Tea was lovely, though the Drake is exceedingly stuffy. It was a little disconcerting when the harp player would switch from classical music to show tunes, though. I mean, pretty show tunes, like "Music of the Night" from Phantom. But still. I had a long chat with my sister, where we actually ended up spending a fair bit of time with me trying to explain poly stuff to her (in my Christmas letter, which she got, I mentioned Jed, and somehow she had not realized that Kev and I weren't monogamous these days -- she thought we were all 'settled down now'). I don't think I succeeded on much of any front in conveying what it's actually like, or why it's something I think is worthwhile, for me, despite the inherent stresses and risks. But she didn't freak out either, which was good. Too often, I try to explain this stuff to people and they get really upset or defensive or angry, as if my not being monogamous is somehow an attack on their monogamy. It gets tiring.
After tea, we shopped, and while she didn't find the winter coat she wanted, she did find a cute skirt and shirt combo (orange-grey plaid, very bold), and I succumbed to the lure of a dark green wool skirt, knee-length, very flared. I was just supposed to be keeping her company, but the sale at J. Crew did me in. I confessed to Kevin when I got home (we were not particularly careful with our Christmas gifts, and thus we are supposed to be very very good the rest of January), and he made me promise not to buy any more clothes this month. I'll try, but I figure, I'm exerting so much willpower on exercise and diet, there just isn't much left over for anything else. That makes sense, right?
Food today: barely-buttered toast and tea (100), high tea (half a scone with 1 T clotted cream and jam, plus four varied fingers sandwiches, plus tea with milk) (estimated 800), 1/2 lb. grilled salmon with a little steamed asparagus and 1 c. spinach-arugula salad with a T mango vinaigrette (500), tiny piece of chocolate cake (50 -- and I can know that precisely because the box of Entemann's said it was 300 calories a serving and there were 8 servings, so I cut the cake into 8, and then I cut each eight into 3, and one of those was what I had last night, but I only felt like I needed half of one today -- it helps to keep it in the freezer, for some strange reason -- I don't end up going back and nibbling on it). Considering the whole high tea extravaganza, going only 150 calories over the 1300 allowed seems not so awful. Will try to cut back a little in the next few days to help, though not tomorrow -- tomorrow's a no-workout, 1000 calories day, which will be hard enough on its own, I think.
Do you think being poly is something a person has a choice about, or is it just hard-wired into ones psyche? I feel that it is an integral part of who I am, even when I am only involved with one person or with no one at all. I have felt this way since before the word ‘polyamory’ existed, at least in my vocabulary…since I was a teenager. Do you feel the same, or is it something different?
Hm. Well, I don’t know that I have a hard-and-fast response to it; I guess I think it’s a continuum. That some people are much more comfortable with monogamy, and some are much more comfortable with various flavors of non-monogamy, and most of us fall somewhere in the middle. And that our preferences are somewhat fluid, and can change over time. Poly feels less…urgent, to me, than it did ten years ago. But that may be simply that I’m getting older and lazier. 🙂
There is a certain difference in attitude, but I don’t really think that’s hard-wired, more that it gets inculcated into you. I blame/credit reading Heinlein at a vulnerable age for much of my attitude towards this stuff. At age ten, multiple marriages sounded totally reasonable. As I got older, I encountered some of the practical difficulties, but kept the ideal in the back of my head, I suppose. And I’m very aware that there are practical difficulties with the monogamy ideal as well, which our culture doesn’t acknowledge so much.
It’s funny. This debate’s come up a bit with people that know me. For me, it’s just something that always has been. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of loving people in a serial type of fashion. I’ve never been able to do that.
When i finally -did- encounter Heinlein’s works, the multiple marriges, poly relationships, and other things never struck me as anything extraordinary. I just sort of thought of them as making sense. What struck me as odd was finding out later on that these same passages completely altered how some people thought about relationships.
Nikki, your experience parallels my own. I do not recall just when I encountered Heinlein’s attitudes on the subject…it seems to me that there was not much poly content in the juveniles of his I read as a child and young teenager. But certainly it was not a new concept to me when I read SiSL when it came out in 1963. (I was 19.) So, I doubt that I “learned” it. It was just always my attitude, even when no one else I knew or read about seemed to feel that way.
Mary Anne, I do not think that getting older means getting lazier in any sense, but it does somehow seem to me to make most things less urgent, at least in my experience.