It's strange the way we carry all of our relationships around inside of us all the time.

How we live them and breathe them as we live and breathe ourselves. How we are living and breathing for and because of them. How we absorb the things that are closest to us, but somehow become only more ourselves, like how a sponge seems "right" only when it is soaked and full of water. 


It fascinates me to think of the things from the people I know and have known, love and have loved, that I have adopted as parts of myself. They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, right? Well, then some people should be quite flattered, because I have taken pieces of them and called it myself. 


Is it plagiarism when you don't realize you've done it until it's too late?


If so, then I've been plagiarizing my father for as long as I can remember. My mother never ceases to be annoyed that I adjust my glasses when they're sliding down my nose in the exact same way that he does. It never ceases to annoy my mother.


There is a hand gesture of dismissal that I stole from the first character I played in a one act play in college. She was a Black nerd from Harvard who took a field trip to Harlem to try to learn about "Black culture," and she was kind of partial to me, maybe because I was engaged in some Black culture(s) 101 myself, or maybe just because she was the first. Anyway, when I make that shooing motion, I am ever reminded of her and then. 


I picked up "hella" from my niece in the two days I spent in California with her when I was 18 and never let it go. I have taken things like "extra" from my little sister. "Nervy" and "deets" from FO. "Fascinating" from KS. "Hey ho" from SH. "Hey girl heyyyyy" from various Black 2012 girls. Various guttural sounds of disapproval from my mother. 


I steal hairstyles from people on the internet allllllllllllllllll the time. I pick up quotes and phrases and save them in some part of myself for use later. 


And most conspicuously recently, I have started expressing disapproval of something by frowning slightly, bowing my head, closing my eyes, and shaking my head no. I had a moment of realization a little over a month ago that this action was not my own. It has KS written all over it. But like all these other things from all these other people, I have adopted it and made it mine. Like the scar on my left forearm from my Wawa days, it's a sign that a relationship has left its mark on me.


I wonder how many more of things I consider to be parts of myself, I have actually quietly stolen from the people who are important to me. It seems to me that I am a Self partially constructed of Others. I carry your mannerisms in my own, feeling I and we simultaneously. I am individual and yet the result of hundreds of "us"es, which never cease to inspire me, no matter the years or miles.   

This. This exactly.

Reblogged from come correct

But as much as I want to say it's impossible

to let go of a place (and/or people) that made you who you are, I can't without feeling dishonest. To some degree, I have already done this. I think about the people who were my best friends in high school: TJ, PD, and RB. These guys were my whole world. We were on the phone for hours every day, hung out after school and on weekends at each others' houses, passed notes back and forth in the hallways... I would have been hard pressed to tell someone about myself without talking about them. Those friendships and the way I developed while I was in that tiny group was, at the time, entirely indicative of who I am. If you'd asked me then, I couldn't imagine not being friends with them any more at X point in the future.

...And now I barely even talk to any of the three of them. PD and I stayed the closest throughout the past four years, but even that closeness is like, months and months of not talking and then a very long and emotional catch up session, often in person. TJ and RB and I are still all totally cool with each other. We hang out in groups when we're home and it's really easy to fall back into familiarity with each other, even as we change, but that bond we had is gone. The people we were then are gone. Erased. Forever. Changed immutably by the new places we've gone, experiences we've had, people we've come to know and love and define ourselves according to our relationships with. I don't regret being the girl I was when that was my life, but I also wouldn't want to go back there for a second, even if it meant regaining those friendships and that experience, even though they once occupied nearly the entirety of my heart. 

There are friends from high school with whom I did keep in fairly regular contact during high school: TN, SH, and FO. TN and SH are the two people in the world I've been closest to for the longest period of time, and though our friendships have gone through lots of changes over the years, I'm pretty damn confident they're going to be my friends for the rest of my life, though the contexts and contents of our friendships will change. FO and I didn't really become friends until after high school, when I was already in the process of undergoing substantive Princetonian change, so he fit right into my "new me" life with all of my friends from school.

And then I changed from the person I thought I needed to be to be a Princetonian (aka "Freshman Year Maya") to the person Princeton actually made me. Remember, in the acknowledgements of my thesis, I thanked the University as a whole "for introducing me to myself and allowing me to reintroduce myself". In so many ways, from what's on my head to what's in it, from what I wear to where I am, from intellectual development to more intimate ones, I feel in this moment as though I was never in my life as "me" as I am now, as these four years have made me. 

...The only thing that keeps tripping me up is this: I don't feel like four years ago, when my family sat on the bleachers at Oakcrest High School for my graduation like we did for my little sister on Thursday, I would have told you that I *didn't* feel like myself. Perhaps, had I already absorbed sociological/psychological language, I would have said that I often felt like a passive participant in the construction of my self. If I was feeling particularly introspective, I could have told you I didn't feel like I was my WHOLE self with anyone. But even that didn't make me feel like who I was wasn't "real", even if that realness was separated into bits and pieces to be shared in different spaces. So if that self was real and this self is real, but somehow to a higher degree than the old self because I'm actively working to make and maintain the person I am now, then there's no way of knowing whether in 2, 5, or 10 years I'll still be this self. Well, okay, actually it's a pretty sure bet I'll be different in a lot of ways, but will I look back on these old blog posts and still recognize myself in the person I am now? I don't know.

