesh-nugget. The prostate secretes a fluid that nourishes and protects sperm — father’s milk amiright?! — in addition to squeezing this fluid into the urethra when ejaculating.

It weighs about 20 grams.

The word “prostate” is taken from the Greek expression meaning “one who stands before,” describing the position of the prostate gland.

Most importantly, perhaps, you can also “milk” the prostate, massaging it with your finger until the man’s mind explodes in the most dizzying orgasms of his life. Or so I hear.

My dear pal, let’s call him Bernard (which incidentally was the name of my feral orange cat in Brooklyn), is conflicted. He’s a tender man; he’s not afraid to cry, and is eager to talk about his feelings. To process. He is generous of heart and spirit…

and he’s got a girlfriend very keen to explore his butthole.

“You gotta get your friend onboard,” my new friend half-yells, his eyes glittering. “The prostate is amazing, man, just amazing.”

“Yeah!” I said laughing. “I’m with you. I tell him all the time he should try and examine why he can’t just accept the physical pleasure of his own body…especially as his lady is butt-drunk in love.” I took a sip of whiskey and shrugged. “But yeah. You can bring a horse to water, but ya can’t make him drink. It’s pretty complicated I think.”

I thought we had covered it. I thought we had sufficiently shared a mutual sadness around the fraught-ness of straight cis men’s buttholes. But no.

Like a bad sitcom, I see Bernard’s head peek over the crowd. “Hi!” he yells and weaves his way over to me.

“This him?” this meatball asks.

I feel my face growing very very hot. But I’m also drunk and thinking to myself, maybe this will be good. I also don’t want to lie and pretend I wasn’t just talking about this. Just be cool. Be casual. We’re fine. This is all fine.

In her Guernica essay, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“Feminism needs men. For one thing, the men who hate and despise women will be changed, if they change, by a culture in which doing horrible things to, or saying horrible things about, women will undermine rather than enhance a man’s standing with other men. There are infinite varieties of men or at least about 3.5 billion different ones living on Earth now, Klansmen and human rights activists, drag queens and duck hunters…

[So much masculinity] is predicated on the idea that violating the rights, dignity, and body of another human being is a cool thing to do. Such group acts are based on a predatory-monster notion of what masculinity is, one to which many men don’t subscribe but that affects us all. It’s also a problem that men are capable of rectifying in ways women are not.”

It’s a long, complicated, and nuanced essay, as is Solnit’s way, but in short, I agree that feminism needs men. One cannot identify a Problem, remove responsibility from the Problem, strip it from the Solution entirely, and believe change will occur. If men don’t believe they’re part of the problem — by deed or mere privilege — then they remain a potent obstacle to equality. The key, for me, is getting everyone on board to recognize the widespread fuckery of all shapes, sizes, and creeds, and swinging a hammer at the piece you’re occupying.

What gets slippery and exponentially more confusing for me is when men, identifying as feminists, are in actuality perpetuating the same dangerous shit — often unbeknownst to them — all wrapped up in the “right” rhetoric and bright smiles.

“This, indeed, is him!” I smile into Bernard’s face and give him a Christian-style side hug. Act like you’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve done nothing wrong!

“You were talking about me?” he says, all innocent curiosity.

“Oh yeah man. We’re talking about the prostate man. Male anal!” the meatball says, turning to face Bernard squarely in the face.

I choke-laugh on my whiskey. I’m trying to stuff my entire head in the cup. Maybe he can’t see my face in here.

“Dude you gotta let your shit go man,” yells meatball. “I let my girl get in there and I’m hands-free man. I’m coming and coming like a firehose — I’m flaccid but it’s pouring out of me. Hands free! It’s the most intense shit of my life.”

I am delighted. I am horrified. It’s better and worse than I could have ever imagined.

“Did you pay this gentleman for this rant?” Bernard laughs, incredulous. “You should trademark that phrase man, ‘hands-free coming.’ It’s good.”

“You laugh dude, but do you know the kind of vulnerability it takes to take it in the ass from a woman? Do you understand the inverse of the power-play that happens?”

“I think I do … yes.” Bernard stutters.

“It’s intense. Now she’s in control. You think your girl likes it when you’re just pounding away” — he slams his fist into his palm again and again and again — “no she doesn’t! You’re just BAM BAM BAM and she’s lying there like…”

I raise my hand. “I like being pounded. It’s really not that simple. One doesn’t really have much to do with the other necessarily. Rough sex can be consensual and amazing! I hear you that …”

He interrupts me to slap a friend’s arm who’s at the makeshift bar to get his attention.

“Yo, Miles! You feel me right? You know the pleasures of the ass, right? Tell this guy!”

“I mean, I really do like it,” Bernard insists. “I do! And I do it. It’s just a little hard for me and I don’t really like being pegged.”

