(crossposted from Facebook)
I used to maintain a really rigid separation between friendships and romantic relationships, and was confused and made vaguely uncomfortable by people who seemed more able to smoothly interpolate between the two, even just people who were able to cuddle casually with people that I couldn’t tell if they were dating or not.
In retrospect, I think I interpreted any interaction in a romantic direction as something like a promise to play out the full plot of a love story, so going in that direction and then stopping or retreating felt like a huge rejection to me. I wasn’t even able to send people messages on OkCupid because of this. There was something deeply important to me about playing out the full plot of a love story; I think there was a kind of safety I only felt if I thought I was on track to someone falling in love with me and staying in love with me.
But in fact every time I thought someone would stay in love with me I’ve been wrong. The safety I’ve looked for in that narrative has never actually been there. And being so caught up in the narrative made it harder for me to see what was actually happening in my relationships, and made it harder for me to see my partners for who they were rather than for who I needed them to be in my love story.
These days I’ve been looking more carefully at the narratives I have around love, and trying to take them as object. And on the one hand I feel a lot of freedom now to explore romantic and sexual flavors of relating outside the boundaries of my narratives. It feels exciting and growthy. But on the other hand I feel unmoored. Outside of the stability and comfort my narratives promise I am directly confronting not knowing what I can expect from people, and not knowing how our relationships will grow and change as we grow and change, and I feel scared and anxious about that. I’m still learning to sit with all of this.
Thicket Forte 