And that terrifies me. Not because I'm afraid of change or because I absolutely love the person I am now (though I am pretty happy with myself, if I'm being honest), but because I don't want what happened with my friendships with TJ, PD, and RB to happen with my friendships with KS and EY. I'm scared that my deepest closest most intimate friendships are the ones that are most vulnerable to falling apart when I undergo deep intimate change. I mean, it makes sense, right? When the whole of who you are is wrapped up in this friendship and then the whole of who you are changes...I think only time can tell whether the friendship is strong enough to stand the change.

But you know, I think there is one thing that I share with my college friends, both the closest of the close and just the people I'm good friends with (hell, and even with all the random internet people who read this blog), that I didn't have with even my closest friends from high school. It's a word I toss around in the classroom a lot. It's a word that interests me when you put an identity category in front of it or the word "politics" behind it. With these people, I feel authentic. I don't feel like I'm taking on roles I don't want or playing up some aspect of myself to fit in...I feel like I just kind of came along and laid myself bare on a table or something and they were like cool and rolled with it. I don't ever feel like I'm frontin', and though I would never have been comfortable using the word frontin' four years ago, I couldn't have said that about the vast majority of my closest friends from home at the time.  I was able to be vulnerable with those people like I am able to be vulnerable with these people, but not wholly, not in all the ways I needed to be. I wasn't able to be strong when I needed to be with them either, sometimes. I had to pretend sometimes, like I don't know. Like I don't want to in the future. Like I refuse to in the future.

So, am I going to stay absolutely as close with my best friends from college as we were in college for the rest of ever? Of course not. That's absurd. We're in different places and leading separate lives and off on our own great adventures. We're going to figure out how people in "the real world" make friends and make new best friends in our respective places. I certainly wouldn't be upset if EY and I talk every day like we did when she studied abroad junior fall, but I'm certainly not going to demand it either. The demand I will make is that I never want to fall out of touch with the people who mean the most to me right now. I never want to not know where they are or what they're up to; I don't want it to be weird if I call/text/email/facebook/tweet them on a whim. I also want to let myself grow in ways only DC can make me grow, like Princeton made me grow in ways only Princeton could have made me grow. There's no point in starting a new chapter if you don't give it the opportunity to affect you deeply, right?       

I place a lot of value on short-term relationships.

This is likely not unrelated to the fact that they're the only kind of relationships I've ever had, but regardless, I don't like it when people find it incredulous that I can have been so substantially emotionally affected by people I only dated for a few months (or less). I'm sorry, was I supposed to be closed and fake during the first few months and only open up and be vulnerable when we had hit a certain point? Is that point six months? A year? Oh, this question is silly? Then sit down.

The Anti-Intellect waxes on this in a recent post:

Underestimating love was our first mistake. Thinking it needed years to do its thing. We forgot-–or, perhaps, never remembered–-that love could come in a week and completely rock our world.

[...]

I had to embrace that notions of eternity, however comforting, don’t afford us the opportunity to do justice to our intimate relationships. Our obsession with length rather than quality thrusts us into boxes of obsession that render us incapable of judging intimate relationships on criteria other than “duration.”

When it comes to relationships, “long term” or “short term,” if it ain’t about mutual pleasure, understanding and love, I ain’t checking for it. I no longer seek long-term-relationships just to be able to say that I am in one. While length can convey certain things, such as commitment and conviction, it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all when we look at love and relationships.

I enjoy being in a place mentally where I can enjoy a relationship regardless of its duration. I can value a two week relationship just as much as I value a two month or two year relationship. I treasure love when it comes. Nothing in nature lasts forever: seasons come and go, rivers dry up, and night eases into day.  I’m not caught up in “forever.”

--antiintellect

Sternberg’s Love Theory

freedom fighter posted this image a while ago, and I bookmarked it because it makes me think. It makes me think deeply and a lot. It makes me contemplate my relationships and my choices and my definitions of things and it makes me ask myself what I'm looking for in my life. It's rare that I come across an image that seems to actually be worth a thousand words, but this one warrants deep exploration.

Love is a word I have so much trouble with. I want to use it in relation to so many things, but sometimes saying it is incredibly serious and sometimes it's not. I don't always know what kind of love I think I feel or am definitely feeling or want to feel. But this might be a helpful (if somewhat problematic in its own ways) way to conceptualize it.  The triangles don't have to be equilateral--the length corresponds to how important that concept is in the relationship.

Nonlove doesn't register on any of these three axes. That seems fair. I don't think you can have something worthy of the word "love" in any form that doesn't have any of these features.

Romantic love is defined as featuring intimacy and passion, which also seems fair to me. I can imagine that many of my friends would balk at commitment not being included in that model, but I for one am perfectly (in fact, perhaps even more) comfortable with romantic love outside of long-term commitment. JB would argue that monogamy is in and of itself a commitment, which I suppose is true in the most basic of senses. I, for one, have never been one to need to fight potential suitors (and/or...suitresses?) off with a stick, which results in monogamy as a general condition of my life even when the situation does not call for it. I have at this point always been functionally monogamous, if not ideologically monogamous, so I guess I don't really see the ability to hook up with other people as this significant thing I'm giving up when I get into a relationship. Regardless of any level of mutual ownership (or partnership if that construction bothers you) engendered by monogamy, however, I don't think it implies any sort of longevity in terms of the commitment by definition. It's a fragile commitment, one that exists between individuals temporally but which is not committed to itself--it's almost an obligation rather than a commitment, and to me, that's why commitment isn't on the triangle for romantic love. 