“Pssssh. C’mon man,” the meatball scoffs. “You can be a man and wanna get pegged.”

“I…didn’t say you couldn’t…I just, don’t like it myself,” says Bernard.

“Ya gotta get over it; you’re depriving yourself man!” Meatball grips Bernard’s shoulders like a father sending his son to war. “Let her get in there man, you won’t regret it.”

“…I…have…and I don’t regret it. I wear it like a badge of honor! And I’m thankful because I think it did make me vulnerable — it’s really different when your partner is looking down at you and realize how little control you have…and I get it. Some people get off on that lack of control …but I don’t?”

Meatball snickers and swaggers away shaking his head.

I stood there—stunned. It was a complicated treatise on the strange and far-reaching tentacles of toxic masculinity.

Here I was, maybe betraying my dear friend’s confidences because, fuck it. Women never get to talk about fucking; they never get to take aim at men’s hangups around sex or discuss their own pleasure without being accused of being “too much,” self-destructive, promiscuous, craving attention, falling prey to the very trappings they’re trying to escape.

Maybe I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral — I’m a girl who “gets it,” ya know?!

But there was also genuine confusion and sadness for Bernard. There was a real desire, a genuine belief that I might be able to use this stranger-man to get through to my friend-man. As Solnit says, I realized I wanted to enhance Bernard’s standing through the exposure to another man’s supposed feminism.

I thought another man could get through in a way I never could.

I thought that Bernard’s ass-pleasure was suffering at the hands of toxic masculinity. Being vulnerable is important to being human! Being penetrated is a potent symbol of that vulnerability! Let your body conquer the shitty steepings of your mind! Set yourself free!

But instead I exposed him to an even stranger brand of toxic masculinity. A man who thought himself enlightened because he had embraced the physicality of being penetrated—because he had had a singular thought about what that meant in terms of his own vulnerability.

I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral.

But all he was doing with his supposed revelations on physical and emotional pleasure was using it as a tool to glean more power. To insist he was more enlightened. A better, stronger, more powerful man than other men. He was using his supposed newfound softness to make another man feel small, ashamed, un-evolved.

It was the same awful, aggressive shit. I’ll show you what a real man is.

I felt I could hear the gears turning in Bernard’s head.

Maybe I am shut-down. Maybe I am a weak man. Maybe I am homophobic and kind of pathetic and caught up in a narrative I thought I was working against.

It was a really twisted piece of alchemy, let me tell you.

We laughed, and I hugged Bernard tight. I told him he was exponentially more evolved than that shitty blowhard — even if he couldn’t come “hands free” and maybe didn’t want to, and maybe never would.

But inside? I felt awful. I thought about the brown and pink puckerings of Bernard’s orifice — that little starburst-ed sphincter that sits at the crux of so much.

I wanted to give it a kiss and say, we’re all in this together. I know you’re trying and it hurts a lot. Take all the time you need. But keep trying. Because we need you.

*This story was published with Bernard’s consent

Content warning: descriptions of physical abuse and sexual assault

The memory that haunts me most is not being strangled until my body gave way to seizure. Nor is it the three days I spent being beaten in a motel by my lover. It’s not the day he raped me on the bed next to our three-month-old son, or the time he punched my head again and again into the cement floor of a garage until I had to prop myself against him, his arms wrapped around my waist, just to get home. These memories hold their share of terror, but the one that haunts me most begins with a bicycle.

It was evening, and already dark. A breeze traced the shiver of fall across my bare arms. We were riding BMX bikes up a long hill. I remember the endlessness of it, how my lungs felt like they would shatter along the way. He’d been my boyfriend four months already, though we became friends when I was 14 and he was 21. It was two years since we met, and I thought I knew him well.

He had more practice riding bikes. I watched, flush and panting, as he cruised ahead, lifting his lithe body over the seat and pumping the pedals with his long, strong legs. When he summited the crest of the hill, he disappeared from sight.

I was afraid there, alone in the darkness, but I was also determined. I’d catch him. He wouldn’t run off and leave me to spend the evening with some other girl, not tonight. I ignored the burning in my chest and forced myself the rest of the way up that hill.

Protesting Trump As A Survivor Of Abuse

When I reached the top, I found him waiting for me, smiling. He was sprawled across a couch someone had left on the side of the road, his bike toppled at his feet. I tossed my bike next to his and crashed onto him. We kissed deeply, before I lay my head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around my skinny frame. While the sweat cooled on my skin, and my heart settled into its resting pace, I was overcome by joy.

Anything is worth this moment, I thought, anything that happens is worth what I’m feeling right now.

That is the memory that haunts me most.