Friendship is intimacy without passion or commitment. This makes sense too--our friends are among the persons we're most intimate with, but most of the friendships we make throughout our lives are temporary. They exist in certain times and/or places, and while their memory is carried with us and they may be rekindled briefly or for a substantial period of time, we are not committed to actively building them every day of our lives. 

Fatuous love seems like "dating just to date" to me. Like the first relationship I was in, which was based more on my desire to revel in his desire for me than in anything else. We were giving to each other, but not of one another. 

Infatuation is pure passion. Again, a no-brainer. No actual relationship is involved in situations of infatuation, so intimacy and commitment are impossible.

Companionate love might be the most interesting to me. I think that this is most clearly where friendship and love overlap. These are the friends you consider family. The kind of friends you say, "I love you" to. The kind of friends you don't have to say you love for them (and everyone else) to know. These are the kind of friends you know you'll have forever, even when that means actual phone calls and trips to see one another--that's where the commitment comes in. Friendships you will actively work at despite adverse circumstances fall under companionate love, in my mind. This is what I feel for TN, KS, SP, SH, EY, etc. I can also see this describing love between old people, who are completely devote to each other but past most/all forms of sexual desire. Hmm--this might be why really close friends are so often compared to old married couples.

Empty love makes me sad inside. It makes me think of people who are trapped in loveless marriages or who are too scared of starting over again to get out of a relationship they no longer want to be in. I want to banish it.

And finally we've reached consummate love. To me, this is conventional Love-with-a-capital-L love. It's a The Notebook kind of love. If I've ever come close to this triangle, it was a weird scalene version with intimacy being the shortest end, passion the longest, and commitment somewhere in the middle, but honestly I don't think the sides actually touched in the situation to which I'm referring. This is love after the romancing bit is over. When approaching equilateral-ness, this is a "real love", whole satisfaction embodied in one other individual. This is the kind of love for which I've been told sacrifices don't feel like sacrifices and obligations to the other resemble obligations to the self. This is the deep kind of love that mostly terrifies me, though a small part of me wants it at some point in the future.

An excerpt from a recent Thought Catalog article that really resonated with me:

"I’ve been raised in a society that both exalts love and fears it. A society that tells me love is rare and experienced only under particular circumstances; beginning with family and radiating outward to long term relationships and close, time-worn friendships. To love too quickly is deemed foolish. To love too many, is superficial. Our tragedy is that we believe something can only be beautiful when it is rare. We exist in a society that dismisses the beauty in everyday life. We overlook the small, fleeting moments that make up our day, because we’ve become jaded to the heaviness of a cat sleeping on our lap; the warmth of someone else’s fingers filling the space between our own... Sometimes it’s okay to abandon caution and open yourself up to the possibility of a connection with another human being. It’s okay to be vulnerable. We were born with an incredible capacity for love...The English language doesn’t contain the vocabulary to express different levels of love—instead using one abstract word to encompass the entire complicated spectrum of human emotion. In Spanish, love between family is separated from love between spouses. In Greek, there are four distinct terms, each with its own meaning. Working with such a limited capacity for expression, it’s no wonder our society as a whole appears to perpetually be in turmoil over the concept of love. We’re in constant pursuit of it, yet question it when we experience it; herald it’s beauty, yet fear that we will be left broken in its wake. Love becomes a contradiction. It simultaneously becomes the root of our joys and our woes."

I have been told before that I say those words too easily. I've had friends freak out when I drop it in casual conversation. I've gotten raised eyebrows from others when I direct it towards a friend. I've even had people criticize my and my ex's use of the phrase during our relationship. ...Such interactions confuse and annoy me. There are so many kinds of love. I'm sick of everyone privileging romantic and consummate love over all of the other loves. And then next time someone suggests that I'm wrong in my usage, I'ma direct them here, to what I think is a comprehensive guide to all the ways you can love someone who isn't family. 

D.O.D. [Updated]

Dick on demand. It's an interesting development to have in one's life, and I seem to be developing it in my own. 

I'm trying to figure out how it works. How do I refer to this? We're friends, I suppose. He is someone I have been friendly, at least, with for a few years. Does that make us friends with benefits? I feel like, ideally, a friend with benefits should be a closer friend than this. Like, a person you would hang out with on an one-on-one level and are also sleeping with. Me sitting here wanting to text him to see if he wants to come over feels more like we're fuck buddies.

...What exactly is the difference? 

UrbanDictionary will tell us!

Friends with benefits: 1) Two friends who have a sexual realtionship without being emotionally involved. Typically two good friends who have casual sex without a monogomous relationship or any kind of commitment. 2) two fairly close, or very close friends have the hots for one another. they do have some sort caring for one another, but it is not one of a romantic couple. 3) Two very good friends that share in sexual acts with eachother with no emotional connection or boyfriend-girlfriend label. Just engaging in the act of sex for fun.

Those all sound well and good except for the "typically two good friends" "fairly close, or very close friends" "very good friends" parts. Let's see what it says for fuck buddy: 

1) A sex partner to whom you have no special attachment. A person you occasionally have sex with who is not your S.O. 2) A person who is not your boyfriend or girlfriend (or farmyard animal), with whom you have sexual relations, on the mutual understanding that you both want sex and nothing more. Strictly, for the term 'fuck buddy' to apply, both people involved have to be single. 3) All the benefits of being in a relationship minus the bullshit like not doing enough for Valentine's Day or her birthday, not spending 3 months salary on a stupid ring, and not spending enough quality time with her. 4) The excellent arrangement of a good friend of the opposite sex (or same sex if you so want) who you can fuck hard and long as long as you both shall want, but without the strings attached so you can go and happily hang out together as friends and have a laugh together (or not see one another for another 4 weeks) rather than go through all the pointless crap of forking out your hard-earned cash for valentine's day or bitching about each other's annoying habits in public or being dragged away from your friends to spend quality time with one another (or do the washing up) or the "I wuv you - I wuv you too!" bullshit.

(Number four included just for the lolz.) 

This is somewhat clarifying, but my soph friends who are currently in the Large Library agree with me that FWBs are people with whom one would hang out as friends. I would like some clarification as to whether this means one with whom you would hang out with INDIVIDUALLY as friends or like, in a group as friends, because that is highly relevant to my situation, but hey. 

The point of this post is that whatever this is, beside yay I'm having good sex...I don't know how it works. So he said that when I want to sleep with him, to bluntly tell him that. When can I do that? What time of the day? Only in the wee hours of the morning? How frequently? Should one or both of us have been drinking before? Are there rules?

Can the rule be try it and see what works? I like that philosophy.

[UPDATE: Wee hours of the morning is not a good look. It wasn't even 1AM when I texted him last night to see if he wanted to come over, and he texted me back at 8AM saying he'd been asleep already. Soooooo, that's not gonna work, haha. I'm mad I sat around waiting for it to feel "late enough" and missed my chance. My best friend from middle school is visiting today/tonight, so now I either have to try again on a school night or wait a whole week! Ugh.] 

Enjoying someone's company v. liking them "enough"

Two of my dear friends have been dealing with similar interesting and unfortunate situations recently. It's a situation both I and my ex went through a version of, and some might say we paid for not paying enough attention to it. 

So you have this friend, or this acquaintance, and you're trying to figure out whether your feelings for them go beyond friend/acquaintance-ship. Maybe you've learned that they have feelings for you. Maybe you just like spending time with them so much that you're conflicted about what you're feeling. Whatever. The point is, how do you know where to draw the line between liking someone as a person and liking them enough to be in a relationship with them? What are the ethics of entering a relationship for exploratory purposes? Should you have to feel some romantic-comedy-esque "spark" or intense desire before embarking on the whole relationship thing, or is it cool if you just like to kick it with X or Y person and want to make your kicking it an official thing?

I guess what I'm really driving at here is this: 

What exactly makes a lover different from a friend?

Apart from sexytime fun, of course. Because as hard as I try and try to think about what separates them, I'm coming up empty. I feel like both of the relationships I've been in were like, suddenly I had a new best friend I also got to regularly hook up with and be cutesy and publicly physical with. And even though the ends of these relationships had me feeling like a hot ass mess for days, the level of emotional commitment I felt to them can't even touch the foundations of the emotions I have for some of my friends. But saying that sex is the only difference seems...just somehow fundamentally like I'm doing something wrong, though Idk if it's my friendships or my romances. I have never found that I necessarily like the person I'm dating MORE than I like my closest friends, and honestly I'm not sure I would trust such feelings if I ever developed them. I even get conflicted about choosing to hang out with a partner over hanging out with my besties. 

But I'm getting off-topic. I begin with the above question in order to better understand the point and goal of relationships. I was at an event on Black Love on Tuesday night, and one of the icebreaker questions asked at the event was something to the effect of, what do you look for in a relationship, and my answers were basically the same things I look for in a close friendship. Which leads me to re-realize (because I've addressed this before) that I'm unsure what prompts me to turn friend/acquaintance-ships into relationships besides knowing that the other party is romantically (sexually?) interested in me and me not being actively disinterested in him (or, theoretically, her). And this question has never been posed to me directly, but I'm afraid that if someone asked me, say, what I wanted to "get" out of a relationship, I wouldn't know what to say but sex and companionship...and neither of those things really necessitates the title. I'm fully comfortable giving and receiving the title expecting only those two things though, and it seems a little bit ridiculous to me to expect anything more than those two things going into a title-based situation. 

Where does the l-word come in? (Love.) I...don't even know what that word is supposed to mean with regards to any sort of relationship, but particularly not with a romantic relationship. Do I NEED to get to that level for a relationship to be "worth it"? Can I still just use it to mean something in me resonates with something in you and I like the frequency we're vibing at? If I like the way that spending time with you makes me feel, should I just say that instead of trying to fit it into ambiguous constructs like "love"? Is that revolutionary or am I copping out? Maybe I should be trying to expand the definition of love to be applicable to all those various situations, but...even though I guess that's what I do now, I'm not entirely comfortable with that. Maybe it's a word that should retain some sort of special value, so that everyone knows what you're talking about when you use it.