Ten years after the end of that relationship, I have told many stories. I have revealed that when I came home with a black eye, it wasn’t the result of a car crash like I had initially claimed, but because my boyfriend kidnapped me and beat me for three days. I’ve talked about the numerous rapes. I have disclosed the many times he strangled me to the brink of death. When people hear my stories of abuse, sexual assault, and coercion, they tell me I am brave. Strong. They thank me for speaking out. But the story that requires true bravery is the one I haven’t told yet: the love story.

I remember lying on the floor of an abandoned house with my boyfriend — my abuser — so close to one another our lips touched when we talked. I remember filling notebooks with love poetry, and devoting entire writing workshops solely to him. I remember meeting at my apartment and embracing midway on the stairs, unable to wait for the top. I remember kissing for hours at the park, ignoring onlookers who shouted at us to “get a room.” I remember making plans for our future together. I remember sitting on the hospital bed, holding our new son in our four collective hands. I remember kisses and kisses and kisses.

I loved the man who kidnapped me, and raped me, and nearly killed me more than once. It wasn’t Stockholm Syndrome — an affinity with the assailant that long-term abuse victims develop as a psychological defense. Because I didn’t start loving him after the fact. I fell in love with him with the pure intensity of someone who doesn’t know any better, the way that’s really only possible in youth. It felt like a fairy-tale, not a trick. Maybe I was manipulated into the feeling, but to me it was real. I loved him before any of the abuse happened, and I loved him for years after it began. It’s not so easy to let go of a love like that, even when it becomes obvious there will never be a “happily ever after.”

It is fair that I’ve blamed myself for the thought I had one night long ago when I went on a bike ride? Should I feel responsible for the four years of abuse I endured because in one moment of teenage joy I made a contract, the terms of which I could not possibly have fathomed? I had inklings of his real nature. There were signs — there are always signs — but “love is blind” is not a cliche for no reason. In that moment, when I lay catching my breath in the embrace of a man I knew was already cheating on me, all I wanted was for my love to be returned. I had no idea the price I would come to pay.

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I fell in love with him with the pure intensity of someone who doesn’t know any better.
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If you google “why people stay in abusive relationships,” hundreds of results pop up, in everything from Psychology Today and Ms. Magazine to small personal blogs. Our culture is obsessed with the question: Why do people stay with lovers who harm them? Though the language varies between publications, the answers generally revolve around the same themes. Control. Emotional and sometimes financial dependence. Fear. Very few articles contain a section on love.

Rena P. Elkins, a licensed clinical social worker affiliated with the University of Washington Medicine, who has worked with trauma patients for over 10 years, acknowledges that fear is a major factor in why women stay with abusive partners, but finds that love can be far stronger. “He says he’s sorry, he promised to change, he’ll never do it again, I hear that all the time,” Elkins reports, “and [abuse victims] believe it, because they want to. Love is a strong motivator.”

Control, dependence, and fear were all factors in my abusive relationship, but love was the quiet, persistent undercurrent. Like Elkins, I suspect the same is true for many abuse survivors. It is a hard truth to voice, not only because it hurts to admit, but because it’s the truth of a “bad victim.” It puts you in the same category as those girls and women who wear short skirts, drink booze, flirt at parties, stay out too late, take rides from strangers; loving your abuser makes you the kind of person who people think invited whatever bad thing happened. It makes people stop listening. It makes your hurt matter less.

Even still, it’s a harder secret to carry. And I hope that by sharing this, I help other survivors realize they are not alone. That their feelings are not wrong. Loving someone doesn’t bind you to them — you can still walk away.

What Responsibility Do We Have To Those Who Date Our Abusive Exes?

On an afternoon in midsummer, when our son was a few months old, I called the police and turned in my abusive boyfriend. Two days earlier, he had strangled me while I was holding our baby. I lost control of my limbs and dropped my son. He was okay, but just barely. The day I called the police, I sat on the steps of the cathedral down the street from my mother’s apartment, holding my cell phone in trembling hands. I considered not calling. I considered going home with my boyfriend, who had recently proposed. I imagined what it would be like for my son and I to continue our lives with him.

Either way I looked at it, there was suffering. I could turn him in, and be alone at age 20 with a child I’d been forced to conceive, struggling to finish college, alone with my harrowing memories. Or I could go home with him, and feel happy in the glow of reconciliation for a few days…until I told the wrong joke, or got a call from the wrong friend, or didn’t come to bed when he asked, or looked too long at the guy scanning my groceries, or whatever. And then the beatings would start all over again. This time, maybe I wouldn’t survive. Or maybe I would, but my son wouldn’t. So I dialed 911, and helped arrest the man I loved.

Yes, even while I gave his name and description to the police, I loved him.

Eventually, after his arrest, I would gain the distance I needed to outgrow my feelings for him. I would come to understand that he never cared about me, and that the man I loved did not truly exist. But when those sirens wailed past me on that midsummer’s day, while blue and red flashed across my face and toward where my boyfriend thought we were meeting, my heart broke. I had to break my own heart to break free.