How do we have legitimate and meaningful interactions when we're not even sure what we mean by the words we're using?

I'm getting off topic again, it seems. It seems to confuse some of my dear friends that I have no problem with what might be called "casual" relationships. By this I mean I can go into a relationship that I know isn't going to last and still be committed to and emotionally invested in that relationship. (This most likely stems from the fact that I conceptualize relationships as transient and ephemeral in nature, thus if I was unwilling to involve myself in romances that I didn't think would last, I would be committing myself to spinsterdom.) And yeah I guess that sounds like I'm just setting myself up to get hurt a lot, but again...that's just part of the way I fundamentally understand the game. I also get a lot of joy and contentment and comfort and satisfaction. 

All this to say, I'm unsure whether I really have even a fuzzily defined line between liking someone as a person and liking them enough to enter into a relationship with them if they expressed interest in something of this nature. I have trouble even imagining what sorts of characteristics would bring someone from one side of this hypothetical line to the other. This means I have nothing on which to even base an understanding of where people are coming from when they're averse to trying relationships with persons whose company (and maybe even affections) they enjoy. I want to understand, though...I really do. Because sometimes my perspective doesn't seem healthy to me. 

What a healthy relationship looks like:

Reblogged from come correct

If you replace "sexual activity" with "personal interactions," you can expand this to include any kind of relationship, not just a sexual and/or romantic one. And healthy is good.

That Friend...

At some point yesterday, one of the top ten Twitter trending topics in the world was #ThatFriend. I didn't actually click on it, so I don't know if it was mostly that terrible "friend" or that funny friend or that dope ass friend that people were talking about, but I know which friend instantly sprang to mind.

#Thatfriend you didn't think you were going to like when you first met him through a roommate you didn't care for. 
#Thatfriend you only started talking to because you were surrounded by strangers. 
#Thatfriend whose name you all of a sudden kept dropping to the bewilderment of your other friends. 
#Thatfriend you kicked yourself for wasting a year and a half not knowing. 
#Thatfriend you fell into best-friend-ship with so quickly you almost mistook it for something else. 
#Thatfriend you can shed every last pretense for. 
#Thatfriend who just GETS you, even when he hasn't been through something you're going through. 
#Thatfriend you can ACTUALLY talk to about ANYTHING. 
#Thatfriend who makes you make sense to yourself. 
#Thatfriend who will judge you (righfully) but stand by you. 
#Thatfriend you can accidentally talk to for hours about nothing and everything all at once. 
#Thatfriend who feels more like your brother than your actual brother.
#Thatfriend who knows every detail of your life. 
#Thatfriend you spend the majority of your free time with. 
#Thatfriend who can just sit in a chair at a desk with you and you guys will have a great time. 
#Thatfriend you wish you could put a piece of in your pocket and take with you wherever you go. 
#Thatfriend you feel kind of lost without when they're out of the country for a week.
#Thatfriend you're dependent on.
#Thatfriend you're afraid to try to live without after graduation.
#Thatfriend who sort of turned almost all of your other friends into afterthoughts.

What do you do when you're less than five months away from losing #thatfriend's daily presence in your life? Do you try to wean yourself off, reconnect with your other friends? Or should you go cold turkey, like it's a breakup, and cry about it for your first month of summer and then move on? Is there even moving on from #thatfriend? Is it possible he can stay #thatfriend from afar? 

A friend from high school asked me what my New Year's resolutions were. I only really had new year's visualizations: doing well on my thesis, getting a job, finding an apartment that made me happy, living as an independent professional woman in a major city. But now I think I have one: stop letting my relationship with #thatfriend eclipse all my other friendships. I love him, but being dependent on anyone scares the shit out of me. I will hang out with each of my five closest friends who aren't in my eating club at least once a month until graduation. That's my resolution. If I don't salvage those friendships now, they'll disintegrate in a few months' time. And if I don't remember that other people can satisfy me socially besides #thatfriend, I might.    

To everyone I have lost:

Reblogged from 18° 15' N, 77° 30' W

A girl I went to high school with is getting married the day after tomorrow.

Okay, okay, so I know some people who got pregnant and/or married right out of high school. But with very few exceptions, these were people who hadn't done well in high school, weren't going to college...there was no real reason for them to delay starting their families. This girl is different. I knew this girl fairly well, meaning she did at least some Honors and AP courses. She played sports. She graduated in the top 20% of our class, thus qualifying for the NJ Stars program. And thus, when it appeared on my News Feed some time ago that she was engaged, I had the curious sensation that this was a real engagement, not a "my-love-life-is-sad-so-let-me-be-engaged-to-my-BFF" engagement, or something otherwise constructed but not real. If I needed further proof, she started talking about wedding rings. And then today I saw a few of our mutual friends had written encouraging things on her wall and talked about pictures and the soon-to-be hubby, and with a little digging I learned their wedding is this Saturday and I was just like...

...

...

WE. ARE. CHILDREN. What is happening?!? I'M TOO YOUNG FOR PEOPLE I KNOW TO BE GETTING MARRIED. SHE'S NOT EVEN PREGNANT. THEY'RE JUST DOING THIS BECAUSE THEY WANT TO. WE'RE TWENTY ONE YEARS OLD. I DON'T UNDERSTAND. 

Don't we not live in that world where you go to college to find a man anymore? Okay, that was rude. I just wasn't expecting this to start happening to like, people that seemed destined to have at least fairly successful futures yet. I thought we as a generation were pushing back the marriage age to the late twenties and generally being fearful of growing up. 

My longest relationship lasted for four months. How do I know people that are getting married?!

The first time you fight with someone you love.

The first time you fight with someone you love is always overwhelming. It is unfamiliar territory, and your emotions race ahead of your reasoning skills because your brain is stuck on This isn't supposed to happen to us. But life has this tendency to not give a fuck about supposed-tos, and here it is happening to the two of you anyway. You are fighting. Words are being exchanged, and though you have said worse things and worse things have been said to you, and still worse things will come out of both of your mouths in the future, the sheer unexpectedness of these words stings. You've been slapped in the face before, but somehow him raising his hand to shush you hurts more. He's a jerk to so many people, but he's never been a jerk to you.

The first time you fight with someone you love, you will be surprised to find yourself meaning the things you're saying. You are the one who talks him up all the time. You are the one who tries to convince everyone else that he isn't so bad. But all of a sudden you'll be sick and tired of defending him and defending the two of you to everyone all the time, and you'll realize that maybe the reason you're always asking him for massages is because he stresses you out. You can't believe you never realized that before. You didn't know all this anger was inside of you, but it will feel so natural and justified and somehow right coming out of you, and it will take you a moment to recognize that feeling for what it is: relief. And relief will make you feel guilty, so you'll slam the door and walk down the hall and you'll be preparing yourself to leave when he'll come into where you are and try to make excuses. You've heard all of his excuses before, and now that he has directed his douche-y-ness directly at you for the first time (to this degree, at least), you won't be able to be bothered with them. You'll tell him that if he insists upon acting like a douche, you'll have no choice but to believe he simply IS one, and he'll tell you he's considering ending this thing the two of you have going.

At the end of your first fight with someone you love, you will be stunned. You will sit quietly trying to wrap your head around what just transpired between the two of you, and when the nastiness of it all settles in, you will fall apart quite suddenly. You will dissolve with the knowledge that you are not as safe in this as you believed. Your breath will become shallow as you chide yourself for getting so caught up in this, because you know that people fight all the time and the world keeps spinning. But you will be so uncomfortable with the truth of what you said that you cannot stop the tears from coming. At the same time, though, it will feel like you finally let out a breath that you've been holding for so long you forgot what air tasted like. 

At the end of your first fight with someone you love, you will be hopelessly conflicted and confused. You'll want everything to be okay again immediately, but you won't want to take back anything you said because you meant it, and you won't want to compromise on any of your principles after you realize you've secretly been compromising on them for quite some time. You will still love him, and you will still value this suddenly-no-longer-perfect relationship, but you will want to demand that things change. You will be terrified of actually making any demands (hell, making any contact), lest you drive him to act on his consideration. 

At the end of your first fight with someone you love, the very first thing you'll need is to talk to someone else you love, someone who can soothe you in a way the person you're fighting with only manages by accident. The next thing you'll need is to contact him in an innocuous manner like a three-page text message to say you handled things badly, but are hurt and angry and to imply that you need to talk. Then you'll find yourself in bed and pantless and wanting to masturbate to distract yourself and feeling guilty about that. You'll find yourself with your teeth pressing into your nail and stop yourself just before biting through it, because you promised yourself you'd outgrown that habit. You will reminisce about how a mere 9 hours ago, you were cuddling and burying your face in his body. You will want that comfort and safety more than anything. Two hours after you sent your texts, he will not have responded. Sleep will seem both impossibly lonely and like your only viable option. 

The first time you fight with someone you love, you will remember anew that anger cannot negate love. You will hope with all your heart that he remembers this, too.   

PostSecret is my favorite thing about Sundays.

Reblogged from PostSecret

I'm not just thinking about this in terms of male/female/fuck binary gender systems, but also in terms of all the weird kinds of trivial 'requirements' some people have about their prospective partners. You know, "he has to be taller than me with this kind of job and make this much money and dress this way and want to do more on Sundays that just watch football," or "she has to cook and clean and take care of the kids and maintain her figure after having said kids and always look put together and..." Eventually we'll all wake up and realize that the only truly necessary criterium is "this person needs to make me feel happy, safe, and secure, even when times are rough." 

I think that's your only chance to find ever after, if it exists.

"Contrary to what fairy tales and rom-coms want us to believe, love is not enough to sustain a relationship. It’s just a good place to start—and a great reason to try." -- Jackie Summers, of The Good Men Project Magazine

I co-sign all of this so hard.

"I wear my heart on my sleeve. Hell, who am I kidding? Truth is, I wear my heart all over my entire body. It’s there for all of you to see and touch. Available for you to appreciate or to harm. Choose your poison.

I give my all to my friends, even when it’s not asked for. I love too much, give too much, expect too much and leave myself open to be hurt. Not everyone wants or needs my brand of love. Not everyone has it in them to give back to me what I find so easy to give to them.

That’s okay, you know? I accept that and in most cases I expect it. Though, there are a select few that I let inside my soul that are dangerous..." --Wookiesgirl, guest blogger on ToxicEuphoria by Lidia-Anain

I really hope I can one day develop the peace she has made with this aspect of herself. It hurts me, but I imagine that keeping me to myself would be even more painful.

Friends, Lovers, or Nothing?

(I hate John Mayer as a person, but I love his music.)

So my friend F came to me today with a question that I have pondered before and will probably ponder again: What exactly is the difference between very good friends with benefits and a relationship? Very good friends meaning you text each other regularly and can talk about things and spend time together outside of one another's bedrooms [disregard the fact that such a situation may not be possible]. 
This relates back to everything I've ever wondered about how to know whether you like someone enough to be in a relationship with them. My friend and former roommate J noted very observantly that I have a tendency to closely befriend guys who fall into my range of "date-ability". I like to surround myself with people who aren't assholes, yeah. And who are smart and funny and whom I can have good conversations with...anyway, this is getting off subject. The important part is, if any of the guys I let into my innermost of circles expressed romantic interest in me, my panties would be off in a second I'd be totally down for that. They've all been pre-screened. They've probably all passed most of my tests. They're good guys. ...But perhaps it shouldn't be so easy for me to cross the line between how I want someone in my life. [Okay, well actually I'd probably be so terrified at the prospect of losing our friendship is shit went sour that I wouldn't want to risk anything by changing things. Because sometimes I'm a pussy.]
A second part of F's question was what's the difference between spending time with someone as a [very close] friend and spending time with someone in the context of a relationship? Is it just the intimacy? I once heard someone describe a relationship as just having someone you know you can hook up with every night, and I don't agree with that. A) Something comes from being emotionally intimate with the person you're being physically intimate with. B) I feel like the person you're in a relationship with all of a sudden becomes your best friend. They start to take on (or at least share) roles your best friends used to claim: the person you eat meals with, the person you text when someone awesome/terrible happens, the person you want to do something with when you're bored, the person you go to events with...but something is different about these things now. Now you're there WITH someone, as opposed to with some people. You and the person you're in a relationship with belong to one another in a way your besties never will. C) Part of that mutual ownership thing is sharing more things about yourself. The person you're in a relationship with has gets to see you with no makeup on and with bedhead and morning breath and explore all the parts of your body even when you haven't shaved. They get to know what your face looks like in moments of extreme pleasure, and also get to calm you down out of panic mode when crazy shit happens, and to comfort you when you've got killer cramps. They kind of take care of you and you kind of take care of them in a more full-time way than besties. D) Relationships are about mutually prioritizing another person, and they are exercises in reciprocity in a way that is not demanded by friendship. E) At least in my experience, you're still not guaranteed to get it every night (or even every night you want it). :\ 
But should there be some way I initially like hypothetical relationship X person that is different than the way I like my closest guy friends? A "spark", if you will? Should time that we spend not physically touching one another feel different than time spent hanging out with a friend? I feel like the answers to these questions might be yes, and given that, I feel like I might be doing things wrong. Except I can't figure out why. People say their spouses are like their best friends all the time, don't they? It's generally considered to be cute and appropriate and damn near ideal. So what separates a friend from a friend you can casually fuck with from time to time from a friend who could also be your life partner? Is something missing from the equation if an appropriate way to describe my relationship with a hypothetical boyfriend is that he's like my best friend AND he sexes me so good! That kind of seems like exactly what I want in life...
K once told me that fwb don't spend the night after they hook up. [Neither did my ex always. Neither did my ex before him ever, but that was high school...] I would like to argue that fwb don't CARE, but that also seems kind of false, if they are decent friends. In fact, isn't that usually the downfall of fwb relationships, that one of the two parties catches feelings? So I think it comes down to the fact that fwb is a relationship of convenience, whereas a real relationship is a matter of cultivating and prioritizing and reciprocity and choice and consequence and sacrifice and real hard work. And fwb will run itself into the ground even faster if you try to do relationship [or friendship?] type things like go out to dinner or catch a movie, right? Can you really be a friend with a fwb?
I suppose the underlying question in all of this is, are relationships worth it [even considering all the pain they can bring]? I think that feeling that you are the most special person in someone's life is priceless. I think being taken care of physically and emotionally and in whatever other ways you might need all by one person and being able to take care of that one person in the same ways is one of the greatest joys in life. I think you get out of relationships what you put into them, and so if your attitude is that your significant other is this cool person you're sleeping with on the regular and hanging out with too...that's not all that significant, is it? Best-friend-ship is probably the most significant relationship I can conceptualize at this age, and so I'm aiming to transcend that in my relationships. Mostly with the little intimate things that my friends and I will never experience together...and by getting naked. XD 

Relationships are not a battle of the egos

And everyone who comes into our lives changes us in some way. If we are no different at the end of a friendship or relationship or even professional relationship than we were when we started, we're doing it wrong. 

That being said,

"'The words 'love' and 'change' used in the same sentence carries a negative connotation for most people.  'What do I look like changing for somebody else?!'  is the question some people ask.  If I had to give an answer, I would say 'You look like love.'" --Euphoric Ears

Goal: To become a better communicator

I've realized that talking to people scares me sometimes a lot of the time. 
There are like, three people whom I never feel any anxiety about talking to--in my head, these are my ride-or-die peeps. I almost never fight with these people, and I know I can talk to them about ANYTHING and be listened to [even if it occasionally comes with a grain of judgment]. (The girl who currently has the same profile picture as me, something which even my ex-boyfriend wouldn't do, is a good example of this.) 
Then there are the people that used to be in that role, but have fallen or are in the process of falling out of it--I still talk to them when I need someone to talk to, and when we're around each other we hang out and it's like no time has passed at all, but they've lost that daily role in my life. While they would definitely still fall into my "The Important People" circle on Google+, talking to them doesn't always feel incredibly helpful...one of the key signs of being in this group. There are also three people who come to mind as clearly being part of this group.
Then there are what I like to call my foul-weather friends. This is the opposite of the fair-weather friends people often complain about. These are the friends that are near and dear to my heart, but whom I rarely actually talk to. But if some shit goes down, we are there for each other through the tears and the hug-needing and the serious conversations about our lives. I know they have my back, and I have theirs, but our relationships are pretty low-key most of the time. I'm sensing two people in this group. 
And then I'm starting to develop a new group, which I'm going to call the I-didn't-realize-how-good-a-friend-you-are friends. These are people I've started opening up to more recently, and whom I've realized I really ENJOY talking to. Getting close to them has been unexpected but very pleasant. I look forward to random-ish Facebook/gchats/running-into-each-other-on-campus-and-sitting-down-to-talks with them, and they almost always lead to in-depth discussions. I think there are four people in this group.
And this last group makes it clear how dissatisfied I am with the low-key-ness of my relationship with the people in the third group. Well, how dissatisfied I am with my contentedness concerning that low-key-ness is probably more appropriate. Friendships should never be crutches. And when I was younger, in the days before texting, I used to spend HOURS (a minimum of four daily) on the phone with my friends. We did homework together, watched TV together, sang songs together, talked about random shit, listened to each other breathe...we shared everything. And while I'm glad to be more of an independent person now that I'm semi-grown, I miss elements of that need to be close all the time. I miss feeling like I was actually sharing my life with other people. I've even had some interesting in-depth conversations with strangers this summer via my reliance on public transportation and messages on that dating site, and it has made talking to people I don't know through the safe semi-anonymity of the internet seem less frightening. And I've realized I'm developing this problem where I avoid conflict like the plague, and so will talk to lots of people about something problematic or potentially problematic I'm going through with someone until I feel like I've come up with a plan to resolve the issue...without ever even addressing the problem with that person. And that's just all kinds of not cute. And even when I do have the balls va-jay-jay to handle talking to people directly, I have a tendency to get flustered and downplay how I'm feeling once I'm there. And y'all know deference doesn't come naturally to me...also not cute.
So here's to keeping in better touch with the people that matter to me. And to carrying this self-imposed openness over into more of my real-world relationships, rather than just on this blog. And maybe even to phone calls. But definitely to communicating with other people, clearly and effectively and not shying away from how I feel. I want to have the same level of openness I have in my relationships with the people in Group 1 in all of my relationships. Maybe that's an impossible goal, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't work towards it anyway.

Why do people liken being bisexual to being "on the down-low"?

Just because a man or a woman is attracted to members of both any sexual category doesn't mean they cannot happily be in a relationship with one person in one of those categories. Bisexuality does not preclude the ability to be monogamous or committed. And I don't think it's something that has to be addressed at the forefront of a relationship or a "talking," either. I don't sit down to have a conversation with my partners about the fact that I'm straight for the most part*, nor do I expect them to have that kind of a conversation with me, so why should that expectation change based on orientation? I hate double standards. I hate people who pigeon-hole LGB sexualities into little boxes of stereotypical behavior and then get mad when the world doesn't work that way. Yes there are gay men who are stereotypically masculine. Yes there are lesbian women who wear makeup and dresses and heels. Yes there are people who fall in love with a person based on their personhood, not their sex or their gender. There are even people who aren't sexually attracted to anyone. The are only two sexualities that I think warrant up-front discussion like that: asexuality, because sex/intimacy is generally expected at some point in a relationship, and polyamorous-ness, because I think people have a right to expect monogamy. But if your boo wants to be with you right now, does it really matter what other categories of people he/she is also attracted to? This seems like me not wanting to date a guy who has been with a woman of a difference race than me, or who is less educated than me, or any other social difference that might be a big deal. In other words, it would be ridiculous. 

*I am straight-identified. I want relationships with men. And while I love me some dick, I wouldn't run away screaming from the prospect of relations with a woman. End of story.  

Facebook blasts from the past

So I'm sure all of you know that Facebook recently updated its messaging system to like, streamline and organize all of your messages and chats, right? At first I was like, "Oh, that's neat. I suppose it could be convenient." My tune has changed a little bit now, though, as a message from a friend I haven't talked to in a while showed up attached to a string of messages from over a year ago. Messages that were full of longing thinly veiled as friendly banter and ended with hearts that probably failed to be nonchalant. Basically, messages from a me I kind of forgot existed, from a relationship almost-turn that never made it around the bend. It was weird seeing them, and knowing that if I could see them hovering up above our current conversation, so could he. So much changes in the space of a year.